It's not just me, right? Everybody does a Bruce bellow whenever they see or hear the title?
Anyway, no contest at all this time, as Backrooms received a whopping 55% of the vote in the request poll, opposite two films whose Criterion Blu-rays will have to sit in my spare room for at least another week. (The Cloud-Capped Star got 33%, Crossing Delancey 13%.) For the record, I'm totally fine with this result, have no objection whatsoever to y'all voting for me to see/review brand-new films that aren't on my stated to-watch agenda (which is to say, not colored green on this list, though streaming-only releases aren't included there). My friend and colleague Andrew Johnston, who died of cancer back in 2008 (and whose job as chief film critic for Time Out New York I took over, largely on his recommendation—not because he died, to be clear, he jumped ship to US Weekly, this was like eight years earlier) used to have a friendly argument about my penchant for skipping heavily-hyped movies that didn't much interest me—he considered it dereliction of duty on some level for a critic not to weigh in on whatever film his/her readers are currently excited about. "They want to know what you think," he'd insist, and while I was stubborn about not wanting to bother with The Phantom Menace (which I didn't see until 2005) or whatever, he wasn't wrong. And I don't blame anyone for declining to wait until the film becomes available at home, when odds are good that I'll watch the first 10 minutes and turn it off. Would be boring were new releases winning the poll every other week, but so far it's happened maybe half a dozen times in nearly eight years (and I'm including stuff like Malignant and Red Rooms and Barbarian—hmm, I do believe I spy a commonality here—that I did in fact watch at home; the only one I'd previously gone to see at a theater is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie). Also I don't want to spend all of Tuesday at the multiplex so this gives me an excuse to run out and see Disclosure Day tonight, even though that means paying full price which I rarely do anymore. It'll be the 30th consecutive Spielberg feature (I'm not counting Twilight Zone—The Movie) that I've seen during or prior to its theatrical release. Last one I missed was 1941. (And the only three I haven't seen in a theater are 1941, The Post and The Fabelmans. Watched those last two on year-end screeners.)
Oh, also Attica has done its 52 weeks in the poll and joins the auto-qualified queue behind Henry V (which I plan to watch tomorrow) and Xiao Wu (probably next week sometime). It's available (albeit not in great condition) on YouTube.