Rated PG for a surprising amount of blood for a Godzilla film.  Sure, people die in droves because giant kaiju end up smashing up buildings all willy-nilly.  But also, like, we get some gore.  Godzilla himself loses a lot of blood. But, also, these aliens spew out black goo that is clearly blood for them.  And that scene happens a lot with a lots of aliens.  It's more gnarly looking than I'm probably describing and it oddly is more than a little upsetting.  Still, it's a PG movie and kids could probably handle most of it.

DIRECTOR:  Jun Fukuda

I didn't think that these movies would get this bad.  I really didn't.  I thought that I had crossed the crap stuff and I was actually looking forward to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.  I thought this was one of the ones that was kind of revered.  I mean, we still get Mechagodzilla in a bunch of the newer adaptations.  But I don't think I've ever been so thankful to be near the end of a box set as I was after having finished this borderline abomination of a story.

I have to backpedal on some of the stuff I was saying about the Godzilla movies earlier.  In other Godzilla blogs, I complained that, sometimes, the movies relied too much on kaiju fighting instead of putting character first.  I still mostly believe that.  There's only so much of guys in monster suits punching each other before you get really tired of it.  I was all about the human component.  Well, Jun Fukuda --again! --wanted to prove me wrong.  This movie barely has any kaiju fight sequences and, besides the blood, they seem to be on par with the previous films in terms of trying to do anything innovative.  Nope, this is a movie that really embraces what the people of Japan are doing while these monsters promise to level the country.

The problem lies with the fact that the story might be the most incoherent story yet.  I genuinely believe that, for most of these films, the biggest hurdle that these movies have during the production is the attempt to make the movie long enough to excuse being in theaters.  To do that, the guys who write these movies --Fukuda included! --have to try to fill ever second with plot because there is no consistency of character in these films.  (Maybe that might be one of the only positive things about the modern American adaptations of Godzilla.  I like that we're following the same heroes as they interact with this weird and wacky world of monsters.) 

Because we don't care about any of these characters, every single beat has to be plot driven.  I hate to tell you, but I've now blogged about a lot of these movies.  (I don't the energy, both physical or mental, to walk downstairs and count how many Godzilla movies I've watched from my Criterion box set.  I'm sorry.  I'm really trying to knock this blog out before I go to bed because my wife fell asleep on the couch and I didn't want to watch the newest episode of Lanterns without her.) The thing is, I don't think those guys give a crap about the plots.  Like, at all?  They almost seem to hate the idea that they have to write something creative.

Now, I'm imbuing my thoughts on this. For all we know, these guys are regular Ed Woods out there, throwing the most bananas crap at the screen and thinking that its gold.  But, holy crap, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla --beyond all expectations --is the most incomprehensible Godzilla movie yet.  Like, I'd almost forgive it if the point was to be obtuse.  I've now watched enough avant garde cinema to understand that sometimes we're not quite supposed to get it.  That's not what is happening here.  (I don't think that anyone thought that was happening, but I'm just covering my bases.)  

This movie is brow-beating its audience into shutting its brain off.  There are so many hats stacked upon hats stacked upon hats stacked upon hats that you kind of forget what the point of this movie is beyond the fact that we're going to have a final act where two actors in rubber monsters suits punch each other near model buildings.  And the thing is, I'm not asking for greatness.  This is 1974.  We're in the Roger Moore era of 007 movies.  I'm pretty open to some wild storytelling swings.  (Note:  I couldn't help but notice that some of the production choices seemed to mirror the stuff going on at EON productions while watching this.)  And it's not like I wouldn't hate any one of the beats if it was just stretched out to make the story make sense.  Instead, it's all these disparate ingredients and none of them has the opportunity to stand by itself.

If this was a movie about aliens, I probably would roll my eyes.  I don't know what aliens want to do with a Mechagodzilla outside of their standard "take over the world" bit that we've seen with the last half dozen entries in the franchise.  I supposed I could take my medicine if it was just aliens.  But then there's the prophecy of two monsters fighting a monster that was going to bring about the end of the world.  Okay, I can even feel like I could weave a tale of scientists / archeologists trying to discipher a cryptic message from a Western perpsective.  But then there's the need to wake up this ancient kaiju named King Caesar (what a choice!).  And then there's this whole story of Interpol, with agents who keep showing up and shooting the bad guys when the time is needed for a heroic guy to get out of a scrape.  And then there is a whole separate team who is investigating the aliens?  Why?  Why do all of this when you could have done any one of these with a degree of subtlety and grace.

And maybe it's because this movie annoyed me so much that I feel like being flippant about it all.  I feel like the answer comes down to laziness.  I've now watched a lot of these movies and I keep typing the name "Jun Fukuda."  He directs a lot of these and his name is attached to a lot of the writing credits for these films.  These movies are churned out quickly.  That's something I'm kind of having to adapt to.  I buy these massive Criterion box sets where every movie of a long running franchise is cleaned up and released as a fancy-pants edition and these movies were not given time to gestate and solve problems.  Instead, these are movies that seem to be made by the seats of their pants.  The reason that we have a million plots thrown into the stew is because it takes time, effort, and crafting to actually use one idea to its greatest potential.  It's like Fukuda knew what the bargain was.  He'll fill in the splash and the plot point knowing that everyone just signed up to watch monster fights.

The thing that's going to drive me mildly insane is the knowledge that this might be one of the entries that people absolutely adore.  I mean, I mentioned earlier that Mechagodzilla is beloved.  Does he get an alternative origin later on?  Maybe he gets an origin that makes a moderate amount of sense at some time down the line, after we leave the Showa era of Godzilla?  I want to believe that there's something that people find attractive about elements of this film because I was just put out by this movie.  Like, I know I'm not completely crazy.  The next entry is named Terror of Mechagodzilla.  It implies that audiences were so on board Mechagodzilla that they had to bring him up.  I love the idea of a Mechagodzilla.  I love the obvious idea that Mechagodzilla was built in response to the fact that Godzilla was an unconrollable threat.  Heck, I'm writing this right now, but I also like the idea that man's hubris caused them to lose control of this Promethean fire and that humanity had to turn to Godzilla, the very creature that they were trying to destroy, for help.

But instead we got this hot trash.  It's so bad, guys.  Maybe someone out there loves this and I hope you continue loving this.  This was such a bridge too far.  I can't wait to knock this box out.  I'm probably going to keep watching the Godzilla movies post-Showa era in the hopes that these movies actually get good.  But, boy-oh-boy, this one was a stinker.

Rated R for typical bloody murder.  I know that this is splitting hairs at this point, but Scream 7, while brutal, lacks some of the truly mean violence that the previous two entries had embraced.  Still, there are some pretty gnarly and gory murders throughout.  Once again, there's commentary about sex, but no actual sex in the film itself.  There's language and I think some mild references to drug use.  Tonally, it matches the Wes Craven entries.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Kevin Williamson

DISCLAIMER:  I watched a library DVD copy of this movie.  I protested watching it in the theater both because of Paramount's approaching merger with Warner Brothers and because of Paramount's treatment of both Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega for speaking out in defense of Palestine.  I ensured that none of my money went towards Paramount.  

Yeah, I waited on this one.  I didn't care that it made a ton of money at the box office.  I also was secretly glad that the reviews of this movie were pretty rough.  Yeah, I got spiteful.  This is a bit of a SCAB film (or, a Stab film?  I'm also mad at myself for writing that.)  So, here I am, trying to write a blog about a movie that I hate got made for a franchise that I really like.  It's a weird time and a lot of people are probably super annoyed that I won't shut up about my political bent.  But things are honestly pretty terrible and I'm floored when people don't say anything about the constantly growing hellscape around us.  *sigh*

So how do I write a review about a movie that is so entrenched in scandal and bad faith that it actually affects the plot?  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention.  Scream 7 was never supposed to happen in the way that we see it.  Scream 7 was supposed to be a sequel to the reboot of Scream and Scream VI.  It was supposed to be the close of a trilogy that was supposed to close up the Sam and Tara Carpenter story, tying into the lineage of Billy Loomis.  Yeah, I get it.  It was already a stretch to make this franchise about Billy's legacy.  But the movies asked us to invest in this storyline and --I don't think I'm crazy for saying this --those movies were so good that it got me to get past the overmythologizing of a too-long-running franchise.  

So when Scream 7 came out, we're now looking at something that is actively interrupting storytelling.  It's not that stories need to be trilogies.  We technically don't need a Sam and Tara story to round out the events of the previous two films.  If we had to pretend that the Scream movies were at least somewhat based in reality, it is entirely possible that Sam and Tara have nothing else to do with the Ghostface killers and that they get therapy to lead quasi-normal lives.  But it all feels...off?  In a weird way, I'm still harping on the fact that Scream 7 is such an aggressive cash-grab.  So not only do I have to put my politics aside to actually watch Scream 7 as a movie, I also have to ignore that there was a storyline in place before this that seems to be derailed by the fact that Paramount, as a company, kind of sucks.

Okay, that means the next step I have to watch is to either watch Scream 7 as a standalone film or as a legacy sequel to either Scream 1-4 and part of 5 or a movie by itself.  I don't think it works as a movie by itself.  I don't think Scream 7 even wants to be considered a standalone film.  A lot of Scream 7 is going for the nostalgia grab.  (If you think I keep bringing in studio suits as a dodge for talking about the movie itself, the Scream franchise was built on meta storytelling.  It's all fair game.) This is a Scream movie written and directed by Kevin Williamson.  It must be weird to be Kevin Williamson, by the way.  (Mr. Williamson, big fan.  Not necessarily of this movie, but I also acknowledge that it is hard making a movie and this movie looks pretty solid.  There's wins here, just not from a fan perspective.)  Williamson rose to a place of mild celebrity in the '90s with the first Scream film.  Like, that movie changed the game.  Dimension Films owed so much to that guy because it made horror cool.  And even though I think that the original film is as good as the franchise gets, he made some absolute bangers in that series.  But he was always a screenwriter.  

Then, every so often, we get a nostalgic pang for the '90s horror and Williamson (for the most part) comes out of retirement and pens another film.  Well, with the late Wes Craven being unable to make more of these movies and the other directors at odds with the studio, I can't help but Paramount's logic to have Williamson direct is an example of a return to basics.  It's not the worst way you could go, by the way.  Even though I am incredibly frustrated with this movie, the back-to-basics approach to Scream kind of works.  Heck, even with all of the moral hangups I have with this movie, I don't want to see Williamson fail.  And do you know what Williamson does for this movie?  He makes it really seem like a Wes Craven entry in the series.

Even though Wes Craven directed Scream 4, Scream 7 feels more like a Wes Craven entry than Scream 4.  This honestly has more of the tone of the first three movies and I can't think that was an accident.  Ironically, this movie as a commentary on AI filmmaking might have that extra meta attempt because Williamson is straight up borrowing vibes off of the first three films.  (Sure, he wrote them, but the visuals were all Wes Craven.) Now, normally I'd complain.  After all, I'm all about innovation.  But I do have a nostaglic fan-service guy in me.  I don't deny it.  When the Enterprise-D comes out at the end of Picard season 3, I lost my mind.  I even have to say that I'm a big Matthew Lillard fan, especially when it comes to Stu.  Billy may be the more interesting character, but I dug Lillard's performance as Stu back in the day.  

But, man alive, is this getting blood from a stone?  Stu...wasn't ever meant to be deep.  He's the idiot buddy.  Having this weird conspiracy theory that Stu Macher survived the events of the first film when he had a TV dropped on his head?  Yeah, I know.  It doesn't play out that way.  But the fact that Williamson considered putting an after-credits sequence showing that Stu was actually alive means that it was considered a plausible ending for this character.  I know!  I know!  The world of Scream is a heightened world where people know each other and the notion of becoming a serial killer is only a thought away from anyone joining the Ghostface club.  But there has to be a bridge too far before we completely suspend disbelief.  If anything, the fact that Williamson considered it means that is how open this series is to just embracing outright silliness as a means of storytelling.

I'm torn on this movie.  Like, it sucks.  It sucks real hard.  But the meat is there.  Let's talk about why it sucks.  I've heavily hinted at the fact that this is functionally a Scream story.  Heck, it embraces the Sydney story aggressively hard.  It ties Stu Macher back into the story.  The very look of the film is something out of the early Scream movies.  But what it doesn't do is make me care.  Horror movies, especially slasher movies, have a real burden on them to make me care about the characters.  We know that a lot of them are going to be picked off before the end of the film.  But a well-developed character makes us want to see them survive.  There is none of that in this movie.  I don't think I've ever seen a movie treat the extended cast as cannon fodder more than the cast of Scream 7.  Golly, Chloe Parker is painfully shoehorned into the story.  She has almost no tie to the main characters.  When we watched the original Scream, these were all friends.  When we thought that one of them was the killer, it actually mattered.  Friendships fell apart.  Trust was broken.  Not so much here.  It's all wildly artificial because none of those people mattered outside of Sydney's family.

Also, I call real shannigans that Mark survived.  Let's talk about Mark and cop-aganda in this movie.  I know that I said that I would divorce myself politically from this, but it feels like Paramount really wanted a perfect police force.  "But, Tim, you didn't complain about this before with the other movies?"  1) I wasn't as socially conscious before and 2) Dewey seemed like he kind of fell into the job and was more concerned about Sydney than being a deputy.  Sure, sure.  Dewey may have been problematic, but Sydney is deeply cool with her husband being a cop.  Now, if we're looking at someone who is ingrained with trauma, a'la Sydney, I can see that she might be cooler with some of the ethical conundrums with being married to a law enforcement officer...especially considering that cops carry guns and should stand up to a background check.  But, man alive, they made Joel McHale supercop.  We're miles away from Dewey, outside of the fact that they both can apparently take a hilarious amount of knife wounds.

I'm going to close this up as quickly as I can because I've invested so much time into this and I keep getting interrupted.  My actual life is falling behind right now and I need to shut up on this.  But I do want to talk a little bit about two more things: 1) empathy and 2) how stupid the killer reveal is.   1)  Empathy:  It may have taken a bad Scream movie to show how insane the people inside the Scream universe really are.  Man, there is this idea that cleverness is just having people saying what they are thinking.  Almost everyone in this movie is obsessed with their own self-interests.  The next door neighbor kid keeps asking Sydney questions about her time in Woodsboro.  Sydney's daughter, Tatum, is wildly obsessed with having Sydney teach her about being a survivor.  But the insane thing of it all is the notion that no one talks to each other that way.  There's something I can be flippant about and claim that teenagers are jerks.  But across the board, people treat each other as commodities to be used.  I thought we've been through enough Scream movies with Gale Weathers that she would have learned her lesson at this point about how people actually talk to each other when they are friends.

And now the real reason that everyone hates this movie:  (Okay, why I hate this movie.  I know a lot of people enjoyed it.)  The killers are dumb.  That revelation, it was stupid.  Sure, we expect --at this point --that the killers have a direct tie to Sydney or her family.  (Note:  Besides being disappointed that we got three stupid cameos for a paycheck, I don't know how Marco got the raw data to recreate killers from the past.)  Jessica Bowden's motivation was insane.  Okay, Williamson writes her off as insane, which I think is pretty thin.  But I like the idea that Jessica was inspired by Sydney to take her power back, even if that meant killing her husband.  But I can't, for the life of me, believe that she would become a serial killer of randos with that motivation.  She's mad that Sydney didn't go to New York?  That...doesn't align with anything.  How does becoming Ghostface balance that idea out?  Coupled with the notion that she casually killed her own kid?  That's...straight up dumb. Like, it makes zero sense.

I hated it before I watched it.  I started to like it when watching it.  Then I sincerely dislike the movie because it got crazy lazy in the final act.  Disappointed.

Rated R, mostly for language, including a bit about porn that two people joke about.  There's also mass death off screen.  It's a lot of existential dread that leads to alcoholism.  If you are sensitive to people being cut, there's one shot that might make you wince.  But the thing that almost exclusively gets the film an R-rating is language.  

DIRECTOR: Mike Flanagan

I'm just so tired.  No part of me wants to write this blog.  I have things that I have to do and I don't want to do any of it.  But I have access to internet for an hour and, gosh darn it, I suppose I should take advantage of the time available to me.  It's my fault.  I went to bed too late and got up too early.  I'm a big dummy and I am obsessed with staying productive.  Here we go.

I read the short story.  I love me some Stephen King.  Honestly, people tend to crap on Stephen King a lot.  Sure, he's going through a bit of a renaissance, especially with the wealth of his works that are being adapted right now.  Pile onto that the fact that Mike Flanagan, Doctor Sleep himself, is adapting another Stephen King work --especially considering that Mike Flanagan is in the spotlight as well --and this movie should make sense.  I don't want to let my current grumpiness to color my blog about the film too much.  Overall, I really liked the movie.  I actually recommended it to people.  It's not that I don't find the value of the film.  But I also have to make peace with something that I don't want to make peace with:

Stephen King doesn't write reality.

For most of you out there, this is a "No, duh" element.  While The Life of Chuck isn't a horror movie, King himself is the most famous horror author out there.  He's written some absolutely bananas ideas.  I'm not really talking about that.  I'm talking about the grounded moments.  

I was shocked to find out that I was one of the few people who really liked The Long Walk.  I'm going to go on a limb and say that I am really forgiving of Stephen King's flaws.  He writes a fun yarn and I'll even go as far as to say that I like the dynamics and friendships that he creates in his stories.  It's just that his dialogue is almost Rockwellian in nature.  That is, if Norman Rockwell was a big fan of cussing.  

The Life of Chuck runs into some of the problems that The Long Walk did.  When you take Stephen King's novels and short stories and adapt the dialogue --and, if I'm honest, some of the moments --to the big screen, there are moments that don't quite feel real.  It's not that they aren't emotional.  Heck, a lot of the movie is aggressive emotional manipulation.  Like, it's thick.  It's a lot of red flags for me put into one movie.  But that being said, for the emotionally  vulnerable, it's some stuff that is meant to make you cry.  I, being a bit of a hard sell sometimes (when it comes to tearjerker films), might be a bit cynical --despite being the guy who preaches the value of emotional vulnerability.  

While there are a bunch of moments in The Life of Chuck that kind of prove my point, I want to focus on dancing.  A key motif in Chuck is the fact that Chuck dances.  It's actually one of the more recognizable elements in his very thin character (which is odd, considering that this movie is called The Life of Chuck).  Because the movie is told with non-traditional chronology, playing with the relationships between cause and effect, we see the big moment for Chuck as he, for reasons up to that point unknown, dancing publicly and with abandon.  I'll tell you, seeing Tom Hiddleston cutting a rug to a drumbeat in the middle of a square is mostly pretty effective.  I know that Hiddleston can dance.  He's done so on talk shows and he seems to have the moves.  When he invites a random girl who is mildly participating to join him in the dance, there's a little suspension of disbelief as the two pull off what looks to be a choreographed number in front of a bunch of people.  Still, we're in a movie and we have movie logic.  The beginning of the film even establishes a scope that is so epic and bombastic that a dance in the middle of the square seems like a slice of reality.  

But because this is a movie that inverts cause and effect, we see the moments that inspired Chuck to dance in the middle of square by showing us his childhood.  And there are some sweet moments that actually kind of work.  Chuck's relationship to his grandmother, who bonds with Chuck over musicals, teaches him (foreshadowed by moments in the dance when we see a woman throw her hand up to the beat) how to express himself through dance.  It's touching.  And then the emotional punches keep coming.  We learn that Chuck continued taking dance instruction as a way to memorialize his grandmother, which is all very sweet.  

But it's the fact that the movie really wants you to have this tearjerker moments is when I think my disbelief has been suspended too much.  The climax of the film is a young Chuck finally getting the gumption to do a very ornately choreographed dance to a song that he didn't pick with a girl with whom he has a crush.  (You could argue that the crush is arbitrary, considering that he celebrates by dancing out in a field alone.)  But the moment when the entire school rallies around this kid who memorized a dance routine is so much of a bridge too far.  I commented on Norman Rockwell because it's something that almost scream Americana, mostly pulling from an America that never existed.  

Again, there are lots of moments like this.  If you make a deal with yourself that King gets cornball, especially when he strays from horror, the scenes aren't so bad.  But it is hard to imagine that people's reactions to what are borderline silly moments are that earnest is kind of absurd.  I'd love to live in a world where The Life of Chuck got people to bring the best versions of themselves out.  Maybe I've grown too cynical.  And it's not like King is too hopeful for humanity.  I don't think he actually thinks people are that great, to be honest.  It's just that his reactions are just slightly off from what they should be.  As opposed to the "Way to go, Chuck!" comments coming from everyone, I think that we should have a healthy dose of politeness or pity claps.  I know that doesn't sell as hard as everyone rallying around the dancing tiny kid.  It's just that these moments kind of read as Simon Burch to me.

It's kind of insane to think the wealth of things that are covered in this movie.  And that's maybe where I'm back on board the movie again.  The first act is crazy.  As I was watching a lot of the movie, I thought that the beginning of the film's very big idea was unearned.  The film starts off with the world quickly ending.  People are trying to live normal lives as the world collapses around them.  It's a bit of a puzzle box trying to understand the supernatural things that affect these people.  And I'll go ahead and say that it is super interesting.  I read The Life of Chuck short story (as I already mentioned) and I still forgot how that played out.  Even with that knowledge, I kept thinking that maybe the opening didn't work for the film.

That would be true if he film didn't develop a motif of "I Contain Multitudes."  Sure, it's a little forced.  Sure, it's almost lobbing a cookie to the English teacher in me.  Heck, I might even criticize that it almost does a disservice to Whitman's poem (if it wasn't presented so darned lovingly).  But the movie almost writes a scenario where it can do wild and outlandish things in a story about a kid who loves to dance because stories don't have to be one thing.  The movie is presented in a reverse three-act structure and all of those acts give almost a different genre.  We get a hint of the apocalypse.  We get the story of an accountant who dances.  We get the story of a ghost in the attic.  That's a lot to take in because it's not like those connections are made explicit.  It's fun and I can see someone being really turned off.  But "I contain multitudes" does a lot of heavy lifting that explains it.

It's not a perfect movie.  I enjoyed it.  Honestly, even though I'm still sporting a pretty impressive headache, I enjoyed it.  But I can't deny that the movie is aggressively cornball.  There's so much cheese and saccarine in this movie that I'd hate to treat reality in the way that The Life of Chuck treats it.  It's more than a little indulgent.  If you go into it with that attitude and make peace with that, it's sweet.  But in terms of really nailing what it means to be human, there's a disconnect there.

Not rated.  This more conceptually upsetting than actually anything that would be worrisome.  I mean, there's a lot of sick kids and a lot of those sick kids drink foot water.   But the movie is mostly about religious trauma and how it affects a family.  Yes, it is very upsetting.  But if I had to point to one thing that was really a red flag, I don't think I could really point to anything.   

DIRECTOR: Satyajit Ray

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R and for good reason.  We're in the place where a movie knows it might have a bit of a cult following.  As such, the f-word --among other swear words --flows freely.  We're going to get some pretty dark stuff, including the gory deaths of major characters.  It also shoots for an uncomfortable tone for much of the film.  One of the key motifs of the film is school shootings, which is simultaneously taken very seriously and, oddly enough, with a sense of humor.  This is a well-deserved, but interesting R.

DIRECTOR:  Gore Verbinski

I think I love this, but I'm not in love with this. 

But I don't know if I'm shocked about that.  Let's back up.  God bless Gore Verbinski for making a movie that goes so hard at AI in 2025.  Like, it's really bizarre that we've all kind of gotten to this point, considering so many of us were raised on The Terminator.  But we're also living in a world where a tech company that exclusively collects information on the American people named themselves "Palantir", so who knows what our human morality really is at.

Before I go too far, I do want to --oddly enough in a blog about a movie named Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die --talk about Pope Leo's encyclial Magnifica Humanitas.  Trust me, there's a direct connection.  I'm part of my church's social action committee.  As part of that, we're doing this breakdown of Pope Leo's first letter.  For those unaware of what Magnific Humanitas is, it's the Vatican's stance on artificial intelligence.  (See, I could have led with that, but I needed at least a sentence or two to build up suspense.) Now, I love this text.  Like, it might have gone harder than anything I've read in a long time.  He's the pope.  I get that he has the opportunity to go on the offensive.  But I haven't seen anything as intense and powerful as this encyclical.  I loved it.  It was more than simply a take on artificial intelligence --which it absolutely rips apart.  But instead, it is the reasons why artificial intelligence is so dangerous to the dignity of the human person.  

Now, I consider Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die to be the darker side of the same argument.  This is a movie that wants to be as fun as it can be while simultaneously traumatizing its audience.  That's not quite Magnifica Humanitas.  But beyond its treatus on artificial intelligence, it is also one of those movies that tries to remind us what it means to be human and how quickly we have forgotten some of our base code (pun intended) when it comes to putting humanity first.  The unnamed protagonist, in his zeal for bringing down this system that places humanity on the back foot, comes across as an anti-hero.  (Please note: you shouldn't take the unnnamed protagonist's stance completely.  He's very cool with undue loss of life, mainly because he's a time traveller who constantly resets people's deaths.) But he also, despite having a cavalier attitude towards all of the people that he meets, seems to understand that life used to mean something.  Yeah, it's a bit of low hanging fruit to show teenagers on their phones as mindless zombies.  I will talk about that later (if I remember it).  But, do you know what?   It's also wildly effective.

Okay, I'm going to talk about the teenagers now because I know I'll forget.  I usually hate when generations are crapped on by their elders.  I got a lot of that as a millennial.  I thought I would never do that.  But I also notice that empathy is at an all time low when it comes to Gen Z, at least as a high school teacher.  It's not absolute and I still want to defend Gen Z.  But I remember a time when I was teaching and my students were deeply moved by the plights of others.  But now, it's stuff like this.  All media consumed comes in small snippets that's meant to appeal to every already embraced facet of their personas.  That scene when Mark touches the screen just to see how they would react?  That scene reads as a violation because to a lot of kids, that would be a violation.  I hate that the commentary is base and old-man problems, but when it works, I guess it works.

I can't help but think that this lives in the shadow of Black Mirror.  Like, if Black Mirror never existed, would we have a Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.  I say this because the movie takes some big swings.  Because Black Mirror is an anthology show with a thematic tie of the dangers of dependence on technology, the tones can vary.  Sometimes a Black Mirror episode can be quite intimate.  Other times, we find ourselves laughing at incredibly bleak humor.  But that's kind of the tone of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.  For the most part, this is an over-the-top film.  Rockwell's performance is so big and so perfect, it sets a pace car for some of the absolutely bananas things that happen in this film.  I mean, that's smart.  We know that Black Mirror works.  (To a certain extent.  We still have wider and wider allowances for what artificial intelligence is allowed to do, despite the fact that this show has been warning us of the dangers for more than a decade.)  

And, yeah, this movie needs to be fun, but bleak.  I actually think that this movie is doing mostly everything right.  Does it feel like a little bit of a knock-off of Black Mirror as opposed to a successor?  Yeah, kind of.  But I also think that this is a much more interesting take on AI than something like Terminator.  The thing about Terminator, as groundbreaking as Terminator was, is that it concentrated on being a great sci-fi action movie.  Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die --for all of its silliness --doesn't really let humanity off the hook.  Yes, there are action moments.  Nothing Terminator-y, but action moments nonetheless.  But the key concept that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die presents is that big explosions and stong morals aren't necessarily going to have an effect on AI.  

There was an X-Files episode a while back where Mulder and Scully discovered that there was going to be a dangerous piece of technology brought into the world and that they had to stop it.  (I barely remember this and I'm really rooting into the back of my memory to even go that far.  Because The X-Files was mostly episodic, Mulder and Scully stopped the guy from inventing that piece of tech, only to discover that someone else across the planet was having the same breakthrough.  That's kind of the point of Good Luck. Technological progress is always going to keep going.  We've proven, as a species, that we are incapable of heeding reasonable warnings when it comes to making destructive choices.  Instead, this movie ends up being a criticism more of humanity than of artificial intelligence itself.  

The film is divided into the mainplot and a series of flashbacks giving us insight into the individual members of the team and their respective horror stories when it came to artificial intelligence.  Big ups to Gore Verbinski for even sticking his toe into the school shooting epidemic that we're in now.  But one of the stories had a character who was allergic to Wifi.  (In the same way that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die knocks off Black Mirror, we can probably accuse the film of also borrowing heavily from Better Call Saul when it comes to that character beat.)  She finally finds a kindred spirit with a pizza delivery driver who embraces more of a technophobic luddite lifestyle.  But that scene also illustrates how addictive technology actually is.  (Note: Only hours ago, Meta settled a lawsuit basically admitting that it makes social media addictive to children.) 

But I have to complain.  I wouldn't be me (that's not true.  I tend to love everything too much) if I didn't point out the fact that this movie seems to hinge on a twist that is almost telegraphing itself to us.  Like, the movie goes out with a twist ending.  But I'm not sure if it was always structured that way.  The movie goes bizarre.  Truly and honestly --sometimes in the best possible way --bizarre.  There is an understanding early on that anything can and will happen in this movie.  As the team gets closer and closer to the boy's house, more and more enemies get in the team's way.  Almost because he could, Verbinski has a cat centaur act as a kaiju barrier between the team and the house.  Now, Rockwell's character straight up verbalizes that this is a lazy prompt written by an AI.  Still, somehow, Ingrid and Rockwell's character seem to have the epiphany too late that they didn't stop the AI and were horrified that they were in the system.  

Maybe there's a beat in the movie that I don't understand, but it seems like the characters just started the film in the AI.  According to Rockwell's character's rules, the AI was going to present them with things that they wanted to see and hear and give them the impression that they were defying the odds.  There is no moment where we question whether they screwed up.  Ultimately, it shouldn't matter that time travel happened.  No matter how many times Rockwell's character goes back in time, it seems like he's already in the AI.  (I'm working out my understanding about the knife wound and AI.  At first, I didn't think that the knife wound would get healed.  But if that timeline was erased, would that have stopped the knife from ever stabbing him?  I mean, he has memories of that timeline.  Why wouldn't those memories get erased if the knife never happened?  Does time travel itself cure travellers?  Who knows?  This is what I think about a lot.)

There was one thing that I hoped would be explained that never got put in there.  At one point, Darren tells Susan that there's a secret tunnel under the diner.  In that secret tunnel, it felt like a nerdy set designer decided to pay tribute to Portal by putting "The Cake is a Lie" as graffiti.  I thought that might have been too obvious, but then Darren's room had a Portal poster on it, making me think that corporeal Darren may have tagged that wall and that he wasn't part of the AI.  But, nah, it seems like people on the design team just liked Portal.  Bummer.

Anyway, I dug it, but it also seemed to not exactly have all of its rules clearly established in its own bible.  I'm still going to heavily recommend it, even if it has some beats thrown in there without explanation.

Rated PG for a lot of Looney Tunes-style cartoon violence.  If anything, it's the core of the movie.  One of the big questions asked is if physical pain matters if there are no permanent consequences.  I'll talk about that in a minute, but I do have to mention the other things that are questionable.  The movie, while definitely staying in the realm of "appropriate for kids", really pushes the envelope when it comes to almost or kinda swearing.  It's mild, but my fourteen-year-old and I exchanged glances when things bordered inappropriate.  Still, it's a mostly family-friendly movie, if not a little heady for younger audiences.

DIRECTOR:  Dave Green

Like, not Coyote v. Acme, huh?  Like, a legal comedy, you didn't decide to go the Batman v. Superman route and made it seem like it was going to be a slugfest, huh?

I need to stop getting my hopes up.  I do have to say that Coyote vs Acme isn't a bad time.  My kids, for the most part, liked it.  My fourteen-year-old weirdly really liked it.  I simply thought it was okay.  The problem is that this is one of those movies that's not allowed to be only "okay."  Next weekend is opening weekend.  This is a movie that needs to absolutely dominate at the box office to show the Warners that they can't just bury art for tax breaks.  Will Forte really seemed to care about this project and he believed in it.  I mean, it's a fine movie.  Heck, it even takes some amazing swings and overall connects when it does.  But in terms of being one of those great movies that I'll talk about for years?  This isn't one of them.

I do have to preface that I'm not a big fan of Space Jam or movies that really remind me of Space Jam, despite being one of the few fans of Space Jam: A New Legacy.  My dad was weirdly into Looney Tunes, but that might have been more of a thing that we could have shared together.  I mildly enjoyed Looney Tunes.  It was something that I wanted to like more than I actually did.  That's kind of how I feel about this.  There are moments.  The joke about the model full-on caught me off-guard.  Like, it's such a good joke.  Even some of the violence bits, hilarious.  But when I saw that Will Forte was the face behind this movie, I thought it was going to be more Will Forte humor.

I can't help but compare this movie to the Jason Seigel The Muppets.  I do think that The Muppets is something special, even though I hold the Muppets in similar regard to Looney Tunes.    But The Muppets was the product of Jason Seigel.  As much as it was a send up to the characters, it feels very much like it was directly plucked from the mind of Jason Seigel.  I know that Will Forte didn't write the script to this one.  Actually, apparently James Gunn had his hand in a lot of this movie.  But Will Forte, for the most part, plays a straight man to Wile E. Coyote, who is silent for the majority of the film.  Here's the deal: When I shut my brain off, I enjoyed it.  

But the good news is that the movie doesn't really let you shut your brain off.  As much as I wasn't howling with laughter the entire time, I do think that Coyote vs. Acme is a way smarter movie than I was prepped for with a bit of an appropriate plotline, given its release history with Warner Brothers.  This is a movie that is unabashedly criticizing oligarchs and big corporations.  It's an absolutely insane idea to turn a franchise that lives and breathes unconsequential violence and then makes a movie about the legal world where things like that happen.  Honestly, I am flummoxed on how this movie broke the hour mark, let alone an hour-and-forty-one minutes.  Remember, this is technically a movie for kids (even though I really wonder who the target audience for this movie really is).  A lot of this movie is devoted to courtroom shanannigans as a personal injury lawyer goes against Amazon.  Did I say Amazon?  I meant Amazon.  

Yeah, Acme could be a lot of different companies.  And be aware, I'm going to write a spoiler for a movie that doesn't come out until next week.  When we watch movies about the underdog going against the all powerful corporation, especially given a family tone, you would think that the little guy is going to win his legal battle.  Um...not really.  That was the gutsiest ending that I've ever seen.  Yeah, the movie backpedals it a bit when Bugs drops off this convenient evidence.  But if we're looking at the climax of the film, yeah Will Forte loses.  Do you get how much I love the fact that the movie is just embracing the fact that the United States government will do just about anything to ensure that the rich gets richer and that this is the message of a children's film?  I love it.

The only issue I have with the ending of the movie is that there's a really schmaltsy moment that was honestly pretty touching.  The problem is that it is really undeserved.  There is a problem with the conceit of the film, despite the fact that I really like the whole notion.  The deuteragonist (the first time I've used that word), whose name is in the title, is Wile E. Coyote.  Yes, there is something mildly sympathetic about Wile E. Coyote because he always gets his comeuppence in spades.  But the bigger issue is that he's the villain of the piece.  When he's in the Roadrunner cartoons (They're even referred to as "Roadrunner cartoons!"), he's the guy who is doing something awful.  Because both the roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote are archetypes, we instantly understand that Wile E. Coyote is the bad guy who never learns his lesson.  He's only the protagonist because we see most of the story from this character's perspective.  We actually know hilariously little about the Roadrunner (a word that I keep capitalizing because I'm treating it as his name).  The problem with this story --and it is baked into the plot --is that we're supposed to be on Wile E. Coyote's side.  This is a legal dramedy (okay, a legal comedy).  While the movie takes the positon that Wile E. Coyote is using these devices against suggested usage, the bigger issue is that he's using these devices to ultimately to try to murder the Roadrunner.  

The movie needs those characters to acknowledge that their friends, not for the sake of the story, but so we don't really revolt.  We see Wile E. Coyote tear up when the Roadrunner claims that the two of them are the closest of friends.  But nothing in decades of Looney Tunes cartoons even implies this.  Heck, I don't think that Wile E. Coyote even reciprocates those feelings.  It's heavily implied that if Wile E. Coyote caught the Roadrunner, even after the events of Coyote vs. Acme, that he would still eat him.  I'm glad that the movie theater got all teary eyed at the Roadrunner's revelation that he cares for Wile E. Coyote, but I call outright shanannigans.  It makes not a lick of sense.  The only dynamic that these two have with enough citations to make a tome out of footnotes alone is that this is a predator / prey dynamic.  When The Lego Batman Movie made the same claim about Batman and Joker, it was way more self-aware that it was a joke.  This was a touching moment that just didn't make a lot of sense.

The reviews for this movie are through the roof.  I am super glad that they are.  I want movies like Coyote vs. Acme to succeed, if for no other reason than to stick it to corporate executives who have forgotten what it means to make art, even if that art may not be lofty.  I'm actually going to follow box office for this movie in the hopes that it absolutely destroys.  I have a feeling that it isn't.  When I talked in front of the school how I just saw this  movie, no one knew what I was talking about.  Still, despite the fact that I only kind of liked this movie, I want to see it succeed.  It's a movie that seems like a passion project, despite the fact that it is an adaptation of a franchise.  And I also really like Will Forte and he seems to really believe in the movie.  Don't let my milktoast blog talk you out of this.  I clearly am in the minority of people who didn't love-love it.  (Although, honestly?  I think that a lot of reviews might be inflated knowing the turbulent hisotry of this film's release.) 

R and I'm not quite sure what made this version R version its PG-13 counterpart.  If anything, it took some of the sexual stuff out of the original film.  (I had to look up what the differences were from its theatrical cut.)  The movie was pretty upsetting to begin with.  This is about human / organ trafficking.  People die horrible deaths on and off screen.  Also, one of the main characters of the film is a convicted pedophile.  While none of the sexual assault happens on screen, there's a lot of talk about it.   The X-Files always kind of pushed the limits on what was comfortable to watch and the same holds true for this movie.

DIRECTOR:  Chris Carter

I'm such a sucker for The X-Files.  Like, that's not necessarily a compliment or something I'm proud of.  As a guy who is obsessed with completion and having absorbed every bit of media, I keep losing my mind when Chris Carter releases something new about The X-Files.  The thing that I really (and unfortunately) believe is that Chris Carter's later forays into The X-Files actually sully (or...Scully?) the goodwill that the early seasons had with me.

I loathed this movie when it came out in theaters.  Like, I know that it is almost universally panned.  I wasn't the only one who came out that movie wondering what the heck that was all about.  But I also have to take into account that I am a fundamentally --almost on every level --different person.  I was bringing a lot of baggage into that movie in 2008.  When the trailer released for this "Vrach Frankenshteyn" version, I thought it looked pretty darned good.  I don't know what it is that makes me desperately wants The X-Files to be good again.  But I saw that trailer and said, "Man, I'm definitely seeing that."  

After all, I'm less protective of Catholics being slandered on screen.  Yeah, I Want to Believe bothered me a ton because it seems like it's coming full bore at the Catholic church with the subtlety of a rocket launcher.  Even then, I hope I wouldn't be completely closed to criticisms of clergy abuse.  Still, one thing that I still hold true is that Chris Carter has never really portrayed Scully's Catholicism with any skill.  Considering that faith --tying to the title --is a central motif in this film, I was super annoyed the first time I saw this.  Again, not the same dude I was then.  This time, I don't know.  I want to kind of break that apart.

I still think that Carter kind of sucks at portraying authentic Catholicism on screen.  The man is a sledgehammer.  "Vrach" is meant to be a director's cut, advertising a wholly different vision.  If anything, this is simply a better cut together vision.  There's some better editing, better pacing, and the film has been overall recolored to make it feel far more like an X-Files episode.  Okay, so that means I'm stuck basically analyzing the same film because we don't really have anything additional to pick apart.  (I also hope that this means that I'm never compelled to watch the theatrical cut as a means to write about the comparison between the two.)  

But back to the Catholicism.  I don't hate the idea of Scully coming face-to-face with a defrocked clergyman who claims to still be faithful.  Removing the entire mythology of the show, I do believe that Carter is attempting to take news headlines and address real concerns that Catholics might have had with their faiths.  For 11 (?) seasons, Scully embodied more archetypal ideas than fully developing as a character.  I don't blame Carter for this.  (I know that there was some character growth with everyone, but let me explain.)  A lot of the problems that X-Files had was trying to get blood from a stone.  This show initially started with a solid mythology that had to be scrapped because it was stretched beyond comprehension.  The way to make people keep watching the X-Files going was ensuring that the characters, from a certain perspective, had to stay stagnant.  Mulder was still a zealot; Scully was always the skeptic, no matter what evidence came her way.  (Sure, XPhiles out there.  There are moments where Scully balances her scientific grounding with an enthusiasm need to discover the truth.) 

So fundamentally, Scully is skepticism and Catholicism.  (A great archetype for her paradoxical nature.)  And now that I've been through a dark night of the soul, I suppose I do appreciate a story of Scully confronting her anger with Fr. Joe.  In fact, it might be the best part of this movie.  I do have to confess here, when talking about Fr. Joe, I remember this movie playing out very differently.  I remember this being a movie where Mulder ends up disappointed that the events of this movie are not an X-File, but rather Fr. Joe being a fraud.  I remember none of the Frankenstein stuff with the body mutilation.  I thought this was  just a disappointing story about a defrocked priest getting one last giggle in the face of misery.  

And maybe it was a blessing that I didn't remember how this movie played out.  That made it kind of watchable.  The big win that "Vrach" brings to me is that it really authentically feels like an X-Files episode now.  I'm in the camp that believes that the freak-of-the-week episodes were way better than anthology episodes.  But when I saw this in theaters, I thought that maybe I was wrong about this.  It's kind of shocking that there are two X-Files movies and the sequel decided to almost completely avoid any attempt at mythology.  We got the notion that Mulder was in seclusion and that a romance between Mulder and Scully had taken off.  But that was about it.  But because this movie was recut and recolored, I do think that this movie works almost exclusively as a freak-of-the-week episode.  Sure, the budget is bigger and the story is longer.  But it ultimately is one of the many episodes that kept me entertained.  I don't know if it sails to a point of being one of the memorable scary episodes.  But it is a functional episode.

That does kind of brings me to one of the more awkward things in the movie.  When I watched this the first time, I was so concerned about the anti-Catholic bashing that I kind of missed the insensitivity it gave to the LGBTQIA+ community.  Spoiler that ultimately doesn't matter:  the bad guys of the movie are a gay married couple.  One husband is stealing organs to help his husband survive his lung cancer, leading to the husband getting a new, female body.  It's almost glossed over in the attempt to shock.  But it does come across as transphobic, right?  I mean, this guy is killing and torturing women, seemingly emotionless to the pain that he's causing these women all for the sake of giving his husband a new body.  It's very scary, but also insensitive at the same time.

I kind of wish I outright hated this or outright loved it.  I am thrilled that I enjoyed this movie more than I did the first time.  But that being said, it's kind of a slump of a movie.  The running thought that I had throughout the movie is that much of this movie doesn't need to actually be an X-Files movie, but rather just a supernatural thriller.  I would say that the final act feels very X-Files-y.  I don't think it's because of an out-of-nowhere appearance by Skinner.  But it does feel like the kind of bananas horror that the Fox TV show did.  It's fun and it's good to see the team back in action, but it ultimately feels unnecessary.

Also, like, the FBI just was able to forgive him?  Doesn't that undo a lot of the tension of seasons of TV?

Rated R for mostly swearing.  Honestly, I had to look it up.  Apparently, according to IMDB, it has 34 f-bombs. There is one gory scene of violence where a guy's head explodes after getting shot.  That should probably be the real reason for an R-rating, but I barely remembered it because the movie felt mostly innocent.  Considering that the movie used guerrilla film tactics like Borat, the improved stuff wasn't offensive.  

DIRECTOR:  Matt Johnson

Okay, apparently I do know these guys from the "Update Day" video involving the Wii store.  Cool.  I feel like I'm less out of the loop.  All I know is that Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie kept making people's best of lists and I had to figure out what was going on.

I have to say, the same thing that happened with Naked Gun happened with Nirvanna.  I hate that it did and I'm starting to think that it was my fault to a certain extent.  With both Naked Gun and Nirvanna, we started the movie crazy late and then agreed to finish it the next day.  Day One?  Laughing my head off.  I saw where the love for the movie was.  My wife seemed to dig it too.  But night two, my wife was distracted by her phone and I found myself watching it alone.  Like, it was still good.  I think it's actually pretty great.  But it killed it, guys.  It really killed it.

There's something about comedies that they need to be watched with someone else.  There's something incredibly contagious about laughing with a group of people versus laughing alone.  It's a sense of community.  I feel that, no matter what I write, I probably didn't have an accurate experience of watching this movie.   I even broke my own rules to watch this.  I guess my dumb obsessive brain likes things better if I have the entire catalogue as backup.  Still, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie ultimately doesn't need anything to set up the film and exists as distinct from the stuff that came before.  

But let's treat this as my opening to these guys, Wii-shop music aside.  There seems to be a rise of viral video creators being able to show their stuff in more formal ways.  I mean, Obsession was one of the biggest movies this year.  That was started by people making internet videos.  Now, I have no idea what these guys' backgrounds are.  For all I know, they all went to some prestigious film school and know how to handle a camera.  But Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie might win most of its points simply by the fact that it refuses to follow rules.

I already threw the word "guerrilla" around.  Don't worry, I stole it from Wikipedia.  But the thing that makes Nirvanna so great is that it did what Borat did, only on the cheaper and less offensive.  This is a cheap movie that has an astronomical scale.  These two guys are performing stunts that land them in prison (sometimes) and they get away with these stunts (sometimes).  It's almost frustrating that these guys have found the loophole in terms of movie making.  What was that movie that was filmed at Disney World without the knowledge of the Disney Corporation?  Escape from Tomorrow?  I saw that one and I was stressed out that a big corporation was going to get mad and take their movie away.  Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie thinks that's kids' stuff.  These guys brought parachutes to the CN Tower and somehow got in.  Reading the lengths that these guys went to in order to get crazy shots is almost what makes the movie worth it.  I can't help but also think that this movie might be a nicer version of Jackass simply because these guys put themselves at risk to tell a joke.

But the more insane version of the movie is how much the film pushes the rules of parody law to the limit.  I've seen enough parody movies.  Every time there seems to be a bit of parody in film, the silliness is so over-the-top that we understand that there's a wink to the camera the entire time.  Like, no studio would ever go after those movies because it's almost in homage of the original source material.  Things are different with this movie.  Like, the almost score to Back to the Future is so close to the original score that I thought it was the original score for a lot of the film.  Heck, the fact that the movie actually shows clips from Back to the Future and references the film throughout is almost daring Amblin Entertainment to seize every copy of the movie and burn it, a thing that even gets pointed out by Matt.

But I do wonder what makes it one of the greats of this year?  Is it the silliness of it all?   Part of me felt more of a nostalgia for 2008 than anything of substance at all.  Sure, we like the dynamic between Matt and Jay.  Sure, there are huge stunts that these two choreograph for the sake of insanity.  There are even moments that are riddled with kismet, having usable footage from 2008 (the heyday of the webshow) that would somehow interact with modern film.  But these are all cool moments.  Yeah, the movie is crazy fun.  And again, I have to stress that I didn't see it under ideal conditions.  I kind of think that there's a little bit of people wanting to like the movie because it's charming instead of being an actual great film.  If this was created by two dudes who got their starts making web videos, that actually makes a lot of sense.  Here might be the most damning thing:  This technically is a movie about two guys who are friends rekindling their friendship.  But the movie, in all of its silliness, doesn't really invest in that being the core of the film.  This might be one of those movies that never really attempted to get vulnerable at any point of the movie.  

I am treating silliness as a bad thing.  For what it is, it is genius.  But I also acknowledge that it might not be a movie that sticks to my ribs as much as I wanted it to.  Maybe if I was a fan of these guys beforehand, that might play out differently.  But for what it was, it was just a good time, which isn't the worst thing.

Rated R for all kinds of vulgar reasons.  It's not that the movie itself feels vulgar.  It's just that this is the cocaine-fueled manic insanity that was the early days of Saturday Night Live.  There's swearing.  There are gender and race-based jokes.  But the worst part is when a man exposes himself just to establish dominance.  Yeah, there's swearing too, but is that the thing you are really worried about?

DIRECTOR:  Jason Reitman

I'm finally out of the Jane Birkin / Agnes Varda blogs.  If I can knock this one out in half-an-hour (which is unlikely) and then knock out one more blog, I'll be caught up on all my stress until I start teaching again tomorrow.

My wife was pushing for a movie.  I never want to overlook these opportunities.  I don't know what it is about movie date night that I can't help but lose my mind over.  But the only movie I could think about was Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die and I didn't think that she was in the mood for that.  But my wife has always been a fan of Saturday Night Live.  I don't know what part of my brain reminded me that we always meant to watch this movie.  But I picked the right movie for the night...even if it wasn't the most incredible watch in the world.

I think that a lot of people at least have a Saturday NIght Live phase.  I'm probably not the only person to really worship at the altar of whatever they saw in high school.  For me, it was the '90s cast.  Yeah, I got into the early 2000s cast too.  But I'm in the Mike Myers / Chris Farley era.  It's not a bad cast to really get behind.  I remember just leaving Comedy Central on and just playing the same SNL episodes on a loop.  I tried showing my kids some of these clips and they think that they are funny enough.  

But I also listen a lot of comedy podcasts.  Right now, I'm trying to knock out the incredible canon that is You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes.  With comedy podcasts, you tend to get comedy themed guests.  Sometimes they are from the SNL world; sometimes they're not.  But a common discussion point is why SNL works the way it does.  Pete won't really let it go.  After all, he has a point.  SNL, fundamentally, works the same way it did in the '70s.  There is a level of stress that goes on all week.  Cast and writers stay up to God awful hours and work on a constant diet of adrenaline and --depending on what era you are in --drugs and alcohol.  But Pete also points out that most people in contemporary casts are actually fairly even-keeled individuals.  Every SNL guest kind of admits that the job absolutely could be a 9 to 5, but there is something mythical about pulling all nighters while worrying about how the show is going to look.

It's hard to pin down exactly what Saturday Night, as a movie, is.  Because SNL itself is such an ensemble show, I don't want to say that this is a movie about one man's attempt to bring the show to the air.  Yeah, if we had to have our collective arms twisted, we could say that this is the story of Lorne Michaels and how he grew into the mega creator that we all know and love today.  (Note:  I should point out, just for my own gratification, that Michaels left the show for a little bit.  Still...)   

I have to say something clearly before I get too far away from it.  As much as I love Jason Reitman, I don't think this movie works like it wants to work.  Very few things are wrong with it.  I just feel like I've seen this movie done better as the first episode of The Bear.  The entire movie hinges on dramatic irony.  Like with most biopics, we know that Saturday Night Live is going to be a television phenomenon.  It's part of our cultural zeitgeist and it is hard to imagine television without SNL being put up.  I also know that there was a big book of SNL released a few years ago (I don't remember the title.  I never read it and I don't have internet right now to look it up.  That's right.  I loaded the Weebly page and then just typed everything out without a safety net, hoping I'll get to digital civilization before I lose everything.) But there's more of an oral history of SNL.  John Belushi was always known for being aloof and unmanagable.  Chevy Chase was and is still known as a horrible human being.  Everyone loved Gilda Radner.  The stories of excess and irresponsibility colored this show that ended up being the foundation of late night NBC.  It's fascinating...

..but it also seems a little bit contrived.  The insane thing is that Saturday Night, as a biopic, is a success, even if it's a mess.   The goal was to show how insane it was that this program ever made it to air and the way that Reitman films it really sells that notion.   There are people who care way too much that this goes up.  There are people who seem to want to pigeonhole the whole thing.  And then there are the people who seem so distanced from reality and how things work that they're just along for the ride.  The movie sells that, telling the chaotic story in real time of the hour and change leading up to the first episode going up.  We switch perspectives to remind ourselves that SNL wasn't just one person's stories.  Some of those stories are interesting.  Some of them are not.  I'm wildly shocked that I didn't give a fig about the John Belushi story, considering that I often think of the early days of SNL as the Belushi-era.  

Oddly enough, I found the Garrett Morris element of this movie incredible.  It doesn't hurt that Lamorne Morris played Garret Morris and I have adored him since New Girl.  But Morris acts almost as the avatar for the audience.  He shows the world through the lens of a Black performer.  I stress his racial background because it is through his eyes that we all can get a little frustrated.  (Epiphany: It is because of Morris's perspective on the things around him that I get frustrated with the rest of the movie.)   Let me explain.

The thing that is incredibly frustrating is that none of this has to happen.  I respect Lorne Michaels right now.  The man is probably a billionaire.  But like with the fact that SNL absolutely could be a 9 to 5 job, there is this understanding that the whole thing could be sdettled (and we know will be settled) by Michaels just making a quick judgment call to which sketches will go up and which ones won't.  Honestly, that's the climax of the film.  Lorne Michaels tells Billy Crystal (that performance might have been the most accurate performance in the entire film) that he cannot perform that night because his act is too long.  As the audience, we're wholeheartedly aware that this tension is self-inflicted and artificial.  We know that he has to pick something or else the show doesn't go up.  I am actually frustrated for the actors in the movie, who also seem lackadaisical about Michael's inability to do a basic production job.  Yes, Michaels has a lot of plates spinning and he's putting out constant fires throughout the story.  But the core of the show is that he just has to make calls and he seems unconcerned by how close the show is up to air.  (Another note:  apparently SNL still runs on cuecards because changes are being made at the time of air even today.)

So let's apply that to Garrett Morris's internal conflict.  The one thing that is his throughline is the question "Why am I here?"  Out of all of the performers in the Not-Ready-for-Primetime Players, Morris is the only one who has multiple talents to fall back on.  He finds himself more at home with the Saturday Night band than he does with his fellow cast members.  He's being relegated to racial stereotype roles, filling in the background of scenes just to offer a hint of diversity in this cast.  But the frustrating part that both he and I share is the notion that just a smidge of professionalism would mean that everyone would get paid.  He's a Black actor.  He was struggling before he got there and all these kids who have never been on television before seem not to care a lick about making a good product.  If anything, they're all treating it like some psychadelic experiment when he's probably the only one with the sense of awareness that the quality of the show could make or break everyone there.

To that respect, there has to be a conversation about the role of the artist.  The only thing that I really respect about some of the characters --most notably John Belushi --is that he doesn't care about where his next paycheck comes from.  He wants to be an artist.  He wants to do things his way.  It's hard for him to listen to authority of any kind and he hates being manipulated.  But that's a really cushy perspective to have considering that it never really felt like Belushi suffered.  (But then again, I didn't read the SNL book that really dived deep into this kind of stuff.) 

So the movie is more interesting than good.  My wife and I both had the same takeaway that this felt more like a Netflix film than an actual cinematic release.  But as a stressful-yet-funny experience, it mostly works.

Rated R for being a genuinely insidious movie.  Golly, I feel like I'm pearl-clutching here, but this is one of those movies that the right throws stones at when it comes to art.  I think there are ways to tell a story that might make you feel uncomfortable.  This feels like Varda and Birkin are trying to be controversial rather than telling something that makes the world a better place.  It's, through and through, about the sexual exploitation of a child and tries to make the whole thing romantic.  While you don't see any nudity, it is aggressively a sexual movie.  There's underage smoking, drinking to excess, swearing.  Basically, if kids could do something bad, they're doing it in this movie.  

DIRECTOR:  Agnes Varda

Imagine someone got around to making a Pac-Man movie.  Then you go to see it, and it's about a forty-year-old woman being attracted to a 14-year-old.  That's Kung-Fu Master!  Kung-Fu Master! is a real video game.  I think I played it a bunch of times when I was a kid.  Thank goodness there were no single 40 year old women hanging around the arcade because my life would be very different.

I'm just going to say this outright:  I hate this movie.  I really do.  This is Agnes Varda embracing the worst impulses of what she thinks being an artist means.  Yeah, I'm regulating what is and isn't art.  It's one of those "I know it when I see it" situations.  In this case, Varda thinks that she's really pushing the envelope of the art scene.  But this is also, "Was it all worth it?"  Varda and Birkin push so many buttons for what feels ultimately like a selfish attempt at glory.  I have absolutely no sympathy for any of the impulses that went into this film.

I mentioned this in my blog for Jane B. par Agnes V., but I watch the introductions that Varda recorded in 2012.  I have to stress, Varda does not seem apologetic in the least for what went into this movie.  Listen, I'm going to high horse this sucker real bad.  Jane Birkin came up with the idea.  They didn't read something great that came their way.  There wasn't a novel (but I can't help but make the comparison to Lolita).   Jane Birkin said to Agnes Varda, "I want to make a movie where my character falls in love with a 14 year old and I want to make it kind of romantic."  Agnes Varda then responded, "Why don't we involve our families?  I'll have my fourteen-year-old son play the love interest and you guys will do sexual things together."  Jane Birkin said "Great!  I love this idea.  Let's stop filming Jane B. par Agnes V. right now and film this movie where I have an affair with a fourteen-year-old, who is played by your son.  I'll get my kids involved in the movie too!"  

Even worse, the kids hated this.  The kids had more self-awareness of how inappropriate this whole thing was.  Varda and Birkin had a great time making the movie.  It seems like this moment is a dark spot for the kids.  While I treat art as one of the great highlights of humanity, everything should have have limits and consideration.  It felt like these were artists who put their own emotional desires first and the futures of their children second.  I hate this movie.  If I spend most of my life defending art, I have no retort to this.  It's so selfish.  I'm sure that a lot of people probably like it.  Do you know what?  I don't feel like a hypocrite for this one.  I always had a hard time with Call Me By Your Name, not because of any homosexual content.  No, I had a problem with the fact that it glorifies an adult / child relationship.  But even Call Me By Your Name is less controversial than this.

Just because I don't want to give a half-completed blog entry (and because I feel like I haven't really explored this movie beyond its controversial nature), I'm going to try to write about other elements of this movie.  Be aware, the only thing that I really have thoughts about are the controversial things.  But I don't think I would allow my students the same grace if they watched something controversial and wrote about it.  So be aware, from this point on, it's probably going to be some obligatory sludge of a writing assignment.

The only thing that I really liked, in terms of seeing something unique, was the opening shot of Julien embodying the eponymous kung-fu master.  It was fun, maybe because there was so much attention to the way that the character moved.  It was novel, which is fine I guess.  But I want to tie it into why the movie is named Kung-Fu Master!.  Do I think that Varda is trying to force the title a bit?  Yes.  I absolutely think that she's being a bit too clever for her own good, tying the notion of this video game that was probably mildly entertaining to the culture of 1988 to her movie.  It's a fun title that has little-to-nothing to do with the rest of the story.

The counterargument is that the title has everything to do with the story.  (I disagree with this point, if I haven't made myself clear.)  What I think Varda is doing with the title and the obsession with this one specific arcade game is talking about childlike joy.  Julien is infatuated with Kung-Fu Master.  From our perspective, it is one game like any other.  In fact, the movie makes a point that not a lot of the arcades carried that game when Mary-Jane went around looking for it.  (And I can imagine Varda losing her mind of the English-language dialogue between Sylvie and the Kung-Fu Master.)  But Julien's real passion happens when he's playing the game.  Mary-Jane coming into his life is something that just happens to him.  One of the schticks of the movie is that all of these teenage boys try to play it cool about drinking, smoking, and sex.  But Kung-Fu Master?  That kid loses his mind.  

It also makes Mary-Jane way more predatory when she involves Kung-Fu Master into their relationship.  She prowls the city not looking for Julien at first.  Instead, she looks for a copy of Kung-Fu Master to prepare for a time when the two of them could be together.  Perhaps there's a lovely irony that she played that game and still played terribly in front of Julien, which only made him disappointed in her.  

I struggle unpacking one thing and it ties into Jane B. par Agnes V.  One of the things that is repeated in each movie, especially when Mary-Jane is questioning her own morality, is the notion that every adult woman falls in love with a teenager at least once.  I'm not an adult woman.  I'm a 43-year-old man.  I can write from the male perspective.  I don't think that's a common thing.  I know that there's something potentially interesting about trying to reclaim one's youth, but I don't really read the same message that Mary-Jane is trying to get at in the movie.  I think that's a weird assumption that both Varda and Birkin are trying to make normal.  Are there people out there?  Absolutely.  These people are called sexual predators.  (And I'm back on my high horse.)  Or maybe it is more common and people are just mature enough to not explore that.  Lord knows I think it's offense.

I don't want to write about this anymore.  I don't care if this blog is shorter than normal.  I have to get out of here anyway.