PG-13 mostly for a bunch of slightly gory jump scares.  There are some sexual references and jokes, but the actual on-screen nonsense is pretty darned mild.  The biggest problem with family friendliness is the Reavers, who are cannibals who rape their victims before they eat them alive.  That's a pretty hard sell for family movie night.  Also, the characters are technically bad guys who resort to violence and killing fairly easily.   Still, it doesn't really seem all that bad.  Except for the fact that Joss Whedon made it.

DIRECTOR:  Joss Whedon

I know!  Writing about Serenity in the middle of Oscar season? Why am I actively trying to overwhelm myself?  Honestly, there's a lot here to talk about.  I was part of the tribe.  To a certain extent, I can't deny that part of me is still in the tribe.  I often think about if I ran into Nathan Fillion on the street, I know that I would be prepped to nod and simply say "Cap'n".  That's the code, guys.  That's the code.  I was obsessed with Joss Whedon in college.  Could not get enough of the guy.  But then he went and lived a terrible life that still confuses me to this day.  Between Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, I don't think that the world has good people in it.  It didn't help that the article that was meant to be an apology was the biggest non-apology that I ever read.  I just Googled what he's up to today and I haven't seen anything since 2021.  So there's that.

The weird thing is that I really want my daughter to get into Firefly.  I think that she would absolutely dig it.  There was a time that I could quote Serenity front-to-back. I was actually surprised how many of the lines I had at the ready while watching it. Serenity is an incredible film that exists beyond any sense of reason.  Honestly, this movie is a miracle.  Maybe, in 2025, could I see a film, big-budget closer to a one season show appear on a niche streaming service.  After all, I just watched Section 31, and that's an attempt to do what Serenity did right.  But man alive, I do have a difficult time distancing the art from the artist.  Every time I giggled at something in this movie, I couldn't stop thinking about the accusations against Whedon.  My daughter could get into Firefly, but I also don't want her to have a false notion of who made the thing that I love so much.  (On a similar note, I've been constantly Googling Hudson Thames in hopes that he issues an apology for his "stupid woke" comments so I can watch Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.) 

But in the times that I wasn't thinking about Whedon, I forgot how good of a rebellion movie that Serenity really is.  I wasn't political last time that I watched these movies.  Since then, I've been aggressively political.  It's not like I've been hiding it on this blog.  I have been vocal about this stupid regime for a while.  Being frustrated with the current administration is emotionally debilitating.  But I'll tell you.  A good rebellion movie?  A movie where a scrappy ragtag group sticks it to the man?  That is something I desperately needed it.  There's a Firefly quote that I used as a meme at the results of the election.  Mal is saying something along the lines of "May have been on the losing side.  Still not convinced it was the wrong one." That's the entire foundation of this movie and it is great.  Sure, Mal and his group are morally dubious.  There's a scene early on in the film when a job their on goes south when a ship of Reavers attacks the town.  The guy who risked his life for the bank tries getting a ride on the mule when Mal shoots him.  He justifies it as a mercy, knowing that the Reavers would put him through hell. But Zoe calls him out on that moment, stating that he was doing it to keep his money.  Mal isn't exactly the moral exemplar when it is a normal day.  

But what is interesting about the morality of Malcolm Reynolds is not only does he have a code, but that code is actually running the show in a lot of the things he does.  Again, not the best morally from day-to-day.  But even Mal would acknowledge that.  He is an incredibly guarded man.  When he was an idealist, fighting against the Republic during the Alliance / Independents War, he was vulnerable.  Every choice he made was based in morality.  But instead, we watch a good man try to stay closed off from compliance, which has slowly pushed him into a place that he never thought he would be in.  Mal, as much as he labels himself a brigand (heh), walks a tightrope that he never meant.  He claims that he is just trying to survive, but he's the ultimate member of Antifa.  He knows that living by the Alliance's code implies complicity in what they are doing.  The only way to still fight the battle that the Browncoats fought, he has to take less-than-moral jobs.  

And the way that he executes this rebellion demonstrates that he, at his core, is moral. Yes, he acts callous, often cracking wise about things that people feel quite deeply.  But he's hesitant to let innocent people, regardless of politics, feel pain.  Yeah, he'll shoot The Operative after he admits to being unarmed.  But that's because The Operative is a fascist who could kill him given another opportunity.  But look at the bank guard.  The bank guard, Mal acknowledges, is just a guy doing a job.  He talks through the many ways that he can harm the guard in a way that lets him keep his position at the bank.  Similarly, when the Reavers attack the town, his first concern isn't to get his money and run.   He wants to get everyone down into the vault and ensure their safety to the best of his ability.  Yes, it's wrong that he shoots the guy.  But he's also the guy who is balancing so many different lives that he is often put in a place where he has to make the wrong choice.

I don't deny that Serenity is a primarily a plot driven movie. I don't think that Whedon (ick.  Every time that I write his name...) is a guy who is going to let an aspect of his storytelling suffer to something else, but it is a plot movie.  It is wrapping up the threads that the television show couldn't get to.  I don't deny that.  But the character drive of the movie is Mal having to come to grips with the persona he adopts --Malcolm Reynolds, clever outlaw --with the persona that is his firmware --Mal, the man who cares for the underdog.  When River goes all wonky when she sees the Oaty Bar commercial (I used to have a shirt with the Fruity Oaty Bar!), in his heart he knows that River is the victim of a totalitarian regime.  Every beat, he's reminded of the fact that he fought for all of this to be avoided.  He lost people because he knew that if these people were given a modicum of power, that it would lead to deaths.  (Note: On a completely unrelated note, 10,000 refugees were sent home despite being vetted by the United States because Donald Trump doesn't like anyone who isn't white.  There is a very good chance that many to most of them might be dead now.) The brigand cares only for his crew and keeping his boat flying.  But Mal the ally sees this girl who had her life stripped away from her and knows that no one else will care for her if he doesn't.

It's weird that Whedon was such a staunch atheist.  It's something that I'm always unpacking because he made his thoughts on God very clear. He often spoke about how absurd faith was, yet the goal that Mal is constantly chasing is belief.  I do love what Shepherd Book tells him in this one.  "When I speak of belief, why do you think I'm talking about God?"  It is something that Mal used to be a devout man of faith.  As much as Book says that Mal needs to embrace something larger than himself, I can't divorce the notion that God is part of that.  After all, if Mal --since the Battle of Serenity Valley --has been running from God; it feels only right that he somehow returns to God, even if that God looks somewhat different.  

This is the movie that introduced me to Chiwetel Ejiofor.  His villain might be the perfect villain.  Listen, in no way am I objective when it comes to this movie.  I simply adore it.  This was a lovely time and I could watch this movie over and over without really losing anything.  But Ejiofor made a villain here that, while following an archetype that we've seen before, is something that is truly scary.  If I have to be critical, it's absurd that Mal can hold himself on his own in the final act with this guy.  The first time that he confronts The Operative, Mal can't land a hit on him.  The second time, while Mal gets wrecked, he does get some pretty good blows in there.  I mean, sure, Mal wins because he embraces that Han Soloness that I've learned to love in Firefly.  Mal wins because he doesn't quite play by the rules ever and we're supposed to applaud that.  (I absolutely do.  Oh man, Mal breaking the rules of the fight is the best.) But the class and sophistication that The Operative plays his part is so good.  And the fact that Whedon ties The Operative's faith to Mal is perfect.  Yeah, with The Operative as juxtaposition to Mal, Whedon's frustration with religion is present.  The Operative is perhaps the most self-aware villain ever.  He knows that his faith is problematic, but necessary.  He calls himself a monster, but a crucial monster so that society can continue the way it does.  He's so screwy that, oddly enough, it makes sense that The Operative and Mal have a very different relationship after the signal is sent out.  Mal still hates The Operative at the end, but he understand that The Operative's code doesn't need Mal dead.  The Operative is so wired to a belief system that he doesn't allow for random violence.  It's just a heck of a character to unpack.  He's the zealot who comes across almost as the Opus Dei bad guy from The Da Vinci Code, only not terrible.

But the biggest thing, for me, is that I can't introduce anyone to Serenity.  This is not a post-Joss Whedon thing either.  I feel like I could sit down and introduce someone to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  They might not like it because it's probably dated and I have a hard time selling people on Star Trek that aren't my older kids.  But you could watch Wrath of Khan without having seen The Original Series.  While Whedon throws a lot of exposition in the first few minutes of the movie, I feel like I would have to explain so much to a newcomer to the movie that it would only make the movie more annoying.  I want everyone to watch this movie because I simply adore it.  But I also know that it is going to be something lost to such a small time in history.  It is an amazing rebellion movie, but who am I going to sell it to?

Rated PG-13 for the most family friendly cursing and family family crude references you can make while still appearing to be edgy.  The bigger red flag is the racism experienced throughout, coupled with the fact that this is a war film, so there's going to be death.  The Six Triple Eight might be the most smoothed out, palatable version of a heavy event imaginable because it's meant to appeal to Hallmark channel audiences while still carrying a message.

DIRECTOR: Tyler Perry

It's D.E.A.R. Day (Drop Everything and Read Day) at work today because it's Catholic Schools' Week.  I'm making the most out of that and trying to knock out a lot of a novel today.  But I also need to squeeze this guy in so I don't fall behind on the ol' Oscar nominations list.  And I have to be honest with you.  The "Best Original Song" category is starting to kill me a bit.  There are exceptions, like Flamin' Hot, which is a movie that only my wife and I enjoyed.

Do you understand how disappointing of an experience The Six Triple Eight was?  For years, YEARS!, I've wanted to get into Tyler Perry movies.  I mean, there was nothing stopping me.  These movies were easily accessible to me.  I watch enough movies that not one would bat an eye that I picked up a new subproject in watching Tyler Perry movies.  But the trailers looked so bad.  There was actually this weird line where I knew that I might hate watch them and I didn't want to do that.  Hate watching something is the worst.  People should try new things, but want to like them.  At one point --and this is a bit too real --I thought I might be trying to show off how antiracist I was by proclaiming that I watched Tyler Perry movies.  That's not a good look.  We should all be antiracists.  I don't know if proclaiming "I watch Tyler Perry movies" is the answer to society's call.  I'm starting a list of directors that I like as people, but I don't necessarily like as directors.  Tyler Perry might now be on that list.  I've listened to Tyler Perry talk about lots of subjects and I find him fascinating.  He's great when he appears in other people's works. But an actual Tyler Perry movie, based on The Six Triple Eight is a bad time.

And I totally understand why.  Let's talk about content first because this is the least of the problem with this movie. Does the story of the real 6888 need to be told?  Oh my goodness, yes.  It is a fascinating part of history and, in this era of whitewashing history to exclude Black contributions to the great moments in textbooks, the 6888 story needed to be told.  But the issue with this (and this is --again --not the root problem) is that it is a difficult story to tell.  These are the Black women who risked their lives to deliver mail when no one else could do it.  Very cool.  That story, unfortunately, does not lend itself to a visual medium.  It's hard to visually show how difficult it is to sort mail and risk life and limb to get those letters out there.  So there's a lot of talking.  There's a lot of shots of piles of mail.  That, in terms of making an engaging war movie, isn't very impressive.  There's a lot of speech making and marching.  That's good set dressing.  That is not a film. 

The bigger problem (and I am taking a huge swing here!) is Tyler Perry himself.  I've heard the criticisms of Tyler Perry and now that I've seen what one of his movies looks like, I get it.  Tyler Perry --while he's an artist, which is a concept that I refuse to ignore --is a financial guy first and an artist second.  There's a reason for this.  He's a guy who knows that Black art tends to get relegated to a lower tier of studio involvement.  In a similar way that kids' movies tend to have one film at the theater at a time, movies starring people of color seems to go to the theater to almost meet a quota.  Perry makes movies to get Black voices out there in greater numbers.  But as such, he runs his studio like a business.  As a business, there are so many choices that he makes that absolutely ruin a movie.  If I'm using The Six Triple Eight as my only example, the movie suffers from budget and tonal issues.  If Perry is a businessman first, making things out of Tyler Perry Studios, he knows that he has to squeeze as much movie out of so few dollars and that's going to hurt his final product.  Okay.  That's the easy read.  The movie just looks cheap.  Digital fire.  Crappy logos and fonts.  It looks like it was made in iMovie at times.  Just a whole bunch of cost cutting methods, especially for a movie that is meant to look epic scale, hurts the product overall.

But the bigger issue is that Perry wants as many eyes on this movie as possible.  One of the things we have to understand that for every Deadpool and Wolverine, that gets all the money, there are a million other great R-rated movies that don't get a ton of cash to them.  The R-rating tends to hurt movies way more often than it helps them.  By that logic and the data, the more family friendly a movie is, the more money it will make.  Tyler Perry is no dummy.  He knows that he has a movie to make that has an important message in an era where people are skittish to admit that they're progressive.  If anything, they want to go back to an era where they think that they're not racist and the message isn't condemning.  To get that movie seen by as many people as possible, you have to make the racists comically racist.  You have to make people of color fun and unproblematic.  It all feels unreal.  

Like, the movie isn't good.  I will admit that the quality of the latter half of the film is better than the first half.  The movie starts off with this sequence that shows that it is wartime.  There's a downed plane that's on fire and the planed hasn't been downed nor is it on fire.  It just looks like a set piece with digital fire around it.  And the entire first half of the movie has this weird, Pleasantville-y vibe to the whole thing.  Do you know what it really comes across as?  This movie feels wildly under researched.  It is more about striking the World War II tone without any of the reality of World War II.  The research that went into this movie didn't come from historical documents.  They came from other inspirational World War II movies.  As such, it feels like a photocopy of a photocopy.  Let's use a functional inspirational World War II movie. While I don't love Unbroken as a movie, I do acknowledge that, as a film, it mostly is serviceable.  I think the book is far more interesting than the movie is, but that's a different blog that I would rather not write.  This seems like someone was just copying the aesthetic of that movie without justifying any of it.

It also hurts that none of the dialogue feels real, nor do the relationships.  When there isn't a budget to show the horrors of war, a lot of the weight is put on character dynamics.  The pivotal relationship in the movie is between Lena and Abram.  Just to catch you up, Lena, a Black woman, is in love with Abram, a Jewish boy who dies at war.  Of course, during this time, few people support such a relationship.  But Abram dies in the first few minutes of the movie.  As a device to show how Lena struggles, she often "sees" Abram in stressful situations, causing her to collapse.  It's that weird fine line between "Is she literally seeing a ghost?" or is she just reminded of Abram.  It's done poorly and I was trying to figure out why.  The real reason is that there is no chemistry at all between these two people.  I'm so sorry to Gregg Sulkin, who I enjoyed quite a bit on Runaways, but a lot of that comes from your performance.  I honestly don't believe it's your fault.  Most of Lena and Abram's relationship is done in shorthand.  They have these over the top moments that almost point to "Look, we're in love" without ever really being in love.  If anything, Abrams comes across as not a person but a fountain of grand gestures.  There's nothing there.

Similarly, the conflict between Lena and Major Adams doesn't make any sense whatsoever.  I get the idea of the Major being hard on Lena for being a weak recruit, but this divide between the two characters feels largely manufactured without anything to justify it.  It comes across as Major Adams picking on Lena because she's bored, not because she is pushing her because she's capable.  This is Lena's story.  While the overall takeaway is that the 6888th Battalion would be the soldiers who got the mail working during World War II, the protagonist is Lena.  We have to look at the story from Lena's perspective.  Her major external conflict is to get Major Adams off her back while her internal conflict is to find a way to cope with the death of her love (who, again, has no chemistry with her).  But there is no gauntlet that the two go from.  You have these two polarized character who have to somehow break before the conflict resolves.  Instead, we don't really have this.  They just have a chat and the two become best friends.  That's not midway through the movie.  That's the climax.  No stress.  Just mutual admiration that is borderline a misunderstanding of intention.  I don't care for that.  

There are too many good actors in this movie for it to be the way it is. Golly, I feel for Dean Norris.  I can just imagine that Tyler Perry kept saying, "Go bigger."  "Give me more."  It's really rough.  Like, the character's level of bigotry is so hilarious that even the most racist jerk would be like, "I'm not racist because I'm not that guy."  It's such an archetype.  Listen, call out racism.  Absolutely.  But make it so we get an image of what racism reads like.  It feels like a cartoon in this movie and that's probably not helping anyone.  This movie is catnip for old ladies. It was tough getting through.

PG-13 for a lot of punchy-punchy violence.  There are some people who die.  Some of them die in kinda sorta sci-fi gross ways.  It isn't exactly explicit, which is good.  But considering that Section 31 is the product of quasi-R-rated Star Trek: Discovery, the movie is pretty tame.  I kind of wish that my oldest watched it with me, but she said that she wanted to catch up.  That's a bummer, because she's not watching R-rated Star Trek any time soon.  There's also a couple of sexual reference.  There's a gag where a fight bursts in on a couple lovemaking, but it is an extremely tame joke.  There's also some language.

DIRECTOR:  Olatunde Osunsanmi

I know!  I'm knocking them all out in one night.  My wife has been incredibly distracted and there's been this push to take advantage of her distraction by killing as many of my blogs in one night.  It probably makes for an extremely fried writer.  But what can I say? I love not having to do these tomorrow.  Unless, of course, we get through another movie tonight...

...which we probably will.

The critics have spoken about this movie.  People hate it.  Yeah, they hate it.  Do I hate it?  No.  Is it incredibly forgettable?  Yeah, that is one that I can sit by.  I'm one of those fans who thinks that there is no bad Star Trek.  There's good and better Star Trek.  Section 31 is fine.  I'm probably going to spend a lot of time simultaneously griping and defending why this movie is fine.  It does commit a couple of sins that Star Trek fans should not settle for.  But in terms of being the abysmal atrocity that people have been making it out to be?  It isn't that.  It is a perfectly fine sci-fi action movie that lives in the Star Trek universe.  But the frustration with the film isn't that it isn't a good movie (It's probably not that either.)  The problem is that it isn't really a good Star Trek movie.

Some of the problems come from the fact that nu-Trek has had a hard time finding its audience.  I adore nu-Trek.  I am living in a Star Trek renaissance.  The reason why I have Paramount+ is almost exclusively for the Star Trek.  It could be called "Star Trek+" and I would be paying unfathomable amounts of money to get me more Trek.  Be aware, I may not be the most objective source for defending a Section 31 film.  Section 31 is the worst impulses of nu-Trek.  It's still something I would watch (and potentially watch again if anyone said that they wanted to watch it with me!), but I have to admit that it falls into some of the trappings that the Paramount+ era kind of falls into.  A lot of it comes from the aftermath of the Kelvinverse Star Trek.  That's the Star Trek franchise that started in 2009.  There's a lot of names that appear in both the Kelvinverse movies and in the Paramount stuff, so let's chalk up tonal similarities to that.  Paramount and Kelvinverse Trek is far more adventure and action that the original shows tended to steer away from, shy of season finales and one-offs.  It was more about exploring moral issues while stressing that humanity had the potential to do phenomenal things as long as they stayed open-minded.  It is why I love Trek.  I'm not saying that the nu-Trek avoids that.  In fact, some of those philosophies (minus the action, which it clearly embraces) can be sledgehammers from time-to-time.  (I don't hate the sledgehammers, though, if I'm being honest.  Some of the fans need to get clobbered over the heads with these messages.) 

But the concept of Section 31 always sat at odds with me.  It seemed like the most anti-Roddenberry concept in Star Trek.  For those who aren't the most Trekkie out there, Section 31 was introduced on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  The idea behind Section 31 was that they were the branch of Starfleet who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty.  They did the black ops work so that humanity had the moral foundation to explore the galaxy with their heads held high.  That kind of bummed me out.  Roddenberry's argument seemed to fall apart with that logic.  Roddenberry always believed that man, when he moved past war and capitalism, (while embracing diversity!) was capable of being an inspiration for the universe.  But if Section 31 existed, there had to be a failure in there somewhere.  As a commentary on America as the City on a Hill, it worked really well.  But if Star Trek was meant to be the one science fiction show that had hope for humanity to get better, Section 31 as a concept was a bummer.  

So announcing a Section 31 television show that would become a movie was the least exciting announcement for me.  I don't want Section 31.  I want Section 31 to be the bad guy that Starfleet has to shut down.  This is almost the crux of why I don't think that Section 31 is necessarily a great Star Trek movie as opposed to a watchable science fiction movie.  My takeaway from this movie is that it is a futuristic sci-fi Mission: Impossible.  The movie is comprised of a team of specialized secret agents and there's a mole taking them out from the inside?  They tell some jokes.  They do some dark stuff?  That's sci-fi Mission: Impossible, another Paramount franchise.  And do you know what?  I like Mission: Impossible.

I shouldn't dislike the notion of a section of Star Trek being Section 31.  After all, I have been the one fan of what Disney+ has been doing with offering a variety of Star Wars offerings.  I like the idea that we can distance ourselves from the Skywalkers with Star Wars.  But Section 31 feels barely Star Trek. There are a couple of nods to the greater Star Trek universe.  Rachel Garrett will eventually become the captain of the doomed Enterprise-C.  There's a laughing Vulcan.  There's even that race of people who are split in half when it comes to being monochromatic.  That's fun.  But the only thing that is crucial to the plot that makes this a Star Trek story is the Mirror Universe.  

Do you know what?  The Mirror Universe hasn't been ruined for me.  Yeah, they keep mentioning the Mirror Universe.  I get why.  They got Michelle Yeoh to be a recurring character from the Mirror Universe. If I was in charge of Star Trek and I got Michelle Yeoh to play in my pond, I would make her character more important as well.  And do you know what?  My favorite stuff out of Star Trek: Section 31 is the Terran Empire stuff that the Mirror Universe offers.  So that's not a loss for me.

The stuff that almost doesn't work for me is the aggressive three-act structure.  As I mentioned, Section 31 was initially sold as a television show.  My guess based on what I saw here was that it was meant to be a limited series with few episodes.  The movie is an hour-and-a-half and there is a very clear three act structure.  The first act is the recruitment of Phillipa Georgiou; the second act is Among Us; the third act is the showdown with the bad guy.  It's very clear.  But it is a movie that never quite makes the movie scope and it's a TV show that never really lets us bond with a character that we're supposed to care about.  Honestly, I was in the second act looking at the timecode and all I can think of "this movie needs to do something big to justify its movieness."  While the third act kind of delivers on that, it seems like the film was intentionally keeping them on a desolated planet because there wasn't much story that would ever justify leaving this place for the grander scope of a spy-fi movie.

I hate to say it, I would have preferred this as a show.  The thing is, it would have been a show that everyone would have hated even more than the movie.  The movie's blessing, for the greater nerd community, is that it is easily forgotten.  It's a side-story that doesn't really affect much of the main Star Trek canon with things that are barely Star Trek.  But the show would have done one thing: it might have made us care about San.   The fulcrum of the movie needs us to not only care about San, but also be hurt by his reasonings to destroy the universe.  Neither of those is really accomplished because so much of the story is purged for the sake of making a 90 minute movie.  Golly, this movie actually makes me want to turn my back on my 90 minute rule, which I still stand as the perfect length for most movies.  

My final gripe comes from the notion of Fuzz.  I don't hate Fuzz.  I'm very cool with slightly silly Star Trek.  But the movie offers something cool that never really pays off.  Just to spoil it, Fuzz is a microbe who is sentient and wants to kill us all.  I like that.  To do that, he inhabits a robot body that is a member of the team.  The robot body...is a Vulcan.  Now, the microbe comes across as an Irish psychopath.  It's fun.  But out of all the bodies in the universe and the species he could be, he chooses to be the one who wouldn't act like an Irish psychopath.  I thought that there was going to be some kind of Vulcan payoff.  Maybe he could act like a stoic Vulcan in public, only to become a loudmouth braggadocio when the spotlight wasn't on him?  I don't know.  Also, the guy who looks like a Borg can't be in Star Trek because...he looks like a Borg without being a Borg.

But in terms of what does work is that it is super fun.  My friends tend not to care for Kelvinverse Star Trek.  I get that.  The Kelvinverse isn't my favorite Star Trek, but I also believe that to be true for all of the Star Trek movies, with maybe the exception of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.   These are movies that are meant to be fun for the general audience.  The goal of Section 31 isn't to make you think.  There's a lot of Star Trek out there that is meant to make you think.  But sometimes, Star Trek is allowed to be fun action.  While I wish that Section 31 got me thinking, I can deal with some good old fashioned dumb fun.  If you watch it for fun, you'll have a good time.  If you watch it for pushing the boundaries to the Final Frontier, it offers none of that.

Unrated, but this is a movie about the fallout of rape.  It was Japan's experience with the #metoo movement.  As such, the movie gets graphic.  But even more than the graphic nature of the crime, the movie is much more about despair, leading to an eventual suicide attempt.  There is some language and a lot of it is about disparaging the victim of rape.  It's a pretty bleak movie, even though you don't see anything that is visually upsetting.

DIRECTOR: Shiori Ito

I'm already fried and I've only written one blog.  I'm one-third of the way through my blog catch up and I don't even know if I can get through this one.  The bigger problem is that I often really struggle writing about documentaries, especially the ones that have a stronger political stance.  It's not that I don't love political documentaries.  Quite the opposite.  I love when documentaries --and art in general --has a strong political stance.  It's just that it is hard to talk about the movie as opposed to the issue.  So if I veer way into just talking about rape culture instead of looking at Ito's story, I apologize.

My biggest warning for people considering this movie --and this sounds monstrous --is that you have to be pretty caffeinated.  It really is a gut-wrenching tale.  But I'm 41 and I try squeezing life out of each moment.  By the time that the kids were in bed (including my oldest who loves staying up way too late), I was already exhausted.  There were times that I drifted off for half a second.  A lot of that is me.  But a little bit is on the movie.  It's one of those documentaries that might be close to an authentic documentary.  Sure, the subject of the movie is also the director.  I really don't want to focus on that because I absolutely believe everything that Ito presents here.  In general, kids, you should believe women.  I'm more talking about the fact that Ito is in the trenches for this documentary.  She's dealing with criminal charges, civil court, writing a book, and filming a documentary.  She has no idea how any of this is going to pan out, which makes the documentary fascinating.   It's just that, when it comes to Sleepy Time Tim, there's a lot of scenes where Ito takes a phone call or is in the car, simply reiterating who she is going to meet. It's a documentary where there's nothing really to manipulate.  There's a lot of sad and quiet scenes and I feel really bad for nodding off from time-to-time.  It's not a bad doc, but it almost is a podcast more than it is a movie because there isn't anything all that visual.

Where Ito succeeds is putting Japan in a context for the Western world when it comes to how women are treated. Japan is a bit of an enigma.  I'll say that this most recent election kind of makes the entire world a crap shoot for what morality might be.  Japan has always existed in a paradoxical state from an American perspective.  Japan, on the grand scale of history, has defined itself from an isolationist perspective.  It's only modern history that Japan embraced modernism and put itself under the global microscope.  From what I see, I see a place that has a rich history coupled with insanely fast moving modern innovation.  But Ito points out kind of the fallout from something like that.  One of the theses of Black Box Diaries is pointing out how incredibly attached to elements of the past the Japanese are, especially when it comes to rape statutes or really any laws that should be implemented when it comes to the greater protection of women.  There's a ton to glean here, but the crux of the movie is the fact that these are out of date ideas based on the idea that women are somehow an inferior gender.

Now, the kneejerk reaction is to say, "Man, Japan is really backwards."  I don't disagree.  Ito is laying out the message that Japan needs to catch up to the rest of the world.  And I know I'm White Knighting a bit here, but it isn't much of a stretch to say that the events of Black Box Diaries are a universal problem.  Maybe the law is written differently, but some of the most horrifying things that happen in the movie would be endemic to the United States as well.  One of the key motifs that the film keeps returning to is the notion that, as a victim, Ito is criticized for speaking out about her own abuse.  She gets emails and the worst part is that these emails come primarily from women.  (And here's where I abandon any attempt to analyze the movie and simply talk about my own political thoughts.) The recent election in the United States was disheartening simply due to the fact that a lot of women voted against their self-interests.  I get the Pro-Life movement and I am even invested in that to a certain extent.  But a lot of the most vocal trolls of progressive politics came from women (with the exception of Black women) saying disparaging things about what could be boiled down to any kind of feminism.  The specific brand of vitriol that the email that Ito received came in that flavor.  A lot of it was "How could Ito be profiting over this man's sadness?"  There's the weirdest double standard that for some reason is contagious because we see it quite a bit.  My best theory is that it is both an attempt to "be one of the good ones" because women criticizing women shows that women could be whatever they want and a desperate attempt to hold onto an era that never really existed.

I'm going to throw out a theory that makes the movie even grosser.  I don't love it.  I'm not an expert.  I can only speak to what I thought about while watching a movie about a real woman going through a real issue with real people.  One of the people in Black Box Diaries was Investigator A.  (Note:  I'm really confused how the Japanese audio handled the name "Investigator A".  Like, third parties called this guy "Investigator A" according to the subtitles of this film and that's weird to me.)  Investigator A is incredibly frustrating.  I don't know if Ito wants us to dislike Investigator A because that narrative goes against what she says.  Investigator A is initially quite brusque with Ito.  He dismisses all of the things she says, claiming she can't prove anything.  Part of it can be written off as an example of why it is incredibly hard to make sexual allegations against someone with a lot of power.  Sure.  But then he starts warming up to her.  Ito claims that he wants to do the right thing and I'd love to live in a world where that is true.  But the more I see of Investigator A, the more inappropriate I see his behavior.  He seems to be in love with Ito.  Ito gets excited for each next meeting, thinking that Investigator A will throw caution to the wind and openly testify against the police department.  But each meeting is just about how supportive Investigator A is, but he cannot reveal his true identity. They honestly read more as dates as opposed to anything that would be considered a clandestine plan.  When she calls him and he's drunk, he claims that he'd come clean if she would marry him.  She writes it off as a joke, but it really reads like "It's a joke unless you're down..."  If anything, I read Investigator A as more of a problem than a solution.  He seems to be taking advantage of someone who was abused by pretending to be a good guy, only to keep it safe and at arm's length.  Again, I'm not behind the scenes, but I do not care for him one bit.

But then, almost as if the world was impossible of goodness, we get the hotel employee.  Thank God for the hotel employee.  Again, Ito does this unbelievable job when it comes to showing how patriarchal Japanese culture is.  But it seemed like there was no hope for society.  I mean, I don't know if it shocks anyone, but the only actual hero in this story is someone who probably makes poverty wages. That is weirdly heartening.  That's kind of why I got so aggressively disappointed at Investigator A.  The tonal difference between Investigator A and the hotel doorman seems like the difference between fake good guy and genuine concern.  The hotel doorman was willing to put it all on the line just to make sure that this woman got justice and that was heartening.

I want to talk about the suicide attempt.  (I almost said sequence because it is so easy to distance a real person's life when it is in a film.  There's a part early in the movie when she says, "If it ever looks like I'm going to commit suicide, know that it isn't true.  I would never commit suicide and it means that I may have been murdered."  But we have this footage.  She confesses to trying to commit suicide after that point.  That's upsetting.  I'm not throwing stones at her.  She is going through her own journey.  I'm more commenting on the fact that nothing seems certain at any point in our lives.  When she made that statement early in the film, it was almost this underground dark web conspiracy stuff.  But then she tries to commit suicide and I realize that none of us are completely free from awful impulses.  I mean, thank God she survived.  It's horrible, but it is also just an indictment of how toxic society can get that someone so focused on a cause and still spiral to horrible depths.

It's a tank of a documentary.  Will I say that it is the documentary that changed my life?  Probably not.  But then again, someone else is going through this thing.  The movie starts off with a trigger warning with a personal plea to look out for one's own well being.  Yeah, I'm not a woman who deals with sexual assault, so I appreciate what the movie did here.

Rated R for mostly language, which is throughout.  (Honestly, I was wondering if I could recommend this movie to my in-laws and the language might be the biggest hang-up.) There is a lot, a lot of swearing.  But the real troubling stuff is both the suicide stuff and the Holocaust stuff.  Mind you, you absolutely should watch a movie about people dealing with the fallout of the Holocaust.  Just know that the content gets pretty heavy.  While you don't get any on-screen suicide stuff, it is the code running behind the movie.  There's also some drug use and light conversation about race and culture.

DIRECTOR:  Jesse Eisenberg

I'm a little overwhelmed, but that's okay.  It's a good problem to have that I have too many movies to write about.  In a perfect world, I knock out all three movies I've watched over the weekend before I go to work while still pretending that I can maintain any objective degree of quality.  Still, I kind of love Academy Awards season.  (Heck, we can just pretend like I've gotten around to updating the Academy Awards page.  I'm also really dating this post because who knows when someone will get around to reading this blog!) 

My one line tag for this movie is "It's about time that someone got around to making a Woody Allen movie."  It's both an incredibly accurate statement and wildly unfair.  I loved Woody in his heyday.  This feels like Woody in his heyday.  It's a small movie, for sure.  But when I signed up to watch this movie, I wanted this exact size and intimacy in a movie.  I mean, I know that A Real Pain is going to be The Holdovers for 2025.  I'm going to rant and rave about how good it is and it will be largely ignored by the general populous.  But I seem to really like well-shot, well-acted movies that are fundamentally about relationships.  While there is an extended cast in this movie, the story is, at its core, about Benji and David.  Again, not ragging on the side characters.  They are absolutely fantastic and make the world of A Real Pain make more sense.  But these characters are there for Benji to bounce off of.  

But the title!  The title is so good.  I mean, I unpacked it a few minutes in and, even then, I was late tot the party.  I love that this is a movie about dealing with pain and mental illness without having to telegraph stakes for mental illness.  David and Benji, considering that this is a movie about dealing about pain, are technically on vacation.  Yes, it is a vacation with strings.  While this is meant to be a bonding moment for the boys, it is almost in the sense a wake.  It's the classiest wake ever.  Remind me to pay for my grandkids to visit my home in Royal Oak, Michigan to determine how I was the king of such a place.   But considering that this trip, in a weird and backwards way, is meant to be a trip about healing, it is really interesting to try to pin down what makes Benji tick.  While I can't imagine Jesse Eisenberg playing this role like he initially wanted to, Kieran Culkin does play the highs and lows well.  For a long time, I thought that this was going to be a tale about how David needs to learn to let go and pull his head out of his butt.  Instead, it is more of a commentary on the free-spirit archetype.

It's not like the movie is wholly original in its criticism of this kind of archetype.  Nothing shocked me about where the character went.  However, I did think that this was going to be basically The Darjeeling Limited in Poland.  While there's a ton of crossover there, this movie ends with a clear psychological victor.  Yeah, Benji grows a lot through the course of his experience in Poland.  But he's fundamentally the same person at the end of the movie as he is in the beginning.  Despite what hurtles he crossed (and they aren't huge), the end of the movie is actually quite bleak for him.  And David, who seems to think that his life is on track, almost gets a confirmation that his life is filled with blessings. If anything, Eisenberg plays the whole movie rather close to the chest (or the vest? I should Google that).  He never complains about Priya or his kid.  Instead, the trip --reflecting a fairly healthy outlook --is about the experience of viewing his grandmother's past.  It never feels like he's fleeing responsibility, despite the fact that Benji makes comments that David has created a substandard existence for himself.

Again, if the movie is called A Real Pain, I find it somewhat horrifying that Benji has glommed onto a woman who has struck him in the past.  I get the feeling that I'll never get to know the reality of who Grandma Dory was.  But that story about Benji being late for dinner is probably the closest thing that we'll get into figuring out who she is.  A lot of the tales that the travelers tell about family are all through the lens of loss. Marcia is still hurting from her recent separation from her husband, so we can only glean what Benji picks up about her.  We know that she has a horrible taste in men, but that's about it. Eloge also is the survivor of genocide.  He's here because he's almost defined his entire faith life around the notion that there are monsters on this world and it is Eloge's job to hold onto the survivors of horror.  Mark and Diane don't really count because they're the most blessed of the group, thus being the most unlikable.  Mark has no sense of empathy throughout the story.  There are moments where he's likable, but he's lost no one.  He's the one who has the hardest time connecting to these moments of loss. But all we have of these people is monuments and stories that don't really reflect reality. Grandma Dory may have been a great person, but the only concrete thing I know about the woman is that she hit her 18-year-old grandson for being late for dinner.  Don't get me wrong.  I understand that Benji is a little turd for a lot of the movie. But the fact that he values that abuse is telling.

One of my favorite running gags in the movie is that, as much as Benji annoys everyone for his high-highs and his low-lows, he's continually liked when all is said and done.  He doesn't even really hold onto those low-lows and the times that he's toxic.  He rips into James at the graveyard and James, when Benji and David are about to leave, thanks him for such good constructive criticism.  In the moment, everyone was mortified.  But in context of time, Benji ends up being everyone's best friend.  If the movie is about pain, that's David's pain.  Benji's toxic behavior is continually positively reinforced because people love getting positive attention from Benji.  That moment when David leaves the dinner gathering, that moment is because he's afraid for his cousin --someone he treats like a brother.  As funny as it is that everyone cozies up to Benji (despite other times being wildly annoyed by him), David sees the family he loves slipping away.  

It's so fun how road movies make every destination look amazing.  I mentioned Darjeeling earlier and then I wanted to go to India.  I've been to Poland.  I now want to go back to Poland after seeing this movie.  It's just this beautiful, yet small narrative about two people that doesn't do the typical movie thing that shows massive change through travel.  Instead, the boys are in a constant state of staring their own mortality in the face (being emotionally moved by the Holocaust) and digging their heels into ways of life that make them comfortable, despite whatever consequences might come down the line.  It really is a solid movie.

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

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: Aaron Schimberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR:  John Carpenter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: Jacques Audiard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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