Right up Till the end

I have one more movie to watch tonight, then I reveal my list to you just after midnight my time, when the Oscar nominations are announced.

The final movie will probably be Lena Dunham's Sharp Stick, because it's short and I don't expect it to have an earth-shattering impact on a list that will be all but done and dusted, to use the Australian phrase.

I intentionally made sure that I gave myself more than 24 hours with Till, since I did figure there could be an impact on my list with that one. You never want to wait too long on a quality movie lest it force you to rethink everything you've pretty much committed to permanence. (I can in fact remember three instances of movies making my top ten on the final viewing day, though I had no choice on two of them -- Inside Llewyn Davis and The Hateful Eight -- because they only just had their Australian release that day. The third, Love is Strange, just took me by surprise.)

I won't of course reveal how high up in my rankings Till will land, but I will say I'm glad I squeezed it in. I was always planning to see it, and knew that an iTunes rental date of January 17th lined up with those intentions, but as the final week took shape I knew I'd think of it as a Monday night sort of movie, and that's what ended up happening.

It was a Monday night sort of movie because there was a good chance this would feel like homework. At the very least it would be depressing. No one really wants to unwind from a long day -- which included a trip to the hardware store and an emergency zoom regarding the relocation of my son's basketball practice, in addition to work -- with one of the most awful racial hate crimes in American history, if only because it was perpetrated against a child.

But Till really surprised me with its choices and being more than a handsome and well acted recreation of an historical event. The thing I wanted to focus on is:

Whose faces to show, and not to show

Among the thoughtful choices any director must make is how to dole out the screen time, because it speaks to what you care about most in the story, and whose voice is given prominence. Till director Chinonye Chukwu made some particularly interesting choices in that regard, and it has all to do specifically whose faces to show, and for what reason.

To show: The dead Emmett Till in his coffin. The movie purposefully does not speculate about what actually took place when two miscreants murdered the boy his mother called Bo at the behest of a young white woman who was offended when Bo told her she looked like a movie star. A scene showing the severe beating and ultimate killing would have been exploitative in addition to speculative. 

But we did need to see the aftermath, because the world saw it. Till's mother Mamie asked a photographer to take pictures of the face that barely looked like a face so that they could be published internationally, and light a fire under the civil rights movement that helped spur the 1957 Voting Rights Act, two years later, into existence. If the world saw it then, we needed to see it now. And yes, it was horrifying. And yes, that's why we needed to see it.

To show: Mamie Till on the stand. In an impressive unbroken take that underscores exactly how much Danielle Deadwyler is bringing her game here, Emmett Till's mother takes the stand in the trial of his accused murderers and is questioned by both the prosecution and the defense. The scene might be as long as five minutes, I'm not sure. Possibly longer. The camera never moves from a close-up of her face as she changes hands between those who will treat her carefully and kindly to those who will not. We also needed to see the anguish of this mother as she does something that could theoretically put her own life in danger as well.

Not to show: The men who killed Emmett. The temptation is to give a big, ugly, redneck, racist face to the villainy in your movie, but Chukwu resists it. You get glancing views of these men, sure, but you see them only in the shadowy nighttime, when they first kidnapped Emmett, and from side angles in the courthouse. Fifteen minutes after finishing the movie I mightn't have been able to pick them out of a lineup.

The explanation? It gives too much oxygen to hate, plus it suggests that these two men were guilty of something that the others around them wouldn't have been guilty of if given the same chance. The real villain here is the systemic racism of this entire town of Money, and this entire state of Mississippi. To show them on screen would be to glorify their actions, so we cut away from them, the same way the cameramen cut away from someone who runs on the field during a baseball game. These are not two men who deserve an additional thought from us, whose actions aren't deserving of even the minimal spotlight of making them identifiable in a story that is fundamentally about them at a basic narrative level. I won't even give you their names.

Not to show: The attorneys defending these men. Same reason. They're part of the problem, not the solution. 

To show: The woman whose complaint led to the death of Emmett Till. Chukwu does not hide all her villains. Perhaps because she wanted to document the inciting event -- when Emmett wolf-whistled at the girl in that shop -- Chukwu does show us Carolyn Bryant, played by Hayley Bennett, who was somewhere between a girl and a woman at age 21. And we later hear Bryant's reprehensible testimony during the trial, in which she accuses the boy of physically grabbing her and talking about his past experience with white women.

I think we need to see the face of the person who enables and encourages racism without herself participating in a murderous crime. If Carolyn Bryant doesn't go running to tell her husband or other men with lynching tendencies what passed between her and Emmett Till -- which history has determined was the mild version depicted in Till, not Bryant's version -- then Emmett Till might actually still be alive today. He'd be 81. 

To show: The Black faces inspired by Mamie Till. Chukwu finishes the film profoundly with Mamie and her father (Fankie Faison) leaving the state of Mississippi before the verdict is read, because she says "I know what the verdict is." As they are driving, a likely fanciful scene shows all manner of Black pedestrians nodding to her appreciatively as she passes, recognizing what she has done for them, for all Black people, even though it will not bring two murderers to justice.

Later, we see a number of others applauding her at a civil rights speech in Harlem. The camera movies from person to person, from a low angle, capturing more than just their faces. But in those faces, we see people galvanized for the fight ahead.

As much as these moments all contributed to the impact of Till, the most impactful moment, where the realization of all this really sunk in, may have come when Mamie first gets to Mississippi and is being escorted by a local contact to the place she will stay. After he's already been on screen for a few minutes, and she gets out of the car, she says "Thank you, Mr. Evers." And he says "Call me Medgar."

In eight years this man will also be dead, his life also lost in a greater fight. A fight that, sadly, is still not over today.

Stop yelling at me, Letterboxd

Inu-oh is just the latest movie Letterboxd is telling me to spell with all capital letters.

Whether it's someone's overly literal interpretation of this poster -- "well, the title is in all capital letters so I guess that means something" -- or something they've gotten from the press materials, Letterboxd serves up the eccentric anime from director Masaaki Yusua with five capital letters. 

For some reason, I'm inclined to go with two capital letters: Inu-Oh. I don't know why I feel like there should be another capital after the hyphen, but it looks better to me that way. I think it's a carry-on effect from thinking that Korean first names should get a capital after the hyphen, like "Park Chan-Wook" rather than "Park Chan-wook." I mean, I already know it's a whole different culture from the ordering of the names. I should not be trying to apply French rules ("Jean-Pierre") to it.

IMDB, which I always find the ultimate source on these sorts of issues, goes with Inu-oh, so that's what I've decided to do too.

But this seems to be a consistent thing on Letterboxd. As follows:

And:

Each of these titles bothers me for an additional reason.

Not only is Alejandro G. Inarritu up to his normal hifalutin titular word salads with this one, but the capitalization of only "BARDO" seems to suggest it's an acronym, rather than a Buddhist word indicating "an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth." Maybe BARDO could mean "Bring Alejandro Richly Deserved Oscars."

With Tar, it's the accent. I'm not going to go to the trouble to find that accent on my keyboard whenever I want to talk about this movie.

All of these movies have normal mixed capitalization on IMDB, so it really seems to be a Letterboxd thing.

I do have one fully capitalized title among my 2022 films, because like last year's CODA, it really is an acronym. RRR stands for Rise Roar Revolt, and in this case, I'm very happy for the abbreviation.

What more can war movies really teach us?

The latest version of All Quiet on the Western Front, a German language film directed by Edward Berger, first crept into my awareness when it got one of the Golden Globe nominations for the best foreign language film. I figured that like many films that receive such a nomination from either the Oscars or the Globes, its availability would be scant until sometime in the middle of the year after it was nominated, so I didn't really give it a further thought.

Then the praise for the movie became deafening when it received a leading 14 BAFTA nominations, tying the most ever received by a film not in English. The BAFTAs are not something I usually keep up with, but I caught this in a news brief on the radio and it obviously really registered. However, I still assumed the movie was not generally available to me, especially here in Australia, because I had not seen it anywhere or heard anyone talk about it.

Then yesterday I was listening to Flimspotting's live year-end wrap-up show, and Adam Kempenaar chose the film's opening scene as a candidate for his favorite opening of the year. In fact, I think he also selected it as his winner. And in the context of this, I learned that it was actually available on Netflix.

Sigh. One more two hour and 30 minute film to fit in before my Tuesday deadline.

I made quick work of it by actually getting to it that very afternoon, during what we call "quiet time" in my house. I set up the projector in the garage so as not to impede my younger son's quiet time, which is usually conducted in our living room. (My older son and my wife favor their own bedrooms for "quiet time.")

There's no doubt this is a really good movie. But as I was watching it, all I could think about was that I'd seen it all before.

"You've seen one, you've seen 'em all" is a dangerous sentiment specifically when it comes to the movies, where we all know that the only six main stories in existence are being told over and over again. It's rare you see something that isn't a lot like something you've seen before. (The other movie I watched yesterday, the anime film Inu-Oh, might be an exception.)

But specifically with war movies, it's starting to feel like I have, indeed, seen them all.

Maybe this sentiment feels doubly so with All Quiet on the Western Front, which now has its third prominent adaptation of the original novel by Erich Maria Remarque. The first was of course the 1930 best picture winner, which I rewatched and discussed in this post back in 2020, and the second was a 1979 TV movie. It hasn't quite been another 50 years but we're now getting our third. 

The real problem with a 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front is that they no longer make any war movies that make war look glamorous, as a contrast with what this movie is trying to do. Hollywood history is littered with movies that function more as propaganda and war boosterism than they function as a serious consideration of the consequences of war, but none recently. It would be morally derelict to make such a movie in the 21st century. 

Therefore, every war movie shows the terrible fear of the soldier. Every war movie has faces blown off and limbs flying this way and that. Every war movie tells us the thing we already know: that war is hell. 

What's more, the thing that once made All Quiet on the Western Front really distinctive, its irony, is also now a dime a dozen. And now I'll issue a SPOILER WARNING before continuing, in case you haven't seen any version of this story.

The thing that makes the ending of the novel so depressing is that the final deaths of the characters we've come to know occur after the armistice has already been announced, when everyone knows that it is simply a countdown to the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. At least in the version I saw yesterday, one particularly proud German general orders a final assault across the battlefield toward the French soldiers in their trenches, determined to lose the war with a final victory. 

But the irony of the soldier who dies just before the war ends -- kind of like the detective who dies on his one last case before retirement -- has also been a feature of numerous war movies. All Quiet on the Western Front might have gotten there first, but others have flooded that space since.

So I don't feel like I myself can heap significant praise on Berger's version of this sort of movie, since it comes only three years after another version that does a lot of the same things, and also won a lot of praise at the time, probably finishing as the runner up for best picture at the Oscars. That's of course Sam Mendes' 1917.

Mendes' movie did offer us something that other war movies had not. It was made to appear as though it all occurred in one take, without any edits. Of course, there's an actual loss of time during the story when a character loses consciousness, and we all know that with a few exceptions (like another German film, Victoria), a movie can't really be done all in one take. But at least Mendes tried to make it seem like he had, just as Alejandro G. Inarritu had done with an actual best picture winner in Birdman. 

What Mendes did in 1917 might not have been teaching us anything we didn't know about war, which prominent World War II movies like Saving Private Ryan were also working overtime to teach us, but it did create a reason for its own existence through its audacious technique.

I'm struggling to find that reason with All Quiet on the Western Front. So that means even if it looks great and sounds great and everything like that (many of those BAFTA nominations were technical), it still is ultimately telling me things I would expect to see in every war movie that gets made from now until I die.

I'll finish on one example.

There's a scene midway through the film when the main character, Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), gets in a close combat fight with a French soldier, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest in a sunken part of the battlefield where they are not in the line of fire. Paul is then overcome by emotion. When he sees his enemy has not yet died, and apparently unwilling to go back to his knife, he tries jamming the man's mouth with mud. This just makes him cough, though. So he goes back and clears out the mud, opens the man's uniform to release some pressure, and wets a rag with water from a nearby puddle to drip it into the man's mouth, to quench his thirst in his final moments. When the man then dies, Paul is swept with a new wave of grief and regret.

As well as this scene is played, it feels like I could have telegraphed this sequence of events from the moment I saw Paul charge this other man. Is that because it happened in the 1930 filmed version of the novel, which I saw only three years ago, and therefore it's in the back of my mind? Or is it just the most efficient way possible to demonstrate the psychic toll on a young man who was in high school two months ago?

I spent all of All Quiet on the Western Front looking for a scene or sequence of events I could not telegraph, and that's the problem with most if not all war movies made today. It's always a valuable project, it seems, to remind us of the horrors of war. Any person in the audience could be considering these things for the first time. 

But for film veterans like me ... I need more, and I'm not sure the prospects of getting it any time in the future, without a radical refocus of how we make war movies.

There is one thing this version has going for it that it does not share with the previous versions, which is that this story about German soldiers is finally being told by a German filmmaker, in the German language. That is probably the best reason for its existence, especially since Berger obviously had the ability to deliver on it. 

Maybe it's things like this I'm going to have to hold on to if I want to feel something new and different from a war movie. But they aren't enough for me to call this one of the best movies of the year.

It's been raining in LA

I think it's stopped now, but it was raining in LA like the Dickens until recently. 

I'm not there anymore to report first hand, of course. This year I will have been ten years gone.

But I'd know it was raining even if I hadn't constantly been seeing my friends' Facebook posts about it. I'd know because the closing of the sale of my house has once again been delayed by a partial ceiling collapse in one of the rooms. They had to test for asbestos and lead, and while fortunately those tests have come back negative, they may have to do mold remediation. It never ends.

I'd also know it was raining because I got an email from Mission Tiki Drive-In with the following subject: "The Weather Forecast Calls for Movies."

I thought that was just a play on one of the new movies coming out this week -- I don't know, maybe Twister 2 -- but then when I saw the image above I realized "Ah right, there's been rain -- and it looks like part of the Mission Tiki grounds are still flooded out."

See, a drive-in movie lot is not usually just set up as a large, flat space. At least the ones in LA are not. They have long rows of humps laid out, kind of like giant speed bumps, so you can angle your car either up slope or down slope, whichever give you a better view of the screen. (I think it's supposed to be up, but once you get in there it's sort of up to you.)

Now, these valleys in the pavement cause drainage issues, I'm sure. Only they've never really had to worry about drainage in Los Angeles, because the annual rainfall is usually pretty minimal. They're far more likely to experience drought conditions than have more rain than they know what to do with. 

So yeah, I can see the possibility that full two screens have giant lakes where the cars are supposed to go.

I'm a bit confused by the timing though. I feel like it was closer to New Year's that I was hearing about the majority of the rain, yet all four screens were open in the Mission Tiki email that came out two weeks ago. Last week, one screen was closed but I thought nothing of it, maybe just a lapse in the programming due to the start of the year. (Though why Avatar would already be off the screens there is a mystery to me -- maybe it was too expensive.)

With this week's email, either the situation is getting worse, or the drive-in is starting to go under -- drowning financially if not actually. 

In any case, we really need to get our house sold, so please, no more rain in LA. 

The other Aftersun

Last night I finally saw possibly the most acclaimed movie of the year, Charlotte Wells' Aftersun. Both Filmspotting hosts named it their #1 of the year, as did Indiewire's David Ehrlich, whose video countdown I try to watch every year. (And yes, to follow up on a previous post, it did become available for a $5.99 rental on Tuesday, saving me about $15.)

Of course, so close to my ranking deadline, I didn't come here to tell you what I thought of it. I came here to tell you something I noticed when I went to add it to Letterboxd.

There is another Aftersun, and it also came out in 2022.

To think that the movies could go some 130 years without there being a movie whose title was this exact contract of two otherwise unrelated words, and then there would be two in the same year.

Of course, this could be one of those cases of intentional confusion, where they try to get you to rent the movie Transmorphers because you are not very bright and you thought it said Transformers. But it doesn't seem that likely, considering that the Aftersun directed by Lluis Galter had its first festival appearance back on May 1st, 20 days before Charlotte Wells' version debuted at Cannes. Plus it has this logline on IMDB, which is quite different than the plot of Wells':

"Summertime. In a camping, three little girls listen to an old mysterious story about a missing kid. They start to investigate."

I love that "in a camping." I think that's the first time I've seen something on IMDB that was obviously added by someone whose first language was not English, then not corrected by someone else before I had a chance to see it.

The confusion is real. While only 53 people on Letterboxd have submitted a star rating for Galter's Aftersun, compared to the approaching 200,000 for Wells' version, all the reviews that are in English seem to indicate the Transformers/Transmorphers situation befell the writer of said review, if only at the point of picking it out on Letterboxd.

One starts out "Very mature and moving portrait of a father and daughter on vacation." Another states simply "I don't know that I will ever recover from the image this film reflects about me," which could be about the other version, but I doubt it. One starts with "Frankie Corio is a star, she gives such a great performance." I have to assume Frankie Corio is not also in the other version.

Then there are a few that point out the mistake, one saying "Oh my gosh! I've stumbled on the wrong Aftersun movie!" It's possible that person left the comment without having seen Galter's version, but it appears this one didn't: "Thought we were going to see Paul Mescal's movie but happy to have stumbled upon this viewing with a Q&A with the director." So in this case, obviously that's not a very good job of vetting by the viewer, but it also sounds as though the people who set up that screening might have knowingly capitalized on the critical acclaim for the other movie.

The thing is, this is not the only 2022 movie that is accidentally blurring the distinct identity of Wells' Aftersun, with both a similar title and similar thematic material.

Earlier this year, on the plane to America, I saw a movie called Sundown, starring Tim Roth. Like Aftersun, it is also set on a family holiday in a tropical paradise. (Can Turkey be considered tropical? I didn't realize Aftersun was set in Turkey until the very end.) Roth's character's family also comes from Britain, but they're in Acapulco, and the family includes his sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and nieces and nephews. Without going into the full plot, I'll just say this also involves a mental health crisis by Roth's character, with some tragic occurrences in the story. Plus that title is basically a synonym for Aftersun -- a true Transmophers/Transformers situation, had Sundown not had its original release back in September of 2021 at Venice.

But the similarity certainly seems obvious if you just look at the posters:

Well I'll end some of the suspense and say that Aftersun is going to end up higher on my chart than Sundown ... and that I won't see the other Aftersun in time to rank it, though that would be funny. 

How much higher? You'll find out on Tuesday.

Avatar chauffeur

My dad and my son finally saw Avatar: The Way of Water yesterday, 20 days after they were originally scheduled to see it.

And not without me chauffeuring them to and fro.

The tickets to see the movie on what was once the world's third largest IMAX screen were a Christmas present "from" my 12-year-old son to his grandfather, which really means I bought the tickets and told my son they were from him. So my son got an extra present. 

They were supposed to go on Wednesday, December 28th. But Tuesday, December 27th was when I tested positive for COVID. Neither of my sons ever tested positive, but it was understandable that my 83-year-old father didn't think it was a good idea to carry on with the next day's scheduled activities when we had no idea whether he'd be infected by his own grandson. (And we tried not to think too much about his exposure to me when I was infectious earlier that day, when we all went to see Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile.)

I had wondered if L,L,C might be the only movie in the theater they saw on the trip, which would have been okay since he and his wife seemed to like it. It was in keeping with the tradition of digital animals that blow my dad's mind, which started when he saw Peter Rabbit five years ago (as discussed in this post).

But the IMAX people surprised me. Despite stating flatly on the ticket that it is "non-refundable and can't be transferred to another session," the good people at the Melbourne Museum gladly allowed me to postpone our IMAX visit indefinitely, given my diagnosis with COVID. (My dad said he would have been willing to buy the replacement tickets if they couldn't reschedule for us, but it's uncertain whether this would have actually happened.)

I stopped testing positive on January 1st, and my wife did on about the 3rd or 4th. On the 6th we left on a weekend trip out of town for four nights, and the remainder of that week was spent finishing a building project that my dad had given us as a present, actually for my birthday if memory serves. 

This week is their last week in town, so I had to move now if I was going to reschedule the Avatar screening. I was sure the IMAX people would have thought better of it by now, but they had not. So we managed to book in seats D-18 and D-19 for the Tuesday 3 p.m. showing.

My original plan had been to send them off on the train for the excursion, but I had started to think better of that plan myself. Although my dad is one of the sharpest 83-year-olds you will ever see, he's shown some signs of confusion on this trip -- nothing major, but enough that I wasn't sure I wanted to send him off on a voyage into the downtown, where he'd have to catch the right tram up to the museum after the train ride, then walk correctly to the museum. Especially since my 12-year-old is fairly hopeless at the moment, which I'm told comes with this age.

Plus, speaking of this age, there's the fact that the 12-year-old has started to respond monosyllabically to every question or potential topic of conversation. I could only imagine the awkward 70 minutes on either side of the movie, when my dad tried in vain to engage him and my son reciprocated with nothing. A fate far worse than getting lost in the big city, it seemed to me.

So I drove them in, waited around three hours, and drove them back out.

This actually worked out to have its benefits. It turned out that our back driver's side tire got a flat the day before, and the place where we have a warranty against roadside tire hazards is right in the same neighborhood as the Melbourne Museum. So it actually worked out quite nicely, as the tire was fixed quickly (at no cost to us), and I could even finish off my normal workday, having only taken about 90 minutes to negotiate the logistics of getting them to the movie. I sat and had an iced coffee with the remaining hour of my work.

But getting there was a wee bit tense. Although I thought I left with plenty of time, the traffic started to crawl as we got into the city, and I probably hadn't taken the optimal route to get there -- seeing as how I was trying not to abuse the spare tire, which was not supposed to exceed 80 km per hour (about 50 mph). It was especially frustrating as we got closest to the museum, though I did luck out in finding a parking spot in front. But I had to go in with them and wait with them in the 15-minute line for the candy bar, since that's where I needed to redeem these replacement tickets. (I think they didn't want to just send me a barcode because then I could sell it to someone else, which goes against the spirit of their kindness in allowing the COVID postponement of the viewing.)

Fortunately, I sent them inside the theater just after the trailers began, and was back to my five-minute parking spot before anyone could realize it had been closer to 20.

Fortunately again, it was all worth it.

My son didn't call it his favorite film ever -- for once -- but he did say that as mind-blowing as the visual effects were, he actually might have liked the story more. Given that it focuses on teenagers bristling against the rules of their parents, that doesn't surprise me. (And I do think the story is a big improvement on the original Avatar.)

My dad used the three-word phrase both James Cameron and I were hoping he would use: "totally immersive experience." He was pretty amazed by it all, and asked a lot of questions that revealed my lack of technical expertise in describing the motion capture process. 

Neither reported being overwhelmed, in a bad way, by the 3D, but my son did say he had to take off his glasses for ten seconds here and there just to reset. 

There was an added risk with Avatar: The Way of Water that I haven't mentioned until now: Neither of them had actually seen the original. So I brought them up to speed over dinner a few nights earlier, though I'm not sure how much they retained, nor how much they needed to retain -- the film's first ten minutes do a pretty good job catching you up on the events of the first. 

I did feel a bit bad getting them tickets to the movie, knowing that they hadn't seen the first -- the least I could have done was set them up with a screening of Avatar, which is of course streaming on Disney+. However, if that hadn't worked for them, either because the story left something to be desired or because my TV wasn't an impressive enough way to watch it, it would have curdled some of their enthusiasm about the sequel. Besides, I know that most people aren't as worried as I am about whether they've seen the first movie before they sit down for the sequel. This was their big chance to see this impressive visual experience on as large a screen as possible, in 3D, so we had to take it. 

And just as I thought would probably happen -- because it happened, or more properly didn't happen, to me -- neither of them had to go to the bathroom during the movie. This even though I bought my son a popcorn, a bag of mixed lollies and a large Sprite (reminding me that they would have had to stand in this line even if we hadn't had to fetch the tickets). My dad settled for a more modest bottle of lemon lime and bitters, but this also did not travel its way through his bladder before the end of the movie.

The movie is having some trouble settling in its right spot in my year-end rankings, having started out higher than it currently is before dropping behind about seven movies that it used to be ahead of. I'm not immune to the backlash there has been to every James Cameron movie in the last 30 years. 

But "seeing it again" a month later, through the fresh eyes of my son and my father, has reminded me that the commodity Cameron brings to the screen every time -- most succinctly described as "movie magic" -- is worthy of a pretty prominent place on this list. That realization couples especially well with seeing a different movie last night whose technical challenges blew me away. This time of year, we always have to remember that while being moved, emotionally, may remain the ideal cinematic experience for most of us, the less sentimental -- but sometimes equally powerful -- emotion of awe must always be reckoned with.

An inadvertent acknowledgement of MLK Day

I'm close enough now to my ranking deadline that I've started to plot out particular movies for particular nights. The Elvis Mitchell movie Is That Black Enough for You?!?, a feature-length essay on Black filmmakers and stars between 1968 and 1978, seemed like a good Monday night movie. You know, not the kind of movie you are expecting to knock back a few drinks while watching.

Of course, since it hadn't yet been Martin Luther King Day in the U.S., I didn't realise the appropriateness of watching it on that particular day until after the fact.

And having watched it, I wish I hadn't already set a monthly viewing series for 2023 (with another potential candidate lined up for 2024), because the documentary revealed so many blaxploitation or blaxploitation adjacent films that I have yet to see. In fact, I almost got out my phone and started making a Letterboxd watchlist of them on the fly. (Since the movie is on Netflix, I can still easily do that at some point in the future.)

For starters, can you believe I haven't actually seen the original Shaft?

This is not to suggest that blaxploitation is a total blind spot for me. I'd say I've seen five to ten movies that qualify as blaxploitation, with Super Fly and Blacula as a few titles that come to mind. The number of titles I've heard of but not yet seen, though, could make up a 12-month series with some overflow. 

And while I don't like to announce my monthly series a full year ahead of time, there's a good chance the option I originally had lined up for 2023 will get bumped back again to 2025, since Is That Black Enough for You?!? filled me with a real thirst to catch up on these other titles I've known about but not yet watched, plus some others that might be new to me. 

As a movie itself, Mitchell's film might be lacking a bit. It's too long at two hours and 15 minutes, though I should say it went by pretty quickly as I remained easily engaged with all the great footage he's assembled, as well as interviews with luminaries like Glynn Turman, Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, Billy Dee Williams and Laurence Fishburne. 

Still, Mitchell is a journalist, not a filmmaker -- I used to listen to him on KCRW when I lived in LA. The massive amount of content he's assembled proceeds chronologically, which is a useful way to organize such a compendium, but reflects a lack of imagination in terms of narrative structure. Plus you rarely get the sense that he's speaking to a larger overarching thesis statement, instead writing passages to link the chronological discussion of the films. These are observant passages and are interesting unto themselves, but they don't seem to be serving a unifying concept.

Plus he has some weird tendencies, like making a first reference to someone without including their first name. At one point he was talking about Sammy Davis Jr. and he simply referred to him as "Davis" despite it being the first mention. There was another instance of that but I can't remember who it was. 

I also find the title a bit florid for someone who is as academic and even-keeled as Mitchell tends to be. It's a reference to a repeated line of dialogue in a couple movies, but the outrage evident in the three punctuation marks is not something Mitchell himself embodies.

Still, Is That Black Enough for You?!? clearly got me fired up to dive into movies by and about Black people at some point in the near future, even if that near future may be 12 months away.

Plus, it's always good to be reminded what Martin Luther King Jr. fought for on the third Monday in January.

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: The Loveless

This is the first in a 2023 bi-monthly series watching the films of Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow I haven't yet seen.

I'm struggling to the finish line with my 2022 viewings. I have a lot of movies I could watch, but the collective exhaustion is sapping my will a bit.

So when I had an afternoon to myself on Sunday and just wanted to unwind with a movie, I chose to watch something from 1981.

It'll be the first in the new bi-monthly series I announced less than a week ago. I figured I'd be cramming it into the period between January 25th and January 31st, once I'm well and truly done with 2022 movies. But the truth is, after that I like to take a day or two off from watching movies entirely, and I've already got two others I need to squeeze in before the end of the month due to various other commitments, both on this blog and elsewhere.

And though this series is devoted to the films of women, I had to get through one man first. 

I didn't realize it at the time I selected this series, but Kathryn Bigelow had a co-director on her feature debut, who was also making his directorial debut. His name is Monty Montgomery, and I'm choosing to blame him for why I liked The Loveless so little.

It's also the film debut for Willem Dafoe, but I don't blame him for the movie's problems. It's not his fault they asked him to play a too-cool-for-school motorcycle greaser from the late 1950s, one of my least favorite recurring character types on film. But I'll get to the specifics of what I don't like about this film in a moment.

Now, Monty Montgomery has some good credits to his name. He would go on to work as a producer with David Lynch on Wild at Heart, which is not a huge surprise as that movie shares some DNA with this one. (Though to be clear, I like that one much better.) In a particular coincidence for this series, he also served as a producer on The Portrait of a Lady, which is a film directed by Bigelow's series partner, Jane Campion. Who knew I'd be able to link the two so successfully in terms of mutual collaborators. 

Interestingly, though, Montgomery is not a director -- not even on this film, according to IMDB. Yes IMDB lists him as co-director on the film's main page, but if you go to Montgomery's page, he only has producer, writer and actor credits, getting only a writer credit on The Loveless if you were to go just by that. His acting career was not a lot more prolific, as his primary credit is playing The Cowboy in Mulholland Drive. 

David Lynch, Jane Campion and of course Bigelow are great collaborators, but I still want to blame Montgomery for what I dislike about The Loveless, even knowing as little about him as I do.

One of the reasons for that is the movie has a hard time accumulating much of a female perspective. In order to tell you the ways it falls down in that area, I should probably set up the plot a bit.

Plot? Yeah there isn't really one. We meet Dafoe's Vance (heh, a nickname I sometimes use, but it did not ingratiate me to him) as a solo biker out on the road, who stops to help fix a flat of a woman broken down by the side of the road. He proceeds to extract more of a cash fee from her than she wanted to give, plus a non-consensual kiss that she seems to start to like as it goes. I can't specifically fault the film for this sort of thing as not only were we considerably less concerned about the agency of attractive women in films 42 years ago, but the film is also set in what appears to be the late 1950s, when society was even less concerned about such things than it was in 1981.

The opening is a bit of a false friend, though, as Vance is actually part of a larger group of bikers who are on their way from (they say) Detroit to Daytona, when one of the bikers has trouble with his Harley and needs to stop in a small Georgia town to get it repaired. There, now I've given you pretty much the whole plot.

The action, such as it is, involves the bikers standing around looking cool, chain-smoking cigarettes, continuing to pop the tops of ten-cent Coke bottles from the vending machine, sneering at each other and the locals, playing various games of chicken with each other (the most memorable being a game where they repeatedly throw a knife as close as possible to the other's boot without hitting it), and generally creating trouble. Each guy is trying to look tougher and cooler than the guy next to him, though there is also one female biker. 

Anything resembling a story comes in the form of a local teenager Vance hooks up with, who drives a convertible sports car. She tells Vance about how her mother killed herself when she could no longer tolerate the girl's abusive father, and the girl shows a scar on her forehead courtesy of the old man as well. (Since I'm disappointed in the representation of the film's female characters, the least I can do is name the actress here. She's played by Marin Kanter, who only made five more films.) Of course Vance ends up despoiling her, though at least this liaison appears to be consensual.

The father becomes an antagonist to the bikers, eager to run them out of town and perhaps even try to kill them. 

The film spends so much time on nothing that the only conclusion you can really reach is that its primary raison d'etre is to show how cool bikers are. I hardly think that would be a reason Bigelow would list for wanting to make a movie, but it was her first movie, and sometimes you don't get a lot of choice in subject matter in such a situation. I will say that the filmmaking is plenty credible, even though it is in service of something that does nothing for me. 

I've just never thought that someone posturing in a leather jacket and combing grease through their hair made for a very aspirational icon. I'm completely immune to the charms of such a character, which I think might be one of the reasons I was slow to become interested in Elvis Presley, though certainly that's only one incarnation of Elvis as a performer. I did like the Fonz in Happy Days, though, so who knows. Maybe it's just these particular greasers I don't care for. All the sneering and the false bravado and the worshipping of vehicles with loud engines and the idea not to mess with them because they could end you ... it doesn't work for me either when this type is put on a pedestal or when it is critiqued, the latter of which is probably supposed to be the case in The Loveless. I'm just too quick to find such a person an insecure, infantile personality, even in a movie 42 years ago where the character deficits of such a person were not nearly as clear as they are now.

Should I be giving The Loveless a pass for the period in which it was made? I don't think so. In whatever period you make a film, you have to decide whether you are going to put the effort into a compelling story or are just going to trot around your characters for 80 minutes and decide that's story enough. 

And yes, the depictions of women are bad. Other than the biker chick, the stalled motorist and Telena, the girl with the convertible and the bad daddy, the most prominent female character is the bored waitress in the diner where a lot of the action takes place. She ends the film performing a striptease at a local bar, for reasons not entirely clear.

Two telling bits from this end portion of the film that I jotted down:

1) The song that plays during the striptease is something called "You're Wasting My Time." Indeed.

2) In one of his last lines of dialogue in the film, Dafoe's Vance says "We're going nowhere. Fast." You said it Vance, not me. It's an on-the-nose comment not only for these characters, but for how I felt the entire time watching this movie -- which seemed like an eternity even at barely 80 minutes long.

I have no doubt Bigelow's career and her depictions of women will start to improve with Near Dark, her next in the series, and certainly by the time of Blue Steel, which features Jamie Lee Curtis as a cop.

Before then, though, I've decided to go with Campion's first film I haven't seen, An Angel at My Table, in March.

Spoiler alert: I won't be ranking the $19.99 rentals

I've come down to the final ten days before I finalize my 2022 film rankings, and I've needed to go beyond the list I scratched out on a piece of paper of movies I definitely realistically planned to see by January 24th. 

There are only six of those titles left that I feel I am certain to see, which are Moonage Daydream, Till, Aftersun, God's Creatures, Is That Black Enough For You? and Babylon. On the list but unavailable by then is Women Talking, the latest from Sarah Polley. Also on that list, but movies I talked about possibly watching with my wife (and others in our family), are My Father's Dragon and Black Adam, neither of which may get watched in time. I only want to force my wife to watch one movie in the next ten days and that's Moonage Daydream, since she's a big Bowie fan.

Then there are two movies on the list that are only available as a $19.99 rental, and when it comes down to it, that's going to be a reason for me not to watch them, given how many choices I have.

The first, as you have guessed, is Spoiler Alert, which I only just learned about for the first time in the past few weeks. This has been a good year for gay characters at the movies between Bros and Fire Island and The Whale, but the movie isn't available in Australian cinemas, so my only choice is the premium rental fee. Sorry, Spoiler Alert.

The second is Bones and All, from a director who made one of the most beloved movies about gay characters in recent years, that being Call Me By Your Name. I point that out only as a coincidence, since I don't believe there are any gay themes in this film (though there is Timothee Chalamet). In this case I did have access to see this, and I could probably still find it in Australian cinemas -- so it's possible this will get watched, if I have time to get out to see it. But not by $19.99 rental.

Then you have some others in the larger list that I could watch at an inflated rental price, like The Inspection, which I only just learned existed with the Golden Globe nominations. Sorry, Inspection.

Seriously Red is actually not available for rental via U.S. iTunes at any price, but I could rent it through Amazon Prime in Australia -- for $24.99 AUD. Considering that I didn't prioritize this either when it was in theaters, that's a big no.

The thing that could challenge this approach to finishing my list is that I actually don't know what the rental prices will be for Aftersun and Till. iTunes advises me that both are becoming available for rental on January 17th, as both are currently only available for $19.99 purchase. Becoming available for rental after a period where only purchase was possible often means a semi-premium rental price, like $6.99, though it could be the full $19.99. I don't know if I will rent Till at the full $19.99 price, if that's what it is, but I will have to do it with Aftersun, since there's a consensus that this is one of the best films of the year.

I had hoped not to be concerned about rental price as I reached my deadline, but my house in California is still not fully sold. There has been a delay in our latest attempt to sell it (the first sale fell through) that could push the closing past my ranking deadline. With that kind of uncertainty hanging over our heads, it's best if I make smart choices and not toss away $20 US on movies I will watch one time.

But one of the other reasons I can use rental price to guide my remaining choices is that I still have so many of them from my larger watchlist. I am steadily whittling it down, but it still has a formidable 85 titles, including those already mentioned as well as at least ten that are not coming out until 2023. 

For anywhere from free on one of my streamers to no more than a $6.99 rental, I can still watch the following:

Athena
Margrete: Queen of the North
Warriors of the Future
Emily
Call Jane
Meet Cute
Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter
Bad Axe
Dead for a Dollar
Speak No Evil
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
Mr. Harrigan's Phone
Breaking
Slumberland
Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul.
I Came By
Goodnight Mommy
Sharp Stick
Inu-Oh
Mad God
Paris, 13th District
Benediction
Something in the Dirt
The Pez Outlaw
Incredible But True
Vengeance
Playground
Mothering Sunday
A Chiara
The Forgiven
Both Sides of the Blade
The Deer King
Belle 
The 355

So yeah, I have plenty to choose from. (And if you want to put in a vote for any of these over any of the others, would love it if you would leave a comment.)

It'll get me well over 170, and will be a new record. It's finally sort of almost time to reveal the list.

Completing more filmographies, but leaving the old white men behind

To say that I have only completed the filmographies of old white men during my bi-monthly series over the past few years is not exactly accurate. I mean, this whole quest to finish off filmographies sort of started with Spike Lee, who may be old and male, but is certainly not white. Of course, I didn't actually finish his filmography, since there were nine Lee features I hadn't seen and the bi-monthly schedule only allowed me to watch six of them.

As a corrective to failing to finish Lee's movies, I did choose auteurs in 2021 and 2022 whose filmographies I could finish with exactly six movies, though there were asterisks next to each. With Orson Welles, I had to ignore certain movie fragments that existed under his name, and with Martin Scorsese, I had to disregard documentaries. With both, the problem remained that they were old and white and male. 

In 2023, at last, I am turning this impulse in a distaff direction.

The problem is, due to age-old inequities in the film industry, there are almost no female directors who are both significant enough to be worth investigating in a series like this, and have a directing credit on six features I haven't seen. That's partly a credit to me for having stayed on top of the work of the more prolific female directors, but also partly a sad reality that there just aren't that many to choose from.

Now, if I dug back into history, I could find directors who worked decades ago who may be largely unseen by me, people like Lina Wertmuller or Vera Chytilova or Ida Lupino, who may have six or more films I haven't seen. But the impulse behind this series is not to discover somebody I'm unfamiliar with, and then work through their filmography. It's to take somebody I already know, whose work I already admire, and to finish it off.

So I've come up with what I think is a pretty good idea: I'm going to split the six films between two directors.

And to give a clear relationship between them that would make sharing this series logical, they'll be two of the three women who have won best director Oscars.

With apologies to Chloe Zhao, who has directed only one feature-length film I haven't seen, that means I'm focusing on Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion in 2023. 

And because of course I do, I've got a fun name for this series: Campion Champion and Bigelow Pro.

Yes that's a bit of a mouthful, but you only have to say it six times. 

Each director has three feature films I haven't seen, and yes, I may have watched K-19: The Widowmaker last year just to allow that to be the case. I may have. 

With Campion, it's An Angel at My Table (1990), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003). With Bigelow, it's The Loveless (1981), Near Dark (1987) and Blue Steel (1990). 

Is either director particularly a favorite of mine? Not necessarily, but they've each made at least one film that I love. With Bigelow it's Strange Days, which is in my Flickchart top 100, and with Campion, my most passionate feelings would probably be divided between The Piano and The Power of the Dog. 

There can be no doubt of these women's historical significance to the movies, though, considering that they were indeed the first and third women to take home the Oscar for best director, Campion just completing the feat a year ago.

Considering that all of my unseen Bigelow movies come before the first Campion movie I haven't seen, chronologically -- even though Bigelow is only three years older than Campion -- I could just watch all Bigelow's movies first, then switch to Campion for the "back nine," as it were.

Or, I could give the series more of a sense of evenness throughout by alternating titles, starting with The Loveless and then going to An Angel at My Table, and so on. Whatever I decide to do, I will go in chronological order at least within each director's filmography.

However I choose to approach it, I'll make that decision within the next week or two, as I plan to start this in January and have subsequent installments in March, May, July, September and November. 

And while I often do this bi-monthly series starting in February and ending in December, I have another bi-monthly series that will be filling that slot that I haven't announced yet -- partly because I haven't settled on it yet. It will be watching the films of one of two directors, and in this case it will be revisiting films I've already seen.

In either case I will likely start out with The Loveless as the oldest film on the list, having just confirmed its availability on iTunes. If you want to play along, you can watch that now and join me back here in a couple weeks for a discussion. 

A thing for movies about clones

I won't tell you how high Riley Stearns' Dual is going to end up in my year-end rankings -- I won't know myself for another two weeks.

I will tell you, though, that whatever stigma was once attached to movies about clones has long since vanished for me.

Spoiler alert for movies about clones you might not have known were about clones, so if you want to be overly cautious you can stop reading. However, only in a few cases are these movies secretly about clones, and if you are a reasonably accomplished cinephile you will likely have seen these anyway. I'm only going to mention five titles so it's not a huge risk. Though, as the newest, mild spoilers for Dual in any case. 

Making a movie about clones was once a guarantee that you had made a shit movie. Either the technology laughably disappointed, or the story did, or both. I think it was both in The 6th Day, my lowest ranked film of 2000. I didn't even bother to see Multiplicity, which came out a few years before that.

There are still plenty of bad ones I'm sure -- Gemini Man would be one example -- but the subject matter alone no longer leaves a stink on a film. In fact, I think the subject matter makes me more optimistic than it does pessimistic. Even some cloning movies that are legitimately mediocre, like the Keanu Reeves vehicle Replicas, have a certain charm for me. 

Maybe it all changed in 2009, when I named Moon my #1 movie of the year. Since this is the main spoiler choice here, I won't go too much into who is cloned and why or how. But come on, this great movie has now been out for 14 years, so if you haven't seen it, that's on you.

The next movie I'm going to mention in my trend was just from last year, so it might not seem like a very urgent trend -- but don't worry, Dual makes three, and every editor knows that three equals a trend. That was Swan Song, the one directed by Benjamin Cleary on AppleTV+ (as opposed to the one directed by Todd Stephens about an older gay man). I found that film's dealing with the existential issues related to cloning enormously moving, as the protagonist (played by Mahershala Ali) signs on to have a clone replace him without his family knowing when he contracts a terminal illness. Anyway, that movie was my #5 of the year. 

Dual -- streaming on Netflix as of last week -- has a similar premise, but does new and more comical things with it. Like Swan Song, the technology is used to replace the dying, but without fooling the family in this case. The family willingly takes on the clone as a way of softening the blow of losing the person, and may even come to like the clone as much as the original person and keep them around past the grieving phase. Of course, issues arise when the terminal patient is suddenly no longer terminal, and the clone has developed its own personhood, so the two must battle it out to the death to see which one continues the life in progress.

A ding against the movie standing tall on the strength of its clone themes is that my favorite thing about it is Stearns' deadpan sense of humor. The humor actually didn't work for me in his last film, The Art of Self-Defense, though I appreciated what he was trying to do. His film before that, which I did really like, was Faults, about a brain-washing cult -- and while there was certainly eccentricity in it, it was a lot more of a head trip movie than a comedy, deadly serious at times.

He's gotten both the head trippiness and the deadpan humor on the same page in Dual, and it's now my favorite of his three films. Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul both kill it with the absurd line deliveries, as does the rest of the cast. There's a definite artificiality in that dialogue and in the affect behind it, but in this case that's a good thing. 

And yes, it gives me interesting new things to consider about the point at which a bag of inexperienced meat resembling a person becomes that person, or at least an entity unto itself deserving of basic human rights. If you had practiced becoming a woman in order to ease the grieving for her family, and possibly live out the remainder of her natural life for her, but were then told after quite a long time that your services were no longer required, it wouldn't really be simple, now would it?

I won't spoil any more of Dual than I already have. 

But I did think it was worth spoiling as much as I have in order to give the movie a very strong recommendation to you, my dear readers, as well as to let you know that The Audient is open for business on movies about clones. 

To quote or not to quote

I watched 6,329 movies prior to watching the Robert Downey Sr. documentary last night, and not one of them has a quotation mark in the title.

The question is, does this one?

The poster for Sr. -- let's just call it Sr. until we get the issue of the quotation marks settled -- seems to indicate for sure that you are meant to include the quotation marks. It's a choice supported by Letterboxd and Wikipedia in listing this movie on their respective sites.

However, IMDB -- which some consider the be-all and end-all, definitive one-stop shop for movie information -- isn't having any of it. The title appears as just the two letters and the period.

Now, this could have a technical explanation. Since quotation marks in the titles of movies or other works of entertainment are extremely uncommon, it's possible that the use of quotation marks in IMDB allows for a more specific title search, an indication to look for only these two key words and not titles that are similar. 

However, after testing this theory with a few searches bracketed by these punctuation marks, I've determined that IMDB appears to just ignore them as though they weren't even there.

Lower on the movie's IMDB page, it lists that it is also known as "Sr.," and in the featured user review, the quotation marks are also used.

While I am tempted to go with IMDB's implicit suggestion -- that it is stupid to have quotation marks in your title, even if that's how it appears in the film itself and in all promotional materials -- I may end up including the quotation marks in my own listing of the movie on my various lists.

Reason?

The title is otherwise so short and abrupt that it looks kind of like someone stopped halfway through typing it. 

The quotation marks serve the function of saying "Yes, this is the full title, you aren't reading it wrong."

So I guess I will go with "Sr.," much as it offends me on some level. (And we're seeing one of the ways it offends me in this very sentence, where I am forced to include a comma that isn't part of the title within the rest of the title, in order to adhere to other basic grammatical rules, like the fact that you always put the comma to the left of the second quotation mark.)

While I've got you, I wanted to talk for a second about what it means to have "Sr." as part of your name.

With Robert Downey Sr., it made sense since the son went on to far outshine the father's accomplishments. While some lovers of independent cinema would certainly consider the father to be the more interesting contributor to the history of cinema, it's hard to argue that the man who earned worldwide recognition as Iron Man -- in fact, the actor probably most responsible for making the MCU what it is today -- is, in any meaningful way, the lesser Downey.

I checked on the internet and could not find an answer to when he actually took the "Sr." on as part of his name. It stands to reason, though, that it was not simply upon the birth of his son. His son had to gain enough renown, and he himself had to be confused for his son often enough, that the change was required. 

But that's not the case with Travis Lakins Sr.

Travis Lakins Sr. is a baseball player. He's only 28 years old, so there is little chance that Travis Lakins Jr. has amounted to anything of note so far. Even with the most aggressive schedule for starting a family, and even assuming that Travis Jr. is the oldest of his three children (the internet is unclear on this), he could be no more than ten years old, and considering that he's not a child actor that I'm aware of it, it's unlikely anyone is talking about him outside of his relationship to his father, and possibly the fact that his existence prompted his father to add a clarifying suffix to his name.

Clearly most people who choose to name their children the same as them are not expecting to add this suffix to their name unless it's absolutely necessary for the sake of clarity. It indicates a certain pride in your offspring, which is sweet -- you are now defining yourself in relation to another person, rather than just them in relation to you. I'm not going to say it takes narcissism to give your son the same name as you -- I have friends who have done this and I don't consider them narcissistic at all -- but in some respects it does suggest you are making a miniature copy of yourself, which is something of a narcissistic impulse. Changing your own name to reflect the naming decision you've made for your child turns that possible narcissism on its head.

I do think it's interesting, though, that while the title "Jr." implies exactly one older person with that name on the family tree, "Sr." is not nearly so precise. Let's say that Robert Downey Jr. had named his son Robert Downey III. (He didn't; he named him Exton Elias Downey, a much more typically eccentric Hollywood child name.) Would Robert Downey Sr. still be a Sr. if there were a third Robert Downey, or would he just go back to being Robert Downey? I suppose at that point the "Sr." is a fixed part of his identity, which is kind of the point of naming this documentary the way it's been named.

What is it with famous Downeys naming their children after them, anyway? I was probably learning about Morton Downey Jr., the notorious television talk show host, around the same time I was first learning about Robert Downey Jr., and I'm sure I thought they were related. In fact, Morton Downey Jr. (son of the singer, Morton Downey) was only four years older than Robert Downey Sr., so he could have easily been Robert Downey Jr.'s father -- and I think at some point, I thought he was. According to the logic of the maybe 13-year-old me, "Downey Jr." was a complete last name. The father's first name was Morton while the son's first name was Robert. 

The funny thing about this whole thing is that Robert Downey Sr. was actually a junior himself. His own father was born Robert Elias, and Downey Sr. was for a time Robert Elias Jr., until the father changed the whole family name as an easier way of getting into the military, if I'm remembering correctly what the film told me. (Something about the name Elias sounding too Jewish.) But wait then why wasn't he himself Robert Downey Jr.? I must be missing something here. 

So at least Robert Downey Jr.'s son was named as a way of honoring the heritage of the family, if only as a middle name. (Which, incidentally, is how we handled it in my family, with both of my children having their mother's last name as a middle name.)

And I think that's about enough discussion of that. 

Note: By using "sr." as a label on this post, I've manipulated Blogger into moving it to the top of my alphabetical list of labels, one ahead of the label for the movie (untitled).