PG-13 for mostly innuendo.  I suppose that Tina's fantasies get a bit risqué for younger audiences, but there is so little holding this back from being PG.  Maybe I'm alone in that, but most of the stuff that is said goes over kids' heads.  There is a murder in this one that the kids investigate.  And yeah, investigating a murder puts kids in peril.  But this is Bob's Burgers we're talking about.  It's going to be just a little too PG-13 to show to kids.

DIRECTORS:  Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman

Writing about movies that are spin-offs of television shows is tough.  Part of me really wants to write about the television show and the other half is about the movie.  I mean, I enjoyed writing about all of the Star Trek movies, simply because I think that Star Trek naturally transcends its television roots.  But writing about something like The Bob's Burgers Movie is going to be a bit of a challenge.  There's a dangerous part of me that wants to write one sentence summarizing my major beef with the movie and bone out.  But that's going to be a temptation that I can't allow myself.  1) I'll be disappointed in myself and 2) what if I do it again?

That one sentence?  It doesn't feel like a movie.  I'm not the only one who said it.  Sure, it has that Simpsons Movie animation style that just screams that the folks behind the film got a little more money.  (BTW, if you are uncomfortable about the comparison to The Simpsons Movie, strap in because that's the crux of my argument.)  But there's almost nothing here that couldn't have been handled in an extended episode of the show.  Maybe there's a charm to that.  (Be aware, there's a concept swirling around my head now that I'm going to formulate into words.)  If The Simpsons Movie is the way to adapt adult television animation into film, then there are some things that we have to presume.  The Simpsons Movie added stakes to a story that fundamentally doesn't have stakes.  While things happen on the Simpsons occasionally, like Lisa becoming a vegetarian or Maude Flanders dying, the show isn't ever about peril.  Each episode, while grandiose compared to real mundane lives, tends to be personal.  Bart is worried about getting a bad grade or Homer upsets Marge.  Yeah, there are some weird ones, like when Homer goes to space.  But a thing that makes episodic comedy is the understanding that you can't upset the apple cart too much.  The same thing holds true for Bob's Burgers.  If anything, Bob's Burgers relishes (pun intended) the mundaneness of Bob's life.  He thrives in his burger shop.  While he has some adventures, it's mostly a guy who likes flipping burgers interacting with his quirky family.  The jokes stem from music and the straight man dealing with the absurd characters in his life.

So to give Bob's kids a murder mystery to solve may seem epic and cinematic, there is a big safety net attached to that story.  The victim is only tangentially associated with Bob.  It isn't a member of his family.  It isn't even a character from the show.  Heck, the format even follows the adult animation model of the protagonists' issues having a remote attachment to what the plot of the episode would be.  Bob and Linda, who have perpetual business problems, must pay back a loan that has lapsed.  They have a few days to get this money together and the only way that they can raise the money is if Mr. Fischoeder, their landlord, allows them to be late on their rent.  To make him change his mind about rent, they must clear him of a murder.  That's a lot of steps to get to "Bob and Linda have to raise money", which is a real world problem compared to clearing someone of murder.  And, spoiler alert, the murderer isn't even a character associated with the show.  As far as I know, the murderer is a new character created for the film. What kind of stakes are those beyond what a normal episode can present?   Bob is always worried about losing the business.  There's nothing all that new going on there that would merit a movie.  

But --and let me work this out on the fly --maybe that's a good thing?  I mean, I know it's not.  I acknowledge that this film is incredibly forgettable because it takes no risks.  But Bob's Burgers has always been the indie darling of Fox.  It is aggressively not Family Guy or The Simpsons.  Bob and Linda are a happy couple whose humor gets a little twee and quirky from time to time.  If anything, Bob's Burgers has worked hard to distance itself from its peers on the Animation Domination block (if it is even called that anymore.  We cut cable years ago.) I'm putting myself in Loren Bouchard's shoes right now.  His entire career with Bob's Burgers has been to distance himself from The Simpsons.  There's a natural comparison.  The idea of Homer Simpson as the archetype for adult animation is nothing new.  Even Homer is just a version of Fred Flintstone and Fred himself has live-action comparisons that go even further.  So if Bob's Burgers has carved itself a niche on television, why shouldn't it be gutsy and be...bland for cinema?  I mean, my major complaint is that I like the TV show and this is very much like a normal TV show episode.  How is that a bad thing?  I can tell you and it's not good.  Because the film is so only okay, it makes me question how much I like the show.  That's no good because I would have fought to the hilt for this show originally.  I mean, it's not must watch TV.  But I always knew that Bob's Burgers was something special.  Now, I question that.  There's only so many times I can see Tina fantasize about Jimmy Jr.  Even Gene's jokes tended to land into, "Oh Gene" territory.  

Which brings me back to "Why a movie?" Like I mentioned, Bob's Burgers often found its voice in its songs.  Each episode of the show seemed to have a musical number or two, accentuating its quirky voice that its compatriots lacked.  There are more songs in the film, but why not go full-musical?  This is probably the takeaway that all of this writing got me to:  Why stay in the safe zone?  The Bob's Burgers Movie was an opportunity to celebrate what makes the show special.  While The Simpsons Movie put the Simpsons and Springfield in genuine peril, The Bob's Burgers Movie should have gone full musical.  Bigger doesn't always have to look the same and Bob's Burgers could have really ramped up what made it something to behold.  Instead, we have internal conflict of the week.  It's not like Louise always grew upset about being a baby.  Gene straight up doesn't have a story for the week, outside of his typical musical frustrations.   All of it just seems...the same.  There's something to mine out of Bob's Burgers, but it all seems a bit wasted because something was working for the small screen.  Ultimately, it didn't translate to the big screen.

TV-14, primarily for constant and unflinching sexual innuendo.  I mean, imagine that you didn't know who Beavis and Butt-Head were.  That's reasonable.  I mean, this is a show that has been off the air for an entire generation.  One of the characters in the title of the film is named "Butt-Head".  Me explaining the parental advisory section on a movie that has "Butt-Head" in the title is a bit on the nose, don't you think?  There's also language that is coupled with that innuendo.  

DIRECTORS:  Albert Calleros and John Rice

Ah, my first day of work.  I got here early enough to write a blog entry before my official duties begins.  So let's take a look at what I will be writing?  Sure, Beavis and Butt-Head had to align with my first full day in the workplace.  I have some setting up to do, but I'm still way on schedule, so I'm going to write about the thing that my parents freaked out about when I was in high school.  I remember Beavis and Butt-Head being this massive scare across the country.  This was pre-South Park.  But I'm 99% certain that it was post-Simpsons.  Either way, there might have been this weird ourobouros thing going on with the fear of Beavis and Butt-Head because here I am, nearly 40, writing about the newest Beavis and Butt-Head movie.

The thing about the fears about Beavis and Butt-Head was that not many people understood the long con that Mike Judge was pulling.  I mean, Patrick Stewart --super fan of Beavis and Butt-Head --did.  But nobody knew who Mike Judge was.  We didn't really get that Beavis and Butt-Head were created to satirize my generation.  Like many animated characters who are meant to expose the faults of our culture, we worshipped them instead of saw the inherent criticism of these characters.  As much as people both worship and fear Rick and Morty, Beavis and Butt-Head were there to show us what not to do.  Instead, it influenced a bunch of morons to play Frog Baseball.  I can see why Beavis and Butt-Head were retired.  I'm not sure if it was just the attitude of Judge himself or if the '90s grunge moron was becoming passé.   But Mike Judge needed to be a little less subtle about his disdain for the way society was progressing.  We got stuff like Idiocracy and Office Space to really point the finger at us.  In light of that, Beavis and Butt-Head as a show made a lot more sense.

I can see why Judge probably returned to these characters.  The cynic in me thinks that Paramount+ showed up with a dump truck full of money and demanded that he do it.  But there was nothing at fault with the Beavis and Butt-Head model.  He just needed my generation to grow up a bit.  I can't imagine Gen Z jumping on board this character.  I'm actually amazed that these characters still mostly work in such a different culture.  I mean, a major tenet of these characters were the fact that they made fun of music videos, which mostly don't exist anymore.  As the movie shows, these two should be old farts who are still obsessed with the bands that they thought were cool in high school.  

So if I'm going to write a blog about Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe, I have to look at what it is satirizing.  It's not like Judge is taking a potshot at one person or group.  I don't think that was ever Beavis and Butt-Head's mission statement.  If Idiocracy was an attack on anti-intellectualism, I have to imagine that Judge is disillusioned with the state of our country today.  There's never been such a sense of pride about facts and education to my knowledge.  (I say this out of an anecdotal perspective and am applying my own depressing thoughts to the discourse.)  But Judge applies an almost hopeless attitude to the way we exist in post-Trump America.  If the OG Beavis and Butt-Head pointed out the stupidity of Bush's America, with low ambitioned individuals getting frustrated at the moronic stupidity of the eponymous characters, this is the movie that stresses that we're never going to find common ground.  I'm really swinging for the fences with this one, but maybe the film is about the absurdity of having basic expectations on the left.  

Beavis and Butt-Head are finally given something that progressives want: the disadvantaged are given a chance to leave their toxic environments.  In the case of the movie, it has to do with sending these kids to Space Camp.  Listen, I went to Space Camp a whole bunch of times.  Do you want me to prove it?  I went to Space Camp enough times to know that you eventually go into Space Academy if you are old enough. Yeah.  That's some street cred right there.  It's not like my parents were rich.  I'm living a far more economically stable life than I did when I was a kid.  But I know that my parents had to be financially set to send me to Space Camp because that is expensive.  But because I've become this progressive liberal hippie, I want the disadvantaged to receive these opportunities.  But Judge isn't going to throw a softball at the left.  Nope.  There's a major flaw in that attitude of sending Beavis and Butt-Head to Space Camp.  It's throwing money at a problem as opposed to actually taking the time to get to help these kids.

Because a goldfish has no idea how to climb a tree, these guys are going to take their previous world knowledge and apply it to Space Camp. And because democrats like me are so thrilled to see success in any form, they put it on display.  They send Beavis and Butt-Head to space.  Before I get too much on my breakdown of satire, I would like to point out that a lot of these choices are probably done in service to a plot.  Beavis and Butt-Head had to find a way to 2022 and to do that, they had to be sucked into a wormhole.  It doesn't change that there's a message there.  Serena wanted to badly to be this moral good for mankind that she ended up exposing a really dark side to herself.  It's the frustration that comes with an objective good staring you in the face and people choosing not to get on board.  Beavis and Butt-Head, avatars of anti-intellectualism, are incapable of growth.  It's what makes them work so well on TV.  We know that there isn't going to be a lot of change for them over the course of the story.  Because these characters won't move and enjoy bliss, it's us who have to look at ourselves.

Serena goes from this advocate for the sciences and alternative forms of education to someone who is willing to kill to maintain political clout.  I mean, the movie literally puts the boys in a 2022 gender studies class and they make the same mistake Americans make on such a grandiose scale.  There's no room for nuance and there's no room for interpretation when it comes to Beavis and Butt-Head.  When they are told that they have White privilege, they see it as this get-out-of-jail-free card.  And that's great.  That's the knee jerk reaction of the right saying that "I've had it just as hard as anyone", but from a place of laughter and stupid joy.  It's kind of brilliant.

In terms of a movie, I don't know if Do the Universe really does anything particularly cinematic.  I'm going to be talking about The Bob's Burgers Movie in a few days and will be covering the same points.  It is kind of a bigger episode of the show.  I want people like my wife to love this, but I don't honestly see that happening.  At this point, I think you either like Beavis and Butt-Head or you don't.  That seems like an empty statement, but it might be more of a commentary on how we absorb popular culture.  The fact that I had to write out the name "Paramount+" on this blog kind of shows how nuanced entertainment has become.  Things aren't necessarily aimed for a broad audience anymore (something that the fine folks at Warner Bros. Discovery should probably learn quickly before they completely gut HBOMax). Like, I don't expect to see this new wave of Beavis and Butt-Head fans popping up.  Instead, I see a bunch of 40-year-old liberals like me commenting on our own flaws instead of making active change to fix ourselves.  (What?  I'm aware that I'm part of the problem!)

It's kind of amazing that sexual innuendo still gets me laughing.  Like, this is a full-length movie and I still chuckle over things that Beavis and Butt-Head find funny.  And to a certain extent, I do see some character arcs, mostly with Beavis gaining even a modicum of emotional maturity over the course of the film.  But this is not going to be one of those movies that changes cinema, even in the least.  It's a great episode of Beavis and Butt-Head, but beyond that it is just something to entertain you while running on a treadmill. 

PG-13 for swearing (including an f-bomb) and ultraviolence.  Tonally, the movie feels more like a PG-13 movie than anything else.  But if you go beat-by-beat, there's a lot of R-rated stuff.  Torture is a regular thing in this movie.  One of the main characters has his fingernails removed on camera (kind of.  It's fun editing.) Also, the scale of death in this movie is something to behold, particularly for a PG-13 movie.  

DIRECTORS:  Joe and Anthony Russo

Okay, this blog might lose all cohesion.  I'm rearranging my schedule to accommodate for a visit from my mom.  She should have been here half-an-hour ago, but she tends to overexaggerate about timetables.  Normally, I would workout, then write.  But it is very hard to workout knowing that someone might be at the door any minute.  So I'm going to write first because I technically can stop this at any time.  Aren't you glad to be invested in the boring process of writing?

How did this movie score so low with audiences or critics?  I will honestly wait.  I know that a bunch of people have seen this movie.  Like, it made waves.  It triggered my FOMO pretty hard.  When my wife suggested that we watched it, I didn't even question it for a second.  That was going to be on the bill for that night.  It's not that it is a perfect movie.  Oh, heck no it's not a perfect movie.  But do you know what it is?  It's a Ryan Gosling versus Chris Evans directed by the Russo Brothers movie.  And do you know how it came out?  Exactly as described.  I was promised a handful of things and it delivered on all fronts.  How are people upset about this?  I mean, it was better than expected.  If I had any complaints, it was just that Ryan Gosling shouldn't have fought Chris Evans hand-to-hand at the end.  A shot from a sniper rifle would have made oodles of more sense.  Sure, it would have been a cop-out, considering that the whole movie was inching these two characters closer to each other until the inevitable fight.  But I would have taken the sniper shot.

I suppose that people might be past Jason Bourne.  Can we all call a spade-a-spade?  (My students call me out for overusing that idiom.)  This is a Bourne Identity movie without the memory loss.  There is this big underground CIA world that is both similar to what the real CIA is like and completely absurd that is the invention of Hollywood.  Sure, I don't know enough about real Black Ops to comment comfortably on what the real world of spycraft looks like, but this movie screams over-the-top. It's meant to.  But why have we lost interest in these kinds of movies?  I acknowledge that I'm not the biggest Jason Bourne guy.  I have always been more of a James Bond man myself.  But this is one of those action movies that intentionally pulls the glamour out of assassination and makes it seem grim and dark.  You know, like the Daniel Craig James Bond movies.

But what makes something like this special?  (Note: I got a workout in.  No need to worry.)  I can't necessarily say that it has to do with the back story.  If anything, a very thin backstory to this movie actually helps it.  Like the OG Predator (btw, I did watch Prey and will be writing about that given a chance), there's something very fun about not knowing too much.  It's not like the Russos left us completely in the dark.  We do know exactly what put Six in prison, but it's not belabored.  Six isn't Bruce Wayne.  We don't need to watch the metaphorical pearls roll down Crime Alley.  We have a brief flashback with a bit of narration showing young Six choosing to kill his abusive dad.  The movie wasn't about abuse.  It's not like he had to flashback to that moment time and again.  We know that he got into this Suicide Squad as a noble heart.  He wasn't out for himself.  He was presented with a no-win scenario and he chose the better of two options.  But that's not the story.

Instead, the movie assumes that we can figure out things through context clues.  The notion that the Sierra program was some kind of elite Suicide Squad is something that we all took a shortcut to.  The same thing is true with Lloyd Hansen.  We're told that Hansen is a sociopath who washed out of the CIA in record time.  Instead of beating us over the head with the details of Hansen's mental illness, we get all of that from Chris Evans's performance.  He takes joy in the actions he does in the present.  I actually applaud the Russos giving Evans something to play with.  I remember the roles that Evans took before Captain America: The First Avenger.  I'm talking about stuff like The Losers or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  (You know, other comic book properties?)  He just seemed like he was having so much more fun and then he became America's moral big brother.  (I know you wanted me to say, "Dad", but he still seems so young to me.)

Maybe the only thing that I didn't really care about was Claire.  Claire is perfectly fine.  I know that there's nothing wrong with her performance.  But the inclusion of a sick kid as the Macguffin didn't really need to exist.  Somewhere in this story is the story of choosing one's father.  Sure, it's an idea that keeps on showing up in movies like this.  We all tease Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious for being so obsessed with chosen family.  But if Six killed his dad because he was going to beat his brother to death, Fitzroy becomes his new dad.  In that comes a moral question.  Fitzroy treats Six with a sense of respect.  As much as Six needs a healthy male figure in his life, perhaps there's deceit there.  After all, Sierra Four is targeted by Carmichael and eliminated because the Sierra Program has become too much of a liability.  When Fitz has his back to a wall, he sells Six out.  Say what you will about Six's abilities, the entire scenario that he was in should have killed him.  The odds were completely stacked against him and against all reasonable logic, he survived.  What if the story was about the nature of parents versus self-interest?

It's just that I don't get much of a connection between Six and Claire.  There's a backstory that quickly showed that the two grew close in almost a montage.  It never necessarily showed closeness, but more of an understanding.  So what we get instead is a watered down Fitzroy story and a watered-down Claire story.  Honestly, that's all fine.  It's because I choose to be hard on the movie for the sake of objectivity that I point it out.  But I think a more well-rounded Fitzroy story might have done more for the sake of storytelling.  Maybe the Russos knew that they had to kill Fitzroy.  Also, it's based on a book, so maybe there are elements that are vital to the franchise.  Oh, I didn't mention that this was going to be a franchise?  Say what you will about reviews, Netflix knows how to greenlight things. 

I'm running out of time and things to say.  It doesn't hurt that I cut something short once in a while.  The Gray Man is a better movie than people make it out to be.  It's exactly what I wanted it to be.  Sure, it's flawed.  But it's also an action movie.  If you are in it to have a good time, that's what the movie offers.  

PG because it apparently scared the living daylights out of my four-year-old.  I thought she would be all over it.  When we all left the theater, we were all talking about our favorite parts and she revealed that the movie was just too scary.  I think she's gotten very comfortable with Paw Patrol so that any actual danger seems horrific.  Also, there's bleeped swearing.  You know exactly what word was bleeped.  I feel a little bad that I laughed at those moments, but they were funny.  Also, Lois and Clark are engaging in pre-marital sex.  It's not like you see it.  It's a kids' movie.  But it is clearly spelled out that she stays over the night.

DIRECTORS: Jared Stern and Sam Levine

I mean, I scream "intimate-knowledge-of-comic-books", right?  I don't know if I'm surprising anyone with that comment.  Even though this blog is named "Literally Anything Movies", I tend to lean harder into genre than other films.  (Okay, I do watch a lot of movies.  But I catch basically every major genre film and superhero movie.)  When I was a kid, the two big comic companies gave a very different vibe than what they present today.  Sure, Batman has been edgy since the late seventies throughout the eighties.  I always considered Marvel to be the heavier of the two companies.  I mean, they had Daredevil, the Punisher, and Moon Knight.  Spider-Man had this whole story where his roommate was on drugs.  (Yeah, I know that Speedy went through the same thing.)  But DC was the home of Superman.  Superman comics, for the most part, were pretty light and optimistic.  Sure, Silver Banshee would show up every so often and that got a little bleak.  But I always thought that DC thrived under a lighter mood.

But the film industry and contemporary comic books (for the most part!) decided to go the other way with it.  DC became the dark and brooding company.  I mean, Superman snaps Zod's neck on screen.  Superman went from being this lighthearted hero of humanity to this struggling alien in a world that hates him.  It's very X-Men of him to deal with that kind of outsider status.  That's what makes me kind of excited to see something like DC League of Super-Pets.  Now, few people will hold this to be hardcord DC.  But I always loved that big time superheroes in the DC Universe had pets.  Yeah, we only get Krypto, Ace, and technically Ch'rrp in this one with some new characters added on.  But DC was the home of Streaky and a flying horse and all kinds of goofy stuff.  It's amazing to me that contemporary DC would even acknowledge this corner of the DCU.  It's just so optimistic.  Sure, I think that there is room for adult-oriented storytelling in the DCU, but sometimes it is fun to just be goofy about animals.  I like that this version of Lex Luthor, voiced by Marc Maron, just wants to destroy Superman.  There's none of that returning autonomy to humanity.  Now, when I read, I kind of like that Lex is three-dimensional, but that's another story.

So as a comic book fan, DC League works so darned well.  It's a return to the camp and goofiness without actually hating the source material.  There's nothing in this film that says that the idea of super-powered animals is goofy.  It's aimed at kids and I can't deny that.  But it almost seems proud that it has this element to the universe.  DC doesn't have to be one thing.  It references the living daylights out of the long history that DC has created and does so lovingly.  There are some liberties taken, to be sure.  In this version, Krypto is in the rocket with baby Kal-El, keeping him company on the long trip to Earth.  But it also gets the essence that these are fundamentally happy characters who view humanity though a positive light.  It's a playfulness that we don't get very often with these kinds of stories.  

But I also have to look at the movie a little bit more objectively.  As much as I like it as a love letter to DC properties long ignored, it is kind of a generic kids movie.  I don't know why I keep feeling this way when I see most non-Disney properties, especially if the animation is computer-generated.  There's something so formulaic about stories like these.  Let's pretend that Krypto and Ace were completely new characters created for a series, like the new Batwheels are offering.  (That might be a bridge too far, by the way.)  The movie does have an Illumination vibe to it.  The jokes are things that we keep seeing in other movies targeted at the same demographic.  Honestly, almost every beat in this movie could be predicted before it happened.  It screams so much formula that it never seems to get great.  And it's not like I'm expecting too much from a kids' movie.  I actually think that it is incredibly difficult to make a kids movie and I would never want to downplay the amount of work and commitment that go into making a movie like this.  But what is challenging about DC Super-Pets?

I'm having a hard time putting the next section into words, so please forgive me.  There was an opportunity to tell the story of finding the role of the hero.  By the end of the film, all of the animals that had gained powers from the orange kryptonite kept those powers.  They find value in their newfound abilities.  But the movie never puts the notion of dependence on abilities on trial.  Krypto loses his powers for the majority of the film.  But with Krypto's lost abilities, there was always going to be a deadline for how long those powers were going to be gone.  To be crass, the amount of time it would take for him to digest the green kryptonite and to pass it is this artificial deadline run through the film.  Ace and the other animals have always been considered worthless to society.  It's when they gain powers that they have value.  They are lauded as heroes.  But the fact that the animals only find themselves in that position by the luck of some cosmic lottery is a bit troubling.  And the fact that Lulu is completely unsympathetic is really weird to me.  Maybe I've been spoiled with the litany of sympathetic villains in the past decade, but what makes Lulu someone to follow as someone more than a villain that wants to destroy?

I also don't love that every problem in this movie can be dealt with by punching it hard.  Sure, the movie talks about the power of unlikely friendship, but what kids' movie doesn't touch on that.  If Batman's power is to be a rich guy who beats up on poor people, who better to represent the lower classes of society than shelter pets who have no one to speak up for them?  I mean, I'm really putting on my armor of injustice for a movie that doesn't really deserve that kind of attention.  But that's what this blog is.  I suppose my big beef is that this movie doesn't really want to take any chances.  Like the Minions movies, this is a movie that loves to just stay in its lane.  And as much as I can enjoy that as popcorn cinema, it doesn't really hit the buttons that I need it to hit.  I need to have commentary that I can talk to my kids about.  The only issues that I really could talk about after this movie was over were about my favorite jokes or scenes.  Art is supposed to push a little harder.  

So as a superhero fan who is about to hit 40, I liked that we had a fun DC movie aimed at kids.  But I really want to DC to go ever further and push that envelope.  Give me a moral or something complex that my kids can unpack.  It's a movie that you can mostly ignore and that bothers me.

Rated R because it is a Jordan Peele horror movie.  But this is mostly an R for language and some gore.  Unlike Us, the focus isn't the brutality necessarily.  It's funny that I contextualize it like this, because objectively there still is a lot of blood.  Blood rains from the heavens at one point, yet I'm cool with that.  I really could see this being a movie that you could potentially edit for TV because a lot of the scares happen off camera.  Still, it's intense...so R.

DIRECTOR:  Jordan Peele

I wanted to write yesterday.  I really did!  That's not a joke.  Sometimes there are only so many hours in a day and I had to actually start work. (Kind of).  Anyway, has there ever been a movie with such a perfect title?  Part of me really wants to fight the title.  When I heard that the next Jordan Peele horror movie was going to be named Nope and that poster came out, I was thrilled.  Then the first trailer came out and it was really cryptic.  But that is also a title that lasts as long as the marketing department allows it to last.  Because now that I've seen the movie, the title Nope doesn't really apply outside the fact that people say it a lot.  Regardless, I love it and will stand by that title, despite the fact that detractors probably have more evidence on their side.

Peele has made three horror movies up to this point: Get Out, Us, and Nope. All three have been critically acclaimed.  But Nope has the weakest of the reviews.  I mean, the critical response is still overwhelmingly positive.  But the notes I've seen pulling away from Nope is by how confusing it is and how disparate the elements seem to be.  I think that this might be the foundation for today's blog because I disagree.  I think that Peele is so good at world-building that things seem disparate when everything has a certain degree of value, even if it doesn't work as a one-to-one form of storytelling. 

One thing that I would like to make clear: there is the attitude of writing that asks writers to kill their babies.  I run into this a lot, but criticize it in others.  Often a writer will have a scene in their heads.  It's perfect.  But that stroke of genius doesn't belong in this particular story.  A bad writer will try to shoehorn that scene into a tapestry that doesn't bond with that moment and the entire story suffers for it.  It's J.J. Abrams' big red ball.  He keeps trying to make it work and the stories don't necessarily accommodate for that moment.  I can see people accusing Peele of doing the same thing in Nope, especially with the "Gordy's Home" sequences.  Honestly, the most brilliant thing in Nope is the "Gordy's Home" stuff.  It's the scariest element of the movie and it is quite upsetting.  I'm going to defend that element first.

I think that there's a racial message in all of Peele's movies.  (Give me a second!)  There is, but I think people want it cleaner than they are ready for.  With Get Out, the allegory was clear.  The story screamed about the use of  Black people for moral cred and simply as an extension of slavery through being seen as a commodity.  Us, that movie went a little bit more complex.  You could read Us as this story of an unseen group of people that could rise up and take over if they absolutely wanted to.  But with Nope, Peele seems to understand that race is part of the everyday experience.  Characters are Black, but they are more than Black.  They should have horror movies about them where the experience is not directly linked to their Blackness.  Peele's going to comment on the role of the Black man in Hollywood with Nope, seen as someone who needs to entertain to be heard.  But he doesn't make it the crux of his argument.  Instead, he is going to make his movie have a message that maybe people weren't ready to hear.  He wants to talk about comfort, entertainment, and how we're completely killing ourselves given enough opportunities to do so.

When the movie starts with "Gordy's Home", it's upsetting.  We learn that the "Gordy's Home" segment only has a remote relationship with the alien that is plaguing OJ and Emerald.  Their relationship with Jupe uncovers that, when Jupe was a child actor, a chimpanzee went crazy and started slaughtering all of the cast of a popular sitcom while Jupe watched the whole thing from under a table.  Because Jupe has led this artificial life, jumping from movie to TV show, ultimately landing his own reality show, he is unable to gain the distance to evaluate the lesson of "Gordy's Home."  It's a story for him, one that had been communicated on SNL of all places.  From Jupe's perspective, it makes him sympathetic and draws the attention to him once again.  But from our perspective, it's about spitting in the face of nature for the sake of entertainment.

With "Gordy's Home", there was a TV show that aimed at the lowest common denominator.  It wasn't art.  It was meant to sell commercials to people who were tired from going to their jobs all day.  They knew that people thought that monkeys were funny and that's as much thought that went into making a show about a chimp that lived with a family.  There was no respect for the force of nature that they were dealing with.  When Gordy ultimately murders the cast, it's a lesson that needed to be learned.  But because Jupe was unable to glean that lesson, he makes the mistake on a far grander scale.  We find out that Jupe knew about the alien far longer than OJ or Emerald did.  In fact, he was busy marketing the heck out of the alien in the cloud to turn a profit.  Like he did with Gordy, he put the spotlight on a force of nature that he didn't understand or respect and it got people killed. 

When considering OJ's perspective, he's in a weird place.  His ancestor, the jockey on the horse that originated film, was a representative of a force of nature that was ignored for the sake of a science experiment.  Emerald,  like most of the people in Hollywood who heard the Heywood story, finds the tale enchanting.  But there's something about OJ that is aware of the tragedy of that story.  He is in the entertainment business almost reluctantly.  He loves the animals and respects the power of the horse, but he needs to make money in the way that his father taught him.  That scene at the beginning where he feels so uncomfortable on the lot, shows that he's there for the horse, not for the shot.  It's because of his respect for forces that no one can truly understand that gets him through the events of the movie.  

The closest that OJ comes to dying is when he starts becoming interested in filming the alien.  I do love the fact that the alien doesn't necessarily conform to the myth that Hollywood and pop culture has given to the flying saucer.  Although the beast looks like what propmakers have deemed to be men from Mars, it's actually an animal that is complex in its methods of hunting.  It's in this moment that the filming of the creature goes from being exploitative, like Gordy, to altruistic.  He knows that this creature is infinitely more deadly than any creature living on the planet and that film becomes something noble.  Anders doesn't realize this.  Anders is still wrapped up in getting the perfect shot.  He forgets the goal and that's what gets him killed.  Sure, Anders at least is doing it for art, but it is art that he doesn't understand. 

In terms of quality of a movie, Nope delivers exactly where it should.  I always find flying saucer movies to be more of sci-fi thriller than formal horror, but Peele really rides that line.  I found it --in terms of tone --more in common with Signs, which is appropriate because that is M. Night Shymalan's third movie as well. Yes, there are scares.  Some of them are great.  But this feels more of a survival against nature movie than a formal horror movie.  The alien terrorizes them in the same way that an animal hunts.  When Peele gives you more than that, it makes all of the world feel all that more real.  There's a lot going on here that I really enjoy.  I know that this might not have been everyone's cup of tea, but it absolutely brought what I wanted to see to the screen. 

Not rated.  It's a story about the working conditions of Mexican fishermen in 1936.  There's violence and a death in the story.  While there are parallels to Battleship Potemkin, the imagery is far more tame.  If anything, this is a kind of propaganda that focuses more on the role and needs of the individual, so there's not a ton of gross out imagery.  My kid walked in on me watching this one and I didn't even consider pausing it.  

DIRECTORS: Emilio Gomez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann

Yeah, I'm writing on a Saturday!  I have just enough time before my daughter gets up from her nap.  Besides, I've been negligent about maintaining the blog when I have just an abundance of movies to write about, so here's me...writing on a Saturday.  I'm really doing this to congratulate myself.  I don't know how many people are going to flock to my page to read about my thoughts on a '30s Mexican propaganda piece, but I'm going to write about it just the same.  Just understand that if this thing doesn't go too long, remind yourself that you probably didn't take the time to write a blog about Redes.

I have to talk about the elephant in the room.  It's 65 minutes.  When I mentioned this to my wife, she considered that a TV episode.  But it was made for cinema consumption.  If Martin Scorsese considers this to be a movie for the World Cinema Project, who am I to argue?  Also, it's a movie. It's one of those things that you know it when you see it.  Besides, I'll rarely complain about a movie being too short.  I got it done in one workout and that brings me a lot of joy.  One of the great things about these Scorsese World Cinema boxes is that I know almost absolutely nothing about the movies that I'm about to watch.  Honestly, I didn't even know what country this movie came from when I put it in my Blu-Ray player.  But that's kind of the best thing.  Now that I've watched the whole movie, I can't help but think that this is the Mexican fisherman version of The Jungle.  But when the movie first started, there was something very Steinbeckian about the whole thing.  It honestly felt like one of John Steinbeck's novellas, like The Pearl.  

When the film first began, I felt like this was the natural conclusion to something like The Bicycle Thieves. I'm not crazy for making this jump. Scorsese says that this is a movie that somehow foreshadowed Italian neorealism.  But Bicycle Thieves implies that these two characters would lead a tragic life because of their entrenched poverty.  Redes starts with that idea as the jumping off point.  A man who works day-in-and-day out loses his son to a disease that is perfectly treatable.  For a film like Bicycle Thieves, that might be the climax of the film.  Instead, it is his inciting incident.  To a certain extent, the death of his son is kind of fridging him.  But the film as a whole is not to tell a story simply as art.  It was made by the government to have people demand better wages.  Miro's exposition is that of laborer.  There's nothing fundamentally special about Miro according to the opening scene.  Like all other fishermen, he laments the poor fishing season that plagues his village.  But it is when he is denied even rudimentary pay to ensure his son's survival that he is able to see that the world does not have to be that way.

What is interesting is that he doesn't become some advocate for unions in this moment.  Sure, the story could have started there, with Miro trying to take down the system.  But that's almost the role of cinema.  It's a heightened experience that probably would lack verisimilitude.  It's when Miro keeps on getting pushed and when he is used as an example for a working system that breaks him into this champion of social justice. There's something real.  It's because he's used as the poster child for a system that is fundamentally corrupt that he wants to change the system.

But what makes Redes watchable today is the fact that none of this has changed.  Listen, I'm now so far left that everyone goes a little side-eyed at me.  I hear me too. I know that Mexico might not be the best supporting evidence for socialism, but that's not the point.  If art is meant to change people at their core through compelling storytelling, Redes does that.  It's not like this is the first time we have heard this narrative either.  I mean, when I made that connection with Steinbeck, there's only a quantum leap between this and The Grapes of Wrath.  The story starts with the notion that there is only one way to get rich and that is to sell one's soul.  Miguel is the one who is the dynamic character of the story.  Miro starts upset at the rich for taking away his son.  But Miguel is the one whose soul is at the center of the story.  He's the one who wants to maintain the status quo.  I mean, I get Miguel.  Some money is better than no money.  There's something comforting about generational poverty.  When poverty is all you know, it's hard to think of the world in a different way. 

But that's what makes Miguel interesting to watch.  Miro is the protagonist of the piece.  He's the one who leads the people to speak out and revolt against their paymasters.  But Miguel comes across as one of the antagonists.  Sure, he's no Don Anselmo or El Candidato.  But Miguel is the major thing stopping the laborers from having a sense of unity against the people who hold the purse strings.  He's the one throwing punches and ensuring that the fish get delivered as unharmed as possible.  (That being said, those fish look pretty beat up.  I mean, they were stepping all over them fish and that couldn't have been pleasant.)  But like how Miro took great offense when people tried using him, the same thing happens to Miguel.

Once Miguel delivers the fish to El Candidato, he's offered double pay for his loyalty. (Technically, it's the rioters' pay, but in my head that's double.)  He knows that Miro was assassinated for his beliefs, even though he was carried off.  It's in this moment that he has his Judas Iscariot moment, minus the suicide.  It's the payment that he receives that colors his soul.  Like Judas, he gives up his 30 pieces of silver.  Only in this case, Miguel is the new leader of the revolution.  I mean, if I want to get personal, I almost understand this greater.  I've been the pain in the butt to all the people in my life when I went from being pretty intensely Republican to pro-life Democrat. It's the knowledge that something you believed in manipulated you that really gets you.  It's embarrassing.  Miguel saw that a system that he invested in and sacrificed for wasn't just killing people metaphorically or spiritually.  When he witnesses Miro's death, he realizes how much his paycheck actually was worth.  MIro isn't killed for oodles of money.  He's killed so the rich could stay richer and the poor could stay poorer.

I hate comparing this to Battleship Potemkin, but I can't help it.  These are two movies that are remarkably progressive that are actually state sponsored.  Neither country necessarily achieved good with these works, but I think we have to take something into account:  correlation doesn't equal causation.  Both countries were open to dictatorship.  Because dictators aren't dummies, they championed causes in name only and delivered quite the opposite.  But this movie is progressive as heck.  Sure, Mexico didn't change the world with their labor awareness.  But championing the poor and questioning the status quo is so fundamentally important to the human condition.  This movie crushes it, even if it doesn't really offer much in terms of solution.

Rated R for a lot of f-words.  If it was only for violence, I could see this being PG-13.  But there's a lot of f-words in the movie and they're pretty in-your-face.  I can't think of any sex or nudity with this movie, but Nicholas Cage does make out with himself at one point.  I don't know why I should include this in an MPAA thing, but my gut says that I should at least point it out.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Tom Gormican

I know I missed writing yesterday.  I'm back on the treadmill, which takes up time.  But right now, it's late.  I'm a little cold, so I'm having my first cup of tea in ages.  (I've gone caffeine-free due to migraine headaches, so I'll have a decaf tea tonight.)   Also, I just finished reading Misery, so the whole notion of writing is on my brain.  Part of a healthy lifestyle is routine and writing is part of the routine.  Also, writing doesn't seem that awful, which is good because I've watched a lot of movies in the past 48 hours.

How lucky am I, guys?  The last two movies I've watched are Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent?  Back-to-back?  That just doesn't happen.  It's a good time to be alive.  Also, how insane is it that two of these movies come out so near each other?  Like, we get this kind of quality of movie every few years.  It's not like you can just throw a Baby Driver or a Eternal Sunshine around anytime you want.  Yet, here we are, in this mini-renaissance, enjoying two very trippy movies executed well.  That's something to appreciate.  People seem to always say that there are no new ideas in Hollywood.  Well, that's partially true.  If I want to be a stick in the mud, I suppose that Everything Everywhere is riding the multiverse train and that The Unbearable Weight is improving upon JCVD.   But even that, it seems like I'm trying to be that stick-in-the-mud.  Yeah, there are elements that we can find in other movies, but these movies are these little gems that we haven't really gotten before.

Part of what makes Unbearable such a good time is that Nicholas Cage seems to know who he is quite intimately. I don't know if this is going to surprise anyone, but I'm going to talk about meta humor a lot in this blog.  Meta humor tends to get me pretty hard.  I want to be a bit cynical about it, but rarely does meta humor fail with me.  I can think of one example where I genuinely got mad at a meta joke and that was Ocean's 12, with the Tess looking like Julia Roberts bit.  I still flare up about that one.  But meta humor done well is addressing an elephant in the room that we all want to talk about.  Sometimes, with movies like This is the End or Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, that meta humor is creating a completely fictionalized version of a person that doesn't really exist.  It's very funny because often the character created is so farcical and clownish that we know that the film isn't taking itself at all seriously.  But with something like Unbearable, that meta humor allows us to laugh and see the actor taking a serious look at him or herself.

The fact that "The Full Cage" is a phrase that people are aware of and use when it comes to referring to actor Nicholas Cage's acting ability says something about the cultural zeitgeist.  Cage has permeated Hollywood in a way that few actors can really lay claim to.  The film keeps using the phrase, "I'm back" / "Not that I've really gone anywhere" to really establish where Nicholas Cage is in reference to the rest of his peers.  This is a man who has won an Academy Award.  He has a lot of great movies under his belt.  But this is also a guy who has let his personal life influence the kind of work he does.  Yet, Cage never seems apologetic for the roles he chooses.  I don't want him to be.  From what I understand, he takes a lot of work because he has horrible spending habits and makes poor decisions and the film doesn't shy away from that.  He's also a guy who named his kid Kal-El, which is what even high school me wouldn't dream of doing, despite joking that I was going to have a kid whose first name was "James" and his middle name "Bond". 

So to see Cage  confronting this dichotomy by literally segmenting himself into two people is almost therapeutic to both him as an actor and to us as an audience.  It's funny because his deaging looks so good mainly because he has aged really well.  I never thought of that, but he doesn't look at all bad for his age.  If anything, a grizzled beard suits him very well.  But besides that, seeing these two Cages personify concepts that are hard to grasp is great.  There's the Full Cage, who is his younger self.  This is the Nicholas Cage who does insanely crazy things and has the bananas delivery that we've grown used to mimicking.  I'm talking about Andy Samberg on SNL, if you need a frame of reference.  But we also have a guy who just wants to be taken seriously.  Neither one is healthy, by the way.  The Full Cage Younger Self is so backed by ego that he can't take active criticism and the bearded older Cage is so focused on being taken seriously that he's toxic to the people around him.

It's what makes his bromance so fun.  As silly as the story gets, with Javi messing with the notion of dramatic irony, it's his relationship with Javi that lets him see who he really is.  Javi, despite the fact that the movie tricks you into believing that he's a sociopath, is a fan of Nicholas Cage, the actor.  He's what we all are who write film blogs.  He's not just a fan of Cage (admittedly, to a point of fault), but he's this guy who appreciates storytelling and what film is meant to do.  Yeah, he's a goofy guy.  But that goofy guy with his admiration for Cage is what gets Cage to remember what it means to make movies again.  When I give summer work, I have my students watch all these movies about the love of movies.  These are movies like Cinema Paradiso or Hugo. While I wouldn't add Unbearable to this list, there is that element there.  Sure, Cage's movies get a little bit of a bad rep from time-to-time.  Not all of them, but the oeuvre as a whole is often slagged off.  Which is why it is heartbreaking to think of Javi as a bad guy.  He's this guy who represents a wholesome view of film.  He doesn't want to invade Cage's bubble so much as offer something positive.  Sure, it gets silly with the whole third act, but that's part of the meta narrative itself.  It's meant to be silly.  It also gives the audience its cake while eating it too...somehow without cheating.  That's pretty rare.

I want to recommend this movie so hard.  Yeah, there's JCVD, which I really need to give another watch because I felt very similarly to what this movie offered.  But this movie could live or die by how Nicholas Cage approached it.   And when he decided to give us both the Full Cage and the Nuanced Cage, a' la Community, it worked so well. Yeah, he offers us a fictional family.  But that almost seems respectful in a way.  Because this is who Nicholas Cage is to us.  He's this human being who is deeply flawed because we're all deeply flawed.  But the movie shows that he's a good man.  Not a great man, but he's done more with his life than I ever will.  That's gotta count for something.

Rated R, which is on me.  Okay, that doesn't make a ton of sense.  It's on me because I invited people to watch this movie with me (and then without me).  And honestly, if I could snip two minutes of inappropriate scenes, this could be a solid PG-13.  There's language and violence, sure.  But there is also a scene with sex toys that are pretty grotesque.  There's also a scene where people try shoving objects into uncomfortable places.  There are also themes of suicide. But besides that, you know, not bad.  R.

DIRECTORS: Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (as Daniels)

What is wrong with me?  Part of me has no idea.  The other part is being brutally honest and acknowledging that I know exactly what stops me from writing.  I'm full-on scolding my lazy writing vibes lately.  I want to write a book next year and this procrastination thing I have going on right now isn't exactly encouraging.  But I know that it is video games that are giving me the dopamine rushes that are normally accompanied with accomplishment.  I also know that I'm running out of time to finish the game and I'm super close to getting it done.  But that's a terrible excuse.  After all, I've been dying to see Everything Everywhere All at Once since I saw the first trailer, so why didn't I write about it immediately after seeing it?  I would like to stress that I have once again lost readership because I can't maintain consistency.  Okay, enough self-flaggelation.

There was a time in my life not that long ago where the concept of a multiverse was lost on people.  I firmly remember there was a time when I started dating my wife where I full out nerded out explaining what a multiverse was.  It wasn't hard.  I mean, my wife and I grew up in a time when Sliders was on TV.  But now everyone won't shut up about the multiverse.  I don't deny that there's a part of me that hates this.  It always seemed like something that was mine.  I know that I shouldn't be encouraging gatekeeping, but it was a multiverse.  I mean, I love me some Marvel movies and I'm one of the greatest advocates for the current slate of Marvel movies, but this whole multiverse well that every piece of genre storytelling is going to is getting a little bit stale.  I don't necessarily have the oohs-and-ahhs anymore about the twists of a multiverse.  But I do like this.  (I like the other things too, but you know where I'm going with this hopefully.) 

I like this because if the multiverse was really a thing, it wouldn't be a thing that was only attached to superheroes.  There's this concept in the DC Universe (until they renamed it the omniverse, which I don't really understand) that there are 52 separate DC universes.   I know that they've strayed from those rigid 52 stories, but the concept is there.  Marvel numbers their universes too, but those numbers go higher.  I mean, they don't go astronomically high, but they go somewhere. But Everything Everywhere goes to the same place that Sliders goes:  every decision made is a separate universe.  Doctor Who tried it with "Turn Left", but I like the idea that multiverse stories should surround an everyman / everywoman character.

There is something fantastically bleak about this notion.  I don't think Daniels (I'm going to use their preferred listing for the sake of brevity) was necessarily thinking about this, despite how clearly thought out this was.  If every universe was based on a choice, either large or small, we are creatures who fundamentally have no free will.  Evelyn leads the saddest of the existences not because of choices that she made, but because she was the result of monkeys trying to write Hamlet. At the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, they keep tossing a coin that lands on its head. No matter what they do, it always lands on its head. While it is tragic that Evelyn's life is the equivalent of the coin that always lands wrong, the more depressing thing is that she can't help but make the wrong choice.  There has to be someone who always gets it wrong.  Heck, all of us apparently have a universe where we get it all wrong.  

To a certain extent, the film is a commentary on free will.  Because I can exercise free will, I'm going to retract a statement and now think that Daniels knew what they were doing with that thread.  But I want to talk about the notion of being small.  This movie goes to places that few other movies dare to tread.  I honestly see so much in common with my possibly favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  They are both mystical realism / sci-fi / genre films that really go as hard as they can into this realm of the absurd, yet are paradoxically powerfully small films.  With Eternal Sunshine, Joel is just getting over a breakup.  Yet, from his perspective, he's doing anything to save the woman that he loves.  The genre is just there to tell the story of the end of a relationship.  Evelyn is literally trying to save the multiverse from collapsing while saving her daughter from committing suicide.  Yet, the genre stuff is just there to develop relationships between Evelyn and Joy and Eveyln and Waymond.  That final act, as bananas as everything gets, is at its core about families learning to say "I'm sorry" and to give each other chances that maybe they don't deserve.  For all of its kung fu action and bizarro cutaways, it comes down to people talking to each other.  I'm now flashing to the Pixar short "Bao", which I still have issues with.  It's this really weird movie where a bao bun becomes human and the mother eats him so he can't run away and grow up.   But all of that bizarre stuff we can chalk up to potentially a metaphor for family.

And I do completely think that Evelyn was recruited by another version of Waymond.  I don't think it was a metaphor.  But since essays are about controversy, I can actually lie to myself that most of the movie isn't about parallel universes.  Maybe we're seeing what people see in a musical.  The reality of what is going on is never shown to us because we get all of the pizzazz of fighting and parallel worlds while in reality, Evelyn is simply having a hard time holding her life together in the shadow of a divorce and a daughter who may be suicidal.  That might be why the movie gets so out there at times.  There's something so weird about these other realities, like the one shaped by hot dog fingers or by Raccacoonie, that it seems like someone who is making it up on the fly.  It's about the feelings of knowing that you may have missed out of something.  I'm going to play a hypothetical because I have been talking about Wong Kar-Wai too much.  Imagine thinking that you could have been the world's greatest celebrity if you just didn't marry a loser like Waymond. (For the record, I don't think that Waymond is a loser and I love Waymond so much.) I don't know where I would be if I didn't make the choices that I did, but some of the imagined scenarios show me pretty happy.  But these aren't moments of reality.  It's why Daniels filmed that universe like In the Mood for Love.  It's not reality.  It's something very different.

I really hope I end up revisiting this one a whole bunch of times.  I desperately wanted my wife to like it.  I felt too vulnerable and raw about subjecting someone else to a movie that requires a heck of an investment.  But this movie delivers.  There were times that I thought that the movie may have been trying too much or luxuriated in its own confusion, but that's what I'd prefer over a movie that played it safe all of the time.

Rated R because the first one touched on some brutal motifs, so the second one had to at least allude to them.  While the first movie is more of a hard R, this one definitely deserves to be R.  It is a brutal horror movie, but much of this comes down to violence.  Sure, there's a heavy drug theme and there's a kid in danger in this one.  But if you took the violence of the first movie and removed the attempted rape, that's this movie.  They still discuss the fact that the blind man is a killer and a rapist, but not much is seen on screen.  R.

DIRECTOR: Rodo Sayagues

Oh man, writing when you are in a bad mood.  I already put this off for two days because I was in a bad mood and now I'm realizing how distanced I am from the original viewing of this film.  Also, my daughter is screaming at me to push up her frozen yogurt tube about every minute and a half,  so I'm sure the momentum on this blog is going to be fantastic.  I rarely watch the special features to movies anymore.  I would rather start another movie than watch something that is borderline marketing for the film.  But it was late at night / early in the morning when I was watching this and I was having my anxiety about the next day, so I decided to watch some stuff.  And the thing is...when I was watching the movie, I knew what direction my blog was going to go.  But it seems like the major criticism I have about this movie is something that was actually deliberate.  So let's see how that affects my writing.

It's weird how I'll invest in horror movie sequels, even of films that I only thought were okay. When I watched the first Don't Breathe, I had issues with it.  I can't say that I disliked it, but I also knew that the movie had major problems that could have been addressed. So why watch the second one?  The easiest answer that I can live with: It's very easy to say "Add to Queue" on my Netflix DVD account.  Yup.  It doesn't take a lot for me to sit down for a movie, especially if I have the mildest form of investment in the franchise.  But I was going to rail on this movie for not actually having a protagonist.  That was the crux of my blog.  And then I found out that the writers and director of this movie knew that and did it anyway?  That was supposed to make me look really smart.  It was going to be this deep dive analysis about how this is a movie that doesn't know what story it is telling and then I found out that it was the point of the movie.  That really clips my wings.  (Insert political joke about the far right and their aversion to facts.) 

But I can come at this from a perspective of an audience member.  After all, that's what I am and a fancy logo gracing my blog doesn't really change that.  Early in the film, we realize that we have one character to root for: Phoenix.  I would love to say that Phoenix is the protagonist, but she's more of a Macguffin than an actual character.  I'm going to go off on a tangent because that's what I do (and I don't know where else to fit this point in the blog).  The movie starts off with Phoenix running away from a burning house in Detroit.  The film apparently is this unravelling of what was happening in this moment. The problem is...this is a sequel to a movie that was fairly forgettable when it came to plot. I won't ever disparage the first film in terms of scares and suspense.  It was fabulous for that.  But to start a sequel with the scene of a girl running away from a burning house and then saying "Eight Years Later"...well, that's just confusing.  I kept asking, "Was there a girl in the first movie?  Did the house burn down?"  Neither of those things happened.  I kept pausing the film to explore Wikipedia and sure enough, neither of those things happened.

Anyway, Phoenix.  Phoenix seems like she is going to be a character with agency in this movie.  Following the eight year time jump, we're given the ol' training montage fake-out.  (You know, where it looks like a character is in real danger, only to find out that the whole thing was a simulation.) The movie starts off by implying that Phoenix is going to be X-23 (no X-Men attachment intended).   It's setting up for the fact that Phoenix is going to bust some heads later.  But no, that doesn't happen.  Instead, the movie sets up Norman to be the hero of the film.  And that's where I'm confused about what the movie is supposed to be.  To a certain extent, the movie is setting up Norman to be a sympathetic character.  He's redeeming himself because he's gotten his goal of being a father again. But this should be noted: Norman is completely a rapist.  He's one of the grossest rapists imaginable.  He was going to rape a girl with a turkey baster in the first film and we're supposed to forget that?  He kept women in his basement.  I wrote this whole thing about how gutsy the first movie was for making a blind man completely despicable.  Norman, towards the end of the film, confesses that he's a rapist and a murderer.  That's good.  But it goes from being an abstract concept with words to a very on-screen reminder of how gross Norman is.

So how does the movie make Norman the hero of the story?  They have to make Phoenix's real parents so over-the-top evil that we have to start rooting for Norman.  The movie, in its short form, should be "Parents search for kidnapped daughter only to be hunted down by blind rapist/murderer."  Technically, nothing I said there was inaccurate.  But the movie wants Norman to come out of this movie as the tank that he's always been, so to do that, we needed them so over-the-top that there's no prayer that this movie feels like reality.  It would be bad enough that the parents cooked meth.  That's pretty bad.  That's why the house was on fire at the beginning.  Okay, that makes them pretty unlikable.  But then the movie adds this extra element that they want to kill Phoenix to save mom?  That's a bit much, right?  I mean, why even have Phoenix talk to Mom and Dad if they're only going to cut her heart moments later?

Okay, that's all stuff that the filmmakers intended.  Again, I should never watch special features.  But let's say something that doesn't make a lick of sense. The movie hides what the true motivation of Raylan is.  We know he's gross from moment one because he kills one of the few likable characters in the film (who apparently knows that Norman is a bad dude, but is cool with it anyway?)  But the first half of the film is implying that the crew is trying to kill Phoenix.  At one point, Phoenix barricades herself in what is meant to be a Panic-Room-styled box.  The bad guy chasing her starts flooding the compartment when she won't open the door.  When Norman accosts the attacker, he threatens to electrocute her.  Now, you could write it off as the bad guy being afraid for his life, but there are two issues with that.  This is early in the film.  Norman is just a blind guy and this is a guy who is overconfident.  Also, the entire purpose of being here is that everyone is obsessed with Momma, the meth cook.  So frying Phoenix doesn't fit with the story.

Sequels tend to have these problems.  Usually, the first film is a pretty simple concept.  In certain regards, Don't Breathe tried complicating its own plot.  But the meat and potatoes of the movie is that the first film is simply an inversion of the heroes and villains where the prey becomes the predator.  Sequels always want to tell a different story while still finding the core of what made the first one watchable.  But this means a forced story that honestly doesn't work.  It just seems like there are all these "Gotcha" moments that don't really work.  Rather, we just want to see Stephen Lang take apart dudes Rambo-style, but now he's not the scary one.  When he's the hero of the story, he can't really be the scary one.  It goes a lot more into "Oh cool" and "Gore" than it does into anything that would be honestly scary.  

While not a terrible film, there's nothing that attaches me to this one.  It's really weird that Stephen Lang is the protagonist in this film both because Norman doesn't deserve redemption and that it is Stephen Lang playing the part.  I wonder what draws someone like Lang to a movie like this, but I also know so little about Lang that it probably wouldn't make much sense to speculate.

PG, but a hilariously inappropriate PG.  The entire movie is about a lush who just keeps boozing and doing inappropriate behavior.  The film often makes light of sex work and the vows of matrimony.  The movie glorifies theft and crime.  Also, some of the clothing in the movie is a little more than suggestive.  It's not like this is a completely risque comedy, but it also would be way more than PG in today's culture.  Still, it's Arthur, so whatever.

DIRECTOR: Steve Gordon

Okay, I don't think I've ever wanted to quit a movie quicker than Arthur.  Arthur is one of those movies that I know more from The Critic than I do any actual litmus of film standard.  If someone put this on a Modern Classics list, I would say that it is one of those movies that is quickly going to be forgotten to history.  (Note: I have this theory that a lot of the movies that we considered to be untouchable will be lost to ebb and flow of history.  It's surprising how few people have seen The Godfather.)  But I was on a flight and I stuck with it.  I mean, the first ten minutes are some of the most excruciating moments in cinema I've had to deal with.  And, for the most part, I'm glad I stuck with it.  By the end of the movie, I had a better time than I thought I would.  It's not a great movie, but there is something there that makes this movie worth watching. 

The big takeaway that I had is that Arthur honestly works better as a drama than a comedy.  I wondered why I wasn't laughing at the humor of Arthur for a lot of the movie.  After all, on the page, Arthur's dialogue reads a lot like Groucho Marx or Woody Allen.  There's a setup and Arthur, in all of his boozehound glory, responds with a witticism or a retort. I should absolutely love it.  But between context and delivery, there's something really sad about the character of Arthur when he's being his full-blown alcoholic self.  I mean, it's the alcoholism that people remember about this movie, isn't it?  It isn't the rich guy problems that I actually kind of found charming.  It was him showing up to places drunk, telling jokes, and then laughing at those jokes.  But, like I stated, I wondered why I didn't care for a lot of Arthur's bits.  And then it hit me.  It was two specific things. 

1) It was the fact that he laughed at his own bits.  It's the same button that makes me loathe The Big Bang Theory.  Instead of letting me react to the joke in my own way, Dudley Moore would chortle out this moment to let me know that the punchline had been delivered. I don't know if this is on Moore or Gordon, but I do know that it was annoying.  The laughing became so big that, often, I wouldn't hear the punchline because the laugh would act as punctuation.  2) Arthur's in the wrong in all of the situations where he is drunk.  That opening sequence, scored by the mellow tones of Burt Bacharach, has these good people simply enjoying their meal and Arthur comes in there like a braying donkey, laughing at forced jokes that are punching completely innocent people.  I'm going to use a very odd point of juxtaposition, but I think it is apt.  Borat will mess with the public all the time. But we don't see the majority of those moments, right?  It's because someone's reaction that exposes their true personality is what makes it funny.  The footage we get in the Borat movies is when someone exposes something toxic about their own personalities.  With Arthur, he's just spraying an audience with comments, even if they've done nothing wrong.  The insane thing is, it's a work of fiction.  Gordon could have come up with things to make Arthur's targets worthy of his commentary.

But I'm also part of the equation.  I never really found intoxication humor funny.  I've kind of shied away from the works of W.C. Fields or Cheech and Chong.  I find that often the people who find intoxication humor funny are people who embrace intoxication.  That's not an absolute rule.  After all, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is one of the most brilliant stoner comedies imaginable.  But it relies on actual humor and amazing scripting to deliver those jokes. So when I watch a movie where the protagonist stumbles over his own two feet, I just feel sad.  The thing is, the film begs that I root for the protagonist.  There are elements where the movie teases that Arthur is supposed to grow up and that the theme of the film is the abandonment of childish alcoholism.  But then the movie goes right back into it.  

Because there is a moment where I think that the movie gets its act together.  When the movie introduces Hobson's illness, Arthur sobers up.  He becomes the adult that Hobson always wanted him to be and what his real personality is.  There's a deep soul under there who understands that growing up doesn't mean abandoning the fun of life.  When he gifts Hobson with cowboy hats, as silly as it is, it's a reminder of a joyful relationship that he had with his servant.  It's about a kid who is learning to mourn a father who never existed and it's a touching moment. The alcoholism makes sense because people forgive Arthur for behavior appropriate for a child.  He holds onto that dependence that childhood provides because it is the only thing that has given him joy.  But in Hobson's death, Arthur realizes that he can still embrace the stuff of youth while being an adult...

...which is why the end of the movie is a travesty.  Arthur, upon Hobson's death, goes on another bender.  Coincidentally, Hobson's death is in line with his own wedding, which seems in poor taste.  They're rich.  They can afford to move the venue. But for the sake of storytelling, Arthur is drunk.  And the movie commits this crime that I really can't forgive.  Instead of having alcoholism be this toxic thing in Arthur's life that is holding him back from actually being vulnerable, it bookends the film with goofy alcoholic rants.  When Susan's dad is beating him, I kind of relate.  He ruined so much for his family and he's tired of Arthur always taking the easy path.  If he broke off the wedding while sober, that fight would still be appropriate, but Arthur would come across as a bit more sympathetic than he does.  Like, I don't feel bad for Arthur at all in that moment because he's goofy Arthur.  Heck, I would feel bad for him if he was sad, introspective drunk Arthur. But no, he's stumble over himself and look like a goon Arthur and there's nothing fun about that. 

And then there's the really weird relationship between Arthur and Linda.  I mean, I never thought that Liza Minelli would make this amazing leading lady, but she really nails it in this movie.  But I don't see what either Linda or Susan see in Arthur.  Arthur is nice to Linda once.  He gives her a perfect day, which I completely applaud.  But Arthur just becomes a mess after that.  He continually reminds Linda that she is less important than money and she still pursues him.  His casual comments that she could be a sidepiece should be a deal-breaker, but she is still in this constant holding pattern for him.  The funny thing is that Linda is both an avatar for the audience and a representation of real world capitalism.  She works really hard for a living.  For a day, she sees how the other half lives and she's swept off her feet.  She doesn't have to keep on living for tips at a diner that abuses her.  So for her to be this character who waits for Arthur?  It doesn't ring true.  What Arthur finds attractive about her is the fact that she is self-actualized and independent, the traits that Arthur completely lacks.  I would like to state: I think that Linda would accept a marriage proposal from Arthur.  But to be clear, I don't think that she would accept it from him when he was drunk.  She's too good for that.

Every time that this movie got just a little vulnerable, it retreated back into this absolutely juvenile characterization of drunk Arthur and that was the thing that I needed scrapped from the film.  There's nothing funny about it.  It's just pathetic and the fact that it isn't central to the film as a problem sucks.  It's such a bad step.  And the fact that he still gets the money at the end removes any emotional stakes that the movie determined.  The only prediction that I can have after this moment is that Arthur will continue being a drunk.  Maybe he'll temper it a bit, but that sense of independence would never really happen.  I'm also mad because the movie teases that he might have learned something.  As much as the movie screams "Comedy happy ending", I read it more as absolutely tragic.