Rated R for a lot of reasons, but primarily for sexuality, especially considering it kind of / sort of makes light of statuatory rape. There's some pretty intense language throughout and some mild violence. It covers some pretty icky content. It also might be making a bit of fun of homosexuality, although that could be left up to interpretation. R.
DIRECTOR: Alexander Payne For years --FOR YEARS --I've wanted to watch this movie. It was always on Comedy Central when I was in high school, but I was an idiot then and thought that there was no better movie than Moulin Rouge!, which I can now confidently say is incorrect. But my wife was always on the fence about watching this movie. I think she had seen it before and had no reason to watch it again. Now that I've seen it, I know why she was probably hesitant about watching it. I had no idea it was about statuatory rape and inappropriate relationships between teacher and student. It also is very casual with the notion of adultery, so I can see why my wife wasn't itching to watch this movie. Why did I want to watch it then? I mean, I wish I could say that it was my devotion to Alexander Payne, who has absolutely crushed it in the past. Okay, I didn't like Nebraska. The rest of the stuff I've seen is pretty phenomenal. But I didn't realize that Alexander Payne did this, let alone worked for MTV Films. Yeah, when that MTV Films thing came across the screen, I realize that Election falls into a very specific subgenre of films that I would have been all over in the late '90s / early 2000s. But it wasn't the MTV Films thing either. It was one of those movies that kind of just felt...lost in my viewing canon. I've seen so much and it almost felt like I should have seen this movie. I mean, Criterion released it. I had the pleasure of watching that edition. But Election seemed like one of those movies that was released on a lark, but had somehow entered the cinematic canon oh-so-quietly. I don't know. It's not like people are constantly talking about Election. But like movies like Office Space or Idiocracy (both Mike Judge vehicles, appropriate because Election feels like a Mike Judge joint), these movies that were considered stupid filler acted as beautiful satire while preserving a snapshot of the cultural zeitgeist. I can't look at this movie without looking at myself. Yeah, I don't teach history, but I'm a humanities teacher. I'm the guy who would get dressed up in a cowboy outfit for the sake of the students. To a certain extent, I teach the same book over and over again. If Mr. McCallister wasn't pointed at me, who was he pointed at? (Let's establish this right now. I know this is not just a story about a high school. But I want to look at the diagetic storyline before I start talking about allegory.) I've never crossed any lines like McCallister does. I've never wanted to cross any lines like he does. Do things about teaching irk me? Yes. But for all of the ways that I'm like McCallister, there's way too many ways that I'm not like him at all. McCallister kind of sees something pathetic about himself. There's one moment that is really telling about his character. It's when he's driving Linda Novotny home and he makes a really crass comment about getting a room at the seedy motel. For McCallister, teaching is a script that he uses to cover up who he really is. Anyway, I feel like I'm protesting too much. Let's look at the movie. Man, it takes a lot to make Tracy Flick unlikable. Honest-to-Pete, the movie has to put her through the wringer to get her to where she is at the end. From moment one, Payne makes Tracy both annoying and the most sympathetic character imaginable. In fact, the things about her that are really annoying are almost the biproducts of an absentee character: Tracy's mom. I mean, she's in the movie, but she's almost a spectre looking over the events of the film. Everything Tracy does is for the sheer desperation of being the best because she needs to be the best. It's programmed into her through insidious methods. I don't even see Mom as evil so much as she's what women have forced themselves to be because of (God, I'm about to say it) the patriarchy. What's interesting is how she views her relationship with Mr. Novotny. Dave Novotny is appropriately cast as the most pathetic character in the story. While Tracy and Novotny's relationship is pretty crucial to the story, it is played for laughs. It's really uncomfortable. It doesn't ruin the movie for me, but it took a lot of winning me back after this moment. The odd thing is that Dave Novotny is two very different people and I don't know if Payne knows which one he is. Dave is the one who says the most vulgar thing about a student ever. There's a smash cut to Dave saying something vulgar to McCallister, which really makes me wonder how complicit McCallister is. I mean, to give McCallister all of the credit, he is the one who turns in Novotny. But in this moment, Novotny breaks down crying screaming how much he's in love and that things aren't fair. These moments leave a lot for us to consider because Tracy also has her duality about the relationship. We, on the outside, know that Novotny, regardless of how mature Tracy may seem, is absolutely a rapist and should be treated as such. But Payne doesn't let us live in a world where things are so black-and-white. Like almost every character except for Paul Metzler, the world exists in shades of grey... ...you know. Like Nebraska? But Tracy is all over the place when she talks about her relationship with Novotny through the film. Payne has to make her a villain. Not the main villain. She's a villain in a bevy of villains. When she talks about Dave Novotny, she both treats him like a child whom she manipulated and someone whom she adored. It's really weird. I know, I'm talking about the rape a lot. I can't help it. I tried getting someone like Novotny booted at a school, so I tend to rage about these things. But all this creates a feeling of mystery behind Tracy Flick. From her perspective, she is absolutely the hero of the story. She knows she can do the most good for the school. She looks at a school full of burnouts and bullies and she knows that she can make change. Yes,s she is selfish because her mother taught her to look out for number one. But that selfishness has put her into the position to make drastic change. It's this stuff: the obsession, the drive, the success, the brainwashing that makes her the perfect allegory for government. Of course Tracy Flick ended up working for a congressman. It takes a sociopath to run for office. There are presidents I like. There are presidents whom I loathe. But one thing that they have in common is the really screwy notion that they can tell everyone what's best for them. Like, who has that kind of confidence? I'm irresponsibly confident and even I have to draw a line saying that I can fix everything that other people can't. If Election was concerned more with morals than themes, the message would be that we encourage sociopathy by fostering Tracy Flicks. The Mr. McCallisters are the folks who keep crossing moral lines for small subjective goods. I mean, the answer to McCallister's problem is right in front of him. Let's pretend that we live in a world where people can't control their sexual impulses. McCallister, a teacher in a place of authority, should never be left in a room with Tracy Flick, a girl that he has forbidden feelings for. Do you know how to fix that problem? Don't be the head of student council. His internal conflict is that he doesn't want to be placed in a situation where he's tempted. Fine. But then he starts seeing himself as the hero of his own narrative, despite constantly crossing lines in other areas of his life. When he finds out that Tracy won by two votes (by the way, nice moral dilemma that Payne gives McCallister), he sees himself as ridding the student body of the girl who tore down posters and keeps breaking little rules, like finding out the results of the count early. But that's what makes Election great. McCallister and Flick are the same person, just at different ends of the ladder of success. Both are willing to break little rules for the sake of what they consider the greater good. That's why we have the Metzlers running in the race too. These two are the foil to the insanity of the race. Say what you will about Paul, he'd make a great student body president. If the Presidency is about sociopaths taking what they want, Paul is doing this because he was told it was what other people wanted. He acknowledges that he might not be the best person for the job. It's so endearing to see him confront McCallister at dinner with his ideas for the student council. But McCallister, like Tracy, can't see what's good for the whole through the rage and self-centeredness. Similarly, Tammy, who is in the race for the worst reason, acknowledges that government refuses to change itself for the better. Now, there's a very innocent 1999 view of government in this if you present Tammy as a valid candidate. Like with Trump, Tammy wants to clear out the swamp and disband government (Okay, there's a loaded sentence, but the short version is that Trump didn't want to do that, but just push the Trump name and narrative). But we now realize that if you don't vote, you get Trumps. A weird irony there. I get pretty heavy into politics since Trump took office. I didn't think that the world could get as bad as it did before he took office. Whenever I take breaks, I have to kick my own butt to get back in. Unfortunately, this means that I checked my CNN app today (It's actually January 10 while I write this) and got really depressed over Biden's parallel crimes to Trump. Election, for all of the laughs it gave me, depressed me just like politics. I suppose that's Alexander Payne's way of torturing his audiences. For all the laughs and giggles, you probably end up leaving his movies a little more depressed than you came into them.
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Rated R for violence, sexuality, and language. It's got a real Royal Tenenbaums vibe to the whole thing. Every element almost seems comperable in terms of explicit content to Royal Tenenbaums. Both movies don't necessarily feel R for large portions of the movie, and then something happens to remind you that it is, in fact, R.
DIRECTOR: Noah Baumbach How do people not love this movie? Genuine question. I could honestly watch this movie forever. I never wanted it to end. Is a movie versus novel thing? I haven't read the novel, so I have no strong opinions about one beating the other. But I will tell you, despite the fact that I got a lot out of the movie by itself, that I'm really considering reading the book. (Look, I'm not commiting myself to a lifestyle change right now. I write these things in a haze anyway. Give me some room to live my life.) Last year, Noah Baumbach changed my mind about him with Marriage Story. Okay, he changed my mind a couple years before that with Meyerowitz. I went from a guy who actively hated Noah Baumbach (okay, that's a bit rough) to someone who can't wait for his next project to come out. You can read this two ways. The first is that I've changed. I mean, we're always changing, so I'm not going to completely disregard that idea. But I also think that if I go back and watch The Squid and the Whale, I think I'll be equally mad. Which leads me to the second thing, and that's the notion that people change as artists. Baumbach confuses me. Take a gander at his IMDb page. His credits are hilarious. He wrote Madagascar 3. Now, from what I've read, he absolutely regretted doing it and he probably did it for the money. There's theories that one of the lines from Marriage Story is reflection of regret for writing that movie. Okay. Fine. But I do realize that there's something recognizable (in the auteur sense) in Baumbach's work. That's very cool, but also the bigger takeaway is that he kind of refuses to make the same kind of movie anymore. I mean, White Noise is absolutely Baumbach. It's got that Royal Tenenbaums vibe that I mentioned earlier. It's grounded people stressing the mundaneness of life in America. It takes the mundane and lifts it up to the levels of loftiness through the lens of absurdism. (That sentence alone almost felt like Baumbach made me one of his characters. I apologize.) But instead of allowing the world to stay mundane, he places his mundane and quasi-grounded characters in a disaster film. I use the term "disaster film" because I have no other way of describing such a movie. A large element is a sci-fi disaster epic, but the rest is a commentary on academia, big pharma, and the role of truth in marriage. It's a very complex movie and I can see why people may have called the book unfilmable. But just imagine taking Owen Wilson's character from Tenenbaums and asked him to deal with apocalypse-driven mortality. That's White Noise. I absolutely love it. We can debate it, but I'm probably still going to come out of that movie loving it. It's the fact that I fell in love with the characters from moment one. Adam Driver is a weird guy who should continue doing exactly what he's doing. It's so funny that many of us got to know Adam Driver as Kylo Ren. Every so often, the image of Kylo Ren (unfortunately shirtless and swole) comes into my head and it makes me giggle. Kylo Ren seems like the least Adam Drivery role that I can imagine. Driver has almost defined himself as the guy who flourishes in a low-budget environment. He makes these phenomenal movies that often were made to lose Oscar categories. Oh, they'll get nominated, for sure. But they won't ever win. Jack might be my favorite character of his. The second that Jack represented success-in-academia, I lost it. I know that the professor archetype is well-worn, but Jack is something special. It's not insane that a professor might be obsessive about a topic. Before I get too big for my britches, I'm a high school teacher, ride-or-die. I always thought it would be nice to teach a college course for retirement, although I'm doing very little to secure that now. But, goodness me!, the full-on nerdy otaku elements of academia are gorgeous in this movie. There's a little corner of this movie devoted to Adam Driver and Don Cheadle as mirrors for each other. Jack is obsessed with Hitler. Not World War II necessarily, but he's not shying away from that. But the notion isn't that he's an expert on World War II. He's an expert on Hitler. And the pride that he takes on being America's foremost expert on Hitler is such a baseball bat to the audience's legs as a character choice. I don't think more about a character has been conveyed so quickly as making him an expert specifically on Hitler. Because Cheadle's Murray acts as foil to Jack, his obsession and almost desperation for status with the expertise on Elvis is equally hilarious. That scene. Guys, that scene. I hope you know what I'm talking about because I just about lost it. Yeah, it is so divorced from what actual teaching looks like. But so much is going on there telling about who these people are. The easy read of that scene where Jack is "helping" the Elvis lecture is that Jack is Hitler, enthralling the masses with his empty rhetoric about motherhood. Yeah, that's there and it's even a read I get from the movie. But the irony that I see is that Jack's greatness isn't even his own. Murray's obsession with greatness coming from an in-depth knowledge of Elvis Presley isn't even real greatness. Instead, they are riding the coattails of history. The entire first sequence is the delusion that academics have fame. They have fame in a very small pond. Hitler, as gross as he was, had fame. Infame, I guess. But still. Elvis had real fame. These guys are famous to thirty kids and a handful of adults around the world. This blog, no fame. I love Baba. I don't think I'd love Baba if it wasn't for Jack. That's a thing. Maybe that's what Baumbach really does well. He creates characters that, in isolation, probably do nothing for me. But when interacting with others. I love the idea that Baba exists for truth-telling. If Marriage Story is Baumbach's thesis on marriage and divorce, the story between Jack and Baba carries with it the spectre of divorce and death without full on hitting me over the head with it. I don't think many marriages are shown with the same love that Jack has for Baba. Baba seems to be slipping away from Jack. The more we see of Baba, the more the tale carries a portend of infidelity behind it. Jack and Baba have been married multiple times. Neither of them seems abusive. Neither of them is the monster of a spouse that Adam Driver was in Marriage Story. But there seems to be something inevitable about Jack and Baba. I know that we're left with Jack and Baba being fine and I will even accept that there's a narrative where they die in each other's arms, painfully and irresponsibly old. (After all, they're afraid to die second.) But in the movie, it seems like happiness is fleeting. It's the secrets and private moments that are both necessary and poisonous to what is happening. They both end up on stretchers at the end, being monitored. In that moment, their relationship is on life-support by a German nun who doesn't care. The world doesn't care about Jack and Baba. Jack needs to be a Hitler scholar who doesn't need to speak German and Baba has her movement class. That's who they are to others. Their writing is on the wall and it seems like the world could care less. It's funny, because their customized family is near perfect. It's screwy and really weird. But mostly, everyone seems happy. Usually, character quirks are reasons for characters to hate each other. Not in this case. Characters seem to treat wild personality traits as something that is not only normal, but something to be encouraged. For the audience, there is this odd relationship with people who are epitomized by their quirks. I can't get enough of it. White Noise might be up there for one of my favorite movies for 2022. I can only use anecdotal evidence for how much people liked it. But I do hope that it gets some attention from the Academy Awards. Yeah, it's weird. But it's awesomely weird and I love it. Also, shout out for the best prop department in the business for the A&P alone. PG and I'm just waiting to say what someone says about this movie. A lot of parents didn't take their kids to see this movie because it has an openly homosexual relationship in it. Normally, I don't include homosexuality in my MPAA section because my politics don't view this as offensive. But I know that it is the central contention point for a lot of people, so I'll confirm it. Yes, one of the major characters is gay and talks about being gay. But the thing that really scares kids is a big scary world where everything is trying to kill them. You know, Disney stuff.
DIRECTORS: Don Hall and Qui Nguyen Such a point of contention. Man alive, I would love to throw stones, but at a point in my life, I would have been close-minded enough to probably avoid this movie. Yeah, it's the movie where Disney finally stopped beating around the bush and made a character gay. Am I going to talk about representation in movies? Yeah. I really, really am. Does that mean that I liked Strange World. Unfortunately, no. I was told the movie wasn't that good. My son didn't care for it. He's eight. He doesn't like lots of good stuff, so I wouldn't take his advice alone. I really thought I would like it. I mean, I like when Disney goes into sci-fi territory. I saw the trailer for this and thought that it would be up my alley. From that first trailer, I thought it was going to be very Star Trek-y or something like Lost in Space. I mean, it's right there in the title. Just add "New" and you have the title of a really good Star Trek show in front of you. Now, I'm putting myself in the shoes of a Disney exec. A Disney exec attaches his name to this movie. Maybe her name. Not the point. A Disney exec needs for Strange World to not be an outright failure because there's the Disney brand to think of. And he or she is holding the cards to the movie that is going to crack Middle America and China. This is the movie that is going to be so good that the whole question of gay representation isn't going to be a conversation anymore. And then they see the final product. And it's not amazing. On paper, everything about Strange World should have been a slam dunk. I know that early drafts of Disney movies don't look anything like the final versions. I am specifically citing Frozen. Frozen crushed. It was one of those earth-shattering Disney movies. I know a lot of people love to hate that movie. They're allowed to, but I think it's a bunch of bandwagon nonsense. As a father to too many kids, Frozen's a pretty solid outing from Disney that has few notes from me. But the original drafts of Frozen were very different beasts. I mean, Elsa was the bad guy in the original Frozen movie. Now, everyone knows Elsa. Heck, it's been a really long time since that movie came out and they're still selling merch from that movie, even beyond the sequel stuff. I'm sure that the folks who make original Disney stories were looking at Strange World thinking that whatever rough edges were in the early drafts of Strange World and those things would be fixed by release dates. And they were. My biggest problem with Strange World is that none of it gels. Some problems don't just get solved because Disney puts its name on it. The biggest problem is that it needed to be amazing. I keep using Jackie Robinson as my example. Bear with me, because I'm more of a history guy than a sports guy. Jackie Robinson destroyed the color barrier in sports because he was amazing. He took a mundane game and made it better by his presence. It's a crime that it has to go that way, but it's true. When Jackie Robinson played ball, it showed that a group of people treated as inferior could elevate something so-so into the stratosphere. But on the other hand, when something is less than amazing that is supposed to change the game, it's evidence --inappropriately --that the old ways are the best. I'm talking about Ghostbusters: Answer the Call here. You know, the girl Ghostbusters movie. Answer the Call was supposed to prove that an almost all-female cast would not only prove marketable, but also dominate the summer blockbuster market. But that movie, for what goodness it had, paled in comparison to the all-male cast that Ghostbusters is known for. Because bigots are looking for ammo, they took away from Answer the Call that women aren't funny and it's all unfair. The same thing is true for Strange World. Strange World's gay son, Ethan, is front and center in this story. It's a sci-fi story of a different planet that ultimately ends up being a living creature. Cool. But the really revolutionary element of the story isn't that Ethan is gay. It's that it doesn't matter that Ethan's gay. It's never an issue. Even with the Boomer avatar in the story who tends to be pig-headed, Ethan's sexuality is never a point of concern for Jaeger. Finally, Disney made a movie to represent a demographic that has been criminally underrepresented in cinema. There are peopel who could look at Ethan and see themselves in the story. That's great. (Or it's not, for those out there. I really want to throw stones. Like, really really want to. But I also know that I lead a privileged life and that I may not have someone in my ear telling me the value of this moment without contention.) But when the rest of the movie is meh, what that simply does is give evidence that America, China, and the Middle East don't want to see movies about gay kids. They don't want to brainwash their kids into seeing this movie. The big argument I have heard is that Ethan doesn't need to be gay. Why make him gay? I'm about the be the culprit of whataboutism, so just be aware that I recognize it. Disney has always had romantic subplots. It's something that Disney does. Why I like Disney is that it humanizes its characters in a lot of cases. People's problems aren't one thing. Sure, Searcher, Ethan, and Jaeger all have a very concrete external conflict: they need to survive the land underneath the mountains. But that doesn't stop them from being human. It's the moments where people talk about their problems that remind us that there is a sense of normality to return to. This conflict is temporary. My problems out there are what I desperately want to return to. Now, here's the whataboutism. Disney's told Ethan's story before and no one made a fuss, ever. Do you know who Ethan is in Strange World? He's Violet from The Incredibles. Violet's crush on the guy at school plays absolutely no part in the overall narrative. It's her internal conflict. The external conflict is keeping her from really exploring her inner conflict. Thus, she must help solve the external conflict to give proper attention to the internal conflict. Ethan and Violet are the same characters. Yet, no one seems to have a problem with Violet. So what makes Strange World not great? I'm going to steal Henson's analysis first before talking about my own: It's too many relationships. The story is about Daddy-issues. I should be on the floor, weeping openly with snot running everywhere. I'm not. The father issues did nothing to me. The reason being is that I didn't know on which family issue to tackle. It's cool that Ethan has the same problem that Searcher has with his dad. I like it. But both relationships are watered down. I don't really get an in-depth look at what makes each relationship tick. Instead, we get an obvious parallel that Ethan takes after Jaeger and Searcher feels left out. But even that is muddy. Ethan yells that he doesn't want to be like either one of them and it's pretty obvious that he wants to be like Jaeger. Pick a lane. (I'm going to start devolving into my own thoughts here, so don't yell at Henson from this point on.) Also, Ethan's...wrong a lot? Maybe that's me as Dad coming into the story, but he does some wildly irresponsible things in the name of being the protagonist of the piece. (You can also think that Searcher is the main character, but Searcher seems helpless throughout.) When Ethan goes off to find his dad, he risks everyone else's lives, including his mom's. That's not fair. She wouldn't even be there if he listened to his dad. But there aren't any come-to-Jesus moments about his lack of listening skills. He almost got so many people killed and he's the one we're supposed to be celebrating. I mean, it is against the odds that Splat would have made that soulful change about treating Ethan like a friend. So it's weird to come down on Searcher for the way he acts around either Jaeger or Ethan. Searcher deserves to be a little standoffish against both these people. But the really rough edge is about the film's message. There's this card game motif that ties directly into the film's theme. The film keeps coming back to this card game over and over (and with a heavy hand, if I do say so). Ethan's obsessed with this card game and, in a moment of family bonding, sits down to play the game with his dad and reunited grandfather. Now, the outcome of the game is to ensure total harmony in this fictional world. Ethan makes it very clear that this isn't about murdering creatures or anything. The two adults can't wrap their heads around this notion, even Searcher whose motivations and lack of clarity don't really make sense in this moment. But both Jaeger and Searcher end up losing the game for the group because of their naturally violent tendencies towards obstacles. Ethan then yells at both of them, stating that it everything needs to live for the society to function and that, by removing one creature, other more dominant creatures destroy the homeostasis. Cool! I love this message. But what happens at the end? Once Searcher and Ethan discover that their planet is a living creature and that the source of energy that they've been exploiting is killing the creature (there's another message, but it seems more preachy than organic, despite the fact that I kind of agree with it), they forget the message of the card game. They decide to wipe out the creature that is attacking the heart of the planet. (The green stuff is called Pando. I don't know why I have to state that now.) Wasn't the point that you can't kill one thing to save the rest of society? You lost your own message trying to do a little bit of everything. I know that the card game is important to the character arcs of the three generations, but the metaphor really got in the way of the point of the film. It's just so...meh. I hate meh. I want things to be good or bad. Good or bad I can work with. Meh is forgettable. Like The Rise of Skywalker, Disney can't get away with stuff like Strange World. A strong opinion means that there's probably someone out there to defend this movie and maybe that the movie wasn't for me. Meh means that more time was needed. I get the vibe that someone just said, "Dump it and we'll move on." It's a bummer because this movie needed to be good and it really isn't. Rated R for lots of blood, lots of violence towards women, lots and lots of swearing, and lots of drinking. While I wouldn't consider The Wolf of Snow Hollow a movie that is going for extremes or offensiveness, it does not shy away from the fact that it is a horror movie and it embraces the R rating readily.
DIRECTOR: Jim Cummings Oh man, there's something here. There's so something here and it just doesn't. I know. I'm intentionally writing cryptically to give the words a certain bite (pun intended). But it's how I feel. Just a little more crafting and a little more distance, this might have been one of those movies I would have been talking about for years. Instead, I'm always going to slightly relegate it to the pile of movie's whose marketing campaign did a better job than the movie itself. I mean, did you see that poster? It's a perfect poster and I really hoped that the movie was going to match the vibe of that poster. (Spoiler Alert: It does not.) It sounds like I really hate the movie. I didn't. Oh no. In fact, I liked a lot of it, especially the end. But the movies that frustrate me the most are the ones that I know I can fix. Anything I know that I can fix, as a layman, bugs me. It's because someone should have gotten to that before it got to my eyes. There had to be moments where someone said, "No, this is not working" and come up with the solution I did just sitting on my couch. Can I tell you what's wrong with it? It wanted to do two opposing ideas well and it completely muddies it. Now, I don't know who Jim Cummings is. I read his IMDb page. I saw his name all over this movie. I think the movie really wanted me to know that Jim Cummings wrote, directed, and starred in this movie. It treated him like he was Bruce Campbell or something. The second I made that connection, I realized the problem with this movie. This movie used the horror genre and a series of tropes to explore what it means to lose control and to break down. That's a story. I love it. But horror isn't just one thing. And I think that there was this pressure (probably by Cummings himself) to make a movie that looked and felt like a horror movie that he liked. It shouldn't have been that. And because it shouldn't have been that, I'm going to say something that I've said a thousand times about art: it needs to be vulnerable. I'll tell you what and I'll tell you that thing for free. This movie absolutely needed so much vulnerability considering that content of the film itself. Part of it comes from the way it was shot. There's a really nifty image I have in my brain. I come up with this idea. There's a werewolf killing the members of a small town. While that's cool set anywhere in the world, setting it in a town defined by snow is a great visual. I mean, look at that poster that I love. You'll see what I'm getting at. But blood on snow is striking and I'm sure that Cummings has that same image in his head. However, he wanted it to be white snow. It shouldn't have been tarnished by darkness. The imagery of blood on snow needed to be as stark as he could have gotten it. But to do that, he needed to film the movie with this bright color palate which does something to the tone of the movie. Instead of being bleak and dark, there's this overly light tone to the movie. This is a movie that is about a small time sheriff at the end of his rope, coping with alcoholism and disrespect. All of this is the byproduct of mortality. His father, a roadmap for the main character, dies of a heart murmur. Pile on a series of murders that everyone expects for him to solve coupled with a fantasy angle that seems to be a werewolf and he's placed under this unmanagable stress. Then why go comedy? Because he shot the film like a sitcom. There are no shadows. Everything is five-point lighting and lit to the nines. If the red is going to be bright, so is everything else. I think the tone shifted from that moment. If everything was going to look like a sitcom, mind as well make elements of the story like a sitcom. I'm not saying dark movies should be humor free. But at one point in the story, Jim Cummings made the choice to drive the story on the jokes and it does not work. I know, Snyderverse fans, that was your complaint about Thor: Love and Thunder. The difference is that you are wrong and your fandom is the worst. If this is a writing class, the first note I have to say is to "kill your darlings." Cummings is obsessed with images in his mind and these images are in direct conflict with the storytelling elements. If anything, this movie needed to learn something from The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot. That movie had something that could have been quirky as heck, but it maintained a tone all of the way through. The insane thing is, I really love what is the framework for this movie. That end is satisfying as get out. The movie tells us everything we need to know about the killer. He swears up and down that there are no such things as werewolves and we're so used to horror film tropes that we thought that this was a story about letting go. After all, metaphorically, this is a guy who holds onto unjustified rage the entire film. The idea of letting go of his preconceptions and then also his narrow-mindedness about werewolves seems like an apt metaphor. So when the guy is right the entire time, you realize that this movie has been this grounded film the entire time. It's about a man who loses his mind not just because of rage issues, but because misinformation has caused him to question his sanity and humanity around him. And that's why the comedy doesn't work. Because this is a movie about so much and yet, it doesn't let us feel what he feels. Even when he spirals out of control, it comes off a bit silly. Nothing about it feels earned. Most of the movie, Jim Cummings yells for the sake of joking and that makes the yelling that he needs to do neutered. But that shot, man. The shot that probably started this whole project going. "Could you stand to full height, sir?" or something like that? It's so good. It is such a solid moment that I makes me mad that the rest of the movie isn't better. Again, elements of absolute genius. But the majority of the film doesn't support this moment. Again, I'l always get upset about a lost opportunity and this is a lost opportunity. I don't want to put this one someone's shoulders, but there's a good movie here that needs to be fixed. Right now, it's a goofball forgettable movie. I want something of substance. Rated R. Get ready for feathers to be ruffled. The formal reason it probably got the R rating is the nudity and sexuality. You can't really fight that with an R rating. But I also got the vibe that this movie would have gotten the R rating regardless of that scene is the fact that it very frankly talks about race, throwing all of White America under the bus. People don't like that, so let's make it harder to see. Regardless, R.
DIRECTOR: Melvin Van Peebles Sometimes, it's really rad when I read other articles on a movie. Again, like with Infernal Affairs, I stumbled across an article while looking for a picture. Because I'm fried and don't want to write, I decided to procrastinate a bit. The tagline of this movie was something along the lines of "It won't happen to you, so you are allowed to laugh." Geez, Melvin Van Peebles doesn't pull punches. I know, I'm getting closer and closer to Sweet Sweetback, so I better strap in if I thought that Watermelon Man was as hard as it could hit. Originally, I wasn't going to write about the elephant in the room. I thought that we had come farther as a people than having to address the fact that Whiteface is not offensive. But we do. It's January 6 and I'm in a low place, reminding myself that we, as a people, might be doomed. It's not offensive. This is a genuine criticism of power structure and refuses to pull punches. If you know me in real life, please have this conversation with me. Because I'm a fragile liberal, I might leave the conversation shaking or crying. Sorry for having emotions. (Golly, this blog has gotten too emo.) I feel bad that I didn't watch Watermelon Man in ideal conditions because this movie is a trip. It's maybe one of the most bizarre tones I've seen in a movie. It has all of the benchmarks of a raucous almost family comedy. After coming back from The Story of a Three Day Pass, something that screams independent cinema and New Wave, Watermelon Man is this film that just about follows all of the rules of cinema that's marketed to the masses with having none of the content invovled. Do you know what I didn't expect in my criticism of Western Civilization? Zaniness. It's the most zany film that ever existed. Anyone else making this movie, it would be considered tongue-in-cheek and would have rotted with history. Honestly, I can see Mel Brooks making this movie. Not Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks (although, KIND OF Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks). I'm talking about High Anxiety Mel Brooks. If anyone else made this movie, there would be something disposable about it. Because it looks like the movie's intention is to make you laugh like a raucous comedy, similar to something like Liar Liar. But the truth is, you're laughing because things are truly messed up. It's laughing at the dumpster fire that we've created at society. And you know the main target of the movie? It's not the Jeff Gerbers of the world. It's not the people who are active racists. Yeah, they get their comeuppance. And sure, casual and conscious racists are the worst. But those people aren't going to change based on this movie. It's me. Hi, I'm White America who thinks that he's sooooo progressive and has everything figured out. I say the right thing at the right time. Heck, you have this blog as evidence that I'm progressive as heck, despite my wandering thoughts during 13th, where my conservative institutional racism crept in. This very paragraph, where I too throw myself under the bus, is just evidence for my forward thinking and how I should be "one of the good ones." Nah, Watermelon Man doesn't care. (Man, he sounds like a superhero when I write it like that. The Punisher of casual racism.) Yeah, I'm the one who has to change. But the problem is that Watermelon Man doesn't believe I can change. Like the early days of Malcolm X, White America is too far to save. And there might be a point there. Althea Gerber starts off the movie as the best of us. She watches the news. She wants to get involved in the civil rights movement. She knows that America has been the home of racism as long as it has existed. (Hey, calm down. I get that other people are racists too. We're just really good at showing off our racism.) Everything's cool until Jeff actually turns Black. There's something to unpack there. Knee-jerk, she's secretly afraid of Black people. That's absolutely true and I can't deny it. But Jeff turning Black is reflective more on who she is. She was the good one in the marriage. She defined her goodness compared to racist Jeff, who kept saying awful things thinking that he was funny or charming. But when Jeff becomes the very thing that he disregarded, she has no sense of truth anymore. After all, it's Jeff getting arrested for a cause. He's the one who is mad because he's not getting basic rights that should be protected. And when she is the one who doesn't have the moral high horse anymore, she kind of falls apart. She doesn't know how to define herself in Jeff's shadow. There's a good chance that the majority of this blog is going to be about Althea. It's not that I don't care about Jeff. (I actually will probably talk about Erica. I think her name is Erica, the Norse or Swedish secretary.) Althea is probably the most grounded element of the movie and potentially the most haunting. Okay, she's the most haunting for me because she acts as my avatar. What's really odd is that Althea never goes full-blown stereotypically racist. Oh, she's exposed as a racist. No denying that. But Althea can't define herself. When she leaves Jeff, it's not because things are bad. They are bad. She's being harassed by the Klan over the phone with threats day and night. But it's when she rejects Jeff sexually that she realizes something about herself that's awful. Up to this point, Althea is the one who has been ensuring that their marriage has a sexual component to it. I never get the idea that she is attracted to her husband, but wants to be close to her husband, as narrow-minded as he might be. But the idea of having sex with a Black man, regardless of relationship or marriage, is abhorrent. It's the idea that we think we're these people and that superficial things wouldn't matter. But Althea in that moment makes the choice to leave her husband. But when that phone call comes, both Althea and Jeff have this conversation that is perfectly amicable. I mean, Althea is filled with regret. That's what's telling. Her side of the conversation is the kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. But more importantly, she doesn't want to make amends for it. I can't believe the English teacher in me is going to scream as loud as it does in this moment, but it's Claudius at confession in Hamlet. Claudius confesses all his crimes and laments the murder of his brother. But the one thing that he cannot do is change the results of that. The consequences of killing King Hamlet involve holding the throne and keeping his wife. As sad as he is about the action of murder, he is not so sad that he'll deal with the consequences of his actions. The same is true with Althea. Althea is sorry that she left Jeff in this moment of crisis, but doesn't return to him. She refuses to live in the apartment with a Black man. Heck, it even seems like she would probably be okay in the apartment if it came to her reasoning. Jeff lives outside of the suburbs now. He's not in an all-White neighborhood. I imagine that interracial marriage is probably tolerated where they would be living. So it's not about the location; it's about Jeff. There's also something sexual about race in Watermelon Man. The movie addresses the obvious stereotype and puts it behind it quickly. But I'm talking about Althea's thoughts about sex being the straw that breaks the camel's back when she leaves. This is juxtaposed with Jeff's relationship with Erica. (Again, I apologize if I have the wrong character. I've established that I should have written this closer to having watched it.) If some progressives find Black people tolerable up to the point where they consider themselves fully sexual people, the antithesis is also a problem. Erica, who seems to be the most cool with Jeff being a Black man, only likes this change because she fetishizes Jeff's skin color. Jeff kind of gets it in that moment, which is really telling of his character. Erica doesn't see Jeff's Blackness as part of his being. It is a trait. It is something that is visibly appealing, but it divorces Jeff's skin from his personhood. Jeff, for a lot of this movie, doesn't make the connection that being Black is more than just visual appearance. He may joke about a lot of things when it comes to the Black experience, but he doesn't adopt the meaning of those things until post-coital discussion with Erica. It's interesting, because Jeff can only make that shift into the Black experience of Invisibility. This is where you start citing Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, reader. I'm not going to do the heavy lifting for you. I already used Hamlet as evidence. It's such a weird movie. Visually, I've seen a million movies that look and sound like this movie. But this thing is subversive as heck. It's a sledgehammer disguised as cotton candy. Is it fun to watch? Not especially. I mean, it's fine. One thing about satire is that sometimes the jokes don't need to land. It's kind of why retro-episodes of TV shows don't always work. Watermelon Man acts as both satire and parody. The satire is commenting on White culture's failure to stop racism and the continual surpression of Black power. But the parody is of zany family films of the '60s. Even if the corny jokes don't always work independently, the parody of one of those jokes landing flat actually might be a better form of parody than if they destroyed. Finally, something R rated! It's not that I want things to be R-rated, but it was getting really hard to write these MPAA sections. I oddly had to look up the Parents' Guide on IMDb because everything was jumbling up in my brain. It's for violence and language, guys. Sure, there are drugs in the movie. People even use these drugs. But what do we care about? Language and violence. There are some pretty gnarly and disturbing things in this movie because, instead of exploiting this stuff, they made it mundane. Yeah, that's some messed up stuff. R.
DIRECTORS: Andrew Lau and Alan Mak Guys, I love The Departed. I know of at least one person who has written me for that sentence. I don't care. I think it's great. Do you want to know something else about The Departed and me? I haven't watched it in ages. Do you know what format I have it on? HD-DVD. Yeah, that means I have to go the basement and warm up the ol' XBox 360 with external HD-DVD drive just to get this thing to play. Yeah, I gotta get around to watching that one, if the HD-DVD didn't deteriorate. Listen, I am having a hard morning. It's not January 10 for me. It's January 6. I'm going through stuff. Also, I just lost about fifteen minutes worth of writing when my browser just shut down for what seemed like no reason. I was having a bad day before that and now I'm desperate to get this done. Nothing about this article will be quality. Sometimes, being done is better than being perfect. (Although, my volume of typos was pointed out to me last night. For those people who care about my typos, this blog is word vomit. The sheer bounty of writing that this blog has developed means I don't have the time or the willpower to go back and proofread before publishing.) When The Departed came out, I was hanging out with other film nerds who had strong opinions both on The Departed and Infernal Affairs. I hadn't seen Infernal Affairs and, to be honest, I didn't really have a desire to see Infernal Affairs. I kind of wish I watched it then because I could ask questions that I have now. While looking for an image for this blog, I stumbled across an article labeled "5 reasons why Infernal Affairs is better than The Departed." Before I spiral down this hole, I'll let the cat out of the bag. I really liked Infernal Affairs; I did not love Infernal Affairs. But The Departed, at one point in my life, was almost life-changing. Now, you see an article like the one above, you can instantly scream out "Clickbait." And you'd be right. Absolutely it was a clickbait article. It was a clickbait article that went hard into its premise. By all intentions, Infernal Affairs was a superior film. Now, we all know that most of this comes down to taste. I shouldn't be so triggered by opinions. But also I'm human and that's something that I'm not going to completely avoid either. Some things were good. For example, I couldn't deny that Infernal Affairs did the heavy lifting. One of the better things about both movies is that the plot is fantastic. If you are looking for an amazing crime drama, the structure of Infernal Affairs is absolutely priceless. But then came the main point that I was going to absolutely disagree with: the emotional resonance. Infernal Affairs is about an hour-forty. It's almost the perfect length for a movie. The Departed is about two-and-a-half. That's borderline a crime sometimes. But the reason that The Departed is two-and-a-half is that it is far more concerned with the emotional fallout of the insane things happening in this crime drama. From what I read, because Infernal Affairs is the first film in a trilogy --a trilogy that I now own-- a lot of the fallout is in the sequel. After all, while The Departed actually follows a lot of the beats quite closely, there is a minor-but-significant change in The Departed. In The Departed, the crooked cop gets his. In Infernal Affairs, while exposed to key people in his life, he actually gets away with it. It's not like there isn't emotional resonance in this movie. The movie holds up. I mean, it really holds up. It's been long enough since I've seen The Departed that I had the joy of being able to watch this movie like it was new. I knew the general concept. There would be a cat-and-mouse game between two guys on opposite sides of the law. Both wouldn't be who they appear to be. But how they got there? No idea. In fact, I kind of hope that when I eventually get to watching The Departed again, there might be differences because I'm always a little bummed when an American remake does things a bit too closely. But this movie almost feels like a story of frustration and desperation compared to The Departed's savagery and hatred. There's something about Hong Kong cinema, especially with its attachment to something cool, that always sacrifices some of the vulnerability that we would see in American cinema. That's a broad stroke to throw out there. American cinema often lacks vulnerability. But I'm looking at someone like Martin Scorsese touching the same material. Maybe that's what Scorsese brings to a table. I've been critical of Scorsese since he went full-on attack on Marvel films. He's allowed to have his own opinion, but he should also understand that his words have weight and everything he says about Marvel seems like a direct attack on another dissimilar filmmaker, Kevin Feige. So, if I'm vollying against Scorsese, maybe he might need more help with his plots. Maybe that's why I love Scorsese's take on Infernal Affairs. What Infernal Affairs does for him is to patch up the weaker (not weak, but weaker) part of storytelling. With The Departed, he had a faultless plot. But he's a master of visuals and characterization. His pacing makes this long movie feel far shorter than two-and-a-half. But as I mentioned, Infernal Affairs did the heavy lifting. It's the perfect scenario for Scorsese. Let's stop talking about The Departed. It will be a miracle if I can find anything to say about the sequels to Infernal Affairs, let alone a remake like The Departed if I keep talking this way. I want to talk about Lau Kin Ming, the antagonist of the story. Infernal Affairs is fundamentally about the corrupting influences of surrounding. Ming is a bad dude surrounded by good guys. Yan is a good man having to do awful things. As much as I want to talk about Yan, it's right there on the screen. Yan lets his frustrations known. He's heroic for doing the right thing despite everything being taken away from him. For all his corruption, he still stays true to himself. But Ming, he's the one I'm wondering about. All these questions might be answered in Infernal Affairs 2, but I haven't seen it yet. I'm allowed to be asking these questions. There's this moment where Mind has crossed every line. He's morally evil from the beginning because he chooses to corrupt the objective good. He enjoys being paid fantastic amounts of money. But the thing about Ming is that he is engaged to a good woman. She is forthright and artistic. She has all of these qualities that seem like these two would not get along. It's because of his engagement that we realizes that his entire life is a lie. With Yan, he can be himself when he's alone. Ming is never alone. At work, he's faking being a cop. At home, he's faking being an honorable man. Part of me wonders why he paired himself with such an upright individual, but there's a weird amount of sense to that. While he could have the freedom from the mask at home with someone equally corrupt, that's a liability. Ming is so effective at being evil because he's alone. But he's also being corrupted by his environment, particularly the situation at home. I get the idea that Ming genuinely loves his fiancee. When she discovers that he is a monster, there seems to be regret coming from two places. The first, and probably most significant, is that he got caught and lost this lady. Okay, but there has to be a psychological connection to the second point, that he was exposed to be scum. And in that revelation, is there moral change? I don't know. I love how the end keeps it ambiguous. Part of me never wants to see part two because I love that is where my avatar steps in a decides what the end means. As much as I talked about The Departed, I dug Infernal Affairs. It's a really solid time and it's an absolutely brilliant movie. Yeah, I like the other one better. So what? Doesn't change the fact that I like a movie. ANOTHER PG FILM? What do you want me to say? Nothing really all that bad happens? Okay, like with most kids movies, especially the live action ones, there's a little bit of peril. Because the world of Enchanted is one based on the fantasy worlds of Disney, there's going to evil magic that makes good people do bad things. There's also a moral component that really needs to be unpacked. But, still...PG. Very, truly, honestly PG.
DIRECTOR: Adam Shankman What I want: to be productive and knock out these family films on my blog. Will it happen? Eventually. I don't really have the time to write this blog start-to-finish, but I'll do my best. I don't know why the following is true, but it is. I've never been a huge Enchantment nut. Some people love that movie. I couldn't give you their names, mostly because I haven't been caffienated yet, but I know that they exist. But for some reason, I was super jazzed to find out that Disney was making a sequel to a movie I was meh about. Not so jazzed that I was telling people. But enough to watch trailers and speculate on how Giselle was going to to turn evil. Maybe that was my button. I love the notion that the hero from the first movie was going to be the villain in the second. I know that a movie like Enchantment wasn't going to go hard into that premise. I mean, it would have been the coup of a lifetime. But I can't have those high expectations. But then, something happened. When Disenchantment came out, I didn't watch it the day it came out. Then I didn't watch it for the weekend it came out. Then the month, etc. until I was finally bored enough post-Christmas to find a family movie and there was Disenchantment. Literally, I'm defining "disenchantment" using an anecdote, so I'm aware of the irony. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was that there was going to be some disappointment when it cam e to this movie. But, guys? The movie isn't great. It has things that I like in it and I really wanted to like it. But I think by the end, I was the only one paying attention and that's only because I try to pay attention to every movie. (It's painfully hard to write this blog passively watching something.) I'm going to be unfair at first and put some of this on Adam Shankman. This is a messy film that really requires the viewer to do a lot of heavy lifting or a lot of brain-shutting-off. Maybe that isn't Shankman's fault. Maybe it's the writers. But the bigger problem is the moral implications of the film. I knew from watching the trailers that Giselle was going to become the villain of the piece. But there had to be some line that they had to toe. I knew that Giselle would be restored to moral righteousness by the end because I knew that Disney didn't have the guts to really villainize a Disney princess who sang to talking squirrels. Sure enough, I'm right. Giselle is basically mind-controlled into becoming an evil stepmother. She does it to herself, but without knowing that would be a consequence. So the movie treats Giselle like a victim who is paralized into doing evil acts. But that's not what the problem with Giselle is. The problem is that Giselle is let off the hook for the crime she actually commits. It's a really big mistake that made me leave the movie more than a little disappointed. Giselle is trying to be the best she can be. In a detail I actually like from this film, it gives the message that parenting is hard. (Is this movie aimed at people my age? Possibly.) But to alleviate her issues, she wishes her problems away. This is a morally gray act. We get it. It's pushing our problems onto something else and people do that. I refuse to list the real world allegory going on here because it feels like an insert-your-personal-story here moment. But just do that. Okay, Giselle has a storyline from this moment. She has something to atone for that has a degree of moral culpability, but ultimately leaves her as the protagonist. But it is the unforseen consequence of her choice that makes her a monster. When the fairy tale wish comes true, everyone is straight up brainwashed. She basically becomes the Scarlet Witch and is cool with people lacking any sense of autonomy. People act weird. Morgan, who may have had a problem with her mother, is no longer Morgan. She's a character from a book. Morgan has a right to be angry as a human being. I think the movie wants to say that. But the movie is also terrified to do anything permanent or damning with Giselle. The movie had two points to damn Giselle and it ignores both. The first moment is Giselle acknowledging that, despite the fact that the Morgan she loves is conceptually dead, she is happy. The second is at the end where everyone's returned to normal. If anyone called her out on her nonsense, there'd be a story here that I could get behind. Instead, Giselle is painted as a hero. It's that whole Age of Ultron thing. When Tony solves the problem he caused, we're all a little mad at him at the end. But Giselle keeps getting lauded as the best hero that ever existed. When she, as the Evil Stepmother, pushes Morgan down a well, Prince Edward and Princess Nancy know that she did it to save everyone from the magic leaving the kingdom. At no point did people say, "Wait, Giselle caused this?" When my kids hurt my other kids, even if it was an accident, there needs to be a sense of genuine remorse. I know, that makes me sound like a monster. But not saying sorry or not having a discussion in that moment is a problem. I just gave two moments where culpability was asked for and I kind of flew over the first example. I want to talk about how much Giselle enjoys fairy land. This is the part that makes her awful. The second is more of a band-aid. The first, however, should be the thing of serial killers. The entire first movie was her learning that our world was a challenging, but beautiful place. Sure, it wasn't home. But New York offered things that Andalasia didn't. There's something psychotic about wiping reality clean and starting again, especially with people outside yourself. Let's give Giselle a way more morally acceptable answer. Imagine Giselle, in her frustation with Morgan and her feelings of helplessness, ran away to Andalasia. Fewer people would have been affected. Morgan and Robert would be appropriately sad because they have been abandoned. We would be booing her pretty hard for being an absentee parent, especially considering that Giselle is the mother that chose Morgan. But Giselle took it a hundred steps further and chose to rewrite Robert and Morgan. That's bananas. And, no, it wasn't her intention. But she also was thrilled when that was the world she picked. It's me choosing an alternate universe version of my family over my actual family. What both Enchanted and Disenchanted get so close to understanding, but ultimately fail to nail it, is that these are movies about the choice to love someone. In the first movie, Morgan is so enamored with the notion that Giselle loves her that she feels whole. It doesn't matter that Giselle isn't biologically her mother. She is the daughter out of choice. Now, Disenchantment wisely comments on the archetype of the evil stepmother in Disney fantasy movies. But it never actually spells out why it's silly that Giselle becomes evil. While stepmothers in film tend to be evil, Giselle is a hero because she chooses to love and see the good in things. The term "stepmother" (she should realize) is someone who goes into a marriage knowing that they are going to be a mother and chooses to accept both parents and children. It's this noble use of the same word and the movie gets right up to that line without ever fully accepting that idea. It's just so clunky, guys. Like Frozen II, when you add too much mythology and plot to the story, it loses what made it special to begin with. (I actually enjoy Frozen II, but you get what I'm saying.) It tries doing so much and accomplishes so little. PG for violence happening to kids. This goes a bit beyond traditional kids-in-peril. The antagonist of the movie goes out of her way to torture kids both physically and psychologically. A lot of it is played for laughs, but I know that this doesn't necessarily gel with all audiences. Similarly, characters die off screen and the entire thing is kind of marred by tragedy. Matilda herself has to also cross some dubious lines to save the day. PG.
DIRECTOR: Matthew Warchus Man, not only did I watch a lot of musicals in a row (my wife was in a mood for them), but I watched a lot of all audience films in a row. It's probably Christmas Break and all and I was surrounded by children for the majority of the time. But all I know is that I've had to make the MPAA section green for so many movies in a row. Is that making me a better person? Probably not. Either way, the next movie is also going to get the Green-Treatment, so yay? I wasn't prepped for this. This movie had no right to slap has hard as it did. No right! I was planning on reading my book while the kids and wife watched this movie and then the opening scene happened. I know I just wrote about Godspell and how much I loved it, but I tend not to like adaptations of stage productions on film. The acting always seems to be a bit off and the spectacle that often acts as the foundation for stage musicals seems stilted. Apparently, Matilda thrives as a film, probably better than the stage production. That's unfair. I haven't seen the stage production. But Roald Dahl is weird. (I hear that there's some really racist ideas that I didn't know about, which bums me out. But until I get confirmation, I am going to simply look at what limited experience I have had with the author.) Like Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl creates these worlds that in no way reflect reality. I was about to make a connection between Roald Dahl and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, until I slapped myself for forgetting that it's the same dude who made both Matilda and Charlie. Matthew Warchus kind of gets Roald Dahl. Yeah, I saw the other Matilda movie when I was a kid. I know that some people hold that movie to be sacrosanct. But I'll tell you what? It didn't do much for me. Again, I'm not really going to comment on something I hold little to no memory of. But still, there's something a little fluffy about that movie. If anything, the Matilda musical does two things that absolutely needed to happen: capture the look of Roald Dahl (what does that mean? C'mon, he had drawings so stop trying to put me on trial, reader) and give her an edge that has a voice. In terms of look, everything in that opening sequence nails what a Roald Dahl musical should look like. It's an insane fever dream. It's our world but bigger and covered in way more sugar. If you took the Tim Burton elements out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this is what is what we're seeing in that opening sequence. Coupled with the fact that Tim Minchin might be a genius that I've kind of ignored for too long, that opening scene grabs your attention. About 10% is considering using that scene to explain what a hook should do in a paper because I went from not wanting to watch that movie to not taking my eyes off the screen the entire time. But more importantly comes the message of Matilda. I keep coming back to something that I promised I wouldn't talk about, but it's the portrayal of Matilda in the 1996 version. She was this sweet kid who is tortured by her parents and a headmistress. It's the other characters who are making the choices and Matilda must react. But this a film for revolutionaries. Yeah, I shouldn't be advocating this reading that hard, but I'm going to. This is the Matilda for the post #metoo / BLM generation. It's probably the Matilda that Roald Dahl was talking about, albeit with different intentions. Dahl's charcters tend to be a bit messy and imperfect. But the movies tend to make them react to things rather than being proactive. I'm thinking about The BFG and Charlie. Roald Dahl, and the UK in general, love the tale of the waifish orphan being downtrodden upon by evil parents or stepparents. I mean, where would Harry Potter be without the Durseys. But OG film Matilda would find solace in simply being right and doing the right thing in the face of evil. This Matilda? Not so much. Matilda has a whole song about the morality of her actions. It makes her compelling as heck. Yeah, she might not always make the right choice, but I love that in the story. She has this song about whether or not to super glue her father's hat to his head. She does it and there's no real consequences, outside of the villainous characters to continue to treat her in a villainous fashion. But it also creates this lovely contrast with this forgiving moment at the end with her dad. Instead of Matilda being a reactionary character, she makes decisions that spark the ire of those around her. Don't get me wrong. In no way does the movie imply that Matilda brings this misery upon herself. If anything, the movie plays up that there is such a notion of privilege and that some people don't have it. It stresses that the world is a terrible place with bits of sunshine hidden in there. But is the world a good place? Oh no way. But it isn't the role of the girl / woman to simply have faith that the world will correct itself. It is the role of woman to take back power from whence it was taken. The odd thing, Matilda fights women. As much as her dad sucks, he's the comic relief in the story. She's after Agatha Trunchbull, the superintendent of her school. Trunchbull, in true Dahl fashion, is so over-the-top with her villainy that she's applause worthy. And everything I say after this is in acknowledgement that Emma Thompson crushes it with her performance. BUT! (But, but, but, but, but!) There's something really missed in the casting of Agatha Trunchbull. In the stage production of Matilda, from what I understand, Agatha Trunchbull is typically played by a man. I think Ralph Fiennes originated the role. (I mean, talk about typecasting that guy, right?) I can see why casting a man in a women's role might seem problematic today, but it is also kind of missing the point. As progressive as I try to be, liberals tend to step on their own toes to avoid problems, often causing bigger problems. Let's back up this argument for a second. Roald Dahl probably didn't decide to make this a story about women gaining power back. He probably wrote a cheeky little story about a little orphan who takes on the ogre at her school and wins. Cool. Fun story, bro. But Matilda made in 2022 is a reflection of the culture. It is fundamentally making the story about power struggle. You have Agatha Trunchbull, who is a woman but embraces both masculine looks and sensibilities, trying to destroy this little girl. If you lose that opportunity, the story stays closer to Roald Dahl's cute story (I can already read the comments in my head). But then it becomes a story about women fighting women. And there might be something there when it becomes about that. What I love (and this makes me feel like Joss Whedon, fake White Knighting, despite the fact that I just believe this) is that this is a story almost entirely about women. The male characters are fun, but ultimately inconsequential. There's Matilda, Ms. Trunchbull, and Miss Honey. Ms. Trunchbull is the woman holding onto the tyrrany of the past. While we don't know much about her beyond her devotion to sports --specifically hammer throwing --her character seems to have used the misogyny of the old regime to gain power herself. She uses physical might for intimidation. Never is Trunchbull seen in a feminine light. If anything, her violence is often excused by others because she is technically a woman. After all, a man beating on little girls is unforgivable. A woman, on the other hand is a bit more acceptable. Then there is Miss Honey, whose learned helplessness has led to a life of misery. Despite having a strong sense of optimism and lust for a potential life, she does nothing to change the misery of those around her for the greater good. But this is where my idea falls apart. Matilda loves Miss Honey. She sees this abused woman and instead allows Miss Honey to take care of her. Yeah, I guess it makes for a happy ending. But she never gets mad at Miss Honey for doing nothing about the situation. To be fair to a fictional character like Miss Honey, there are times where she vocalizes her frustration with Trunchbull. But she always tends to back down when her own safety or profession are compromised. I have to remember that so much of this movie is directed at children. Children need to be the hero of the story because that's fundamentally who Roald Dahl is. There's really this tempest of thought brewing in me right now. On one hand, the film teaches a great lesson: Stand up for yourself because no one else will do it for you. Awesome. Love it. I'm on board. But also, on the other hand, why aren't adults doing something about the world. For all of Miss Honey's innocence, is that innocence really worth preserving in the face of tyrrany and oppression? That's something that is odd. Matilda is looking for a stable family, but all of the adults are obsessed with maintaining comfort and purity. It's not like Miss Honey has a good life. But she still has her life while kids are being hurt / killed in Pokey? Sure, everything in Matilda is hyperbole, but these are the facts presented us. Ah! I leave this blog loving the movie, but also having so many questions that can't be answered because the movie gave me a full stop on problems in society that it refuses to address. Should Matilda take care of herself? Is this a movie about women infighting? Why are adults so fragile while being asked to care for children? Why is the world such a bad place? I don't know. All I know is that Tim Minchin can write amazing songs and that the movie is pretty to look at. G, despite the fact that the protagonist is crucified (admittedly using red arm bands) and there's some references to illicit activities. Listen, these G-ratings are really hard to cover. There's almost nothing to object to, outside of the general psychadelicness of the whole thing. I suppose if you really wanted to throw up a stink, someone might consider the portrayal of the Gospel of St. Matthew heretical or blasphemous, but even that seems like a stretch.
DIRECTOR: David Greene Okay, I have a bit of momentum. I can do this. I can catch up on a list that has gotten way out of control. (Of course, I finished not one, but two movies last night.) I have to tell you, I directed Godspell once. Okay, I helped direct Godspell once. It's weird how your brain can purge weird things once time has passed. As much I had some things memorized from this show from the sheer repetition of it over the course of a month, there were genuine surprises while watching Godspell this time. I don't think I've seen this version before. I had watched a lot of the Broadway and stage versions before directing it, but not the film itself, despite the fact that this movie was Victor Garber's claim to fame. Adaptations of religious stories always kind of weird me out. I throw stones (allusion intended) at my wife for never giving Jesus Christ Superstar a chance despite the fact that she loves Godspell is one of her favorites AND that Godspell is way weirder than Jesus Christ Superstar. But the hypocrisy of it all is that I don't really care for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, except for that one song that I can never really get out of my head. But I make a lot of assumptions about when Broadway adapts religious stories. It's always odd for me because they are done lovingly, but I always get the vibe that few people are actually all that religious. I know that's a huge assumption. And, right now, it feels like I'm attacking that notion. I don't think I am. It's part of how I approach watching something like Godspell. There is a secular approach to who Jesus is compared to the religious approach to who Jesus is and that's not necessarily something that is in conflict. If anything, that conflict has been nurtured, most likely on the part of the religious. There's something odd to the notion of Jesus existing without the element of worship. I mean, Godspell, from this humble nerd's perspective, straight up says that "Jesus is Lord." I think a director has to make the choice before starting the story. Maybe that's what I'm trying to pick apart in this blog. Does David Greene think that Jesus is Lord and I'm going to treat him as if he's the Son of God or is Jesus a great dude who changed the world through his teaching and was killed because he upset the status quo? I know. I'm going back to that binary because both can be true. But that's what is kind of happening. And in the case of Godspell movie, I feel like the words are saying, "Jesus is the Son of God", but the production is saying that he's a hip guy who changed the world through his actions. The insane part of all this? Godspell is the worst --but potentially the most accurate --allegory for what is going on in my faith life. Godspell is based on the Gospel of St. Matthew. It's being pulled from the Bible directly. Yeah, the words are changed to make hip language and it's skipping over sections where Jesus ends up being a huge bummer at times. It's reflecting the times and the need for change in society. In this case, it's the hippie movement. I'm not writing off the hippie movement yet. I'm going to talk about that later if I can get my act together and keep a sense of organization in this blog. Considering that it is from the Gospel of St. Matthew, it has to say that Jesus is Lord and divine. But when the film treats Jesus in a secular humanist way, there's something very attractive about that Jesus. One of the big things about early Christianity / Catholicism is the understanding that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. That's a really heady concept. Emotionally, we tend to treat Jesus as one thing or another. But Godspell hits the story in a really weird way that verbally highlights his divinity while stressing his earthly mission as a man. The frustration I've had with my message is people ascribing things to the divine Jesus that we have little evidence for (but wait, isn't that faith?!) and forgetting that the man Jesus did. I would like to point out that the human element of Jesus wasn't as cool as Victor Garber's Jesus, by the way. There are moments where Jesus can be kind of rough and I should point that out. But the Victor Garber Jesus is a cool takeaway of what we should be. I'm about to spiral into my frustrations with my specific faith life in a second, so get ready for some real vulnerability. The Victor Garber / secular humanist Jesus is about being counter-culture in the best possible way. I'm going to put myself in the shoes of the creators of Godspell. Like the forefathers of America, the people of Godspell probably saw the best parts of Christianity and distilled it into lessons for everyone. Give to the poor. Have empathy for sinners. Be the best version of yourself, despite what other people tell you. The following is all my theory that I think about way too much. The notion of secular humanism kind of disgusted devout Christians. After all, Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. You can only get to Heaven through accepting Christ. The notion that you could be a good person and not through the worship of Christ, but simply his teachings about behavior is slightly sacralige. So what did devout Christians do? They decided to act opposite of secular humanists. "We don't want to be like any of those people who claim that Jesus isn't God." So all the teachings that Godspell advocates somehow come across as cheap platitudes. Do you need an example? This is preachy as heck, but I am talking about Godspell, so I probably get a bit of a pass. When I see "God, Guns, Country", I have so many issues. "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword." Also, isn't it putting America on par with God? It's because Christianity has moved to distance itself from the secular humanist Godspell. But it does it such a kneejerk reaction that it misses the point of God in general. You can have a problem with the notion that Godspell and secular humanism miss the point, but not change the behavior or belief system in a means to distance yourself. Without going too deep, but it's a major reason for the rise of radical conservatism in the Catholic Church. Phew! Anyway. Can I talk about how something is both cool and off about Godspell? It's my blog? Fine. Let's talk about how John the Baptist and Judas are the same person. I have such a love/hate John-the-Baptist/Judas-Iscariot relationship with this idea. John the Baptist is often seen as one of the most thankless roles in the Bible. He's Jesus's cousin and, as his song suggests, prepares the way of the Lord. He knows that, as holy as John's mission is, that it pales in light of the Messiah. John the Baptist will die with his head literally on a platter defending this belief. To make him Judas Iscariot is kind of an insult to who John the Baptist really was. Man, that irks me a bit. But on the other hand, the players in Godspell are more archetypes than roles, outside of Jesus himself. Jesus stays Jesus throughout, but the other players fill in either characters in parables or civilians of Jerusalem. But John / Judas is actually named. And if you are telling the Christ narrative through a storyteller's lens...it's kind of cool? There's a thread in the Bible, in faith, and just in day-to-day life that people --for all of their good intentions-- kind of suck. We are always reminded that we are sinners. We're defined by our own dissatisfaction. While the real John's story didn't end the way it did, imagine being John. John is the one who prepares the way for the Lord. He knows that he has this great destiny. He's going to open the door and Christ is going to take over. Now, John the Baptist was a real weird dude from what I understand. But here? He's probably one of the more normal people in the troupe. A normal dude fulfills his great destiny and has nothing to show for it? He has this moment in the sun where everyone is looking to him for deliverance and then his cousin takes over? It's interesting from a narrative perspective. But, again, it didn't happen that way. The last thing I want to say about Godspell. I liked it a lot. But I loved the opening that the film does. There is too long of a time where no singing is happening. The film takes an aggressive stance against giving you much in terms of tone in the first moments. There's no singing. It's not that weird. People are in boring jobs and their frustrated with the world. It's this screaming at the audience that these characters are avatars for you. They become weirdos. They aren't weirdos who find a similar person in Christ. Instead, they're almost actively distant from God and they turn to him because the world does nothing for them. I told you I wanted to talk about hippies. They all turn to hippies because they're meant to be the representatives of counter culture. But I don't know why productions keep pushing the Victor Garber Superman Jesus. The visuals have become so iconic that they've lost their meaning. Godspell needs to change for its message to continue. Yeah, the music screams late-'60s / early-'70s. But there might be a way to tell this story to every generation if enough work was put into it. I dig it. The movie isn't perfect. It's really retro and I don't really get the guy who is the equivalent of Robin Williams here. Sometimes it's a clown show (literally, not as criticism), but I like it overall. If you are looking for good music and a good story about a groovy dude who had some good ideas, there's something here. If you are aching for spiritual revelation...I mean, God works in mysterious ways, I guess. PG-13, and I would guess mostly for murder. Yeah, it's a murder mystery, which means there's going to be violence both on-screen and off-screen. There's also language and some sexuality, but no nudity. There's also some just uncomfortable stuff with guns and outfits. Listen, it's a PG-13 movie. It's got the stuff of PG-13 movies. Plus death. If death is your trigger...
DIRECTOR: Rian Johnson What is my darned relationship with Rian Johnson? (Dear Rian Johnson, if by some fluke of the Matrix, you happen to be reading this, we do not know each other. The relationship I'm talking about is between audience and filmmaker. Feel at ease. Maybe enjoy a lovely hot chocolate or something. You deserve it.) Rian Johnson exists in a part of my brain that is in raging conflict. He's the guy who made Brick, and Looper, and Knives Out. He made this masterpiece. He's incredibly smart. But part of my brain also makes him a Star Wars guy simply because of The Last Jedi. That Star Wars connection is so damning and completely unfair because I've learned to really like The Last Jedi. I probably will never love it, but I love that it tried to do something different (even if it is just The Empire Strikes Back kind of). It's weird, because I'll typecast an actor less than I am treating Rian Johnson right now. Honestly, I see Daisy Ridley in a movie, I don't see Rey. There are only a few actors that really turn my head in terms of typecasting. But Rian Johnson? He's the Last Jedi guy. I don't even associate him with Brick, which I will rave about all day long. But that's where I come into Glass Onion. I was floored by this movie. Unequivically. It knocked my socks off and I immediately started recommending it to others. Sure, once I slept on it, there were a couple of small things that irked me. But the movie was so good and it was such a fun mystery that these (seeming --because I'm ready to accept an answer given a little persuading) plotholes. But did some of that reaction come from the fact that I'm always surprised that the Star Wars guy made something so good? So many people have worked for Lucasfilm and so many people have gone onto doing other things that have been brilliant. Why am I lumping Rian Johnson into Star Wars so hard? Is it because there might be a trilogy spearhead by him that is going to make a lot of fans mad? I don't know. Onto Glass Onion. I was going to say that I didn't know what made Glass Onion work so well. I do. It's the fact that the movie is both clever --and more importantly --fun. Golly, this movie is just too much fun. I'm taking a real leap here, but I think that the words "Murder Mystery" and "Thriller" have been irresponsibly used interchangably. Thrillers have to be really smart to transcend the genre / subgenre. They tend to be a dime a dozen. It's only stuff like The Usual Suspects that manage to jump into a new tier because of their cleverness. But when something is referred to as "A Murder Mystery", it somehow should seem more bleak, but it never is. It has the word "murder" in the idea. It is fundamentally about death. Yet, these are stories where death paradoxically both carries weight and is somehow silly. I love that Dave Bautista is the murder victim. There's this tank of human being, crass and armed to the teeth, and he's the first one to drop. At least in terms of runtime. It's a blog about a murder mystery, I'm going to have to drop spoilers. But his death sets off this chain of events that leads to an island borderline catching fire. Paradox. Silly and serious. Remind me to talk about Ben Shapiro's idiocy later. I might not remember and this is a solitary writing experience, but still...remind me. Right. Death and the murder mystery. Somehow, the murder mystery lives in the world of paradox. Especially something like Glass Onion, the murder matters and almost fundmentally is about something else. I mean, I'm being obvious now, but I want to deep dive into this. All murder mysteries are about motive. And as much as this is an investigation into who killed Duke and Andi, it's about taking down sleazeball Miles not for their deaths, but for just being a blight on humanity. Yeah, his worst crime is the murder. But that is almost an element of character than it is a plot device. Maybe that's why Glass Onion and true "Murder Mysteries" find their joy. The thriller is all about living and breathing for justice for the victim. There's something very grounded about the murders. It treats death as the ultimate device. The detective is broken up about providing closure to families mourning. While there's an element of caring about what happened to Andi and how her sister mourns her death, this is kind of a game for Benoit Blanc. In real life, that's a trait that would make him a sociopath, manipulating horrific events for the sake of joy. Yet, we all want to see Benoit Blanc pull that off. (Okay, a lot of us don't. Don't write in absolutes, Tim.) There's something really messed up about the fact that, as macabre as the entire situation is, we need a Blanc to provide objectivity to these events. It's why these characters need to be so over-the-top. There's a scene in Glass Onion that is just pure joy. I might quote it forever. It's the iPad joke. Miles has his guests all sitting around a table, explaining the vibe of the next few days. Blanc, with just the right amount of social ineptitude, asks about a prize, ultimately coming up with an iPad as an offhanded remark. In that moment, we have this shift. Miles treats him like an idiot for suggesting an iPad. Blanc solves the mystery before it even starts. It's this moment that I realize that Blanc has been let off the chain in Glass Onion. See, I really liked Knives Out, but I didn't necessarily love it. Yeah, Knives Out is a murder mystery and it's a good murder mystery. But it is about the family. Like my definition for the thriller, it is about obtaining justice. The death in itself is the driving cause. It makes it about the family and Benoit Blanc, despite being the main character, is an outsider. But Glass Onion, he's front and center. He's driving so much of the story and I absolutely adore that. We're often attracted to these over-the-top detectives. Sherlock Holmes is fun because he's smart, but he's also a bit of a card. Benoit Blanc, same deal. His genius drives the plot forward, but his personality is what keeps us coming back to watch these movies for fun. As part of what makes the whole thing genius is that Blanc makes us see the world in the way that he sees it. The film is called Glass Onion, after the Beatles song. Two seconds of thought reveal what the title means, beyond the bar the suspects went to as young adults. The movie even explains the metaphor clearly. So when we see the movie in the same way Benoit Blanc does, we understand that the movie is a glass onion: something seeming to have layers but is way more straightfoward than the characters would have you to believe. Hey, thanks for reminding me to talk about Ben Shapiro. I know it wasn't that long for you, if you read this far, but for me? My brain was in a whole different place and time passes in the weirdest way while writing. Ben Shapiro hated this movie. It's because he's a little troll and he's made the world a worse place through his political commentary. Okay. That's out there. But the reason that he hated the film was because it had misdirects. I know I'm spelling out the obvious, but that's what makes murder mysteries fun. When we think we know one thing and something else happens, that's fun storytelling. Rian Johnson gets that. There's probably a way to tell the Glass Onion plot that would make it horribly mundane. But this all ties back to Rian Johnson as auteur. (See, Star Wars guy, I can movie past it!) Rian Johnson almost is a character in Glass Onion in the best way possible. There's this idea with comedy that good comedy doesn't go from A to B to C. Good comedy jumps from A to C and demands that the audience keeps up. The same is true for this movie. Telling this story from A to B to C would be doing a disservice. But telling things from multiple perspectives in the wrong order creates something magical that a lot of films can't get away with. When we are watching the first part of the movie, we're watching the film from the perspective of Miles and his cronies. It is not a mislead. It's just the information that certain people have. Then we are watching the movie from Blanc's perspective. It's great. Instead of the villain being the liar, the hero is the liar for a good reason. The takeaway? Ben Shapiro is a moron and I loved watching him get roasted on Twitter because I'm petty. My final thought on this isn't about the quality of the film. I've been preaching how brilliant this movie is. What I am going to say is that it is weird that we don't have more pandemic movies. Films during World War II often acknowledged that World War II was happening. It's not like it didn't happen. But very few pop culture things have any references to the pandemic at all for 2020-2022. I know that This is Us did something. But, if nothing else, I love that we have at least one work of fiction that felt like an authentic pandemic story. And I also love that the events on the island may have been a super-spreader event becuase Miles is a moron. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
April 2024
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