Not rated, but this one is one of the more questionable ones in terms of content.  Sometimes, Zatoichi movies aim to be family friendly.  Then there are the movies that toe the R-rating. While there isn't any actual sexual acts, there is a lot of innuendo, including some rear nudity.  This one also gets pretty brutal when the bad guys torture Zatoichi a bit.  Still, I didn't feel the need to pause the movie when my four-year-old entered the room because most of the movie is pretty tame.

DIRECTOR:  Kazuo Mori

Do you know how much I want to be playing Star Wars: Outlaws right now?  Like, I've leveled my character up enough that the game is crazy fun.  I'm just tearing through content as it comes my way.  I've unlocked some trophies that I thought were impossible.  Instead, all my kids are being adorable and playing four player Mario Kart and that's pretty adorable. So instead of procrastinating on writing about the movie I just finished, I'm going to write about it now.  I have to confess: I watched the conclusion of this movie without glasses.  I don't kow where my glasses are.  I got a little flummoxed about what was going on in the final fight.  Still, I got enough to make sense of what was going on, including questioning...

...is Zatoichi immune to fire now?

I mean, those shots are super cool.  Slowly walking out of fire and facing down the big bad, not even bothering to put out the fire.  Still, there are some bad third degree burns.  Heck, I was stressed out for the stuntman who had to do this scene.  Still, like my Kay Vess in Outlaws, I'm the in the final throes of the Zatoichi franchise.  I have two more Zatoichi movies to watch after this before I have to restart because I haven't written about those initial films.  Still, I will have been able to say that I've seen the OG Zatoichi films.  It's this point in the franchise where he's just a tank.  He's always kind of been a tank.  But at this point, by Zatoichi at Large, his reputation is so well deserved because he's just gone through bad guy after bad guy that I never question if Zatoichi is going to win. Heck, he's so far leveled up that the filmmakers behind this one took their trope and just downplayed it.

I'm talking about that scene from Rebels where Old Man Ben Kenobi just took down Darth Maul without effort.  Sorry, I'm feel like my writing is a bit manic today, but let me explain. There's a great scene in Star Wars: Rebels (I swear that I'm not obsessed with Star Wars) towards the end of the run where Kenobi, without ceremony, defeats a seemingly overpowered Darth Maul in one swipe.  The Zatoichi franchise has played up the trope that "Zatoichi has finally met his match."  There's always a guy who admires Zatoichi's skill so much that he can't help but be tempted into fighting this blind swordsman who just wants to be left alone.  Traditionally, these movies put this fight on a pedestal.  There tends a bit of sturm und drang with these fights.  Both sides take hits and Zatoichi only barely pulls through. But with only a few movies left in the franchise, I adored that we weren't even made privy to the fight.  Zatoichi, with a few slashes of his blade, completely destroys the big bad without ceremony.  Because the story isn't about this guy.  This guy is a wonderful witness to the world of Zatoichi.  He's outside the world, so he's allowed to provide commentary on Zatoichi's skills.

But I'm actually pretty floored that I liked this movie.  This movie breaks a lot of my rules about Zatoichi movies.  I've been frustrated with the majority of this series.  Many of the movies, like other samurai / jidaigeki films, involves a mean local mob boss harassing the town.  It's up to Zatoichi to free these people.  And, I'll tell you, I tend not to like these movies, mainly because the films tend to add complicatons to these bad guys to differentiate them from other Zatoichi bad guys.  But ultimately, these stories are the same.  But maybe what makes Zatoichi somewhat more interesting is that it doesn't steep the character in a lot of backstory that, ultimately, doesn't matter.  Instead, we see the way that he treats the villagers and the supporting cast and that's all we need to know.  I don't need to know his relationships with neighboring bosses and the internal politics of gangland Japan.  Instead, his actions have 1:1 relationships with people that we are seeing.  That's way more interesting.  The crafting of this film lets us see his moral code and what he would do to defend himself.

And it's not like the movie doesn't tell us about him.  If anything, I was really skeptical about this movie because so much of the first act is about telling us about how bad Boss Tetsugoro is and I didn't think that he could live up to that.  But because the film gives us real world consequences for tolerating Tetsugoro, I got on board wanting to see Zatoichi bring this guy down.

But do you know what I'm slightly annoyed by?  Two movies, back-to-back, have noble characters instantly distrust Zatoichi despite his behavior with these people.  Sure, I'm kind of yelling at a kid who watched his mother die in childbirth.That seems to be a fair character to distrust a stranger who is carrying is little brother around.  But beyond that, we also had Denjuro believe his son, who clearly didn't know what he was looking at instead of trusting the man who was bending over backwards to help his family and returned his child.  There was no sign that Zatoichi had the 20 ryo, yet Denjuro was quick to believe that Zatoichi murdered his pregnant wife and stole that 20 ryo.  Sure, it would be easy to write off that a man grieving for a wife stolen from him.  But it seemed like he was pretty quick to turn on one of his only friend.

And then the constable's son?  That's a weird pick.  There's a poster on the ground and he comes to the conclusion that Zatoichi killed him?  Killers tend not to leave posters of themselves when they murder folks.  Still, we have that trope slightly beaten to death.

Yet, the movie works!  Like, our character is leveled up to the promise we were given at the beginning of this franchise (although, in all reality, he was always there and I'm just used to it) and the stories are simple and straightforward.  There are some cool sequences.  I wish I could find my glasses to really appreciate some of the nuance that went into the "Zatoichi on ice" sequence at the end of the film.  But when Zatoichi is in the burning building, he really does come across as this unstoppable demon of death.  It makes the takedown of the villain that much more sweet. Yeah, Zatoichi at Large works really well.  Even if the title only makes sense in the last few minutes of the movie.

Not rated, but there's actually a fair deal of blood with this one.  Some of the Zatoichi movies downplay the blood. Some of them go blood galore.  This one is on the higher side.  It has that effect where a guy gets stabbed with a sword and blood actively sprays everywhere a second after being stabbed.  It's a lot of that.  Also, some parents get murdered right at the beginning, forcing the story into play.  Coupled with that, you have some language and potty humor, but nothing too bad.

DIRECTOR: Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Oh my goodness, I am so glad that I read the Wikipedia article before starting to write this.  See, I had a theory when watching this one.  Considering that you have one protagonist who is known for his handicap (blindness), it's weird that you have the other guy who is known for his handicap fight him and no one really addressed what happened to that guy's arm.  In my head, for most of the film, I thought that "The One-Armed Swordsman" had to be from another franchise or something, like they did with Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo.  But when that ending came up, where (SPOILER ALERT) Zatoichi straight up kills the one-armed swordsman, I thought that I had to be wrong.

Guess what?  I was right! 

"The One-Armed Swordsman" came from a series of movies in China.  How did a crossover movie kill a character who had his own line of movies?  In the Chinese version, it's Zatoichi who loses.  What?  I can't even wrap my head around this.  What kind of mania was going on in 1971 where they could just make multiple versions of the movie to please different audiences?  Don't get me wrong.  I am entirely here for it.  I kind of love that canon was so fast and loose that you could just say, "The Japanese people want the Japanese guy to win.  The Chinese people want the Chinese guy to win.  Let's do both."  That's fantastic.

I've been up and down on the Zatoichi train.  For the few people who have been following along (which, at this point, I don't think that would even be me), I've been frustrated more than I've been pleased with Zatoichi as a franchise. They tend to hide the fact that there is no plot under complex relationships that ultimately don't matter.  But this is a movie that embraces a straightforward plot.  I love that so much.  It becomes more about character than it does around story.  And considering that it is a crossover film, which we saw kind of fizzle out with Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, the story is great.  It's one of those stories that's easy to summarize.  A Chinese child's parents are murdered in front of him because he stepped out of line during a procession.  The One-Armed Swordsman witnesses this and tries to save the child.  While the One-Armed Swordsman fights off bad guys who want to cover up their crime --which really isn't a crime but that's some good shorthand here --the boy runs into Zatoichi who helps the One-Armed Swordsman defend the boy when he smells that something isn't right with the claim that the Swordsman is the bad guy in this situation.  Because the two don't speak the same language, they're manipulated into fighting each other, eventually leading to the death of the Swordsman against the best attempts by Zatoichi.

That's a fun story!  How is that not a fun story?  It's simple.  It's interesting.  It has the promise of two juggernauts of violence fighting each other?  On top of that, it's done well.  The fight scenes are great.  You get some fun wire fu in a samurai film.  That's really cool.  But the best part of the movie is the fact that you have these two guys developing this fast friendship when they don't understand each other.  Say what you will about how fan servicey that this movie could potentially be, the core of the film is that these two are ultimately good people who are hampered not by their handicaps, but by the fact that they can't understand one another. When that final fight happens, it's not because one person is being a bad person and the other isn't.  Admittedly, I feel like the One-Armed Swordsman is far more easily duped than Zatoichi is, but that's part of suspension of disbelief.  We can lie to ourselves that someone can convince themselves that the guy they thought was a good guy was a bad guy the whole time.

It is weird, though, that I'm so forgiving of the One-Armed Swordsman (whom I should refer to as "Wang Kong" because that's his name) but not of Yone.  Yone is the one who really lets this thing get out of hand.  I have to give her some credit.  Her father is murdered because of her generosity when Zatoichi and Wang Kong are looking for shelter.  She's angry and wants revenge on someone, so when the bad guys blame Zatoichi, it makes sense for her to distrust him.  But it also seems plum silly.  Zatoichi is the one who frees her.  He treats her well after freeing her.  But it's one of those scenarios that you only really see in movies where a basic discussion would probably solve all of the problems.  When she accuses him of being a traitor, I don't know why he isn't vehement that he had nothing to do with the death of her father.  She's the one who eventually comes around too late to the idea that the bad guy --the guy who caused the death of her father --might have been lying about Zatoichi. 

Still, I find myself more mad at her than I do at Wang Kong.  Is it because he's male?  Golly, I hope I'm not that chauvinistic.  Is it because he can't speak the language?  Maybe.  Maybe it's because he's put in this situation that questions his own heroism.  It is weird, though, that the second that Wang Kong finds himself dying at the blade of Zatoichi, he knows that Zatoichi was innocent in the whole affair.  I don't quite understand that beyond the fact that the film wants to end in a happier place, considering that it just killed the star of another franchise who just wanted to do good.  To return to an idea that I had before, I'm floored that they didn't just find a happy ending where Zatoichi disarms (no pun intended) the One-Armed Swordsman and through his continual lack of fatal blows, convinces the Swordsman that they're both on the side of angels. 

Still, I'll argue that a simple, well-told story will always be better than relying on formula and covering up a vapid story with unnecessary complexity.  Considering that this should have been a throwaway crossover movie, Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman is one of my favorite in the bunch.  This movie was rad. 

Rated R for sex, language, murder, and attempted rape.  The odd thing is that this movie could have been an easy PG-13 because each of those elements are so short in the movie and often just tacked on to make the movie seem a little more edgy.  If it wasn't so boring, there would probably be a way to make the movie viewable for younger audiences.  Still...R.

DIRECTOR:  Steven Soderbergh

I almost got away with not watching this.  There would have been this thought that this was one of those fancy pants, A24 wannabe deep horror movies that I never got around to.  But I've seen it.  I have seen it and I also know that it was one of the most deeply disappointing movies I've seen in a while.  Maybe I'm hating on it because I had modest expectations that were not met.  Maybe I'm hating on it because I now have to write about this movie when I have a billion other things to do.  All I can tell you is this:  Presence is kind of terrible.

Now, I can't say that it's objectively terrible. I actually don't like that term.  Besides the fact that entertainment is entirely subjective, Presence, if it wasn't made by Steven Soderbergh would be a "good first attempt at a movie."  I'll be completely candid.  I didn't know that Soderbergh made this when I went into it.  The only thing that I knew about the movie was that it took place from the ghost's perspective.  I mean, considering that I just wrote about In a Violent Nature, a movie that takes a similar premise of telling the story from the slasher's perspective, I knew that the concept had legs.  But while In a Violent Nature --a movie that I acknowledged was a bit flawed in its own way --does something interesting with the role of the first person camera attached to the supernatural being, Presence seems like it is trying to ride high on its concept and practically nothing else.  And even the first person perspective almost detracts from the movie instead of adding to this.

I'm in a pickle now because I want to talk about how the first person perspective is wasted as is the rest of the film.  I really need to keep my focus because I'm trying to knock this bad boy out as fast as I can because I'm starting to stack up some Zatoichi movies in my wake.  I want to talk first about the premise.  The beginning of the movie has that kind of faux A24 / Neon Films vibe of the camera meandering around the house.  The cool thing is that we get a sense of isolation and loneliness from the ghost and that is interesting.  Honestly, A Ghost Story did the same bit a little bit better, but I can't begrudge the few successes this movie has.  Now, the hopes that I had would be that we saw the frustration of this ghost leading to the haunting of the family so we could understand why ghosts behave the way that they do in film.  Unfortunately, we're a little bit in a Casper situation.  The ghost has no malevolence towards the family.  There are moments where we question why the ghost acts in seemingly violent ways.  But most of the movie involves the ghost protecting Chloe.  There isn't much of a threat to the family almost at any point in the film.  The closest we get is bringing the medium in and getting a little ripped off.  So, from a horror perspective, we don't really get the narrative of what causes ghosts to haunt people.  Instead, the ghost mostly just acts as a camera for the audience...because it literally is a camera.  For the majority of the film, you could just write off the camera as not-a-ghost and that's the only thing that Presence is adding to the party.

But let's pretend that the ghost-as-camera thing works like Soderbergh swears it does.  The actual story is almost non-existent.  Before I knew that this was a Soderbergh film, my theory was the following: this was a student short created for film school that was remade by the same person into a feature length film when the short film got more traction than he thought it would. The best part of the movie is that it is only 84 minutes.  The problem is that, even with that runtime, there isn't really 84 minutes of content.  The only recognizable name in this movie is Lucy Liu, who gives a bit of an over-the-top performance in a painfully sedate film.  Much of the movie relies on archetypes instead of nuanced characters.  Mom is evil and potentially sexually interested in her successful oldest son.  Dad is too perfect, frustrated by Mom's continual crossings of boundaries.  Chloe is the suffering rebellious teenager who can't share her feelings with the people who need her to.  Tyler is the quintessential worst jocky bully.  And then Ryan?  Ryan is such an extreme version of a villain it's hilarious.  There's nothing subtle.  When I confused this script for something that came out of film school it's because it reads like everyone has to be quickly understood.  But do you know who wrote this script?  David Koepp.  The guy who wrote Jurassic Park.  I don't even know how you got to this point.  It seems so lazy.  

And part of that is the attempt to get to its twist ending.  One of my biggest frustrations with The Great Gatsby is that the story does cartwheels to get to its shocking ending.  Don't send my boss this blog because she is adamant that The Great Gatsby is perfect.  What I do think about The Great Gatsby is that it is an incredible book that tried to get this perfect dismount of an ending, but strains the conventions of plausibility to get to that ending.  I don't think Presence is an outstanding story before the reveal at the end, but it goes through a bunch of absolutely silly moments to get to that ending.  SPOILER ALERT: The big reveal is that the ghost is Tyler.  There's a throwaway line that the medium says that ghosts experience past, present, and future all scrambled.  So Tyler is there to protect Chloe from Ryan.  That's a fun idea.  I really like that as a reveal.  After all, it explains why the ghosts looks away when Chloe is having sex.  There are small moments that tease that Tyler is the ghost.  Fun.  But here's the problem, that ending is a mess.  Tyler is a ghost protecting his sister from an untimely death even though he's still alive.  At the midway point, Tyler-as-Ghost creates a minor earthquake to stop Ryan from putting date rape drugs in her orange juice.  (Note: these kids are really into orange juice.  It could be with alcohol or it could be just orange juice.  These kids don't care.  They want the orange juice.) But Ryan tries that again and Tyler-as-Ghost doesn't do anything about it.  He instead has to wake his living self up with flashing lights so Tyler-as-Person sprints up the steps (somehow?) to save Chloe.  I don't know how living Tyler knows to do that or how to do that.  Then he...tackles him out the window?  What?  It's so silly.

Presence is an examples of filmmakers putting all of their chips into a gimmick and hoping it pays out.  It doesn't.  The rest of the movie is kind of lazy.  The story isn't that interesting. This is a short film that should not be expanded into a larger film.  

Rated R for a lot of violence.  The movie is one big excuse to do almost a supercut of the most violent deaths imaginable.  As part of the schtick, these deaths happen and before you are given the chance to actually process what horrific thing you've just witness, the movie smash cuts often to a funeral for the person just killed.  I will say that it does take a lot of the sting of said violent action, but you can't deny that you've seen that violent action.  There's also swearing, but it all seems hilarious to think of when you've seen someone get ripped apart in some new way.  R

DIRECTOR:  Osgood Perkins

Of course I decided to watch this on a plane.  My kids weren't around.  My wife wouldn't want to watch this movie.  Every time I am alone, it seems that I binge a bunch of horror movies.  It's not that I'm this guy obsessed with horror.  I just know that my spouse has no interest in watching these movies.  And I thought, violent Stephen King horror story made by the guy who made Longlegs?  Don't mind if I do.

Well, that might not have been the greatest choice because now I have to write about a movie that I'd have a hard time recommending.  While Longlegs was far from perfect for me, I did recognize that Osgood Perkins was probably a genius.  We're starting to see a lot more auteurs coming out and making genre cinema, so I was ready to line up behind Perkins.  And it's not like The Monkey is even remotely bad.  I think the place that I'm in right now is between "not for me" and "trying too hard."  Part of what makes The Monkey a story worth telling is that it is perhaps Stephen King's most obvious trope.  The notion of a killer toy has been done by all of the greats.  One of the subgenres of horror is the intentionally innocuous thing causing fear.  Heck, it's why It works.  I can see the appeal for a director to jump on something like this because, as a short story that's based on a trope, a lot of the heavy lifting has to be done on the visual side.

I will admit that I haven't read the short story that this one is based on.  I may be way off in my assessment of what I saw because I have no evidence to base that on.  (I would like to point out, in case Mr. King is reading, that I'm more than halfway through Bag of Bones, so I'm not exactly a slouch when it comes to reading King's canon.) But this feels like Perkins is looking to have a good time when making a horror movie, which is a nice alternative to Longlegs because --while the film toys with a macabre humor --it seems more serious than not.  Perkins uses The Monkey to indulge the quirkier side of gory horror.  The Monkey feels a little bit like a mix between a Jared Hess film and a David Lynch film, only with a lot more blood.  Perhaps I'm being overly critical because the movie slightly annoyed me, but I wonder if I would be as critical of Sam Raimi because he kind of toys with the same kinds of things.

I mention David Lynch to do a couple of things.  The first, most egregious, thing is that I'm one of the few film fans who never liked David Lynch.  I always wanted to.  I went deep dive into Lynch in hopes that something would click and I could finally understand what all of the hubbub was about.  It never happened.  But the thing that makes The Monkey Lynchian in its approach is that people don't act like people.  That's done for humor in a lot of the cases.  With the first death in the movie, we have this running gag of funerals that I wrote about earlier.  The thing is, these funerals are said by a overtly incompetent, stonery priest.  Now, it's done for laughs.  But it also...doesn't make a lick of sense.  There's no background on this priest.  There's no reason that this guy would be a priest.  Instead, we just get a bunch of lines performed in an absolute bananas kind of way.  That's such a weird decision.  But it's not the priest alone.  Sure, the priest bit is repeated, but there are also town cheerleaders who do a cheer when anyone dies a horrific death.  There's no explanation about why these kids act this way.  Nope.  They just do.

And these are side characters.  While the first act of the movie, told through flashback, have the two main characters as teenagers, this part kind of comes across as more of a cinematic reality.  Perhaps the movie leans a little hard into archetypes and characters are a bit more like caricatures, there's at least some modicum of restraint when it comes to making these boys have somewhat grounded motivations.  But when the boys grow up and we enter the second act, the entire world is bananas.  Hal, for some reason, has given up his son.  It gives a loose indication because the monkey exists?  But he hasn't seen hide nor hair of that monkey since he was a child.  Now, I understand that Hal is a traumatized person.  But his character doesn't really reflect the things that he is saying.  Instead, he's thrown into a world with Elijah Wood as a fatherhood guru without an actual kid?  Wood's Ted just says goofball alpha statements at Hal without much decorum.  It's all of these moments that are written to be funny, but don't make sense why people are acting like that.  It's a bit of the same problem that I had with Friendship.  When people are supposed to act normal, they act normal.  When people act weird, it's usually for a joke and no one really bats an eye at the weird moments.

And it's not like there aren't comedic moments that should continue being in the movie.  The whole opening sequence with Adam Scott as, presumably, Hal's father is larger than life, but follows the rules on how people act.  He's terrified of the doll and playing it cagey.  The thing follows through on its murder and kills the attendant.  (Also, who turned the key in that sequence?) It's funny and dark, but also lets us know that people are horrified by death.  The fact that people have silly reactions to death later on betrays the rules of the world set up for us.

Similarly, the obsession with the weird actually tanks the main plo

R for all of the mega violence you can handle.  If you think it's just violence, oh no.  You forget that the Predator franchise is a big fan of messing with people's skeletal systems on the outside of their bodies.  Also, the freedom of animation means that you can do some pretty gnarly stuff with violence.  It seems moot, but in the shadow of all that violence is some language.  There isn't any sexuality or nudity.  But, you know, tons of violence. R.

DIRECTORS: Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung

Guys.  Guys.  It's pretty great.

Like, I'm not the first person to be all about Predator: Killer of Killers.  The internet basically unanimously all got behind this Hulu Exclusive.  I'm going to pat myself on the back here because I can.  I saw that trailer when it was first released and instantly thought, "This is going to be my favorite Predator movie."  Now, do I always keep the faith?  Not really.  When I found out that this was going to be an anthology movie, I was a little disappointed.  The thing about the trailer was that we saw a bunch of people from different times fighting Predator monsters.  I thought that Killer of Killers was going to be these people coming together and have a big mega battle.  And guess what?

It was both!  It was both an anthology movie and a sick film about warriors throughout time fighting Predators.  Oh my goodness.  It's so on the nose and exactly what a Predator movie should be that I'm actually going to have a hard time writing about it.  I think that there are some people who get attached to projects and it is absolute serendipity.  Dan Trachtenberg, this is what he does now.  It's like Kevin Feige.  Feige's got his Marvel stuff.  Trachtenberg has his Predator universe.  And where I'm giving him all of the kudos comes from the fact that he's willing to take big swings and make me care about a universe that should absolutely bore me.

(I would like to point out right here that I'm writing the rest of this at 1:15 in the morning three days later because I went to San Francisco for a funeral.  On the plane there, I watched a movie.  On the plane back, I watched a movie.  I was this close to getting caught up on this blog.)

I think that when I wrote my Predator 2 and my Prey blogs, I pointed out some stuff that was pretty obvious. If I didn't, I'm disappointed in myself.  Regardless, I'm going to do a quick version here: The very notion of a Predator is a scathing commentary on the role of the mighty hunter.  I suppose that Kraven the Hunter tried to do something with this and failed in the shadow of the Predator franchise.  I never want to kill things. I'm not wired to do that.  But we know that there are people who go on safari to hunt lions and massive killer beasts.  The logic of this behavior implies that man is able to be something bigger than his fragile self and fell nature's predators because of intellect and cunning.  However, for people like me, this behavior is always a bit absurd.  After all, those not involved in killing lions for funsies are aware that the gun is doing most of the work.  Also, a lot of these hunters hide behind the luxury of money, meaning that they are equipped with guides and places of safety to do their hunting.  

That's why I always thought the notion of the Predator was always a little bit silly.  This is a race of creatures who have devoted every element of their society to hunt the universe's greatest killers.  But the one thing that is wildly obvious is that the Predator always outguns its victims.  (One of the things that I can't really wrap my head around is how the creatures, who seem intellectually pretty simple, create the most devastating hunting technology in the universe.  Are there Predator scientists?)  Now, when these Predators used to stalk Arnold in the first movie, that tech was pretty advanced.  But Arnold at least had machine guns and stuff.  That was at least a weapon that could potentially put a hole in a Predator from a distance.  Sure, that stuff didn't work so well because the Predator has cloaking tech.  But we can at least pretend that late '80s military weaponry could hold its own against an invisible killer.  But I love that Trachtenberg takes that one moment at the end of Predator 2 and rides that imagery into the ground.

The best part of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the opening credits.  We got to see Wolverine and Sabretooth throughout the ages, interacting with history.  The rest of the movie is a full-on disappointment because all of those images in the opening credits seemed more interesting than the actual plot that the movie had.  But what Killer of Killers does is embrace the absolute insanity of this massive goopy alien tearing apart warriors from olden times.  Sure, these are the humans that win. There's the shieldmaiden Viking, the samurai, and oddly the kid who uses more smarts than weaponry to destroy the bad guy.  But I love that the newest tech in this is from World War II. With the viking and the ronin (which is probably more accurate?  Maybe ninja?), their tech is pointy things.  That's the extent of tech that goes against a monster that can see you in the darkness and be invisible with spaceship tech to back him up.  It's so hilariously unevenly matched that it becomes more about the skill of the fighter than it is about the absurdity of what is being watched.  There's no way that anyone would stand a chance against the Predator.  And yet --AND YET! --there are three guys through sheer skill and luck get through killing their hunters.

Yet, again, this is a commentary on the stupidity of hunting.  That's what the movie keeps kind of coming back to. Even when we get to the Predator planet, which I have to believe is more about building lore in a franchise that was almost infamously anti-lore, these are a bunch of alpha males all clapping each other on the backs and saying that they are the ultimate killers.  Heck, these three, against all odds, defeat their respective predators on Earth only to be forced into a deathmatch with each other, a giant beastie, and then have to take on the King Predator.  And of course it's unfair.  The movie doesn't even go into a place that says that the hero beats the King Predator.  No, it just makes them win by escaping...kind of.

The reason that I'm losing my mind over Killer of Killers is that none of this should work.  Instead, what I was given was a Hulu original (the second in this franchise) that is animated and absurd. And yet, the movie feels rich.  It sticks to its guns about what a Predator movie should be about.  When Terminator fell off the rails, Predator somehow maintained a very similar formula and continues to be more and more entertaining without losing what made the movie something to be watched in the first place.   Honestly, Killer of Killers is probably my favorite Predator movie.  On a much smaller scale, Killer of Killers is what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man.  It's super fun.  It turns the anthology format on its head, giving value to the connecting thread, and it's a darned gorgeous animated movie.  

​Points all around!

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

DIRECTOR:  Edgar Wright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Morocco didn't do anything for.

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

DIRECTOR:  Christopher McQuarrie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: Hark Tsui

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: Bong Joon Ho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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