PG, despite nudity, language, sexuality, and domestic abuse.  I think the same thing happened with the TV version.  For a guy who spends a lot of times claiming that MPA ratings are too tough, this one is far too lenient.  This is not a PG movie.  If my kids walked into the room, I would quickly shut it off.  It's not like the whole thing is offensive, but it's not not offensive either.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Guys!  Guys!  First of all, it's a crime that I haven't written anything on this blog since Wicked.  This movie was long and I had to do alternative exercises that didn't involve watching a movie while I exercised.  Secondly, it's really weird that I'm writing another blog about a movie that I both disliked and watched recently.   It's a different cut of Scenes from a Marriage that was on TV instead of in theaters.  That means that the TV cut was longer.  But it's in the Bergman set and I feel like I wouldn't be a completist if I didn't write about every movie in the set.  I'm wired in a very specific way that I'm not entirely proud of.  

Well, here's the take.  While Scenes from a Marriage the theatrical cut is better, it doesn't really change my opinion about the story itself.  I could write intellectually (I think I could.  If I haven't done it so far, why start now, I guess?) about the role of pacing and focused storytelling.  But the long and short is that anything that makes this infuriating movie shorter is good in my estimation.  The movie is still incredibly long.  We're looking at almost three hours when it comes down to it.  That's not exactly a quick romp nor is much of the movie excised from this version.  It takes out the credits from each scene, which is good, I guess.  There's probably some smaller stuff that has been tightened.  It does make the movie more watchable as a movie.  But golly, the content is still borderline all there.  I'm trying to find a comprehensive list of changes between the two cuts and people are being really dodgy about the changes.  (I'm apparently the only one who slightly likes the theatrical cut better.  Trust me, if I liked this movie, I would be all about the television cut.)   Apparently, some of the secondary characters are minimized.  I mean, I remembered Johan's other lover.  But honestly...and this is a hot take...but the focused story is the theatrical cut.

I know!  Absolute blasphemy.  Again, I get it.  I get where the blasphemy lies.  I love how I'm advocating for a cut of a movie where I don't like either cut.  But the (and here's my intellectual read on this whole thing that I said I wasn't going to do) thing about the theatrical cut is that this is called Scenes from a Marriage.  The theatrical cut, while not being absolute in this format, is almost exclusively Johan and Marianne. We look to see what their actual marriage looks like.  It becomes a much tighter piece where we have to question what is truth and what is outside behavior.  While Marianne moves on from her separation from Johan, we never get to meet her new significant other. Instead, we have to trust that everything is above board.  From a marriage perspective, we get to see a more accurate version of Marianne to what he experiences on the reg.  The film version still shows how Johan flirts outside of his time with his wife.  I honestly feel like the theatrical version has that element of gaslighting that the television version doesn't have.  It also spirals out of control faster.  The movie starts with the implication that these two will never lose each other, despite the fact that their friends offer them a template of misery.

When the two split up, it seems like one moment shattered the whole thing.  I find that far more interesting than the death by a thousand cuts that the television version offers.  It's almost inevitable, which is kind of the point of the movie.

Oh, that's the major realization that I came to.  The first read of the film when I watched the TV version was that this was about infidelity.  Bergman, if you've been reading my Bergman blogs on this page, has been obsessed with infidelity.  But with the other Bergman infidelity movies have been mostly forgiving of infidelity.  And to a certain extent, Scenes from a Marriage is forgiving of infidelity.  Marianne constantly allows Johan back to have these sexual moments with her.  Sometimes these moments are meant to be attempts to fix a marriage; some of these moments are genuine moments of infidelity.  That's how the movie ends, by the way.  The two are away from their respective spouses on a tryst with each other.  That's the end.  It does imply that infidelity should be forgiven because it seems inevitable.  But I'm going to say that Bergman may be supporting infidelity even more than that with Scenes from a Marriage.

The behavior between these two is toxic.  We get that.  At one point, Johan beats Marianne quite badly almost to the point where I think that he tries to kill her.  (It's incredibly upsetting to see her go back to him and I think I went into this with my last blog about Scenes from a Marriage.) Initially, I thought that this all stemmed out of infidelity.  But I believe that Bergman is criticizing monogamy instead of infidelity.  It is because the two are married that they take sexual deviance as a slight against their natures.  The problems come from the fact that they are viewed as failures for keeping their marriage intact when everyone else is failing.  After all, the only other couple in their lives hate each other.  I even forgot that Johan and Marianne were married previous to this marriage, implying that no marriages last.  

It's only when the two are sleeping with each other when they aren't supposed to be that the two are happy.  That's kind of a bummer.  The more that they ascribe to a traditional happy family, the more that they seem to hate each other.  When they're being rebellious, that's when they find each other attractive.  (I honestly don't know why Marianne finds Johan attractive.  There wasn't one moment in the movie where I found him tolerable.  There were moments where I found him less intolerable than others, but I never found him to be a descent person worthy of love.) 

The whole thing bums me out so much, guys.  I want to be the guy who likes Bergman movies.  I mean, I still have The Seventh Seal, which is objectively a masterpiece. Ooh!  I also have Fanny and Alexander! It's just that I may be the only person who finds these other movies frustrating.  It's not that I'm against watching infidelity movies.  It simply seems like Bergman is trying to justify behavior that he partook in.  When he keeps coming back to the same well, it feels a bit like "She dost protest too much."  Fine.  Be sex positive.  It's not a me thing, but crapping all over marriage over and over and having people treat each other like dirt makes me sad.  There's the implication that if everyone was sex positive like Bergman, they'd be happier.  But people do fall in love.  People do get attached.  It's nice on paper, but it gets messy fast.  

The funny thing is that I still want to watch the Apple TV show.  I don't know what's wrong with me.

PG and, honestly, it kind of deserves to be PG. I thought, for sure, that this would be one of those arbitrary PG-13 movies because it dealt with themes condemning xenophobia and danced around some queer characterization.  But good for them!  This is mostly a deserved PG rating.  There is a scary part with some of the flying monkeys that upset my 10-year-old.  But, God love him, he's a sensitive lad.  The PG is well-deserved.

DIRECTOR:  Jon M. Chu

Look at me, being crazy productive with my blogging.  It actually took me a lot of work to log in to my Weebly, so please appreciate the frustration that came with trying to make this thing happen.  Right now, I'm staying up late on a retreat, waiting for the junior boys to go to bed.  These fools tend to get up to nonsense, so I have to stay up super late to make sure no foolishness happens on my watch.  So what do I do?  I write my blog on Wicked while wearing some very fashionable Wicked sweatpants.  Trust me, fam.  They slay.

Everyone lost their minds about Wicked this weekend.  I was honestly concerned that I wasn't going to get a chance to catch Wicked in a timely fashion.  This movie is going to be all over the Oscars, right?  Like, I'd have to see Wicked, for technical credits alone.  Also, if I'm not mistaken, there are some original songs in this version, right?  Anyway, if I didn't see it soon, I would have hit my maximum level of FOMO.  The insane part is that I've seen the stage production.  I will be honest, while I enjoyed the movie, Wicked isn't necessarily for me.  When I saw the stage production, I was one of the few people alive who poo-pooed it.  Now, before you go swearing me off,  know that I tend not to crap on things just because other people like them.  Honestly, a criticism that you are allowed to throw at me is the idea that I like too many things.  So when I turned my nose up at the stage production, that was kind of a big deal for me.

Mind you, my criticisms of the stage production of Wicked were way off the mark.  My frustration was wanting Wicked to be something that it fundamentally was not.  I wanted what Maleficent has been promising: a retelling of a classic story from the villain's perspective.  And, to a certain extent, Wicked is that.  These are stories that I, at my core, do not trust.  There's a certain amount of lying that these movies take.  Instead of simply being another perspective, something fundamental about the story has to change.  To make the villain a hero, something that we have accepted as a truth cannot be accurate.  I don't really get where the charm comes by saying "This part never happened."  It's not all that clever.  

But now that I've seen the movie?  My obsession with the fact that Wicked ignores a lot of the core of The Wizard of Oz is borderline silly.  See, I've made my frustration with the results of the last elections...not subtle.  I'm borderline horrified by our country right now.  I don't know how we're going to bounce back from this and while conservatives are probably rolling their eyes at my liberal tears, I often wonder a thought.  "If I went back in time, could I somehow stop the results of the 2024 election?"  Until recently, I could not think of an answer that would give me the result I wanted.  Considering that I thought that Kamala Harris did everything right and still lost is mindboggling.  But now I realize that there might have been one thing that could have swayed this election and the answer is silly.

My theory?  Release Wicked before the election.  Allegory is a heck of a thing.  People hate being preached at.  But Wicked is a thing right now.  It's a talking point.  Considering that a lot of the problems with conservatives voting came from a lack of objective information coming that way, allegory might be the best way to sneak in a powerful message.  And that's where Wicked absolutely destroys for me. When I saw the animal allegory in the play, I was probably put off by it.  I thought it was this world-building nonsense and that it was distracting from the Dorothy narrative.  (After all, my thoughts were that the Wicked Witch of the West actively tries to kill Dorothy throughout the Wizard of Oz and I was angry that the play never tried to address how that was an objectively evil act.) But that animal scene is intense.  I wish it was all the way throughout the film instead of being a background thing because Elphaba's commitment to the cause of equal rights makes her not only the outsider who is trying to keep her head above water, but someone who is martyred for doing the right thing.

I mean, thank goodness the final act of the film full on says the theme of the story.  Jeff Goldblum's Wizard straight up reveals that he chooses to demonize animals because people tend to unite over a common enemy.  Can you understand how Harris could have ridden that message all the way to the White House?  I wonder if something at the studio didn't like that being a summer message.  I mean, I get that Thanksgiving weekend is a big weekend for movies.  I mean, I saw this and Moana 2 in theaters, despite having no time to see much of anything.    But making a comparison between the original citizens of Oz and the ostracized minorities in American society is so on the nose.  It would have destroyed.   I know that there were some conservatives I know who finally started pointing the fingers at themselves when that message was laid out so explicitly by Goldblum.  Why couldn't we have that message before Election Day?  *sigh*

Goldblum, by the way, is starting to get these roles.  You have to acknowledge that Thor: Ragnarök was Goldblum's complete audition for this movie.  Like, the Wizard is just a toned-down Grandmaster.  Like,  Jeff Goldblum is actually holding back a bit to make this movie work.  And good for him.  It would be tonally inappropriate if he went full Goldblum on the movie.  But he's also incredibly charming for a sociopath.  Like, maybe people wouldn't make the connection that Trump is a fascist with this performance. Again, the point of allegory is to get people to listen to you, so we have to allow these choices.

Now, I'm dancing (through life) around the core characters of the movie.  I am slightly afraid that Cynthia Erivo is going to read this somehow.  I mean, I doubt it, but I'm sure that she's getting the Google alerts based on what the Internet is telling me.  She's freaking fantastic in this movie.  She's so good (and this is not meant to be slander) that I actually have a harder time picturing Idina Menzel in the same role.  But to that note, am I now an Ariana Grande fan?  Now, I don't love that she's dating someone who was married from this movie.  That's probably not too great.  But  I have to give so many points to Grande for making this role simultaneously her own and with a nice nod to Kristen Chenowith's performance.  I mean, the big win is that it is Grande's character to play.  While there are nods to Chenowith's performance, Grande destroys here.  Absolutely destroys.

Also, if you ever want to explain the difference between "Not racist" and "Anti-Racist", look at Wicked as a movie.  While I like a lot of the movie, I adore "Defying Gravity."  I know.  I know.  People have been making memes about "Holding space for 'Defying Gravity'".  Do you know why you should?  Because that part is absolutely perfect and it fixes a lot of the problems I had with the stage production.  Guys, I have a theatre degree.  I get that theatre does some things so much better than movies.  But Defying Gravity is about taking back power and Chu makes Elphaba powerful as heck in this movie.  That entire sequence, stretched out, works so much better.  She's scary and amazing and I love it so much.

But this is where I have to let you down a little bit.  There was all this hype for Wicked.  And I'll be honest...I don't get it.  I love the political message.  It is a completely functional musical by a guy who completely destroyed it with In the Heights.  But in terms of "Will this make me cry?"  Not at all.  I don't get why everyone was shedding massive amounts of tears for this movie.  If anything, a lot of the musical numbers felt a bit reined in.  That's unfair.  I don't know.  Maybe because Wicked is more of a traditional musical than I care for, there were a bunch of moments that felt restrained.  It's not that they weren't impressive.  It's just that they didn't blow the doors off of the place when they were performed.  Everything felt a bit more safe and less innovative.  Sure, I loved the spinning library.  That was a fun dance number.  But in terms of face-melting dancing?  I don't know.  Maybe it's because The Wizarding World of Harry Potter doesn't do much for me, so Wizard, which seems to share an aesthetic, doesn't do much for me either.

But it's good.  I'm jazzed to see the second one.  I've had the soundtrack stuck in my head, which is a bummer because I was digging Chappel Roan for the time that she invaded that headspace.  Is it as amazing as people are making it out to be?  Probably not.  Is it still very good?  Absolutely.

PG, but this is 1985 PG.  Man, I had to really beg my wife to let my older kids watch this movie.  The '80s were a very special time where kids could wander the neighborhood for friends and watch content that would be deemed offensive in this era.  I'm not trying to be a Boomer here.  I'm just saying that The Goonies has a ton of swearing, some sexual humor, a fake suicide, a modest amount of ableism and racism.  Still, I wanted my kids to watch it, which may be a bigger commentary on myself than anything else.

DIRECTOR:  Richard Donner

These all tend to be excuses to pat myself on the back.  I have this video game that is just waiting to be played, but my obsession with being productive is getting in the way.  If I'm lucky, I'll be able to take a chunk out of The Walking Dead: The Telltale Final Season.  But with my wiring saying that I need to do things that tap into my productivity, here I am writing The Goonies blog...before I knock out Wicked possibly tomorrow.

We don't get movies like The Goonies very often.  This was a movie that I've seen so many darned times that I was probably being insufferable quoting it with the film as my kids watched it for the first time.  Now, I have to wonder.  Is there some gender lines with considering The Goonies as a modern classic.  My son loved the movie.  He watched it with me and we bonded.  He kept quoting parts of the movie after it was over.  ("Hey Mikey, you gotta use the batroom?")  But my wife and daughter seemed put out by this one.  Sure, they were second screening, which automatically makes the primary movie being watched garbage.  But I thought that my oldest daughter would be all over this movie.  I mean, we wouldn't have Stranger Things if it wasn't for movies like The Goonies.  It's why Sean Astin is in season two of Stranger Things.  The kids-in-peril genre has kind of gone by the wayside.  Disney still puts kids in peril, but those tend to be well-behaved children.   Instead, I love the idea that slightly naughty kids with good hearts do something great. The French are good at that.

The funny thing is that I didn't realize how simple this movie is.  Like The Lord of the Rings, The Goonies has a group of protagonists heading in one direction to complete a quest.  With Lord of the Rings, that story forces the group apart with an attempt to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.  But with The Goonies, the group is split up with an ultimate reunion with One-Eyed Willie's pirate ship.  But in my mind, that adventure was massive.  I remember them being underground for so long.  They had earned their treasure because they were gone for so long.   Not so much.   A lot of the movie is above ground, giving us more context into what the Goondocks are all about and how the Goonies fit in this.  I mean, the term "Goonies" is never well defined.  We can understand from context that Goonie is a little bit of a synonym for "outcast."  But the movie does this thing where we are meant to understand that this group of children has been on numerous adventures prior to this moment.  With the case of the film, the hunt for One-Eyed Willie's treasure may be their most grandiose adventure.  However, there is this flavoring to the film that this group keeps on getting into shenanigans.  

Maybe that's what I love about the movie so much.  I have a lot of problems with The Avengers.  It's not a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination.  It just spends a lot of time with growing pains.  It does everything it can rejecting the call to becoming a team.  For a movie called The Avengers, we don't get to see them as Avengers all that much in the film.   But with The Goonies, the movie sacrifices an origin story for the sake of immediate adventure.  From moment one, The Goonies are The Goonies. Sure, it splits them up.  That's just good storytelling.  We have multiple threads that all come back together.  Also, the absurdity of the adventure is never questioned.  The movie starts with a bleak scene of a fake suicide.  We get this gritty story of criminals escaping prison.  Now, a traditional tale would make The Fratellis the only conflict in the film.   Maybe have Mikey or Chunk witness a murder and it becomes Home Alone, just not at Christmas.  But the main story is the hunt for One-Eyed Willie's treasure.  If anything, the real criminal is late stage capitalism.  (Note: We're in an era where capitalism is the bad guy for a lot of movies and people wonder while I'm so vocal about the woes of the poor.) 

And the crazy thing is that Donner manages to balance an incredibly absurd set of circumstances.  Brand yells at Mikey that no treasure is worth their lives and he's absolutely right.  But because the only way to escape the Fratellis is to accept the call to adventure, all of the conflicts work in crazy harmony.  To save the Goondocks, the Goonies need to escape the Fratellis and find their way to freedom.  There is one point where the kids can reject the call.  It's a great scene.  It's the "Troy's Bucket" scene. In the real world, Troy's Bucket is a valid way out of this movie.  They are still on the run from the Fratellis.  But the fact that they, as characters, have evolved that much in that little amount of time makes them have this bond.  Also, there's the idea that they had gone farther than Chester Copperpot is oddly encouraging.  By the way, I always used to give Chester Copperpot crap for dying so early.  They find him so early in their adventure.  I was wondering what kind of crappy adventurer he was.  But Copperpot is also the guy who set off the booby trap ("That's what I said!  Booby traps!").  As much crap as I give him, he didn't have the benefit of knowing he'd be killed for simply investigating caves.

I'm exploring this thought right now, but my favorite dynamic in the movie is Stef and Mouth.  Mikey and Brand have conflict.  Most people don't get along with Mouth.  Everyone teases Chunk.  But Stef and Mouth actively dislike each other from the beginning of the movie.  Maybe the end is a little undeserved with them being so sweet to each other.  But these two end the movie with simple understanding of each other's personality.  Yeah, there's hilariously a light romantic overtone to that moment.  Maybe I'm reading into it more than other people are, but I oddly ship them.  But maybe not romantically.  Yeah, I take that back.  It's there, but I don't want that dynamic to happen.   It's just that they seem to genuinely care for each other.

Why aren't there more movies like The Goonies?  I mean, part of it has to come to having been done perfectly.  Every so often, we get attempts.  My example is Super 8, but that doesn't work as well.  I feel like the '80s was the perfect era for kids-in-peril movie.  Maybe it's because we had latchkey kids taking care of themselves.  The old man in me is thinking that the advent of the cell phone and video games have changed how kids hang out.  But it also seems like there's something wholesome to the boys' crimes that doesn't read in 2020's America.  I have to say, I loved this movie after not having seen it for over a decade.  Sure, a lot of it was nostalgia.  But I still think that The Goonies is a really funny and suspenseful movie with an ensemble cast that just works together.

PG mainly because every kids' movie has a lot of scary parts for kids.  Like, these creatures are becoming a little bit upsetting every time.  There's a giant clam island that swallows boats whole.  There are a lot of bats.  If you have a thing about bats, that might be the worst for you.  Also, there's a lot of death fake outs.  There's one that can be really upsetting for younger kids because it comes at that one moment where a character understands their own mortality.  You know, kids' stuff.  PG.

DIRECTORS: David G. Derrick, Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller

See, now I've gone off the deep end.  Not only am I going to go see Wicked today, but we decided to watch The Goonies last night.  So that, once again, puts me at three blogs behind and I don't want to be writing these things next week.  I don't know what it is about the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas where everyone is down to watch a movie, but I know it is going to create a lot of work for me.  This is the weirdest complaint in the world.

I really want to know the entire background for this movie.  For those who don't know, Moana 2 is repurposed from being a Disney+ Limited Series into being cut for a theatrical run.  I know that most of the brass at Disney tend to know that their IP does better as theatrical releases, even if theatrical releases may not be the most financially successful stuff out there.  The way I understand it is (and this is from someone who is not on the inside) is that television has always been considered a lesser medium.  While theatrical release is more of a financial risk, the big name stuff that Disney puts out keeps people in the Disney collective consciousness.  But I also wonder how far Moana 2 got before it was decided to go in a different direction.  Why I'm positing all of this is because, despite the fact that I knew that this was meant to be a limited series before going into it, it does feel mostly like it was always meant to be a theatrical release.

Part of me is glad that this is a theatrical release.  Listen, I'm a guy who gets pretty jazzed for Disney+ stuff.  I thought that the direct release to a streaming service during Covid was a godsend, despite the fact that it angered a lot of filmmakers.  I get it.  But I'm always going to be on the public safety side of things over the egos of filmmakers.  (Mind you, if I was in their shoes, I would also be a big stick in the mud about such things.) As a theatrical release, it works pretty well.  I will admit that I'm still kind of unpacking things.  The reality of the situation is that Moana was a bit of a game-changing movie.  (Note: I can't believe I've been writing this blog long enough that I can say that I watched both of these movies in theaters, despite the sequel coming out almost a decade after the initial movie.) I know that Moana 2 is not a game-changer.  It's very good.  In fact, I'm a little annoyed by some of the ho-hum reviews that the movie is getting.

But I kind of get where those reviews are coming from, even if I don't agree with those thoughts at all.  The Disney Princess films (even though, as the movie stresses, that Moana is not technically a Disney Princess) tend to be hard to sequelize.  As a guy who gave Frozen 2 a fair shake, I think the problem comes with the idea that we fall in love with whole new worlds and whole new characters with each Disney Princess entry.  (I'm sorry, I'm going to use the terms "Disney Princess movie" as shorthand for something that I'm having a hard time defining.) Maybe Final Fantasy as a franchise might have the same problem.  It is hard to find that magic again.  Do I think that Moana 2 comes incredibly close?  Yeah, I do.  Part of that comes with how pretty the movie is.  The color palates that the Moana movies deal with are aesthetically pleasing as can be.  The movie starts with the artsiest shot of a hermit crab searching for a new shell.  I was about to say that it has nothing to do with the movie, but I just got the metaphor that the movie is about Moana looking for more people to find a new home.  

But that shot of the hermit crab is a testament to what lengths animation has gone to in an attempt to push the envelope.  My father-in-law was meh about the movie, but he couldn't deny how pretty the movie looked.  If nothing else (which Moana 2 offers a lot), this movie acts as a showcase of animation that might be unmatched.  These are gorgeous movies and, as stupid as this sounds, it is a celebration of color and form. 

But Moana 2 thrives at screaming something at us that many of us, unfortunately, do not care about.  The recent trend of Disney movies has been a healthy step towards undoing the tropes that have tended to lean towards the misogynist.  I know that there are probably a bunch of people who scream "Woke" at these movies, but I do love that Moana is a character who has all of the odds stacked against her, but defies those odds when it comes to self-sacrifice and belief in herself.  And I applaud the movie for doing these things while not undoing the lessons from the first film.  It's not that the characters aren't flawed.  Maui is still incredibly cocky when compared to the other character.  But he's also imbued with respect and love for Moana, whom he views as an equal despite being a demigod.  If the first movie was learning to find oneself, the second movie is about pushing oneself.  Moana, in the first film, does what she does with the word "no" being thrown at her at all sides except for her grandmother and the ocean.  But the second one is Moana in a place where society supports that, not only is she capable of great things, but she might be the only person capable of great things.  With a character like Maui, that would be a toxic combination.  But with Moana, she treats this newfound respect as a leader should, empowering others to pick up their own talents and use them for a greater good.

The insane part is that Moana also understands that her adventures don't affect just her.  In the first film, her parents held onto her too closely. That was a story about defining oneself beyond the influence of parenthood.  But now she realizes that she has someone younger looking towards her.  Yeah, they're giving Moana a motherhood story when she's really just an older sister.  But it is fascinating to know that the real kryptonite that Moana faces doesn't come from physical impediments, but rather the emotional ties that she owes to others.  It's a cool concept, especially giving the character emotional growth.  But...

...the other characters don't really add anything.  I mean, they are likable.  Moana's sister makes sense, but the extra add-ons with the boat don't really add anything narratively.  Here's me trying to make sense of them.  A limited series on Disney+ needs more characters.  They probably got a ton more character stuff to go through in those stages.  But when it comes to the much more focused story that a theatrical release has, these characters had little reason to be there.  There might have been a small reason when it came to the theatrical release when it came to those characters.  Spoilers, but Moana might be a demigod by the end.  They needed a human character to stand on land, so Moana would be out.  But that's three characters who have little value who are there simply for their mortality.   It's a weird choice.

But the movie mostly works.  I would 1000% watch this movie again.  Am I missing Lin Manuel Miranda?  Yeah, a bit.  The songs are good, but not Lin Manuel Miranda good.  Part of that comes from the fact that I haven't heard them a billion times at this point.  But all of the weaknesses come from the fact that this is a sequel.  But we shouldn't complain.  I lived int he Return of Jafar era of Disney sequels and loved that movie.  So, we should be thrilled with the same attitudes of TV show to movie transitions.  Listen, as long as the movie works, I'm on board.  Well done, Moana 2.

Not rated, but this movie is way gorier than the first movie.  Like, the stabbing deaths are so excessive.  People are bleeding out of their mouths all of the time.  There's an old man who is straight up set on fire and burns to death.  Also, characters you like die horrible deaths.  There's also some Pepe LePew sexual harassment nonsense, which seems pretty standard for these kinds of movies.

DIRECTOR:  Chuan Chen

This is an attempt to get ahead of the glut of movies that I'm seeing over Thanksgiving break.  In the same day, I finished Fearless Hyena II and went to go see Moana 2.  It's bad news that I almost don't want to sneak out to see Wicked because I would have to write about that movie as well.  These are unhealthy attitudes.  I want to see every movie.  So I'm using this down time to sneak in a Fearless Hyena II blog before I'm completely overwhelmed  

I'm so glad that I wrote the first blog the way I did.  My big takeaway from The Fearless Hyena was that it was an exercise in doing one thing very well.  Trust me, this is me being playful with the way I write because the foundation of this blog is "Why did Criterion release Fearless Hyena II in the Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Star box set?"  At first, I thought I was going crazy.  Fearless Hyena II is not a good movie.  I thought I was losing my mind.  This box set was supposed to be celebrating the sheer insanity that a young Jackie Chan brought to his ouevre.  But Fearless Hyena II is a hot mess from moment one to the end of the film.  It was so bad that, when I took a break, I Wikipedia'ed this movie.  I needed to know what was going on and why everything felt off about this movie.  Well, the big thing I learned is that Jackie Chan also hates this movie.  He hated it into it being a bad movie.  It's such a choice.  

See, here's the deal.  Jackie Chan was trying to change his contract before Fearless Hyena II.  He was contractually obligated into filming the sequel to a movie that he made.   He wasn't going to be directing this movie or fight choreographing this movie either.  He was just going to be starring in it.  Okay.  Well, the first studio got mad that he was trying to get out of his contract with them.  So they GOT THE TRIADS INVOLVED!  The Triads.  I feel weird even typing their name into this blog.  Chan hated everything about this movie, mainly because the Triads were making him make the movie.  He finally agreed to finish the film, but he did it with zero effort.  That's the first thing I noticed about the movie, by the way.  I talked a lot about how The Fearless Hyena feels like a passion project to show just how skilled Jackie Chan is when it comes to fight choreography.  Watching Fearless Hyena II feels like the fight choreography was mostly "marking it."  Like, if it wasn't Jackie Chan, you'd be pretty impressed.  But that's the thing that the box set sells.  Jackie Chan, when he puts all of himself into his fight sequences, is borderline unmatched.  Heck, I love the Bruce Lee Box Set, but Jackie Chan's fight sequences are more fun than Bruce Lee's.

The real crime is that Jackie Chan is so divorced from this movie is that he has other people doing the fights for him.  I even read that his replacement pulled the old Bruce Lee trick of slightly altering his name.  Apparently, his fight guy is named "Jacky Chang".  And these people are incredibly talented.  But they aren't Jackie Chan.  It's so shameless, guys.  It's so bad.  To get around from filming, they introduce this thread that Jackie Chan's character, Chan Lung, likes doing things in disguise.  There's no real reason for it narratively.  It's a quirk that they give the character.  But the reality of the situation was that this costume element is an excuse for Jackie Chan to only film half the scenes while his stunt guy does the other scenes in the costumes.  Sometimes these scenes are fight sequences.  Sometimes, they're just scenes that Jackie Chan chose not to film.  And it's really noticable.  Now, this confused me even more because there are side character that I thought were supposed to be Chan Lung.  

Let's pretend that there's a way to make this movie work with doubles.  I mean, it's a pretty low bar when I'm trying to excuse something that was not made out of love.  This is a movie that is made out of spite, which is pretty inexcusable.  But I do want to then break down the rest of the movie.  First of all, this is a sequel in name only, kind of like Troll 2.  The only thing connecting this movie to the first one is that Jackie Chan is in both and there are similar archetypes.  If anything, that might hurt the movie more.  There are so many moments when I thought it might have been an Evil Dead 2 style remake, where part of the movie is remaking the first movie.  It's not.  But I see that Jackie Chan lives with his elderly master / parent who is no longer dead, but will later die a horrible death, inspiring the lazy Jackie Chan to get his act in gear.  But then there's a whole second group of characters who were probably added to the movie when Jackie Chan decided to pull a Wesley Snipes and not show up to the movie.  They have the same dynamic, only one of those guys is an inventor and the other guy is a con man?  It's a lot.  And figuring out how these guys are related is incredibly frustrating.

Part of the biggest failure is that it spends so much time padding out the fact that Jackie Chan is not there that they ignore the part of the movie that needs to be in there.  I had this complaint a little bit with the first movie, but it including the absolutely vital parts of the film that needed to be in the movie.  One of the conflicts of the film is that Ah Tung (I think I have the right guy) is so obsessed with technology to make his life easier that he refuses to learn martial arts.  We know that he's going to have to confront these two jerks who are murdering everyone (Why?  The movie really ignores this motivation).  The biggest problem is that Ah Tung is trained...for two seconds.  He's supposed to be fighting the two greatest fighters who have slaughtered every master that has come along.  Ah Tung is tricked into one fight with a medium challenge bro.  That makes him prepped for the big fight.  Also, Chan Lung doesn't really learn anything to make him a better fighter.  He just...is a better fighter?  It kind of implies that Chan Lung, had he been stuck in a fight with that old guy from the beginning, probably could have won.  That's not a very interesting story.  

There really is no hurtle to overcome.  These two guys are just moderately better than the bad guys.  There's almost a lesson in the movie, when Ah Tung decides to use his tech to help him win the fight.  I would have gotten behind that as a message in the film.  But it's this half-a-thought when it comes to giving a purpose to the story.  Listen, I have complete sympathy for the director trying to make this movie work.  There are times when the film feels gosh darned cinematic.  But he's cobbling together (Early Soviet Cinema style!) footage that he has from this movie and others, including Spiritual Kung Fu. But after seeing something that was so impressive and then this movie comes out, with a sequeled name, how can you not be disappointed?  This brings me back to my original question.  "Why did Criterion release Fearless Hyena II?"

My theory is that Fortune Star made them do it.  When they went fishing for the rights to release Fearless Hyena for this box set, they made them buy Fearless Hyena II for more profit.  But if you were trying to show off the integrity of this young actor who had a talent that no one else did, you release a movie where he phoned it in and put little effort in the project?  It's just a weird move by Criterion.  

Anyway, it's not like the movie isn't fun.  It just isn't good.  Like, almost at all.  It's really weird that they killed Frog, the one likable character in the film, in the most brutal way imaginable.  If you want just an old Kung Fu movie, you got something else to watch.  But it's pretty hot trash pretty much all around.

Rated R for a good reason.  Fede Alvarez is a brutal director.  Luckily, that brutality really works for the Alien franchise.  Be aware, Alien movies are scary.  That's what they're aiming for.  This one is maybe the scariest out of the bunch.  It shows a bit more than most people are used to in these movies, but it works considering that the whole aesthetic was based on Giger's works.  There's some language and body horror, occasionally involving infants.

DIRECTOR:  Fede Alvarez

Just a heads up before I get into this.  I got me a new computer!  It's cheap, but so far pretty great.  But the problem is that I'm typing on a new computer.  There might be a ton of typos in this blog.  Please don't lose your minds.  I don't proofread these things before uploading them.  

I'm also going to go into blasphemous territory right off the bat.  Be aware, I'm actively trying to combat my recency bias right now.  But --and this is coming from a guy who adores the original Alien as a near perfect movie --Alien: Romulus might be the best of the franchise.  I told you that this was going to be blasphemous.  I was thinking, earnestly, if I didn't have such a high regard for the first movie as a groundbreaking piece of cinema and I saw this movie, would it blow my mind? Yeah.  I think it might be impossible to make an Alien sequel this far removed from the original and anyone giving it its due credit.  Now, I know that this is one the higher rated ones and it did incredibly at the box office.  I'm  just taking it a step further.  Now, the only thing that might stop me from dying on this hill are a few things. But right now I'm riding really high on Alien: Romulus.  

And that's coming from a guy who traditionally does not care for Fede Alvarez movies!  (Sorry, Fede Alvarez. I find you to be a cruel director who leans a bit heavily on brutality.)

Here's what's stopping me from dying on this hill.  Ready?  Alien: Romulus stands on the shoulders of giants.  A lot of my glee that came with this movie came from a return to what an Alien movie should look like.  I feel like the later movies had the same problem as the Star Trek reboot: everything looked like an Apple Store.  It was all a bit too clean.  Now, here's the paradox.  Alvarez really makes his world look like Ridley Scott's original world.  Everything is a bit dingy and a bit gross.  But would I really care about that if I hadn't been so obsessed with the original Alien?  Probably not.  It just aggressively felt like the first real movie to get what it meant to live in a Weyland-Yutani world.  I know, some of you are screaming Aliens, but I don't love that movie like everyone else loves that movie.  Also, it's been a hot minute since I've seen Alien 3.  

The second thing is the most annoying thing on my list: the stupid uncanny valley.   I'm being a huge hypocrite with this one.  I shouldn't even write about this.  Rook, who is the same model as Ash (and apparently went through the same wringer)  took me back.  I loved the Ash storyline in the original.  Seriously, it was like Alvarez was making this movie for me and me alone because when I saw Ian Holm in this movie, I lost my mind.  But then Rook became this huge character in this movie.  I was actually taken aback by how much Ian Holm is in this movie.  And the upsetting part is that it isn't actually Ian Holm.  That's that fine line that we've been treading and dancing around for a while.  Bringing back dead actors for legacy sequels --especially when the characters shouldn't be ravaged by time --seems a little gross..  There's that fine line between honoring the fallen with reminding a modern audience of their former performances and then also just stealing the person's face to make money in a movie.  On top of that, while there are moments when Rook looks freaking great, there are other moments where the character looks rough.  Like, I mean really rough.  It feels like a painted on flat face on a round object.  It's a stupid complaint, but it's also one that ran through my head whenever Rook was on screen.

But let's talk about how much I loved this movie.  It's so hard.  The weirdest thing about this movie is that it successfully manages to put a hat on a hat.  That's normally a bad thing, but Alvarez, against all of my better judgment, makes it work.  Honestly, every time I think the movie is over, something else happens.  Like, I hope there was nothing after the credits because I missed out if there was.  I mentally did not think another beat could happen in this movie.  But Alien thrives when it is about just trying to survive this situation when it really isn't your fault.  I mean, these movies nail the anti-Capitalist rhetoric pretty well.  It's the ultimate tale of how corporate America is leaving us to deal with the problems that it creates.  These are some people who just say "Forget the system" (which is a nicer way of me not using a curse word) and are still punished for not being wage slaves.  (I'm using this rhetoric because it's a lovely shortcut.  If you want me to preach about the dangers of capitalism unchecked, I can.  That's not what I'm trying to do right now.)  But the message is there and then we have these people who are punished for just trying to make it out of a system that is killing them slowly.  Instead, it kills them quickly.

And that survival has to be scary as heck.  My goodness, Alvarez makes good use of the facehugger.  The facehugger was also was something that was used as a jump scare alone.  But Alvarez makes them these amazing predatory creatures. Heck, I'm going to go as far as to claim that the facehugger is the primary threat in this movie and that the xenomorphs are almost secondary scary things.  It doesn't make them less scary.  It just makes them not as much of a horror to the facehugger.  I love that change in dynamic.  

But then there's this argument that I've been having about sci-fi for a while that Alvarez tackles head on.  See, mentally, I have a hard time with the robot being a person trope.  When I watch Star Wars, I have difficulty treating Droids as people.  I've had the conversation before.  Like, we're really cool when C-3PO gets ripped apart doing what is ultimately slave labor.  (I'm getting real liberal in this one, guys.)  I have a fine line with that concept that people are people and robots are robots.  I mean, I, Robot tried to get me on that team and it did nothing for me. Heck, I even like A.I., but I didn't get my mind changed.  But Andy in Alien: Romulus?  I have authentic concern for that character.  The way that Andy and Rain interact made me question so much.  When the Weyland-Yutani tech overrid his protocols, I kept wishing to have the old Andy back.  It's great.  How did I get so moved by that?  I mean, a lot of it had to go to David Jonsson, who played two very different version of Andy.  Alvarez, and this is so much credit to him, made a lot of the threads that other Alien movies tried out and failed with work.  Seriously, the Prometheus double-feature desperately tried to make the cold-hearted synthetic story work with mild success.  Romulus?  Absolutely nailed it.  My big problem with Aliens was making them ultra killable because there are more?  Romulus nailed it.  They're still scary, buit they also can be taken out with a gun.  Heck, it even fixed Alien: Resurrections human / xenomorph hybrid work and it was really scary.

Like, most of this movie works and it works hard.   I was looking forward to it, which might have made me go in full throttle.  But Romulus might be the best Alien movie.  If not the best, I put it in a solid second place.

Rated R for blood, violence, death, language, and some questionable gender humor...including making light of someone getting sexually assaulted.  When thinking back to what made this movie kinda / sorta questionable, I had a hard time (outside of the Jackie Chan in drag sequence).  It doesn't feel that bad, but it would be enough that I wouldn't want to show my kids this movie.  There are parts that they would love and the humor is aimed at their age.  But there are some questionable  moments, so R.

DIRECTOR: Jackie Chan (as Jacky Chan)

I gotta be honest with you, kids.  I 180'ed on this movie pretty hard.  I really want to love Kung Fu films.  There's something so impressive about them while simultaneously being incredibly campy.  If you asked me about The Fearless Hyena, that absolutely is the best summary of what I just watched.  I should be able to close this blog off right now given that description, but I can't.  I gotta fill the space.  The problem with Kung Fu movies is that I want to vibe with them and then mostly don't.  The first day of watching The Fearless Hyena, I thought that the movie was straight trash.  It was almost a burden to watch it.  The second day?  I realized that I had a notion completely wrong when I came to watching these films.

The Fearless Hyena has a couple strikes against it.  Jackie Chan is incredibly talented and likable.  That being said, he's incredibly immature and often goes for low-hanging fruit when it comes to comedy.  Listen, I'll laugh at a good fart or sex joke.  It's just that...these aren't good jokes.  They're wacky.  It almost feels like you are watching a Looney Tunes cartoon at times in the movie.  I always said that if you have a wacky soundtrack because you are a comedy, something went horribly horribly wrong.  There shouldn't be wacky soundtracks.  The music shouldn't be the thing that's covering for the lack of laughs.  A lot of the first act is that kind of stuff.  It's spit takes and double takes done to goofy foley effects.  It's actively not good.  But the second thing that hurts this film --at least in my first day of watching this --is that there is no real story. Honestly, it bugged me.  It bugged me so much.  To a certain extent, it still bugs me.  I'm watching for the better part of an hour nothing but a variation on the same scene.  Shing Lung dresses up as a character.  He fights a dude.  It's funny.  Repeat.

And normally, there's only so much that you can handle of that.  I was in that camp.  And even though I ended up liking the movie by the end, there were some of those fights that were borderline tedious.  I was actually talking about this in class today.  I didn't really like seeing Vegas shows, most notably Cirque de Soliel, because the initial fright and suspense of acrobatics diminishes the more we see of that trick.  It's the magician repeating the same trick over time.  It gets a little less impactful.  

But my big takeaway, given some distance from it, is that Jackie Chan is the guy who does one thing incredibly well.  Honestly, The Fearless Hyena is a half-hour movie.  It starts in the last half-hour and that is a film that exists in itself. If you had to have push come to shove, the entire first hour and change is world building and character.  We have to get how intense Shing Lung trains and that he is inferior to his old grandfather.  He's a little bit of a con man, but in a charming way.  And that's all that there really is to know.  The lion's share of the movie is Shing Lung making a quick buck working at the school.  But the big pull from this, narratively at least, is that his gaming the system inadvertently gets his grandfather killed.  It's the lesson that the character is supposed to learn.  But even that is a bit of a stretch mainly because the bad guy is the real guy who gets his grandfather killed.  It's kind of hilarious how much cinematic real estate that the film exhausts before it actually gets to anything resembling a plot.

But here's the deal.  Here's the epiphany I had.  Maybe we don't have to expect everything to be amazing.  But Jackie Chan, as an artist --however you want to define that word --does one thing better than anyone else.  The fact that he's stuck forming a narrative around an excuse to do the most incredible fight choreography is impressive.  That's something that I should be celebrating instead of lamenting.  When Jackie Chan was dominating American films in the late '90s and early 2000s, he made fight choreography both impressive and hilarious. When I watched the first two movies in the box set, we got hints of greatness.  I saw a young Jackie Chan who was being experimental as heck while trying to make a funny movie.  But what I got here?  Outside of the story and film being only so-so, I don't know if I've ever seen such creative and impressive fight choreography.  The scene that sold me?  The pots and bowls on the ground scene. Here's the deal. 

Jackie Chan was the king of the blooper real in his American heyday.  We saw how all of these fight sequences occasionally failed.  I know the amount of work that goes into making these scenes work.  While watching that bowl scene, even with the thoughts on how these scenes are filmed, I was flummoxed how he pulled it off.  I must be the only one impressed by this because I could not find the clip on YouTube.  I found a million other clips from the movie.  But the one that impressed me?  Not there.  Maybe I'm impressed by very specific things.  But that's what we're seeing.  

I now know that Jackie Chan is one thing.  If this was the culinary world, he made the world's best croissant.  People come from all around to just try the croissant.  Of course, there are other things on the menu.  Some of the things are fine.  Some of the things are not good.  But it doesn't matter.  You come for the croissant; you should enjoy the croissant.  Once I figured out that part, the movie became fun.

But this leaves me analyzing a fraction of a movie.  If the fight choreography is artistry, then the rest of the movie must be broken down.  It's so odd because the real inciting incident happens near the end of the movie.  The death of the grandfather is the motivation for the actual plot: how to defeat Yam Tin-fa.  And I'll say, while it is some low hanging fruit for emotional connection, it mostly works.  But the crux of the story depends on Shing Lung mastering his emotions.  Is it all that impressive if Shing Lung learns to study his emotional state (which is tied to the title of The Fearless Hyena) only 20 minutes before the final confrontation?  Again, this is only a fragment of a movie.  That fragment is pretty good, but it's not fair to give all of this value to an incredibly rushed storyline.

So I enjoyed it.  It does the job.  I don't hate the idea of watching part two pretty soon.  What this is happens to be very specific.  What is there is pretty fantastic.  But the rest is almost not a movie.

Not rated, but SURPRISE, SURPRISE!  It's another movie that's fundamentally about adultery.  It has some of the most messed up morals of the group too.  I'll talk about that if I remember.  But there's also some violence, some drunkenness, and some over all misogyny sewn all the way through it.  It has the tone of a rom-com because it is meant to be a rom-com.  But the whole thing is just a bummer.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

How is that owning the Ingmar Bergman box set make me dislike Bergman?  I know what few people have been following this blog are saying.  I should stop binging the Ingmar Bergman box set if it is making me dislike Ingmar Bergman.  After all, I asked for the set so I could have a deeper appreciation for Bergman.  But here I am, movie after movie, just rolling my eyes harder.  It's not like I don't like any Bergman movies.  The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander are top tier films.  Honestly, I get that the man was a genius.  It's just seeing the movies that would normally be in the Eclipse line are driving me nuts.

The big thing I need to remember is that I had incredibly similar opinions about Woody Allen when I was binging his movies and I like Woody Allen films.  I don't like Woody Allen himself.  I think the same might be true about Ingmar Bergman.  Bergman keeps making movies about how cool it is that men cheat on their spouses.  For the even fewer people who follow this blog and have also seen A Lesson in Love, you might be yelling at me that A Lesson in Love is meant to be a condemnation of infidelity.  I will argue against that pretty hard.  While the movie definitely wants David to end up with Marianne, it really has a sinister message underneath.  The one thing that we're supposed to agree with is that David is a well-meaning scoundrel.  I used to write the phrase "cake and eat it too" on this blog a lot.  That's what this movie is all about.  David starts the movie in a noble position.  He is seduced by one of his patients.  She seems younger than he is, which is super gross --but in line with what I'm getting from Bergman himself.  But he protests!  Oh man, for at least three minutes he protests.  But Bergman, because this is supposedly a comedy (which I want to discuss more if I can remember!), allows the character to flip at a certain point.  We've seen the story of how women have been coerced into extramarital affairs.  I just watched that movie with Dreams, so I at least have a leg to stand on with this.  But with this being a comedy, David has to make a flip.

He all of the sudden becomes this man free of burden.  He has met a woman who has allowed him to free himself from the shackles of commitment. He reveals that he has always been attracted to this younger girl and that the cross he has been carrying is unbearable.  We then get this message that his wife is a shrew of a woman for not understanding the challenge that he is undergoing.  To the film's credit, we find out that Marianne isn't this harpy that she's been set up to be.  But David is still the protagonist.  I wish the film was about redemption.  It dips its toe into that pool, but it isn't really about redemption, is it?  When Marianne is introduced, there's this game that the film plays on us because the characters are playing a game.  We don't realize that Marianne is David's wife until well into the game.  David and Marianne are in a train car together. David does not seem surprised to see his wife on the train, which is a bit of a lie to the audience.  He then sets up a bet with another man on the train (in the most misogynist, back-era way possible) to see which man can kiss the woman first.  It's meant to be funny.  I don't care for it.

See, we're meant to be in this place where we see David as this quiet guy who loves a bit of hijinks.  He's not, though. He's a guy who is going through such a messy separation with his wife that she's considering marrying someone she once considered boorish. There's a flashback where Marianne remembers fondly the love that she had for David, back when he still didn't suck.  She is in a torn apart apartment lamenting that she has to marry Carl-Adam.  She confesses that she doesn't want to marry Carl-Adam because she is madly in love with David.  That's a nice touch for a rom-com, but we meet Carl-Adam immediately after this moment.  She's right.  Carl-Adam is boorish.  It's done for laughs.  Bergman can't stop excusing infidelity, even something as wholesome as David and Marianne's last second love affair.  (She even tries to convince David to have premarital sex, but David is so noble in his youth that he considers this as immoral...which is what I think too!) But Carl-Adam is presented in a way where we know that he's the villain of the piece.  But from his perspective, his best friend stole his fiancée the day of their wedding.  

The insane thing, the movie keeps letting David off the hook.  There's this whole scuffle at the wedding that is played for laughs.  But ultimately, Carl-Adam pours David a drink and has one to their happy marriage.  Come on.  That's such a narrative short cut.  Maybe that's my biggest problem with the constant tales of infidelity in Bergman movies.  Even movies that are about fallout from infidelity are polishing complicated feelings out. Scenes from a Marriage is probably the most vulnerable movie about infidelity that I've seen out of his ouvre so far.  But even with that, the two kind of excuse the cruelty to one another for the sake of happiness in the long run.  With A Lesson in Love, it's worse. People just stop being angry when the joke is done.  The weird part is that the plot for Carl-Adam isn't over.  When he comes back as the chore that Marianne must marry, he becomes full on villainous. He sets up this whole scenario where David is tempted by another woman. 

The weird part is that Carl-Adam is right!  I mean, the whole thing is a smoke and mirrors thing.  David doesn't know the woman who is there to seduce him.  It's implied that she's a sex worker, not a teacher, and she's there because she's paid to be.  But the thing is, David doesn't fight her off.  It's all part of that rascal charm I was talking about earlier that I don't think hits in the least.  Carl-Adam even gets David incredibly drunk --fantasy-land drunk that doesn't exist in reality --so that he makes a spectacle over his love for this mystery woman in front of Marianne. Now, if this was a story of redemption, we'd see him fight for Marianne and reject this woman, regardless of how much alcohol is in his system.  If the message is that David only really cares for Marianne, then no amount of alcohol could stop him from getting her back.  But he does fall for Carl-Adam's plan.  Why?  Because Bergman is being cheeky.  I really believe that the man believes that you can love one person and be promiscuous with other people.  I'm not saying that it can't happen.  (Okay, I don't believe that can happen, but I'm also for other-strokes-for-other-folks.)   

The end is the most depressing thing for me.  David has this whole plan to woo Marianne back.  He takes her to this fancy hotel where they have all of these servants willing to dote on them and then Cupid just says that they are in love again?  That's the lesson in love?  Buy your spouse things when you are bad?  Come on.  I know the message is supposed to be "Remind your spouse that you love them".  But David is a turd to Marianne throughout the story.  By the end, he's pretty unredeemable and we're supposed to say that money makes things all better?  Money can't buy trust.  Again, I'm trying to bring this old world morality to a movie that is supposed to be pretty forward thinking about polygamy.  I never find these movies to be romantic.  It's getting so old.  It feels like he's just cramming this faux romantic sentiment down my throat.  

The dumbest complaint I have about the movie is that it straight up isn't funny.  Maybe it's because I'm getting so tired with Bergman, but nothing in this movie makes me crack a smile.  The crazy thing is that there are bits. But in a movie where a daughter is worried about losing her father due to a divorce, wacky hijinks don't work in the least.  It's not that Bergman can't be funny.  I laugh at silly moments in his dramas.  He does them all the time.  But an attempt at a Hollywood style Bringing Up Baby style rom-com is frustrating.  I don't like it at all.  I actually might straight up hate this movie.  It's not a bad movie.  It's a bad entry in a series of very similar movies.

PG, which is kind of odd because this movie --probably because it is a product of its time --has Superman have premarital sex.  The second he becomes mortal, that's what he does.  It comes into play in Superman Returns, but it's just odd that it happens to begin with.  Also, this one is more violent than Superman: The Movie because Superman bleeds at times.  Also, way more punching.  Also, the movie seems to go out of its way to show that Lois is a smoker.

DIRECTOR:  Richard Lester

I was crazy sick all weekend.  I wasn't planning on watching anything because, being sick, I am crazy behind on all my work.  But I also needed to distract myself, so I needed to watch a movie that I knew pretty darned well that I was allowed to take breaks from.  Yeah, I don't want to get more graphic than that.

I have a tumultuous relationship with Superman II.  The first movie is precious to me.  Honestly, it might be one of my favorite movies of all time.  It never makes any lists because I acknowledge for however I might view it as perfect, it has some flaws.  But if you want me to feel good, put on the original Superman movie.  But as such a fan of the first movie, if you know anything about the creation of Superman II, you know about some crazy Hollywood drama.  For those not in the know, Superman: The Movie and Superman II were originally supposed to be filmed at the same time.  The Salkinds --who are characters in themselves --had spent an absurd amount of money on a property that no one thought would work.  They couldn't get Superman to fly right and that was only the beginning of their problems.  They knew that they wouldn't get a second chance to make a movie if the first one didn't work out, so they invested in two movies.  Anyway, apparently the Salkinds did not get along with Richard Donner, who directed the first film and --by default --a lot of the second film.  They brought in Richard Lester to finish the second film.  Lester gets the credit for the film and that seems super gross to me.  I don't harbor a lot of resentment to Lester.  He's doing a job.  But while Superman II should be a better movie than Superman: The Movie, there are things about this film that just bother me.

In terms of a story, Superman II is a superior film.  Like many superhero origin stories (even though we're dealing with the OG superhero / superhero movies here), a lot of the first film is devoted to the hero.  Often in these films, the bad guy gets ignored.  Now, I will not disparage Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in Superman: The Movie for a second.  He's perfect.  He's not my favorite Lex, but he's the perfect casting for THAT particular movie.  It's a specific hill that I'm ready to die on.  I regularly (REGULARLY!) quote Hackman's lines from Superman: The Movie.  Often, a sequel gives the villain a bit more attention.  Such is the case with Superman II.  As much as I love Hackman's Luthor, he's a second fiddle to Superman himself.  And it's not like Superman doesn't have a story in part two.  He has a great story in this one.  It's just that the villains are given time to do what they need to to make the story engaging. 

I'm going to be honest about this.  I'm the only person on the planet who believes that the first movie is superior to the second.  I like the second one a lot, but there are just things that bug me about the movie.  In the most verbose way ever, I have to say...I don't like that the movie takes shortcuts towards filmmaking.  Now, I've had an epiphany about why this  makes sense in context.  For the longest time, it bothered me that they gave Kryptonians extra powers to make up for storytelling elements.  There's some goofy stuff in this movie, guys.  I mean, a lot of people flash to the big plastic Superman shield that traps Non.  I think even Family Guy made a joke about it.  Kryptonians can just point at things and they start floating?  That's a weird choice.  The sequels will do even more of this kind of stuff.  It really used to bug me.  

But here's how I make peace with it.  The Superman movies were a reflection of the comics at the time.  I'm pretty sure that the post-Crisis Superman (I refuse to get into what that means) happened in 1984.  The defined, clearly delineated Superman narrative first started with John Byrne was after this movie.  If you've ever read some pre-1980s Superman comics, that guy got into all kinds of shenanigans.  He had a power of the week.  There was nothing consistent with those comics from week to week (or month to month).  The fact that I got so hung up on this stuff for years just shows how petty I can be...and I tend to like everything.

So the real bummer is simply knowing the Behind-the-Scenes stuff.  That does bum me out.  It does feel like a little bit of a Frankensteined movie.  It doesn't read as smooth as the first movie and that's me complaining, especially considering that the story in Superman II is so good.  Honestly, Zod and his companions is fun.  But I really like what the movie does for the Clark and Lois story.  Sure, I don't understand why the two can't just date with Clark being immortal.  It places a lot of onus on...ahem...intimacy.  But that was something that the comics always said was fine.  Superman and Lois were in love all through those stories.  The notion that he had to become mortal was always something that this movie introduced.  Still, it is this fun narrative (that Spider-Man 2 mirrored) that Clark has to choose between his own happiness and his sense of responsibility.  It's a bit odd when Superman doesn't hear that the world is being destroyed by three Kryptonian villains, but that's something that we can leave to suspension of disbelief.  

There's no better moment for the character in the series than when they are in the Yukon hot dog joint.  See, what made Christopher Reeve the perfect Superman is that he's playing three characters that are all authentically the character.  There's Superman, who seems genuine and earnest.  He cares about everyone and is a model to society.  He's not putting on a role.  That seems like the most authentic version of himself.  Then there's Clark, who seems to be a mask.  But the funny thing about the Clark persona is that Clark is authentically awkward because he does some things that seem to be counterproductive to him being Superman.  He gets hit by a cab in this one, something that the Superman persona would never have a problem with.  The movie even addresses this when Clark's glasses go into the fire.  There's a part of the Clark persona who wants the Superman persona to be the dominant character.  But what Superman II does for Reeve is give him a third persona who doesn't get a lot of screen time.  When Clark is mortal in the hot dog joint, he's this character who is not sure who he is.  Visibly, he's Clark Kent who is in love with Lois Lane.  It's the nerd without the clumsiness.  Clark is the visible, but the moral foundation is that of Superman.  We get almost a look back to the Clark of Smallville from the first film, who knows that there's a moral good to work towards, regardless of ability.  But he's also horrified that he can't be infallible.  It's really interesting.  

But that's what makes this character compelling.  There's something Atticus Finch about this version of Clark.  When Rocky the truck driver harasses Lois, he gets into a fight with the guy, asking him to step outside.  Now, Superman gets into fights.  He's taken a hit.  (In my mind, there have been adventures between the first two films because everyone treats Superman as the norm by the second film.)  When he takes the punch, he's horrified by his own blood. But there's this look that says that he knows he can't win, but he still isn't going to give up the fight.  Now, I was about to say that I wish that the news report hadn't happened to see how the rest of the fight with Rocky would have played out.  (Obviously, Clark would have lost.  But I wanted to see the "try anyway" scene.)  But now that I'm thinking about it, Clark's next move is more telling.  When he sees that Zod has returned, he walks his way back to the fortress.  (I love how Lois doesn't drive him back.  I get that she probably drove him as far as the car would have gone, but still...) 

It's disheartening to see him wandering in the snow, but it's also what makes Superman the character he is.  What Superman II does for the character is to show that none of this is about his ego.  Again, you guys know that I'm not the biggest Man of Steel fan.  The biggest complaint about that movie is that Superman doesn't treat human life as the biggest priority.  Part of that comes from how chaotic Zod is in Man of Steel.  Okay, fine.  But Superman, in Superman II, keeps taking hits because he's making sure that no one is hurt.  The reason that Metropolis turns on Superman is that he flies away.  They all read it as Superman abandoning them when, in all reality, he doesn't want anyone hurt because of him.  Everything about this is about sacrificing the ego.  Okay, he goes back and puts Rocky in his place.  Sure.  That's just a fun moment.  But Clark learns more about what it means to be a hero and that means that his vulnerability has to be more than just kryptonite.  It's knowing that you can't be everything for everyone.

Do I wish the movie ended differently?  Yeah, that forgetting kiss is problematic in every scenario.  Even from a narrative perspective, that is a weak choice.  It feels like a get-out-of-jail free card that the movie doesn't need.  The first movie acknowledges that Clark will break the rules to achieve the over all good.  Remember that "Interfere with the course of human history bit"?  He's allowed to date Lois and let her in on the secret.  Why make her forget something that is so personal to both of them?  I know that she says that it is torturing her, but even the acknowledgment that they can be romantic without being intimate is something.  Maybe I'm putting too much thought into this.

It's still a pretty great movie, but it will never be Superman: The Movie for me.

Not rated, but once again, Ingmar Bergman makes a movie about adultery.  There is some mild (I can't believe I'm writing this) domestic abuse in the movie.  Also, someone calls someone else a mean word.  There's also the implication that one of the characters is suicidal.  Tonally, it's more slow than it is upsetting.  But that's the long and short of the whole movie.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

There's no way I'm getting this done today.  I'm way too distracted.  My motivation is in the toilet.  Yet, I'm powering through everything as if my life depended on it.  Maybe I should be complimenting myself on my willpower.  After all, here I am, writing about a Bergman movie that is kind of blending in with all of the other Bergman movies.  Also, again, I'm not in the mood to be writing in the wake of the end of civilization.  So points to me for finding some degree of normalcy in the face of all...this. 

I'm going to be the guy who tries dunking on one of the most respected directors in all of the cinematic canon.  The worst part, the part that is bringing this out of me, is a box set which is meant to be a celebration of Bergman.  By itself, there's almost nothing wrong with Dreams.  It is another smaller Bergman movie, of which he made a lot.  The notion behind auteur theory is that you can recognize a director's work without credits because of cinematic technique, themes, motifs, ideas, etc.  I can definitely recognize the smaller Bergman works because he keeps returning to the same gosh darn well over-and-over-and-over again.  

To his credit, there's something incredibly romantic to these movies.  With Dreams, I have to give him the credit to tell these stories from the women's perspective, especially in light of some of these other movies that paint women to be awful.  It's not to say that Doris isn't awful.  But Doris is awful while simultaneously being sympathetic.  On top of the idea of empowering women is the notion that maybe love is more than something that is trite to be explored in a romantic movie.  The thing that Dreams does pretty darned well is the notion of yearning and emptiness when it comes to exploring love.  Women in a lot of movies, including Bergman's other works, seems like something that people are constantly chasing because it is the social norm that women are supposed to chase.  Instead, Bergman gives us the story of two strikingly different women and, using that juxtaposition, explores how they end up in similar places.  

For the sake of exploration, we're going to have to use "love" as the idea that they are chasing simply because they try finding wholeness in romantic relationships.  With the case of Doris, her immaturity (which borderlines on stupidity) gives her a perverted sense of completion.  Doris intentionally does not push herself into emotionally challenging places.  If anything, Doris's major crime is that she takes the easy route to everything that she does in life.  There are moments where Doris actively tries to redefine herself.  When Otto offers to buy her the dress initially, she's appropriately skeptical.  We can't dismiss her as someone who is completely shallow.  Instead, we see someone who is manipulated by capitalism and ownership.  She acknowledges that she wants the dress, but Otto keeps moving the goalposts when it comes to getting said dress.  It makes Otto somewhat despicable, despite having a handful of sympathetic traits to him.  He swears that there are no caveats to her receiving the dress, but he keeps dangling carrots out in front of Doris.  The reason that he comes across as gross is not because of his age (which isn't helping his case).  It's the idea that he employs his riches to manipulate a girl who is without funds.  He manipulates her into a place where she borderline prostitutes herself.

It's interesting, watching Doris embrace something that she initially is hesitant.  As much as I imply that she's dumb, she does have a wealth of emotion behind her.  At one point, she gets a little drunk on champagne and reveals that she wants far too much that would be considered appropriate.  The irony of this scene is that she's embracing Otto's request.  He asks her to be honest with all of her desires.  But when she says all of these extravagant things, Otto looks at her with horror.  She then states quite soberly that she would not accept any of these things because that would make her a bad person.  But she also is scolding Otto for even the notion that he needs to buy someone's affection.  Still, she does live this fairytale life for a while.  I've never seen Pretty Woman, but I imagine that there's a lot of crossover happening here.

But it's odd that Doris is the secondary character in the movie.  Doris could absolutely be the focus of her own film.