Not rated, but --if you couldn't guess --this movie is a movie about vulgarity.  It's tackling that line between art and filth.  As such, it really tries pushing that line as much as it can.  The entire last scene is pretty darn in-your-face. Per usual, Bergman uses infidelity as a form of passive cruelty and that is something that happens all throughout.  There's nudity in this film, coupled with what is meant to interpreted as a rape scene.  The movie is trying to push limits, which only makes me roll my eyes.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Guys, I'm so tired. Like, so tired.  I don't want to be writing about this.  I'm reading this really fascinating novel right now that is incredibly dense.  It's long and it isn't a fast read.  As such, I've been trying to find a few moments to knock this blog out.  It's not like I have nothing to say about this movie.  It's just that I'm starting to actively dislike Ingmar Bergman.  I know.  It's blasphemy.  Ingmar Bergman is one of the greatest auteurs of all time.  He's unimpeachable.  But The Rite almost encapsulates everything that frustrates me about Bergman.  And my takeaway about the man is that he is incredibly insecure.

To a certain extent, The Rite is almost an attack on me. It's almost in response to what I've been writing on this blog for the stretch of watching this box set.  Bergman is in that place where he, as a filmmaker, has crossed a societal line.  Bergman, with a streak of movies, has toyed with sexuality in both explicit and implied ways.  In some of these cases, I can see why sex has played such a forward and obvious role.  It isn't often, but some of his movies are shattering barriers and using the taboo to get there.  But my frustration is that it kind of became a bag of tricks.  When I am teaching either writing or acting, I say that the creative's worst enemy is their bag of tricks.  When I say that, I mean, that the artist knows what gets applause.  The problem with a bag of tricks is that it gets really repetitive.  My biggest criticism is that Bergman keeps returning to the same bag of tricks.  With the case of Bergman, his bag of tricks is infidelity and sex to push his audience out of their comfort zones.

But when sex becomes unsurprising, there might be a problem.  The conceit of The Rite is that an acting troupe is under investigation for performing lewd acts in their routine.  It's vague until the final reel of the movie.  Even in that case, barring the erotic costuming, the acts are more described than enacted.  Still, the point of the movie is that this is a movie that puts art on the stand. If there was ever a metacontext, it's this.  It's not very subtle to make a literal interrogation room as the alternating scenes in the story.  After all, if Bergman feels under attack (I know I'm doing the laziest form of analysis right now, but it's a miracle that I'm upright right now), the notion of being dragged in front of the interrogator is something that probably resonates quite a bit right now.

This is where it gets a little bit self-indulgent.  I mean, it's the part of the movie I like.  I won't even deny that I like self-indulgent stuff from time-to-time.  A lot of the movie is almost painfully cryptic, playing on the nature of reality.  After all, we see Sebastian set himself on fire in his Black-Box-style hotel room.  We also have a rape sequence that is treated so non-chalantly that we're not even sure what we saw in those moments.  But the final sequence flips the notion of the interrogation on its head.  As much as this entire film has been a brow-beating of the perverted artists, the real criminal is the interrogator.  And that's where society is put on the stand.  Yeah, when I say that this is self-indulgent, it's that Bergman makes his metaphor "Society is the real pervert" in this situation.  As much as Abrahamson is this bastion of morality and purity, going even as far tearing up a bribe given to him, he instead fetishizes the entire experience.  He goes into a prolonged confession, promising not to interrupt the performance at the end...only to continue to wedge himself into the story over-and-over.  

It's Abrahamson who sentences himself to death.  It's a really weird moment in a really weird moment, so we kind of forgive it.  If anything, the ritual that the trio perform, shy of being clothed in perversion, is fairly tame.  I actually give props to Bergman for this choice because, at this point in the film, nothing that Bergman can describe can live up to the expectations that society's perversion has already crafted for this final scene.  If anything, it is evokative of The Aristocrats, being something so ribald that anything that Bergman could have described would have only disappointed.  When he dies of a heart attack, the lewdness almost becomes symbolic of some greater imaginary horror that doesn't really affect the artists.  Yeah, the afterword tells that the artists were not allowed to perform those acts domestically.  But the almost apathetic tone that the final section offers is more of a commentary on Abrahamson than it is the artists.

There is the title.  And the costumes.  The title, juxtaposed to the costumes. I know that this was a TV movie in 1969.  From what I understand about the cultural zeitgeist, I don't think that The Rite was exactly one of those really impactful films that changed the way that we talked about art and sex.  But I can't help but make the connection to Eyes Wide Shut, the combination of the outfits with the masks and the acts involved.   As part of all that, the notion that this is something beyond the performance element that the movie says, but doesn't seem to believe is something that should be explored.  Honestly, the more noble and heady version of myself wants to preach that all art is a form of creation that mirrors God's relationship to the universe.  But if I'm grounding myself, as I should, that final sequence reads more like a religious ritual more than it does a stage performance.  After all, the performance doesn't happen in a theater.  The time of the performance is during the sunrise in a spot that offers sacrifice.  Couple this with all the fact that the actions that the trio performs is without narrative story, instead evoking a sense of a relationship with a higher being.  

Why does Bergman go to religious lengths?  I do think that he views art as the closest thing to spiritual ecstacy.  While there are a handful of his films that show moderate respect towards the religious, the canon of his films scream of a frustrated atheism.  When he creates a work, often one where he has to treat something that could be considered uncouth as a form of entertainment, there is a sacrificial element to that.  Yeah, I think that sacrifice loses all meaning because I'm binging all of his films over the course of a year.  But from his perspective, that's what's going on.  He is the artist and he is willing to sacrifice his audience for the sheer messy act of creation.

It doesn't change the fact that I don't like this one.  The Black-Box Theatre style of design isn't helping.  The fact that we're now tapping a much-drained well is also frustrating.  Maybe it's that I am more guarded getting behind the avant-garde, but this movie doesn't really do it for me.  Yeah, it's interesting exploring Bergman's relationship to his art, but it's all a bit on the nose for me.

Not rated, but this is another Bergman movie about adultery and the casual cruelty that people inflict on one another.  There's a lot of what I'd describe as "kinda nudity".  It's at a distance.  The characters are naked.  Often, you don't know if you are actually seeing what you are seeing.  There is one shot that clearly has nudity up close.  The film also has a scene that can at least be labeled as sexual assault if not full-on rape.  This leads into a character prostituting herself.  There's also a little bit of violence and blood and a character attempts suicide.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Do you know how happy I would be if I could just get this whole thing done while I have time?  I mean, I absolutely don't have the time to write this blog in one sitting.  But I'm going to be in a stage of constant overwhelmed-ness for as long as I can think and it would be nice to have a really nice, completed blog about Sawdust and Tinsel before what few insights I had about the movie disappear from me.

I am honestly worried about that, by the way.  I was watching this movie and I had these lovely thoughts about the film.  But I'm stressed out now and all of those thoughts seem to be leaving me.  I'm worried that, the further I get out from the film, the more this blog will turn into something about overall vibes as opposed to poignant analysis.  There's a slight burden to write about Sawdust and Tinsel as well, considering that it might be one of Bergman's bangers.  I mean, I liked it.  I actually liked it more than a lot of the other ones that I watched in the box set, but I wonder if I'm burdened by the knowledge that this is one of his classics.  I always feel like I have to open my heart a little more to the movies that carry a certain amount of renown rather than simply absorbing it with a blank slate.  Is it a bad thing that I liked a classic, even if it falls into a lot of the tropes that Bergman often hits?

I mean, I am honestly brutally tired of the fact that Bergman keeps making movies about infidelity.  With this case, maybe Bergman is landing on the same page I am about infidelity.  This is one of the movies where the characters' problems all stem from the fact that they are cheating on the person that they promised that they wouldn't cheat on.  That's, at least, progress for Bergman, who often treats infidelity as simply a fact of life.  But Sawdust and Tinsel doesn't exactly fight that thought either.  Like many of Bergman's other films, these characters keep welcoming infidelity into their lives.  These moments are almost dictated by fate rather than the product of willful choices coupled with negligence. Albert and Anne's relationship is one that is based on infidelity.  It's one of those weird Bergman relationships where she's a 10 and he's a 4.  But that seems to be the norm of these things so I choose to ignore that fact.  These two are the product of workplace infidelity.  Albert hasn't seen his family in three years because he lives a nomadic lifestyle with the circus.  Anne is aware of the fact that he technically is married with children and not-so-secretly curses that Albert must interact with these people, albeit irresponsibly and sparingly.  Still, she knows what's up.  The thing that Bergman perpetuates is that, even though Albert and Anne seem to thrive in each other's companies, they are bound to find partners in other places.

In the case of Albert, which treats the Albert-Anne coupling as the healthy relationship, Albert yearns for a life with his wife, who is thriving without him.  If anything, it is because she does not need him.  I can't help but think to Scenes from a Marriage, knowing that the power dynamic has shifted that makes the characters somehow more attractive.  Anne does the thing that I just saw in the last Bergman movie (which I'm ashamed to say that I don't remember the title to) that had this chaste character tease (IT'S CALLED THE DEVIL'S EYE!) Don Juan only to become actually seduced by him.  Maybe I don't necessarily like Bergman's characterization of women.  There's this idea that women go around gaining pleasure at titillating men only to become enraptured by them.  Anyway, with the case of Sawdust and Tinsel, at least it all falls apart because of their respective cruelty to the others.

But what I found fascinating is the cruelty of everyone.  Bergman movies aren't exactly the healthiest places to hang out.  What's funny is that I keep viewing any artist in these movies as representations of Bergman himself.  If my job is to analyze these movies, I'm going to make these leaps.  Albert, in my head, is Bergman.  Oddly enough, I think that many of us view Ingmar Bergman as a hoity-toity, artsy-fartsy type, more in line with Mr. Sjuberg (I hope I have the right character).  But I view Bergman more as the type that views film as a subserviant medium to classic theatre.  So, if my forced analysis holds true, Bergman views himself as the circus director, trying to wrangle his troupe of actors from one project to another with the hope of moderate success.  Anyway, there's almost this expectation in the film that Sjuberg and Albert would be comrades in the trenches.  Both of these characters have had to be vulnerable to their audiences, presented exaggerated forms of themselves for audiences.  They both have sacrificed a sense of normalcy for art.  But with the dynamic of Sjuberg and Albert, it becomes this bullying project of high art versus low art, tying into the title of Sawdust and Tinsel.  The sawdust and the tinsel, not being literal in the case of the movie, are how the circus achieves a sense of wonder while the high art theatre embraces pagentry and high brow performance.  These two should get along, but instead there is a scorn for the lower art.

For such a smarty-pants film, you'd think that I would have the presence of mind to ignore something completely arbitrary, right?  I mean, this is a movie from a smart person for smart people.  But the entire time, I just kept thinking that Albert would have destroyed Frans in that fight.  For the sake of the story, Albert needs to get to a real low point.  Losing to Frans is the thing that drives him to partake in a one-player game of Russian Roulette, ultimately leading him to slaughter the bear.  But from a practical perspective, Frans is a bit of a wimp.  He's a guy who has had it cushy his entire life.  (I'm imbuing this character with a silver spoon in his mouth, despite the fact that we get criminally little about the character.)  I say that he doesn't really have the gumption because he treats sex like a power grab.  He dominates women because that is whom he is able to manipulate.  He's a weak dude who likes playing sexual games because he gets off not on the act itself, but on the humiliation that comes along with that.  Albert, however, has been on the road for three years.  He's built like a cement truck and has probably fought his way out of more than one scrap.  He's pissed and this is his house.  You would think that a guy like that would completely destroy someone like Frans.  Still, we have this moment.

Before I forget, I don't know what it was about Sawdust and Tinsel, but it reminded me more of a Kurosawa movie, like Rashomon, than another Bergman movie.  Oddly enough, it was the clown Frost and that despondent look in his face that reminded me of that movie.  Okay, moving on.

The funny thing about this movie, once again about cruelty, is that none of the characters are all that likable.  The movie starts off with the humilation of Frost.  Frost is our most likable character and he's a wet mop throughout the movie.  He's threatened by an insane Albert, who is willing to take Frost's life at the end almost as a suicide pact between performers. But Albert acts like Frost and he are friends who are willing to die for one another.  But we have to remember that the film starts off with the other circus performers getting the giggles knowing that Frost's wife is unfaithful to him and likes to seduce soldiers by the shore.  I have to imagine that Bergman is commenting on the myth of the found family.  Sure, these people stick together at the end of the movie and continue their travels together, even sticking together during the fight between Albert and Frans.  But they all still derive joy from Frost's lowest moment.  In fact, we see Albert guffawing in the flashback to their saddest time together. They find joy in the fact that Frost, who never really seems to do anyone harm, is the most overwhelmed by life's constant sadness.  It should also be pointed out that, as much as the circus folk stick together during the fight in tent, none of them really try breaking it up.  Even beyond that thought is the notion that the audience for the fight seemed to glean more joy out of a fight between a cast member and a member of the audience.  Bergman thinks very little about the integrity of humanity. 

Sawdust and Tinsel is pretty great.  I don't quite know why.  I think when Bergman gives us characters that are a little bit more esoteric, there's something about the storytelling that becomes fascinating.  Had this been one of my first Bergmans, I think I would have enjoyed it more.  I am very tired of the notion of cruel infidelity as a casual act. The next movie I'm writing, also a Bergman, does the same thing and it's just depressing.  But he does what he does and I guess I can't complain about that too much.

PG-13 for a bit of language that almost hits an R-rating.  There is definitely one f-bomb in this.  There's also a lot of era-accurate anti-semitism, coupled with some some characterization that is less than flattering about Jewish people.  While the movie wasn't really all that offensive, the language did catch me off-guard more than once in the film.  This is one of those movies that talks a lot as opposed to showing anything that may be questionable.

DIRECTOR: Robert Redford

I keep thinking that I'm giving myself a vacation from writing the blog...and then I watch another movie.  I'll be honest...I'm not sure that I've seen this one before or not.  Like, part of me is fairly convinced that I've seen it.  But I can't say that I remember any part of this movie outside of simply being part of the cultural zeitgeist.  Quiz Show, like a lot of movies from the '80s and '90s, might be the byproduct of a fading understanding of modern classics.  In my head, of course I have to watch Quiz Show.  People have made Quiz Show references.  But I am also painfully aware that, as people are consuming less and less non-FOMO media, this may be one of the last blogs about Quiz Show shy of novelty blogs who watch things ironically.

I want to dive directly into the moral ether here.  I desperately want to explore how I am a fundamentally different person than I was in 1994.  Admittedly, I was 11 at the time, which is the same age my son was.  He watched this with me until his bedtime.  But I also want to explore how I'm a different person than I was in 2016.  There was a time that I would have held Quiz Show as the quintessential film about the role of integrity and truth.  I'm pretty sure that, if I have seen Quiz Show before, it probably would have been in my early 20s.  Either in college or after college.  There was a period where I had watched so many movies in a contained period of time that I was sure to lose memory of if I've seen the movie or not.  But the thing that I like to think that I hold fast and true to is the notion of representing truth.  Ultimately, what Robert Redford made here was a movie about the importance of truth, even when nobody is really looking.  One of the central themes of the film is the notion that Dick Goodwin's investigation of Twenty-One comes out of the belief that the American people are being lied to and that is wrong.  

I should point out that I mostly liked the movie.  I might kvetch about Redford's take on 1958 is a bit too nostalgic and White.  But if we're looking at a movie that takes apart nuance, that's where Redford shines.  Okay, just be aware, that as I gripe and moan, it's part of the investigation of the nuance of the film.  Back to my central idea!  Dick Goodwin is looking into Twenty-One because they tout to be one of the most honest and challenging quiz shows on television.  When there are rumblings that things may not be completely above board, Goodwin becomes this one-man taskforce investigating how corrupt television is.  In the process, he realizes that he might be destroying a lot of people's lives, which is not his intent.  Redford goes even a step further, adding a lot of moral grey area for the contestants.  Van Doren, considering that he's the most charming and genuinely intelligent men you could possibly meet, comes across a little bit like a puppy / puppet in this grand design over at NBC.  He wants to make the most entertaining television possible.  He wants to advance the social cause for the advancement of education, championing his own vocation as professor while being a compelling and marketable contestant on this show.  He keeps hearing that this is how television is made.  He initially has hang-ups, but also had the issue of being a fish out of water.  After all, the guys who are telling him that it is okay to get the questions ahead of time do this all the time. He's the rookie who doesn't seem to know any better.  When he's wrapped up in a federal investigtion, he has come so far that he has almost no option but to lie.

Bravo, Redford.  It's what makes the movie interesting.  The bad guy is a guy who means well.  The foil to Van Doren, Stempel, is correct in his commitment to the truth, but is also wholly unlikable.  I don't love that Herbie Stempel, played by John Turturro, is often marred by Jewish stereotypes.  I would say that it might be something that is unconsequential to the story, but Stempel's entire argument --and rightly so --is that Jewish contestants tend to get dethroned by more likable and more traditionally handsome White males.  Sure, it makes the movie more complex knowing that Stempel is right and that he's the voice of truth in this movie.  But he's also incredibly unlikable, often harming the people around him for the sake of getting ahead.  He's not there as this bastion of truth, fighting for the underdog. Herbie Stempel is only bringing this to light because of his addiction to the limelight and that brings up all kind of questionable reads on the film as a whole.

But this is about me, right?  I made that my central point.  Quiz Show has the ironic position of being a movie that is commenting on 1958 Tinseltown from the position of 1994 when really, I view this movie commenting on the naivete of the '90s in the shadow of Trump's America.  Yeah, I'm going to go there again.  I've mentioned many times on this blog, simply due to the sheer glut of entries, that I'm a Star Trek fan.  Often, Star Trek roots its argument as one of integrity above all things.  After all, lying is not befitting of a Starfleet officer.  And I can get behind it.  As much as my faith has directed me to make moral choices, I can't deny that optimistic, ethically-challenging space operas have had almost more of an impact.  I do believe in truth.  (I also believe in justice and a better tomorrow.  I'm going to put "The American Way" on hold for this time period.) Quiz Show, at its core, is about the danger of the white lie.  The voiceover by Dan Enright as a dejected Charles Van Doren walks away talks about how everything is a lie.  No one was hurt.  People wanted to see a winner get all the questions right and that's what NBC provided for them.  It makes this whole idea kind of murky because we're meant to find Dan Enright a bit of a slimeball.  

Dan Enright, as the movie progresses, gets grosser and grosser.  He tells dangerous lies for the sake of protecting the show and avoiding the corporate bigwigs at NBC and Geritol from feeling any blowback that might come from negative press.  It doesn't take a lot to get me to rally against millionaires and billionaires on this blog.  If anything, I'm itching for the opportunity to take them down. I, too, hate NBC in this.  We're supposed to.  So when Dan ends the film with those words, excusing the comfortable lie, we're meant to hold him to task.  The problem is...Dan Enright's kind of right.

I think that Redford, as much as he made a movie using this line as the foundation for the story, might also agree with that.  After all, he intentionally muddied the waters.  Dick Goodwin doesn't get what he's shooting for, the studio heads.  Instead, the people he's trying to protect, like Charles Van Doren, come across as the real victims.  Redford presents something that is meant to be debated and not come to terms with.  And here's why I think that Dan Enright might be correct.

Illusion is art.  Sure, the game Twenty-One might be a cash grab.  But, as I'll be talking about in my next blog about Sawdust and Tinsel, there is value in both high art and low art.  For those unaware of George Melies, please watch Hugo.  It's a gorgeous movie about a fascinating man.  Yeah, it's historical fiction, but the history part is still mostly intact.  Melies, like many magicians, presented illusions as reality.  It's the reason that we find magic to be something so beautiful.  We know, in the back of our minds, that the laws of physics --when it comes to magic trick --are not being broken.  But those people who allow their minds to believe in the impossible, even if for a moment, appreciate magic all that much more than the broken skeptic.  The reason that Twenty-One presented all of the showmanship of locking up the questions in a bank vault is the magic trick.  That is an extra step that is unnecessary to a quiz game.  We don't tend to do that anymore.  Game shows, as fun as they may be, aren't required viewing as much as they used to be.  It doesn't change the fact that we have replaced the bank vault for moving lights and lavish sets.  There's a line in The Incredibles that my son and I quote all the time.  Bob ask the little kid what he's waiting for and the kid replies, "I don't know.  Something amazing, I guess?"  What Twenty-One provided was the notion that people were capable of amazing, impossible things.

Now, does this mean that all truth is dead?  No.  I think the problem I have is that there is truth that matters and truth that doesn't matter.  Sure, the commandment is "Thou shall not bear false witness," implying that lying, from any perspective, is morally awful.  (Note: In my intro level ethics class, I fought that some lying was not only morally neutral, but a good.  I was debated for a long time by a professor who did not convince me, but I also acknowledge that this man spent his entire career doing this and I wasn't going to have ground to stand on as a layman.)  It's just that I like the notion of the magician being coy about truth while I hate the President demolishing the White House after saying he wasn't going to touch it.  I hate that the same man sent a legal resident to a foreign country and called him a human trafficker / gang member because it made his job easier.  I hate that he sent the military into cities because they're war-ravaged hellholes when, in truth, he just wanted to flex dominance.  That's lying.  When an artist tells you to "trust me," there's joy in knowing that, ultimately, knowing the emotional truth of something is far more interesting than the reality of what happened.  When I look at conflicting moments in the Bible, I don't think that the Bible's lying to me.  I think people are telling a story where the reality may miss the details, but the core of it is the truth of the moment.  

Yeah, the NBC people deceived its audience.  Some people might be mad about it.  But I also know that there are millions of wrestling fans who are told by non-fans that wrestling is fake, but they still choose to believe.  I know that The Blair Witch Project scared me pretty good when I was in high school because the producers told me it was real.  I cherish that illusion because, for a second, I had to question the world around me.  Yeah, was I glad when I found out the reality of the situation?  Sure.  I'm going to deep dive anything.  Do I hate AI?  Sure.  I hate it because that lie hurts people.  But an artist, even as low art as something like a game show, tells its audience that they are making the impossible possible?  I don't hate that.  It's not a moral good, but it is the choice of an artist and I think that might be something else.

Also, everyone watch F for Fake.  That's a better version of this story.

PG-13, but that's only by a hair.  If you have any memory of the Leslie Nielsen franchise entries, the point is to push the line of what is considered in questionable taste.  As such, the movie has both sex and sexual innuendo.  There is also a lot of death, but the death is all silly nonsense.  If anything, one consistent trait is that there is a lot of inappropriate stuff, but all done in a lighthearted and intentionally silly tone.  

DIRECTOR: Akiva Schaffer

Guys!  I don't have to write about another horror movie.  I just found out that a horror movie that I was mildly excited about watching just dropped on Netflix and I said, "No, thank you."  I'm in the mood for lighter stuff now.  We actually had a  bit of a discussion in class today for what genre is most appropriate for November.  My argument is that November is for rom-coms.  It's cozy.  It's nice.  We're not fully Christmas, but we're detoxing from the mass death that was Spooky Season.  I don't know.  You tell me.

I have to apologize for this blog, by the way.  I watched The Naked Gun in the least condusive way imaginable.  In fact, it was so bad that it gave me a very specific perspective on the movie.  I watched the first half of the movie three weeks ago and then finished it up two nights ago.  I know!  It's not that long of a movie.  We planned to getting around to it, but then we discovered that our lives are horribly busy and it slipped our minds.  Now, how does this give me insight into a movie like The Naked Gun?  My theory is that comedy is all about circumstance and environment.

I remember watching The Wedding Singer in the theater.  It was packed.  These were in the halcyon days of people actually going out to the cinema in droves, especially when it came to opening nights.  People saw everything and that was heaven.  (Note:  It was in this moment that i realized how much I miss going to the movies, let alone going to the movies regularly.)  Seeing The Wedding Singer with a loud and boisterous audience made that movie seem like the funniest thing that had ever existed.  It was so good that I had to purchase the movie on home video as soon as it was available.  (I don't have a date in my head, so I don't remember if it was VHS or DVD.  I think DVD because I owned that DVD for a while.) But when I watched it at home, by myself, it wasn't all that funny.  If anything, I remember being kind of put off by the movie.  Now, I wasn't sure if it was a matter of having already seen the jokes, the surprise element was gone or if it came down to the fact that I was watching the movie alone that damned the film.  I do believe that film should be a communal experience.  But even more than just film, I do believe that comedy thrives on the symbiotic relationship of the people in the theater.  

When it comes to The Naked Gun, I loved the first half.  My wife and I watched the first half and I found myself giggling throughout.  So was she.  I was surprised.  My wife is a classy lady and The Naked Gun movies have never shied away from their targeted audiences of juvenile men.  But watching it together, we were chuckling pretty hard.  But we started it late and we had to get up.  Three weeks later, I was excited to finish the movie.  I don't think that my wife gave it a second thought.  If anything, she was doing anything that she could to tune the movie out.  She was on her phone and on her laptop throughout the film, so I felt like I was watching it alone.  And, as a result, I thought the second half of the movie wasn't very good.

Now, the odds that Akiva Shaffer made a movie where the first half was comic genius and the second half was unfunny buffoonery can't be accurate.  Instead, I realized that it was most likely the circumstances.  A lot of you are saying, "Of course that's how it works.  That's life."  I'm not a complete moron.  Just a partial one.  The bigger problem is wondering how to approach a film when writing about it when you have so much user baggage determining if something is funny.  It's not like I didn't laugh at all in that second half.  (Although, the snowman scene that everyone talked about made me want to laugh, but that was me trying to meet the movie halfway.) 

Part of what I need to come to grips with is that I miss comedies and the theatrical experience of those comedies.  While there is mounting evidence that movie theaters are dying a prolonged slow death, I don't know how much of that data is subjective or if they actually are dying.  Let's say this: I miss going to the movie theaters.  If I didn't have so many kids and so much responsibility, I would be going to the movies all the time.  The Naked Gun is a movie that needs a packed house to work as well as some of the bits allow.  I refuse to call this movie a "stupid comedy", although my guts desperately want me to.  For a long time, I've held onto the notion that many of the comedies that we dismiss as "stupid" might be some of the smartest writing that is out there.  I'm a guy who laughs going on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disney World.  I find puns and timing to be something that brings me great joy.  From a writing perspective, a lot of The Naked Gun works.  Golly, there are a lot of beautiful cornball jokes in the movie.  

But, then, why do I hate the Scary Movie franchise?  I mean, I kind of liked The Naked Gun.  The Naked Gun, all of the movies, including stuff from Police Squad!, are in the same genre as Scary Movie.  These are all spoof / parody films.  I also liked most of Mel Brooks's canon, especially when I was in high school.  Is it because I'm a snob?  Maybe.  So much of The Naked Gun was me saying, "Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson have no right being this good in this movie."  But I do question whether or not it was their straight talent or if it was the novelty of it all.  That really might be the case for how I'm feeling about the movie.  It does feel like a bit of a novelty to revisit the world of The Naked Gun.  These movies are incredibly silly and have no pretense of being more than what they are presenting.

Maybe that's the frustrating thing when it comes to trying to write about these movies.  I am a different person than I was when Leslie Neeson was my Frank Drebin.  (This very vague and indecisive blog was brought to you by "Subjectivity."  It's what's for YOUR dinner.)  I'm now in a world where I'm looking at all art as something that's meant to change its audience.  For the most part, with the exception of my favorite joke in the movie, the movie is apolotical (which I cannot stress enough, is a form of politics.) While I want more movies like The Naked Gun, I honestly don't see much point in them.  I've probably used this simile dozens of time on this blog in various entries, but this feels like just eating frosting.  There's no substance to The Naked Gun outside the fact that it has some absolutely silly jokes and it seems like I should be happy for Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson.  Every part of this movie is executed to what the director wanted.  There's nothing wrong with the movie.  But I also know that, when my wife stopped watching the movie, I found it unfunny.  That's frustrating because the movie did nothing wrong outside of fail to deliver anything of deep meaning, which was the movie's goal.  

Why do I have to hold The Naked Gun to a standard of quality of a Criterion picture?  There is value to high and low art.  We need low art to appreciate high art.  Similarly, low art has value in itself.  The jokes work, but gosh darn it if 90% of the jokes seem to have dislodged themselves from my brain because they were mostly fine.  I want to like this movie more than I do and that's a huge bummer.  

Please visit the Collections Page for all the Final Destination movies...all in one spot!

Rated R for horrific deaths, leaning a little harder into Saw style deaths than the previous entries.  Still, while gory, it isn't outside the scope of the previous films.  If anything, the upsetting part is the contemporary filming styles that somehow make these moments seem a little more troubling.  There isn't any sex or nudity, which is a breath of fresh air because, as silly as the movie gets, it doesn't feel superfluous.  Still, the movie is upsetting and gory as heck.  

DIRECTORS: Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein

Yeah!  I cheated!  I jumped the line to watch Final Destination: Bloodlines an hour earlier than I thought.  If the Final Destination movies are all about Death's Design, I'm all about the algorithm.   But I wanted, for once, to be done talking about horror movies once November showed up.  Also, like, I have a nice break from writing after this.  Taking all that into consideration, my viewership just jumped up in the middle of the night.  It could entirely be bots.  Who knows?  Considering that Cujo didn't get a lot of Threads attention, that makes the most amount of sense.  Still, I can't deny how good it feels to see that number spike up again.  I'm easily manipulated.

Before we go into the specifics of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I want to talk about the franchise as a whole.  I have always kind of shied away from these movies when it came to the blog.  On paper, I'm against gore.  I'm pro-character.  I'm pro-plot.  From any breakdown of these movies, I should absolutely hate this series.  As I've stated in all of my other entries, I realized that these movies are excuses for VFX artists to strut their stuff and story be darned.  I accepted that pretty darned quickly.  And when I accepted that, I had a really good time.  I would never advocate for stupid movies.  Okay, almost never, because he I am, talking about how sometimes a stupid movie franchise is exactly what is needed.  

The funny thing is, Final Destination, as a franchise, might be the most existential concept in the world.  It is a movie that personifies mortality.  It is a constant commentary on how anyone one of us, at any moment, are a loose screw away from being turned into a bag of red goo.  I mean, we're meant to laugh and scream at these moments.  There should be something profound to be said about how life is fleeting and that no one is immortal.  Instead, from moment one of this series, the narrative is something far sillier than anything I just wrote.  Instead of actually treating Death as something majestic, it's treated as a bit of a petulant child who doesn't like to be stymied.  

This kind of brings me to Bloodlines.  Bloodlines finally did the thing that I wanted the series to do: Death by Natural Causes.  I was always wondering why --in a completely practical society --that people didn't just...die.  I mean, if Death is really hurt by people surviving the grand design, why go through all the showmanship that these movies thrive on?  Why have the most gory disaster ever to pulp people by acts of God?  People die natural deaths all the time.  They die for no reason.  Do you know why Death is a crybaby about losing?  Because dying of cancer is all just a little bit sad.  By the way, I was actually heartbroken by seeing Tony Todd appearing in his last on screen film only to have him, in character, dying of cancer.  That's a bit rough.  It seems a little tactless on the part of the filmmakers.  But in my head, Tony Todd probably appreciated being welcomed back to the franchise.  Even moreso, he was able to put a cap and closure on his character, which is nice in a really screwed up way.  

Anyway, I have to say that, while I enjoyed Bloodlines more than many other entries in the franchise, I was a bit let down.  I'm going to complain for a while before I start talking about the things I liked.  It's what I always do.  (But what I also do is forget what I like and then, in a desperate attempt to close up yet another blog entry, just cap it off without the counterpoint.  I, at least, recognize some of my own inadequacies!)  I just spent the last two paragraphs talking about Death's personality, at least based on the Rube Goldberg events that happen in these movies.  The Death of Bloodlines might be the most confusing version of Death yet.  The opening sequence of the film, which is probably the most impressive opening death sequence, takes place in the '50s or '60s.  We have a World's Fair style exhibit of a Space Needle inspired Sky View Tower.  Now, we are all waiting for this thing to start crashing to the ground.  Because the filmmakers wanted to have this grandiose spectacle ever, don't allow the collapse of this tower to be in line with natural disasters.  A million things go wrong to make this tower collapse.  But the problem is that it doesn't really feel like Death's personality is coming through.   Maybe this is a bit of headcanon when it comes to this series, but I see the reason that Death is so spiteful in these films is that he sets these events in motion long before the actual bullet is fired.  These are stories of entropy and timing.  In the case of Bloodlines, Death puts the penny in the fountain in viewing of the child, who throws it off the roof, forcing it into the ventilation system.  Everything that happens poorly in the story should come from the ventilation system.  Instead, we have three separate wild coincidences (can't spell "coincidence" without "coin") that makes this seem absurd.  There's no reason for the split.  It could have just played out stemming from the coin.  The coin stops the fan.  The fan breaks, exposing the building to flammable gas.  The flambee blows up the main room, exploding the floor.  The explosion, combined with the people shifting in the building, tips the tower, causing the whole thing to collapse.  See?  Natural disaster.  Having the coin, the unscrewing of the pins, and the cracked glass floor is just silly.  

Also, Iris's den makes not a lick of sense.  What Bloodlines is doing is evoking Halloween Ends.  At least that trilogy.  And Halloween Ends is evoking Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  There's this cool concept that we have this battle weary woman, the one who has beat the odds so many times that she will not allow the evil to come to her without a fortress between the monster and her.  And, for Halloween and Terminator, that totally makes sense.  It's actually absurd that Sydney Prescott is about to fight Ghostface again and doesn't have a bunker.  But Iris's bunker makes no sense.  It's meant to look cool, not be effective.  The fact that it just exploded when other people tried using it kind of says that Iris would have died minutes into living there.  The only real safe place, in my head, is what Ali Larter's character (you know, the one with the absurd name?) does in Final Destination 2.  A padded cell is the only thing that even makes a lick of sense.  

Finally, as much as I like this scene, I want to talk about Erik and the tattoo parlor.  I mean, I love the sequence.  It's really gruesome and ornate.  But also, a fakeout?  I love a good fakeout.  I really do.  I like the idea that we were so invested in something happening, only to have that fade to something else.  But that sequence is in line with the personality that Death has in this movie.  It's so elaborate.  It also has the absurdity that Final Destination is known for.  The odds for those things to happen in succession is something that you only really see in these movies.  Like, the chain in the ceiling hits Erik's piercing perfectly and it raises him to the ceiling?  Yeah, I'm glad that he survived.  I don't know how he survived, but I'm glad he did.  But why would Death be playing with Erik the way he did.  Does Death not like Erik?  Like, Erik gets put through the wringer (and MRI machine).  What's the point of that?  Was Death just feeling a bit cheeky?  Or was Death aware that he was a character inside of a movie, which is entirely too frustrating.

But let's start talking about what I liked about the movie.  The shortest contribution is that it does something new.  I like that we have a story not about the person who escaped the tragedy, but the literal bloodline of that person.  The subtitle Bloodlines is such a trope, but Final Destination finally earned the title.  It's so good.  It plays with the wider implications of an absurd premise and I dig that a lot.  Sure, I wish we weren't seeing only Iris's family deal with the repercussions of the Sky Tower incident.  But at least it is something new to look at.

I do love Tony Todd's closure in this movie.  Yeah, we all wanted Bloodworth to be some kind of supernatural creature or maybe even the personificaiton of Death himself.  But I do like that we get a non-hamfisted origin story of this character.  It gives us enough of an insight into why this mystery figure is so knowledgable about how Death works while closing the book on a pantheon of characters all about.  If I had one gripe, Bludworth changes in this movie based on what we discover about him.  Bludworth, in the other films, almost seems gleeful about the trials that the survivors have to go through. Those clues were always cryptic because there was something sinisterly impish about the character as a whole.  Instead, Todd delivers a much more approachable version of Bludworth now that we know that he is the last survivor of the tower.  As morbid as it is to talk about this, it also raises a question of if Bludworth can die of his cancer if Stefani and Charlie didn't get smooshed by --once again --logs being transported.  (Golly, these people are aware of what phobia this franchise created and gosh darn it if they weren't going to exploit it.) 

But the final thing that I love that it retconned a retcon and made it work.  I still don't like that reviving a dead person is a loophole in the whole plan.  But at least the movie didn't ignore Final Destination 2.  The ending of Final Destination 2 always rubbed me the wrong way.  Instead, Bloodlines is a fanboy's obsession.  It's someone who tried to make all the various dumb ideas work and is mostly successful.  Like, none of it feels like it is trying too hard.  Instead, it says "There are two ways to escape Death and both are incredibly difficult."  And, to go beyond that, it also plays with the notion of tropes.  I love that Stefani is just Death's plaything at the end of the film.  We've all seen that someone breathing again is "being brought back from the dead" and the movie just calls shannanigans on that.  That kind of stuff brings me joy.

Again, these movies are about just enjoying the glee of a horror movie.  These movies seem to be filmmakers trying to gross each other out and there's something kind of sweet --if not deranged --about that kind of filmmaking.  Yeah, I'm not going to have some kind of deep moment with these films.  Instead, it's a reminder of why we go to the cinema.  We want to scream and giggle and that's what these movies are good for.  They aren't scary so much as they are surprising and fun.  So I don't regret this series.  Not one bit.

Rated R for being generally traumatic, especially when it comes to children in actual peril.  Like, Tad screaming and being afraid of the dog is actually pretty darned upsetting.  But there's also a moderate amount of gore.  You don't really get gore from violence, but Cujo, as the story progresses, gets more and more funky.  There's also an affair in the story that leads to an attempted rape.  While there is no nudity, it is pretty visceral.  Couple that with some language and this movie has a well-deserved R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Lewis Teague

I'm gaming the system, guys.  I will say that I watched Cujo the honest way.  It was on the schedule.  I watched it during the workout.  But I know that tomorrow is Halloween and I really want to get the last Final Destination movie out before I close up October.  So I decided to jump ahead of the TV show that I was supposed to watch in-between and knock out that last entry.  Maybe there's a scenario that I am able to write about both Cujo and Final Destination: Bloodlines before people start heading out for Trick-or-Treating.  We'll see.

A lot of this blog is going to be a discussion about the book and the movie.  Like my blog of Christine, I just finished the novel, which inspired a viewing of the film adaptation.  Like with Christine, I was skeptical at the notion of Cujo as a story.  After all, it seems like a rabid dog seems like a fairly minor threat for a Stephen King novel.   Well, guess what?  Stephen King was probably aware of that and simply embraced it.  In my head, a rabid dog should be taken out by a stray bullet.  Heck, King even acknolwedges it in the novel by citing Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.  He knows what's up.  A dog shouldn't be able to rip apart a town, so King lets the story be incredibly small.  And, can I tell you something?  That's so good.  

There's something refreshing about the notion of a story understanding that scope matters.  While I'm a big fan of Avengers: Age of Ultron (against everyone else's opinion), I do wish that Whedon's initial statement about the movie held true.  Not every story has to be about escalation.  Where Cujo thrives is understanding that characters matter.  Ultimately, I find it weird that the book and the adaptation are called Cujo.  Yeah, the dog is the threat to all of the characters.  In the same way that Christine killed folks, Cujo is responsible for all of the deaths in the story.  Okay, except for those committed before this book with Frank Dodd.  (Now I wish that I read The Dead Zone first, another book that I own.  Frank Dodd was a character in that one.) In some ways, the story is so small that it almost reads as a disaster film.  I know.  Disaster stories tend to be large in scope.  But really, a disaster narrative tends to focus on a core group of characters who must survive the impossible.  There's no malice on the part of the disaster.  There are deaths in the background.  But we tend to care about these characters against something that can't be fought directly.  We care about Donna and Tad.  Yeah, Cujo can rip through Deputy / Sheriff Bannerman and Joe Camber all day long.  But those are just establishing that the disaster is something that needs to be taken seriously.  When we watch a disaster movie, those characters are so expendable that they often don't even have names.  

And the threat to Tad and Donna isn't necessarily the dog either.  Yeah, Cujo will get them if they leave the car.  The movie and the book go through a lot of backflip establishing that there's a good chance that Cujo is unable to get into the Pinto.  He can damage it pretty good.  He can give them some pretty good scares.  But both versions of the story seem pretty keen on Cujo being on the outside and the real danger is on the inside.  It's a story about setting because that car is getting hot and no one is coming to get them.  There's no food.  There's no water.  Any attempt at self-care is going to be violated by this Saint Bernard with rabies outside.  I mean, the dog dies by baseball bat (and revolver, if the movie is to be believed).  That isn't exactly Jason.  Instead, what kind of spirals out of this claustropobia-inducing car is the notion that Donna doesn't know what she's doing.  

There's some really cool stuff going on with Donna in terms of storytelling coupled with some mildly gross, kinda-sorta sexist stuff going on here.  Let's put the gross stuff first.  Vic is a bit of a Mary Sue in this story.  He's the perfect man, who has been wronged by the woman in his life.  Yes, we are supposed to have a mild level of sympathy for Donna, whose relationship with Steve Kemp was due to the slow death of a marriage.  But Vic never really faces many of his own demons in this story.  King points out that, in the heat of an arguement, Vic says something that he can't take back.  But ultimately, the slight is mild in the grand scheme of things and Vic's biggest crime is that he can't see past his own victim blinders to consider that Donna and Tad might be at the Cambers.  I don't love that Donna is so demonized through the story that we have to question her ability to mother because she has had this affair in the first two acts of the story.  It does color some of the characterization, especially when she takes out her frustration on Tad.  It also kind of hurts that Donna is juxtaposed to Vic, who is such a good father that it makes her seem incompetent, no matter what she does.  Sure, it makes compelling storytelling.  But I do wish that Vic sucked just a little more so it didn't make Donna look like a demon.

But what is interesting is that it talks about how fallible a parent is.  That's the story.  Again, I find it weird that the film is called Cujo because the story is about Donna in the car.  I mean, King made the right choice. The fact that this killer Saint Bernard is part of the cultural zeitgeist means that King was doing his job properly.  Still, the story is ultimately about mother and son and feeling helpless in the light of something that no one can control.  King spends a lot of the story pulling every safety net away from these characters.  In reality, the odds of these two being stuck in this boiling hot car for multiple days is addressed.  After all, Donna is right.  The postman should be coming to deliver the mail.  Vic should be able to return home and figure out that the car is missing instead of thinking that Steve Kemp kidnapped his family.  There are all these beats that force Donna to go through the unthinkable.  Her son is dying in front of her and she feels helpless to do anything about it.  That's the story and I find that story completely intriguing.  

And maybe that's what I'm slightly frustrated with this movie.  I don't want to throw any stones at the acting.  I want to commend Danny Pintauro as Tad.  Honestly, this is a kid acting.  It's the most effective thing that I've ever seen.  Pintauro did such a realistic job of being a terrified kid that I was kind of concerned that Teague was pulling a Stanley Kubrick and torturing his actors to get a proper reaction.  I mean, I really hope that's not the case because I've seen scared kids before and it looks like Tad in Cujo.  But Teague, as functional as this movie is, doesn't really push cinema too hard in this movie.  The film hits all of the beats of the book.  I mean, when I say that this is a faithful adaptation, for the most part, of the novel, I cannot stress enough how many of the details that this movie hits.  But in the process of doing that, we forgot that the crux of the film needs to be about Donna in that car.  While those scenes are great and do the job, I don't know if I get enough of the inner turmoil of Donna.  If anything, I get the idea that she's scared, which is what a horror movie does.  But I don't see a lot of the self-reproach that I kind of imagine Donna should be having.  In my head, there's a lot of failing to hold it together for the sake of Tad.  Instead, I get the vibe that Tad is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  It's Tad's reaction that makes the entire third act scary.  

The choice to let Tad survive is a choice for sure.  Leonard Maltin had a problem with Tad suriviving. This makes me feel a little bit gross, but I do think that cinema has always made kid death taboo.  I mean, the core of Pet Sematary is about kid death.  But it does matter that Tad survives this one.  I don't know if it is make-or-break.  But it still resonates with me.
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So part of me is kind of thinking that the film adaptation of Cujo is as effective as a movie about a book can be.  But I also wanted something with a bit more personality.  There are times where Cujo almost reads as a made-for-TV movie.  It's good.  It hits all of the notes.  But I don't get a lot of soul (outside of Tad) for this movie.  Still, I don't regret watching this one.  It does the job and that's not the worst thing in the world.

R, and this one is almost exclusively for gore.  Maybe it was an attempt to class it up just a little bit from what I consider the trashiest entry (The Final Destination), but this one seemed somehow more about the scares rather than the exploitation.  That being said, one of the survivors in this one is a sleeze.  That's his entire personality: sleeze.  So he's going to tell some raunchy jokes.  But the thing that is most upsetting is that we're back to the old gross visual effects when it comes to the accidents once more.

DIRECTOR: Steven Quale

They did it!  They Nostradamused my blog and knew what I hated so much about the last entry and course corrected entirely, leaving me with the best entry in the franchise...so far.  I mean, I hear glorious things about the final entry in the series, which is the next Final Destination movie that I have to get through.  So, you know, I'm not in a bad place.

But I have to tell you, this feels like it was meant to be the last entry in the franchise.  I love confessing stupid things on this blog, so I'll announce freely and without reservation that I skimmed the Wikipedia page.  The word "skimmed" is doing some heavy lifting there because there's a very good chance that I missed the piece of information that I was looking for.  I checked Wikipedia exclusively for an announcement that this as meant to be the last entry in the franchise.  Instead, I found out that the last one, The Final Destination, was meant to be the last one.  Instead, the people behind these movies rushed Final Destination 5 into production.  The other entries in the series are spread three years apart while the distance between The Final Destination and Final Destination 5 are only two years apart.  For a movie that isn't supposed to exist, I find it fascinating that, somehow, Final Destination 5 came out with such a level of class that I was taken aback.

I mean, I want to jump right to the big reveal.  The big reveal was icing on the cake for me.  I was watching this film honestly enjoying it and holding it as the standard for the franchise.  I'll try to talk about that later.  But the reveal is such a beautiful send up of the series as a whole.  Making the film a secret prequel to the first film is honestly a level of genius that I wasn't quite ready for.  I don't know if it works in terms of aesthetics.  The only real hint that you get for this secretly being a prequel is Isaac's phone and the VHS tape on the bus.  These are two things that almost feel like they were put there for the viewer watching this film in 2025 versus someone watching it in 2011.  Of course in 2025 did I assume that people were still using Motorola Razrs and VHS were more commonplace.  I have to remember that my wife bought me my first iPhone when we started dating in 2009.  It's that level of attention that I should have been holding onto when watching the film.  But there's something a little special about dismounting on this idea.  The funny things about prequels is that you often have your hands tied into what you are allowed to do with storytelling.  After all, you can't undo the events or specialness of the original film.  And the sequels to Final Destination seem to treat the Paris Flight 180 as this watershed moment for how death deals with being cheated, so you can't have this bridge accident be the center of attention.  But none of it feels like it is beholden to the original film --yet all the puzzle pieces work!  It's honestly rock-solid storytelling in a franchise that often does not care about story.

We were obsessed with The Office in 2011, right?  I mean, there had to be someone in the production department who was obsessed with this show during the making of this film.  While I do think that this movie is perhaps the pinnacle of the franchise so far, it does feel like the movie is going out of their way to put things in this Dunder Mifflin style location and have the bully factory worker named Roy while Todd Packer shows up as the boss of this place.  There's, like, a billion little things about this that seem to be a send-up to that show.  But even more than that, the story doesn't really need the office so much as it needs the location so Roy can die by hook to the jaw.  It's really weird that everyone in this office environment holds two jobs.  Perhaps it's the go-getterness of 2011 --an era that infamously lambasted millennials as lazy --to have every character have two jobs.  I mean, from a Final Destination screenwriter's perspective, two jobs means two locations with different horrors that could occur.  (Also, I don't think that the gymnast death could look like that.  It was a bit much.) But it is kind of fun having The Office dynamic while creating a movie that absolutely had nothing to do with The Office.

But the thing that absolutely made me love it is an embracing of the thesis.  I've been writing these things for the month.  I have now watched the majority of the Final Destination films and, for the most part, no regrets.  They are fun movies, if they are lacking a little bit on the nutrition of film.  But I always theorized that the Final Destination movies should have been a home for special effects dorks to have free rein over making a movie that highlights gory deaths.  Now, Parts One through Three absolutely lived up to that edict.  But Final Destination 5 completely crushed that.  It is a movie that not only has good special effects (for the most part), but also the film looks great.  I know.  A lot of this is that color grading that movies in the 2010s absolutely loved.  But it also gave the film a sense of not just being a throwaway entry in a long running series.  I can't stress how dumb this franchise is.  Dumb is not a bad thing, in cases of Final Destination movies.  These are movies made for the sake of making movies.  But do you understand how much better a movie feels when it seems like the director kind of cares.  Like, he shot the movie well.  He made us like and dislike characters and that's something that I don't want to necessarily ignore or downplay.  

God bless Final Destination 5 for picking up a thread from Final Destination 3 that I felt was overlooked.  One of the things that I thought Final Destination needed as a franchise was the notion that there needed to be a bad guy to rally against.  One thing that was getting increasingly muddy was the effect of free will against fate.  It's a central concept (in, if I may repeat myself, what is an incredibly dumb premise) that keeps kind of stepping on its own toes.  Sometimes, free will is the bringer of respite. Sometimes, it's all part of death's plan. It's a mess, if I may be honest.  But when you make a character have a reason to start murdering other characters, that makes the story have some kind of investment in motivation.  Now, I'm not going to say that Final Destination 5 is brilliant in terms of choices going into these movies.  After all, Peter choosing Molly as his target really makes you do some mental backflips to figure out his motives.  He says that he can't kill some stranger because they've done nothing to deserve it.  But Peter believes that Sam saving Molly in both realities makes her undeserving of life?  I mean, I don't quite get it.  It almost feels like Peter is arbitrarily mad at Sam for giving him a second chance at life.  Whatever.  They wanted the story to have some personal stakes and I get the desire to make that happen in this story.  

But this also leads to a weird retcon.  Don't get me wrong.  Final Destination 5 absolutely made the right choice in changing the rules of death.  One thing that completely frustrated me about Final Destination 2 was the fact that Death's plan could only be overwritten with new life. That seems like Death would get more mad about that.  (I also love that I know that Final Destination 2, while being canonical, even going as far as to show the logging truck in Final Destination 5, is ignoring its own rules.)  But I love that Death would be satiated with one of the survivors swapping lives with someone else.  That Nathan epiphany when we find out that Roy was dying of cancer is pretty fantastic.  Silly, but fantastic.  I champion this retcon because it makes Death a character that is oddly spiteful.  I mean, think about it.  One of the things that always kind of bothers me about this series is the idea that these people have to die by some kind of Rube Goldberg killing accident.  Death could easily just give people some kind of aneurysm and that would be in line with Death's master plan.  But making these deaths horrific every single time means that Death's kind of spiteful.  That's why I've been capitalizing the first letter in death because this is a personality attacking each of these surivors in the most salty way possible.  So the notion that Death would get a kick on these guys turning on each other.

It also gives Tony Todd's character a closer tie to Death.  I always treated Mr. Bludworth as some kind of old soul, like Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who had insight into the things that mere mortals could not understand.  Maybe he was a little imp or something or a medium who had insight into the afterlife.  Nope.  I'm saying now that Tony Todd's Bludworth might be Death himself.  It would explain the changing of the rules.  It's how Death is feeling in the moment.  And with the case of Final Destination 5, instead of having simply the one visit by the survivors looking into what is happening, Bludworth is stalking them at every death.  Yeah, yeah, he's a coroner.  Of course he'd be picking up these bodies as he goes along.  But there's almost something gleeful at seeing these kids being manipulated into their respective scenarios.

Would I like this movie as much if I hadn't just watched the nadir of the series, The Final Destination?  Maybe not.  But after seeing a movie that straight up bothered me, Final Destination 5 comes across as a breath of fresh air.  The movie works all around.  It's still fun, but it's also filmed with a sense of respect that I hadn't seen coming.  I hope I can knock out two more movies before Friday.  It's going to be tight, but I think that I can do it.  Maybe.  I don't know.

Rated R for gore and generally upsetting stuff.  There were a couple of scenes where my wife asked me to tell her when it was over.  It's that kind of movie.  While Zach Cregger also did Barbarian, this isn't as brutal as that film.  But that's a pretty high bar to match in terms of upsetting imagery.  This one has that in spades.  Also, there's a bit of alcoholism, sexuality, language and violence thrown into the movie.  It's all a bit much.

DIRECTOR:  Zach Cregger

How much do I want this blog done?  Like, a lot.  How much do I want to write it?  Like, not at all.  The funny thing is that I really enjoyed Weapons.  That's not a shock.  Everyone seems to be really getting into the movie and I'm actually pretty late to the game.  I'm one of those HBO Max folks now.  But I want to be lazy like I've been all day.  Also, I know that I have another movie after this to write about, so that's just making this whole process seem overwhelming.  Don't worry, folks.  I made myself a late night cup of Earl Grey and, hopefully, that will get me through this overwhelming, self-imposed torture I've decided on.

People lost their minds for Barbarian, right?  I mean, I really liked it.  I thought the opening act of the movie was one of the most clever horror movie openings that I've seen in a long time.  I'm also a fan of The Whitest Kids U Know, so I have that going for me.  But I have to say that Weapons is something else.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it is my favorite witch horror movie.  That's a pretty low bar.  I don't know why witches don't really do it for me.   I kind of want to break that down, if only for an excuse to dump a lot of writing onto this blog.  But I don't know why.  I find them normally silly or toeing the line into other monsters' lanes.  But Gladys, for some reason, works.  Maybe its because she's so absurd of a character that I can't help but find her charismatic.  I actually am reminded a lot of the OG film of Roald Dahl's The Witches.  It's the cackling that we get from the Werid Sisters of Macbeth that we haven't really seen in a lot of films lately.  I kind of blame the A24 embracing of the super dry and subdued witches.  But Cregger, with his comedy background, knows how to play up that real discomfort that comes from a comical character being the scariest thing in the room.

Now, I have to tell you, my wife didn't care for this movie.  She doesn't like horror.  She's a lovely lady who gives me my horror movie on Halloween.  And, nomally, I don't have a horror movie in the chamber to watch.  We tend to watch a lot of garbage on Halloween, mainly because I've seen too many horror movies and I'm trying to find something that might intellectually tickle us as well.  Well, this is the first year that I feel like I've absolutely picked a gem.  We watched it a little early because I've been avoiding spoilers for this long and I really wanted to see this movie.  The reason why I'm prefacing all of this is because I want to talk about the fact that Zach Cregger is probably one of the best directors out there right now.  I can't help but make the natural connection to Jordan Peele.  Both of these writer / directors came from a sketch comedy background and I'm trying to find the throughline that brings them from short form, occasionally low-budget storytelling to making feature length films that look absolutely gorgeous while lifting up the genre.  

The easy answer is that both comedy and horror depend on the understanding of how surprise and suspense work.  But here's the deal: while Key & Peele looked gorgeous, The Whitest Kids U Know was functional at best.  I laughed at it because it was funny.  But I never imagine that Zach Cregger cut his teeth making those clips.  I also know that there was a Whitest Kids movie that infamously looked terrible.  Instead, maybe there's this drive to be something more than simply a sketch director.  These guys happened to be funny, but also seem to have a genuine appreciation for film.  We've seen movies switch out perspectives before.  Tarantino's done it a few times, most notably in Pulp Fiction.  But these are both dudes who understand that genre storytelling have gotten the raw deal over time and have pushed themselves to make something gorgeous while absolutely terrifying the audience at the same time.  I know my wife didn't care for the movie, but it didn't mean that she wasn't invested for the majority of the film.  (Note: because I'm a terrible husband and a borderline irresponsible father, I taught my kids to run like the kids in Weapons so they can terrify their mother on a moment's notice. You're welcome, Lauren.  Slash, I'm also sorry.)

One of the frustrating things I'm getting from the film is the interpretation of Weapons as an allegory for school shooting.  I mean, I get it.  But I'm also secretly happy that Cregger came out and said that he never intended it to be an allegory for school shootings.  Let's explore why people think that the movie is about such a heavy topic and why I don't think it works as a concept all the way through.  What Weapons is really good at is looking at a tragedy and showing how people react to the unthinkable.  Now, there's an easy temptation to attach the notion of "school shooting" as the framework for that.  After all, it's becoming the most common "Breaking News" story that we get on a regular basis.  It's something that's always on our mind.  Coupled with the fact that the movie is called Weapons, it scans.  But instead of saying that Cregger is tackling a heavy topic like school shootings, what he's actually doing is creating a real, lived-in world.  The thing that makes Weapons great isn't so much when it comes to plot twists or anything like that.  Honestly, if you told Weapons chronologically and from a singlular perspective, it might actually be pretty mediocre.  No, what Cregger is good at is understanding is that we need to have challenging characters that we can relate to.  Horror has always been plagued by having disposable characters and Cregger doesn't really let us off the hook when it comes to that.  It would be easier to make this about a horror movie body count.  Nope.  Each of the characters matter and nothing about the movie is easy.  I like that a lot.

I do lightly feel betrayed over one thing though.  Maybe I'm misremembering the introduction.  The opening of the film is incredibly effective.  The film starts off with a little girl doing a voice over, stating that the horrific premise of the film --an entire third grade classroom having disappeared overnight --is not really the start of the film.  It's about the characters that I talked about earlier.  But I'm pretty sure that she stated that the children would never be seen again and...um...they totally are.  For people wondering, I'm going to go spoiler light:  there is a concrete explanation of what happens to the kids.  You get to know more than you need to know about the kids and that's fantastic.  But it also is a bit of a lie because I am trying to unpack this story as we discover a whole bunch of stuff about this mystery.  I mean, this is fairly minor, but I liked it a lot.

Also, I'm super glad that I went into this movie completely blind.  I had no idea that it had such a stacked cast.  I honestly love every casting decision in this movie.  I mean, when we see Julia Garner, that oddly makes sense.  She's one of those top-tier actresses that comes from television.  For those who haven't seen Ozark, you are missing out.  But it makes sense when TV royalty do horror.  There's always a little bit of a transition issue when it comes to breaking out to other drama.  It's why I'm never quite surprised to see Jon Hamm in fun things.  But then we have Josh Brolin and I honestly thought that Josh Brolin wouldn't be showing up in horror movies about a witch.  My theory is that they just fell in love with the script.  I mean, there's a chance that Barbarian transcended the zeitgeist so much that there was a need for big name actors beyond Justin Long to show up for this thing.  But man, it was kind of refreshing seeing horror taken seriously.

Listen, I have a hard time writing about movies that I like, especially when they kind of hinge on spoilers.  This is one absolutely fantastic, yet fairly brutal, horror movie.  It lived up to the expectations and I'm now jazzed to follow Zach Cregger.

Rated R for mostly pretty bad looking 2009 CGI death coupled with a sex scene that has completely unnecessary nudity.  Also, there are some comments about  racism that probably need further exploration.  Oh, and hey, they finally addressed how suicide works, which creates some pretty troubling imagery.  There's language throughout and bad behavior galore.  It's a well-deserved R-rating.

DIRECTOR: David R. Ellis

It's the 3D one, okay?  

I know it is going to be the thing that colors this entire blog.  I did not watch this in 3D.  I watched this on HBO Max.  So there's going to be this whole thing where I watched the film in a format that it really wasn't meant for.  There's a whole history of horror and tailoring the film to a 3D audience not reading for the 2D.  I actually have a DVD of Friday the 13th 3D with the red-and-blue glasses.  I won't even shy away from this.  I'm, oddly enough, a huge fan of 3D movies.  Less so now, but there were times when I would shell out as much as was needed to go see a movie in 3D.  Heck, I even convinced my wife to buy a 3D TV and I bought four very expensive pairs of 3D glasses to pair with that TV.  I may have used the 3D feature on our TV twice.  Yeah, I'm not proud of that moment. 

But what I'm dancing around is that The Final Destination looks bad.  Like, it looks really bad.  I don't know what it is.  I feel like adding the definite article "the" in front of a franchise film means that there's going to be something attempting prestige.  The funny thing about The Final Destination is that it definitely is the one that shies away from any form of class whatsoever.  Now, I know where my following statement is coming from.  Nick Zano, who plays Hunt, was a long-time castmember of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, a show that I watched a lot of (but never actually finished...yet).  What I was going to say was that The Final Destination feels like the CW TV adaptation of the franchise.  If you turned this into a teen drama where people died kinda gory deaths, but those deaths didn't look even remotely real, you'd have The CW's The Final Destination.  A lot of horror franchises do this.  As they realize that a franchise doesn't really matter in the later numbers and that they can probably get a bigger investment on return by cheapening up the production value, you get stuff that looks like it is completely disposable.  I'm not breaking anyone's brain here.  Is there a chance that a lot of the budget was thrown into the 3D gimmick?  Oh, absolutely.  There's a lot of CG sequences that are meant to pop out at the viewer, things that the previous movies wouldn't do.  But they don't look good.

And so much of it is based on whether or not it looks good.  I am ashamed to say it.  That's been something that has bothered me about film lately.  I hate that I'm getting to be a crotchety old man. I was reminded about the concept of the "second screen storytelling" where movies and TV have to get dumber because people are going to be distracting themselves with their phones.  The Final Destination movies are key films for second screen storytelling because they are a phenomenally low bar to understand.  Because they are so fantastically simple, you have to hold on tightly to the things that do work.  And the things that worked in the other films were how gnarly the gore was. It always bothered me that Gen Z liked the Star Wars prequel films because the "lightsaber fights were so cool."  Listen, I'm now excited that people like those movies while I don't.  I'm secretly always rooting for Hayden Christiansen and Ewan McGregor because they seem to be fighting for those films all the time.  But I don't like that I like the Final Destination movies because how cool they should look.  But when you get a movie like The Final Destination, there's nothing to hold onto.  Honestly, a character like Hunt becomes more frustrating because there is so little redeeming about the film.  

Heck, let's have a conversation about Janet, why don't we?  These characters don't make a ton of sense. There's no excuse for a character like Janet to exist.  One of the tropes of these films is the hump that it takes to get over when it comes to accepting that Death has a design.  It's part of it.  One of the tropes of a time loop movie is shorthanding re-explaining that people are in a time loop.  For Final Desintation movies, it is the notion that they are going to be killed off in order.  I'm not mad at Janet for being skeptical that she's going to die the first time.  It's an absurd premise and a lot of us would act like Janet.  But then Janet narrowly escapes her second death, thanks to George and Lori.  She should be the most devoted believer in Nick and his visions.  She went through the trauma.  She went through all of it.  It's understandable that she wants to go back to her old life. But Lori, when she gains the ability to see the signs, should have an acolyte in Janet.  When Lori starts seeing the signs, Janet fights it tooth-and-nail...over a movie.  That's it.  The stakes are "I want to see the rest of this movie."  That doesn't make any sense.  The worst case scenario would be that Janet misses the film and the two of them are put at ease that Lori's fear over what just happened was just a healthy dose of paranoia.  And I would even accept that Janet could be tired of running.  It makes little sense, but also the movie teases the notion of survival fatigue.  Maybe she has that.  The performance she gives is...not that.  Instead, Janet 180s the whole thing because the movie needed her to be a different person than she was.  I hate that so much.

One thing that kills me about a horror movie is when it breaks its own rules. This is double when they introduce something quasi-supernatural into the story.  With most genre storytelling, the audience is meant to make a logical leap.  We are asked to trust the film to tell us what can and cannot happen.  Now, loopholes are fine.  To a certain extent, The Final Destination tries playing a loophole, which I call a betrayal of trust.  One of the key concepts that repeats throughout this franchise --and The Final Destination goes out of its way to confirm --is that the survivors of the initial inciting incident must die in the same order that they do in the previous timeline.  It makes no sense and I don't get it.  (Also, I still don't get why they just don't die of natural causes, but let's ignore that.) Anyway, it's a trope that we're asked to invest in because that's the story.  When George wants to kill himself --and I am quasi grateful for peace to my nerd side that has been asking this question --he is not allowed to because the order would be messed with.  George tells the audience that he's been trying to kill himself all day and the universe won't let him.  But that order is thrown out the window at the end of the film.

The movie desperately wanted to have the "It's Here" play its way out.  The movie thinks it is being clever, but I can honestly say those words mean nothing.  It says that Nick's visions are messing with him to get to this specific spot and everything is part of Death's plan.  But that doesn't really scan, now does it.  You might think that the truck slamming into the coffee shop might technically kill them in the right order and that's fine.  I'm more talking about Nick saving all of the people at the theatre, a vision that should have Death really angry.  After all, Nick has a vision of Lori getting ground up in an escalator, but he's not just saving her.  The explosion on the construction site kills a lot of people.  But when Nick interferes, he gets nailgunned to a wall.  Now, the nailgun isn't killing him.  The rules are still working.  But Nick uses his ingenuity to use the sprinklers to stop the fire.  If Nick didn't interfere in this moment, he would be the first to die. The explosion would have gone off right next to him.  Maybe that's my whole frustration.  The movie keeps playing with the notion of what is free will and what is scripted.  Final Destination 3 also played with that notion and it's just annoying. 

This is also small, but I hated the NASCAR race.  Each of these giant set pieces are meant to be intense for the audience.  But what is also true is that they are supposed to be grounded in oddly realistic tragedy.  (I know, the highway scene in Final Destination 2 is pretty massive.) But the NASCAR sequence has screws unscrewing themselves.  If Death has a plan, these moments are supposed to happen slowly.  We don't need to have magic Death killing anyone.  Wear and tear tend to lead to Death, not the heavy finger of the Grim Reaper pushing everyone to their demise.  It's stuff like this.

There is one fun moment.  In all this complaining, I need to have one moment that brought me joy.  Boy-oh-boy, did they put the racist redneck stereotype in the movie.  I don't mind.  As the United States starts re-entering that phase where racism is the new normal, I'm not going to fight the over-the-top stereotype (although, just because people don't look like this, doesn't mean they aren't racist).  But that entire death for the racist was pretty funny.  The radio station changing to War's "Why Can't We Be Friends?" got me pretty good, especially considering that this death was maybe the only grounded effect (for the most part).  

I read that this is universally the low point in the franchise, so that gives me hope for the final two films.  I don't know if I have the time to knock out another two movies in the franchise before Halloween, but I hope to.