PG-13, but with a very heavy undertone.  The movie, while nothing necessarily offensive happens on-screen, deals with a community who are raped and continue to be raped.  Often, this is shown through the aftermath through blood and bruising.  It is not an easy movie to watch, nor is it easy to listen to.  There is some pretty strong language, but it isn't used throughout.  There's also some mild on-screen violence.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Sarah Polley

Depressing times make depressing films.  That has to be the motivator to all of these movies that are just straight up bumming me out.  I tend to put a little bit of my life into these intros.  It's bad writing, but it also gets the momentum going.  I often don't want to write about depressing movies anymore because I've written so many in a row.  This one is a double challenge because it is a depressing movie that I really enjoyed.  But I also am knocking out so many movies that, if I want to write about them all, I have to push myself harder to get more writing done per day.  I have a very blessed life that these are my concerns.  (Geez, I have other concerns.  This is just something that I can control.) 

I loved Women Talking.  My wife really loved Women Talking.  But the thing that we both noticed is that this almost deserves to be a play before it deserves to be a movie.  There's some DNA being shared here with Doubt.  Doubt is actually probably better known for being a play.  But both Women Talking and Doubt are very small movies with large consequences.  They both deal with moral questions that really have no right answers, just wrong ones.  Maybe Women Talking is a little less morally grey so much as it is spiritually satisfying, these options.  I kind of kept away from trailers for this movie, simply because...actually I don't know.  I've been slowing down on trailers of movies that I know that I will watch regardless.  There's no selling me on a lot of these ideas.  If they're up for an Academy Award, I'm going to do my darndest to watch every one of these movies before the Academy Awards.  Women Talking is one of those movies that kind of creeped into my awareness only after it had been nominated.  (A father of five in the Midwest often lacks the table-talk of cinephiles.) So I didn't really know what this movie was about.

The movie presents three (but really, two) options for the women of this community.  I tend to get a little annoyed by films presenting a binary option, but I'm weirdly cool with Women Talking's three / two choices.  (Okay, I'm being oddly coy about the third option.  The third option, "forgive and endure", is quickly shut down and thank goodness because that would have been a different movie altogether and oversimplified the argument.  Instead, the binary presented are both complicated and real world scenarios.  Both have problems.  What the choice ultimately comes down to is practicality (which in itself has holes in it) and justice / revenge. Because I'm dancing around it, the first choice that is nixed is the forgiveness one, where they live in harmony with their rapists and are punished for complaining about their assaults.  That's nixed by everyone except for Frances McDormand's character, who is oddly a bit part in a movie where she gets pretty good billing.  The other two choices are to leave secretly and form their own colony or to fight back and take control of the colony.  

Don't worry, the movie also treats the "stay and fight" as kind of an absurd option because it is so self-destructive.  But it is a real option that we as audience members want.  God, to have that kind of control over one's life.  I mean, the allegory here is appropriately thin, right?  We get that the men of the colony is the patriarchy.  Go beyond that.  The men of the colony are the people who hoard power and keep everyone else oppressed, despite having so much control.  Heck, let's just throw some respectable Communism in here.  As much as I want to go the easy route and talk about how this is about the oppression of women, the narrative works even better if we talk about economic revolution.  The women, as much as I don't want to completely shift away from the subjugation of women here, are talking about striking.  I'm going to put this over the Russian Revolution.  Do nothing is what America is at. We keep forgiving the powerful for our subjugation and need to apologize for complaints against it, a'la late-stage Capitalism.  Fighting back is rioting in the streets.  We know that we're going to lose, just like the Russian Revolution.  (As in, even if we physically win, there's no way to sustain that kind of society, as proven by the rise of Joseph Stalin.) 

But the third option: leave.  The way that the women talk about leaving is left with a bunch of questions that need to be answered.  They don't know anything else but the life that they've suffered through for generations.  But the plan isn't forever.  They know that if they leave, everything will fall apart at the colony.  While not skilled with higher knowledge, their fundamental knowledge and skilled labor is essential for the survival of the colony.  The men will need to ask their forgiveness before anything can happen with a surviving colony. What is this talking about?  This is straight up unionizing.  It's not as sexy or satisfying as revenge, but it also is the only way for a society to succeed when those providing labor are oppressed.  I love it. Like I said, because I don't like binaries, I don't think the allegory has to work as an either-or thing.  It works as both.  This is a story about giving power to the workers and taking down the patriarchy, who have normalized sexual sin all throughout.  That makes a great piece of art.  It doesn't have to speak to one audience.  It speaks to multiple audiences about multiple ideas and it does it well.

I'm going to be picking apart the next piece of analysis as I write.  If it goes nowhere, I apologize.  I also have so many thoughts rushing around in my head that I have to confess that I forgot about a big moment in the story that I can't unpack.  But right now, I want to talk about August.  I want to talk about August because I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop on August.  One of the grossest thing you can say about a woman's story is "Not all men."  Again, cultural catch up time: "Not all men" recenters the narrative of the woman on the man.  It makes it a man's story again. August does a lot in this movie.  He has one part that is haunting and it might be the part I wanted to discuss.  When the women decide to leave, they ask August a poignant question: "What age is too old to be considered dangerous?"  It is clear.  The men have been indoctrinated in this world where sexual assault is normalized and forgivable.  The women here are mothers.  They love their boys. They don't want to make these boys monsters like the men of their colony.  But when they want to take 13 to 14-year-olds, it is August who warns of the dangers of 13 or 14-year-olds.  

It's in this moment that August is part of the narrative.  One thing that I haven't really talked about is the notion of everyone being a protagonist or an antagonist.  Maybe better words would be "Good guys" and "Bad guys", because there isn't necessarily a traditional protagonist or antagonist in this story.  The women are all victims. But some of them get into some pretty morally grey moments at times. But August all of the sudden becomes a heroic character.  Because I watch too many movies, I was ready to watch for the "Not all men" fallacy pop up.  It never did.  He genuinely becomes one of the good guys in that moment.  In fact, as bleak as the women's lives ends up, there's something almost more heartbreaking watching August left behind in this colony.  So if he's not a rallying cry for the "Not all men" crowd, maybe he's the answer to the problem.  After all, I tend to complain about problem stories without answers. Maybe August is the answer.  It's not enough to scream "Not all men!".  Maybe it is the role of the men who avoid patriarchal roles to fix other men.  

August is a teacher.  He's with these boys. Appropriately, August's uniqueness comes from the notion that he's academically enriched.  He's left the colony, seen the world.  I don't quite understand his return.  I get the feeling it is a matter of love rather than any need for him to go back to the simple way of life.  But August's role is to ensure that no boy ever learns that rape or sexual assualt is okay.  After all, the women can't change them.  There are moments where Salome sits with her teenage boy and tries to make him see her as a person, not as simply "mom." God, I hope I'm right about this analysis that I discovered as I was writing because that gives me hope for the world.  For those who are quick to shout, "Not all men!", maybe August's example of sacrifice and allyship is more what the world needs.  He's not doing it to impress Ona.  He's not an incel.  He's accepts what love Ona can give him and understands that he will forever be lonely.  He is the one man who knows the punishment that the patriarchy must suffer and accepts it for the betterment of society.

I really don't want to make August the hero of this story in this blog.  For all of my talking about August, I have him as my avatar.  I'm sorry about that.  But also, for as deep as the movie gets, it wears its other messages on its sleeves.  Characters are somehow three-dimensional archetypes.  They have clear objectives and since so much of the movie is talking, like a play, there is little left to the imagination about intentions.  We'll never know the details about Mariche's husband despite the fact that we know that he's a domestic abuser.  But Polley gets her points across clearly.  There's a clear right and wrong.  It's not saying what Polley did was an oversimplification. There's nothing simple about this movie.  Instead, this is a movie about having a clear message.  There's room for interpretation, as you have just read. But ultimately, the author didn't want to mince words and I respect that.

NC-17, which makes me nervous to even write about it.  I know that there's this political buzz about why this movie is NC-17.  Guys, it's pretty vulgar all throughout.  I honestly think that Marilyn is nude more of the movie than she isn't. There's a lot of sex stuff that's pretty graphic.  I choose not to write those words on my blog, but it leaves little to the imagination.  But the more upsetting thing about the movie are the forced abortions that happen in the movie.  There's domestic abuse of both the physical and emotional manner.  It's got a ton of language.  It's just misery for about three hours.  NC-17

DIRECTOR: Andrew Dominik

My hook today is about how everyone loves hyperbole.  We do.  Absolutely, everything is either the most or the least.  It's the best movie or the worst movie.  It's filthy or its innocent.  I know that my student didn't come up with this, but he's made it his own.  "This is definitely one of the movies of all time."  While I don't think that Blonde is great by any means --and I will be complaining about the movie for the majority of this blog --it's also not this travesty.  Do I think that Ana de Armas deserves the Oscar for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe? Probably not, but that's because I think the character is a little too Oscar-baity for me as opposed to the quality of her acting.  (The only reason that she would get it is for the misery that she probably had to subject herself to in the process of making this movie.) 

But the big one?  The "Does-this-deserve-to-be-NC-17?" question.  Gosh darn it, this one kind of annoys me.  I kind of already touched on it, but this is absolutely a vulgar movie of the worst kind.  For those in the know, Blonde is at the center of one of Fox News' many trumped up (pun intended) controversies.  As someone who is a Pro-Life Democrat (nobody likes me with that label), do I think that the movie has a Pro-Life message?  Yes.  It does and it is kind of insane that the message exists in a movie.  Do I think that the libs are slapping an NC-17 label on this to keep it quiet?  No.  That's the dumbest conspiracy theory today.  (I had to add today when I realized how bad conspiracy theories were getting.) Most of the film is about the sexualization of Marilyn Monroe / Norma Jean until she ultimately has to deal with mental and physical scarring from a world that demands that she be sexualized.  Now, I am making this movie, I would probably minimize the actual on-screen sex stuff.  But that's a take that is beyond my pay grade as a guy who has a self-funded blog with a minimal readership.  

But the movie really goes all in with the sex.  Here's me, devil's advocate, claiming that I get what Andrew Dominik is doing.  It's one thing to talk about Marilyn being sexualized.  It's something that is part of the collective consciousness.  But there's something cheeky about Marilyn's abuse in that light.  The sexualization of Marilyn Monroe was quickly recontextualized into something healthy.  By showing the sex and the violence that is associated with sexualization, the movie quickly becomes almost a horror movie when it comes to how Marilyn was treated.  And, as a guy who is objectively looking at the film, it works.  But then there's the problem with making the movie almost three hours long.  I talked a little bit about this with All Quiet on the Western Front.  Both of these movies are probably now known for being visceral portrayals of real-life atrocities.  But as time goes on in these very long films, the brutality becomes something it absolutely should not be: mundane.  If the goal of Blonde is to leave the film with the scarring that Marilyn went through, you can't keep going to the same well.  It just becomes something abhorrent, but oddly boring.  It's getting us desensitized to things that should still be traumatic by the end of the film.  Unfortunately, we were just waiting for the movie to end.  If the goal is to make people horrified by sex acts, but you just ended up making us accustomed to sex acts, what's the point?

I'm really going to go into a dangerous place with this next one.  Please go through the whole argument before you judge me because there is something I want to communicate quite badly.  In terms of structure and tone, there's something eerily similar between Blonde and The Passion of the Christ.  Breathe.  I'm not done. The structure of both films is about brutality.  These are movies that are meant to destroy and they absolutely do.  I remember sitting through The Passion of the Christ and everyone just sat watching the credits in silence.  It was a powerful experience.  I have a handful of DVDs that I own that I haven't watched my copies of.  Sometimes, it's just that I'm watching new movies all of the time.  But in the case of The Passion of the Christ, it's too much for me to view again.  I eventually will probably watch it, if for no other reason than watching it.  But I adored The Passion of the Christ while disliking, for the most part, Blonde.  Part of that comes from the end goal of the film.  The title The Passion of the Christ names Jesus "the Christ".  It comes from a place of religious reverence.  I am pretty sure that non-Christian audiences probably dislike that movie for the same reason that I don't really like Blonde.  It seems like a lot of torture for a time at the theater.  But when there is religious significance to the actions happening on screen, it becomes this moving experience.

This begs the question, then, am I so divorced from humanity that I can't watch Blonde as a moving experience? I don't know.  I think that I'm actually quite empathic when it comes to the plight of the individual.  After all, Death of a Salesman is one of my favorite plays.  I teach it every year and mourn the sacrifice of the common man.  (I'm a very good person, as you can tell by my blog.) But Marilyn is something different.  I applaud Andrew Dominik for regularly returning to the name "Norma Jean" throughout.  I love that Norma treats Marilyn like the other because it humanizes her.  But Marilyn Monroe is part of the cult of celebrity.  She transcends the cult of celebrity.  She's so rooted in who we are as Americans that it is hard to see her as a person.  And because Marilyn keeps the Marilyn voice, even when she identifies as Norma, there are no moments where I can't see Marilyn instead of Norma trapped inside the shell of Marilyn Monroe. Yes, there's empathy for the entire film.  It's not like I wasn't moved by it.  But in the same way that someone of a different faith views The Passion of the Christ, gaining little from the movie beyond the two-hour torture marathon, I gain little from the rape and torture of Marilyn Monroe for three-hours.  It's not Norma Jean.  It's cultural icon Marilyn Monroe and I don't worship at that cult.

It's not that I run out of things to say, but I always find myself returning to the following touchstone: "Is the world a bad place?" I may be treading on the same ground over-and-over again, but it is nice having it in one place.  When I was younger, I vascillated between thinking the world was mostly good with a few bad people and the inverse, that the world was bad with a few good people. As an adult, something in me is broken and I'm firmly convinced that we're not good and that only a few of us genuinely want to make the world a better place.  That's where I stand when I watch something like Blonde.  So many people are awful to Norma Jean.  Some of them make sense.  Considering that we're post #metoo, we know that people in power abuse those looking to survive.  The movie doesn't shy away from that and nor should it.  (Note: I just realized in this moment that I referenced Death of a Salesman, forgetting that Arthur Miller is a character in Blonde considering that he married Marilyn Monroe.) But I'm talking about Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson, Jr.  These characters confuse me and frustrate me about life.  I mean, that's the point.  Mission: Accomplished, movie.

Cass and Eddy intially represent this kind of sex-positive, no shame element to Marilyn's life.  If the entire world is trying to either sleep with her and use her, or shame her for her sexual history, Cass and Eddy are meant to be the alternative for that.  They seem to invite her into this secret circle of progressives who take care of Norma Jean as one of their own.  Yes, their actions are extremely sexual.  From an outside perspective, we acknowledge that their interactions were not completely altruistic.  But it also seemed like an alternative lifestyle.  (If Andew Dominik is politically motivated, which he may or may not be, it would scan that he presents the liberal left as wolves in sheeps' clothing.)  It's when she is forced to have her first abortion from seemingly Cass's child, they almost thrill in tortruing her. It all seems petty.  Now, I think we read up on this and the whole polyamorous relationship with Eddy and Cass was overblown for tabloid headlines.  But let's pretend that this was real.  Sure, it's written by someone who had to make villain characters.  But it just seems depressing to have these evil characters who have no motivation for their evil.  Marilyn is out of their lives and they still mentally scar her years later.  It actually would make a lot of sense if the filmmakers were taking a conservative position, showing that the Hollywood elite get their kicks out of misery.  That demonizing of the left is pretty standard.

I don't know about this movie, guys.  It's got some things.  But while I often rail about overly long runtimes, this movie's runtime is the thing that hurts it the most.  There's nothing to really gleam onto.  It's just bleak abuse for almost three hours.  Golly, we had to split it up over multiple nights and it was actively a chore to sit down and watch more of the movie. That's not good.

PG for people dying by sea beast and sea beasts dying by people.  It's the lightest version of a scary concept, though.  Yeah, I don't think my little ones would be the biggest fans of the scares in this movie, but it does have such a light tone that it is hard to fault the movie.  The most upsetting stuff in the movie, honestly, is how people treat other people.  There's also the notion of unnatural magics that are considered evil.  PG.

DIRECTOR: Chris Williams

Oh man, I have a lot to say about this movie and I'm kind of driven to write.  But I also know that I'm not going to get this whole thing down in one sitting, so I'm considering just giving up and putzing for a bit.  I don't know what it is about pirate-y movies, but they really don't do a lot for me.  It's not to say that I didn't enjoy The Sea Beast.  I actually liked it a lot more than I planned to. But this movie is way too pirate-y for me to have any lasting relationship with this movie.  In fact, one of the motivators for writing this blog as quickly as I can is the notion that I'm already forgetting basic things about this movie.  

Mind you, that's for a couple of reasons.  As I mentioned, piratey things?  Not for me.  I mean, I tolerate them fine.  But they are just other adventures when I am looking for something very specific.  But the bigger deal, and this might be the crux of my argument throughout this blog, is that it is just a bit of a knock-off of How to Train Your Dragon.  "But, Tim," you may ask, "don't dragons fly?"  You'd be right.  Most dragons fly.  But in the way that there are only a few plots out there, this is fundamentally a story about a race of creatures who are misunderstood to be vicious killers only to reveal that the real monster is man.  There's a plucky kid who is willing to take down society and fight for creatures who have the potential to wipe out scores of people before being slowed down.  The humans and the beast learn to live in symbiosis and we can't imagine what it was like to live without these creatures.  I mean, it's all spelled out for you in the first few mintues of the movie.  Yeah, there's an important theme that I'm going to hang my hat on pretty strongly later.  But in terms of plot, there's nothing to look forward to.  If I can quote myself from when I first started writing this blog, it's pretty "paint-by-number."

I can't leave this blog to be just, "It's just How to Train Your Dragon" (Although it totally is and I can't stress that enough!).  After all, I said that I liked this movie and --get ready for blasphemy! --I don't even like How to Train Your Dragon that much.  There is something that makes me like this movie.  And it is so me and so on the nose me that I can't not be insufferable about it. (It's okay, because I'm politically insensed anyways because of the proud meninists that are in my class.)  I'm about to say some words and I have to stress that I'm intentionally using them.  They are not accurate words, but they have a cultural meaning beyond their denonative status.  Here we go.  I really appreciate and borderline love The Sea Beasts because it is pro-CRT.  Okay, see?  I got the emotional impact that I was going for and now I can break that down.  CRT, what most people don't realize, is a pretty heady concept about how laws are either intentionally or unintentionally racist.  The whole hullaballoo about CRT was a fundamental understanding of what CRT was, thinking that any kind of Black history, especially if it was directly stemming from the evils of slavery, was considered inaccurate.  Okay.  Basically, to remove something that most schools couldn't even integrate into a pre-higher education curriculum, the far-right started deleting things that were appropriately taught, namely a culture and a history that is vital to who we are as a people.

But then, where does The Sea Beast come in?  There's this great subplot, far more interesting than the rehashed plot that the rest of the movie offers, where Maisie starts questioning the books that she's been devoted to her entire life.  Now, the dangers of this plot are numerous.  For those going with knee-jerk reactions, which unfortunately is most of America right now, is that books are lies and that you can't trust anything you read.  It also could be used that Maisie uses anecdotal evidence to make decisions.  Instead, if America would just take a gosh-darned breath, you would notice that Maisie uses all of the resources available to her, to verify the authenticity of a text.  When she sees that her anecdotal evidence doesn't match the content of books, she starts looking at bias in books.  Upon further inspection, she sees that all of the books have been basically government propaganda, published by the same source.  Now, why I used the phrase "CRT" earlier is that the consequence of most of America flipping out over the phrase CRT was the notion that we shouldn't be analyzing cultural bias in texts.  

Again, completely White Knighting here and I apologize, but I love the idea of the 1619 Project.  The 1619 Project and CRT are easily connected by the right as Woke revisionism, but that's such an underread of the story.  Let's use Maisie as the example because, after all, this is a blog about The Sea Beast.  Maisie's discovery that the books in the kingdom have all been promoted by the King and Queen to keep the lower classes focused on an external enemy rather than question their own financial standings.  After all, when we're all working together to take down giant sea beasts, can we really question the government that is keeping the whole thing together under such trying times?  And it's not like people aren't being encouraged to read. What is being written has elements of verisimilitude.  It has real people and mostly real stories.  But they are devoid of context.  Conservative America would look at Maisie as trying to erase a belief that people have defined themselves by. Captain Crow is a hero of these stories.  He's sacrificed life and eyeball to this quest. As proven by Red's defensive, yet aggressive behavior, there's some truth that the sea beasts are dangerous.  

But this is where Maisie's story gains importance.  Remember, 1619 Project isn't about erasing as it is about contextualizing.  More information isn't bad.  Maisie, when she reveals that the sea beasts have degrees of sentience and many of their actions were done out of self-defense, it makes Crow go from looking like a heroic patriot to a zealot.  Jacob Holland, for all of his indoctrination in the old ways, has the blessing of not being the in the spotlight as the captain of the Inevitable.  Yes, his acceptance of new data is slow.  But he's also more vulnerable to listen.  But Crow is part of the old guard.  He is given this option to either accept this new data, which means that everything that he's devoted to has made him a monster, or pretend that the new data is false, maintaining his heroic status.  While I'm not sympathetic to Crow in this movie, his choices make sense.  It's why people are so nervous to accept stuff like the 1619 Project (or as they think it, "CRT").  No one wants to look like the bad guys of history, but it is also important that history is written by the victors.  

As crazy as this is, The Sea Beast is the search for objective truth.  There is a reality that happened, but we choose to bury it because we're afraid of more information.  Yeah, every bit of fact is probably tainted by bias.  But the more information we have, the more of a real picture we gain.  As dumb as The Sea Beast is as an action kids movie, it has an amazing message about critical thinking and evaluating sources.  Sure, I'm probably tainted by the fact that I'm a liberal English teacher.  But this is the kind of storytelling we need right now.  It shouldn't be about believing or not believing.  It's exploring why a story is being told.

PG, but I think that Disney+ labelled it as TV-14.  It's pretty innocent.  It's not very graphic.  We see some burns from being too close to a volcano, but even as gross as this is, it's pretty mild.  The big concern I have about watching this movie with children is the knowledge, from the beginning, that the Kraffts will die by volcano.  But most of it is pretty light, talking about a relationship built around volcanos.

DIRECTOR: Sara Dosa

​I had to pull teeth to get my family to watch this.  It was on Disney+ and it was up for an Academy Award and I thought, "Perfect.  I can get my kids into documentaries."  I assumed because my kids were really into Science Comics that this would be a natural extension.  And to a certain extent, I was successful.  Olivia ran upstairs and got her book on rocks and minerals.  But I don't know if my family necessarily has the attention span for something like this.  I don't know if it is a documentary thing or if it is borderline a nature documentary thing.  But Fire of Love is such a specific thing and, in this case, it means that it has a very specific audience.

At its heart and on its sleeve, it is a love story.  It sells itself on that premise. Maurice and Katia Krafft bonded over their love of vulcanology.  That's as unique as it gets.  I love this one line where they acknowledge that they basically have to be the only married vulcanologists on the planet.  It's not saying that vulcanologists don't get married.  They just don't get married to other vulcanologists.  And it's a nice story.  But there's a problem with documentaries to begin with, especially when it comes to love stories.  They either have to be the most unbelievable relationships ever or they are not enough to carry a story.  The story of Maurice and Katia is cute, but it isn't necessarily one wrought with twists and turns. Maurice is a bit of a thrillseeker.  Katia is more in awe of the majesty of nature.  Now, both of these personalities are drawn to volcanos.  Cool.  There's some conflict.  Maurice's fame coupled with his dumb ideas causes tension between the couple.  But we know from moment one that they have a pretty solid marriage.  Like all marriages, there are things that drive you crazy about each other.  But that's the nature of any relationship.  The onus on the film is to establish that those differences matter.  Really, they don't.

So National Geographic then leans heavily into the other element that they're good at.  I'm going to refer to this as the Planet Earth factor.  Fire of Love, thanks to the devoted documentation and filmmaking of the Kraffts, has a lot of really spectacular footage of volcanos.  Me, I'm not a big National Geographic guy.  I tend to want my documentaries to be either about music (I don't get it either) or about politics (I get that.  I'm fighting the world and want ammunition.) But straight up gorgeous footage of the world doing crazy stuff normally doesn't do it for me.  I'm going to dance around something for a while, so I apologize in advance.  But the gist of this is that while Fire of Love is effective in getting me to watch a lot of cool stuff blow up, it could be better.  Because the thing that kept me watching all this cool blowy-uppy stuff is that story of the Kraffts.  But as I mentioned before, that story is very thin.  Sure, the movie keeps it going for an hour-and-a-half.  But the story of the Kraffts is really about forty minutes tops.  Thank God that the movie decided to cop out at 1.5 hours because it started relying a bit too much on the film.

But there is one thing that really kept me going.  It's not surprising that, being the film snob I am, that I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson.  There's this back and forth between artist and inspiration with this movie.  Using The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as our foundational work, my wife and I couldn't help but make comparisons to that work.  The thing that I'm going to comment on that may seem a bit obvious is the notion that Wes Anderson had to be inspired by the Kraffts for Life Aquatic.  Geez, like it is on the nose. I just typed "Life Aquatic Fire of Love" into Google and I'm not the only one to jump on this train. It's everything.  The Kraffts, for as twee as it is to be romantic vulcanologists, define quirk.  They wear goofy colored hats.  They point at things and have the intense zoom on volcanos.  There are short shorts and everything is shot on Super 8.  (Okay, if I'm wrong about that, I apologize.  I'm mostly good at recognizing Super 8.) Trust me, thank goodness that the Kraffts were this way because I ship them so much harder for being Wes Anderson's template for everything. 

But there's something about Fire of Love, removed from the Kraffts' entire thing, that is also inspired by Anderson.  If Anderson was inspired by the Kraffts, Fire of Love was Inception-level inspired by Anderson. Most of that comes from Miranda July's flat affect delivery of narration.  Sure, the majority of the film is directly edited footage that the Kraffts used for films. But the transitions were basically made out of paper cuts outs and puppets.  I hate dealing in speculation, but the natural inclination for talking about volcanos and their affects on Earth would be impressive charts, graphs, and effects.  Instead, there's this intentional rudiment to everything that is presented on screen.  I can see this movie smoking a cigarette in a beanie, perhaps portrayed by Willem Dafoe.  It just embraces what it is.  It makes the movie somehow special to me.  I don't think that Wes Anderson would ever make a documentary (although I can be wrong; he did make animation), but this is what I imagine something from Anderson would look like.  It's almost fan service in the best way.  Sure, if you hate Wes Anderson, then I have nothing for you.  But this is almost a thought experiment on how something would look like.

The thing that I always have a hard time writing about when it comes to documentaries is about the subjects themselves though.  There's a weird personality behind the Kraffts that I find both incredibly romantic and incredibly frustrating at the same time.  I am going to preface this by saying, "Thank God they didn't have kids."  It does feel like the narrator is their kid, though, right?  I can't be the only one thinking that while watching this movie, can I?  Anyway, thank God they don't have kids because their life, for as joie-de-vivre as it is, also seems incredibly reckless.  Okay, there's the pursuit of science.  That part I get.  I don't get mad at astronauts, knowing that their rockets could blow up or absolutely anything could go wrong because what they do is done for the advancement of science.  The Kraffts are scientists.  Absolutely and I almost am about to undo my entire argument here, but they are scientists.  But it doesn't feel like a lot of this is for the pursuit of science.  It's almost thrill-seeking.  I suppose I can give Katia a pass because she's less than a thrill-seeker.  But Maurice is kind of selfish.  

There's this part that is probably going to stick with me.  At one point, Maurice and an associate figure out how to get a boat onto an acid lake.  It's horrifying.  There is this pretense of science that is put into it that quickly unravels when the line gets eaten by acid.  Then it just becomes this three hour trip to get back to land and free of the acid lake.  If Maurice learned his lesson there, I would write off the entire thing as cheeky.  It's because I want to be British and I'm writing, but cheeky is the word I'm going with.  But then Maurice won't stop talking about taking a boat down a lava flow.  Where is the science there?  How is the world becoming this better place?  I know that the Kraffts studying the most dangerous kinds of volcanos could save lives later and they may have saved lives later, but it feels like it is all part of the thrill-seeking, almost carnival attitude that Maurice is embracing with wanting to canoe down a lava flow.  Is there something more beautiful about the grey smoke volcanos than the ones that they approached previously?  It's oddly a death wish that ended up getting fulfilled?  Did they kind of want to go out in a blaze of glory?  I'm not saying that they were suicidal, but it seems like their deaths seemed somehow glory-seeking. I don't know.  Maybe because it's what I absolutely wouldn't do that I can't understand it.

It's a bummer that my family didn't really like the movie.  I think I might have enjoyed it alone a lot, but I do see the flaws of the movie through the people next to me.  It's like seeing a movie in the theater and the mood is infectious.  Regardless, worth my time.

Rated R for being an incredibly brutal war movie.  Many war movies are meant to be uncomfortable.  All Quiet on the Western Front is known for being intentionally anti-war.  As such, it pulls no punches and shows the gore and horrors of war throughout.  It's kids dying horrible, horrible deaths throughout the film.  Nothing about it is pleasant.  It almost even goes too far at times. R.

DIRECTOR: Edward Berger

Why do war movies have to be so long?  I don't understand it.  I know that we found the one exception to the rule, but I can't remember which one it is.  Before I go into a long diatribe about All Quiet on the Western Front, I do want to state that this movie would have been way more effective if it was 30-40 minutes shorter.  At a certain point, it becomes, "I get it.  The war is terrible."

A few years ago, I had a small class that had actually gotten through all my scheduled content.  This isn't something that happens very often, especially with an English class.  I gave them practically carte blanche on what they wanted to do with their last month before graduation.  Whatever part of the literary canon they wanted to study, I'd make up a lesson for that, assuming it was appropriate.  In that class, I had a military nut.  He would daily cite specifications for different tanks while inserting these tanks into historical military strategy to discuss how outcomes would change.  It was this student who recommended All Quiet on the Western Front.  I didn't want to be the one who broke it to him that All Quiet on the Western Front was infamously an anti-war story.  If anything, the evil liberal in me was secretly relishing being the genie who gave more than he bargained for. Realistically, he probably still really enjoyed the war elements of the book and didn't change his philosophy on war based on what the book offered him.  I believe in the power of literature, but I also know what is realistic and what is (pardon the pun) a bridge too far.  But luckily for me, that made me actually quite knowledgable about All Quiet on the Western Front.  I mean, it was recent enough for me to write about the 1930 edition of the same movie.

I would have a hard time discussing which is better.  It's what I tell my students not to do when writing.  But I also know that this is a blog that is written very stream-of-consciousness style.  In terms of cinema, the new movie is almost next level.  While I would never put it on my favorite movies list, I acknowledge that it is a powerhouse of a film.  Gripped with emotion and filmed fantastically cinematically, I could show scenes from that movie on how to properly film war.  But it is also way too long.  There's probably a problem when such a harrowing story becomes boring and tedious.  I know, wars are long.  Often, a long runtime is meant to make the audience feel the impatience that the soldiers feel as well. But as Paul becomes desensitized to war, so do I feel watching All Quiet on the Western Front, which is a real problem to the mission statement to the film.  I'm supposed to prep people for the horrors and instead, I'm just just waiting for the movie to be older.  Also, and this isn't so much a criticism as it is something that one probably needs to know: the movie veers off from the original book (which it initially holds great reverence for) and produces its own third act, also weaving in elements of the greater world outside of Paul.  It's a choice and I think it is meant to create a sense of epic scale.  But for a story about The Great War, All Quiet on the Western Front is meant to be quite an intimate tale.

Paul as a protagonist, in all versions of the story, is almost lacking a sense of characterness.  It's on purpose.  I'm not criticizing any version of Western Front.  It's just an odd experience.  I hate throwing around the term "anti-war propaganda" (despite the fact that we need more anti-war propaganda!), but Paul is the ultimate avatar for the audience.  Written after what was meant to be the war-to-end-all-wars, it was a signal that war was not glorious.  One of my favorite scenes from any war movie is the pro-war propaganda that is spewed at these children. The notion that one is bred to defend one's country is something that is still wired into children today.  The new version is missing my favorite part of the story.  In All Quiet in the Western Front, Paul is indoctrinated by an older teacher, who talks about the glory of the fatherland.  That first part is in the new movie and I adore it.  All these kids are riled up and jazzed to go fight for one's country.  Cool.  There's a quick turn to realize that there's nothing sexy about being in a foxhole.  Death is just the norm in these places.  People tell the incoming recruits that they won't last the night and, in a lot of cases, their prophecies of doom are correct. 

But Paul, as our avatar, survives quite a bit of the war.  He's actually given the opportunity to go back to that teacher and shame him with the realities of war.  Now, this part doesn't happen in the new version.  I kind of hate that.  Like, it's so important to the inclusion of the brainwashing in the first scene.  I know he's not a boomer.  Heck, he's probably generation-less in the sense that he came from before we named generations.  But I love that basically, Gen Z is taking down a Boomer.  (Did you read what I just read before that inflammatory sentence?) There's something really cathartic about the entire notion of confronting those who are brainwashing others. Listen, I liked the new Western Front.  But there's something that's lost by not having the scene of confronting the teacher.  If the message of All Quiet on the Western Front is to avoid war at all costs because it will rob you of everything, that's a message of avoidance. It's telling us "not" to do something.  That's a pretty passive role for the audience.  But if Paul is the everyman avatar, having him confront the criminal teacher is something that can be done.  When Paul confronts his teacher, he's shutting down the narrative that war is glorious.  Instead, war is seen as something that is inevitable, despite the fact that Paul forges a parent's signature allowing him into war at a young age.  

But I'm already starting to see a trend with this year's Academy Awards.  Maybe it's an every year thing, but it seems like movies this year are bloated brutality.  The world is a terrible place.  I've said it for a while.  Hopeful Tim is dead.  That being said, I don't know why we have the need to keep punching our protagonists over-and-over.  It's not like there's a ton of happy things in All Quiet on the Western Front as a novel.  But the punches keep coming towards Paul.  (Trust me, All Quiet on the Western Front is not the worst offender this year.) But this movie really stresses that the notion of hope is a foolish one. One thing that the new movie does is really toy with the notion of hope as a myth.  Paul dies in the novel too.  But this is one of those movies that stresses that war will get everyone.  Because the film plays with the notion of time and a finish line, it just messes with us that Paul is the last casualty of the war.  He's war's greatest victim (again, representing the audience), because he survived so long and he saw that the end was in sight. But he watched everyone die before he did.  He had to suffer all through the war.  He could taste home and then that was denied him,  It's almost a bit too cruel. In the novel (and I only kind of remember this), it's remarkably boring that Paul dies.  The message isn't that Paul the Avatar will die nearly tasting freedom.  It's in those little moments.  Paul cannot get a spectacular death as he does in the film. Instead, the mundaneness of his death is an insult to injury

Maybe only Germany could have made this movie.  It must be really odd to be a German and to be the world's bad guy for two major films.  But the notion of making an anti-war movie from the German perspective is really telling of what the German cultural identity must entail.  I'm looking both at the perspective of Remarque and of Berger as well.  Remarque is doing something that Steinbeck is really known for: commenting on things that he lived through.  But Germany in 2022 is running into the same things most Western countries are dealing with right now and that's the notion of extremism.  I don't know if I'll be alive for when America starts telling the stories of its atrocities as cautionary tales to other countries, but that's what All Quiet on the Western Front offers.  As much as I see people wearing pro-gun shirts and I hear threats of war and violence as an American, we keep trotting forward not understanding that war is in no way sexy.  It's one of those things that should make us wrech at the notion of it.  Yet, it is glorified time and again. There are those in Germany (for all of the radicalism that is returning to all Western countries) who at least can understand what it means to be German and to be sattled with the burden of history.

It's a good movie.  It's a really good movie.  But it is long and there's a lot of bleak storytelling going on this year.  But that being said, the movie works as a whole. Yeah, it runs into the problems that many war movies run into.  But if you are into war films and are cool with the notion that war is terrible, this might really do it for you.

Rated R.  It's not a brutal documentary.  I mean, it's a gut-punch and I want everyone to watch it.  But in terms of visuals, there isn't so much that one would consider offensive.  But there is one thing that you should consider: the attempts on Navalny's life are not fiction.  This is real violence happening to a real dude.  Yeah, there's language, but we should be bothered that we're witnessing the real pain of a human being.  R.

DIRECTOR: Daniel Roher

I'm a little ashamed that I don't know more about Alexei Navalny.  As a Ukrainian who just ate up the news around this time, I don't remember much about Alexei Navalny.  Admittedly, I was watching American infrastructure collapse in real time.  Maybe I had marginalized the knowledge of international affairs to make way for other tragic information.

We've entered a weird time in cultural literacy training.  Everything has become a paradox when it comes to absorbing the news.  I'm a CNN guy.  If I look at a bias chart of different news network, it means I skew left and I absorb information that isn't always the most accurate.  I find solace in this because I see where FOX News falls on the scale and that only helps me accept my confirmation bias.  It's true.  We all have a bias.  I looked at the bell curve for accuracy and the dead center, most accepted and accurate news sources were so devoid of morality that they read like robots were transcribing human events.  At the center of Navalny, for all of its breakdown of complex politics, lies the paradox of accepting truth.  There's an irony that the movie starts off with the CNN Films banner.  Me, I accept that immediately.  Of course CNN is fighting the good fight.  While I rant about hypocrisy and bias, I honestly believe that CNN is at the center of a cultural battle to bring truth, but ask a FOX News viewer and this entire blog is considered moot and tainted.  This is always running through my mind throughout this movie. 

It's kind of a bummer because documentaries like Navalny are the best way to understand who Vladimir Putin really is.  Yeah, we get a deep dive into who Alexei Navalny is and I'm really glad to know the man from the ground level.  But Navalny is a foil to Putin.  It's a little bit of what The Diary of Anne Frank does for the Holocaust.  Conceptually, we should all know that Vladimir Putin is a monster and I think, for the most part, we do.  But he's a monster in a movie sense.  He's this removed person who doesn't affect Americans in a blatant way.  Okay, he hacks basically all facets of American culture and turns us against each other.  But we don't see that.  But through the story of Alexei Navalny, the guy who decided to stand up to Putin, we get a greater understanding of the true villainy of Putin.  The apex of this movie is the proof that Vladimir Putin poisoned Alexei Navalny and they got the scientist who did it to accidentally confess.  It's a real Robert Durst moment.  Anyway, let's pretend that we can follow Putin's spin on it, that the whole interview is staged and there is no scientist who did that.  Okay.  But what we do know for sure is that Putin is a nutbar.

I'm looking at the fact that Putin won't say Navalny's name.  Geez Louise, so much is telling about that.  Okay, there's no scenario where I'm not believing Navalny over Putin.  But again, and I'm going to stop saying this, for the Fox News Crew out there, the fact that he refuses to say his name is so telling about his character.  Now, I know that this just makes him seem human to a bunch of folks.  To those people, I actively Justin Timberlake stare in judgment.   But it's the same tactics that Trump did.  (Do you know how much effort it took to avoid dropping his name?  What few far-right punks I had a chance of reaching, I've now completely lost.) I'm probably doing some faulty argumentation here, but it's something as small as not being able to say Navalny's name that really gives the whole game away. 

The culture war in Russia is the antithetical problem we have here.  Here, we have a glut of news that is probably mostly accurate.  Since I'm using CNN as a touchstone, I would like to point out that CNN regularly criticizes Biden, despite being accused of being lib fake-news.  Russia media refuses to criticize Putin any way because it literally is state-run media.  Everything that Putin wants to do, he has the people who are willing to do that for him.  Perhaps it is because of the completely abhorrent economy there, but it is easy to bribe the poor into doing something not on the up-and-up.  I can see that the Q-Anon folks and the alt-right feel like they are in Russia, proclaiming the truth against a wave of people telling otherwise.  But it's also something we have to consider in the cult of personality.  Vladimir Putin and Trump both tip their hands when it comes to criticism.  Listen, Joe Biden, in my mind, is fine.  He's not great.  He's painfully vanilla, to the detriment of the country a lot of the time.  But I don't mind calling him out for that.  He's been called out for worse and has kept his cool.  He keeps things professional and allows people to think poorly of him.

Compare that behavior to that of Trump and Putin.  Yeah, this is a documentary about Alexei Navalny.  But this is Navalny's message: Putin will never let go of power willingly.  He's a child who needs control and is willing to kill to maintain it.  As much as we're focused on Navalny as the subject of this documentary, he's just the microphone that we need to hear about Putin's regime.  There's something that I don't like, but also completely intellectually understand from Navalny's perspective.  Navalny, like Trump, refuses to alienate White supremacists.  It's a real bummer moment in the movie. (Again, CNN doesn't mind showing the whole truth about someone, despite the fact that this documentary paints Navalny in the most loving light imaginable.) I wish that Navalny ripped into White supremacists.  For all I know, he might have sympathies.  I don't know enough about him outside of this doc to make those claims.  But I do know that he is in between a rock and a hard palce with this sham of an election.  Navalny is in this place politically where there's borderline an impossibility to win.  The election isn't real.  It's, at best, to save face and to stress that democracy is a thing in Russia.  

To a certain extent, he has a point.  If Navalny comes out against White supremacists, he's censoring what people have to say.  Now, we can start talking the paradox and misunderstanding of tolerance.  I get the flaw in Navalny's thinking.  But Navalny is in a place of practicality.  Anyone who supports Navalny publicly is at risk of imprisonment.  It's amazing that he has people who show their faces on TV.  I was kind of freaking out for one kid in this documentary who looked right into the camera and realized that his life may be over.  (I'm surprised that CNN didn't think of that.) To turn away supporters means to guarantee loss.  Perhaps his weaponizing of zealots may have a role in changing things (assuming he didn't get arrested for 20 months.  Or now, 11.5 years).  But I also hate to see that happen.  I don't know.  It's these slow deals with the devils that bother me.  But also, I get it.  I really do.

Ultimately, this is the story of a martyr.  I get really depressed thinking about this movie.  I learned a lot about a man in about an hour-and-a-half, but what did I really learn?  Is the world a terrible place?  I know that those living under the oppression of the Soviet Union thought that the Cold War was never going to end.  I know that change seems impossible in the present.  It's only viewed positively through the light of history.  But I can't be the only one who sees the world that we're living in and watching everything rewind to a state where things were worse?  I'll be honest, I get sad a lot.  I'm told that I'm not supposed to share my feelings online, so I'll keep it to a minimal. I was raised believing that human beings are fantastic people.  Alexei Navalny seems like an exceptionally optimistic human being.  He fought a system that was built on oppression and control.  There are people in the streets cheering for him and fighting for him.  But Alexei Navalny's imprisonment and martyrdom was supposed to be the door for change.  Has anything changed?  Putin is going to be president for ending.  There will be no comeuppance.  It's going to be this.  Forever. 

​Bullies win.  

Rated R for a lot (and I mean A LOT) of specifically Irish swearing.  That's not me making a judgement call.  It's literally a lot of words that we acknowledge as foul language that we don't specifically use in the United States.  Also, the movie gets really dark, going into stuff like self-mutilation and violence towards animals.  The R-rating is pretty well-deserved here.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Martin McDonagh

I'm glad this is the official kick-off movie of awards season because, after seeing the trailer, it's the movie off of the Academy Awards list that I wanted to see the most.  Well, out of the ones I still hadn't seen.  Everything Everywhere All at Once made me lose my marbles.  But The Banshees of Inisherin was up there.  Just because I'm incredibly basic, I was in the mood for another In Bruges. I mean, it's the same director with the same cast.  What wouldn't make me excited to see this movie?  

Thank God it wasn't another In Bruges.  Okay, I need to go back and watch In Bruges again because I've only seen it the one time.  But I think I needed something else from Martin McDonagh that still somehow maintained his sense of auteurness about him.  (Auterness?  Auterity?  Auteurnidom?)  I kind of have a Danny Boyle appreciation for McDonagh now.  When you watch a Boyle film, there are certain hallmarks that really stand out in his work.  But Boyle infamously doesn't like doing the same genre twice.  I could have seen The Banshees of Inisherin as this very cool and clever takedown of friendship, set up against the backdrop of a civil war.  To a certain extent, it is that.  But The Banshees of Inisherin is as vulnerable as a movie gets.  I mean, that is my buzzword.  I love vulnerability in this movie.  McDonagh can't hide behind anything here.  As clever as his writing is, it's never trying to mask the fact that all of the weight falls on the likability of a village everyman against the boorishness of a snobby intellectual. Yeah, apply this to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Ireland and that's exactly what is going on.

The village is sparse.  That sparsity is what makes this borderline a play.  Yeah, there are people in the town of Irisherin, but they are color, not forces.  They make the world of Inisherin a spectacle of drama.  Let me explain.  If I had to summarize the story, in its most basic form, is that it is a friendship breakup over nothing.  One thing that Colm keeps on stressing is that Padaric has done nothing wrong.  Fundamentally, Padaric will never be more than average.  He luxuriates in his middling.  This story is so universal that it would be considered too basic to film.  Obviously, McDonagh knows what he's doing and he's not going to settle for simple.  But in the way that Arthur Miller made the mundane fascinating with Death of a Salesman, McDonagh elevates what should be just a spat between two friends into something grandiose and epic.  It is through the eyes of those secondary and tertiary characters that compounds what should be a hiccup into something that destroys worlds.

We, as the audience, become the town of Inisherin.  The only people who have any right to sway over Padaric and Colm are Siobhan and Dominic, and even Dominc is a stretch.  But it is Colm's dramatic nature, despite the fact that he seems calm as stone, that escalates all of the events.  Listen, I know that that allegory of the civil war is in the background of this movie and it should be what I'm analyzing.  Instead, I choose to analyze Colm and Padaric as a story divorced from the war coloring the setting of the piece.  If I get there, I get there.  But let me talk about Colm and Padaric because I find them fascinating.  Colm outwardly seems in control of the situation.  Colm thinks that he is the super-ego, rationally understanding that Padaric removed from his life is all that is stopping him from little immortality that he wishes to achieve.  But as dramatic as Padaric gets in the movie (and who acts as an avatar for me), Colm is the one who is dramatic as get out.  I honestly get the vibe that Colm is doing this as a form of self-destruction.

Colm is closest with Padaric.  He has few friends with whom he interacts in a vulnerable (that word again!) place.  He plays the fiddle and the town knows him because of his presence in the tiniest place on the planet.  But he knows how Padaric will react.  I refuse to think that he considers any of Padaric's behavior as a surprise.  Everything that happens in the story is Colm.  Sorry if I'm taking a side so hard, but I am.  Does Colm have the right to separate himself from Padaric?  Absolutely.  I don't like it. Like the priest tells Colm, it's not a sin, but it's not nice either.  But he does have that right.  But the way that Colm handles it.  Padaric is owed (sorry, but this is where I'm going to play it a bit conservatively) a real breakup.  But Colm's silence is intentionally confusing.  What Colm is doing is blaming Padaric for his own smallness.  (Grow up.)  The ultimatum that he gives Padaric is unreasonable.

From Padaric's perspective, the moral good is to rescue a relationship with his friend.  Again, we can start breaking down id, ego, and super-ego here and I ask a better man than I who has a bit more patience and time to do it.  But Padaric balances what he selfishly wants, his friend back, with the moral good, stopping his friend from self-destruction. Everything from Padaric's perspective, shy of burning down Colm's house with Colm in it, is done out of good.  All of the data he's receiving about the situation is to ignore Colm's words and to concentrate on not letting his friend flounder.  It would be easier for Padaric to allow Colm to suffer.  Yeah, he would be sad that he lost a friend, but he also knows that he wouldn't be the center of a attention in this small town.  Now, we have to be aware of the romantic breakup metaphor going on.  There's this idea that, mental health wise, have to discuss aloud. While there are no blatant homosexual overtones, one could easily view this film through a gay lens.  If this was a romantic breakup, we'd view Padaric as inappropriate.  He would be considered mopey and manipulative.  But gay lens or not, we would be denying Padaric his humanity.  

I don't see Padaric as mopey.  I see him as grieving.  In much the same way that death is often confusing and surprising to us, Colm's choice to distance himself from Padaric does.  All rational thought and a lifetime of input says that Colm should be close to Padaric.  We are built on the expectation of normality and routine.  Siobhan and Colm leaving Padaric, especially with a current of anger in leaving, is too much for anyone's mental health.  While Siobhan empathizes with Padaric, she doesn't understand that he's a child with a wholly new experience.  I don't see Padaric as manipulative so much as he is overwhelmed with emotion.  I'm citing the scene where he gets a ride from Colm or the scene where he is saved from the abusive police officer.  Leaving Padaric to his own devices may mirror the distancing from arrested development into adulthood, but it is too much without a safety net.  (I mean, that's the point of ending arrested development.)  But the Padaric shifts from a place of emotional death to literal death with the death of Jenny.  There's something morbidly funny in this, although you won't find me laughing.  Intellectually, I can state that the silly donkey is the one who dies in this scenario, directly caused by the selfish self-mutilation of Colm.  (I mean, I don't need to analyze that.  Colm says that his mutilation is tied to his artistic dreams being ruined by Padaric.)  But Jenny is the only thing that represents normality.  Jenny is given almost childlike qualities.  This is an animal that is spoiled and raised by Padaric.  As much as it is a joke, Padaric cares about the consistency of the tiny horse's excrement (very confused about what the final status of that animal is).  It's the same care that a parent gives to a child.

Just to go full academic on this movie, there's a parallel between parenthood and friendship as well.  Although Colm claims to be the more mature one, he only looks out for himself.  He has the responsibilities of the single.  He can play out at the pub every night and has nothing to really care for outside of his artistic talent.  Padaric seems to care for others.  He's almost entirely defined by caring.  He cares for Colm, Siobhan, Dominic, and Jenny.  Jenny, being the allegorical child in this situation, is the focus of his conversation. The conversation about analyzing her feces is the same converation that parents have about analyzing the diapers of a child for heath purposes.  Colm's frustration may be that Padaric is boring compared to his free and fancy-free lifestyle, but it also acts a commentary for the traits that Colm lacks.  Padaric, for his lacking intellect, has emotional maturity that Colm cannot fathom.  Yes, he cares for Jenny out of selfishness because he has bonded with his animal.  But he takes care of Dominic not because he loves Dominic.  He actually finds Dominic quite annoying, but recognizes that Dominic is being stripped of his intrinsic value by his father.  If fatherhood is about sacrifice, that's Padaric acting as the father that Dominic never had. 

It's appropriate that Colm bonds with Jonjo.  Jonjo, despite his label as literal father and public father (as police officer, caring for the town), he fails at meeting the requirements that it takes to being a father.  He cares only for himself and his own creature comforts.  He beats on Dominic (I'm not sure if the molestation was a real thing or a turn of phrase) and assaults those who don't respect his authority.  But Colm sees a kindred spirit in those who don't care for social conventions nor self-sacrifice.  It's while he is sitting with Jonjo that Colm has his speech about being famous for kindess.  While Padaric allows his true feelings to come out at this moment, he also should note that people aren't respected for their evil either.  Mozart may have been a blowhard, but he's not famous for being a blowhard.  (I have no idea.  I just know Amadeus.) 

So, yeah, I could analyze the civil war as the reason for this movie.  But I also really just grew to the characters.  I wanted to know what made them tick.  Is it the point?  Maybe, maybe not.  Did I overanalyze the relationship between these two men?  Probably.  But it's movies like this that have complexity in the simplicity (God I hate me for writing that) that allow me to write for long periods where I really enjoy writing. 

Not rated, but definitely deserving of an R-rating.  The central conceit is about a murdering rapist on the loose in the Korean countryside.  There's a man who pleasures himself to the perversion of the crime on camera.  It's a lot.  It's just a lot.  This has a lot in common with movies like Se7en in terms of brutal and mature content.  There's genital mutilation and all kinds of horrors done to women.  

DIRECTOR:  Bong Joon-Ho

I know!  I should be writing about Academy Award nominees.  But here I am, knocking out my last Netflix DVD before I can start writing about these things. I'm fascinated by Bong Joon-Ho.  One of my earliest discoveries at Thomas Video was The Host.  It was a horror movie unlike any I had seen up to that point and it completely blew my mind.  I'd seen a couple of different ones in there, but then came Parasite.   Parasite changed things.  I always treated the works of Bong Joon-Ho as some kind of underground thing.  Sure, I recommended these movies to people.  I insisted that people watch these movies.  The intellectual part of me wanted them to watch them so they would become culturally literate and to experience something different from the norm.  The selfish part of me wanted to be the guy who introduced them into this secret cult of Director Bong.  

But when he destroyed at the Oscars, the world had changed.  I wanted to have that seductive feeling of secret knowlege.  So I threw some of Bong Joon-Ho's film onto my Netflix DVD queue and now I have Memories of Murder.  I will say, that feeling I had of wanting to discover, is currently waning.  I almost didn't care when the DVD came in the mail.  Heck, I didn't even remember that Memories of Murder was a Bong Joon-Ho movie.  I was certainly glad when the Criterion menu popped up and Bong Joon-Ho's name was in giant letters. I knew that I was going to be in for something special. Maybe that's what made it so hard to get into the movie.  Memories of Murder took a long time snag me.  I do think a lot of it was chalked up to my expectations.  But it also took me a long time to realize what this movie was.  The thing with Director Bong is that, while he might dip his toes into established genres, his entire modus operandi of filmmaking is to break free of constraints and formulae.  

I went into this movie thinking that I was going to write about how this is just In the Heat of the Night without the racial component to it again.  The first half of the movie really feels like this.  There's a series of murders that the local country cops have no skills to investigate.  They use TV cops as models for how to run a crime scene.  They abuse people into confessing that they are criminals, despite mounds of evidence suggesting otherwise.  It's only when a big city cop, actually trained, starts poking holes in their methods that the film gets anywhere near a traditional narrative.  But that's when the film surprises me.  I thought, "Another big city cop embarrasses small time cops and they learn to be friends at the end."  It was only late in the movie that I realized, "Oh, this is something subversive."  For those who haven't seen the movie, which is probably the majority of my Facebook page, they never solve the case.  Not like Mulholland Drive neer solve the case.  I'm talking about, intentionally ambiguous not solve the case.

As much as In the Heat of the Night is damning of backwater police work, which seems to be the majority of policework (thus damning law enforcement overall), Memories of Murder is more an attack on policework in the sense that people, by their very nature, are corruptable.  I don't want to forget the following point, so I'm going to jump the gun: Because Seo Tae-yoon falls, it kind of forgives (in the worst way) everyone else.  Okay, I got that out, so let me go back.  The country bumpkins are shown as backwards hicks.  And they totally are.  They are what we fear about police work.  We don't want to imagine that society has no idea what we're doing.  The idea that this town is overrun by a murdering rapist and these are the guys behind the scenes is horrifying.  There's something very comforting by the arrival of Seo Tae-yoon.  He's that imagined character of legend in our heads.  As everyone else looks a little goofy, Seo Tae-yoon evokes a sense of confidence and cool.  He's handsome and aloof.  That archetype is really hard to break for audiences.  Heck, I know my in-laws often won't watch a movie unless the hero of the story has the same traits as Seo Tae-yoon.  It's something that's wired into us.  If he's being juxtaposed to the bumbling corrupt sheriffs, then he's supposed to bring the bad guy to justice.

That's what I realize about Bong Joon-Ho.  I do think that Memories of Murder might be weaker than the other stuff I've seen from him.  But it doesn't make it weak.  Bong Joon-Ho's films live or die on the turn.  I'm not saying that Bong Joon-Ho is anything like M.Night Shyamalan, who plays heavily on twists.  There's something similar happening in the emotional responses that Bong Joon-Ho's audiences have, that notion of a turn.  But his turn is a defiance of expectation.  One of the first chapters that I teach in my film class is that audiences either respond to expectations being met or expectations being subverted.  Bong Joon-Ho is almost working on a different level when it comes to the subversion of expectations.  I think the man is actually a genius.  From what I've heard in interviews, he just sees the world differently.  It's not that he's including these moments as "gotcha" moments.  It's just that he doesn't want to tell the same story that everyone else is telling.  The corruption of Seo Tae-yoon makes the movie something in its own category. Solving the murder is fun and satsifying. But it is ultimately forgettable.  I can think of the great serial killer reveals and they're fun.  But think about Silence of the Lambs.  Catching Buffalo Bill is necessary for the story because Clarice Starling is able to conquer her imposter syndrome, not because catching the killer is right.  Not catching the killer for Seo Tae-yoon is more important because he's willing to murder an innocent man simply for a sense of closure.

So, yeah, the movie is great.  It took me a while to realize that.  But the same thing happened when I watched Arrival.  I thought the movie was going to adhere to tropes and then those tropes were subverted for something far more interesting.  That's what Bong Joon-Ho does. He makes a quality film that is accentuated by the knowledge that he's going to be talking about something that other films aren't talking about.

R for being aggressively sexual at times.  I don't actually know if I saw nudity.  I know I saw near nudity for sure.  But it's more of the actions of sex than the nudity itself. Then it also gets a bit violent, often dealing with ideas of self-harm and suicide.  It's not an easy watch and often balances a horror aesthetic when least expected. Also, there are some questionable moments when it comes to imagery and race.  Very R.

DIRECTOR:  Olivia Wilde

I have so many movies to write about again thanks to Oscar season and here I am writing about Don't Worry Darling.  I have plenty of things to say.  Heck, I hope I have too many things to say.  But I'm also sitting under this bomb of Academy Award nominees and here I am, schlepping Don't Worry Darling, the last movie I watched before the nominees were announced.  (My next movie is the Netflix DVD I watched so I could start getting nominees from Netflix DVD.  My life is very specific and unique.) 

I gotta Elephant-in-the-Room this one.  I often have the following commentary about movies that make a  bigger splash through controversy than people who actually went to see the movie.  I don't know who to sympathize with here.  It's really hard to watch movies when there's controversy in personalities on set and off of set.  A few years ago, my students said I should listen to Harry Styles.  Now, I'm a grown man who didn't need to be listening to music aimed at teeny-boppers (again, proof that I'm of a certain age).  But I also have an Amazon music account and it's no skin off my back. So during dishes for a week, I'd put on some Harry Styles.  Not 1-Direction, mind you.  Just Harry Styles.  I discovered that, while he probably won't be making a ton of money off of me, he is kind of talented and I could listen to him if I was more into music instead of podcasts.  Then I saw that he was this guy who wanted to become an actor and I was very cool with that as well.  But then this is the movie that established him as potentially our next Jared Leto: a singer who becomes a complete diva and toxic influence on set.  It's a shame, because I'm kind of jazzed to see him as Starfox.  

But when we have this kind of drama on set, it taints everything we watch.  It all comes down to that argument of accepting the character over the actor.  As much as I loved Bullet Train, I'm watching old man Brad Pitt do some amazing stunts and amazing acting. Instead of seeing Alice, Jack, Frank, and Bunny; I was watching Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, and Olivia Wilde.  I know it is tempting to throw performances under the bus, but I had no problem with any of the performances. Heck, some of these performances were amazing.  It didn't change the fact that I kept on imagining Harry Styles spitting on Chris Pine.  Or Olivia Wilde dumping Jason Sudekis for Harry Styles.  Or Olivia Wilde begging Florence Pugh to stay and finish the movie because Harry Styles was toxic.  All of these things kept overshadowing a movie that, by its own right, wasn't that bad.  Yeah, the end probably needs a little more work and ambiguity, but it's a functional film that is now almost known for its infamy than its contribution to the cinematic canon. 

But it doesn't stop there.  I know too much about Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudekis at this point. Do I follow either of them?  Not really.  Have I ever Googled either one of them? Nope. Their relationship, somehow, has transcended into the cultural zeitgeist and I feel bad for them.  Okay, I feel bad for him, but that's because I'm a Ted Lasso fan and it probably had to suck to film divorce stuff for that show. What I know about their relationship can fit on a post-it note.  But still, that's more than I really need to know.  Here's my long-winded point: is this movie a commentary not on men, but on Jason Sudekis?  See, I shouldn't have to say that out loud.  I shouldn't have to.  Artists use their real lives as templates.  They write what they know.  But the role of the audience is to be an avatar in this world.  There's the notion of something being universal that needs to stick. Because this movie garnered so much attention behind the scenes, I can't separate (there's no way to not make a divorce or separation reference here) Olivia Wilde from Bunny or Olivia Wilde as filmmaker to include Jason Sudekis as part of the story. The thing is, it probably isn't Jason Sudekis.  It may be Olivia Wilde's anger about Jason Sudekis.

But the idea that Jack is the nice guy inverted archetype keeps resonating with me.  Jack is the villain of the piece.  Even more than Frank is the villain of the piece, the real villain is Jack.  Frank did something really gross to begin with. He extorted men and imprisoned women in a VR world.  Okay, fine.  (I really shouldn't put the crime against men in that sentence, but I did want to stress that he had a lot of crimes happening and none of it was done out of a false sense of altruism.) But if Alice is the main character, the thing keeping her in this golden prison is Jack.  Jack is the one keeping her alive and captive in a room.  Frank, for all of his bluster, isn't there to hold Alice in Jack's apartment. (There's a thin threat that they have to get to Alice's real body, but that seems like an impossibility from moment one.) Frank is society, where the patriarchy lock up their wives in sociological and emotional prisons.  He's the setting.  That makes Jack...Jason Sudekis?

Wilde gives Jack two seconds of sympathy in this movie.  I want to make this clear: there is a difference between likability and sympathy.  We're supposed to like Jack for a lot of the movie.  He's the fun husband who genuinely is attracted to his wife.  He listens to her and somehow seems less misogyinistic compared to his peers.  But that's Wilde setting up the carpet only to tear it away.  We're supposed to like Jack for the inevitable turn to have meaning. But Jack honestly only has a breath to make him sympathetic.  There's a moment told in flashback in the real world.  Alice, revealed to be a talented surgeon, comes home late.  She barely has given any consideration to her spouse (which is supposed to be okay.  To a certain extent it is, people are allowed to be tired.  But it is in this split second that I give him sympathy) and he seems desperate to save their marriage.  Now, Wilde is going out of her way to make him seem like a lunatic.  He hasn't eaten dinner, a passive-aggressive way to mope and manipulate.  It doesn't work, so he then goes to the extreme of kidnapping her and sticking her in a prison.  Okay, I get it.  It's allegory.  Sure. But let him get to that point.

There are almost too many influences on this movie.  Watching the trailer, I thought, "Oh, another Stepford Wives" adaptation.  I mean, that's me dismissing the movie too quickly, considering that I haven't seen any version of The Stepford Wives.  I mean, a lot of this is owed to Get Out and The Master, right?  Okay, Get Out, The Master, and The Matrix, right?  It just seems like there isn't its own movie in here.  I'm a guy who thought that this movie is alright.  But there also is a real problem with a lot of the elements of this movie trying to be other things.  It's because the imagery and the influences are so prevalent without a real understanding of that imagery.  This leads me into something big and it might be a real problem.

I mean, we acknowledge that this is meant to be a progressive movie, right?  I mean, it's a full-on assault against the patriarchy, as it well should be.  Okay, let's talk about that racial casting.  The film, like many Hollywood movies, is primarily White.  There are a few exceptions to the rule about this, most notably Margaret.  Margaret is the precursor to Alice's character.  What happens to Margaret portends what happens to Alice.  Okay, that's cool.  But I can't ignore the fact that Alice, played by Florence Pugh, is a blonde White lady while Margaret is Black.  Now, there is nothing about Margaret's race or status in this community that is analyzed.  You could force something in saying that she is the first community on the outs, but that kind of gets neutered when the same thing happens to the White lady.  The real issue is that Margaret, in a not subtle-at-all way, is meant to be a mirror reflection of Alice. Wilde literally does this.  Alice looks in the mirror to see her reflection as Margaret.  Now, Wilde has this entirely for artistic value.  She's juxtaposing them for effect.  But that means that Alice is not looking in the mirror and seeing race.  She's seeing color.  KiKi Layne is hired for this movie entirely for the shade of her skin, but none of the meaning, culture, or baggage that comes with it.  She's being relegated to a sense of "other" once again.  It's a striking image, but it's an entire backwards way at looking at who Margaret is as a person.

Don't Worry Darling, which is apparently a command --not direct address--isn't as bad as people make it out to be.  It's just mired by a bunch of content that should stay distant from the narrative presented in the movie.  There are parts that are gorgeous and fascinating.  But it also is messy when it shouldn't be messy.  It's unfair to expect perfection with any movie, but when one highlights its mistakes, one can't blame the audience for picking up on those flaws.