Rated R for a lot of sexual references, including clothed on-screen sexuality.  There's also a ton of drug use and drug use. There is death, but more of the issue is how people react to death as opposed to outright murder.  But there is some violence in here as well.  Along with language.  Along with adultery. Really, this movie has a lot.

DIRECTOR: Greg Jardin

There's so much writing today.  I wrote too much for the book today and now I'm trying to get this blog done.  Also, the weird part of it all is that this is my inaugural entry for 2024's spooky season, when really it's more horror adjacent.  That's okay.  I'm not looking for over-the-top gore in my spooky season, even though that's for sure happening soon.  Anyway, I had to throw this movie at the top. io9 did a whole article on it and how genius it was, so I had to check it out for myself.

They're right.  It's pretty brilliant.  Maybe I was a bit more forgiving because I'm often taken by a twist.  This is one of those movies that really caught me off-guard.  Part of the reason it might have worked on me so well is that I stayed away from anything informative going into it.  I just knew that, aesthetically, it looked like it could get creepy.  I mean, I wasn't wrong.  It's more of an upsetting movie than it is a straight up horror movie.  It's a commentary on how people are absolutely terrible and it takes very little for inhibitions to get wiped away.

The odd epiphany I had with It's What's Inside is what horror movies (again, bear with me) comment about teenagers generationally.  It's not a surprise that horror tends to appeal more to teenage audiences than other demographics.  There's something rebellious and new about being able to see horror. Horror for children stays away from tropes introduced in R-rated (and, now, intense PG-13 movies), which leads to these films having teenage protagonists.  Now, once again, we're dealing with semi-teenage protagonists.  The narrative technically starts in high school or college and these characters are in their early 20s.  I'm in my 40s, so I hate to say that I treat 20-somethings like children.  I'm a bad person and I'm working through my personality defects.  But let's treat these characters like teenage representatives.  I was thinking about slasher movies in the '70s and '80s.  There are characters who are unlikable, who tend to be cannon fodder for the killer.  But for the most part, there's a handful of characters who we are meant to like.  We lose some of these, but our final character (tends to be a final girl) is the paragon of virtue.  The '90s and 2000s had characters a little more callous towards death.  They host parties in spite of a problem happening around them.  But ultimately, most of them are loyal to, once again, the paragon of virtue.  

But since watching Bodies Bodies Bodies and It's What's Inside (which would make an amazing double-feature), Gen Z might be the natural evolution of the awful teenager.  I feel incredibly old complaining about "kids these days".  But Gen Z horror (and horror adjacent!) doesn't mind making the protagonists completely insufferable.  Now, part of me believes that it is because, as storytellers, we've become far more comfortable with making our protagonists --regardless of age --as morally complex to the point of being straight up evil.  I'm a guy who loves Breaking Bad.  But the characters in It's What's Inside are, top to bottom, all terrible people.  Now, part of that comes from the central conceit of the movie.  Everyone, no matter how morally grounded they seem, are awful people given the opportunity to take advantage of it.  There are a handful of moments that have whiplash like moments where morality is thrown out the window.  Sure, it's in the face of trauma.  (Hey, I get why the word "Trauma" is right beneath the balcony now!) 

The second that these characters get a pass to be their worst selves --especially culminating in the death of the two on the balcony --they instantly do horrible things.  Dennis (I think he's inside Cyrus's body) instantly frames Cyrus for murder. Admittedly, it's an odd choice considering that Dennis wants to stay inside of Cyrus's body.  But even Shelby is willing to completely destroy Nikki as a form of blackmail over someone that she not only calls a friend, but also partially idolizes.   Shelby, for the bulk of the movie, is the one that has our sympathies.  But Jardin does something really smart.  The movie demands concentration.  No one knows who is who, so there's moments where you have to actively be thinking about character motivations.  Yet, Shelby does some things that make us sympathize with Cyrus.  Listen, you're supposed to hate Shelby and Cyrus.  That's the point of the movie. But when Shelby goes dark with her motivations, she becomes a straight-up villain.

It's funny how both Bodies Bodies Bodies and It's What's Inside are about rich Gen Zers (Zoomers?) at a really swanky house, spending God foresaken amounts of money before something goes horribly wrong.  Both movies are stories of circumstance.  But I wonder if Gen Z is starting to return to the narrative of economic prosperity.  It's weird.  The story I've been hearing my entire life is the story of how nothing is affordable.  Yet, every single person at that table enjoys a moderate amount of financial and social success.  It's a story of jealousy among the upper crust.  I hate that I watched Metropolitan right before this because I keep seeing rich people having rich people problems. But I am thinking that if the previous generations commented on specific vices, like premarital sex and drugs, I wonder if the bigger commentary in these rich Gen Z movies is about empathy.  

These characters have sex and do drugs.  We haven't shifted off of those moral norms as reasons to kill of characters yet.  But it seems like the drugs and sex is almost an afterthought to the fact that these characters don't really care about anyone else.  In the same way that elder Millennials have a hard time relating to younger Millennials, I wonder if elder Zoomers have a hard time relating to younger Zoomers.  The elder Zoomers that I taught were incredibly imbued with empathy while the younger ones tend to look out for number one.  That's the movie that I feel like I'm watching.  It's odd, and mainly it comes from the fact that I'm seeing someone else's face attached to the wrong character, but I don't even feel bad for Forbes at he end of the movie. We have the joy of everyone's life being destroyed.  Lord knows I rooted for the big bad behind everything when the movie ended and I adored it.  But it's because everyone is really unlikable.

But even all of this generational analysis aside, the movie works. The movie works like crazy.  Greg Jardin has such a sense of style coupled with a really clever take on the body switch story.  Yeah, it's not outright scary.  But it is fascinating and the proper amount of brain breaky.  It's a fantastic good time.

PG-13 because a lot of stuff happens off camera or is heavily implied.  It's awful people doing awful things.  One part that is particularly offensive is the implication that one of the characters did a lewd sexual act to someone in the past.  But in terms of actual R-rated language, the movie keeps it pretty mild.  There's some drunkenness and vomiting at one point in the movie as well.  

DIRECTOR: Walt Stillman

See, now I have a predicament.  Usually, it takes me a minute to get into spooky season.  My friends tend to go spooky season early. I think I'm often too exhausted to be soaking in that much gore, so I tend to delay it.  But my list of horror movies this year?  Top tier.  There are some real bangers that I'm excited to watch for the first time.  But now I'm stuck writing about a movie that I am no longer mentally excited to write about, so please tolerate my malaise as I power my way through this slog of Metropolitan.

I think, if you really tried, you could organize Criterion releases into "Things that Criterion really likes."  This is the same category as Richard Linklater movies.  It's a celebration of late '80s and '90s indie cinema.  There's indie cinema that is actually pretty darned impressive.  But a lot of the American indie movies from this era tend to be talking heads almost espousing witty bon mots.  Now, during the '90s and early 2000s, I was really into this kind of stuff.  I was obsessed with Clerks because we were all obsessed with Clerks.  But something in me got incredibly exhausted with this kind of cinema.  This almost seems like the cinema of the college student.  It was so different from everything else we were watching.  It seemed so smart (man, I'm being really rough on an entire genre of film mainly because I wasn't in love with Metropolitan).  Maybe it was the constant "looking at the strings" and forgiving things that were meant to save on a budget.  After all, indie cinema is a celebration of pure cinema, removed from the control of the motion picture studios. But Metropolitan, especially dealing with the last twenty minutes, is incredibly frustrating.

Let's talk about the end of the movie first, because it made this movie from being a tolerable three-out-of-five star rating to a two.  (I'm assuming that I'm standing by that by the time I hit Letterboxd later today.) My initial take was that Metropolitan was the least romantic romantic comedy that I have ever seen.  Part of it, understandably, is a send up of the bourgeoisie.  (Note: despite teaching the word "bourgeoisie" means "middle class", every single real-world context for the word "bourgeoisie" illustrates upper class.  I need more information.) These kids, who have few problems, seem so self-involved that even the smallest slight seems to be a major deal.  I get that Stillman wants us to be critical of these kids because they, in many ways, are the absolute worst of the worst.  Even Tom, who is our protagonist, is kind of awful because of his hypocrisy.  Yet, I'm also criticizing myself with that commentary because I'm frustrated with the cast --particularly Charlie --for hating Tom and his few mistakes.  

Back to my topic sentence!  The end!  The entire thing, as critical as it is about the insular nature of the upper crust, is the white male wish-fulfillment fantasy.  Tom and Audrey's relationship initially is quite grounded.  Audrey likes Tom.  Tom is friends with Audrey, but is dating Serena.  Okay, that's reasonable.  He's allowed to not be in love with Audrey.  It's weird that he's keeping his relationship with Serena close to the vest, but that's also his own thing.  (Also, Serena sucks, but that's not really on Tom.)  But Charlie and Tom have a complicated relationship with Audrey.  Charlie has always been in love with Audrey, but she's not into him. (There's a wonderful irony that she can't understand why Tom doesn't love her but won't give Charlie the time of day.)  But the movie needed to make a bad guy.  Listen, Charlie and Tom both have lost their shot with Audrey.  She's frustrated with both of them.  The movie, honestly, should embrace the fact that she's lost to them and dismount on that.  Instead, we have to have a cardboard cutout of a villain: Von Sloneker.  

Von Sloneker is Clerks villain.  Golly, the ponytail and everything. The stiff delivery.   (I apologize greatly to Will Kempe, who played this part.  I often blame wooden performances in these kinds of films to directors.) He's everything a shortcut of a villain should be.  On top of that, any attempts to make him somewhat relatable are instantly undone.  He is an archetype unto himself.  The odds that Audrey, who completely out of character, runs into the arms of Von Sloneker --who has the most devious of intentions for this girl.  If we're talking about the White male fantasy, especially if we're throwing around terms like "beta male", this is it.  There's always this wish-fulfillment of the underdog beating up the bully to win this vulnerable woman.  Some grand romantic gesture will undo tons of self-involved, problematic behavior because that's kind of how we're wired.  For a movie that is divorcing itself from the studio system, it embraces a trope that, in no way, reflects reality.  Even if all of the elements of this narrative led to a confrontation between Tom, Charlie, and Von Sloneker, there's no way that the results would resemble anything that we actually see in the movie.  It just lacks verisimitude.

Perhaps my greatest takeaway from Metropolitan is Nick Smith.  (Is the naming of Nick and Tom homages to The Great Gatsby?  If so, why aren't these characters inverting their names?  Tom is the outsider looking in on the wealth of the aristocracy, carrying that imposter syndrome with him everywhere he goes.) Nick is meant to suck.  He's, again, the archetype of the upper class.  He's rude and boorish, not out of abuse but out of boredom.  We've seen this before. The odd thing is that --and a lot of this comes from the fact that Chris Eigemann is the most recognizable actor in this movie --Nick is oddly likable.  I kind of love the dynamic between Nick and Tom while I find Charlie insufferable. (We're meant to. Don't worry.) I love that, as awful as Nick's methods are, he's ultimately right about Von Sloneker.  Nick can easily be diagnosed as being perhaps the most childish and insecure amongst the UHB while demonstrating overcompensatory behavior to cover up his own insecurities.  Still, I like Nick and Tom.  That goodbye in disgrace is a great moment for the character and the rest of the film suffers for him leaving.

Unfortunately, a lot of my takeaway from this movie is that I've grown out of this era of filmmaking.  It's completely unfair and I'm commenting more on myself than I am on the film.  Sure, I loathe the end of this movie.  But I also didn't care for most of it, giving me more ick when it came to the end.

Rated R because it is fundamentally about fun crime.  These are guys who don't need to get into crime, but embrace the biker lifestyle.  Apparently, if you want to be a biker, you gotta like crime.  That means that there's a lot of violence, death, and sexual assault in the movie.  There's also a ton of alcoholism and drug use in the movie.  Add to that some pretty gnarly language, and you have The Bikeriders with an R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Nichols

Oh man, I'm kicking and screaming writing this right now.  I just wrote 1,667 words and now I have to write this?  I'm exhausted.  Honestly, I'm plum tuckered out.  The easy answer is to caffeinate myself, but my tum-tum is a little queasy and tea sounds like it wouldn't quite help that.  So what am I going to do?  I'M GOING TO POWER THROUGH THIS AND MAKE IT SOMETHING WORTH READING!

I was going to embrace spooky season.  I really was.  It's October 1st, and how exciting would it have been if every movie that I wrote about in October was somehow horror related?  But every year, Spooky Season feels more and more like a chore to me.  I was going to watch Abigail on Peacock, but then I saw The Bikeriders was also on there.  Now here's the reason that I'm really full of crap.  (Something I freely admit!) I know nothing about The Bikeriders outside the fact that I saw the poster all over France and the movie looked prestige as heck.  Spoiler alert: It absolutely was.  You know how you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover?  Yeah, I totally did that and succeeded.  I have to say, I'm a pretty big fan of this movie.  Not absolutely.  There was actually a long stretch of the movie where I did not care for it, and that mostly came down to poltiics.

There's something so fundamentally toxic at the core of The Bikeriders.  The Bikeriders harkens back to that Jack Kerouac, On the Road vibes.  There was something so counter-culture about getting on a bike and forgetting society's norms.  At its core, it should be transcendental as can  be.  It's forgetting that the world shapes people to match society.  Instead, it's embracing nature and the open road.  It's finding community in like-minded individuals and it values the individual members of the group.  Fine.  I get that.  But we also live in a world where the Proud Boys exist.  Now, if you didn't stay for the whole movie, you might think that The Bikeriders is a story embracing the chaos of biker gangs.  Johnny makes the Vandals seem to be the perfect club for finding oneself.  I should note here, before I get too far, that this is a movie based on a true story --the book being a long-form expose on the Vandals and their culture over the course of years.  I don't know how much of the adaptation is true because I never read The Bikeriders book.  Again, as much as I applaud the counter-culture element of it all, I'm definitely not into motorcycle culture.  Anyway, Johnny starts off the story as the most wholesome character imaginable.  He liked to race his bike with his friends.  He liked to talk bikes.  He's a big fan of The Wild One, a movie I now need to watch.  But because Marlon Brando likes to get into fights, Johnny models his bike club after this band of rebels that he watches on screen.

And for a while, there's something really sexy about being a rogue or an outlaw.  There's a reason that the rebel is such an appealing archetype.  THe notion of not playing by other people's rules is an appealing concept.  It's something I probably won't do.  I love me some rules too much.  But I get it.  It's that fantasy that I'm harboring.  But to bring it back to the Proud Boys, the Vandals under Johnny's watch gets pretty disturbing.  It's rebellion for rebellion's sake.  I kept having this thought that, as dark as the movie got at times when it came to violence and whatnot, that these were children out of something like Lord of the Flies.  Once these man-children had free reign and found out that no one was going to stop their awful behavior, everything had escalated to the point where it was no longer about the bikes.  That final scene with Johnny, most of the motorcycle club is sitting out in their cars, watching the carnage ahead of them unspool.  It misses the points of being passionate about what is liked.  

I'm having a stray thought that I want to follow.  I hope I don't lose my original thoughts.  Is The Bikeriders a criticism on fandom?  I tend to embrace some pretty healthy fandoms.  I'm a Star Trek and a Doctor Who fan.  I also like movies; hence the blog.  While there are incredibly toxic elements of any fandom, including the ones that I'm a part of, it seems like the more obsessive any fandom gets, the more awful it gets.  This is my whole sports thing.  Hardcore sports fans scare me.  They honestly do.  The amount of vitriol and investment that goes into that kind of tribalism is scary.  If today, I renounced my Star Trek fandom, few people would care.   Heck, the number might border on no one.  But when we look at The Bikeriders, people are almost killed for turning their back on their passion.  There's something repugnant about the shifting of priorities.  The most obvious example in the movie is Cockroach, who --in a drunken haze --reveals his passion for wanting to be a motorcycle cop.  Now, part of that comes from the anti-establishment guy embracing something that is so polar opposite from what Cockroach has embraced in the past.  But very little of it seems to be about the cop element.  It's the idea of turning in one's colors that illustrates obsessive fan behavior.  That's where Jeff Nichols sells me on the film as a whole.

The more obsessive the fan, the more it forgets the core of the belief.  Johnny is a victim of his own press.  He's a  guy who started a riding club.  The boys looked to him and he modelled himself after the rogue Marlon Brando.  It was boys playing dress up.  But as the film progressed, we see Johnny losing himself to the very cult he created.  The entire movie, he bemoans his position as the head of the Vandals.  He's always in a place where he wants to pass it off.  Part of that seems from personal exhaustion, being Johnny the Leader all the time.  But the other part of that is that he personally might not like what the Vandals have become.  The violence and debauchery is escalating.  Kathy is almost raped by the new members, whom Johnny laments as people who don't listen to him.  He has created a monster and he has to both feed it and kill it at the same time.  When he's gunned down by a zealot of the faith, it only makes the more sense.  Johnny goes from being the guy who is indulging in everyone's worst instincts to being the guy who has to be the stopgap on gangland criminality.  It's a fascinating role.  

I hate that I'm talking about Johnny so much, but his character was core to my initially not accepting this film to fully embracing it.  The part I actually liked throughout is the fact that Jodie Comer's Kathy is the main character of the film.  Okay, that might be easily debated.  She's definitely the narrator of the film.  We view all of the chaos from her, the closest thing we have as an avatar for a non-chopper culture. Comer is an amazing actress.  She's always been an amazing actress.  She might be the most underused and underrated actresses out there right now.  Comer takes Kathy and almost makes her a caricature, which is kind of brilliant. (This sounds like a backhanded compliment, so please bear with me.)  A lot of Kathy's relatability comes from the fact that we get that she was a Midwestern housewife who embraced a life of chaos because of love.  There's such a shorthand for how Kathy and Benny fall in love that we need Comer to make strong choices.  We get to understand that relationship that seems impossible and Comer does the heavy lifting on that.  I don't know what the real Kathy sounded like.  For all I know, Comer is dead-on doing an impression of the real Kathy and I'm giving her so much credit for making a strong decision.  But Kathy might be my favorite Jodie Comer role, and that's coming from a Killing Eve fan.  

Nichols challenges himself with this movie.  Considering that The Bikeriders isn't so much a traditional narrative --hence having a threadbare plot --it does act more like a cleverly crafted documentary.  Again, I'll always preach documentary over biopic.  (It's kind of a biopic, right?)   But he's got so many balls in the air, I'm amazed he lands them all.  The movie dances between Johnny, Kathy, and Benny.  Sometimes the three are all in the same scene. But Kathy's narrative is about what all three are doing, so she dances between all three personalities.  But every so often, we get this almost sympathetic story about a psychopath only referred to as The Kid.  The Kid is the White Walkers of the story.  He's there and he's closing in on our main characters.  We don't always know what The Kid's motivation is, but we know something major with this kid is going to happen.  Yeah, about ten minutes before the big Kid reveal happens, we can guess what that is going to be.  But by the time he shows up in the film, he feels inevitable.  It's a punch in the gut that the movie needs for the conclusion.  So good.

It's funny.  I haven't talked about Benny and I really consider a good chunk of this movie to be Benny's story.  Benny is the acolyte.  He's not a zealot, but he appears to be a zealot in so many scenes of the film.  I will clarify: Benny is unhealthy as can be.  I don't want a Benny in my life.  But Benny is almost the difference between a parishioner and a cultist.  The cultists need escalation.  Benny, for all of the crap that he doesn't want to do in this movie, is about the bike and the relationship.  The movie starts off with Benny refusing to take off his jacket in a bar.  Ultimately, this action leads to him in the hospital with a very real chance of losing his foot.  But the big fear isn't that he's going to lose his foot.  The real fear is that he will not be able to bike without a foot.  And for a long time, we're left really angry at Benny.  He makes his priorities clear.  The club comes first.  Kathy comes second.  His own needs come last.  (In a way.  He's incredibly selfish and self-sacrificing at the same time.) When that ending comes, it teases an element of doubt while still reassuring that Benny genuinely does love Kathy.  It's this really subtle change in him that had to be a nightmare to get just right.  Part of this probably goes to Austin Butler (who still has a bit too much Elvis to shrug off).  

The Bikeriders was something that I went into excited, lost that excitement, and then got it back in spades.  It's a mafia movie, if truth be told. But it's one of the good ones.

Unrated, because I have officially watched my first YouTube movie.  There's a lot of swearing and a fair bit of murder.  Because it's a horror movie, there's some brutal violence and I don't want to up-or-downplay.  Treat it almost like a short from V/H/S.  We're in that era of found footage where there's going to be something shocking often shown from a stagnant camera.  The specific violence I'm talking about is the kind of violence that doesn't cut away, which is often quite upsetting.

DIRECTOR:  Curry Barker

Yeah, I watched a YouTube movie. Do you understand what kind of leap of faith that was?  It's the first time a movie was texted to me.  I had debates about actually having to write about this.  Then I realized it was just my old man side coming out, being too snobbish for the way that things are released.  As of right now, I think my criteria for "What necessitates a movie?" is "Is it on IMdB or on Letterboxd?"  If those criteria are met, I guess I don't mind writing about it.

Now, there's something genuinely impressive about Milk & Serial.  I'm going to speak positively about this first because a lot of my frustrations with this movie come from a "me thing" more than a quality thing.  For a completely independent film, the movie mostly works.  The idea behind found footage horror is really a great idea for low budget filmmaking.  Now, we have to kind of shift our perspective when it comes to found footage films.  Rarely do we have the ability to criticize or analyze the cinematography or the technical elements of the film.  There still are technical things going on with the movie, but they are more functionality over aesthetics.  It's kind of what has burned me out on found footage horror to begin with.  (I used to be really into it.  Then the novelty wore off.) Acting wise, though, we have some things we can discuss.  Good found footage movies have to involve good improvisers.  Sure, Milk & Serial might have had a script, but there's an element of truth that comes from actors who can pull off natural sounding dialogue.  From that perspective, Milk & Serial is top notch, especially considering that it is a completely independent film.  These movies either have the most authentic dialogue or the least, and Milk & Serial comes out pretty good on that front.

There's also a fairly solid middle to this movie.  The beginning is what is needed for the film, but it also isn't potentially the most engaging. What the beginning of the film is ultimately doing is setting up for the needle drop.  Because I love petting myself on the back, I guessed 90% of the twist pretty early on.  But the final delivery of how it played out, it caught me by surprise.  And that surprise is fairly engaging.  I was invested in the characters. The story is fun and kept me going.  But with that in mind, the ending really drags.  From what I understand, these guys make a lot of horror and comedy shorts.  I kind of get that because, clocking in at 62 minutes, Milk & Serial feels like they're trying to pad out a conceit that does not support a 62 minute movie.  Once that mic drop happens in the first 40 minutes, the movie should bow out, knowing that we delivered our twist on how we viewed the entire first half. But the problem is, the movie tries to talk about the fallout of the revelation.  

I'm dancing around this not to spoil the movie, aren't I?  It's weird how sometimes I can just come right out and say what the twist was.  With the case of Milk & Serial, I'm playing it pretty cagey because I don't think a lot of people would have watched this movie.  I get the vibe that my limited readership mostly clicks my stuff to see if they gel with my thoughts on movies they've already seen. But I also get the vibe that people might click on the link because they want to know what Milk & Serial actually is.  So, just to cover my bases, from here on out, there will be SPOILERS.  Okay?   Cool.

The first third of the film establishes that Milk and Seven are comedy influencers who are known as the Prank Bros.  Their names make me think of Good Mythical Morning, especially considering that one of the side characters is named "Link".   The rules of prank movies closely follow the rules of con artist movies.  If one person is pranking another, there's an even deeper prank going on in the background.  I stand by this argument.  It's how you know that Milk is the one pulling all of the strings. Now, where the movie does a better job than I do is how insane Milk is.  Okay, I like that a lot.  But the issue is that once we found out how Milk got Seven to murder Gary, that's the end of the story.  That's the drop.  Everything beyond that is anticlimactic.  Honestly, the movie didn't need to wrap up everything with a bow.  The message of the film is how far people would go for fame and the movie kind of forgets that at a certain point. 

Heck, there's one scene that is completely superfluous for the sake of padding out of a film.  Milk kidnaps Lara.  We see how he does this through Milk's uploaded footage and it's pretty rad.  It heavily implies that he kills her.  The problem is, once the big reveal happens that Milk is the big bad guy of the entire story, we go back and we see that Milk has not killed Lara.  He says "Surprise, bet you all thought she was dead" or something like that.  Then he proceeds to kill her.  Why?  Outside of the fact that the movie needed more gore and minutes, it does nothing to serve the story.  We know that Milk is a psychopath by this point. Nothing character-wise hinges on this concept.  It's just brutality for brutality's sake, which is my least favorite horror trope.  

My other frustration with the movie is the title.  Oh man, that is a forced title.  It's the same problem I had with Across the Universe.  If you are going to do a musical using the music of The Beatles, it's a cop out to name a character "Jude."  In the early planning stages for Milk & Serial, they came up with the title first and reverse engineered it.  That bums me out.  I know.  It shouldn't be that big of a deal.  But it also has the bigger issue that we see in "Piano Man".  No one calls it "tonic and gin."  It's a gin and tonic.  The same is true for Milk & Serial.  It's cereal and milk.  That title, my guys, no bueno.  I know it's something small to complain about, but I have all of this digital real estate and, gosh darn it, I'm going to use it.

But the most important thing about Milk & Serial is its commentary on content creator culture.  I'm not sure if it is an intentional beauty or hidden irony that makes two guys who make internet videos the gatekeepers of internet culture.  The things that these guys get is the almost immorality of some content creation.  Listen, I'm a guy writing a blog (I see the irony!) who is obsessed with movies (a media that is seen as antiquated by Gen Alpha). And I know that there is ethical content creators, so this movie isn't exactly painting with a wide brush. But the notion behind prank videos seem a little sketchy.  It's this toxic environment where there's a fine line between "nobody's getting hurt" to "a place where no one feels safe."  Milk & Serial is almost a commentary on escalation and what real friendship is about.  I'm really showing my age in this, talking about these kids in this fashion, but that's kind of what the movie is getting at.  While I don't consider Milk & Serial necessarily elevated film, it is a movie with something to say, even if that thing is pretty specific.

At the end of the day, someone went out there and made a movie for $800.  It's a completely watchable movie that can stand on its own two feet and have something to say simultaneously.  While I probably won't preach this movie to anyone, I wouldn't begrudge people watching the film, especially during spooky season.  

Rated R, mainly for more than its fair share of sexuality.  There's also a lot of nudity, but hilariously not in the context of sexual situations. The movie really wears its R-rating on its chest, always being just a bit too much to recommend to one's in-laws, despite being a pretty solid movie.  There's underage drinking and smoking.  The movie is very comfortable with adultery and people just being out and out cruel to each other.  Also, after all of that, there's still issues with language. R.

DIRECTOR:  Luca Guadagnino

I just read a Time magazine article talking about that "bonkers but perfect ending" to Challengers.  Here's the deal.  I'll give them "bonkers", but I have a long way before I can even approximate "perfect" for this movie.  For a long time, I thought that Challengers was going to get close to being a perfect movie.  I don't know why I was so invested in the movie, but I was.  No doubt, the movie had sold me on a premise that I never thought that I would enjoy.  I tend not to like sports movies.  I don't like adultery in films.  But gosh darn it, this movie out Woody Allened Woody Allen.  I wasn't ready for how good the simple idea of recontextualizing scene after scene was going to work.  But it absolutely did. 

Which means I have to talk about how one moment ruined the movie for me.  Okay, it didn't ruin it.  I still adored this film.  Honestly, I lost my mind over how much I enjoyed this movie.  But I have to talk about the ending.  And the ending is a heck of a spoiler, so I have to bold it.  I hate myself for doing it, but that's the world I live in.  The movie has to have an emotional resolution to the tension that gets built up in the movie. It's about two friends who learn to absolutely hate each other because of their mutual love for this intense woman who seems emotionally distant to both of them.  Woven into that is a metaphor for tennis, talking about how real tennis, in the rare times that it is played honestly and furiously, is a relationship. Okay.  The two guys, by the end of the film, have developed a keen sense of hatred for each other.  Despite being sexually attracted to one another, they have put each other through the ringer and come out husks of their former selves. After the big revelation that Zweig has slept with Art's wife and plans to win the game anyway, Art, in a moment of blending sports and romance, embraces Zweig and they all feel something that they've never experienced before.

Now, I get the argument.  The movie is about that relationship that comes out of the sport.  It treats tennis more than what it is: a game.  It's Tashi's mission statement for tennis.  It's why she is so intense and refuses to distance herself from the sport.  It's also why she deprioritizes her marriage with Art because tennis will always be her true love.  Okay.  I'm on board. But the physical manifestation of that almost feels like a betrayal to the movie itself. I know.  That's some incredibly 21st Century Disney  Star Wars fandom nonsense.  My argument is how abrupt the whole scene is.  Hitchcock once said --and I'm paraphrasing badly --that it is about the suspense of the gun going off, not the gun going off itself.  My goodness, this movie builds up the tension. Each scene tops the last.  By the end of the film, we're watching bad people make worse people and there needs to be some kind of catharsis to the whole movie.  Instead, we get a hug.  It's too little.  It's comically little for what the movie is about.  But more importantly than the metaphor about the relationships built through sport is that there lacks a verisimilitude towards the entire sequence.  

It's unbelievable. Like, too unbelievable.  Let's pretend that this scene happens.  From my memory, it's Art who is about to spike on Zweig.  It really teases that Art is going to murder Zweig, but Art chooses forgiveness, despite that --moments before --Zweig does the unforgivable and cuts out the one thing that kept Art going.  Okay, it could be a noble moment to have Art choose to be the bigger man (despite everything in his character saying that it is impossible to find common ground between these two).  I don't buy that Zweig would just understand and reach the same emotional place.  Sure, the kiss earlier in the movie shows that the two are wired both for attraction and the way that they handle situations.  But that also leaves Tashi, whose repeated philosophy is that she's not going to be a homewrecker.  Her big character moment is that she confesses that she became the very thing that she refused to be.  I don't see her cheering for this moment.  

I don't know, everything about that final moment seems to be a betrayal of character.  Yes, the two guys have similar traits, but they're also fiercely competitive at the same time.  The movie spent two plus hours establishing the characters' motivations and moral codes only to have all of that abandoned for a message that "Tennis is about relationships?"  It all feels so...phony. AND I HAVE TO REITERATE!  This is an absolute banger of a movie.  The way that it builds these characters and makes us question intentions all the way through the film leading into an event that --for all intents and purposes --is mildly meaningless.  So much is invested in all of these things that a hug is a cop-out.  It feels like an afterschool special with that moment.   It's cheap.  It's there because it's surprising, not because it is what the scene needs.  Man, I might dislike this movie more than I thought I did because I'm really riled up about this.  (It's partially why I write this blog, so I'm forced to confront my thoughts on movies.) 

The funny thing is, I'm probably going to give it a 4/5 on Letterboxd.  Part of that comes from the fact that I like everything. (That's not true, but I am more forgiving than most.)  For so much of the film, the movie earned my absolute investment.  I was pausing the movie, talking it over with my wife, processing.  That rarely happens with me.  I'm usually about the uninterrupted experience, but this movie made me think.  I can't forgive that end.  Not where my head is right now.  I think it's a noble attempt, but it ruins a beautiful film. I want to like it so bad, but man, it just feels like such a disappointment of an ending that I can't process it.

Unrated, but this has some content.  This one has more to do with violence of all kinds.  One of the characters has a short fuse, causing him to get into all kinds of fights.  There's a stabbing at one point and people die.  There's also some domestic abuse.  There's male violence towards women.  Some children go through some harrowing situations.  It feels more R-rated than unrated.  It's not intensely R, though, despite all the things that I just listed.

DIRECTOR:  Edward Yang

See, they saved this one as the last in the box set because it slaps.  They know that they need me to buy the next box set (which, in my case, is Box Four) so they have to tell me that there are some good movies in these box sets.  The insane thing about this movie is that it almost doesn't belong in the World Cinema box set because it kinda / sorta breaks the rules.  I thought the mission statement of Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project was to shine a light on the cinema of underrepresented countries.  Um, China's films have been pretty well-viewed, especially in context of the Criterion Collection.  While Taipei Story may not be the most famous of Edward Yang's films, Edward Yang is a name that you can drop around cinephiles and there's a good chance that he's recognized.  Again, they need me to come back and spend more money on the next box set.

I know that Edward Yang directed this, not Wong Kar-Wai.  But I'm listening to a Wong Kar-Wai Spotify playlist to get myself in the headspace of Taipei Story.  According to Scorsese, Yang is one of the guys who started the Chinese New Wave...and I get that. Sure, you need to understand the cinematic history of a country to really proclaim a film part of the New Wave or not, but I'm going to trust him because a lot of this movie screams "New Wave."  Golly, Yang spends so much time and effort making a pretty movie about character.  Sure, there's a lot of plot here and I'll even admit that I didn't catch all of the plot beats.  I had to go to Wikipedia a bit because I wasn't sure what some of the dynamics of the film were, but that's just because I can be a big ol' dummy at times.  But there was never a point where I lost the character motivations of individual scenes.  Ultimately, this is the story of two people lost to Late Stage Capitalism (despite being in a Communist country!) and how they are husks of their former selves.

It doesn't mean that the characters aren't frustrating.  Both Lung and Chin (both body part names?) need to be shaken out of their self-imposed miseries.  I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but a lot of their issues would be dealt with a healthy combination of therapy and shaking them out of their respective malaises.  But these are two people who, while being colored by their flaws, are good people.  They live in a society (not unlike the Joker) that is filled with people who are self-involved and users.  Both Lung and Chin seem outside of the world of greed.  Chin's biggest issue is that she wants this moment of silence beyond corporate greed to last forever, despite having the depression that accompanies non-productivity.  But Chin's initial intentions are noble.  She has loyalty both Lung and Mrs. Mei, even if that loyalty isn't deserved.  She's devoted to these characters not because Lung or Mrs. Mei are necessarily good people. It's just that they look like saints compared to the other people in Chin's life.  She has these family members that are not only overbearing, but do not see her for her personhood.

It's so odd that Lung --pathetic Lung! --is the protagonist of the story.  It's a hot take to say that Chin isn't a protagonist, but a lot of Chin is sitting in a room waiting for something to happen to her.  (That's a little unfair, but is it?) But Lung is a really weird choice for a major character because his main trait is "mopey".  Lung is a real Charlie Brown in this movie --which is both a compliment and a criticism.  Charlie Brown is a good person who keeps getting screwed by the system, yet he keeps engaging the game.  I mean, the main difference between Charlie Brown and Lung is that Lung's natural tendency is to fight versus Charlie Brown, who is written to be the world's doormat.  But Lung is obsessed with a game that happened in his childhood.  He has these very Death of a Salesman like dreams, where he's convinced that, if he works hard enough, things will turn around for him.  Unlike Willy Loman, Lung lacks the self-delusion that he's great.  He's a guy who simply has that almost American Dream where --if he works and does the right thing --the world will work out for him.

The thing about Lung is that it isn't the world that brings him down necessarily.  It's the fact that other people don't follow the rules of society.  I don't think that Yang has created Taipei Story to admonish do-gooders.  Lung is in a constant state of fixing other people's problems.  When he sees injustice or a moral dilemma, he understands that investment in these people will lead to his own issues down the line.  We're supposed to be mildly angry at Yang for sacrificing his own desires for others, but we're supposed to be more mad at others.  Geez, I hate that I'm making all of these comparisons, but I can't help it.  Lung is George Bailey without the eventual happy ending.  Instead of having all those people stepping in and saving George for all the good that George did, Lung just dies stabbed to death, his anger and pent up rage getting the better of him.  Even taxi cabs let him bleed to death on the side of the road.  It's incredibly depressing, but that might be Yang's story to tell.  The one thing that Taipei Story does is avoid the fantastical in exchange for the gritty reality of a world that doesn't praise it's do-gooders.

I think I get more frustrated at Chin than I should.  If Lung is the character who is grounded to the past to the point of a flaw, one looking at the future should be the respectable one.  I mean, she gets the happier ending of the two, but even that ending is incredibly bittersweet.  She doesn't get to go to America, but that's mostly because she has woken up to the notion that any dramatic change isn't really going to bring her any real happiness.  It's going to be a Band-Aid in the grand scheme of things.  It's a solid message that Yang has for Chin, but I also am frustrated that Yang doesn't really offer any solutions outside of getting reabsorbed into the corporate rat race.  One of the frustrating things about the end --which is ambiguous in terms of the takeaways of Lung's outbursts --is that we're not sure if it's the right answer.  Lung outright tells Chin that America won't fix things and that marriage won't fix things either.  I kind of like the idea that life is slow and that we have to push through some of these moments instead of circumventing them.

But then Lung dies...he dies a sad and pathetic death.  So is the message that the two should have gotten married and run away to America?  Part of me also likes that.  I mean, two Band-Aids might have done the trick, right?  I'd love that as an argument, but it didn't seem like Lung and Chin really were romantically ever interested in one another.  To a certain extent, they loved each other in the sense that they cared for one another.  But also, Chin is all over the place when it comes to her feelings for Lung.  I mean, she hits him.  Tell me that moment didn't break your heart at all.  It's the takeaway of the movie for me.  But a movie like this is almost intentionally ambiguous.  It's more about how hard even a basic life is.  It's critical of existence without offering too many real solutions, which isn't the worst argument in the world.  Instead, it's more about the sympathy we feel for these characters.

I dug it.  This is a pretty movie with great acting and just fantastic, almost hypnotic, pacing.  And guess what?  I'll probably end up buying Box Four one day.  Just I need a moment from Law of the Border still...

Not rated, mainly because  this is more of an MSNBC special look than it is a traditional film.  There is talk about drug use and strip clubs in the movie. Really, there's some debaucherous behavior all through the film.  But in terms of showing stuff, it's pretty mild. Honestly, I'm exhausted and don't remember if there's swearing or not.  

DIRECTOR: Billy Corben

Okay, I was really trying to talk myself out of saying that this was a movie.  I mean, it's that fine line.  It's an MSNBC special report by Rachel Maddow in most ways.  But it is 90 minutes long and is made by MSNBC Films.  There's no bumper on either side and it was just presented as-is.  By my own rules of having to write about every movie that I watch, I guess I have to put From Russia with Lev on that list.  The worst part is that I'm exhausted and have a million of these to do.  Just...so much fun on my part.

As tired as I am right now, I'm always itching to gripe about Donald Trump.  If there is no other record in the future about how I tried stopping a dictator from reestablishing power, you have my unread blog about From Russia with Lev.  This was my wife's choice.  The blog kept on coming across her X feed and I said I would give it a whirl.  While ultimately effective for what it is trying to be, From Russia with Lev is ultimately useless to me in terms of trying to convince that Donald Trump is a monster to anyone who needs to hear it.  I mean, it's not like the information about Donald Trump isn't out there.  It's just that we're not going to change minds because Trumpians are in a cult.  They get news from people who already agree with them colored with so much spin that Trump can do no wrong.  The worse he gets, the more they like him.  We're in a country with bad people and that's something that I have to make peace with every day.  But if I was to argue that point, I also have to make the argument that MSNBC is not the best source for news.

I know! I know!  Apples and oranges!  MSNBC didn't inspire January 6th.  But I have to be completely honest.  There was this study that I found fascinating.  The title was completely clickbaity, so I have to explain.  The title was something along the lines of "Fox News Viewers Know Less about Current Events than Those Who Watch No News".  I was like, "Yeah!  Got 'em!"  Now, while Fox News viewers tend to be the most uninformed about current events, in second place were MSNBC viewers.  Then came "No news" people.  So to drop From Russia with Lev as definitive proof on people isn't exactly the selling point I want.  Do I believe the things that I see in From Russia with Lev?  Yeah.  I do.  I think that this doc contextualizes a lot of the Russia interference stuff that we've been hearing about for the past eight years.  I now have a face to put with events.  I have a timeline of things that happened.  I have the guy who did all of these things outright confessing to doing these things.  But can I take it as absolute truth?  Probably not.

In terms of how documentaries work, From Russia with Lev might have too many pieces.  Told mostly from anecdotal evidence by Lev Parnas --Trump's Ukraine guy who did most of this evil stuff --the movie speeds through a lot of information very quickly.  In my head, Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben probably had 14 hours of tape of Lev Parnas talking.  They cut it down into 90 minutes and still had such a glut of information that it comes across as chaotic.  It's not only Lev Parnas talking.  His wife and some investigators and lawyers chime in corroborating Lev Parnas's story from alternate perspectives.  But the lion's share of the movie is Parnas's testimony itself.  A lot of it is chaos.  Parnas isn't a terrible narrator.  He's just doing a lot of shortcuts.  He also, as remorseful as the whole thing is, colors the whole thing under the umbrella of "I thought I was doing the right thing."  That's one thing that is both good and bad about the movie.  Parnas admits that he was in the MAGA cult. This rich grifter basically fell upwards until he got into Trump's inner circle.   From there, he feels special because he has the President of the United States asking him for advice.  It all seems very seductive.  The thing is, I want a smoking gun.  Unfortunately, that smoking gun, according to Lev Parnas, is Rudy Guiliani.

For those not nearly as obsessed with the monsters in the GOP as I am, Guiliani used to be a decent dude (kind of / sort of!), especially during 9/11.  He was known as America's Mayor for the way he was the face of New York after the terrorist attacks.  But when that faded, he turned into a little troll under Donald Trump.  Trump put him first in the grand scheme of things.  Guiliani became an alcoholic and was willing to do anything to further the MAGA cause.  Now, Parnas throws most of the shade at Trump, but almost through the filter of Rudy Guiliani.  Now, the most convincing bit of information that shows that Trump and his cronies lie is that Guiliani is the godfather to one of Parnas's children.  Trump distances Guiliani from Parnas once Parnas goes down for crimes committed in the president's name.  He becomes this fall guy.  Now, one of the arguments that the right make is that Parnas is just doing this doc to bring everyone down with him, which might not make the most convincing argument ever.  But the real sell that Parnas does through this doc is showing clearly the lie that Trump uses to show that he doesn't know Parnas. That Guiliani godparent thing, plus SO many photos with him and a video of Parnas inspiring policy with a Trump who acts like a king sooner than a president is the damning stuff.

Now, what I wanted out of this doc is something a little bit more explicit about Hunter Biden's laptop. One of the things that the movie does really well is show that Hunter Biden was made to be a talking point despite having very little proven criminality behind him.  It shows how they got a guy in Ukraine who hated Joe Biden for losing him his job to invent propaganda against Hunter Biden to stymie the Biden campaign.  That stuff is great.  But I wanted the laptop thing off the table.  I'm so sick of hearing about Hunter Biden's laptop.  It's Hillary's emails all over again.  But the documentary keeps the laptop elements kind of vague and it is incredibly annoying.  Because the movie does something really nice with the end of the movie.  Since Hunter Biden was convicted of a crime, he's been such a decent human being about accepting responsibility for anything that befell him.  He is the antithesis of how Trump handles responsibility that it actually gives me hope for how politics are handled.  The end of the movie has Lev Parnas apologizing to Hunter Biden for unleashing this nonsense on this man.

But the biggest frustration I have with even writing about this is that From Russia with Lev is almost becoming that video that is passed around Q-Anon, only for progressives. When I see links put in social media to this thing, it feels very Sound of Freedomy.  That MSNBC banner is such a damning thing because it can't absolutely be trusted.  I'm just thinking if my in-laws sent me a documentary made by Fox News Films, I would instantly dismiss everything in it.  It makes me feel like I'm in a cult for the Harris / Walz campaign (BECAUSE I DO ABSOLUTELY LOVE THEM!).  Honestly, the biggest takeaway from From Russia with Lev is the idea that I can now talk mildly eloquently about Lev Parnas if he ever comes up, but that's only if someone comes to me first.  I almost want to do some more reading on the documentary from someone a bit more neutral than from seeing the confirmation bias that I intentionally watch.  Yeah, it's probably true.  But also, I'm not going to change anyone's mind with a documentary like this.  It's great for me, but it's another preaching-to-the-choir doc.

Not rated, but there's a lot of shooting and the movie uses a minefield as a central location.  While people walking through the minefield may be intense, the gore budget is pretty minimal.  No one loses body parts as much as their legs are painted to show injury.  The worst part is that sheep are genuinely scared by explosions in this movie.  It's more sad than it is upsetting.  Still...

DIRECTOR:  Lufti O. Akad

Martin Scorsese is messing with us, right?  This can't be one of the cinematic greats of the world.  I mean, I get it. Turkish cinema has a very specific vibe to it.  But this movie is borderline incomprehensible.  I honestly don't know what I'm going to write about it because it's barely coherent.  I get some major ideas that the movie is pushing, but this is a film that lacks some very basic things that would make it a functional narrative.

The biggest problem that I have with this movie is that it is a film about a setting.  I tend to get really frustrated when a movie is more about setting than character or plot.  It's not that there's no plot or no characters.  I get the loosey-goosey premise of this movie.  It's just that we don't spend a lot of time with any one character to say that there is a protagonist.  I get it, gun to head, I can say that Hidir is the protagonist.  It's just that I know so little about this character.  Part of that comes from the fact that this movie really needs you to enter with cultural context more than anything else.  If conflict is based on two diametrically opposed characters who are stopping each other from getting goals, that's in this movie.  The problem is that so much of this movie is talking about things that are going on instead of developing characters that we're supposed to sympathize with.  For about three-quarters of the movie, I was debating if I was supporting Hidir or the police chief.  I mean, good for Law of the Border making the antagonist a likable character and keeping him away from being a stereotype.  But I need to know what's going on with the movie, so give me some evil traits, okay?

There's something childish about the movie as a whole.  I don't mean to demean an entire culture's film industry, but a lot of Turkish movies from this time period have the same issue. (It's not like I've seen a billion Turkish movies, by the way.  It's just that there are a handful that I've seen that are laughably bad.)  It seems that, at the heart of Law of the Border, there's something vulnerable.  We have the story of a community fighting for freedom in the face of government oppression.  (I think!)  It seems like everyone is going to benefit if this school is built and that the rebels become farmers.  There's this repeated phrase that love grows out of shared work.  Okay, that's the message we're supposed to take.  Now, with a lot of stories with an objective moral good at the center, we have to have something to tear it all down.  That's okay.  But the movie doesn't really give the plan a chance to work.  The characters say that they are going to work the land and become a successful community.  But immediately, naysayers just start murdering everyone.

I said that this was childish and I'll tell you why.  This movie can't wait to get to its gunfights.  When I teach film and I have the kids do projects where they have to show camera techniques, I always have a group of boys who make the most violent gunfights imaginable.  That's what this movie feels like.  Every time there's almost a vulnerable moment in the film, the movie cuts to what looks like improv gun battles.  These aren't even choreographed that well.  It's a bunch of grown men going "pew-pew" to one another. I will concede that there's one gun scene that's really well shot, but it is almost a copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which came out the same year. But Law of the Border has these guys kill each other and I'm not sure who died and who did the shooting.  I'm also not entirely sure how it affects the story outside of acknowledging that the town won't have its school nor it's farming.  There are just these logical leaps that the movie kind of needs to spell out for me. 

I'm not going to write much more.  Anything else I write about this movie is me just filling up space.  Law of the Border, while potentially canonically valuable, is such a ramshackle of a film that it feels almost snobby to say that it's a great film.  I normally try not to be that harsh, but it has more in common with fan films and exploitation cinema than it does a fully realized film.  I honestly felt like I listened to a movie in another room and am asked to have thoughts on it, it's that unfinished.

Rated R for nudity, sexuality, teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse, crime, and attempted rape.  Geez, while I absolutely think that this is an R-rated movie, it's weird to think that this movie has all of this stuff in it.  It has the tone of an older film, which makes the questionable content somehow less intense.  But all of those things happen in this film and that definitely is stuff that you'd see in an R-rated movie.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

So...Monika is a lot, right?  

Once I hit the midpoint of the film, that's the only phrase that kept going through my head over-and-over-and-over again.  I have to pivot the way that I'm viewing these movies.  Normally, if I watch special features and supplemental material (which I honestly should do way more often if I had time or patience for it) I tend to do it after I watch the film(s).  I think with how many Bergman movies I'm watching in quick succession, I need to slow down and watch a primer on Bergman because I'm running into the same problem that I have with Woody Allen.

Back in my Thomas Video days, I would regularly do what I'm doing right now.  If I didn't feel educated on a certain director, I would watch all of their movies in a short amount of time.  It was my own way of having retrospectives and it would make me incredibly knowledgeable incredibly quickly.  Some of you out there might consider this to be heresy, burning through a director's complete oeuvre in such a limited time.  Yeah, they blend together.  I understand that. But also, the world is full of great art and I was passionate to absorb as much as I possibly could while on this planet.  I still have that wiring in me, by the way.  But I noticed with some auteurs that not only was there a throughline to their films, but there was almost a sense of repetition.  Now, I love Woody Allen films.  Not all of them and my love for these films have been tempered the more I learn about the dude.  I will say that I generally like Bergman (although my gut is saying, "Not another Bergman" when it's time has come up).  He's got more hits than misses.  But Bergman, at this point, is almost a formula with a lot of his films.

Bergman has heady films and less heady films.  Honestly, I started by liking his less-heady films more.  He kept giving me the right level of melodrama with his earlier films.  They were almost kitchen sink dramas about young love and how it all spirals out of control.  And, besides the fact that it was easier to absorb, they were decent stories.  But now that I've reached Summer with Monika, I'm getting a little tired of the same narrative over and over.  From what I understand, Bergman wasn't probably the healthiest person when it came to relationships.  I'm probably going to be bummed the more research I do into this guy.  From what I understand, he was all about infidelity.  But the thing that is really a red flag is how quickly characters shift from being anti-violence to being domestic abusers.  But the story that Bergman tells often is that men are driven to beat their wives and that it is the wife's fault.

With the case of Summer with Monika, the eponymous character was raised in a home where domestic abuse was commonplace.  It's why she runs away with Harry.  Harry, from a characterization standpoint, is different from the other men in Monika's life.  She has all of these deadbeats around her and they fully embrace the villainous natures that men possess.  There are a handful of scenes where Monika is molested and almost raped, implying that she needs to get away from a world that treats her like a sex object.  When Harry not only treats her with respect, but also comes to her with grievances against society, the two run off, embracing an anti-capitalist lifestyle on a boat.  They pride themselves on having abandoned the expectations of society and there's almost this moment of pure romantic bliss.  But because Bergman seems kind of gross, it isn't Harry who changes; it's Monika.  Harry is the one who is willing to sacrifice for their life of simplicity. 

Once Harry discovers that Monika is pregnant, he's adamant that he needs to provide for Monika and their child.  It's Monika who says that she refuses such notions and the two devolve into thieves.  But while Harry views thievery as part of his appropriately named "Summer with Monika", Monika grows harsh and aggressive, attacking Harry for small mistakes.  She becomes this caustic, toxic personality and then, in the most gross way possible, Monika almost asks to be beaten.  Okay, this is me showing my grossness because she literally says, "Don't hit me.  Whatever you do, don't hit me."  From Bergman's perspective, he is stating the only actual punishment that Monika will listen to.  After all, Monika keeps pushing Harry.  He does that weird thing again, the casual adultery, that we keep seeing in his movies.  These all end up being stories about how easy it is to hurt other people.  With Bergman, it's often the people who cheat who aren't left with the fallout of the relationship.

But the biggest problem that I have with Summer with Monika is the fact that it was so easily turned into an exploitation film in the United States.  Not a long movie by any stretch of the imagination, the U.S. was able to cut Summer with Monika into a 62 minute exploitation film.  The insane thing about that is the fact that I guessed it easily could have been cut into an after-school special about the dangers of loose women fairly easily.  Summer with Monika, despite being incredibly similar to his other films from the era, is Bergman painting with his widest brush yet.  The teen pregnancy angle coupled with the notion that Monika just changes personality on a dime almost screams "morality play" at the audience.  That final shot, of Harry looking at himself and baby Monika (or June?) in the mirror is telegraphing what little subtext there is in the film.  It's just so heavy handed that there's almost nothing to derive from the film.  The title has more depth than the film as a whole.

Also, has Bergman ever raised a child?  There are some fundamental, basic things about rearing a child that this movie does not understand in the least.  That first night sequence, when Harry is the only one to wake up to the screaming baby --which is just a scene to really drive home that Monika is both an unfit mother and an unfit spouse --Harry just covers the baby with blankets.  I wish I could say that it was a commentary on how unprepared these two are to raise children, but the baby does grow quiet after Harry just almost SIDSes the kid.  Also, I know that maybe things are happening behind the scenes with the baby, but that baby needs to be fed.  Maybe it's getting formula, but we get this message that Monika is doing nothing for this child, ultimately leading her to abandon the child once she has been beaten.

Honestly, if I hadn't seen the other movies ahead of this, I would find Summer with Monika quaint.  But given how many of these movies I've seen at this point, this movie almost becomes infuriating.  It almost seems lazy.  The crazy part is that I know that this is part of the cinematic canon.  I think that this might be one of the Criterion films that was released separately from the box before this.  It's one of those kind of "must see Bergmans" and I don't really see what makes it special.  Maybe writing this made me more mad than I was initially, but this was just heavy handed preaching versus nuanced storytelling.  

Not rated, but the story of the Central Park Five is one of wrongful imprisonment based on race and lazy police work.  Because the crime is so heinous, the film must talk (and, to a certain extent, show) elements of a rape and a severe beating.  The movie also talks about drugs and abuses in the prison system.  It's not an easy movie to watch, but it should also be stated that this was a PBS special.  There's only so much that PBS will show.

DIRECTORS:  Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon

It's going to be a week of a lot of writing.  That's probably not the worst life to have. One of the things that I really try to push myself at (while actively patting myself on the back constantly) is to educate myself about talking points that everyone should know about.  I have always known the loosey-goosey talking points of the Central Park Five.  The title given to these boys has been in the news more often now that Donald Trump is ruining all of our lives with his constant threat of returning.  Now, I knew that Donald Trump put out of a full-page spread calling for the death penalty when it came to these boys.  (It's weird that he's been associated as the pro-life candidate.) But if I was going to be continuing the fight against Trump through discussions with people in my life, I wanted the deep dive into what exactly happened with the Central Park Five.

I wish I could say that the Central Park Five story was a unique one.  As someone who really gets into true crime --a phrase I never thought I would say before I got married --there have been too many tales of shortcuts from law enforcement when it comes to getting a suspect.  Now, I kind of get it.  This is not a forgiveness of the profession at all.  If anything, it's pointing out a chink in the armor of what we think of as police investigation, but being a detective seems way harder than what TV makes it out to be.  We've all been wired (no pun intended) to think that detective work is just like police procedural television.  We assume that everyone who is a detective is well-trained and is able to piece together crazy concepts using the evidence at their disposal.  It's documentaries like The Central Park Five that remind us that a lot of police work is about getting the public less fearful about a criminal out there on the loose.

What the Burnses and McMahon do is remind us that crime is scary, but that doesn't really excuse taking away individual liberty in exchange for a sense of calm.  I think I get yelled at for being too critical about law enforcement.  It is a dangerous and difficult job that a lot of people have respect for.  And, to a certain extent, I'm not necessarily anti-cop.  I'm anti-free passes.  One of the things that The Central Park Five reminds me of is the fact that certain professions aren't allowed to be criticized.  I'm a teacher.  One of the things that is meant to be applauded is when we hold each other accountable.  I was involved in having to report another teacher for inappropriate boundaries.  (Note: This was years ago.  If you are trying to figure out who I narced on, good luck.)  In almost any profession, if you see something shady and immoral, it's encouraged that you point it out.  But the fact that we keep hearing the same narrative come out of law enforcement, that there are a few rotten apples and the whole is good, that has to be somewhat of a myth given the story of the Central Park Five.

One of the key issues with these boys is the fact that multiple precincts worked in tandem to ensure that a structured plan was done to put these boys into prison as quickly as possible.  This wasn't one detective who was lazy or vindictive.  This was a whole police force colluding to get enough kids off the street almost exclusively because they were Black or Hispanic.  They were the perfect targets.  They were poor kids that lived in an area that was considered scummy by well-off white people.  They boys were mostly isolated from each other.  In reality, these boys were only linked through the moniker given to them by the media.  And they were borderline tortured through exhaustion to repeat a story that did not happen.  The worst part, though, is that --as a society --we ate this up.  It's what we do.  The narrative that a bunch of young minorities were doing abysmal things and that they were caught by law enforcement is something that the news is out there for. It's so depressing, by the way, to see Tom Brokaw talking about these kids like they were monsters.  I mean, from his perspective, given the information that he was given, he had little responsibility to give another opinion.  But it's Tom Brokaw!  I grew up watching him and, in my mind, he was the bastion of journalistic integrity.

The Donald Trump bit is only about a minute long in a two-hour documentary.  That makes sense.  In some ways, it's a bit of propaganda to bind Trump to the Central Park Five narrative.  But in a way that I actually believe, it's very much a part of Donald Trump's playbook.  This is me going off on Trump because I honestly think that he's one of the worst human beings on the planet.  But the Donald Trump playbook is to get a read on the room of White America.  Trump tends to find what white people are most afraid of and, from a distance and lacking information, just lets loose. People react poorly.  You know what he does?  (YOU KNOW WHAT HE DOES!?)  He loves turning the temperature up on an already crappy situation.  He presents himself as the voice of reason when he makes everything worse with each opportunity that he gets.  So yeah, he's barely in the movie.  But that's what he does.  He's really good at lighting the match and then running away.   (There!  I feel justified in my watching of a two hour doc so I have a one second talking point added to my piles of rants on Trump.) 

In terms of filmmaking, I've actually never sat down and watched a Ken Burns movie.  I know.  He's the quintessential subdued documentarian.  But I have no desire to watch Jazz or Baseball, so I watched this.  This film is pretty masterful.  True crime is such a difficult balance to achieve.  Often --and I'm part of the problem! --these things tend to be exploitative.  There's a ton of information, but the movies try to make you gasp.  Instead, The Central Park Five elicits a depressing horror at just how easy it was to destroy people's lives.  That's what Ken Burns kind of nails.  (Sorry for not constantly citing all three filmmakers.)   It's organized.  It's clear.  It's also incredibly respectful.  Maybe that's what makes this a little bit different from other true crime docs that I've absorbed.  There's a real lean into the format as opposed to just exploiting information.

Anyway, it works.  It does a thorough job of teaching, which is the point of renting this movie.  I needed to know everything and I got a complete breakdown without feeling like they were stalling for time.  It's fascinating in the most depressing way.