Cleanup on aisle 3. (Patreon)

Lemme use this week's final poll-results post to address several totally unrelated items.

• The tiebreaker for the poll itself, thrown open to everyone, resulted in a fairly decisive victory (57%) for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Not the winner I'd expected, honestly. For those who didn't read the comments or see my addendum (the problem with Patreon's emailing everything out is that people rarely see edits, unless I obnoxiously alert you to their existence), it turns out that I was wrong about this being our first head-to-head tie— completely forgot that it had previously happened with The Dead Zone vs. The Professional. In that instance, I chose The Dead Zone by fiat, explaining my reasoning for doing so. But rerunning the poll for all tiers now seems like a better solution, so that's what I'll do in future. Caligari is streaming on Amazon Prime, incidentally (though I own the DVD myself). 

• As you can see above, the top two films in this month's random drawing are Bully (among the very earliest requests, long defunct) and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (a fairly recent addition). However! I feel a little guilty about wasting one of these slots on Bully, which I was gonna watch anyway in about two weeks (estimated, subject to revision) as part of my annual revisiting of movies released 20 years ago prior to voting in the A.V. Club's annual best-of-20-years-ago feature. So what the hell, I'll throw in the next film on the list, which is Nostalghia. That's been an option for a little over a year now, so I get to reward perseverance and delete an additional 54 entries from the whopping 2000+ that we now have. I should probably note that the same is true of Freddy Got Fingered, since that's nearly won Films I've Seen the past couple of weeks. I'm gonna watch that no later than August whether it wins or not, because it came out in 2001. Streaming: Bully is also on Amazon Prime; Lost Honor is on the Criterion Channel; Nostalghia appears to be on Kanopy and MUBI.

• Yesterday's review of The Circle praised its ending thusly: "Circular sweep of the prison cell threatens to be painfully conclusive—the imaginary film I hated in 2000 would show every woman we've met huddled there—but Panahi looks out the little window to observe an ideally tangential final moment." Since then, I thought to read the film's Wikipedia page, which includes a detailed plot synopsis...and apparently at least some of the other women we'd seen previously are in the cell with the sex worker. It's quite plausible that I saw that clearly in the 35mm print screened at TIFF but couldn't recognize faces in the low-res DVD rip that's currently (as far I can determine) all that's out there. (Netflix-by-mail, to which I still subscribe, doesn't carry the DVD itself. Kinda surprised Criterion didn't jump on it long ago, actually.) On top of which, the woman that the guard inquires about, who I'd assumed was just a random name, is reportedly in fact the mother from the hospital scene that opens the film. (No doubt that's easier for an Iranian viewer to catch.) So Panahi actually did go the painfully conclusive route, which helps explain my negative reaction 20 years ago. I never revise my rating without rewatching the film, but that might drop it down a bit should I ever take a third look.

• A friend challenged me about Beatriz at Dinner, saying that he didn't consider the title character's behavior in any way reprehensible. We basically agreed to disagree—it was a short text exchange—but I thought about it some more and mentally clarified why it bothers me; since some of you may have felt similarly but not commented (or have my phone number), I'll lay it out here. Think of it this way: What if it were the other way around, politically? Imagine a MAGA type whose car breaks down, causing her to be invited to dinner with a group of progressives. Imagine that, upon being shown a video of the guest of honor advocating the abolishment of ICE on cable news, she hurls the phone at his head. Imagine that she spends the rest of the movie castigating everyone present for supporting the murder of millions of innocent babies with their pro-choice stance. Does that seem acceptable? If your answer is yes, then okay—I don't agree with your notion of civilized behavior, but at least you're consistent. If that sounds grotesque to you, however, then so should almost everything Beatriz does. They're equally obnoxious, and the fact that you agree with the actual Beatriz and not my hypothetical Beatriz (if in fact you do; hi, Victor!) shouldn't matter. At least I don't believe that it should. 

• As always, thank you for being here. I'm so grateful for your support, and for this community, such as it is.