Not rated, but there's a fair amount of blood coupled with some pretty 1997 stereotypes in this movie.  There's also a lot of casual, but not-too-intense cursing.  It's actually weird how this movie goes out of its way to have consistent blood.  At one point, there's this guy who is bleeding pretty badly. He falls in a trough of water and the blood just stays there.  Also, if this is your thing, a wolf dies a pretty gnarly death.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR:  Sammo Kam-Bo Hung

I told you this was how the franchise was going to end!  (Okay, I was sure that they would go to America.)  Honestly, if I spent two seconds and just looked at the titles in the box set, I would have seen that they go to America at one point.  Still, I feel pretty good about calling where the story was going to go.  And boy-oh-boy, this movie gets silly.

Now that I'm done with all of them, I don't quite know what to make of the franchise.  I'm in a place, at this very moment, where the last thing that I really want to do is write a blog.  My brain is scattered and I really want to do anything to distract myself.  Having an opinion on a movie that kind of felt like a mild waste of time might not be the thing to distract me right now.  But it is also the thing that is going to give me time later to really wallow about what is going on.  

When I think of the first film, Once Upon a Time in China, there was an almost overly-serious tone for what ultimately a beat-'em-up movie.  There was a bit of geopolitics coupled with a decent amount of mild Chinese propaganda.  It was shot with a sense of scale and choreography that, even though the story got a little silly at times, felt like they were really making something.  I can't help but think of the first Lethal Weapon movie against the other ones in the series.  Still, I can't fault the last film for trying to pull out all of the stops considering that Jet Li had left the franchise two films prior.  But the Once Upon a Time in China series goes from the dangerous Westernization of a country that wants nothing to do with that to what is just ultimately Shanghai Noon, but not as funny.  (I would like to stress that Shanghai Noon wouldn't come out for another three years and I can't help but think that there's some money being owed to Once Upon a Time in China and America.) With this movie, the gulf of misunderstanding between Americans and the Chinese is so large that it's almost comical how the smarmy the Americans come across.  

Like, we have Billy, who is meant to be the avatar for an American audience.  Every major American character in this movie, including the indigenous peoples, treat the Chinese as focuses of their scorn.  There's a great video that shows why people don't think they are racist.  It comes down to stereotypes in movies.  "I can't be racist because I'm nothing like that guy who is so over-the-top racist that no one can possibly match that."  There's a lot of that stuff going on.  It's not that I mind, but considering that I felt like there was something to unpack from the first movie, I now feel like I have nothing to really analyze here.  Maybe that's the connection between the two.  From an American perspective, I looked at a time in Chinese history with a sense of vagueness.  I understood big ideas (stereotypes), but nothing with a sense of nuance.  Instead, we have a movie made by Chinese filmmakers talking about America and all I get are American stereotypes.  That could unpack a lot of the movie for me.  See?  I'm willing to admit my own faults 

My biggest complaint about the film isn't how kind of silly it is.  By this point in the franchise, the sixth film, the stories had gotten less and less rich and had kind of spiraled into what Once Upon a Time in China and America really was: two separate films.  These movies got really bad about finding a throughline narrative.  Instead, the stories got kind of episodic in their own locations.  The film starts off with Wong Fei-Hung and 13th Aunt fighting off the indigenous people (again, broad stereotypes) and Wong Fei-Hung cracking his head on a rock.  Very much in a Saturday-Morning-Cartoon fashion, Wong Fei-Hung gets amnesia and lives with the indigenous people, learning to be one of them. Now, there was actually a moment where I actually hoped we'd get another Avatar / The Last Samurai / Dances with Wolves / Ferngully: The Last Rainforest trope where Wong Fei-Hung learned that the savages that he thought that he was fighting were actually the good guys.  I mean, there's a little bit of that.  He leaves on a note that makes these guys noble (not a new trope in Hollywood).  But instead of learning who he is in a nuanced way (again, the word I'm going to overuse in this blog is "nuance"), he simply cracks his head again on something and all of that work of the first hour comes down to a silly trope that we see in cartoons.  That's a bummer.

It really kind of craps the bed in the second half of the movie.  If there was a throughline between parts one and two, you'd think it would be the evil mayor.  It really looked like the story was going to be that the evil mayor of the town was going to be the big bad and, because Wong Fei-Hung was out of action, that they'd have to get him back on his feet to fight this dude. Nope.  The movie simply introduced a new bad guy at about the hour mark.  And boy, they didn't spend a lot of time developing that character.  The villain of the piece is almost an amalgamation of all of the other villains of the piece, only with a Western bent.  I know that I let my eyes roll into the back of my head with all of the silly wire fu stuff because it's overused (although, this one is way more tame than some of the other entries), but the spurs on his boots as little saws should be fun, but absolutely are incredibly dumb.  Also, their effectiveness keeps on changing.  The first time those spurs are used on a wolf, it severed limbs.  When the spurs cut the deputy's throat, a small cut.  Finally, when the final fight happened, it slightly hurt the bad guy.  I know.  All of this is stupid.  Still, my brain won't shut off.

Can I make a motion that synthesized music can ruin a movie?  Like, when the American music goes down, it is so rough?  I started turning on The Princess Bride because of the score.  The score in this one is rough.

But can I tell you something overall?  I dug the series.  Like, it's so incredibly dumb at times.  The dropoff of quality?  The fact that the story lost any sense of growth?  Still, watching these movies as amazing wire-fu films makes it worth my time.  Sometimes we like stupid stuff and this is one of those times.  Can I recommend it?  Probably to a specific audience.  Still, these movies are dumb fun.

TV-MA, not because of anything that Theroux does, but because the subject matter is inherently pretty darned gross.  If this is an expose on the Manosphere, the film only skims the surface at the amount of sex, misogyny, antisemitism, and all around bigotry that the culture embraces.  Theroux makes a point to blur out some of the more truly heinous content, but it doesn't change the fact that the audience is aware that it is happening.

DIRECTOR: Adrian Choa

There is a very real chance that I am going to become the left wing version of what I criticize the right wing of doing.  When I see people online pushing documentaries about the awful underbelly of a political spectrum, automatically walls go up.  Often, these documentaries take unreliable data and present it in a way that gives these stories a vibe of validity.   Now, Louis Theroux has earned a sense of respectability.  He's been in the game for long enough that his name carries a bit of weight behind it.  But even the most objective journalist holds onto bias.  Theroux has his bias.  I don't think you could make this documentary without having a bias.  Still, I am getting to the notion that this is a documentary that people should watch and --God forbid --trust because it is the thing that needed to be said.

The absolute hellscape (Am I just embracing hyperbole at this point?) that we're in today has a lot to do with the Manosphere.  Anecdotes hold weight, but shouldn't be used as the end-all-be-all of an argument.  That being said, almost all of the frustrations that I have as a teacher come from the sheer presence of the Manosphere in my students' lives.   It is a cancer.  It's weird how I can recognize seemingly innocuous buzzwords and understand that someone has been redpilled almost immediately.  (It's weird that "beef tallow" and "seed oils" let me know a lot about what teenagers think about women.)  There was a time when I first started teaching when the students kept me accountable about being more tolerant and progressive.  Now, it feels like I am fighting for my male students to have even a modicum of empathy for anyone but their own tribe.  It's gotten pretty darned bad.  I always wondered how Kindergarten teachers adapt their teaching to account for simple subjects.  I show a kid the color "red".  If they don't get it, how do I simplify that?  That's how it feels like to teach humanities nowadays.  I teach about treating other people as valuable human beings, capable of love and pain.  If a student doesn't think that someone else deserves the most basic of respect, how do I adapt to make them understand that?

If we're looking at Theroux's attempt to understand that, I feel he's in the same place.  I don't think Theroux ever gets shocked by the answers he receives.  If anything, I think Theroux got the exact coverage that he was looking for.  The way that Theroux goes after information in this is pretty standard for a documentary: he interviews his subjects.  It's incredibly telling that HS doesn't understand how documentaries work as he starts treating the documentary as a content farm, talking directly to the cameras to explain what he's doing in every moment and why.  One of the things that is evident is the sheer hypocrisy of the major players in the manosphere.  I'm going to use Harrison (HS) as my prime example because he seems to be the core of this documentary, even though Theroux highlights other culture influencers.  Harrison, from moment one, never comes across as a good dude.  He's always a jerk, but he's either a jerk who likes you or a jerk who thinks that you should be destroyed.  Considering how much Harrison is distrustful of big media, it's odd that he didn't even do a cursory Google search on who Louis Theroux is.  It took his comments on his real-time content to discover that Theroux is probably doing a hit piece on him.  When he becomes a monster, he goes full-on evil.  Still, the one thing that is paradoxical is that Harrison --as the other influencers kind of are --hates the world he created and will do anything to bolster that evil.

There's something really disgusting about these guys.  Harrison is perhaps the least savvy about his own hypocrisy.  He hates sexual promiscuity in women, yet owns talent agencies pushing OnlyFans content.  He sleeps around himself.  He says that he finds it disgusting that 13-year-olds are modeling their behavior off of his hedonism, and yet is constantly taking pictures with thirteen-year-olds and encouraging them to keep watching.  He is both incredibly self-aware and lacks even the most basic understanding of how he is maybe one of the most problematic human beings alive.  And all of it comes from his apathy about humanity.  I don't want to get as basic as one can get, but it's a worship of money as the ultimate root of all evil.  All of these people worship at the altar of money and fame and find it to be a good.  The thing is, Harrison has a moral code.  He spells it out quite clearly.  He just does have the sense of awareness to see that the moral code applies to him as much as it does to everyone else.  It's not like he's the first person to have that hypocrisy to them.  But he's also a guy who advocates for his own lifestyle that he wants other people to emulate his behavior. 

Maybe that's what makes me the most frustrated.  He is someone who understands right and wrong and cannot give a ______.

That's the thing that pisses me off.  It's knowing that something is wrong and either not caring or, even worse, advocating for that evil.  The rest of these guys, the same deal?  And the thing that makes it worse is that we have guys like Myron Gaines playing roles in how our government functions.  This guy worked for the government.  When we hear stories of corrupt officials and officers, it's guys like Myron Gaines who should scare us.  That guy might be even worse than Harrison because he tries enforcing his awful stances.  Watching that scene where Gaines's girlfriend was in the room explaining their dynamic, you could see the rage behind his eyes that his girlfriend might have had a different opinion than he did. He hated her in that moment.  That entire invite for Louis Theroux to come back on the podcast as just revenge.  These are tiny people full of so much emotion that it undermines everything sexist thing that they've ever said about women.  

The thing that might be the most horrifying --and I don't like writing this one bit --are the people who are enabling these podcasters.  I'm going to be gross, but let me explain immediately afterwards.  There are so many women involved in the Manosphere and that is so much of the problem.  Now, I am angry at these women.  Specifically these women.  Not all women.  Not women in general.  These women.  These male influencers go out of their way to show how easily manipulated and superficial women are and then have these women to prove their points.  These are women who know that they are going to be exploited, but don't care because either they are getting paid a lot or their social media presence will be bolstered.  Heck, let's ignore the people that are on the podcasts.  I can't help but look at Harrison's mother.  Harrison has a weak spot for his mother.  He looks at her like a saint.  Theroux, when he asks about Harrison's mother, seems to awaken an even darker demon inside of Harrison.  So when Harrison's mother is there for the podcast, you would think that she would live up to the expectations that Harrison established.  But the second that Theroux questions Harrison's criminal background  

Rated R for a lot of ultraviolence.  Like, what are the two grossest violent acts that a movie can do?   Gross eye stuff and someone getting their Achilles cut, right?  Both of those things happen.  Keep that as your gauge for what to expect in this movie.  There's a lot of death, most of it catching you off guard.  There's also some rear nudity, drug use, and blurred sex things.  It's meant to be a shocking post-apocalypse / comment on current misery.  Oh, and language, I guess?

DIRECTOR:  Edgar Wright

This is the longest it has taken me to see an Edgar Wright movie. Do you understand how excited I get when they announce an Edgar Wright movie?  He's my favorite living director.  The man is an absolute genius and it was a low-key crime waiting to see this on home video.  Yeah, I should have been going to the movie theater to see it so I could boost the very limited box office that this movie got.  Like, I actually pang with guilt right now, which is probably unhealthy.  Still, I did pre-order the 4K version of this movie, which also makes me feel guilty because that means that both Paramount and Amazon made money off of me.  It is very hard to be a consumer in 2026.

There was a minute where I thought that this was going to be Edgar Wright's dud.  The thing that keeps on bringing me back to Edgar Wright movies is the fact that they are so meticulously planned.  They are tight films.  And, while I can say that The Running Man, might be his loosy-goosiest movie out of a run of near perfect films, he's definitely the guy who made this movie.  For those students (none of them?  I think the answer is "none of them") who follow my blog, Edgar Wright might be the prime example of auteur theory.  The reason that I was hesitant about The Running Man is that Wright does play it cooler with this film.  Heck, it almost doesn't feel like an Edgar Wright movie until the "Running Man" show within the story starts.  Once Ben gets to the studio and the action starts, there's this language of cinema that really starts.  It's funny, because Hot Fuzz exists as a film.  For those unaware, Hot Fuzz is Edgar Wright's send up of the action movie genre.  It's not a parody.  But it definitely rides the line between parody and satire.  Everything you need to know about Wright's thoughts on action movies can be seen in Hot Fuzz.  But, ultimately, Hot Fuzz has the benefit of having a meta narrative there.  It is allowed to not be an action movie in its own right because it is commenting on the action genre.  The Running Man, however, doesn't have the benefit of hiding behind anything.

As an action movie in its own right (hah!  Wright!), it's incredible.  Now, I have to say that I had the bro-iest time watching this movie with a bunch of guys while eating Taco Bell on a pretty large screen.  It's the way that this movie needs to be watched.  I don't think that I've yelled at the screen more in the past decade than I did at The Running Man.  The conceit is simple enough:  Everyone is trying to kill Ben Richards.  He has 30 days to survive an all-out onslaught of everyone coming at him and that's a good time.  It's the thing that John Wick 3 was supposed to do and they nerfed that pretty quick.  (Note:  I'm actually a fan of John Wick 3, so leave me alone.) But this is a movie that delivers on the promise.  And the weirdest thing, most of the movie sticks to the book.  I mean, it's not a one-for-one.  It's weird that there is a book for this, considering how action heavy it is.  It's even weirder that I own it and have read it.  (Not that it's weird that I've read my own copies of books.  It's actually something I try to take great consideration in doing and pride myself on trying to read everything I own.) But as an action movie that happens to be an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, it's pretty darned solid.  It does the job and then some.  And this coming from someone who is meh on Glen Powell.

Okay, that's not fair to Glen Powell.  The man is handsome as can be.  He's charming and reads as strong-male-lead.  What do I need?  I don't know.  He does the job really well as Ben Richards, especially when the story gets a bit sillier.  Powell, actually might be a little bit more quirky than we allow him to be in movies.  One of the ideas behind The Running Man is the notion that Richards has access to a few different costumes that let him hide in plain sight.  When Richards is punching and kicking his way out of problems, it really doesn't matter that Powell is playing Richards.  Any handsome action star will do.  But in those sillier moments, which are played for laughs, Powell actually holds his own pretty nicely.  The Running Man almost begs its cast to simultaenously take the film seriously and to also take the mickey out of it.  Like, Ben Richards is so over-the-top of an action protagonist.  I described Richards to a friend who showed up late and I was catching him up as "the angriest hero ever."  He's a good guy who keeps getting angry at injustice.  And, golly!, is Powell good at that stuff.  Could someone else have played him?  Yeah, probably.  I don't want to be a jerk.  I want to advocate for Glen Powell really strongly.  I hate dissing someone's performance, especially when there wasn't anything inherently wrong with it.  But I will acknowledge that this might not be the film that makes me think twice about Glen Powell.  (I'm sorry, Mr. Powell.  You are doing a fine job.  It's probably just me.) 

But, as usual, I can't help but love the political elements of The Running Man.  Yeah, those beats are in the book.  (Side note: I never saw the last Running Man movie with Arnold.  I can't comment on that.) Golly, if Edgar Wright didn't capture what it is to be a fan of Fox News and conservative media.  Could I make this a story about how gullible audiences are in general?  I mean, sure.  But you really have to look at The Running Man sideways to think that this is a both-sides issue.  The audience of Free-Vee are visceral and violent.  They are quick to believe AI and fight against their own success.  Everything draped in red and the entire look of The Running Man screams Fox News.  Like, this is a world where the rich manipulate the poor into supporting multi-millionaires.  I guess someone out there is probably grousing that this lib writing this blog don't see the facts in front of him, but this reads as a criticism of the right far more than it does a criticism of the left.  When we see Elton's mom refer to someone as a "Welf", it's all the commentary on how the right demonizes people who are poor.  Yeah, I don't even know why I'm trying to fight this battle with an imagined audience.  "The Running Man" show tells its viewers that Ben is a traitor who sold secrets to the Communists for a few bucks.  It labels its contestants as people abusing the system and cop-killers so that people will fear and hate them harder.  In a way, this was a waste of a paragraph outside the fact that I'm loudly applauding Edgar Wright for being so forthwith about how he lambasted conservative media.

As good as this movie is from an action movie perpective, the side characters are what make it.  First of all, can I tell you how happy I am that Edgar Wright and Michael Cera are still a thing?    Golly, just remembering the good ol' days of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World made me happy all over again.  But Cera steals the film.  He's got a not-nothing part in this movie and if I couldn't be critical of myself while watching the Cera stuff, I would be wildly ignorant.  If much of the movie is a critique of the right's audience, my stupid desperation to become a martyr for the cause is epitomized in Cera's character.  It's so over-the-top, but it is over-the-top in a movie that welcomes that kind of stuff.  He's so good.  Coupled with him is Martin Herlihy's Tim and you are reminded that Edgar Wright knows how comic timing works.  Like, these characters are so funny in a movie that loves just to have fun.  

But I do have to talk about the end of the movie.  See, Stephen King can't write an ending.  I don't hate-hate the end of The Running Man novel.  But I also can say that it seems somehow end-stop awkward.  It feels like Edgar Wright wrote an ending for me and for me alone.  It's for the people who read the book and were noticing how darned close the book and the movie were and wanted something else.  Because the book is a bummer of an end.  Since I am talking about the end of the movie, I do have to put a rare SPOILER WARNING, just because I'm going to spell it out.  The end of the movie still seems to have Ben's family murdered by the evil corporation.  He still is about to fly his plane into the studio to end it all. But, apparently, we still have a stigma about flying planes into buildings.  So the movie gave us an overly optimistic ending.  Ben takes down the corporation and starts a revolution (which doesn't feel realistic considering how easily manipulated the Running Man audience is).  His family, for some reason, got all their money and moved on.  The execution of his family was all AI.  It's just stuff that takes some of the umph out of some shocking moments.  And for a hot second, I liked it...until I was called out on it.  And my buddy was right.  It was too happy.  It took a lot of the meat out of important moments and it shouldn't have done it.  

But with the book ending, there is something hopeless about the whole notion.  As much as The Running Man is silly, there's still this ominous feeling that this is the way that the world is going.  Without having any chance of fighting back against the Rupert Murdocks of the world, why watch a movie like this?  I don't know.  I don't love the ending, but I kind of get why we got what we got.

Still, the movie is insanely fun and Edgar Wright is still batting a thousand with me.  Get some Taco Bell, crack open a (disgusting) Liquid Death, and enjoy the crap out of this movie.

PG-13, which is really weird because it feels like it should be R.  The content in this movie is incredibly heavy, but none of it is really all that explicit.  These are victims of an oppressive government who describe the horrors, both physical and sexual, that happen to them.  But because these characters have all been through this, they often use shorthand.  There never is a scene where they are talking to an avatar of the audience.  Your brain tends to fill in the story between what is said and what is unsaid.  But there is some violence considering that this is a tale about how vengeance should or should not be executed.  

DIRECTOR:  Jafar Panahi

I wish this wasn't the last one I saw.  I've knocked out all of the Academy Award nominees that are available to me in my area.  It was an incredibly productive Oscar season and I'm happy that I watched as many as I have.  The problem is that It Was Just an Accident might have completely blown me away...if it wasn't the last full-length movie that I will be writing about for the 2026 Oscar season.

If the first Trump administration made me an amateur activist, the second has galvanized me about the importance of activism while actively criticizing myself for keyboard activism.  There are things that I do that I don't post about, but almost that is exclusively because I don't want praise.  Praise defeats the purpose.  But when I think of what Jafar Panahi has done for his beliefs, it makes me appreciate his art so much more.  If you are unaware, we are at war with Iran.  President Trump calls it an "excursion".  I think he was told to say "incursion" and he keeps messing up the word.  That's neither here nor there.  While I am vocally against the strikes in Iran because the sheer loss of life involved (and the dubious reasoning for being involved), I can't deny that the Iranian government is an oppressive government.  (You can condemn both the U.S. actions in Iran and the Iranian government at the same time.  The world isn't black-and-white.) Panahi made this movie without legal permission from the Iranian regime.  He's been in prison so many times for the art he has made criticizing the government.  He's older and has starved himself for his beliefs.  If you see this movie for no other reason than the fact that the man has risked his life to make this movie, then see it for that reason.

And the movie is pretty darned good.  It's a character-forward story about how good people --victims! --deal with their victimhood and risk selling out their souls for what toes the line between revenge and justice.  If you are one of my World Lit 2 students right now, this might be an incredible source for your final paper.  Just saying.  I just watched The Voice of Hind Rajab, also a socially conscious movie talking about oppressive governments.  Watching these two films makes us aware that, as much as we occasionally challenge our government, the situation in the Middle East are haunting reminders that art does have that level of importance.  While Hind Rajab is perhaps a bit more overt in its message, there is something incredibly universal about It Was Just an Accident.  

This isn't to say that It Was Just an Accident isn't culturally relevant.  After all, what becomes painfully clear that Iran's secret police have such zeal in the performance of their brutality that everyone Vahid met knew of Peg Leg.  Like, everywhere that dude went, people knew of the atrocities that this man had caused them.  Sure, some of might be because Vahid went searching for people who could help him make these moral choices.  But the fact that the film has a bride and groom in their full regalia getting ready to commit serious crimes is telling.  That is something that probably speaks to the Iranian people (people who probably be denied the chance to see this movie.)  I don't want to downplay a second of how culturally relevant and timely that this movie is.  This movie probably messed with a lot of people's sense of calm.

Yet, I don't want to downplay the universal either.  While the events that brought all these people is specific to the people of Iran, this is a movie that affirms what it means to be human.  The movie starts off in a dark place.  Vahid's revelation that Peg Leg is downstairs causes him to spiral into something that, we discover later, is fundamentally against his character.  Yes, the movie wants us to question whether or not the man with the prosthetic leg was this sadist who tortured all of these people.  After all, Vahid doesn't get a look at his face.  He recognizes the squeak of the leg that Vahid later tells us was left intentionally to strike fear into Peg Leg's prisoners.  (He actually says that he leaves the squeak to remind people that he lost his leg fighting for the regime in Syria, but I am adding characters' reactions to the leg to synthesize a deeper meaning.) We only discover later that Vahid had spent all of his adrenaline capturing Peg Leg and digging the hole that, when he has the comedown, his morality begins making him doubt his choices.  Maybe it is a bit of a trope to tell the story of how victims almost lose themselves in revenge plots, but there's a reason that the trope exists.  

There's a reason that this movie probably resonantes with me now than it did before.  When Henson and I argue whether art has impact on politics, I can't help but think that I may have gotten more of my morals from movies, TV, and comic books than I did from examples in my church.  I love Catholicism because, on paper, it says all of the things that pop culture does.  "Love your neighbor."  "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?"  That kind of stuff.  But I don't really see a lot of people in my neck of the woods living up to those expectations, so I look to movies like this where those words have a lot more impact.  I'm not a victim like these people.  I have a fairly great life.  Yet it feel like everyday I hear something that tears my heart out and I wonder what happened to us as a species.  When I was absorbing these messages of doing the right thing, even if it hurts, as a child, it was molding me.  But now I need those moments because Vahid and Shiva don't kill Peg Leg.  (Yeah, spoiler.  Also, that dude was 100% Peg Leg.  He confesses to all of it.  It's a mislead that he has a family and seems fairly normal when he's not directly kidnapping and torturing people.) 

And Panahi gives us a clear message of what we should do when confronting a chance for revenge.  Simultaneously, he also tells us that there will be consequence for holding close to your truth.  Vahid and Shiva almost kill the guy.  It really reads like both of them are going to cross a line.  I bet the actors had to tell themselves that their characters didn't know if they would cross that line or not.  But the two of them, after getting close to killing him, set him free.  (Slowly and carefully.  They aren't dumb.  They just can't stoop to his level.)  But that last shot was the shot that I was hoping for throughout the film.  Peg Leg isn't the kind of guy who learned his lesson just because he had a come-to-Jesus moment.  It's almost a tale about the blindness of self-righteousness.  (Listen, the worst thing that I'm doing with my self-righteousness is attempting to have poor people and foreigners treated as actual human beings.  We're not the same.)  That squeak ending, knowing that Vahid will never know peace because Peg Leg is always out there, messing with him, is the more authentic ending.  

But, yeah, there were times that I got a little bored.  That makes me feel like a monster, knowing that each shot had something clandestine that went into it.  It's an incredible movie that just caught me while I was a little tired.  Does that mean I shouldn't ever criticize a movie that went through hell to make it?  Probably not.  But this is a good movie that was simply overshadowed by other great movies.  

Not rated, but this is one of those brutal movies that mixes real footage with fiction.  This is a movie that is meant to be as painful as possible because it is about the horrors of war.  While much of the movie is over the phone with a six-year-old, the descriptions of things happening are harrowing.  There is also some language when the characters aren't on the phone.  At one point, the movie shows real bodies of people who died in Gaza, but they are blurred out.  

DIRECTOR: Kaouther Ben Hania

Sometimes, I want to force people that I politically disagree with to watch a movie and have them continue spouting their ideology afterwards.  Now, I have to try for some degree of objectivity.  If someone asked me to sit down and watch that Angel Studios movie about child trafficking that we know is a false narrative, I would be skeptical too.  But The Voice of Hind Rajab is one of those movies that toes the line between "Based on a True Story" and a documentary.

The unique presentation of this film is explained in the actual movie itself.  For much of the movie, the actors on screen are performing the dialogue recorded from telephone conversations with six-year-old Hind Rajab.  The other side of the telephone is the actual recording of Hind Rajab.  Once in a while, when the film gets deep, sometimes we'll hear the voices of the Red Crescent phone operators and the actors only react to what they hear.  There is even one scene where we see video footage of the original operators as the actors pantomime the video, but out of focus.  It's incredilby powerful and this is one of those movies that is meant to make you question your own humanity.  

It feels like I'm completely brainwashed as I write this because of my outright and unabashed glowing tone approaching it.  The thing is, there are so many lines in this movie that reflect the frustrations that I've been having living through these last ten years of Empathy-Free America.  There's a line --straight up --that says something along the lines of "We've been showing them pictures of dead people on the sides of roads, killed in war, and no one lifted a finger.  We assume they are going to change their minds because they can hear the voice of a six-year-old?"  Yeah, that's how it feels, all the time.  There is no reason for me to think that anything in The Voice of Hind Rajab is fake.  I know that if I show this to someone on the Right, that's probably going to be the first thing that is said.  After all, I was dismissive about that Angel Studios thing.  Why wouldnt the same be true?  I'm trying to understand.  You have to see me trying to understand.  Still, I see a wide gulf between RIght Wing propaganda and people just trying to explain that war is hell and that they have documented Israel committing war crimes on audio.

In terms of movie-making, this is one of those movies that I oddly like.  I don't know why these kinds of movies hit hard when done right, but I really like a good "Bottle Episode" movie.  The two movies that I'm thinking about when I think of bottle episodes are Phone Booth and Buried (?).  The conceit of these movies always has to be simple.  In all of these stories, the phone is a quintessential element to story telling.  In Phone Booth, the guy can't hang up or he's going to be shot.  In Buried, the phone is dying and it is the only way that he can be found.  With a movie that has the title The Voice of..., you know that voice has to be throughout the film.  The fact that it is the real audio is what makes the movie.  Yes, the actors are acting. After all, to memorize their lines and their deliveries, they probably had to listen to those original recordings so many times that, at one point, they probably felt like it became noise.  And I do understand how acting works.  I know that the actors probably had to do those scenes over and over again.  Some of those performances were good. Some of them were probably lacking.  Still there seemed to be something more than simply acting out a hypothetical scene.  It makes the whole piece more than simply a gig.  There's something inherently altruistic about the whole production.  These people are keeping both the memory of a little girl alive and reminding people that a tragedy didn't have to happen.

Once again, I have to talk about the ending.  It's weird that I sometimes write remembering that real events colored everything that we saw on film.  Reality doesn't have to follow the rules of formula.   But I knew that this story couldn't have ended with a happy ending.  It's odd to have a room full of heroes and have to determine who the antagonist is.  There is almost a person v. nature element going on because the soldiers that are endangering Hind Rajab are never seen on screen.  They are nameless and faceless.  It's more like hating a concept, even though the soldiers are real people who commit real world atrocities.  From a narrative perpsective, that makes it real hard to identify someone who can never show up on screen.  Instead, I have to sympathize with the real life Mahdi, who may have the most thankless job in the world.

It's clear that Omar and Rana are the protagonists of the piece.  They are the ones sacrificing themselves for the good of a stranger that they haven't met.  But the bottle format means that everyone else, to greater or lesser degrees, are also sacrificing themselves.  Everyone there is on the same team.  Everyone there is trying to get Hind back home to her mother.  But Mahdi has the thankless job of playing things smart.  (Again, one of the big takeaways is that, even though everyone follows the book to the letter, despite constant attempts to sabotage those efforts, the Israeli government still kills everyone.)  But it has to be weird because Mahdi is a real world hero.  His face is in the movie. Not just the actor, but the real actor's face is in the movie.  And instead of this great glory that the guy probably deserves, he's kind of the antagonist of the piece.  If you knew Mahdi in real life --based exclusively on the events that the film portrays --yeah, he's a hero.  But it is really hard to like him in this movie because, from our protagonists' perspectives, he's the one who is slowing down the rescue of this poor little girl.  What he's really doing is trying to minimalize casualties and even that doesn't matter in the end.  (There's a line in the movie that Mahdi says along the lines of "If someone else dies under my watch, I can't do this anymore."  I wonder if he followed through on that, because that's a huge bummer in a movie that's already a huge bummer.)

I get real sad, guys.  I have slipped this in other blogs.  I pepper my blogs full of therapy stuff.  It's a blog that few people read, so I can use it for journaling as well.  I am so glad that this movie exists, but I also know that few people that I need to watch this movie will watch this movie.  I had a debate with Henson the other day asking whether or not art moves the political spectrum in any meaningful way.  I argued wholeheartedly that it did.  But I also saw Henson's perspective that often that change is slow.  The Voice of Hind Rajab is such a painful film and it is so important, I'm sad that people won't watch it because they don't want to potentially change their thoughts on what they have "sunk [so much] cost" into.  This movie was incredible.

Rated R for old school violence, sex, nudity, and language.  The movie feels like it wanted to capture some of that late '70s exploitation, so the gore is really a lot. Like, I haven't seen gore like that outside of some of the more culty horror movies I've seen in the past. But this is also violence that, while not real, is meant to remind us that oppressive regimes tend to lean heavily into cold-blooded violence.  A body is just left behind on the side of a road and there's a shark that is autopsied.  It's a lot.

DIRECTOR: Kleber Mendonca Filho

I've been so productive today that it would be an absolute crime if I can't knock out my final blog of the day.  This is the last of my Best Picture noms for 2025 and Lord knows that I can pull this off as long as I don't get too distracted.  The real problem is that, like many movies in the international category about oppressive regimes, there's only so much that I understand enough to wax poetic about.

I'm talking about a certain subgenre.  The titles of these movies elude movie.  I know that they are in my Film Index and I can easily look them up.  I'm more inclined to put a link and hope that you do the heavy lifting.  That's an attitude of momentum and  I also am ashamed that I don't understand these movies as much as I should.  The Secret Agent is the best of these subgenres, but I can't deny that the film gave me too much of a headache trying to piece it together.  The biggest problem is a problem that I have with a lot of the Academy Award nominees.  In this specific case, The Secret Agent runs 2 hours and 40 minutes long.  There have been movies that feel like that amount of time can fly by.  And, as much as I liked how the movie was made, this is not one of those films.  This is "Eat apples to stay awake while watching it."  Yeah, I have a theory that apples keep me awake during movies while not being too unhealthy.  

You know that the director was messing with us, right?  It takes until the halfway point of the movie to tell us what the heck is going on with the film.  And even when he does, the motivation for everyone is still a bit cryptic.  You know from moment one that Armando is in trouble. But even his relationships are a little bit muddied.  Yeah, I figured that Dona Sabastina was helping him lay low.  But there is a lot of the movie where I didn't understand how these people knew each other.  Heck, I only knew that the police chief and his cronies were bad guys because they looked like bad guys.  But that even came into doubt when Armando and the chief are hanging out casually.  Is the point of the movie that Armando had the worst cover ever because he was hanging out with the people who were actively hunting him down?  Maybe the police chief had nothing to do with hunting down Armando.  I mean, it just seems like such a stretch of the imagination to think that these guys didn't know who looked like who?   Like, there are characters who are woefully undefined all for the sake of mystery.  The problem with that is that I have to understand what the stakes are inside of a movie to really get as much as I can out of it.  

The funny thing is that this more seems a send up of late '70s cinema than it does a story about corruption and hit squads.  Yeah, the film often feels grounded.  It's so grounded that the major critique of the film is that Armando kind of sucks at being off the radar.  He constantly responds to his name and calls his alias of Marcelo silly.  If this is a story about how the director really wanted to make a movie that took place in the late '70s in the context of the other great art that is coming out, I guess that works better.  I don't see "Best Picture" if that is the only reason that some of the imagery in the movie happens.  Like, from moment one, we get that Jaws plays a major role in the film.  For good reason, it ties into the image of the leg in the shark.  But that being said, I don't really get the direct connection between Armando and the shark.  I know that the corrupt cop is getting the leg back to cover up a murder that happened at Carnivale.  But ulimately, this isn't a story about the leg or the shark.  Sure, my favorite parts of the movie are the leg sequence and the shark stuff. But if we're about storytelling, the shark and the leg kind of muddy an already confusing story.  On top of that, while I adore the leg sequence, it is tonally confusing to have this really comic bit that the movie hasn't really earned.  The film is, decidedly, unfunny.  It doesn't try to be funny.  There aren't really bits in it.  While Armando is charming, that's a long way off from being a comic character.  The film is serious as a heart attack and still, we get this over the top bit about a severed leg kicking people and murdering them.

So what is the movie trying to say about cinema?  There's also a good deal of film dealing with The Omen, which is super cool.  Armando hides out with his father-in-law at the cinema.  But I can't help but think that the movie isn't just using the movie theater as a locale for a story.  The final shootout with the hitman kind of plays that up.  Because I don't want to dance around that sequence, I want to stress that the shootout looks like an old movie.  The guy gets shot in the eye and it looks like hamburger is coming out of it.  Another guy gets shot in the face and there's cheeky flap sloppin' around.  You don't see those kinds of effects in movies nowadays.  This is a send up of the action / horror movies of yesteryear.  There's even a reference to another movie from the '70s named The Secret Agent.  I mean, this isn't even a movie about a secret agent in the stricted sense.  This is a guy who has to stay hidden for the sake of his kid while an oligarch wants him dead.  

I did a play in college called "Mere Mortals."  It was a one-act by David Ives about three construction workers who all had theories that they were reincarnated legends, despite being average joes.  My professor asked me to put myself into it, so I made the whole vibe very comic-booky.  It worked because I was able to tie the notion of secret identities into the story that was being told. But, honestly, had I not been pushed into imbuing the film with my own tastes, it wouldn't have made a ton of sense.  That's kind of the read that I'm getting on The Secret Agent.  Yes, all the trappings of the film are great and made what otherwise would have been a kind of dull movie interesting.  But I also didn't really get why the old school film stuff was in the movie.  It doesn't matter that I liked it.  Everything should have a cohesive vibe and I felt like the style of the film and the story of the film were so disparate that I couldn't really understand why things worked the way that they did.

Because the film treated it as an afterthought, I guess this paragraph also comes across as an afterthought.  There's a narrative here about family and integrity.  Armando is in all of this trouble because he hit an oligarch's kid when he was being disrespectful to Armando's wife.  The wife is dead at the beginning of the story and we only see her through flashback.  It's assumed that the oligarch had her killed and was hunting down Armando and his kid.  The story tells us that Armando is doing everything for his son, Fernando.  And he tells us this a lot, but Armando and Fernando share very little screentime together.  Like, you can keep telling us that Armando cares about Fernando and I want to believe that. But in a 2 hour and 40 minute movie, we couldn't have had a couple more scenes with them together.  The movie pushes that we should love their relationship, going as far as having Wagner Moura play the adult verison of Fernando after playing Armando for the '70s sequence.  We are even told that Fernando doesn't really care about his father's life because he saw none of that.  But that moment would have hit so much harder had Armando spent more time trying to be with his son as opposed to working in a records office.  I guess the obsession that Armando had with finding proof about his mother's existence is a contrast to how Fernando feels.  It just doesn't really hit as hard as it should.

I always admit with these kind of movies that I might not be the target audience because I'm not savvy enough to understand a rich cultural dynamic that wasn't aimed at me.  Still, while I liked the look and feel of the movie, I don't think I ever understood the film enough to be properly invested.

Not rated, but this is a pretty bleak movie considering that it is about expecting mothers.  A lot of the movie generally floats around either miscarriages, abuse, and abortions.  Even when the characters aren't talking about such things, that is always somewhat part of the color of the film itself.  There are neglectful husbands and parents who often are cruel to the women in the film.  There is some nudity, but it is all in the context of breastfeeding.  There aren't that many men in the film to witness affairs, so the closest thing we get are discussing relationships that happen outside of wedlock. 

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Watching this movie in the midst of Oscar season is just an exercise in stress.  I started this movie because I knew that I would be gone for the weekend and I didn't want to waste a rental because you only get 48 hours to watch a movie once you started it.  So I watched something I owned and now I have to shotgun this blog so I can write about The Secret Agent.  My life is difficult and it is of my own doing.

Do you understand how nice I'm going to be about this movie because there isn't an active affair happening in the film?  Ingmar Bergman has broken me because I simply expect that characters are just going to talk about unfaithful spouses nonstop.  The funny thing is that I just wrote about Hamnet being described by critics as "grief porn", a term I don't care for because it seems vulgar.   Hamnet is not grief porn.  This movie and a lot of the Bergman movies themselves are grief porn.  We have five children and we're expecting our sixth.  Maybe this movie hit harder in the grief button because pregnancy has colored so much of our marriage.  As part of that, miscarriage has also been an ever-present visitor in our marriage.  Between my wife having her fair share of miscarriages, there's always the fear, despite things being healthy right now, that something absolutely tragic is going to happen soon.  I don't think of myself as a pessimist, but I just know how bleak things get when you expect new life and something takes that away.

I'm really interested in Bergman's politics with this one.  I don't think that I would care for Ingmar Bergman in real life.  He seemed to use women pretty selfishly.  I view his male characters as extensions of his own personal demons.  Again, a lot of this is my headcanon, so I apologize if I am way off the mark.  I look at this movie through two very different lights.  In one version, Brink of Life might be an example of a male director trying to be an ally to women.  In the most optimistic read of this film, Bergman is trying to step back from his own male ego and allow women to tell their stories.  While it would have been nice to have a woman write and direct this film I also have to take into account that 1958 coupled with Bergman's burgeoning celebrity would have made Brink of Life impossible to make by anyone else.  If it is that --which I really hope that it is --then this is a story about Bergman growing.  He's been critical of men in the past, mostly criticizing himself.  But in this, he's not allowing the men to be the focal point of the narrative.  It's not the first time that he's told a woman-centered story and he mostly talks about the real fears of what it means to become a mother, especially when one had no intention to do so.  It is a little crass and it is a little clunky, especially knowing that man is oh-so-desperately trying to capture the female voice and attitude.  Still, if it is that, then I don't really dislike this at all.  (Please note: I am completely aware that I'm a man writing about what it means to be a woman.  This hasn't been lost on me.)

The other version of the story might be a little bit gross.  It is the job of the storyteller to find that slice of life and make art of it.  Especially when dealing with drama, you have to make your characters flawed because the real world is really flawed.  However, there is a certain whiny category that doesn't necessarily meet the weight of what these women are going through.  A lot of the women in this maternity ward are almost neurotic about their behavior.  If I'm getting my characters right, Stina is our protagonist.  (It's hard to tell who the protagonist of the story is because the film attempts to give every woman her due over the course of the story.)  Stina is the one who goes in with the attitude that babies are for other people.  She's been pregnant before and, gosh darn it, she'll probably be pregnant again.

Maybe I've watched too many movies and read too many books, but her conflict resolved itself too quickly for the story to proceed in a way that wouldn't have been considered Bergman-esque.  She came to grips with the challenges that she faced at the midpoint of the movie and the film kept giving her screentime.  Of course she wouldn't have been able to deliver the child alive.  That sounds callous of me, but I can't help but look at her place as a fictional character inside of a movie.  But just imagine what it must have been like for those other characters inside the maternity ward.  (Note: They don't call the room that the ladies are in the "maternity ward" until they actually go into active labor.  I apologize for not knowing what the name of that room is.)  The reason that I'm kind of tied to the "grief" film as a concept is that there is no real good for having her lose the child outside the fact that it is very sad.  Maybe Bergman really wants to make the point that life is unfair and that a positive attitude does nothing to change how the world turns.  But we don't even have a post-game moment with Stina.  Stina appears catatonic.  It's very the end of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.  She lost the child.  There was no rhyme nor reason for why the child died in labor.  Instead, we have to depend on the reactions of the other characters.  It's through Stina's tragedy that Cissi calls her mother, which is nice and all.  

But there is something a little false about Cissi's call.  I mean, I applaud Bergman for being open to the notion that family will always be there, regardless of how much we might stray from them.  I get that.  I even like it.  But it also feels like it is an afterthought.  (I am going to confess something right here.  I intellectually get that this ending is unearned, but I don't want to trade it in for any other ending. It's because I'm a filthy hypocrite.) I guess there is something very Afterschool-Special about how Brita is the ideal nurse.  Brita gives her money to call her mother, holds her hand through the phone call, and then gives her money for a train ride.  I don't know why my brain can't comprehend that this is just a nice moment.  Part of me has to understand that so many women come in-and-out of this maternity ward and there are probably a million girls like Sissi, afraid to talk to her parents.  I just can't see that Brita could take that kind of hit every day.  This is depressing because I think all life is sacred and special, but Brita treats her like she's the main character of a movie...because Bergman made her the main character of a movie.  I want Brita to be real.  Oh my heavens, I almost need Brita to be real.  But in a movie this bleak, it almost feels like Brita is there so the movie can end and that the audience wouldn't cry themselves to sleep...or worse?

I didn't hate this movie, but that might only because it had good intentions and it finally deviated from the old "my husband is going to casually cheat on me" narrative that we've gotten time and again with Ingmar Bergman.  I like that we're highlighting women, especially women who are about to become mothers.  It has a beautiful intent, but a bit of a messy unpacking.

Rated PG-13 because the film is mostly about child mortality.  Because this is based on real events, I feel like I'm not spoiling anything by saying that one of William Shakespeare's children died young.  But the movie also has a mildly graphic sex scene without nudity.  I also want to say that the movie dances around notions of witchcraft, but that's neither here nor there.  

DIRECTOR:  Chloe Zhao

​I'm almost there, guys!  I've almost watched all the movies that I can watch before the Academy Awards.  I have half of The Secret Agent left and then I'll try to watch some of the foreign films.  After all, we're coming up on the Academy Awards this Sunday.  And I don't know how I feel getting a real contender at the end of this list.  If you don't feel like reading anymore, I can tell you that Hamnet might be the dark horse contender of the Academy Awards.

I don't know if I'm breaking any new ground here, but Neon feels like a slightly different A24.  The aesthetics of this movie feel almost like a horror movie at times, especially considering that this is a movie that personifies Death.  I want to establish the film's use of personification because I know that I would call shanannigans if I read someone else pulling that card.  There is no metaphorical death in the movie.  No one plays death a'la The Seventh Seal.  Instead, the story is told through Agnes's eyes and, by association, the children view life and death as almost corporeal.   Just to jump to the shocking moment, Hamnet saves Judith's life by tricking Death into taking him instead of his sister.  From an outside perspective, we are all aware that Hamnet probably didn't actually do anything except for contract the same disease that claimed his sister.  Judith was probably incredibly fortunate that her body was able to fight off the disease that ended up killing her brother.  But the film never really treats it from a grounded perspective.  The film tells us that Hamnet sacrificed himself for his sister and that is the assumption that the film asks its audience to make.  And it's weirdly affective.

A lot of that is probably because the film focuses so much on Jessie Buckley's Agnes / Anne Hathaway.  I do like that William Shakespeare / the husband is only a supporting character.  I almost said "minor character", but he definitely takes a backseat to Agnes.  Zhao builds Agnes to almost be a supernatural character, adding to the A24 vibes that the film gets.  Honestly, there are moments where I got The VVitch vibes.  But because we experience all of what happens from Agnes's perspective, that decision to see Hamnet's action as self-sacrificing makes the story have a deeper resonance.  If there was a moment where I wondered, "Well, he didn't have to do that.  He wasn't changing anything," the film would just be kind of silly.  But he climbs into that bed and looks his sister in the face and tells her that he's going to trick Death into coming for him.  Yes, I was mentally screaming at the screen to get out of there.  But in reality, had he not done that, I'm still in the headspace that Judith would have died.  Maybe its the narrative element and the English teacher in me, but the story wouldn't have made sense if she just got better.

I see that a lot of complaints about Hamnet have to do with the notion that it is grief porn.  Um...heavily disagree.  I've accused other movies of having that description (I feel weird writing that term) and Hamnet is not one of them.  Honestly, most of the movie feels like a celebration of life.  Honestly, I fell in love with the movie with the story of Will and Agnes / Anne.  These were two people who were unsatisfied in life and fell madly in love.  They manipulated their families to get married and for years, they had a loving situation.  Heck, there was almost something Bluey about the whole first half of the film.  (Okay, it gets more graphic than Bluey.)  But usually, we have stories about abusive fathers or distant mothers (which is what I'm reading right now in Stoner), but this is a story about two loving parents who come from different worlds.  If you didn't know that Hamnet was goign to to die, then the story would read quite differently.  (There was a moment --and I have to admit this --that I thought that this was going to be intentional revisionist history and we saw a "What If" scenario if Hamnet had lived.) Yes, Will and Anne start falling apart after the death of their child.  Yes, Will comes across quite badly because he was gone pursuing his dream.

But that's part of the story.  When Will left for London, there's this narrative that both of them are meeting each other in the middle.  Agnes comes across as this free spirit of the forest who domesticates herself for the sake of her children.  Will, in contrast, is a man who is so attached to a grounded sense of employment that he gives up his dream of writing.  But as the story progresses, the two of them find their bliss in the inspiration of the other.  Will's crime is one of not being prescient when it comes to his children's surprise illness.  Yeah, we shouldn't be thrilled that Will spends so much time away from his family.  I think my wife and I always comment when characters in stories find themselves away from their families for extended periods of time.  But I can't help but feel more than a little sympathy for Will in this scenario.  There is this need to do great things out there.  We get that Will loves his family and that he is providing.  Also, we have that historical dramatic irony knowing that William Shakespeare ends up being the greatest playwright of all time.  Still, we're watching this from a human perspective.  Most of the movie doesn't call Shakespeare by name.  I snickered during the film "What if you didn't know that this was William Shakespeare until this moment?" because his name isn't formally dropped until the last ten minutes of the film.  (Sure, the film is about a guy who writes the "To be or not to be" soliloquy.)  

The ending is the dismount.  (And other things that I thought necessary to write.)  I have to question everything I know about Shakespeare.  One of the things that I regularly tell my students is that teaching is just repeating what someone told you.  One of the ideas that has always been repeated to me when I was a student was that Shakespeare worked from common storytelling, but elevated it.  The notion that Shakespeare's audiences would have been moderately aware of the bare bones of Romeo and Juliet let them understand his loftier takes on the characters when he adapted them.  But the Hamnet / Hamlet thing always stressed me out.  I know that I'm on the outs when it comes to the beat-for-beat true events of what led to Hamnet's death.  I'm even further removed from the story when it comes to how the Hamlet / Hamnet shift happened.  I have to trust that opening slide that it is the truth. But still, I find this narrative far more interesting than the version that I had in my head.  (Also, I'm not allowed to embrace Neil Gaiman's Midsummer Night's Dream comic as historical fiction anymore.) 

But we're in this for the end, right?  The grief people who swear that this movie is all about grief probably harken to the end of the film as their key evidence to that theory.  I don't deny that the end of the movie is heartbreaking.  But it is only because we knew happiness and that happiness was taken away from us.  When we watch Agnes beg the players not to speak Hamnet's name, I understand why.  But also watching her understand her husband all the more in that sequence is fascinating.  Because the mystery of it all is that Hamlet barely looks like a story about Hamnet.  But when we see those details, it's not the story itself that is about Hamnet.  Instead, this is a story of wish fulfillment.  Will wishes that he could trade places with his son and die.  But even beyond that, Hamlet is the play that he wishes could have been for his son to play in.  That's the way that he bonded with his son, over theatre.  It's incredibly touching and to see Agnes start to get that with the version that she was was heartwrenching.  Yes, it's sad.  But it's not manipulative.  Nothing in the film fees manipulative.

So, yeah, pretty darned great.  I know that a lot of people aren't going to see it, but I adore stuff like this.  Is it a movie about Daddy issues?  Sure, but it's more about parent issues and marriage issues.  And it doesn't hurt that I love Hamlet and Shakespeare.

PG and I was really wondering.  Like, I know that animation tends to be PG and it's not like Arco is by any means offensive.  But do you know what?  Do you know what?  It feels like it is aimed at adults.  There's a scene where the protagonist child gets a pretty intense head injury.  Sure, we're used to kids in peril in animation.  It's almost par for the course.  But I watched this scene and thought, "Are they gonna kill that kid?"  It also gets pretty bleak at times.  Not the happiest of endings.

DIRECTORS: Ugo Bienvenu and Gilles Cazaux

Oh man, guys.  Guys.  If I can knock out this blog quickly and keep that momentum going, I will have the biggest high in the world.  I would like to apologize to my wife for buying this movie, not because it's bad, but because the opening credits said, "Netflix France."  That really makes me think that this movie is going to show up on Netflix one day and I will own a digital copy of the film as well.  Let's hope that the movie doesn't show up on Netflix before the Academy Awards because then I feel like the purchase would have been worth it.  

I love me some time travel.  I mean, I really love me some time travel.  I would have watched this movie even if it wasn't up for the Academy Awards.  I may be already overhyping it because, while I did absolutely enjoy the crap out of this movie, I do have to admit that I'm probably going to forget about this movie given enough time.  The funny thing is that this movie doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel when it comes to telling a good time travel story.  But what it does do, it does well and also steals from ideas that not a lot of time travel narratives do.  I hate doing a spoiler warning.  But if I'm going to really nerd out on a time travel film, I think I need to take the cuffs off.  There was this episode of Quantum Leap that absolutely slapped.  (Quantum Leap fans, both new and old, that show was all over the board in terms of quality.  That being said, I probably loved every episode.)   Anyway, there was this episode where Sam and Al switched places.  Al was the leaper and Sam was the hologram.  The problem was that Sam didn't have a link to exit the imaging chamber and it seemed like that was going to be a real problem.  But do you know how they solved it?  They literally sent a letter to the folks at Project Quantum Leap and they manually opened the door for him.  River Song also kind of pullled this card on Doctor Who and I'm flummoxed that more time travel stories didn't try pulling this as a get out of jail free moment.  Heck, Back to the Future tried to do this and somehow forgot how time worked in that franchise.  

I love when time travel has an easy answer for a really complicated problem.  The central conceit of Arco is that the kid who has the most impressive technology on the planet has no idea how to properly use it.  He broke it getting to a different future (which for him is the past!  SQUEE!) and is stuck with no way to contact his parents.  But the solve of the story is remarkably cool because a robot that is losing his memory etches his memories into a cave wall, which the parents see from the future?  I love it.  I love it so much.  I know.  I'm telling you.  It's a trope that has happened in other time travel stories, but not often.  (The more I'm thinking about it, the fact that Back to the Future III did very little with the "I can just write a letter" bit is hilarious to me because that would have solved all of the problems in Back to the Future part I.  Although, Back to the Future really loathes the paradox.  He could have just asked Doc to remember the extra plutonium.  Ah, I'm off-topic.)

I had to immediately Wikipedia everything about Arco when I was done. The thing is that the movie felt aggressively French in the best way possible.  If I had to put money on it, I would have thought that Arco was an adaptation of a band dessinee.  I specifically thought of Moebius with the character models that I was looking at.  (Let's be completely fair to a movie that I really enjoyed.  French animated faces sometimes look weird.  Arco's faces look straight up bizarre at times, especially considering how pretty everything else looks in this movie.) I could only award myself partial credit because the writer / director of this movie took elements from a different book he was working on --specifically the robot --and put it in Arco.  Still, the band dessinee vibe of the whole thing is incredibly hard to translate here.  I have to point out that I've never really been an anime or manga fan, despite loving comic books.  But I have dipped my toe into French comic books and there is something culturally different about the way that the French tell a story in visual and words that America doesn't really do as well.  

I started the MPAA section by saying that the movie doesn't really feel like it is for kids.  I'm probably going to show this to my 14-year-old this because she can handle it.  But I can't believe how bleak this ending was.  I just want to say that, for Arco, the ending of the story is tragic.  He has to live the rest of his life knowing that he stole his parents' and his sister's youths.  Like, that's bleak.  The fact that they all walk up to him old as dirt and that's the happy ending?  The crazy part is, this is a time travel story that doesn't even try to acknowledge that maybe there's a little wiggle room for a paradox.  Nope.  Arco, you have to live with your family who is happy to see you, but will not be able to watch you grow up because you stole a time travel suit.  That's a lot.  The sadistic part of me loves that.  One of the thing that always bothered me about the Harry Potter stories is that Harry breaks one of the cardinal rules of magic without a hint of consequence for his action.  In Arco, the protagonist is a child who just wants to see some dinosaurs and basically burns down his parents' lives and that's the message of the story.

And, Geez Louise, the amount of emotional angst in this movie is palpable.  Like, I absolutely believe that these kids are obsessed with each other.  I hate to keep on tying in other time travel stories, but the notion of Arco being a version of "The Eleventh Hour" from Doctor Who is too much.  Normally, this would all be a criticism, claiming that Arco lacked originality.  I don't even care because these storytelling tropes are incredible.  Iris's obsession with Arco both as a romantic interest (which is a little weird, but also adorable) and as an escape from the reality that she is experiencing is great.  I want to throw the world of 2070 under the bus.  Arco views Iris's world as a failed experiment in many ways.  He comes from a world where nature is the factor that motivates humanity to be the best version of itself, so seeing cars and supermarkets with rationing is something that comes across as perverse to him.  Yet, he finds joy in that society to because the one thing that 2070 has that Arco's time doesn't have is a sense of companionship.  Yeah, Arco can talk to birds and that's fine.  But sharing a prepackaged sandwich with a girl that finds him fascinating and dresses him up in her clothing?  That's the stuff that makes Arco compelling.  He's paradoxically intrigued and mortified by the world around him.  Also, how bleak is our timeline that a world that is run entirely by robots and remote parenting seems like an upgrade from what we have?

The insane part of this movie is the baby.  I tried looking up the baby's name, but I refuse to use AI so our forests won't burn like they did in Arco.  That baby is just shuttled everywhere.  I was thinking, if Iris's robot has to be in two places at once, a scenario parents deal with regularly, can't they just temporarily get a substitute robot.  I was watching that baby just vibing in the middle of a forest fire and I was anxious.  Sure, the baby is a drawn fictional character.  But in a year where there are multiple movies about forest fires, I just got really nervous for that baby.

Can I tell you my favorite fun little twist?  I weirdly like that the conspiracy theorists (whom I would hate in real life) were both right and also completely adorable when we realized that they weren't trying to hurt the kids.  Like, the Fratellis in The Goonies have so conditioned us to fear trios that chase kids that we all read these guys as absolute psychopaths.  But when they're all taking on the robots?  It's great.  And also, Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea?  Yeah, good choice.  I seriously thought it was Will Ferrell, but refused to believe that it was him.  I don't know why.

I know the movie isnt going to stay with me.  That doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the heck out of this film. It's so good, guys.  It's not even my favorite of the Oscars.  But I'll tell you what? This is time travel done well.

R and I had to look up why.  I do not remember there being nudity in this movie, but apparently there was.  I now feel like I didn't watch the movie somehow.  Yeah, I know tha there is some language, but even the language that was used was used sparingly.  There is a couple in bed together, but you don't really see anything.  I do know that people are angry at each other.  The most traumatizing thing in the movie is discussion and recreation of a suicide that you don't see, but it is haunting hearing the noise of it.  

DIRECTOR:  Joachim Trier

Guys, I really wanted to make this my favorite one.  I saw that trailer and thought, "That's the movie that's going to make me cry for days."  I mean, just the fact that the trailer is cut the way it is, coupled with my painfully obvious Daddy-issues, how did this not completely destroy me?  What's funny is that I honestly think that Sentimental Value might have the greatest chance of getting the Academy Award.  It's a well-shot and well-acted movie that has a certain class to it.  That's the perfect combo for an Academy Award winner.

By the way, if I can knock this blog out in twenty minutes, I will be the most productive person alive.  I know that's impossible, but it is still something that is going to inspire me to write like the wind.

When I saw that Sentimental Value trailer, I thought there was going to be a lot more knock-down, drag-out moments in the film.  From moment one, you know that this is story is about the fallout of a selfish father figure who wants to reconnect with his successful daughters.  Gustav Borg is successful as an artsy-fartsy director (by the way, the gift that he gives his grandson is *chef's kiss!*)  But the girls have carved their own niches in the world.  I suppose, even if Nora has more respect for her craft, she is the most fragile member of the family.  But from Gustav's perspective, he's kind of coming in after the respective members of the family have already picked themselves up by their bootstraps and become something without his help.  Maybe I'm confusing "knock-down, drag-out" as I put it as simply subtlety.  So many times when I write these things, I often have to reach deeper than what the film says because I'm used to the movie telling what I have to think and unpack.  This is a movie that lets us experience family life and, sometimes, that family life isn't as necessarily obvious as movies make them out to be.  

Nora is sad from moment one.  Honestly, Nora needs a therapist, even if it means weakening her craft.  (I'm putting that in here.  I get the vibe that Trier is implying that Nora is so effective as an actress because she feels all of her pain on that stage.  Acting is scary to her, not fun.  It's the trauma.) I'm not saying that the other characters aren't sad.  I do think that Gustav is sad and I think that Agnes is numb.  But Nora's pain is the most expressive.  She almost torpedos a show because she is so afraid of what is in her that she needs to escape it.  If we break down this story from Nora's perspective (which I think is probably the smart move considering that I see her as the protagonist), her father's peace offering of giving her a bespoke script for what might be his final film comes across as really upsetting.  It seems like Nora's major desire with her father is a combination of normalness coupled with a genuine apology.  Gustav isn't that.  Gustav almost prides himself on the fact that he marches to the beat of his own drum.  He's so captured by his specific celebrity that he just can't be a father again.  I can see that being frustrating for Nora (and I'm writing like a therapist...) because she's offered an olive branch not from Gustav Borg, her father, but instead from Gustav Borg, famous director who appreciates her talent.  It's something that isn't necessarily worded that way, but I kind of get it.  It's why when Nora actually reads the script and sees the vulnerability in it, she changes her mind.

Agnes is maybe the hardest to unpack.  Agnes, seemingly, is the one who has it mostly together.  She has a kid (who happens to be on his screen too much and I can relate as I type away a blog).  Agnes is the bridge between these two warring parties.  She sees both her sister's misery when it comes to discussing their absentee father and also a sympathy for an artist who carved his own past.  She also sees that Gustav isn't ever malicious with his choices, but has grown so accustomed to a life of selfishness that he has no way to relate to people who are supposed to be his family.  From what I understood, Agnes is also the one who actually worked with Gustav on projects.  She's the one who sees how passionate he is about his work and the fact that he actually might be a real genius.  Still, I do love that Agnes draws the line where Erik is concerned.  Agnes, to me, is the most relatable character.  She's not toxic.  She, instead, relies on healthy boundaries.  While everyone celebrate's Agnes's childhood when she played Anna in a movie, it seems like Agnes views that time differently.  She cherishes it because she spent so much time with her father, but also hates that she wasn't ever herself.  The most formative moments of their relationship had Agnes play someone else.  On top of that, those moments were shared with everyone for artistic success as opposed to the moments for themselves.  There's a scene where Gustav plays with Erik and those moments seem authentic.  But he tarnishes that by equating Erik's natural screen chemistry with something that he can exploit.

I am kind of unpacking the relationship between Gustav and Rachel.  There are two toxic reads on why Gustav hires Rachel to play his daughter's part.  I hope I have the presence of mind and the time to write about both of them because I have this idea locked in now.  It seems like Gustav should shelve the movie until Nora is ready to hear him out.  But he doesn't do that.  Instead, he translates it into English so he can hire Rachel.  One of the things that's made a little more clear is that the version that Rachel is about to perform is a lesser version of the script because it is in English.  Does he hire Rachel to hurt Nora?  It kind of feels that way.  But it also feels like there's a mildly sexual relationship between Gustav and Rachel.  Yes, there is still a paternal relationship between the two because Rachel is metaphorically stepping into her daughter's shoes.  But that initial meeting wasn't based on a mutual relationship to begin with, but rather playing up the notion of fame.  After all, Gustav has a reputation of being a bit of a lethario, as seen when he's collapsed in the hospital bed.  But it is through rachel that we get Gustav's growth.  Rachel  grows and understands that this part was not meant for her and it's Gustav's reaction to her quitting that shows that he has grown out of his own stubbornness to a certain extent.

I guess what I've discovered, then, is that  this movie should be all I'm talking about.  I mean, I write a film blog about breaking down complex themes and this movie begs to be unpacked.  Still, as good as it is, I still can't give it my resounding endorsement because it didn't hit me as hard as I thought it would.  One of the dominant ideas of this blog is that I need to stop overhyping myself because that can only lead to misery.  Still, Sentimental Value does the job in spades and I'm just being weird.