ONE FILM A DAY UPDATE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Will I be through the piles of movies by the end of April?
   I asked myself this in January. Could I remove movies from this office? They shouldn’t have found perches for themselves on the bookshelves. And yet, there they were. All 90-odd.
   Allowing for life’s getting in the way, for the purchase of more movies in the interim, and the relentless march of an army of special features – including heavy time-consuming commentary tracks – could I make it through those piles of movies by the end of April?
   If life doesn’t get in the way, then, yes. I should manage. Comfortably. Were there rules? Vaguely. Rule number something: never waste time on truly boring mundane special features. Then there’s rule number something else: watch the movie and its special features in one day…or don’t.
   What if I don’t? Ah, rule number something or other: gather the watched movies in a pile and knock all the special features down at once. At the start of this month, I removed a dozen films from the bookshelves in one day. They all had minor special features, and I had a few hours to kill. I toppled one domino and the rest fell.
   Movie stills, publicity photos, and other galleries are all worth catching at slightly faster speed when it comes to the old slideshow mode. Mostly, you are viewing shots you’ve already seen in the movies. Trailers are best left unseen. Good trailers are rare.
   Now for a law of the jungle. Thou shalt not. And this applies to people who make movies. I’ve said this elsewhere, but it is worth stating again.
   Thou shalt not place a single frame of footage from the last half hour of thine movie into thine movie trailer. Woe unto ye who transgresseth and giveth away the fucking plot in all its twisty glory to the unsuspecting viewers of so foul and blasphemous a trailer.
   This is a wide problem. It isn’t confined to footage from the last half hour of your film. No. It’s spread across the whole movie, just like granules of sugar infiltrating coffee. No good. I won’t mention the film. But there’s a traitor in a nameless moving picture. He’s a fairly obvious traitor. And he’s fairly obviously killed off so you don’t think that he’s the traitor.
   Woe indeed, then, if you watch the trailer. For there he is, in a scene, moving dramatically into shot. This is after his death. So it will annoy you, and linger in the memory, when you watch the rascal “die” in the movie. Wait a bit. I haven’t seen this shady guy move dramatically into shot, yet. That was in the trailer.
   Either…that bit from the trailer has been cut from the movie (another trailer crime, with a rant for another time), or…there’ll be a bit of a twist in the plot, and (GASPS IN SPANISH) that shenanigangster will return to life. No, the movie you are thinking of is not the movie I’m thinking of. You are thinking of another movie in a long list of movies with spoilery fucking trailers. They all show the bad guy springing back to life. It’s like making a dodgy trailer became an Olympic sport, or something. They all trained for this special event, sadly.
   Anyway…
   When it comes to skipping “special” features attached to movies, I recommend dodging dodgy trailers. Only at the end, after the movie is screened, should you consider MAYBE watching a sketchy trailer. Just to check if they’ve broken the bit about THOU SHALT NOT. Sometimes the people who made the movies should be the ones to make the trailers. And at other times, decidedly fucking not.
   Yes, movie trailers are foolishly assembled before the finished movies come out. This leads to silliness. BATMAN BEGINS featured a trailer without the computer-generated bats in a few scenes. When a later trailer came out with the bats intact, that trailer took the concept of THOU SHALT NOT and walked it around the back of a Gotham skyscraper for a right proper bat-kicking.
   Holy END OF MOVIE IN THE TRAILER, Batman!
   GHOSTBUSTERS II suffers from the unfinished movie problem in early trailer form. People float through the action. Effects weren’t added. Later trailers show you those people are carried through the movie by ghosts. While I’m here, GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE commits a crime in its trailer by showing you a thing that would have been more fun to see in the movie itself. Not in the trailer beforehand.
   I didn’t watch any of these films for this blog post. (Was too busy watching other movies.) But I did scan the trailers, just to talk about trailers. I am meant to discuss time taken up by “special” features. The trailer is designed to interest you in the movie. Why would you put the trailer on the home cinema release? I’ve already seen the film, pal.
   Oh, the trailer is there for those who haven’t seen the trailer or the movie. If that’s the case, here’s my advice. Watch the trailer last, if you must.
   What takes up your time in watching films? Nothing overmuch, if the home cinema release is of the Vanilla Flipper variety.
   Vanilla: plain. No special features.
   Flipper: character from (checks notes) a movie/TV hybrid franchise about a brave intelligent dog named Lassie who, for copyright reasons, became a fucking dolphin.
   Lassie could swim. So could Flipper. Lassie could run on land. See ya, Flipper. How the red wet fuck is Flipper meant to foil the bank robbers inside the abandoned gold mine unless the mine is flooded and has a cave leading out to the ocean? Should have called the Ghostbusters. Or Scooby-Doo. At least Scoob can talk.
   Skippy the Bush Kangaroo could play the fucking piano with fake paws, and casually disarm a gas bomb by using a kangaroo tail at the same time.
   I could find nothing in the historical record concerning Flipper’s attempt to get Rommel. Michael Asher’s book, Get Rommel, seems a little thin on the dolphin-based details. I must stay away from lists of heroic movie and TV animals. There’s no pop-culture sustenance there.
   Flipper the dolphin can’t speak English, or German, for that matter, meaning a FLIPPER home cinema release is without an accompanying commentary. Without an annoying accompanying commentary. What’s worse than a movie without a commentary track? One with what I can only charitably at best call a movie with commentary for the blind.
   I’m looking at you, Tim Burton. Yes, I had the misfortune to sit through Sleepy Commentary, Tim’s commentary for the blind on his Sleepy Hollow movie.
   Martin Landau appears on the screen. There’s Martin Landau. He was Bela Lugosi in a movie of mine. I’m aiming for a vampire theme.
   Noted English actor Alun Armstrong appears on the screen. There’s noted English actor, Alun Armstrong. I’m making a Hammer knock-off and he played a vampire in a snooker musical.
   Johnny Depp puts in an appearance. There’s Johnny. I like to watch. Watch in the dark. My quivering victims, aware, painfully, that soon they will be subjected to the process, are all out to lunch right now.
   Christopher Lee is wheeled on for a cameo. There’s Christopher Lee. He was a vampire in an actual Hammer movie. I’m making a knock-off. But subtle, y’know.
   Peter Guinness ambles through. There’s Peter Guinness. I saw him in the Michael Mann movie, The Keep. It’s kinda vampirey.
   Michael Gambon and Michael Gough lurch drunkenly through the doorway, arm-in-arm. There’s Michael Gambon. He was in one of those Hammer knock-offs, you know the kind. The ones with Milton Subotsky’s fingerprints all over. I’m really making a Milton Subotsky movie. Who can forget Sir Michael’s near Bafta-award winning performance in The Beast Must Die…
   And there’s Michael Gough. Well, he was in actual Hammer work, with Chris Lee. At one time, Michael Gough was married to every pretty actress in England, including Michael Gambon. Yeah. Gambon had the marriage annulled. Domestic life with Michael Gough was difficult. It made the other Michael’s eyes water.
   Ian McDiarmid smashes through a window to grab a bottle of non-existent vodka. Ah, Ian McDiarmid. He’s a vampire in real life, y’know. I enjoyed his performance as the satanic facial reconstruction guy in Gorky Park. His scenes alone deserve an entire horror movie devoted to…oh, yes, back to my movie…
   Anyway…I made much of that up, just to avoid falling asleep typing a less-vibrant accurate version. Well. Damn.
   I’ve listened to Tim Burton’s audio track on his movie so that you don’t have to. Ever. In the history of ever. And then some. The problem with movies is that they’ll knife you in the front as you approach them. They’ll offer multiple commentary tracks. I think the record stands at four. This means watching the movie at least five times, and possibly six.
   Once. You watch it at the cinema or on TV. Second time. You watch the home cinema release. And then all the commentaries kick in. If someone, somewhere, somewhen, somewhow manages to corral all the major players, they’ll tell the assembled thespians not to repeat each other on these many many many tracks. We live in hope.
   The real killer? A bonus movie, added to your movie. No, that’s not it. The real time-waster is a klaxon commentary. They’ve hired a film historian, in love with the movie, to sit there and sigh in silence at the beauty of it all. That fucker should have an assistant standing in the background with a giant klaxon alarm. Anything over five seconds of silence, and BANG. You send a rocket up the film historian’s arse as a reminder to SAY SOMETHING about the film.
   I feel I’ve written this entire blog post before. And I make no apologies for that. The real rule is rule number something obvious: when a film arrives, watch the whole thing on the day of arrival. Sadly, that’s when life gets in the way. Life’s like that, a lot.
   The 90-odd movies are pretty much dealt with. What of the 45 movies I bought from January until now? Many of those are dealt with, too. But the true killer, hiding in the shadows, is the odd TV series that crept into the building under cover of darkness. And the streaming shows, while a lot rarer, still add to the endless pile.
   I now wonder how many unwatched movies will be on my shelves by the end of the year. Something to consider blogging about…the next time January strolls by.