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

DIRECTOR: Drew Hancock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passed, which makes sense.  But this is a movie about alcoholism, infidelity, and emotional abuse.  There's also an off-camera dead baby.  The movie actually gets quite dark.  Nothing is visual, but the more problematic parts are all through discussion, which makes sense considering that this is a Dorothy Arzner movie.  

DIRECTOR:  Dorothy Arzner

We can thank Andor for my break from writing.  Trust me, I don't mind.  The only thing that it made happen was that I feel like I have to relearn how to ride this bike.  I can't imagine how many words I've written for this blog because my blog entries tend to be way too long.  But I'm excited.  As much as I love having a topical movie like Thunderbolts* at the top of my page, I feel like having something like Merrily We Go to Hell at the top to give this page a sense of gravitas and authenticity.  It's mostly a sense of snobbery, but I've never denied that I'm comprised of a good deal of snob DNA.  

I have two ways to start, so I'm going to have to sacrifice one of my babies.  Let's start with my biggest concern with this movie:  "What the heck is the tone of this film?" (I'd also like to point out that I decided on "heck" instead of "hell" even though the word "Hell" is in the title of the film.) I've seen a lot of movies from this era.  The Great Depression through the '40s loved the notion of the charming, upper class alcoholic.  Heck, he's a staple for the rom coms from this era.  And, to be honest, I often fall for this archetype.  There's something so fun about devil may care attitude that accompanies the rich alcoholic.  Jerry Corbett, on paper, checks every box when it comes to that archetype.  The weird part, in terms of the tone of the film, is that Jerry is much closer to the real world version of an alcoholic.

I mean, it's hard to call Jerry completely realistic.  I mean, there's some over-the-top stuff happening in this.  Arzner is riding a weird line here.  She's calling back to the tried-and-true by giving the character "bits."  Like, Jerry leans on the horn when he kisses the girl.  He's witty and charming when he's drunk.  But this is a picture that is meant to have a bit of a backbone.  It's an air raid siren for all the women who have been taken in by the charming alcoholic.  The weird part is, this movie comes across like a screwball comedy for the first third of the film.  There's tap dancing.  Jerry screams around a crowded club looking for a baritone so that they drunken four can make a barbershop quartet.  When they do get a baritone, Jerry has some witty comments of how the bartender is neither a baritone nor a gentleman.  These are bits!  They're silly bits!  We're meant to ship Jerry and Janet.

But the movie foreshadows that this is all going to go downhill.  Honestly, it's either Dorothy Arzner is the most self-aware director that ever lived and she's writing a satire of the dangers of the Hollywood narrative or she's trying to juggle a lot of things in the air as both a commercial artist and a voice for the oppressed and kind of failing to strike a balance, but I'm afraid it might be the latter.  I want to love this movie so much.  I've always been in the camp that art should say something and that thing should be controversial to some extent or another.  Dorothy Arzner is making a movie about emotional abuse and alcoholism in 1932.  She's the only female director making any kind of dent in the industry and this is a movie that punches hard.  The problem is that she's also trying to be commercially successful with this movie, even though the word hell is in the title. I don't think these things work together.

Okay, let's say that the screwball element of the movie is meta.  There might be some evidence towards this because of the humor kind of falling flat.  Honestly, all the things that happen are funny.  The delivery and editing edges a lot of the humor out of these moments.  It's like we have a team that is really good at drama not understanding why some things aren't funny.  But if there is this meta element, it kind of makes sense.  The same things happen with the jokes on Kevin Can F**k Himself, that is aware of the paradoxical elements of emotional abuse with the screwball comedy.  (Only with Kevin --coincidentally another show with vulgarity in the title --there's no doubt that the very specific tone that they hit is self-aware.)  Now, I think that I could applaud the deconstruction of the comedy into an intense tragedy...

...if the ending didn't exist.  This is a pre-code movie.  For those unaware of the Hollywood code, there was an attempt to self-regulate questionable moral content in film.  Heck, the MPA / MPAA is also self-regulation of content, but the Hollywood code was far stricter. There were rules on what could or could not be done in movies.  Now, Merrily We Go to Hell has the "Passed" certificate at the beginning of the movie.  There was an attempt to release this movie the proper way, in line with the standards of Hollywood.  But pre-code movies technically didn't have to follow the standards.  And the standards that I'm talking about are the role of virtue.  Evil must be punished.  Good must be triumphant.  Now, let's jump back to Arzner's world.  She's writing about a bum of a husband whose been a real heel since the opening shots of the film.  But this is also a world where the sanctity of marriage must be upheld.  The notion that Joan might get out of this toxic relationship is a foreign concept.  

But this movie ends with the most mind-boggling ending ever.  Joan has moved on from Jerry.  She advocated for herself.  Now, you could look at this movie as a criticism of polyamory and that feels like an inherently 21st century read of the moment.  But if I applied the same lens over this film, you have to argue that Joan is being manipulated into accepting polyamory.  This was not her choice.  Instead, old values are forcing her to adapt to a world that is not what she wants.  (Real update:  I am on the struggle bus for writing all day.  This has taken so many hours just to knock this garbage out.  I don't know how much I'll have left in me.) Again, I just accused the reader of putting 21st Century values on the movie and I suppose that I'm doing the same thing myself.  Again, I'm stuck in this weird position of not knowing the intent of the director.  Does Dorothy Arzner want to tell a story of a woman freeing herself from the oppressive selfishness of her husband or is this a story of the importance of fidelity, come Hell or high water?  Because there's a real chance that the studio said that the two had to be together at the end.  

That ending, I'm not going to let go of it.  Because the last line of the movie is Joan taking Jerry back.  That's incredibly frustrating. But really, the whole final five minutes is frustrating because it seems like Joan gains agency when she leaves Jerry, refusing all of his flowers and weak attempts to say "I love you."  But when we find out that it is actually Joan's father who is pushing Jerry out of the picture, that's a very different narrative.  Again, I have to give the movie the credit for being incredibly rebellious for 1932, but making Joan's father the agent of change i the story is heart-breaking.  Part of it comes from the fact that Arzner puts all of these crumbs leading to the end.  Vi regularly warns Joan about the dangers of trying to change someone.  Vi is the morality play that Joan needs to listen to.  Vi married someone who didn't change.  When that marriage fell apart, Vi became this shell of a person, who gets drunk with Jerry and Buck.  Now, Vi at least has the presence of mind to draw an ethical line of what she will or won't do.  She sees that Jerry is toxic and scolds him for his behavior (while, admittedly, enabling him for most of his alcoholic bouts). 

But if I want to give Arzner the points for being explicit with her feelings, Vi also serves as a warning about the dangers of divorce.  As much as Vi's thesis statement is that women can't change men and that marriage won't remove the monster from the husband, her misery might be implied to be from the fact that she is divorced.  The fact that the movie --while not having a happy ending --leaves the viewer optimistic that Jerry and Joan have turned a corner, there's no actual evidence that he has.  After all, Jerry went cold turkey before and the second that he saw Claire, he --with the mildest of pressure from Claire --went on a bender.  The only reason that he really goes after Joan is because she rejected him.  Honestly, much of Jerry's motivation isn't because he loves Joan (although he probably believes that).  I see his motivation as the fact that he got a good scolding and lost one of his few concrete things in this world.  It's less about Joan and what Joan represents.

The reason I say that?  He was overly content about Joan becoming polyamorous.  He was almost happy that she was willing to become a different person because it freed him from any moral responsibility to the fidelity of marriage.  So if he was really in love with Joan and wanted her back, he should have been fighting for her then. But fighting for her only when she physically leaves seems more selfish than anything else.  Had he loved her in the way that he claims, watching her spiral should have been the red flag.  I keep putting the morality of today on this older movie, but I also can't deny that I really want these two separated by the end of the film.

Maybe it's because the movie is so muddy that it doesn't affect me as much as it probably should.  I like morally gray stuff as much as the next person.  And I applaud the darker moments in the story.  But trying to combine all of these disparate elements without a clear and explicit message is troublesome.  Because I don't want to support the message "stay with your abuser".  And a lot of this movie kind of has that vibe.  It's so unfair to the film that I have this response because this was a revolutionary film that just seems backwards by today's standards.

PG=13 for slightly slightly SLIGHTLY more questionable content than other MCU superhero films.  It's kind of the bargain that you make agreeing to make a movie about the former villains becoming heroes.  You have to deal with a lot of that darkness.  There's more swearing, especially forms of taking the Lord's name in vain.  There's a ton of violence and references to even more violence, like John Walker's murdering an innocent man on camera.  Death abounds.  There's talk about meth and there's a scene of domestic abuse.  There are also loose suicidal references in the film as well.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Jake Schreier

No, I didn't know I'd be able to watch this one during one of the opening showtimes.  I was thinking that today was going to be a pretty mellow day.  But here I am, writing about a movie that's opening up today.  That's a good feeling.  I hate letting Marvel movies rest in theaters before going to see them.  In a perfect world, I'd still be fighting the spoiler mill.  I'm a little worried that Thunderbolts* is not going to get the traction that it deserves because it's a bit chic to skip Marvel movies now.  And I'm not going to say that "Marvel is back!" for two reasons.  1) I don't think that Marvel ever left.   It's a problem with audiences, not Marvel.  2) People will jump ship given one misstep, so this is no guarantee of quality over time.   But that being said, Thunderbolts* really works.

I hate making spoiler warnings.  I can't even guarantee that I'm going to talk about spoilers, but there are lots of things that can be spoiled pretty heavily, so I just want to give myself freedom to talk about whatever.  As much as this is a Battle for New York, immediately and intentionally paralleling the first Avengers movie, the story is surprisingly small and intimate.  I never want to write the phrase "Joss Whedon was right" after how much I invested in that man and then he ends up being a monster, but his feelings on smaller Marvel movies is pretty darned smart.  Marvel has always been pretty darned good on character driven narratives.  But I don't think that they've done a better job with their focus on character than in Thunderbolts*.  And, yes, I'm going to write the asterisk every time because the movie completely justifies that asterisk.  

Honestly, everyone gets their time in the sun.  And, thus, I get to the first major spoiler of the movie.  Boy-oh-boy, they kill off Taskmaster unceremoniously.  Putting her on all of the posters?  She gets pretty early billing?  Like, she never actually becomes a member of the Thunderbolts.  She's borderline an NPC in the movie.  She gets one line without a mask and then shot in the head.  So Taskmaster doesn't really align with the character stuff.  But what that does is create a smaller team where everyone kind of has their moment.  I mean, it doesn't seem to shock anyone to think that Yelena is the protagonist of the movie.  Gosh darn it, I love Florence Pugh.  Is it the script that makes Yelena great or is it Florence Pugh?  I honestly believe that Thunderbolts* is the perfect marriage between actor and content.  

I know a lot of people didn't care for Black Widow.  I say those people are wrong, but I also know that I'm in the minority for loving these movies.  Anyway, I kind of have to disparage Black Widow a bit to make a point.  But understand that I think Black Widow is exactly what it should have been.  My bigger argument is that Thunderbolts* is about a character growing.  Black Widow does a lot of heavy lifting.  I think the reason that Black Widow exists as a movie is to give Scarlet Johansson her own superhero movie as a farewell to a long-running character coupled with the need to fill the hole that Johansson's departure from the MCU would leave.  When I found out that it was Florence Pugh, I was thrilled.  She might be my favorite actress working.  But if Yelena is a character based in trauma, it took something that is almost a bit too tangible to base that trauma in.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  You are introducing a character with whom we have no relationship and you know that her character is motivated by trauma?  It has to be something that provides origin context.  For Black Widow, it was the violence and abuse inflicted by the Red Room coupled with Yelena's desperation for family. 

Now, none of those trauma's disappear in Thunderbolts*.  But time has passed for Yelena.  While she is still pushed by an attempt to make sense of her trauma, it's not she has been stagnant.  While she still deals with the loss of Natasha and the disappointment of the Red Guardian as a father figure, she now faces a more existential dread.  And THAT is what makes Thunderbolts* far more fascinating.  Thunderbolts* is about the darkness that can't quite be defined.  I mean, that seems like a cop-out.  But visually, Schreier makes that darkness work.  Yeah, we've seen symbolic representations of psyches before.  It's not like he's exactly breaking new ground with every shot.  Instead, I think it more about how he's a much more patient storyteller than any Marvel director has been so far.  He doesn't just spoonfeed those moments inside the Void as something revelatory.  Instead, he has conversations between characters.  The first act of the film is such a mundane idea.  The heroes are stuck inside a bunker after surviving a death trap.  Something that I've never thought about when it comes to death traps is the notion that they shouldn't be easy to leave.  Valentina made this place to be a place that incinerated anything that walked into it.  Why would she make that place easy to leave?  In her mind, there would be no one leaving.  There shouldn't be easily marked exits.  There shouldn't be a way to just walk out of the building.  So spending an entire act just trying to find an out from an already sprung death trap really works as a template for people to have earnest conversations.  

I love how much the MCU has grown as well.  Phase I had a good idea that had a fundamental flaw:  the villain should be a dark version of the hero.  Iron Man had Iron Monger and Whiplash.  Hulk had Abomination.  Thor had Loki.  It made sense.  The problem was that it also got repetitive.  We had people on similar power scales.  The characters tended to be a bit too arch to get the point across that while they were similar people, there was something wrong with the bad guy.  But Bob and the Thunderbolts (especially Yelena) are foils for each other while not being insanely over-the-top.  Yelena and Bob both deal with trauma and finding one's place in the world in real, but different ways.  Yelena's only motivation is the purpose placed upon her as a weapon.  She isn't a person. She's never allowed to be alone with her own thoughts.  She isn't allowed to make decisions by herself.  Her antithesis, Bob, has the opposite problem.  He's only left alone by himself.  He completely lacks any kind of purpose.  When he's offered purpose, it's coupled with unimaginable power.  It's a beautiful dichotomy because they are jealous of each other in ways that they can't imagine.  Yet, they also have the same result, despite having that Gift of the Magi tragedy to each other.  Listen, I'm going right for the heart of this.  This is about untreated mental health issues and they're both treating their trauma in ways that keep spiraling themselves down these holes.

And, yet, the movie is about non-traditional friendships.  These guys all hate each other. With these characters, they have done awful things.  Yet, they all come across --with varying degrees of success --as at least somewhat sympathetic.  I don't think the movie is advocating for toxic people to find each other. Instead, each member of the Thunderbolts at least wants to be something better than what they were before.  Sure, John Walker is probably the most antagonistic among the group.  I get that.  He went from being a decorated soldier and Captain America to the citation for the dangers of even having a Captain America.  But the second that he stops being a turd for two seconds, he actually becomes a mildly likable character.  These are all people dealing with crap that can be fixed with a reasonable dose of therapy and the only real help that they are getting is this accidental group therapy that they call a superhero team.  And the fact that de Fontaine is their Nick Fury is incredibly telling because no one is actually concerned with the mental well-being of these people shy of Bucky.

The sheer brilliance of having Bucky as a de facto team leader (despite Yelena being the protagonist) is fantastic.  We're a lot of movies into the MCU at this point and there's a lot of history to remember about how some of these characters got to this moment in the story.  But having Bucky as someone who has gone through the trials that these characters have gone through is so smart.  I like the fact that Bucky wants nothing to do with these guys, mostly because they are so rag-tag and morally dubious. But I also adore that he can't help but see that the road to recovery is about accepting help and that's his role now.  He's so close to legitimacy as a freshman senator that it would be tempting to watch these morons flounder.  But there is that greater cause to good that Bucky can't help but fill in for that makes the story great.

Honestly, this movie hits on every level. I'm sorry that I didn't talk about Ghost.  I would have loved her to get a little bit more screen time.  I think that her character seems the most well-adjusted by the beginning of this movie.  Clearly, stuff has gone down between the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp and this movie that we haven't gotten too much insight into. But the movie is good.  It doesn't have a villain problem.  If anything, The Void is one of the best villains we've gotten.  There were honest questions on how anyone was going to do anything about this villain and I applaud how the movie handled it.  The Sentry and the Void were always an interesting experiment in the comics and I am amazed that the movie made these characters work as well as they did in the movie, even if it meant changing some fundamentals about the character.  Still, the film is top tier Marvel and I can't wait to watch it again. 

PG-13.  I mean, sure, it's for violence and swearing.  I can't deny that it's not for violence and swearing.  But my kids decide to walk into the room, I'm foing to feel way more uncomfrotable with the nude group shower or the kid who is peeing into a river.  Also, the inclusion of a sex worker as a bit was mildly uncomfortable as well.

DIRECTOR:  Jackie Chan

Oh man, it's been a minute since I've written anything for this blog.  There was just a tear there where I didn't really have the opportunity to watch movies.  I mean, I kind of planned it that way.  I had a disc of the stage production of Spirited Away which was with an alternative cast that I wanted to watch.  Couple with that the fact that I'm watching Daredevil: Born Again and Andor and there's going to be stretches where I don't write about anything.  But I got a really good Jackie Chan kung-fu movie and that goes a long way to making me want to write.  I will admit, it doesn't help that I'm feeling more sleepy than I'd like to admit.  But here we go!

I thought that I was on the last disc of my Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar Criterion box set.  I knew that there were six movies in there.  I knew that the first two discs had two movies each.  I knew that there were four discs.  My brain?  Two movies per disc plus a special features disc.  Nope.  That last two movies get their own discs.  In my head, that's because they're better movies.  And if The Young Master is any indication, there might be something valid with that read of the movie. It's not that The Young Master is some kind of life-changing film.  No, there's still plenty that is kind of dumb and oddly structured about this movie.  But what The Young Master does that is pretty darned phenomenal is nail Jackie Chan's exact sense of humor and tone that would make him famous later.  That's a bit of an oversimplification because The Young Master is definitely the product of this cultural era of kung fu movie.

That being said, there's enough different about The Young Master to make it watchable.  Honestly, I was getting a little bored of the story of Jackie Chan, the guy who wants to learn kung-fu only to get good at it by the end.  There's something incredibly exciting knowing that Jackie Chan can do the tricks at any moment from the first scene in the movie.  From a writer's perspective, this is probably a pretty frustrating take.  After all, we want our characters to be dynamic and grow throughout a narrative.  But from a choreography perspective, Jackie Chan is allowed to do the thing that he does best: choreograph some absolutely incredible and pretty hilarious fight scenes.  I mean, this is both a good and a bad, but the last twenty minutes of the movie is almost exclusively a fight sequence.  A twenty minute fight sequence might absolutely define what makes this movie what it is.

That's kind of what I'm learning about Jackie Chan, by the way.  I think I've already made this comparison in one of the other movies, but Jackie Chan is Gene Kelly for fight sequences.  Both Gene Kelly and Jackie Chan have this fun sense of showmanship.  Both are immediately charismatic and know how to make the most of out a moment.  But both feel like they are there to show off the technical saaviness of their respective crafts.  As much as I'm lauding (and, partially, lamenting) a twenty-minute fight sequence.  It's just the dream ballet from stuff like Singin' in the Rain or An American in Paris.  Yet, seeing just the technical proficiency isn't enough.  It's why I never really jumped on board the Phantom Menace train for the rad lightsaber fights.  Maybe, when making a movie that relies so heavily on the technical prowess of the choreography, there needs to be some self-awareness that understands that the format needs to laugh at itself a bit.  On the last Jackie Chan movie I watched, ​Fearless Hyena II, Jackie Chan was miserable.  Yeah, he also phoned in the choreography because he was being forced to make the movie by the Triads, so I don't know if this example is going to hold as much water as I want it to.  But as good as the fighting was in that movie, golly was it a slog to get through.  Instead, we have this movie that seems to take a point of pride when it comes to choregraphing everything and --which is super important --the fighting is funny?

Now, is this to say that serious Kung Fu isn't great?  Nah, I mean, I already wrote about the entire Bruce Lee​ box on my Collections page.  And, as much as I'm praising The Young Master so far, I will take The 36th Chamber of Shaolin any day over anything I've seen in the Jackie Chan box.  But if you don't necessarily have an amazing story, Chan understands that you have to upsell the character and the tone.  The tone of the movie is fairly light.  I mean, this is a crap comparison, but this feels more in line with his work in Rush Hour or Shanghai Noon than it does with his other work.  Instantly, Chan's character in this movie is charming.  That charm provides a shorthand into the world of the movie.  As much as there are some very thinly drawn characters surrounding Chan's character (whom I refuse to call "Dragon" because I don't remember anyone actually calling him that), they almost don't matter because we instantly identify that Chan's character is a lovable protagonist.  Here's the reality of my hypocrisy.  If Chan wasn't so darned talented at everything he does, this would drive me insane.  Charm shouldn't replace both character and plot. But when handled by someone like Chan, I genuninely don't care. 

And here's the deal:  this is a me thing.  I hate the little voice in my head that screams "Martin Scorsese probably respects the heck out a young Jackie Chan.  Golly, this is going to get pretentious, but The Young Master might be pique Jackie Chan because it feels like he's doing it for the love of the game.  There's some real old school kung-fu filmmaking going on here.  The zooms on this movie are violent.  The scenes last incredibly long.  But Chan, as director, is making something that just feels fun.  I talked about the importance of tone when I started this whole thing.  Chan goes into this movie knowing that he has to balance his tone and the rest has to be borderline guerilla filmmaking.  Are there some overly silly things in this movie that might not work?  Sure.  But that kind of adds to the charm of the piece as a whole.  And, yeah, there's potty humor.  Jackie Chan gets his bare bum pinched.  Okay.  Fine.  Also, he almost drinks pee from down a stream.  But do you understand how elevated the humor in this one feels compared to the last few Chan films I've watched.  He gets that certain base humor is always going to be funny, but he's not putting a ton of weight on those jokes either.  Instead, there are things that are naturally crafted that are hilarious.  That final fight, when our tensions are all built up?  Having the bad guy of the movie act as the ref for the fight is borderline priceless.  Sure, the bit goes on and on, but it works.  Honest to pete, there are moments in that fight that made me giggle on the treadmill a lot like how I laughed at Rush Hour the first time I saw it.

But all of the stuff I wrote is way too forgiving of some of the lazy storytelling that we fall into again.  I can praise the fact that Jackie Chan embraced an imperfect premise and made the best of it.  But on the other side of that, there are a lot of moments where the movie doesn't feel cohesive.  Like many of the other movies in this box, these movies almost feel like a collection of scenes and bits as opposed to a coherent story.  The big bad guy of the movie?  (Not the one who acts like a ref.  The convict.)  What's his deal?  We know that he's a convict getting transported and that he's incredible at Kung Fu.  But he has almost no tie to the story.  There's a loose explanation that the evil school freed him for...reasons?  Like, regularly, throughout the movie, I kept wondering "Is this the plot?"  At first, I thought that this movie was about redeeming oneself in the school after losing a big match.  Then I thought it was about getting a brother back.  Then I thought it was about escaping a constable.  Then I thought it was about the convinct that I knew nothing about .  Finally, I had no idea what it was technically about.  Now, you could argue that these are all beats in a movie.  And to a certain extent, that's true.  But none of these scenes seem to have continuity or consequence.  When we see the school after Chan returns, it's almost startling.  "Oh yeah.  These guys."  Like, no part really stood out as "This is the movie."  

But again, I've been preaching the movie.  The Young Master (despite having a terrible name for this movie) is possibly the best movie in the box set.  Again, I have one more movie in the set, so it's not over for me.  But it is definitely a solid film.

Rated PG.  Probably the only red flag from this movie is the kind of scary bad guys.  There's something unsettling about the CG world of Minecraft when given film aesthetics.  What might be a simple thing when watching these characters in a video game comes across very differently when it comes to a film.  I can't think of much else that really would be upsetting about the movie.  

DIRECTOR:  Jared Hess

I know that I start all of these by saying that I don't want to write.  I'm kind of in a funk, so if I'm overly harsh on this movie, I apologize.  But I've been putting off writing about A Minecraft Movie long enough, so I suppose I should still write about it while it is still somewhat fresh.  (Note:  I have things that I absolutely need to write about and this is not helping.) 

By this point, you'll all have heard about the walking meme that is A Minecraft Movie.  Younger Gen Z and older Gen Alphas have been tearing apart movie theaters to ironically lambaste A Minecraft Movie.  Me?  I have younger Gen Alphas.  My kids loved the movie unironically and thought that the applause and the hooting that was going on during the movie was genuine enthusiasm for the movie.  I want to look at theater culture both to comment on the degradation of society when it comes to the movie while keeping myself also in check as I'm about to turn 42.  

I knew what I was getting into when I took my kids to the movies.  My son has been way too excited about this movie without any sense of irony.  Sure, his classmates are making "Chicken Jockey" references left and right.  But my kid, like many other kids, absolutely adore the whole Minecraft culture.  I kind of get it.  It's a game that isn't for me.  But out of all the games that he could be playing, Minecraft is oddly wholesome.  It's digital Lego.  I applaud that. Given time and effort, players can create anything that they want. While it's a bummer that it is digital, there's something wonderful about the notion that kids are creating worlds, many of whom are doing it without the thought that there could be something artistic or self-serving in the behavior.  For a culture that is so viral-video obsessed, many kids take those videos as inspiration as opposed to seeking instant fame and that's pretty great.  The fact that there is a narrative mechanic is also kind of fun.  I get Minecraft. 

So, for my kids, it was a movie that spoke to them.  Now, my son said it was his third favorite movie after Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and The Super Mario Brothers Movie. You can see what he likes more than movies, right?  I do think it is weird that we have A Minecraft Movie as a concept.  The lore is not exactly one of those stories that is easily adaptable.  But I also grew up in an age when no one had really cracked the video game movie code.  Now, decent video game movies are a dime a dozen.  To A Minecraft Movie's fault, some of them are pretty darned good.  A Minecraft Movie isn't great.  I'm putting that first and foremost.  The reason that all these pre-teen turds are ironically watching the movie is that there is quite a bit to pull apart.  But is it watchable, especially for kids?  Yeah.  Maybe.  Me, a 41-year-old man who never got into Minecraft?  I kept on watching it as a Jared Hess movie.

I know that I'm writing just to write here, but Jared Hess is the Napoleon Dynamite / Nacho Libre guy.  His directing style is so rife with irony to begin with that he almost lacks heart.  I know that Napoleon Dynamite is actually kind of a touching movie at times.  But that seemed like a balancing act and a passion project that allowed Hess to really figure stuff out.  A Minecraft Movie is not that.  If anything, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen here.  The sheer amount of people who have a screenwriting credit on this movie is borderline offensive.  I know that many movies have screenwriting credits that we never get to see.  But A Minecraft Movie had too many people writing this movie and you can feel it.  The entire opening had to be a draft of the film.  The movie opens with Steve explaining his entire life and a whole movie's worth of adventure.  The problem with that movie, probably, was that it didn't have enough characters in it.  Jack Black as Steve probably had to carry the movie himself, saying things to no one because Minecraft itself is a pretty solitary game.  (I know!  You can have people working on the same project in the same server.  But that seems to be the exception to the rule nowadays.)

But the rest of the story feels like a bit of a formula, leading to the big problem of saying absolutely nothing by the end of the movie.  Here's the problem:  Steve is not the protagonist.  Steve is almost more setting than he is a character.  If we're going to compare Steve to another character in my son's canon of great movies, Steve is Toad from The Super Mario Brother Movie.  He's there to show how insane this world is.  While he might be on the adventure, Steve does very little growth, going as far as abandoning the internal conflict that set him on this mission.  (Steve promises to betray the team for the sake of his dog.  From moment one, he's pretty open that he lied to Malgosha.)   Henry is the protagonist of the movie, which is shocking considering that most of the film is almost devoted exclusively to either Jack Black's Steve or Jason Momoa's Garbage Man Garrett.  

That's where the real problem lies: Garbage Man Garrett and Steve serve the exact same role in the film.  This is some studio nonsense.  It seems like every video game movie thrives with Jack Black in the movie somehow (Sorry, Borderlands...) and Jason Momoa physically looks different from Jason Momoa.  But both can do physical comedy.  The inclusion of both of these characters is, as Dan Harmon would most likely testify to, "a hat on a hat."  (I know he didn't come up with this phrase.  I feel like I'm defending myself from you guys more than normal today.)  Both of these characters play the goofy blowhard.  Neither one of them is particularly good at their jobs.  If anything, it's the parody of the blowhard American.  But having two of these characters was a bit much.  If anything, we have our main characters take a backseat because they act like everymen in this story. 

And, honestly, I love Danielle Brooks.  I love her.  She's fantastic in everything.  She's even fantastic in this.  She has nothing to do in this story.  If anything, the movie kind of regresses gender narratives by splitting the movie into "boys' stuff" and "girls' stuff."  While the men are having an adventure, the girls literally make a home.  That's the girls' story.  That's no good.  Danielle Brooks is there to be a sounding board to the white girl saying that she might be a bad sister.  The worst part?  I bet that "I'm a bad sister" plot was the crux of one of the drafts of the script, but doesn't even really matter in this movie.  It comes back to it every so often.  But from this perspective, Natalie and Dawn have borderline nothing to do in this movie.  It's bad storytelling.

But that brings me to the thing that frustrated me most about the movie:  Gen Z and Gen Alpha.  Here's where I want to not be an old man.  Part of me loves that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are turning out for A Minecraft Movie.  In some ways, it's The Rocky Horror Picture Show for a new generation.  I love audience participation.  From a guy who was raised with Mystery Science Theater 3000, I can't claim I'm above watching a movie ironically.  Mind you, I would never talk during a Mystery Science Theater.  Here's my point.  Where I lose Gen Z / Gen Alpha on this movie is the fact that Rocky Horror is a sign of loving the film unironically.  It's a complete embrace of the purpose of the film.  And when we watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 and laugh about how bad these movies are, they tend to be dramatic.  We're adding comedy to something that wasn't meant to be a comedy.  

When these kids are tearing apart theaters (too far, by the way.  Don't be jerks to people who are trying to show you a good time.), it's being ironic about something that is already ironic.  When Jack Black delivers a line completely over-the-top, he's aware that he's doing it.  We're supposed to laugh at the absurdity of what is going on.  Making fun of something that is making fun of itself misses the point.  Like, it's just broadcasting a lot of stupidity to the rest of the world.  And I'm being the old man again here, but it isn't a good look.  Also, how dare you make fun of the songs in A Minecraft Movie.  Mr. Jack Black is one-half of Tenacious D, a comedy-band duo that rocks so hard that it forgot more about comedy than you'll ever know.  Also, keep in mind, there's probably a studio head who wanted "Peaches", but for Minecraft.  Get off Jack Black's butt about it.

However, there is a certain joy that comes out from knowing that A Minecraft Movie is benefitting from all the attention it receives.  It's going to be a bummer, though, when Another Minecraft Movie (or whatever it's going to be called) comes out and tries capitalizing on the irony that was Gen Alpha culture.  They're going to be saying "Chicken Jockey" every so often (much like how this movie included "tots") and no one is going to laugh.  But whatever.  

​It is what it is.

Rated R for being pretty darned R-rated.  Yeah, I know what I wrote.  Judd Apatow's core talent is to mimic real-world vulgarity and then, somehow, escalate it.  As such, this movie is fully of language and graphic descriptions of sexual acts.  It also has a sex scene with nudity.  But I'm a guy who laughs a lot at Apatow's brand of crassness, so who am I to throw stones?  

DIRECTOR:  Judd Apatow

Do you know why I'm writing right now?  It's because I'm too sleepy to read.  Yeah, sometimes I have to prioritize my productivity.  And, sure, I won't be able to finish this in about twenty minutes.  But I'll get a good chunk of this done.

I'll tell you what.  Serendipity is a weird thing.  Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  I've been watching Funny People slowly over the course of a few days.  (Sure, that may be blasphemy to a lot of you.) But I got to the second half of the movie and then the whole thing felt like Gatsby.  Now, I dismissed a lot of this as something that has just been taking over my life right now.  I'm teaching Gatsby right now.  It was the 100th anniversary and I got all kinds of treats from my boss who is unabashedly obsessed with the book.  I couldn't help but think that this was the English teacher in me over-reading into it.  

Then I Googled it.

Sure enough, the IMDB page has that under the trivia section.  Apparently, that was entirely intentional.  Yeah, I'm not an idiot here.  I know that some people might fight this one pretty hard and I can't even throw stones at that.  The biggest thing that I'm fighting against with the Gatsby comparison is the first half of the movie.  Funny People is a great movie that I was surprised that didn't take off.  But the one thing that I understand frustration with is the fact that it feels like two movies.  It's  long movie, especially for a comedy.  The first half deals with the very real concerns of confronting one's own mortality, especially when it comes to securing a legacy. I want to talk about all of that because, if I'm being honest, I find that part of the movie far more interesting than the Gatsby part.  But the second half of the movie is aggressively The Great Gatsby.

The easy read of that Gatsby is that George Simmons is Gatsby, the rich man who regrets letting the love of his life go.  Admittedly, Simmons doesn't have the same motivations as Gatsby.  Gatsby makes money to win Daisy over.  Simmons lets Laura go to pursue his riches and wants a do-over.  (Aw, the fictional in-universe baby movie is called Re-Do.) But Laura is stuck in a terrible marriage with Clarke, who is just a nicer version of Tom Buchanan.  Apatow doesn't go as far as making Clarke racist, despite the fact that he's really into cultural appropriation.  But there are kids involved!  It's Pammy all over again.  But the real deep cut is the role that Ira plays in the story.  Ira is Nick Carroway.  The really interesting part of Funny People is that the story is about Ira, not George.  Admittedly, Ira is more invested in the whole story than Nick ever gets.  Because the protagonist of the story is Ira, Ira is allowed to have a bit more backbone than Nick ever does.  My frustration with Nick Carroway is always his passive attitude to all of the nonsense going on around him.  Golly, I actually like how, narratively, Ira works better than Nick.  (Don't tell my boss.  Gatsby is a perfect book for her.) 

I got onto the whole "rewatch Funny People" thing because of my comedy podcasts that I listen to.  Right now, I'm deep into You Made It Weird wth Pete Holmes.  But I remember when Funny People was first out, it was the movie to be talked about.  Listen, I'm not a standup.  I probably will never be a standup.  But one of the things that Pete Holmes talks about is the importance of paying dues.  He keeps comparing it to The Karate Kid, but it shows that it only helps to take the whole thing slow.  Appropriately enough, Pete Holmes would go on to work with Judd Apatow intimately on Crashing, the show that was semi-autobiographical about his life.  Apatow got deep into standup.  You can get the absolute respect that Apatow has for the entire standup world with this one.  It's funny, because I think about this being a movie about standup first, a movie about death second, and The Great Gatsby third.  There's a lot of plates spinning in the air here.  But if you want to altruistically live the life of an up-and-coming comedian, Funny People kind of does it great.  I assume.  I write a lot.

But I mentioned, to me, the real meat of the movie is the fact that we have a hard time processing death.  There's a truly great line saying that George is the only person to face death and not come out a different person.  Part of what makes Funny People stick to the ribs more than other movies is the fact that it refuses to pull punches a little bit.  I think I'm growing cynical in my old age.  I tend to like a depressing message more than anything else in movies.  But Apatow doesn't really seem to have George mirror the Scrooge story as a means to be shocking.  I think the narrative that Apatow is playing with is that it is hard to make real change.  A lot of the movie is devoted to George and the way that he processes death.  Yeah, George is a jerk from moment one to the end of the movie.  He's always kind of been a jerk. There's something endearing about him when he's a young man making prank calls.  But he's never outright a good person.  

I suppose you could argue that his hiring of Ira shows that he has a bit of a heart.  And, yeah, Ira melts George a little bit.  But George doesn't have his healthier moments because a desire to be a better person.  Instead, he's afraid.  A lot of his behavior is a manifestation of fear.  That's a little bit of a hard nut to crack because George is so isolated from humanity in that giant house of him, so the notion of him being a good person was always a bit of an uphill battle.   When George blows up in the first half of the movie, there's something inherently sympathetic about his reactions.  He's a scared man who completely lacks a support system around him.  That's why Ira is necessary to the story.  After all, Ira is the Nick Carroway of the story.  He has a distanced relationship with Ira because there's a power dynamic that can never really be leveled for a lot of the movie.

But that's why the second half of the movie works well with the first half.  The second half of the movie shows George thinking that he's made some major changes in his life.  (I mean, that Eminem scene is perfect, but it also plants that seed of immorality in him.) And that's kind of the truth that Apatow is spouting to a certain extent.  It's incredibly cynical, but it also is imbued with verisimilitude.  People don't change just because they're faced with tragedy or hardship.  Every movie we ever see, we have characters who go through some kind of trial and come out a better person.  (Unless the story is serialized.  Then, we have to do everything that we can to keep them the same person at all costs.)  

And I would like to point out that Apatow probably isn't screaming that people don't change.  The absolute denouement of the film is George visiting Ira at his old job.  The two of them put the past behind them and George becomes vulnerable, offering Ira tags for his bits. (See, I do listen to comedy podcasts!  I called them "tags" and "bits".)  It's because George wants to change.  The first time I saw this movie, it bothered me how everyone was mad at Ira in the movie.  Like Ira, one of my triggers is infidelity.  Ira, in a move morally culpable unlike Nick Carroway, tries to stop George from sleeping with Laura.  He points out that there are two little girls who would be affected by this decision and that it wasn't George's right to make that decision.  He then tries to stop Laura from dumping Clarke.  And, admittedly, it does backfire on him.  (I am bothered that Laura doesn't have the self-assessment abilities to point out that she lied to Clarke one last time.) 

But when George is driving Ira back from that debacle, he is unable to comprehend his own responsibility for the emotional train wreck that he caused.  Heck, Clarke --who is the Tom Buchanan of the piece --has more self-awareness than the actual Tom Buchanan.  He takes responsibility for his actions.  But it's because there is a direct correlation between his goals and his morality.  George keeps apologizing to Laura, but it almost is a sadness that he let her get away, not because he did things that were bad.  Again, these are all arguable points.  But at the end of the day,  I really don't see George as someone who is sorry so much as he regrets the road not taken.  

I honestly don't see why Funny People isn't considered top tier Apatow.  Apatow is actually a genius. But I tend to like his sleeper hits more than the ones that people preach all day.  Again, between Funny People and This is 40, I'm on board this guy's films for all time.

Not rated, but this one can mostly be condensed into one scene that is wildly uncomfortable.  While the way that people deal with mental illness can be upsetting for some viewers, the real scene that is troublesome is a scene of incest.  While most of this happens off-camera, the scene is still extremely uncomfortable.  Otherwise, this is a small story that is meant to mirror the format of a stage play.  Ultimately, there's a little bit of cruelty between characters, but what can you expect from Ingmar Bergman?

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Guys!  Guys!  I'm in the section of the Ingmar Bergman set where there is only one movie per disc.  That means I'm in the classics.  It's almost a prestige thing, I think.  The big movies are allowed the cinemartic real estate to have their own discs.  That's exciting for me.  As much as I've been slowly moving through the Bergman box / compared to how much effort I've put into moving through the Bergman box, I'm thrilled that I only get one movie per disc.  I get quality films in small doses.

I also have a delay in my flight at the airport so I have time to catch up on some writing.  I have 41 minutes before the flight begins boarding (fingers crossed!) and I'm going to try to clear off my blogging list!

Two things can be true.  I probably have seen this movie and I don't remember it at all.  I mean, I own this movie in two formats now.  I own it on DVD and I own it in the Criterion Bergman Blu-Ray.  The crazy thing is that I kind of like this one.  I mean, this is something very specific for Bergman.  The second that the movie starts up, you get this aura of quality.  Sure, the other Bergmans have quality.  I know someone out there probably hates all my reads on the Bergman films.  But honestly, there is something absolutely gorgeous about Through a Glass Darkly.  And I mentioned the play thing.  While the play thing gives the film an avant-garde quality, what it also does is focus primarily on performances.  

Maybe that's something that I haven't been giving the Bergman movies a lot of credit for in the past.  While they have all been artistic as get out, I haven't really paid attention to a lot of the performances.  Part of that comes from the fact that I don't speak the language.  That's a real thing.  I simply assume performances are functional because I'm so trying to wrap my head around the bigger ideas.  You can't fault me for this.  It's part and parcel of watching Bergman movies.  But what I'm not exactly used to in Bergman films is a straightforward character drama.  Yeah, we got a little bit of that in the early Bergman stuff.  The early Bergman era tended to lean towards melodrama.  Instead, Through a Glass Darkly sacrifices complex plots for focusing on a unsolvable problem.

I like when a problem is both internal and unsolvable.  There's something heartwrenching about Karin's situation.  Like most of my blogs, I'm always in a state of unpacking the films, so bear with me while I do some of that here.  Karin is a woman who oddly seems divorced from her medical condition.  The first act of the film acknowledges that Karin is dealing with schizophrenia.  However, much like many first acts throughout art, we're seeing what life is like before the conflict becomes too much of an issue.  Karin's life is focused outwards on her father.  The movie seems to mirror much of Bergman's other work, making it seem like about an absentee father obsessed with his art.  It's not surprising that Bergman is making a movie about a father who can't remember his own priorities when it comes to his art.  Bergman even admitted that much of this movie was a reflection on his own life.  

But the further that this movie progresses, the more we understand that little of David's obsession with having his novel published (note: the flight I'm waiting for is to Las Vegas, where I'm attending a writer's conference to pitch my novel to agents...so, like, I get it?) is the central conflict.  If anything, it seems like David might be mirroring Bergman's own impotence to balance real world problems with his own artistic agenda.  The movie only embraces its central conflict when Karin discovers that David is pessimistic about her treatment.  That's when she spirals and the schizophrenia takes center stage.  She has a full on manic state (I'm not even sure if I'm using that correctly) and the movie places her as the protagonist of the piece, despite the fact that she has little control over her own actions.

I don't want to take agency away from Karin as protagonist.  One of the few things that I don't want to let go of is that this is a woman's story written by a man.  I really do believe that he wanted to give Harriet Andersson an acting challenge through Karin.  It's who we care about through the story.  But I can't help but attach to the male perspective of this story.  It is written by Bergman.  As much as we root for Karin's health, the real meat comes from how the three separate men relate to Karin.  Again, I'm the worst and I hate myself for making this about the male gaze.  But it's what my brain does and I can't stop that.

The three men in the house all start the film as caretakers of Karin, even if they define themselves initally from the perspective of David.  David is a father who acknowledges that he's kind of a turd when it comes to being a caretaker.  His daughter is floundering through mental illness and that impotence enables him to hide away in his work.  It's almost a crutch.  When he wants to, he abdicates his responsibility to Martin, Karin's husband.  Martin might be the healthiest of the men.  Part of that seems to come from the fact that he signed up for this as opposed to was relegated to caretaker.  As a husband, he sees Karin for the woman first and then as relation second.  Honestly, Martin's perspective on Karin is the most sympathetic.  (I'm basing this all on a shot toward the end of the movie where they all hold her down and inject her with a sedative.)   

But Minus?  PRONOUNCED MEE-NUS?  Come on, Minus.  What is going on with you?  The dumbest read that I can offer is that Bergman created a character based on sexual repression coupled with a loose condemnation of pornography.  Minus rapes his sister.  And on top of that, Karin blames herself for it happening.  There's a lot to unpack here. 

Now, here's me swinging for the fences.  Without a proper understanding of psychology, I can't help but think of id, ego, and superego for these three characters.  It's a stretch.  I know.  Everything about Minus screams "id."  Here's a character who makes plays about his father's failures.  He looks at smut.  He denies any kind of control when it comes to being attracted to his sister.  David, as superego, is about being proper.  He's obsessed with art and obsession with his own status.  He can't balance two different elements of his life, so he retreats into his own sense of propriety.  Martin, however, is attracted to his wife.  Sure, it was uncomfortable that he referred to his wife as "child", but I'm going to ignore that to make my stupid idea work.  He's the one who is both sexually attracted to his wife, but is also able to care for her health and reprimand misbehavior.

Now, the image I was talking about in the end of the movie almost encapsulates the perversion of caretaker to sexual object.  I can't help  but see Karin as a woman who is being held down against her will.  For the sake of a narrative, she is being "helped" so she can make it to the hospital to treat her mania.  But that image is three men holding her down, two of whom have had a sexual experience with this character.  It feels morally gross.  Yeah, there was no other option to get Karin on that helicopter.  She was screaming and clawing at walls. But because two of those characters have uncouth motives with her, it taints the whole experience.  

Sure, I'm really adding a lot of my analysis to something that may be straight-forward.  This could just be a story of a family dealing with a family member spiraling out of control under her own mental illness.  But Bergman is a smart dude and I have this opportunity to unpack something rich and deep.  This is the Bergman I signed up for.  

Yeah, it's not the greatest of the Bergmans.  But we're in the good stuff now, guys.

Not rated, but the other one is rated X.  This may or not be accurate.  I mean, while there is quite a bit of sexual content (including nudity), it is somewhat less than I Am Curious (Yellow).  I still felt super awkward watching this one again.   The movie also has a lot of discussions about sexually transmitted diseases, so keep that in mind when watching the movie.  There's also the implication of rape in a scene.  The movie also, in its attempt to remind audiences of its political core, says quite a bit negative about the church.

DIRECTOR: Vilgot Sjoman

Do you know how tempted I was just to copy and paste my blog from I Am Curious (Yellow) and just switch Yellow to Blue?  I mean, that would have been wholly unfair to the movie and also too lazy for me to handle.  But there was a mischievous element in me that wanted to do just that.  And, honestly?  If I'm being the most honest?  This writing right here is the most intense demonstration of willpower ever because I have this blog and then I have to follow it up with Through a Glass Darkly, another film produced by Svensk Filmindustri.

This is going to be so hard to write about.  Part of it comes from the fact that this is meant to be a companion piece to a movie as opposed to a sequel or anything.  From what I understand based on the introduction from Sjoman on the I Am Curious (Yellow) disc was that he must have felt like the film was not quite what he wanted by itself.  Because both movies were made without a formalized script, there was something experimental about the whole thing.  I mean, watch this movie for even a few minutes and you get what Sjoman was shooting for in terms of being experimental.  We live in an era where formalized scripts tend to be optional.  If anything, a lot of the prestige television and cinema we make comes from loose drafts and improvisation.  So I get it.  But the relationship between Blue and Yellow seems oddly tenuous.  

The movies tout themselves to be the same movie, but different.  I might actually have a hard time accepting this as fact.  Maybe, in my mind, I am thinking that the same movie but different means the same story with different tones.  Instead, we get something that almost acts as a sequel.  These movies come out a year apart from each other.  They feature the same characters played by the same actors.  They have a lot of the same motifs.  But the story is different in each movie.  It's almost like the other movie doesn't exist, but the same characters exist.  Do you know what issue I'm having with this?  Back in 1967-1968, the notion of a reboot doesn't really exist.  What I Am Curious (Blue) is --as dumb as I sound writing this --is a reboot.  It's a reboot of Yellow.  Yellow didn't give Sjoman the satisfaction of a movie by itself, so he made another movie where the canon of the first movie is almost arbitrary.  The things that he wanted to keep about the film stayed the same.  What he didn't want to stick didn't stick.  That's fine.

I know.  I hate me too for saying it.  I'm already debating myself.  I, too, am being split into Blue and Yellow.  I get that there's more nuance to what I just said. But part of what Blue and Yellow are all about is coming to grips with some complicated thoughts.  At the films core, there is a shared intentional DNA.  Lena is a political activist who is open to sexual experiences.  In both worlds, she's frustrated by the world around her both politically and personally.  But with Blue it seems like the focus is on the movie itself.  Both films have a metatextual core to them.  Sjoman as a character making a movie about making a movie is happening in both stories.  Every time that we get invested in the grounded story, Sjoman appears to remind us that this is a movie.  It's very Bertolt Brecht.  

But I had an easier time grasping onto Blue than Yellow.  That kind of surprises me.  I mean, both stories are almost amorphous in their storytelling. There isn't a clear plot going on in either film.  But with Blue, it seems like Sjoman almost embraces the meta narrative for the benefit of the grounded world.  The Lena in Yellow seems to be finding her own spirituality.  There's something laughable about how Lena fails to embrace her own activism, always searching for the next high.  Blue, however, offers a Lena who seems human, despite the very weird metanarrative about making a movie.  She still lacks the maturity that Yellow's Lena has, but her maturity seems a lot more universal. She has a complicated relationship with her mother.  She's annoyed by annoying people who are important to her overall success in life.  It makes sense that Blue's Lena has a meandering lifestyle.  

There's also lovely motifs of disappointment.  The whole thing feels very upset at the lack of caring that people have.  I can't help but confess that I might be bringing a lot of my own neuroses to this movie because I have been so depressed about the way that politics has played out.  Part of what makes Lena upset (as a background concept) is the notion that prisons used to be something.  I have to confess that I only know about the Swedish penal system from memes.  I know that there was probably a complex political battle to get prison systems up to snuff and I am spared the burden of understanding the complex turmoil that got it to that spot.  But Lena seems to be the only person in this entire movie who is angry at the stagnation that the penal system has taken.  Now, because I don't know the intricacies of Swedish politics, for all I know that she thinks that more could be done with the prisons or that the prisons might be inhuman places of torture.  I don't know what exactly she is advocating for because I don't really have a baseline for her position.  All I know is that her actions seem to lack any real punch because the world seems happy with the misery that Lena has pointed out.

What does I Am Curious offer as a unified product?  From a certain perspective, I get the feeling that a lot of it is dealing with Sjoman's frustrations with a movie that he made.  While Yellow and Blue are solid in themselves, they don't feel like this transcendent work without the companion piece.  But if I didn't think of it in terms of artistic expression, I can't say that the two movies offer much to one another outside of seeing a bizarre experiment come to life.  Yes, Yellow needs Blue and Blue needs Yellow, but it's almost because of a novelty element.  Neither film is fully dependent on the other outside of the notion that these are two alternate movies to one another featuring some of the same talent and concepts as the other.  I wish I could say that these movies changed my life.  I appreciate how political they are.  I like some of the weirder stuff.  But that's not something that always gels in the movie.  It's good, but something is still missing.  

But thank goodness that he didn't create I Am Curious (Green), mainly because there is no green on the Swedish flag.

Not officially rated in the United States, but it's your standard PG-13 fare.  If you are using other countries' metrics to determine what we would give it, it would be PG-13.  There's a decent amount of violence, but nothing that would even raise an eyebrow.  I suppose the final fight gets a little brutal to the point of being unbelievable.  But the bigger issue is that this is a story of revenge where there are only small shifts towards a moral high ground.  Still, the movie would be considered unrated.

DIRECTORS:  Alexandre de La Patelliere and Matthieu Delaporte

I know I don't have the time to give this blog my all.  It's probably going to be split up again, so if there's a shift in tone at one point, please forgive me.  I teach The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  I have for the past four years, I think.  I love this story.  It might be my favorite epic, even more than Les Miserables.  (I think that I like the musical better than the very long novel, which seems like heresy.) But the biggest problem when teaching The Count of Monte Cristo to high school seniors who are desperate to get out of any kind of actual work is the lack of payoff when it comes to movies.  Now, you guys are all thinking, "What about the Guy Pearce version?"  Do you understand what kind of heresy you are awakening within me?  The Count of Monte Cristo, as a novel, has a very specific message about revenge and redemption.  That movie completely butchers it.  

So when I was in Paris last summer and saw billboards for The Count of Monte Cristo all over France, I got really excited.  I watched a trailer and I thought I found a mildly accurate version of the book on the big screen?  Did I succeed?  Nope.  I mean, to a certain extent, some of the movie matches the book exactly.  If I had to explain the premise of the book without the richer tapestry of what Dumas did, the movie does a pretty good job.  I would pretend to wonder why no one has adapted The Count of Monte Cristo properly.  But I know exactly why.  The book is 1,400 pages long.  It's really in-depth and the slow parts kind of matter to making the final revenge all the sweeter.  But that doesn't exactly work for film all the time, does it?  I mean, this version of The Count of Monte Cristo is already pushing the three-hour mark and it still rushes a lot of the story.  This almost feels like it would need to be multiple movies and even then, I don't know where you could make the cut.  I suppose that there is a reason that ABC made Revenge into long-form storytelling.

The Count of Monte Cristo somehow seems to be simultaneously big-budget and cheap at the same time.  I am actually having a hard time verbalizing what exactly is wrong with the visuals of this movie.  Like, when you watch that trailer, it looks impressive as can be.  And there's nothing in the movie that necessarily negates that when watching the film.  I kind of want to applaud the movie because it does a lot to create the sense of grandeur that the epic novel has within it.  But at the same time, it also feels like there's something in the sauce that's off. There's almost something a little PBS about it.  Maybe it feels like a filmed TV show more than it does a theatrical release film, but I think --and this is awful! --that the fact that it is a big budget French movie has something to do with it.  There's something that's almost like an imitation as opposed to original in the way that the movie looks.  It looks like it is trying to capture a spectacle that comes across as just a little bit off.

I won't deny that I'm having a harder time writing about this movie than I do most movies.  I think when they hit a solid 3/5, I have difficulty writing.  Part of what I like about The Count of Monte Cristo is an attempt to get the vibe of the novel down while missing some of the elements that make the story the story.  For example, out of everything in the book, Pierre Niney as Edmond Dantes --while having major character changes --feels always like Dantes.  Dantes is a character that is incredibly sympathetic, even when he's doing horrible things to people.  If the goal was to make a small intimate story into something that plumbs the depths of human morality, putting Niney as Dantes as the foundation of that is perfect.  He seems so pitiable, yet when he spirals out of control, it is easy to dislike him. And the movie gets that.  The movie gets that Dantes's obsession with getting his revenge is killing the good man inside of him.

I think I realize what I don't like about the movie.  Now, the easy and dumb read of this take is that it isn't accurate.  I mean, sure, I was really hoping that the movie was going to shoot for being the quintessential adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. I would have loved that as a teacher.  It's just that the changes that they made almost felt like they were there for being cool.  One of my favorite things about It was that it took the novels and, through its changes, made the story --at its core --the same while the scares were different.  I liked that a lot.  I feel like the directors really tried to pull that card with The Count of Monte Cristo, but more shot for "cooler" reveals.  For example, as much as I preach about how Niney nails Edmond Dantes and all of his various personas, the side characters almost completely missed their marks.

One of the key concepts in the novel is the notion that Dantes will sacrifice anyone to get what he wants.  The way that Dantes has Benedetto as the son that he always loved doesn't really gel with the original Monte Cristo story.  Again, I get that a lot of this would be done for shorthand.  I'm sure that the team behind the movie were clapping themselves on the backs when they found out that they could merge characters together to get more emotional collateral when things went south.  Benedetto's sad ending in this movie doesn't quite read the way that Dumas has it.  There are so many moments in the very long novel where Dantes has to move his moral compass just a sliver to understand what is necessary to get revenge.  And I need to remind you that the Benedetto story is only an example, but it works.  When Benedetto dies a horrible death because of Dantes's actions, the move is too great.  There are so many moments that are tragic that Dantes feels, but he has shifted so much that these moments come as another grain of sand added to the pile.  It's different from the movie when he has to come to grips with the morality of his own choices.  

When Dantes comes to the realization that the Count has killed Edmond Dantes through all of these small moments (and partially because he can never truly be with Mercedes), it's a lifetime of mistakes.  His second life is as much of a prison as his first life.  Instead, the film's epiphany moment (which I appreciate is still in the movie) comes from a direct regret from an immediate action.  It feels more like the revenge that Dantes achieves is somewhat lacking.  The book has this idea that Mercedes reminds him of what it means to be a good man and to take care of those around him.  

And this is a stupid reason to complain.  I already stressed that the book is 1,400 pages long.  I get that it's intense.  But the book is really good at making each revenge kind of mean something.  Each time you get a little bit bored, one of the coolest revenges happens to remind you that you are part of this cabal of evil schemers.  Instead, the movie dumps them all as this one moment in time that comes across as both unsatisfactory and unbelievable.  There's times when I tried explaining to my wife what the revenge was trying to be and we both stared at the screen, questioning how these moments made any sense.  And trust me, I really wanted to make these moments make sense.  I did that thing that I always do and try to apologize for a movie's mistake because I wanted there to be a reasonable explanation.

I hate when movies are just fine.  I don't know.  I want to love this movie because it really tried at times. It's night and day from the Guy Pearce version, so please understand that this movie holds a good deal of value for me.  I don't regret owning it because I'll still probably use it in my class, despite how inaccurate it is. But it doesn't change the fact that I can't find a version of The Count of Monte Cristo that nails the most important elements of the story.  Instead, we get a vibes-accurate, but heart-inaccurate version of the movie.  But at least I have a French version of a movie that is an adaptation of a famous French novel, so I have to give the movie credit in that way.  Even if it doesn't have a digital copy.

R, and it had every opportunity not to be R.  If I'm going to go off on how Sony is the most studio studio that ever studioed, part of the R rating is part of that.  They amped up the violence a bit and added a couple of f-bombs to attract the Deadpool crowd.  It's such a dumb reason because this is almost a cookie-cutter of every other Sony Spider-Verse project they've made.  Absolutely no reason to be R outside of some desperate attempts to be violent.

DIRECTOR: J.C. Chandor

You guys finally put me over the edge, Sony.  I have been "Team Like-Everything" despite having major problems with the other movies.  My goodness, Sony.  You kind of left it all on the floor for how much trash you could shove into one movie.  I'm the one guy who thought that Madame Web got more hate than it deserved and you still made me mad about Kraven the Hunter?

Here's the thing.  Sony's Spider-Man Universe was a bad idea from the start.  In general, it is really hard to make movies about villains.  They tend not to work, at least not in franchises.  I've pointed this out when Disney did stuff like Maleficent.  To make a movie where the protagonist is the villain of the story, but in a manner where there is action and it is entertaining like the hero's story, you need to make a worse villain.  With stories like these, the villain character that we're all hoping to see over the course of two hours tends to have justifiable reasons for abhorrent behavior.  To do this, you need to introduce people who are worse.  But the point of these stories is to show how messed up the villain protagonist is.  So we now know that the villain protagonist isn't the greatest villain.  We know that they're kind of just a scarier version of a hero.  Like, in no way do I want to see Kraven fight Spider-Man.  It almost makes no sense.  There was this shot of Kraven fearing spiders for no reason, but that doesn't really align with anything else that the story set up.  (If anything, there are a lot of people in Sony's Spider-Man Universe who have an unnatural aversion to spiders as their main motivation to encounter Spider-Man.) 

So what corporate Sony (again, the most studio driven movie conglomerate) does is fundamentally misunderstand what their character is about.  I swear, when all is said and done, Kraven in this movie is more animal-themed Punisher than anything else.  They even went as far as to give him superpowers.  Yes, I know that later in the Spider-Man comics, Kraven mutates himself to give himself an edge on Spider-Man. But the very nature of giving him powers as an origin story misses the point of Kraven altogether.  Let me go off because this is important.  The character of Kraven is someone who can't see the forest for the trees.  In an attempt to gain valor and glory, Sergei Kravinoff hunts creatures that cannot be killed by man.  It's all about hubris.  These are not threats to anyone.  Instead, Kraven thinks of himself as the world's greatest hunter.  As an extension of that thought, he hunts down Spider-Man, a trophy that he considers the alpha predator.  When Spider-Man defeats him (despite Kraven getting some shots in), it's so humiliating because Spider-Man has no interest in killing him.  It's only after multiple defeats that Kraven turns to manipulating his own biology to give himself a leg up on Spider-Man.

You know, villain stuff?

But this is a movie about a fundamentally good kid who was born into a crappy situation.  So he doesn't get sucked into this world of crime and moral depravity, he runs away after being transfused with some tribal and culturally-dubious super soldier serum.  He then uses his abilities as a mercenary to take down bad guys.  While the "being paid to do it" element is a little gross, the villainousness of the whole thing is absent.  If anything, he only hunts bad guys makes him the Punisher.  I mean, the movie starts off with Kraven getting himself thrown into prison so he can take down a mob boss.  That's Frank Castle, guys.  That's his entire playbook.  I have seen that movie.  Man, I don't even like a lot of the Punisher movies and I have to say that Punisher does that move better than Kraven does.

Honestly, Russell Crowe's Nikolai Kravinoff does a better job getting to the root of Kraven than Aaron Taylor-Johnson does.  I know.  You would never watch an aging Russell Crowe (sorry, Mr. Crowe!  I don't want to age shame you whatsoever) tracking down Spider-Men, but the character you are playing is more in line with the character that is supposed to be on screen.  Even the side characters, which are named and have a vague attachment to their comic book counterparts are way off from their basic storylines.  The Rhino is just a mess of a character.  I mean, I'm impressed that he has the Russian name and the Russian accent, but that's the only thing that these two characters have in common.  I know that Miles Warren probably injected rhino DNA into you or something to give you a full on rhino transformation, but that's almost arbitrary.  

I don't love that the Rhino is a mob boss.  There was always something so tragic about the Rhino as a villain before.  Like the Scorpion, these were small time criminals who were paid to honestly mutilate themselves for the sake of powers.  But the Rhino was always a little not smart. He seems like he was tricked into getting this suit grafted onto him and now he would do anything to get out of it.  It's why there are some really lovely Spider-Man comics when Rhino plays a little bit of a grey area villain.  He's a character of regret.  Instead, you missed on Rhino's fundamental emotional core: he's supposed to be stuck in the suit.  In the movie, for most of the film, Aleksei looks human.  His curse is that he wears this backpack that keeps him looking like that.  But that's not the story.  The idea is that the Rhino never has a normal moment whatsoever and that's sad.  

And the bigger issue is the lack of originality in these movies!  Why is it always a mob boss?  What is the Sony Spider-Man Universe's obsession with some big rich guy causing all kinds of problems?  I'm not saying that rich guys aren't terrible and shouldn't be punched.  I'm the last guy who should say that.  I'm saying that there's no attempts to find stories where there's just people trying to have sympathetic storylines.  One thing that Marvel has gotten really good at is making the sympathetic villain.  To a certain extent, had these movies kept going, Dima's Chameleon might have an element of sympathy.  I mean, I have no idea why the character is acting like a villain at the end of the movie.  I wish that there was a throwaway line saying that he kept copying everyone else's behavior until he learned to make it his own.  But that didn't happen. I just made that up on the spot right now.

I hate when my blogs get so complainy.  I want to like stuff.  I enjoy liking stuff.  But there's so much to this movie that is incredibly dumb.  I talked about the origin story of Sergei Kravinoff.  He goes off the grid, becomes Kraven the Hunter, a boogeyman for criminals.  You know, animal Punisher?  Anyway, the funny thing is that it is a huge epiphany for everyone in this movie when they discover that a guy named Sergei Kravinoff is Kraven the Hunter.  No one put that together.  I'm pretty sure that "Kraven" was never supposed to be a secret identity.  I'm pretty sure that it is just...his name.  You know, his name?  Yet, everyone, "Who is Kraven the Hunter?"  "He doesn't exist?"  Yet, Sergei Kravinoff who was really into hunting with his dad arrives into town and people have to do facial recognition matches to prove that Sergei is Kraven?  What is going on with this movie?

I have to keep complaining because this movie is rough.  The movie looks bad.  This might be the first time I mention this point, but all of the Sony Spider-Man movies that don't have Spider-Man in them look bad.  They are all these really safe productions where nothing is all that challenging.  I'm not talking about the CG animals.  I've learned to make my peace with CG animals.  I'd rather that than using actual animals as some form of torture.  No, I'm talking about having a model of visual imagery when it comes to their angsty characters that is so boring and uninspired.  I want people to watch the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again and see what they do with Matt's hearing when he's using it.  It's clever.  It's dynamic and unique.  Then compare that to when Kraven is constantly using his telescopic vision.  

Oh my goodness, I was about to close this blog up without talking about The Foreigner?  What?  He might be the most underbaked villain that I've ever seen.  Listen, I own every Spider-Man comic minus Amazing Fantasy # 15.  I kinda / sorta remember The Foreigner.  But there was no attempt to tell me what allegiance The Foreigner had.  His powers didn't make sense.  Heck, Kraven didn't even beat The Foreigner. He was sucker punched by Calypso, who has no attachment to the character from the book.  Oh my goodness again!  The end?  The reveal that Nikolai was the mastermind behind all of this?  That makes no sense.  It makes no sense.  Honestly, there's no way that was Nikolai's plan.  It took that old trope of making the bad guy someone close to the family and nuking it beyond comprehension.  

Golly, this movie is stupid.  For a guy who tolerated these movies better than most, I hated this film.  I'm glad the SSU is dead.  Normally, I'd be barking for more stuff like this.  I thought that I would rather have less-than-stellar content out there than nothing.  Nope.  Kraven is a hot mess of a movie and I'm glad that my viewing of these movies is done.