I'm changing things up.  I have The Complete Films of Agnes Varda box set.  At first, I thought that this meant only the feature length films.  Nope.  This includes the short films as well.  Since I'm painfully a completionist, I'm watching all of these short films as well.  But I also know that I can't write an essay about each and every one of these movies.  So instead, I'll do some blurbs about each one as I watch them.  So I'll keep updating as I go along.

Les 3 boutons (2015) -I think I like Varda's early work a lot.  I've talked about this in Varda by Agnes and Visages / Villages.  It just seems like it was trying less to be art and simply was art back in the day.  Again, I don't mean to poo-poo.  Varda has more artistic merit in her pinky than I'll ever have.  To a certain extent, this movie felt like some of her earlier work.  It had a narrative.  It had a confusing narrative, but it was a narrative.  But in the mix of visuals, I kind of lost the point of it besides looking pretty and being artsy.

Ô saisons, ô châteaux (1958) -There is something incredibly satisfying about this.  There's an innocence to Varda as she's making what ultimately is a comissioned travel film. She seems worried about upsetting those who are hiring her while trying to maintain an artistic integrity and it is near perfect.  Yeah, it's a travel promo film.  It's the equivalent of a town asking for an extended infomercial.  But it works so well.  But not as well as...

Du côté de la côte (1958) -...this.  In the same year, she's hired for basically the same job with the French Riviera.  Then she just goes bananas and makes her own art film that happens to be emotionally about the French Riviera.  When the folks who hired her saw that she claimed that the best view is from the grave, were they all excited about it?  This is Varda that I adore.  She's spunky and adorable and has social commentary, even when she's hired for travel videos.

L'opera-mouffe (1958) -I'm living with a very pregnant lady right now.  She doesn't go around the streets of Paris making little art films.  This one is pretty.  Maybe things in black-and-white get a little bit of a pass compared to things in color.  I'm not normally a fan of strictly experimental cinema, but this mostly works for me.  Maybe because it is so hypnotic and relaxing that one can't help and view the movie through the lens of calm.  It's sad at times.  I lost myself in my own mortality watching this one today.  There was this old woman who looked so rough and the camera just stayed on her for longer than was appropriate.  I then realized that this lady, along with almost everyone involved in this movie, was probably dead.  But that old lady also has this specific form of immortality because film snobs like me will watch everything that Agnes Varda has ever made.

Les dites cariatides (1984) -Varda still has it going on in 1984.  I think it is when film goes digital is when I get off the Varda train.  I think she picks her shots so beautifully when film costs money that, when it is disposable, she doesn't quite get that same sense of grandeur.  She has a specific subgenre of experimental art film.  It's almost a documentary, but with little done in terms of informing.  Varda shows all of these women carved into stone and tells the story of the inspiration of these pieces.  But the point of the documentary is not to have you leave and tell your friends about what you learned, but to experience the same sense of awe that Varda does while looking at these moments.  The 2005 update doesn't really deserve its own section.  That's just someone's slideshow of statues.  But it shows what can happen when a filmmaker really pays attention to the small stuff.

T'as de beaux escaliers, tu sais (1986) -I almost didn't write about this.  I'm actually kind of amazed that I found an image of this.  It actually is probably from another movie.  It's funny.  Varda says that this isn't an advertisement; it's a documentary.  It's both. It's an excuse to say that Varda really likes film and I have no problem with that.  It's what I really like and to claim that this is my favorite of Varda's shorts is a bit too much fan service.  Doesn't mean that I don't like it.

Le lion volatil (2003) -Man, Agnes Varda --especially older Agnes Varda --was a sassy old lady.  In the introduction to this piece, she spills all the tea about how her producer disappeared with all of the money that was meant to make this short into a feature length film.  I'm already starting to see some of the weaknesses of Varda in 2003.  She wants this to be this heady piece about love around this neighborhood, but it all feels a bit forced compared to the other stuff we've seen.  It's cute and I like the fact that it has a narrative.  But it also wears 2003 really hard.

Elsa la rose (1966) -My goodness, I don't want to write about this right now.  The odd part is that I really like a lot about this short film.  I just wrote about Les creatures, where I feel like Varda is trying to be artsy.  Instead, we see honest-to-goodness art here.  She's in the zone with this one.  Maybe she does better with earnest reactions versus trying to reconstruct something.  She is making this almost as a commission.  She took the love between these two people and didn't try to fabricate something.  Elsa is romantic without being sappy.  She talks about art and her husband still embraces her with the skills that he already possesses.  It isn't perfect.  It's a little chaotic, but that's part of the narrative.  

Uncle Yanco (1967) -I always assume that I'm going to be annoyed by Varda's experimental stuff.  It mostly feels put on (trust me, I'm going to be writing a lot about this pretty soon).  But this is that sweet spot.  It comes from the fact that you can feel Varda's appreciation and love for her subject in this one.  The eponymous Uncle Yanco is Scrappy Doo in the best possible way to Agnes Varda's Scooby.  It's insane that both of these are in the same family...even though Yanco makes a point to say that they aren't actually related.  Still, this is a charming short and this is Varda's experimental stuff at its best.​

Black Panthers (1968) -I love when Varda gets out of her own way.  Yeah, I know that we're at the height of Varda's talents.  But I can just feel Varda getting wrapped up in the wealth of actual content that she needs to respect.  It's not like Varda's fingerprints aren't on this.  There are some very Varda elements happening in this documentary.  But the subject matter comes first to her.  There's such a respect for her subject and that's what makes "Black Panthers" compelling.

Reponse de femmes (1975) -See, I found this one more interesting.  It's really that tightrope that Varda rarely pulls off.  This is avant garde as can be, but it also doesn't forget its focus.  It's both a damning condemnation of misogyny coupled with a masterclass in efficient purpose.  Does it get a bit much with all of the nudity?  Yeah, kind of.  But Varda's going for a bit of shock value to get her audience to really listen to her message.  It's pretty incredible.

Plaisir d'amour en Iran (1976) -I both like and dislike this (kind of like the movie its associated with).  In many ways, it's borderline a deleted scene from One Sings, the Other Doesn't.  I will say that I find Apple far more interesting in these six minutes than I did the entire film of One Sings, the Other Doesn't.  It takes a lot to make Apple relatable because she doesn't really hold relationships with anyone who really challenges her.  If anything, her relationship with Suzanne gains weight because we see her in a place and a time that brings down her walls.  Also, the notion that Varda uses Iran as a backdrop so effectively is lovely.

7 P., Cuis, S. de B....(A Saisir) (1985) -Okay,I get that the short films will be more avant-garde than some of the full-length narratives.  There are things that I really like about this .  (Note:  It will never be my favorite.  It's a bit "so what" for a lot of it.)  I do like that we kind of look at the nuances of family within a period of 28 minutes.  But also, there are some images that are trying so hard to be weird that it almost pulls from the things that are more effective.  Still, I can't deny that the images are actually cool.  It's trying too much to do different things and I don't know it nails any of it.

Not rated, but let's call it.  This would be rated R.  There's some blurry nudity.  There's a sexual assault that happens off camera.  There's a very frank portrayal of death.  Drug use and alcohol use are fairly commonplace in this movie.  It's a pretty bleak film full of things that make you sad about life.  But nothing in this is overly exploitative.  Still, it gets heavy.

DIRECTOR:  Agnes Varda

Oh my goodness! I  played catch up on the blog.  I have to tell you, this is the Varda I was waiting for.  It might be another hard one to write about because I genuinely love this movie so much. It's what made me want to buy the Agnes Varda set.  

Now that I've seen an exceptional amount of Varda, Vagabond is simultaneously the most Varda thing and the least Varda thing I've watched so far.  Varda, God bless her, was incredibly socially conscious.  She understood the fundamental necessity for the artist to use her voice to actually say something of substance.  Now, my frustration with some of Varda's works has come with the fact that she sometimes wields that social commentary with a boring sledgehammer.  Again, my entire headcanon is that Varda sometimes gets in her own way.  But Vagabond isn't quite that.  Oh, Vagabond is blunt.  Typical Varda.  But it is also made with a craft that Varda doesn't always put in her movies.

This is something I'm coming to terms with.  Varda always seems to partially excuse craft with passion.  That's a completely unfair assessment because I wasn't there when her movies were made.  For someone who almost exclusively dealt with either experimental film or films with a little bit of an avant-garde bent, for all I know funding was nonexistent. But Varda's films outside of Vagabond and maybe a few other movies (Cleo from 5 to 7?), it always feels like Varda thrives in the unpolished.   It's almost an embrace of garage band culture.  When I think of her special effects or more surreal elements, it always has a DIY element to it.  I'm not saying that I'm against this.  It's just weird knowing that something like Vagabond exists.  Those DIY, guerilla filmaker moments seem somehow a little lazy knowing that something like Vagabond was something that Varda made in 1985.  We're not even in prime Varda era right now.  She was a creature of the nouvelle vague.  But this is 1985!  And the movie slaps.  Like, there are Varda elements, like with all of the interviews with the NPCs of the story.  But if you didn't know that Varda made this movie, it would be really hard to tell.  Yes, it still feels like Varda, but not in a way that makes it feels like she's resting on her bag of tricks.

Okay, it's been days since I wrote the first part of this blog, so I'm just going to throw up everything I can remember about this movie and stop talking about Varda.  Listen, if you haven't noticed me being a bleeding heart liberal on this blog, then you've probably missed the code behind everything I've written.  I think the first thing that I've really been moved over is the plight of the poor.  Now, Varda does something way more nuanced than I thought possible with her.  Yeah, this is a  movie aggressively about what it means to be homeless for a year.  She starts the story with the protagonist dead in a ditch.  The entire film is a flashback from that point on.  Cool.  We know that Mona is going to die.  We don't know how long that it is going to take from moment one, but we know that things aren't going to go well for Mona.  Now, the most Varda-y thing in the movie is the fact that this almost shifts to mockumentary by having NPCs answering questions to a police investigator who is trying to find out the timeline for Mona.  Now, it almost gets a little silly because some of these moments are more like fourth-wall breaks where these characters just voice their thoughts about Mona.  

Okay, but if the entire notion of making a movie about poverty through the eyes of a woman seems a little on the nose, Varda's choices to characterize Mona is fascinating.  My natural tendency is to side with Mona.  We never really get a clear timeline of what led Mona into this lifestyle, but it really reads as an act of rebellion.  Whether that rebellion is against a parent, a lover, all of society?  All of the above?  we don't really get. (Yeah, I played fast and loose with the rules of punctuation.)  And while I do sympathize with Mona, she's also incredibly frustrating as a human being.  Varda makes this movie seemingly with an attempt to make us empathize with the homeless and yet makes Mona someone you want to shake out of self-destructive behaviors.  Like, there are a lot of situations where Mona's expectations are incredibly basic and she almost prides herself on being defined by her own rules.  

Some of these are even the basic tenets of kindness.  There's the guy with the lock and chain around his neck.  This guy didn't ask a darned thing out of Mona.  He gave her all of his drugs and let her hang out.  But when he was being assaulted, Mona just bailed with a bunch of his stuff.  Yeah, I can see her getting frustrated with the goat hearders.  Not because the goat hearders are in the wrong.  No, I just don't see someone like Mona really wanting to be so disciplined to take care of a plot of land.  When they start asking for a modicum of help on the farm, we know that Mona's not wired to have that kind of structure.  But it is still wildly frustrating to hear that the patriarch of the goat hearders is so willing to not only give her a plot of land, but also help her get it started and she still demonizes him.  

Still, I do feel for Mona.  I don't want to associate myself with Mme Landier, but I think we as intellectual audiences are meant to tie ourselves to her as an avatar.  I don't see Mona through Landier's eyes.  But out of all of the characters, that's the closest.  (Hey, side thought that I promised I would put in this blog.  Do you understand how much I wanted to offer to clean Mona's clothes.  One of the things that Landier pointed out was how bad Mona smelled.  You could just...offer to wash her clothes.) Anyway, I don't see the reality of wanting to track someone like Mona down.  Yes, those anxieties of what could have happened to Mona in those woods was accurate.  It doesn't mean that Mme Landier had a chance of re-encountering her out there.

I actually grew a little frustrated with one of the devices that Varda uses.  I don't like the "It's a Small World" attitude that the film presents.  I get that there is an element that "We're never as far from the homeless as we think we are."  But the fact that everyone is somehow connected to everyone who Mona interacts with is darned frustrating.  It's such a grounded movie and to have everyone somehow know Mona is just a bit silly.  I know it gives us that one moment when Landier's assistant runs into Mona while searching for her and that we're supposed to feel frustrated with him when he refuses to contact Landier when he finds Mona.  But I don't think the inimate relationships work as well as Varda wants it to.

Still, I adore this movie.  I feel for Mona so hard.  The fact that every relationship in her life has a ephemeral quality.  When that house is burning down around the sleeping Mona and no one bothered to wake her up, it depresses me in the way that it should.  This is a story about lonliness as much as it is a story about homelessness. If Varda's goal was to make me feel deeply about a cause, Vagabond does it better than anything else she's made.

Rated R for gore, death, and a lot of language.  This is almost the quintessential Stephen King adaptation.  It really feels like you are reading one of his works, swearing and all.  Sure, the dialogue is a little snappy and everyone's just a little bit more vulgar than they would be in reality.  But the R rating really comes from the bluntness of violence.  Sometimes you see it.  Sometimes you don't.  It really doesn't matter because it all is jarring.  There's also a fair amount of issues that come with bowel movements.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Francis Lawrence

Guys, I'm deep in the hole again.  I have bitten off more than I can chew and I'm trying to find time to write these things.  I hope that no one notices me writing or that I look like I'm doing something important enough to justify quiet time.  Still, I am a little bummed that I didn't write this blog immediately after watching the movie.  

Golly, people said that The Long Walk was going to be something special and they were right.  Very rarely does that happen with me.  I tend ot get my hopes up way too high when it comes to movies that are generally well liked.  Maybe it is one of those movies that embraces the notion that genre is almost more tonal than formulaic.  Like The Walking Dead, The Long Walk ​(which I now realize have very similar names), the setting and the genre are horror, but the genre is almost utilitarian in nature.  With The Walking Dead, the conceit of a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland means that people can't sit still.  They have to be moving and you see what happens to human nature when the concept of home is stripped from them.  (Hence, when they get to Alexandria, there's something that is sacrificed from the formula.) 

The Long Walk uses the notion that the boys can't stop walking to see how people's codes of ethics hold up under the threat of death.  And, honestly, even though this is a post-apocalyptic allegory, it has an oddly optimistic view of humanity.  (I want to get into the political stuff very soon, so please, remind me!)  If you ignored all of the political stuff that is pretty thickly folded into The Long Walk, you still have a fantastic story about the way that humanity and brotherhood works.  Honestly, points to Stephen King for building their characters the way that he does because I would be tempted to show a lot more of men's demons rather than the goodness that is woven into people.  Ray and Pete are fantastic protagonists (even though technically one of them is the antagonist, if we're really following characterization rules closely).  These are two guys who understand that both of them can't survive.  Life and death is woven into the story so inherently that it's almost a little weird that anyone in this walk would talk to each other.  And, to be sure, there are characters in the story that choose a different attitude than the musketeers do (a very Stephen King concept that teenagers name themselves after Alexandre Dumas books).  But these guys establish a precedent that they view life --even life beyond their own --as sacred. 

Listen, this is weirdly a story about the inherent empathy that people should have.  Yeah, not everyone has that.  But Ray and Pete know that this walk will probably end in their deaths.  But they also want all 50 people to continue walking --by their limited perspective --forever.  It's a battle between heart and head.  Their heads tell them that the sooner that their peers fall, the more likely that they survive without the torture of having to walk for days.  But they also know that these are human beings.  They recognize their universal brotherhood and inherent value.  That's wonderful.  This is a movie where most of the cast is shot brutally and, yet, I can't help but think that this is a truly pro-life movie (in the strictest definition of pro-life.)  Okay, sure, Ray wants to shoot the Major through the head.  But Pete also tries talking Ray out of this wish.  I also recognize that Pete fulfills Ray's wish, but that almost mirrors the end of Supergirl, so read that for a look into my thoughts about that ending.

I confronted someone online again.  My wife kind of hates when I do this.  This is someone whom I view as intellectually superior (mainly because that's the persona he displays online), but morally different enough from me that I'm genuinely concerned at times.  He had the argument (without actually saying the word "woke") that science fiction and fantasy has gotten too political.  He claims that he grew up saying that his science fiction wasn't political.  Well, I went on a rant (a very polite on both sides discussion, really) claiming that those things that he liked as a kid were actually quite political.  It's just that those things either aligned with his politics or shaped his politics.  My point is that when people complain about politics in their storytelling, I think it's because the politics have been executed poorly.  I loved Quantum Leap.  I got really excited when the show came back.  I watched every episode (and am sad that I'll never find out what happened to Dr. Sam Beckett).  But there was an episode that was so intensely political that I couldn't help but roll my eyes.  I even agreed with the politics portrayed in the show and I still thought it was terrible.  I think we tend to lean towards "too woke" (and when I say "We", I mean "You") when the quality of the storytelling makes it seems like the creators are preaching.

The Long Walk's biggest strength is that it is probably My Dinner with Andre, but there's a chance that Andre's head is going to get blown off if he doesn't eat fast enough.  (Okay, I've never actually seen My Dinner with Andre.  It's on my list.)  Immediately, there's a commentary on the rising tide of Nationalism and the dangers of American exceptionalism.   It highlights how we use violence blindly without actual need for violence.  It's probably the most obvious thing about the story.  There's this explanation about the role of the Long Walk by the Major as a means to inspire Americans out of laziness (a commentary on the welfare state).  But there is never really an explanation for the need for violence beyond the most obvious answer:  America loves violence.  Like, this could just be a walk across America where we root for stamina and endurance.   But then we, as Americans, wouldn't have any stakes for watching people walk.  It's incredibly depressing, thinking that this is what we want.  And yet, it resonates as true.  

The Long Walk's glory lies in its simpleness.  When people have no excuse but to walk, we get to see simple, honest stories.  I was wondering what differentiates this from something like Speed.  After all, both have the conceit that people can't go slower than a certain velocity before they are killed.  And I think Speed is great.  Sure, it's been decades since I've seen it. But I do think it is great.  But it is a very different movie than something like The Long Walk.  The Long Walk occupies a space of character.  Yes, it is nervewracking and anxiety-inducing.  The entire movie, I wonder how characters are going to survive.  But I also know which characters are going to go.  It's more of a matter of which two characters it comes down to and what the walk does to them.  Do I get sad when characters die?  Absolutely.  Even the more antagonistic and unlikable characters generate sympathy before their deaths.  Heck, that might be the biggest trick that this movie pulls off: characters you start hating become sympathetic.  Sometimes it happens quickly.  Sometimes it happens slowly.  But you don't want anyone to die.  The attitude that Ray and Pete have towards the others becomes contagious.  We understand their perspectives towards life because they believe it. 

I really liked this movie, but there are a few things that I would do differently.  I love Mark Hamill as a person.  I really do.  I don't love this performance.  He loves this character that I've seen him do more than once.  But beyond that, I would have ended the movie one minute earlier.  I know that Lawrence wanted to end the movie with more walking in a movie all about walking.  But I would have ended the movie with "I want a carbine."  But besides that?  Man, I loved this movie.  Like, I kind of want to buy it because I enjoyed it that much.  It's hard for me to wax poetic, at least in isolation, when I like something a lot.  But honestly?  Check it out.

PG-13 for a lot or cussing, a lot of drinking, and a lot of dying.  It's going to be a hard sell for my five-year-old, who really wants to see it.  But I'm going to go with a hard "No" on this one.  It really feels like the adult cousin of Superman.  And it's not like it would really work without the stuff that is questionable.  It's fundamental to this version of the character.  So as much as I want to say that this is the fun superhero movie of the summer, it's one of those liminal movies.  As it is a PG-13 movie, 13 is about the right age to consider this movie.

DIRECTOR:  Craig Gillespie

What kind of landmine am I stepping in?  The internet is bringing out all of the trolls with this one.  The manosphere wants this movie to fail so badly.  I, on the other hand, was more excited about this movie than I've been for a long time.  Like, I wanted this movie to be great.  So here I am, having to explain that Supergirl isn't the movie I wanted it to be, but I also think that the trolls are way off on the movie as well.

I don't want to speed through this part for the first time.  There has been this revisionist history saying that this movie is crapping on a legacy of great Supergirls.  I'm not saying that the other Supergirls out there aren't great.  The Helen Slater Supergirl film was played on repeat in my house.  (Even though I had seen the movie dozens of times, I kept waiting for Christopher Reeve to appear.  I dont know why I didn't understand that he wouldn't, outside of a poster, even though I had the movie memorized.)  I am one of the few advocates for The Flash with Sasha Calle as Supergirl.  She was solid and I enjoyed that movie well-enough.  And even though the series never got great, I watched every episode of Supergirl with Melissa Benoist.  I think that every Supergirl has added to the history of this character.

What I won't stand for is the idea that the internet loved these other Supergirls and didn't root for their respective downfalls.  So when I start praising Milly Alcock for a near perfect performance, part of it comes from the fact that she honestly was that good, but also because I refuse to hear "This movie would have been better if Sydney Sweeney had the role."  No it wouldn't have.  Stop being the worst.  Had Sydney Sweeney gotten the part, we'd have an equally toxic reaction with a different bent to it.  Milly Alcock absolutely crushed the part that she was given and none of my frustrations of the movie come from Milly Alcock.

A lot of my frustration with this movie had to do with the fact that I needed it to be great.  I was too excited.  I wanted it too much.  I honestly thought the trailers were some of the best trailers ever.  (Although my peeping online told me that people thought that the trailer looked terrible.)  I don't deny that my overenthusiasm has wrecked many a good movie for me.  I love the entire Superman story.  I like that we've gotten to a point in storytelling that we get a Supergirl centric story.  But to say that I was getting an adaptationo of Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow?  That's just adding to the expectation that I was going to get something truly special.  

But I have to think, Woman of Tomorrow was a risk.  (Note:  I know that Craig Gillespie directed this.  Some of the criticisms are Gillespie's issues.  But in some cases, it's a James Gunn issue.  Also, I adore James Gunn, especially when it comes to comic book storytelling.) From a comic book perspective, Woman of Tomorrow gave us insight into an underdeveloped character.  As a lifelong Supergirl fan, I have to acknowledge that the character has always had issues living in her cousin's shadow.  Please note:  We're all aware that is one of the central themes of the movie.  But she was created as a marketing push to sell comic books to girls.  She was a feminine Superman for a long time.  It's why I don't write off the Melissa Benoist version of the character because she often fills that role on the show.  But a lot of Supergirl's story didn't do new readers any favors.  She died in Crisis on Inifinite Earths.  She was replaced by Power Girl, a Supergirl from another planet.  She was replaced by Matrix who simply took a Supergirl design.  She was brainwashed by Darkseid.  She was a Red Lantern.  That's all interesting stuff over the course of decades and decades of reading the character.  But it wasn't until Woman of Tomorrow that we had a definitive exploration of what made Supergirl fundamentally different from her cousin.

But it took a long time to get to that breakdown.  Now, put me in James Gunn's shoes.  Supergirl, especially in an incredibly depressing and toxically masculine era, is a harder sell.  We can't really afford to do this whole soft launch of Supergirl.  Instead, I get why Gunn and Gillespie started with "Woman of Tomorrow" with the story.  This is the character that differentiates her from Kal-El.  We don't need two Supermen.  We have a tangential character that is at least introduced in Superman.  From a marketing perspective, it all scans.   It has less pressure compared to a new section of the DCU opening.  (It's why Iron Man 2  came so close to the first Iron Man.) 

And the thing that I really appreciate about Supergirl is that it breaks up the formula, which is one thing that people can't seem to wrap their heads around.  One of the myriad of complaints that people seem to have is that people don't care about Krem.  Krem isn't a supervillain.   He's a bad guy, to be sure.  He's definitely the antagonist of the piece.  And I'll say that, he might be one of the more evil characters we've encountered in superhero media.  He's not complex.  He's a human trafficker.  He is selfish and hurts people to get ahead in life.  But the scope of his villainy isn't some grandiose, universe-ending problem.  You'd think a powerhouse like Supergirl would be trying to save the universe.  No.  This is a very small story where Supergirl gets overwhelmed by her own limitations rather than any kind of cosmic level event.  The modern run of Hawkeye did something very similar of having the hero overwhelmed by local thugs.  But the point isn't the bad guys.  If the bad guys won, the universe would keep ticking.  This is a story that only affects two people (okay, the people that Kara saves along the way are also important).  

Instead, this is aggressively a character study of what makes a broken person tick.  I love the Krypton stuff / the Argo City stuff.  Like, honestly, that is some of the best origin story stuff I've seen in a movie.  I adore that it was all in Kryptonian / Kryptonese.  It gives us more context for the Superman movie while fundamentally being an understanding to what Krypto means to Kara.  It's so good.  We understand why Kara has to stand up for Ruthye.  All that stuff comes so organically and it gels with what the movie presents us.

So why didn't I love it?  I mean, here I am defending the movie from the manosphere and I didn't love it. It's all stupid. It's got editing and music issues.  And I'm not talking about "The Middle."  That needle-drop was perfect and I'm going to die on that hill.  The only criticism that I have of that moment is that we're starting to get a trope happening in each James Gunn superhero movie with the use of needle drops. But I smiled wide at "The Middle."  It felt like a fun movie at that point. 

But this is a less fun movie.  I wanted it to be more fun and I think a lot of that came from sitting in a half-filled theater with some real pacing issues.  The music never really grabbed me.  Like, I loved Superman's take on the John Williams theme.  I don't think Kara's theme exactly has the legs that Clark's does.  And that's in the shadow of using Blondie's music in the trailer.  Like, that trailer music was so perfect that I was surprised that we didn't get the bangers that we normally would have out of a James Gunn joint.  (Again, I cannot stress enough that this is Craig Gillespie's film.)  

The one thing that I want to sleep on is the fact that Kara kills Krem.  I really had a problem when Superman killed Zod in Man of Steel.  Like, I really didn't like it.  I actually like when superheroes have their "no killing rule."  But somehow, that death made sense to me.  I don't want to defend it because I feel like Clark would get incredibly mad if he found out that Kara did that.  But I also feel like the Kara that we learned about in this movie isn't the Kara that already has a firm sense of right or wrong.  Instead, we have an angry girl who sees Krem as a monster that destroyed a little girl's life.  And she's both mature and immature enough to understand that she has do anything to stop Ruthye from throwing her life away.  Now, in "Woman of Tomorrow", there's a death fakeout when it comes to this moment.  In reality, Kara sends Krem to the Phantom Zone.  I like that as a book ending. The reason why I don't think it works in the movie is because it's a third option that the movie never presented.  We don't live in a world with Phantom Zones yet.  To introduce the Phantom Zone seems disingenuous to the story we're presented with.  So I don't like that Kara kills in this movie, but I also am processing it.

I am 1000% going to buy this movie and probably watch it a dozen more times.  But right now, I acknowledge that it's a flawed movie that I enjoyed the concept of.   Also, I hate entitled white dudes.

Not rated.  I almost don't want to write the parental guide at the beginning of this one because even mentioning anything kind of spoils the film.  Still, I kind of have to.  The first thing is that there is nudity.  Although the nudity we see is in the context of bathing as opposed to anything sexual in nature.  Still, there is sexuality and violence in the movie, which is kind of a shock if you know anything of the structure of this film.  None of the movie feels exploitative, but it doesn't change the fact that stuff happens.  

DIRECTOR:  Chantal Akerman

I did it.  I have slain one of my white whales.  (By definition, I should only have one white whale, but Jeanne Dielman has always been one of the movies that has intimidated me.) Before I get too far into this, I have a specific sin to confess.  I blew up the disc.  Literally.  When I was putting it in the player, I dropped it, giving it a small-but-noticable scratch at the end.  It still played until I reached the middle of the film.  I have my new repair kit (the same one we used at the video store) and that scratch must have been a crack because the repair kit blew up the disc.  Another one is coming in the mail.  Shhh!

I normally don't feel the need to explain a movie to people.  Most people who would read a blog about Jeanne Dielman (By the way, I'm going to just call it Jeanne Dielman instead of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commence, 1080 Bruxelles for what should be obvious reasons.)   The reason that this movie is one of those white whales is that it is a three-hour-and-twenty minute movie where the protagonist basically just keeps her apartment tidied.  It's borderline silent.  It almost dares you to watch the movie all the way through.  When I tried explaining this to my wife, she wondered what I was doing with my life.  I talk about this movie a lot, especially when I talk about the nouvelle vague / French New Wave.  

The easy thing to get out of the way is to say that I oddly liked it.  This movie is far more complex than simply a woman keeping her apartment clean.  I mean, I'm going to forever roll my eyes at you if you put this in your Top 5 because that is an exercise in trying too hard.  But there is a narrative here.  There is a wealth of character that comes through the silence of this film.  And, to top it all off, it has a lot to say.  No, I get it.  It doesn't hurt that I live in 2026, where Instagram Reels feeds me Type-A personalities keeping their apartments spotless for my enjoyment.  I think I've been molded into being a Jeanne Dielman fan.  I was basically bred in a jar to be the ultimate fan of this movie.  I took it in hour shifts and that's exactly how this movie worked for me.  Basically, one of Jeanne's days aligned with my day.  It was lovely.

Now, Chantal Akerman made this movie as a feminist perspective on what it meant to be a woman in French culture.  I couldn't help but feel like I was watching an ant farm.  I've been trying to talk in therapy how I'm worried that most of society absolutely lacks asperation.  Jeanne might be my Exhibit A.  Jeanne has no hobbies.  She preps dinner early.  Like, watching her clean the table and set out the silverware immediately after her strangely aged child leaves for school (Honestly, I feel bad because he's either the oldest child or the youngest grown man that ever lived) makes me worried about her.  While we see elements of relaxation in days two and three (the two days that start falling apart) Jeanne does nothing really for herself.  It's not that I don't find joy in a well-kept home.  It's just that I would go insane if that was all I lived for.  The story reminds us that Jeanne was not always a single mother.  We know that she was married, although the amount of information we get about her late spouse is sorely lacking.  It kind of feels like Jeanne was always some version of this.  

Dielman has nothing to live for when it comes to herself.  She doesn't fawn over her child.  There are stories about the courage of motherhood and this is not that movie.  It's not that her kid sucks.  He's actually kind of obedient and takes after his mother.  But it almost doesn't feel like love.  It all feels like obligation.  We get some odd moments where the two talk about what seem to be heavy conversations, but with an attitude of apathy and distance between the two of them.  Everything that Jeanne does seems to be out of obligation.  That's going to lead into the heavy twist on the story that people don't talk about: the fact that Jeanne is a sex worker.  When Jeanne gets up in the morning, she makes a meal.  She shines her son's shoes.  She spends the day cleaning.  She eventually sleeps with a john (and the first few times you see this, there is soemthing almost asexual about it.  It honestly could have been a reflexology session if it wasn't for the final half hour of the movie.)   But everything is done out of a point of "This is what we do right now."  It's a movie about a shell of a person just thriving and Akerman seems to be saying that's the way that women are encouraged to live life.

The sex worker thing threw me.  I think a lot of that comes from the fact that I've never seen sex work portrayed this way on film.  Often, there is usually a weight attached to this kind of portrayal.  We've seen sex workers proud of who they are and often find themselves on the back foot defending their life choices to others.  Then we've also seen people who have been human trafficked and the misery that comes with it.  With Jeanne, we see a woman who does this activity once a day and that keeps the lights on.  She doesn't have a fulfilling life. She does what she does and continues to clean her apartment.  

It's fascinating that it was the little things that got to her more than anything else.  We see her make small mistakes.  The mistakes that Jeanne does in the course of the movie are incredibly small.  She drops the brush while shining the shoes.  The potatoes aren't ready for dinner at one point.  It's all teeny-tiny things.  But I think those teeny-tiny things are the beats that lead to the conclusion where she murders her john.  It's the foreverness of it all.  It's not that a Type A personality need to have everything perfect.  I'm sure there's an element of that somewhere in there.  But the bigger issue is that there's no purpose going on if things just get worse.  Those small mistakes are Jeanne losing control.  When there's nothing in life beyond batting a perfect game, those small mistakes are indicative of greater frustration that life has nothing to offer beyond being in control of the self.  

That murder seems to be a desperate attempt at gaining control over the uncontrollable.  It's not that she's Type A because she enjoys being Type A.  It seems to be the only influence she has over her world.  When small things disrupt that control, she has to go bigger.  It's probably why she sits alone at her dining room table, covered in blood.  She couldn't control her husband being dead.  She couldn't control the lonliness that seemed to be pervading everything. She couldn't control that massive baby from screaming bloody murder.  What she could do was stab a dude and just wait for her fate.

It's an incredible movie.  Again, I would roll my eyes at anyone who put it on their favorites list.  But it is a way more solid film than I was willing to prepare for.

PG-13.  There's an f-bomb in there.  I wrote that first because I knew that I was going to forget unless I wrote that down immediately.  But among the swearing, there's one f-bomb.  Also, there's some mildly scary stuff, some of it involving blood.  The entire movie, the government is trying to kill the two protagonists.  Sometimes, it comes across as basic action.  Other times, that trying-to-kill-you thing gets pretty intense.  There's also some questions about religion and a crucifix is used to cut into skin at one point.  Still, summer blockbuster fare.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Steven Spielberg

Guys, I had a pretty darned good night.  This is the time period in parenting that I've been waiting for.  While other parents dread when their little darling angels turn into teenagers, I've been chomping at the bit.  There's a reason that I teach high school.  I need to have stimulating conversations.  Tonight, I took my older two kids to the movies to watch something that wasn't a kids' movie or wasn't part of a franchise.  I mean, I was mortified when my son said that this was his first real movie in the theatres.  My daughter blamed it on the fact that real movies aren't shown in movie theaters anymore.  I called shanannigans on that one.  I just have always understood that my kids were either too easily traumatized by stuff or didn't have the attention span to watch "real" movies in the theater.  A lot of that is on me.  It's scary not knowing what the next scene is going to be.  But now that their older and I want to unprogram them from everything being puppies and kittens, I think I might be able to take them to more movies.

These two lost their minds over this movie.  I showed them Jaws last week to prep them for this.   As a film teacher, I was pretty mortified when I found out that my oldest didn't know who Steven Spielberg was.  (To my credit, she has seen Jurassic Park and The Lost World, so that's on her.)  For them, it was probably a 10/10.  The most amazing movie they've ever seen.  I'm glad for them.  It's a solid fun time.  For me?  7/10.  While I might have had the night of my life bonding with my kids, Disclosure Day was a decent Spielberg summer movie that was bolstered a lot by having a John Williams score.  (I really hoped it was John Williams when I was listening to it.  If it wasn't, I thought whoever was doing it nailed the vibes of John Williams.) 

Disclosure Day seems to be Steven Spielberg's most recent attempt to make the same movie, only colored by his age.  I can't help but put this at the top.  We're seeing Spielberg once again touch on aliens and government agencies, the same things we've seen in E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Heck, for all I know, Spielberg isn't that into aliens.  But when you look at E.T., you get the running from the government stuff.  When you look at Close Encounters, (which I think this movie borrows the most from) it's the message of what does humanity have to do with what's out there.  When you get Crystal Skull, it's straight up seeing aliens and what that does with our understanding of humanity and God or gods.  But we're seeing it through older Spielberg eyes.  Yeah, I claimed that Disclosure Day is fun.  It is fun.  I don't want to take that away from this movie.  It's a good time.  The problem is that it isn't as good as a time as Spielberg's early work.  There's something a little too grounded about Spielberg now, which is insane because the swings that Spielberg takes with Disclosure Day are to be admired.  

But I might think that modern Spielberg has been influenced by too many other directors.  I kind of hate that everything starting with A.I.  looks a little too blue and a little too J.J. Abrams.  I even want to say that Spielberg has been influenced by Michael Bay.  There are just too many scenes of cool guys looking at monitors and getting locations on people.  Also, this is the same Spielberg who made movies like Lincoln and War Horse.  There's nothing garage band about Spielberg anymore.  He's got multimillion dollar cameras and studios making each shot look very pretty.  I think the Spielberg who had to figure it out on the fly used humor and characterization to cover up the fact that a special effect might not pass muster.  When he has a whole studio behind him, characters and silliness kind of go out the window.  (Still, kudos for the invisible warehouse bit.  It was fun and we giggled a little.) 

Remember that I overall kind of like this movie before you get too mad at me because I have to basically gripe for a lot of this blog.  In some ways, Disclosure Day is doing so much that it's actually doing nothing at all.  From moment one, Spielberg presents the movie as a puzzle box.  Here's an example of him stealing from Christopher Nolan.  If you use the trailers for the movie to pick up on vibes, Spielberg is hesitant to tell you anything.  We know that there are aliens somehow related to this movie, but the actual drop is something that you wait almost an hour for to get any insight into.  Heck, you only really get the story spelled out for you in the last thirty to forty minutes of the movie, and even there, there's a small amount of anticlimax.  Actually, the anticlimactic reveal might be an indicator of scared Spielberg in there.  The reveal for what happened to Margaret and Daniel is filled so well that it covers up the "wait?-that's-it?-ness" of it all.  In an attempt to make his audience unpack the film, he makes the film so over the top cryptic that any reveal whatsoever feels a bit more grandiose than it actually is.

On top of that, Spielberg gets to be a little unfair about the why of it all.  If you are paying attention, the story is backdropped with a potential World War III with North Korea.  It's really not made explicit for a lot of the film.  The movie starts with Margaret auditioning with headlines from this event, but I simply understood that to be a fake story that she was reading to show that she could anchor the lead desk.  When she speaks to the Korean guest in studio, I thought that was simply implying that there were tensions between North Korea and the United States.  It was so bad that I was wondering why there was a rush at the gas station because not much of the movie let me know that people were as scared as they were.  My evidence towards this  that Margaret, speeding to work, is singing at the top of her lungs with reckless abandon.  None of that reads as "We're in the shadow of armageddon."  

Therea re things I like and there are things that I don't like about the messaging of this film.  There's a scene (that unfortunately my son asked me a question during and I wish I could rewatch that sequence) where Hugo talks about what separates man from animals.  He talks about empathy and I was super jazzed, but it also kind of seemed like an afterthought.  After all, most of the people in this movie almost lack empathy.  We have isolated characters who want to do the right thing, but the majority of people in this movie are from a secretive government agency or are just looking out for their own happiness.  They don't do so in ways that are overt.  If anything, beyond the government agents, the characters who are selfish are selfish in small, reasonable ways.  So when the movie talks about empathy, I want the story to be about that.  But I still don't get that from the film.

Also, the notion that this movie is about revealing the truth to the world is something that I keep having a hard time believing in the real world any more.  I wrote about this when I wrote about Serenity and the whole "Can't Stop the Signal" thing that was part of the marketing. It is becoming more and more difficult to believe that humanity just needs to hear the truth to become better people.  I think we're past that in our culture.  So much news is getting out there, stuff that should lend pause to what it means to be human, and we simply don't care.  Heck, it isn't that much of a hop, skip, or jump to get from reality to Disclosure Day.  The government has been begging us to listen to what they have on aliens and it doesn't even make page one.  I would love for our world to all tune into the news and actually care about what is going on.  Maybe that makes me cynical, but I don't think the Disclosure Day drop would play out the way it did.  (Also, the fact that everyone just accepted that they were watching non-doctored footage was hilarious.  I know we got a two-second throw away confirmation that nothing was AI.  Still, bananas.

(Quick thought.  I honestly thought the movie was going to start where the movie ended.  I had no idea that this was what the movie was about.) 

I'm going to write one last thing about this movie and it is something that continues to bother me in a lot of film.  I don't know a lot of movies that get the concept of faith, religion, or belief right.  There are a billion crappy movies that my mom ends up seeing, often made by Angel Studios, that nerf challenging faith pretty hard.  They present tailored stories that make faith seem like the only route out of a hopeless situation.  But when you get movies that aren't from a position of trying to evangelize, faith comes across as comically silly.  I got weirdly jazzed when I saw that Jane was a novitiate.  She was studying to become a sister and she lost her vocation.  It's oddly shoehorned into this story because Jane isn't as big of a character as the two protagonists.  If anything, Jane comes across as problematic --even when it is isn't her fault.  She becomes this big liability because she's easily possessed by Scanlon (the former university president at my very Catholic school!).  But she also disagrees with Daniel about the role of truth.  And that's where the movie loses me.

I know that Catholics have had discussions about what it would mean to find out that aliens are real.  (I know other faiths have too.  I just write about this because I happen to be pretty seriously Catholic.) The complete lack of nuance that Jane's argument has makes Catholics look ridiculous.  Jane sees the fact that humans have been in contact and have been brutalizing aliens doesn't lead her to think, "These are living creatures that are suffering.  They clearly have sentience and intelligence, probably far beyond what humans are capable of.  We should do something."   Nope.  None of that.  She immediately goes to this childlike reaction of "God doesn't exist because aliens exist and they are supreme to us."  I hate that so much.  I mean, the movie rectifies that moment later so Jane can leave this film a hero by having one of the sisters explain that the Bible says, "On Earth", which is just dumb and semantics.  It's that the film doesn't have anything to really say about this of quality.  It seems like a beat that doesn't belong in this film and isn't explored with any depth.

YOU STILL HAD TO REMEMBER THAT I LIKED THIS MOVIE!  It's fine.  It's a good time.  I won't own it unless it hits Criterion.  But still, it's a good time!

Rated G, but it's now mind-boggling that it is technically a G-rated movie.  I'm going to give this movie a bit of pass.  The only reason that this movie could get an R-rating is because it was made way before the concept of Blu-ray and high definition video existed.  The bad guys, at one point, decorated the interior of their cab with pornographic imagery.  I'm sure that in its original rough looking film print that the nudity was probably blurry at best.  But in blu-ray?  Man, it's weird how much nudity is in this kids' movie.  Also, Gigan is in the movie and he likes making Godzilla bleed.  Still, G.

DIRECTORS:  Jun Fukua, Yoshimitsu Banno, and Ishiro Honda

Oh, I'm genuinely concerned about writing this.  Straight up anxiety.  What do I say about a movie that has had a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode spoofing it.  My goodness, what have I done with my life.  I have to write about this movie because the plan is to see Disclosure Day tonight, finish Jeanne Dielman tomorrow, and catch Supergirl this weekend.  Even worse, I watched this a few days ago and I just haven't had time to log it.  There is so little outside of vague griping to write about.  Like this film, there isn't much quality to be found here.

Episodic film really has become a problem.  It's honestly slightly a bummer that Criterion releases the entire runs of these episodic films.  When I say "episodic", I mean that the same team of filmmakers are making annual (or, sometimes, multiple films a year) films in hopes to capture on audience goodwill.  I know.  We're looking at 1973.  It's not like there's incredible big-budget sci-fi on television that people are tuning into right now.  (That could easily be disputed, but I'm making a point about stories being an hour-and-a-half on a big screen.)  I'm sure that audiences were probably jazzed every time that there was an announcement at all related to Godzilla.  But we're in some real dregs here.  I'm going to have a very similar complaint that I had with Godzilla vs. Gigan when it comes to Godzilla vs. Megalon because its the same people making two sequels within a year of each other.

I am always going to be in the camp that Godzilla films leave or die based on the human element.  After all, Godzilla vs. Megalon proves that the kaiju fights are absolutely arbitrary because they showed the same footage of Japan being destroyed that they used in Godzilla vs. Gigan.  Like, don't make your sets so specific if you are planning to reusing them.  I think we all noticed that MobilOil gas station blowing up over and over again.  Also, the melting tanks?  You can't say that people are showing up for the spectacle if the same spectacle is being used over and over again.  So if you are going to release another Godzilla film so close to the first one, there has to be something new to offer.

And this movie's human element is a straight up disaster.  First of all, all dudes.  Like, this movie strayed so far from a then-non-existent Bechdel test that it's laughable.  But let's put that aside because this movie hasn't deserved that level of scrutiny.  This movie is just nonsense.  Like, the entire point of this movie was to get some Tokusatsu (I had to look this up) action on screen.  I'm going to try to explain this movie, but it really involves some mental gymnastics to find even basic foundational support to tell a story.  A guy and his little brother work / live in a lab.  A lab...for making ROBOTS!  And there's a spy guy action hero or something that is either just the guy's friend or --if you have any understanding of queer theory --is the guy's friend.  The underwater sea kingdom of Seatopia --not Atlantis -- is mad that the surface world is still playing it fast and loose with nuclear weapons, decides to steal the robot from the lab.  That robot is named Jet Jaguar.  

I'm going to stop the summary here because I hate summarizing and I've already run into the biggest problem in the movie.  Why does the underworld kingdom of Seatopia need Jet Jaguar?  How do they even know about Jet Jaguar?  It seems like the inventors creating Jet Jaguar weren't even really done with him until the exact moment that the story started.  He hadn't gone through any test runs?  They sent Megalon to destroy Tokyo and Jet Jaguar was supposed to lead him there?  But, it really seems like that's a lot of heavy lifting and risky choices just to get this kaiju to attack the right spot.  And it didn't even work.  All it did was bring Godzilla to fight Megalon.  This really seemed like a backwards idea that was thrown in the movie.

But, that's the whole movie.  Honestly.  It seems like there would be a few more curveballs. Maybe Jet Jaguar gets big through the power of determination, but there is nothing that makes this movie a movie.  Even basic structure is missing from their movie.  (I'd also like to point out that I started watching the Mystery Science Theater episode devoted to this film and there was so little story that the bots kind of lacked jokes.  That also was a byproduct of the Joel era.  Sorry, Mr. Hodgson.)  I am almost mad at this movie because it's just capitalism without art.

I don't hate the idea of a Jet Jaguar.  I'm 50/50 on whether he shows up again in the final two discs of the box set.  Bu tthere needs to be purpose behind some of these decisions.  This movie feels aggressively soulless.  The characters don't really have any characterization behind them besides rudimentary archetypes.  I don't really know any personal stakes for any of these characters besides the fact that Japan will once again get destroyed and they might not be able to get their robot back.  One thing that always bothered me about The Lost World: Jurassic Park is that it was a toyetic film. It was made to sell toys.  (Sorry, Mr. Spielberg.  I'm still excited to see Disclosure Day.)    But at least The Lost World attempted to make a great movie that was also toyetic. I don't think anyone cared about this movie.  It's recycled footage from the previous films coupled with a cool toy character that is a brightly colored robot.  Golly, if there was a throughline of story between these films, this movie would have added nothing to the thin tapestry that is Godzilla.

I'm going to call it here.  I have nothing else to say.  This movie is bad.  I thought I was going to give it one-and-a-half stars so I wasn't going to be bitter about it.  But, honestly, it might be a rare one star.  It's so bad.  Like, writing about it made me a little more mad about the whole thing.

PG and this one is important.  While the kaiju are often busy wrecking whole towns and leaving devistation in their wakes, there really hasn't been any blood or gore.  But in Godzilla vs. Gigan, Gigan has a giant buzzsaw for a belly and that thing tears into Godzilla, spraying blood all over.  At one point, the silly violence weirdly gets a little too real and it looks like the kaijus start trying to crush Godzilla's skull.  Still, we have to remember that this is mostly a movie for children.  We're in that period of Godzilla films where it really seems tailored for younger audiences.  

DIRECTORS: Jun Fukuda, Yoshimitsu Banno, and Ishiro Hondo

There's no way that I'm getting this done tonight.  There's no way.  It's almost midnight.  We just brought my newborn home this afternoon.  I then took my daughter to a Ben Folds concert and I'm probably going to be incredibly sleep deprived.  The problem is...I don't know when I'll have time to write a whole blog on a movie that few people have a strong opinion about.  I'm learning that this movie may have had a remake and I'm so curious where that movie went with the story because Godzilla vs. Gigan is a pretty hot mess.

One of my repeated complaits about this series is how much the series has missed the point.  Yes, I'm going to give props that this series once again decided to have environmental and social overtones to the story.  But I also feel like the Japan of the Godzilla-universe can't possibly exist in the multiverse.  Like, these movies don't understand what its population thinks about giant monsters.  The foundation of Godzilla vs. Gigan's human story lies in the fact that the protagonist is a manga artist for a line of kaiju themed comics.  When his editor finds his creations too over-the-top (which is saying a lot for a character in a Godzilla movie), he tries to sell them to a Godzilla-themed theme park.  In this world, kids love Godzilla and kaiju.  They love them.  They're meant to mirror an idealized Japanese reality.  I'm sure that in 1972, Japanese audiences were probably eating up Godzilla merch.  They kept releasing these things one-after-the-other.  The world inside the films was meant to almost model a fever pitch about these characters.  

The problem is that inside these worlds, they also understood that Godzilla and the monsters of Monster Island were existential threats.  When the kaiju come to shore, the army comes out and immediately unloads a payload of heavy weapons into these creatures.  And that makes sense.  Sure, it's a bit silly that after how-many-movies, the army doesn't understand that missles don't affect these creatures.  But from an in-world perspective, so much of the population has been destroyed by these giant monsters.  These giant monsters have been villains in other films.  Heck, there are villains in these movies.  The eponymous Gigan and also King Ghidorah are kind of big deals from a survival perspective.  These very disperate attitudes towards giant monsters are so opposed to one another, it actually makes it hard to watch the film.  The movie is begging you to shut off your brain because its human story can't possibly exist with the kaiju story.

That's what's really going on at this point.  I've always said that Godzilla films live-or-die based on how the human story plays out.  I know that there's probably a pretty intense audience who are all about seeing guys in giant rubber suits punch each other into scale models of buildings and could watch that stuff all day.  I'm going to confess that I'm not sure that these movies aren't reusing footage from other Godzilla movies when it comes to these fight scenes.  All these old creatures keep showing  up because they have the costumes.  But I'm watching some of these King Ghidorah scenes and I genuinely wonder if they asked a dude to refilm some probably annoying shots.  (Note: Is it just me or are there some scenes where King Ghidorah looks legitimately pretty cool?  Like, it's not a lot of scenes.  A lot of the shots of that three-headed dragon look like straight doo-doo.  But some of them?  Some of them look kind of rad.) 

This is not one of the good stories, by the way.  While I think that the human stories need to be great, I don't actually believe that the fine folks at Toho really cared about the human stories.  I mean, we are starting to repeat a lot of the bad sci-fi tropes of both previous Godzilla films and other American sci-fi B-movies.  There's just a lot that doesn't make sense or doesn't matter.  I don't mind spoiling the entire plot of this movie because I'm going to go ahead and say that I don't really respect Godzilla vs. Gigan.  If you like it, more power to you.  I wish I liked it more than I did.  But this is a movie where two random dudes (who apparently died the year prior) build a giant Godzilla themed theme park.  I don't know why it had to be Godzilla themed.  That bit seems almost counterproductive to their goals of summoning Gigan and King Ghidorah.  Those two dudes, by the way?  Cockroaches.  They're cockroaches in human skin.  (Hey!  Just like Men in Black!)  They want to take over the earth because the human equivalent on their planet enviornmentally destroyed their own planet, so they want to take over Earth.

Here's where I almost get mad.  It really makes zero sense for the protagonist to be involved in this story.  Because these two cockroach overlords built a Godzilla-themed theme park, Gengo got a job with them.  Why would they hire...anyone?  If the theme park was just an excuse to summon King Ghidorah (seeing how incompetent Gigan was, I really think that Ghidorah was doing the heavy lifting), why get people who would snoop around.  Like, Gengo saw these guys act all shady, chasing a girl after she stole a tape.  Why hire him?  Get that dude as far away from the plans as possible.  He ends up, despite being wildly inept at most things that he does, destroying their whole plans.  It's a lot of silliness.

And I think that I just don't have this degree of silly in me.  I feel like a silly little lad a lot of the time.  But there's a degree of silliness that I don't like in my cinema.  This one really overdoes it for me.  I really hate that Godzilla can talk to the other creatures on Monster Island.  On top of that, he does it through word bubbles.  On top of that, the discourse that these creatues have is way too casual.  If Godzilla is going to be barking out commands at his fellow creatures, I want something along the lines of High Valeryan.  Not "Okay" and "Got It!"  Nope.  

This is the biggest waste of digital real estate ever, but I actually have some nerdy complaints about Godzilla being able to discuss complex ideas.  Besides the fact that Toho seems to have forgotten that this series was about the dangers of nuclear power and weaponry, the conceit behind the original Godzilla was that Godzilla was a creature of instinct.  He's the villain in that piece in the same way that the tornado is the bad guy in Twister.  He's a force of nature that we created against ourselves.  It's not that Godzilla hates or loves us.  He's reacting to the thing being pushed at him.  Over the course of the series, Godzilla has become the hero of these pieces, protecting Japan from other invading creatures.  But these have been almost instinctual, like a trained animal. (I also hate this, so just be aware.) 

But if Godzilla is able to communicate complex thoughts, it kind of recontextualizes everything.   Before, we only had the sentient Mothra.  But Godzilla all of the other creatures having the same level of intellect, it gives the creatures agency.  Why even have the human storylines that are treated with such hamfisted disregard if Godzilla himself can make decisions and have reasons for choices that are made beyond self-preservation and protecting its symbiotic creatures.  But Godzilla, as a fleshed-out character, isn't really all there. It's almost like a child wrote him.  He's giving Axe Cop vibes.  If he's going to be sentient, I need reasons to understand this creature.  Yes, writing this makes me all the worst, but that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily wrong.

I wanted to love the meta commentary on the whole thing.  When the film starts and we get those rad manga pages, I thought that this was going to be a special Godzilla.  But as this movie progressed, I just felt my brain leaking out of my ears.  This was one of the dumber ones.

Guys!  This is the longest Collections Project I've uploaded.   There are a lot of films that I watched and wrote about.  I have a pretty impressive knowledge of Ingmar Bergman's movies.  I'm not saying that they are accurate assessments of his movies.  I'm just saying that I've seen them and have written about them!  Check them out here!

Not rated and it's pretty darned tame.  If the film Fanny and Alexander has some questionable content, it's not like the documentary that Bergman threw together was going to harp on that stuff too much.  While the movie does discuss the scene where the guardian angel has an uncomfortable moment with Alexander, it's not treated in an exploitative way.  If anything, the film could have gone a little harder into the some of the questionable content involved in shooting a movie with kids.  Still, this is probably the most wholesome content associated with Ingmar Bergman.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I'm so glad that this is the last thing that I watched.   A little context (because that's what I always do as a warm-up paragraph), I normally don't write about what I consider to be special features.  I always thought it was weird that Criterion made The Making of Fanny and Alexander a separate spine number.  But, also, in the back of my stupid head, I think that there's a world where I will have written about every Criterion entry.  Like, we know that this is a fool's errand.  But I went as far as to make a Criterion page on this blog, so here I am writing about The Making of Fanny and Alexander.  

But I also have to mention that this is the last entry in the Ingmar Bergman mega box from Criterion.  It took me two years to watched everything in there.  I know.  That's not that much time.  I'm sure that with the sheer number of movies in that box set, there are people who will never finish it.  That being said, it felt like a really long time for me.  Maybe it is because I used to do entire directors' retrospectives within a weekend.  Those were the glory days of no responsibility.  Still, I'm proud of myself, you know?  Bergman was harder to get through than I thought that he would be.  I bought that mega box having mostly just seen The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander, so I thought that they'd all be bangers.  And I know that most film fans probably liked a lot of the movies that I didn't care for.  (I just remembered that I had seen way more of Bergman's stuff than those two, but I think I was in the glorious limelight of two movies that absolutely destroyed me.) 

But I said that I was glad that this was the last movie that I watched in the box set.  This box set had me create a headcanon for Ingmar Bergman, simply because Bergman had a lot of these bummer themes pop up in a lot of his movies.  I have to say, after watching these movies, I started to get a healthy paranoia about the man.  I would rank all of these Bergman movies lower than most people on Letterboxd.  Not insanely lower.  But what other people would label as complete classics, I sometimes left with a sour taste in my mouth because I had just watched so many Bergman movies where men were simply expected to cheat. That healthy paranoia, by the way, also led me down so many Wikipedia rabbit holes where I tried to discover what made Bergman so obsessed with male infidelity.  I found out that he had multiple divorces and I simply assumed that he was this miserable and lecherous person.  Now, I'm not saying he's not that thing.  But this Making of Fanny and Alexander presented a very different person than I was prepped for.

I'm going to say something incredibly stupid right now.  That's probably par-for-the-course when it comes to my blogging about Ingmar Bergman.  The dumb thing is that he looked different than I thought he would.  I don't know why I imagined this emaciated guy who was pale and probably had bony fingers.  I expected this grumpy old turd who yelled at people until he got the shot he wanted.  Instead, we get this portrait of an older, but healthier guy.  He seemed to really enjoy making movies and liked hanging out with kids.  The rapport he kept on the set seemed welcoming and positive.  And here's these movies where guys tank their marriages and spit on religion.  Instead, we get a fun uncle vibe who makes movies sets fun to hang out on.  Now I don't know what to think.

I don't think that I'm going to have the longest blog about The Making of Fanny and Alexander.  I can force myself to see why Criterion made this its own spine.  Besides being directed by Ingmar Bergman, it isn't the structure of a traditional documentary.  Between this and Burden of Dreams, I can't think of any film in the Criterion Collection that is about another movie and how it was made.  This isn't exactly Burden of Dreams.  Instead, this honestly feels more like a home movie.  Bergman is open about that from moment one with his intertitles.  He says that this is more of a way to preserve a memory about a positive time in his life.  He's reflecting on his own footage not necessarily from an educational perspective, but more of an emotional moment.  He seems to watch the footage fondly, almost separating it from Fanny and Alexander itself.  Instead, we get a preservation of what it was like to work with the same people over and over again and the cameraderie that he builds on set.

It's not like Bergman has nothing to say.  (By the way, if he had nothing to say and this was just an emotional throwback to a happier time, that is also pretty fine. We just wouldn't really have this paragraph.)  A not-nothing percentage of the film is devoted to Gunnar Bjornstrand (I think!  I'm really doubting it, but I can't find out without rewatching the film and I'm not there at 12:07 am).  For the sake of argument, let's pretend I'm right about who its about.  The point is that there's a heartbreaking part of the film where an actor, who I think is Bjornstrand, struggling with a very difficult song to get out.  He's playing an actor who has to sing a portion from Twelfth Night with a lit candle on his head while a rain machine is hitting an umbrella over him.  For this, Bergman's got commentary.  He says as much.

It is heartbreaking. Bergman sees taht Bjonstrand is aging here.  He used to have things come easily to him and now we see that there's this desperate gratitude behind his performance.  By the way, every take that Bjornstrand does is fine.  From any stretch of the imagination, Bergman could have taken almost any one of those takes.  But it's not what Bergman was looking for and Bjornstrand never fights Bergman on any of these things.  And some of these takes are truly heartbreaking.  There's one take where Bjornstrand can't hold his hand still while he's holding the umbrella.  Like, it's a small moment, but it's the point of the entire sequence.  It's something that he used to be able to do comfortably and now, in his old age, its a chore to do something so simple.

The best thing about this is that I'm forced to reconcile my headcanon with reality.  Sure, Bergman is the guy who made this documentary.  If he really wanted to make something that would make people like him as a filmmaker, maybe this is the thing that he created to shape that narrative. Still, I don't get that.  Bergman, for all of my bemoaning of some of his films, is never one to avoid a challenge.  Instead, I think he's just a guy who liked doing what he did.  Maybe I was so prepped to apply an archetype to him that I forgot that he could just be a guy.  There was probably a reason that he had an acting troupe that he kept working with over and over.  They probably liked working with him and saw that he wasn't just talented, but a good dude.  It's nice.  I watched all these movies and this film finally let him take a bow for all the movies I just watched.