​PG-13 for swearing and clothed butts.  Honestly, if I wanted to rename The Fast and the Furious franchise to match what is expected, that's a pretty good title.  There's a lot of violence, but the violence is so absurd that you almost can't comprehend it as violence.  Like, if I had to make a body count, it would be a mass tragedy.  But the deaths are so abstract because they're all faceless goons.  There is one death of a character that we know, but even that is pretty absurd.  There's some marital implied sexuality, but that's me fishing a bit.  PG-13.

DIRECTORS: Louis Leterrier and Justin Lin

Listen, I'm just listening to what IMDB tells me about directors, okay?  I'm pretty sure the credit goes to Leterrier, not Lin.  But I know nothing about what happened behind the scenes of this movie.  If you were wondering, "Hey, Mr. H, why are you knocking out Fast X when there are so many good movies out there?"  Well, I mean, I shouldn't feel the need to justify what I'm constantly doing.  But I get it.  Really, I saw that it was disappearing from Peacock and I really didn't want to have to pay to watch this down the line. I mean, it probably would have shown up on another streaming service, heck, almost immediately after being taken down.  But I've now seen every Fast and the Furious movie and why wouldn't I just maintain my status with this franchise?

The only things that I knew going into this was that it was the first part of a potential trilogy and that it got absymal reviews.  That didn't make me exactly inspire me to get out there and see the movie.  The more I think about it, I don't think I've seen any of these movies in the theater.  Part of me thinks that I'm too good for these movies.  I mean, if I criticize all of these movies, I have to criticize myself.  Part of me watched these movies ironically until I didn't.  I wish I could say that I'm a complete convert to these films, but the reality is that I tolerate these movies at best.  There's a bell curve to the quality of these movies.  They start off phenomenally bad, bordering the unwatchable.  Then, in the middle, they hit this sweet spot of understanding that these are just superhero movies with cars.  But a while after that, there was this need to continue to up the ante.  The problem is, those movies were absolutely absurd.  There was a heavy tipping point, honestly bottoming out at F9.  F9 was unwatchable. It was so so so so much that I couldn't even pretend that there were any stakes.  We knew that Dom and his crew were going to beat Jakob.  

To some that's fine, that feeling of comfort.  But films about meeting expectations and defying expectations.  Keep that in mind, but there is such a thing of going too far in either direction.  F9, when it decided to up the ante with the physics and the car crashes, in an attempt to do what no movie had done before, did exactly what The Fast and the Furious always does.  That's not good.  It made everything plastic.  It became toys hitting each other.  I wanted to invest in Dom and his relationship with his lost brother.  I did.  I had given these movies more than a fair shake, and that means investment.  I thought I might never really like these movies again.  

That brings us to Fast X.  I stress: people hated this movie.  I mean, they thought it was absolute trash.  Everything I heard about it was that it was a low point with the exception of Jason Momoa's Dante.  (I have thoughts.  I hope that I remember to write about these thoughts or else why am I even trying?) I think that was the best thing I could have heard about Fast X because I had strapped in.  (Henson's gag about the movie?  It absoultely should have been called Fast X: Your Seatbelts.) I honestly thought that this movie was going to be the worst.  I mean. I have to make it really clear.  This is not a great movie.  But I will give it the laudy praise of "It's fine."  Heck, I'll go as far as to say that it's darned fun.  The crazy part of the whole "It's fun" bit comes from a trope that this movie needed.

Momoa's Dante is a specific archetype.  He's the unstoppable force.  They said the line, guys.  "Dante's always been ten steps ahead of us."  That's his entire schtick.  He's the guy you shouldn't be able to punch your way out of.  He's the guy who is only going to be beaten through smarts and sacrifice. Don't get me wrong.  There's a very real chance that Dom's going to do the same thing he does for all of the movies with this movie.  I have just learned to accept that Dom saying something about family and hitting the nitrous button at just the right time.  But there's a chance that something real might happen.  Dom might sacrifice himself for his family.  There's a real chance of that. That's something though.  It's almost the healthiest in the world for this franchise to say that it's closing up shop.  (I mean, they're closing up shop until it's time to reopen the shop.  We all get that, right?) With the closing of a franchise, we have to expect that something might happen that might stick.

Because these movies really play it fast and loose with death.  Say what you will about superhero death, the superhero films have actually been pretty good with keeping characters dead.  I say that now, but it seems to be the truth right now.  The Fast and the Furious?  No one dies in these movies.  Honestly, that Gal Godot reveal on a submarine?  I wasn't sure if she was someone who was supposed to be dead or not.  I actually should probably Google that, but I don't know if I care about.  Ending a franchise might be the only way to make sure that people are actually dead.  Because the stuff that these people do should absolutely have killed them a thousand times over.  I mean, there's no scenario where a character could just die from a regular stunt at this point.  It has to be in slow motion with an epic score over it.  It actually has to be a choice.  

Jakob's death was a huge ask of us, by the way.  Jakob was the bad guy in the previous movie.  I'm glad that Fast X is the one entry in the franchise to actually address that the villain in the previous movie somehow becomes a member of the family, despite the atrocities of the previous entries.  And everyone came out of the woodworks to be here for the finale.  Now, apparently since F9, Jakob became not only a member of the family, but he became the most important member of the family?  He gets a pretty sweet subplot in Fast X, being in charge of Little B.  (Oh snap, if Dante's going after Dom's family with God's Eye, are we just ignoring the fact that Brian is out there, retired?  He would be the most painful sacrifice and there's really no appropriate way for the franchise to make that choice.) But when Jakob sacrifices himself for Little B (a name that I loathe typing), we have this disconnect between head and heart.  In my heart, I'm very sad.  I like John Cena and he's given some great bits to redeem his character in this one.  (You know, besides letting a child murder some folks.) His death hits all of the sad beats.  But my head is like, "That dude was a monster in the previous movie and he's not acting anything like he did in the previous movie."  It was almost a  death for the John Cena in all of those family friendly comedies that he has been in over the death of Uncle Jakob. 

Jason Momoa is going to be the guy who makes this movie memorable, right?  That's the consensus and I get it.  He's charismatic in this movie.  Sure, he's really channeling Heath Ledger's Joker here.  This entire movie really wants to be The Dark Knight, by the way.  But I'm moving past that.  There's a couple of things that raise yellow flags about the character. The opening scene, establishing that Dante is the child of the guy who was killed in Fast Five shows him as this intimidating beast of a man.  He's serious and intimidating.  Then he's Joker.  There's a throwaway line of exposition that said he had a head injury in that bridge event that explains away his behavior.  Okay.  That's fine.  But I do have questions about his performance.  He's playing a stereotype that I'm pretty sure that we're not supposed to be doing.  It's right on the line.  I get the vibe that Momoa is a cool dude.  I'm on Team Momoa.  I would like to think that he's an advocate to the gay community.  But this villain really plays up the effeminate choices as a means of gaining laughs and I don't know if I can necessarily applaud that. It all feels a little disrespectful, even if Momoa isn't going for that.  But he's charismatic and he's a villain that's probably going to be remembered.

The trope that I don't love though is the "that was always my plan" elements of the movie.  Dom Torretto does some hilariously silly stunts and survives when absolutely no one should have been able to survive.  On top of that, Dante gets really frustrated at Dom when Dom is successful.  I would be too.  These plans seem really hard to pull off and would be insanely expensive.  Each time that Dom gets out of these plots to kill him, Dante retorts with a variation of "That was always my plan.  You're exactly where I want you."  Nope.  Shannigans.  That dude almost always dies.  You can only plan so far ahead before we all call nonsense on the movie.  The entire third act of the movie is that by the way.   In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a movie try to lie to me straight in my face about that always being the plan.  

But it's fine.  Because team members are allowed to die in this movie, it makes the movie watchable.  The thing that I question, though, is the Rock.  There was this big public feud between Vin Diesel and the Rock.  So when the Rock showed up as the post-credits sequence, it was meant to be this moment.  But do you know what?  It all feels a little bit...staged?  I mean, was there beef beforehand?  Maybe.  But when it became a public Twitter battle, that now feels like it was made to draw attention to the movie.  

Just saying.

It's fine.  It's fine it's fine it's fine.  That's the takeaway.  Catch it at your leisure.  

Rated R primarily for language.  There's a lot of sexual references, but nothing that is overtly offensive.  Again, this is another one of those movies that has moments of people being intentionally cruel to one another.  Unlike other movies with deliberate cruelty, the movie itself is not cruel.  I honestly think that it gets the R rating for language.

DIRECTOR:  Alexander Payne

I was not ready to watch the best movie of the year when I sat down for this one. I knew it was going to be quality.  I knew it.  It looked like one of those movies from the preview.  But in a year that had Oppenheimer and its super-cinematic feel to it, it really caught me off guard that The Holdovers might be better than Oppenheimer.  I'd like to point out that, while I own Oppenheimer, I have yet to watch it.  Take this opening paragraph as something more of a speculative concept.  

I mean, the movie sold me with its production company titles.  I'm such a sucker for faux retro that it wouldn't take much to push me over into admiration of this film.  I mean, it even came down to the font on the credits.  Everything was just trying to appeal to me.  This is a guy who likes Alexander Payne, but doesn't love Alexander Payne.  I know I'm going to upset some people out there, but I did not care for Nebraska.  Some of the other movies in his ouevre are pretty forgettable for me.  (I also found out from his IMdB page that he directed some late night stuff for HBO, which I tend not to include in the Alexander Payne canon.)  But Payne's got something that was fully realized in The Holdovers that I've never really thought of before.  The closest he ever got to The Holdovers was The Descendants.  The Payne comedy / dramedy tends to be this fine line between finding the funny out of the mundane and the honest truth out of misery.  With The Descendants, Payne takes the notion of divorce and scandal and infuses it with quirky neuroses.  I think it entirely works and I don't want to diminish the success of that movie.

The thing about The Holdovers is that we have neurotic characters, but all three of these protagonist are imbued with a rich history that explains the way that they act.  These are some well-developed and --more importantly --well-loved characters.  Because I probably relate more to Mr. Hunham as an aging humanities teacher, I'm going to save him for last.  I hate to put Mary first because it feels like I'm diminishing the richness of her character, but I also am able to put my finger on what is going on with her so clearly that I can't wait to let it out.  Mary is perhaps one of the most realistic portrayals of grief that I've ever seen. It's so important that this movie is set at Christmas for all of these characters because Christmas means three different things for these characters, yet all of them are tragic.  Mary's tragedy is the most spelled out for us.  She has recently lost her child to a senseless war.  She previously lost her husband, so this is the first time that this character is alone.  One of the things that is often portrayed about grief is that it is about constant crying.  

For some people, it is absolutely that. I don't want to say that grief is one thing or another.  I think my grief is a lot like Mary's.  Mary doesn't want to be the poster child for grief. She has been through a lot and all these eyes --these White eyes --are constantly looking at her.  She was always defined by her strength, and her character has now been redefined by weakness.  There's this fine balance that Da'Vine Joy Randolph gives Mary.  Everything is about survival for this character.  She both wants the world to be normal and the world to be better. She knows that she would rather be anywhere else than at her job with these two whiny losers.  But she also knows that anywhere else would force her to stay with her thoughts.  There's an odd kind of therapy happening by coping with these two guys who are so screwed up that she can at least try to fix it.  Do I think she loves these two characters?  Yes, but...  

The "Yes, but..." is the most accurate thing I can sell this as.  She sees both of their humanities, bruises and all.  There has to be a temptation to play that character as someone who wants to actively slap both of these characters constantly.  Instead, there is almost a gratitude to be able to be a distant caregiver to both of these people.  When everyone is looking at her, it's nice to know that she has people that she can direct that energy outwards to.  If she was grieving, would she put that much investment into these two guys?  Probably not.  She would probably give a little effort, a coutesty that Lydia Crane gives.  But there wouldn't be a degree of investment.  She finds value in the fact that she is the most together of the three of them and she has no right to be the most together of the three of them.  It's a fascinating character and I absolutely adore it.  When Mary breaks down at Lydia's Christmas party, there's a heartbroken family all standing together.  They are all there to catch Mary as she falls and she wishes that they weren't there in the least. It hit me hard.

Angus Tully is really well played. My wife told me that this really was Dominic Sessa's first thing and he might be my actor of the year.  He's so convincing as this.  He nails his very specific character so well.  I kept asking, "Is he the coolest loser or the least-liked cool guy ever?"  I mean, it's Holden Caufield.  I hate that I made that comparison, but Holden Caufield and Angus Tully are fundamentally the same person.  I hate me for writing it, too.  The drop, though, for this character is absolutely perfect.  Again, I'm always going to bond with a movie that has aggressive daddy issues.  I apologize to everyone for that. It's just points in the right slot. The trailer prepped me for one movie.  Really, the Christmas party is such an important scene for the movie because it changes the dynamics of the characters so much.  But that scene, where Tully blurts out that is father is dead prepped me for one movie.  When the Boston reveal happens, I was shook.  Somehow, the movie took the grief of a dead father and made it somehow harsher.

Honestly, the sanitorium scene had me begging for one happy moment.  We all knew how that was going to shake down.  We had Angus desperate to hear a normal response for his dad.  He's setting up all of these pins for his dad to just say something healthy and normal and we knew that we weren't going to get that ending.  We knew that he was going to say something just a little bit crazy and that's what happened. Maybe this is one of those moments where Payne absolutely gets what tone he's shooting for.  We knew that he was going to say something crazy.  There's such an opening for a joke here.  After all, this is a dramedy.  But he says the most mundane insane thing in the world. (Seems paradoxical, but it's accurate.)  He complains that he thinks he's being drugged in his food.  Flat delivery.  He says it with the essence of a confidant, not of a father.  With this scene, all of those pieces fall into place. We get why Tully is booted from every school he goes to.  We get mad at Angus's family because this is a kid desperate for something to go right for him.  

That's what makes Mr. Hunham's critique of  Angus's mother and stepfather so brutal.  Everything he says is accurate.  These are people who fail to see beyond the blinders of comfort and happiness.  Listen, for the most part I believe in "Whatever makes you happy". That phrase makes me cringe real hard, despite believing a lot of that concept.  But the reason that I cringe is because of Angus's mother and stepfather.  Happiness is nice, but caring is better...

Which brings me to Hunham.  That's his entire throughline as a character.  Hunham has found comfort in his station.  He is the big fish in a small pond.  All the other fish hate this guy, but he's just being his most authentic self.  He loves things that everyone else finds tedious.  (Check.  I get that pretty hard.)  He smells like fish.  I hope I don't smell like fish, so I refuse to check that.  He's technically living the American Dream.  He found the job he is most suited for. His work became his home and he absolutely loves it. He may be lying about his own happiness.  He seems more numb to criticism than actually ignoring it.  It could explain the constant drinking that isn't resolved at the end of the movie.  But the message behind this character is that happiness is important, but caring is more important.  I told you that Christmas is so central to each of these characters because Mr. Hunham is actually a more authentic Mr. Scrooge than Scrooge is.

Hunham doesn't hate Christmas.  He has almost no opinion on Christmas.  Scrooge is almost a bit over the top for me.  I know that real Scrooges exist.  I'm not naive to think that there aren't people who value money and productivity over people.  I see the world crumbling around me, guys.  I'm just saying that Hunham is so locked into a sense of comfort that he's doing the right thing that he forgets that different people have different needs than he does.  He's not a bad guy.  As frustrating as Hunham is at the beginning of the movie, he's never actually villainous.  He has a strict moral code because he thinks that he's doing the right thing as a teacher.  But when the movie progresses, he's reminded that individuals have different needs and sometimes we need to sacrifice for others, even if we aren't required to. 

The scene of him with the parents --again! --so powerful.  Only minutes before this scene, Tully and he are discussing the value that Dalton has for Hunham.  He didn't need Harvard or any of these prestigious universities to take care of him.  He made a home in the place that made him feel most accepted.  Again, that American Dream thing is perfecdt for him.  He's getting paid to do what he loves and he's living off of that.  He's sacrificed great pay for something that makes him happy.  When he claims that it was his idea to see Angus's dad, we all knew the value of the sacrifice of that moment.  He sees that Dalton isn't really the Dalton of his childhood.  It's incredibly bittersweet because, even if he got his job back, he would only be able to see Dalton as the perversion of what it once was.  

Rated R for nudity, sex, language, violence, and death.  It's a horror movie where, intentionally, not a lot happens.  People get frustrated to death. It doesn't mean that it's boring by any stretch of the imagination.  It's actually quite the brutal movie.  Everything about the movie is just a bit more upsetting than it has to be.  It's not gory, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a bit upsetting throughout.  R.

DIRECTOR: Lorcan Finnigan

Every time I teach a film class, I have a student who tells me that I need to see a movie that I haven't heard of.  In the past, it was Perfect Blue and John Wick.  I always go into these movies with ridiculously high expectations.  I think with all three of these movies, I leave disappointed.  That's not fair. Why do I have to be a punk like that?  I have to be coloring these viewings with myself in high school.  I know that if I met my high school self today, I would find that person's favorite movies cringe.  I won't say that Vivarium is terrible.  By no means is it terrible.  It's a pretty darned good movie...that really doesn't gel with me.

I will be honest.  I have a good reason for not loving this movie.  Vivarium's biggest problem comes from its absolute lack of subtlety.  The allegory of the film, constantly (and often, literally) being screamed at us, is that the suburbs will kill you.  The biggest question I had after watching this movie was about the screenwriters.  There's not a lot out there about the makers of this movie.  Maybe if there's a commentary track, I'll check that out one day.  But I have two scenarios in my head.  I'm not sure if the writer of this movie had a family that was burning him out and he wrote a horror movie about it.  The other seems more likely and that's someone who prides himself at not being a sheep.  This is someone who lives the high life in the big city and scoffs at those people who have fallen prey to that old trap of marriage and kids.  But everything about this movie is so bitter.  There's nothing that isn't screaming that the suburbs are a way to slowly die in sadness.

There's a flaw to the entire premise though.  I know.  It's a horror movie with allegory and I should be a little patient with it.  Allegories often can't be perfect by their very nature.  One of the key elements of the movie is the notions in the movie is that Gemma continually repeats that she is not the boy's mother.  If the main characters of the movie are avatars for the screenwriter, then there is the notion that these people are somehow trapped by something that they never really wanted.  Maybe this might be one of those pro-choice allegories, but a poorly done pro-choice allegory that argues that a life of comfort is equal to death.  Are there sad things about family life?  Yes.  Do people --including myself --sometimes get depressed about having to take care of children and houses all day?  Definitely.  But the fundamental thing that is missing from this story is the reason why I do it all.  If you had to go to the suburbs and raise kids, with all of the screaming that is shown throughout the film, it's because I choose to do it.  

I get it.  There is a stigma --appropriately so --about the ability to leave all of this behind.  People shouldn't be deadbeat dads and leave their family to fend for themselves.  But everything in this movie is about how much the notion of four walls and a child are miserable.  There really isn't a moment where the film lets in that at least one of them starts to love the child.  The reason why we put up with kids screaming all day isn't so that we can one day escape.  Again, deadbeat parents can do that anytime.  But we do it because the kids bring more joy than they do misery.  They scream.  God, Vivarium got that part so right.  But the screaming is pretty minimal.  That doesn't a horror movie make.  I think a lot of this ties into the notion that Tom and Gemma don't really deserve what happens to them.

I'm going to connect this to my problem with Smile.  Tom and Gemma kinda / sorta agree to go on a tour to Yonder.  But these are fundamentally good people.  With Smile and Vivarium, you have two characters who do the right thing all the time.  With Smile, the protagonist helps the mentally ill.  She doesn't break any kind of contract.  The evil is thrust upon her.  The most evil thing that Tom and Gemma do is to walk into a real estate office.  As I write that, it might be the commentary that the filmmakers want to say.  The very notion of considering a next step might be a crime in this universe.  The frustrating thing, as a viewer, is that the characters almost never have a choice in anything that they do.  That's the premise of the film. Everything in their lives is predetermined.  There are a limited amount of choices and none of them actually are the right answer.  I've seen the stranded / imprisoned horror story and we get that the horror comes from not being able to control your situation.  It's just that Gemma and Tom really never made any kind of decision.

Every action before this moment is about how good these people are.  (I think that I'm getting more of the film the more I write about it, despite the fact that I kind of got it before?) Tom buries the baby birds pushed out of the nest by the cuckoo, foreshadowing the arrival of the Boy. I know that the movie even tells me that this is just nature, that there is no reason for these things.  But Tom does the right thing.  He buries the baby birds because it was an act of kindness.  Similarly, Gemma works with little kids as a kindergarten teacher.  Again, this is all the point.  I'm trying to argue my way out of a losing battle.  But my frustration comes from how angry the movie comes across.

Rated R because A24 movies are almost just a little too much to comfortably sit through. Most of the R rating comes from the creepiness of the dead people sprinkled throughout the film.  But there are motifs of suicide that make the death just a bit too real to really be considered fun.  There's a lot of swearing and the constant reminder that teens make bad decisions, such as sex, booze, and drugs.  It's a pretty hard R and you won't hear me trying to downplay this one.

DIRECTORS: Danny Phillipou and Michael Phillipou

Some horror movies are just a little bit mean.  A24 movies tend to be mean, so I shouldn't be shocked.  Before I lose my absolute most on-the-nose takeaway, here it is: "It's a better Flatliners."  There, that's the takeaway.  I mean, it sounds completely dismissive of both films, but that's what this movie is fundamentally, even down to the timer breaking down the time on the other side.  But as I'm saying, this is also a crueler Flatliners, which is almost a cruel movie in itself.

I mean, I really liked it. Everyone said that this one is rad and I'm just trying to watch rad movies right now.  (Sorry, The Blackening.  You are going to be surrounded by far better movies in the next month.)  Part of what makes Talk to Me almost something special (I'm still trying to wrap my head around this movie.  I finished it minutes ago and am trying to knock out a blog before it gets too late at night. Regardless, I'm supposed to be asleep right now.) is the fact that it remembers that it is being more of a movie beyond its scares.  I like that.  I like that a lot.  This is a story about grief and being a teenager.  The Phillipous have created something that is almost intentionally a little difficult to digest and I think that's what makes this movie something beyond the typical horror movie.

Talk to Me is not alone in one element of the movie.  In some of the darker horror movies I've seen, especially ones involving demons and things that only the protagonist can see, there is a precedent to have the protagonist become the villain of the piece by the end.  The thing that Talk to Me does a little bit different, which ultimately seems minor but resonates really well, is that they make Mia both likable and fundamentally flawed.  There are a lot of movies, especially in the indie circuit like Booksmart and mid90s, that remind us that teens are idiots and baseline cruel. 

Rated R for language, drug use, a horror-movie amount of violence and gore, and some racial truths that need to be talked about.  It's not the most gory movie in the world, but it is about a slasher in the woods.  I mean, if you can keep that in mind, also remind yourself that it is a comedy.  Oh, there's also an off-screen sex scene that characters talk about.  A well-deserved, but mild R.

DIRECTOR: Tim Story

C'mon, Tim Story!  I keep rooting for you and then we get movies like this.  Honestly, I'm a guy who quasi-sorta likes Tim Story movies.  But these are always movies that are increasingly difficult movies to defend.  They really aren't good.  I'm sorry.  I know.  Again, I'm always in the camp that, if you like these movies, you should continue liking these movies.  I started this whole paragraph by saying that there are Tim Story movies that I like that no one else likes.  But all that being said...c'mon.

The reason why I'm so frustrated with The Blackening is that all of the elements were there.  If I summarized this movie for you, you would think that this sounded absolutely rad.  I know that when I watched the trailer, I thought that this was going to be a pretty good time.  I mean, I knew from moment one that it wasn't going to be a Jordan Peele movie.  I also understanding that it is wildly unfair to compare any Black-led horror film to have that level of prestige cinema behind it.  But I also don't really think that The Blackening would exist if Jordan Peele wasn't out there absolutely crushing every time he gets involved in something. 

Again, let me go back to the short pitch that makes this movie sound amazing.  A group of Black friends rents a cabin in the woods to celebrate Juneteenth after not seeing each other since college.  By the end of the night, the group must survive a deadly game that is tied to their sense of racial identity and friendship.  Okay, I'm overdramatizing it for a reason.  It's because that idea is amazing and I would absolutely watch it.  But The Blackening, like many of Tim Story's films, is a movie that is so underbaked that we are left with the elements of a great film, but are given something that is borderline inedible.  Tim Story, you have a decent control of the camera.  You have a cast that is (for the most part) incredibly likable.  But then comes the thing that absolutely ruins the movie: the term "Horror-comedy."

Horror-comedies weren't really a thing for a long time.  We had the funnier Nightmare on Elm Street movies --movies I also don't like.  But those movies were well grounded in the horror genre.  They had funny parts because expectations for entertainment were aiming for the widest audiences.  But they were still fundamentally horror movies.  True horror-comedy --at least in the contemporary setting --with Shaun of the Dead.  Listen, I'm going to make a lot of comparisons with Shaun of the Dead and Jordan Peele's Get Out.  I just want to give you the heads up so you can beat me to the punch.  Shaun of the Dead was an objectively great movie filled with nuance and love.  It balanced both genres really well and redefined both genres.  It was something amazing.  But the lesson that a lot of people and studios took was that zombie-comedies were great.  We got a glut of really forgettable zombie comedies.  Some of them were better than others, but the only really memorable zombie comedy was Shaun of the Dead.  (Some of you are peeping in with Warm Bodies.  That's an odd flex. It could be good, but it isn't Shaun of the Dead.) 

The Blackening is the natural byproduct of Get Out being an amazing movie.  A social conscious Black horror movie absolutely destroyed and here's the first attempt to copy that.  But Tim Story kind of reads like all those zombie comedies we got post-Shaun.  Every joke is honest-to-goodness low-hanging fruit.  God, there wasn't a nuanced moment anywhere in this movie.  Now, given what I just said about copycats from their inspirations, I don't think that I ever expected The Blackening to ever get as good as a Jordan Peele film. The trailer alone gave me hints that this wasn't going to be as subtle or smart as any one of the Jordan Peele horror trilogy. But to quote Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion, "No!  It's just dumb!"

Part of that comes from the fact that the movie doesn't know what it wants to be.  Structurally, this seems like it is meant to be satire.  I mean, you have Peele's template, so mind as well continue a well-established tradition.  And there are a ton of movie where it almost works as a satire.  If I could cut this into a fifteen minute short (with some stuff refilmed so it would make sense), this actually might work as a short satire.  But there isn't a ton of content that Story wants to talk about with a sense of nuance.  Instead, he then pads this satire with parody.  There is so much of this movie that feels more like Scary Movie than Get Out and that's almost a crime.  I'm always in that camp that all art should be political, including parody.  But Story is afraid to dive into one tone or another.  It's way too silly to be a proper satire of Black pop culture, but it's also not silly enough to be a proper parody of the same thing either.  

The movie wants us to lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that "yeah, I guess that might happen."  That's a weird place for an audience to be in the entire time.  Mel Brooks was the king of the parody.  The fact that he has parodies that loved and respected in film history is a triumph.  The way that Brooks does that is that he lets you know that there is no limit to where things can go.  Think about the end of Blazing Saddles.  That degree of fourth wall destruction gives us a sense that we're all here for the laughs.  When we learn something about film and culture while that silliness is going on, that's a win.  Paul Verhoven's Robocop is also an example of satire that goes big, but sticks within rules to let the narrative continue being a narrative.  But The Blackening has characters acting all sorts of ways for the joke.  

I wondered why Clifton bothered me so much in this movie.  I mean, it's a specific thing that Story is commenting on.  (I have so many thoughts about Clifton as avatar, but I'd have to do some research before I could say anything confident with that.) The Clifton character isn't the problem in himself.  This specific character has been littered throughout parody films for ages.  I mean, Blankman is just Clifton.  But again, Blankman is a parody.  When Clifton is a character in a movie full of semi-realistic characters, he just stands out like a sore thumb.  We're supposed to comment on Clifton's weird behaviors, but the other characters also think that Clifton is a weird dude.  He doesn't exist in the real world for them and that's unsettling.  He's breaking the rules of the movie.  Also, his weird behavior is the product of writing and directing.  I know that Dan Harmon comments on a specific joke that he doesn't care for.  When a character is given a specific look that the rest of the characters tease, it's not really a joke because it's not like we're picking on something real.  We're calling out how silly we're being.  I hate to say it, but that's Clifton.  He's so many hats on so many hats.  

I'm a broken record, but this is a movie that needs a heavy dose of vulnerability.  There's nothing real about this movie.  The movie will often tell us that things are vulnerable and that we should care about the events, but everything is treated with the lowest stakes ever.  Structurally, we should be horrified by things happening.  Again, I'm going to back to Shaun of the Dead.  (I would use Get Out, but the body count in that is low and it is a fairly intimate film compared to the large cast of The Blackening.) Shaun and his cohorts are a little silly, but they also have their own sets of rules.  Ed is the outlandish one, but Ed's behavior has real world consequences.  People genuinely get mad at Ed's antics, all of which seem like a character that would exist in Shaun of the Dead.  So as silly as things get (the moment that most pushes it might be when the gang run into their dopplegangers for a quick joke), when characters die, there's emotional investment.  Heck, even the character we don't like, Sean's stepdad, is quite the emotional moment when he eventually turns.  That doesn't really exist in The Blackening.  I'm glad that not a lot of characters died because I don't think that there would have been many characters that I would have lamented.

Maybe King.

But we're never given these vulnerable moments with these characters.  The reason why I give the characterization of King a few props is that he gets honest with Nnamdi.  He calls Nnamdi on his crap while admitting that he's earnestly happy with his wife.  Sure, he backpedals a bit.  He does have a gun, despite claiming that he left that life behind. There's moments where he beats the crap out of the killer, which is lightly satisfying.  But the rest of the characters, even the ones that are treated with a modicum of nuance, like Allison and Lisa, are given weird character traits to make them utter goofballs.  Allison, for no reason, is given Adderol.  I don't know why Shanika has them if she doesn't know that they're not painkillers.  But, again, hat-on-a-hat.  Allison doesn't need bits.  Her character background is far more engaging than the Adderol bit.  Same thing is true about Lisa.  Lisa probably has her head on straight for a lot of this movie.  If this was a standard horror movie, my bets would be either on Lisa or Allison.  Heck, I would straight up root for a Lisa led slasher film.  But then there are these moments that are done for humor that completely remind me that I'm not supposed to care about these characters.  Yelling at Nnamdi in the vents while trying to stay silent for a killer looking for them takes me out of the movie so hard.

Maybe if the jokes were funny and original, I would also jump on board.  There were a few chuckles, to be sure.  I am sounding super-bitter right now, so I want to give credit where it is due.  I honestly don't remember which jokes got me.  But honestly, an AI could have written most of the jokes.  They're bits that we heard a million times before.  The comedy doesn't match the horror.  "It's just dumb."

I'm so disappointed.  My expectations were mild.  I expected a fun horror movie that I might forget about.  But even in the Tim Story canon, this is low.  The funny thing is that he's talking about all of the things that should be talked about in a Black genre film, but he's doing so with the subtlety and grace of a sledgehammer.  Nothing is discussed.  It's almost like he's reading a greatest hits list. The words don't match the content and that makes it forgettable.  There's almost a responsibility when a movie has so much to say to mirror it with quality.  As awful as it is, people's politics are swayed by quality.  If I quoted a line from The Blackening that was socially important, people would dismiss it, "You mean from that bad movie?"  I know, there should be no correlation between quality of a film and political ideals.  But the inverse is true.  There's all kinds of conservative crap out there that I dismiss because most of those movies are terrible.   The Blackening needs to learn from the mistakes of the people on the other side of the aisle.

Rated R for language.  It's that corporate thriller kind of swearing.  I don't know if you can make a movie R because characters are mean to each other.  It does have a lot of meanness, but the R-rating comes from that inside baseball corporate swagger.  It's a lot of the same R-rating that comes from Succession.  So if you are good with swearing, you could probably handle this movie.  R.

DIRECTOR: Matt Johnson

Bear with me.  I'm going to have a lot of false starts.  I have limited amount of things that I can think of to say about Blackberry, but they're all various facets of the same idea.  A lot of this blog is going to be written from a scared place. Not horrified.  Lord knows that I've been stumped by a lot of movies. I don't think I am stumped by this movie.  I just think I lack the right voice to write about this movie. Before I get completely flummoxed in a web of nonsequiturs and rambling, just know that I absolutely loved this movie.  I sometimes forget to make my opinion clear on things.

Adam McKay started something so incredibly specific that it could now be considered a subgenre.  Just so I can do some handholding and make my point absolutely crystal, McKay was the comedic director behind the Anchorman movies.  He's done a bunch of stuff, but Anchorman really summarizes him best.  He's an incredibly talented director who is fundamentally a guy who gets the joke. McKay, a few years ago, started making a kind of movie that is so incredibly smart and serious that it can only be viewed as kind of hilarious.  The movie that I'm going to be using as my evidence is The Big Short, but that's because that's the one that a lot of people saw.  While The Big Short had jokes, it was a deadly serious movie about a real issue stemming out of late-stage capitalism.  It wanted you to laugh, but also acknowledge that this was a movie that could not be dismissed.  To do this, the majority of the movie, despite having a cast that had comedic chops, was as serious as a heart attack.  When people hear the word "satire", they automatically put it into the three kinds of comedy (farce, satire, and parody). But a satire doesn't actually need to be funny.  It is really an emotional commentary on either a person or an event.

Yes, The Big Short was funny at times.  But the reason that it permated the cultural zeitgeist was because of how seriously the movie treated the subject matter. What Matt Johnson did with Blackberry took the swing that The Big Short did and went even more meta.  The Big Short broke the fourth wall at times, reminding you that this was a movie that was both entertaining and informative, all blanketed in heavy politics.  Blackberry, on the other hand, wants you to laugh at its very existence.  The entire movie, as gorgeous and intense as it is, almost feels like an inside joke on everyone.  It is a dare, begging its audience to do what I'm doing right now.  It is a movie made by comedians starring comedians and the most obvious comedieans never tell a joke.  Sure, there are moments that are absolutely hilarious.  Matt Johnson, who plays Doug in the movie as well, gets some of these perfect comedic gems that are objectively funny.  But when you have Glenn Howerton and Jay Baruschel doing a two-hander for most of the movie and they never even wince, there's something hilariously trollish about the whole thing. 

What is super cool about this choice is that one of two things had to happen to make this movie the way it was. The joke was always going to be "No one laugh.  The joke lies in treating it as serious as can be."  The first scenario is that Matt Johnson and the entire team behind this movie were so prescient that they actually pulled it off.  The other is almost more encouraging.  While the joke about being serious was there, they actually realized that they made an incredible corporate thriller that stands on its own two feet and doesn't really need the metacontext to make the movie work.  I mean, I'm stealing from Cinefix a bit here, which is one of the reasons I'm watching the movie right now.  They commented on Glenn Howerton's Jim as one of the most intense performances of the year and he's wearing an absurd bald cap the entire movie.  But guess what?  I really stopped seeing him as the Always Sunny guy pretty darned quick, despite the fact that both of his characters are overconfident jerks.  

I mean, we know its a joke even beyond the casting.  The fact that the movie is a tell-all about BlackBerry might be a tease to the year Titanic came out.  "You know the boat sinks in the end, right?  Spoiler alert!"  We had all of these movies about Steve Jobs and his meteoric rise to success.  But the fact that there is a movie about the number two phone in history kind of says everything that it needs to in the title.  We go in with a sense of "of course it's going to fail." 

But that joke almost makes all of these moments all the more tragic.  This is a story about two desperately different human beings.  One of these guys is the nerd.  The other is the overconfident jerk.  I tend to shy away from biopics because the biopic formula has picked the entire subgenre clean. But because this movie is a bit of a satire not only on the role of capitalism on society, but also on the corporate thriller, these archetypes becomes somehow fresh again. Mike is an earnestly sympathetic character.  I don't know if this was a detail from the book that the movie was based on, but there's this really interesting little moment that the character gets.  There's this humbing neurosis that Mike has.  He hears white noise in poorly made objects.  It's this thing that is a constant reminder of the character and his need to do things well.  There's nothing funny about it.  As much as Matt Johnson as Doug is wearing a headband and pulling out Ninja Turtles wallets, Mike is there, fixing the lazy mistakes that a Chinese factory put into an American product.  That's how the movie starts.  That's how the movie ends.  

See, if I was to completely dismiss this movie as simply a meta joke, I couldn't say that was fair.  Those moments of Mike taking apart technology is amazing character development.  This is a 3D character existing when he's supposed to be a famous actor in a wig.  This isn't the only moment. This is a movie that escapes the trappings that it hoists on itself.  Jim, a dirtbag through and through in this movie, has these moments of true disappointment.  His little petty emotional war with the CEO of Palm Pilot is so revealing about the values of this characters.  He's a guy who has burned every bridge he's ever crossed and it becomes not if he can redeem himself, but more a matter of how much can this man sink.  

The movie even brought out the worst in me.  Listen, I'm ready to throw Capitalism in the trash.  I'm in that camp now.  It's the worst and these movies remind me about how gross things get out there in the corporate world.  That being said, like Glengarry, Glen Ross, the very thing that the screenwriters are warning me about are the things that I find just a little sexy when presented this way.  I would hate every moment of being on the ground floor of BlackBerry. There's this running gag that the engineers only like Movie Nights.  (Note: Doug promised them the Letterboxed VHS of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Last time I checked, that was pan-and-scan.  Just don't say it if you can't show the letterboxed version.)  When Michael Ironside's Charles Purdy comes in with a foreboding warning from another engineer, it's sad when the team has to be bummed to work on these phones silently and intensely.  But I was also thinking that there was no way that these phones were going to be successful without people like Charles Purdy.  Heck, I was getting darned frustrated with them because of their lackadaisical whimsy. They knew that Mike wasn't going to yell at them so they didn't try hard.

Do you know what button was hit really hard with this movie?  I miss Halt and Catch Fire.  This was the same show.  If I remember correctly, there might have even been a Canadian connection as well.  But it is fundamentally the same story.  These were characters who were motivated to change the world through technology and were ultimately doomed to be second place in the grand scheme of things.  But I like that story.  I like it a lot.  Man, I wish I hadn't thought of that Halt and Catch Fire thing right now because it makes BlackBerry just a little less original as a concept.  But I also know that Halt and Catch Fire took multiple seasons to get across what BlackBerry does in a fairly short stretch.

This movie has somehow aggressively entered my orbit this week.  Everyone I know is talking about it.  Cinefix talked about it.  I keep seeing ads for it.  Then the library had it on Lucky Day?  I mean, it was bound to be seen.  I'm also really glad that I'm writing about this before I write about The Blackening, which is probably going to be a tomorrow thing.  But right now, I'm pretty happy with this one.

TV-MA.  One of the articles about this movie said that it was so bleak that it was considered an anti-Christmas movie.  Yeah, it gets pretty rough, especially by the end.  This is one of the movies that is aimed at shock.  It does get pretty dark by the end, especially involving death and rape.  Listen, it's not a competition.  If you are watching to watch something dark, it gets there.  Have you seen darker?  Maybe, but that's not really the point of this section.  It's dark and unsettling.  TV-MA.

DIRECTOR:  Liza Williams

Out of all of the movies that I missed out on, I didn't think I'd be rushing over to watch Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare​.  I mean, there are so many great movies.   Heck, we're in the predictive Oscar season.  I know that Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare is probably not going to be on that list. Still, I decided to watch it.  Do you know why?  I feel like dumping some really intense dramas that you need to pay attention to on my wife right now wouldn't be fair.  So we watched something that is short and true crime.  That's the mood we were in and we basically got what we were looking for.

I have some strong takeaways from Hell Camp that may not fill a whole blog.  If I ramble and get long-winded, I'll be very impressed because I don't know where I'm going to go after I get my major claims out right now.  This movie comes down hard on the wilderness survival therapy camp for troubled youths. No problem there.  It's low hanging fruit.  Spoiler alert:  A kid dies and two people get sexually assaulted.  The movie is an hour-and-a-half.  About an hour-and-twenty minutes are anti-wilderness therapy camps, especially the ones created or run by Steve Cartisano.   That's great.  The weird part is the ten minutes of the movie that is not.  About ten minutes of this movie are talking about how these therapy camps saved a lot of kids.  Maybe not "a lot a lot", but more than you would think.  I should be okay with that.  After all, this is a documentary, although presenting a strong bias and agenda, that is shooting for objectivity.  But I also wonder, "Why?"

Part of me really wanted there to be a script of text claiming that many people were grateful for these camps and that they turned their lives around.  I'm using myself as the audience for this next section by the way.  As negative as these therapy camps come across in the course of the movie, I don't deny that I was somewhat influenced by the success stories that came from these camps.  I've always been a bit of a wimp.  I never really had my rebellious streak.  I never would have needed one of these therapy camps.  That being said, I also have five kids.  What if some or all of them become turds?  What if I was at the end of my rope and I needed something to get my kid back?  I mean, I wouldn't do this.  I know that.  But I also can completely sympathize with the parents in this documentary.  Like, I don't want to.  And the movie does a good job to help me hate some parents.  Like, I really hate the old guy who said that he should have sent his son to that camp for his entire life.  I want to hate some of these parents.  

Williams does an admirable job of reminding me that I'm watching from a place of hindsight.  Cartisano designed all of these advertisements to make it look like this was a safe endeavor.  It looked professional and well-researched when none of that was really true.  For all of that, I keep going back to that clip from Donahue.  (That was Donahue, right?) Daytime talk shows tend to show some of the worst of humanity.  I know.  That's me being incredibly judgy.  But I embrace my judginess.  It's not very shocking that Boomers tend to be more conservative based on what we grew up with.  There's this sequence on Donahue where Cartisano is confronted with some of the problems that come with wilderness therapy.  But instantaneously, one of the ladies in the audiences talk about how today's youth don't listen and need this kind of discipline to adjust to the morality of the day.  See, this is where I lose my mind.  This is one of those docs that remind us of the dangers that Ronald Reagan brought into the home.  There was this misconception that teens became evil in the '80s and '90s.  Really, Boomers were some of the roughest teenagers in all of history.  Think of the Rebel without a Cause kind of violence.  There were straight up epidemics of teen violence and crime.  Government agencies formed JD (Juvenile Delinquent) squads to crack down on teen crime.   But apparently, everyone after this era was the real problems.  We went from regular knife fights to kids having problems and everything is always on the younger generation.

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