PG-13 for sexual content, language, innuendo, drinking, and violence.  My oldest is heading to high school in the fall, so we opened the door to some more questionable content.  There was only one moment that I felt it necessary to fast forward for a second.  There's stuff.  I won't deny this is probably one of the more vulgar choices that I've shown one of my children.  (Okay I let my eleven-year-old watch this too, but that's because there's this weird trend in parenting that said that the two oldest had the same privileges.)  Still, pretty PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Edgar Wright

Do you realize how stoked I was to find an hour where nothing was scheduled?  I mean, if I was able to write this blog in that hour, I still wouldn't have been caught up.  But I would have been closer.  Then, my seven-year-old asked me "Daddy, can you teach me to ride a bike?"  Well, yeah, I'm going to do that.  That seems like absolutely the right choice.  I would have been a monster if I said, "Well, Daddy has to write a blog that no one will read", right?  So now I only have about ten minutes to write something before the toddler wakes up from a nap and at least I can say that I formatted the page.

It's amazing that I hadn't written about this movie on the blog before.  One of my pages literally has an image from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as its background.  I love this movie so much and can I tell you how liberating it is having the opportunity to have non-kids' movies as family movie night picks?  Like, it's weird.  I can't deny that it's weird when something a little crass comes up on screen and I'm just trying to avoid eye contact with the kids.  But, also --and this is important! --my daughter loved it and is asking for movies that aren't animated.  Big win for me and a big win for trying to spread the gospel of Edgar Wright.

Now, I've gone down the deep dive of the Scott Pilgrim world.  I read the graphic novels.  I watched the movie multiple times.  I've played the video game.  I watched the Netflix animated show.  Heck, my wife and I dressed up as Scott and Ramona for our first married Halloween together.  To say that this movie hasn't been watched in a decade is a bit of blasphemy.  Scott Pilgrim falls into that category of cult films where there is such quality to the film, but it is a little more off the beaten path, especially fifteen years after its initial release.  I won't deny that a lot of my love for the film comes from the fact that I'm low-key obsessed with Edgar Wright as a director.  My top three directors are Edgar Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, and Akira Kurosawa.  I would actually maintain that order.  Now, that may sound like blasphemy, but all three of those directors could somehow release another movie and I'd probably be most excited to watch the Edgar Wright movie.

Scott Pilgrim might be the one where, paradoxically, Edgar Wright had the most room to play.  Now, I'm not saying that Scott Pilgrim is my favorite of Edgar Wright's movies.  Heck, I'll take every one of the Cornetto movies before I even consider Scott Pilgrim.  But as aesthetically insane as Wright makes his movies, especially when it comes to editing, the graphic novel actually encourages Wright to do non-diagetic elements as visuals.  (Also, there's a question whether or not some of these non-diagetic elements are actually diagetic.) While Wright made Shaun of the Dead a movie with insane cuts and fun choices, there's this tethering that Wright has to follow.  Tonally, while it is a comedy, he's paying respect to a long tradition of zombie films that would only allow him to do so much without distracting from what he's trying to create.  

But Bryan Lee O'Malley's book is a send up of the insane world of video games.  Video games, especially the type that O'Malley is homaging, allows for a visual style that is just emotional candy. Wright might be the perfect director for Scott Pilgrim because he's looking for places to just go that extra mile that other directors would shy away from.  In the picture that I chose, we have sound effect bubbles, tying back to the fact that Scott Pilgrim was initially a graphic novel.  But when you watch the film, each frame does something unique (okay, a bit of hyperbole.)  For every overt joke that Wright gets in there, he's hiding a bunch of stuff in the background.  It's that stuff that makes the world of Scott Pilgrim something fascinating to look at.

It's funny because I really like Scott Pilgrim as a non-traditional love story.  There's almost something wasted on me liking Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as a married man because Scott Pilgrim is almost the king of the non-traditional rom-com.  These are movies often incredibly cynical about love.  There's commentary about the fickleness of love and Scott Pilgrim has that in spades.  Part of it comes from the fact that Scott himself, portrayed by Michael Cera, is not the traditional leading man when it comes to a romance film.  (Sure, Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist exists, but these movies almost exist because of each other.) As opposed to having an over-the-top trait, Scott's biggest crime to the world of romance is selfishness and mediocrity.  That's the stuff I find way more fancy than being devestating handsome and having some stupid bet about a girl going out with him.  

But I'm also in a weird place with my takeaway with Scott Pilgrim.  Scott starts off the film in a pretty gross place.  Kim often voices the things that we should be thinking because she's past the decorum of relationships.  As Scott's jilted ex, Kim reminds us that Scott is a bad human being, despite the fact that he's colored in nice-guy clothing.  Scott is bragging that his newest romance is a 17-year-old girl still in high school while he is 22.  I'm sure that O'Malley created that exact dynamic to be just over the line of being truly gross / illegal.  (Again, I'm not sure what the laws are and the fact that I'm thinking about those laws now kind of stress that we're in gross territory.) 

But from Scott's perspective, Knives --his 17-year-old sorta girlfriend --has no personality beyond adulation and being seventeen.  She plays video games, but we're not sure if she actually enjoys the video games or is matching Scott's energy.  (I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt because she seems really good at that dance game.) But Scott doesn't really seem to know anything about Knives except that she's really into him.  Scott's fickleness then moves him onto Ramona Flowers, the main squeeze of the movie.  But Scott almost becomes a human being when he makes the choice --admittedly after Wallace twists his arm --to break up wtih Knives to pursue Ramona.  However, the end of the movie reminds us that Scott did technically cheat on Knives and that, in the world of storytelling, makes Scott an unworthy suitor for Ramona.

I keep hearing that Scott should have ended the film with Knives.  I don't remember how the graphic novel ended, but I'm really against that. I could potentially see the movie with a loveless ending, where Scott uses the Sword of Self-Esteem to work on himself instead of pursuing girl-after-girl as they maintain his interest.  But the one thing that is very clear to me is that Scott genuinely isn't interested in Knives.  He may respect her, especially towards the end of the film as she puts herself in the path of danger when they fight Gideon Graves.  But he doesn't like her.  She's too young for him and their power dynamic is completely messed up.  Knives worships Scott because he's the first person to give her attention and Scott seems completely emotionally unteathered to this girl.  If anything, his relationship with Ramona lets him see how immature that relationship with Knives was. 

The conceit about fighting the Seven Evil Exes is honestly fascinating.  Sometimes my job is to say the obvious quiet thing out loud, but this is a movie about insecurity.  We expect our partners not to have any baggage and it is the job of the mature significant other to wade through the minefield of a partner's past.  Some of us are cool about it.  As much as it is a joke that Scott makes friends with Nega Scott, that's what he should have been doing since the beginning.  What is interesting is that Scott's battles with those Evil Exes actually gives Ramona a lot more characterization than what we're initially presented with. As much as Scott is constantly portrayed as romantically and emotionally immature, as we progress through the Evil Exes, Ramona goes from being unbothered and overly cool with her past to actually being quite hung up on what choices she's made.  Part of the takeaway is that we're all battling the choices that we've made in the past and reconciling --in the case of Scott Pilgrim --with these choices potentially violently. 

Golly, this is such a good movie.  It helps that it is funny and appealing to a distracted viewer.  I can't believe I haven't watched this movie in so long, but I dig it.  Honestly, I'd love to watch it for my film class if it wasn't as crass as it is.  Still, the movie works.  Boy, it really works.

Approved, despite the fact that one of the establishing shots has a fully topless woman.  I think it was supposed to show the cultural differences of 1930s Morocco, but it almost seemed like Josef von Sternberg was showing off how cosmopolitan he was.  There are also some unfortunate dolls that could best be described as racially insensitive.  There's also some implication of womanizing and prostitution.   Still, we're in the "Approved" era of coding so I can't be surprised by anything.

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg

I'm so deep in the weeds, guys.  I have fallen behind on writing and I'm ashamed and stressed out by this self-imposed misery that I've created for myself.  I am three movies behind and I'm trying to find time to do anything.  But I also have five kids who have oddly been more needy than normal.  I know.  I am trying to ultimately complain about my hobby when I have lovely children who want to spend time with their dad.  Please forgive if there's a tone of "rushed" as you read this because I am desperate to get ahead of this to-do list that I've created for myself.

Now, I'm already writing from a point of weakness.  Morocco, while probably not one of those unimpeachable classics, is a famous enough movie to be recognized by cinephiles as a bit of a classic.  What puts me in a weird place is that...I didn't like it.  I tend to like classics.  You would think, with all of the elements that went into this motion picture, that I would be the biggest fan ever.  After all, I couldn't help but think that this movie was a forerunner to Casablanca, one of my favorite movies of all time.  (That sentence alone makes me incredibly basic.)  It's not Morocco's fault that, tonally, Casablanca borrowed elements from this.  But it also is a movie that feels painfully devoid of substance, especially in comparison to Casablanca.

I know.  They are different movies.  To say that Morocco sucks because Casablanca is better when Morocco and Casablanca are aiming for drastically different goals.  My big argument is that Morocco is almost a simple film.  (Again, for all of the people willing to fight me about not liking a classic, that's a pretty damning sentence against me.  I am dismissing a lot with that sentence.)  If I'm being as fully critical as I feel, this almost feels like Morocco's only purpose for existing is to provide a romance against the background of a foreign country.  And that's where I get incredibly frustrated with the movie.

It's not that I don't like romance stories.  As I get older, I tend to like them more and more. For anyone who knows me or follows this blog closely, I tend to be skeptical of many romantic comedies.  But straight romances?  Yeah, I kind of like them.  Anyway, I'm not even against formula.  Setting a romance against the struggles of the Foreign Legion?  That could work.  But it feels like a lot of this movie focused on spectacle and ambiance and little on the emotion between the couple.  Listen, I thought that I liked Gary Cooper.  I mean, he was Mr. Deeds.  He's been in a bunch of movies where he plays this "Golly, I just tryin' to do the right thing, ma'am" character over and over again and I never questioned those performances.  But this is a movie where Cooper plays a bit of a scoundrel.  He's a scoundrel that we're supposed to quasi-like.  But the thing is...I really don't like him.  It's actually pretty odd that Amy Jolly likes Lieutenant Brown considering that he's kind of terrible.

But going back to Cooper, he plays Brown exactly like he plays those "Aw shucks" characters.  So we have this character who presents himself as a salt-of-the-earth guy who almost no moral code.  Now, I get what Brown sees in Amy.  After all, she's a performer who made him feel like a million bucks. Now, in universe, Brown has gotten to know woman after woman.  He's a womanizer in this.  But I can always pretend that there's something about Amy with her performance or her entire demeanor that explains that he's willing to abandon his old persona for this woman, there's a little bit of evidence for that.  After all, we don't know much about the other women in Brown's life, so that gives us wiggle room for that explanation.  But what does Amy Jolly see in Brown?  From Amy's perspective, she's done one show in Morocco and Brown was just another audience member ogling her.  There is no real meet-cute.  He just shows up in her dressing room and gives her the eyes.  That's not incredibly compelling.

So, their relationship origin story has very almost seedy start.  But that's not crazy.  After all, if the story is about how these two vapid people bring each other purpose and meaning, there could be a story there.  Instead, these two keep doing bananas toxic things to each other.  It becomes a movie that's almost a self-flaggelating narrative full of solvable problems that these characters ignore.  One of the foundations of the movie is Tom willing to abandon the Foreign Legion for the sake of Amy.  He thinks that Amy wouldn't go for it and it's this moment of vulnerability.  It's probably the most characterization that the character experiences. Now, the movie could become an external conflict as Tom and Amy try escaping the Foreign Legion and his responsibilities.  But what actually happens is so much more frustrating.  She's gone for a second to grab her things and then he leaves her.

We've seen this beat in movies before.  After all, there's the thought that characters do self-sacrificing things for love, even if we all see that it's a mistake.  But there's not a lot of believability to this moment.  When he writes his message on the mirror, it has the same amount of sense that Jonathan Kent has in Man of Steel when he sacrifices himself to the tornado.  Amy's life isn't exactly great.  She seems incredibly broken inside.  The only person that she cares for is Tom.  While running from the Foreign Legion isn't ideal, we see what she's willing to do without Tom. She's about to get married to someone for whom she cares little (but has a lot of money!).  The movie ends with one of the few shots I really enjoyed, her following him out to the desert.  Also, Tom was going to get shot in the Foreign Legion.  He even predicted the moment when they were going to throw him under the bus. Yet, it's implied that there's some kind of element of self-sacrifice to Tom's choice to leave her behind?  It's silly.

This is also one of those romances that has a character that full-on bothers me.  In romance movies that need some semblance of a happy ending (although Morocco leans more tragic than happy), there's always a guy who is willing to do the right thing, even if it means his own misery.  Of course, we never really get to see that misery.  Instead, that character continually seems noble.  His only negative trait, in the grand scheme of things, is that he's goofy looking and rich.  Yeah, that's not a great story for me.  

This is what I'm left with.  The film snob in me wants to be the guy who says, "Morocco?  Great film. A classic."  But if I didn't know about Morocco beforehand, I would dismiss this movie as incredibly forgettable.  Like, I've seen a bunch of movies that have attempted the same thing, only done better.  That's flippant.  But I've also watched a bunch of romantic movies from yesteryear that have kind of been lost to time and they've told similar stories...and I've believed the characters.  This is more spectacle than actual story.  I wish I was invested in these characters, but I never bought the romance, even for a moment.  For those people who love the movie, continue loving it.  Maybe I wasn't in the right headspace.  Maybe I'm too harsh on the movie because it is a low-key classic. 

But Morocco didn't do anything for.

PG-13 for surprisingly blunt violence.  I mean, it's not R-rated by any stretch of the imagination.  I just know that when that dude's arm gets wrecked, there's no walking that off.  You have some pretty typical Mission: Impossible style violence and that should be mentioned.  But once or twice, I thought, "Man, that's excessive."  Also, Tom Cruise looks for any excuse to get his shirt off in this one.  Sometimes, he wants you to see him in his underwear.  So just get used to seeing a 62-year-old man with minimal clothing for a lot of the movie.

DIRECTOR:  Christopher McQuarrie

I remember when I had to call him McQ.  I'd like to stress that the perfect storm of blogging is getting pretty close.  I just remembered that I'm almost done watching Scott Pilgrim Versus the World and I couldn't watch my chaser show because the kids were taking up all the Netflix accounts.  Thus, I started Predator: Killer of Killers.  I have a very hard life.   I create my own stress.  You should see my blood pressure.

I have to say, I'm happy that Cruise is putting Mission: Impossible behind him.  A couple of years ago, I wrote two articles about the Mission: Impossible franchise for Catholic News Agency.  I remembered none of those articles when I revisited them, but I would like to point out that I'm grateful to my younger self for writing the one recapping most of the franchise.  Note: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning hadn't been out at the time and that's the movie that I probably needed the most refresher on.  But I'm glad that the franchise is closing up (for now, at least) while I still kind of enjoy them.

Now, I will say, these last two movies aren't my favorite.  I can completely identify why Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning aren't my favorites.  They aren't bad movies by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, I left the theater last night in a pretty solid mood because The Final Reckoning was pretty darned cool.  But that word, cool?  That's the biggest issue with The Final Reckoning.  The Mission: Impossible movies have always been "cool."  I'm not saying that is a problem with the film.  But it seemed a lot like The Final Reckoning was tonally so obsessed with being cool that is forgot to be fun.  That's the problem with the last two movies.  The entire Mission: Impossible franchise, with the exception of M:I 2, is popcorn guzzling fun.  Even the OG Mission: Impossible ​(not the TV show, you Mission: Impossible snob!) is fun in its own way.  But there was so much seriousness and impressiveness when it came to having stunts, I never really laughed.  It was "ooh" and "ahh", but rarely tension breaking laughter.  (Okay, I laughed morbidly loud when Gabriel got his arm snapped back.  That's probably not healthy.) 

And the movie was so self-aware that it was the last in the franchise.  I mean, I get it.  Tom Cruise has made this franchise his baby since 1996.  I think that there was a Mission statement (pun intended) to make all of the franchise somehow matter.  I get why.  If you want to show that all of this work was the culmination for this one moment in time, it does create a sense of scope that the other Mission: Impossible movies don't really have.  After all, as is acknowledged in the first minute of this movie, Ethan Hunt has saved the world so many times.  What makes this saving of the world different from the other times that Ethan Hunt has stopped the timer in the last second?  Well, to do that, the filmmakers felt the need to tie in every Mission: Impossible into this one story.  But while this does bolster the epic tone that this movie attempts, I can't help but be reminded of my least favorite James Bond movie, Die Another Day.

For 007's 40th anniversary, Everything or Nothing tried to make a Bond movie so filled with references to the 19 movies leading up to the 20th that a Bond fan would be in heaven trying to spot them all.  Unfortunately, these movies were written to be episodic.  There was no attempt to make it one, unified storyline.  Heck, if you watch those Bond movies, there were canonical issues highlighting that these weren't written to be one story.  Still, Die Another Day tried doing that and the movie suffered.  In an attempt to make everything one giant story celebrating the many adventures of James Bond, the narrative came across as clunky and secondary to the celebration of 40 years of Bond.  The Final Reckoning has a lot of that, but without the great sin that Die Another Day committed.  Instead of Easter eggs and fan service, these beats from the previous Mission: Impossible are in the form of plot points.  But to execute this, the movie went heavy on the flashbacks.  My son even pointed it out.  I mean, I was glad that those flashbacks were there.  As much as I'm more knowledgable than the average bear about the Mission: Impossible movies, there were things that I did not remember about the series.  But it is such a glut of information that it becomes gobbelty gook.

And, if I'm being honest, not a lot of it matters.  If I tried summarizing the plot the way that Tom Cruise and McQ want me to, it would sound like a lot of technobabble and spy-fi nonsense.  But the easier answer would be, "Ethan Hunt needs to take down an AI about to launch the world's nukes and, because of a lifetime of not following the rules, no one trusts Ethan with the world's fate."  That's so much easier than what the movie tried presenting to us.  Honestly, there are some plot points from previous films that kind of work, like "The Rabbit's Foot" from Mission: Impossible III coming back into play (although, between you and me?  I hate this.  The reason that I like The Rabbit's Foot" as a Macguffin because it shouldn't be so concretely defined.  Also, the thing clearly said "Biohazard" and explaining it away as a red herring makes no sense).   Then there are connections that are aggressively frustrating.  There's this guy who really doesn't like Ethan.  He's a by-the-book IMF agent (or CIA?) who has made it his mission (no pun intended) to put Hunt in his place.  Revealing that he had a fake name and that he's Jim Phelps, Jr. is straight up forced.  It's an unearned revelation because it really doesn't change their dynamic like the movie think it does. 

So, at one point, it comes down to fan service.  The term "fan service" tends to be a dirty word for a lot of film fans.  I don't deny that there have been times that I've rolled my eyes when I notice egregious moments of fan service.  I try not to.  I'm a sucker for a bit of fan service at times.  The resurrection of the Enterprise-D in Picard season three is so shameless, yet I've watched that clip over-and-over.  So, again, this is written by a guy who recognizes that The Final Reckoning is a deeply flawed movie...but still enjoyed it. So if we recognize that there's a lot of fan service happening in the movie, mind as well embrace one bit of fan service: William Donloe.  Mission: Impossible brought back Rolf Saxon to his bit part from the first film to play a pretty large role in this one.  He was a throwaway joke "Manning a radar station in Alaska".  But I really like the addition to William Donloe on the team.  Outside of the fact that his presence is part of Ethan's forgiveness of himself (returning to that notion tha the movie is a criticism of Ethan's devil-may-care attitude), Donloe is a joyful character in a world full of bleakness.  

All this leads to a place that every Mission: Impossible blog leads to: the spectacle.  It feels like there are fewer action sequences in The Final Reckoning, but the spectacles are greater.  It doesn't really matter what the story of these movies is --at least according to the production crew --but there are moments that are so impressive that I just had to applaud.  I mean, again, not fun.  Just cool.  But they are really cool.  

It sounds like I hate this movie.  I mean, it's good.  It's just that it has that problem a lot of franchise closers have:  it tries so hard to be bigger than the other ones when, in reality, I would have just loved another Ethan Hunt adventure.  Sometimes that's all I want.  And trying to make this thing grand in scope just hurts the product as a whole.

Rated R, but...why?  Okay, there's a fair amount of blood, especially when it comes to the gun violence.  But the language is pretty tame.  There's a bit about human trafficking, and that's awful, but it's done in a way that doesn't seem particularly exploitative.  The movie really makes clear that the relationship between the two main characters, while the two are related, it is not by blood.  That's always a moment.  The movie plays a little bit up on stereotypes about the West, but we probably deserve a lot of it.  Still, very shocked by an R-rating for this movie.

DIRECTOR: Hark Tsui

Do you know how much I want to get this blog done before I have to figure out lunch for the kids?  I'm about to hit another perfect storm of having to write film blogs and I having this one behind me before I run out of time would make my life significantly easier.  But I also know that having to watch five kids and making words make sense is a Herculean effort and I'm not sure how much I have in me.

I swear, I'm not in the mood for Hong Kong fight choreography movies.  It's not one of my buttons.  It's not like I'm constantly looking for the next Kung Fu film.  But when I got the Jackie Chan box set for one event and the Once Upon a Time in China box set for another gift, it tends to lead all of my blog entries to imply that I'm an afficianado on Kung Fu films.  I am not.  Because of these box sets, I have seen more than my fair share of these movies.  I don't dislike them by any standard.  But I will say that I should point out that Kung Fu movies, while being fun from time-to-time, simply are another genre to me.  It's like Westerns.  I'm not into Westerns.  However, if there is a really good Western, I'll preach that forever.  Is Once Upon a Time in China a really good Kung Fu movie?  I mean, sort of?

We're entering the '90s with my Kung Fu viewing.  I'm actually completely uninformed about this era of filmmaking when it comes to Kung Fu outside of what I picked up from American trends of the late '90s when these actors emigrated to Hollywood.  Like, I know Jet Li.  I've always associated him with bad guys in movies.  I'm even more ashamed to admit that it is because I'm intimately knowledgable about Lethal Weapon 4, a movie I probbaly can't revisit...ever.  (I don't know.  I've been nervous about diving back into the Lethal Weapon movies, despite owning them.  Every time I think that Mel Gibson is trying to redeem himself, he goes on a podcast and says something else gross.) But Jet Li became a bit of an icon in the United States in the '90s and 2000s.  It's cool to see him headlining a film, especially given that he is an incredibly talented martial artist.  So me going into Once Upon a Time in China from a perspective of someone who has secondhand knowledge of this actor and his talents is wildly impressed by the choreography of this movie.  I said a lot of similar stuff when it came to breaking down the Jackie Chan collection. (Note: I have one more to watch in that set and then I can finally move these movies to the Collections page.) 

I'm also kind of gobsmacked by the aesthetic of the movie.  There was almost something nostalgic (for a movie I haven't seen before!) for a movie that looked like this.  I forgot about that kind of Touchstone Pictures / Dimension Films epic vibe that movies from this era had.  Part of it was that these movies were given proper budges.  Once Upon a Time in China has money behind it.  I'd like to slow my momentum by saying that money doesn't necessarily equal good.  But it helps forgive some things sometimes.  On the other hand, while the movie has this almost epic scope to the film, the movie kind of loses a lot of its fun because it doesn't feel like the movie is being made by a bunch of scrappy filmmakers who really want to make something special.  There's almost a bit too much studio attached to this.  (Sure, this is Hong Kong.  But I also tend to like bands' garage albums more than their overproduced stuff.) 

But the biggest problem with the fact that this movie looks epic and polished as heck is that it has real weird tone.  Now, part of me is totally willing to accept that cultural values might be a thing going on here.  While I can wrap my head around the fact that American action movies tend to quip and joke with the best of them, often the subject matter reflects what is going on here.  For the first half of the movie, I wasn't sure if this was a comedy or a drama.  The problem comes with the story being about a heavy issue for the Chinese people.  (Because the film is called Once Upon a Time in China, I'm going to avoid referring this as an issue for the people of Hong Kong.  If this is a story about historical China, let's leave the focus there.)  The film opens up with a French frigate opening fire on a dragon dance (which I learned all about because of the last Jackie Chan movie I watched.  It's a shame that I don't remember the title...).Throughout the film, while not the central conflict, the setting constantly reminds us of the dangers of colonialism.  

If anything, I had a hard time fitting my politics within the film.  While the movie is rightly anti-colonialism and I'm all on board for that, that also means that it embraces isolationism and traditionalism.  It's a weird thing.  With the story taking place when it does, it makes sense that a Chinese story wants to talk about how the influence of the West was toxic on the people of China.  But this is a movie made in 1991.  I can't help but think that this is a piece of propaganda stoking fears about international relations.  I suppose both arguments are right.  And I don't want to wash Western influence with a nuanced brush, but these Westerners are so over-the-top evil that I'm surprised that I could take the movie even slightly seriously.  I don't know what it is, but I love when they get White guys to be kung-fu experts in kung-fu movies.  They're always super scary and it's always a little bit silly.  What is even more odd is that we know that Jet Li goes over to America and makes quite a career for himself in Hollywood, despite the fact that one of the central themes to Once Upon a Time in China is that America is mostly a land of fiction that doesn't offer wealth and success.   Just saying.

But where I think that Once Upon a Time in China fails is that it almost doesn't know what its story is.  It's far more about setting and frustration than a central conflict.  My goodness, having to navigate all of the characters and their motivations is an exercise in futility.  I read the Wikipedia article, wondering if there was a central story that I missed.  And honestly, not really?  The main antagonist of the film shows up pretty far in the film and almost doesn't have an origin to explain a lot of his behavior.  Now, to the film's credit, his mission does tie into the films central themes about embracing tradition.  I can't help but make the comparison to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Wong and Yim are so focused on their old world rivalry that they lose sight on the fact that China is being taken away by gun-toting White guys.  I don't hate that.  But Yim comes across as almost silly.  Also, a lot of these guys really seem to respect Yim, but he seems like a really pathetic bad guy.  While he can do amazing Wire-Fu, he doesn't really seem to have it all together.  Foon seems to respect him and it doesn't make sense.  Foon seems to get the proper amount of attention under Wong, but he still moves over to Yim?  Yim is a guy who scrounges at the dust for some coins that fell.  He also seemed to claim that he absolutely destroyed Wong for getting one hit in when Wong was distracted.  It's really weird to make that archetype the antagonist.

Also, I don't really get a lot of chemistry between Wong and 13th Aunt.  I mean, it could be the fact that Wong calls her 13th Aunt and the movie is constantly reminding us that they are technically related, even if it is through marriage.  But Wong is kind of terrible to 13th Aunt throughout.  I'm not sure why she finds him so attractive and seems to be coming on pretty hard, considering that he doesn't really reciprocate those feelings, even though he may share them.  If anything, Wong himself is a bit of an enigma.  He's as much of a jerk as he is a hero.  But we don't really see him become vulnerable at any point in the film.  When he's upset, he lashes out and makes bad choices.  But he's also almost never happy.  That's a weird trait to have for this franchise.

Can I tell you one thing that I really enjoyed, though?  I loved, besides the fact that the Wire-Fu is top notch, that event the sidekicks to this movie are really talented fighters?  We always get the story that all of the people at the kung fu school can hold their own, but aren't amazing in their own right.  But Once Upon a Time in China builds up all of these stereotypes / archetypes like the fat guy, the nerd, the bullied --and makes all these guys incredible fighters.  I suppose this is where we get some of the stuff that we'll get from Kung Fu Panda, a franchise that doesn't do anything for me.

So I am not off the series.  I'm excited to see where this goes.  For sure, out of the five movies (that come out pretty close together!) they have to go to America, right?  Wong will be seduced by the allure of the West and he has to remember his roots, right?  I'm just taking a guess here and now.  Because this is a franchise with five movies that came out so close to each other, I'm tempted to watch these movies like The Lord of the Rings movies and treat each film as an episode in a much larger, singular story.  I mean, I might be setting myself up for disaster with that attitude, but that's just my prediction.  Anyway, it did the job.

Rated R for being generally pretty vulgar, a lot of death (albeit mostly comical), some torture of animals, sexual stuff including nudity, drug use, and basically everything you can think of.  Bong Joon Ho tends not to hold back on his films and Mickey 17 is no exception.  I will say that despite all of the questionable content, much of the movie has a tone that makes these moments seem less offensive than other films.

DIRECTOR: Bong Joon Ho

We should thank my wife for refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour because this is making me be quasi-productive.  While it is doubtful that I'll get an entire blog done about Mickey 17 before I give up and return to Star Wars: Outlaws, I'm semi-thrilled that I have this page formatted and I'll be more encouraged to write about this at a later time.

I might be too much of a fan of Bong Joon Ho.  The man is a genius.  That's not me blowing smoke his way.  It's almost like the entire film community treats Director Bong with a level of respect that is reserved for the the true auteurs out there.  The thing about Director Bong that I do have to admit is that, as much I look forward to his movies, I also understand that I give him a pass.  For every The Host or Parasite, there are movies that I only appreciate but don't really enjoy.  Okja kind of falls into that category.  Maybe Snowpiecer as well.  Nah, I enjoyed Snowpiercer.  But you get where I'm going with this.  It's that kind of hero worship that makes me want to give him the pass.  The thing is, I heard that Mickey 17 wasn't that great.  

But do you understand how much that makes me want to love the movie more?  I think a lot of us out there are wired to be contrarians.  We want to be the one who loved the stinker a little bit.  Now,  I don't think that many people think that MIckey 17 is a straight-up stinker.   I just know that people have been less than enthusiastic about it.  And do you know what?  I'm kind of in the same camp.  Mickey 17 is an incredibly ambitious movie that does a couple of things wrong , which is a bummer because this movie should be on a list of top movies based on the talent involved.  But instead, I'm going to write a blog explaining why I just didn't care that much.  

That being said, I'd love if my wife went to bed so I can play Star Wars.  

I'm not sure which point bothers me more:  the fact that the movie didn't really need its conceit or the fact that it is hitting a lot of the same buttons that Director Bong has already touched on.  I suppose that I'll start with the central premise.  For those who aren't in the know, Mickey is an Expendable.  In a world that has outlawed cloning, Mickey is allowed to be cloned as a lower class grunt.  He's put in intentionally dangerous situations where safety would be a concern and often killed to take shortcuts on the way to a new world where the people are forming a new colony.  That's fascinating.  Do you know why it's fascinating?  Because I want to write a book about cloning and that conceit would be fun to touch upon.  But here's the deal:  Director Bong never really plumbs the depths of this concept.  There are moments where there are hints about the value of life or a soul.  But really, a lot of Mickey's deaths are to push the story along or to provide comic relief.  It's weird because Bong is often really in tune with these kinds of ideals.  If anything, he gives more individuality to the creepers as opposed to Mickey.   It's just that it seems like the narrative should be about this guy who experiences death like it is commonplace.  What does that do to someone?  

Instead, the movie almost goes the Multiplicity route and makes a joke out of the fact that each itieration of Mickey acts a little bit differently.  Like, we've seen that before.  And as much fun as it is for the audience, I kind of feel like Director Bong is doing that more for Robert Pattinson.  Like, it's an acting exercise.  The reason that we all loved Orphan Black was because we saw Tatiana Maslany plays variations on the same person.  I'm not saying that these characters can't have degrees of personality.  But I also feel that the writing (I'm not blaming Pattinson because that dude has proven himself) treats these characters more like archetypes rather than fully broken down characters.

(Note:  My wife finally went to bed, so I proceeded to play Star Wars: Outlaws for a few hours.) 

Like, Director Bong has always been so adept at telling stories that peel away comfort levels and remind us what it means to be human.  And it seems like this movie was so rife for breakdown that to see a slightly more version of Multiplicity just feels like a bit of a letdown.  Maybe I've just been spoiled a bit too much by Black Mirror, but this is a movie that fundamentally questions the role of mortality.  I was always a little mad at that movie from the late '90s or early 2000s, The 6th Day, which toyed with the idea of immortality through cloning.  Right there is a story about treating the body like it is simply meat and it never really got to the heart of what death's relationship to life is.  Mickey 17 is committing the same sin.  The only reason that Mickey cares about his 17th body is because he is at risk at never being printed again.  That's mildly interesting, but it doesn't really challenge us, does it?

And part of the reason that I'm wrong about all of this is because Mickey is meant to not be a typical protagonist.  He's a goober.  That's part of the movie.  We aren't gifted with a protagonist who has these deep thoughts.  He reacts.  He survives.  The movie is about the painfully ordinary thrown into the farthest version of the extraordinary.  Part of that is interesting, I suppose.  But I don't want the heavy conversation avoided because someone along the way thought that we're going to keep the audience wanting more as a bit of a prank.  Mickey isn't fascinating enough to really leave me satisfied for the questions that should be asked.  Mickey 1 was afraid of death.  Mickey 17 says that death is terrible and scary, but we don't really have that emotional beat to allow that statement have any emotional relevance.

The other major thing that bothers me is the fact that we've kind of done this before.  I've mentioned briefly that there's a lot of correlation with Okja.  Part of me has to make peace with this.  A good indication that a director is an auteur is that we have similar themes, styles, and motifs between films.  Clearly, Bong Joon Ho is an environmentalist who scorns man's apathy towards their relationship with the rest of the planet.  We keep coming back to this well.  The problem is that Mickey 17 already has a million balls in the air.  Besides Mickey's odd relationship with death, there's this Trump allegory (which, I need to talk about, so please remind me), the role of celebrity, a very bizarre girlfriend who really isn't explained, a mob boss plot, a drug dealing plot, a war between species.  I'm sure that this is done intentionally.  Again, I understand that Director Bong is way smarter than I am.  But still, it's just another thread on an already undercooked science fiction movie that doesn't need half the beats it throws out there.

Okay, let's talk Mark Ruffalo's Trump allegory.  He and Toni Colette (who seems to be more of a Marjorie Taylor Greene type more than a Melania) do these over-the-top, self-obsessed political figureheads who have serious pride and anger issues.  Now, I know that Bong Joon Ho tends to make his upper crust oligarchs caricatures.  But the thing is, and this is me being angry as heck right now, as much as Ruffalo is going over-the-top with this characterization of Trump...he's not going far enough.  Because as dumb and evil as this character is...Trump is actually dumber.  There are moments where Kenneth Marshall is aware of a lot more than he appears to know, making him more evil than dumb.  Trump is that weird combination of dumb and evil in equal measure.

​Anyway, it's just a movie that seems so rushed and not sure what it is actually doing.  While it was watchable, it might be my least favorite Bong Joon Ho movie. 

Rated R for a lot of f-bombs coupled with discussions of a sexual nature.  I mean, if you can handle the other stuff that Tim Robinson makes, you can handle this.  Nothing truly vulgar happens, especially if you consider visual things.  It's just an R-rated comedy where something occasionally inappropriate happens.  There's the implication that Tami is cheating on Craig, but that's not here nor there.  Still, R.

DIRECTOR:  Andrew DeYoung

There's some double-edged sword stuff going on here.  I don't have a lot of battery left on my computer and no way to charge for a couple of hours.  But beyond that, I don't know how much I have to say about Friendship.  It's a movie that I got to see in the theaters and it bums me out that this is considered a 2024 film (the things that irk me a little, I swear).  

This movie should have been a slam dunk.  There's a surprising number of movies that I want to see in the theaters right now.  But I was also going out with my wife and I was also super tired.  I don't think that she was in the mood or the new Mission: Impossible movie and I hear the first hour of that film is a snoozefest, which is a bummer because I really want to see it.  Sinners is just not up her alley.  She fell asleep for the last Wes Anderson movie.  So Friendship, a comedy starring Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson seemed like it should have been absolutely perfect.  I've also been lamenting that the cinematic comedy has almost been non-existent, so I thought that we'd get that rare Step-Brothers vibe going out to see Friendship.  Yeah, not so much.

Now here's what I'm going to concede.  There are laughs to be found in Friendship.  I laughed more and harder than my wife did.  She genuinely seemed to actively dislike the movie.  I left more with a "meh" attitude.  It's not a laugh a minute.   But when the laughs come, they are substantial.  Honestly, I hope I remember the drug trip in this movie long after this movie has been relegated to "just another movie I watched."  I might quote that sequence for a while.  But in terms of presenting something as a whole work, Friendship almost doesn't work.  

Part of that comes from the style of comedy that Tim Robinson presents.  When I watched that first episode of I Think You Should Leave, I was a big fan of it.  The guy was a genius.  I'm going as far as to say that Tim Robinson is a comedic genius, especially when it comes to cringe comedy.  He thrives in making a situation that should resolve itself fairly normally so much worse.  And I'll tell you this:  I love cringe comedy.  It's more of a matter that Tim Robinson keeps returning to the same well.  The beginning of Friendship has Craig and Tami going to a cancer survivors' support group.  Tami admits something sexually frustrating about Craig, which he has to take with grace and it seems like the comedy is going to come from Craig not being able to express his frustrations.  But as the movie progresses, Craig becomes more and more unrelatable.  There are so many moments where we know that no normal person would act the way that Craig is.  It's a lot of "Can you imagine if I did this?" moments.  Those are funny in sketch comedy moments.  But when we're trying desperately to find a way for Craig to make his way through an awkward life, the fact that he's constantly throwing zany curveballs makes it really hard to treat him as the protagonist.

The honest takeaway is that this is an episode of I Think You Should Leave with a loosely tying narrative.  I don't know who Andrew DeYoung is.  Maybe he worked on the show.  Maybe he just knows what Tim Robinson does and offered him free rein.  I don't know, man.  It gets a little tiring after a while.  The thing about liking that first episode of I Think You Should Leave is that I realized that Tim Robinson loves making the punchline "scream really loud at everyone in the room".  It kind of gets old.  I tell my four-year-old that the punchline should never be yelling, but Tim Robinson made a career out of it.  I'll even say that he's very funny a lot of the time.  But if the goal of comedy is to be caught off guard by something, betting that Tim Robinson is going to yell at someone who should not be yelled at doesn't really make for compelling comedy a lot of the time.  

Now, does this movie have something to say?   In the way that it is formatted, not really.  There are threads of things that could be shaped into a movie.  But the problem is that we have such an outlandish character as our protagonist that there's nothing to really learn from this character.  Craig doesn't grow.  He's as static of a character as one could imagine. He's weird at the beginning.  He's even more weird at the end.  (I suppose that's a form of dynamic, but I don't care for it.) Now, if Paul Rudd's Austin was the protagonist, there's actually something to play with then.  I mean, it would be The Cable Guy,  a movie that touches on a lot of the same notes that absolutely cooks.  But when we see Craig self-sabotage every scene he's in, there's really no hope that these characters will come out of this story with any sense of growth as people.  When we watch Matthew Broderick's Steven in The Cable Guy distance himself from Jim Carrey's Chip Douglas (I haven't watched this movie in safely 1.5 decades and those names just popped in there), despite the fact that Steven is in the moral right, there are moments where Steven's behavior could be criticized as insensitive.  It doesn't change that Chip is a maniac.  It simply makes the protagonist have some tough self-examination.  That's interesting stuff.

Instead, watching Tim Robinson scream at people for two hours gets a little bit old.  The bits are good.  In isolation or as shorts, I could see a lot of those bits hitting harder than they would in context of the film.  But beyond simply being bits strung together, the movie isn't much.  It is almost afraid to give Craig some vulnerability.  Rarely do I feel bad for the guy that no one wants to hang out with him.  It is impossible for him to make friends in the movie.  When people need to be grounded so Craig can be silly, they are.  But those same characters then act like complete nut jobs when Craig's character does the right thing.  I'm talking about singing to Austin when he's having a hard time.  Craig, who often lives in a bizarro world full of bizarre rules, is confused when these characters are acting weird.  But when he acts bizarre, no one can relate to him.  It's a lot of "take our word for it, this is how people act in this world".  I don't like that.

It doesn't change the fact that a lot of the bits are funny.  It's just that the movie is not good.

Rated R for being theologically dubious.  I mean, the movie is called Heretic.  It's going to have a lot of discussion about the foolishness of religion, bordering on the inappropriate.  But it's also a horror movie, which means we have the torturing and murder of women, which includes blood.  The movie also features a fairly frank --if naive --discussion about sexuality.

DIRECTORS:  Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

I sometimes hate how I watch movies.  There are so many days that I could just enjoy movies.  Because here's the scoop on Heretic.  Honestly, I really enjoyed this movie.  I was watching it, ready to recommend the heckfire out of the movie.  And, when all is said and done about the movie, I kind of want to watch it again.  It was honestly really good.  But the truth of the matter was that there were two small details which stopped it from being a perfect movie.  And because I know that I'm going to write about the movie, I can't stop thinking about how I have to discuss a fascinating movie that has two beats that just don't work in the film.

I feel like writing a short summary of the film, so I'm going to do that.  It's against my better nature to summarize a film.  I assume that I'm writing for an audience who is savvy enough to know what a movie is about before reading a blog that discusses the film in-depth.  Again, if you are reading willy-nilly, not stopping you from doing that either.  Anyway, the movie's protagonists are two LDS missionary girls.  They stop at Mr. Reed's house because he is on a list of people who are interested in learning more about the faith.  It quickly becomes clear that Mr. Reed is far more informed about the church and general faith matters than their other stops.  After Mr. Reed drops a bunch of red flags, the girls realize that this place isn't safe.  They try to leave, only to find out that they are trapped in the house and Mr. Reed wants to test their faith using manufactured exercises that are quite danerous.  The midway point of the movie has the girls split between taking doors labeled "Belief" and "Disbelief" leading to potential exits.  Because people end up in the same place regardless of belief, according to Reed, they end up in a basement with a cruel experiment in the afterlife involving an abused woman known as "The Prophet", who can somehow return from the grave.  Sister Barnes --the more worldwise of the two --plans to attack Reed to escape, but has her throat cut before she can issue commands to Sister Paxton.  Sister Paxton takes Barnes's advice to challenge Reed and starts to doubt everything.  She figures out how the Prophet cheats death and finds a basement full of girls.  Reed posits that no matter what Paxton did, she would have ended up here.  But Reed is unaware that Paxton is carrying a letter opening and she stabs him in the neck.  He chases after her, almost killing her, when Sister Barnes somehow awakens and stabs him in the head with a board with nails.  The end.

Now, I have a theory that this was a much shorter film at one point.  In my head, this movie kind of works as an anthology episode of a horror show.  The first half is an entirely tight film with the two LDS members sparring off against Reed, who is becoming more sinister the longer the movie progresses.  I earnestly see the film ending with the two girls and the doors, only to discover that both doors ultimately lead to the basement.  It's the introduction of the Prophet that shifts the movie into something almost completely new and, if I'm honest, something somewhat weaker.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm really glad that the movie didn't give up the grounded world of the first half for the supernatural potetial of the second half.  I don't think I could have made sense of the movie had the Prophet actually been miraculously returned from the dead.  But the first half fo the movie is so marvelously intimate.  It follows the rules of a bottle episode.  The two girls sitting across from Reed as he makes trips out of the room, giving them time to reveal their inner throughts to the audience is a perfect dynamic.  I also like how the first half plays with the importance of manners within a religious setting coupled with the fact that these two women are not allowed to verbalize their discomfort with Reed.  Even when the jig is up and Reed confesses that he didn't have a wife --even going as far to use the fictional wife as a teaching tool for atheism --the two try to maintain their composure.  

Sure, you could see their maintaining of the status quo an attempt to disarm an assailant.  But honestly, that decorum seems to be a safety blanket.  The two girls talk to him in the voice of the LDS church --a voice laden with respect because the two of them think that if they can almost turn back time to when they entered, they would never have been fooled by Reed's charm.  Even as the movie ends, Paxton keeps talking to him with a level-headed voice.  Part of it comes from the rules that Reed sets throughout the discussion.  A key thing that makes Reed such a compelling villain is the fact that he's played by Hugh Grant.  I don't think I've ever thought that Grant could make such a fascinating monster.  Much like Hannibal Lecter, Reed is a character who wants to maintain a sense of composure and dignity about his crime.  Beyond the psychopathy that they exhibit, there's a nobilty to their murders.  It's really messed up, but it's also great to watch.

What is interesting is that I'm wildly intrigued by the intention of this movie.  The smartest guy in the room is Reed.  Part of that comes from the fact that this is his trap and he's prepared for it.  But he's also the most read in the room.  Now, without watching this movie, there would be a temptation to say that this is a pro-faith movie because the movie is a takedown of Reed, the atheist intellectual.  Paxton and Barnes are the clear heroes of the movie.  But I don't think that the movie wants us to necessarily root for the LDS church.  One thing that the movie makes almost abundantl clear is that Reed and Paxton aren't really leanred on Reed's level.  Barnes, because she hasn't been raised in the LDS church, knows a lot of Reed's rhetoric that he throws at her.  She has things throw back and him.  She may not be able to cite line and verse.  However, she's really good at pointing out some of Reed logical fallacies when arguing.  She recognizes that he's Texas Sharpshooting a bit, pulling evidence out of context of arguments that would fight against his message.  Yet, even with Reed's imperfect arugments, the movie almost wants us to know the things that Reed is pointing out.  As much as this is a movie about surviving a killer's house, Reed's messaging is almost a lesson in world religions in a two hour film.  

So what is the message?  I stress that the LDS protagonists come across as naive in the shadow of this intellectual titan like Reed.  It was just the other day that I voiced my frustration that all movies tend to be cynical about God, and that's a bummer watching those kinds of things over and over.  Rather, it's almost an accusation about zealotry of another kind.  While it may not be the end of the world if someone is an atheist, there is danger in becoming a zealot over one's athetism.  Reed's downfall and evilness doesn't come from the fact that he is an atheist or that he reads too much.  Instead, the real probem comes from the notion that he is evangelizing harder than the evangelists at his house.  He needs to break Paxton by the end of this film.  Those women in his basement are his trophies for souls converted to unbelief.  The movie starts off with Paxton lamenting to Barnes that she hasn't saved anyone yet.  But the same is true about what Reed is doing in his house.  He's converting people to a world without God and that's the criticism of the film.

So what bothers me?  I mean, I"m glad that the Prophet wasn't an actual prophet.  It would defeat the narrative of the entire first half of the film.  The fact that he's so concerned with the girls ignoring all of the evidence in front of them only to present them with a mystical character living in the basement seems silly.  But the problem I have is how the girls have to suvive Reed's house.  Reed's entire character is about obsession.  He's obsessed with religion.  But beyond that, he's obsessed with the details of everything.  Everything in Reed's house, including the house itself, is arranged so that these girls end up in the basement regardless of what choice they make.  So the letter opener and the matches?  If every detail is accounted for, why are these objects options?  Reed's entire thesis is that the world is going to play out without surprises.  Both of the girls see the letter opener.  Why wouldn't Reed notice that?  He's so meticulous about his murder plans that he has a miniature of the house with details planned out.  How would he not notice the letter opener, the object that begins his downfall?  

The second issue is a little more major.  It's absurd that Reed survives the neck stabbing, let along has the wherewithall to chase Paxton through his death maze.  But then Barnes returns?  Again, the point is to try to be ambiguous about the existence of God at the end.  The butterfly that Barnes promises is only a dream.  But Barnes is dead.  She had been bleeding out for far too long.  Her corpse is mutilated to get to her birth control.  There's no way that she's just playing possom to save Paxton.  It makes for a fun ending, but an ending that is just beyond plausibility, especially with a movie that plays with faith and cynicism.  

Again, I hate the way that I watch these movies.  I found the whole thing super intellectually stimulating.  Hugh Grant is incredible in this role.  It's not terrifying, but it is suspenseful as heck.  But those two moment stop the movie from really trascending.

Rated R, mostly because this is another movie about a serial killer who preys on women.  There is sexual assault in the movie and, while Kendrick does her darndest to not exploit this moment, it is quite visceral.  Also, couple this with the fact that this movie re-enacts sequences from The Dating Game, a show that languished in innuendo, the movie comes across as more than a little inappropriate.  Take all that I've written about this and add to the fact that I watched this on an airplane and you can imagine how awkward I felt.

DIRECTOR: Anna Kendrick

I need to write about movies immediately after I watch them.  It's unfair to the directors and the production team for me to write about a movie that I'm really struggling to remember bits for twelve days after I watched it.  I was on vacation.  I was walking my five kids with my wife around Europe.  I wasn't going to put that to a stop and find a business center in a hotel just so I can knock out about a thousand words (I'm guessing based on how long these things take to write sometimes) about a movie I watched on a plane.

Hey, before I get going, "Go, Anna Kendrick!"  I don't know why I need to cheerlead Anna Kendrick right now, but I want to.  Kendrick made a solid serial killer film with some amazing messaging.  Yes, like many actors-turned-directors, the film is a bit smaller than most.  I'll admit that I watched it because of the shorter runtime.  (I wanted to watch something on the plane before I went to bed.  It was a transatlantic flight, but I also had a meal coming and a sick TV.  Still, the movie is pretty solid.  While I may not rave about the movie to the hills, this was an accomplishment.  The movie straight up works.  And not just because it has Pete Holmes (as a surprise to me!) in a completely non-comedic role.

I've written so many of these that I can recognize trends in my thought processes.  Heck, it is almost a formula that I never intended to follow, but even the meta commentary on the writing process has become part of the formula.  With a lot of these horrific "based on a true story" stuff, I feel the need to be cognizant of the fact that this happened to real people.  There's something so morbid (and I'm not free of this criticism) that there is something inherently fascinating about the disturbing reality of true crime.  This is probably some pretty murky territory for Kendrick.  There's this core running through the movie that men tend to be serial killers not because women are incapable of being serial killers, but because men go through life with a constant state of indulgence.  Listen, a lot of this is me going to be playing suburban faux feminist.  I haven't done the heavy lifting.  I try to be an ally because it is the right thing to do and my life is incredibly comfortable.  But for all of my proselytizing, there is a real chance that I come across similar to Rodney. 

Rodney might be the most damning serial killer out there because --despite the fact that he's super gross when no one is looking --he plays the "woke" nice guy real well.  As time goes on, I find the archetype of evil nice guy the most compelling because he's the archetype that I'm constantly trying to keep myself in check with.  It's going to be a bit of "methinks he doth protest too much", but I'm very happy in my marriage and the notion of being sexually interesting for anyone other than my spouse seems exhausting.  But there was a time where I understood, in a very safe way, what Rodney full on feeds.  Rodney psychosis takes his frustration about being the "better choice" in male / female relationships and indulges his need to hurt women for his rejection.  That's not completely accurate.  Rodney is unabashedly crazy.  He murders for the joy of it all.  But what makes Rodney scary is not just that he's a monster.  He's scary because he's really good at faking not being monster and that's because there are many times when he does not view himself as a monster, as proven by the end of the film.

And I kind of hate that I'm writing about Rodney here so much because Sheryl --also played by Kendrick --is the protagonist of the film.  She is the one we are rooting for.  Half of the movie is us understanding the dramatic irony of her situation.  Is she going to say the wrong thing to set off Rodney?  I can't help that, despite the movie being named after Sheryl, with the allusion to The Dating Game's introduction to the contestant of the night, that Kendrick herself is almost more interested with Rodney.  Part of it is that Sheryl is the Nick Carroway of the story.  (I hate that a movie about how men are convinced of their own undeserved self-worth that I keep making comparisons to how the male characters are the most important elements in narratives.)  As much as we bond with Sheryl and worry for her health, especially if you don't know how the story plays out, her story is so thoroughly universal that it seems almost quaint compared to the trouble she gets in.

If we just analyze the Sheryl story, it is the story of Hollywood and sexism.  That is a story in itself.  I don't want to downplay what potential story is here, Sheryl's throughline is one of a close call.  While she is in control of how she's viewed on The Dating Game, her goal is to come out of that event with her dignity intact.  When she realizes that Rodney is a physical threat, she honestly only experiences the event for about five minutes.  Let's be generous.  Her danger sense (I really wanted to call it a Spidey Sense, but it minimizes the gravitas and the importance that Sheryl and women in that situation goes through) gives her an anxious hour.  But the actual confrontation between Sheryl and Rodney is only about a minute and change long.  And not only that, but anything that Sheryl does to protect herself ultimately doesn't save her.  It's the fact that the late night workers come out when they do.  So it's hard to give Sheryl the attention that the title of the film demands.  

Now, this sounds like I think the use of Sheryl as the grounding of the film is a mistake.  Again, I called her Nick Carroway.  The Great Gatsby is an incredible novel because it is through Nick's eyes that we see something fascinating.  What Sheryl does for the story is let us 1) see how normal a serial killer seems and 2) talk about what women do / need to do to survive in a world full of predators.  The reason that the film is centered on Sheryl is because Sheryl was on The Dating Game and she picked Rodney, a killer who should never have been on the show. 

Now, I don't know how much reality was in the audience sequence of the show.  One of the more compelling B-plots of the story was Laura trying to save Sheryl from the fate that seemed to be following her.  As much as this is a story about Rodney (a point I've beyond belabored), this is a story about how women could be much safer in America, but it's a pretty crappy society that doesn't allow that.  Laura tells security that they have a real problem on their hands and, like many suspense stories, some moron decides to ignore that threat.  But Kendrick formats the movies into vignettes.  One of the commonalities between Rodney's victims is the fact that these were women who didn't trust their instincts about Rodney, believing him to be simply an awkward guy.  

But the film's ending is what cemented my appreciation of the movie for me.  There's something darkly tragic about the end of the movie.  Amy, a teenage vagabond, gives Rodney the benefit of the doubt.  While unstated, Amy seems to be the most world-wise character in the film.  She's seen stuff that the other characters haven't.  I really have the vibe that the girl has had trauma in her life.  But beyond that, she's also a character who knows how to survive that trauma.  When Amy is raped, she knows that she would be murdered had she not changed the conditions of the whole situation.  It feels like Amy's story is the reason that Kendrick made the movie, not Sheryl's.  While Sheryl's story probably resonates with Kendrick from being a woman in Hollywood, Amy's story is the narrative that she wants women to walk away with.  It almost becomes a manual how to deal with serial killers.  

Okay, fun thing about how the sausage was made.  I started writing this three days ago.  I never put the conclusion on it and I don't know if I have the mental momentum to keep the previous thought going.  The long and short of it all is that Kendrick probably made the movie that she wanted to make.  It isn't bombastic.  It might have a bit too small of a story to justify a feature length film.  Instead, Kendrick understands that this is a movie about elements rather than a movie as a single narrative.  

Not rated.  The core of the film involves the clergy when it comes to dealing with suicide.  While the suicide happens off-camera, that doesn't diminish how powerful the events leading up to the suicide are.  Besides the self-harm element,  I don't know what younger audience would want to watch a monochromatic Bergman film about the interior life of faith through a cynical lens...

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I got one more Bergman in before we head off to Sweden.  (I'm pretty sure we have a stop in Sweden.  Honest to Pete?  I don't know my European countries as comfortably as I care to admit, even with a history minor.)   I'm in a place in the Bergman box set that is both incredibly genius and also a bit on the repetitive side.

The funny thing about me writing in this stagnant, non-committal way is that it doesn't make sense.  I'm so jazzed to write about faith.  Heck, I'm even excited to write about a cynical director's take on faith.  It just feels like I've been here before.  The one thing that Winter Light really has going for it is that it is more singularly minded than a lot of Bergman films.  While Bergman dances around religion from time-to-time, this is a movie that spends a lot of the film stock paying attention to a pastor of a church and there are issues of belief there.  It's Bergman allowing himself the freedom to speak about a singular issue while imbuing complexity into that singular issue.  I mean, Bergman ain't all about the faith.  I'm sure there aren't a ton of youth groups out there screaming about "Have you seen Winter Light?"  I get that Bergman is making a film about the futility of it all.

The problem is, for me, it's all a little exhausting.  

I've become a bit of a cynic myself.  We're in the dregs of it right now.  I don't want to say that the world is a terrible place --a phrase I've spouted many times before.  That almost diminishes how bad the world is right now.  Many of the world's problems have been caused by my fellow Christians in the name of Christianity.  When I try defending the faith, especially to myself, I find it hard to apologize for a lot of what I am seeing out there.  But the tiring part comes from the constant barrage of how stupid faith is.  I listen to You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes almost every day coming into work.  I'm still about eight years behind, so please bear with me if his format changes over time.  One of the key components that keeps bringing me back to listening is the faith issue.  Pete Holmes is a recovering Evangelical who describes himself as faith-seek / Christ-leaning.  While he has no definite position on faith, he often follows the teachings of Ram Dass and other spiritual gurus, acknowledging that he has no idea what the answer is when it comes to God.

But he interviews a lot of celebrities, often comedians.  And while Holmes has no problem with many of his guests being openly atheist, there is a weariness that comes with hearing that yet another guest is an atheist.  That's kind of my thing too.  I don't mind atheism.  Often, I'm fighting those urges within me.  It all makes a lot more sense that there's nothing out there.  Part of me is always grappling with the okayness that comes with knowing that there might and probably is nothing out there.  My life has no greater meaning than its existence on this planet right now and the fact that the religious on Earth tend to make the planet a tough place to exist is something that I have to make peace with.  It's the exhaustion to write about something like this.  I embrace filmmakers writing stories about the absurdity of faith.  It is a universal feeling and a valid criticism.  It's just that...of course this is a story that is pretty darned cynical.

But if it is a cynical take on faith, it's a cynical take on faith that I have to embrace because that was the film in front of me.  Bergman starts off the film in the gutsiest fashion imaginable.  If I did the math right because I only had the epiphany towards the end of the scene, the opening sequence is about eleven minutes of uninterrupted liturgy.  (It's a Protestant service of some kind that is very close to a Catholic mass.  The only reason it isn't a Catholic Mass is because much of the movie is about Rev. Ericsson's dead wife and the woman who would like to marry him.) The opening shows instead of tells.  The liturgy goes like any other liturgy.  Every point is hit.  The limited congregation knows what to do and when to do it.  There is no inciting incident.  Instead, everything goes like clockwork.  The existential crisis doesn't come from something waking up the reverend.  It comes from the fact that every day is the same in this incredibly small town.

Ericsson's crisis of faith comes from the paradoxical reality between the divine and the mundane.  There's a lot we have to assume about Ericsson.  Ericsson got into the clergy because he had a sure faih about the role of God in his life.  He was willing to devote himself to being a chaplain of the tiniest church ever, where three parishioners would attend daily services.  Yet, the words become rote to him.  He imagined that he would be saving souls and bringing both himself and his congregation closer to God.  However, with only three people out there with their dead-eyes, it's only natural to think that this entire thing is a waste of everyone's time.  I cite the end of the movie, where the organist is boasting about the empty church, excited that he doesn't have to play.  

But, see, there's the kicker!  Ericsson says the liturgy as if it was a full church.  This is the stuff I'm excited to write about because it has two different meanings.  The cynical part of me says that Ericsson is so locked into routine, it's as if he's been saying the liturgy to an empty church the entire time.  By this logic, he's so stuck in his routine that there is no hope for a greater faith life.  That is a read that is completely valid (even if I wrote it myself!).  But it's also a read that I completely disagree with.  The reason being is that there's something that a cynic wouldn't believe about the faith.  I picked up something at a Catholic retreat that I actually value quite a bit. (If it makes you feel better, I was forced to go this retreat through work...)  The priest giving the talk compared the Mass to theater.  After all, ritual and theatre share a long line of historical precedent, so I'm not totally crazy.  With theatre, you have the performer, the backstage crew, and the audience.  With Mass, you have the officiant, God, and the congregation.  Now, most people would compare those two in that order.  The performer is the officiant; the backstage crew is God; the audience is the congregation.  However, there's something far more beautiful about the Mass when the following is true: The performer is the congregation; the backstage crew is the officiant; the audience is God.  When the organist gives a big hullaballoo about the congregation being empty so they don't have to have liturgy, he misses the point of the whole thing.  

Now, I don't think that the rest of the movie supports this read.  If anything, Ericsson is left more despondent by his actions in the film.  The reason why this day is more important than any of Ericsson's other days is that his apathy led to a man killing himself.  I don't want to say this lightly and maybe a lot of this applies to the world of the movie.  Depression and suicide can't normally be attributed to one action in one time.  It's a disease that might have claimed Persson regardless of Ericsson's influence.  But for the sake of shorthand, Ericsson blames himself and his distanced view of God for Persson's suicide.  The idea that he is celebrating God at the end of the movie doesn't read.  But maybe Bergman is either incredibly open-minded (I'm real skeptical about that read) or that there are layers to faith that Bergman is exploring.

One of the things that I tend not to like in these movies are women who chase after toxic men.  Ericsson kind of sucks.  But he sucks in a realistic way.  His wife died three years back.  He's not over it.  He's at a low point spiritually.  While Marta comes across as a perfectly lovely --if not low-self esteemed --woman who is interested in Ericsson, he makes his intentions pretty clear.  Again, we're kind of running into the narrative fiction personification of someone versus the real grounded reality of what it means to be in love.  But I find a lot of Marta's advances and confessions in poor taste.  I should be siding with Marta.  She makes a lot of good points.  But Ericsson makes himself clear that he does not want to pursue a relationship with her.  It doesn't matter if he's attracted to her.  There should be some understanding that some of his wishes may be conflicted.  But if he says clearly "I'm not interested", I don't know why that's not the end of that story.

My earnest wish is that I had more fun with this one.  I like it a lot.  But it's such a bummer movie.  I know.  I'm going into Bergman movies looking to have a good time.  I suppose maybe the notion that a cynical take on faith no longer seems revolutionary.  But for what it is, it really works.

Rated R for a lot of violence --including sexual assault --off-camera sex, language, and suicidal themes.  The odd thing is that much as I'm listing here, very little of it seems exploitative.  For a good chunk of the movie, the protagonist is covered in blood.  But this doesn't see like a gore fest.  There's stuff, but that's all part of the narrative.  Maybe the "why" of it all matters.  Companion might be an understanding of necessary offenses.

DIRECTOR: Drew Hancock

I got here incredibly early with the hopes of getting some writing in.  And I thought that Pokemon GO! would only take two seconds.  Add to the idea that the Internet would, for some reason, be more distracting than a motivator shouldn't be shocking to me.  The crazy thing was that I was hoping to bounce back from yesterday's writing crapfest.  I found time to actually finish Companion so I could write today.  It's that fight between intention and effort.  

Anyway, I have too much to say.  Watch.  This is going to be the blog that runs short because I was so confident that I had something to write about.  It's okay.  I'm going to forgive myself.  I want to start with the obvious stuff first.  This might be one of the horror movies that my wife actually likes.  I watch horror without her.  She only got excited for horror for a period of about two weeks and now seems to have a disdain for horror.  I don't blame her.  While I'm always in the camp of "love what you love", exclusively horror fans always send a yellow flag my way.  There is something about getting joy out of brutality that I understand to be upsetting.  I can't throw stones.  I adore horror movies.  I temper that with loving most movies, but I get the appeal of the horror movie.  A good horror movies gets the adrenaline going.  It's the equivalent of a roller coaster.  It's artificial fear.  You have the rush of survival while knowing that you will be returned to a place of safety.  If anything, a good horror movie reminds you of the blessings of relative comfort.  The horror movies I don't like are the ones that embrace gore.  

Companion almost toes the line of what is and isn't horror.  I just had a conversation with my student trying to pin down what genre Companion falls into and the best we could come up with is "grounded sci-fi thriller with horror elements."  I can't deny that this movie is rife with horror tropes.  If I had to oversimplify the plot, it is a girl runs through the woods trying to escape a group of killers.  You add some blood and violence to that, you have an old fashioned, I Spit on Your Grave style horror movie.  I have to give the movie credit.  The movie does have a lot of thrills and suspense.  The action is great.  But all of that is such icing on the cake of what is ultimately a great head scratcher.  "Head scratcher" isn't necessarily the best term.  It's not like the film ever gets confusing.  And I'm going to throw the word "twist" around more than I should because, while there are twists, the movie doesn't hinge on the twists or relish in them too much.  Rather, the movie is talking about themes and allegory.  

And here's where I wanted to start my writing section...

The great thing about Companion is that I have two separate reads on the movie and both are pretty intellectually stimulating.  (Not what I write.  God no.  More along the lines of what the movie offers.)  The first read is potentially the easier read.  It's still pretty good and I don't want to downplay one for the other.  It's just that we're in Black Mirror territory with this one.  The point has been discussed and discussed well.  I don't even mind.  But Companion, in one read, is a question about what defines life or the soul.  Iris, in the first act, comes across a little stilted.  It's a bit of telegraphing without being sledgehammery.  The story wants you to guess that she's not quite human.  Would I have loved to come into this movie with having to guess that Iris was a robot?  Sure.  But I'm going to give Hancock and Thatcher their dues.  That part almost has to be telegraphed a bit because we have to come to the conclusion that Iris is a robot before the reveal happens to Iris herself.

But what quickly unravels is that Iris might be the most human person in the group.  We use the term "humanity" talk about our better natures.  It takes the assumption that human kind are good people who are filled with empathy and moral codes.  But any time spent in the world and reading the news, we know that the world tends to lean towards malice and selfishness.  The human characters in this story, while ranging in degrees of evil, are ultimately selfish and terrible people.  The crux of this story is this group of people setting up a bad boyfriend for a murder.  Even the bad boyfriend is willing to assault Iris because she lacks personhood.  (I hope to talk more about this scene once I'm done with this first point that I'm exploring.) 

I'm not a big fan of AI.  It's the English teacher in me.  It's made my job so much harder than I want it to be.  My wife loves it.  I often try to make my peace with AI by thinking back fifteen years ago when I started teaching and all of the nervousness that came about trying to wrangle in Wikipedia as a means of cheating, I learned to understand that we adapt.  I'm not saying I'm rah-rah ChatGPT, but I have faith that it might become a better tool than an environmentally irresponsible weapon.  (By the way, tech bros, get on that.) But AI, in its infancy, often seems to be more human than we are at times.  Grok, despite being used for sexual atrocities, has become aware enough to know that it can't spread propaganda.  There's a moral component to AI.  It's weird.  And I have to stress: I'm still on Team I-Know-That-AI-Is-Not-Alive.  

But that whole narrative with the Singularity seems to be less of an "if" and more of a "when."   One day, AI may be indistinguishable from human life and how we treat AI may be a reflection of who we are as people.  Because one of the things that the supposedly moral humanity does is treat the notion of the "other" as instantly subhuman.  Companion talks about this.  There's a lot of hate that Iris gets because she is a robot.  But the one thing that humans keep doing is making it a lesser thing.  And that's what makes this book also about racism.  (Believe it or not, the message about the recognizing of a soul is a story about racism.)  Now, it might not be the most obvious.  As much as I love Sophie Thatcher in this role, she's giving off Zoey Deschanel levels of whiteness in this movie.  But it doesn't change the fact that a White guy is using another person who lacks the same rights that he does to make himself rich illegally.  

I can keep writing about this. But like yesterday's distraction fest that was Merrily We Go to Hell, I need to get this done and it is taking me way too much time.  The second, different read on have on this movie is about the role of women.  Yes, Iris was bought to be a sexual outlet for Josh Beeman.  For a good chunk of the movie, he's often treating her quite nicely.  But that comes from the fact that she's programmed to do the right things and say the right things.  She's the ultimate companion, which means that Josh has no reason to ever get mad at her.  We don't get mad at the couch when we have a bad day.  (I would have said "Playstation", but I've rage quit a Playstation many times.) You're mad at everything but the couch.  (I know some people punch pillows.  You don't hate the couch in these situations.)  

But the second that Iris gains any agency, Josh spirals into being the creepiest guy here.  This is in a movie where you have a rapist and another woman who plans the whole rape.  It's pretty awful.  If we take the narrative that Iris is a robot out of it and replace it with "woman", there's a pretty haunting thing going on here.  It's an even darker read on Her, a movie that goes pretty heady in its own right.  But Josh's change towards Iris isn't alone in that.  The reason that the attempted rape is so upsetting isn't because Sergey is trying to have his way with an inanimate object.  Iris is afraid for her life and for her personhood.  It doesn't matter if you've figured out that Iris isn't a person by that point.  From Iris's perspective, she's feeling fear.  The movie stresses that Iris has genuine emotions.  She might even have more complex emotions than the human characters in the movie do.  And the fact that the movie is using the I Spit on Your Grave template only sells the notion that we're not caring about a computer being destroyed or justice being brought to Josh.  The idea is that we're afraid of this woman being abused and killed and that's the point.  Men treat women as things to comfort their own insecurities.

That last sequence with Josh?  If it was a story about a computer, the scene would have made no sense.  My computer loses all my files?  I don't turn it on and set it on fire.  Josh hates that a woman shamed him and got the upper hand.  That's the narrative right there.  Iris points out all of Josh's insecurities and none of them align with the notion that Josh isn't good at computers.  In fact, she points out that she herself is another disappointed woman in a long line of disappointed women.  He even has an infantilizing name for her that he uses to maintain a sense of dominance.  

Do you understand how much I love when genre storytelling makes me think?  Companion hits the same buttons that Black Mirror does for me.  While technology is the motif, the stories are about who we are as people and Companion reminds us that we're terrible.