Finish What You Started: That Sugar Film

This is my second in a 2020 bi-monthly series of finishing movies I had to abort watching on my first attempt. (I still like the original usage of the word "abort," but this particular instance is, er, not ideal.)

There are discontinued viewings that you stop by choice, and then there are those that are just out of your hands.

My attempt to watch That Sugar Film in December of 2015, as discussed here, was the latter.

By waiting all the way until the end of my 30-day rental period on iTunes before starting to watch it, I had no time to recover when the viewing started glitching and buffering, and then just wouldn't play at all. It was a prelude to the end of my previous laptop -- actually, two laptops ago now -- which succumbed to a faulty hard drive (and was too old to be worth replacing), but I didn't know it at the time I wrote the post linked above.

The circumstances were rather unusual. I was watching the movie in a Starbucks prior to my midnight screening of The Force Awakens. That doesn't happen to be all that relevant to the story, I just thought it was worth sharing.

When my laptop did ultimately die, I was still able to get back the other rentals I had downloaded but not yet watched by just setting up iTunes on my new computer and downloading them again. Obviously there was no such option with That Sugar Film, as I had already kicked off my (then 24-hour) viewing window. It's not Apple's fault my laptop gave up the ghost.

I had only been liking the movie at a mid-range level before then, so I have not prioritized getting back to it before now. I should probably explain a little bit what this is, if you don't know. It's basically Australia's answer to Supersize Me, with director-star Damon Gameau in the Morgan Spurlock role. Instead of 30 days of only McDonald's, though, the experiment is 60 days on a high sugar diet, the kind Gameau had previously forsaken. That "high sugar" diet being, of course, a fairly average diet for most people in the world. Gameau made the experiment one step more difficult -- he would only eat foods that are considered to be "healthy," like non-sugar cereals, yogurt, fruit and smoothies. He quickly discovered he would have no difficulty getting to 40 teaspoons of sugar a day -- the average intake for an adult in the western (?) world -- even without a single bit of what's considered "junk food," and in fact might even have to "diet" for a part of each day not to exceed those 40 teaspoons. It's all in the interest of preparing for the arrival of his new daughter, who is in the belly of his pregnant girlfriend for the entirety of the narrative. (That last detail feels very Spurlock-ian.)

Interesting experiment. At the time I thought "The world already has one Morgan Spurlock -- does it need another?" Since then, though, I've softened on Gameau, who also released a documentary last year called 2040, which looks at where the environment will be 20 years from now if we do nothing about it, and what we can do. Again, not all that original, but it gives him a little more credibility than if he were trying to be "just another Morgan Spurlock."

The good news is, Gameau comes across positively, as Spurlock did in is early efforts, and not kind of self-indulgently, like later career Spurlock. I was fully with That Sugar Film this time around. It has a really lively presentation. There's a lot of use of fun and reasonably sophisticated graphics, like Gameau riding around on a fat cell travelling through the body. My favorite recurring technique that felt distinct was the way Gameau handles normal talking head interviews. Instead of just appearing in whatever environment in which they were interviewed, they appear on the side of a cereal box or in the ingredients section of a bag of candy, with their faces often color-adjusted to match the packaging. It's a small detail, but small details in a form as frequently tired as the documentary can make a big difference.

There is, of course, quite a lot of eye-opening information here, if it is all to be taken at face value. We know that there is some disagreement among experts whether sugar or fat is more harmful to humans, though maybe less so than there once was. But Gameau is quite clearly on the side of sugar = bad, and a lot of the information he provides compellingly makes that case. (Among them -- the one expert he talks to who seems to disagree with these findings is someone who openly admits receiving funding from Coca Cola.)

The one hesitation I had with the film, because I just did not believe it, despite the physical evidence presented, was the transformation to Gameau's body over the course of the 60 days. He gained something like 20 pounds, his bloodwork was terrible and the doctors were telling him he was on the way to getting a fatty liver. As this is a healthy early 30s guy, it just didn't really ring true, even with before and after video/pictures of how he looked. There just seemed something too far-fetched about the radical changes given only a change to drinking more juices, while maintaining the same level of exercise.

Then the fact that there's a lot that just seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He'd say he felt a lot less energy and had wild mood swings, then there's footage of him just being sacked out on the couch in a half-coma of exhaustion. I'm not saying Gameau would fake this to sell his case more convincingly, I'm just saying he could.

Overall, though, it's a really compelling and alarming documentary, while remaining very fun. Probably the best of all worlds when it comes to the aims of the types of documentary I tend to enjoy the most.

Full disclosure: I ate the remnants of a bag of chocolate chips while watching. Ha.

Okay, I'm whittling down my choices. I'll probably watch the original Paddington in June -- or finish watching it, I should say.

Buffering without streaming

I should have guessed my viewing of That Sugar Film was doomed from the start.

First I succumbed to the allure of a 99-cent rental from iTunes, even though I was not that interested in the film, and have a number of other prominent documentaries I need to watch before I close off my rankings.

Then I kept pushing it back and pushing it back until yesterday, when it was set to expire within 40 hours, and my only chance to watch it would be in the window of time between the end of my meeting and the start of my midnight showing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

I was looking at something theatrical for that time slot, but I've been getting out to the theater a ton lately, and the only movie I really wanted to see -- Mississippi Grind -- started too late (9:40) for me to be sure I'd be able to get over to a different theater in time for the start of Star Wars. (We'll be getting a ton of new releases on Boxing Day, but for now there's pretty much of a drought -- especially with movies trying to avoid coming out around the same time as Star Wars.)

So I reluctantly brought my laptop along with me and spent that downtime in a Starbucks, where That Sugar Film would reluctantly be my appetizer for the main meal. Appropriate, at least, in that it was about food. Appropriate also in that I had just bought a bag of M&M's, a bag of Hershey's Miniatures, and two white Reese's Peanut Butter cups to accompany my bag of gummy snakes, which were all designed to give me diabetes to keep me awake during the midnight screening. I added a toffee nut latte to that excessive expected sugar intake and got to work.

At the time I started, it was just after 9, and I should have had plenty of time to finish a 100-minute movie before I had to leave for the theater. Except that I was hit by an almost immediate Sugar crash.

Extremely annoyingly, the movie started buffering. Which makes absolutely no sense, because it was not streaming.

So it was really "buffering," I guess, not actually buffering.

One of the great benefits of iTunes is supposed to be that once you've downloaded the movie, you can watch it anywhere without interruption. That file exists completely on your hard drive, and it should not be the least affected by ephemeral environmental factors like a poor wi-fi signal.

Yet here I was, watching the movie pause, then go on fast forward for 30 seconds to catch up, then have its video out of synch with its audio, then just come to a complete standstill.

If this had happened once, it would have been a glitch. When it happened the twelfth time, or thereabouts, and after two reboots of the PC as well, I basically had to give up. With more than an hour still remaining in the movie -- an hour I will struggle to squeeze in before the rental expires tonight around 9 p.m. And even if I do find the time on approximately four hours of sleep, there's nothing to say that these shenanigans won't repeat themselves.

It may just be this one file having an issue, and the other four movies I have downloaded from iTunes may not be similarly afflicted. But you better bet I wasn't ready to test one of the others, as that would start that movie's 24-hour expiration clock ticking.

Before I go writing a letter of complaint to Apple, I must acknowledge two things:

1) I am at least five, and probably more like ten, versions behind on my iTunes. This is because half the time I upgrade to the latest version, it seems to wipe out my library and I have to restore it from a backup. Easier now just not to upgrade.

2) My PC is, sadly, getting long in the tooth. Just lately it has started to show increasingly erratic behavior. It turns five years old in May.

So is this the beginning of the end for my PC? Certainly, the ability to play movies on iTunes is not an essential feature -- not the kind of thing that would total it, anyway. But this time of year, especially with four other movies already downloaded, I do feel like I rely pretty heavily on it. And I'm certainly not buying a new PC any time between now and January 14th.

So here's hoping That Sugar Film was just That Faulty File. And not my PC slipping into a permanent diabetic coma.

Unpausing the world's longest pause

For four of the past five years (I skipped 2016), my bi-monthly viewing series – not to be confused with my monthly viewing series – have been part of the lifeblood of this blog.

In 2015, I watched one of the six existing Star Wars movies every two months in anticipation of The Force Awakens. In 2017, it was anime films. In 2018, I revisited films by Joel & Ethan Coen that I hadn’t loved when I first saw them. In 2019, I filled in (most of) my blind spots in Spike Lee’s filmography.

In 2020, I am going to take a little pause from something quite that useful.

Starting in February and every two months thereafter, I will be finishing movies that I started, but was not able to finish at the time I started them for whatever reason. Think of it as kind of branching off of last year’s monthly series, Audient Audit. (In fact, I considered doing them both in the same year, but I decided I wanted to watch Lee’s films more.) Appropriately enough, the series will be entitled Finish What You Started.

So while this series has no grand thematic ambitions and it’s unlikely to be something you are going to “follow along with” – to the extent that you do that anyway – it’s a useful personal goal that helps tidy up my lists and scratch itches that were never fully scratched.

As I am working from a very specific list, I can already tell you the titles I plan to watch, assuming I can source them. Since I don’t know what order I’ll watch them, I’ll just list them alphabetically. They are:

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Paddington (2014, Paul King)

Sisters (2015, Jason Moore)

That Sugar Film (2014, Damon Gameau)

Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

Coincidentally enough, the reason I could not finish That Sugar Film relates to The Force Awakens, indirectly, but I’ll wait until we get to that film to expand on that further.

You’ll notice that’s only five films. That’s because when I first started gathering titles for this series, I had not finished Sophie’s Choice. As I watched the entirety of that film in 2019, it now quite obviously cannot be watched for this series. I already finished what I started. So that means that sometime before December, I will have to remember one other film I prematurely aborted, or else prematurely abort this series.

Just so it’s not a completely dry series, I will try to add some humorous comments about why I did not watch the entire movie at the time I started watching it.

In any case, this series may not be supremely interesting to you, but what can I say, it’s my blog and I decide how to use it.

Hopefully you will derive some enjoyment from it from time to time.

Finish What You Started: Sanctum and Withnail & I

Today I am not only finishing a movie I started -- two movies, actually -- but also a series I started.

As you are surely aware, it is the end of the year, which means it is also the end of Finish What You Started, my 2020 bi-monthly series that involved completing movies that I once had to abandon unfinished.

I ended up with two movies in the final month. I'll tell you how that happened in just a minute. But at one point, I wasn't sure if I'd have any.

When I first forecast what I expected to watch in this series, I could think of only five titles. I needed six. 

October saved me from that predicament, as I remembered that I'd once started Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, a film I happened to have assigned to me in October for a different viewing project altogether. That meant I didn't have to find any more movies for Finish What You Started, and that the final film in the series, Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I (1987), could be my December movie.

Only I combed the various streaming services and iTunes, and I could not find this film. I had never thought of it as particularly hard to come by -- we came by it eight years ago, which is approximately when I started watching it with my wife the first time. But it was nowhere to be found this time.

So then I remembered one more movie I'd started but not finished. (There are certainly others, but the trick is remembering them.) That was Alister Grierson's Sanctum (2011), which I immediately rented from iTunes. 

Done and dusted, right?

Not so fast.

Within hours of renting Sanctum I realized there was one more source for Withnail & I that I had not yet consulted. The public libraries have been closed for the majority of the year, it probably goes without saying, but they were even significantly slower to get back up to regular functioning than other local entities, probably because they are not designed to turn a profit or support people's livelihoods. In fact even now, when we are going on two months without a single new case of COVID in the state of Victoria, you are still given the third degree when you enter the library, and the librarians help you with tasks you previously were free to do yourself.

So I hadn't reserved anything from the library all year, but yes, reserving movies is now a thing again. And of course, Withnail & I was available for reserve. Even though I'd already sorted things out with Sanctum, Withnail had been on my original list and I decided just to watch it also. The librarian had to go to the reserve shelf to get it for me rather than letting me walk the ten feet into the library to do it myself, but indeed, I had now sourced Withnail as well.

So you get a bonus movie for this series. Or, I should say, I get a bonus movie, because if I'm being perfectly honest, this series probably has pretty much zero value for you to begin with.

I watched Sanctum first, on the night of December 20th. 

It was the completion of a viewing that began almost six years ago, when we were away for the weekend renting a house for my wife's birthday. It was a surprise gathering involving three other families, which wasn't revealed to her until they started showing up. (My wife wondered why we had such a big place just for the four of us.) As we were the first to arrive on Friday night, I started watching Sanctum from the house's DVD collection on its exceptionally large TV. There was a chance the first other family would not arrive until the next day, but when they showed up about 20 minutes into the movie, I had to abandon the viewing. There wasn't a reasonable chance to pick it up again for the rest of the weekend, and I've never gotten back to it.

Although I'd heard not great things about this James Cameron-produced disaster movie, I ended up quite enjoying it. I'm a pretty big fan of disaster movies to begin with, and this was a setting I hadn't really seen before. The characters are spelunking and mapping out a tremendous underground cave with its multiplicity of previously unexplored passageways, most of which require diving gear to properly explore. So as the characters start dying as the result of a surface-level monsoon, the deaths took on a variety of forms related to climbing mishaps and diving mishaps, with headwounds and drownings aplenty. I think the idea behind a disaster movie is to put you in the shoes of the characters and what they're dealing with, and this one does that quite well. I'd heard the acting derided, but I found that for the most part, the actors portrayed their fear and (occasionally) their courage with total credibility.

Probably neither of these viewings -- the one that started in 2015, or the complete viewing now -- were under the ideal conditions to watch Sanctum. Those conditions would have been on an IMAX screen in 3D back in 2011, as Cameron's involvement meant all sorts of technological spectacle that's invariably diminished when you watch it on the small screen. Given that I found it effective even in that forum, I suspect I would have really enjoyed it in a format that accentuates the film's visual strengths.

Unfortunately, Withnail & I -- which I watched last night on Boxing Day -- was a different story.

And this I might have expected given the circumstances of my original failure to finish the movie. That's right, this is the only movie in this series I stopped watching simply because I didn't want to watch it anymore. Saving the worst for last, I guess. 

It was sometime late in 2012 or early in 2013, as the second half of that first year and the first half of the second were the only times we lived in the house we bought in Los Angeles just before moving to Australia. (And still own, but have been renting out.) My wife was either the driving force behind the viewing or she co-signed it once she saw I'd acquired it from Netflix, discs through the mail back then. In any case, it had been a favorite of hers that she wanted to show me.

But I just didn't like it. 

Considering only the two movies discussed in this post, there could not be a bigger contrast between the visuals of Sanctum and the visuals of Withnail & I. This is a scuzzy looking movie -- by design, I'm sure -- full of scuzzy characters, both scuzzy looking and scuzzy acting. It is no doubt an outgrowth of the kitchen sink movement in British filmmaking of the 1960s, populated by angry young men, albeit in a would-be comedy. And yes, Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann have anger to spare in the title roles.

If I can be really reductive, here is a quick and easy way to describe the two halves of Withnail & I:

The first half is a portrait of Withnail trying to drink himself to death, a peak he reaches very early on in the narrative when he drinks paint thinner and then asks for his compatriot's toolbox to see if there's an additional supply he's holding back. I suppose the people at the time thought this was funny, but my face did not even crack a smile.

The second half is an extended episode of gay panic. That's right, "I" spends literally the entire second half of this film trying to escape the pursuits of Withnail's randy uncle, who is almost rapey in his enthusiasm. Except instead of being played as comedy -- even this film's dark version of comedy -- the idea of possibly being buggered is treated as a source of serious drama for "I," one the film feels it can keep hitting over and over again without seeming exceedingly homophobic. Of course, 1987 was a different time, and you could get plenty of comedic mileage out of gay panic. If this film were just doing that, it would be okay, but the look on McGann's face is not one of comedic worry -- it's like deep existential dread. 

As I said, 1987 was a different time, and it's possible -- though quite unlikely -- that I would have been more favorably disposed toward the movie if I'd seen it then. It has things in common with movies I like, most notably something like Mike Leigh's Naked, which I only just saw for the first time a few years ago. But in 2020, this movie was as much a slog for me as it was in 2012 or 2013. Only this time I could not turn it off.

I did take breaks every half-hour on the half-hour, a task made easier by the fact that I could easily see the readout on our DVD player. And to be fair, it did pick up for me a little in the middle before spiralling downward again. But it's good to know that I wasn't just too tired, or not in the mood, or whatever temporary affliction I thought I might have felt the first time I tried to watch Withnail & I. It's quite clear now that I will never be in the mood for it.

One final note on this film. I have chosen to write the title as Withnail & I rather than Withnail and I, even though it is far more often represented in print with the "and" than the ampersand. I usually go with how the title is actually presented on screen in the movie, but I don't remember that in this case, and I'm not going to put the damn thing back in my DVD player to find out. I do remember, however, that in the credits, Grant is listed as "Withnail" and McGann is listed as "& I," so that's what I'm going with. In fact, that may be the funniest joke in the whole movie. 

That's it! That's the series. 

I'd offer some kind of recap, but really, these were just six (actually seven) movies that I started once and didn't finish: Sisters, That Sugar Film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Paddington, Dreams, Sanctum and Withnail & I. They didn't have anything else in common with each other, except that they shared a wrong I have now righted.

In 2021, it appears I'm going to be doing something I haven't done before: I'm going to do two bi-monthly series, intertwined with each other. That's in addition to the regular monthly series I will also do. Whereas I usually had January, March, May, July, September and November off from my bi-monthly series, now I'll be watching the second (or is it first?) of the two bi-monthly series those months.

What will they be? You'll have to stay tuned to see.

My favorite Wax Stamp Movies

I can't believe I've been writing a film blog
for over 14 months, and still haven't told you about Wax Stamp Movies.

Well, if you've waited this long, you can wait another paragraph. First things first.

I had wanted to see The Wolfman on the big screen, and exactly a month and a day after it was released, I finally did. During that time, the movie had been through several near misses -- one time when I got together with a friend, and instead of going to a movie we watched TV, and another time when I had to cancel a plan to see it with a friend the day beforehand. When that second friend and I rescheduled for this past weekend, it appeared we'd waited too long. The Woflman was in a handful of theaters near my house on Thursday, but had almost completely failed to survive Friday's slate of new releases. We ultimately met at a second-run theater that was kind of equidistant from both of us, where neither of us ever goes, and saw it on a screen that was more like a big flat-screen TV than something you'd expect in the cinema. So when I say I wanted to see it on the big screen, I ended up seeing it on the medium-sized screen.

The reason I'd been so eager to see The Wolfman was because I considered it a genuine, certified Wax Stamp Movie. That's a term I came up with myself, so I better define it for you. A Wax Stamp Movie is any movie that either actually features, or is likely to feature, a piece of correspondence sealed up by red wax, with the stamp of the correspondent punched into the hardening bond. When I say "likely to feature," that gives me leeway to include films that don't literally have a wax stamp in them, but have a production design that's consistent with wax stamps. A production design that loves, nearly fetishizes, period details, such as a quill pens writing on parchment.

Some time ago I identified the wax stamp as emblematic of a style of art direction I deeply cherish. This is not just another way of saying I like period pieces. Actually, I've been somewhat down on your standard-issue period piece lately, asking something more than just highfalutin dialogue and romantic betrayals. Most period pieces are pretty capable when it comes to period costumes and sets, but the Wax Stamp Movie is something a bit more than that. It's a form of art direction that is highly detail-oriented, that would care enough to lovingly show that stamp pressing into that drying wax. It's a moment that drives me crazy -- it's just so satisfying.

So what qualifies as a Wax Stamp Movie, in the opinion of me, the inventor of the concept? Well, let me quickly run through what doesn't qualify, so we can eliminate a lot of candidates that might seem logical:

The Straightforward Costume Drama. By this I am speaking of most movies that are in some way a descendant of Masterpiece Theatre or the Merchant-Ivory tradition. And it's not to say that none of these movies qualify; certainly, there would be some art directors assigned to these projects who'd have an eye for this kind of detail. But this is more to say that such movies do not automatically qualify as Wax Stamp Movies, because then the category would just be too big. Besides, many such films are far more interested in performances than the details of the production design. Rules out: Sense and Sensibility, The Wings of the Dove, The Remains of the Day, etc.

The Fantasy Film. There's plenty in, say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy that might ordinarily seem like the kind of art direction I'm talking about. But these movies already belong to the fantasy genre, so the Wax Stamp classification is not appropriate to them. Rules out: The Lord of the Rings movies, The Golden Compass, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, etc.

The Pirate Movie. Ditto the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. They're in the right period of time, but the pirate genre supersedes them. Rules out: The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, etc.

The Animated Film. There are a number of period-appropriate animated films that would totally count if they were live-action, but the wax stamp effect is specifically a comment on actual props used by actual art directors. Rules out: Beauty and the Beast, Disney's A Christmas Carol, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, etc.

Asian Wire Work Films. There are plenty of movies that would also qualify here, but I consider their classification as kung fu/swordplay films to supersede the Wax Stamp classification. Rules out: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The House of Flying Daggers, Hero, etc.

Okay, enough ado! Here are my ten favorite Wax Stamp Movies, ranked not according to how much I like them as movies, but to how well they use the wax stamp-inspired production design.

1) Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992, Francis Ford Coppola). The ultimate Wax Stamp Movie. For anyone who loves this film, the acting of Keanu Reeves has nothing to do with it. It's all about the wax stamps. While there's at least one actual wax stamp in the film, there's also plenty of other good stuff: sugar cubes dipped in Absinthe, people writing letters with quill pens, droplets of blood everywhere you look. This is a wet dream of art direction, and that's why it gets spot #1 on this list.

2) Sleepy Hollow (1999, Tim Burton). Before Tim Burton became evil, he made one of the wax stampiest movies ever in Sleepy Hollow, even though it may not contain an actual wax stamp. Everything else about the production design contains high doses of that mentality: loving close-ups of Ichabod Crane scrawling words with his quill pen is just the start of it. Over the course of this list, you'll see plenty of blood and guts mixed in with the art direction of these films, and Sleepy Hollow certainly qualifies.

3) Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tykwer). Tykwer's many detail shots of perfume being made are what qualify him here. One of my favorite things about Tykwer's movie is his attention to detail, which also includes intimate shots of the sources of the various smells the protagonist experiences with his over-developed olfactory capabilities.

4) Dangerous Liaisons (1988, Stephen Frears). Frears' film might just be another costume drama -- albeit an excellent one -- except for the fact that I specifically noted that some of the correspondence that's a central part of the film is conducted on wax-sealed paper. Mmm mmm good.

5) From Hell (2001, Allen & Albert Hughes). And now we're five for five on movies where blood is spilled. I think it was the Hughes' approach to these sprays of arterial blood that caught my attention, plus all the time Johnny Depp spends in the opium den. This Hell is Wax Stamp Heaven.

6) Marie Antoinette (2006, Sofia Coppola). People have argued that Coppola's follow-up to Lost in Translation is nothing but production design. They might be right, but I still love the movie, maybe all the more so for that fact. Coppola's film is gorgeous and decadent. If I had to choose one moment to stand for the rest, which makes it qualify for this category, it's the montage of desserts to the tune of "I Want Candy." Scrumptious.

7) Elizabeth (1998, Shekhar Kapur). I haven't seen this since it was in the theater, so I'm hard-pressed to remember details. But I remember the production design as vibrant and colorful. There had to be a wax stamp in there somewhere.

8) The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001, Christophe Gans). This was a weird movie -- weird in a good way. It was like a mixture of a costume drama and a wire-work kung fu movie, with a monster thrown in for good measure. Oddly enough, the scene in this film that really made me consider it a Wax Stamp Movie was not one of the costume drama scenes, though that kind of art direction was certainly present in those scenes. It was a scene where the characters practice their marksmanship on pumpkins, and the pumpkins splatter in a wonderfully artful way.

9) Quills (2000, Philip Kaufman). I don't remember Quills very well, but it had the right production design for it.

10) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994, Kenneth Brangah). This film gets the last spot because, really, it's not a very good movie. But I always considered it kind of like the little brother of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and not only because the author's name was listed as a possessive in the title. If Branagh did anything right in that film, it was give it the Wax Stamp production values I know and love.

Sorry, Wolfman. You don't make the list. The Wolfman does qualify as a Wax Stamp Movie, don't get me wrong. But it ended up being so inept that it just didn't belong among my top ten.

Here are some other titles I considered but did not include, either because I didn't consider them good enough, or could not remember the production design well enough to give it my Wax Stamp of approval, or thought the art direction was close, but not quite Wax Stamp:

Topsy-Turvy (1999, Mike Leigh)
Amadeus (1984, Milos Forman)
The Crucible (1996, Nicholas Hytner)
Gangs of New York (2002, Martin Scorsese)
Les Miserables (1998, Bille August)
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999, Luc Besson)
Moulin Rouge (2001, Baz Luhrmann)
Oliver Twist (2005, Roman Polanski)
The Phantom of the Opera (2004, Joel Schumacher)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007, Tim Burton)
The Red Violin (1999, Francois Girard)
The Prestige (2006, Christopher Nolan)

Movies I might have considered if I'd seen them:

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002, Kevin Reynolds)
The Libertine (2004, Laurence Dunmore)
The Other Boleyn Girl (2008, Justin Chadwick)
Sherlock Holmes (2009, Guy Ritchie)
The Duchess (2008, Saul Dibb)

In my haste to write this relatively quickly, and without re-watching the movies in question, I hope I've communicated some of what I mean by a Wax Stamp Movie.

And if I have, let me know what other Wax Stamp Movies I should be exposed to. Because I take no greater pleasure at the movies than seeing a customized stamp sink its way into a freshly poured puddle of red wax.

No Audio Audient: Broken Blossoms

This is the eighth in my series No Audio Audient, in which I'm watching one silent film per month in 2016.

When I first started this series, one of my concerns about silent films in general was how they don't make good apples-to-apples comparisons with modern films. I wasn't talking only, or even primarily, or even at all about the fact that they have no spoken dialogue and are black and white. No, I was talking about their length. I can compare almost any dissimilar dimensions of films, but length was a real sticking point for me. Simply put, I had a hard time considering a 45-minute moving picture to be a "film."

As soon as I saw Sherlock Jr. in February -- a 45-minute film (yes, film) I gave five stars -- I basically dropped that concern.

And now I want more.

At 85 minutes, D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms is kind of exactly the movie I was looking for when I started this series. It's a significant movie from the era while also having a run time that meets my idea of what a movie is. While also not being too long.

Except Broken Blossoms really is too long. It would have been much better off at 45 minutes.

I had a weird moment where I looked up at how much time had passed in the movie and saw it was 55 minutes, and felt that the movie was only just getting to its semblance of a plot. How is that possible? Where was the other time spent?

The story, such as it is, involves a Chinese immigrant to London (Richard Barthelmess) who does not find the welcoming home in the west he thought he'd find. (He "dreams to spread the gentle message of Buddha to Anglo-Saxon lands.") He has a shop in a wharf area, where one of the neighborhood girls (Lillian Gish) is beaten by her father, a drunken prizefighter (Donald Crisp). When one of his beatings leaves her seriously injured and wandering the streets, he takes her in and nurses her back to health. When the prizefighter discovers her whereabouts, all his instincts as a brute and a racist kick in to try to punish both the "Yellow Man" (ugh, that's how he is referred to) and the girl.

I imagine this seemed progressive at the time. There is no overt romance between the "Yellow Man" (also sometimes referred to as "the chink," and sometimes by his name, Cheng Huan) and Gish's Lucy, but the mere suggestion of an interracial affair between them would have likely been a pretty big deal. Unfortunately, knowing what we know about Griffith, it's difficult not to see elements of his racism here -- even when the movie is overtly fighting racism. I suppose referring to him as the "Yellow Man" ("chink" is usually reserved as an epithet used only be nasty people) would have been a fairly inoffensive crime in 1919, but nearly 100 years later -- and taken in combination with the values put forward by Griffith in Birth of a Nation -- it doesn't play particularly well. Then there's the fact that Cheng Huan is played by a white actor, which is probably obvious but is no less troubling, since they had to give him what we might call "yellowface" in order to make him look Chinese. (We would only use that term to play off the existing term "blackface," of course.)

But let's set that all aside and give Griffith the benefit of the doubt. One of the biggest problems with this movie is its slow pace and its scarcity of plot. This was again part of the style of the time, but things that seem like they should take place in a matter of ten or 20 seconds take more like a minute or two on screen to transpire. The whole movie is elongated in that fashion. One of the most comical is an interaction between Huan and the boxer, named Battling Burrows, where the two stare each other down for about two minutes, exchanging disdainful and suspicious looks. It reminded me most of the recurring bit by Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he and an adversary look each other over suspiciously from a distance of about two feet away from each other, for a period of maybe 30 seconds. Imagine that but taking two minutes.

The elongation of action is problematic in many other ways. I suppose before I tell you about them I should give you a spoiler warning, especially since I want to reveal one of my other problems about the movie and the only way to do that is to spoil it. So, SPOILERS ahead.

At the end of the movie, Lucy dies, because her father has raged so hard against her and beaten her so hard that the life simply escapes her body. We are meant to believe this is the result of her father's drunkenness and therefore is some kind of unpremeditated crime of impulse. Yet after the father corrals her at the end, there are two to three minutes of yelling, making threatening motions, raising and then lowering a whip, and muttering "Why I oughta" with the proverbial raised back of the hand before he actually descends upon her. If we are to believe that this father was so out of control that he was capable of killing his daughter, shouldn't we also believe that he'd be incapable of several minutes of preamble in which she is pleading for mercy? I suppose some of this can be excused by the melodramatic storytelling styles in fashion at the time, but not all.

And let's talk about this boxer. He is the epitome of the over-the-top silent movie villain. Would that the had a moustache to twirl. When I was watching the film, I failed to understand that he was actually the girl's father, which makes his behavior both better and worse. She calls him "Daddy," but I thought that was used in the way that you call your sugar daddy "Daddy." I thought this was a girl who was under this guy's thumb for some reason -- not that he was her pimp I guess, but someone he had the right to claim as his property. I thought his behavior was that of a jealous lout. Reading the wikipedia synopsis afterward, I discovered the actual blood relationship between the character. That he's actually her father makes his moral claim over her at least righteous -- a good father would want to save his daughter from being misused by someone -- but makes it far more unlikely that he would beat her to death. (And not seem to care that he had done so.) He's just so damn evil that it strains all credibility.

Then there's the movie's message. Huan's philosophy throughout has been that that he believes in peace and non-violence, even when confronting his enemies. By the end of the movie, he pulls out a gun and shoots Burrows. (Which leads to a hilariously prolonged chest-holding and staggering death.) I suppose this is Griffith's point, that he has come to such a state of despair the he has lost his core philosophies completely. Yet that point doesn't translate with any certainty, meaning that it seems more like carelessness and confusion on Griffith's part.

Technically speaking, the film does seem to have a few advances worth noting. In that prolonged scene before Burrows administers the fatal beating to his daughter, Griffith uses a close-up on both faces that's very effective, to illustrate the intensity of their interaction. The image also seems much clearer and in focus at this depth, and more use of it would have helped me become more involved in the film. But filmmakers were not yet ready to consistently shoot at a depth closer than mid level. I guess there are certain things I need to be patient on.

Gish is worth a special mention. She's quite good here, and it's easy to see why she became an icon whose acting methods engendered an entire legacy of acting for the screen. She does have some moments of silent-movie exaggeration, as Griffith would have directed her to do. But her more subtle instincts shine through, and she's heartbreaking.

I did find myself just a wee bit moved in the last few moments of the movie, when in spite of what I said earlier, I did recognize Huan's sacrifice and loss of idealism. Griffith is not an ineffective filmmaker. He just could have been more effective in this one, I thought.

Also, I'm still annoyed about how he includes his initials at the bottom of each of his title cards.

Narcissist.

So having been exhausted by Intolerance (but rewarding it for its ambition) and with Birth of a Nation being what it is, maybe I'm just never going to be big into D.W. Griffith. I feel like I should watch Orphans of the Storm before reaching that conclusion once and for all, and that was a film I was considering seriously for this series. But it's two-and-a-half hours long, and really, I think I'm done with him for now. Two in this series is enough. That'll probably already be one more than anyone else gets, even the classic comedians like Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd.

Instead, in September I will watch the 1925 film The Big Parade, directed by King Vidor. This was on my radar from the You Must Remember This podcast, where it was mentioned briefly. Vidor is on my radar from a film of his I love, The Fountainhead, which I probably need to watch again now that I know more about Ayn Rand, to see what I'd think about it nowadays. But for now, The Big Parade.

The trouble with being bored

The following is a pretty rare sequence of events for me:

1) See a movie poster for the first time on a trip to the movie theater.

2) See a trailer for that movie for the first time before the movie I'm seeing on that trip to the theater.

3) That's the next movie I see in the theater -- only three days later, which was its opening night.

Yet that was the sequence of events with The Trouble With Being Born, which I saw on Thursday night after first learning of its existence on Monday night when I went to see Possessor.

A couple things clinched it. One was that it was a foreign film (German), and though I've seen enough others this year to compensate, that's the type of film that tends to go by the wayside in a year when theaters spent most of their time closed. Then there was its promise of addressing artificial intelligence, always a bountiful cinematic theme, through an arthouse lens.

But I think the thing that sealed the deal was one of the raves from critics shown in the trailer, which was along the lines of "You will ask yourself: 'What did I just watch'?"

I always want my mind to be blown, so even the promise of it is enough to get me in the door, even when there are other movies steadily hitting theaters that I probably need to watch before I close my list just six weeks from now.

This viewing was also important as the first post-Possessor viewing. You will recall from a previous post that I had a mouth full of novocaine for that viewing, which prevented me from eating any of the candy I'd brought with me as a sugary stimulant. I did okay that time so I wondered if this was a change I could make permanently. So to The Trouble With Being Born, I brought only No Sugar Coke -- two of them, just to be sure.

Unfortunately, boredom is a strong, strong tranquilizer, which tends to nullify stimulants.

If I asked myself what I just watched, it's because The Trouble With Being Born was a wasted opportunity.

Since you may not have heard of it -- it has played only festivals so far, and I can't tell when it's going to open in North America, or if North American prudishness may play a role in that -- I can tell you that the film at least heavily suggests an improper relationship between a man and a young girl. Now, the young girl is a robot. But she still looks like a young girl, which means he is still a creep. More than that; a criminal.

I have a strong stomach for objectionable content, so this was not a problem for me, though I did question its overall value in a film that plays basically like an arthouse version of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. (I won't repeat my whole review, which I have already written, but it won't post until Monday so I can't link to it yet.) 

The problem for me, though, was how boring the movie was.

I do appreciate a movie's narrative being told in fragments. I do appreciate long, thoughtful moment of ennui. (Yep, repeating my review.)

I don't appreciate something that can't develop any momentum, and causes my eyelids to droop even after I've stuck into my second soda.

Would sugary sweets have helped me in this situation? Probably not. I do think, though, that there is a certainly Pavlovian instinct when I'm sitting in a darkened movie theater, that prompts me to need something to chew on. I got so desperate at one point that I went digging in my backpack to see if there had been anything squirreled away from another time that I'd forgotten about. There was: a granola bar so old that it actually tasted dusty and stale. I ate it gladly.

In the credits for The Trouble With Being Born, I noticed that the various individual pieces of the score had names that mirrored the name of the movie: "The Trouble With Getting Over," "The Trouble With Remains," "The Trouble With Eternal Love," etc. 

"The Trouble With Being Bored" was not in there, but it should have been. 

Finishing James Bond where I began

It's hard to believe it took me 40 years to watch all the Roger Moore James Bond movies.

This was my James Bond, after all.

And after my 9:25 p.m. showing of The Spy Who Loved Me last night, I have now seen 24 James Bond movies exactly one time -- and one about ten times. (Will get to that in a moment.)

I can't recall whether I saw Moonraker (1979) or For Your Eyes Only (1981) first, but I'm inclined to say Moonraker just because that keeps the chronological order. Both would have been on cable at a friend's house.

I know the next was Octopussy, because we recorded that off cable ourselves and I continued to watch it regularly, maybe once a year, for the rest of the 1980s. If it came out in 1983 it would have been on cable in '84 or '85, which was when we had The Movie Channel and when I recorded a bunch of other seminal films released about two years earlier that I watched about as often as Octopussy.

A View to a Kill would have been the first Bond movie I saw in the theater, followed by most of the rest yet to come (with exceptions for each of the men who would play Bond, even Timothy Dalton -- I think I didn't see Licence to Kill until it was on video). And that was also the last for Roger Moore, my Bond.

In between when Pierce Brosnan left the role and Daniel Craig started it, I went back to the beginning and watched Dr. No on January 2, 2006, intending to belatedly begin my chronology forward until I'd seen all the films.

Almost 18 years later, that task is finally complete, thanks to the Sun Theatre in Yarraville.

I shouldn't really credit the Sun with helping me finish. I could have done that any old time, considering that just about every, if not every, Bond film is available for streaming on Stan. Any that aren't could be easily rented.

But the Sun's four-day Bondathon, which began Thursday afternoon with Dr. No and ends Sunday night with No Time to Die (incidentally, the only two Bond films with "No" in the title), gave me the excuse I needed to watch the final three I hadn't seen. And really, it was actually the final five, because I had to watch On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever just to get to the point in the chronology where the next film I hadn't seen (1973's Live and Let Die) would align with my first available time slot on Friday after work (5 p.m.).

I should also thank the Sun because the whole thing ended up being free.

Now, I'd fully intended to pay for these tickets. I watch a ton of movies at the Sun for free, because they accept my critics card and they are the closest theater to my house that does so (about a 15-minute drive). I thought this was my way of "giving back" -- to actually fork over money to them for once.

But when I first arrived and chatted up the ticket clerk about how the marathon had been going -- which I had planned to do from the start, in order to get more of a feel for the marathon on the whole -- I also broached the question about whether it made any sense for me to buy all three tickets I needed up front. Of course I fully intended to stay for The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me after Live and Let Die, but what if my wife called and one of my kids was sick or something? I didn't want to have already forked out an extra $40 for tickets I couldn't use. 

I could tell she was not a "company woman," as eager to roll her eyes at the whole thing as to hawk the product earnestly -- but that also meant she was looking out for me as the customer. Instead of trying to get my money up front, she said I could certainly buy them between sessions, although I had already calculated out that the window of time between the end of one movie and the beginning of the next would be very short, during which I might also need to use the toilet or buy another snack.

I had in fact decided to go ahead with all three -- if I had to leave for some reason, "giving back" to the Sun would take on a whole new meaning. But when she asked if I had any concessions, meaning something that would allow my tickets to be discounted, I did pull out my critics card, knowing that it usually means a couple bucks off even in a situation where the film would not be free, like this one.

Well, the woman said the movies weren't blocked out on her screen, meaning they were still eligible for free tickets, so she just printed three tickets and handed them to me. I actually tried to protest, double checking to be sure, but I wasn't going to argue with her about it.

Wow is the Sun awesome.

I wasn't sure how well the Bondathon might be going now seven movies into the event, but the woman assured me that "they've been here all day." I actually asked if anyone had come to all of them, but I realized she probably wouldn't have been there since 8 a.m. and so couldn't say for sure. 

But there were definitely some diehards there. While the others around me looked a bit more like geeks than aspiring international spies, there was an older man dressed in a tuxedo. Given the relative freshness of the tuxedo, he wouldn't have been there all day. 

One who had definitely been there all day was the programmer/owner of the Sun, not a man I know but he was the right age for it. I suspected this might be Bert Murphy, a name I know from these short films produced by the Sun about their community that play before features, which he directs. In any case, he was dressed a bit like the captain of the Titanic, and he was trying to make his staff wear similar hats. The woman taking my ticket as I went in -- who was the same woman who had sold me it, "sold" being used very loosely there -- removed her hat as soon as he turned his back.

The movies had gotten a little behind due to a small mishap earlier in the day, he told me while we were chatting briefly in the lobby, which is why I could see there was still about ten minutes left in Diamonds Are Forever at the expected start time of Live and Let Die. (I could easily estimate how much time was remaining from the events on screen, given that I'd just watched the movie myself for the first time the night before.) With the tight schedule they'd programmed, which included about five but no more than ten minutes between screenings, there wasn't a good opportunity to catch up once you'd gotten off track. He tried to do so by starting LALD about a minute after DAF ended, but fortunately I was there and ready for that exchange of films. Anyone who had been there longer than that was probably accustomed to the idea that they might miss a minute or two of a film if they required a longer bathroom break between them. (Any time credits rolled on one of these films, the beeline for the exit was noticeable.)

It was when he was standing in the auditorium itself -- the biggest one the Sun has, by the way -- that I got my best idea of whether anyone might have been at all the films. Before LALD started, he asked those gathered if anyone had been seen Dr. No last night, a question he proffered allegedly to see if anyone agreed how great the print looked. (I would certainly agree, all the movies looked great and it was really fun to see them on the big screen.) Informally, I suspect he was trying to do his own calculations about whether anyone else had been crazy enough to be there from the start.

I hadn't intended to get one of the passports they were giving out to people who were going to at least three movies. That was probably another thing the eyeball-rolling woman didn't care about foisting on me when I got my tickets, and since I got them for free I didn't dare ask. But in a conversation with the man I will say was Bert Murphy in the lobby, in which I told them these were the final three movies I needed to see to finish the Eon productions, he told me "Oh well you've gotta have a passport!" And quickly fetched me one.

The image you see above is what a typical page in the passport looks like. There's one for each movie and as you are going in -- or between movies if you're staying longer -- you go back and get a new page stamped. I did indeed get all three of mine stamped. Oh, here's what the cover looks like:

It may be obvious that the content of these three movies, watched in immediate succession and with the same Bond in each film, tended to bleed into one another. And since I've already used up most of my allotment of your attention span on details about the experience, I won't go on at length about each film. But I do think I should make a quick comment about each, especially since I can accompany that with a quick comment about what I ate during each.

To get that established up front, I'll tell you that I went in with two cans of Pepsi Max, a foot-long BMT from Subway, a bag of miniature Reese's peanut butter cups (even smaller than the individually wrapped ones), and a bag of gummy worms. These were all tucked away safely in my backpack. Don't worry, I did also buy some things from the Sun, as you will see. But unfortunately, going in with so much on hand meant that I didn't apportion them out the way I would have liked.

1) Live and Let Die - This was my favorite of the three, though it's impossible to say whether that's because the movie was the best or because my conditions for experiencing it were the best. It was the first so I hadn't yet started to get tired from more than six hours of James Bond movies. This is as close to a blaxploitation film as James Bond ever got, as Yaphet Kotto is the villain and the whole thing has the flavor of the occult to go with its Caribbean island setting for part of the film (in a fictitious island nation called San Monique). Jane Seymour plays a tarot card reader in one of her earliest films, and she's astonishingly good looking. There were some good set pieces here too, but I am having a little trouble remembering them. Oh yeah, there's a great speedboat chase that takes place partially on land.

What I ate: Well this was a rough start in terms of my food resources. I bought a small popcorn going in, both because I wanted to give the Sun some of my concession money and because I wanted to push the eating of my sandwich to the second movie, which more closely aligned with my normal dinner time. But then I ate the first half of the sandwich, thinking that would be it. And then I ate the second half of the sandwich. And then I ate the Reese's peanut butter cups. What are you going to do.

2) The Man With the Golden Gun - Now this was one I knew a little about because a friend's brother -- the same friend at whose house I had watched Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only -- used to talk about Scaramanga, its villain, played by Christopher Lee. As soon as I saw him shirtless I remembered that his thing was that he had an extra nipple. When my friend's brother used to talk about him I think he thought he was drawing on a mutual experience, and I'm sure the two brothers had seen this movie, but I hadn't. The other notable things about the movie are the villain's henchman, played by the erstwhile Tatoo (Herve Villechaize), and the two Bond girls, one international beauty Britt Ekland and the other Maud Adams, who was also a Bond girl (playing a different character) in Octopussy. In terms of the actual plot, I remember less about what happens in this one. Middle child syndrome I think.

What I ate: You'll notice I at least held off on my two Pepsi Maxes in the first film. I drank one of them here. I also ate the gummy worms.

3) The Spy Who Loved Me - I'd heard the named Barbara Bach and she is the Bond girl this time. By the way, all the Bond girls I've mentioned are still alive, I'm glad to see. (Bach is married to Ringo Starr.) Bach plays the titular spy, which I guess means Bond is the titular "me," though since they are both spies and since they both "love" (i.e. sleep with) the other, the perspective is not entirely clear. Here the villain is Curd Jurgens, who I was sure was the "diplomatic immunity" guy from Lethal Weapon 2, but it turns out Jurgens was already dead by then and that is actually Joss Ackland. Anyway, they look a lot alike. If it sounds like I'm not getting to the plot it's because I don't remember this one either. Oh yeah, it was about a device that can track nuclear submarines. And I almost forgot! This is the first appearance of Richard Kiel's Jaws, who would return in Moonraker.

What I ate: I came in a little late to the start of this movie -- just a minute or so -- in part because I needed a little fresh air, and in part because I wanted to buy something else at the snack bar. Was I hungry enough for another thing? Probably not. Was I concerned about needing a jolt of sugar to keep me awake for the whole movie? Yes I was, especially because a Pepsi Max does not contain any sugar. So I bought a bag of peanut M&M's, and finished it without any trouble I am somewhat ashamed to report. I also drank the second and final Pepsi Max. And failed to save them for when I really needed them, the last minutes of the last movie.

And even though I didn't have any more tickets, I did for a moment think about staying for Moonraker at 11:25. I was in a groove in some "movie marathon or die" sense if not in an actual "I can stay awake for one more movie" sense. But I came here to finish exactly the movies I hadn't seen, and staying for Moonraker would have destroyed the perfection of that mission. To say nothing of requiring me to buy yet one more food item and possibly a drink, after which I would probably throw up.

Four takeaways about the experience on the whole:

1) The most fun thing about watching these movies with a crowd was to hear everyone produce gales of laughter whenever Moore dropped a particularly silly one-liner. I think the best was when he's just finished passing himself as Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun, a feat he is able to accomplish by affixing a fake third nipple to his chest -- that being the only thing most people know about the man's appearance. Upon reporting back to, I think it was, the Bond girl Ekland, he quips "I think they found me titillating." Even when you see a movie with an appreciative crowd nowadays, you don't usually hear everyone howling at lines like this one, because baked into it is the idea that it's silly and dumb and exactly what we would hope for from a James Bond movie made nearly a half-century ago. And the great thing was that this happened at least three times, maybe closer to five, in every movie.

2) The other thing that got us laughing, though, was the hick cop played by Clifton James, described on Wikipedia as "an uncouth Louisiana sheriff." I recognized James from his similar role in Superman II, a role he almost certainly received as a nod to these Bond films. He's introduced in LALD and pops up again in TMWTGG, and he is turned up to 11 in his southern hick mannerisms, to hilarious effect. It's so off tone for a Bond film but it just reminds us how much fun these movies could be when they wanted to be, especially the ones directed by Guy Hamilton. (Which include Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.) 

3) I was curious to see to what extent Blofeld, who does not die at the end of Diamonds Are Forever, remained as a villain for Moore's version of Bond. The answer is: not at all. They weren't necessarily making a totally clean break between George Lazenby and Sean Connery in the previous two films, as Blofeld appears in both, but he doesn't show up here. That said, in The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bach's Russian spy is giving Bond a little biographical run down on himself to prove she has done her homework, she says "Married once, wife killed --" before Bond cuts her off in no uncertain terms. So after two movies of making no overt or covert reference to anything related to the ending of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, we do get one quick mention here, keeping alive some small amount of continuity between the films. (And in terms of continuity, I believe we've gotten Bernard Lee as M, Desmond Llewellyn as Q and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny in each of the five films I've watched in the past ten days.)

4) The songs! Hearing Paul McCartney and Wings sing "Live and Let Die" (and have its melody repeated throughout in orchestral form) and Carly Simon sing "Nobody Does It Better" (and have its melody repeated throughout in orchestral form) were both very nice. I didn't know the song from The Man With the Golden Gun but I can sort of remember it emerging from my six-hour James Bond blur. 

To end this long post where I started it off, it was indeed strange that it took me so long to see 3/7ths of the movies made by the guy who was the only James Bond I had ever seen on film until Timothy Dalton took on the role. 

But it occurred to me that these three movies were kind of like a Bond prequel trilogy for me, a primer on the man I'd watched so many times in Octopussy and once each in three other films. Except instead of as is the case with most prequel trilogies, I actually did want to find out where Roger Moore's James Bond had started out, how he had gotten to the place he was when I first met him -- even though these movies mostly have nothing to do with one another and generally make little of the character's past. 

And these three films in particular operated very much along the lines of prequel trilogy logic, especially as Jaws is introduced in the third one. The appearance of Jaws, the man who can tear metal (and kill people) with his bite, was the thing that gave me the greatest sense of finishing where I started off. I remember when I saw Moonraker way back in what was probably 1982, I was a bit terrified of this man, who occupies a bit of the same space in my mind as Non in Superman II (speaking of Superman II). Now I finally got to see how it all began.

This is a lot of talk for a guy who doesn't actually consider himself a huge Bond fan. Remember that Octopussy is the only Bond movie I've seen more than once. Don't worry, I'm almost done.

I do, however, want to finish this off with something that now seems obvious: a ranking of all 25 Bond films. So maybe after a breather of a few days to let the last five films settle into place, I'll wrap up this whole thing mid-week next week. 

Oh, and if you are reading this and are in the Melbourne area, my beloved Octopussy is just about to start as I publish this. While you'll be too late to jump in your car to go see Octopussy, there's still time to get in Moore's last movie (A View to a Kill) and watch all of Dalton, Brosnan and Craig.

One of our last bastions of such great customer service and such delightful programming spirit, The Sun most definitely deserves your money, even if they didn't get much of mine. 

Justifying my shitty taste

When blogger Mike Lippert of You Talking to Me? announced an interactive event on his blog this week called "Justify Your Shitty Taste," I knew I was in. One of my favorite things as a film lover is to defend movies I think people got wrong.

A film immediately jumped to mind: Repo! The Genetic Opera. Despite having some passionate cult fans, the film was generally lambasted, in part I'm sure because it features Paris Hilton. But my wife and I truly liked it -- a lot, actually -- and I thought it made a great candidate for Mike's project.

But then I decided I should really watch it again in preparation for writing the piece. As luck would have it, I own the movie on BluRay -- a friend gave it to me as what he thought was a joke. But the way my week's shaking out, I wouldn't have an opportunity to watch it until Saturday night, then write the post hurriedly on Sunday morning. Chances are Mike would like to be posting his results by then.

Then I remembered: I did a whole series on my blog last summer called Double Jeopardy, in which I re-watched films that I'd liked, but most other people didn't, to see if I still felt the same about them upon second viewing. I figured, Mike's probably not going to cry in his beer if the shitty tastes I choose to justify were first written on a previous occasion.

I had about ten movies to choose from in my series, but I chose Ivan Reitman's Fathers' Day because it was about the most universally reviled on the list. I figure, if I'm going to participate in Mike's project, I want to go all in.

So without any further blah blah blah, my first-ever re-post on The Audient. Enjoy. Or don't. It's up to you, really.

"It's no Ishtar"

I've never seen the infamous flop Ishtar, but I have a very specific memory of reading a review when it first came out, back in 1987. I was 13 years old and probably just getting into reading film reviews, so this one stuck with me, as such formative experiences often do. I can't remember if it was the Boston Globe critic or someone like Roger Ebert, but it was a two-star capsule review which read, and I may be paraphrasing slightly:

"One star for Dustin Hoffman. One star for Warren Beatty. No stars for anything else."

So when I heard Ivan Reitman's Fathers' Day, which came out a decade later, described as Robin Williams' and Billy Crystal's Ishtar, I was as wary as everyone else who steered clear on the basis of that dour prognosis.

But when I actually did see it, sometime in probably 2001 or 2002, in order to provide the review for the website that employs me, I thought it wasn't half bad. In fact, better than that. I thought it was good.

In the years since then, I've been operating on the assumption that I must have been crazy. Like Bedazzled, which I wrote about in my first Double Jeopardy post, I've owned this movie for over five years, but had yet to re-watch it until yesterday. And like Bedazzled, I didn't actively seek out this movie as part of my collection. In fact, I came into possession of it at a theme party at a friend's house. Her idea was that you brought over crap that you wanted to get rid of, put it on a table, and walked away with someone else's unwanted crap. I can't remember what I purged at this party, but I came home with Fathers' Day. I'd liked it, after all. But I haven't watched it again, and this was so long ago, now, that I'm not even friends with that woman anymore -- haven't been for three or four years.

Well, I'm not crazy. And now I think I probably ought to go watch Ishtar, because if it's anything like this, Ishtar is probably not half bad, either.

The plot basically revolves around a 16-year-old boy who goes missing for two weeks after running away from his heartbroken parents (Nastassja Kinski and Bruce Greenwood). Desperate, Kinski's character visits two of her former lovers, Jack Lawrence (Crystal) and Dale Putley (Williams), who both bedded the woman right around the time her son was conceived. Either could be the father, and she uses this possibility to separately enlist their help in finding young Scott. (In retrospect, it seems like a precursor to Mamma Mia!, as there's actually a third possibility for the boy's male parentage -- Greenwood, who has thought he was the actual father the boy's whole life, and is involved in his own separate search for the boy.) As might be expected, Jack and Dale cross paths and discover each has been told he's the father of the boy. Hijinx ensue.

It's the nature of those hijinx that probably left some viewers and critics displeased. Williams is skittish and eccentric, and when we meet him, he actually has a gun barrel in his mouth, ready to off himself -- in a scene that's played for laughs. Crystal is, well, Crystal -- he's businesslike and sarcastic. Both could do these roles in their sleep, I'm sure, and they're meant to be a zany odd couple.

Well, it works. I'm not a huge Williams fan, and Dale Putley is normally the kind of role in which I like him least. But for some reason, I found him lovable and actually sort of believable here. I like the dynamic that builds up between he and Crystal, whom I've always enjoyed on screen. (And why did he quit acting, anyway?) It's not just a buddy comedy-type situation -- it's almost a bickering lovers-type situation, since Jack so clearly wears the pants in the relationship, and Dale plays the sensitive role that's traditionally ascribed to a woman. As they say in the movie, they really do make a good team in seeking out the wayward boy, and their attempts to navigate the rock 'n roll underground (Scott is following the band Sugar Ray, before they became sellouts) contain some funny fish-out-of-water stuff. (And if you know Sugar Ray only from that song "Fly" that was ubiquitous back in the late 1990s, see this movie -- it reminds you that they were once inaccessible punks, musically speaking.)

And it shouldn't be a huge surprise to us that it works. After all, the film is directed by the reliable Ivan Reitman, he of Ghostbusters and Dave fame. And it was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who also wrote Splash, City Slickers, A League of Their Own and Parenthood. Throw in producer Joel Silver, and you've got a dream team working on this film.

So why didn't people like it? Eh, who knows. Dale and Jack are likable, Scott gets swept up in a relatable predicament with his feelings for a girl (even if it involves a sort-of unrelatable theft from drug dealers), and even the notably serious actor Bruce Greenwood moonlights successfully into comedy, notably a scene where he gets pushed down a hill in a port-o-potty. If that just sounds silly, listen to Greenwood's hilarious line readings while he's trapped inside the overturned john: "Oh, it's horrible! Get me out of here!" Playing against type in the other direction is Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Jack's wife -- she's probably the most straight-faced person in the whole movie, and apparently, it didn't go over well, as she was nominated for a Razzie as worst supporting actress.

A couple other things to look for: an uncredited cameo by Mel Gibson as a guy with a face full of piercings, and the director's son, Jason, a future director himself, as "wrong kid in alley."

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Fathers' Day: It's not going to revolutionize the comedy world, but this is a nice little movie that didn't deserve to be bashed like it was. Fans of Williams and Crystal in particular should give it a shot. These two comedy icons give the fans what they came for, and isn't that one of the primary reasons people make movies?

Measures of duality

On Friday night I was reading my six-year-old from his series of books about Zac Power, the 12-year-old super spy, as we are wont to do. I've noticed the phenomenon I'm about to tell you about plenty of times before, but had occasion to contemplate it anew during the reading of the book Sand Storm, in which one of Zac's chief rivals appears.

The rival in question is a 12-year-old girl named Caz. Get it? Caz? Zac? Zac? Caz? Zac works for the good spy agency called GIB, while Caz works for the bad spy agency called BIG. Get it? BIG? GIB? GIB? BIG?

But you haven't heard all of it yet. Caz' last name is Rewop. That's right. Rewop. Power. Power. Rewop. Zac Power. Caz Rewop.

It'll go right over most kids' heads -- my son hasn't commented on it yet, anyway -- but for adults, it's a stupidly obvious application of the notion that the hero and villain are two sides of the same being. They're not opposites -- the opposite of the name Zac Power would not be Caz Rewop, but, I don't know, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Rather, they are mirror images of each other, having more in common than they have different. In fact, in extreme instances, you might argue that the only thing they don't share in common is their respective morality. Even then, though, the creator of these characters likes to emphasize the bad in the good character and the good in the bad.

It was interesting timing, then, that the movie I was watching that night also engages in a sort of literal exploration of the hero-villain duality.

Last Days in the Desert is the latest film from writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, and it couldn't portray a more symbolic struggle between good and evil if it tried. In the film Ewan McGregor plays both Jesus Christ and the Devil, who tempted him during his 40 days in the desert. Garcia makes the things they have in common manifest by having the same actor play both roles. If the side of Jesus that tempts him is personified as the Devil, I suppose to balance things out we'd also need to see the just side of the Devil as portrayed here. That complicates the duality a bit but I think the principle of the thing still holds.

If this were a children's story about super spies, I suppose his name would be Susej Tsirhc rather than the Devil, but I digress.

Garcia's rather on-the-nose choice is meant to allow one actor to explore both sides of a characterization, and theoretically give us something profound. McGregor is reasonably good in the film without quite attaining that level of achievement. So the film is worth watching but nothing extraordinary. McGregor might as well have a mini angel McGregor on one shoulder and a mini devil McGregor on the other, both advising him on what to do.

Perhaps the biggest "disappointment" about it, if you want to look at it that way, was the fact that it was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki and does not actually look mind-blowingly good. It looks good, but not mind-blowingly.

An interesting thing happened while I was watching it, though, that makes the thoughts I was already having about Zac Power and Jesus Christ and writing this post all the more eerie.

At about the halfway point of the film, I was getting really sleepy and I decided it was time for a bit of a sugar wake-me-up in the form of ice cream.

Not "about" the halfway point, though. At the halfway point.

Going over to my computer, which was tethered to the television via an HDMI cable, to press pause on iTunes, I then discovered that I had paused on exactly the halfway point of the film. There had been 49:51 that had already elapsed and there was 49:51 left to go. You could say I planned it, but when you're watching something in iTunes, the time remaining only displays when you run your cursor over the progress bar. There's no alternate method to track the minutes ticking away -- or none that I know of, anyway.

So I managed to split the movie right down the middle, into a duality of its own running time.

Even stranger was what happened about five minutes after that midway point. Another character who fancies riddles says to Jesus, "How far can a man walk into the desert? Only halfway. After that he's walking out." Probably just another way the movie is conscious of its own duality. But it had a special coincidental significance for me, given how I had just paused after walking exactly halfway into the movie, after which I was walking out of it.

I thought I'd leave you with five other explicit considerations of the duality between hero and villain, good and evil. Listed in the order I thought of them.

1) Oh God, You Devil! (1984, Paul Bogart) - The third in George Burns' series of Oh God! movies features Burns as both God and the Devil, much like in Friday night's movie. Though I don't think anything other than Borscht Belt comedy was being explored here.

2) Superman III (1983, Richard Lester) - Even at the best of times, Superman has a dual personality that includes another side of himself -- the Clark Kent side. Usually, both sides are good. In the third Superman movie, though, they explored an evil Superman, one corrupted by kryptonite -- and one who actually fights Clark Kent. I don't remember how they managed to get them into separate corporeal bodies -- I think there was a bit more suspension of disbelief than usual on that one -- but I do remember their extremely bizarre junkyard battle for control of their soul.

3) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Peter Jackson) - There's also a struggle for the soul of the man once known as Smeagol, now the twisted troll called Gollum. To emphasize this, Jackson uses a technique whereby the two sides of the character -- one kind and one cruel -- have a conversation with one another on how to handle the two travelers Gollum has just met. Although only one being is actually present, Jackson gives a standard shot-reverse shot setup as though there are two conversing.

4) The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) - Back to superhero movies, one of the most commonly referenced instances of hero-villain duality is between Batman and the Joker, though in this case they look nothing like each other. However, there's a direct symbol of the two sides of a character's personality within The Dark Knight, and that's the very brief appearance of Two Face, known as Harvey Dent before he is disfigured and corrupted. The coin flip that is part of his MO -- which usually decides the fate of a prospective victim -- could also decide which version of him you're getting. But truly, the Dent side isn't there anymore, only symbolically represented by the failure to kill somebody instead of killing them.

5) Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze) - And though I should end with something from Hitchcock, I couldn't find anything that literalized the theme in the way I'm going for here. So let's finish with a movie I alluded to on this blog only yesterday -- giving us one final coincidence with the Zac Power reading/viewing of Last Days in the Desert. In order to literally explore the dormant half of his personality, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (appearing as a character here, played by Nicolas Cage) introduces a brother character named Donald, who is everything he isn't -- gregarious, mainstream, moronic, successful. In this case it's not really good and evil Kaufman is exploring, though -- he intermingles aspects of both in each personality, and toys with his own perception of which is which.

For more examples, check out, oh, the rest of western literature and cinema.

Barbenheiming movies back to relevance in 2023

Films are not going away any time soon.

The greatest example of that may be that my friend Sterling, who does the same year-end ranking exercise that I do, saw a career best 436 movies and yet still had at least a dozen that he considered regrets.

I suppose the other example is Barbenheimer.

I didn't particularly write about this phenomenon on my blog -- twice all told, I think, and they were both within the first few days of the films' simultaneous release. I didn't actually review these movie on ReelGood either, since my most regular contributor handled Oppenheimer, and his partner and her writing partner (both women) reviewed Barbie. (Fortunately for them but unfortunately for me, the Oppenheimer reviewer and the Barbie co-reviewer just had a baby, so I may be handling a significantly higher percentage of reviewing duties in 2024.)

But it does seem like these movies did something even more than what Top Gun: Maverick did in 2022. That phenomenon confirmed something that was probably obvious: a huge blockbuster franchise with one of the world's biggest stars can still sell a lot of tickets. What Barbenheimer did was show that movies that wouldn't necessarily attract this sort of attention on their own can be hyped and packaged in such a way to remind us why we all love going to the movies. The fact that they were both among the year's most universally acclaimed didn't hurt.

The other thing was that Barbenheimer was something new, especially invigorating since cinema is an old format no matter how you gussy it up with new technology -- which may be as much miss as it is hit anyway. (Witness things like 4DX try to catch on, and you'll know that gimmicks can only take you so far.)

It was a canny marketing strategy that recognized these films inherently contradictory nature as a result of their coincidentally planned release dates, and capitalized on that by setting in motion a mild battle of the sexes. Men were supposed to flock to Oppenheimer, women to Barbie. Why not see both and decide for yourself?

People did. Boy did they. Often wearing costumes. 

The interesting thing for me personally, in terms of my list, was that the two movies stuck to each other like the Lego brick stuck to Emmett's back with krazy glue in The Lego Movie. They seemed so close in quality in my mind, with Barbie only enjoying an infinitesimal advantage, that I could never insert another movie in between them as I continued to add bricks to my own building of 2023 rankings. If only going on their individual quality as movies, had they not been paired together in the culture, they might have ended up at least ten spots apart just due to the randomness in how I parse small differences in the qualities of movies. Instead, I was also unable to escape how the Barbenheimer phenomenon played upon my brain.

And as they continue to cross the finish line hand in hand, both earned Oscar nominations for best picture on Tuesday.

The cautionary word about all this, if we try to apply the general optimism to the future outlook of movies, is that the phenomenon is almost certainly not repeatable, at least not at this level. I heard recently that someone tried to do it with the release of two other films in the autumn, one of which was Saw X, though I can't remember the other because Wikipedia does not show anything else released on that date that would make that sort of counterintuitive pairing. Obviously that one didn't work out.

But if you choose to look only at the sense of buzz Barbenheimer created and how it lingered in the culture, you can take that as an openness to other phenomena regarding attending movies in the theater that we may not have even thought of yet. Twenty twenty-three showed us the appetite was there. Now we just need to figure out how to feed it.

Best (and worst) performers of the year

This is the annual section devoted to three people who appeared in multiple movies I liked and no movies I didn't like ... and then the reverse for the ensuing "three who had a bad year" section. So it's problematic and excludes some good candidates on the basis of one outlier, or simply not enough work. And I had a harder time than usual with it this year. So, advanced warning about cheating, have too little diversity, etc. ... it was just one of these years where the people who appeared in a lot of things were mostly all over the place in terms of how their films worked for me. What are you going to do. 

Three who had a good year

Matt Damon - Although I'm still not happy with some of Matt Damon's public gaffes, including the whole bit where he essentially admitted he'd only recently stopped using a hurtful gay slur starting with the word F, I can't deny that he was in two of my favorite movies of 2023, and was an essential component to both. The highest ranked was Air (#19), a true delight from director (and Damon buddy) Ben Affleck, which told twin underdog stories: the best basketball player of all time and the biggest shoe company of all time. That's a joke -- at least Air takes place before either was either -- but it's a testament to Affleck's filmmaking that he actually does put us in these board rooms and back offices at Nike headquarters and make us feel the stakes of it all, and root for an outcome we already know occurred. Damon's pudgy hero Sonny Vaccaro really does feel like a man with it all on the line and also with the sort of likable pluck that really makes you pull for him. Less than ten spots lower on my chart comes Oppenheimer (#26), in which Damon plays a guy we can actually relate to in amongst all the eggheads. Again he uses his easy charm and likability as Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, who is an officer with the Army Corps of Engineers and has to take a lot of what's told to him on faith because he doesn't have the science to know if it's all going to work. He's a great viewer surrogate, as astonished at what he's seeing as we are. Maybe it's the real Damon's gaffes and flaws that make him easier to identify with in that everyman role he does so well -- or maybe it's just that he's a fellow Boston guy like me. 

Florence Pugh - I debated on whether to add Florence Pugh here because a) she only just made this list four years ago in 2019 and b) unlike Damon, she isn't essential to the success of Oppenheimer, in which I thought her supporting role actually sidetracked the main thrust of the narrative. So what am I going to spend the rest of this post writing about? Her work in A Good Person (#6), of course. Pugh took what might have been a mediocre bit of melodrama and turned it into something moving and profound. She didn't do this alone, of course -- Morgan Freeman, Molly Shannon and Chinaza Uche were by her side, and Zach Braff's contributions to the film were pretty damn impressive for a guy who has been sort of turned away from Hollywood. Pugh, though, can make tears well up in her eyes on command. But she doesn't have to play the role of a woman responsible for the deaths of two people, because she was looking at her phone while driving, only through such obvious gestures as crying. The character becomes addicted to pain medication while recovering from her own injuries, and Pugh does high and strung out well, too. Then there's just the fact that she's wrung out, even in her best moments only a shell of the bright young woman she was before all this, who now can't get out of sweatpants and is low-level cranky for much of the time. When Pugh wins an Oscar one day it will be richly deserved. And oh yeah, she was also in Oppenheimer, which I liked quite a bit. If you want more of an explanation for why she appears here, the combined ranking for her two films is lower (lower being a good thing in this case) than the combined ranking of any other performer in 2023 who had as big a role as she did in more than one film. (There's one who beats her but he's only a very small supporting character in one of his films. He gets his due in the honorable mentions.)

Wes Anderson - Adding Wes Anderson is a cheat. I'm well aware of that. If I don't count shorts among my movie rankings, I shouldn't count them in this section either. So let's at least delay further reference to the cheat for a few moments. For starters, Anderson hasn't had a film ranked as high as Asteroid City (#8) since Rushmore was my #4 movie of 1998, and that was in a year that I ranked only 58 films. Factoring in inflation, they're very similar rankings. This was an especially strong feat considering that I've been trending toward burning out on Anderson, as The French Dispatch took several movies' worth of built-up good will and trashed it in one fell swoop. Asteroid City just reeled me in completely and never let go. But perhaps the more impressive feat was the four (!) short films he directed for Netflix, Roald Dahl adaptations each: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, Ratcatcher and Poison. Impressive because four more individual bursts of Anderson whimsy in the same year as Asteroid City could have been overkill, especially for a viewer who had been teetering on the edge of burnout, but somehow just increased my renewed love affair with the man's core artistic sensibilities. I haven't written about these movies on my blog but each was beguiling to me in some way, with truly gymnastic verbal performances and feats of exquisite mark hitting from a half-dozen performers essaying multiple roles. Just imagine if he'd envisioned them or pitched them to Netflix as a feature film with four individual stories, like Anderson's own Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Then Anderson's great year wouldn't even have required any cheating. 

Honorable mentions: Willem Dafoe (Asteroid City, Poor Things), Emerald Fennell (Barbie, Saltburn), Nicolas Cage (Dream Scenario, Renfield)

Three who had a bad year

Jillian Bell - There was a time a couple years ago when Jillian Bell could have steered her career toward independent film. Sure she'd first been exposed to us in Seth Rogen movies, but in 2019 she played an overweight alcoholic who determines to get her life back on track in Brittany Runs a Marathon. Alas, that fleeting moment in time has been utterly snuffed out. It seems that every bad comedy in 2023 had Jillian Bell as a common denominator. The least offensive of these was a brief appearance in Charlie Day's Hollywood satire Fool's Paradise (#147), in wish she has a minute-long cameo as some kind of shaman. It didn't make the movie any better but it didn't make it any worse. But it gets a lot worse for Bell as she claims the indignity of appearing in two of my bottom ten movies of the year, a dishonor she has all to herself. The "better" of these two is Candy Cane Lane (#161), a truly rancid Eddie Murphy Christmas vehicle in which Bell plays an evil elf who puts a curse on Murphy's character. She's called Pepper, and she mugs in ways that are both naughty and annoying. In a movie that suffocates you with its excess Christmas ornamentation, she's one of the most suffocating. Fewer things were more unpleasant to sit through in 2023 than the utterly lifeless sequel to the surprisingly charming 2019 Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston vehicle Murder Mystery. To be honest, I blocked out so much of what happens in Murder Mystery 2 (#164) that I don't even remember what Bell's role was in it. (The Wikipedia plot synopsis comically refers to her just as "Susan" on first reference without explaining who Susan is.) I just remember her sinking lower and lower in my estimation with every line of dialogue. As her titular character, Brittany, once realized, Bell needs to get her life back on track. 

Ben Whishaw - I have been a fan of Ben Whishaw since I first "discovered" him in my beloved Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I use the quotation marks to joke that without my love of that movie, the world would never have known who he was. But it's true that since I adopted that film early and with an intensity matched by few others, I think of Whishaw as one of "my guys." Well, "my guy" let me down this year. Perhaps because there was so much back and forth before I could finally see Passages (#141), I had little patience for anything that annoyed me, and there was a lot in this movie that did. Most of that boiled down to the noxious character played by Franz Rogowski, who I'd been told I wouldn't like on a podcast, and that could not have been a more accurate assessment of my feelings toward this shithead. Why is this Whishaw's fault? Well, he plays one of two characters who is inexplicably obsessed with Rogowski's character, a pretentious director who messes with the heads of Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos by stepping out on his lover with a woman. Ira Sachs, who directed one of my favorite gay love stories of all time in Love is Strange, directs a bad one here, and Whishaw seems like a simpering fool with too much capacity for forgiveness of the real creep he's involved with. Whishaw would have avoided this dishonor except he was also in my third least favorite movie of the year, Bad Behaviour (#166), in which he plays a fatuous self-help guru who inexplicably flees the retreat he's running after an act of violence by the main character, played by Jennifer Connelly. I just found this movie incredibly mean-spirited and it left me feeling shitty. I guess if I were Ben Whishaw I'd want to run out in the middle of the movie too. 

Jeremy Allen White - And here is my cheat on the negative side. Jeremy Allen White, breakout star of the TV show The Bear (which I still have not seen), was in two movies in 2023, and one of them was (narrowly) in the top half of my rankings. But he was SO BAD in these two movies that this is where my mind went when I was looking for a third choice that I actually wanted to write about. Or rather, so poorly used, leading to what seemed like awkward performances just because they capitalized so little on his evident charisma. The film he was in that I liked was Fingernails (#75), a slight miss at an attempt to make an Eternal Sunshine-style contemplation of love in the age of analog technology that helps determine whether you are in love with your partner by analyzing a fingernail torn from your body. Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed are the leads, but JAW (like that acronym) plays Buckley's boyfriend, who has already passed the mutual fingernail test with her, thereby confirming they are an appropriate match and should continue their relationship. The point is that this information has allowed him to become complacent, but did they have to do so little with this character that the performer barely even registers? They should prescribe his performance for insomnia. The casting director of Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw (#125) must have had the same thought: "Hey, let's cast this upcoming star but get exactly zero out of him by giving him one of the least interesting parts." In a movie I actively disliked, JAW (there's that acronym again) plays the last of the four brothers in a family of cursed wrestlers to enter the narrative, and the one with the fewest lines, even though he's in the movie for longer than some of the others. The camera should love this guy, but it was almost as though Durkin was actively pointing it elsewhere and asking him not to speak. Is this White's fault? Probably not. Does it make it a bad year? Yes. 

Dishonorable mentions: Chris Evans (Pain Hustlers, Ghosted), Bill Burr (Leo, Old Dads), Julie Hagerty (Somebody I Used to Know, The Out-Laws), Charlie Day (Fool's Paradise, The Super Mario Bros. Movie)

The year my kids stopped liking movies

The thing I've tended to think about, as I look back on 2023, is how often I was by myself in the movie theater this year.

To be clear, I'm almost always by myself. My wife and I rarely have movie date nights and I only had one 2023 viewing with a friend at MIFF. It's been this way for probably 15 years and no, I don't think I'm a loser for sitting in movie theaters by myself constantly. I'm just a film critic who has to see movies right when they come out, and I just skip being slowed down from that requirement by trying to make it a social experience.

I did, though, use to go to the movies a half dozen times each year with my kids -- sometimes together, sometimes separately. 

This year, I didn't see a solo movie with either of them after June, and a superhero movie was the last straw in both cases. 

First it was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (#65) with my older son. My younger son likely would have gone except he was trying to wait to go with his friends after they had to take a raincheck. He never went but did later see it later on the plane. Although my older son liked going out at night and getting a pizza at the theater, the movie itself left us both a bit befuddled, due both to its multiverse complexity and its ungainly length. Any other suggestions to see something else later in the year were mildly rebuffed.

Eighteen days later, I took the younger one, who was only nine at the time, to see The Flash (#35). Although I really liked this movie when I eventually completed the viewing (as you can tell by the ranking), its intensity, both in terms of its themes and its high-impact sound and visuals, made my son feel sick, and we needed to leave. We didn't take another trip to the movies, just the two of us, again in 2023.

The specific experiences of these two movies are probably more symbolic than the viewings themselves having turned my kids off to going to the movies. The reality is, they are much more interested in YouTube and video games than feature-length stories where they can get treats and sit in a darkened theater. Getting treats is not such a novelty that they need to agree to go to the movies with me to get them. So they aren't the driver of going to the movies, and if a particular movie doesn't come along that totally grabs them, they'll never ask on their own.

Both are probably also in a transitional period in terms of subject matter. My younger one doesn't care about things like Wish, which I listed as a regret in yesterday's post, and will still watch movies aimed at children, but only if they are a bit aspirational in terms of the content that's appropriate for him. My older one may be dropping movies entirely, but if not, at least he definitely wants them to be in a more adult genre if he does agree to go. Even so, you may remember that he recently turned down the opportunity to see my first movie of 2024, a horror movie in Night Swim.

As a cinephile, I do bemoan this a bit. Of course I want my kids to follow in my footsteps. Of course this means they probably won't. At least my older son loves basketball and my younger son loves board games.

And at least I take solace from the fact that we had a great experience on my younger son's birthday on January 1st, when we went as a whole family to see Next Goal Wins (#27) and loved it -- especially him because he's a soccer fan, but we all felt really enthusiastic about the movie. 

Maybe I won't be using my kids to watch animated movies I want to see quite so much in the future, if at all. Maybe I'll have fewer one-on-one movie dates with either of them.

But if I can just keep them occasionally exposing themselves to movies, who knows which one will cause the obsession with this art form to click for them. 

Year of the year: 1970

Did someone say turning 50 also turns you into a nostalgic old softie? Even if it isn't your exact nostalgia?

In 2023, 1970 wasn't just the year my current home was built, which I suppose creates an additional fondness in me. No, it was also the exact year in which two of my top ten movies were set.

Not 1969. Not 1971. 1970.

I saw both of the films within the space of the long Christmas weekend, too, which made me wonder if the universe was trying to tell me something.

First it was The Holdovers (#10), which I saw three days before Christmas. Alexander Payne's film, which many have said feels like a Hal Ashby movie made in that era, takes place at Christmastime 53 years ago. The time period is significant primarily because the U.S. is still involved in Vietnam, where the character Mary, played by Da'Vine Joy Randolph, lost a son earlier that year. The characters played by Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa comfort her, in their way, as the three develop a bond that just helps them get through that lonely, wintry holiday season.

Then on Christmas itself I watched Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, which quickly became my #2 movie of the year, a position it did not surrender. This is the summery rather than the wintry part of 1970, as the movie starts off with these lovely images of the main character enjoying summer camp, placing us in the movie's capable hands and never dropping us. The immaculately created nostalgia is almost like a drug in Kelly Fremon Craig's movie.

As I mentioned in yesterday's piece, I wasn't actually born until three years later. But enough of what was great in 1970 still felt familiar to me when I was a child later in the decade, and two filmmakers delivered this feeling to me with devastating efficiency in 2023. 

Welcome to the two-timers club ... to a song?

If you thought a little horror movie like Skinamarink, from a first-time feature director with no known (or even visible) stars among the cast, couldn't possibly share a component with one of my previous #1 films ... well, you'd be right. But there's an asterisk to that.

Although this is never made explicit, the title is, of course, partially a nod to that popular kids song, which Wikipedia says is either called "Skidamarink" or "Skinnamarink." You know, "Skinnamarink a dinky dink, skinnamarink a doo. I ... love ... you." At the very least, Kyle Edward Ball is leaning into our memory of that song, even though it's not clear what connection his movie has to it.

Well, that song also factors memorably into the climax of my #1 film of 2012, Ruby Sparks.

In case you can't remember Ruby Sparks very well, the title character sings this nonsense song in the final scene when she's kind of short-circuiting, as Calvin cruelly types actions out on his typewriter, knowing she is hidebound to immediately fulfill them. It's certainly a form of emotional violence toward her if not one of actual physical violence. And it's extremely effective.

In fact -- before this year, anyway -- if I heard the word "Skinnamarink" (let's go with the spelling that is closer to the title of the movie) come up in any context, most likely hearing the song somewhere, I thought of the end of that movie.

Of course, my #1 of 2023 will probably supplant that association -- if only because the connection is so much more explicit. 

Best non-2023

These are the best ten movies I watched in 2023 that were not released in 2023, in alphabetical order.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) - My first Fassbinder did not disappoint with this complex look at class, race, aging and relationships at a fraught time in West Germany. 

The Balcony Movie (2021, Pawel Lozinski) - One of my few highlights in a lean first year on MUBI was this profound documentary that consists only of a filmmaker interviewing passersby walking below his second-floor Warsaw apartment. 

Braindead a.k.a. Dead Alive (1992, Peter Jackson) - Inconsistent titling on this blog aside, this practical effects horror extravaganza tickled me pink during my October of horror comedies. 

Day for Night (1973, Francois Truffaut) - Confusing the works of Truffaut and Godard as I sometimes do, I thought this might be a ponderous Godard film, but instead, it's a really enjoyable Altman-style Truffaut film taking place on the set of a movie.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies) - Davies died in 2023, but not before I saw this formally unforgettable portrait of working class British mourning loved ones and singing in pubs. 

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961, Stanley Kramer) - One of only two movies I gave five stars in 2023, this courtroom drama blew me away with its performances and with the significance of its desire to grapple with the Nazi banality of evil. 

Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz) - Mildred Pierce is the one of these movies I remember least well, but I remember quite well enjoying the portrayal of the characters and particularly the bleakness of its view of human beings and their venal tendencies. 

Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow) - The sole survivor of my Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro series captured a Tangerine Dream-style 80s vibe that was only improved by the presence of vampires.

Pearl (2022, Ti West) - I didn't prioritize this the previous year, scoffing a bit at the old person makeup used on Mia Goth in X, but this is a different sort of horror movie completely, and a career-best Goth may still be holding the final shot's expression of insanity.

The Voices (2014, Marjane Satrapi) - This story of Ryan Reynolds as an accidental serial killer startled me with its mix of tones and its creative derring do, building on the promise Satrapi showed in Persepolis. 

Stats

Movies by star rating on Letterboxd: 5 stars (1), 4.5 stars (18), 4 stars (33), 3.5 stars (37), 3 stars (31), 2.5 stars (19), 2 stars (16), 1.5 stars (10), 1 star (1), 0.5 stars (2)

For some reason this year I didn't notice giving out the same number of 3.5 stars as I usually do ... and then it led the list again like it always does. I gave out 50% more 3 stars this year than I did last year, though, from 20 up to 31, and that was with seven fewer movies overall. Once again either end of the spectrum is hardly represented at all, which I think is as it should be. 

Movies by source - Theater (43) (3 by advanced screening), Netflix (41), iTunes rental (33), Amazon Prime (14), Disney+ (9), AppleTV+ (7), MIFF theatrical (7), MIFF streaming (4), Airplane (3), Stan (3), Screener (2), Kanopy (1), Amazon rental (1). This is almost exactly the same breakdown as last year except I took fewer airplane flights.

Total new movies watched in the calendar year: 259
Total rewatches: 52 (hey, one per week)
2023 movies watched more than once: 2 (Skinamarink, BlackBerry)

Discoveries 

Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Charles Melton, May December
Sunny Sandler, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
Ayo Edibiri, Bottoms

Another name for ...

Showing Up is ... Art Talent Show
Somebody I Used to Know is ... Ghosted
A Million Miles Away is ... Leave the World Behind
M3GAN is ... Robots
Killers of the Flower Moon is ... Bad Behaviour
Skinamarink is ... We Have a Ghost
Flora and Son is ... The Mother

Opposites

Dream Scenario ... Reality
A Good Person ... Monster
The Burial ... Evil Dead Rise
The Flash ... Still
Longest Third Date ... Shotgun Wedding
No Hard Feelings ... You Hurt My Feelings

Lightning Round

Highest ranked best picture nominee: The Holdovers (#10)
Lowest ranked best picture nominee: Maestro (#132)
Best picture nominees I didn't see: American Fiction, The Zone of Interest 
Most surprised I loved: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (#21)
Most surprised I did not love: Theater Camp (#143)
Worst performance by a best actor: Brendan Fraser, Killers of the Flower Moon
Best performance by a non-actor: Marshawn Lynch, Bottoms
Actor who didn't deserve an Oscar nomination: Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Actor who deserved an Oscar nomination but didn't get one: (tie) Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers /Charles Melton, May December
Actress who didn't deserve an Oscar nomination: Carey Mulligan, Maestro
Actress who deserved an Oscar nomination but didn't get one: Natalie Portman, May December
Movie that wasn't about what I thought it would be about (good): Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (#31)
Movie that wasn't about what I thought it would be about (bad): Beau is Afraid (#144)
Most common word in title: Strays (Strays/The Strays)
Least common word in title: Skinamarink (Skinamarink)
Best movie with a minuscule budget: Skinamarink (#1)
Worst movie with a big budget: Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (#168)
Best reboot: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (#21)
Worst reboot: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (#156)
Best Christmas movie that didn't need to be about Christmas: Family Switch (#99)
Worst Christmas movie that didn't need to be about Christmas: Genie (#165)
Most surprising director: Zach Braff, A Good Person (#6)
Least surprising director: Zack Snyder, Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (#168)
Best live action Disney: Peter Pan & Wendy (#37)
Worst live action Disney: The Little Mermaid (#129)
Best Marvel movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. (#92)
Worst Marvel movie: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (#157)
Marvel movie I didn't see: The Marvels
Studio it was a bad year for: Marvel

I was going to try to keep that lightning round going a little longer with some categories I've used in the past -- I've even added them in a spreadsheet so it's easier for me to find them each year -- but honestly, I'm too tired and I just can't be bothered.

One more formal 2023 wrap-up post tomorrow with my annual portmanteaus post, and then one more informal post about my #1 movie on Saturday. And THEN I will really move on.