Oppenheimer wins, after all

Back in July, when I had no idea how this whole Barbenheimer phenomenon would play out, I went to see Oppenheimer on opening night for both films. 

The Sun in Yarraville was decked out in pink, as were the eager beavers coursing through its lobby, many of them carrying drinks or posing for photos in the life-sized Barbie packaging. 

Meanwhile, my screening of Oppenheimer in one of the Sun's smallest screening rooms was attended by three other men, all older than me.

There were a couple obvious explanations for this last. One was that it was far more popular to attend a 70 mm screening of Oppenheimer at the Sun on one of its largest screenings, though that showing was halfway through its running time, so I wouldn't have seen any of those excited attendees in the lobby or anywhere else.

But I thought I'd collected enough evidence about the relative merits of these two movies to write a post entitled "Barbie wins," which you can find here if you are so inclined. 

Nearly seven months later, in the competition that confers on a film its immortality, Oppenheimer has emerged as the ultimate winner, taking home the statue for best picture at the 96th Academy Awards.

It was only my seventh favorite of the best picture nominees at my ranking deadline, and would now fall to eighth behind The Zone of Interest. But it was still my 26th ranked film overall in 2023, so I'm happier about this win than I have been about many of the best picture wins in the past decade. 

And as I told you I would yesterday, I watched the ceremony live for the second year in a row -- an hour earlier, as you know, so the 10 a.m. start time basically meant it did not impede on the trajectory of our Labour Day one iota. 

Here is what would have been my "live tweets" if I were on Twitter and if it were still called Twitter.

- The Australian television network 7+ is really making me kiss the ring in order to stream the Oscars for free. They've required me to sit through seven ads, in increasing agitation, in order to start watching. Fortunately, the telecast did then play from the start.

- Back to extensively praising the acting nominees. It's going to be a long night.

- How did I never hear Da'Vine Joy Randolph's name pronounced correctly before now?

- Rita Moreno must be the most still-coherent person over 90 in Hollywood.

- Love that Paul Giamatti was seated next to Randolph and had a tear in his eye during her acceptance speech, which was very nice, even if she did not thank him (or anyone else in the film, for that matter).

- I got the animated short winner correct so my first miss of the night comes when The Boy and the Heron wins best animated feature. It was dumb to go against Hayao Miyazaki's last film, even if I didn't like it very much. (Then again my guess, Across the Spider-Verse, was not a personal favorite either. But I knew Elemental had no shot.)

- Okay I liked that adapted screenplay joke by Jimmy Kimmel, who is off to a fairly disappointing start otherwise.

- What are Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer talking about?

- I'm surprised that I correctly picked Anatomy of a Fall to win best original screenplay. I'm also surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, that they played "P.I.M.P." as accompaniment to Justine Triet walking on stage. (Great, now it will be in my head again for the next three weeks.)

- The Oppenheimer sweep is officially off as it loses best adapted screenplay to American Fiction. (It didn't win for best supporting actress either but that was never going to happen.)

- Cord Jefferson is really likable. 

- Billie Eilish comes on stage and I continue to amuse myself by calling her "Billie Eyelash." But I don't know why we need 50 different shots of people reacting to her Barbie song. 

- Speaking of possible sweeps, Poor Things is going after all the art and design awards. (And I actually wrote this before it won for its costumes. Unfortunately, best costume was the only one of those things I picked correctly.)

- The John Cena bit was funny. "Costumes ..." (pause for laughter). Good stuff. 

- Okay, the reactions to the Killers of the Flower Moon song were many, so I guess this is a thing this year.

- Will Jonathan Glazer winning an Oscar cause him to want to make more movies? I hope so.

- The Gosling-Blunt Barbie-Oppenheimer rivalry bit was funny. When they introduced the montage on stunts, though, I wondered if they were finally giving out an Oscar for stunts and I just missed it on my ballot this year.

- That is one hirsute Sam Rockwell.

- It's taken a long time but Oppenheimer finally has its first win of the night. Robert Downey Jr. seems like he should have won an Oscar before, but it's only his third nomination. Unsurprisingly snarky acceptance speech, but with enough heart.

- The Oppenheimer editor is adorable.

- Okay, as Oppenheimer has now appeared in each of my last three comments, the momentum for it is building as it wins for Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography.

- Of course Wes Anderson did not show up, even though it was expected he would win. 

- Wait, what is the movie Flamin' Hot again? (Checks IMDB.) Holy shit it's about Cheetos and Eva Longoria directed it! 

- John Mulaney made me laugh out loud with the second rip of Madame Web of the evening, but then I missed most of his bit about Field of Dreams because my wife and son came into the garage needing to get the beach tent. Okay, so much for having the day not impacted by the Oscars and vice versa.

- Picking Oppenheimer to win all the technical awards lets me down again. I should have figured that the sound in Zone of Interest was one of its best bets at an Oscar.

- I think it's funny that England has Mother's Day in March. The English-speaking countries need to get together and figure this stuff out. Australia and the U.S. both have it on the same Sunday in May, but they do deviate on Father's Day (which is in September here). I have no idea when British Father's Day is.

- Okay, Ryan Gosling is reminding me again of how awesome he was in Barbie. Remember when he went away for a few years? So glad he's back, and it looks like Fall Guy will be super fun. 

- Wait, Slash?

- Every Oscars needs a bring-the-house-down number. That was it. But thank you for playing, Cheetos movie song.

- When Kimmel continues to make references to his crush on Gosling, he's just saying what we're all thinking.

- Jeez Cynthia Erivo, take it down a notch with the facial jewelry.

- I just realized Mica Levi didn't get a nomination for her Zone of Interest score. And Robbie Robertson didn't get his posthumous Oscar, which seemed like an easy call. 

- Really, the other Barbie song wins? Come on Billie Eyelash. It feels like we have a future EGOT here.

- Tina Turner gets the last spot in the In Memoriam section. Not a fan that they never went full screen with it. Didn't learn of any deaths I didn't already know about except one: Lee Sun-kyun, who played the rich father/husband in Parasite. And now via Wikipedia I've just learned a lot of unsavory details about accusations and investigations of drug use that may have led to his suicide. I might have preferred not to know.

- I finally learned how Paul Giamatti did the eye thing in The Holdovers.

- Matthew McConaughey looks a bit like Spock looked after he fixed the radiation leak on the Enterprise in Star Trek II.

- Cillian Murphy wins in his first attempt. This should have been Giamatti's third if they didn't insanely forget to nominate him for Sideways.

- Nolan has eight nominations? That's crazy, considering that many of his films weren't really going for Oscars.

- Sally Field is still adorable.

- Emma Stone wins and Killers of the Flower Moon gets shut out. Seems like the biggest surprise of the night. She gives one of my favorite speeches of the night but I'm maybe a little surprised she's quite so emotional on her second win. 

- "Isn't it past your jail time?" NICE.

- For a second I thought they were introducing Robert De Niro to give out best picture, which would be a conflict of interest, but no, it's Al Pacino, looking his age. And acting his age, as he forgets to read the nominees again and gives a completely botched and confusing delivery of the winner's name. But yes indeed, it is Oppenheimer as we all thought it would be.

Past Lives and Flower Moon got shut out, which may be a tad disappointing, but so did Maestro, which was richly deserved. 

Just another quick thing I noticed ... the only non-best-picture-nominated features to win Oscars won them in categories where no best picture nominee was nominated. So Godzilla Minus One won for its visual effects, The Boy and the Heron for best animated feature, the documentary whose name I already don't remember for best documentary ... but in none of those categories was there a best picture nominee. Even the best international feature winner was, of course, a best picture nominee.

And so that puts an official final wrap on my Oscars coverage and on 2023 in general. Catch me again this time next year when Madame Web takes home its statue for best picture.

Labour Day Oscars, second year running

Last year in this post, I discussed the fact that it took ten years of my family being in Australia for the Oscars telecast to line up with Labour Day, a day off from work that I believe always falls on the second Monday of March.

Well, it took only one year for it to happen again.

I doubt the Academy is specifically consulting the Australian bank holidays, but by landing on some sense of consistency with its telecast date, it has allowed the two to align for the second year in a row -- which means only my second chance to watch the Oscars live since I've lived in this country.

And this year, I don't even have to take my kids out for breakfast as a trade with my wife, to buy myself the good will to take three hours off in the middle of the day to watch TV.

I hadn't remembered that that was the case last year, but reading the previously linked post reminded me of it.

Another improvement from last year: I'm writing the post you are currently reading on Sunday, rather than Monday, meaning that I can write my Oscars recap post as the ceremony is occurring, and post it straight afterward. (Some necessary background information: I never post more than one post in the same day. If it looks like I have ever done this in the past, it's only because changing time zones to Australia may have retroactively placed two posts in the same day that were once in two different days.)

I did my final bit of Oscars homework this past week, watching American Fiction on Tuesday night. It's the only best picture nominee I hadn't seen and really the only film of note that received any nominations that I hadn't seen. The only other film I haven't seen with a nomination in any of the major categories -- excluding categories like documentaries or international features, where there is not an expectation that I would have seen them -- is The Color Purple with its best supporting actress nomination for Danielle Brooks. (I don't know why they even bothered to name any other nominees in that category as Da'Vine Joy Randolph is going to win, and rightly so.)

My initial reaction to American Fiction was a bit more tepid than I wanted it to be. You can read my review here. Then yesterday I was listening to a podcast in which the three hosts discussed the movie, and though they had some of the same reservations I had, they pointed out that the bait-and-switch Cord Jefferson is doing here is similar to the sort of stunt Monk Ellison is trying to pull off in the story. And that gives some of my concerns with the film a sort of intentionality that makes me value those choices more. It still likely comes in ninth out of the ten nominees for me, miles ahead of Maestro, but at least trailing the others by less than I would have originally thought.

As proof that it is almost Oscars time, I am also early this year in printing my ballot -- or would have been, if I'd actually clicked print on Vanity Fair's printable Oscar ballot just now. But the printer is in close enough proximity to where my wife is currently sleeping that I held off. 

Don't want to give her an excuse to make me take my kids out to breakfast again. 

International Women's Day: The Marvels

To recap, my position on The Marvels at the end of 2023:

1) I'm definitely not seeing it in the theater, but

2) I'll definitely see it if it streams on Disney+ before my ranking deadline, which it did not, which is okay because

3) I'm feeling kind of backlashy toward Brie Larson, for reasons that may be valid but might align me with people I don't want to be aligned with, and besides

4) Not seeing it would allow me to finish watching Ms. Marvel on Disney+ before I see it.

But really, what I worried people thought when I didn't rank it was "He just doesn't want to see it cuz there's girls in it."

People who know me know that's not the case, but I'm thinking about all those people who don't know me.

So to atone, I watched it last night on International Women's Day. 

It's only been a tradition for me to watch a movie to celebrate International Women's Day for one year. Last year I finished off my best picture nominees by watching Women Talking, which hadn't yet been accessible to me on my ranking deadline, and that experience had a good ending. I say "ending" because I thought the start of that movie was stilted, but I came around on it pretty strongly by the time it reached the finish line.

No such finish for The Marvels, but I will say that it also went up for me a half-star by the end. Unfortunately, instead of that getting it up to the four stars Women Talking received, it got it up to only 2.5.

The Marvels has been streaming on Disney+ for about a month now, and considering that I've watched two 2023 best picture nominees as well as one other 2023 film that wasn't nominated for anything, the lid was officially off the prohibition against watching movies from the previous year in the wake of closing my list. In fact, I'd already been eyeing it for a viewing for several weeks now. Once a Marvel die-hard, always a Marvel die-hard, I guess -- even after consciously acknowledging that Marvel movies don't carry the likelihood of success with me that they once did.

The thing is, there was one thing holding me back: Finishing Ms. Marvel, as I said n point 4 above that I intended to do.

To recap that one, we started watching it as a family not long after it debuted in the middle of 2022. But after about two episodes, the kids admitted they weren't drawn in by it. My wife and I were disappointed, but not enough to continue watching it on our own after they went to sleep for the night. 

I did try to pick it up again last month, to prepare for the Marvels viewing that I didn't care enough about to prioritize a viewing in the theater. I guess that was too much preparation for too many things I didn't care enough about. A pause of 18 months fatally sapped my interest in finishing Ms. Marvel. I'd watch halves of episodes before either falling asleep or moving on to something else, and in the halves I did watch, even though I watched them consecutively in terms of the narrative, I felt myself confused about what was happening.

And then I realized a simple thing: I'm not in a place right now to be a Marvel completist both in terms of Marvel television and Marvel movies. It's enough to be a Marvel movie completist, which I am again now. Stuff may have happened in Hawkeye and Secret Invasion and She-Hulk that has some bearing on these movies, but I've gotten by without watching those shows. Ms. Marvel would just be the same.

And in truth, the only thing I probably needed to know that I didn't get from three-and-a-half episodes of the show was that Kamala Khan did indeed come into her powers and that the members of her family survived the experience. Which is what I would have guessed before I watched one minute of the first episode.

Okay let's get back to this movie.

It's fine. I have no interest in getting all hatery and saying how it's a disaster. It's competently made and I didn't find the characters grating in any way. I have actively positive thoughts toward Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and especially the delightful Iman Kellani as Ms. Marvel, essentially our viewer surrogate in this film. They did their level best to try to make both the actress and the character a bit more accessible in terms of Larson as Carol Danvers, surely absorbing some of the backlash that involved Larson being difficult to work with and feeling too arrogant about her character's powers. But I still caught her posing with a superior look on her face one too many times for my liking.

There's a problem that remains with Captain Marvel, which is that she is, by some descriptions, the most powerful character in the entire MCU, and yet you can't have a protagonist who doesn't have vulnerability. I must admit that I didn't work very hard to piece together the plot of this movie and whether it made sense or was satisfying, but I had a hard time feeling like Carol was in danger at any given moment. At the same time, they have to specifically not have her use some percentage of her powers to solve problems so she doesn't just fly into everything and zap a supernova at it, which it seems she is capable of doing. By being too strong, the character has possibly unsolvable problems in terms of building stakes and creating tension in the narrative.

I did like the bit about how the three main women switch places, though again, I didn't really understand how or why it was happening and what the rules were. Therefore, I couldn't tell if the gimmick was being used cleverly or fairly. The enjoyment I got there was purely surface level.

Then I will also admit liking the scene with all the newborn cats, which I won't spoil if you haven't seen it, even if that whole joke is the sort of thing we've already seen in four Men in Black movies.

So let's drop the qualitative analysis of the movie for a moment and see how it does as a viewing on International Women's Day.

I feel like there is something smart in the construction of this movie as being divided between three main female characters. Even though more women may be more triggering for the wrong segment of the public, Marvel has not been catering to that segment of the public for years, if ever. What it does for people who are less extreme in their anathema to heroines is it divides it equally between three characters, rather than providing a monolithic single character against whom to expend your negative thoughts. To some this is just woker and woker, but again I say, those people can go suck an egg.

I also do think there is something useful about the movie in terms of being post the most obvious subtext of any movie involving female superheroes: namely, the chip on its shoulder about being able to do anything a man can do. We've had enough female superhero movies now that those original gestures are now too simplistic of a goal in this type of movie. As with any representation hurdle we must overcome, the first step is to overcome it, and to tell your audience that you are doing so in no uncertain terms, so they're not too thick to get it. Then, you get to a point where the representation alone is enough and you don't have to draw extra attention to why you were fighting for that representation in the first place.

I think The Marvels is in that spot, which is good. The fact that it doesn't totally succeed -- in fact, that it doesn't even succeed enough to earn the minimum three stars for a recommendation -- isn't on the women, or on director Nia DaCosta, who does a good job with the material in terms of her specific responsibilities. (Though she does share the writing credit with two other women, and that particular trio may not do their job as well as the trio they are writing about.)

No, The Marvels is a disappointment because 33 MCU movies have raised the bar to impossible heights in terms of what qualifies as something new or interesting. Even the trio of female superheroes is not particularly new, in the wake of that famous scene in Avengers: Endgame where all the female Avengers assembled on the battlefield to walk together in slow motion. And space? I feel like fully half of the ongoing MCU properties are now set in space, even if it is outer space-resembling inner space, like in the last Ant-Man movie.

I'm glad I watched it on International Women's Day, though, if only for the benefit of that hypothetical bean counter I often reference, who may be taking note of spikes in streams and may correlate that to a day dedicated to women. I still want to appreciate women, even if I didn't appreciate this movie as much as I'd hoped.

A public service announcement from the audience

Yesterday after work I went to see Molly Manning Walker's How to Have Sex on its opening day, and felt myself compelled to make a joke to the (female) clerk about whether people are supposed to be embarrassed about buying this ticket. I think I even said something like "I promise I've done it before." Before things started to get awkward I took my ticket and went in.

(As a side note, I wonder if this title will overall do well for the movie's box office or hurt it. On the one hand, it seems to promise to titillate. On the other, you do have to face the person selling you the ticket and actually speak that title out loud, in which moment you can't help but be self-conscious.)

Greeting me inside the small (about 20 seats) screening room was a set of increasingly interesting sights. 

Of the about seven people scattered throughout the theater, only one struck me as in any way the target audience for this film (and that includes myself, I suppose). She was what appeared to be a mid-20s Black woman with very hip stylings. She might have had a friend with her, she might not. I didn't get a second good look at her later because she was sitting in a row behind me and she left pretty much as soon as the credits started. 

The rest were a truly eclectic bunch:

A woman who appeared to be in her 60s.

A man about my age, maybe a little younger, who spent the entire trailers talking on his phone to someone in the area just outside the entrance, where we could easily hear him and were becoming steadily annoyed by his violation of social etiquette, even before the movie had started.

An older man, though it was hard to tell how old because of his COVID mask, in a fully mechanized wheelchair that was pushed to the right side of the area just in front of the front row, for obvious reasons of accessibility.

And a much older man in the seat closest to the exit on the left side of the front row, who was at least 75.

I thought the guy on the phone was going to be our biggest problem, but then this happened:

At the start of the trailer for the Luca Guadagnino tennis movie Challengers -- whose trailer I have seen about six times now -- the 75-year-old man stood up, faced us, and said something along the lines of this, in a loud and perturbed voice:

"This movie features a lot of tennis players who smoke. This is a product placement by the tobacco industry. No real tennis players would ever smoke. This is a crappy American movie."

And then he sat down.

I considered piping up that Guadagnino was Italian, but thought better of it.

I'd never seen this sort of thing before. And frankly, it annoyed me. Not because of the message -- sure, it is for the betterment of society if you try to prevent people from smoking -- but because he thought it was his responsibility to send it to us, when at least half of us were over 50 and none of us were likely tennis players. (Actually, I am a tennis player, but he probably wouldn't have known that by looking at me.) Given our collective age, we decided whether we intended to smoke or not a long time ago. 

The funny thing was, this was actually an alternate version of the Challengers trailer than the one I'd seen the other five times, which does indeed feature a lot of casual smoking among these world-class athletes. There isn't all the casual smoking here, but there is a very pointed moment where the tennis player played by Josh O'Connor asks the tennis player played by Zendaya to come outside and have a smoke with him, holding out a dark blue pack of cigarettes.

As if to purposefully tweak this guy, or perhaps reinforce what he was saying, Zendaya shuts him down and tells him she doesn't smoke. And then there's a long beat and she closes her laptop, I guess indicating that she succumbed to the request. (And because I've seen the other trailer, which reveals the whole story, I know that things don't go particularly well for her, so maybe they were trying to hint at that with this bit in the trailer.)

When the actual movie started -- and, thank God, the man on the phone finally ended his conversation -- the first thing that happened was that the characters lit up a cigarette every one minute on screen. I thought this was hilarious. The old man may be boycotting Challengers, but the actual movie he came to see featured what I would assume is far more smoking than that film. In the first few minutes alone, the girls humorously commiserate a pack of cigarettes lost to the ocean water when they go for a spontaneous swim, and then when they arrive at their hotel, one of them dumps about half a pack of cigarettes into a frying pan, though I did not entirely understand what she was trying to accomplish there. The rest of the movie features a regular succession of more traditional smoking moments in the midst of drunken hedonism.

I regularly checked in on the guy for signs of visible annoyance, but I saw none. I did wonder what had brought this cantankerous old coot out to How to Have Sex in the first place. Maybe the aforementioned titillation promised by the title. Dirty old buzzard. 

He did inexplicably leave with about ten minutes remaining in the movie, though he did not appear to be annoyed when he did so, and there was nothing particularly confronting that had just happened on screen to prompt it. Maybe his bladder finally caught up to him.

Some of the explanation for this motley bunch lies in the fact that the screening was at 4:20, which is before most employed adults get out of work. But most of these people seeing this movie at all was somewhat unusual. 

Gummy worms and sand worms

The long-awaited day finally arrived on Sunday.

Dune: Part Two.

It was long-awaited in a couple respects. In one sense, I was waiting for it since the end of the first Dune in late 2021, not because I had to find out how it all turned out -- I had read the book, and these aren't the sorts of movies that leave you on the edge of your seat in terms of the drama. (And having seen the second movie, it's clear that "how it all turned out" is just another stop in the road in what seems to be envisioned as a long Dune franchise.) No, I was waiting for it because being transported to that world was such a surrounding, fulfilling, tactile experience that I wanted more of it. You could say, we go to any movie because we want more of that sort of immersive experience. The movie finished in my #9 spot for the year. 

The other reason the day was long-awaited was that this movie was supposed to come out either three or five months ago, I can't remember which. If memory serves, the delay was due to the writer's strike, though in the end, not many titles actually moved their release date for this reason. Remember the writer's strike?

And then it sort of felt like a long wait between Thursday, when I would have liked to have seen it, and Sunday, when I actually did get to see it.

Fortunately, I was able to carve out an ideal 4:15 viewing slot on Sunday, on a suitably large screen at the Sun with a suitably soul-rattling sound system. (That's a phrase I used in my review, which you can find here.) 

I don't normally get to go to the movies in the late afternoon, usually requiring a 9 p.m. time slot, which can be a bit of a challenge for a movie that lasts two hours and 45 minutes -- even one as engrossing as this one. But I've started to become conscious of possible times on the weekend when I can sneak in such a viewing, which also includes the first pre-11 a.m. viewing of the day (it was in this time slot that I recently saw The Zone of Interest) and the so-called "quiet time" time slot, since my kids are allowed to have "quiet time," i.e. get back on their screens, around 4:30 on weekend days, but sometimes as early as 4. 

Anyway, I don't have a lot to say about the viewing except for the series of logistics I've already rattled off. I'll let my review speak for itself. 

If you don't want to read the review, well, in short:

Is this a perfect movie? No.

Does it still deserve 4.5 stars because of the staggering scope of its achievement? Yes, yes it does.

Oh! One final thing.

The subject is a reference to the fact that I had a bag of gummy worms in the movie with me when I watched this movie about giant sand worms. Technically they were gummy snakes, but if you are splitting hairs on the difference between a snake and a worm, you're doing it wrong.

One survived the entire movie, and at the end, I saw it sitting there, looking up at me from the seat next to me. 

That one went down the hatch too. 

We're all talking in complete sentences

Horror director Jane Schoenbrun is well acquainted with subjects, predicates and objects.

Two years after her squirmy little horror movie We're All Going to the World's Fair, Schoenbrun has been given some name actors to work with, including star of Jurassic World and Pokemon movies Justice Smith, in I Saw the TV Glow.

Realizing I had heard her name before and seeing that this also involved looking at screens, I didn't take long after hearing about I Saw the TV Glow to conclude it was from the same person who made We're All Going to the World's Fair. 

But really, it was the similar structures of the titles that clinched it.

No real comment here, except that we do tend to notice when movie titles are a grammatically complete thought. It's a somewhat irregular occurrence. I don't have a way to test this against the titles I've seen that wouldn't take forever, and if I look only at movies starting with "I," I'll get a sort of reverse confirmation bias because most of those will in fact probably be sentences. (Quick glance: The only ones that aren't are those that start with I and a comma -- such as I, Tonya -- and one other that just doesn't really mean anything: I Origins.)

This is a pretty flimsy premise for a post because Schoenbrun has one other feature as a director, when she was Dan instead of Jane: 2018's A Self-Induced Hallucination. So that breaks that particular titling convention.

But this is Jane Schoenbrun, and Jane, in two features, has been consistent in her approach.

The movie doesn't open until a couple months from now, but the advanced buzz seems to be good. And consider me unusually primed both after World's Fair (which was quite chilling until it petered out into a limp ending) and Skinamarink (which, as I have discussed ad nauseum, was the first horror movie to top my chart last year).

February 29th redeemed

Four years ago, I put up a poll in the Flickcharters group on Facebook, asking people which of a dozen terrible movies I should choose as my viewing for February 29th of 2020. It's a tradition that started in 2008 when I happened to watch the Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man on that day, and it birthed the idea that I should be watching something howlingly awful every February 29th. 

The Flickcharters made their choice rather definitively, but in the comments section a write-in candidate started gaining traction. It was seconded and thirded and before long, the evidence was overwhelming that the best candidate wasn't in the poll offerings, but was, rather, Christian Mingle, a Christian-themed dating movie starring Lacey Chabert.

So I watched Christian Mingle. And I sort of liked it.

I wasn't going to let that happen again.

So the winner of the 2020 poll, the 2003 film From Justin to Kelly, was my choice for 2024 ... and I couldn't have been happier with that decision.

I'm not even sure where to start on how bad this movie is, but maybe I should start on how much different a movie like this would be if it had been made today.

A 2024 movie featuring two American Idol stars would be a cross-promotional dream with all the various social media platforms, and it would get high-profile talent behind the camera -- an up-and-comer with possible music video experience, but either way, someone fresh and full of ideas. The resulting movie, even if ultimately unsuccessful, would have been bouncy and buoyant and probably have the look and feel of something like this year's Mean Girls remake. (Which I haven't seen, but I can make assumptions based on the trailers.)

The person they did get to direct the movie, Robert Iscove, is not a name I know off the top of my head, but neither is he some hack who stumbled into the job through nepotism. In fact, Iscove had more than 50 of his 65 directing credits (mostly in TV) prior to From Justin to Kelly, and was already 56 years old at the time of its release. Perhaps the clearest example of why he was chosen was that he had directed She's All That, which was a pretty big hit in 1997, even if it does have the dubious legacy of popularizing the instantly dated notion that a woman would turn from ugly to pretty if only she removed her glasses. 

Given the sheer volume of professional experience Iscove brought with him, it's hard to overstate how shabby this movie looks, how inert are its performances, and how flat the whole experience feels.

Surely, the fact that neither Kelly Clarkson nor Justin Guarini were trained actors had something to do with their lack of charisma (independently) or lack of chemistry (jointly). (During the movie I found my mind wandering and thinking how "chemistry" can be defined as "charisma between two people.") But they are not as bad as they could have been, and might have been propped up a bit by any sort of passable filmmaking technique, or decent choreography or song choices. 

Nope.

One of the first things you notice about From Justin to Kelly is just how bad the lighting is. That's not something you see anymore on any movie with any modicum of a budget. These actors are not lit to bring out their physical attractiveness -- not just these two, but the physical attractiveness of any of the cast, who are all attractive as this movie takes place in a Hollywood version of spring break. Even the daytime scenes are full of shadow and glare.

To delve fully into all the things that don't work, I need to set up the plot.

So Kelly plays Kelly, a waitress in a country (Texas, is it?) bar who also sings to a nightly crowd of two to three drunks sleeping it off. Her two friends, backstabber Alexa (Katherine Bailess) and the sweet Kaya (Anika Noni Rose), convince her to come to Florida for spring break. That's also where Justin (as Justin) has come with his two friends, horndog stud Brandon (Greg Siff) and nerdy Eddie (Brian Dietzen), who is trying to meet up with a girl he met on the internet. Their paths are going to cross way more times than should be possible in an area suffused with probably 15 to 20,000 college-aged kids.

So here we get into one narrative problem with From Justin to Kelly. The two leads are supposed to be separated after their initial meeting by bad luck (she writes her phone number in lipstick on a paper towel, but it lands in a puddle and becomes unreadable) and the conniving of the bitchy Alexa (who gives Justin her own phone number, pretending it is Kelly's phone number, so she can send him misleading texts and send him on wild goose chases that will allow her to swoop in on Justin instead of her friend). 

When characters are kept apart in a movie for these reasons, it's supposed to increase our investment in their eventual pairing and make us yearn for that to happen. However, after every latest roadblock is introduced, it takes less than two minutes of screen time for them to randomly cross paths again, meaning that whatever narrative value is gained from these roadblocks is immediately frittered away. They don't seem to discuss the reasons they didn't call or arrive at the designated meeting spot the previous time, so it's like they are reset to their default interaction standards without any of what happened before meaning anything. Also, they never manage to learn -- until the very end, of course -- that Alexa has been manipulating and misdirecting them. (A simple reference to any one of several dozen texts would have done the trick.)

You'd think the relationship would be off to a less-than-magical start given this film's version of a meet cute. Although they have rubbed elbows in big dance numbers before now, Justin and Kelly first speak after meeting in a women's bathroom. He's been chased there because women want the tickets he's handing out to some party, and she's already in there. Under some staging this might have worked, but this is the most drab and boring bathroom the location scouts could have possibly found, and nothing of the short exchange that occurs between them seems like it lays the foundation for an infatuation that will occupy both of them for the rest of the movie. The actors can't sell it, but it's not there in the script, and it lets us know that this sort of lack of a pulse is going to inform the entire film.

And boy does it ever.

My wife walked in on what was probably the funniest scene in terms of the cluelessness of the staging.

In one of their many attempts to overcome the obstacles that have been thrown their way, Justin and Kelly go out on a boat ride. I can't remember how or why he has access to this boat or how he knows how to pilot it, but you need to understand how this is staged in order to understand why it's so funny. So here is a picture:

They sing a duet on this boat, but they never leave the configuration you see above, and in fact, she never even turns around to look at him. It's supposed to be a point of optimism in their relationship but the song feels dour, which is exacerbated by the fact that they are not looking at each other and in fact are both as stiff as a board. Making matters worse is that Iscove shoots it from about ten different angles, but because they never move it just draws further attention to their twin senses of rigidity and lifelessness.

Given the sort of career Clarkson has gone on to have, you might think that the songs she and Justin sing are some real bangers, maybe not "Since You've Been Gone," but at least something befitting a recently anointed diva. Nope. I wouldn't say the songs are horrible in that they violate basic principles of song structure or anything like that, but they are just so mediocre and forgettable, which is also the best description for the scenes that do have some sort of choreography that does not involve two people sitting on a boat staring straight ahead. A final fart in the wind is the closing number, which is quite involved in its choreography, but is a curiously chosen staging of KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way (I Like It)." A good song, to be sure, but not really the vibe you are going for in a big happy ending number where everyone has been paired off successfully and everything's going to turn out alright. (Oops, spoiler alert.) Plus it seems to last for about two full play-throughs of the song, an interminable ending to a movie that is only 81 minutes long.

Is there anything good in From Justin to Kelly? Maybe "good" is too strong of a word, but I can tell you about something I found in the neighborhood of charming. The only real actor in the cast -- there isn't even some guest star from the older set, a Danny DeVito or someone like that -- is Anika Noni Rose, though she would not become described as such until later on. It's kind of hard to believe Rose went on to appear in films like Dreamgirls, considering that this was her first feature and it might have ended the acting careers of anyone involved (and did for most of the others). But Rose does indeed have ability, and she shows it in a romantic sub plot with a young man named Carlos she meets who works in one of the spring break resorts. (He's played by Jason Yribar, who is also pretty good.) The things that happen in their sub plot are mostly sweet and are the sorts of things you would hope would happen in the A plot, if the script knew what to do with either Justin or Kelly.

Take away points, though, in another romantic sub plot involving Brandon and a female police officer who keeps issuing him tickets for holding events without permits and gambling on things like a grudge being settled in the form of a duel between two hovercrafts. (Don't get me started on that one.) Since we're naming names, the officer is played by Theresa San-Nicholas. Brandon is a real douchebag, and Siff's performance is probably the third most professional in the movie after the two mentioned in the previous paragraph. You'd expect he'd be a douchebag with a heart of gold but he's just sort of a regular douchebag, always boasting about his female conquests and trying to see a little more female flesh (they hold a whipped cream bikini contest). He tries to seduce the female police officer as well every time they meet -- which is about five times -- so it's no surprise at all that when she finally shows up in the final scene, and he's not doing anything illegal, it's in a bikini and she's finally succumbed to his "charms," such as they are. Yes, retrograde morality on the powers of seduction of a creep were still alive and well in 2003.

It's hard to understand how Clarkson and Guarini would allow this sort of travesty to be made, except that they weren't famous at all a year before this, and of course she couldn't yet know she was really going places. (Guarini, not so much.) Today's recently minted American Idol winner and American Idol finalist would be much more conscious of burnishing their brand, as they would already have millions of followers on Instagram and would expect the world to be at their feet. Here, Justin and Kelly look like novices pushed into a disaster on terrible advice, powerless to do anything about it.

One final note on the universally agreed-upon awfulness that is this movie. From Justin to Kelly has a user rating of 1.9 out of 10 on IMDB. Usually when you see that sort of rating, it's because a bunch of trolls have gotten on IMDB to give 0/10 on a movie whose subject matter they find politically objectionable or that challenges their sense of the primacy of the patriarchy. That could not possibly be the case with this movie, so it just means that everyone thinks it's bad. 

I could go on, but February 29th is over, and now it's time to get back to our regularly scheduled viewing.

But I'd be lying if I didn't admit I'm already thinking about potential candidates for 2028, now that I've gotten this tradition back on track. 

Driven away

Australia is, or at least once was, known for letting movies hang around in the cinema for ages. I frequently marveled at how a movie released in March was still available in August, and sometimes commented on it here. (That might be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.)

You know Drive-Away Dolls isn't great when it is already retreating to the smallest screening rooms and way fewer showtimes after only a week in theaters. 

I know Drive-Away Dolls isn't great because I saw it yesterday.

I know Drive-Away Dolls really isn't great because a beguiling performance by Geraldine Viswanathan was only enough to bring it up to two stars. (You can read my full review here.)

There were some lesbians in my audience who seemed to be enjoying it, so I know there is at least a possibility I would have liked it more if I had been giving it the pass you give movies that speak very specifically to something about you. Like as soon as they make the world's first movie about fantasy baseball, I'm sure I will give it five stars on Letterboxd, no matter how shit it might be.

But I'm not going to sit here and berate myself for not being queer enough to like Drive-Away Dolls. I think it's just a bad movie. 

And I guess most audiences do too, considering that my Wednesday showing (after last Thursday's debut) was in the smallest screening room at Cinema Kino, and when I checked the Sun in Yarraville to see if there was a more optimal showtime to catch on my way home from work, I noticed that the day's latest showing had been at 1:45.

It's now another Thursday release day -- Dune 2 comes out today, very exciting -- and Drive-Away Dolls has survived at both of these theaters. It's even got a nighttime screening at the Sun, though only the 6:50 slot, not the primetme slot. 

At Kino, it is playing only once, at 1:20.

So what drove me -- and presumably others -- away from Drive-Away Dolls?

If you followed the link to my review, you already know, but it's two words:

Margaret Qualley.

Like mother, like daughter I suppose -- or maybe, dislike mother, dislike daughter.

I'm not going to make a whole post out of this because I already regret the traction that my post "Anybody but Andie MacDowell" gets. I guess any traffic to your site is good traffic, but the internet seems to have glommed on to my posts that allow them to indulge in some sort of negative take on an actress. My post about Gaby Hoffman gets a lot of engagement, and the one about Andie MacDowell I wrote in 2010 has had 7,835 views and 21 comments.  

The premise of that post was that if anyone other than Andie MacDowell had appeared in two personal favorites -- Four Weddings and a Funeral and Groundhog Day -- then I might like those movies even better. (Though I also ended up saying that if changing a single thing about them made me like them any bit less, I wouldn't risk it.) I got into a few specific things I don't like about her as a performer. I won't rehash them here.

The same things I don't like about Andie MacDowell, I don't like about Margaret Qualley. But Qualley doesn't have a great movie propping her up a bit -- or not one where she plays a central role, anyway.

I saw Qualley in several movies (Palo Alto, The Nice Guys, Death Note) before I really made note of her or her connection to MacDowell. I really like The Nice Guys but I don't even remember what her role was in it. I don't think I had made the MacDowell connection yet either with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but I do remember Qualley being one of Manson's crazies, which seemed appropriate since there is something in her eyes I don't like. Interestingly, Sydney Sweeney was also a Manson crazy and I have gone on to love her. Not so much Qualley.

By the time of Claire Denis' Stars at Noon, I knew she was MacDowell's daughter and I really, really didn't like this movie. As one of the two main characters (along with Taylor Swift's ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn), Qualley bore the brunt of my dislike. A similar two-hander -- a lot more of a two-hander than Stars at Noon -- was last year's Sanctuary, parts of which I liked. Overall, it was too much time with Margaret Qualley. She was in a top 12 movie for me last year, Poor Things, but see my previous comments about the amount of screen time she gets. Not much in Poor Things.

And now Drive-Away Dolls, where she's turned up to Nigel Tufnel's 11 with her exaggerated southern mannerisms and cartoonish love of pussy.

I already found a couple creative ways to rip her in that review so I will stop talking about Margaret Qualley now.

Because Ethan Coen also deserves a significant helping of my scorn.

Another observation I made in that review was that if we were to take the Coen brothers' two solo efforts as indications of the sorts of tone each brother prefers, we'd conclude that Joel was more responsible for the direction of a film like No Country for Old Men (which is not one of my Coen favorites) while Ethan would be more responsible for something like Raising Arizona (which is not only my favorite Coen movie of all time, it's my favorite movie of all time). 

The trouble is, there is a far greater range of outcomes for a movie in the Raising Arizona mold. There is worshipping it as I do, and there is hating it, which is how I feel about something like Burn After Reading. Zaniness is great unless it's terrible. 

The zaniness in Drive-Away Dolls is terrible, and Qualley has been asked to personify it from start to finish. (Sorry, I said I would stop banging on about her.)

The final reference I will make to my review is that I said that apparently Joel does not need Ethan but Ethan needs Joel. (I can't be accused of stealing good lines if I am stealing them from myself.) I may not prefer that the output of the Coens is all in the mold of The Tragedy of Macbeth, but that film did make my top ten in 2021. And if DAD is any indication, Ethan may no longer be able to hit the high end of the range of outcomes for this sort of movie.

I'm regretting, now, the decision to stack my chips on a viewing of Drive-Away Dolls yesterday when I might have been better served to use my wife's good graces to get to an opening night viewing of Dune 2 tonight.

Then again, lo and behold, it's February 29th again -- meaning the revival of my tradition, which dates back to 2008, to watch the worst movie I can find.

Tune in tomorrow to see what that ended up being. 

And I hope it's worse than Drive-Away Dolls. I really do. 

Jonathan Glazer's film-per-decade approach

I doubt it could be intentional or likely something he's ever considered -- he doesn't seem like the sort of person to dwell on superficial patterns -- but Jonathan Glazer appears determined to grace us with his talents only once per decade.

"But Vance," you say. "Glazer put out two films in the 2000s, Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004)." (Yes, you include years in parentheses when you speak.)

Ah but did he?

If you believe all those smartypants who wanted to be pedantic when the year changed from 1999 to 2000, the 21st century didn't start until 2001 -- meaning that the year 2000 is technically the final year of the 1990s. No one actually really thinks of it that way, but if you are being as accurate as possible, it's true. (I didn't see and rank Sexy Beast until 2001, but it played festivals in 2000.)

In any case, the point is, Glazer does not make very many movies. And if he were to reveal after making his final film in 2042 that he had purposefully made only one film per decade, I wouldn't be surprised. If Quentin Tarantino can decide he's going to make exactly ten features, Glazer's hypothetical mission statement might not be much different in concept.

Which is why the fact that I didn't love The Zone of Interest is particularly disappointing.

Oh, I started out loving it. For about the first 30 minutes, I imagined the post I'm currently writing would be entitled "The movie that would have been my #1 of 2023." But Glazer made a couple choices in the direction the narrative went that just didn't really work for me. I don't oppose them on moral grounds -- I understand there is some outrage out there about how this subject matter is handled, but I haven't delved into it. I oppose them on storytelling grounds only.

If you want to read my full review now that the film has finally released in Australia, it's here.

Will I now have to wait until 2031 -- or, if we are considering the ten-year gap between Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest to be the new standard, as late as 2033 -- to get another of Glazer's incomparable conceptions of the world we live in?

It's hard to say. I'd hoped to be surprised and go to IMDB and see another project in pre-production. I mean, even Terrence Malick eventually started becoming more prolific, and then he became so with a vengeance. (On the music side, this can also be said for my favorite band, Nine Inch Nails.)

Alas, no. And if we are to take his previous patterns as a prediction of future patterns, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with shorts and music videos and other bits of ephemera that occupy a creative person between major symphonies. 

Before I go, I should circle back on two bits of business:

1) You may recall that earlier in the month, I watched the aforementioned Sexy Beast as the inaugural film for my bi-monthly Audient Outliers series. At the time, I stated that I chose to watch that before Zone of Interest, even though I could have worked it out in the reverse order, because if I didn't like Zone of Interest, not liking Sexy Beast wouldn't be such an outlier. If you didn't follow the link to my review previously, you won't know that I ended up giving Zone of Interest an 8/10, only dropping from a 9/10 in the last 20 minutes of the film. (I actually may have dropped all the way from a 10/10, or five stars, in those last 20 minutes.) So at least you know Sexy Beast remains a valid first choice for that series. 

2) This is a potential future entry in another series, Audient Bridesmaids, but as discussed a few days ago in the post about The Prince of Tides, we don't actually know for sure that The Zone of Interest will not win best picture this year. So to save myself the hassle, I'll limit the reference to that series to the two sentences you are currently reading. 

The end of a different Affair

With all my talk of Love Affair and An Affair to Remember two weeks ago on this blog, you'd think Sunday night's viewing of The End of the Affair might have something to do with that.

You'd be wrong, and it would be a different End of the Affair than you might think.

In December I read Graham Greene's celebrated 1951 novel The End of the Affair, which was recommended to me by a friend who called it his favorite book. Since I'd actually borrowed his copy, I moved it straight to the top of my reading list in order to avoid one of those "perpetual loan" situations we all dread. 

I really liked the book. Not a personal favorite maybe, but quite a quick read and quite an anguished look inside the head of a narrator full of jealousy and loathing, which I hadn't remembered being the default condition of Ralph Fiennes' character in the 1999 Neil Jordan film, where he was opposite Julianne Moore. Nor had I remembered the story was so much about spiritual yearning, involving a promise to God and then a desperate urge not to believe in that God in order to break that promise.

Usually when I finish reading a book that has a well-known film version, I watch the film version pretty soon afterward, whether I'd already seen it or not. Therefore, I expected to queue up the Jordan film, which I'd also quite liked, pretty soon after the start of January.

That being my busy time of year in terms of viewings, though, I hadn't gotten to it until Sunday night.

But when I couldn't find it on any of my streaming services, including the streaming service everyone has (Internet Archive), I turned to iTunes, where I noticed not one, but two filmed versions of Greene's novel to choose from. 

Instead of choosing the one I'd seen, I spontaneously decided to choose the one I hadn't seen.

That's the 1955 version directed by Edward Dmytryk whose poster you see above. It stars the always fascinating Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson (whom I've seen plenty of times, but whose films I could not identify without the assistance of IMDB) and perhaps most importantly in terms of clinching the decision for me, Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. 

And I think I liked it even more than Jordan's version.

I wasn't sure that would be the case at the start. Dmytryk's film, from a screenplay by Lenore Coffee, tells the story of Henry and Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix chronologically, which is a departure from a book published only four years earlier. In the book, we meet narrator Bendrix, appropriately, after his affair with Sarah has already ended. From my limited memory of Jordan's film, that's where that film starts as well -- and perhaps one of the reasons Jordan wanted to adapt the material was to correct the "mistake" made by Dmytryk and Coffee. It definitely seemed like it would be the less courageous choice, to feed this classic novel, which at the time was really only a contemporary novel, to audiences in the most common chronology available that they would be able to understand most easily.

By the end of the film, though, I was so wrapped up in the characters, in the performances, and in the choices made to adapt the book that I found myself giving the film 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, half a star higher than the admittedly flawed 4-star rating for Jordan's film -- flawed because I gave it out retroactively, some dozen years after I'd seen it.

Is this one of those recency bias things, or a case of me already trying to stack the deck for next year's "ten best movies I saw in 2024 that weren't from 2024?" Or another sort of bias, the "I just read this book and therefore would be more favorably inclined than average toward an adaptation of it" sort of bias?

Possibly. But Coffee and her director made all the right moves here, which I won't discuss in detail because it's likely you haven't recently read this book or seen either version of the movie, so it would fall on deaf ears.

One thing I am wondering, though, is whether this means there will be one more Affair in my near future. Now it feels like I must rewatch Jordan's version. If comparing a recently read book and its film adaptation is a good exercise on a blog -- or really, just a good cinephile exercise that helps expand your appreciation of the screenwriting process -- then comparing that book with two different adaptations, separated in time by 44 years, is even better. 

Vivarium is so getting that exemption

It's still early in the decade, but increasingly less so with every passing moment.

We've all just started watching movies from the fifth release year of the 2020s, which means there are only five more to go. The fact that most of us have seen only a handful of 2024 movies is what allows us to still think of this as the early part of the decade. A year from now, we will be officially midway. If the 20s were our age rather than an agreed upon convention for denoting the passage of time, first established more than 2,000 years ago based on the birth year of a person who claimed to be the son of God, we'd be calling ourselves in our mid-20s already.

And for an obsessive list maker like me, it causes me to ponder the paucity of serious contenders for my #1 movie of the 2020s. 

It makes for a very interesting contrast with the 2010s. At this same juncture last decade, four of my eventual top five movies of the decade had already been released, and all four of my top four. Only my #5, Tanna, still had its release on the horizon, in the year ending in 6 (2016). Three of the top four were all from the very first year of the decade (2010). 

I can't see the movies of the early 2020s dominating in this same fashion, unless it is going to be a really weak rest of the decade. I've named a #1 film in each of the first four years and I've loved those films, but each time I've anointed one of them, I've recognized that it was not a serious candidate to finish the decade at #1 -- and my secret hope was that none of these four titles would actually penetrate my top ten. They were the best of their year but of course that's all relative.

This is where Vivarium comes in.

I rewatched Vivarium on Friday night for the first time since 2020, having set myself the goal of scrolling until I found a heretofore undetermined title for my Friday night viewing. It didn't take long on Amazon Prime to see Lorcan Finnegan's film pop up and decide it was time for my third viewing. 

Vivarium was, technically speaking, my #3 movie of 2019. This was because I saw it at MIFF in 2019, well in advance of the rest of the viewing public, who saw it on its wide release in 2020 or sometime after that on video. But I gave it five stars without hesitation, and if I had just seen it in 2020 like everyone else, there would have been no doubt of its appropriateness to be ranked alongside all my other 2020 films. In fact, I feel pretty confident that it would have been my #1 movie of 2020, ahead of I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (Though how interesting would that have been as a 1-2 punch of noodle fryers.)

And as I thought about it, I thought Vivarium might actually have taken each of the next three #1s as well, if it had been released in those years. As I write this, I don't actually know whether Vivarium is ranked above or below those movies on my Flickchart, so let's find out right now in real time. I'll list each as a hypothetical duel based on the rankings they already have, rather than making this decision as though it were a live Flickchart duel, and you'll see which one is higher when I present the result: 

Vivarium vs. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Ending Things wins, 182 to 355
Vivarium vs. Our Friend - Our Friend wins, 209 to 355
Vivarium vs. The Whale - The Whale wins, 227 to 355
Vivarium vs. Skinamarink - Vivarium wins, 355 to 408

Not a very conclusive result in what I was hoping to prove, since Vivarium is only fourth ranked out of these five films. 

But I think this does indicate an interesting subconscious bias on my part. I believe the first three #1s of the decade were added to my Flickchart after I had already crowned them the best of their year, meaning I was inclined toward a confirmation bias and to elevate these films into comparatively august positions on my chart. Skinamarink was, if memory serves, the only of these movies to be ranked before it was officially named the best of its year.

In any case, if these movies came up against each other organically, I could see myself picking Vivarium in any of the four duels -- especially now that my third viewing reminded me how great it is. The film may have suffered a mild setback in my personal feelings during that second viewing, in which I think I forced my wife to watch it with me, as that was something I did in 2020 a lot more than I do now. When she inevitably didn't like it as much as I did, I think it made me a little more critical of it.

No such problem on this viewing. I was audibly laughing at twisted absurdities and saying things like "Oh my God," especially anything and everything related to that bizarre little kid. Not really a kid, as Jesse Eisenberg points out at one point, with a resigned sense of loathing: "That's not a boy." In fact, one of my big takeaways about Vivarium on this viewing -- and we might go into mild spoiler territory here -- is that the things that are observing our two protagonists may not be aliens, but rather, AI. That likely wouldn't have been what Finnegan was thinking in 2019, but today, it seems like an obvious conclusion to reach. The ways they get this "boy" wrong are very similar to the way an AI creates humans with extra fingers. This gives the film a whole creepy new interpretation that the director mightn't have even considered, which is one of the things good art is capable of doing. 

I won't go into too many more details about the movie itself because the purpose of this post is not to synopsize Vivarium or specifically to try to get you to see it, if you have not already.

What is the purpose of this post, if I can finally get to it?

It's to remind myself that I did not initially consider Vivarium eligible for the best of the 2020s. Like Agora the decade before it -- a film with a 2009 release year in its native country, but that I didn't see and rank until 2010 -- Vivarium had slipped into that crack between decades, not quite a 2019 movie but not quite a 2020 movie, and because I compiled my best of the 2010s list after I saw it, I felt like it had missed out on its one and only shot.

Now, I think there's a plausible reason to reconsider it -- to call it a 2020 movie even though it is listed on my 2019 lists, and is definitively associated with that release year by my own rules for determining such things. 

You may recall, though it's more likely that you do not, that I considered the Vivarium question in my post for the best of the 2010s. Unlike the other three movies that narrowly missed consideration due to similar release year ambiguities -- Agora, Mother and Mr. Nobody -- Vivarium was the only film that missed because of a future release ambiguity (post 2019), not a past release ambiguity (pre 2010). Here is what I wrote about it:

"The last is a film that had only festival premieres in 2019, including MIFF where I saw it, but for most of the world will be a 2020 film, meaning I have decided to consider it for the next decade even though I have already ranked it in my 2019 year-end list. We'll see how I handle the release year in parenthesis dilemma ten years from now." 

Well there you go. Just as I didn't check my Flickchart rankings before starting this post, I obviously didn't read this previous post, or remember what I had concluded from it, before I started writing either. 

So I had already made the decision that Vivarium could not slip through the cracks between decades, that it would be considered as part of the 2020s, despite the aforementioned disconnect between putting a 2019 release year in parentheses whenever I mention the film, and then including it for a consideration in a decade whose other movies start with a 2 rather than a 1.

Well, maybe not whenever I mention it. As you will see if you are reading this post relatively soon after I've written it, I have decide to challenge my own sense of the rules by listing the release year of Vivarium as 2020 in my "most recently revisited" section in the right margin. It is an ephemeral choice, as it will be gone as soon as I rewatch three more films, but I do it symbolically, out of recognition that, indeed, I am making the decision -- or rather, reinforcing a previously made decision -- to grant an exemption to Vivarium for consideration as part of the best of the 2020s.

Because who wants to get to decade's end and have a top ten bereft of the sorts of movies that decorated that most elite tier last decade? Here is a reminder of those titles:

10. Under the Skin
9. First Reformed
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter
7. Inside Out
6. Like Father, Like Son
5. Tanna
4. The Social Network
3. Rabbit Hole
2. Spring Breakers
1. Tangled

As of right now, all of those movies are better than any of my 2020 contenders, Vivarium included. (And if Vivarium does make my top ten of the 2020s, that'll mean two straight top tens for Eisenberg, star of The Social Network.)

Here's hoping the 2020s will be a backloaded decade. 

A steady progression toward my demise

You know those movie characters who get injured a number of times during the course of the movie, so when they do finally get killed once and for all, you don't feel as great a sense of loss because they were already 85% of the way there anyway?

I kind of feel like this is me since I turned 50. 

First there was the loss of my big toenail on my left foot last November, followed five days later by the breaking of that same toe, which I discussed in this post. This was about three weeks after my birthday, mind you.

Then a few weeks ago, I fell while climbing up a ladder from the water at a pier near my house. I won't get into all the details, but let's just say that a kid behind me literally nipping at my toes caused me to hurry and lose my grip. Fortunately, he was alright. I was not. Even though I thought it was a clean fall, broken nicely by the water, the next day I noticed pains in my left hip, thigh and knee. Yes, that's the same leg as the repeatedly abused toe, whose nail is now a hideous sight that I cover with a bandaid anytime I'm at the beach or in mixed company who are going to have to stare at this monstrosity. Anyway, it took nearly three weeks to feel like I'm close to 100%, although I still have some numbness in my heel and some pain in my ankle that I think were side effects of the original injuries.

What prompted me to write this post, though, was that yesterday, I hurt my back just walking across the room in my house. 

I have no idea what caused this injury. I didn't step wrong. I didn't run into anything. All the sudden it just screamed out at me, and I ended up rubbing some Deep Heat on it.

Just put me out of my misery, already.