R for sexual scenarios and almost-going-out-of-its-way-to-get-there nudity.  I would say that this would be simply a heavy and slightly vulgar dialogue-driven film if it wasn't for this character revealing that her body is still appealing, despite her advanced age.  I don't think I'm crazy here, but there's at least a hint of both a spiritual and a physical incest element to the story as well.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

If I really lock in, I can get a whole bunch of this done before I need to start my day.  I actually got here at a reasonable hour.  I don't seem to be too distracted.  I have a lovely cup of tea steeping and I'm playing Mozart.  Honestly, shy of any interruptions, I might be able to knock out a blog about a shorter film that I have a lot of opinions about.

At one point in my life, realistically around my late teens to my early twenties, this might have been one of my favorite movies.  It would have been a snobby pick on my part in an attempt in order to seem cultured, but so much of this movie screams that time in my life.  I was teaching at a theatre school and taking theatre classes in college.  I was mildly obsessed with a text that I actually currently use (now sparingly) in my performing arts class.  I'm talking about Boleslavsky's Acting -The First Six Lessons.  For those who are unaware of this, it is a short play between a director and his female lead.  In the play, the very lofty director acts as a sage, catching his well-intentioned actress in some traps about acting.  (He's not actually directing her in a play in the play.  She simply comes to him for advice.)  If I was more critical, I would accuse the play of misogyny.  But that also transitions me into After the Rehearsal.  The fine folks at Criterion knew what they were doing when they paired this and The Magic Flute onto one disc.  I actually thought that this was going to be a literal companion piece to The Magic Flute considering that I caught that Erland Josephson was in the audience for The Magic Flute.  For the first chunk of After the Rehearsal, it seems like a spiritual adaptation of Boleslavsky.  There's an elder director talking to a well-meaning actress about her craft and how she's really not all that good at it yet.

I don't know if this is going to surprise anyone, but it doesn't stay that way.  I surprised me.  In what I've learned to be a typical Bergman fashion, the film shifts into treating this as a therapy session where Vogler (a name that he seems to use a lot in his films) stands in as an avatar for Bergman as artist and letch.  I'm going to approach how this movie views him as an artist first because I struggle more with that than the letcher part of Bergman.  Bergman, at this point in the box set, is the Bergman of renown.  He is always in his own shadow and there's something very tired about not having real peers when it comes to talking about art.  I'm synthesizing my thoughts on Bergman-as-Vogler using all of the works where an aging artist is paradoxically genius-and-child.  I get the vibe that, as much as Bergman acknowledges that he's potentially one of the most knowledgable directors of all time, he also seems himself as a fraud.  For all of the time that Vogler talks to Anna, he is giving great technical advice for the character and the choices that she should make.  But he is also someone who cannot handle basic human interaction.  Like many of Bergman's other characters, he is cruel.  I don't love this part of the theatre, but many of the greats tend to be more brutally honest than they have to be.  I choose those words because while honesty is important in the performing arts, many of the productive directors have that switch flipped on at the expense of their performers.  Yeah, they get great performances out of their actors, but often at great and irresponsible emotional strain.

There's something damning about the entire After the Rehearsal experience from a directing perspective.  I'm going to say that I overall liked it. But if one half of this story is the story of art and the artist, After the Rehearsal is not Bergman's best work.  I applaud that Bergman presents this almost exclusively as a play.  The metatextual play-within-a-film works really well for this because the content of this story belongs on the stage.  When he made The Magic Flute, he blended cinema with the stage to pull people deeper into the story through unobtrusive craftsmanship.  Bergman doesn't do that too much with After the Rehearsal.  The problem with that is that he breaks his own rule occasionally, and it is incredibly glaring.  Ultimately, this could have been a real stage performance.  But I can almost accuse Bergman of cowardice.  In the midst of these performances, which we see happen in real time on stage, he occasionally has Vogler's inner monologue comment on what is happening.  These moments are more tell-not-show, leaving the viewer with little to interpret.  He tells us what we should be thinking about both himself and the other characters when the interaction between the characters is already doing that.   If this is going to be a play, let it be a play.  We don't need that element telling us what to interpret.  I think he watched the film and kind of Blade Runnered it.   Plays are hard.

The bigger issue is that Bergman is just being that gross old man that keeps justifying terrible behavior.  As Bergman gets older, the stories kind of get more pathetic.  I do have to add yet another disclaimer here:  I don't know who Bergman was as a man.  I tried watching special features and documentaries about him, but they seem overwhelmingly fawning over the man's genius.  He was a genius and history puts in him that context.  I know that he tended to have open relationships.  I know that he was married at least three times.  I shouldn't be one to judge.  The issue is that he keeps imbuing his characters with traits that have created a narrative for me.   When he was a younger guy, his sexual proclivities were about adultery between two people of equal age.  As he gets older, there's almsot an obsession with the notion that younger women are attracted to older men.  The thing is...he seems wildly aware that he's being kind of a perv.   

Okay, I'm trying not to judge, but I'm going to judge.  (My wife says that the "J" in ENFJ should always be capitalized for me.)   Bergman is an emotional child.  In the wake of all of his artistic intelligence, he seems to thrive in the same emotions that I had in my early 20s.  Again, there's a reason that I would have loved this movie back then.  There's this idea that the protagonist needs to torture himself and others because he's attracted to the worst idea ever.  One of the running motifs in the film is that Vogler is unable to control his baser desires, even if he vocally says that he's in charge.  He's attracted to Anna, but he also maintained a sexual relationship with Anna's mother, Rakel.  Even the timetable implies that Anna could technically be his daughter.  While it is unlikely, it is also not entirely impossible.  But the frustrating thing about Vogler --and using Vogler as an avatar for Bergman -- is the idea that Vogler is the one who is both torturing himself and indulging himself because he is somehow superior in the relationship.  This is probably my most frustrating thing about my constant commentary on Bergman's relationships in these movies.  Very few relationships in Bergman movies are about vulnerability.  If anything, they are incredibly guarded relationships.  Both of these people have people at home.  Vogler has a wife.  Anna has a significant other who got her pregnant.  Yet, the two torture each other when, honestly, a little bit of vulnerability would go a long way. And I know that there's crying and self-rebuke.  But just the fact that the role of elder and youth are the only personalities that these two take on.  The fact that Vogler goes into the "fatherhood" element of the whole thing is even worse.  He's aware of the metaphor of what is going on and he's still indulging the conversation.

So it's interesting.  I don't deny that.  I love the theatre.  I love emotion. But I can't stand that Bergman keeps exploring the same stuff that should be explored in therapy.  It's a weird assumption that I'm going to watch a later Bergman film and find an older character discussing his romantic relationship with a younger character, who will automatically be obsessed with the older man.  It never feels healthy, and yet will always be assumed to happen.

G, which I would have agreed with if the last scene didn't exist.  The finale of The Magic Flute involves the protagonists to make their way through the depths or underworld.  Now, while you don't see any real nudity, there are scores of people wearing flesh bodysuits to make it look like they are simultaneously in agony and nude.  It's a lot.  Like, it's one of those situations where you feel like this is somehow offensive and also acknowledging that you aren't really seeing anything. Also, there are multiple discussions about suicide.  Remember, I'm trying to say that this movie deserves to be G rated, but it also has a Blackface character who tries to rape the female lead. Still, I'm glad to have a G-rated blog amongst the wealth of filthy films.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

This is what I've always kind of wanted.  

As a theatre kid, I honestly nerd out about live theatre.  I like musicals.  I love drama.  But I've always felt like a litle bit of a fraud when it comes to opera or ballet.  There are times where there are Fathom Events at my local movie theater where they have live broadcasts of the MET.  But I don't even know where to start.  Part of what is driving me is snobbery.  Another part is a Faustian (Oh, I'm aware) obsession with consuming all art before I die.  But maybe the biggest part of what makes me want to watch opera is that my dad was smarter and classier than I am and there's an unhealthy need for his approval, despite the fact that he died decades ago.  

Still, the notion that Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute, keeping it mostly tied to its operatic roots is exactly what I wanted.  I've been burned out on Bergman lately.  I've been watching movie after movie where he talks about the cruelty of love and I just can't keep watching this same stuff.  But I've always been in the camp that Bergman, for the most part, knows how to tell a story that's visually compelling.  If you are going to appeal to an ignorant audience, it's probably through something like this.  The odd thing --and I genuinely applaud Bergman for this --is that Bergman seems to have a seemingly paradoxical appreciation for both the world of the stage and the language of film.  The beginning of the film starts with Mozart's overture...you know, the beginning?  But during this, Bergman makes a point of showing various audience members (including at least one member of his troupe), consumed by rapture as they stare at an empty stage.  Once the opera starts, the film jumps back and forth between what is clearly a traditional proscenium stage and what could only be a film set.  And it's cool?  Like, so much of this is Bergman stressing what he's great at.  He knows how to make things look pretty and immersive while reminding us that this isn't a competition between two media.  He then blends the two artforms, and lets us imagine that these characters live lives as actors in their own stories.  Like, our introduction to Papageno is him waking up behind stage in character realizing that he almost missed his own entrance.  I love it so much.

If you've been reading my Bergman blogs, you've probably noticed that I'm mildly annoyed by Bergman. It's such a weird thing to try to take down one of the greatest directors that the world has ever known.  It's not on purpose. It's just that I have to say things that come to my noggin and not all of them are flattering.  Much of it probably spirals out of ignorance.  Again, the point of watching these movies, for me, is to learn.  It feels pretty bad to comment on Bergman.  It feels even worse to comment on Mozart, especially from a perspective of a film viewer.  Narratively, The Magic Flute is baffling.  From what I understand, many operas are adaptations of stories that already exist.  Maybe I'm commenting on mythology more than I'm commenting on Mozart.  But I find The Magic Flute to be something that I should have predicted, but I had no idea that it was like this.

Before I proceed, I have to establish that I needed a little Wikipedia help.  The very notion that this movie exists begged for context.  From that article, I discovered that Sarastro is not actually Pamina's father in the initial story.  So many of my thoughts about the story stemmed out of the fact that Sarastro is actually a heroic character as a father and the Queen of the Night, who is Pamina's mother, is actually the villain of the piece.  So I have to realize that I'm commenting more on this specific production than I am on Mozart's work as a whole.

So much of the story is defiance of expectation.  Tamino is rescued by the Three Ladies on behalf of the Queen of the Night.  Because the story begins in media res, we have to assume that Tamino is actually a noble knight who actually might be good at fighting things like dragons.  Because I'm so wired for archetypes, I treat Tamino as a hero who is deserving to be the protagonist of this story.  After all, the Queen of the Night picked Tamino to rescue her daughter for a reason.  But as the story progresses, I don't know if Tamino is all that good of a hero.  Sure, a lot of my takes on Tamino come from the fact that I love Papageno way too much and find his story way too compelling.  But Tamino is treated as the protagonist of this story and has a rep that may not be earned.  Tamino is serious as get out.  He follows all the rules.  He is willing to subject himself to trials.  But Tamino only barely passes the trials and doesn't really consider a lot of the consequences of his actions as he undertakes these trials.  

It makes me think why we're supposed to be bonded to Tamino.  Tamino can't beat a dragon by himself.  He gets frustrated by Papageno, who is appropriately a loving-but-bumbling oaf.   But Pagageno seems to be --and this is probably a bigger commentary on me --the more heroic of the two?  Papageno finds Pamina first.  He helps her escape.  And, yeah, he's kind of dumb.  He keeps failing these trials and keeps getting punished in weird ways for failing these trials.  But he also in unabashedly himself.  He seems to be wildly aware that the very nature of these trials is kind of dumb.  Again, he's insanely dumb.  He blames his talking during the silence test on "forgetting that he was not allowed to talk", despite being constantly reminded that talking is no bueno.  Still, I want to look at the consequences of Papageno's actions versus the consequences of Tamino's actions.

Papageno talks all throughout the silence test.  The test, being what it is, is meant to present a bunch of disruptions, shows Papageno a hideous version of the girl of his dreams.  But it is because he is a bumbling oaf (which is why he's talking) that we see that Papageno is as morally a good guy as can be.  He is unmoved by Papagena's false ugly visage.  If anything, he seems enamored by her overall and her ugliness doesn't even move him a little.  They laugh and flirt and it's kind of romantic as heck.  But when he isn't shocked by her looks, he's rewarded by having her true beauty revealed.  Ultimately, in this scene, he's punished for talking all throughout the silence test by having Papagena disappear.  It is only during his suicide attempt, which becomes wildly metatextual, that he remembers that he can be soothed by his bells.  The bells brings him his Papagena and the two sing about the insane amount of children that the two simple folk will have.  It's great.  I love that story.

But if we contrast this to Tamino and Pamina's story, Tamino and Pamina seem to almost miss the point.  Papageno talked all through the silence test.  Papageno couldn't imagine hurting Papagena.  He saw the present as this wonderful opportunity to get to know someone and he eventually gets his happy ending.  But Tamino refuses to talk to Pamina, who is confused by Tamino's cruelty.  When she goes to kill herself, it is far more serious than Papageno's foolish attempt at getting affirmation.  She almost does had it not been for supernatural intervention.  So much of this makes me wonder what the point of the tests are.  In my head, I have to assume that the tests should mirror traits that would be good in a marriage.  After all, the point of the tests are to see if Tamino and Papageno would make good husbands.  So what is the point of the silence test?  Is the notion that sometimes we have to do things that hurt our spouses that are good for them?  Because the story doesn't support that logic.  That silence almost gets Pamina killed.  Papageno, on the other hand, with his defiance of any rules, builds Papagena up and leads her to want to marry Papageno for who he is, not because he fits some kind of archetype.

The part that blows my mind is the fact that the Queen of the Night is the bad guy of the story.  Like, we get very little about the Queen of the Night.  She is Pamina's mother, but it's really bizarre that Sarastro is a noble ruler.  And the Queen of the Night?  She tortures Pamina for most of the second act.  It's really bizarre.  I mean, I like it.  I do think it is underdeveloped.  But I also know that it made the movie far more watchable because it meant that so much of the story was somewhat unpredictable.

As a close, I do have to acknowledge that opera might be a little boring.  I liked this, mostly a lot.  But it is funny how it takes forever to get anything done in an opera when the story could be far more briskly paced. Still, this is exactly what I wanted it to be.

PG, which may be pushing the limit a bit.  Listen, it's right on that fence.  But if I was on the anti-PG rating for this one, I can immediately cite the premarital sex in the movie.  It's tame, compared to what could happen in a movie like this.  It's on that level as Superman II, but it doesn't change the fact that it is in there.  Also, it's a bleak movie.  Golly, it's a bleak movie.  Sure, in the best way possible.  But there are depressing parts and then there are upsetting parts and then there's the straight up Tin Man element of the story.  I have a hard time really supporting PG on this one, but I'm always happy to see that PG still exists as a rating.

DIRECTOR: Jon M. Chu

You ready for some straight up controversy?   This is better than the first half.  What?  I know that all of the bangers are in the first half of the story.  I get that everyone who started crying at Wicked probably didn't have as much of a good time as the second one.  I'm reading those reviews.  I heard what my wife said.  I don't care.  Wicked: For Good is that movie that's going to stick to the ribs for a while.

I have been preaching for a while now that art needs to be political.  (And as I always state, all art is political, even if it tries not to be.  I just prefer politics with an active voice.)  Little story here because I don't think that I've ever documented this formative moment before.  In college, I took a playwriting class.  I went to an incredibly conservative college because I didn't believe my progressive friends that conservatives were dangerous.  A lot has happened since then and I am struggling to make it through the day sometimes.  Thanks for asking.  Anyway, I wrote this piece of garbage script that swore a lot.  It wasn't exactly embraced, but I did get points for trying something that none of the other conservative students in the room had done.  The big thing I learned is that swearing should be used sparingly to give the word meaning when used.  But in that same workshop, someone had written a conservative piece that everyone loved.  The professor went on a diatribe about how arts should be used to challenge people and he applauded this work.  Ironically, I thought then what I think now.  I thought that the piece was incredibly safe because it didn't push anyone in that room. But the moment that changed me was the notion that art needs to be challenging as heck.  It should be entertaining, sure.  But more than that, it needs to address the problems that we have in society.

I'm about to write something incredibly embarrassing right now.  I'm ashamed to write this.  There's a viral trend where people match the poses of people that they consider their philosophical idols.  Yeah, I want to do that with Elphaba in this movie.  Oh my goodness, I seem to model everything off of Elphaba in this movie.  This isn't something that I should be writing with pride.  I want to hide myself from myself by saying something so basic and awful.  But I don't think that I've identified with a character harder than Elphaba, specifically the Elphaba from this movie.  I really need to point out that Wicked: For Good was filmed a while ago.  We're now about 10 plus months into Trump's second term and Wicked: For Good is a straight up condemnation of what Donald Trump is doing to America right now.  

I have heard that there's a contingency of MAGA that says that For Good is a pro-Trump movie and that takes a level of delusion that is painful.  Before I go into a long spiel about how much I applaud the filmmakers of Wicked: For Good for leaning in hard into the political stuff (stuff that the stage production also championed years before Donald Trump was a blip on the political spectrum), I know that a bunch of people out there are probably dismissing Wicked: For Good as typical liberal claptrap.  I know.  The voice of celebrities against a wave of hatred isn't going to change a ton of people.  But I have to let you know, what I love about Wicked: For Good is that allegory does amazing things into giving insight into what people are going through.  I am a blue dot in a red state.  I live in suburban Cincinnati.  It didn't matter what Donald Trump had done up to this point.  Donald Trump did insanely evil things in public and it didn't matter.  It seemed like everyone I knew didn't care.  It was cultural to vote for Donald Trump because that's what the Christians around me did.  Christian Nationalism has pervaded the world around me and that's something that I fight against every day.  Honestly.  I'm not exaggerating.  Every day I wake up, look at the world around me, and am reminded that the environment around me is in direct oppositions to the teachings of Jesus Christ --and the people who are violating Christ's teachings are the ones who call themselves "Christian." 

So, the movie?  The movie perfectly encapsulates the same sense of loneliness that I feel.  Sure, I'm hyperbolizing around me.  I'm not a literal criminal. I may be one day, but let's save the drama for if that bridge is crossed.  I have made friends with people eight years removed from Trump's first presidency that have kept me sane.  But from any real perspective, I often feel like I'm in this fight alone.  Elphaba starts the film writing the phrase across the sky "Our Wizard Lies."   If I haven't got a one-for-one about posting and how people ignore information in front of them than Madame Morrible switching it to "Oz Dies", a willful misinterpretation of what is present.  I know that I'm feeling incredibly vulnerable about this, but I couldn't help but think about the message given by Democrats to military servicemen and women about refusing illegal orders. The message that was put out there was legal and verifiably true.  However, Donald Trump called for these people to be executed for seditious behavior.  I repeat, this movie was filmed a long time ago.  The play was up even longer than that.

By the way, if I was getting paid to do this blog and/or took pride in how well or poorly written it was, I would have tossed the entire first part.  This blog is going to be mostly me going on diatribes about what is going on in the world and the fact that so many people are cool with the most evil crap happening.

Again, back to Elphaba's loneliness!  The first movie is great, don't get me wrong.  But a lot of the first movie is about the fragile friendship between Elphaba and Galinda. The political stuff is in there and I liked it, but it's in the background.  What's great about For Good is that the character stuff is already there and we're allowed to be full on mad at Glinda.  (I will be switching between both names because I'm not sure which name is the more appropriate.)  I feel a lot of people around me are Glinda.  Glinda is not evil.  Heck, the Glinda the Good moniker actually really works for her because she honestly thinks that she's doing good.  But from any outside perspective, there is something incredibly complicit about Glinda.  There is a logic that says that you can do more good by changing people from within.  Yes, the story ends with Glinda taking on the mantle of Elphaba, but it's a little more complicated than what it seems.  Glinda's behavior in this movie isn't excused.  She is the face of a New Oz underneath the Wizard.  One of the things that an authoritarian government needs is someone to hate.  Just for the people who didn't get it, the animals are immigrants.  (I mean, they're lots of things, but the easiest one-to-one is immigrants.)  In the universe of Wicked, animals have sentience.  They are citizens within the empire.  But as the story progresses, the animals are used as (pun intended, probably by the Stephen Schwartz himself) scapegoats.  For an authoritarian to divert attention away from faults, a leader needs to have a common person to hate.  Immigrants throughout history have been the brunt of hatredfor the sake of giving monsters power.  With the case of the animals, because they are treated as less-than-human, they start acting like animals in our world.  I know that some people only view the animals as literal animals, so I feel the need to spell this out. 

Back to Glinda!  Glinda lives in a world where she is feeling like she is bringing peace to the people of Oz as a public figurehead.  But what I find interesting about Glinda is that she's confusing "good" for "nice."  Glinda's final goal is that everyone is happy and nice to each other. I do kind of love that Fiero is the one who sees Glinda for who she really is, often calling her on her malarky throughout the piece.  Again, Glinda isn't evil.  What Glinda is, however, is someone who is so blinded by privilege that she can't even see the damage that she is doing to the people of Oz.  When Elphaba hands over the reins to the resistence to Glinda, it is because Glinda has finally come to terms with the fact that she was only helping the regime and that Glinda can use her platform to kill off the nature of an enemy.  There's this great speech that the Wizard gives, mirroring Trump's "I could shoot someone in Times Square" speech that stresses that people want to have a villain to hate.  Elphaba knows that, like with The Dark Knight, that people need to have a villain to hate.  If she can be the villain instead of the animals, it's something that people can move past because a single person is defeatable.  Again, most of the people that I know, who are absolutely great people, are more Glindas than Elphabas.  They so want the world to be the way it was that they act that way, ignoring the clear evils just out of sight.  Like Elphaba, I want to live that way so badly.  I'd love to pretend that things are going fine.  I just know that they aren't and it horrifies me that there are people in cages.

Oh, you know that there are immigrants in inhumane cages right now, right?  Just a reminder because we've been through so much in 10 months. 

Okay, all of what I said above is why this movie is personal to me.  But I do want to talk about it as a movie.  I think this movie is incredible.  I'm a guy who likes musicals because I'm a guy who likes movies.  I would like to think that I'm not a "Musical Kid Turned Musical Adult."   I probably know more showtunes than most of my peers.  I don't deny that.  But I also know that I'm not instantly swayed by a toetapping number.  Honestly, I'd sooner see Death of a Salesman or To Kill a Mockingbird than Dear Evan Hansen, but it doesn't change that I like musicals (and still want to see Dear Evan Hansen).  But I can see how the musical kids might like Wicked better than Wicked: For Good.  All of the good numbers are in the first half of the musical.  But my point is that the story is better in the second half.  And, if I'm going to be honest, if you don't have a rigid alliance to the score or the songs, I kind of dig the new songs.  I know!  Blasphemy!  I'll tell you what.  If you are incredibly political, like I am becoming more and more every day, "No Place Like Home" makes you want to cry.  Like, I get that it might not be the most vocally impressive song in the world.  But those lyrics?  It's the message of someone who is also struggling out there.  Golly, so perfect.

But I do have to be critical, don't I?  Can I tell you one thing that didn't move me as much as I think the storytellers wanted it to?  I don't care that the Wizard is Elphaba's father.  It really has no bearing on how the story plays out.  Call me a Rian Johnson sympathizer, but I don't think that every character needs to have some kind of secret villain lineage.  It's a bit of a hat-on-a-hat for the movie because all of the emotional beats are done from that point on.  I don't believe that the Wizard would be so moved by discovering that he caused the death of his daughter because I don't think that his daughter ever mattered to him.  I don't see a throughline of a character wishing that he had time to raise a child.  Nope.  I see a guy, very much like Donald Trump, who puts his own quest for power and worship over the people around him.  It's fine.  Like, it doesn't detract that much.  But I also don't have the jawdropping moment that the film wanted me to have.

There's so many beats that I want to explore.  I want to talk about Nessarose and her moniker as the Wicked Witch of the East.  I want to talk about the Tin Woodsman and how scary Boq gets without a heart.  I also am also trying to unpack Fiero as the Scarecrow, simply becuase the movie downplays the "lacking a brain" issue coupled with why he would befriend Dorothy.  (I mean, the first movie has him kicking books around and Fiero's entire profession as spy is set up before that, but it's not quite explicit what Fiero was doing during the Dorothy sequences."  And, oh my gosh!, the Cowadly Lion as a race traitor?  Golly, I'd love to explore that.  But do you know what?

The movie does an incredible job already exploring that.  It's such a good movie, guys.  Like, between this and Andor, I have a lot of genre allegories about the Trump administration that moved me beyond what I thought was possible.  I know that people were moved by the first one, but this is the one that got me on board.  I know.  No one is going to be excited for replaying For Good.  But I loved this movie, bleakness and all, that it might be one of my favorite movies of the year, even potentially giving Superman a run for its money.  (I'd like to stress that I adored Superman and that's incredibly high praise.) 

Passed.  This one feels very pre-code.  It has a bunch of girls skinny-dipping at the beginning of the movie, but you don't really see anything.  It's one of those things that we got with Psycho.  You are fairly certain you see something, but I'm pretty sure that you don't see anything.  But that's not the problem with this movie.  The problem with this movie is the same thing that you got from all of the movies about vaudeville acts from this era.  What is that problem?   Apparently every vaudeville act was somehow wildly racist because that's all that entertained audiences back in the day.  Also, the movie kind of dances in the prostitution zone without outright saying that Helen ever becomes a sex worker.   Also, we see a bathing kid's butt.  That's uncomfortable for many people.

DIRECTOR:  Josef von Sternberg

There's so much to do before I go to bed.  I'm now two movies behind and I just started setting up the house for Christmas.  So late night writing it is.  I'm really getting to worry about this Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg box set because I'm most of the way through the box and I realize that these two are pushing the melodrama well into the soap opera zone.  Like, in my head, Josef von Sternberg was one of those provocative directors who really opened the world to what it meant to challenge the system.  Instead, I am watching these movies and simply getting that these were almost incredibly lazy movies.  I know that there would be people who would wildly disagree with me out there, but first impressions aren't doing a lot for him.

The thing that makes me full on annoyed by Blonde Venus, and by extension Josef von Sternberg, is that the first act of this movie actually seemed halfway decent.  I'm talking, of course, before the scent that comments on the savagery of African dancers.  That was pretty gross.  But I'm watching Blonde Venus and I'm actually kind of taken aback.  For the first time in this box set, I'm watching Marlene Dietrich playing a character that isn't some kind of seductress.  I mean, she's still a woman skinnydipping in a pool with a bunch of other ladies.   It's a weird place to start a movie that actually is meant to stress how domesticated Helen is supposed to be.  Also, it makes Ned completely unlikable before making him to be the picture for domestic bliss.  But let's ignore those two bits completely because this was the first movie where I actually saw Marlene Dietrich play a sympathetic role from the outset.  Even before I had seen a Marlene Dietrich movie, I had always associated her with that Tiger Lady archetype.  To see her as a loving mother of a child and, while that may not be a stretch for a lot of actors, I find that shift oddly interesting.

But then Act II goes into full afterschool special.  I have to be aware:  I am not the audience of 1932.  But the message that Acts II and III bring us is the notion that women should not enter the workforce under any circumstance.  My goodness, the speed at which Helen is corrupted by the arts scene is incredibly laughable.  I want to take my time going down this rabbit hole because I have enough to say without feeling the need to rush this.  What von Sternbern did here was to create yet another morality play about the vice of the arts.  With Act I, we have the most wholesome mother and spouse that von Sternberg's mind could come up with.  Helen, Ned, and Johnny are the nuclear family.  In the case of Ned, he's actually gone nuclear and is dying of radiation.  It feels very much like the other films that Dietrich and von Sternberg made together.  Ned's diagnosis seems really made up.  I know.  I can't necessarily prove that what Ned says about his prognosis is malarky.  But, golly, does it feel really silly.  He could have just had cancer.  There's nothing wrong with giving a fictional character cancer. If anything, giving a character cancer may give a film verisimilitude.  But dying of nuclear isotopes or something is just absurd.  Lo, I digress.  She's the perfect spouse and she has left the debauchous world of jazz singing to take care of her family.  She has this moral high ground for returning to this sleazy underbelly.  She's only going to take care of her husband's medical expenses, despite the fact that Ned is willing to die so that she doesn't have to sell her soul.

Now, I'm going to get frustrated and fast.  I hope you are fans of Breaking Bad because that show was incredible.  It took a morally gray area about how Americans don't care about educators and health care and, over the course of many seasons, showed how intoxicating the criminal underworld could be.  That show took its sweet time, pushing Walter White down more upsetting moral conundrums until he left that show completely swallowed by his own desire for power.  Now, I would love to pretend that Blonde Venus took any time for this because we're meant to feel sorry for Helen as the movie progresses.  My biggest angry reaction to this movie?  I don't feel sorry for her at all.  If anything, Josef von Sternberg goes out of his way to make Helen as unlikable as possible.  She goes into this whole thing on the side of angels.  She's going to sing a few song anonymously, work late hours, and then get out so that Ned can survive his nuclear isotope problem.  That's pretty moral to me.  I could see, over the course of that story, that someone is willing to only pay her if she does some morally unscrupulous things and she begrudgingly has to do those things. That would make a compelling tale, ultimately leading her to go on the run from Johnny Law and live the life of a vagabond.  Cool.  That's not what happens.  I mean, it kind of is. The problem is that she is taken in by Nick Townsend, a gross millionaire with a heart of gold. Honestly, the movie doesn't know what to do with Nick.  This is a guy who goes into seedy nightclubs and, in a very Pretty Woman sense, seduces women who are down on their luck.  But he's, like, charming while he does it?  This movie is very afraid to make Cary Grant look bad, despite the fact that this is Cary Grant's breakout role.  

The frustrating thing about this whole movie is that she genuinely cheats on her spouse.  Nick Townsend, who should be allowed to be gross in this movie, keeps giving her outs.  He says that he wants to kiss her, but keeps stressing that she has a dying husband.  And do you know what Helen  does?  She kisses the heck out of Nick Townsend.  She goes on sexy expensive vacations with Nick and Johnny just gets to watch her mom having moments with a dude that is not his dad and that's supposed to be okay.  When Ned discovers all of this, we're supposed to be a little mad at his obsession of wanting the kid, even though he's just a big dumb man who has no idea how to raise --or apparently bathe --a kid. But Josef von Sternberg makes a point that Helen has become bad news. Why do we have to throw Helen in the mud like that?  This could have easily been a story of a woman who had to sacrifice her soul to save her husband only to be punished by said husband later on.  Nope.  Let's make her crappy and put all of the onus on her.  

When Nick returns to the picture towards the end of the movie, he does the thing that makes me mad in a lot of rom coms. (Admittedly, this is more on the "rom" and not the "com" end of the spectrum.)  When films have love triangles but don't want to deal with the consequences of that love triangle, one of the characters has to be unfathomably mature about the whole thing while the more emotional people indulge their own feelings.  In the case of Blonde Venus, Nick has to propose to Helen (Also, before I forget!  Did this story change on the fly between scenes.  There are so many scenes where Helen says that she will never do something only to have her do that exact thing in the next scene!) and drag her to see Johnny, despite the fact that she said that she would never see Johnny again.  He then makes himself scarce when Helen and Ned start repairing their relationship, but still makes his point known that the limo would be downstairs when Helen was ready to come home.  Nick is a sleaze. He stole another man's wife with the power of his pocketbook and spends the final few minutes repairing it all, without word one of how he actually felt in that situation?  It's simply too convenient of an ending and it frustrates me because it's just a deus ex machina.  The problem went away becuase the story needed the problem to go away.

From a completely practical side, I too would have been mad at Helen if I was either O'Connor or Smith.  Did you see how nice that marquee was that Helen got out of nowhere. Sure, she probably didn't ask for that marquee.  But from what I understand, Helen bailed on O'Connor after one show.  That's not okay.  Clearly, one performance didn't make up for all of that investment.  Sure, there was no contract, but I don't think that anyone would have thought that she was up for prostituting herself just that quickly into performing at that lounge.  

Like, it's all so melodramatic.  I know that there was probably an audience that ate this crap up.  I like a good woman's picture.  I tell you, you show me a good Rita Hayworth or Joan Crawford picture and I can feel like anyone else.  It just feels like these stories are so saccharine that I can't ever feel like there's anything real to embrace.  It feels like everything I hate about Hollywood tear-jerker movies and that's a bummer because I was expecting to get challenged in this box set.  

Approved.  For a Bergman movie, this one is pretty tame.  The weird part is that I'm saying this with the full knowledge that, not only does a person die, but they are autopsied and their body parts are used to scare someone.  There is a scene of romance that implies premarital sex, but we don't actually see anything and it's just a lot of flirting teenagers.  Once again, people are cruel to one another and that's probably not very nice.  But in terms of stuff that we see in Bergman movies, this one isn't too upsetting.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

This is going to be the most unfair blog that I've written in a while.  I did not care.  I didn't want to watch this movie.  I technically watched it without any physical distractions.  But my mind wandered.  Maybe that's a criticism of the movie, the fact that I can just miss a bunch of what happened despite physically watching it.  Maybe it's just that I have too much going on in my mind and sometimes you need to be in the right headspace.  But The Magician was a bit of a slog for me.  I'm going to try my best.  Realize the criticisms that I levy against this movie may be completely unfair and a real blog would rewatch the movie under better conditions.

When you watch a bunch of Bergmans, you start getting used to some tropes and techniques.  I'm really glad that I watched this after The Rite because The Rite and The Magician share a lot of the same DNA.  It might be my reaction to both movies because I keep on thinking on how Bergman is constantly commenting on the frustration of the artist.  I love how, in multiple films at this point, he equates the artist with the confidence games.  Maybe its why we refer to conmen also as con artists.  In oh-so-many stories, we keep having these depressed protagonists who have a need to perform for the world.  They offer something that does not exist.  With the case of The Magician, the protagonist offers the ability of animal magnetism, a term I tried researching on Wikipedia, but was still annoyed enough with the film to quickly give up.  I told you, this blog is going to be trash.  Ultimately, like the American version of the title implies, this is just a magician.  Now, I am certainly glad that I watched The Prestige before watching The Magician because some of the behaivor in The Magician is only amplified by understanding the philosophy and obsessive natures of magicians.  I feel like Bergman is touching on the obsessive nature of artist without really getting there.

Here's my frustration.  Vogler, as a protagonist, uses his character of the mute to create an air of mystery around him.  We don't get a lot from this character.  Instead, we get this character who mostly feels abused by the world around him.  Now, I'd love to say that Manda Vogler is the protagonist.  I'd love to see this woman who lives in a man's world comment on the role that men have versus women. That interests me and provides something new from Bergman's perspective.  But we don't actually get a lot of stuff from Manda either.  She has one scene where she's not being Mr. Aman and that scene she just seems sad.  Once again, Bergman ties the notion of identity to the notion of fidelity or the lack thereof.  Oddly enough, the notion of sexual attraction and fidelity is actually a bit muted in this movie.  Instead, people kind of just hate each other.  Vergerus (a character who would also be a villain in Fanny and Alexander) and the police captain find these people disgusting.  They are borderline performing for these people so that these two can hate-watch their performance.  But there is this animosity that comes between Vogler and Vergerus.  Sure, the movie presents it as intellect and respectability versus the nomadic nature of the travelling.  But it feels incredibly personal.  Once again, Bergman makes a movie about the malicious nature of mankind and it is bleak.

If this is the story of illusion versus reality, there's something upsetting about how this movie ends.  I mean, it's probably the part I like the most of this movie, but it is also incredibly depressing.  One of the big wins for Vogler is the fact that he manages to convince --for a brief moment --Vergerus that Vogler has become a ghost and is haunting Vergerus.  For a guy who has been dismissive of this travelling performer, it's a big win.  But in this moment, we get to see who the real Vogler is.  (I mean, I'm sure that there's an interpretation that the beggar is the performance and the mute is the real Vogler.  That's an interesting read that I just don't buy.)  But Vogler gets on his needs and asks for any money from the tantruming Vergerus.  It almost feels like the real win is for Vogler and his troupe of actors off the premises instead of getting even a modicum of cash.  But that revelation that Vogler is far more human than wizard is slightly disappointing.  I mean, it keeps in line with Bergman's cynicism.  (I know that there are also reads that Bergman is an incredible optimist who believes in the glories of the universe, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em.) 

This blog is frustrating me.  I told you this would be a hard one to write and that's true.  Honestly, there's this aside in the movie that almost feels like Bergman is making a short film about young love with the kids.  That's the part I was way more engaged in.  I'm talking about the part where the old lady, Granny Vogler, and Tubal sell the *ahem* aroused teenagers some love potion.  I don't know why I found this part far more interesting outside any accusations you might have that I'm just gross.  I don't know.  The Vogler plot is so blah and so what's-the-point that any kind of genuine positive interaction seemed far more engaging.  

Maybe that's my big complaint.  I'm going to start closing this up, even if I haven't written too much.  Everything I would write after this is going to be stalling.  My complaint is that this one feels more about vibes and tone than it does actual content.  There are some pieces of high brow art that almost seem like an attempt to mirror the format.  Again, everything that I'm writing here is completely unfair.  But I also know that I'm not the only person who only felt meh about this movie.  I read up on this on Wikipedia before abandoning the "animal magnetism" thing.  This movie was submitted for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and it was rejected.  It didn't even get a nomination.  Now, the Academy has infamously gotten it wrong over time.  But one idea doesn't discount the other.  I want to like this movie.  It feels like it wants to say something concrete.  Instead, we're looking at the same themes that I've seen in other Bergman films, only without being that concrete about the whole thing.  Again, I cannot forgive myself for not being invested in the movie.  But it didn't hit as hard as I wanted it to.

Rated R and that makes no sense to me.  This is the least R-rated R movie I've ever seen.  Here's me stretching to figure out where the shift happens.  Yeah, people die.  But very little of it is really all that gory.  There is one scene where Clubfoot gets his leg broken and that looks pretty gnarley.  There's some cursing, including the f-bomb.  But it actually doesn't happen as much as you think it would.  Honestly, this might be that example that we've all been waiting for to prove how many times you can use the f-bomb...even if it is only a subtitle.

DIRECTOR: Hark Tsui

I've been waiting in my classroom for students because students asked for help with something.  I don't think that they're showing up.  So here I wait, putting the opening paragraph on my blog before I have to leave in six minutes.  This is my life.  

I both don't hate this movie and also think it is a hot mess.  90% of this movie contributes nothing to the overarching story.  It makes a lot of sequel mistakes.  The action sequences are too ambitious and come across as a visual nightmare.  But if you don't care --honestly, don't care --it's mildly fun.  The part of me that likes everything just embraced the fact that this wasn't going to be one of the masterpieces of the Criterion Collection and is only on Criterion because the whole box set is in the Criterion Collection.  Like, honestly, let's really start breaking down this movie and how it is almost absolutely a train wreck of a film that I didn't hate watching.

Let's talk about the one thing that this movie could have been.  Here I am, watching this movie for an hour, and I'm wondering what the big threat of the movie is.  Like many of the kung fu films that I've watched, there's a standard story about feuding kung fu schools / dojos.  Like, I've now seen so many movies where there is an evil kung fu school that just doesn't mind murdering the good kung fu school.  The crazy thing is that I can almost hear the producers phoning in this script.  From moment one, Chiu Tin Bai (I think I got the right character) just comes across as super evil.  He smashes other schools and intimidates the neighborhood.  I mean, I can't really throw stones.  I mean, gangster movies about Italian Americans are fundamentally the same things.  So as a threat to Wong Fei-Hung?  There isn't much there to really explore.  Like, he's done incredible things in the first two movies.  Sure, there's a deeper plot that is really shoehorned into the final act to give this movie stakes.  But the threat to this movie is so small and so almost arbitrary that it almost feels like there isn't really a threat to Wong Fei-Hung.  At no point di I think that Chiu Tin Bai was going to do any kind of real damage to this franchise.  Heck, at one point, we almost thought that maybe 13th Aunt (it's easier for me to type and I hate myself for that) could have gotten hurt and I almost got mad at the movie for implying that this stupid threat could have done anything.

And the frustrating thing is that this movie almost hit a story worth exploring: Clubfoot.  Ultimately, a lot of this movie was an attempt to squeeze water out of a stone when it came to character.  But the only thing that could have been a new exploration is how Wong Fei-Hung treats someone that is aggressively an enemy.  Clubfoot is Jaws, specifically from Moonraker.  He is that henchman that far-and-away shames every other henchman that comes around.  He has a look to him that even stands out in a crowd.  (While Jaws is intimidating, Clubfoot holds himself close to the ground, ready to pounce.)  Yeah, Wong Fei-Hung is a better fighter because Wong Fei-Hung is surrounded by plot armor.  But Clubfoot goes beyond just holding his own.  Like, Wong Fei-Hung has to break a little bit of a sweat fighting this guy.  And there's this fantastic beat where Clubfoot loses the only thing that gives him value.  His leg is broken so badly that he's considered permanently out of commission.  In the matter of only a few minutes of screentime, his own kung fu school starts ridiculing him and shaming him, even though he did more damage than any of those other bozos.  He goes into a shame spiral and ends up on the doorstep of Wong Fei-Hung.  And in this moment, Wong Fei-Hung shows him compassion, offering to heal his leg at no cost.  He even goes to this great place saying that the two of them can fight once Clubfoot is healed.  Clubfoot initially rejects the offer, shamed by the mercy shown by his enemy.  

And Clubfoot eventually learns to change as a person and become an ally to a man he once hated.  Do you know what would have been great?  All that I just wrote?  Maybe three minutes of screen time.  This could have been a movie about redemption and seeing humanity in the most surprising places.  This could have been about a journey involving forgiving oneself and understanding people are far more complex than the archetypes that these movies have been about.  But the Clubfoot stuff?  All afterthoughts.  It was an excuse to get another fighter on the side of Wong Fei-Hung.  It's so frustrating because that's a story!  That's a real story that would have made this movie not just fun, but honestly pretty darned good.  

Because --and this is what I have been dancing around --this movie offers almost nothing new to the franchise.  The first movie is complex and challenging.  For a movie that is an excuse to do some well-filmed wire-fu, it talks about the dangers of losing tradition and offers some admittedly propagandized takes on international realtions that might not be completely inaccurate.  And, yeah, there's a lot of people punching each other and doing absurd jumps.  But even in Once Upon a Time in China II, the progress that Wong Fei-Hung makes is superficial.  That's the sequel crime that always bothers me so much in sequels, when the protagonist undoes all of the internal conflict stuff that they learned in the first movie.  (The most heinous example of this is Kevin McCallister from Home Alone to Home Alone 2)  But the entire first movie is about Wong Fei-Hung admitting his feelings about 13th Aunt and being open about that relationship.  But each movie has been a reset for that plot.   It seems like 13th Aunt remembers all of the trials and tribulations that they've been on, but Wong Fei-Hung is acting like this is all new information.  When I'm seeing this same plot line for the third time, it means nothing to me.  He's probably going to do this thing in Once Upon a Time in China IV.  I mean, it's so dependent on the character having the same flaw over-and-over that it can't think of another flaw that Wong Fei-Hung could have.

Can we talk about something being a valiant attempt without success?  Again, a Lion King tournament means nothing to me.  I don't get the value of these things outside the fact that it's kind of pretty?   But I don't get why there's this obsession with how violent these things get.  Okay, I don't get it.  But I don't like watching sports that I understand.  Imagine having to get invested in a sport that I don't know the rules for.  Now, you can blame me for this all you want.  That's not the point.  What I'm bothered by is that there are a lot of fight-to-the-death Lion King tournament sequences...and they are just too much throughout.  I have never been a fan of Transformers in any format.  But that Michael Bay movie drove me insane because it was a lot of metal CG just hitting each other.  I had no idea who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.  It was visual overload.  That's what these Lion King tournaments are.  There is so much on screen and I can't really make heads or tails of what I'm looking at.  I understand that there's an insane amount of choreography going on screen, but it looks like unstructured chaos and I don't care for it.  

That plot with the Russian at the end is straight up lazy, by the way.  The previous entries had commentary about foreigners taking advantage of the Chinese.  But to have a love triange started with 13th Aunt only to make him sinisterly evil is just dumb.  Also, that plot at the end doesn't even make all that much sense.  It seems overly complex for no real reason.  I'm sure that there are easier ways to assassinate someone.  It's just dumb.  

Still, I don't hate watching these movies.  They are very pretty and there's some impressive choreography.  This one is a low point, but it's still incredibly watchable.

For those excited about the Criterion release of Jackie Chan's early work, find all of the links at the Collections Page!

PG-13...and that's mostly for some pretty 1980s casual sexism, often bordering on sexual assault.  Yes, this is a movie where kung fu plays a not-insignificant role.  But mostly, I'm more uncomfortable with a lot of the sexual humor.  If you want to get the exact tone of My Lucky Stars, think Pepe LePew from Looney Tunes.  Like, it really doesn't hold up, especially when it comes to live action.  I don't know if anyone dies.  I think there are some vulgar jokes.  It's weird how I just watched it, and none of the vulgar stuff stuck.  

DIRECTOR:  Sammo Kam-Bo Hung

I broke my own rules again.  It tends to be the point of the opening paragraph to build momentum for writing the rest of this blog.  Well, I remembered that one of my students is doing her midterm project on Jackie Chan, so I offered to bring in as many Jackie Chan movies as I could get a hold of.  Well, I realized that I should get my butt in gear if she's going to have time to watch all this stuff.  The crazy part is that it is bananas that Criterion included My Lucky Stars in the Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar box set because this, 100% is a Lucky Stars movie...not a Jackie Chan movie.

Like, he's in it.  He starts the movie.  He ends the movie.  But there's, like, 49 minutes where his character isn't seen or even discussed.  By the way, My Lucky Stars may act as a cautionary tale about how I shouldn't write about movies without doing a little bit of homework on the film itself.  I started the first ten minutes thinking that this was going to be a movie similar to Police Story, also by Jackie Chan.  (In this moment, I realized that Police Story and My Lucky Stars were both made in the same year.) Jackie Chan was doing these amazing, often unnecessary stunts.  Coupled with that was a budget that made the other movies in this box set feel incredibly cheap.  I was going to whine that a lot of the movies in this box set were all masters in the element of stalling for time because most of these movies lack a plot that can support an hour-and-a-half runtime.  Like, the movie is mostly bits.  Bit after bit that all seem to forget that this is a movie about the Japanese underground kidnapping a cop.  That's the plot of the movie.  Instead, much of the movie is Kidstuff and his gang getting into shananigans (or trying to molest the one girl assigned to watching these dopes.)

Then I read up on the movie.  I'm not saying a deep read of the film.  I was just floored how little Jackie Chan was in the movie.  After all, I learned that there was another movie in this box set that Jackie Chan didn't want to be in and I thought that we might be dealing with a similar situation.  Nope, that wasn't the case.  The real case is that the Lucky Stars are a de facto comedy troupe (their first movie was called 5 Lucky Stars and My Lucky Stars is a tonal, but not canonical sequel to that film).  So I had to pivot as I was watching the movie.  This would be getting mad at Duck Soup for having too many bits.  The point of the movie is to have bits.   These guys are the Marx Brothers of Hong Kong and making movies in the mid-'80s.  Who am I to crap on that?

So, if this is a comedy about hijinks, what do I think of the movie?  I don't know.  I can't help but be part of a culture where these guys aren't in my home and that I don't necessarily have love for them.  One of the criticisms of the Lucky Stars is that they love to beat a dead horse.  Don't get me wrong, some of the conceits are hilarious.  One of the grosser bits (although I found kind of funny because I acknowledge that I'm obsessed with white knighting) is that the Lucky Stars try to trick Poison Ivy into thinking that robbers are tying them up.  The joke is that these guys are roped up with a pretty girl in the hopes that they can steal a kiss.  Now, the real gag comes from the fact that they all agreed to take turns with Poison Ivy, leading to a Family Guy level of repetition that is both funny and frustrating.  That's the humor.  Family Guy has kind of nailed the joke-that-has-gone-on-too-long to a science.  Like, they make you laugh.  Then they make you mad.  Then you are just impressed how long the bit has gone on.  I don't know if these bits ever got me back on board.  Like, there are moments where I'm intellectually laughing, but never actually laughing. Is it a culture thing or is it just not that funny?  I don't know.

My Lucky Stars often falls into the "incredibly forgettable" genre.  Honestly, if this wasn't part of a Criterion boxset, I would relegate this film to a double-feature with Beverly Hills Ninja.  There were a lot of movies like this.  Maybe stuff like Johnny English frames the film as a loosey-goosey action movie, but the point is to be as silly as possible.  In these films, we have the thinnest characterizations.  (Golly, I hate that I'm going intellectual snob on this film when really I should just accept that some movies are dumb and that we shouldn't be investing this much blogging space to exploring the film).  One of the thing about Poison Ivy is that she makes her opinions clear on the Lucky Stars.  They are gross and she is constantly offended by their nonsense.  But there's a moment where the film needs to progress beyond this pretty girl hanging out with these gross turds. So, all of the sudden, she falls for Kidstuff?  Kidstuff?  I know that he's the director of the movie, but I don't quite get the whole logic.  It's like the film is so married to formula that we needed to change character motivation.  I don't hate this decision, by the way.  It leads to my favorite bit, where Kidstuff revvs the enging on a moped and knocks Poison Ivy off.  I enjoyed that.  

But if we're watching this as a sorta-Jackie Chan vehicle, can I tell you that the action sequences are flipping great?  Maybe it's the money that's being thrown at this movie.  But the only reason that My Lucky Stars should be part of the box set is because, what limited fight sequences are in the film are really, really impressive.  It kept feeling like there was more to Muscles than the movie really let us in on, but that's because I was desperate for challenging content.  Instead, I had to admire just how dangerous this movie looked to make, especially considering the speed at which Chan is moving in these fight sequences.  And, also, like Sammo Kam-Bo Hung can move?  Like, he's so good that the other stars in the previous movies in this box are moving kind of slow.  

Honestly, I feel like My Lucky Stars probably has more in common with the Western films that Chan would go onto make than what I've seen in the previous kung fu entries.  It is not a great movie.  It is fun, but it often misses more than it hits.  Yeah, I like some of the running gags, but the movie wasn't all that great.

Approved.  Outside of the dated racism, occasionally touching on yellowface, the film is actually a little more violent than I'm used to in 1932.  We're not talking about anything by today's standards.  But considering a lot of these films that I'm watching in this box set tend to lean towards just discussion back-and-forth, Shanghai Express actually has people die quasi-violent deaths.  There's also some implication that sexual assault might happen, but nothing to explicit when it is presented on screen.

DIRECTOR:  Josef von Sternberg

This is supposed to be one of the more popular movies in the box set, right?  I mean, for the first time in the box, I don't completely hate the movie.  I'd even go as far as to say that I like a good chunk of this movie.  But I am going to be as fortright as possible:  this movie has a lot of flaws that will keep it from being one of those greats that I've been looking forward to.

Because I've basically tried to mold my personality into being a political turd, I have / want to talk about the specific racism of 1930s Hollywood.  It's not like I'm completely removed from this racism.  I can just imagine how excited the studio was to make a movie that took place in far off China.  This is the China of mystery and intrigue.  It's what we thought of most of Asia, the notion that these people were barely people.  I want to throw as many stones as I can at movies like Shanghai Express, but we're really crossing into Indiana Jones territory as well.  I can't help but sit through Shanghai Express and think that this is more Mann's Chinese Theater than it is anything that represents the nuance of Chinese culture.  I mean, you see those opening credits in that American Chinese restaurant font and you know exactly what you are getting into.

I need to learn more about the history of Warner Oland.  I did the Wikipedia article.  It was meh.  The stuff that I'm finding on YouTube seems to be more fluff than actual in-depth study of what Orland thought about his specific appearance.  But it does seem like a red (pun unintended) flag when Warner Oland appears in a movie as a person of Asian descent, especially when it comes to playing a villain.  To the film's credit, Orland plays a person of mixed race who is often commented on as acting mostly like someone from  the West.  But there is something sinister about Oland's performance as Mr. Chang.  I'm really going to be insufferable to any conservative voices out there, but there is a really weird implication behind some of the choices behind Mr. Chang.  Shanghai Express --admittedly made by a German ex-pat --presents Westerners as charming and quirky.  If there is criticism thrown to the people visiting this mystical East, it's that they are fairly superfluous and shallow people.  But they are used for comedy.  Mr. Chang is something else.  When Sam Salt interacts with Chang in the first act, he points out that he mostly looks and acts like a White man.  To Salt --who is admittedly a bit of a dunce --White means normal. 

But as silly as Salt comes across in the movie, his distrust of Chang ultimately ends up being right.  When the train is pulled aside, Salt is the one who takes the victory lap knowing that he couldn't really trust a man like Chang.  Chang actually becomes a really good villain if it wasn't for the racist overtones, implying that even a little bit of Chinese blood makes someone untrustworthy.  Anna Wong's Hui Fei is meant to be a contrast to Chang.  She's on the side of the angels.  But even Hui Fei doesn't present her character as something that is gauged as normal.  She's always presented as a woman of mystery, allying herself with Shanghai Lily.  She has few lines in the movie and always seems angry at the world around her.  

But the big frustrating thing about Hui Fei is the fact her heroic moment aligns with Western views on Eastern characters.  No one on the train is really willing to commit any act of violence.  When Captain Harvey punches Chang when Chang threatens to assault Madeline, it is his cultured stance as a British soldier to deliver a single punch to preserve Madeline's maidenhood...whatever it may be.  (Note: the film makes a big point to tease the notion that Madeline may be a ruined woman.  Not independent.  Ruined woman.) Contrast that to Chang, who finds his fragile honor contested by the slight and tries to blind Harvey for his assault.  Hui Fei, like Chang, isn't afraid to get her hands dirty.  The way that she gets her hands dirty is in line with how the West views the Chinese.  If Chang is willing to betray everyone on the train through his duplicitous identity, Hui Fei is willing to stab Chang in the back, a term we use for dishonor.  

Also, there's the term "Shanghai Lily", a moniker bestowed on Madeline the protagonist.  I won't deny that the name "Shanghai Lily" is perfect for the archetype that Marlene Dietrich built up for herself.  The notion that she's somehow different from other White Westerners.  I won't go as far as "less than", but rather the embodiment of sin.  Mr. Carmichael is meant to be a foil to the persona of Shanghai Lily.  We're meant to be intrigued by the adventures of Shanghai Lily, often using Carmichael as the buffoon who gets stymied everytime he tries landing a point against her.  Yes, we root for her, but it comes from the narrative that Madeline is a ruined woman and it takes a dashing captain / doctor to redeem and domesticate her.  Maybe that's the frustration in all of these movies starring Dietrich seem to be about the fantasy about domesticating this wayward woman.

Okay, I got off of my high horse.  I've proven that I'm the most evolved person in the room, so I suppose that I should talk about the movie outside of the heavy racial and sexist overtones.  From an enjoyment perspective, there is something very fun about this movie, even if it is incredibly disjointed.  I can't stress that enough.  This is three movies linked together like train cars.  The first act, the exposition, is filmed like a comedy.  Von Sternberg fits as many jokes as he can into this first act.  Part of it comes from the need for Chang to be a trustworthy character.  I won't lie.  I was a little tired from the first act.  We needed to know that Harvey still held a painful torch for his lost love, the wayward Madeline.  We needed to completely embrace the mythos of Shanghai Lily and imagine what adventures she had been up to since she left the arms of Harvey.  But in terms of great storytelling?  There's not much there.  It's not insane that an exposition spends a lot of time on setting and character, but it honestly goes on a bit long before the inciting incident happens all the way in Act II.

Act II is what I'm here for.  While there are lighthearted moments in Act II, the movie takes the tone of a --albeit silly --political thriller.  As much as I rally against the Warner Oland portrayal of a Chinese rebel, who is as evil as they come, he does make a compelling villain.  The movie wanted to show the dynamic of a woman trying to control an ancient society using her own sexuality to become a hero in an unwinnable situation.  And for a lot of Act II, again, a silly Act II, that narrative kind of works.  It becomes this fascinating triangle between Chang, Madeline, and Harvey that seems like it is the end of the line for these characters.  It actually gets so locked into the notion that Madeline and Harvey are doomed to stay in the middle of China that I was questioning if Shanghai Express was an appropriate title for this movie.  Unfortunately, the second act resolves far too nicely.  Considering that Chang is the head of the rebels --who are borderline Stormtroopers from Star Wars --once Chang is killed, the protagonists' escape back onto the train (an object that is locked to a track) is surprsingly easy.  So I can like the suspense of the second act all I want, but it doesn't really resolve in a meaningful way outside of the knowledge that Madeline was willing to sacrifice herself for Harvey's wellbeing.

But the final act?  Man, that act doesn't really make any sense, does it?  The final act shifts away from political intrigue to over the top romantic melodrama?  And the thing is, to make that work, Harvey has to become a crazy person.  He has to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire scenario.  I know that he doesn't have the metatext that I'm dealing with.  But it isn't much of a leap to imagine why Madeline would want to run away with Chang.  Also, the notion that Madeline didn't fight Harvey on the escape kind of implies that she was going with Chang against her desires.  Now, there is a perk to the final act and that's the role that Mr. Carmichael plays.  I really like the sitdown between Carmichael and Madeline.  It's a nice beat in a story that needs to talk about the role of the overly pious.  But as a narrative device, it's completely unnecessary.  Unfortunately for von Sternberg, that would meant that the film wasn't long enough to be a film.  It feels like the last act is tacked on because there's not enough content to make a movie here.  You really could have the emotionally resonating moment with Harvey pulling Madeline onto the train and passionately kissing her.  But the movie would be 20 minutes too short.  

All of this means that the film is not only watchable, but it's more than watchable.  I can't say it's great or even that good.  But it is a watchable movie that helps me understand why people love Marlene Dietrich.  It's a fun movie, even if it is a bit racist.  And a bit sexist.  And a bit of a mess.

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

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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