Rated R for sexuality and, more importantly, an incredibly graphic rape scene. The foundation of who Donald Trump is in this movie is built on a complete lack of empathy. Because of this, people are cruel to each other all through the film. The movie also has that Wolf of Wall Street attention to vice, despite the fact that Trump himself often doesn't partake in drugs or alcohol. Still, this movie more than embraces its R-rating.
DIRECTOR: Ali Abbasi Come on. This is a layup for me, right? I mean, this is me, straight up embracing my cultural biases. The Apprentice wasn't made for anyone but for people who reflect the same political values. But I kept hearing that the movie might not have been any good. Listen, I'm not the guy who can tell you this. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. The biggest problem, for me, is the fact that I can't use it as a teaching document because biopics aren't documentaries. But do you know how much I would want to cite parts of this movie to tell people how much they should be afraid of a man like Donald Trump. In terms of a movie, The Apprentice is brilliant. Again, not a big fan of biopics. I tend to find them follow the same layout, copy and paste. But Ali Abbasi has an eye on him. Part of it is the idea that any kind of takedown of Donald Trump can't be a standard presentation of how much of a turd he is. Instead, we have this Mean Streets Martin Scorsese approach to this film. Now, I'm going to show my hypocrisy off here. I hated Joker when it gave a movie a vintage Scorsese pastiche, but I love when The Apprentice does it? Yeah, I'm a huge turd. The reality is that I like the pastiche in Joker. I just disliked the movie. Trust me, if you want me on your team, you are going to make the film look a little vintage. But back to the lambasting of Donald Trump! Donald Trump mentally lives in the late '70s. Every part of him seems influenced over what happens in The Apprentice. The film takes the argument that Donald Trump went from a wishy-washy dork to a dumb shark because of the tutelage of Roy Cohn. So to set the movie in the grimiest version of New York with an aesthetic to match that dirty '70s vibe that movies like The French Connection were so good at achieving is smart as heck. I look at this era in history fondly because I never lived through it. Instead, there's something Bukowskiesque (I hate me too) about this era in history. Part of it is that Donald Trump only succeeded because he became the King of Turd Mountain. (I want this blog to be really crass, despite having thousands of entries where I avoided any vulgar language whatsoever.) Just to avoid constant caveats, please be aware that I'm talking about the character of Donald Trump as presented in The Apprentice, even though I think that they might be one-in-the-same. Donald Trump was born at just the right time to become what he has become. He lived in an era where the world was falling apart under its own stupidity. It was on the verge of the '80s, where things got bigger and bigger and --to a certain extent --prideful in its own stupidity. Trust me, as someone who is living in 2025, I can't deny that stupidity spreads. Maybe it wasn't stupidity. Donald Trump is simultaneously a con man and the most earnest man in the world. The Apprentice's Trump is a guy who believes his own press and that's mostly due to Roy Cohn. I didn't know much about Roy Cohn before watching this movie. By that logic, I still don't. What I don't understand is Cohn's decision to make Trump a pet project. The one thing that is made very clear to me is that Cohn is the one person who was never taken in by Trump's hubris. He saw this guy who tooted his own horn, Willy Loman but with success, and took him under his wing. I don't quite get it. Part of my read of Cohn at the beginning of the movie is that Trump becomes his apprentice mainly because Cohn has nothing to do. Cohn molds Trump into this mover and shaker because he sees the perfect vehicle for corruption. But there's a big difference between Cohn and Trump, at least from a morality perspective. Cohn knows he's evil. I don't know how smart Roy Cohn was. I get the vibe that Cohn was a monster, using his talents for his own sense of success. It's why everything around Cohn is about excess. Trump never really thought about morality. It's odd, because we don't really have a moral grounding in the movie shy of the few scenes with Trump's mom. I often ask my students if they ever made a mistake on a grand scale if they'd like to be considered evil or incompetent. With Cohn and Trump, they are evil and incompetent respectively. Regardless of Trump's stupidity, it doesn't change the fact that the man completely lacks empathy. That's something that I can glean from the real world. He never feels anything for anyone. It's such a depressing concept that someone that powerful can't even entertain the notion that other people exist around him. He rapes Ivana because he's bored with her. He's angry not that he might not sexually satisfy her, but the notion that she is a burden by her mere existence. It's incredibly depressing. My favorite thing about this movie, though, is the exact characterization of Cohn and Trump. I can't deny The Wolf of Wall Street vibe that the movie teases. But it's not The Wolf of Wall Street by itself. It's The Wolf of Wall Street by means of Napoleon Dynamite. Roy Cohn lives in a drug fueled, sex-addled fantasy world where he rules with an iron fist. Donald Trump is a man boy playing dress up. They both think that they are amazing, but both of them are insufferable from moment one. It's two guys who think that they're incredibly cool. But every scene together is in that awkward place where people would talk about how uncomfortable these two made them. There are scenes of outrageous wealth being displayed. If it was anyone else, it would be a Pennies from Heaven sequence. But adding Roy Cohn and Donald Trump into these scenes, you'd be counting the seconds until you got to get yourself out of that. I love it. As evil as these turds are, they're more insufferable and losery than anything else. I mean, points for having Donald Trump trip in a snowsuit. I honestly wondered how Ivana could stand being married to this man. I don't know how anyone could be in a room with him at all. I do have a confession to make. I used to pride myself on the notion that I didn't hate anyone. I was taught that the very notion of hate was a toxic concept and sinful in itself. I still really do think this. But I earnestly hate Donald Trump. He is the worst person on this planet (when it comes to making broad strokes) and I genuinely hate him. I'm not proud of that. I'm taught that I should love my enemies. But Donald Trump disgusts me on such a visceral level that I can't even pretend to hide it. There have been so many things lambasting Donald Trump and his cronies. But The Apprentice somehow seems like the most artistic and authentic take on the current president. Just beat-for-beat, I found the take on Trump fascinating. Yeah, it's a bit much and it's a bit shameless. But it is also a movie that resonated so strongly with me that I couldn't help but applaud. This movie was incredible. Rated R for being quite appropriately graphic about the abuses of the Catholic Church. These abuses range from physical abuse, to sexual abuse, to straight up mass murder. While we never see any of the abuse, the descriptions of these actions are harrowing. The results of these actions lead to alcoholism and we meet some of these alcoholics throughout the film. It's a brutal movie. R.
DIRECTORS: Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat Again, very hard to write about documentaries. How do we write about subject matter while divorcing it from the context in which it is presented? Part of the argument that goes into determining Best Documentary Feature is how much it moves you. As part of that, there's the idea that one's personal politics plays a part in the investment that comes with a documentary. Perhaps if you asked me years ago about a movie like Sugarcane, I would have been skeptical. I'm far introspective nowadays. I didn't go into this with a defensive stance. Instead, I let the misery wash over me. It sounds like a sadistic attitude to take, but the only way that real change will ever happen is if people start looking at themselves before putting up walls. For those not in the know about Sugarcane, this is a documentary looking at the Catholic Church's abuse of indigenous people in Canadian missionary schools. While it draws attention to its American sister schools, Sugarcane points the camera at one particular school as a representative of an institution that preyed on indigenous people for decades. When I was in high school, all of the attention towards the Catholic Church focused on sexual abuses by the clergy. I was also at the height of my charismatic love for the Church during this time, so a large part of me wanted to bury my head in the sand. After all, I was hearing things from adults that it was overblown. I think I heard a report from a pretty biased source that said that the amount of sexual abuse among the clergy was typical if not less than other professions. Do you know how I held onto that fact as a life raft for a lot of my formative years? It made the world make sense. But as time passes and more information gets out there about pastoral abuse, especially when it comes to minors, there has to be a willful ignorance to ignore it. We're re-entering some pretty dark times. The last two weeks in America have been incredibly troubling. There is a culture war going on between a bunch of different factions. The mental culture war I'm fighting is between Christian Nationalists (who seem to be gaining more and more traction within the Church) and progressive Catholics (a term that I would have been mortified to be associated with at one point but now find to be a beautiful concept.) (I'd also like to note that I wrote a lot of this blog, but then lost it pretty quickly when Windows opened a new website...somehow. I'm pretty angry that I have to rewrite this. Also, I was supposed to go on a date with my wife tonight to celebrate our anniversary, but my oldest daughter didn't do her homework again. These sentences are my way of venting my frustration.) Anyway, back to the notion of accepting truths. When I was far more conservative, there was this need to defend the Church against accusations. If I repeat something, I apologize, but I'm trying to recreate my initial argument. Back then, someone told me some pretty dubious information. I remember desperately grasping on to this pretty unverified fact that said that while sexual abuse in the Catholic Church existed, it was on par or less than other professions. Do you know how much I held onto that like it was gold? That gave me hope for the world. But stuff like Sugarcane keeps coming out. It is incredibly hard to be a Catholic in light of stuff like that. I can't imagine what it is like to be Rick Gilbert in this movie. Rick Gilbert has the unfortunate role as the most paradoxical indigenous person in this movie. While it seems that anyone else tied to these missionary schools distanced themselves from the Church (probably rightly), Rick Gilbert married Annie and seems to have become a pastor. How do you go from a world that praised the name of Christ and then did these horrible things to devoting one's life to Christ? I mean, I'm having a hard time holding onto my faith and that's just me interacting with people who lack empathy. But Sugarcane is a spotlight on some truly awful communities who institutionalized abuse on a scale that I have a hard time even comprehending. Like, there was a point in time when I was thinking about becoming a priest. Right now, I'm sitting here thinking that I dodged a bullet because I struggle real hard in my early 40s. But at the height of my faith, with the zeal I was holding in my heart, imagine if I went into the seminary to discover that there were all these monsters who did awful things. Like, the events described in Sugarcane are on par with almost concentration camp level evil. Children were raped. Babies were thrown into an incinerator. Live babies, thrown into fire. I don't know how to stress how evil this movie got without straight up telling you what happened. I know I'm stating some real obvious stuff here, but how could people who espouse the teachings of Christ? What is it about people that proclaim the Good News the loudest also seem to have the darkest sins attached to them? There has to be some kind of psychological correlation. It's really messed up. I'm not saying that holy people are without sin. But the darkness that came out of these missionary schools is so bleak that it makes me question everything. I know that there are good people who have religious convictions. I refuse to believe that every single religious person has this darkness inside of them. Like, it shouldn't be to a point where I hear that someone is filled with the spirit and that raises a yellow flag for me. I don't know what to think anymore. There's also this secondary narrative in the story that I feel like the directors want me to pick up on and it is the weightlessness of an apology. There are a few threads in the documentary, just because the different individuals have different ways of looking at events. Not that they don't all view it as less than horrible. It's just that they are different people and they process trauma differently. Going back to the Gilberts, he goes to the Vatican to receive an apology from Pope Francis. I tend to love Pope Francis. But I can't say that I haven't heard some stuff that might make Francis complicit in stuff. I don't know what to believe. We live in an era where there is a glut of information and all of it seems contradictory. Anyway, Gilbert goes to the Vatican to receive his apology and it seemed so tone deaf. Again, I love Francis, but there seemed to be an exhaustion to the apology. It's almost that a ceremonial figurehead is so used to apologizing for the atrocities of an entire faith community that the words seem to lose any kind of merit. I want these apologies to be heartfelt. I want to be able to go into a time in my Church where actual change seems to happen. It's not that Francis did anything wrong with the apology. It's just that he didn't do the right thing with it either. And these horrors that came out of the school? They cause all of these ripples in people's lives. These events don't live in a void. Everyone in the community seems to be carrying their pain differently. The prevalence of alcoholism seems to be a common theme. But then there's the story of the director and his father. Julian and Ed NoiseCat have an estranged relationship that may be one of the more sympathetic abandonment stories that I ever heard. A less sympathetic watcher might say that emotional vulnerability made Ed NoiseCat a bad father. But this is a man who carries around so much mental scarring from the things that happened to him in the missionary school that he had no idea what it meant to be an adult, let alone a parent. It's heartbreaking to watch. I would sooner watch a documentary about this than an adaptation about this. Spotlight covered similar material and everyone lost their minds. I'm sooner moved by the real stories by the actual people. What Sugarcane accomplishes is the fact that we are experiencing these events from the perspective of the fallout without actually dumbing down the events that happened there. The problem I have with movies like Spotlight is that it makes it all about the intellectual investigation and we have to imagine what the trauma was like. Sugarcane hits hard. A good documentary makes you look at everything a little bit differently. That's what Sugarcane did. Not rated, but there is a lot that kids cannot see in the movie. There is nudity, both in a sexual context and in a non-sexual context. Like apparently all foreign films, this is a movie about having an affair and the fallout of having an affair. (I am writing this, admittedly, in the midst of my journey through the works of Ingmar Bergman.) Also, there's a suicide in the film that gets pretty rough. It has a lot that is fairly objectionable.
DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda Oh man, the font is huge on my new computer and the spacing is all off. I have no idea how big this blog will be in the long run. Yeah, I eyeball it. So what? All I know is that this blog is on a To-Do list full of low-priority things objectively, but high priority to me. I'm a mess of stress and I need to get a blog about an Agnes Varda movie done. Le Bonheur took me all over the place. Maybe it is a good thing that I don't necessarily instantly adore every work by an auteur. I mean, I'm probably wrong in a lot of those cases. So when I start up an Agnes Varda movie, I'm not sure if I've signed up for a genius film or something that is going to drive me insane. In the case of Le Bonheur, I kept on jumping between the two. I didn't know what I was watching. I think my takeaway is that this film is absolutely genius while being kind of dumb at the same time. Okay, that's not even it. I don't know. The long and short is that I'm frustrated at this movie and I have to write about it to process it. I'm a vulnerable human being with lots of flaws and writing helps me understand art sometimes. For a long time, I thought that this was a movie about the joys of polygamy. I am completely influenced by my deep dive into Ingmar Bergman and the fact that he treats infidelity as something that everyone does. The Criterion Collection isn't a dummy. They know that they put Le Bonheur on a disc labeled "Married Life." I don't know much about Varda's marriage. I even watched the documentary that started this whole thing. But that was ages ago and I don't necessarily retain everything that I watch. But for a minute, this was the loveliest take on infidelity ever. I mean, sure, I hated Francois and I kept thinking that this isn't how the real world works. I knew that the real world gets messy. I'm also in the mindset that some people make polygamy work, but it wasn't like how this movie was showing it. After all, the movie has an incredibly chipper tone for the majority of the film. Considering that Le Bonheur translates out to Happiness, it keeps with that idea for the majority of the movie. Francois is an odd protagonist. Now that the movie is over and I'm writing about it, I knew that I was right for hating this guy. There are so many movies about the unfaithful. But usually, the adulterer tends to be somewhat sympathetic. There's something in their story that makes them tragically attracted to some kind of out. Either that, or the movie paints the character as some kind of monster. Varda doesn't quite do that. One thing, as much as Varda paints with optimistic hues for this character, is that he is without motivation for his affair. It does make him selfish. But the way that Francois speaks, he is unique as a philanderer. He doesn't really mince words with Emilie. There's never a story where Francois wants to leave his wife. If anything, he's the paragon of polyamory. He keeps stressing that he loves everyone equally. I mean, there was a reason why I kept stressing that I thought that this was going to be a treatise on polyamory. It paints it like it is something that can absolutely be achieved. Then the movie goes the other way with it and becomes an After School Special for a very specific crowd. The movie just has Francois's wife, Therese, kill herself after the two made love. See, Varda knew what I had floating in my head. Again, I understand that there are people out there who are fine with having open relationships. I can't wrap my head around such things nor would I want to, but I also don't want to throw stones at something that I don't understand. What I do know is that it's not really an open relationship if someone doesn't have a choice in the matter. Francois simply pursues Emelie without ever consulting Therese. When he eventually reveals that he has been having an affair for months and that is why he is happier than he was before, it puts Therese in a situation that seems unwinnable. I'm not in the mindset to victim blame here, but Therese absolutely should have destroyed him in this moment instead of --let me check --sleeping with him and then committing suicide. But that's all on Francois. It totally is. It may be a bit much for a movie like this, but I respect that curveball of an ending. (Note: I would go as far as to say that this ending is needed to redeem the movie that was frustrating me at this point.) Now, here's where the real unpacking happens. What do I think of the end of the movie? The end of the movie somehow makes the film a straight up horror movie. Yeah, it might not be a gore ridden murderfest. But Francois has a spare wife! That's something that we need to think about. Varda's most genius moment has in her bookending of the film. The movie starts off with a blurry image of a family of four holding hands and walking towards the camera. In that original shot, the mother is Therese. But the movie ends with a family of four walking away from us and Emilie is the mother. That's some messed up nonsense. I've clearly lost some of you. He goes right to Emilie immediately after the death of his wife. And this is where the unpacking is happening. The movie's name is Happiness. That's Francois's entire motivation. When he is unhappy, he does what he wants to restore that happiness. I often roll my eyes when people need to look beyond happiness in life and value the important things. But with the case of Francois, he's almost deleting an entire person so he can experience happiness. Therese's death becomes almost an inconvenience. That dinner table scene where people are volunteering to divvy up the kids shows the nightmare that Therese's parents are going through. It's really quite bleak. The movie ends in a world where Therese basically didn't exist. Francois, in his pursuit of happiness, goes beyond hedonism. He's almost a sociopath. Yeah, he admits that he misses his wife. But he says so with the same apathy that I just wrote that sentence. He's more upset about being put out as a parent. The more crazy part is that the supplanting of Therese with Emilie has so many weird beats that it is hard to wrap my head around these beats. First of all, the kids are oddly cool with having a new mother. But the bigger issue is the assumption that Emilie would want to be a mother of two on a dime. Emilie feels incredibly immature for the entire film. She's there because she finds Francois attractive. I get it. They're both gorgeous. But Emilie is in a different place in her life. She's not Therese. Yet, she's all in on just upending her life for someone with whom she's only had an exclusively sexual relationship. I don't know if that's the story that she told herself about how relationships are supposed to go. In a very specific way, it seems against her character. Do I believe that she believes that she loves Francois? Sure. She seems pretty head-over-heels for Francois. But she also claimed that she had a hard time taking the next step with a lot of men. She always found reasons for distancing herself from them. This entire upheaval of her life seems insanely out of character. The only thing that really makes it makes sense is her immaturity. After finally finding a place where she starts off her life as an individual adult, she's absorbed into finishing up someone else's life. I'm not saying stepparenthood isn't for anyone. I'm saying that Emilie isn't the most wired to make that choice. It's a fascinating ending because it is such a bleak decision to end the movie on. Overall, I'm going to say that I dug it. It's a weird take on the narrative of infidelity. It is harsh and oddly bleak of an ending. Still, it is absolutely worth a watch. Rated PG because the Norbot gnomes get a little bit scary when they turn evil. My kids, who aren't always the most brave, were able to handle this. It's kind of silly when cottagecore OGs have to fight some kind of penguin supervillain. All of it is in a very lighthearted tone, so there's not much to be concerned about. But there still is an intimidating threat at times when everything comes at Wallace at once. Nothing to worry about when it comes to parenting though.
DIRECTORS: Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park The odds on me making any kind of real headway in today's blog is slim. How is it that Sundays end up being the most stressful days of the week. I have oh-so-many goals per day and I've been squeezing these to-dos in the last hour. It's not through lack of trying either. So I'm trying to knock out a blog about Wallace & Gromit before I have to fold laundry and staple student essays. We'll see how much I can get done and go from there. We can all read the room on this one, right? Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl could be the best animated movie ever made. There's no way that it would win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I have an oddly long history with Wallace & Gromit. My art teacher in high school used to put these things on all of the time and I started to love them. I already dropped the Cottage Core reference earlier, but they might be the most soothing form of children's entertainment while being simultaneously funny. In my head, there were dozens of Wallace & Gromit movies, but there are only two. Apparently, everything else was a short or a television program. Still, I forget how much I like Wallace & Gromit. I guffawed harder while watching this movie than I can say about any of the other animated features this year. It's not like I disliked the other movies so far. It's just that Wallace & Gromit has the ability to sneak up on you with an unexpected gag while providing some unfathomable impressive claymation. But I'm also forced to be critical. Wallace & Gromit, for what it is, never will be really challenging. I know. I'm bringing politics into what is the most vanilla content ever made. I know. I'm a bad person and some of you are rolling your eyes incredibly hard. Wallace & Gromit loves staying in its lane too hard. Again, it's been a minute since I've watch a Wallace & Gromit movie. But really, this series hasn't really grown all that much in terms of adapting to the 21st Century. Perhaps that comes from the notion that the world that Wallace and Gromit live in doesn't really make major leaps in attitude. Wallace entertains himself with making Inspector Gadget style technology. We live in a world where iPhone generations are the only major leaps in tech, yet we get these gear-and-sprocket hands that consume Wallace. Norbot, as adorable as he is as an attempt to talk to contemporary audiences, is a kind of invention that would have worked in the '90s as much as it would have worked today. It's cute. It's just not very heady. Spiraling out of this, while I liked the movie a lot, the story of Vengeance Most Fowl is painfully forgettable. I may have been influenced by a review of the movie when it first came out criticizing it for being almost superfluous as a story. I hate to agree --again, because I really enjoyed the movie --but that review might be right. Wallace and Gromit are afraid of changing. They pride themselves on being characters who are incapable of growth, despite the fact that we see some emotional frustration coming from Gromit. I think that Gromit keeps going through some kind of existential dread because Wallace is incapable of seeing him beyond the notion of being a sounding board for Wallace's obsession with Wensleydale cheese. (I'd like to point out: Vengeance Most Fowl might be the most cheese light Wallace & Gromit trope and I don't know how I feel about that.) But in terms of what does work, it does nail the heart of a story like Wallace & Gromit. I like the idea that two friends who have grown to know each other for so long have still fundamental issues with expressing that love. If anything, Vengeance Most Fowl is a reflection on not recognizing each other's love languages. Wallace uses his talents to try to make Gromit's life easier. The problem is that Gromit doesn't want his life easier. He's a bit of a luddite. Heck, the movie borders on being almost technophobic in its criticism of "these inventions these days." Norbot (whom I enjoy quite a bit) is an incredible piece of tech that Wallace almost accidentally creates. The intention behind the creation is wholesome if not crucially misunderstood. Gromit enjoys his frustrations with the garden while Norbit does the job of a hundred soulless gardeners in seconds. Gromit, being mute, is unable to express his frustration that his only outlet is being taken over by someone who doesn't belong there. But Wallace becomes the villain when he starts marketing Norbot to the neighborhood. And for a while, I thought that Vengeance Most Fowl was going to be a display of how tech will ultimately be the death of us all. In an era where AI is in every part of our society, I can kind of see where that would go as a story. After all, Norbot is hacked, turns evil, and makes an army of evil Norbot clones. If that didn't seem to be a condemnation on society's dependence on convenience at the expense of artistry, I don't know what it would be. But oddly enough, Gromit learns more of a lesson than Wallace does. I mean, a lot of that comes from the fact that Gromit --a dog --is more emotionally intelligent than Wallace --and fully grown man --is. But Gromit is the first one to forgive Norbot. (He should. Norbot steals the show of the movie and I get it.) Part of that comes from the fact that he's able to divorce himself from intention and result. He understands that Wallace created Norbot from a healthy place. Sure, he didn't think it through. Gromit gets Wallace's dopiness. And through that emotional intelligence, he learns to respect Norbot, despite the fact that Norbot is not conscious. I have to tell you. I like Feathers McGraw. I mean, I only kinda sorta remember the first story with Feathers McGraw. I was glad that this movie caught me up pretty quickly. But it's such a great and silly villain that kids can appreciate. It was odd though. I had to keep explaining that the rubber glove was a disguise for a penguin to look like a chicken. The disconnect was that my kids didn't understand why he wanted to disguise himself like a chicken. The inherent funniness was lost on them. It was even more lost on them when Feathers McGraw disguised himself as a nun. It doesn't matter. Violet was cracking up about all the slapstick so I didn't have to explain it. The more I think about it, Vengeance Most Fowl might be my favorite animated film of the year. I still have to watch a couple of them. But in a year where there hasn't been any real top notch, life-changing movies, Vengeance Most Fowl was a pleasant experience. An R rating almost exclusively for language. Like, it has enough f-bombs to definitely earn an R-rating. But it's not so much that I could even remember a single instance of the f-bomb being used. There's also a plot where children are prostituted to Nazi officers. Nothing is shown and, as far as we're informed, nothing actually happens. Maria ends up singing to the officer. But the implication is that something horrible happened to them. R.
DIRECTOR: Pablo Larrain I almost feel bad for writing about this one. This movie took way too long to get through considering that it had a fairly normal runtime. I have to thank whoever is running the IMDB page for Maria for putting the trailer right on the front page. I know they do that for every IMDB page, but I'm making a point. The trailer just started playing and I saw that this was directed by the same guy who directed both Jackie and Spencer. Both of these movies frustrated me a whole bunch, so it makes sense that Maria did almost nothing for me. (Does he name all of his female led biopics after single names?) This is probably an unfair take on the movie, but this might be the most sleep inducing movie ever. The reason that it took so long --four nights to be precise --is that I kept falling asleep. I am getting older. The couch puts me to sleep. But I've been watching other Oscar noms and I haven't had nearly the sleep issue with those movies. (Although, I dare say, that I have yet to really have my socks knocked off by any of the Oscar noms yet. It's still early.) I don't really want to write about a movie that kept putting me to sleep. I'll give myself some props. I'm really good at realizing that I just fell asleep and I will only have been out for a second. But it doesn't really bode well for having a unified understanding of what Maria is all about. These are issues that I carry with me. It's not that anything in Maria is outright bad or detestable. As a movie, this is a completely functional movie. If anything, it makes me appreciate Angelina Jolie more. My wife, who does not care for Jolie in the least, thought by the end of the movie that nothing changed her opinion. I gave Jolie credit. This is a heavier role than I'm used to seeing for her and she kind of nails what it means to bring this character to the screen. From what I understand, there was a splicing of Jolie's singing voice with Callas's unique singing voice. There's an intensity to Jolie that makes me believe that Jolie was earnestly invested in this role. It's not a role that I'm going to carry with me. Again, I kept falling asleep on this movie. (It's almost like I kept getting sung to sleep on my comfy couch.) It's just that I respect the craft that went into this performance. That's a tip in the right direction. But the real issue is that Callas doesn't have much of a story here. I'm actually surprised that this movie didn't grab me. While I tend to bemoan biopics in general, the format for Maria is my favorite way to do a biopic. I tend not to like biopics that cover a person's entire lifetime or entire career. I'm a big fan of the truncated timeline. This movie covers the last seven days of Callas's life. But maybe it is Larrain's fault because a very similar format was part of Spencer. Maybe Larrain is not-so-great at the spotlight on one moment story. Let me distance Maria from Spencer. While the format is similar, the effectiveness of the last days of Maria Callas works better than Diana Spencer's three days at Balmoral. These days give Larrain get to be a bit more artsy fartsy because there's no real way to say what Callas was dealing with. I respect the attempt. I don't necessarily love the execution. Part of it is that, while it is an examination of aging and mortality through the eyes of a celebrity, it doesn't really have a lot to say. Will I admit that I'm less-than-familiar with the historical Maria Callas? Yeah, probably. But the character comes across pretty clearly in the first moments of the movie. She's a celebrity who unabashedly loves her imprint on history. She's haunted by her own looming shadow and knows that her deterioration, while affecting her time on this earth, is doing more damage by forcing her to fall into obscurity. That's all great. But in terms of story beats, it really only has a few. Callas is rude-but-flirty to her house staff. She tries to sing. It's nowhere as good as it used to be in her youth. She walks out on the people trying to help her get to a good point. She interacts with some hallucinations where she stresses that she likes when people fawn over her. Repeat. It's a lot of that. While these scenes are great, it never really is a story of progression. Instead, we watch as Callas gets more and more desperate. While this could be intentional, I do also get the vibe that Callas herself has the same knowledge into dramatic irony that we do. We know that she's nearing the end of her life. It's almost like she watched the beginning of the film as well and has to get some kind of artistic success before the film. Really, it's a Monster at the End of this Book scenario, only she's really going to die. But where the film succeeds is serving the needs of character. It's funny. The movie is up for cinematography and the cinematography is pretty rad. But if this is just a study of character, it is fun to see these characters interact in the way that they do. I do find comfort in the most bizarre way with Callas's home life. The fact that she surrounds herself with people who adore her, yet are completely open to her causal abuses, somehow brings me a sense of reality to the whole thing. But it also stresses the fact that Maria Callas was a lot. Everything that she does is almost an attempt to build a wall between what most people find relatable and where art begins. She keeps doing these things that are incredibly frustrating from an outside perspective. But Callas never becomes unsympathetic. When the journalist has his "gotcha" moment, which seems a bit ridiculous considering that most people sound like hot death during the early days of rehearsal. Here's one thing that I'm having a hard time digesting. I get the superficial read on these moments, but I don't really connect the human element to these times. Maria Callas was a celebrity, one of the greatest singers in the world. She performed for sold out audiences and probably royalty. She did so much by herself. Yet, she's surrounding herself by old, gross, rich guys. Now, here's me trying to meet the movie where it's coming from. The young Maria Callas was in a rough spot growing up. Because she was prostituted, there had to be a moment where she relied on funds to allow her to sing. But she is married to a guy who is gross but rich. With whom does she have an affair? With a man who seems older and grosser than her husband? And even more insane than both of these things, so does Jackie Kennedy? I don't even understand the history of that. But it almost feels like the stories of the affairs doesn't really play out into the larger ideas of the film, what few moments really exist. Perhaps these scenes are to pad out the story. Maybe it's a bit of showing how insane her life was. But it feels more like it is a disconnect. Look, I should be writing more about this movie. But everyone is distracting me and I don't really have a good take on it. I honestly don't think that the movie has all that fascinating take on Maria Callas's life. Instead, it's a good performance and pretty visuals, but not much in terms of things to say. PG-13 mostly for a bunch of slightly gory jump scares. There are some sexual references and jokes, but the actual on-screen nonsense is pretty darned mild. The biggest problem with family friendliness is the Reavers, who are cannibals who rape their victims before they eat them alive. That's a pretty hard sell for family movie night. Also, the characters are technically bad guys who resort to violence and killing fairly easily. Still, it doesn't really seem all that bad. Except for the fact that Joss Whedon made it.
DIRECTOR: Joss Whedon I know! Writing about Serenity in the middle of Oscar season? Why am I actively trying to overwhelm myself? Honestly, there's a lot here to talk about. I was part of the tribe. To a certain extent, I can't deny that part of me is still in the tribe. I often think about if I ran into Nathan Fillion on the street, I know that I would be prepped to nod and simply say "Cap'n". That's the code, guys. That's the code. I was obsessed with Joss Whedon in college. Could not get enough of the guy. But then he went and lived a terrible life that still confuses me to this day. Between Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, I don't think that the world has good people in it. It didn't help that the article that was meant to be an apology was the biggest non-apology that I ever read. I just Googled what he's up to today and I haven't seen anything since 2021. So there's that. The weird thing is that I really want my daughter to get into Firefly. I think that she would absolutely dig it. There was a time that I could quote Serenity front-to-back. I was actually surprised how many of the lines I had at the ready while watching it. Serenity is an incredible film that exists beyond any sense of reason. Honestly, this movie is a miracle. Maybe, in 2025, could I see a film, big-budget closer to a one season show appear on a niche streaming service. After all, I just watched Section 31, and that's an attempt to do what Serenity did right. But man alive, I do have a difficult time distancing the art from the artist. Every time I giggled at something in this movie, I couldn't stop thinking about the accusations against Whedon. My daughter could get into Firefly, but I also don't want her to have a false notion of who made the thing that I love so much. (On a similar note, I've been constantly Googling Hudson Thames in hopes that he issues an apology for his "stupid woke" comments so I can watch Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.) But in the times that I wasn't thinking about Whedon, I forgot how good of a rebellion movie that Serenity really is. I wasn't political last time that I watched these movies. Since then, I've been aggressively political. It's not like I've been hiding it on this blog. I have been vocal about this stupid regime for a while. Being frustrated with the current administration is emotionally debilitating. But I'll tell you. A good rebellion movie? A movie where a scrappy ragtag group sticks it to the man? That is something I desperately needed it. There's a Firefly quote that I used as a meme at the results of the election. Mal is saying something along the lines of "May have been on the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." That's the entire foundation of this movie and it is great. Sure, Mal and his group are morally dubious. There's a scene early on in the film when a job their on goes south when a ship of Reavers attacks the town. The guy who risked his life for the bank tries getting a ride on the mule when Mal shoots him. He justifies it as a mercy, knowing that the Reavers would put him through hell. But Zoe calls him out on that moment, stating that he was doing it to keep his money. Mal isn't exactly the moral exemplar when it is a normal day. But what is interesting about the morality of Malcolm Reynolds is not only does he have a code, but that code is actually running the show in a lot of the things he does. Again, not the best morally from day-to-day. But even Mal would acknowledge that. He is an incredibly guarded man. When he was an idealist, fighting against the Republic during the Alliance / Independents War, he was vulnerable. Every choice he made was based in morality. But instead, we watch a good man try to stay closed off from compliance, which has slowly pushed him into a place that he never thought he would be in. Mal, as much as he labels himself a brigand (heh), walks a tightrope that he never meant. He claims that he is just trying to survive, but he's the ultimate member of Antifa. He knows that living by the Alliance's code implies complicity in what they are doing. The only way to still fight the battle that the Browncoats fought, he has to take less-than-moral jobs. And the way that he executes this rebellion demonstrates that he, at his core, is moral. Yes, he acts callous, often cracking wise about things that people feel quite deeply. But he's hesitant to let innocent people, regardless of politics, feel pain. Yeah, he'll shoot The Operative after he admits to being unarmed. But that's because The Operative is a fascist who could kill him given another opportunity. But look at the bank guard. The bank guard, Mal acknowledges, is just a guy doing a job. He talks through the many ways that he can harm the guard in a way that lets him keep his position at the bank. Similarly, when the Reavers attack the town, his first concern isn't to get his money and run. He wants to get everyone down into the vault and ensure their safety to the best of his ability. Yes, it's wrong that he shoots the guy. But he's also the guy who is balancing so many different lives that he is often put in a place where he has to make the wrong choice. I don't deny that Serenity is a primarily a plot driven movie. I don't think that Whedon (ick. Every time that I write his name...) is a guy who is going to let an aspect of his storytelling suffer to something else, but it is a plot movie. It is wrapping up the threads that the television show couldn't get to. I don't deny that. But the character drive of the movie is Mal having to come to grips with the persona he adopts --Malcolm Reynolds, clever outlaw --with the persona that is his firmware --Mal, the man who cares for the underdog. When River goes all wonky when she sees the Oaty Bar commercial (I used to have a shirt with the Fruity Oaty Bar!), in his heart he knows that River is the victim of a totalitarian regime. Every beat, he's reminded of the fact that he fought for all of this to be avoided. He lost people because he knew that if these people were given a modicum of power, that it would lead to deaths. (Note: On a completely unrelated note, 10,000 refugees were sent home despite being vetted by the United States because Donald Trump doesn't like anyone who isn't white. There is a very good chance that many to most of them might be dead now.) The brigand cares only for his crew and keeping his boat flying. But Mal the ally sees this girl who had her life stripped away from her and knows that no one else will care for her if he doesn't. It's weird that Whedon was such a staunch atheist. It's something that I'm always unpacking because he made his thoughts on God very clear. He often spoke about how absurd faith was, yet the goal that Mal is constantly chasing is belief. I do love what Shepherd Book tells him in this one. "When I speak of belief, why do you think I'm talking about God?" It is something that Mal used to be a devout man of faith. As much as Book says that Mal needs to embrace something larger than himself, I can't divorce the notion that God is part of that. After all, if Mal --since the Battle of Serenity Valley --has been running from God; it feels only right that he somehow returns to God, even if that God looks somewhat different. This is the movie that introduced me to Chiwetel Ejiofor. His villain might be the perfect villain. Listen, in no way am I objective when it comes to this movie. I simply adore it. This was a lovely time and I could watch this movie over and over without really losing anything. But Ejiofor made a villain here that, while following an archetype that we've seen before, is something that is truly scary. If I have to be critical, it's absurd that Mal can hold himself on his own in the final act with this guy. The first time that he confronts The Operative, Mal can't land a hit on him. The second time, while Mal gets wrecked, he does get some pretty good blows in there. I mean, sure, Mal wins because he embraces that Han Soloness that I've learned to love in Firefly. Mal wins because he doesn't quite play by the rules ever and we're supposed to applaud that. (I absolutely do. Oh man, Mal breaking the rules of the fight is the best.) But the class and sophistication that The Operative plays his part is so good. And the fact that Whedon ties The Operative's faith to Mal is perfect. Yeah, with The Operative as juxtaposition to Mal, Whedon's frustration with religion is present. The Operative is perhaps the most self-aware villain ever. He knows that his faith is problematic, but necessary. He calls himself a monster, but a crucial monster so that society can continue the way it does. He's so screwy that, oddly enough, it makes sense that The Operative and Mal have a very different relationship after the signal is sent out. Mal still hates The Operative at the end, but he understand that The Operative's code doesn't need Mal dead. The Operative is so wired to a belief system that he doesn't allow for random violence. It's just a heck of a character to unpack. He's the zealot who comes across almost as the Opus Dei bad guy from The Da Vinci Code, only not terrible. But the biggest thing, for me, is that I can't introduce anyone to Serenity. This is not a post-Joss Whedon thing either. I feel like I could sit down and introduce someone to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. They might not like it because it's probably dated and I have a hard time selling people on Star Trek that aren't my older kids. But you could watch Wrath of Khan without having seen The Original Series. While Whedon throws a lot of exposition in the first few minutes of the movie, I feel like I would have to explain so much to a newcomer to the movie that it would only make the movie more annoying. I want everyone to watch this movie because I simply adore it. But I also know that it is going to be something lost to such a small time in history. It is an amazing rebellion movie, but who am I going to sell it to? Rated PG-13 for the most family friendly cursing and family family crude references you can make while still appearing to be edgy. The bigger red flag is the racism experienced throughout, coupled with the fact that this is a war film, so there's going to be death. The Six Triple Eight might be the most smoothed out, palatable version of a heavy event imaginable because it's meant to appeal to Hallmark channel audiences while still carrying a message.
DIRECTOR: Tyler Perry It's D.E.A.R. Day (Drop Everything and Read Day) at work today because it's Catholic Schools' Week. I'm making the most out of that and trying to knock out a lot of a novel today. But I also need to squeeze this guy in so I don't fall behind on the ol' Oscar nominations list. And I have to be honest with you. The "Best Original Song" category is starting to kill me a bit. There are exceptions, like Flamin' Hot, which is a movie that only my wife and I enjoyed. Do you understand how disappointing of an experience The Six Triple Eight was? For years, YEARS!, I've wanted to get into Tyler Perry movies. I mean, there was nothing stopping me. These movies were easily accessible to me. I watch enough movies that not one would bat an eye that I picked up a new subproject in watching Tyler Perry movies. But the trailers looked so bad. There was actually this weird line where I knew that I might hate watch them and I didn't want to do that. Hate watching something is the worst. People should try new things, but want to like them. At one point --and this is a bit too real --I thought I might be trying to show off how antiracist I was by proclaiming that I watched Tyler Perry movies. That's not a good look. We should all be antiracists. I don't know if proclaiming "I watch Tyler Perry movies" is the answer to society's call. I'm starting a list of directors that I like as people, but I don't necessarily like as directors. Tyler Perry might now be on that list. I've listened to Tyler Perry talk about lots of subjects and I find him fascinating. He's great when he appears in other people's works. But an actual Tyler Perry movie, based on The Six Triple Eight is a bad time. And I totally understand why. Let's talk about content first because this is the least of the problem with this movie. Does the story of the real 6888 need to be told? Oh my goodness, yes. It is a fascinating part of history and, in this era of whitewashing history to exclude Black contributions to the great moments in textbooks, the 6888 story needed to be told. But the issue with this (and this is --again --not the root problem) is that it is a difficult story to tell. These are the Black women who risked their lives to deliver mail when no one else could do it. Very cool. That story, unfortunately, does not lend itself to a visual medium. It's hard to visually show how difficult it is to sort mail and risk life and limb to get those letters out there. So there's a lot of talking. There's a lot of shots of piles of mail. That, in terms of making an engaging war movie, isn't very impressive. There's a lot of speech making and marching. That's good set dressing. That is not a film. The bigger problem (and I am taking a huge swing here!) is Tyler Perry himself. I've heard the criticisms of Tyler Perry and now that I've seen what one of his movies looks like, I get it. Tyler Perry --while he's an artist, which is a concept that I refuse to ignore --is a financial guy first and an artist second. There's a reason for this. He's a guy who knows that Black art tends to get relegated to a lower tier of studio involvement. In a similar way that kids' movies tend to have one film at the theater at a time, movies starring people of color seems to go to the theater to almost meet a quota. Perry makes movies to get Black voices out there in greater numbers. But as such, he runs his studio like a business. As a business, there are so many choices that he makes that absolutely ruin a movie. If I'm using The Six Triple Eight as my only example, the movie suffers from budget and tonal issues. If Perry is a businessman first, making things out of Tyler Perry Studios, he knows that he has to squeeze as much movie out of so few dollars and that's going to hurt his final product. Okay. That's the easy read. The movie just looks cheap. Digital fire. Crappy logos and fonts. It looks like it was made in iMovie at times. Just a whole bunch of cost cutting methods, especially for a movie that is meant to look epic scale, hurts the product overall. But the bigger issue is that Perry wants as many eyes on this movie as possible. One of the things we have to understand that for every Deadpool and Wolverine, that gets all the money, there are a million other great R-rated movies that don't get a ton of cash to them. The R-rating tends to hurt movies way more often than it helps them. By that logic and the data, the more family friendly a movie is, the more money it will make. Tyler Perry is no dummy. He knows that he has a movie to make that has an important message in an era where people are skittish to admit that they're progressive. If anything, they want to go back to an era where they think that they're not racist and the message isn't condemning. To get that movie seen by as many people as possible, you have to make the racists comically racist. You have to make people of color fun and unproblematic. It all feels unreal. Like, the movie isn't good. I will admit that the quality of the latter half of the film is better than the first half. The movie starts off with this sequence that shows that it is wartime. There's a downed plane that's on fire and the planed hasn't been downed nor is it on fire. It just looks like a set piece with digital fire around it. And the entire first half of the movie has this weird, Pleasantville-y vibe to the whole thing. Do you know what it really comes across as? This movie feels wildly under researched. It is more about striking the World War II tone without any of the reality of World War II. The research that went into this movie didn't come from historical documents. They came from other inspirational World War II movies. As such, it feels like a photocopy of a photocopy. Let's use a functional inspirational World War II movie. While I don't love Unbroken as a movie, I do acknowledge that, as a film, it mostly is serviceable. I think the book is far more interesting than the movie is, but that's a different blog that I would rather not write. This seems like someone was just copying the aesthetic of that movie without justifying any of it. It also hurts that none of the dialogue feels real, nor do the relationships. When there isn't a budget to show the horrors of war, a lot of the weight is put on character dynamics. The pivotal relationship in the movie is between Lena and Abram. Just to catch you up, Lena, a Black woman, is in love with Abram, a Jewish boy who dies at war. Of course, during this time, few people support such a relationship. But Abram dies in the first few minutes of the movie. As a device to show how Lena struggles, she often "sees" Abram in stressful situations, causing her to collapse. It's that weird fine line between "Is she literally seeing a ghost?" or is she just reminded of Abram. It's done poorly and I was trying to figure out why. The real reason is that there is no chemistry at all between these two people. I'm so sorry to Gregg Sulkin, who I enjoyed quite a bit on Runaways, but a lot of that comes from your performance. I honestly don't believe it's your fault. Most of Lena and Abram's relationship is done in shorthand. They have these over the top moments that almost point to "Look, we're in love" without ever really being in love. If anything, Abrams comes across as not a person but a fountain of grand gestures. There's nothing there. Similarly, the conflict between Lena and Major Adams doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I get the idea of the Major being hard on Lena for being a weak recruit, but this divide between the two characters feels largely manufactured without anything to justify it. It comes across as Major Adams picking on Lena because she's bored, not because she is pushing her because she's capable. This is Lena's story. While the overall takeaway is that the 6888th Battalion would be the soldiers who got the mail working during World War II, the protagonist is Lena. We have to look at the story from Lena's perspective. Her major external conflict is to get Major Adams off her back while her internal conflict is to find a way to cope with the death of her love (who, again, has no chemistry with her). But there is no gauntlet that the two go from. You have these two polarized character who have to somehow break before the conflict resolves. Instead, we don't really have this. They just have a chat and the two become best friends. That's not midway through the movie. That's the climax. No stress. Just mutual admiration that is borderline a misunderstanding of intention. I don't care for that. There are too many good actors in this movie for it to be the way it is. Golly, I feel for Dean Norris. I can just imagine that Tyler Perry kept saying, "Go bigger." "Give me more." It's really rough. Like, the character's level of bigotry is so hilarious that even the most racist jerk would be like, "I'm not racist because I'm not that guy." It's such an archetype. Listen, call out racism. Absolutely. But make it so we get an image of what racism reads like. It feels like a cartoon in this movie and that's probably not helping anyone. This movie is catnip for old ladies. It was tough getting through. PG-13 for a lot of punchy-punchy violence. There are some people who die. Some of them die in kinda sorta sci-fi gross ways. It isn't exactly explicit, which is good. But considering that Section 31 is the product of quasi-R-rated Star Trek: Discovery, the movie is pretty tame. I kind of wish that my oldest watched it with me, but she said that she wanted to catch up. That's a bummer, because she's not watching R-rated Star Trek any time soon. There's also a couple of sexual reference. There's a gag where a fight bursts in on a couple lovemaking, but it is an extremely tame joke. There's also some language.
DIRECTOR: Olatunde Osunsanmi I know! I'm knocking them all out in one night. My wife has been incredibly distracted and there's been this push to take advantage of her distraction by killing as many of my blogs in one night. It probably makes for an extremely fried writer. But what can I say? I love not having to do these tomorrow. Unless, of course, we get through another movie tonight... ...which we probably will. The critics have spoken about this movie. People hate it. Yeah, they hate it. Do I hate it? No. Is it incredibly forgettable? Yeah, that is one that I can sit by. I'm one of those fans who thinks that there is no bad Star Trek. There's good and better Star Trek. Section 31 is fine. I'm probably going to spend a lot of time simultaneously griping and defending why this movie is fine. It does commit a couple of sins that Star Trek fans should not settle for. But in terms of being the abysmal atrocity that people have been making it out to be? It isn't that. It is a perfectly fine sci-fi action movie that lives in the Star Trek universe. But the frustration with the film isn't that it isn't a good movie (It's probably not that either.) The problem is that it isn't really a good Star Trek movie. Some of the problems come from the fact that nu-Trek has had a hard time finding its audience. I adore nu-Trek. I am living in a Star Trek renaissance. The reason why I have Paramount+ is almost exclusively for the Star Trek. It could be called "Star Trek+" and I would be paying unfathomable amounts of money to get me more Trek. Be aware, I may not be the most objective source for defending a Section 31 film. Section 31 is the worst impulses of nu-Trek. It's still something I would watch (and potentially watch again if anyone said that they wanted to watch it with me!), but I have to admit that it falls into some of the trappings that the Paramount+ era kind of falls into. A lot of it comes from the aftermath of the Kelvinverse Star Trek. That's the Star Trek franchise that started in 2009. There's a lot of names that appear in both the Kelvinverse movies and in the Paramount stuff, so let's chalk up tonal similarities to that. Paramount and Kelvinverse Trek is far more adventure and action that the original shows tended to steer away from, shy of season finales and one-offs. It was more about exploring moral issues while stressing that humanity had the potential to do phenomenal things as long as they stayed open-minded. It is why I love Trek. I'm not saying that the nu-Trek avoids that. In fact, some of those philosophies (minus the action, which it clearly embraces) can be sledgehammers from time-to-time. (I don't hate the sledgehammers, though, if I'm being honest. Some of the fans need to get clobbered over the heads with these messages.) But the concept of Section 31 always sat at odds with me. It seemed like the most anti-Roddenberry concept in Star Trek. For those who aren't the most Trekkie out there, Section 31 was introduced on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The idea behind Section 31 was that they were the branch of Starfleet who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty. They did the black ops work so that humanity had the moral foundation to explore the galaxy with their heads held high. That kind of bummed me out. Roddenberry's argument seemed to fall apart with that logic. Roddenberry always believed that man, when he moved past war and capitalism, (while embracing diversity!) was capable of being an inspiration for the universe. But if Section 31 existed, there had to be a failure in there somewhere. As a commentary on America as the City on a Hill, it worked really well. But if Star Trek was meant to be the one science fiction show that had hope for humanity to get better, Section 31 as a concept was a bummer. So announcing a Section 31 television show that would become a movie was the least exciting announcement for me. I don't want Section 31. I want Section 31 to be the bad guy that Starfleet has to shut down. This is almost the crux of why I don't think that Section 31 is necessarily a great Star Trek movie as opposed to a watchable science fiction movie. My takeaway from this movie is that it is a futuristic sci-fi Mission: Impossible. The movie is comprised of a team of specialized secret agents and there's a mole taking them out from the inside? They tell some jokes. They do some dark stuff? That's sci-fi Mission: Impossible, another Paramount franchise. And do you know what? I like Mission: Impossible. I shouldn't dislike the notion of a section of Star Trek being Section 31. After all, I have been the one fan of what Disney+ has been doing with offering a variety of Star Wars offerings. I like the idea that we can distance ourselves from the Skywalkers with Star Wars. But Section 31 feels barely Star Trek. There are a couple of nods to the greater Star Trek universe. Rachel Garrett will eventually become the captain of the doomed Enterprise-C. There's a laughing Vulcan. There's even that race of people who are split in half when it comes to being monochromatic. That's fun. But the only thing that is crucial to the plot that makes this a Star Trek story is the Mirror Universe. Do you know what? The Mirror Universe hasn't been ruined for me. Yeah, they keep mentioning the Mirror Universe. I get why. They got Michelle Yeoh to be a recurring character from the Mirror Universe. If I was in charge of Star Trek and I got Michelle Yeoh to play in my pond, I would make her character more important as well. And do you know what? My favorite stuff out of Star Trek: Section 31 is the Terran Empire stuff that the Mirror Universe offers. So that's not a loss for me. The stuff that almost doesn't work for me is the aggressive three-act structure. As I mentioned, Section 31 was initially sold as a television show. My guess based on what I saw here was that it was meant to be a limited series with few episodes. The movie is an hour-and-a-half and there is a very clear three act structure. The first act is the recruitment of Phillipa Georgiou; the second act is Among Us; the third act is the showdown with the bad guy. It's very clear. But it is a movie that never quite makes the movie scope and it's a TV show that never really lets us bond with a character that we're supposed to care about. Honestly, I was in the second act looking at the timecode and all I can think of "this movie needs to do something big to justify its movieness." While the third act kind of delivers on that, it seems like the film was intentionally keeping them on a desolated planet because there wasn't much story that would ever justify leaving this place for the grander scope of a spy-fi movie. I hate to say it, I would have preferred this as a show. The thing is, it would have been a show that everyone would have hated even more than the movie. The movie's blessing, for the greater nerd community, is that it is easily forgotten. It's a side-story that doesn't really affect much of the main Star Trek canon with things that are barely Star Trek. But the show would have done one thing: it might have made us care about San. The fulcrum of the movie needs us to not only care about San, but also be hurt by his reasonings to destroy the universe. Neither of those is really accomplished because so much of the story is purged for the sake of making a 90 minute movie. Golly, this movie actually makes me want to turn my back on my 90 minute rule, which I still stand as the perfect length for most movies. My final gripe comes from the notion of Fuzz. I don't hate Fuzz. I'm very cool with slightly silly Star Trek. But the movie offers something cool that never really pays off. Just to spoil it, Fuzz is a microbe who is sentient and wants to kill us all. I like that. To do that, he inhabits a robot body that is a member of the team. The robot body...is a Vulcan. Now, the microbe comes across as an Irish psychopath. It's fun. But out of all the bodies in the universe and the species he could be, he chooses to be the one who wouldn't act like an Irish psychopath. I thought that there was going to be some kind of Vulcan payoff. Maybe he could act like a stoic Vulcan in public, only to become a loudmouth braggadocio when the spotlight wasn't on him? I don't know. Also, the guy who looks like a Borg can't be in Star Trek because...he looks like a Borg without being a Borg. But in terms of what does work is that it is super fun. My friends tend not to care for Kelvinverse Star Trek. I get that. The Kelvinverse isn't my favorite Star Trek, but I also believe that to be true for all of the Star Trek movies, with maybe the exception of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. These are movies that are meant to be fun for the general audience. The goal of Section 31 isn't to make you think. There's a lot of Star Trek out there that is meant to make you think. But sometimes, Star Trek is allowed to be fun action. While I wish that Section 31 got me thinking, I can deal with some good old fashioned dumb fun. If you watch it for fun, you'll have a good time. If you watch it for pushing the boundaries to the Final Frontier, it offers none of that. Unrated, but this is a movie about the fallout of rape. It was Japan's experience with the #metoo movement. As such, the movie gets graphic. But even more than the graphic nature of the crime, the movie is much more about despair, leading to an eventual suicide attempt. There is some language and a lot of it is about disparaging the victim of rape. It's a pretty bleak movie, even though you don't see anything that is visually upsetting.
DIRECTOR: Shiori Ito I'm already fried and I've only written one blog. I'm one-third of the way through my blog catch up and I don't even know if I can get through this one. The bigger problem is that I often really struggle writing about documentaries, especially the ones that have a stronger political stance. It's not that I don't love political documentaries. Quite the opposite. I love when documentaries --and art in general --has a strong political stance. It's just that it is hard to talk about the movie as opposed to the issue. So if I veer way into just talking about rape culture instead of looking at Ito's story, I apologize. My biggest warning for people considering this movie --and this sounds monstrous --is that you have to be pretty caffeinated. It really is a gut-wrenching tale. But I'm 41 and I try squeezing life out of each moment. By the time that the kids were in bed (including my oldest who loves staying up way too late), I was already exhausted. There were times that I drifted off for half a second. A lot of that is me. But a little bit is on the movie. It's one of those documentaries that might be close to an authentic documentary. Sure, the subject of the movie is also the director. I really don't want to focus on that because I absolutely believe everything that Ito presents here. In general, kids, you should believe women. I'm more talking about the fact that Ito is in the trenches for this documentary. She's dealing with criminal charges, civil court, writing a book, and filming a documentary. She has no idea how any of this is going to pan out, which makes the documentary fascinating. It's just that, when it comes to Sleepy Time Tim, there's a lot of scenes where Ito takes a phone call or is in the car, simply reiterating who she is going to meet. It's a documentary where there's nothing really to manipulate. There's a lot of sad and quiet scenes and I feel really bad for nodding off from time-to-time. It's not a bad doc, but it almost is a podcast more than it is a movie because there isn't anything all that visual. Where Ito succeeds is putting Japan in a context for the Western world when it comes to how women are treated. Japan is a bit of an enigma. I'll say that this most recent election kind of makes the entire world a crap shoot for what morality might be. Japan has always existed in a paradoxical state from an American perspective. Japan, on the grand scale of history, has defined itself from an isolationist perspective. It's only modern history that Japan embraced modernism and put itself under the global microscope. From what I see, I see a place that has a rich history coupled with insanely fast moving modern innovation. But Ito points out kind of the fallout from something like that. One of the theses of Black Box Diaries is pointing out how incredibly attached to elements of the past the Japanese are, especially when it comes to rape statutes or really any laws that should be implemented when it comes to the greater protection of women. There's a ton to glean here, but the crux of the movie is the fact that these are out of date ideas based on the idea that women are somehow an inferior gender. Now, the kneejerk reaction is to say, "Man, Japan is really backwards." I don't disagree. Ito is laying out the message that Japan needs to catch up to the rest of the world. And I know I'm White Knighting a bit here, but it isn't much of a stretch to say that the events of Black Box Diaries are a universal problem. Maybe the law is written differently, but some of the most horrifying things that happen in the movie would be endemic to the United States as well. One of the key motifs that the film keeps returning to is the notion that, as a victim, Ito is criticized for speaking out about her own abuse. She gets emails and the worst part is that these emails come primarily from women. (And here's where I abandon any attempt to analyze the movie and simply talk about my own political thoughts.) The recent election in the United States was disheartening simply due to the fact that a lot of women voted against their self-interests. I get the Pro-Life movement and I am even invested in that to a certain extent. But a lot of the most vocal trolls of progressive politics came from women (with the exception of Black women) saying disparaging things about what could be boiled down to any kind of feminism. The specific brand of vitriol that the email that Ito received came in that flavor. A lot of it was "How could Ito be profiting over this man's sadness?" There's the weirdest double standard that for some reason is contagious because we see it quite a bit. My best theory is that it is both an attempt to "be one of the good ones" because women criticizing women shows that women could be whatever they want and a desperate attempt to hold onto an era that never really existed. I'm going to throw out a theory that makes the movie even grosser. I don't love it. I'm not an expert. I can only speak to what I thought about while watching a movie about a real woman going through a real issue with real people. One of the people in Black Box Diaries was Investigator A. (Note: I'm really confused how the Japanese audio handled the name "Investigator A". Like, third parties called this guy "Investigator A" according to the subtitles of this film and that's weird to me.) Investigator A is incredibly frustrating. I don't know if Ito wants us to dislike Investigator A because that narrative goes against what she says. Investigator A is initially quite brusque with Ito. He dismisses all of the things she says, claiming she can't prove anything. Part of it can be written off as an example of why it is incredibly hard to make sexual allegations against someone with a lot of power. Sure. But then he starts warming up to her. Ito claims that he wants to do the right thing and I'd love to live in a world where that is true. But the more I see of Investigator A, the more inappropriate I see his behavior. He seems to be in love with Ito. Ito gets excited for each next meeting, thinking that Investigator A will throw caution to the wind and openly testify against the police department. But each meeting is just about how supportive Investigator A is, but he cannot reveal his true identity. They honestly read more as dates as opposed to anything that would be considered a clandestine plan. When she calls him and he's drunk, he claims that he'd come clean if she would marry him. She writes it off as a joke, but it really reads like "It's a joke unless you're down..." If anything, I read Investigator A as more of a problem than a solution. He seems to be taking advantage of someone who was abused by pretending to be a good guy, only to keep it safe and at arm's length. Again, I'm not behind the scenes, but I do not care for him one bit. But then, almost as if the world was impossible of goodness, we get the hotel employee. Thank God for the hotel employee. Again, Ito does this unbelievable job when it comes to showing how patriarchal Japanese culture is. But it seemed like there was no hope for society. I mean, I don't know if it shocks anyone, but the only actual hero in this story is someone who probably makes poverty wages. That is weirdly heartening. That's kind of why I got so aggressively disappointed at Investigator A. The tonal difference between Investigator A and the hotel doorman seems like the difference between fake good guy and genuine concern. The hotel doorman was willing to put it all on the line just to make sure that this woman got justice and that was heartening. I want to talk about the suicide attempt. (I almost said sequence because it is so easy to distance a real person's life when it is in a film. There's a part early in the movie when she says, "If it ever looks like I'm going to commit suicide, know that it isn't true. I would never commit suicide and it means that I may have been murdered." But we have this footage. She confesses to trying to commit suicide after that point. That's upsetting. I'm not throwing stones at her. She is going through her own journey. I'm more commenting on the fact that nothing seems certain at any point in our lives. When she made that statement early in the film, it was almost this underground dark web conspiracy stuff. But then she tries to commit suicide and I realize that none of us are completely free from awful impulses. I mean, thank God she survived. It's horrible, but it is also just an indictment of how toxic society can get that someone so focused on a cause and still spiral to horrible depths. It's a tank of a documentary. Will I say that it is the documentary that changed my life? Probably not. But then again, someone else is going through this thing. The movie starts off with a trigger warning with a personal plea to look out for one's own well being. Yeah, I'm not a woman who deals with sexual assault, so I appreciate what the movie did here. Rated R for mostly language, which is throughout. (Honestly, I was wondering if I could recommend this movie to my in-laws and the language might be the biggest hang-up.) There is a lot, a lot of swearing. But the real troubling stuff is both the suicide stuff and the Holocaust stuff. Mind you, you absolutely should watch a movie about people dealing with the fallout of the Holocaust. Just know that the content gets pretty heavy. While you don't get any on-screen suicide stuff, it is the code running behind the movie. There's also some drug use and light conversation about race and culture.
DIRECTOR: Jesse Eisenberg I'm a little overwhelmed, but that's okay. It's a good problem to have that I have too many movies to write about. In a perfect world, I knock out all three movies I've watched over the weekend before I go to work while still pretending that I can maintain any objective degree of quality. Still, I kind of love Academy Awards season. (Heck, we can just pretend like I've gotten around to updating the Academy Awards page. I'm also really dating this post because who knows when someone will get around to reading this blog!) My one line tag for this movie is "It's about time that someone got around to making a Woody Allen movie." It's both an incredibly accurate statement and wildly unfair. I loved Woody in his heyday. This feels like Woody in his heyday. It's a small movie, for sure. But when I signed up to watch this movie, I wanted this exact size and intimacy in a movie. I mean, I know that A Real Pain is going to be The Holdovers for 2025. I'm going to rant and rave about how good it is and it will be largely ignored by the general populous. But I seem to really like well-shot, well-acted movies that are fundamentally about relationships. While there is an extended cast in this movie, the story is, at its core, about Benji and David. Again, not ragging on the side characters. They are absolutely fantastic and make the world of A Real Pain make more sense. But these characters are there for Benji to bounce off of. But the title! The title is so good. I mean, I unpacked it a few minutes in and, even then, I was late tot the party. I love that this is a movie about dealing with pain and mental illness without having to telegraph stakes for mental illness. David and Benji, considering that this is a movie about dealing about pain, are technically on vacation. Yes, it is a vacation with strings. While this is meant to be a bonding moment for the boys, it is almost in the sense a wake. It's the classiest wake ever. Remind me to pay for my grandkids to visit my home in Royal Oak, Michigan to determine how I was the king of such a place. But considering that this trip, in a weird and backwards way, is meant to be a trip about healing, it is really interesting to try to pin down what makes Benji tick. While I can't imagine Jesse Eisenberg playing this role like he initially wanted to, Kieran Culkin does play the highs and lows well. For a long time, I thought that this was going to be a tale about how David needs to learn to let go and pull his head out of his butt. Instead, it is more of a commentary on the free-spirit archetype. It's not like the movie is wholly original in its criticism of this kind of archetype. Nothing shocked me about where the character went. However, I did think that this was going to be basically The Darjeeling Limited in Poland. While there's a ton of crossover there, this movie ends with a clear psychological victor. Yeah, Benji grows a lot through the course of his experience in Poland. But he's fundamentally the same person at the end of the movie as he is in the beginning. Despite what hurtles he crossed (and they aren't huge), the end of the movie is actually quite bleak for him. And David, who seems to think that his life is on track, almost gets a confirmation that his life is filled with blessings. If anything, Eisenberg plays the whole movie rather close to the chest (or the vest? I should Google that). He never complains about Priya or his kid. Instead, the trip --reflecting a fairly healthy outlook --is about the experience of viewing his grandmother's past. It never feels like he's fleeing responsibility, despite the fact that Benji makes comments that David has created a substandard existence for himself. Again, if the movie is called A Real Pain, I find it somewhat horrifying that Benji has glommed onto a woman who has struck him in the past. I get the feeling that I'll never get to know the reality of who Grandma Dory was. But that story about Benji being late for dinner is probably the closest thing that we'll get into figuring out who she is. A lot of the tales that the travelers tell about family are all through the lens of loss. Marcia is still hurting from her recent separation from her husband, so we can only glean what Benji picks up about her. We know that she has a horrible taste in men, but that's about it. Eloge also is the survivor of genocide. He's here because he's almost defined his entire faith life around the notion that there are monsters on this world and it is Eloge's job to hold onto the survivors of horror. Mark and Diane don't really count because they're the most blessed of the group, thus being the most unlikable. Mark has no sense of empathy throughout the story. There are moments where he's likable, but he's lost no one. He's the one who has the hardest time connecting to these moments of loss. But all we have of these people is monuments and stories that don't really reflect reality. Grandma Dory may have been a great person, but the only concrete thing I know about the woman is that she hit her 18-year-old grandson for being late for dinner. Don't get me wrong. I understand that Benji is a little turd for a lot of the movie. But the fact that he values that abuse is telling. One of my favorite running gags in the movie is that, as much as Benji annoys everyone for his high-highs and his low-lows, he's continually liked when all is said and done. He doesn't even really hold onto those low-lows and the times that he's toxic. He rips into James at the graveyard and James, when Benji and David are about to leave, thanks him for such good constructive criticism. In the moment, everyone was mortified. But in context of time, Benji ends up being everyone's best friend. If the movie is about pain, that's David's pain. Benji's toxic behavior is continually positively reinforced because people love getting positive attention from Benji. That moment when David leaves the dinner gathering, that moment is because he's afraid for his cousin --someone he treats like a brother. As funny as it is that everyone cozies up to Benji (despite other times being wildly annoyed by him), David sees the family he loves slipping away. It's so fun how road movies make every destination look amazing. I mentioned Darjeeling earlier and then I wanted to go to India. I've been to Poland. I now want to go back to Poland after seeing this movie. It's just this beautiful, yet small narrative about two people that doesn't do the typical movie thing that shows massive change through travel. Instead, the boys are in a constant state of staring their own mortality in the face (being emotionally moved by the Holocaust) and digging their heels into ways of life that make them comfortable, despite whatever consequences might come down the line. It really is a solid movie. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
February 2025
Categories |