PG-13 for mostly bloodless murder constantly happening.  I know that the Assassin's Creed video games tend to get remarkably violent, but it is that dangerous kind of violence that we tend to ignore because it becomes commonplace.  There's also a very dodgey morality in the Assassin's Creed series that implies that religion may be the downfall of all humanity.  I mean, as PG-13 as this movie actually is, the higher level complexity of the franchise might really be pulling towards an older demographic.  At the end of the day, Assassin's Creed might be a really dark attempt to justify relativism.  PG-13.  

DIRECTOR: Justin Kurzel

I think I know where this one went off the rails.  It's hard to vocalize it, but it definitely did go off the rails pretty fast.  The thing is, I might be the perfect demographic for this movie.  If it wasn't a snow day, there would be a chance that I would be spending my few minutes knocking out one of three Assassin's Creed games I'm currently playing.  (If you were wondering, those games were Assassin's Creed: Origins, Assassin's Creed India, and Assassin's Creed III: Liberation).  Like, I know this franchise pretty well.  Sure, I'm behind because these games are massive and I refuse to only play one franchise until I die, but I think I get it at this point.

When I say that I'm the demographic for the Assassin's Creed movie, I really want to put that not as an age thing, but as a guy who knows his series.  This movie was made specifically for me and people like me.  We really love this series (despite its very questionable morality) and want to explore the mythology deeper.  But...video games already have an uphill battle.  With the exception of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, both movies which happen to have a really light tone and little attachment to deepcut mythology, video game movies tend to...suck?  Like, it's kind of a thing at this point.  The reason that I can point out Sonic and Pokemon because they are the by-far exception to the rule.  So when a movie that comes out that tries to hit every market, from the die hard Assassin's Creed fan to the person who has no idea what's up, it's going to fail pretty darn hard.  There are so many moments where I just watched the movie fall flat on its face.

And, really, it's my fault.  I know that everyone warned me that this movie was going to eat it pretty hard.  When I put it on my Netflix DVD queue, I felt like the streaming service tried to warn me by really stressing how few stars it had.  Now, I will say it is a better movie than people are making it out to be.  There were moments where I actually found that I was enjoying it.  Heck, I don't even regret watching it.  But there are so many misfires, most notably the most anticlimactic ending I've ever seen in a movie without winking at the camera.  It's a movie that doesn't know what it wants to be except for cool.

Cool is a dangerous goal.  There are a handful of movies that went out with the goal to be cool and actually succeeded.  Heck, part of me is absolutely terrified to revisit the OG Matrix because I have a feeling that it would be nails on a chalkboard in 2021.  (I know the new movie is coming out in theaters and on HBO Max and I know I'm going to watch it on HBO Max...so there's a really good chance that I'm probably going to rewatch the movie in the next few months.)  But cool doesn't often really feel that cool.  I would compare the final result of Assassin's Creed to someone really swearing that you are going to like a band, but then throwing them into the deep end of the catalogue assuming that they are going to hear the same things that the fan of the band is hearing.  It's so awkward.  Because Assassin's Creed is begging the audience to like it.  I can see why Michael Fassbender took the role, despite being an actor of his stature.  At its core, there's a story to be told in Assassin's Creed.  And maybe it is because I'm a glutton for punishment, but I think a TV show would service the mythology pretty darned well.

Stick with me here, because here's my elevator pitch for a TV show that would fix a movie that was not worth watching.  WandaVision is crushing it right now.  It threw viewers, experienced and no, into a world where nothing made sense.  Then, in episode four, it decided to explain what was going on in the real world, which contextualized everything.    Think about a movie that starts off in 1492 Andalusia.  We meet young Aguilar, like a young Ezio Auditore as he learns of the assassins and the world of the Apple of Eden.  Then, episode four, Cal Lynch is in prison.  Guess what? I just fixed your story.  Because, and this is key to my theories about why complex video game movies don't translate, is that these epic video game stories take a long time to unfold.  The stories are interesting because information is rewarded for gameplay. 

Now, I kind of feel like I'm doing that whole book v. movie argument and I suppose that there's a little bit of crossover there.  But with video games, there are long periods where the avatar for your character is performing just an abundance of tasks.  I swear that each Assassin's Creed game, the way I play, takes about 100 hours until the end of the game.  If I had to summarize the story of each of them, it would take a minute.  Yet, these stories feel rich and detailed.  I love these stories, despite the fact that I could summarize them in a heartbeat.  But when a movie jumps from plot point, there's no real reward for that information.

And then there's the big elephant in the room: Maybe some things just shouldn't be made.  Video games have become remarkably impressive. For as much money as the movie industry can make, the video game industry secretly dwarfs that.  Video games are cash cows.  From what I understand, a company that makes consoles like Microsoft or Sony, actually lose money on these consoles, despite the fact that their price tags are remarkably high.  So these games need to look amazing.  Assassin's Creed: Origins (reminder: the game I'm currently invested in) is too big and too impressive.  I'm actually needing to take regular breaks from it because I feel like I'm barely making a dent in this massive open world.  I understand the next entry in the franchise, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is even bigger.  But we don't really need these games because it's not about the cool violence.  Yeah, when I'm playing a game and I see my character do an amazing action move, it's great.  But it's because I'm doing that move.  But watching real people mimic those moves?  It just feel cold and distant.  It's watching a stunt show, not imbuing these characters with our own characteristics.

Because that's what a video game is all about. It's about control.  It's about making choices.  Those violent outcomes come from the decision to make those violent moves.

Two things about this specific movie though.  When I read that the majority of the movie would take place in 2016 as opposed to 1492, I originally was really skeptical.  The Desmond sections of the video games were interesting from a narrative perspective, but weren't why you bought the game.  But for a movie about Assassin's Creed, I kind of see the logic.  It's very imperfect.  Part of me wanted to see more of Spain, subtitles and all.  After all, I couldn't help but make a mental comparison to The Fountain, one of my favorite movies.  Like, it's that, only worse.  But it did kind of make the movie a story to watch.  I am pretty sure that the movie exists in the world of the video game, so for me, the movie only adds to the rich (okay, it might not add) tapestry of the games, giving me more insight into the story. 

But the second thing I wanted to discuss is the fact that the Templars, according to the movie, only seem to be bad guys because they look like bad guys.  It's really hard to sell assassins as heroes.  They are guarding the Apple of Eden, which is cool.  But what makes them heroes?  The Templars are bad guys because they want to hack free will.  Yeah, that's bad and I totally agree with that being bad.  But it seems that they are doing it simply to curb violent impulses.  Okay, I'm still on the Assassin's team if it just came down to that.  But it doesn't.  Because the Assassins really come across as extremists in the movie.  They are okay with any kind of collateral damage for the sake of this mission.  (See, now I'm traipsing into Assassin's Creed: Rogue territory.)  What really makes them heroes?  They seem extremely self-involved.  And the Creed constantly stressing the complete lack of a code seems kind of hypocritical.  

Also, why is the female bad guy always the weak link?  I mean, it ultimately doesn't matter because the only thing you need to the big bad guy is stab him secretly.  Why not take down all of the Templars? 

Yeah, the movie sucks.  I wish it didn't.  Again, a TV show might have serviced it better, but I don't need more TV, especially an Assassin's Creed TV show.  But this is a bad idea all around.  At least don't make it cool.  Just focus on characters and storytelling.  If there was any more slo-mo, I would lose my mind.

​ 

​Rated R for just being absolutely gruesome.  I mean, it's one of those movies where you need to know what is going to happen before you come into it.  Also, the protagonist contemplates pleasuring himself.  To do this, he watches some home movies.  He also drinks urine and vomits.  It's all pretty heavy and uncomfortable content, coupled with the fact that a dude's hand is rotting off and he has to self-mutilate.  It's a well-deserved R-rating.

DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle

The 20th Anniversary box set of Fox Searchlight should just be renamed "The Danny Boyle Collection with Guest Directors as a Bonus Feature."  I don't mind.  I really dig Danny Boyle.  And I acknowledge that there are a lot of not Boyle entries in this box.  But it seems like the biggies in the box are all things that Danny Boyle made.  Okay, it's three out of twenty.  Still, I'm going to be a stick in the mud and stand behind my initial comment.

I really thought that I would never revisit this movie.  There are a handful of movies that are absolutely brilliant while being absolutely brutal.  I'm glad that I've seen them, but it's behind me.  Like, after my next Covid shot, I'm not going to be jonesing for another Covid shot, but I'll be glad that I had it.  I suppose it's that fine line of torture porn that these kind of movies offer.  The very conceit behind the film is the same reason I don't want to watch it again.  It brings up a really interesting idea that I've never thought about before.  There have been many occasions where I have binged horror franchises.  During October, I'll tend to knock out horrible slasher movies where people are ripped apart in new and unique ways.  Heck, the reason that there are so many Halloween or Friday the 13th sequels are simply for excuses to find new ways to mutilate teenagers.  Yet, 127 Hours makes me squeamish.  

I have to believe that it comes from character investment.  Aron Ralston is a bit much for me.  I'll go into this later.  But Aron Ralston 1) is a real dude that this really happened to and 2) Boyle invests a lot of celluloid (digital or no...) into making Ralston come across as a real dude.  One thing that seems to be a standard in the horror movie is that these characters tend to be cannon fodder.  I'm going to even give points to Sydney Prescott from the Scream films.  She is the heroic protagonist who keeps coming back and keeps surviving these movies.  Her story is pretty fleshed out by this point.  But there seems to be a wide chasm between someone like Sydney Prescott, a genre heroine, and Aron Ralston, based on a real guy that I would hate to hang out with.  And it doesn't matter that I want to avoid this guy at all costs. I invest in Aron surviving.  But that's almost not what even matters.  Because all of the investment in the world wouldn't matter if this movie wasn't marketed the way it was.

I find it really bizarre talking to my students about The Sixth Sense.  (I apologize if I have a million hooks in today's blog.  It makes me seem all over the place.)   I simply assumed that everyone knew about the ending to The Sixth Sense.  These kids don't.  I can actually recommend that movie because it might have a new shelf life.  I have a feeling that the shift in culture might have an opposite effect on 127 Hours.  127 Hours was always the movie where the guy cuts his own arm off using a brand-X Swiss Army knife.  When I bought my ticket (I actually think I got this from Blockbuster Online) to 127 Hours, I knew what I was doing.  I knew that Aron Ralston was going to survive by mutilating his own arm.  While watching this for the second time, I realized that Danny Boyle had to work pretty closely with the marketing team for the film to make it work.  The movie banks on the notion that everyone knows he's going to cut his own arm off.  There are so many references to the arm coming off that it becomes this terrifying exercise in suspense.  And that grossness that makes me never want to rewatch this movie is central to the movie existing.  It's this knowledge that I'm going to see something horribly gross.

But then why do I like this movie?  I mean, it's never going to hit my list of greatest movies. But I also acknowledge that this is a big Danny Boyle victory.  I mean, I like it in spite of never wanting to meet Aron Ralston in real life.  It works because, as much as it is a survival movie, everything that makes it interesting isn't the survival aspect.  To be honest, I don't necessarily love survival stories.  Survival stories can get pretty boring.  But looking at Aron Ralston from a perspective of regret...that's something to watch.  There's something about a good setting or a good conceit that brings out humanity.  With The Walking Dead or the better Romero zombie films, the zombies force humanity to act in a way that they normally wouldn't.  Because you can't just be comfortable in one place, the notion of civilization is stripped away and people act on their worst impulses.  The same thing is true for Shane Black's action comedies at Christmas.  Christmas is already a stressful situation, so any kind of conflict arising from said issue is going to exacerbate the situation.  With Aron being pinned down by a rock, he's forced to stand still.  This is a guy who is constantly moving.  While I abhor using the cliché, he's the shark who needs to continually move or die.  I kind of wish that Boyle leaned into this element of the movie a little bit harder, but I did appreciate the woulda-coulda-shoulda element of being stuck on a rock.

Because Aron is one of those criminally optimistic people.  Maybe that's what I find so abhorrent about him.  (I'm so sorry, Mr. Ralston.  I'm sure you are a perfectly fine human being.)  I thought it was the whole adrenaline junkie thing that turned me off in Free Solo, but it might be the overt chipperness that he presented.  But we get a look at some real regrets from his perspective on the rock.  While Aron never does anything actively wrong, there are moments where he should have appreciated the little things.  Instead of being bullheaded and going off on his own, maybe he should have stayed with the girls.  It's implied that he lost the love of his life for something dumb.  (That being said, the movie has the nice coda of letting us know that he's happily married now.)  It also all comes down to answering the phone when your mom calls.  I love my mom, but there are a handful of times that my stupid life caused me not to pick up the phone.  (Sorry, Ma, I just don't have that much alone time to play video games.)   It's all this stuff that is fascinating.  Well, it's the introspective stuff coupled with the knowledge that, at any point, he's going to saw his arm off with a crappy dull knife.  

And Boyle just keeps messing with us.  So much of the film is based on the sense of false hope.  I mean, you know that he's going to saw his arm off.  Everyone said that he saws his arm off.  I have even seen this movie before and I still hoped that he didn't saw his arm off this time.  But Boyle knows that you both want to see that moment and fear that moment simultaneously.  The flood sequence alone is enough to make you believe that the story can somehow shift directions, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel.  It's great.

​It's just that I never want to see it again.  

PG-13 for being generally bleak.  There's a decent amount of blood in one scene, which is set in zero gravity, so it goes absolutely everywhere.  There's a sense of peril to the movie and some scenes are genuinely nerve-racking.  I would also couple this with the notion that most of humanity is dead.  The off-screen body count is astronomical, which I suppose should be mentioned.  There might be some mild language, but I'm becoming deaf to it.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  George Clooney

There are movies that I really want to like.  I mean, that poster is rad.  It's kind of a bummer when a movie gets a really sweet poster, but the movie is very "meh."  Because if I hung that poster on my wall, it would be a talking point both for "What did you think about that movie?" and "Why do you have the poster on your wall then?"  But beyond that, I really root for artistic genre fiction.  I mean, we've had a few standout entries in genre fiction lately.  It's not like science fiction can't be used to tell a great story.  But I also know that George Clooney, as amazing of an actor as he is, is also a pretty talented director.  But The Midnight Sky, despite my constant attempts to love this movie, kept boring me stupid.

I don't hate boring.  I've probably written that phrase too m many times on this blog, so it is probably losing its meaning.  Heck, for all I know, I do hate boring.  (I don't.) I went into this thinking that Clooney was trying to either redeem or repeat his remake of Solaris.  At the end of the day, he kind of is. For those who don't remember Clooney in Solaris, it was a remake of a Russian space film that ended up filling the character and the audience with existential dread.   The remake was fine, but didn't capture much of the artistic merit that the Russian version offered.  It was a bit too clean and a bit too studio to ever really have the impact that the original film did.  But I imagine that this was the moment when Clooney discovered that he wanted to use space and isolation to talk about the heaviness of man's soul.  And he's right.  If there's one thing that The Midnight Sky absolutely nails is how to use setting to provide a sense of loneliness and self-loathing without being tainted by characters having to tell you that you are lonely and self-loathing.  

It's the downside of the setting that really hurts the movie, though.  The Midnight Sky is, and should be, about Augustine dealing with his failures while life was populated and abundant.  That is what we care about.  But that's a Twilight Zone episode in terms of length...unless you are extremely talented and smart.  Clooney is both of those things, but not in the case of The Midnight Sky.  Instead, to actively defy boredom, he provides a B-plot that really fights to be the A-plot.  And it is that B-plot that really hampers the story.  Because for all of the heavy themes and motifs of isolation running throughout the story, the B-plot is there so people don't get bored stiff.  (It is in this moment that I effectively convince my readership that boring is good and that thrills are bad.) For all of Clooney's forays into indie film, his movies tend to be extremely polished.  I loved Good Night, and Good Luck.  It's probably the best talking-heads movie that I can think of.  But that movie is clean and safe.  This is what Clooney makes.  He makes these small release films that just look like Spielberg directed them.  This is where his Solaris remake fell apart.  It became about the mise-en-scene and not about the message of the story.  If I think of The Midnight Sky after this blog, I'm going to picture colorful galaxies and overwhelming worlds of beauty.  But that's not what I should be taking away from it.

The B-movie's plot is almost an attempt to apologize for nothing happening in the movie.  The ship in space takes elements from The Martian and Gravity and then calls it a story.  Honestly, those scenes offer nothing new to the table.  It just distracts from the story of Augustine and Iris on Earth.  There probably isn't much of a need for the survival scenes on Earth, but at least it makes sense contextually.  (I don't believe that a guy who has a hard time walking down the hall swimming for a Ski-Doo that is sinking, but it's a cool sequence.)  But I wanted to bond with the group in space.  They are in the movie for a reason.  Perhaps that reason isn't justified.  It kind of feels like I'm jumping into another movie full of scenes that are meant to bond me with these characters.  I am told that characters miss their families, but I don't believe it.  There's a scene that the crew all sing "Sweet Caroline" altogether to show their comradery.  But that is telling me, not me understanding.  Star Trek: Enterprise had the same problem.  Instead of earning those relationships, we have to simply believe that the story had validity.  

So then it all comes down to me reacting to half the movie and seeing if the story is effective.  Honestly, as much as I'm dunking on this movie, I think the answer is "Yeah".  I really like the Clooney alone in an observatory story.  It's the part that my wife found boring while the opening credits were still running.  But there's something real there.  There is a character that I can have opinions about and relate to.  The flashbacks to his younger life are interesting, but far too infrequent. All this shows that there's a movie in here that is actually pretty darned good.  Listen, we can have the daughter in space.  But how cool would the movie have been if the daughter faced a parallel isolation that the father did?  While Dad is dealing with this sacrificial moment as the end of his life of emotional failure, the daughter deals with the same sacrificial loneliness to define her life.  She is this beacon of hope while he is a remembrance of failure.  There could have been this great cross-cutting of looking at the world in different ways.  It's not to say that there wouldn't have been hardship in space.  I think stressing that would have added to the story, but just looking at things in two different ways.  Dad sees a breakfast that hits the spot with relish that he can actually enjoy the remaining food on the planet.  The daughter looks at freeze-dried rations with disdain because it's the same thing, day-in, day-out.  There's a story there.  It's a boring story, but a far more valuable one than getting set off course against an asteroid field.

So there's something there, but the movie kind of squanders it because it feels like it needs to be entertaining.  Not every space or genre film has to have action.  Sometimes, the setting can just be a setting.  Perhaps we've all been tainted by the successes (and well-deserved successes!) of The Walking Dead, which balances drama and action.  But The Midnight Sky could be something beautiful if it was just smaller in scope.  Not everything has to be a big-budget epic.  This could have just been what it was instead of being ashamed of being a personal story of a man reflecting on his life squandered.

PG-13 for a bunch of little things.  While there is no nudity or actual sex, the protagonist is having an affair with a married woman.  There's a suicide that happens off camera.  The movie both comments about fat shaming while also fat shaming.  There's language, death, and abuse.  It's got some heavy content, but it definitely reads like a PG-13 movie.

DIRECTOR:  Lasse Hallstrom

Yeah, this is a big one.  I don't have too many of these anymore.  Sure, on the grand scale of the cinematic canon, I don't know if What's Eating Gilbert Grape is at the top of it.  But it is somewhere on that list of movies that a lot of people have seen that I just never really got around to seeing.  There was a time when I aggressively pursued all of the cinema greats.  I still kind of do, but there are very few of the really popular ones left.  Trust me, this isn't sadness.  I suppose that I'll never really have one of the biggies to look forward to, but there are still insanely great movies out there.  This is all a roundabout way of saying that there is a rich wealth of amazing film that just never got around to being popular.  

Which kind of brings me around to What's Eating Gilbert Grape.  There is so much good about Gilbert Grape, but at the same time, there is stuff that kind of irks me as well.  To be honest, I think I skipped over Gilbert Grape because I didn't expect much out of it.  My initial judgments about the tone of the movie was right: this is a bit of a sappy manipulative tearjerker.  I tend to react poorly to this.  I'm not saying that I shouldn't be sad at movies or that movies shouldn't be sad.  But I kind of want to get there on my own.  There are major moments in the story where I should have been really moved and these may have been the least effective moments for me.  Arnie getting arrested didn't do anything to me.  Mama dying kind of felt out of left field.  Burning the house down just seemed silly.  I know.  I'm not being emotionally vulnerable.  But I also got that these choices were meant to get me to grab for a tissue and I just wasn't really feeling that.  The film as a whole, when it came to the mood it was shooting for, just kind of missed for me.  

I'm going to Gilbert Gripe about one more thing before I move onto what I really dug about the movie.  Because if push-came-to-shove, I have to say that I enjoyed this movie.  But it is interesting to think that what we considered so progressive last generation comes across as kind of gross this generation.  I think that Gilbert Grape is now starting to deal with the problems that Gone with the Wind originally dealt with.  At the time, I could see the movie being seen as brave.  The most memorable characters in the film are a morbidly obese woman and an autistic boy.  Darlene Cates as Momma is heartbreaking and I applaud her for taking the role.  She must have to had been extremely emotionally strong to take a role simply because of her sheer weight when that weight would be a talking point in the film.  But for all of its talk about how Momma's a person and not a sideshow, it also fat-shames her for jokes a lot.  There are jokes made about her weight.  I get it.  It was 1993.  It was a different time.  It's also absurd that the entire town would get such a kick out of seeing a morbidly obese woman.  At one point, in a cluster of people looking at Momma leaving her house, a man straight up takes out a camera and emotionlessly takes a photo of her.  I want to comment on how America is loaded with women like Momma and that she probably wouldn't be considered a freak, but Darlene Cates herself was actually made famous by showing up on an episode of Sally Jesse Raphael entitled "I'm Too Fat to Leave My House." 

Then there's the autistic problem.  We're just entering the era of representation of allowing people to play their own disability.  Again, I didn't love The Peanut Butter Falcon, like everyone else on the planet did.  But I did respect the choice to cast the lead actor in that role.  Again, I know it was 1993 and that young Leonardo DiCaprio is a very talented actor.  But I also feel like Leo is playing "Hollywood Autism" made famous by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.  This is the kind of performance that's meant more for impressing Oscar judges than actually bringing attention to the cause.  A lot comes down to 1993, but 2021 doesn't find this performance all that exciting.  It's good, but it just really feels dated at this point.

But I told you I liked this movie!  I didn't lie.  And do you know why I liked this movie?  Because it has the most accurate title of any movie that I have ever seen.  The title as the theme of the movie is just perfect.  There's a really fine line that this movie has to walk and I think it nails it.  The story is about mental health.  It's advocating for mental health.  Gilbert comes across as a good guy who keeps screwing up in realistic ways.  He loves his brother and love-hates his mom.  Part of what the story is about is the knowledge that Gilbert should be used to his lifestyle.  He's been taking care of his mother and his brother his entire life.  He has no real support system.  Everyone else is looking out for number one, leaving Gilbert in a role that is completely unfair to him.  And we all know that, if Gilbert decided to abandon all of these responsibilities and roles thrust upon him, he would be a villain in this story.  So when he runs off into the night, we as the audience become both sympathetic and critical of this choice.  Gilbert has too much responsibility with little actual motivation to do it outside of goodwill.  For all of his faults, there's almost something saintly about him.  I mean, he shouldn't be sleeping with an older married woman, but it is one of his few releases.  (I'm definitely not advocating sinning, especially when it comes to adultery.  But I'm more stressing his humanity in the face of such pressure.)  

So when Becky comes to town, she offers a third option that he has never thought of before.  Prior to Becky, his options were "Accept a life that is devoted to others at the cost of the self" and "Be the villain who abandons everyone in hopes that you can find a modicum of happiness."  Becky's offer is the ol' Kraft Mac and Cheese commercial of "Why not both?"  Admittedly, it takes Momma's death to allow him to take up this offer.  But he's allowed to think of himself if he has a support system.  As much as the other family members have responsibilities when it comes to Arnie and Momma, these responsibilities act more like a chore chart.  Instead, Becky loves Arnie like Gilbert does and that's what it takes.  It takes a group of people working together to make sure that good people don't drown.  

It's a great sentiment and the movie communicates the message well.  Yeah, I'm an emotionally stunted guy a lot of the time, so weepy movies often come across as cliche for me. But even when you divorce the mood from the content, the movie still holds up.  I dug it. Probably not as much as other people adore this movie, but it overall works for me.

Rated R for being a spooky thriller.  There's some pretty brutal violence done to women in this movie.  Coupled with that, there is nudity in an autopsy sequence.  It's not surprising with all this kind of stuff that we'd have some pretty intense language.  A lot of people have been comparing this movie to Se7en.  Se7en is more intense, but they both deserve the MPAA's R rating.  

DIRECTOR:  John Lee Hancock

It's official!  It's the first 2021 film to hit the blog!  It's usually about this time of year.  I mean, I don't think I'd be rushing out to theaters to see The Little Things if Covid wasn't around.  And I genuinely am rooting for the survival of movie theaters post-pandemic.  But God bless HBO Max for making this a low-stress decision to make because I in-no-way regret watching this movie.  Is it perfect?  No.  Is it a pretty solid film release in January, a time of year where studios bury their garbage? Yes. This is a perfectly fine movie that's new and I had a decent time with it...when I wasn't fighting exhaustion.

Yeah, I would recommend cutting fifteen minutes from this movie.  But a lot of that comes from constantly being exhausted and wanting movies to be shorter.  I may or may not have fallen asleep after my alarm this morning because I'm always tired.  Maybe movies weren't built around parents of four, but having a dark film with a slow pace isn't exactly the thing to keep this demographic awake.  We were planning on watching it in one sitting, but instead got super exhausted.  But, Day Two was great.  I was wide awake.  I was folding laundry while watching and that's what I needed.  I don't think you are allowed to fold laundry at the movie theaters.  I know that you can now order food and booze from them, but bringing a big basket of laundry is a no-no? Thanks a lot, Obama.

But I'm going to mostly applaud the film.  The Little Things, while kind of being a lame title that really tries justifying itself throughout the movie, does what I want a lot of psychological thrillers to do. While the reveal isn't that impressive, it does take a left while other movies take a right.  BIG SPOILER: My wife, at one point, said, "What if he isn't the guy?"  I mean, I'm pretty sure everyone thought it at one point.  But vocalizing it goes a long way.  The thing is, we always need closure.  I imagine (and again, "imagine" really stresses how unqualified I am at saying this) that being in law enforcement is a lot about getting comfortable with never having closure.  The Little Things is about two smart cops.  One is kind of a Sherlock Holmes level genius who can view a crime scene from this detached place.  The other is an up-and-comer.  Cool.  But both are obsessed with getting answers. But the movie ends with us not knowing who committed these murders. There is just the implication that Sparma, the most serial killer-y guy with the most serial killer-y name, probably didn't actually do it.

And that is what makes the movie interesting.  Sparma, despite the fact that he probably didn't kill anyone, makes this amazing villain.  I will go out of my way and point out that I loathe Jared Leto for his personality on set.  I keep reading these reports about how he crosses way too many lines to get an authentic performance.  Maybe he needs to be cast as an altruistic humanitarian just to undo some of the garbage that he did with his Joker from Suicide Squad.  But he makes this truly compelling villain.  See, I kind of covered some of this with The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog and The Lodger remake.

But there's a big difference between those two movies and The Little Things.  With The Little Things, Sparma is actually a full on villain. While it is questionable whether or not he is the killer, much like the different endings of The Lodger, it doesn't matter.  A lot of Sparma's evil comes from the element of chaos that he adds to the narrative.  Yeah, I mean, I also saw the connection with The Little Things and Se7en.  But Sparma is an extreme version of a real person.  There are all these people out there who enjoy confessing to things that they didn't do.  Sparma might be the most extreme version of that.  Instead of simply being someone who has psychological issues, Sparma seems to enjoy two potentially disparate things.  It really reads like he is someone who enjoys derailing the pursuit of justice.  Now, I'm not exactly all "justice" or anything.  But I do get that evil need to be kept in check.  There is no nobility to the murders and kidnappings of these people.  These are objective evils and the people working to put these criminals away are there for the greater good of public safety.  But Sparma acts as an act of God, intentionally trying to rewrite the story to his own sick narrative.  He wants to derail something that is already very difficult.  

But then, there's also the attention issue.  I have a hard time justifying this one, but I also want to contextualize it in the frame of looking for attention.  Sparma is this over-the-top character.  He's not exactly acting like a normal human being for any part of this movie.  (Again, John Doe from Se7en.)  He's very clever with his jokes.  He has this cold demeanor, knowing how much he's riling up all of the people working to get justice for these girls.  But if he didn't do it --and the movie definitely implies that he didn't do it --there has to be an element of sick fame behind it.  He has all of these people looking deeply at him when they should be looking at someone else.  And that's probably the thrill of it all.  He's getting the vicarious attention that  a serial killer would have without actually being one himself.  My guess is that, if he wasn't killed in a bout of rage with a shovel,  he would probably be a serial killer himself.  But let's jump to that scene where Deke is on the roof, hiding from the police after his illegal search and seizure.  He's there, showing off how clever he is. But he didn't commit the murder (probably).  He never really gleans that self-awareness of how childish the whole thing actually is.

There's one element that kind of sticks in my craw.  The movie has one too many elements to it.  I know, I shouldn't be complaining about the complexity of a film.  After all, I have a blog so I can analyze every nuance of a film.  But Deke's background is almost arbitrary.  I'm not exactly a John Lee Hancock fan, so please understand that this is kind of in line of that train of thinking.  There are elements to this movie that are undercooked.  Deke has this story that has been bugging him throughout the film.  We know that he screwed up and went too far.  It's kind of implying that Deke decided to break the rules of law enforcement and had to retire.  But then, we discover that he accidentally killed one of the girls that he was trying to save.  It's this big reveal at the end...that shouldn't have been treated as a reveal. We have the barrette acting as a far greater turn.  If we had known that Deke had killed that woman, we could have understood the choices he made.  There could have been something really fun to explore with that decision that we never really get.  

It comes from the idea that the movie can't give us too much information.  It so tightly kept secret that Denzel Washington can't exactly act that as motivation.  There really could be an entire movie about a guy who has to deal with this major mistake.  I mean, Die Hard did it and it worked as a great motivating factor for a character.  But instead, we are left with a lot to absorb.  I'm very cool with the ending of the movie with the barrette being kind of buried under a bunch of different moments.  Also, the boots in the apartment is a very confusing shot.  My wife and I both sat looking at the screen, wondering if he was the killer with the boots the whole time.  This is a John Lee Hooker mistake.  Hooker is implying that he abandoned everything in his apartment, including the evidence he was meant to bring back.  But it doesn't read that way at all.  It reads like those boots were Deke's the entire time and the investigation into Sparma was entirely meant to derail the investigation into him.  Yeah, that would have been a dumb ending.  So that artsy shot actually worked against the film as a whole.

But I liked it for the most part. I know I should be talking about Rami Malek, but he doesn't really do anything for me as a character.  Instead, I was way more interested in the notion of a villain who didn't do the killing.  That's the best part of this movie, chasing a guy who probably didn't do it.  That's what makes The Little Things worth watching.  Remember, it's January.  That's not a great time for movies. For a January movie, it's pretty good.

PG-13 and I'm not really sure why.  There is a potential future where Ted becomes an alcoholic.  I'm not exactly sure if it comes across as serious.  I suppose everyone is killed and goes to Hell, but it's a hilarious and adorable version of Hell.  It's not like any of it has a tone that is serious.  Maybe, MAYBE, you could consider the killer robot scary for a little bit.  But there's very little here that is really and truly objectionable.  It kind of feels PG-13 because it's live-action.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Dean Parisot

I'm going to lay it out there: I've never been a big Bill & Ted ​fan.  I know.  That seems like it's the snobbery talking.  I do have quite a reserve of snobbery in my wine cellar (I don't have a wine cellar.  I have a basement full of vintage video games).  But I've seen them.  I can now even say that I've seen them all.  I think it was because my dad thought that these movies looked phenomenally dumb (he was probably right) that he never took us to see them.  But I remember that one summer in Brighton, MI, I rented both Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey and shotgunned both of them.  And I giggled a few times.  I mean, nothing really blew my mind, but it was a decent time.  I just never really understood what the appeal of these movies were.

While I still am not on board the Bill & Ted train, I can kind of / sort of respect Bill & Ted Face the Music.  This is yet another one of those nostalgia sequels that my generation loves so much.  There's a big ol' gap since the last movie and we want to see where these characters, played by the original actors, ended up.  Sure, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey really secured the absurd plot in place.  For those not in the know, using Doctor Who's time traveling phone box as a point of parody, these two dopes from San Dimas, California, good natured and obsessed with rock 'n roll, were destined to be the best band in the history of bands.  Their music tastes seemed pretty simplistic and the joke lies in the absurdity that a band named Wyld Stallyns would change the world.  But that last movie ended with that exact thing happening.  There was this mega show where the personification of Death played bass and the entire world watched.  Face the Music takes a lot of time to undo this epic finale, implying that both Bill and Ted shared fifteen minutes of fame and then failed to make any real, lasting cultural impact.  Okay, fine.  It seems like that doesn't make a lot of sense, but you need to give the protagonists some conflict to overcome while adding to the greater mythology.  I get it.

But what I realized about Bill and Ted as protagonists is that they are characters we genuinely root for.  Yeah, they're the archetypal lovable buffoons.  Everything they do is actually pretty wholesome. We get that in Face the Music when they see possible futures and how horrible they behave.  The reason that those jokes work is because of the juxtaposition from where they are now to where they will be in a reasonably short period of time.  Listen, I'm going to spiral into some pretty nerdy time-travel stuff in a second and I want to provide insight into why this movie is mostly successful before I tear apart some pretty nerdy minutiae.  But Face the Music accomplishes something that the first two movies really wanted to, but never actually did:

They made it about the music.  I just read a headline when I was looking for images that stated that Bill & Ted Face the Music fails because of the music.  Yeah,  I will say that the music in this movie is criminally uninspired.  For all the talk about being music lovers, the soundtrack is super forgettable.  But that doesn't mean that the movie doesn't appreciate music in a way that the first two films only talked about.  Now, if we look back at the central conceit, there was supposed to be this band that united the world.  It is Zepham Cochrane's rocket from Star Trek: First Contact.  I always have a problem when writers have a genius character who must be the smartest person imaginable.  By that implication, the author has to be the smartest person imaginable or else the story doesn't work.  I'm flummoxed that people can write Fantastic Four or Doctor Who with this knowledge under my belt.   But Tenacious D really nailed it with their song "Tribute".  There's no possible way to write the Greatest Song in the World because 1) music is hella subjective and 2) someone would have done it and not saved it for the third entry in the Bill & Ted franchise.  Okay, fine.  When Billie and Thea start playing the music, it may be uninspired.  But what it does is remind us that it isn't necessarily the quality of the song, but the passion behind it.  Yeah, it's a little bit goofy that everyone in the world has some degree of musical talent, but I really like that the entire world unites to play one song.  That's fun and kind of makes me really want to pick up an instrument.  And, that, my friends, is the point of the movie.  It's not that I want to listen to Bill & Ted Face the Music;  it's that it makes me want to create.  So for all of its posturing about rock 'n roll, it's really a movie about passion.

Yeah, I should have ended the blog there.  After all, I'm writing for a while now and I might lose all this content because I'm writing without having the safety net of the Internet behind this, but I do have to talk about time travel.  I shouldn't be deep diving into these kinds of movies because the Bill & Ted movies have always been remarkably flimsy when it comes to plot.  But I always get a little annoyed by the rules established in a time travel movie.  Time travel movies should have one rule: follow its own rules.  At one point in the movie, because the boys needed to be successful, they simply are.  Their dumb plan, which the script keeps insisting shouldn't work, just does.  Kind of.  For all of the plot and mythology that Face the Music lays down, the plot keeps taking a backseat to the theme of "Space and reality don't matter if you can't love your family."  Okay, fine.  But that being said, Bill and Ted come up with an idea to borrow the Greatest Song in the World from themselves in the future instead of having to write it themselves.  You know, the old Bootstrap Paradox?  (Sorry, Lauren, for mentioning the Bootstrap Paradox again.)  The boys quickly discover after multiple visits to the future that no future version of them (how do they exist if reality has fallen apart?) have written it and the very act of trying to steal the music has doomed civilization.  Yet, they keep pushing forwards.  They keep going further and further into their own futures in the hopes that their older selves would have written it.  The message of this is that they can't just pawn off the act of writing to a time travel contrivance.  But lo-and-behold, their oldest selves have the song.  After spending most of the movie trying to get their older selves to give it to them, it just happens?  So how did all of those dark Bill and Teds  come into existence?  I know that there's a line about possible futures and infinite pasts, but that's not really an answer.  

Which all leads me to the final conclusion:  Bill & Ted Face the Music has great themes and a great tone, but with an awful plot.  I want to talk about how their daughters are the true rock stars and how great certain elements of this movie are, but you'll pick up on that.  Instead, the movie begs you not to think too hard about it, but instead feel how it works to be a great film.  It's my favorite of the series, but that isn't necessarily saying much. 

Rated R for being a Diablo Cody movie.  That means that there's a lot of hip swearing going on throughout the movie.  Similarly, this is one of those movies about pretty girls being terrible people.  That means that Charlize Theron will do some absolutely horrible things, often using her sexuality to get what she wants.  She drinks like a fish and has the worst morality imaginable.  That being said, that's the point of the movie.  If you didn't want to watch something like this, turn away now.  R.

DIRECTOR: Jason Reitman

This is the story of how I'm an idiot and need to have my film blog taken away from me.  I've seen this movie before.  Yet, I watched a lot of this movie before realizing that I've seen it before.  That's no good.  I mean, at the end of the day, I was still questioning if I had seen this movie or whether I was just really good at predicting which way this story was going to go.  It was actually just confirmed at the IMdB page when I realized that I confused Young Adult for Tully and now feel like a big ol' moron.  It all started because of my free month of EpixNow and now I felt like I had to binge this movie before my account ended.  Regardless, it was kind of new to me and I now realize how old I am.

When I saw who was in this cast, I nearly lost my mind.  I wonder what it is like being Patton Oswalt.  I mean, I never want to step into someone else's shoes so flippantly, but he seems like he dabbles in all of the things he likes.  But as much as I love Charlize Theron in this movie, there's nothing shocking about her performance.  I mean, it's Charlize Theron.  Of course she's going to nail it.  But it's so bizarre that Patton Oswalt has such impressive acting chops and no one will ever point it out.  Mind you, he has become a bit of a character actor.  He's always going to play the nerdy second fiddle to a handsome male lead.  It might be a bit much to make him a guy who makes Star Wars bourbon and crafts his own action figures, but sometimes a movie needs to use broad strokes to get a point across.  

I think that when I wrote about Juno, I may have touched on this point.  I am seriously concerned that I wouldn't get along with Diablo Cody.  This is based on my entirely unfair assumption of her personality.  Perhaps she really does just have a remarkable ear for dialogue and uses that to write characters that are nothing like her.  But Mavis kind of reads as an avatar for Diablo Cody.  I mean, Stephen King does the same thing by constantly making his literary characters authors.  It seems like the safest way to write authentically, just changing the name of the character.  But Cody keeps writing stories about women who kind of want to see the world burn.  I mean, we all love Juno.  (That statement is far from true.  I know so many people who loathe this movie.  I don't.  I really like it.)  But the titular character has a bit of a mean streak in her.  Jennifer's Body, also a movie about a mean main character (I don't remember enough about the movie to determine if Megan Fox's character was a protagonist or just an antagonist to someone else.  I'm telling you, I'm either losing my memory by having seen SO many movies or it's Diablo Cody specific) who is absolutely drop dead gorgeous.  But Mavis Gary reads the most authentic to potentially the real person.

It's kind of how we keep having these main characters who are awful human beings to the people around them, yet still come across with a modicum of sympathy.  Juno was born sympathetic.  She's a teenager who is dealing with a lot, which gives her a little bit of leeway when she's being toxic to others.  But Mavis somehow still becomes endearing.  I think a lot of that comes from the fact that Mavis is so clueless to reality that she just comes across as kind of pathetic...which is the point of the movie.  Remember, my thesis for this whole thing is that Mavis Gary reads like an avatar for Cody herself, but that might actually endear me to Cody more.  It's not shocking that writing acts as therapy for a lot of people.  Heck, I had a pretty annoying day and I'm writing to feel accomplished.  Cody keeps setting her characters in alcohol-fueled shame-spirals.  We're all aware that her choices come across as really really dumb.  Yeah, her book series is basically dead.  But she did something that I have always wanted to do.  (I'm thinking of potentially writing something new this summer, but me-writing this is really Willy Loman of me, so I should probably just keep that under my hat.  Again, no one reads this.) Cody created this person who has the most backwards self-worth imaginable. She finds all of her value in the things that a high schooler would.  She's too cool for this world not because of having genuine talent, but because she's always been more gorgeous than the world around her.  That's why Buddy makes sense.  He's a guy who actually grew and found true value in the small things.  

And Young Adult touches on the thing that kind of makes it really interesting with the Buddy / Mavis juxtaposition.  I mean, we have Matt as a foil as well, but Buddy and Mavis were the same person.  They were the king and queen of the school.  And Buddy never really grew out of his town, but he did find his place in the world.  He found someone who liked him for who he was, not by how popular he was.  He found his own success and he loved it.  Instead, Mavis kept looking at what she didn't have.  She didn't have a successful marriage.  She didn't have a book series anymore.  But instead of nourishing her gifts, she decided to take back what she deemed was rightfully hers.  It's an interesting tale because Sandra vocalizes it to her directly:  everyone wishes that they were Mavis Gary.  Hey, I wish I was Mavis Gary.  I mean, I am very happily married and her life just seems so toxic.  But everything that is wrong with Mavis's life is of her own doing.  Honestly, a good therapy and a couple of trips to AA would probably make Mavis's life extremely attractive.

But, again, this all makes me worry about Diablo Cody.  I don't know why her writing always seems autobiographical when no one else's writing does the same thing to me. I mean, I could do a really quick Google / Wikipedia search and confirm or deny all of these things.  But Cody, like Woody Allen, makes it hard to divorce the art from the artist.  With a writer like Diablo Cody, I don't know of any scandals that would come out of having a toxic personality, but I do always wonder why she keeps going back to the toxic femininity well.  I mean, it might just be because it works.  Her movies are compelling and interesting.  I've heard people complain that her work is too clever by half, but I disagree.  She strikes this nice balance of cleverness and catharsis that Is hella watchable.  Yeah, I wish I remembered that I watched Young Adult prior to looking it up.  That probably doesn't earn it points.  But I also don't remember years of my life.  Honestly, if I time traveled and observed my first thirty-seven years from a third-person perspective, I'd be grateful if I recognized a fifth of it.  And I'd like to point out, I probably wouldn't even like the stuff I'd seen.  But the movie really works.  I love the chemistry with all the characters.  I like the music and the hipster cred that Diablo Cody brings the movie.  I think that Jason Reitman is a talented as heck director, so what have I to complain about?  The movie works, plain and simple.