Rated R mostly for being all spooky pookie.  But not a lot happens that is necessarily gory or vulgar.  Instead, we have a liberal use of the f-bomb, which makes me want to question whether or not that this movie could have been PG-13, despite being kind of upsetting.  Sure, they decided to embrace the f-bomb because this was meant to do the thing that The Blair Witch Project did and present itself as a documentary instead of a found footage film.  Still, not that much gory stuff happens here.

DIRECTOR:  Oren Peli

It's finally spooky season for me.  I know.  Some people start spooky season in September.  I can't do that much horror.  It makes me numb to it.  But I do want to knock out at least one franchise during spooky season.  So I decided to revisit Paranormal Activity.  

I know.  I know!  Guys!  You don't have to tell me.  I watched a lot of these movies back in the day hoping that they were going to screw me up pretty bad.  I don't know why I was rooting for that.  I suppose that I'm always chasing the thing that is going to rewire my brain.  And I don't think I'm alone in saying that the Paranormal Activity movies are a bit too overhyped.  I watched all the way, but not including, The Marked Ones in hopes that I was going to find a gem in this series.  But I remember that one of the first dates that I took my wife on (Again, apologies to my wife) was to watch this movie in the theaters.  I heard so much chatter about this movie that I thought that it was going to be one of those experiences.  When we left, ultimately disappointed, boy, did I have egg on my face.  I don't know why I kept reapplying that egg for my face another three times, but I did!  

But now I'm going into this franchise a little differently.  The thing about Paranormal Activity is that it was always in the shadow of its own hype.  We were always promised to see something that was going to scare the living daylights out of us and that kind of never happened.  Sure, we tended to get something mildly engaging towards the end of act III in these movies.  But in terms of actually writing home about something, that never really happened.  So my theory now is to say "Now that I've tempered expectations, are these things watchable?"  And I'm going to say, at least based on the first movie, "Maybe?"  I have to confess to another crime before I go too deep into this blog.  I watched this on a phone.  David Lynch is rolling over in his grave, but I watched it on my phone.  There are seven of these movies.  I want to watch them all throughout October and it's already the 5th.  I'm also planning on watching other horror movies this month between entries, so I don't want to be watching these until Christmas.  So I watch when I can!  Also, it's not like I'm dealing with top notch cinema.  This is a movie that I've already seen and it's found footage.  We're good.  

Tempered expectations definitely help.  It's actually kind of funny that I remembered so many story beats in a movie that almost actively does nothing throughout the film.  The biggest frustration that I had with the franchise before was the notion that so little happens in these movies.  It's about setting up atmosphere and playing with the notion of verisimilitude.  There's a lot of buy-in to the Paranormal Activity movies.  One of the issues I've always had with found footage is the notion that we have to believe that someone is always concerned with videotaping everything.  I'm not saying its impossible.  If anything, the invention of the GoPro might be one of my favorite plausible elements when it comes to these stories.  But from a narrative perspective, there is a lot of "Get to the good part."  Hitchcock said that it wasn't in the firing of the gun; it's the anticipation of the shot.  Paranormal Activity movies kind of push that to almost an irresponsible level.  So little happens in these movies as the entity slowly messes with small things.  

So here's me being gracious.  There is a temptation to ride the high horse of "This crap doesn't scare me."  For the most part, that's true.  There are times where it gets a little anxiety inducing.  But the reality of it is that I can see how this movie can be terrifying to the right crowd.  If anything, I'm a little jealous of the fact that people are okay with a movie being painfully slow.  I've always advocated that slow isn't necessarily a bad thing when it came to storytelling.  And I can't absolutely lie.  The tension does work to a certain point.  But I kind of feel like we need...more.  There's always the absence of what could be.  Part of that probably lies in the format of the found footage movie, with the dubious claim that we're seeing something real.  Reality doesn't necessarily throw up a ton of unasked for information.  But the thing that makes us scared is the notion that our imagination is better than anything we can see on screen. There is something incredibly anticlimactic to that.  If my brain is putting together horror stories that make me want to weep, I at least want an element of that confirmed in what I'm physically watching.  We never really get that kind of stuff.  I mean, I remember back in the day watching this movie and watching Katie's leg being pulled out of the bed.  That was pretty cool. But that moment was the child of the communion of an audience.  Watching that alone, it lacked the umph that many other movies kind of give me.

But there is something that I discovered once I stopped being scared.  If Paranormal Activity gives me anything, it kind of gives me a great movie about toxic masculinity and commentary on influencer culture.  This is a movie from 2007.  Micah's camera is giant.  He's not holding an iPhone. He's got a whole rig going.  This is pre-TikTok (as far as I know) and the notion of people being professional influencers is probably in its nascency.  As a conceit, I mentioned that the camera needs to go everywhere.  It's the issue that I have with first person narrators, especially if they are the ones not pushing the plot forward, like with Nick Carraway and The Great Gatsby.  This is Katie and the demon's story.  (By the way, round of applause whoever thought to make this is a story about Katie's entire life.  It makes it far more interesting than simply about scares.  We have a bible and a concept to explore with a character who seems used to the misery that her life is.)   Micah is there as the camera.  As such, the camera gains a personality.  It would be absurd that, as the story got darker and darker, that Katie would be the one pushing for the camera to continue to get involved.  That means that Micah has to be a complete butthead.  

Okay, there's probably a narrative where Micah is trying to get help for Katie.  But from this perspective, we can tell that he's sabotaging anything that would actually help Katie be free of the demon.  From a drama perspective, we have to watch Micah making bad choice after bad choice, giving the camera character a personality.  We have to remember that Micah is invading this space and actively making things worse.  If you don't care about scares, which I didn't really care about in this viewing, it becomes about how passive Katie becomes when a toxic force weaves into her life.  Yeah, I know that Katie gains agency as the story progresses and we learn more about Katie's backstory.  But that final image, where Katie is ripping into Micah, becomes oddly cathartic because we know that all of this escalated because Micah refused to take Katie's well-being into account.

So as a story --weirdly enough --I kind of like Paranormal Activity.  Yeah, it's really gimmicky and I often don't think that the gimmicks work in the way that the filmmakers want me to.  I wish it scared me as much as I wanted it to.  But from a lore perspective, the first movie does a solid job to make me peel back more stuff.  In a world where I get bored of V/H/S/  movies, this entry into a long running franchise does what it needs to do, but no more.

Rated PG-13 for scary stuff.  Like, the movie doesn't get overly scary.  I get the PG-13 line in the sand.  There are maybe one or two moments that are actually genuinely frightening.  If you are afraid of squid people or things that are kind of Lovecraftian, there might be some terror.  Most of the movie builds more on discomfort than on actual jump scares.  There is some drug use and some language in the movie.  This is more existential dread than anything visibly upsetting.  But there is some death in the movie, so take that into consideration.

DIRECTOR:  Louis Leterrier

So Hand Foot and Mouth is a bear when you are an adult.  See, a lot of the movies that I watch are on the treadmill.  (Aging, apparently, is also a bear.)  But when your feet are covered in sores (you're welcome, readers), it's hard to find time to watch movies like you used to.  So I just shotgunned The Last House, a movie entirely brought to me by gimmicky ad campaign.  Apparently, in Los Angeles, there was a billboard shaped like a house.  Inside of that billboard house, there was  a guy living in it.  Yeah, that was enough to get me to watch this movie.  Congrats, PR department, your gimmick worked.

Now, The Last House falls into a specific subgenre that I tend to like.  I don't want to name this genre, but these are high concept horror movies where the monster isn't easily seen.  (Well, in two of these cases, until the monsters are seen.) There tends to be a promise in these movies of a mystery that should have this great explanation.  In the cases of Bird Box or A Quiet Place, we have to wonder why senses are so key to human survival.  With the case of The Last House, we wonder both what is keeping these people locked in their houses and how they are going to survive with limited resources.  With Bird Box and A Quiet Place, I think these movies give us just enough info about the answer that we don't want to know much more.  It's a real tightrope, these kinds of mysteries.  Like, I still don't really know what makes Bird Box work, but I don't want to know.  I just know that it is spooky pooky.  With A Quiet Place, I kind of know too much and I hope that I don't get any more info.  It's better being ambiguous.  But with The Last House, the answer to the mystery isn't worth the mystery itself.

I can't stress enough: the conceit is pretty cool.  The simple notion of being locked in a house is a cool idea.  Heck, as a Covid allegory, it also works pretty well (although probably not on the same political spectrum as I'd probably like.  Let's just say that I'm a big fan of vaccines and masking).  But there are a bunch of reasons why this movie doesn't work and most of it comes from the third act.  The movie desperately wanted to have an answer for what locked these people in their houses.  This might be one of those few examples where "That's just how the world is now" probably was the better answer.  Having a race of mythical squid people who change the rules every time these people start to adapt is frustrating.  The movie gives us rules at the beginning.  There is no way out.  Cool.  I like that.  When the protagonists find a small (and absolutely absurd) workaround for survival, these creatures start appearing and change degrees of hostility.  I'm not quite sure why there are nice ones hunting them.  Also, the notion that these creatures can just flood a house willy-nilly?  As part of the evolving rules, the inhabitants of the house have to keep the windows closed and they have to stay out of sight during rain.  Fine.  But are the squid people stupid?  They see that there's movement inside the house initially and then just go away?  Why didn't they flood the house then?

Okay, I'm going to come out and say it.  Louis Leterrier might not be an amazing director.  I watched the trailer and thought, "Man, this looks incredibly watchable."  But within minutes of the movie, I realized that this movie had a tone problem.  Like, this movie wanted to be fun.  It really wanted to be fun.  I can see the code behind this movie and how much it wanted to be like other movies tonally.  And I really hate throwing actors under the bus, especially considering that I like these actors, but the chemistry is...rough.  Now, I want to immediately backpedal this comment because I think a lot of it comes down to the edit.  One of the things that we have to believe from the outset is the idea that this is a family full of quirks.  In terms of the dialogue, I could see some of this dialogue reflecting a complex family that fundamentally loves each other, even if they get on each other's nerves from time-to-time.  But we're supposed to fall in love with this family and I never quite get that.  

Everything in the film feels stilted.  The jokes never quite land.  Moments that are meant to be cute don't quite play the way that they're supposed to.  If anything, this movie is a race to the finish line.  Now, I don't know much about the world of streaming algorithms.  This movie desperately wants to be under two hours and I don't quite know why.  I honestly think that a lot of this movie would have been fantastic had it been allowed to breathe.  When we look at a movie that has pacing problems, especially with a choppiness that I see in The Last House, often it is because of the limitations of movie theaters.  See, movie theaters thrive on having a shorter runtime.  The shorter the movie, the more showtimes they can offer.  With Netflix, I don't quite understand.  Maybe the longer cut of the movie was a burden and people just weren't finishing the original cut of the movie.  I'm such a cynic, though, that I feel like the whole movie is kind of a mess and  it isn't in the edit.  

Maybe it's in the mimicry.  I think this is a desperate attempt to pleasing a corporate overlord.  I might be touching on something here because this feels right.  Again, I hate dunking on a movie so hard because it is hard to make a movie.  But this all feel like an attempt to become relevant rather than telling a good story.  I keep coming back to the conceit versus the revelation.  Puzzle box stories are compelling because we want to solve them.  With the case of the rain locking people in their houses, there's something fascinating about nature needing people to be locked inside.  Now, maybe I'm so obsessed with formula that it bothers me when formula isn't followed. (Again, I don't really think that's what is going on here.)  This is a story about nature.  We have gotten story after story (again, I don't think that this is a movie about breaking new ground) about how nature seems horrific, but ultimately is a caretaker of the human race, keeping the moniker of "Mother Nature" intact.  So when we see these people being locked in their houses (ultimately leading to many of them dying), it feels like there's a reason that people are locked up.  

The problem with that, of course, is that we find out that this is simply a weapon used by squid creatures that we were unaware of.  I mean, I can't throw too many stones.  We didn't know about the aliens in A Quiet Place until we did.  Okay.  Fine.  But if the seal in The Last House is meant to be a weapon...it's a pretty stupid weapon.  Sure, it ends up killing people in spades.  But how slowly does that work?  We find out in the third act that these creatures have the power to instantly flood a house, killing everyone inside.  It seems like that should be round one, right?  Instead, there's this need to patrol neighborhoods and search for humans.  Not animals.  Animals are allowed to do whatever.  It's the need to kill all the humans.  Why not, upon seeing any movement within a house, flood the house?  That seems like a really good weapon and one that would have worked had the squid creature not entered the house.  It's just silly.

Also, the car thing is a bad Chekhov's gun.  Like, it's there.  There's a whole room devoted to a garage with a car that is waiting to be put together.  Yes, the car is used to fight the squid monster.  But it didn't have something inherent to the car.  It was a way to pull the monster.  Now, normally, no problem with that argument.  But the thing is, the main character, Jason, invents all of these traps to fish for animals outside the house.  They all have springs and traps and lines to catch them.  So when we have the car catch the squid monster, it really could have been anything.  I see this giant set piece and, sure, he interacts with it at one point.  But the car wasn't being a car.  It was there as set decoration.  That's a bummer.

I wanted to like the message of surviving versus living.  It's a good idea.  But it treats the whole thing as very black-and-white.  Jason's got the internal conflict here.  He's destroying his kids' lives because he's trying to keep them alive.  It's just that...the kids' ideas are bad?  Like, I get that I want to see what's out there as well.  (There's no freaking way that anyone could have predicted that the squids would just call off their invasion of humanity because one of them is mildly cool?  It doesn't make sense.  Are the squids simple?  Like, they can just get over that they exterminated most of the population and then just learned to cohabitate without any kind of dialogue?)  It feels like the finale, once Jason learns to get over his survival instinct, is kind of a suicide run.  Is the goal to kill the one squid creature that got into their house?  They know that there are a billion squid creatures out there.  Do they want to punch their way through it?  It seems like the movie is begging us to forget the rules of the movie just to push through.

Golly, this movie was...disappointing.  It had elements of genius.  But it was so bogged down with action elements that it forgot what it meant to be suspenseful.  

R.  You knew it was R, right?  There's literal cursing in the title.  There's so much nudity and vulgarity piled on top of people doing horrible things to bodies, both their own and others.  Like, I can't even start to explain if there are a straight five minutes where I could show someone without something incredibly (and comedically) horrific happening to someone.  Oh!  Don't forget about the bodily fluids.  There is actual vomit and feces all over this film.  Trust me, we should be lucky to only have an R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Tremaine

I had a film class student ask me once, "How do you write about a Jackass movie?"  From his perspective, admittedly, he was in a much bigger pickle than I am.  He decided to binge all of them and write about the movies individually and that sounds like a hot nightmare.  I do think that there are smart things to say about the Jackass films.  Heck, if I was really in an amazing headspace and was given enough distance between films, I'm sure I could scrounge up some words to explore each of these films.  But I'm super glad that I'm probably only writing about what should be the last Jackass film.  (Unless, of course, I've written about the other ones...which actually probably scans because I've seen those other movies when they came out.)

Perhaps this might be the commentary about the death of Gen X and elder Millennial culture.  Listen, I loved me some Jackass back in the day.  I really did.  Much of my high school career were friends coming over and just binging Jackass episodes one-after-the-other.  I have the DVDs of the show.  These were our counter-culture (oddly enough, by embracing something that made MTV a lot of money).  And I'll tell you what.  I'm in my forties right now.  These guys?  Significantly older.  And every time one of these things comes out, I watch them.  It's not even a FOMO situation.  In fact, people would probably be comforted by the notion that I finally decided to sit a Jackass entry out.  But, man, I don't think I've ever gotten sad by a Jackass movie before.  That kind of changed.

And it's not because of what the movie wanted me to feel.  Maybe it's exactly what I was supposed to be feeling.  One of the things that I kind of appreciate about Best and Last is the fact that it might be one of few moments, separated from the loss of Ryan Dunn, that the Jackass crew --in particularly Johnny Knoxville -- breathed vulnerability into one of their movies.  I should be celebrating this.  Johnny Knoxville wants us to be as sad as he is.  The problem is...this movie probably shouldn't exist.  I'm going to start with my easy, softball argument for this first.  The movie ends with Knoxville strapped to the electric chair that they built for the movie. (I love how this is how I'm about to talk about vulnerability, with a commentary about the electric chair that they built.) The conceit is that the chair acts as a lie detector, shocking Knoxville every time he strays from truth.  But he seems genuinely sad that this is their last Jackass experience ever.  We're supposed to be moved by this, until the joke quickly follows with "You said that every time." 

Okay, that's the easy one.  Now the tough one.  The thing that I liked about Jackass was that it was an insight into a party-hard lifestyle that I never got into nor ever would.  It was living this life vicariously.  When Jackass gave the warning at the beginning of the episodes or the movie about my dumb little buddies trying to emulate these stunts, they really didn't have to tell me twice.  I wasn't even drinking while watching these.  I was enjoying a Mountain Dew or a Surge at best.  I wanted to watch these guys show the fun side of a carefree lifestyle while I was busy memorizing lines for the school play.  It all seemed so care free.  Like, I got the humor, but I was never at risk of being punished for being one of their friends.

But the movie started off with the homemade pitch for Jackass and that thing was upsetting.  The first ever Jackass stunt was Johnny Knoxville, then nicknamed "PJ", having to shoot himself at point blank range.  He's wearing kevlar and he stuffed that bulletproof vest full of adult magazines.  But unlike with the other stunts, where there is at least a modicum of thought put into the stunts (I acknowledge that a lot of them are deadly, but at least there was some concern for the life of the stuntman), it just seems like Johnny Knoxville was cool with killing himself.  You can see it in his eyes.  He has no idea if he's going to survive this.  It's not like, in his mind, that this was a situation where he's fairly confident that he's going to be fine.  No, this feels like a 50/50.  The laughter afterwards wasn't because the stunt was funny.  The laughter was because it seemed like he had to live another day and that was beyond his comprehension.

So to watch this farewell tour of the Jackass crew after that moment was incredibly sobering.  I can't lie.  Eventually, the stunts get so absurd, that I got out of my funk.  But every time there was a moment of melancholy or downtime, I went back to that time in the woods when Johnny Knoxville thought that he was killing himself.  I don't like that.  I worry about them.  Now, these guys haven't been free of controversy or personal drama since the start of this show so many years ago.  Steve-O got put into rehab.  Ryan Dunn died.  Bam Margera doesn't actually have any new content in this movie because his life is a genuine mess. If the point of Jackass was to have some escapism with some of my hard partying friends, Best and Last almost is the most painful thing to watch because it brought up the most obvious thing in the world:  nothing that they're doing is all that fun.  Yeah, it's funny because we know it didn't kill them.  But this is the movie that recontextualized a lot of what I found to be simply a good time.  Is that how I want to dismount?

The funny thing is, I think I've watched a lot of my franchises all address the notion of aging.  Heck, I just showed my two older kids Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a film whose central motif is Kirk dealing with aging while confronting the ghosts of his past.  But I don't think I've ever seen a movie that is so fundamentally about aging while putting the notion of aging as kind of an afterthought.  Jackass exists despite of itself.  At their prime, these guys shouldn't have been doing any of this stuff.  But all of these dudes (with the exception of Chris Pontius, who must have a horrid looking painting in his attic) look ancient.  Sure, some of it comes with hard lifestyles (and even keeping that in mind, they look better than they should in a lot of cases, especially Knoxville, whose age is betrayed by white hair).  But we're watching them blow themselves up and, golly, I sit the wrong way and I can't get up the next day.

There is something superhuman about the way that these guys rebound from injury.  Like, how is Steve-O alive?  That's a question I kind of ask myself a lot.  Perhaps there's a need for this movie to be successful?  Do these guys need this to have any sense of purpose or relevance in the world?  Maybe that sense of relevance is part of why Bam can't be part of this story.  I know that he processed Dunn's death the hardest.  But it almost feels like Bam Margera not being in this movie is part of an ongoing intervention.  It's a bummer, because the movie reminds us that Margera was foundational to the whole Jackass experience.

I want to talk about the thing that annoyed me most about the movie and I have a two-pronged take on this.  The Bam Margera stuff?  The reason that I was thinking about him for the entire movie was because this was a clip show.  Sure, it was done under the guise of a celebration of the long history of Jackass.  I get it.  It's nice...on paper.  But ultimately it's a clip show and I've seen a lot of these clips.  Remember, I had the DVDs.  But the bigger issue is that it almost demonstrates how desperate that these guys are to hold onto something that is so gosh-darned ephemeral.  (Just because the title is a curse word doesn't mean that I have to swear.) There's a clip from back in the day where Steve-O is angry with the guys.  He doesn't want to stick a toy car up his butt.  Don't worry, I get it.  Neither do I.  He's so angry and you don't often see that.  We get that probably happened a lot.  I got the vibe that Englund and Preston Lacy also had those moments, but it is rare to get it from Steve-O.  In that moment, he's so afraid of the myriad of things that could happen with the car up his butt that he's borderline torpedoing his career with this franchise. 

Now, juxtaposition is a bear because in present day, Steve-O takes a prostate exam from a robot with sharp edges.  No fear. No nothing.  We watch him squirm in the most pain ever and this old man is just getting ripped apart down there.  It's very funny for the Jackass crowd.  But it's also incredibly depressing at the same time.  (I mean, they're absolutely brilliant for having off-camera commentary by the "robot", which makes the entire thing very entertaining.) Like, instead of leaving it well alone and having lines that they won't cross, we have a painful as heck moment where there's no even trepidation for what is about to happen to Steve-O.  I kind of like the idea that these moments are somehow new and anxiety-inducing.  Instead, it's just kind of...gross?  I don't know.  I'm overanalyzing.

I'm also genuinely worried about Poopies.  Besides his name being hilarious, he doesn't seem all there.  It kind of feels like they're taking advantage of this guy.  

I don't know.  I didn't love it.  How about this?  It's my least favorite one, despite having Best in the title.  Between the clip show element feeling like this was a cheaper episode and the fact that there are some actually upsetting moments in this one, it felt like this one was not the one that we should have dismounted on.

Just a quick update!  I've finished the Showa-Era Criterion box for Godzilla!  While I will be adding post-Showa Era films to this list, feel free to read my thoughts on everything in this box.

G?  This movie is rated G?  I'm actually writing this parental advisory section before actually finishing the movie because I needed to remind myself, when I write this later, that there was straight up nudity for longer than a little bit.  I wondered if this, potentially, was the first R-rated Godzilla movie.  I mean, they straight up murdered a guy by shooting him a whole bunch of times.  WITH GUNS!  Like, it seems strange that this is the one Godzilla where I'm writing "G" for "General audiences."

NOTE:  The American cut apparently removed the nudity and the blood.  I now understand the "G" rating.

DIRECTORS:  Ishiro Honda and Jun Fukuda

And I'm done with the box set?  I mean, I keep looking at the box set and marvelling at the fact that I finally finished it.  There's a fleeting feeling of success when I think that I've finished this box set.  Besides having watched something that I own and the fact that it costs a lot of money to own, I have to remember that there are a lot more Godzilla movies out there.  I set out with the purpose of becoming Godzilla literate.  In my head, Godzilla is part of the cultural zeitgeist.  There are people who adore these movies and I didn't want to dismiss them.  The crazy part is that I don't necessarily hate kaiju movies.  I have a handful that I think are amazing amazing films.  But when I watch a superhero movie, it has to be pretty bad for me to completely dislike it.  I think that, at the format's base, I don't really like kaiju movies.  In fact, they have to be pretty darned special for me to actually care about them.

Terror of Mechagodzilla is an improvement on its predecessor.  I really hated Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.  It was a low point for me.  Like, if I see Jun Fukuda's name attached to a movie, I'm in for some real schlock.  These are the things that Mystery Science Theater would riff during the height of the show.  These were rough movies and Terror of Mechagodzilla can definitely be lumped into that era.  Again, I want to point out that this movie is way better than Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.  The biggest problem is that it doesn't try retconning anything in any way.  This movie is a direct sequel to the previous film.  When the foundation for a movie is that bad, it might take a lot to fix it.  

I don't know why I don't like the heavy shift to space aliens as a regular conceit for each of these films.  It seems like the movies try to avoid confrontation as much as they can.  At one point, these aliens complained about pollution and, as thinly constructed as a talking point as those moments were, they at least were something.  There was something to invest in.  But we're at a point in the franchise where these movies are exclusively spectacle and even the spectacle isn't that good.  I'm getting kind of tired of writing this point over and over, but these human stories are just excuses to stretch out a movie that is about people in rubber suits punching each other.  I want these stories to matter more.  I think that Godzilla movies live and die based on the human storyline and Jun Fukuda keeps making these stories that are so trope heavy that we stop caring about humans.

That being said, if I'm being a little forgiving, there are seeds of a story to care about in Terror of Mechagodzilla.  (Before I forget, it's really weird that this movie is called Terror of Mechagodzilla because, despite being a sequel, Mechagodzilla himself is barely a character in this movie.  This movie's villain is primarily the Titanosaurus or whatever he's named.)  Let's strip away all of the Interpol and scientist drama that come part and parcel with Godzilla movies.  (It's really weird how much these movies embrace Interpol as an organization.  The newer movies aren't much better because they embrace the secret organization "Monarch.")  But there is a root of a story with a scientist who is trying to keep his daughter alive.  I mean, the fact that Dr. Mafune (a great name!) is arch about getting revenge on the human population is absurd.  It's very comic book villain and I'm a fan of comic books.  But the fact that this is a girl who is (and I love how this is an example of something human that we can relate to) being held together as a cyborg and losing pieces of herself.  That's a story that at least is interesting.  I don't know.  This all seems very subjective.  But I'm going to pat myself on the back and say that I'm trying to find redeeming things in these movies.  The fact that she's struggling to hold onto her own humanity (and if I'm stretching here, not wholly unlike Obsession) gives me something to root for.  It doesn't involve stumbling upon an answer through luck.

And Terror of Mechagodzilla does what a lot of the kaiju movies I've been watching do.  These movies are based on the heroes rallying to solve a problem.  Like, Godzilla loses until he doesn't.  He's just there.  He gets buried at one point and then he's not buried.  It's not like someone figured out how to rescue Godzilla or that Titanosaurus had some kind of hidden flaw that was exposed.  Nope.  The movie's runtime was getting short and then the bad guys just started to suck.  I want to get behind these movies because I'm sure that superhero movies tend to do the same thing.  But maybe the bigger problem that I have with kaiju movies versus superhero movies is the notion of intended sacrifice.  I'm going to use a panned superhero movie (despite the fact that I really enjoyed it) as a comparison.  I really liked Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.  I know.  Crazy.   A lot of people said that Kang had to be nerfed for someone like Ant-Man to even stay in the ring with him.  But that's what I really like about the movie.  Ant-Man is outmatched from moment one in that movie.  What the story becomes, then, is a story of self-sacrifice.  Scott knows that he's going to lose.  So to fight against someone like Kang, the story becomes one of "how do we both lose", not "how do I rally and win?"   When Scott survives that, it's a reward for the fact that he was expecting to lose and was willing to give it all up for the common good.  I never get that with Godzilla.  While there is no reason for Godzilla to fight these battles outside of an assumed love of humanity (despite what the earlier entries talk about), he's always there as the reigning champion.  So when he comes out as the reigning champion, it's not a turn.  It's expected.

I don't want to write about this anymore.  To a certain extent, it is just another Showa-era Godzilla film.  There are moments that are shot better than other entries in the franchise.  It's weird to see humans get shot to death. But it's just another nonsensical Godzilla movie where Godzilla wins for no reason.  Just because it's better than the previous entry doesn't mean it's any good.

Rated R, and I honestly thought that it would be NC-17.  I started making plans for where to bury this on my page because of the shame of having seen this movie.  Sure, it's on a bunch of "Must See" lists.  But it doesn't change the fact that the movie is uncomfortably sexual throughout, often beyond what would be considered into social taboos and well-entrenched in atrocities, not limited to rape.  While there is nudity throughout and sexual acts throughout, there are...safeguards from becoming NC-17.  Still, it's a lot.

DIRECTOR:  Federico Fellini

Before I lament having watching something that is actually pretty offensive to me (Yup, there is a specific subcategory of film that I loathe so thoroughly that I lose all sense of objectivity), I would like to put some some notes about the print I watched.  I booted up my Laserdisc player to watch the Criterion laserdisc of this movie.  The movie is 129 minutes.  I somehow finished in about two hours.  There was one skip, but I can't imagine it was nine minutes long because I was still in the same scene.  But early Criterion, for all their good intent, was miles away from the meticulous subtitles we'd get in contemporary releases.  There were so many sections that either weren't in Italian or Criterion deemed weren't worth their effort to subtitle.  So when I go off on this movie, I did the best I could have with what I could.

How is this on the list of movies I need to see before I die?  Now, I get it.  It's Fellini.  While Fellini's other films often are quite challenging and move beyond the realm of entertainment, Satyricon is a movie that is daring its audience to engage with it.  I would like to admit that I never read the original text for Satyricon.  From what I understand, the film is only a loose adaptation of that original work, but I can't speak from an informed perspective about the intents of the original play.  (Also a confession, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome --despite being an English teacher with a history minor -- oddly don't interest me.)  I know a lot of people, that's their bread and butter.  Not me.  I find that entire time in history incredibly frustrating.) But, geez, this movie had nothing appealing to me.

I understand that Fellini is reacting to late 1960s Italy.  Fellini is a hep enough guy to make movies in the shadows of society.  From what I understand from what I read, Fellini's making a film about a post-Christian society (which I have a hard time coming to grips with based on what I saw and what I know about Fellini) and that's why we have a movie that both struggles to have a coherent narrative (which I chalk up to the source material) and intentionally unlikable characters.  I'm going to go into my Poor Things rant right now, so please tolerate me, especially considering that I'm in the minority of people who didn't like Poor Things.  Satyricon almost starts in media res.  There is no inciting incident.  Encolpio is giving you the bare (absolutely no pun intended) bones information that you need to understand why he's in a tizzy.  And, without a breath to prep yourself, you have to get cool with the notion that he isn't fighting for anything all that glorious.  He's fighting to get back his underage sexual plaything that was stolen by his best friend.  We're meant to feel incredibly uncomfrotable.  I certainly hope that is the case because it is a pretty gross statement and goal coming out from nowhere.  I would like to point out that Encolpio is the closest thing that you find to being a quasi-heroic character.  (My point is, by comparison, everyone else in this movie is so abhorrent that Encolpio is only sympathetic because he gets the most screen time.)  

Now, the Poor Things comparison!  I do believe that Satyricon is meant to be a criticism of excess.  We're coming down in the late '60s.  We're post Summer of Love and Sexual Revolution.  And this movie is fundamentally about people fulfilling their darkest sexual pleasures without anyone batting an eye.  Okay, so I view Satyricon as a criticism of all of that.  I don't hate that notion.  And let's give it to Fellini.  After all, from a strictly technical standpoint, it is wildly impressive in scope and visuals.  Okay.  But I hated Poor Things because it was a criticism of the sexual exploitation of women while the film itself spent the entire length of the movie sexually exploiting Emma Stone.  Golly, I feel like a prude when I watch these movies, but when you throw that much sex and nudity on the screen for that long, it stops becoming a criticism and simply becomes someone's dark secret as well.  You know that there has to be a notable-to-quite-large percentage of the viewing population who find this movie to be their dark fantasy.  Like, it almost seems to want to produce viewers who act like the people in this movie.  

As a parallel thought, it also is a cruel movie.  I don't like Eli Roth.  I don't.  I've seen a handful of his stuff and it seems just mean.  Satyricon seems like a mean movie.  Every time that the movie almost hands us a real, human moment, where our protagonist(s) have a moment to breathe out and find joy in the world, it's instantly stamped out.  Part of that comes, I suppose, from the fact that it is a deeply moralistic movie.  This movie is trying to tell us about the evils of the world and it isn't going to let us decide by itself.  Instead, it is a movie that is piling on misery after misery until we're left just feeling miserable.  I can't help but think that it's also incredibly cynical.  This doesn't seem to be a goal-oriented movie, trying to pivot its audience away from the hedonism of the past.  Rather, it claims that mankind is inherently hedonistic in his very nature and that whatever pretence of morality we've displayed seems to be a mask from the reality of cruelty that we've somehow buried.

I can't help but make the comparison to Dante's Inferno (I specifically am mentioning Inferno, not the Divine Comedy.)  The easy personal read is that I found both texts frustrating, partially because of the cultural references that eluded my 21st Century American ignorance.  But both are stories about the fact that things just...are.  When you read Inferno, there's no way for Dante to affect anything in the afterlife.  We follow him on a journey through misery and, because it is the afterlife, Dante does nothing to try to stop any of the atrocities he is witnessing.  All he can do is comment that this is what happens.  There's literally a scene in Satyricon where roaring flames cook the viscera on a spit, depicting a version of hell, and never does Encolpio address the fact that this needs to be stopped.  No, it exists in the notion that this is part-and-parcel with being human, which is a bleak idea.

I'm going to close up on the most unfair statement in this whole blog.  I want to talk about individual moments, like the one-eyed man fight on the boat.  Maybe the woman setting fires.  Maybe the minotaur battle.  But this almost felt like seeing a carnival freak show (a term I don't love using).  At one point, because we just see misery, it all just bleeds together.  It's odd, because I tend to like Fellini.  Fellini has never shied away from sexual content, but I think he accomplishes more with the discussion of sexual acts than the outright portrayal of sexual acts.  The quality of the film demonstrates that he's a capable director.  It's just the fact that he gave himself few-if-any rules might have hurt him more than anything else.

Rated PG for a surprising amount of blood for a Godzilla film.  Sure, people die in droves because giant kaiju end up smashing up buildings all willy-nilly.  But also, like, we get some gore.  Godzilla himself loses a lot of blood. But, also, these aliens spew out black goo that is clearly blood for them.  And that scene happens a lot with a lots of aliens.  It's more gnarly looking than I'm probably describing and it oddly is more than a little upsetting.  Still, it's a PG movie and kids could probably handle most of it.

DIRECTOR:  Jun Fukuda

I didn't think that these movies would get this bad.  I really didn't.  I thought that I had crossed the crap stuff and I was actually looking forward to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.  I thought this was one of the ones that was kind of revered.  I mean, we still get Mechagodzilla in a bunch of the newer adaptations.  But I don't think I've ever been so thankful to be near the end of a box set as I was after having finished this borderline abomination of a story.

I have to backpedal on some of the stuff I was saying about the Godzilla movies earlier.  In other Godzilla blogs, I complained that, sometimes, the movies relied too much on kaiju fighting instead of putting character first.  I still mostly believe that.  There's only so much of guys in monster suits punching each other before you get really tired of it.  I was all about the human component.  Well, Jun Fukuda --again! --wanted to prove me wrong.  This movie barely has any kaiju fight sequences and, besides the blood, they seem to be on par with the previous films in terms of trying to do anything innovative.  Nope, this is a movie that really embraces what the people of Japan are doing while these monsters promise to level the country.

The problem lies with the fact that the story might be the most incoherent story yet.  I genuinely believe that, for most of these films, the biggest hurdle that these movies have during the production is the attempt to make the movie long enough to excuse being in theaters.  To do that, the guys who write these movies --Fukuda included! --have to try to fill ever second with plot because there is no consistency of character in these films.  (Maybe that might be one of the only positive things about the modern American adaptations of Godzilla.  I like that we're following the same heroes as they interact with this weird and wacky world of monsters.) 

Because we don't care about any of these characters, every single beat has to be plot driven.  I hate to tell you, but I've now blogged about a lot of these movies.  (I don't the energy, both physical or mental, to walk downstairs and count how many Godzilla movies I've watched from my Criterion box set.  I'm sorry.  I'm really trying to knock this blog out before I go to bed because my wife fell asleep on the couch and I didn't want to watch the newest episode of Lanterns without her.) The thing is, I don't think those guys give a crap about the plots.  Like, at all?  They almost seem to hate the idea that they have to write something creative.

Now, I'm imbuing my thoughts on this. For all we know, these guys are regular Ed Woods out there, throwing the most bananas crap at the screen and thinking that its gold.  But, holy crap, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla --beyond all expectations --is the most incomprehensible Godzilla movie yet.  Like, I'd almost forgive it if the point was to be obtuse.  I've now watched enough avant garde cinema to understand that sometimes we're not quite supposed to get it.  That's not what is happening here.  (I don't think that anyone thought that was happening, but I'm just covering my bases.)  

This movie is brow-beating its audience into shutting its brain off.  There are so many hats stacked upon hats stacked upon hats stacked upon hats that you kind of forget what the point of this movie is beyond the fact that we're going to have a final act where two actors in rubber monsters suits punch each other near model buildings.  And the thing is, I'm not asking for greatness.  This is 1974.  We're in the Roger Moore era of 007 movies.  I'm pretty open to some wild storytelling swings.  (Note:  I couldn't help but notice that some of the production choices seemed to mirror the stuff going on at EON productions while watching this.)  And it's not like I wouldn't hate any one of the beats if it was just stretched out to make the story make sense.  Instead, it's all these disparate ingredients and none of them has the opportunity to stand by itself.

If this was a movie about aliens, I probably would roll my eyes.  I don't know what aliens want to do with a Mechagodzilla outside of their standard "take over the world" bit that we've seen with the last half dozen entries in the franchise.  I supposed I could take my medicine if it was just aliens.  But then there's the prophecy of two monsters fighting a monster that was going to bring about the end of the world.  Okay, I can even feel like I could weave a tale of scientists / archeologists trying to discipher a cryptic message from a Western perpsective.  But then there's the need to wake up this ancient kaiju named King Caesar (what a choice!).  And then there's this whole story of Interpol, with agents who keep showing up and shooting the bad guys when the time is needed for a heroic guy to get out of a scrape.  And then there is a whole separate team who is investigating the aliens?  Why?  Why do all of this when you could have done any one of these with a degree of subtlety and grace.

And maybe it's because this movie annoyed me so much that I feel like being flippant about it all.  I feel like the answer comes down to laziness.  I've now watched a lot of these movies and I keep typing the name "Jun Fukuda."  He directs a lot of these and his name is attached to a lot of the writing credits for these films.  These movies are churned out quickly.  That's something I'm kind of having to adapt to.  I buy these massive Criterion box sets where every movie of a long running franchise is cleaned up and released as a fancy-pants edition and these movies were not given time to gestate and solve problems.  Instead, these are movies that seem to be made by the seats of their pants.  The reason that we have a million plots thrown into the stew is because it takes time, effort, and crafting to actually use one idea to its greatest potential.  It's like Fukuda knew what the bargain was.  He'll fill in the splash and the plot point knowing that everyone just signed up to watch monster fights.

The thing that's going to drive me mildly insane is the knowledge that this might be one of the entries that people absolutely adore.  I mean, I mentioned earlier that Mechagodzilla is beloved.  Does he get an alternative origin later on?  Maybe he gets an origin that makes a moderate amount of sense at some time down the line, after we leave the Showa era of Godzilla?  I want to believe that there's something that people find attractive about elements of this film because I was just put out by this movie.  Like, I know I'm not completely crazy.  The next entry is named Terror of Mechagodzilla.  It implies that audiences were so on board Mechagodzilla that they had to bring him up.  I love the idea of a Mechagodzilla.  I love the obvious idea that Mechagodzilla was built in response to the fact that Godzilla was an unconrollable threat.  Heck, I'm writing this right now, but I also like the idea that man's hubris caused them to lose control of this Promethean fire and that humanity had to turn to Godzilla, the very creature that they were trying to destroy, for help.

But instead we got this hot trash.  It's so bad, guys.  Maybe someone out there loves this and I hope you continue loving this.  This was such a bridge too far.  I can't wait to knock this box out.  I'm probably going to keep watching the Godzilla movies post-Showa era in the hopes that these movies actually get good.  But, boy-oh-boy, this one was a stinker.

Rated R for typical bloody murder.  I know that this is splitting hairs at this point, but Scream 7, while brutal, lacks some of the truly mean violence that the previous two entries had embraced.  Still, there are some pretty gnarly and gory murders throughout.  Once again, there's commentary about sex, but no actual sex in the film itself.  There's language and I think some mild references to drug use.  Tonally, it matches the Wes Craven entries.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Kevin Williamson

DISCLAIMER:  I watched a library DVD copy of this movie.  I protested watching it in the theater both because of Paramount's approaching merger with Warner Brothers and because of Paramount's treatment of both Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega for speaking out in defense of Palestine.  I ensured that none of my money went towards Paramount.  

Yeah, I waited on this one.  I didn't care that it made a ton of money at the box office.  I also was secretly glad that the reviews of this movie were pretty rough.  Yeah, I got spiteful.  This is a bit of a SCAB film (or, a Stab film?  I'm also mad at myself for writing that.)  So, here I am, trying to write a blog about a movie that I hate got made for a franchise that I really like.  It's a weird time and a lot of people are probably super annoyed that I won't shut up about my political bent.  But things are honestly pretty terrible and I'm floored when people don't say anything about the constantly growing hellscape around us.  *sigh*

So how do I write a review about a movie that is so entrenched in scandal and bad faith that it actually affects the plot?  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention.  Scream 7 was never supposed to happen in the way that we see it.  Scream 7 was supposed to be a sequel to the reboot of Scream and Scream VI.  It was supposed to be the close of a trilogy that was supposed to close up the Sam and Tara Carpenter story, tying into the lineage of Billy Loomis.  Yeah, I get it.  It was already a stretch to make this franchise about Billy's legacy.  But the movies asked us to invest in this storyline and --I don't think I'm crazy for saying this --those movies were so good that it got me to get past the overmythologizing of a too-long-running franchise.  

So when Scream 7 came out, we're now looking at something that is actively interrupting storytelling.  It's not that stories need to be trilogies.  We technically don't need a Sam and Tara story to round out the events of the previous two films.  If we had to pretend that the Scream movies were at least somewhat based in reality, it is entirely possible that Sam and Tara have nothing else to do with the Ghostface killers and that they get therapy to lead quasi-normal lives.  But it all feels...off?  In a weird way, I'm still harping on the fact that Scream 7 is such an aggressive cash-grab.  So not only do I have to put my politics aside to actually watch Scream 7 as a movie, I also have to ignore that there was a storyline in place before this that seems to be derailed by the fact that Paramount, as a company, kind of sucks.

Okay, that means the next step I have to watch is to either watch Scream 7 as a standalone film or as a legacy sequel to either Scream 1-4 and part of 5 or a movie by itself.  I don't think it works as a movie by itself.  I don't think Scream 7 even wants to be considered a standalone film.  A lot of Scream 7 is going for the nostalgia grab.  (If you think I keep bringing in studio suits as a dodge for talking about the movie itself, the Scream franchise was built on meta storytelling.  It's all fair game.) This is a Scream movie written and directed by Kevin Williamson.  It must be weird to be Kevin Williamson, by the way.  (Mr. Williamson, big fan.  Not necessarily of this movie, but I also acknowledge that it is hard making a movie and this movie looks pretty solid.  There's wins here, just not from a fan perspective.)  Williamson rose to a place of mild celebrity in the '90s with the first Scream film.  Like, that movie changed the game.  Dimension Films owed so much to that guy because it made horror cool.  And even though I think that the original film is as good as the franchise gets, he made some absolute bangers in that series.  But he was always a screenwriter.  

Then, every so often, we get a nostalgic pang for the '90s horror and Williamson (for the most part) comes out of retirement and pens another film.  Well, with the late Wes Craven being unable to make more of these movies and the other directors at odds with the studio, I can't help but Paramount's logic to have Williamson direct is an example of a return to basics.  It's not the worst way you could go, by the way.  Even though I am incredibly frustrated with this movie, the back-to-basics approach to Scream kind of works.  Heck, even with all of the moral hangups I have with this movie, I don't want to see Williamson fail.  And do you know what Williamson does for this movie?  He makes it really seem like a Wes Craven entry in the series.

Even though Wes Craven directed Scream 4, Scream 7 feels more like a Wes Craven entry than Scream 4.  This honestly has more of the tone of the first three movies and I can't think that was an accident.  Ironically, this movie as a commentary on AI filmmaking might have that extra meta attempt because Williamson is straight up borrowing vibes off of the first three films.  (Sure, he wrote them, but the visuals were all Wes Craven.) Now, normally I'd complain.  After all, I'm all about innovation.  But I do have a nostaglic fan-service guy in me.  I don't deny it.  When the Enterprise-D comes out at the end of Picard season 3, I lost my mind.  I even have to say that I'm a big Matthew Lillard fan, especially when it comes to Stu.  Billy may be the more interesting character, but I dug Lillard's performance as Stu back in the day.  

But, man alive, is this getting blood from a stone?  Stu...wasn't ever meant to be deep.  He's the idiot buddy.  Having this weird conspiracy theory that Stu Macher survived the events of the first film when he had a TV dropped on his head?  Yeah, I know.  It doesn't play out that way.  But the fact that Williamson considered putting an after-credits sequence showing that Stu was actually alive means that it was considered a plausible ending for this character.  I know!  I know!  The world of Scream is a heightened world where people know each other and the notion of becoming a serial killer is only a thought away from anyone joining the Ghostface club.  But there has to be a bridge too far before we completely suspend disbelief.  If anything, the fact that Williamson considered it means that is how open this series is to just embracing outright silliness as a means of storytelling.

I'm torn on this movie.  Like, it sucks.  It sucks real hard.  But the meat is there.  Let's talk about why it sucks.  I've heavily hinted at the fact that this is functionally a Scream story.  Heck, it embraces the Sydney story aggressively hard.  It ties Stu Macher back into the story.  The very look of the film is something out of the early Scream movies.  But what it doesn't do is make me care.  Horror movies, especially slasher movies, have a real burden on them to make me care about the characters.  We know that a lot of them are going to be picked off before the end of the film.  But a well-developed character makes us want to see them survive.  There is none of that in this movie.  I don't think I've ever seen a movie treat the extended cast as cannon fodder more than the cast of Scream 7.  Golly, Chloe Parker is painfully shoehorned into the story.  She has almost no tie to the main characters.  When we watched the original Scream, these were all friends.  When we thought that one of them was the killer, it actually mattered.  Friendships fell apart.  Trust was broken.  Not so much here.  It's all wildly artificial because none of those people mattered outside of Sydney's family.

Also, I call real shannigans that Mark survived.  Let's talk about Mark and cop-aganda in this movie.  I know that I said that I would divorce myself politically from this, but it feels like Paramount really wanted a perfect police force.  "But, Tim, you didn't complain about this before with the other movies?"  1) I wasn't as socially conscious before and 2) Dewey seemed like he kind of fell into the job and was more concerned about Sydney than being a deputy.  Sure, sure.  Dewey may have been problematic, but Sydney is deeply cool with her husband being a cop.  Now, if we're looking at someone who is ingrained with trauma, a'la Sydney, I can see that she might be cooler with some of the ethical conundrums with being married to a law enforcement officer...especially considering that cops carry guns and should stand up to a background check.  But, man alive, they made Joel McHale supercop.  We're miles away from Dewey, outside of the fact that they both can apparently take a hilarious amount of knife wounds.

I'm going to close this up as quickly as I can because I've invested so much time into this and I keep getting interrupted.  My actual life is falling behind right now and I need to shut up on this.  But I do want to talk a little bit about two more things: 1) empathy and 2) how stupid the killer reveal is.   1)  Empathy:  It may have taken a bad Scream movie to show how insane the people inside the Scream universe really are.  Man, there is this idea that cleverness is just having people saying what they are thinking.  Almost everyone in this movie is obsessed with their own self-interests.  The next door neighbor kid keeps asking Sydney questions about her time in Woodsboro.  Sydney's daughter, Tatum, is wildly obsessed with having Sydney teach her about being a survivor.  But the insane thing of it all is the notion that no one talks to each other that way.  There's something I can be flippant about and claim that teenagers are jerks.  But across the board, people treat each other as commodities to be used.  I thought we've been through enough Scream movies with Gale Weathers that she would have learned her lesson at this point about how people actually talk to each other when they are friends.

And now the real reason that everyone hates this movie:  (Okay, why I hate this movie.  I know a lot of people enjoyed it.)  The killers are dumb.  That revelation, it was stupid.  Sure, we expect --at this point --that the killers have a direct tie to Sydney or her family.  (Note:  Besides being disappointed that we got three stupid cameos for a paycheck, I don't know how Marco got the raw data to recreate killers from the past.)  Jessica Bowden's motivation was insane.  Okay, Williamson writes her off as insane, which I think is pretty thin.  But I like the idea that Jessica was inspired by Sydney to take her power back, even if that meant killing her husband.  But I can't, for the life of me, believe that she would become a serial killer of randos with that motivation.  She's mad that Sydney didn't go to New York?  That...doesn't align with anything.  How does becoming Ghostface balance that idea out?  Coupled with the notion that she casually killed her own kid?  That's...straight up dumb. Like, it makes zero sense.

I hated it before I watched it.  I started to like it when watching it.  Then I sincerely dislike the movie because it got crazy lazy in the final act.  Disappointed.

Rated R, mostly for language, including a bit about porn that two people joke about.  There's also mass death off screen.  It's a lot of existential dread that leads to alcoholism.  If you are sensitive to people being cut, there's one shot that might make you wince.  But the thing that almost exclusively gets the film an R-rating is language.  

DIRECTOR: Mike Flanagan

I'm just so tired.  No part of me wants to write this blog.  I have things that I have to do and I don't want to do any of it.  But I have access to internet for an hour and, gosh darn it, I suppose I should take advantage of the time available to me.  It's my fault.  I went to bed too late and got up too early.  I'm a big dummy and I am obsessed with staying productive.  Here we go.

I read the short story.  I love me some Stephen King.  Honestly, people tend to crap on Stephen King a lot.  Sure, he's going through a bit of a renaissance, especially with the wealth of his works that are being adapted right now.  Pile onto that the fact that Mike Flanagan, Doctor Sleep himself, is adapting another Stephen King work --especially considering that Mike Flanagan is in the spotlight as well --and this movie should make sense.  I don't want to let my current grumpiness to color my blog about the film too much.  Overall, I really liked the movie.  I actually recommended it to people.  It's not that I don't find the value of the film.  But I also have to make peace with something that I don't want to make peace with:

Stephen King doesn't write reality.

For most of you out there, this is a "No, duh" element.  While The Life of Chuck isn't a horror movie, King himself is the most famous horror author out there.  He's written some absolutely bananas ideas.  I'm not really talking about that.  I'm talking about the grounded moments.  

I was shocked to find out that I was one of the few people who really liked The Long Walk.  I'm going to go on a limb and say that I am really forgiving of Stephen King's flaws.  He writes a fun yarn and I'll even go as far as to say that I like the dynamics and friendships that he creates in his stories.  It's just that his dialogue is almost Rockwellian in nature.  That is, if Norman Rockwell was a big fan of cussing.  

The Life of Chuck runs into some of the problems that The Long Walk did.  When you take Stephen King's novels and short stories and adapt the dialogue --and, if I'm honest, some of the moments --to the big screen, there are moments that don't quite feel real.  It's not that they aren't emotional.  Heck, a lot of the movie is aggressive emotional manipulation.  Like, it's thick.  It's a lot of red flags for me put into one movie.  But that being said, for the emotionally  vulnerable, it's some stuff that is meant to make you cry.  I, being a bit of a hard sell sometimes (when it comes to tearjerker films), might be a bit cynical --despite being the guy who preaches the value of emotional vulnerability.  

While there are a bunch of moments in The Life of Chuck that kind of prove my point, I want to focus on dancing.  A key motif in Chuck is the fact that Chuck dances.  It's actually one of the more recognizable elements in his very thin character (which is odd, considering that this movie is called The Life of Chuck).  Because the movie is told with non-traditional chronology, playing with the relationships between cause and effect, we see the big moment for Chuck as he, for reasons up to that point unknown, dancing publicly and with abandon.  I'll tell you, seeing Tom Hiddleston cutting a rug to a drumbeat in the middle of a square is mostly pretty effective.  I know that Hiddleston can dance.  He's done so on talk shows and he seems to have the moves.  When he invites a random girl who is mildly participating to join him in the dance, there's a little suspension of disbelief as the two pull off what looks to be a choreographed number in front of a bunch of people.  Still, we're in a movie and we have movie logic.  The beginning of the film even establishes a scope that is so epic and bombastic that a dance in the middle of the square seems like a slice of reality.  

But because this is a movie that inverts cause and effect, we see the moments that inspired Chuck to dance in the middle of square by showing us his childhood.  And there are some sweet moments that actually kind of work.  Chuck's relationship to his grandmother, who bonds with Chuck over musicals, teaches him (foreshadowed by moments in the dance when we see a woman throw her hand up to the beat) how to express himself through dance.  It's touching.  And then the emotional punches keep coming.  We learn that Chuck continued taking dance instruction as a way to memorialize his grandmother, which is all very sweet.  

But it's the fact that the movie really wants you to have this tearjerker moments is when I think my disbelief has been suspended too much.  The climax of the film is a young Chuck finally getting the gumption to do a very ornately choreographed dance to a song that he didn't pick with a girl with whom he has a crush.  (You could argue that the crush is arbitrary, considering that he celebrates by dancing out in a field alone.)  But the moment when the entire school rallies around this kid who memorized a dance routine is so much of a bridge too far.  I commented on Norman Rockwell because it's something that almost scream Americana, mostly pulling from an America that never existed.  

Again, there are lots of moments like this.  If you make a deal with yourself that King gets cornball, especially when he strays from horror, the scenes aren't so bad.  But it is hard to imagine that people's reactions to what are borderline silly moments are that earnest is kind of absurd.  I'd love to live in a world where The Life of Chuck got people to bring the best versions of themselves out.  Maybe I've grown too cynical.  And it's not like King is too hopeful for humanity.  I don't think he actually thinks people are that great, to be honest.  It's just that his reactions are just slightly off from what they should be.  As opposed to the "Way to go, Chuck!" comments coming from everyone, I think that we should have a healthy dose of politeness or pity claps.  I know that doesn't sell as hard as everyone rallying around the dancing tiny kid.  It's just that these moments kind of read as Simon Burch to me.

It's kind of insane to think the wealth of things that are covered in this movie.  And that's maybe where I'm back on board the movie again.  The first act is crazy.  As I was watching a lot of the movie, I thought that the beginning of the film's very big idea was unearned.  The film starts off with the world quickly ending.  People are trying to live normal lives as the world collapses around them.  It's a bit of a puzzle box trying to understand the supernatural things that affect these people.  And I'll go ahead and say that it is super interesting.  I read The Life of Chuck short story (as I already mentioned) and I still forgot how that played out.  Even with that knowledge, I kept thinking that maybe the opening didn't work for the film.

That would be true if he film didn't develop a motif of "I Contain Multitudes."  Sure, it's a little forced.  Sure, it's almost lobbing a cookie to the English teacher in me.  Heck, I might even criticize that it almost does a disservice to Whitman's poem (if it wasn't presented so darned lovingly).  But the movie almost writes a scenario where it can do wild and outlandish things in a story about a kid who loves to dance because stories don't have to be one thing.  The movie is presented in a reverse three-act structure and all of those acts give almost a different genre.  We get a hint of the apocalypse.  We get the story of an accountant who dances.  We get the story of a ghost in the attic.  That's a lot to take in because it's not like those connections are made explicit.  It's fun and I can see someone being really turned off.  But "I contain multitudes" does a lot of heavy lifting that explains it.

It's not a perfect movie.  I enjoyed it.  Honestly, even though I'm still sporting a pretty impressive headache, I enjoyed it.  But I can't deny that the movie is aggressively cornball.  There's so much cheese and saccarine in this movie that I'd hate to treat reality in the way that The Life of Chuck treats it.  It's more than a little indulgent.  If you go into it with that attitude and make peace with that, it's sweet.  But in terms of really nailing what it means to be human, there's a disconnect there.

Not rated.  This more conceptually upsetting than actually anything that would be worrisome.  I mean, there's a lot of sick kids and a lot of those sick kids drink foot water.   But the movie is mostly about religious trauma and how it affects a family.  Yes, it is very upsetting.  But if I had to point to one thing that was really a red flag, I don't think I could really point to anything.   

DIRECTOR: Satyajit Ray

​AH!  I'm so flummoxed right now!  I wrote this.  I remember writing this.  I remember where I wrote this (admittedly, in a place with spotty internet).  But I was looking over my page and saw that there was no post for Devi?  Now, the date for this was the last day of August.  We're almost done with September.  What I should do is rewatch this movie.  But what the reality of the situation is that I don't really have time and I still have strong opinions on this piece.   If this blog isn't as long as some of my other entries, it's because I'm trying to cobble this together because I should be writing about my last movie the Godzilla box set.

I almost quit this movie when I first started watching it.  My goodness, I had real issues with it.  It was one of those movies that I couldn't grasp.  I like Stayajit Ray.  I've watched a trilogy of Satyajit Ray movies.  Those movies were fantastic.  And I'm also going to throw myself under the bus right now for being a midwestern white guy who probably has some unwanted racial issues that I'd like exorcised.  But this is a movie that did nothing to help me figure out who was who.  Do you know how I figured out how to watch this movie?  I had to stop, read the Wikipedia article that summarized the movie up to the point where I got to and then continued with my hand thoroughly held.  Golly, I don't like admitting that I don't recognize characters nor do I understand their relationships to one another.  I'm an English teacher, for goodness sake!  I should be all over this basic stuff.

But once I did, man am I glad that I watched this one.  (Not thrilled that I can't present my nuanced taken on the movie like I wrote about immediately after watching it, but I can at least get something out there.) For those many not in the know, I'm going to do something out of character and summarize the plot.  This might be too obscure for even the biggest film devotee (someone out there might be rolling their eyes and, for that, I apologize).  Doyamoyee, the daughter-in-law of a religious zealot, is --due only to a stray dream on the part of her father-in-law, put in a place where she is meant to be the incarnation of the goddess Kali.  Because she is probably a 9 on the enneagram (I'm getting into the enneagram and becoming insufferable about it), she refuses to stand up for herself,  despite the fact that it is causing problems for her sister-in-law, who refuses to believe that Doyamoyee is a goddess.  People start worshipping this woman, bringing their ill children to drink her foot water in hopes that they are healed.  Just to jump to the end, it all ends with the fact that her nephew is denied scientific medical care in a sign of faith to Kali, leading to the kid dying.  (Man, I hate writing summaries.) 

The turn.  Like, all you really need to do to get me to love your movie is to have a point in making the movie and presenting it in a creative way.  I mean, I can't deny that Devi does swing the cudgel pretty openly.  Kalikinkar Roy is the bad guy of the piece, but he's not evil in the traditional sense.  I mean, I feel such disgust with this character and I'm sure that I'm not alone in that read of the character.  I've been listening to You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes and there's a lot of talk about the confidence of faith.  Literally, before I sat down writing this, there was this talk about faiths that are able to understand God.  They were going back and forth and came to the conclusion that anything that shrunk the majesty of God is not a proper faith.  If you completely "get" what God is or what God is supposed to be, it's an insult to God himself.  That's a lot of Devi.  Devi is a criticism of the individual trying to make God into something that they are not.  

And the beauty of the argument is that there is a direct fallout to this choice.  It's not that Kalikinkar Roy hates his daughter-in-law.  If anything, this is a perversion of love.  He thinks that he is bringing his daughter-in-law to her true fulfillment.  But in the process, he stops seeing her individuality.  Doyamoyee is so non-confrontational --in may be one of my favorite bits -- questions her own mortality.  She is never a character who wishes for veneration.  Instead, she sees it both as a means to keep her family together, but also to serve the community.  It becomes a burden to her, knowing that there may be a slim chance that she would be harming others by denying her divinity. 

It's the seduction of faith.  Listen, I'd like to think that I'm a pretty good Catholic.  I try my darndest.  I am open to faith and I mostly fulfill my responsibilities and then some within my faith parameters.  But I also get that there is something incredibly upsetting about the notion of not knowing what's out there.  I hope I'm not going out too much on a limb and putting my immortal soul in danger (although, if I am, this is only proving my point the more), but I think there's always an element of doubt when it comes to faith.  At least, there's an element of doubt when we approach what I consider to be at least somewhat of a healthy faith.  It's the zealots that scare me.  And that's what zealots do.  Zealots are incredibly charismatic for those who are open to listening to overt devotion to a god.  Kalikinkar Roy never really gives anyone a chance to listen, despite the mounds of evidence opposing what he says.

It's that surredness that he's right and that everyone else is wrong that makes people question themselves.  Doyamoyee, when left to her own devices, never really thinks that she is the goddess.  She is a girl who is trying to do right by her husband who is off getting more schooling (which sounds pretty awesome, but I'm supposed to be critical of him.)  From Kalikinkar Roy's perspective, if there was any doubt that his daughter-in-law was a goddess or not, he doesn't think that there's much wrong with what he does.  It's only as that zealotry becomes contagious and --more importantly --law, that there's a real world consequence of a child dying.  The movie's end, with Doyamoyee disappearing from the estate as Kalikinkar's son --and Royamoyee's husband --scolds him for his obsessiive nature.  I can't help but think that Kalikinkar Roy is living vicariously through his daughter-in-law's newfound divinity.  After all, it is Kalikinkar Roy who had the dream and discovered the incarnation of Kali.  He's the one who sets the laws saying who can come and who can go.  It's thought of as blasphemy to try to give the child any kind of medication, not even as a supplement to prayer.

Like, the movie is damning, guys.  And, yeah, it works as allegory because we're not living in India. But the foundational stuff is all there.  It's pretty darned impressive and I almost didn't have record that I watched it.