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Approved.  I mean, everything is pretty darned tame in the movie.  But if you think about what is going on in this movie for even a second, yeah, the whole thing is pretty gross.  Basically, this is a movie accusing women of sexually manipulating men to do their bidding, ultimately leading men to try to murder each other.  There's some comic bits, but everything I'm reading says that this movie is meant to be take quasi-seriously.  There's some mild violence, but that's about it.  Oh, wait.  I completely forgot about the domestic abuse.  That's pretty awful.

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg

I do not care for this.  Not one bit.

Okay, I thought that I would eventually come around on this box set.  But nothing got me more frustrated than each movie somehow doubling down on the worst elements of the previous films.  I know.  I'm alone in this loathing.  Everyone else seems to like these movies...a lot.  My reviews tend to be the only negative reviews of these movies.  Can I be more glib than normal?  I feel like people see "Old black-and-white movie" and that means that it is somehow a classic.  I know.  There's always Plan 9 from Outer Space.  But I honestly had more fun with Plan 9 than I did the Josef von Sternberg.  

Coincidentally, I'm teaching Josef von Sternberg right now in my film class.  I always had a von Sternberg slide, but I had never seen the movies.  Now, I've seen all of the movies that my slide and I can now give commentary on these films.  The thing that von Sternberg had always gotten praise for is the fact that he aimed to make every cell a work of art.  I mean, you really have to squint to see where he's coming from.  This is a dude who was all about mise en scene and I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to that.  What I watch when I watch movies like The Devil is a Woman is that it all feels a bit hokey.  It's all a cheaper version of what could be something great.  In the box set that I watched, I saw a bunch of movies that all tried to capture the wonder of foreign places that American housewives of the 1930s probably only dreamt of.  But it never really felt like anything even remotely authentic.  If anything, the takeaway I have from Josef von Sternberg is that he's more Epcot than bonafide traveller.  Golly, the broad stereotypes that these movies embrace honestly feel lazy.  

That's probably the most frustrating things about Josef von Sternberg movies.  Very rarely do Marlene Dietrich's characters feel like real people.  Instead, Dietrich leans in so hard into stereotypes and archetypes that it's incredibly hard to take the movie at all seriously.  Honest to Pete, I had an existential crisis thinking that I watched the von Sternberg movies through the wrong lens.  I thought, at one point, "This romance is so fake that all of these movies might have been satire or parody."  I just Googled it.  No, these movies were meant to be things that people watched to fall madly in love with Hollywood.  I don't get it.  Let's focus entirely on The Devil is a Woman, considering that this is technically a blog on that.  It doesn't hurt either that it feels like The Devil is a Woman is the ur-von Sternberg movie.  (Say that ten times fast.) 

The story is almost an epistolary story.  A jaded officer tells a young upstart about this woman who absolutely has him wrapped around her finger.  Marlene Dietrich's Concha, a borderline racist portrayal of a Spanish con artist, is awful for really no reason.  Now, can I admit that there are people in the world that are terrible like Concha?  Sure.  But if the role of storytelling is to create full worlds for these characters where an audience is meant to remotely relate to this character.  But do Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg want us to understand what makes Concha tick?  Honestly, I don't think there's even an attempt for this.  With the title The Devil is a Woman, this feels like a send up of the harlot character.  It's really weird, because Concha is the main character of the story.  Sure, we have to say that Don Pasqual is probably the protagonist of the piece because we are following his goals.  But the strange narrative that women use their sexuality to manipulate men is kinda gross.  And I'm not talking 2026 gross.  There seems to be some joy in showing how powerless men are over sexually attractive women.  I mean, I say "sexually attractive women."  But those drawn on eyebrows?  Sir, we must have a talk.

But since I introduced 2026 Tim, I want to have this paragraph unabashedly talk about how insane this entire thing is.  The key concept is that Concha is holding all the cards because she's so cunning.  Let's put this out here.  Concha does nothing clever.  If anything, she's almost comically honest about how promiscuous she is.  She sings a song about it and everything.  But even beyond that, there's a very gross assumption that men can't control their sexual desires.  Let's treat Don Pasqual as an abboration.  After all, if I'm adding a lot of myself into breaking down his character (because I still say that von Sternberg barely touches on any of it), I can force a reasoning for his behavior.  Pasqual is an older soldier, disappointed by his own station.  Success hasn't brought him the comfort that he expected and he meet Concha, a woman who pushes his every button.  Most people move out of his way.  She stands her ground. Cool.  I can see why, when she has her claws in him, that he continues to make toxic and self-destructive choices.  But that leaves Antonio, played by Cesar Romero (?!  That Cesar Romero?).  Antonio has the heads up on Concha.  He loathes her simply from the story that he was told.   He goes to meet her to kill her and then she asks for a kiss.  

That's stupid.  I'm sorry.  I refuse to believe that Concha is so much of a force of nature that people forget to kill her.  There's no real convesation.  She doesn't let him see a different side of the world.  If anything, Antonio is singularly focused, unlike the bored and tired Pasqual.  The fact that he's ready to kill Pasqual over this woman makes not a lick of sense.  I mean, the entire movie is almost a horror movie about this woman who can make men throw away their souls with a simple glance.  That's not love.  There's nothing romantic about this movie.  I don't understand why these men are losing their everloving minds over this woman outside the fact that the movie tells us that men are meant to lose their everloving minds over her.  I want something that seems real.  I want to have one moment of vulnerability that explains why Concha is somehow worthy of all of this attention.  But, no.  The title stays, implying that women have feminine wiles that are only used for evil.  Come on.  We can do better.  Von Sternberg knows that he has Marlene Dietrich and Marlene Dietrich is associated with being a bombshell.  That's not a movie to me.  It's just her being distant and removed for an hour-and-a-half.  That's so disappointing to me.  I want substance and The Devil is a Woman doesn't even say anything remotely true.  It's just attitude and vibes the entire time.

The movie is dumb.  These movies...they're dumb.  I know I'm alone in this.  Dietrich keeps playing these shallow characters and people don't act like people.  It's reading romance novels that aren't really challenging.  There are great romances out there.  It's not like the entire genre is trash.  But there is a lot of trash in this genre and Dietrich and von Sternberg added to it.  

Rated R for nudity and, to be completely frank, just absolutely abhorrent self-mutilation.  There's also consistent talk about suicide.  Once again, Bergman at least dips his toes into the casual adultery thing.  However, for the first time in the Bergman set, those advances are rejected.  Still, despite being a movie about mourning and death, there is something very sexual about the movie, occasionally touching on incestuous motifs.  

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I've been waiting for this one.  I mean, that's always a dangerous attitude to have before watching a movie.  And, sure enough, it bit me in the butt.  Listen, I'm the guy who didn't get into Persona and Cries and Whispers probably has a lot in common with Persona.   But while I see Persona as mostly inaccessible, Cries and Whispers is mostly a simple story that I can kind of get behind.  It's just when it gets a little bit more bizarre that I start to get critical of it.

The funny thing about me is that I usually like when things get a little weird.  Why does it bother me so much when Bergman gets to be an odd duck?  I don't know.  One of my favorite films is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I know.  I'm very basic sometimes.  Michel Gondry lives in the oddity of film.  It's part of his visual art.  When I watch stuff like Eternal Sunshine, the mise en scene and choices that Gondry makes often enhances his core message.  When it comes to Bergman, it's almost like we get something Brechtian.  (I'm almost trying to sound smart at this point.  I don't think it is working.)  Brecht wanted to shake his audience out of complacency.  It wasn't meant to be entertainment.  It was meant to make you think.  Watching something like Cries and Whispers feels incredibly Brechtian.  The first forty-five minutes of the film are a radical way of looking at how people die and grieve ahead of death.  It borderline has no story, shy of a hint that Maria had affairs and is self-involved.  But it looks at how this sister's final moments affect the world around her.  It's haunting and beautiful at the same time.  (I use the word "beautiful" nervously because every moment of Agnes's suffering is haunting.  I just can't deny that Bergman's use of color in conjunction with death has a pleasing nature to it.) 

But the second half of the film almost dares you to maintain contact with the core of the film.  I do think that this is a movie about grief.  The second half of the film has beats that remind you that this is how grief is processed.  But the second half of the film is intentionally surreal.  Characters do things that aren't really set up for in the film.  I want to talk about Karin and the self-mutilation of her genitals.  The first half of the film is upsetting in a universal way.  When we know that someone is on their death bed, we are going to have upsetting moments that are natural.  Karin's labored breathing, coupled with her screams and almost labor pains are something that most people will deal with, in some form or another, before they leave this earth.  It is a universal thought.  I'll even go as far as to say that Karin's desire not to be touched is also a universal idea.  I, with the exception of those very close to me, shy away from touch.  But Karin using the excuse of a broken shard of glass to mutilate herself isn't really set up in any way.  Then spreading the blood over her lips?  This is something that a lesser director couldn't get away with.  That's not a compliment to Bergman.  If anything, I don't know who could get away with that moment, especially so unearned.

Part of what frustrates me about that moment, besides the fact that it is absolutely horrific and seemingly dropped in there for shock value, is the fact that --as slow as this movie is --almost no character work was done before this moment.  We barely know anything about Karin at this point.  We know that she's a bit closed off, bordering on frigid.  Okay, that's something.  But that is such an extreme measure for a character not to be touched that it feels wildly out of character for the film at all.  And remember how I said that Gondry uses the weird moments to focus on the themes of the story?  This moment is so distracting for me that I don't care about the role of mortality up to this point.  Yeah, we could use the genital mutilation as a reminder of birth and the role of life.  I mean, Bergman does attach a sexual component to both family and mortality in the film.  It's not too much to say that there is a sexual component to that moment.  But, ultimately, it feels divorced from the rest of the film.  In that moment, Agnes is so far from our minds that it is ahrd to imagine what that moment really adds to the narrative as a whole.  And I have to be alone here.  I know that Cries and Whispers was up for Best Picture, so I'm the only one who saw that moment and said, "Nope.  Not part of it."  Maybe I'm squeamish and I'm just kvetching because I don't like it.  But it feels so tonally weird after that moment.

The odd thing is that I find the Karin coldness to be one of the more compelling parts of the story.  Maria is overly sexual.  My interpretation of Maria, which may and probably is way off, seems to be a character whose actions may be read as familial.  But I also really believet that Bergman imbues her with an incestual element throughout.  The role of motherhood (which I have to confess I got from the Internet and is not my only thought on the matter) is something that plays out through the story, even if the matriarch of the family dies way before the events of the film.

PG-13 because apparently, this got a lot less spicy than the book got.  That being said, there is some sex and some nudity in the movie.  Over the course of the movie, there are a few scenes that really push that MPAA rating, but there's a lot of course correction to get that coveted PG-13.  The movie mostly dances around innuendo, never really going truly vulgar.  Still, a pretty borderline PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Brett Haley

This might be the fastest I've ever gotten a new year movie after the new year.  When your wife asks to watch a movie --any movie! --you say "yes."  Sure, the following combination of words often spells intellectual death: Netflix original rom-com.  But my wife read the book and really enjoyed it.  I'm going to promote reading and film watching, so I went in with it for a good time.  

I am aware that I'm in the minority of people who doesn't like a rom-com.  It's not that I dislike rom-coms.  But...like...I kind of dislike most rom-coms.  The ones that are good tend to be really good.  The bad ones are insufferable.  And then there are the majority of them, which end up being incredibly forgettable given any amount of time.  The snob in me keeps watching these movies through the lens of that admitted snobbiness.  I don't like this about myself, but I acknowledge that it is deeply a part of my personality.  People We Meet on Vacation is better than most of the rom-coms I get suckered into, but I am almost confident that it will fall into the category of "unfortunately forgettable." 

The things that work are obvious.  Things that don't work are even more obvious.  But I don't want to take any shortcuts on this, despite the fact that I still have to write about Cries and Whispers after this (which is maintaining my snobby street cred.)   The number one thing about this movie is Emily Bader as Poppy.  I mean, if you were looking for an adorakble hero that is meant to be relatable and sympathetic, you have Poppy.  From moment one, she comes across as someone with the joie de vivre that a rom-com heroine should have.  I mean, I don't know how much heavy lifting a profession can carry, but Poppy's entire job is to travel the world and write for a magazine.  If the American Dream says that you can do whatever you want as long as you are willing to sacrifice for it.  Now, if I'm writing this in the looming shadow of Hallmark romances, those sacrifices tend to cause them to spiral, making them hate the choices that they decided on along the way.  Poppy is never that despondent, despite the opening where she claims to be miserable.  But Poppy, throughout the story, is always the Poppy that we love.  We discover that her separation from Alex has caused her to lose some of her spark.  It doesn't matter because Poppy is still Poppy, just a little less bright.  Emily Bader understood the assignment.  Her bright attitude and personality perfectly juxtaposes her character to Alex, who is the Mr. Darcy of the piece.

Now, I don't think this is necessarily Tom Blyth's fault, but I don't get Alex.  I think that Mr. Darcy is a fine line.  Like, Darcy is incredibly unlikable, but a lot of his unlikability comes from years of trauma.  There's so much screwed up about that guy that when Lizzie confronts him on all of his garbage, we're left with the notion that love can change people.  (Hey, I like Pride & Prejudice, okay?  I told you: snobby!)  Alex...isn't Mr. Darcy.  Don't get me wrong.  The absolute last few minutes, I like the guy again.  But Alex is kind of...terrible?  Yes, Poppy is late for their trip, which isn't good.  But Alex comes across as overly confrontational from moment one.  And there isn't a really good reason why Alex is the way he is.  It's actually oddly frustrating when Alex becomes a much nicer person, despite the fact that Poppy's behavior hasn't changed.  (Okay, to give the story a point, Poppy opens up about a vulnerable moment.  It isn't a character change for Poppy because Poppy really hadn't had a moment to be vulnerable.  He may be nicer to her because he hadn't viewed her as a human being before.  But why hadn't he?  That is also a point against Alex.) 

So the frustrating part for me, which I understand is different from the book, is the fact that Alex doesn't really shift as much as Poppy does.  If anything, Alex becomes more demanding.  Again, it might be because he's been distant from Poppy and that Poppy brings the best out of him.  I honestly was surprised by how this movie is laid out.  A lot of the movie feels like this is the story of a friendship that should have been something more.  (You know?  Friends-to-lovers?  That phrase just helped my SEO.)  Two-thirds of the movie is the will they / won't they of it all.  And you think that the movie is going to be over when, big surprise, they do, the movie decides to throw another beat in there.  And it's that other beat that frustrates me.  I hate when my students dump a bunch of summary in their writing, but I'm doing more work dancing around and idea, so a summary might actually help me a little bit.

The movie is formatted in a non-linear fashion.  The present tense has tension between Poppy and Alex, where there has been a quasi-recent falling out.  The two are bound to see each other at a wedding for Alex's brother.  The tension of the present is often diffused by flashbacks to the past, particularly summers leading up to the present day.  The flashbacks surround the trips that Poppy and Alex take together, often building the romantic tension between the two as Alex takes major steps away from being a turd.  Anyway, it all culminates when the two bring respective others on one of these trips and Poppy and Alex almost share a romantic moment when Poppy thinks that she is pregnant.  (I hear that in the book, the two sleep together at an earlier date, but I'm only here to talk about the movie.)  The fun climax of that format closes up in the present at the wedding when the two have the epiphany that they were always perfect for each other and that, despite being drastically different human beings, that they bring out the best in each other.  Happily ever after?

​But then Alex turns into a turd again.   He starts making these unreasonable demands on Poppy and there really is no consequence for that behavior.  Like, he has this reasoning for his argument that makes zero sense.  Poppy is there for a wedding.  She is heading home the next day.  The two of them confession their mutual love about an hour before the wedding.  Okay.  That's completely reasonable.  But asking Poppy to completely throw her life out the window just because she started dating her best friend.  Like, he doesn't care about her perspective at all.  I'm borderline mad for her at this point.  She goes through this whole dark night of the soul, questioning all of her choices when, really, she hasn't done a darned thing wrong.   We have this whole end-of-rom-com moment where she makes the trip to the one place she swore off (although I never really bought that character point) and literally runs after him.  We get a happily ever after in the same way that we got a happily-ever-after from Grease, where the woman has to box up her own personality for this emotionally stunted guy.  I don't care for it.  

But thank goodness for epilogues, right?  I do like that he travels with her.  We get a lot more blending with that epilogue than the movie offers.  But Poppy was willing to throw it all away for a guy who didn't shift at all.  I don't care for that in the least.  It was almost against the plot that Alex ended up not being a turd because I was not optimistic for their chances at the end.

In terms of fun, the movie is very fun.  I keep talking about how good Emily Bader is and every joke she tells lands.  The bits land.  It's just that...I don't like Alex very much.  I like what he becomes when he's around Poppy, which is exactly what the movie wanted me to think.  But it does take a lot to get Alex to a likable place.  But that's what rom-coms are all about, right?  I've already overanalyzed, so maybe I'm not the target audience.  Is it a good watch with the wife?  Sure.  Is it a great movie?  Probably not.

Not rated, but hoooooo-weeeee!  This one is intensely R-rated in my head.  We have a lot of the violence that the first one, but this one has a pretty darned graphic sex scene with nudity.  It also...has nothing to do with the story?  Like, at all.  It's kind of just in there.  Plus, this movie doubles-down on the torture of a character.  While I shouldn't make this a separate category, the violence towards eyeballs is palpable.  It's a lot, guys.

DIRECTOR: Toshiya Fujita

There is a flaw to the out-of-five-star system.  For the most part, I don't use this system, but Letterboxd does.  The flaw of the system is that I instantly compare quality of films to one another.  The long-and-short of it all is that Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance isn't as good as Lady Snowblood, but is still a darned impressive film.

This is a film that suffers the same fate as a lot of these violent swordplay films.  There is always such a quick turnaround between feature films based on how well the first movie did.  The first film is full of story, and it's a story that is personal to the protagonist.  I mean, the first one is a revenge film.  Shy of Yuki running into a super secret second plot that caused her misery throughout her life --which a lesser franchise probably would have done --the revenge story can't be all that personal.  Instead, the world opened up.  Now, considering that this can't be a terribly personal story for Yuki, the story is pretty good.  The problem with that is that, despite the movie being a Lady Snowblood film, Yuki barely plays a part in the story.  She is in the film being wielded as a literal weapon.  She contributes nothing narratively.  There's a moment where the film attempts to make it about Yuki, but it might be the weakest part of the plot.

I hate dancing around things.  I was going to address this later, but since I'm here right now, let's just talk about the thing that bothered me.  Mostly, the story is about the government secret police trying to shut down Ransui Tokunaga, an activist trying to expose the crimes of said government.  For some really dumb reason, they want Yuki to be their spy and discover what Ransui has against them.  The thing is, they don't know this woman.  They know that she's really good at killing and that's about it.  They have her dead-to-rights and they want her to be this nuanced character?  The most obvious thing that would happen is that Yuki would discover that Ransui is a good man who is a fighter or truth and justice.  If you needed a spy to find out what Ransui had on the government, you'd absolutely need a zealot.  It seems like the movie needed an excuse for this to be a Lady Snowblood movie by putting Lady Snowblood in a situation that she normally wouldn't put herself in.  When that plan clearly goes to pot and the secret police just arrest Ransui anyway --which worked, by the way! --they stop really paying attention to their goal of Ransui and devote all of their efforts into finding Yuki, who has almost nothing to do with this story.  Yeah, she killed a bunch of dudes.  But, honestly, the way that these cops are acting, is almost an afterthought.  It seems like the reason that they're after Yuki is because the movie is named after her.  

Okay, that's my gripe.  There may be others as I cross those bridges.  But for right now, that was the thing that bothered me the most.  Oh, and the fact that Yuki just constantly exposes herself to the plague.  Okay, back to griping.  Shusuke does this noble thing for the first time in his life by treating Ransui after he's been injected with plague.  He makes this big point of the fact that no one should be coming close to Ransui and he locks himself in with this guy who has the plague.  Now, Im' not going to be the heartless dude who screams that he should kill Ransui from a distance and burn the body.  I'm not that.  I find that moment quite touching and a moment of major character growth for Shusuke.  But when Ransui dies, putting him in the water source for the town?  Okay.  Fine.  Let's pretend that's not how this works.  He could have just burned the body, but whatever.  The part that really burns me up (no pun intended) is that when Shusuke gets the plague from Ransui, he wants Yuki to help him fight the secret police.  After all that stuff about the fact that Yuki needs to stay away from Ransui, he's very cool with making physical contact with Yuki, who questions whether or not she's a carrier.  But even beyond that, Yuki ends the film handling Shusuke unnecessarily. Okay, now I think the griping is over.

Let's go back into what makes this movie kind of great.  It's my old chestnut: make the movie incredibly political.  The first film is mildly political.  This film?  Full bore let's attack the government and that the police are not your friends.  I do enjoy a good revenge film.  But I also love an "expose the bad cops" film as well.  Boy-oh-boy, does this movie love showing how evil these cops really are.  And it doesn't end with the cops.  The relationship between the police and the higher ups in power is so casually evil that you can just feel the anger behind the camera as this movie was being made.  Part of me is just really tired of watching all of these Zatoichi movies where the bad guys are all gangsters and thugs where it doesn't feel like there's consequences to killing bad guy number three.  Yuki tears these guys apart and I kept thinking, "Geez, I can't believe this movie is going this hard after a shady government."  Instead of any pretense of slow change, represented by Ransui, Yuki just tears these guys up.  It goes so hard that I had to question the final act of the movie.  

This is actually kind of great, especially in the wake of the Epstein files effecting no law enforcement change. The final act has Shusuke and Yuki confronting the government folks, swords drawn.  It's kind of hilariously unbelievable because these guys are brandishing guns as Yuki just takes bullet after bullet while chopping these guys apart.  Okay.  Got it?   Before the fight starts, Shusuke is brandishing all of the evidence of the police corruption over his head.  Shusuke initially was going to use that information as blackmail to get rich.  Not so much now.  Now that he's a changed man, he lets the evidence get swept away in the breeze, treating the letter like the Macguffin that it is.  It just becomes about a bloodbath against the people who are holding power.  Why that one cop doesn't just unload his pistol into them is a mystery, but it still makes a more powerful scene than simply a man infected with plague watching a printer print up evidence.  It's like the movie understands that people don't really care about evidence and it's about action.  Still, I continue to live this nonviolent lifestyle because I want to believe that the world is a better place.  I mean, I'm constantly disappointed. 

Ultimately, there's a kind of gross wish fulfillment thing happening.  As someone who refuses to partake in violence, I watch Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance in the same way that I watch John Wick.   I know what I'm watching is kind of gross.  But also, the notion that problems could potentially disappear given some kind of stabby-stabby superhero is something that my lizard brain finds appealing.  In real life, I would have a hard time defending any of this.  But that's why these kinds of movies exist.  

​Not rated, which is its own kind of insane.  Like, this movie is the template for Kill Bill, questionable content and all.  I've now watched a lot of jidai-geki / samurai-era films.  There's a lot of Japanese swordplay.  There's bloodless violent.  There's bloody violence.  And then there's insane amounts of blood, similar to Lone Wolf and Cub.  This is Lone Wolf and Cub over-the-top bloody violence.  This is the blood that sprays everywhere, regardless of where someone is injured.  Also, the bigger problem is the rape and the child nudity, which avoids genitals but is still really icky.  Not rated, but definitely problematic. 

DIRECTOR: Toshiya Fujita

Happy New Year, everybody!  My smug rear end didn't pick up any resolutions this year because I'm already doing too much.  Maybe that's a New Year's resolution in itself: self-care.  Regardless, here I am, writing yet another blog.  I'm mildly excited about this one because Lady Snowblood is something special.  I am pretty darned sure that I've seen this one before.  Like, 90%.  I've seen Sympathy for Lady Vengeance for sure.  But I also think that I've seen Lady Snowblood because of the direct ties to Quentin Tarantino.  Like, all of Kill Bill owes a heavy debt to Lady Snowblood.  

I had the opportunity to see Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. And then Quentin Tarantino couldn't keep his stupid mouth shut about Paul Dano and it reminded me that Tarantino kind of sucks as a human being.  He's a guy who is weirdly cool with Roman Polanski's past.   I always loved Kill Bill.  I know.  It's a yellow-flag to have that as a favorite movie.  But there's something always fascinating about revenge films. I don't know what it is.  Maybe there's something sadistically satisfying about watching revenge flicks.  It's the kind of thing that, if I encountered in real life, I would shy away from it.  But maybe no one knows how to make a revenge story like the Japanese.  (That sounds inappropriate, but I'm going to stick by it because I quasi-believe it.  You can talk me out of things like this pretty easily, so feel free to chime in.) 

I want to talk about the only negative thing about the movie first because it contextualizes a lot of my thoughts on the great things in the movie.  While completely iconic as Yuki / Lady Snowblood, Meiko Kaji is a little bit of a buy-in for me.  I've now watched a lot of pretty incredible swordplay in all of my silly box sets.  (I keep asking for Criterion box sets for special occasions and the cooler ones tend to be samurai films.  It has made me accidentally a low-key expert on samurai films.) For stills, Kaji is perfect.  But the second she has to move, I really have to turn the imagination on to think that she's this killer, cold assassin.  It's just that the story asks so much from her.  She's imbued with a demonic origin story, implying that, like Frank Castle, she is a storm of fury that cannot be slowed down regardless of what challenges await her.  Now, the story confirms this attitude.  Yuki shows up somewhere.  For sure, everyone is going to die.  But most of the action sequences convey violence by the camerawork, not by insane footwork.  Honestly, she looks the most uncomfortable when she's brandishing a sword.  

But that's really it.  If you do that buy-in for the movie, it really works.  The thing about Meiko Kaji is that she doesn't really have a ton to do, despite being the protagonist of the film.  If anything makes the movie really thrive, it's the piece as a whole.  I want so desperately to say "setting", but that's really not accurate.  If anything, this is a movie that doesn't mind being its own thing.  Golly, it takes some big swings.  The first few minutes, I thought that this was going to be a rougher film.  I mean, again, I know about Lady Snowblood.  I know its whole rep.  Again, very good chance that I've seen this movie.  (Some people are out there wondering why I can't remember if I've seen a movie before.  I watch a lot of movies, guys.)   But between the disjointed narration, the incredible style of the film, and the intense storyline that gets incredibly meta, Lady Snowblood is way more than simply a traditional samurai revenge film.  I mean...she's not even a samurai, guys.

Before I get too lost, I want to bring my thesis to the table.  Once in a blue moon, I'll come up with a great idea for a critical response essay.  I'm telegraphing the fact that I had this thought while writing because I need to do way more research before I would ever present this to an academic environment.  That being said, I do want to stress my paper about gender and ableism, using Lady Snowblood as my foundational text.  My argument is that Lady Snowblood treats womanhood as a disability.  I'm juxtaposing Zatoichi as my counterargument.  The thing that kept all of the Zatoichi movies going was the notion that blind swordsman Zatoichi went from town-to-town and people underestimated him, leading to their inevitable downfall.  No one believed that a blind swordsman could take down a gang of thugs.  Still, movie after movie, he would swing his sword around and they'd all fall to the ground, bloodied by his cane sword.  Same premise exists in Lady Snowblood.  The umbrella sword she carries as a stand-in for the cane sword is fun.  But the real comparison is that Yuki gets incredibly close to these people that she ends up killing because people assume that a woman can't possibly hold her own against a gang of thugs.  Heck, the entire movie is almost reaffirming that notion.  After all, Yuki's origin lies in the fact that these four rape a woman for four days.  I am not trying to dismiss the grossness of the act, but I can't help but make the comparison to Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in Terminator 2.  It's the trauma that she experiences in her origin story that causes her to dehumanize herself, creating the ultimate soldier in her wake.

Now, I've never read the manga.  As comic book literate as I am, it's always been Western comics.  I've kinda/sorta dabbled in bains dessinee because I've been to France.  Here's the thing, what I love as a Westerner who has limited experience with Lady Snowblood as a concept finds the story of Lady Snowblood fascinating.  I imagine that if you were from Japan, you are probably mad that this is only an hour-and-a-half movie and she murders all four of her targets.  After all, Kill Bill takes two films do do the same thing.  In my head, the manga takes a long time for each target to be hunted down and its probably incredibly ornate.  While that might be cool, I like how the movie handles the meta narrative of it all.  I'm talking about Ryu adopting the pen name of Kazuo Koike and becoming the creator of the Lady Snowblood manga in universe. Golly, that is a cool bit of fun.  I like when a fourth wall is broken well.  With a movie like Lady Snowblood, it helps me as a Westerner get a little bit more context for the film as a whole.  Like, in universe, Yuki can't walk around because people know of her story.  Somehow, even beyond all that, we get more insight into the vague politics of the era, having the police under the thumb of the evil Okono Kitahama.

There was a moment that I thought that the movie was going to commit a crime.  It was insane that this movie tried to have Yuki hunt down four of her killers.  When movies like this present such a large premise, very much like The Count of Monte Cristo, I have to wonder what would happen if a target died of natural causes.  And for a hot second, I almost believed that this movie would have answered that question.  And, for that second, I thought the answer was: nothing.  There's nothing you can do if someone dies of natural causes.  I mean, thank goodness that's not how the story ended.  As melodramatic as it was, having a big boss who impliments disguses (I mean! That was an incredibly effective face mask for 1973) as a guy who returns from the dead?!  It did the exact thing that the movie needed to do.

AND THEN!  AND THEN!  Having Yuki deal with the consequences of killing the most pathetic of the group by getting stabbed by the daughter?  Chef's kiss, guys!  Chef's kiss!  I love that the movie doesn't let Yuki get away with anything.  It is a world that has too much blood, but just the right amount of real world consequences. 

​I love this kind of stuff, guys.  I really do.  

Not rated, but this one gets a clear R-rating in my heart.  I mean, there's this one casual shot of a woman changing, involving nudity.  Couple with that the fact that the entire third act is about a botched abortion that leads to a woman dying.  The entire film is about sex shaming the protagonist, so all of this should be kept in mind before watching.  Also, one of the opening shots Just because something is black-and-white doesn't necessarily mean it is for all audiences.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Guys...I'm being a little naughty.  Two things I have to do everyday on top of my job and parenthood: exercise and read 50 pages a day. I exercised already.  Check that one off.  But I haven't read yet.  I tend to write these blogs only if everything else is done.  Well, I will have access to the novel I'm reading later, but I won't have access to a computer.  So I'm placing all my bets on knocking both of these things off and having a tremendously productive day.  Also, I'm in the homestretch of the box set, so I'm really jazzed that I'm almost done.

The fine folks at Criterion are smart cookies, I'll tell you.  I was a fool approaching Bergman the way I did.  (There might be some irony to that statement because I used to adore Bergman and now I'm incredibly skeptical.)  I previously watched The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander before watching the Eclipse box set of Early Bergman.  In my mind, that Early Bergman set was a one-to-one lead into waht would be some amazing storytelling later on.  Now that I've seen the bulk of Bergman's work, which all happens to reflect on the justification of casual sexual cruelty, the early work just reads different.  Part of me sees stuff like Port of Call as an attempt to push boundaries and figure out what it means to be an artist.  The really weird thing about Bergman is that he has always been an incredibly technically skilled director, even as a young man.  

Bergman's later work looks nothing like his early work.  The funny thing is that those early pictures feel so unobtrusive. They really look like Hollywood films.  I mentioned this in Thirst, but Bergman's later films embrace the minimalism when it comes to set and music.  There's straight up a score in Port of Call and I don't know why that stands out so much. This all comes down to seeing a young Bergman oh-so-desperate to rebel against a system that encourages standardization.  

I look at the end of the film as a bit of a travesty.  Listen, I'm not in love with Port of Call.  I don't outlike dislike it.  But it does feel like the Swedish version of Reform School Girls.  I've seen a lot of movies made by angry filmmakers who throw a bit of a temper tantrum through their films.  But even in the biggest tantrums, I at least appreciate that the directors have something that they want to say.  I don't think that Port of Call is necessarily a tantrum.  I will say that it is a bit of a sledgehammer, coming across as a mix of an exploitation film and an ABC Afterschool Special.  It wants to talk about the casual abuse of women in society as second class citizens and how girls with any degree of agency tend to be criminalized, leading into a heavy-handed commentary on underground abortions.  There are things I like; there are things I don't.  That's not where I'm coming from in this blog.  But what I really hate is the last shot.

In the film noir era, it was also the early days of self-regulation in Hollywood.  We're talking about the institution of the code, which would be the forefather of the MPAA.  Film noir, by ambiguous definition, was about exploring and almost glamorizing vice.  It's the same reason that we watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos.  We want to go on the other side of the tracks and see how attractive sin can get.  But because it was a time of self-regulation, every story --no matter how seedy --had to end with sin being punished and virtue overcoming.  It's why the cops burst into the hideout at the end of every crime film.  That was the deal.  That's very much how Port of Call ends.  

Berit and Gosta had escaped a trial that threatened to take Berit away for her complicity in a death that wasn't her fault. The entire film was a condemnation that said, unequivically, that this society was toxic for girls like Berit.  She couldn't succeed no matter what she did.  She was a moral character who lived with this scarlet letter for the entire film and things weren't getting better.  Gosta booking the boat to leave this place was the natural place that the film should have ended on.  After all, that scene exists.  Clearly, Bergman thinks that the reality was that the Sweden that Berit and Gosta grew up in was a prison.  But because, in the eyes of the law, that was a slander against society...they just decide that things will get better?

Can I tell you what I like versus what I dislike about this movie?  I can completely get behind Berit.  Starting the story in medias res, where Berit is committing suicide after something that we'll only discover later is a fascinating way to explore how Berit got to this point.  Yeah, heavy handed and melodramatic as heck, but I don't care.  It's still very watchable.  Okay.  But Gosta is a problem in this movie. Like a really big problem.

Absolutely this is Berit's story.  Honestly, I shouldn't care about Gosta at all.  If anything, Gosta is more of a sounding board so Berit can have a reason to tell her tale.  Okay.  I get that.  But Gosta is all over the place in terms of characterization.  What I'd like to think is that Bergman wanted a man who was better than the other men in her life, but also had a lot of those toxically male character traits.  Unfortunately, I don't know if Gosta read that way.  I hated Gosta from moment one.  Introducing your character as "aloof" might be a hard thing to get people to get past.  Yeah, Gosta is the one who sticks with Berit for the film.  He ultimately stands by her after putting her through a bunch of crap.  The problem is that Gosta's moral code is a bit of a mystery for the entire length of the film.  

I have no idea what Gosta is going to do from moment to moment.  I don't even know how Gosta feels about Berit for a lot of the film.  Yes, he gets into a fight over Berit's honor when three guys hurl sexual insults at her after a date.  Okay.  He then takes her to a hotel, faking a husband-wife relationship to be a bit naughty and to avoid scandal.  But then he flies off the handle when she reveals that she's had a past.  That past, by the way, is incredibly tame. Sure, I'm not in 1948.  But she's contextualizing so much.  Mom is a monster.  Dad was abusive.  The guy she met housed her when she was on the street.  Like, Gosta freaking out on Berit is meant to push the story, not based on what his character previously did.  

It's not like that characteristic hasn't been attributed to other male characters in romances.  I'm watching Nobody Wants This and Noah is gross sometimes.  There is a wide divide between Noah, for whom I am rooting, and Gosta, who feels like an old man casually hitting on a young girl.  Gosta is constant vascillating between human being and complete jerk and he's the guy we're meant to be excited about?  He is vanilla sometimes and spoiled cottage cheese the next.  The thing with Noah is that he's great most of the time, but has a couple of yellow flags.  Gosta isn't great at his best and feels like he's being stuck with someone he's not that into, despite the fact that he makes Berit tell him that she's in love with him.  Also, that stage business with the cigarette flip sometimes goes against what is necessary for the plot.

Either way, it's more interesting than good. It's not not-enjoyable.  But in terms of quality film, it's too safe while trying to be rebellious.

Not rated, but this is a movie once again about cruelty in marriage.  A man forces the protagonist to get an abortion that leaves her sterile.  Also, there's an image of murder (I have to word it that way because it is too complicated to explain).   There's also a scene that really borders on sexual assault and taking advantage of a drunk woman.  It's a pretty pessmistic film that has lots of stuff that kids shouldn't see.  Still, tonally, it isn't too explicit.  It's only if you are paying attention that you realize how bleak the film really is.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Oddly enough, despite being about infidelity once again, this one feels a little different?   The weird thing is that I've probably seen this one before, despite not remembering any of it. The good news is that, if I can knock this blog out, I might have two days before I have to write anything.   That brings me a little bit of comfort.  It's a weird productivity that doesn't need to exist.  Keeping all that in mind, I would like to say that getting a lot of views on the last blog in the first half-hour kind of made me have enough of a dopamine rush to finish out this streak of blogs.

One of the weirdest things about Thirst is that it borderline doesn't make sense.  It's not like Persona, which doesn't make sense because Bergman is being obtuse.  The plot of this story is so simple that when something doesn't make sense, it's baffling.  (I mean, I just defined "baffling" by saying "something doesn't make sense."  I'm not always a stellar writer.)   Here's what I'm trying to get here.  The story is about a married couple who give off just-past-newlywed vibes.  They are having problems because of his restlessness coupled with her traumatic history.  They go on a trip, bringing out both their affection and resentment of one another.  Very simple plot.  Every so often, we get a little context about why people act the way that they do through various flashbacks.  

But then the couple's story would be put on hiatus and we'd have this scene with this lady and her abusive therapist.  So I looked it up.  On Wikipedia.  Trust me, it tends to be my source for solving basic problems.  See, I pay attention to the movie better than most.  The treadmill kind of forces you to focus on the screen or else you are stuck focusing on how much time is left on the treadmill.  I don't have a phone in front of me.  Honestly, I recommend it a lot.  I mention all of this to stress that I give a lot of my brain power into unpacking movies.  And some things just stymie me enough to use Wikipedia.  And that's when I figured out that these minor characters were occasionally given a little extra cinematic real estate than I thought appropriate for tertiary characters.

Now, if I was reading this blog, I would be the first to argue that it's all one thing.  There are juxtaposing themes that might act as a foil to Ruth and Bertil's struggling marriage.  I bet that Bergman even justified some of his choices this way.  He was a young dude when he made this movie. It's one of his earlier films.  Sure, still a genius.  But those beats often didn't align.  That's when I found out that this was inspired by a book of short stories.  So much made sense when that puzzle piece was put into place.  Bergman is trying to adapt the best of the book, even if the book's individual elements didn't necessarily align with the film that he was trying to make.  The whole subplot with the abusive therapist leading into a homosexual encounter almost felt like it was its own side movie.  It shouldn't have mattered that Bertil knew her at one point.  That's all arbitrary.  Instead, we kind of have to make these logical leaps to moments.  In fact, I have to go as far as to say that I'm mostly going to be ignoring the Viola storyline because it seems wildly underdeveloped.  The only thing that I can really say is that it stresses the notion that women are often preyed upon and are expected to hold up unreasonable standards.  I mean, Viola's story ends in her suicide because of all of the horrible things that happen to her.

Actually, I do want to say one more thing about the Viola story. Valborg's seduction of Viola is meant to come across as predatory.  But here's the thing.  I want to apply a little historical queer theory to the film.  This is 1949.  Early Bergman.  Yeah, it's a little gross to assume that every lesbian out in the world is trying to trick heterosexuals into homosexual relationships.  But Valborg, as scary as she comes across in her final scene, isn't gross through the entire piece.  If anything, the scene comes across as "lonely."  (Note: I almost made a comparison to Port of Call, the other movie on this disc, because I forgot it was from a different film.  These are reasons that I have to push myself to get these blogs out because there is a line where information starts to blur.) Is this scene progressive?  I'm going to lean towards "no."  Is it impressive that it exists at all?  Maybe.  I don't know.  I do like that Valborg, for that final scene of manipulation, comes across more as sad than evil.  Also, Viola is no cup of tea, even if I do sympathize with her for most of the film.

Okay, back to the main story of Ruth.  Honestly, I don't care about Bertil.  I really don't.  Like, I'm going to talk about him in relationship to marriage.  But Ruth is the protagonist of this piece.  The funny thing is that I use Ruth's story as almost a cautionary tale against infidelity.  Don't get me wrong.  Bergman, for all of his justification for casual adultery in his later films, gives people heaps of misery.  But this is one of Bergman's early films.  I don't know if he's not the horndog that he'll be later in life or he's just playing the game.  After all, those early Bergmans all actually look more like Hollywood films than his later works.  Anyway, the movie starts out with Raoul coming across as an absolute demon when it comes to how he treats women.  He seduces Ruth, only to tell her that he's married once the deed is done.  When caught by his wife, he scolds both women for being so weak and then demands that Ruth get an abortion, which leaves her sterile.  

I mean, the very notion that Ruth comes across as simply ignorant of being the other woman in a relationship takes a lot of that responsibility off her shoulders.  Yes, she still deals with consequences for the events of the story. But Ruth also becomes someone with trauma that goes beyond what she caused.  On top of that, Raoul --despite kind of getting away with it --seems miserable in his relationship with his wife.  We don't really have such a clear indication of vice and subsequent punishment that we get in later films.  From a guy who is really annoyed by how mean people are in later Bergman films, there's something oddly refreshing seeing Bergman condemn something that he would champion later.  I have to be a prude because these are the things that get my gears working.

There is one thing that bugs me about the movie, shy of the confusing side plots.  This is a story about the slow poisoning of a marriage.  Neither one of the spouses is necessarily evil or at fault for the tension rising in the relationship.  But Bertil (I know, I said I didn't care about him) seems to want to save the marriage despite having some pretty crappy habits.  It's when we see him beat Ruth over the head with a bottle, trying to kill her, that it all kind of reads wrong.  Even worse, Bergman doesn't really stick with that image.  It's meant to be incredibly shocking, seeing him kill his wife in a fit of annoyance.   But then we have her resurrected (and teased in the dark) and it just feels like he wasn't allowed to do anything too shocking with his film.  It completely nerfs the film.  If the film is a grounded story about the slow growing cancer in the marriage, that moment seems to take a shortcut for something unearned.  The problem is that the film is stuck on a train.  A lot of stories intentionally take a small story --like a couple's train ride --and imbue it with life-or-death stakes.  In this case, Bergman wanted us to believe that a husband would kill his wife over a vacation.  It's just...I don't believe it.  It feels forced.  He wanted to earn it, but I don't see anything about his character that would explain that scene.  It would have felt important to purge it.  If he really wanted it, he needed to undo it immediately to let us not feel like it was a fakeout.  Instead, we have a scene in-between and explain it all away as a dream with a happy ending.

My biggest problem with Thirst is that it is a bit underdone.  Like, it's still an incredibly filmed movie.  But there's stuff that I would have avoided.  Hear that, Ingmar Bergman: one of the greatest directors of all time?  I would have done other things!

Rated R for a lot of vulgar stuff coupled with some pretty intense violence at times.  This is one of those movies where the implication of horrible discussion is sometimes worse than actually seeing some stuff. I'm not saying you don't see anything.  You see stuff.  But those scenes are oddly less horrifying than the dialogue that accompaines those upsetting moments.  Add to that a lot of swearing, sexual assault, and general all around misery, the R-rating is more than earned.

DIRECTOR:  Paul Thomas Anderson

I don't know if I have another blog in me.  I have yet another blog to write after this one and I actually have a little bit of time to knock this one out.  But also...I don't want to?  Like, I could.  There's almost nothing really stopping me except for dinner being ready in about eleven minutes.  But seriously, I'm tired and I never want to write another blog.  I also feel like I'm going to whine about this movie than I want to.

I did the thing.  Again.  I once again got caught up in everyone telling me how amazing this movie was.  Once again, my brain says "This is a good movie."  But my heart?  My heart didn't bond with the film.  It's going on a date where everything is fine and you acknowledge that the person across the table from you is a very lovel--you know what?  That never happened to me.  It either clicked or it was terrible and now I'm happily married and have five+ kids.  The intellectual part of me wants that metaphor to work because that's what it feels like.  Like, I really dug it.  I laughed throughout.  I found it fascinating and it was unique.  But do you know what else it was?  Or more like, wasn't?  It wasn't There Will Be Blood.  Because nothing ever is There Will Be Blood.  I don't care if it was made by Paul Thomas Anderson.  

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself.  I mean, I lost my mind over Licorice Pizza and that was also PTA.  (I just did the PTA thing.  Yeah, I'm one of those guys.)  It's just that everyone seemed to be losing their minds over this movie.  I mean, it's still very early, but people are talking about Best Picture at the Oscars.  The Golden Globes seem mildly obsessed with this movie.  I had to see it. I mean, I had to see it...not enough to go to the theaters.  But, you know, it's on HBO Max and it's the first week that it was on HBO Max.  That's kind of commitment.  And it did the job.  It's a three hour film that is funny and has something to say and has an amazing cast.  

It just didn't resonate with me.  I'm going to try to talk positively about it because I acknowledge that there's something here.  If I stray into some negative talk, that might be a bit of a blessing because that means I can figure out where my heart and my brain aren't talking properly.

Can I talk, at the most surface level, about what I loved?  I mean, it's my blog, so I can do whatever I want.  I just want to talk about the part that absolutely hit.  And it's a literal part.  Benecio del Toro absolutely crushes in this.  (By the way, the entire time, I thought, "If you can make it through One Battle After Another, you should totally watch The Phoenician Scheme.") I'm going to try to piece together what makes del Toro the most engaging part of this movie.  The world of the film is meant to be both alien and universal.  It's really weird that this movie slightly demonizes resistance fighters to fascism.  It's one of those things that people on the left scream, "There is no formal organization like Antifa" and then we see stuff like the French 75.  Of course there are organizations like the French 75 out there.  They don't look like that.  This is a fictionalized version played for laughs and for pushing the story.  But as messed up as the world of the French 75 looks, this is a story about regular folks in insane situations.  There's something so grounded about how insane this plot gets and no one performs that message better than Benecio del Toro.  Sensei Sergio St. Carlos shouldn't even be in this story.  He starts the film as simply Willa's martial arts instructor and then we find out that he's a captain of a sanctuary city who is trained in anti-government raids.  I love it. 

But where del Toro thrives is that, as things escalate, he maintains the same level of nonchalance against whatever he faces.  That's a Wes Anderson thing he learned, isn't it?  I mean, that's what I love.  Bob is all about spiraling.  In realistic ways, sure.  But Sensei never spirals, does he?  He gets arrested at the end of the movie for a drunk driving charge and the joke is that it is the most anticlimactic way for that character's arc to end.  I love it.  Everything else builds to a climax.  These two yahoos could have gotten to the convent unscathed had Sensei not brought beers.  Instead, these guys shoot themselves in the foot and complicate and already insane plot to a new level for no reason and I adore that.

I had to read a little bit about the movie.  Not too much. I never want to be overly influenced by what other people are saying about a film.  Still, I did read about the names.  The names were getting me.  I don't think I totally understand every bit of this because, despite owning a Thomas Pynchon novel, I haven't read it.  (I promise to get around to it.)  The absurdity is odd because it's almost like swearing in church.  You have these characters like Perfidia Beverly Hills and Colonel Lockjaw, clearly meant to be commentaries on the characters.  But these commentaries aren't subtle in a way other characters can be.  (I mean, Fr. Jud Duplenticy...?  Thanks, Wake Up Dead Man.)  The weird part is that the movie is actively silly at times.  There's a moment where Bob jumps off a roof, crashes into every tree limb on the way down and gets immediately tazed.  It's funny.  But the entire shtick is almost as somber as a heart attack.

(I would like to apologize if my tone shifts here.  I'm finishing this blog the next day and I'm in a drastically more annoyed mood.) There's a reason that they got Sean Penn to play Lockjaw.  I mean, Penn has infamously been characterized as one of the more vocal liberals in Hollywood.  Having him play the most evil conservative fascist I've seen on screen is something that I'm sure that he was itching to do.  There's nothing sympathetic about Lockjaw.  Penn, being able to play a guy whose motivation is to get into the Illuminati --named the Christmas Adventure Club (?) --is this feast of opportunity.  The guy doesn't even walk normally.  I'm sure that Penn built the character with a literal stick up his butt, explaining why he walks that way.  Still, fascinating stuff.

The funny thing is that this movie is about immigration and race while simultaneously having no clear stance on it.  I mean, we sympathize with Bob because he's our protagonist.  But Bob, who was at one point a left-wing terrorist war hero who liberated immigration facilities, turns into this kind of gross dude.  His daughter with Perfidia (let's just leave it at that) defines herself as Black and that's so much of her characterization.  After all, it's why Lockjaw is hunting her down, in an attempt to cover up his attraction to strong Black women.  Bob, however, despite being that deep into the cause, makes racist comments and reductive references to gender.  I have to believe that PTA is making a commentary that the extremists on both sides have weirdly more in common than either one of them would care to believe.

But I also hate that read.  If I had a chance to rename this blog, I would consider something to do with "Daddy Issues."  I'm going to always comment on the role of fatherhood when presented in movies.  Yes, Bob has lots of crappy baggage that I see inside Lockjaw.  And, despite Bob's vices, he's fundamentally a good person (who might be willing to kill...) while Lockjaw is unadulterated evil.  It's unclear whether or not Bob knows that Lockjaw is Willa's biological father.  I really think that he knows.  But beyond that, he doesn't seem to care.  I always like when storytelling does this.  For all of someone's faults, they love beyond reason.  Yeah, it doesn't forgive the crap that he does.  But it does make him a sympathetic and lovable character in the story, especially juxtaposed to Lockjaw, whose commentary is a perversion of what fatherhood is supposed to be.  I'm talking about stuff like accusing Willa of disrespect to her parents, despite the fact that he's actively trying to have her killed.  That kind of stuff.

Like, I know the movie is good.  I also know that if I keep pulling at strings, I would discover a lot more complexity than I've broken down here.  But sometimes the music just doesn't move me as much as I would have liked it to.

Not rated, but there's language, violence, and gore.  Like, tonally, this feels like a PG or a PG-13 movie.  It's something that I probably would have watched in 1994 without a second thought.  But comparing the gore in the early entries versus the gore in the later entires, it's kind of hilarious.  Like, one of the main characters gets a tendon ripped out of his leg and he just walks it off.  There's a lot of this.  Also, there's a mild sexual innuendo that is tame by any standard.  So take it from there.  It's not rated, but treat it as '90s PG-13.  

DIRECTOR: Hark Tsui

It makes no sense.  There is absolutely no reason that I started enjoying the Once Upon a Time in China franchise once I got to the fifth entry.  Like, it breaks so many of my rules for what makes a solid film.  Yet, here we are.  Me, turning around on this entire franchise because I like part five of a series.  To be fair, I'm one of the few people who actually kind of likes Rocky V, so maybe I just like being contrary and temper my expectations.

It's Boxing Day as I write this.  Traditionally, we have a big family party on Boxing Day.  But we cancelled it this year.  However, the reason that I'm mentioning my situation is that I'm buried in blog entires that I have to do.  I have three films to write about and one of them is Part FIve of a series and I kind of liked this one.  That's a dangerous combo.  We'll see if I can find enough things to say to justify this digital real estate.

The thing that frustrates me is that the one thing that this franchise actually intrigued me with is a political stance.  I don't know if I always agreed with the politics of the Once Upon a Time in China franchise, but I at least applauded that it had something to say, even if it was set in a world of epic action comedy.  Now, I've been complaining about these movies for a while now.  Between being drawn out and often incredibly muddy, there wasn't a ton to jump on board.  I mean, I was being generous sometimes.  But it seems like Once Upon a Time in China V finally stopped talking about isolationist zealots versus treasonous foreigners.  Like, I liked the commentary that the franchise as a whole offered, but even I had to acknowledge that the further that the films progressed, the less nuance that the conversation offered.  This one doesn't do that.  If anything, this movie kind of comes across as a '90s team superhero movie like X-Men​.  (Yes, I know that X-Men came out in 2000.  Maybe The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?  Oh, that 2003.) 

But there is a political stance in this.  Okay, sure everything is political, even and especially things that claim to be apolitical.  That's not what I'm talking about with Once Upon a Time in China V.  No, it's not aggressively political and that's a bummer. But the final act of this movie makes a statement on oppressive capitalism.  I mean, the movie is called Once Upon a Time in China.  But this is one of those stories, much like It's a Wonderful Life, that weaves in the notion that people shouldn't be so tight-fisted about their services.   I also am probably the only person on the planet who has made the connection --albeit forced --between Once Upon a Time in China V and It's a Wonderful Life, so I'll take that award now.  Much of the movie is a fun romp between Wong Fei-Hung's school and pirates.  Yeah, pirates.

Can I tell you how much I like the pirates in this movie?  Like, I'm not a pirate guy.  Those people who are huge Pirates of the Caribbean fans, I don't get it.  Those movie deliver on a very specific pirate archetype and that's fine for a lot of people.  But Once Upon a Time in China V serves up what I consider "the video game pirate."  These are so over-the-top brigands that they are almost laughable in how evil these guys are.  And the thing that's absolutely perfect?  It almost undoes the crime that Once Upon a Time in China II commits.  Once Upon a Time in China II offers a potentially supernatural villain.  Now, one of the things that this franchise does is establish certain rules, but pretends that it is grounded.  When the villain in II claims that he is immortal, there's this question all the way through on the rules of this world.  After all, while wire-fu is a key conceit to this franchise, the first movie takes what should be an extreme version of a grounded world, the second brings up the notion that perhaps there is something greater out there.  Well, that guy was a fraud and it was all tricks.  

Forget that in V.  V embraces that weird stuff happens.  And I don't know why the weird stuff makes me smile.  There's this sequence, oddly enough, in the second act, where Wong Fei-Hung fights a 120-year-old super pirate who is borderline magic.  And I don't know why that made the franchise way more fun.  I've been getting more and more annoyed by the casual use of wire-fu in this franchise.  But when you combine wire-fu and an absurd premise, it somehow becomes way more fun.  Like, I was way more forgiving of these epic wire-fu sequences because it was magic pirates.  Before, I lived in a world where everyone was a superhero trying to win a contest that seemed silly and now I have my super team fighting evil magic pirates and I'm all aboard.  It seems like such a smaller story than what I was dealing with before and I just liked that story where I could understand what was going on.

I also complained about Once Upon a Time in China IV about Wong Fei-Hung being the worst boyfriend in the world when they introduced 14th Aunt.  Like, it was such a step backwards in the story.  I thought they were just going to ignore 14th Aunt.  But it feels like Hark Tsui was desperately trying to redeem the franchise, so he took advantage of the goofiness that Once Upon a Time in China IV did.  I need to point something out from a relationship perspective.  Wong Fei-Hung's entire personality is being a genius at everything except for love.  Okay, I can accept that.  I don't love that sequels undoes some of the things that he learns in previous entries, but a lot of his growth has stuck by Once Upon a Time in China V, so I can forgive certain things.  But I was always so angry at Wong Fei-Hung for being such a dope in this series.  But I actively got mad at 13th Aunt / Siu-Kwan in this one.  One of the things that's kind of cute about her character in previous entries is that she's a little shrewd when it comes to flirting with Wong Fei-Hung.  But in this one, that line is crossed I didn't care for. Let's talk about the marriage that happens in this movie.

Sure, the two characters needed to move their relationship along by this point.  I wouldn't even hate a marriage between the two characters at this point.  They've been dancing around it for long enough.  But I don't like the idea that Siu-Kwan tricks Wong Fei-Hung into a marriage.  It's this moment that makes us sympathize with 14th Aunt, who absolutely should have no claim over Wong Fei-Hung.  There's this great fallout with these two sisters fighting over the same dude (I know, it's regressive, but it makes for fun storytelling.) But the bigger problem is that Wong Fei-Hung doesn't really have a chance to screw up.  It's almost like the movie is safeguarding Wong Fei-Hung from any scrutiny because he's constantly being manipulated in this relationship.  That's not healthy.  It makes the entire relationship that I've been low-key rooting for something gross.  Besides, we don't really know if they're married or not.  

Also, stop teasing me by saying that Foon and 14th Aunt are never going to be a thing.  He puts himself out there in a vulnerable way, which is huge for a comic relief character.  But the movie won't let him be a character.  II gave him moments of pain and this movie, given an opportunity to cash in on that pain, makes it a bit.  It's really weird because the script teases that he should have more from that moment than what he got.

Okay, I have nothing left to say.  This is a silly movie that embraces its own silliness.  I'm almost done with this franchise and I have a feeling that this entry won't have much say in the next film.  Still, I dug it against all odds.