Not rated, but this is a story that has just a lot of swearing.  That seems like it wouldn't raise any flags.  The thing is that the movie is more heartbreaking and depressing than anything visual.  But it is also one of those movies that hits differently if you aren't comfortable with war footage.  But in terms of visual things, it's just a lot of swearing.  Also, as much as I love Pavel, I'm a fan of keeping relationships with students more professional.  That's a teacher thing in me.

DIRECTORS: David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin

Okay, I've found a (mostly) kindred spirit.

The Academy Awards tend to choose similar themed documentaries every year.  As a Ukrainian, I tend to lean towards the docs involving the Ukraine / Russia conflict.  They're heartbreaking and they are hard sells for people to watch because they are mostly comprised of war footage.  But the thing that always drove me insane about Russia is that, from an American perspective, it's shocking to hear how pro-Russia the Russian people are.  Internationally, Vladimir Putin is probably one of this century's greatest villains.  And when we watch Russian propaganda from an American perspective, it's easy to see how silly it all comes across.  But what Mr. Nobody Against Putin does (which is a terrible title considering how effective the documentary is) well is let us know how propaganda works in an hour-and-a-half.

Now, the easy read on this, unfortunately, is that --if I showed this to my Trump supporting circle of people --folks would see this as "Look how immoral Russia is."  And you know what?  Russia, especially under Vladimir Putin, is a hellscape.  The propaganda is so thick that it is a miracle that people like Pasha exist.  Like, we get that rules in major cities tend to skew differently than suburbs or, in the case of Pasha, the most toxic place on earth.  When you get people so densely packed together in a city hub, the challenging of ideas is normal.  But out in the middle of nowhere, where it seems like no one cares about the residents, that message is palpable.  But I can't help but make the comparison to suburban Cincinnati.  The fact that the word "Ohio" has become synonymous with "fly-over-state", implying the very existence of the State of Ohio is boring in itself, there's a desperation for identity that propaganda does really well.  If I asked one of the people around me to take care of an immigrant who was staying at my house, they probably would be welcoming and throw a party for them.  But the second I talk about immigration as an issue, it's part and parcel of an identity that is impossible to break.

I love Pasha because I get him too much.  It's funny that he is incredibly aware of his home town of Karabash's repuation.  He knows that it is the most polluted, unlivable place on Earth.  He knows that the buildings are dirty and that, because the entire town is industrialway, there are pipes that go back and forth.  But he also is hurting because he loves his homeland so much.  Pasha is a young dude.  I don't know if he remembers a time when things weren't under Putin's thumb.  But the war with Ukraine was an escalation that went too far for him.  I mean, he was fighting the system even before the Ukraine invasion, so I really like Pasha then.  But he has the same logic that I have for America.  I get really emotionally moved by what is happening in the country now.  The assumption is that, when you protest what is happening in your country, it is done out of a lack of patriotism.  I don't think that was it.  In fact, I might have believed the same thing at one point, wondering if I was at all patriotic.  But the truth is that I'm overly patriotic.  I just hate Nationalism that much. If we're talking about doing the little things that are going to get you in trouble, Pasha understands John Lewis's attitude of "Good Trouble" quite well.

But this is all happening here.  Yeah, we're not in those final days of having to record our indoctrination courses in schools.  But there are things we cannot say out loud.  Heck, I got into a lot of trouble this week where I almost got fired for speaking out for what was actually happening in this country that aligned with Church teaching.  I don't regret what I did.  Heck, I guarantee if push-came-to-shove, I'd do it again.  But that's the attitude that Pasha has.  He's a guy who knows that teaching lies to children is wrong.  (I'm really soapboxing with this blog and I apologize.  I just like having a blog that I actually want to write a lot about.  Imagine when I have to go back and finish the Bergman set!  Yeesh!) But that first half-hour was mirroring what is going on here in spades.  It's kind of horrifying.  I think a lot of that comes from the notion that propaganda is comforting.  It's nice to think that your team is always the good guy.  (Please note:  I continually am disappointed with everyone, so I know that I don't have a team.  But I also need to keep examining that attitude so I don't actually get on a team that I don't acknowledge.)  Watching those cars wave Russian flags outside their windows without any encouragment?  That's the stuff that scares me.  I don't want to have that kind of warmongering Nationalism as a form of comfort.  Maybe that's the only way that you can justify a questionable war and still be able to sleep at night.  Knowing that people are going to die is a hard sell, so giving the war a glorious cause is the ultimate sleep aid.

I keep looking for the name of the scumbag history teacher, though.  I need an entire documentary on this guy.  From what was implied, that history teacher was a full-on plant by the Putin government.  He was there with the expressed purpose of misinforming students.  Golly, that teacher of the year award (which seems like something that the Hallmark Channel made up) is painful.  The thing is, it's weird to think that Pasha actually thought that it might have gone to him.  Yes, we are hopefully all brimming with self-awarness and have the benefit of being outside the film.  But that history teacher, as much as that whole thing was manipulated to show that the Putin government is the one that people want, is actually the one that the people want.  It's actually odd to think that, in an interview with Pasha, that he wanted to be the cool teacher.  That guy, even as a teacher completely divorced from his words, was the worst.  Like, he's just a bummer of a dude.  I actually wonder what the history teacher's relationship to Pasha was like.  After all, Pasha did stuff that would get anyone else killed.  He played "America the Beautiful" over the speakers.  He put images of the underground on the windows.  He had a democratic flag in his office.  Why did ol' history teacher agree to be interviewed by him?  And not to be the worst, that guy even looked evil.  Like, you couldn't cast a better secret police guy.  Holy moley.

I don't necessarily love Pasha's relationship with his students.  I know that there's something that is trying to be communicated in the film.  The idea is that Pasha cares for the students under his care more than your average teacher.  He created a safe space for these kids to be themselves in an environment that actively stifled any creativity or free thought.  It was aiming for that Glee relationship.  But guess what?  I also hated the relationship on Glee.  His obsession with his one student kind of sours a lot of the film.  I get that he cares for his kids, but the teacher in me needs to establish boundaries.  

Anyway, the movie is a tank.  I like this guy a lot.  I teach John Lewis's March in my classroom and I make my students understand that the term "Good Trouble" is so vital for active citizens.  Pasha's tale is the ultimate "good trouble" story for Russia.  I wish that he didn't have to leave his home, but I hope that he's out there making more trouble.

Rated R because this is about a real murder.  While there isn't any gore in the film (that I remember), the entire thing is pretty brutal. This is a movie that addresses racial tensions, coupled with the tensions that come from class differences.  There is a solid amount of language and the movie is meant to make you mad.  Still, if you are worried about seeing visual things, that part is the only thing that is pretty tame.  But if you have any degree of imagination, maybe go in with caution.  

DIRECTOR: Geeta Gandbhir

Oh man, these things are getting harder to write.  Again, if I can knock this one out by the end of the day, I can get caught up to where I'm supposed to be.  (Assuming I didn't forget to write about one somewhere along the way.)   This one is a weird one because it absolutely does not feel like an Academy Award nominee.  Not to say it is bad, by any means.  But this feels like your standard Netflix True Crime doc as opposed to anything beyond what is obvious.  The thing is, there is something incredibly important about watching The Perfect Neighbor.  It's almost like this is one of those situations where someone is taking their medication because it's baked into the pie.

Because I don't really know how I want to approach this yet, I want to say the obvious thing.  As much as this is an interesting true crime story about how Susan Lorincz killed Ajike Owens, this is fundamentally about racial justification for murder coupled with the dangerous precedent about the Stand Your Ground laws in Florida.  But I had a conversation with a student who saw this movie as well and the Stand Your Ground thing didn't even really come into play.  Honestly, as a true crime doc, it works better than a movie with a message.  That's no good for me.  I want it the other way around.  I want this to be a story about the Stand Your Ground laws that happens to be interesting to watch.  The Stand Your Ground thing is definitely an afterthought.  That conversation doesn't really show up until the last half-hour.  And while it is important to how things play out for Susan Lorincz, it reads as an afterthought to the whole story.

There's also an unintended consequence for how the film is presented.  This is a story about Ajike Owens, a mother of four, who was standing up for her kids after Lorincz harassed them for years.  But Ajike Owens is almost the "surprise" of the movie, and that seems wildly inappropriate.  Her death was a massive tragedy.  It brought a community out to memorialize her.  Like, that was so much more important.  Okay, I'm dancing back and forth over this.  Here's me, trying to learn as much as I can about communities and how that they have suffered.  But I couldn't point out Ajike Owens's name out as it stared me right in the face.  Heck, I knew that this story ended in a murder.  I even kind of guessed that it was Owens who would be killed by Lorincz.  But my brain never put two-and-two together that this was national news.  No, in my mind, this was a small story that never made the circuit.  And would I have been invested in this story had it not been marketed as a true crime documentary?  Probably not.  There's so much misery out there and some of it is going to fall through the cracks.

Before I get too overwhelmed by side thoughts, I do really like how this documentary is formatted.  Ultimately, this is almost a found-footage doc compiled mostly of police body cams.  One of the key conceits in the film is that Susan Lorincz is a miserable human being.  I do suspect that there's mental health issues, but I also don't want to diminish how terrible of a person she actually is.  She's the kind of person who has swallowed this narrative that her rights are way more important than anyone else's rights.  She, on a dime, will call the police on children who aren't doing anything illegal.  By having the story told by the body cams, we're reminded how much she's abusing that 9-1-1 call by having these officers come out monthly to complain about kids playing football on a neighbor's yard.  I'm trying to at least relate to Lorincz (even though I really don't and don't really want to).  Do I find neighbors' behavior annoying?  Honestly, not really.  I had an annoying neighbor once.  But I always think that the squeaky wheel neighbor is always way more toxic than a live-and-let-live neighbor.  The one phrase that is repeated all the way through the piece is "They're just kids."  Yeah, they are just kids.  I don't even like football, but I'm glad that these kids are playing football rather than sitting inside watching TV...like my kids tend to do.

The messed up part of me wants to know everything that there is about Susan Lorincz.  I think we're all reading mental illness.  But the fact that I want to make that deep dive into what would make Susan Lorincz the way she is might be completely inappropriate.  Lorincz is the product of disappointment in the American Dream.  She has been told her entire life that she could be anything that she wants.  She was told by people in government that her right to bear arms was to protect her from all of the minorities out there and she created these fantasies in her head about defending herself from the savages outside her door.  There's a scene that almost makes the movie really worth watching.  When the film doesn't use bodycam footage, it uses CCTV footage to fill in those gaps.  At one point, towards the end of the story, Susan Lorincz is being interrogated for a second time.  In that narrative, she constructs this detailed breakdown of all the events that led her to shoot Ajike Owens.  There's a phone call to 9-1-1 and, according to Lorincz, Ajike Owens started breaking down the door.   In reality, we know this to be untrue because there's only two minutes between the phone call that Lorincz is worried about what might happen and the killing of Ajike Owens.  She was waiting to shoot her.  She wanted to shoot her.  She wanted to show that she wasn't someone who was pushed around and that all came from the narrative that she heard that poor people and Black people wanted to kill her.

And the really crazy thing is that I really believe that Lorincz probably believed the yarn that she was spinning. In every scene you see her, there's this victim mentality.  There's no moustache twirling.  It's just this lady who doesn't understand why she is the one in police captivity.  There's a damning moment at the end of that second interview.  She is given an opportunity to write a letter to the kids of Ajike Owens.  Instead, Lorincz doubles down and insists that their mother was trying to kill her, just so the police read that note.  But the piece de resistance is that she just refused to go with the police to the holding cell.  If there was a greater commentary on how a certain class is privileged, it's in that moment where an older White lady, after being arrested, refused to move for police officers and the officers had to beg her to go is a telling tale of the separate police states we have.

As a message about Stand Your Ground, it's definitely there.  I don't think that it hits as hard as it could, especially considering that Lorincz is found guilty of manslaughter.  But as a memorial for Ajike Owens, it at least is a good start.

Rated R for a lot of cursing.  Not a lot a lot.  But, like, it seemed like they knew that they were going to get an R-rating, so they just threw the cursing in there.  Like, there are people on fire, but it's all kind of tame in terms of graphic violence.  It's intense because you are worried about a school bus full of kids dying in a horrible fire.  But it seems like it got the R-rating because of the language.  It's also weird that the two of them swear in front of the kids.  (Okay, I know it's a life-or-death situation.  Still.) 

DIRECTOR: Paul Greengrass

One of my least favorite feelings is being behind on the blog.  It is such an unnecessary thing in my life and it slows me from watching other movies.  But I've also been so exhausted when I get home that I haven't been watching movies anyway.  So now that I think that I'm through the woods (pun not intended), I can get caught up on...let's check...oh.  The Lost Bus.

So my wife and I try watching all the Academy Award nominees before the actual Academy Awards.  It's something we both love to do.  But I also know that there aren't enough hours in the day for us to sit down and watch every movie on that list.  I already established that I am a very sleepy puppy.  So I watch the categories that she's a little less excited about.  These tend to be "Best Original Song," "Documentary Feature", and "Visual Effects."  The Visual Effects category is the one that she least minds me watching.  Some of these movies tend to be rough.  I don't think that The Lost Bus is rough.  I do say that I wouldn't be watching The Lost Bus if it wasn't for the Oscars though.

It's funny.  The Lost Bus and Deepwater Horizon feel like the same film to me.  Both of these movies I watched for the Academy Awards and the Academy Awards alone.  They are both survival movies based on real recent events with a slightly environmental tone (that seems almost to absolve issues with environmentalism).  But there is one thing that absolutely drives me bananas.  These are both stories about how "common sense wins out against intellectualism."  Don't get me wrong.  We're supposed to care about Mary in this story.  But Mary, as a dynamic character, changes way more than Kevin does.  If anything, this is a story about how Kevin is the only perfect character in the story.  

Yes, we're supposed to have sympathy for Kevin.  I'll even go as far as to say that's a solid message.  I like the notion that the working poor have so much more to deal with than employment. It's a lovely message.  But I don't like the fact that it's an either / or situation.  I know.  The movie implies that Kevin's respect for Mary grows as she steps up to more and more dangerous situations.  But the story, intentional or no, has the message that only certain people live in the real world.  Kevin is the product of "the real world."  He has kids who get sick.  He has an ex-wife who is unsympathetic to his father's death.  He's the one who has to mourn a father that he never cared for.  He did the right thing to take care of Shaun.  But having a protagonist where nothing is really his fault and everyone else kind of sucks, it undoes Die Hard.  

John McClane has ultimately becoming the template / archetype for this type of movie.  He's the guy who is down on his luck and has such a specific skill for keeping his head during a crisis.  While John is good at taking down terrorists, Kevin is good at: Bus.  He's good at bus.  But John McClane has real flaws that brought him to this place in his life.  He's hot-headed.  He is emotionally illiterate.  When he's trying to get Holly back (and ultimately loses her in the sequels), it's because of his own stubbornness.  Kevin --who I have to remind everyone is based on a real dude --has none of those faults.  It really does seem like his wife was being irrational.  It did seem like Shaun blames his dad for all of his teenage problems.  The worst thing that Kevin does is misdiagnose Shaun's stomach flu, which is part of parenting.  (Also, does Linda leave Kevin's very fragile mom at a rescue shelter as she drove Shaun away?) I think you need to have something for the protagonist to overcome.  It's a bummer that this movie keeps hitting the same beat over and over.

The funny thing is, that this is a movie with something to say.  Yes, it's a little bit of that "Our government is the real hero" mentality, but in a fairly good way (because I like firefighters?).  However, there is this final message at the end of the film given as text explaining the real story.  The movie ends with this text where we find out that a lot of the problems that happened were because of Pacific Power, which is an anti-corporate message.  But the thing is...the movie doesn't hit it that hard.  I feel bad for the actor who had to play the Pacific Power rep because that had to be the most thankless roll.   They hired a guy, made him look smarmy, and had him continually apologize for the power not being off when it was supposed to be off.  It's this thing that seems like it could be pretty important.  But instead, it's an afterthought.  Like, we needed a bad guy for this movie, so we have this Donald Gennaro type from Jurassic Park.  Maybe the frustration I have in this movie is that everything is just a bit too simple.  Kevin is a bit too noble.  Mary is a bit too naive.  The heroes are so heroic and the bad guy is only a bad guy.  It's kind of one of those things that roots for common sense as the only attitude to advance.

It's such a basic movie that there's almost nothing to talk about.  Now, I associate Paul Greengrass with the Bourne movies.  These movies are amazingly shot.  And, to be fair, The Lost Bus is pretty well shot.  It's a tricky concept, having the location being one giant blaze while the characters stay on the bus.  But the thing that I don't think that my brain would let go of is the idea that the Bourne movies are almost too complex while The Lost Bus is almost too simple of a film.  Like, it feels like there are beats in the movie that are thrown in there simply to give the film any kind of complexity.  There's this thing about Mary.  I don't know if this is true about the real Mary or not.  I don't think it really matters because I have to believe that this film took its fair share of liberties.  But Mary had never left her home town.  The big regret for her character isn't getting back to her family.  It's the idea that she's embraced her small life to zealously.  But I can tell you, I never really cared about that beat.  I know that Greengrass wants me to give something for Mary.  But I found Mary to be a one note character that never really felt human.  

As a visual effects thing, which is what the film is nominated for, it's pretty good.  And if you really shut your brain off and have a good time with it, it's pretty easy to do.  But in terms of any kind of meat to this story, it's a little bit of that backdoor patriotism that is fine, but not fulfilling.  I don't think that there's a challenging idea in this entire film.

Rated R for being an honest look at facing one's mortality.  Life is simultaneously beautiful, funny, bright, joyful and gross, vulgar, and painful.  There's nudity, but it's not in a sexual content.  There is some crude speech about sexual acts, but no on-screen sexual acts.  This is the story about a woman facing those final moments and these moments are not edited for the sake of an audience's comfort.  It does need to be R-rated because the world is R-rated, especially when fighting something that is killing you.

DIRECTOR:  Ryan White

I want to stress that, if I misgender Andrea Gibson, it is an accident.  I struggle when I'm writing quickly.  On top of that, my head is not in the right space.  I have been making so many basic mistakes over the course of this weekend because I have the world on my shoulders right now.  I've done even the simplest of tasks wrong.  Please understand, for Gibson's sake, that I embrace their pronoun.  But I also am giving myself the grace to understand that I have to understand when something is done out of malice and something is done out of best intentions.

My dad died of cancer.  I've probably mentioned it a time or two, but it hasn't always been the center of attention. To be the guy who is openly responding to a story about cancer with "Cancer is bad" seems like a pretty low bar to be meeting.  Come See Me in the Good Light is my least favorite thing about cancer.  It's the weird sense of hope and the notion that you can do something to change things.  The movie starts off with Andrea saying that they want the movie to start with their funeral as their words play over the film.  I thought, "That's a really good idea.  But does this mean that Andrea survives cancer?"  I mean, if the film didn't have that footage, wouldn't have made sense to respect their wishes?  

But as much as this is a story about mortality, this is a story about hope.  Okay, it's a story about all of those elements that goes into a cancer diagnosis.  When we see cancer in fictional films, we see the Hollywood version.  We see the person walking around on a ventilator, hacking up a lung and coughing blood into a toilet bowl.  They're more crochety and offer sage wisdom at the most important part of the film.  Cancer isn't that.  Cancer, for as life-changing as the diagnosis is, is about knowing what parts of life are disappearing every day and finding ways to discover normality.   (Note:  I stopped writing here and there was a long gap between the first part that I wrote and this section.  If there is a disconnect, I apologize.)  Maybe that is part of the human experience too.  Let's separate ourselves from literal cancer for right now.  We're all destined to encounter tragedy.  I don't know if this shocks anyone, but there will be good times and there will be bad times.  What Come See Me in the Good Light understands that there's this need for anything normal.  Even when the abnormal keeps going on, it's an attempt to quarantine that weirdness.

One thing that hit hard is the notion of living in three week increments.  For Andrea and Megan, these three weeks are the time periods between tests to see how much the cancer has progressed within Andrea.  For the sake of storytelling, one of these three week stints is waiting to get permission for Andrea to do one final spoken word performance.  For me, that was exciting to see Tig Notaro, whom we might have tickets to see fairly soon.  Andrea's story of having to do their last performance kind of hit me the hardest throughout the piece.  There's so much out there that I really want to do and I don't know if I'm going to Willy Loman my life away waiting for retirement, only to curl up and pass away before I get the artistic satisfaction that I have been craving.  I suppose the transcendentalist in me wants to go off in the woods now and write that Great American Novel before the world gets too far away.  Still, Andrea positioned themselves into a place where there is simultaneously an abundance of time and no time whatsoever.  

I think I would go crazy if I had Andrea's specific breakdown.  I don't deny that this is a celebration of a relationship and of a life.  Andrea doesn't seem, by any means, paralyzed by the reality of their situation.  That cross weighs over them, but it seems like the Andrea we get in this documentary is the Andrea that was probably the Andrea before the cancer and after the cancer.  But I also know that, when things go bad in my life, I know that I have a litany of responsibilities that I can't afford to indulge in.  That has to be maddening, knowing that final moments are determined by a number at the end.  And when that number was a "10" (which, by context clues, was a very good thing), I wondered if that was either a misread or something else.  The cynic in me said, "That test wasn't done correctly for it to swing so strongly in one direction than the other."  But it also might be part of that unknowable element of medicine.  I mean, I'm a pretty strict follower of Western medicine.  But I can't help but hope that Andrea wanted to do this show so badly that they biologically held the cancer back for enough time to do this performance.

Here's where I feel like a real punk.  Honestly, this entire time I've felt like a  punk writing this.  Come See Me in the Good Light is Andrea and Megan's cancer journey.  It's not mine.  I don't have cancer.  My father died of cancer, so I'm projecting all of my own trauma onto this movie (which is slightly permitted, to a certain extent.)  But the bigger thing that I have to do is that I have to criticize this as a movie.  And, as a movie, I didn't want to let go of the sympathy that I had for Andrea and Meg.  But at a certain point, my mind started to wander.  Yes, I absolutely felt for them.  Once again, this was a story about life as much as it was about death.  I needed to see how Andrea viewed themselves as a teen.  I needed to see what Meg saw in Andrea.  And all of that stuff was very moving.  But there were moments in the movie --and maybe this is completely unfair --where it felt like the movie was padding to be the length of a movie.  Yes, I did learn something about why some LGBTQIA+ people stay friends with their exes.  I liked that a lot.  But I also kept being distracted by people who seemed on the periphery of Andrea's story.  

Do you know what wasn't really communicated much to me?  As much as this is about Andrea and their art, I never really dealt with the scale of someone being a poet laureate.  There was one moment where it really hit me.  Andrea's final performance was sold out on the marquee.  I thought, "Man, it's hard to fill a theater with a poet."  Because as much as this is about Andrea's poetry, Andrea seems almost too normal to be a poet laureate.  Okay, there's definitely things in there that I only saw in my artsy-fartsy literature circles.  But from any stretch of the imagination, Andrea's story is almost one of how normal they are compared to what we associate with this prestigious title.  One of the things that Andrea clings to, especially when it comes to writing, is the idea that they don't know a lot of words.  I mean, I get frustrated by that entire concept.  But realistically, I kind of applaud the fact that the key element of any kind of communication is clarity.  It's not like their poetry is necessarily easy to process.  It's just not raising its nose to its audience. At that to the entire piece of Andrea being a small town basketball player who found an outlet in spoken word and all of the choices that we see lead to a consistent image of Andrea as someone who just wants to talk.  

Is this movie going to change me?  I'm such a jerk, but I don't think it will.  I think we've talked a little bit about how much I feel the pain of cancer.  But, as effective as this is as a tribute to a beautiful human being, it almost acts as a better tribute to their families and friends than it does to a general audience.  What it does for me is give me awareness of an artist I was unfamiliar with.  But this thing acts as something sacred to those who knew Andrea.  This work should exist, but I don't know as an all-audiences thing.  The people who love this would treasure this forever.  Regardless, it gives us a photo of someone who moved mountains in their own way.

Rated R for gore mostly.  Guillermo del Toro knows how to make gore somehow interesting.  Still, it doesn't change the fact that these are incredibly gory movies.  There's also one scene where Victor's rear end is shown for a more-than-necessary amount of time.  But the big thing you have to remember that del Toro is trying to scare you with a lot of the stuff he puts in his films.  There are some truly upsetting shots, even though it seems to capture the tone of Mary Shelley's work. R.

DIRECTOR:  Guillermo del Toro

I'm writing this immediately after writing my blog on The Alabama Solution.  If you are just reading everything that I write, first of all, thank you?  I don't know if that reader really exists out there, but I did get spammed by an "AI creator" to take one of his courses on Threads.  Maybe he's reading.  If so, thank you, but also cool it with AI, okay?  Anyway, still pretty traumatized, but I'm really trying to distract myself as I continually have chained panic attacks throughout the weekend.  Here's the deal.  I, again, watched Frankenstein before I decided to throw my entire life away for my morals.  I'm still kind of reeling, so I apologize if I don't do this blog justice.

I have had a theory that those who go into some kind of humanities / English-adjacent studies program are going to have to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein about four times before they die.  I'm the outlier.  I had to teach that book for years, which threw my numbers way off.  But I remember reading it in high school once and then having to read it for two seperate classes in college.  I have a love / hate relationship with the book.  I intellectually understand its brilliance.  Because of the novel, Mary Shelley became the de facto creator of science fiction.  And it is incredible.  Like, it's a way smarter book than anyone I know could do. It's deep.  It's insane that it was written basically on a bet.  And!  AND!  It kills the kid in the book.  Kids have plot armor all over them.  Every single Jurassic Park movie has a kid in it and the kid's always fine by the end.

But I think that the Universal Boris Karloff version did so much damage to the notion of the purpose of Frankenstein that there is a notion that completely contradicts the intentions of Mary Shelley.  It doesn't taken an English teacher like me (at least until Monday...) to inform you that the real villain of the piece is Victor Frankenstein.  That's the point.  The monster, for all of his violent deeds, is desperate for a moment's peace from any direction, especially from his creator.  Most of our criticism of the Universal Frankenstein is that the creature never really evolves beyond rudimentary speech.  It is incapable of higher level thought.  Other adaptations have rectified this.  But the bigger problem that I realized with the tonal shift of Guillermo del Toro's version of Frankenstein is in Oscar Isaac's performance.  Don't get me wrong, I think Oscar Isaac is great in everything, Frankenstein included.  But Jacob Elordi is the actor we're looking at for a reason.  Elordi has all of this emotional nuance with his creature that is just spot-on pitch perfect.  Oscar Isaac?  He's a little over the top and I don't think it is an accident.  The issue I'm dancing around is that the Universal Victor Frankenstein was always just a little too sympathetic to be considered an outright villain.

One of the themes of Frankenstein is that it is almost a work of anti-science.  Victor's largest crime in most adaptations is that he tried to play God and that is his biggest sin.  The distancing himself from the creature was always out of fright.  That's the way I always read it in the book.  I always found it odd that Victor devoted so much of his studies and obsessions to reanimating the dead that I found it somewhat disingenuous to think that, when he was ultimately successful, he would scream at the creature in fear.  The movie doesn't do that.  If anything, as accurate as the spirit of the film is, there is so much that shifts away from the original text.  This version of Victor makes him a barbaric disciplinarian, mirroring a father who beat him to learn whatever was necessary to become the best.  Victor initially embraces the creature, proud of his own success in this version.  The division that happens between Victor and the creature is almost that of that abusive father / son relationship that molded Victor into the callous jerk he is in the story.  I kind of like that better because it makes Victor far more culpable than the novel version who is simply reactionary to the surprise that he encounters. 

There are some changes that I don't quite understand, however.  Victor is a cold dude.  I get that.  The movie gives us a bunch of examples of Victor kind of being the worst and I'm all here for that. But I don't really understand the dynamic of Harlander and Victor.  Harlander funds Victor's work for the entire first act.  (Maybe del Toro painted himself into a corner by making this whole thing divided by act, then realized that Victor's story isn't all that compelling compared to the Creature's.) Harlander seems morally dubious throughout.  He has this secret which is revealed that he is close to death and wants to use Victor's reanimation technology to grant him a second chance at life.  He's also gross, tempting Victor with his niece in exchange for eternal life.  Okay.  But Victor doesn't grant Harlander extended life.  Now, I can see a version of this narrative that shows that Victor only cares about himself, which may be what del Toro and Isaac were pushing for with the scene right before the rise of the Creature.  But instead, I get the one of the few sympathetic moments where Victor explains that the technology was never really intended for that.  There's also the hiding of Harlander's corpse, which doesn't really come into play, especially considering that Victor and Elizabeth share such a complicated relationship. 

But it's the Creature I care about, right?  I can't stress enough that Elordi really brought his A-game.  It's the best of what the book had to offer.  The reason that I emotionally resonated with the Shelley novel wasn't the Victor elements.  It was always about the creature and the blind man.  Maybe that's the teacher in me (God, I don't know what I'm going to do if I don't stay a teacher.) And all of that.  All of that.  Honestly, getting the Creature to confront the boat captain from the framing narrative is perfect.  Because I always treated the Creature as more culpable than this movie let on.  This movie has him being incredibly violent.  But when the Creature takes a beat and explains the story from his perspective, oh my goodness.  Sure, the wolves thing feels like a bit of a cop out.  But I do like the fact that the blind man's family is still no good.  I just have to say that.

Can we also talk about how this movie looks?  Golly, Guillermo del Toro knows how to make a pretty movie.  I've never seen Crimson Peak, but I get the vibe that Crimson Peak was a dry run of what he wanted to do with this because this movie looks like art.  Sure, there ware some Tim Burton vibes at times in this film.  It's the whole macabre thing that both of them share.  But I always feel like del Toro uses that dark aesthetic as a romantic thing as opposed to a twee thing.  (I don't even know if that word's appropriate anymore.) Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein feels almost like a spiritual successor to something like Barry Lyndon (a movie I have yet to see and am too embarrassed to admit that I haven't seen it.) It is just cinematic as can be.

So why isn't it a perfect score for me?  Honestly, for such a long movie (I also hate that every Academy Award nominated film feels the need to be two-and-a-half-plus hours) there are so many beats that don't really either fit in the film or are left incomplete. The changing of Elizabeth is possibly one of the more curious beats.  I get it.  We need to have Victor a little bit more gross than normal. I've already spoken to this. But beyond that, why is Elizabeth Victor's sister-in-law.  It makes her flirtation with Victor odd.  Yes, I get that Victor is attracted to Elizabeth.  But Elizabeth has two very separate reactions to Victor.  She finds him replulsive and seemingly flirts with him.  I do have to remember that this is an epistolary novel.  Victor is telling the story from his perspective, which means we might have a little bit of an unreliable narrator.  But Elizabeth feels really incomplete in the story.

Still, this is a pretty rock solid del Toro.  I mean, it's not hitting my top del Toro movies.  But in terms of cinematic impressiveness?  Incredibly solid.  Now to panic myself to sleep.  Pray for me.

TV-MA because this is a documentary about the real violence that takes place in Alabama (and, by loose proxy, other...) prisons. The conceit almost makes you understand how graphic things are going to get.  This takes smuggled camera phone footage of the abuses that prisoners in the Alabama Prison System face and makes it as raw as it can be.  This movie shows real death and real blood.  There is language and homophobic remarks throughout.  This is not meant to be an easy movie to watch.

DIRECTORS: Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman

I'm really far behind for a reason.  Things...are not good right now.  I'm spiraling pretty hard guys.  I did something that I needed to do at work because it was the right thing to do and I'm probably going to get fired from the best job I'll ever have.  I'm throwing every self-care thing at the wall and seeing if any of them stick.  So maybe, just maybe, crossing off my stupid unnecessary to-do list will give me power over these weird overwhelming feelings I have every few minutes.  I know that this has nothing to do with The Alabama Solution, but I tend to overshare in these things anyway.

I did watch this one a minute ago and I remember being incredibly moved by it.  (When I say, "A minute", it had to be less than a week ago.)  It's just that so much emotional stuff happened between now and then that trying to conjure up my emotional response to something distant is a bit trying right now.  Since both of these moments involved justice, let's color what I'm feeling right now to this film.  One of my low-key regrets on this blog was that I haven't always been the most informed when approaching some of these entries.  I mean, we're all growing and acknowledging that we're growing is important.  Back in the day, I wrote about 13th, a look at the modern day Black slave movement through the lens of law enforcement and the penal system.  I remember being way too centrist about that film in retrospect.  It wasn't that I disagreed with the movie as a whole.  It's just that I thought that I knew better than a group of researchers who were living the life.  

Again, mature life is about growth and, in many ways, I knew a lot about The Alabama Solution without having even heard of it.  But it is so different understanding that the prison industrial complex is corrupt and seeing the images of it from the inside.  What the directors of the film (and I'm not surprised that its The Jinx guys) is take this incredibly widespread story of violent corruption and exploitation and make it incredibly personal.  This isn't one person's story, but grounding the film with Robert Earl Council / Kinetic Justice is possibly the smartest thing that the film could do.  Admittedly, Council is the ideal subject matter.  If the point of the prison system is rehabilitation, Council was rehabilitated against what is even basic logic.  He was a man who pushed to better himself in a system that likes throwing people like him in prison. 

If anything, Council's thriving in prison shows how the system that Council is in wants him to stay savage.  Using Robert Council as an example, he was a guy who jumped onto the few and far between opportunities offered to him.  It's not like the Alabama Department of Corrections was giving Council the chances to better himself.  What I am absolutely taken aback with is that he learned how to self-advocate from the protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.  These were prisoners who knew what they were getting into before they got to prison.  They knew that the system was going to get them for doing the right thing and used those skills to survive in an environment that was meant to kill them.  Again, 13th argued that prisons were modern day slavery, a way to keep Black people and the poor as free labor.  But the only thing that even slightly disrupts that is when those imprisoned know how to understand a legal system that seems almost intentionally obtuse.  When someone is able to somehow break that code that is meant to keep the uninformed in prison, there's a disruption to the status quo that can only punished.  

And as much as this story is about the savage world of the prisoner of Alabama, this is almost a brutal takedown of something that we know so much to be true that it almost feels like we're stereotyping.  I can say that I now know who the governor of Alabama is and she is not failing to live up to an expectation that I have about what I think that the people of Alabama might think of themselves.  (I cannot stress enough that I'm talking about the people who voted her in.  I'm sure that there's the Tim of Alabama just banging his head against the keyboard wondering how he can escape this Fresh Hell).  Kay Ivey is just an old white lady who seems to be afraid of Black people and fosters that fear in all of the people around her. Sure, I have to acknowledge that this documentary, like all documentaries for the most part, has an agenda.  Bias is a thing.  But seeing how the people in prison understand the outcomes of the Stanford Prison Experiment through living it and understanding that the world is a cruel place, Kay Ivey and her entourage come up with ideas that are the results of generations of afraid white people.  

The main issue that seems paper thin is that much of the concern for Alabama's prison system is that, because Alabama might hold the most prisoners per capita, the prisons are overcrowded and there aren't enough guards and employees to staff these prisons in an effective manner.  On one end, with a defecit of qualified employees, these private businesses tend to take anyone that they can get.  There's a beautiful irony that the prisoners who are leaking this footage to the press are getting their phones from corrupt cops who are then being filmed being monsters.  But beyond that, Ivey's solution to a problem with overcrowding  and understaffed prisons is to shudder the prisons that Alabama has and transfer all of these prisoners into three mega-prisons.  It seems like she doesn't understand how overcrowding works, but it seems all really impressive to those who don't want to put a ton of critical thinking into this.

Just a heads up, I'm spiraling.  I have two more of these things to write afterwards and I'm having these clusters of panic attacks, so I apologize if I'm not all here for this.  I'm really hoping that if I get more of these done, I can at least feel the (chemical that is released from joy?  My brain isn't braining right.  Seratonin?) kick from being done.  I feel like I'm doing this thing a disservice.

What's really interesting is that The Alabama Solution also wants to dispel the notion that, while mass incarceration is a race issue, it's also a poverty issue.  The filmmakers cement the story of The Alabama Solution on Steven Davis, a white man who is killed by a guard.  All of the inmates involved in the video tell the story of how Steven was subdued and that the guards just kept hitting him and hitting him because he had a plastic knife tied to his hands.  He dies in the hospital barely looking human (I can't help but make the Emmitt Till comparison).  Now, the real empathy that the movie establishes is that every human life is connected to another human life.  The Davises don't seem like rich folks.  If you were to comment on what (potentially) Appalachian white seems like, the Davises probably might match a lot of those traits.  (I'm really not trying to stereotype here, but Mrs. Davis is meant to be representative of a population.) But Mrs. Davis, because of Steven's placement in prison, has made herself educated on the nuance of prison.  She loved her kid.  She acknowledged that he was a flawed individual who found himself in the prison system.  But she also has that knowledge that not everyone in prison is beyond redemption or at the same level of threat to society.  Yet there's a haunting part where the people in her environs are looking for reasons why Steven died beyond the notion that the prison system might be corrupt.  There's an old man who thinks he is being well-intentioned who keeps asking what Steven could have done that got him killed.  Eventually, he lands on the notion that Steven's drug use was the real probelm.  

That's what the world seems to be.  Again, I'm just going to ride my anxiety wave right now.  If something bad happens to someone, there needed to be a reason.  Instead, we keep forgetting that these people are people.  Everyone's a little bit good.  Everyone's a little bit bad.  There are people who make me so fearful about humanity that I get angry.  But then I have to remember.  These are people who are loved.  It is so hard to remember that kind of stuff normally.  However, a movie about the grossness of our penal system reminds me that there are other people suffering when someone is killed and it takes those people to see the dead's personhood sometimes.

I'm having a hard time writing beyond this point.  I knew there were a bunch of things that I wanted to say, but I have to cut it off here.

PG.  It's really funny.  My second youngest daughter did not want to do this for family movie night because there's a really scary scene in it, according to her.  She told me when it was coming up and she hid her eyes in my shoulder and I let her know when the scene was over.  Spoiler alert: the scene was not scary.  There were some scenes that were a little scary.  There's one joke that's entire punchline is how scary this is for a kids' movie.  But, honestly, Elio is fantastically tame.  Some younger kids might have a problem with the fact that Elio is orphaned and has to deal with dead parents.  But beyond that, it's pretty mild.

DIRECTORS: Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, and Domee Shi

I hate that I kind of like this movie.

I mean, the movie is the safest Disney movie I've seen in a while and that's a real problem considering that I know the background of this movie.  I wish I didn't.  For those not in the know, Adrian Molina, who is credited first for directing this movie, made this as a personal story about feeling alienated when it came to being a young homosexual.  I get the vibes that Disney and Pixar have a tumultuous relationship.  Pixar --and thank goodness for this --loves pushing the emotional and cultural envelope when it comes to a lot of their movies.  Disney isn't completely devoid of being challenging.  It's just that they see the bottom dollar first and foremost and that often means nerfing artists' visions when it comes to saying meaningful things. There have to have been arguments in boardrooms and some name-calling has to have happened. 

I wish that I didn't know that story because I feel like I could have lived with the vanillaness of Elio without the background that someone's very personal tale wasn't forcably removed in exchange for something that would play better in the Fly Over states.  Because the worst part of it all is that Elio didn't make that much of an impact culurally.  I mean, here I am, writing about Elio because it is up for Best Animated Feature.  It's not going to win.  Oh, heck no.  KPop Demon Hunters is going to run away with that one easily.  It's just depressing to think that, if Disney decided to take a chance with this one, it might have been a movie that we talked about for years.  But alternatively, it could have been one of those movies that still tanked, regardless of how it was made and then people would be blaming the homosexual agenda and all around wokeness for why the movie didn't do well.  Again, I can speculate all day.

But as a vanilla movie about a kid, the one thing that kind of gets me about Pixar, even when they aren't pushing the boundary about theme, is that they get human interaction.  Elio thrives because it understands that relationships are messy and that people are idiosycratic.  Listen, I don't want to slag KPop Demon Hunters because I think that movie is absolutely fabulous. But as much as I like KPop Demon Hunters, it isn't great with vulnerablilty.  The characters get sad and fight, sure.  But Elio's problems, from moment one in this picture, come from the burden of having to exist in a world where there's nothing left for you.  For the sake of a coherent blog post, I am going to pretend that I didn't know about the heartwrenching gay narrative and stick with the dead family thing.  I apologize to the LGBTQIA+ community, but I am better with the dead parent narrative.  You're right.  It should have been your issue.  But since I can talk about what was on screen, I'm going to do that.

If the story, regardless of intent, is about alienation, it doesn't matter what the external conflict of the story is.  Honestly, the external conflict is all window dressing.  Elio is a borderline animated reskin of Galaxy Quest in a lot of ways.  It may not be straight up making commentary on Star Trek, but the rest is there.  The protagonist, through heavy heapings of dramatic irony, is lying to these aliens, pretending that he's some big tough hero so he can stay in space.  A violent alien threatens to expose his ineptitude.  He's eventually revealed to be a fraud, but still stands up for the right thing in the end.  It's all very fun and the kids in the family got behind that.  But what this story is all about is in the small moments.  It's kind of amazing that I'm not attacking this movie harder, considering that the movie almost buries its purpose for existing.

If the story is about alienation (see, I got back there!), then the entire adventure story in space is almost a way for Elio to distract himself from the real problems he has.  Yes, he's a child so we have to cut him some slack. But every time we get a little invested in the external conflict of the film, there's a small reminder that Elio has way bigger problems.  I do kind of like that we don't have to have the Bambi moment of seeing Elio's parents die or the fact that he's handed off to Aunt Olga.  Instead, we have an almost in media res situation where Elio is already resentful of his aunt and she is in over her head.  He's desperate for any kind of escape and it is the voice of Kate Mulgrew, appropriately talking about Voyager (the probe, not the ship.  Both were vital to Star Trek lore though, so just enjoy all of the levels of nerddom happening there.).  When he uses a love for space in an unhealthy way, it's scary how quick he wants to abandon any family ties.  There's the narrative not necessarily in the background, but not in the foreground, of how hurt Aunt Olga is about how Elio treats her.  

All of this leads to my favorite moment in the film.  One of the more fun ideas behind Elio is that there is a duplicate who is borderline a robot that clones your genetic material so no one notices that you are missing.  It's a fun device conceptually, but it also leads to commentary on the role of parents, adopted or no.  The Clone Elio at home eventually gets discovered that he's not real, which is a level of intuition that made me feel guilty.  I personally would look at my kids' improved behavior as good fortune and never question it.  Thank goodness that the aliens sent a message to Aunt Olga to make her just paranoid enough to question weirdness in her life.  Anyway, Elio looks in on how the clone is doing and, when he sees that both the clone and Aunt Olga are happy, he realizes how easy it would have been to make this woman happy.  Yes, real Elio shrugs off this moment because he's in the midst of a crisis.  But the fact that he sees that even the smallest of effort would have changed his guardian's life is interesting.

This leads me back to the fact that the film is vanilla.  Because beyond Aunt Olga's frustrations with the fact that she has no idea what she's doing as a parent, the only other fun commentary is the role of non-traditional friendships.  I love Glordon.  I really do.  He's a great supporting castmate.  But there isn't much there to say beyond the fact that Glordon doesn't get along with this dad?  I mean, sure, I could dive deep into the fact that, for all of Grigon's faults, he's a good dad, kind of?  It's so surface level that I almost don't feel like writing about it.  But this is typical Disney fodder.  It's not as challenging as most Pixar films and that's why Elio is ultimately going to be forgotten in the long run.  

It's a fun movie.  I had a good time with it.  But you can feel that there were no chances being taken with this one.  I'm sure that the corporate higher ups are all nervous in the fact that people don't go to the movies anymore and can't respect creators enough to challenge audiences, regardless of if they're going to show up anymore.  Still, it's a fun movie that no one will remember this time next year.  It's a good time without a lot of substance.

Rated R for language, sex, nudity, racial slurs, and violence.  It's a Safdie movie, so you can expect at least a little bit of questionable material.  This one gets pretty explicit at various parts of the movie, so just be prepped.  It's not exactly Uncut Gems level of intense, but it isn't exactly a walk in the park either.  Even when things aren't explicit, the movie is graphic enough to convey that kids shouldn't be seeing this movie.  If you signed up to see a biopic about table tennis, yeah, that's not exactly the best description.

DIRECTOR:  Josh Safdie

I really do have to make that point clear.  This isn't "That ping pong movie."  Okay, it is.  When it all comes down to it and people ask you, "What's Marty Supreme?"  It's that ping pong movie.  But you know what?   It totally isn't.  As much as this is a movie about a real life table tennis champion, so little of the movie is actually about table tennis that I'm almost insulted on behalf of this movie for being reduced to it being described as a ping pong movie.

I also have to make a confession.  I told everyone that I wasn't excited to see this movie.  After all, I wasn't a fan of Uncut Gems, which made me think that the Safdies only did shocking movies.  And it's not like Marty Supreme isn't intense at times.  As I mentioned in my MPA section, there are sections that get wildly uncomfortable.  It's just that Marty Supreme is an incredibly told story that is engaging and often surprising.  The second reason that I wasn't excited about this movie is that I wasn't exactly jazzed to see another Timothee Chalamet biopic that is out just in time for Oscar season.  We had a discussion in my film class that, outside of Dune, Timothee Chalamet does better in movies when he is a supporting actor as opposed to having the film rest on his shoulders.  But now I have to put that in question because every single performer in this movie absolutely nailed it.

Even Gwenyth Paltrow.  Okay, I have no shade for Paltrow normally.  It's just that I've never really seen her in a role like she had in this film.  I don't know.  It always felt like Paltrow signed up for things that were safer.  I know that there's a bit of a hubbub about the fact that she came out of a six-year retirement for this film and people are wondering why.  I mean, it isn't all that shocking.  This is a character that actually was a bit challenging.  There's depth to that character.  Who wouldn't want to play Kay in this movie?  It was a no brainer and she honestly did a fantastic job with the role.  

But I am trying to nail down what impressed me most about the movie.  The easy answer is that it wasn't about ping-pong because sports / competition movies do little for me.  Instead, I want to first and foremost applaud the performances.  I know.  I've been doing that a lot so far.  But as much as I'm praising Chalamet and Paltrow (again, I won't take back what I said...they did a fantastic job), I'm really praising Odessa A'zion as Rachel. Oh my goodness, every time she's on screen, my wife and whispered back and forth, "Who is that?  She's so good in this."  Rachel could have been a forgotten part in the hands of a lesser actress.  The movie takes place in the 1950s.  Abused housewife having an affair with the protagonist is borderline an archetype with a sprinkle of trope in there.  Rachel, from moment one, gains sympathy.  The opening credits involve Marty's sperm impregnating Rachel's egg.  And we see nor-hide-nor-hair from her for a good while.  The next time we see her, she's eight months pregnant and it seems like her life just fell apart.  So when we see her making these active choices that show that she has more agency than Marty seems to allow her, it's fasciating.  And, in a really messed up way, Rachel is good for Marty.  He's his best self when he's with her, as long as he's not in survival mode.  Also, Tyler the Creator, while not as juicy of a part than the other characters, can really act.  Like, really act.  I knew that he was in this movie, but I kept forgetting that when I saw that Wally holds his own to Marty's overly smug characterization.

As good as the acting was (which --despite it being early days --probably should get some acting accolades), the script?!?  I mean, the Safdies are kind of famous for script writing. But this is a story that kept on catching me off guard.  I mean, I cannot give enough respect for the sheer chaos that this movie exhibits, especially when it comes to Moses the Dog.  Oh my goodness, it's amazing how much bad luck one character can have.  But the Safdies, beyond simply giving the film some honestly A-class dialogue, wrote a story where we absolutely hate the protagonist, yet want him to succeed.  He's a more pathetic Walter White.  And the thing is, the screenwriters understood that not everything in the film is necessarily Marty's fault.  The inciting incident for the second act that carries Marty through an After Hours level of insanely bad luck is a moment where he refused to be bullied by his uncle.  His uncle very clearly said that he would get paid at the end of the day.  But based on his uncle's character, that was simply a ruse to keep him in the family business.  When his uncle hires a cop to arrest him for stealing, despite the fact that Marty's right and that the money was his, everything else becomes a series of bad choices made out of desperation.  Marty, throughout the piece, has two problems: bad luck and a bad attitude.  The bad luck sucks and maybe a better human being would know when to throw in the cards.  But Marty's character turns every 3 problem into a 10 problems given enough rope to hang himself.

Because I listen to "You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes", I can't help but try to tie the end of this blog to religion.  The Safdies have openly been telling stories about the Jewish people in their films.  This one is interesting because there's almost something masochistic about Judaism in this movie.  It's not openly ever about faith.  But the first act of the film establishes that one of the main characters is a Holocaust survivor.  Coupled with that, there's a stigma to the fact that a Japanese challenger is allowed to take part in the table tennis tournament.  While Marty is never really the instigator of his faith being discussed, his relationships to other Jews brings out something very cynical about faith.  I will say that Josh Safdie does use Judaism more of a coloring to a character than an actual plot point, but it also was a message of a character who was so divorced from the religious elements of faith that he could only view his identity from a cultural, not a theological perspective.

I'm so curious what the original end of this movie would have looked like.  For those who don't know, there's a vampire ending to this film.  Yeah, a true story about a guy has a potential vampire ending.  And the movie sets it up too.  It's not like there was nothing on the screen that set up for a vampire ending.  It's in there.  My wife and I were baffled by it.  But it also seemed that the studio hated the notion that there was an ending that involved characters becoming vampires.  The funny thing is, the whole movie is prepped for that.  There's this anachronistic (thanks, Lauren) soundtrack to the film that is meant to have a pay off with a sequence in the '80s where characters didn't age due to vampirism.  It's such a gutsy ending that seemed super risky.  Still I kind of wanted a peek at that ending beyond just the tease that we got from Milton Rockwell.

I dug this movie, guys.  I didn't think that I would.  But Marty Supreme is really hitting with me right now.  I know that I have a lot more movies to watch, but Marty Supreme was a good start to Oscar season.

Check out the page as I keep it updated with my thoughts on the nominations.  (Or as many as are watchable before the Academy Awards air...)

Not rated, but it has nudity, that's for sure.  Once again, this is a story about casual cruelty in relationships.  There are times when the movie actually seems quite tame and other times where the film feels quite vulgar.  There is an entire sequence that is kinda / sorta about suicide, so that should be taken into account before sitting down to watch it.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

In these times of strife, I sometimes lose track of when the Academy Award nominations come through.  I got so many Breaking News stories to my watch that the Academy Awards didn't even come through as a blip.  It took a coworker to bring that to my attention.  So I have to mentally get myself together.  There's going to be a lot of watching.  There's going to be a lot of writing.  I have to be in the writing mood for a while.  So I have to apologize to Assassin's Creed: Shadows for getting so close to the end while simultaneously throwing my watching queue into the bin.  I might watch the other Bergman on the disc just to torture myself, but then it's going to be all new stuff.  We'll see how I survive.  The plan is to watch Marty Surpreme tonight.

I'm almost at the end of the line when it comes to the Bergman set.  I may have seen the most Bergman movies out of anyone I know (maybe Greg excluded).  I have to start making some swings to make sense out of his work as a whole.  The easy read is to only look at motifs.  I mean, Waiting Women might be a great movie to start closing up shop on Bergman because, in many ways --outside of visual elements --it is quintessential Bergman.  It has all of it in there.  But what I'm most referring to is the fact that Bergman, once again, really hammers home the notion that everyone cheats.  I've written blog after blog about this and my main leap --which I admit is more of a hop --is that Bergman is justifying his own selfish behavior.  I'm sure that's true.  The reason I said it is because it's the Occam's Razor answer.  We know that he had multiple women in his life.  He makes movies about infidelity.  I applied the Woody Allen model of "Methinks [he] doth protest too much" to Bergman and that's fine. 

But Waiting Women brought up the next stage I should be looking at.  I'm not saying I agree with Bergman in the least, but Waiting Women might give me context for a lot of his other films.  It's weird that the one that most people haven't heard of might give me insight into what Bergman is trying to tell me with these stories of romantic cruelty.  Bergman might be trying to explore a complex idea by showing its negatives.  I'm going to state something paradoxical in the hopes that, by writing it out, I will be able to make the idea tangable.  

Bergman is making movies damning the Hollywood romance to explain that romance exists, but not in the way that we've all glorified it.  One thing that we have to probably agree on for this argument to work is that humanity, especially individuals, are incredibly selfish.  I don't see this.  I know that there are people out there who are as selfish as the characters that he portrays on screen.  But Bergman also makes practically everyone in his stories devoted only to self-interest.  Even the characters who voice opposition to selfishness often take selfish routes, like Rakel.  Rakel maintain a platonic relationship with Kaj, knowing the two had a romantic history years ago.  When Kaj makes a move on her (a move that borders on assault), she tells him that she loves her husband and that she couldn't cheat on him.  (In reality, she had cheated on him once before and couldn't live with the shame.) Let's use Rakel's story as our evidence so I don't get too lost in the weeds here.  (For those who are reading this blind, the film is borderline an anthology story with a throughline of the women all being in-laws.)  

Bergman seems to use Rakel's ignorance to criticize her and he uses Eugen's victimhood as a full on damnation of traditional romance.  Be aware, I can't help but imbue my own sense of morality, especially when it comes to romance, when it comes to writing about this movie.  I think I'm more critical of Bergman's attitude that these are universal problems.  Anyway.  Rakel, being more traditionally romantic, confesses to Eugen about their afternoon tryst.  Eugen flies into a rage, grabbing a shotgun and threatening to kill himself.  He then starts shooting at Raj and Raken.  If the story ended up there, you'd think that Bergman was just telling the story of an affair gone wrong.  It's always the takeaways that the narrator gives afterwards.  You would think that after a spouse tried to kill you post-affair, that would be the end of the relationship.  Instead, in the post-script to the story, Raken reveals that she and Eugen stayed together and that their marriage was as healthy as it had ever been.  Bergman still damns Eugen for his violent reaction to the notion of being cheated on, having Raken confess that their relationship is closer to that of parent and child rather than equals.  She likes taking care of him and it brings her joy, which is super gross to me.

But the same takeaway can be said for the other women at the table.  Marta had to give birth alone because Martin was throwing a temper tantrum of being borderline disinherited.  Maj, the younger sister, is impressed by this story, implying that she celebrates the feminist attitude that Marta has of having a child by herself and living life her way.  Instead, we find out that Marta married Martin and is happy with him.  The same thing holds true for Karin's story.  Karin tricks her husband Fredrik into confessing his own adultery.  Karin's scene, by the way, is the most playful of the group, trapping the couple in an elevator full of wacky circumstances.  But as she keeps getting details about Fredrik, she keeps loving him all the more.  Karin reads as the most mature of the group, never really giving into the miseries that comes with marriage.  It actually seems like she changes Fredrik for the better once they are freed from the elevator.  But Fredrik immediately goes for a work call after returning to the apartment, implying that he'll never change.

And that's kind of the message:  the only women who are happy in their marriages are the ones who put up with the crap that their husbands sling their way.  They won't change, so the only thing that they can change are their own attitude.  Now, I hate this messaging.  It's been getting me angrier as I've been watching these films. But it is also oddly --and ignorantly --flattering to the notion of women.  Again, I cannot protest enough (as I posted that Hamlet quote earlier) that this is a gross message, but the implication that women find a way to mature their love has a little bit of a silver lining.  The men in these stories are all portrayed as children and the women are the ones who grow as people.  Sure, some of that comes in because the women of the narrators of their own experiences (which were written by a man...).  

Maybe there's something to accepting your spouse's flaws.  I don't hate that as an idea.  But there's also the understanding that Bergman seems to miss and that is the notion that people grow together.  In these stories, the women are expected to be the anchors of the relationship and the men are too foolish to see what they have in front of them.  There's almost the expectation that "men be cheatin'" and that's how life is.  I don't hate that the movie has a commentary on mature versus immature love.  If the mission statement is to say that the Hollywood romance is garbage, by all means.  But I don't love that Bergman is weighting the scales in his favor so much.