R for animal cruelty (which, because it is 1969 Sweden, you know is actual animal cruelty), violence, domestic abuse, suicide, gore, sex, nudity, and I think some language.  In a very specific way, this might be the least family friendly of the Bergman films, even if tonally it feels very much like Bergman's other films.  It's oddly brutal, but it also has that specific red color of blood that films of the '60s had.  

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Welp, my wife and I were supposed to go see The Brutalist tonight, but then YET ANOTHER KID started throwing up.  It seems like every time I have the opportunity to do something fun for myself, one of the kids gets a G.I. bug.  Hopefully we'll have another opportunity to go see The Brutalist, mainly because it's three-and-a-half hours.  But at least this gives me a moment to try and play catch up with the blog.  (Note: the kid is throwing up half an hour apart, so I have the in-between time to write this.  Also, this is the oldest, so she doesn't mind having a little bit of space away from me.) 

The Passion of Anna is in that weird spot between being totally cryptic and being quasi-understandable.  Sometimes I feel dumb for not understanding what is going on in his movies.  Listen, I can't be alone in that feeling. But with The Passion of Anna, I apparently get a pass.  I'm looking for any freedom to be wrong here.  But there were spots in the film where major changes happened in the story and nothing really indicated what happened to change the dynamics of the character.  So you know what I did?  I did what I do every time I don't understand something in the plot:  I looked it up.  And do you know what I discovered in my follow-up reading of The Passion of Anna?  I found out that lots of people don't understand this movie.  Even the die hard Bergman fans are trying cobble something together.  And even beyond that?  I felt like I was comfortable with the majority of it.  So what I'm going to do is speculate my analysis and just live with the notion that I could be way wrong, but that almost everyone is way wrong with this movie.

Part of it comes with the history of the film.  Again, I read some stuff on this one.  Apparently, The Passion of Anna was kind of scrapped together because Bergman didn't want to burn the house from Shame down.  He made a very unofficially, tenuous sequel to Shame and made it super duper weird.  I'm so glad that I knew this because a lot of this movie does feel like a hodge-podge of half-ideas.  Normally, I would be annoyed by this.  It's not like it thrills me, but each time I pivoted to meet the half-idea, I tended to enjoy what I was actually watching.  Maybe I'm just growing more patient with things that I watch, especially considering I'm this deep down the Bergman hole.  To a certain extent, this movie is a lot of hat-on-hats.  Part of it comes from ideas that would almost benefit from being short stories.  (I just found out that Bergman turned this into a novella, clearing up some of the stuff in the movie.  Nifty!) But this movie tries to take on a lot and quasi-sort-of tie all of these loose ends together in a unified narrative.  It's not like it fails, but it is almost like none of the ideas are thoroughly explored.  Heck, if I didn't watch this after Shame, I wouldn't have even gotten some of the character relationships that were carrying over from that movie.

The most clear and defined thing that comes out of this movie is Anna's troubled history.  I'm going to assume that Anna is the animal killer.  We don't get a lot of reasoning for Anna being the animal killer.  There's just the implication that she is the one who is saddled with the term "physical and psychological violence" repeated throughout the movie.  We keep seeing that image that we get from her handbag, which is odd that she carries around this very damning letter from her husband.  We even get it spelled out for us that she is probably responsible for her husband and child's death at the end of the movie.  Now, I find Anna as a murderer an interesting story.  But The Passion of Anna is almost just introducing that as opposed to really exploring what is going on.  I think the title was From the Life of the Marionettes.  In that movie, Bergman goes deep into the psychosis that leads someone to break out into violence.  Instead, it's something that we have to color Anna with.  I don't hate that as a concept.  The idea that someone in your own house could be a deranged killer is a fascinating thing.  But we never really get a resolution beyond "Anna is not a nice person."  It's odd because Anna acts fairly nice throughout the story.  I mean, she acts nice for a Bergman movie.  We have a lot of Andreas and Anna yelling at each other and that's part of being in a Bergman movie.

From that story we get possibly the most human story, the story of vigilante violence.  Honestly, that made the movie worth watching.  In a desperate attempt to find this animal murderer, the town turns on Verner.  I think it's Verner.  I'm sorry.  It's a bad photo on IMDB.  But there's this tale of this sweet old man who has become a hermit after he loses a lawsuit.  He befriends both Anna and Andreas and that's a really sweet story.  His death comes across as tragic because there's this wide gulf between the perception of the mentally ill and the reality of this sad old man who just has nowhere to go.  If Erik Hell plays the part I'm thinking of, good on him, man.  The character carries this potent-yet-hidden gratitude to Andreas for treating him like a person.  When the letter is read describing the horrors he went through by two men in the town, that's a story in itself.  That stuff is fascinating.

I'll even say some of the weirder stuff in the movie is actually pretty rad.  I probably wouldn't have done some of this, but I'm not Ingmar Bergman.  (And because I'm not Ingmar Bergman, that also means that I'm going to make a movie devoid of infidelity and cruelty once in a while.) I do have to admit that I weirdly like the meta interviews that happen in the midst of the movie.  For those not in the know, Bergman stops his narrative to interview the cast members of The Passion of Anna.  I mean, I'm going to start referring to them as the Ingmar Bergman players because it's Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, and Liv Ullmann who are in every freaking Bergman movie at this point.  But the movie stops and we get the actors discussing their characters as if we're watching a press junket or DVD special features.  Golly, if this wasn't made in 1969, I would love to think that this was a commentary on our obsession with unpacking films through special features.  Maybe I'm the exact audience that Bergman is criticizing, but I weirdly appreciated insights into these characters from the actors' perspectives.  Because Bergman doesn't necessarily show us a lot of the vital information needed to unpack the film, the stuff that the actors give us make the movie have a little bit of weight to it.  I understood more of the film because these moments existed.  I know.  It may have been satire or a thought experiment.  But this dope liked it for what it was.  It also gave my mind a way to segment the films into quarters so I could appreciate tonal shifts.

The stuff that didn't really click with me were Elis and Eva.  Again, I'm complaining about a movie segments that seem intentionally done.  But Elis and Eva don't even fit with the rest of the story.  It's almost like Bergman is falling back on comfortable content, which I've now seen beaten to death.  I've not made my thoughts on Bergman's obsession with toxic polygamy secret.  Once or twice, it is a fascinating study.  But he keeps trying to normalize infidelity.  And the thing is, Eva is barely a character after Andreas has an affair with her.  Elis speaks cryptically about the role of the still image.  (Okay, I get the metaphor of that one.)  But Elis and Eva are almost excuses to have two actors in a movie with his other buddies.  Narratively, it is almost contrasting to what the rest of the story is about.  I'd also like to point out that Erland Josephson still gets under my skin since Scenes from a Marriage.  I know.  I should separate them.  He just keeps playing these unlikable intellectuals and it drives me crazy.  I say these scenes are counterproductive because the relationship with Anna, who is key to the understanding of this movie, almost takes a backseat for the first third of the film.  Anna and Andreas are just together and the Eva story disappears.  There's never any consequences of that relationship outside of Andreas lying to Anna once.  It doesn't come into play.  It's almost like Bergman is incapable of making a movie without these themes.

It's weird that I liked this.  It feels underbaked at every step and I know that I can't say that because it's Bergman.  But I did like it.  It was hard to grasp as a whole, but the bits really worked.

Rated R for some gore (there's a very Cronenbergian scene where Edward rips off his deformed face to find Sebastian Stan's face underneath), but the real points go to the very on-screen sex scene that involves nudity.  There's language and violence, also leading to a murder at one point.  It has a lot of things that little kids should not be viewing.  If I have to make a stretch on this one, the movie is about ableism, but very little of it has to do with negative characteristics of ableism, shy of sexualizing some of those traits.

DIRECTOR: Aaron Schimberg

I'm in procrastination mode, which is not a good idea considering that we're officially in Academy Awards season, people!  I am going to be swamped by film blogs over the next month and change, so I gotta stay on top of these things.  The problem is that I find instrumental suites on YouTube and YouTube's algorithm has videos I feel I need to watch right now. It's not a good thing.

A Different Man might be one of the best movies that falls into the A24 trap.  Before I go too deep, I would like to point out that I love that A24 has started to distance itself from traditional horror movies.  I'm all for horror movies, but A24 combined with horror gets to be a bit tedious.  Instead, the aesthetic and attention to craft behind A24 movies is fairly solid with things like A Different Man.  This is a gorgeous and well-acted film that mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do.  If you needed a blurb for a poster, A24, just cite LiterallyAnythingMovies.com and you can use that bit of praise.  But I started this paragraph with a bit of a complaint and it does take away from the movie as a whole.

A24 loves to take an interesting as heck conceit and then run it into the ground.  It's not like A Different Man is a tremendously long movie.  An hour-fifty-two is nothing, especially compared to The Brutalist, which runs at an offensive three-hours-and-thirty-five minutes.  I'm probably going to see that tonight, by the way, so let's see how long it takes me to get that blog uploaded.  Do you think I'll have the energy to write about that at 2:00 am?  Probably not.  But when it comes to A Different Man, this is an hour-and-a-half story tops.  The last fifteen / twenty minutes only added a couple of giggles when it comes to seeing what happens to Edward given time.  The thing is, it almost changes tone as well.  I beg my reader to allow me the luxury of arguing hard versus accurately because it makes for more interesting writing.  While the movie, by its very conceit, is a bit absurd, it overall feels like a grounded idea.  If a man who has lived with a visceral disfigurement, so much so that his life is colored by that disfigurement, what would happen if this man not only gained a normal face, but was also considered handsome?  It's genre storytelling, but almost in the vein of mystical realism.

For a lot of the movie, while the film dabbles in some weird moments, it is telling the story of the too-real world Edward. If anything, people are accepting of his disfigurement up to a point. Still, he seems to only get acting work when it comes to playing disfigured people.  He makes enough of a living to live in a modest apartment and feed himself.  If anything, his major cross when it comes to his condition is a lack of confidence. He has a hole in his ceiling that gets worse and worse.  He's mostly too timid to report the leak in the ceiling because of his deformation.  He also has a crush on the girl next door, which is pretty typical faire when it comes to similar stories.  The eradication of his deformity gives the film something to talk about.  He uses the opportunity to look different to abandon the entire Edward lifestyle.  He gains confidence through sexual encounters and open acceptance of who he is.  He creates a new persona.  But these moments aren't so grandiose that they lack plausibility.  Edward becomes a real estate agent.  It's not that his dreams came true.  He's not a mega actor, which is ironic because he's played by handsome Hollywood actor Sebastian Stan.  He becomes successful at real estate.  

And because the movie is A24, it gets a little weird from there.  There's a certain expectation when it comes to A24 and genre storytelling to get a little weird. But even the next beat, I could accept.  He sees that the girl that he was in love with wrote a play about him, so he auditions to play himself behind the guise of Guy.  The reason that I'm supportive of this choice because it plays with the notions of masks.  It's a key motif in the film and it returns him to deal with the fallout of the personality change that happened in the first act of the film. It's interesting and fun because he receives criticism from multiple sources on how to, ironically, play himself.  It also gives us the opportunity to view Ingrid through a more objective and honest lens.  Ingrid, who comes across as the perfect neighbor in the first act, is more than selfish and a bit of a deviant.  It doesn't negate who Ingrid is in the first act, but it gives us a new lens through which to view her.  I especially love the addition of Oswald as the antagonist of the piece.  There's this very cool meta element of having Adam Pearson playing Oswald. 

Adam Pearson genuinely deals with this condition versus Sebastian Stan, who is only dabbling with this as a role.  This is not meant to be an attack.  If anything, it's part of the commentary that the movie is offering.  It's interesting to see a story about an actor pretending to have this condition acting across from someone who earnestly has this condition and that plays out both in the world of the film and in the real world.  This is kind of why the movie hits so hard.  I can't ignore the fact that the movie takes a real solid stance on the value of representation and how trolls are kind of built out of inclusion.  Edward gets violently frustrated with Oswald's presence and ultimate superseding of his character within the play on-stage.  On top of that, while Edward is the one with the toxic behavior, he is the protagonist. We feel the same frustration with Oswald as Edward does because it does feel like Oswald is manipulating this world to fit his own needs.  That's all really interesting.

I'm going to go as far as to say that Oswald appearing in the film gives the film even a greater depth, allowing commentary on self-loathing.  I always got the notion that Edward was fairly successful for being burdened with his disfigurement, but he is also sympathetic for being limited socially when it comes to success.  But when Oswald shows up and is good at literally everything he does, it's both frustrating for Edward and for us as viewers.  It's this notion that we have to break about ableism that says that the deformed are always filmed through the lens of sympathy.  They exist in a state of "less than" as opposed to simply being people.  When we make movies like The Elephant Man or Mask, we're commenting that the only proper response to those with deformities is a place of pity.  Remember, if I'm using the proper use of "pathetic", not in a hateful way but focusing on the denotation, that pathetic trait is what evokes pity.  I mean, the movie juggles a ton of stuff to unpack over the course of the film.

Maybe that's why the final act bothers me so much.  It is almost an epilogue for a film that has already covered so much.  Edward, through his exchanges with Oswald and Ingrid escalates into Edward fighting for his life.  He launches himself onto the stage, fighting Oswald for his metaphorical representation.  As large and dramatic as it is, it is also completely a climax to Edward's life.  He didn't appreciate what he had and is left with the vapid Guy.  That assault on Oswald cements Oswald as the guy in the moral right, even if he still kind of sucks.  The story, narratively, ends there.  He should drive away Ingrid.  Instead, A24 --and here's my initial point! --goes to the further absurd.  In a means to humorously torture Edward for the next couple of decades, he keeps escalating the absurdity.  He is crippled and is forced to become family with Oswald and Ingrid, two people who he despises.  He then murders his physical therapist because he is the only character in the story who disparages the deformed.  I kind of get it.  Edward is broken and uses that violence to lash out at anyone he can.  He then goes to prison for so long, only to meet back up with Oswald and Ingrid, who have somehow become even more vapid than they were before.

It's so many beats too long and I think it's done for the sake of comedy. The thing is, A Different Man is more of a dramedy than it is a comedy.  You don't need to have the A24 humor at the end of the movie.  I'll go even further.  As much as I like quirky stuff that makes me laugh, the movie could almost completely purge the weirder elements that A24 is known for.  I've said this before, but A24 gets in its own way sometimes.  There's almost an expectation that things are going to get weird.  But A Different Man doesn't have to be as weird as it is.  It chooses to beat a dead horse when it could have dismounted on a real, literal punch.  It doesn't mean that the movie isn't good.  It just means that it doesn't need all of the extra trimmings.

Rated R.  This is a solid R.  The opening shot of the film involves nudity, which is odd, because this might be the least sexual of Bergman's films.  The movie is more about the horrors of war on the civilian public.  As such, absolutely awful things happen to the protagonists and the people around them.  There's also some coercive rape in the movie.  There's violence and death all around the movie and characters casually commit suicide.  There's a lot of upsetting imagery.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I think I'm in a sweet spot when it comes to Bergman.  I don't think I'll be able to finish this blog tonight, but that is also how I start most of my blogs.  Shame might be the most on-the-nose of the Bergman movies I've seen so far.  It makes me feel like a real simpleton that these are the movies I glom onto, but that doesn't change the fact that I really liked this movie.  It was an incredible film and I want to feel like the movie might be in a subgenre of its own.

Okay, that might not be the most accurate thing that I've ever written.  I'm mortified that I want to make Shame a double feature with Children of Men.  I know.  Both movies are probably in the cinematic canon.  They're both smart war films by smart directors.  But also, like, you don't have to be a genius to get either one of them.  I'm not saying that these movies aren't smart.  They're very smart.  Shame got me all kinds of turned around thinking about character dynamics and the role of politics when it comes to filmmaking.  But if you put zero thought into this movie as an audience member, you'd probably still walk away with getting most of what Bergman was going for.  He rarely hands you something like that.  It's not like there isn't stuff to unpack, but the stuff that is unpacked is about nuanced takes.  

I mean, I'm still going to try and unpack it.  I'm not a monster all of the sudden.

Part of what kind of caught me off-guard about Shame is that it starts very similarly to Berman's other works.  I don't know if it shocks anyone, but the film once again starts Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow as a husband and wife.  Big surprise!  They both don't really like each other. There's also the discussion that Jan, played by von Sydow, may have had a tryst during a romantic break from his wife, Eva.  There's this animosity between the two characters and it took me a minute to realize that the war that they were talking about was a literal war.  (What?  I'm not used to Bergman setting his movies during actual wars.)  But he almost starts us in medias res.  (I mean, almost.  His action is in the middle of a debate where there's all of this history that we don't really know about.)  Bergman gives us just enough about Jan for us to jump to conclusions about the man.  I hate to be the kind of guy who makes an avatar from an unlikable character, but I instantly understood Jan.  There's a lot of me in Jan.  I don't want it to be absolute because it does not end up in a healthy place for this character.  I have the privilege to sit in my clean (by me!) living room typing away on a laptop.  I am not in the middle of a war.  But if the beginning of the movie is any indication, I understand Jan in a way that is deeply uncomfortable.

Again, I'm grafting my experience onto this character, but Jan seems to have too much of an empathy problem.  (Remember how I said I understood Jan?  Self-glaze.) He is not at war, but he's also disgusted by the notion of war.  He feels simultaneous guilt for not fighting for his country and a deep revulsion for the violence that has consumed people from his country.  A lot of the movie, it seems like we should be criticizing Jan for his wishy-washy attitude towards violence.  But ultimately, Jan is kind of right.  Every time he encounters elements of the war, both on his country's side or not, it fills him with despair about the role that mankind plays when it comes to casual attitudes about life and death.  Honestly, every part of the war has horrific baggage attached to it.  When the enemy gets the jump on them as they are about to leave, the two are humiliated and forced to make propaganda for the enemy.  The enemy even fails to get the footage that they want and they're still harassed by their own side.  Their government is almost excited to abuse Jan and Eva.  That footage is obviously fake, yet they relish at the notion of harassing these two civilians.  Their humanity is stripped and Jan almost seems to predict that this is how people would behave.  Again, I'm giving my own experience into this whole thing.

The odd thing is that the title has so much meaning and I'm not quite sure where the shame is supposed to lie.  Initially, Eva seems depressed that Jan is so weak when it comes to dealing with valor and honor.  (Note: My goal in life is to avoid killing anyone before I die.  It's the small things.)  But as the movie progresses, Jan is forced  into more and more morally compromising scenarios, leading to him becoming almost comfortable with the notion of murder.  And as Jan becomes more violent, Eva looks at Jan with more scorn.  That's where my frustration and my joy for the complexity of the movie (I swear, it's there!) butt heads.  Is the shame for not standing up to a violent force or the toxicity of men or is for losing oneself to the violence surrounding them?  It's fascinating.  

Like, that one scene!  (For the one person who may have seen this movie that might be reading this blog, THAT SCENE?) I'm talking about the scene where Jacobi gives them 23,000 kronor (which I have no idea how that translates out to U.S. dollars in 2025) and Jan doesn't hand it over.  Now, this is the first scene where Jan doesn't bend the knee to whomever is holding the gun.  He knows where the 23,000 kronor is.  He knows that they're going to destroy his house looking for it.  But He also wants Jacobi dead for raping his wife.  And Eva is mortified by this action.  See, if I was reading this scene as Jan, I would have thought that Eva would be impressed that Jan actually stood up for her.  Eva has always thought of Jacobi with contempt.  She had to sell her body to this man and seemed disappointed that Jan let Jacobi walk all over them.  But instead, she's the one who gives up that Jan has the money first.  She's actually floored that that he's not confessing where the money is.  By the way, I'm so far off about how much 23,000 kronor is.  Is that enough to rebuild a house?  I know that money doesn't have that much value when there is no one to give the money to, but I am curious if it was worth it.  But it's not about 23,000 kronor.  It's about murdering Jacobi and getting him out of their lives.

It's not like there haven't been anti-war movies.  I tend to like anti-war movies.  But rarely is there an anti-war movie from the point of view of the civilian populous.  I have less enthusiasm about when these movies are about soldiers.  I don't know.  I have a hard time relating to soldiers.  But there haven't been the thing that freaks me out.  I've had lots of thoughts about what it would be like if there was a war on domestic soil.  But this movie is the right thing that I wanted to see.  The horrors of war is bad from the soldiers' perspectives; seeing from people who want nothing to do with it is even more horrifying.  It's exactly the anti-war movie I was looking for.

Rated R for being one of the most visually upsetting horror movies that I have ever seen.  It's a movie's whose creature effects are so successful that this might be the closest thing to a timeless special effects film.  There's a lot of gore and death.  There's discussions of suicide.  There's language and drinking.  Honestly, it's the ultimate horror movie.  It absolutely needs to be rated R.

DIRECTOR:  John Carpenter

I have very little time to write this.  I'm being stay-at-home Dad this weekend as my wife and oldest daughter are off in Boston having the time of their lives.  Don't worry about me.  I'm milking every second of laziness out of this weekend.  It's been fun productive.  I'll say that.  But we're leaving for church in about thirteen minutes and I realize that I have at least thirteen minutes to set up this blog to finish later.

I've seen this movie before.  Oh, I've seen this movie before.  I've seen the original black-and-white The Thing from Outer Space before that.  I've seen the 2011 sequel with the same name.  I'll go as far as to say that I'm a huge fan of this movie.  Like, it might be the best horror movie ever made.  And I've only seen it once before.  Yeah, I've been nervous about revisiting this one.  The reason that I've only seen this once is that it was a nearly perfect experience.  The Thing by John Carpenter might be one of the most upsetting horror films ever and I needed this movie to be perfect.  Honestly, a movie hits a certain quality and I'm afraid to make it a casual viewing.  Before I did this blog, I did the same thing with Seven Samurai.  I knew that it was genius.  I was just afraid to come back to it.  While I completely lost it on how well Seven Samurai held up, I don't know if it holds a candle to how well The Thing held up.  Seven Samurai will still be a more important movie to me.  But The Thing as a rewatch was as haunting as the first time that I watched it.

There were moments in  the beginning of the film where I was skeptical that it was as good as I remembered.  John Carpenter is a bit of a goober with some of his direction.  The man is an undeniable genius, but few directors date themselves as hard as Carpenter does.  His movies look like the eras in which they were made, mainly because Carpenter loves the trappings of his era.  With the case of The Thing, Carpenter completely embraced 1980s computer technology with a vengeance.  I can't throw stones at him.  After all, the Star Trek movies with the original cast did the same thing.  And before the threat shows up, Carpenter is always just a little too obsessed with making his characters cool and relatable, thus making them look insanely out of touch.  Nauls's taste in music being rebellious is adorable by today's standards Still, that's my only even slight complaint.  It isn't even a complaint.  If anything, I love how quaint some of those choices are in retrospect.  But if I tried showing this movie to a high schooler today, there might be a few too many giggles before the movie gets completely unhinged.

I do hate the fact that The Thing might not get respect in 2025 because it is the foundation for Among Us.  Okay, the trope of a monster among us (see?  It's back!) is something that we've gotten since the Golden Age of science fiction with Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  But I never find those movies all that scary.  Upsetting at times?  Absolutely.  Especially when it came to the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there are things that are haunting.  But truly scary?  Nothing hit as truly scary as The Thing.  While I tend to fall back on The Descent as the scariest movie I've ever seen (another one and afraid to revisit movie!), The Thing might win until I give The Descent another watch.  The reason that I think it might be the scariest movie ever made is that, oddly enough, it's the anti-Jaws.

Jaws is an incredible movie.  It's a movie I've actually seen a lot of times.  My major argument about how Jaws works as a horror movie i under the concept that nothing is as scary as our imaginations.  We rarely see the shark and that's something that I can't take away from the movie.  But that argument might not be completely accurate given The Thing as a counter-argument.  While there are more and less effective moments in the film when it comes to creature effects, I think it all hits on some scale.  We are allowed to see this creature often and in all of its myriad iterations and they're all completely terrifying.  Well, I think I can firmly say that the creature designs in The Thing are actually more horrifying than I can imagine.  I think of all of the video games that have basically stolen the design of the creature from The Thing and how none of them are nearly as effective as what I see in this movie.  Like, I was thinking of how boring the creature designs were in Resident Evil 6, but they were knock-offs of absolutely incredible effects from this movie.

I stand by a theory of mine that isn't the most complimentary.  John Carpenter was a director who could not miss until he became a director who could not hit.  I'm really sorry because I respect the man tremendously and I hate saying rude things like what I just wrote.  But this might be Carpenter at his best.  I mean, I'm always going to hold Halloween in my heart as my quintessential Carpenter film.  But The Thing might just be a smarter film.  I know.  I'm pointing out the genius of the Secret Werewolf formula.  I think we've all crossed this bridge when watching stories like this.  But The Thing is both a lifting up and a tearing down of what it means to be human.  A lot of the movie shows the worst of people.  In terms of allegory, I don't see a lot of "fear of communism" that we get with Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I don't know how the movie manages to avoid that comparison considering that the formula is borderline the same.  But it does say that we don't know who to trust in society and we'll do anything that we need to in order to survive.  For the majority of the film, we realize that these men, who mostly get along starting from moment one, are borderline itching to kill one another and this monster gives them the excuse.  It's odd that people are cool with MacReady being the leader of the gang because the real MacReady would be a good leader.  MacReady was just as possible of being the monster as everyone else.  

But the film also gives humanity a pat on the back.  MacReady is kind of a selfish butt from moment one.  I mean, he's charismatic, but he's also a bit unhinged.  He's the guy who doesn't want to listen to valid concerns when they're brought to him.  We're introduced to MacReady when he pours his whiskey into a computer (that is meant to be a form of entertainment for everyone on the base in the middle of nowhere) when he loses a game of chess.  He's unhinged.  Yet, when the chips are down and Blair has disappeared, he's the one who nominates the few survivors for self-sacrifice when the end of the world is a real possibility.  Yeah, humanity doesn't come across as great for a lot of the movie.  But I'm also going to give the movie points for acknowledging that --when the chips are really down --humanity will do the right thing.  It's odd that everyone jumps on board.  I do give point to Carpenter to make the situation so dire that people would jump on board the heroic sacrifice train that MacReady suggests.  

Also, the cryptic ending?  Chef's kiss.  Oh my goodness.  Here's the deal.  I could look up whether or not MacReady or Childs is the creature.  In my head, it's MacReady.  I want the movie to end with the creature replacing MacReady because it slaps so hard as an ending.  After all, MacReady understands that everyone has to die to ensure that the creature doesn't leave the camp.  But when he survives the massive (by the way, don't say "massive" anymore.  Gen Z boys ruined that too.) explosion underground, he seems cool with Childs and he slowly freezing to death.  That's the one thing that he was trying to prevent.  And Childs is selfish enough to lie to himself that MacReady isn't the creature because he doesn't want to barbecue himself to death.  That's a pretty rad ending.  But I'll tell you what.  Me?  Unpacking that.  If I said that with any confidence, it almost weakens the film.  I love the idea that we're left kind of scratching our heads.  The movie almost ends because there is nothing else to blow up in this world, so the movie has to end. MacReady wept because there were no more bases to 'splode.

I have nothing to add about the best scene in the movie.  It's the "everyone's tied up" scene.  There's so much commentary and analysis done on this scene that I am only going to detract from the discourse.  It's so good.

Honestly, this movie is incredible.  It might be the best horror movie ever made and I might have to dethrone John Carpenter's other great movie.  It's earnestly very scary and I was even prepped for it.  Such a good watch.

Rated R and a pretty solid R all around.  While the movie is pretty open and honest about the entire experience of what it is like being a transgender woman in Mexico, including transition, the movie's real moral core struggles from a protagonist who is a drug lord who does horrible things.  There is violence, including domestic violence, coupled with scenes of gore.  There is also sexual scenes, but nothing shown on camera. The weirdest thing in the movie is the borderline blasphemous imagery as the movie ends.  And as always, there's some language.

DIRECTOR: Jacques Audiard

I'm screwing up every bit of my routine to make everything happen.  Here's the deal.  If I get through my To-Do list for today, it will be a minor miracle.  Normally, I deprioritize blogs when I have other things to do.  But I also have guaranteed Internet right now, so I'm going to see if I can knock this out before the world catches up with me and no internet.  Also, I'm incredibly frustrated trying to find an image that is representative of the main characters of the film while still looking pretty cool.  The eponymous woman is in the foreground, but she's blurred out.  Any other images with her are pretty meh, so I had to make a choice.  Oh, or they're AVIF files and I can't do anything with those.

Do you know how much I wanted to like this movie?  I don't know if I am ready to take the plunge and just purge social media, especially considering that social media is the only way that I get eyes on what I write.  I took the leap from X when Elon took the whole thing incredibly right wing and now that Zuck is starting to do the same, I guess I have to figure out new outlets.  And in the same way that I want to like Bluesky, I also wanted to like this movie.  (See, I can focus!)  Because the world is a terrible place, I kept seeing memes about how it was insane that Emilia Perez beat Wicked for Musical at the Golden Globes.  Now, the scene that all the trolls kept on pushing was one of the few English language songs in the movie, which is a doctor walking Rita through the transition process, but using colloquial language to explain the process.  All of the comments defending the scene said that the scene was silly in isolation, but a powerhouse in context.  If that defense was true of the scene, I got incredibly jazzed.  It felt like Emilia Perez was going to be this nuanced story where the music was an alternative to big budget flashy musicals.  And to a certain extent, my theory was right.  The music is certainly an alternative to what we get in big-budget musicals.  The problem with that is...

...it also isn't good.  Oh, and I was way off on the "subtle" bit.  The movie doesn't want the viewer to interpret a darn thing.  It is a sledgehammer of intent with --and I hate to say this --an awful soundtrack.  Now, I'm going to backpedal that almost immediately.  I'm not the best guy to be talking about music.  Heck, even though I'm literally wearing a necktie with the name of a bunch of musicals on it, I probably even can't comment on what musicals are fantastic.  I like what I like and I've always been in that camp, especially when it comes to music.  But if we're talking about music in a musical here, which I admit isn't even mostly in my own language, the lyrics in these songs seem to lack any kind of artistry to them.  This is way too rough of me to say, but it feels like the stuff that I wrote in high school.  It's so on-the-nose message wise. What I'm about to write aren't lyrics to the actual songs (although I do realize it is completely in my power and skill set to just Google lyrics), but the lyrics to Emilia Perez are like the following.  Rita and Emilia walk pass a homeless person (this does not happen in the movie.  Again, just an example.)  The two of them sing lyrics like, "Look, a homeless person!  How did you become homeless?  Is it the fault of a system of economics that discourages humanity?  I want to give you humanity!  The government is wrong for letting you suffer!"  And it is a lot of that.  I mean, song after song, there is nothing left for interpretation.  We gain nothing from listening / reading these lyrics.  If anything, Emilia Perez doesn't want to let you question any part of this movie.

I will say that the final third of the movie made me not hate it though.  I'm a progressive butthead living in a world of conservative monsters.  (See, I don't have to write subtlety either.) I want to support my transgender brothers and sisters in whatever they are going through.  But the message in the first two thirds of the movie is really weird.  And it's not that the story can't be told.  The problem is that the story can't be told the way that it is told.  I want to unpack the first two thirds of the film and tell you what completely crapped the bed, then follow it up with the final third that gives me a little bit of peace.  I hate to be summarizing so much of the movie, but that summary is also going to reveal where the movie falls apart.  The movie surrounds Rita, a lawyer, who is tasked with helping Manitas, a real monster of a drug lord, transition into being a woman.  She takes the job reluctantly because she had a big loss recently and I assume needs the money.  Also, she has a bag put over her head and forced to do it.  Manitas is not a good dude.  Once Rita gets Manitas the surgery she needs, Manitas names herself Emilia and disappears for four years.  Four year time jump in the plot, Emilia confronts Rita and wants to hire her once more to help her with charity work.  A lot of the movie is Emilia trying to undo the sins of her past by being altruistic.  Now, the problem lies in the time jump.  When we have a time jump like that, where a character goes from being a monster to being a saint, the read on the story is that transgender surgery makes someone a better person.  I certainly hope that the movie isn't trying to sell that.  Maybe, and this is a stretch of the imagination, the movie might be trying to sell the notion that denying one's true identity can lead to monstrous behavior.  It may tie into the notion that there are violent expectations put on men that women don't necessarily have.  What I think that the movie wants to say, especially if the four year time jump was removed, is that a fresh start gives people the opportunity to reflect on their mistakes and try to correct them.  But the four year time jump destroys that message.

If the four years was reinserted back into the narrative, we'd have those epiphany moments.  We don't want to miss Ebenezer Scrooge coming to terms with his past and just being a better person because he was scared by a ghost.  No, Emilia needs to understand that what Manitas did was awful and learn the damage that Manitas caused.  There needs to be a struggle to understand that Manitas caused people pain in real ways, leading to Emilia trying to get all of these charities up and running to stop others from doing what Manitas did.  That's a story.  But the four year time jump ruins a lot of that.  I want to watch the four years, not what I got afterwards.  

But I told you that the final third ain't bad.  That's kind of true.  I mean, it's not good either.  By the time the movie was over, I was thankful that I didn't have to watch any more.  You know that I'm pretty frustrated with a movie when I realize that there are ten minutes of translation credits on Netflix and that the film is shorter than I was prepped for.  But the final third is better.  Emilia (and this is pretty gross) decides to Mrs. Doubtfire her old family.  I get it.  She misses her kids.  She doesn't hate her wife (ex-wife?).  But also, you can't lie to these people and still be a good person.  Anyway, she Mrs. Doubtfires her family.  She is even mildly supportive to find out that Jessi, her wife, has moved on from Manitas's death.  She doesn't like the guy, which is understandable because he is also a drug lord.  But the reveal of Emilia being Manitas was a chef's kiss moment.  It had to be the part that the movie most desperately needed.  When we have the needle drop (which, by the way, makes Jessi a little more dumb than she needs to be because she is given so much information that Emilia is Manitas before that moment), often that scene makes the liar seem sympathetic.  It's often, "I'm sorry, but I didn't think you would accept me if you knew who I really was."  None of that here.  Emilia shows us Manitas, violence and all, in that sequence.  There's nothing sympathetic about the reveal.  If anything, it makes it looks like the choice to be Emilia was a means to run away from truths instead of actually getting therapy or dealing with the consequences of being an abusive drug lord.  That is way more heady than anything else that the movie gave us.  Yeah, the movie ends with Emilia still being mildly sympathetic, especially as Jessi comes to terms with  the reality of Manitas and what Jessi is doing to Emilia.  But the movie also wants its cake and eat it too.  Like, Emilia comes across as a bit of a victim by the end of the film as opposed to being someone dealing with the consequences of her actions.  It's a bit of weak tea, but it is at least something that gives the character human traits instead of "Look, everyone!  Change the world with words."

I do want to change the world with words.  I'm a big fan of the message.  But it makes those who want to fight that good fight look like simpletons who act entirely on feelings instead of struggling every day to get the message out there.  It's such a simple look at fighting the good fight that it might be hurting the good fight more than it helps.  It also doesn't help that almost no part of this movie is done in an entertaining way that could sell it to naysayers.  I hate that I'm going to see a scene posted by a bigot who describes progressive entertainment as "woke" and not have  a good response.  The movie is terrible.  Do you know why it is frustrating?  It's the R-Rated God's Not Dead of left leaning beliefs.  It's not a good movie and probably doesn't represent the struggle that a lot of people go through. 

Not rated, but this is, by far, the most inappropriate of the Zatoichi movies.  Zatoichi movies tend to stay away from sexuality and nudity.  This one decided to get it all out in one movie with a ton of sex and nudity.  There's some pretty bad gay stereotypes in this movie as well, teasing a potential sexual assault.  Then the gore!  Misumi decided that if they were going to greenlight sex stuff, mind as well go whole hog on the gore.  Yeah, this movie is not appropriate for kids.

DIRECTOR:  Kenji Misumi

Okay, I am so lost on what to think about Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival.  In lots of way, it is so much fun.  It's exactly what I want in a samurai movie.  But the beats in this movie are so darned weird.  There's going to be some active unpacking as I write this.  I'm hanging out with a pukey four-year-old.  I really want this behind me because I'm constantly overwhelmed and I want time to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  None of this has to do with Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival, which has also nothing to do with Fyre Festival.

What's really cool about Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival is that it's spiraled into borderline The Man with the Golden Gun.  All these movies, at this late stage in the Zatoichi franchise are one giant Man with the Golden Gun. Seriously, most of this movie is "Kill Zatoichi!"  We're a sneeze away from a bad guy yelling "Kill Bond, now!"  And the villains!  I mean *chef's kiss*!  It's like it took a while to realize that you could have some real goobers in these movies.  Honestly, the bad guys in the Zatoichi movies have been too safe.  It may have taken me this long to realize what made me slightly annoyed about the earlier Zatoichi films.  The entire idea of Zatoichi is absurd.  One of the things that's always gotten under my craw is the idea that I have no idea how Zatoichi's blindness works.  But as this franchise has progressed, the series has turned Zatoichi's blindness into magic blindness.  It does exactly what Zatoichi needs to get ahead and beat the bad guy.  When he needs to look silly, the blindness is crippling.  When there's any danger or need to make some other people look like dopes, it can do anything he wants it to do.    

So attaching the movie to a villain who also has magical blindness?  It took 21 movies to do that?  It seems like the most obvious choice for this series.  I mean, I'm really not sure what Dark Lord Yamikubo's abilities are.  We see that he does that sword trick of cutting something in mid-air, despite being blind. But he's also an old dude.  It's kind of bananas that the movie teases that blindness is a superpower.  At one point, Yamikubo has to direct his army and everyone is listening to his every choice because he can see the things that sighted people can't.  When the movie full on embraces the rules of Zatoichi blindness, that's what the series should have been from moment one.  What it does for the series as a whole is open the door to other characters having very specific talents.  When Zatoichi is the only one who can slice up umpteen bad guys, it means that every problem is solved with Zatoichi just slicing up them bad guys.  That doesn't make for compelling viewing.  But if there is some other quasi-super power that Zatoichi is fighting against, it creates dynamic sequences.  Yeah, it's all fluff.  But Zatoichi rarely works when it leans heavily into plot.  So well shot fluff actually kind of goes a long way with movies like this.

Do you know what thing I got hung up with on Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival?  A lot --and I mean a lot --of this movie is hung up on the bad guy toying with Zatoichi.  He does so many ceremonies where he invites Zatoichi only to immediately try and murder Zatoichi.  Like, there's almost no reason for it outside of the fact that Zatoichi is a threat to him.  But the bending over backwards to have Yamikubo quit being the Dark Lord only to have a big ceremony with dice that have no marks on them?  Like, I don't hate the pool full of gasoline that he lights on fire.  After all, the movie is called "Fire Festival".  But so much of it is unnecessary theatricality.  It's not subtle the fact that Zatoichi and Yamikubo are meant to be mirrors for each other.  I don't know if you picked up the very subtle nod to both characters being blind.  Or when they play the black and white pieces of Go (which I associate with another name that I can't think of).  Do you get that they are two sides of the same coin?  Like, it lays it on thick and I'm on board.

But beyond all this, the movie is super frustrating.  Part of it is that it relies on a trope that the series has used too much. (What?  Zatoichi falls back on formula?  Get out of town!)  The movie really leans into people falling hardcore in love with Zatoichi.  For a while, I was invested in these kinds of relationships.  In fact, I would get mad when Zatoichi wouldn't get emotionally tied to a female lead.  But we've now met so many versions of Kiyo that Kiyo doesn't matter at all.  Like, I like her as a character.  But I've now completely acknowledged that there's no way that Kiyo is going to change the narrative in any meaningful way.  And then we have the really inappropriate stereotype of Umeji.  Part of me really wants to believe that this was a really poor attempt at being progressive.  But I can't.  I mean, Umeji is so over-the-top as a gay stereotype that it's upsetting.  It's...really rough.  On top of that, it has that gay trope that says that he can't hold him back from the straight protagonist.  The thing is, Umeji is enough of a character to make a movie out of.  I love the idea that a youth being thrown out of his house and wanting to be a yakuza is a great idea.  I also love the idea that he bonds with Zatoichi, who secretly discourages him from that decision.  But he comes across as a really inappropriate joke.  It really could have been a movie in itself.  Instead, it's a wasted opportunity.

It is weird how sexual this movie gets.  There's a whole story with a guy who is trying to kill Zatoichi because he may or may not have seduced his wife.  Now, I mentioned in the Parent Guide section on the top that this is the first Zatoichi movie that completely went into the deep end with sexuality.  I'm not quite sure why.  I mean, I like a lot of the imagery that the paranoid husband holds onto.  I think he's a Ronin.  But this is kind of where I'm going with my frustration with this movie.  I love this Ronin.  He's this right level of insane, where he goes over the top and keeps Zatoichi alive because Zatoichi's death gives him something to look forward to.  He has all of these hallucinations of his wife copulating with Zatoichi.  It's some wild stuff.  But...when did that happen?  Am I missing something?  Am I forgetting about a character from a previous movie because that would be absolutely wild, considering that the franchise never did a callback like that before.  It's all this stuff.  But I'm still confused why the sexual element of the movie?  Is it because it is 1970 and there's this attitude of freedom?  I know that there was a push towards pornography as studios were restructuring themselves.  But it really felt like they were testing the waters and fulling embracing a new structure.  As much of a prude as I'm becoming as a parent, I didn't hate how much fun that they were having.  That sequence with the bathhouse where all the dudes were fighting nude was clever as heck.  But it just felt odd.

Part of what make Zatoichi movies kind of forgettable is that there is so much filler over what is a very thin story.  And I like that the movies tend to lean into simple plots.  But it's trying to do a little bit of everything and it needs to just focus on Zatoichi keeping his head above water as someone hammers him with things that scare him.  As a movie, it was mostly enjoyable.  That's what I figured out.  But it has a long way from being a good movie.

PG, and sweet mercy, I don't know what PG means anymore.  For blog after blog, I've been rallying that every movie has been too harshly rated.  Then, there's this movie about sex scandals all throughout, and it's PG?  My theory was always that the new MPAA was all about intended audience and I can't think of any young person who would want to sit through Conclave.  

DIRECTOR: Edward Berger

It's late at night and I just finished Conclave after we watched it in three separate nights.  (It's a long movie and I went back to work while the kids had off.) I'm trying to stay on top of writing blogs as soon as I watch them because there's going to be a glut of them for the coming months.  Honestly, if I had my druthers, I would have gone to see a movie at the theater.  But it's another snowpalypse in Cincinnati, so that seems like a dumb reason to make our children into orphans.  Especially considering that a ton of these movies for the Academy Awards shortlist are on streaming right now.

It's amazing that I started off with the most challenging out of the group.  I don't know how much I'm going to promote that I saw Conclave, simply because it deals with a subject matter that is incredibly sensitive and nuanced.  Normally, controversy and me are best pals.  I've always acknowledged that I'm a hypocrite.  But I think there might be more than simple hypocrisy here.  Part of why I might be less about promoting this blog isn't because of the gender stuff.  Heck, if it was just about the gender stuff, I probably wouldn't shut up about this movie.  (Although my more conservative friends calling this movie "silly" aren't entirely wrong from a realism point of view.  I'll probably get to that later in this blog.)  No, the problem I'm having is that I'm struggling with a lot of this stuff faith wise.

I haven't been exactly quiet over my crisis of faith over the past few years.  Since the rise of Donald Trump to political heights, I can't say that I've been in love with the way that the Church has responded to what I deem a dangerous precedent, especially when it comes to embracing Christian Nationalism.  For a long time, I thought that my faith was just washing away.  Instead, I think I've had to really question what I really believe versus what I think I believe.  Again, unpacking a lot of this.  I'm still figuring out exactly what I really believe.  I think I've grown closer to the actual teachings of the Gospels.  I think I love what the Church is supposed to be about.  But one of the things that I've had to dispel is that the Church --which is meant to be the Spouse of the Spirit --being more than a political grouping of adults who are all harboring their own political motivations, which includes backstabbing and, more importantly, horrible beliefs that should be considered in direct contrast to Christ's beliefs.

For those who aren't Catholic or struggling faith wise, you may find this not to be this big deal.  The thing is, I was raised to believe that there was nothing that could be really doubted.  The idea of a cafeteria Catholic was blasphemous.  These were people who weren't really Catholic in the eyes of the Church.  It's part of the Creed, after all.  But Conclave, at its core, is about watching how unspiritual the Curia really is.  I mean, it's all about ritual and ceremony.  Golly, Conclave is swimming in ritual and ceremony.  But it all feels like this is "Just something that we do" versus being moved by the intensity of these times.  Even the Pope, who is greatly loved in this film, is fundamentally just a man who makes some poor choices.  It's a lot to take in.  For Conclave to be kind of a big deal right now is hitting me in the feels.  And that's probably the movie's goal.  I don't know how they did it, but they decided to hold off on making this movie until I was going through all these crises of faith to confirm what I'm already struggling with.  (For those people not reading the irony, I'm stating that I'm aware that there probably is a surge of people feeling the same way and the release of Conclave is a response to that.)

When it comes to building this world and letting us see behind closed doors of the Curia, I have a vibe that Conclave nails it.   My wife and I had an immediate discussion after the movie ended and I think we both landed in the same place.  90% of the movie is phenomenal.  Between colors, cinematography, the whole mise en scene, and the performances, the movie absolutely nails it.  It gets you aggressively invested.  The movie intentionally pushes you into comfort zones only to rip you out of those zones immediately.  It reminds you that there is no perfect person, let alone a perfect pope.  The sheer amount of talent and skill behind Conclave is impressive as heck and, for that reason alone, I think the movie is incredible.  I want to recommend it to everyone.  But I also stated that the movie is, at its core, hilariously silly.

I talked about gender.  I'm going to call its commentary on gender subtle for most of the movie.  Others might disagree with me.  I didn't feel the sledgehammer until the end of the movie.  Before I talk about the silly part, I want to talk about the effective message throughout about gender.  I'm stating the obvious, but the Church is a boys' club.  Yes, women have their roles inside the Church, but Conclave is not afraid to remind you that men have the real power within the Church.  But when you cast Isabella Rosselini in a movie all about men, you know that there has to be a message about women.  The sisters of the film are the observers of the foolish notions that the men of the Curia hold.  While Lawrence might have good intentions, he is a fairly helpless dude.  He constantly needs help from outsiders.  Most of the time, he looks to his assistant, who is also a man.  Now, Archbishop (?) O'Malley is a lovely man who tries his best.  But his entire personality is "overwhelmed."  He gets information slowly.  It's Sister Agnes who is just sitting on a mound of information that desperately needs to be shared.  While the women of the story are mostly overlooked as even basic human beings in the Curia, their silent observation gives them a sense of tortured wisdom.

That stuff is great.  But the movie wants to end on a bombshell.  I get it.  The movie dances around the notion of progressivism versus toxic traditionalism throughout the film.  After all, the movie starts off with the forward thinking Bellini versus the Trumpian Todesco as the big fight.  As the votes keep being offered up and failing, a very Twilight Zone-y character starts gaining more and more traction.  Now, the movie is trying to fake you out a bit.  There's this atmosphere and implication that Benitez is not a real Cardinal.  No one has ever heard of this guy and he is so charismatic that there has to be something up with this dude.  At one point, you know that Benitez has to be a real contender for pope and that's the way that the movie is going.  Okay.  Interesting.  But when he becomes pope, you have to wonder what's the big reveal.  While I was ready for this guy to be an imposter, the silly part comes with its commentary on gender.  I'm spoiling it, but Benitez has some gender incongruous organs.  I'm dancing around the fact that he is male, except for the fact that he has ovaries and a uterus.  You know how you hear that gender is a spectrum.  Sometimes that is a physical thing as well.  In a loosey-goosey way, the movie teases the notion of trans rights without wholly embracing them.  

And it's such a bombshell that doesn't get the cinematic real estate that it needs.  The Benitez reveal is a movie all in itself and instead we only get a thirty second speech explaining that he decides to keep the organs because he's always had them.  We don't get a deep moral discussion about this moment.  If anything, it's meant to be this "Deal with it, audience" moment.  It's meant to make some people mad and other people cheer.  But the reality of the situation is that the whole thing is a bit silly when you think about how dodgy the Church is about gender.  Like, this movie is meant to be a criticism about how regressive the church is on gender, yet this guy fell upwards to the papacy.  First of all, there's a lot of hoops that the movie has to get Benitez in a point where no one would know this major moment for him.  Benitez also is incredibly coy about his secret until after he is elected pope.  Here's the deal.  Benitez is either super progressive (which isn't really his character.  He's empathetic, but also a practical dude because he's advocating for Lawrence to become pope) or just a weirdo who doesn't know how the papacy works.  Like, if O'Malley finds out Benitez's secret, does he think that the press won't find out?  It doesn't feel like Benitez is trying to take down the Church either.  If anything, it just feels like he hasn't thought it out.

Which is why he chooses the name "Innocent"!  Yeah, there's something to be said about Benitez's childlike view of faith.  It's great.  He has this great moment where he shames Todesco for not knowing what war looks like.  He also advocates for Lawrence because he believes that Lawrence's lack of enthusiasm for becoming pope makes him the ideal papal candidate.  But the reveal there is beyond the pale.  I either want the movie to make the movie about the gender reveal or don't do any part of it.  It all feels like it wants its audience to do its own heavy lifting, which feels more like a writing prompt than actual commentary that the movie is making.  It only feels brave of the filmmakers for a hot second.  I don't need that kind of bravery.  I want you to say SOMETHING, not just that it shouldn't matter.  Make the whole movie about it, not an afterthought to a movie that is about something else throughout.  This is me really trying to add thought to it and I could say that it is a commentary on those who think that they are progressive being terrified stupid about actual progress.

It's an incredible movie that's hindered by lack of depth at the end.  Again, I don't mind controversy when it comes to gender roles in the church, especially with topics that border with transgenerism.  But do it loud and proud.  Don't bury it at the end as a "gotcha" ending.  The rest of the movie is given so much nuanced depth and then this is thrown in at the end?  Nah, this movie didn't need the surprise ending. Do it from moment one and I'll find the movie way less silly. 

Not rated, but this one gets pretty gory.  There are some Zatoichi movies that are almost family friendly.   Then there are Zatoichi movies that really embrace the fact that a guy who swings a sword a lot should be surrounded by blood.  This is the latter kind of Zatoichi movie.  I'm also a little concerned that there's really brief nudity, but I can't be confident about that.  There's also some language!  So one of the more controversial Zatoichi movies!

DIRECTOR: Kihachi Okamoto

You know, considering that this is the best looking Zatoichi movie, I could not find one still that really reflected the cinematography of this movie.  It's a borderline crime how much time I wasted only to settle with the image that I had above.  Some of those other Zatoichi movies had immediate finds.  This one?  Both Google and Bing image searches.  When I hit Bing, you know that I'm desperate.  (Although I actually like their image searches better than Google's...)  This movie is the prettiest looking Zatoichi and I had to find an image where some of the eponymous protagonist's head is cut off.  Boo.

This is the movie that I was excited for.  Are you kidding me?  The hero of the Kurosawa film Yojimbo meets Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman?  I watched 19 movies up to this point just to get ready for this film.  But I have to tell you, this movie was bound to disappoint.  In some ways, it did exactly what a crossover film should do.  In many other ways, it kind of craps the bed.  When I eventually log this into Letterboxd after writing this blog, I'm probably going to give it a three out of five.  I hate to simplify movies into "out of five" breakdowns, but I know that I'm going to stray into some pretty whiny writing.  I can see it now.  Three out of five is fine.  We're all in the fine camp here.  But with a movie that I've hyped up a lot, three out of five might be the worst review that it can get.  I was almost let down in the first moment.  I was watching the opening credits and I had the weird epiphany, "What if it's not Toshiro Mifune?"  I thought it might have been the character from Yojimbo, but they couldn't get a big name like Mifune to show up for the movie.  The credits kept going and I didn't see Mifune.  Then, poof!  There's his name.  You'd think that would be enough to get me excited.

Here's the problem.  It is Mifune.  They even say "Yojimbo" a whole bunch in the movie.  The problem is, the character's name isn't Yojimbo in Yojimbo.  "Yojimbo" means "Bodyguard."  And for a lot of the movie, the word "Yojimbo" does stand for bodyguard.  But the character in Yojimbo is named "Sanjuro."  The Yojimbo character in Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo is not named Sanjuro.  He's named something else.  The idea is that Daiei couldn't get the actual rights to the Yojimbo character, so they called the movie Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo because the character is played by the same dude in a similar vein to the character he played before.  Yeah, there's a lot of dancing around.  So the weird thing is that we're supposed to treat and think about Mifune's character as Sanjuro without any of the mythology of Sanjuro.  It's some tap dancing that I should be more okay with, but I think we're in the same camp when we say, "I guess I'm excited that Toshiro Mifune is playing a cool dude in a Zatoichi movie".  Still, it's not Sanjuro.

There is some degree of specialness to this movie.  I'm sure it's not an accident that they saved this crossover for Movie 20.  I prepped for this movie by watching Yojimbo, but I also should have watched the OG Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman in preparation for this movie.  This is the movie where Zatoichi returns home.  The movie makes a pretty fine meal out of Zatoichi's return.  I'll have to be honest with you.  It's been a minute since I've seen the first movie.  It's been so long that when I finish this box set, I have to go back and watch the first few to say that I've written about every Zatoichi film.  While I don't remember the individual beats, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo does a lot to catch me up on what happened in the previous films.  And the movie is longer too.  Like, this is almost a full two hours.  In terms of grandeur, the movie feels bigger than the other Zatoichi movies.  But the runtime does not help the pacing of the film whatsoever.  I'll get to that in a second.  But as I've mentioned, the cinematography is something of scale.  I don't know if they necessarily spent more money.  We have a lot of the same "Stay in one village" tropes that the Zatoichi movies have employed in the other films.  

But if Samaritan Zatoichi did everything right by making the story a character film, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo makes the mistakes of previous movies by leaning heavily into a plot that doesn't make a lick of sense.  Sometimes, I'm convinced that it is just me, not understanding the dynamics of jidaigeki era films.  But I decided to read up on the plot of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo.  I wanted to be something special.  After all, I watched a lot of movies to get here.  And do you know what?  I don't think many people really understand the bulk of the plot.  I understood most of what other people had gotten about this movie and that was pretty minimal.  Some of those plot things brought about some great imagery.  For example, I knew that there was some hidden gold in the village.  I understand that gold was in dust form.  I know that the gold blew away in a storm, covering the fighters in gold dust and that all looked super rad.  But a lot of how the gold got there and why it was being treated the way it was eludes me.  Honestly, the dynamics of a lot of the criminals is odd.  I get that the guy hoarding all of the money has two sons.  The sons are trying to kill each other for the money.  But that's all I know.

Even beyond this point, I don't really get how Sassa (Yojimbo) and Zatoichi interact with each other.  They really play up that old chestnut of the two heroes refusing to get along, mainly because they're too alike.  But because we don't know much about Sassa --because he's not Sanjuro --Sassa really comes across as the villain of this piece.  His entire gag is that he's a bit of a bully when it comes to Zatoichi.  If you didn't know it was Toshiro Mifune (which I didn't for a minute!  He's older in this movie!), he would just be the villain of the movie.  He has some moral scruples, but I'm not quite sure what he stands for.  We get that he's in love with the woman that may or may not love Zatoichi.  But he's also a spy.  Zatoichi vocalizes his anger at men like Sassa, claiming he won't even pretend to be like him.  (Mind you, the last movie made a big hullaballoo over the fact that Zatoichi is a yakuza.)  Here's the deal.  If I had never seen Yojimbo (and it shouldn't matter because this isn't the same character!), I wouldn't know that Sassa was a heroic character.  Much of the movie, he complains about not being paid enough.  He doesn't really help the town except with his scheming with Zatoichi.  It's all about personality against a town's real problems.

I also don't think that there's enough mythology behind both Sanjuro or Sassa to really establish tropes for this character.  There are some beats of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo that are just rehashes of Yojimbo.  If I squinted, I could see that Mifune's character slightly plays the two warring factions off of each other as he keeps getting paid peacemeal.  That's something that happened in Yojimbo, but in a much more deliberate way.e  Similarly, we had the evil gunslinger character walk into town and be all mysterious.  That's something that happened in Yojimbo.  It's just that we don't get any character growth.  It feels like the production team just wanted to remind you about how good of a movie Yojimbo was, even if it has nothing to do with this film.  But by having Sassa tease Zatoichi's blindness, it feels like his aloofness that came with the original Kurosawa film is more about the protagonist being a jerk who simply got a happy outcome rather than someone who is pretending to be a selfish samurai when he's actually a good man.

I mean, thank goodness that the movie looked pretty or I would be pretty annoyed by the film as a whole.  I can't deny that the second act was a blur for me.  The final act, when the two are just massacring the bad guys left and right was actually kind of fun.  I even liked that Zatoichi struggled to beat the bad guys in this one.  (I'm still absolutely confused by the inconsistency of Zatoichi's blindness.  He's either hyper aware, "seeing" what others can't or he gets confused by steps.)  Yeah, it's great to see Mifune again in a similar role.  But this movie lacked the meat of the knockout that was Samurai Zatoichi.  But it will all work out in the end because I'm getting close to the home stretch.

Not rated.  Some of the Zatoichi movies try going hard edged.  Some of them try being a little bit more gentle.  We're back in the gentle era of Zatoichi.  I don't mind that one bit.  Zatoichi movies work better when they aren't trying to be Lone Wolf and Cub. There is still an incredible amount of violence --but with little blood.  Also, there's some implications of rape and sex trafficking.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR: Kenji Misumi

I have to write this quickly because I want to go back to work with no backlog of films to write about.  The funny part is that we're trying to get ahead of the Oscar season by watching some of the shortlisted films ahead of time, so I'm going to be really swamped.  The slightest bummer about the most blessed life in the world is that I got some video games that I would love to give some attention.  But if I'm to write about every movie I watch, then something has got to give.

Guess what?  No notes.  Samaritan Zatoichi is the perfect Zatoichi movie and I'm back on the Zatoichi train.  I know.   It took me a billion years to get back to that point.  But Samaritan Zatoichi did right what Prisoners did wrong.  (I'm acting like Prisoners is a terrible movie when it was fine.  Read what I wrote before.  I harp on the following point pretty hard.) Zatoichi films tend to work on a formula that makes a plot so complex that it almost becomes stupid.  I've always contended that I might be the stupid one in the equation.  But the story tended to always be the same.  If anything, in an attempt to churn out as many Zatoichi movies imaginable, they stopped trying to change anything about these films, even down to the weak plots.  But Samaritan Zatoichi works because it stops trying to offer plots that don't really matter.  If you don't know where I'm coming from, I'm going to try to unpack an idea that only comes from watching a lot of crappy Zatoichi movies.

Zatoichi movies tend to have the eponymous Zatoichi stumble upon a complex dynamic of a local lord or a boss trying to make a bunch of money off of messing with a village or town.  The movie plays up Zatoichi's blindness by trying to cheat him.  Eventually, everyone in town discovers that this is the mythical Zatoichi, the unstoppable swordsman.  Then people try manipulating him.  Sometimes there's a big bad.  There tends to be a small difference in the way that the bad guys confront Zatoichi.  Some of them give Zatoichi the chance to fall in love with someone who sees beyond his blindness.  And so on and so forth.  Some of the movies offer variation.  These tend to be the movies that I lose my mind about.  But Samaritan Zatoichi does something way smarter than what the other movies do.

It gets rid of the plot.

Old me would have lost his mind about this.  I thought everything was about the plot.  If you didn't have a good plot, what did you have?  Do you know what old me discovered?  If you don't have plot, it works if you have excellent characterization or themes.  Samaritan Zatoichi has both of those things.  What little plot there is builds on some of the issues that the Zatoichi franchise struggles with.  The basic plot is that Zatoichi is the cause of death of the female protagonist's brother.  He was a bit of a slimeball, but didn't deserve death.  When the other assassins try to tak advantage of the woman, Zatoichi alienates himself from the other assassins and bonds with the woman.  This is some great stuff because she is torn between being protected by Zatoichi and acknowledging that her brother would be alive if it wasn't for him.   That's the movie.  She hates him and loves him and that's a great movie.  Sure, a lot of movies do that.  But I really like that it is Zatoichi.

Samaritan Zatoichi does something that I wish the franchise I did more often.  Zatoichi is obviously a hero.  Doctor Who tried touching on this theme as well, but I like when the morality of a hero is questioned.  A few movies ago (You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't be able to tell you the title of the movie) the word "yakuza" was dropped.  I was thinking about how weird the very notion of a wandering swordsman was.  Now, the early films really played up the fact that Zatoichi's primary form of income was a masseur.  But the later movies really play up the fact that he's an assassin for hire.  As an assassin, he's forced to align his morality with the person who is paying his bills.  But if he's not being paid for something, he has to fall back on what he finds morally right.  Yeah, the brother was a bit of a sleezeball, but he was also backed into a corner.  Because Zatoichi signed up for a hit job, he didn't know the ins-and-outs.  He doesn't understand that this boy took a loan that had so many strings attached that there would be no way out from under the crime boss's thumb.  There's this guilt (that unfortunately is assuaged when he's given verbal forgiveness) that rides through a lot of the movie.  He feels bad that he killing this boy, but not enough to change his ways.

Can I tell you how much I like the fact that this is character motivated?  I'm not lying to myself when it comes to the fact that this will have almost no impact on the franchise moving forward.  (I mean, I'm on the home stretch.  Only with a franchise like Zatoichi that seven movies makes it the home stretch, but I'm there anyway.) But I like that Zatoichi makes this story personal.  They've done this a couple times in the franchise, but it always kind of felt artificial.  The fact that Osode has a hard time with Zatoichi makes the story all that more interesting.  I also kind of dig that the guy who is supposed to be the big bad guy of the movie is actually a pretty rad dude.  The governor is supposed to be this corrupt guy, but he's constantly mentioning that Osode is not a big deal and that his underling really needed to let this whole thing gone.  It comes down to the underling being someone who has to deal with a point of pride.  He doesn't like that Osode got away, especially with the help of a blind man.  That's way more interesting than a complicated plot that the other movies try doing.

I'm a little torn about the muscle of this movie.  In terms of what it offers, it's super cool.  Yasaburo (I hope I have the right guy) is the first bad guy in this very long franchise that is actually better than Zatoichi.  There have been threats to Zatoichi.  They tend to be gimmicky bad guys that play on his blindness.  But Yasaburo is the first guy who is genuinely better than Zatoichi.  I can't believe that I got this far in the franchise before running into a problem that a lot of movies introduce early on.  And the guy loses!  I don't know if that's really a spoiler.  But he loses because he's playing with Zatoichi.  If the message of the entire series is that people undervalue the handicapped, Yasaburo is the mascot for that entire idea.  It's really kind of cool.  But in terms of anything else with Yasaburo, he's way too cryptic to actually be considered a character.  That dude shows up everywhere, to an almost supernatural level.  At one point, Osode is running through the woods away from kidnappers, runs into a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and there's Yasaburo. He doesn't care about money, which is interesting.  But who is he?  Why is he so good?  It's almost like they set up a big bad for the entire franchise and then killed him.  That's fine, I guess. It's just not in line with the rest of the movie.  Still, I'll acknowledge that the movie needs him for the movie to end.  It's all pretty good.

I can't believe that it took this long to find the perfect Zatoichi movie.  There were a few other times that I lost my mind about these films.  But this one is solid as heck.  I can't deny that I'm the most excited for the next one.  But because I'm so excited, I'll probably be disappointed.

PG for all of the Star Wars-y action that you are accustomed to.  It almost seems like tradition that someone has to lose a limb, so there is another dismemberment.  Some kids are scarred from scary monsters.  It's weird that I'm even writing this, but the rancor and the sarlacc pit are pretty messed up and scary.  Also, characters die.  But we're at the height of PG here.  I have few notes that make this movie not okay for kids.

DIRECTOR: Richard Marquand

I had to Google if Ross Marquand was related to Richard Marquand.  The answer is yes.  He's a distant relative.  See, you learned something from reading this blog.

My kids got me really angry for this watching of what might be the best presentation of Return of the Jedi.  This has nothing to do with Return of the Jedi, but I've officially turned into the old man who gets mad at kids these days.  How do my kids have such a crappy attention span?  Seriously.  One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to watch movies with my family.  Like, it was the thing I looked forward to all week.  I'm going to guess that something is probably tied to the existence of streaming and the fact that they can watch anything at any time.  But a family watch of Return of the Jedi is supposed to be one of those bonding moments.  Oh my goodness.  It was like I was asking them to clean their rooms.  They did anything they could not to watch the movie.  There were a couple of tantrums on my end.  I just wanted my kids to sit down and watch the theatrical cut of Return of the Jedi with me.  They make Star Wars references all the time without actually having seen Star Wars.  Drives me nuts.

Anyway, this crime spree of watching the theatrical cuts of the Star Wars movies through the despecialized editions was a treat.  (Well, it would have been if they hadn't been so obstinate about watching a movie with their dear old dad.)  Maybe I'm nuts, but as beautiful as the print of Return of the Jedi was (absolutely justifying the purchase in my head), The Empire Strikes Back print seemed better.  It could be that Hoth just looks absolutely sick in high def.  I don't know.   But Return of the Jedi might have the most amount of changes between the theatrical cuts and the special editions.  I'm going to be a bit blasphemous here, simply because I can.  I adore the theatrical cut (that's not the blasphemy!), but the changes in Return of the Jedi, while massive especially compared to Empire, aren't as evil as the changes that happen in A New Hope.  There's a reason that we talk about the Han and Greedo sequence.  It is a character change that affects the whole franchise.  Now, again, I'm giving a lot more weight to something that ultimately shouldn't matter.  But I'm firmly in the "Han Shot First" camp.  But with Return of the Jedi, the changes are almost there knowing the legacy of Star Wars.

Let's be honest: George Lucas --as much as I respect the dude --claims that the Special Editions were the only version of the story.  He claims that, if he had the technology available to him back in the day, would have made the theatrical cut look like the Special Editions.  The Return of the Jedi special editions are exhibit A for the prosecution that these were never planned sequences.  The first and foremost argument is the ending of Jedi itself.  Me, I always loved "Yub Nub".  I was an insufferable nerdy kid who sang "Yub Nub" ironically all the time.  But it wasn't that ironic.  I genuinely loved "Yub Nub" and pretended that my goofy rear end was making fun of it.  It seemed like what the Ewoks would have done.  But even more so, showing all of the planets in the New Republic rising up and throwing of off the shackles of the Empire only really works when you understand that there is a much larger canon that would only be made present with the start of The Phantom Menace.  Star Wars as a franchise got way larger than Lucas had ever imagined it.  That last sequence is a testament to what these movies became versus what they were.  I'm all about celebrating what Star Warsbecame.  I just don't want to claim that this was always the plan.  Lucas was always really good at "This was always the plan." 

But Return of the Jedi Special Edition also is the birthplace of Sy Snoodles's "Jedi Rocks."  I don't hate the sequence.  Honestly, I don't.  It's very CG.  Like, VERY CG.  This might be the thing that aged the poorest.  But it's fun.  I'm a big fan of fun Star Wars.  But do you know what else it is?  Absolutely unnecessary.  If anything, it's distracting from the amazing pacing that Jabba's Palace offers in the theatrical cut.  Jabba's Palace is a place of tension.  It's a grimy and un-Jedi like place.  That's kind of what I love about the original trilogy; we kept getting thrown into places that Jedi would not find themselves comfortable with.  Jabba's Palace on Tattooine is similar to how we experience Dagobah.  Maybe that's what prequel trilogy kids seemed to dislike about the original trilogy.  Jedi in the prequels and the sequels are all about massive cities and Jedi temples.  Return of the Jedi makes its opening adventure (which takes up a lot of great runtime) in a grimy backroom of a slug mob boss.  And guess what?  It's freaking great.  I'll be honest with you.  A lot of me wants to argue that Return of the Jedi might be the best Star Wars movie.  (I won't because both emotionally and intellectually, I will hold up Empire as the perfect Star Wars movie.)   But you can split Jedi into two perfect parts:  Jabba's Palace and Endor.  Sure, a lot of you hate Ewoks.  But if Empire was aggressively bleak, Return of the Jedi rewards you for going through the Swamps of Sadness (I know, NeverEnding Story) to just an action packed romp.  Return of the Jedi works in tandem with Empire Strikes Back.  Sure, you could argue that Empire Strikes Back has nonstop action.  But its the repeated failure of these characters.  When we get to Return of the Jedi, there's this inherent fun all through the movie.  I mean, you scoff, but a blind Han Solo bumped Boba Fett into a sarlacc pit to his death.  And it still does all this while resolving its heavy themes.

Why do you hate Ewoks?  I mean, honestly.  Why do you hate Ewoks?  Sure, we all know that Lucas wanted Wookiees for the final film and couldn't afford them.  (I'm still trying to do the budget that would change tall people for short people and drastically change a movie.) But I saw Revenge of the Sith and Wookiees did nothing for me like what Ewoks did for me.  Ewoks are more fun.  Between being stand ins for indigenous fighters repelling a far superior force, they're kind of hilarious.  Sure, I'm the guy who probably railed against Jar Jar Binks because I never cared for Jar Jar Binks (which does not give people license to harass Ahmed Best).  But Ewoks balance humor and pathos in the exact way that scene should have.  The fact that Han, Luke, and Chewie are almost sacrificed to these adorable creatures makes the entire culture instantly understandable.  

I'm writing for the sake of writing at this point, despite the fact that I have another entry right after this.  Let's talk about Obi-Wan Kenobi and "From a certain point of view".  Now, I have to imagine that Lucas himself knew that his throwaway line from A New Hope was problematic.  When Obi-Wan explains what he meant by the death of Anakin Skywalker, Luke even looks at Ben incredulously.  It seems like Ben is doing some mental gymnastics to get to that point.  But what I will give Lucas credit for with the prequels is establishing the friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin.  Return of the Jedi is mostly strengthened with the prequels.  There are some moments that probably didn't work before the prequels.  A New Hope and Empire mostly don't thrive because of the prequels.  It's probably why the Machete Cut of Star Wars is watchable.  Return of the Jedi thrives most when Darth Vader becomes more than an evil archetype.  With Jedi, there's some humanity woven through the character.  Lucas has always been a bit of a problem with light switch moments when it comes to his characterization, especially when it comes to Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader.  One of the most frustrating parts of Revenge of the Sith is when Anakin turns on Mace Windu.  The thing that kind of excuses that moment is Darth Vader's betrayal of the Emperor.  It's such a light switch moment that I've always forgiven.  After all, it was only moments before then that Vader is torturing Luke and tossing lightsabers at him.  The fact that he shifts is only slightly helped by parallel frustrating character changes.

It's weird how little we know about the Emperor.  Seriously, we have action figures for the guy who stole the ice cream machine on Bespin, but the Emperor is just an evil dude.  I know that there have been stories in the extended universe and some of the new Disney+ stuff, but we don't really have a definitive origin for this character.  Yet, this character still positively works.  Maybe the Emperor's presence is what allows Darth Vader to become redeemed at the end of Jedi.  We needed a joint character to rally against and that's what Emperor Palpatine provides.  I adore Ian McDiarmid in this role.  Like, the fact that the man stayed as the backbone of the franchise is wonderful.  But I have no idea what is going on with this character.  Oh, don't worry!  I inherited a lot of Star Wars: Legends novels, so I'm probably going to know a lot about this character even though very little of it will be canon.

Listen, I'm not selling anyone on Return of the Jedi here.  I already wrote a ton about Return of the Jedi on the Special Edition blog.  Do I remember what I said?  No.  Will I read it?  Absolutely not.  But my big takeaway is that I wish my kids gave the movie a fair shot.  Regardless, it was a good time for me.