PG-13 for some strong language?  I honestly don't remember any strong language.  Mind you, I was completely over-emotional about the whole thing.  It could have been cursing the entire time and I wouldn't have remembered it.  The thing is, I wanted to show my kid this movie and now I have to question everything? Oh yeah!  The f-bomb on the wall of the hot tub!  Anyway, PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Matthew Heineman

I wasn't ready.  Guys, I just wasn't ready.  First of all, I didn't know that American Symphony was a doc, let alone a rock doc.  That's all fine.  I can pivot on that pretty easily. Since I knew nothing about it, I can sit down and watch a documentary.  Then you give me a rock doc where the subject of the documentary seems like the sweetest dude ever and that's just bonus.  But then you make it about the love story between Jon Batiste and his wife who is fighting leukemia?  Yeah, you officially crushed me.  

Listen, I don't know who decided that this documentary wouldn't be incuded in the Best Docs category, but shame on you.  We've had some amazing music documentaries in the past and this year could have used some American Symphony. I've always been honest with my lack of knowledge when it comes to music.  I know a ton about movies, TV, comic books, novels, and video games.  Music has always been my weak spot.  It's always been a case of taking a long time to bond with a musician.  It takes me a long time to decide whether or not I like an album or not.  This documentary?  This documentary right here?  I'm now a fan of Jon Batiste. I knew nothing about him outside of the name and now I feel like I want to attend every concert of his...ever.  Is it because of the movie being so moving?  Do I deal with mortality in a weird and confusing way?  Sure do.  But beyond that, the man is incredibly talented.  

There's that fine line in artists.  My wife brought this up, but I get where she's going with this.  Musicians, the truly talented ones, often are a little more eccentric than your average bear.  They often become incredibly hard to relate to. They are so passionate about their work that it takes a very intense person to become so granular about what they do.  It's encouraged in the community.  (I'm not part of the community.  I'm not really a part of any artisitic community.  I'm a high school teacher who lives outside of Cincinnati who likes to write.)  But there is all this theory out there that encourages creatives to think beyond the immediate emotional response to artwork.  A good artist needs to go to the theory and see beyond the "good" and "bad" of art.  Instead, they need to live a life as a bit of an eccentric.  Often, these personalities are incredibly frustrating.  They are divorced from the problems of the every day.  Jon Batiste, thankfully, is not this.  He's got his things.  I can't deny that I'm watching this man and thinking, "Well, that's a bit much."  

But the big pull towards this movie is how, as weird as someone can get about music (I'd like to remind you that Jon Batiste is tame compared to a lot of artists), he's so fundamentally human.  It isn't simply because he is taking care of his wife with leukemia.  That would take away so much of her agency.  Instead, it is only part of the tapestry that we see in this documentary.  There's something so modest and so humble about Jon Batiste.  He's this guy who plays music every day.  It's mind blowing that he was the house band on The Late Show because he got Album of the Year.  In my mind, that's like Taylor Swift agreeing to being the house band.  It still blows my mind that the Roots are a house band as well. But at the same time, he's just a guy who wants to be at home with his wife.  He's a guy who has a hard time getting out of bed.  He has to get out of bed, like we all do.  But he has to get out of bed because he has to play Carnegie Hall.  That's the thing that is very odd.  The cult of celebrity has been talked about so much and it often is a story of corruption and change.  If anything, he's becoming more and more human as he gets bigger and bigger.

That's the role his wife plays.  It's almost a little bit unfair to her to define her as the one with leukemia.  Yes, that instantly tells us what Jon Batiste is focused on instead of building celebrity.  But more than that, while Suleika is in remission, it is about building a healthy and loving relationship.  Both of them are artists.  They are very different artists, but they are artists nonetheless.  They get the need to encourage each other's creativity. Golly, this makes such a good Valentine's Day watch because, the sicker that Suleika gets, the more you see his love pouring out for her.  The fact that he gets married to her as things get tougher only screams to the commitment that he's always had to this woman. It's this intimate affair, with a few close friends telling stories on a floor.  For all of the cool stuff that we see him do, including the finale of the Carnegie Hall performance, that's the moment I'll take away from the whole thing.  He has this money and ability to make a huge hullabaloo and have the most expensive wedding of all time.  Instead, the entire movie is about two people living within their means.  Maybe things are a little nicer than most people could afford.  But the things that they really need are paper, paints, a piano, and each other.

There's a really fascinating B-story within the narrative as well, the story of being Black and young in a world of gatekeeping.  This isn't one of those stories about how racist the world is.  It is, but it never has that moment that we see in a lot of films where Jon Batiste wouldn't be allowed to play in clubs.  Instead, he reads about how people are so skeptical to be considered in all of these categories in the Emmys.  I know.  Different problems than a lot of us have.  But we shouldn't complain.  He's a musician.  He lives in a different world, thus gatekeeping would look different to him.  The thing about genre is that it is really hard to pin down.  Any time we deal with genre, there's a certain spectrum with a large amount of give and take when establishing what falls into what genre. Yet, there are all these people screaming out that he shouldn't be considered a classical musician if he's a jazz musician.  There's all these people who are so defensive of things that are subjectively sacred that it's telling to think that this man suffers because he created something that can't be easily pinned down.

That speech at the Emmys?  What?!  How do I not have that speech painted on my walls in my classroom?  I was just thinking how American Symphony might be in my Top 5 for 2023 and the entire speech at the end was about how art finds people at the right time when they need it. It's such a gorgeous speech and I want that everywhere I go.  And as much as I may fundamentally believe that speech, I also want to remind myself that I am guilty of not always listening to that idea that is so key to my entire philosophy.  He's this guy who keeps getting criticism after criticism because people like what they like.  He's just this great and honest person.  Sometimes art isn't for everyone.  It was made for everyone, but we bring so much of ourselves into our tastes that it is a crime to tell people what is good and what is terrible. I mean, I'm currently writing a blog unpacking movies.  Part of the natural end to that is evaluative.  But that speech is so important.  Man, Jon Batiste is a smart guy.

This might be my favorite documentary this year.  Again, super disappointed that it wasn't nominated.  Now, again, since I don't know the music community, I don't know how many waves this documentary made.  For all I know, it might be required reading for the music scene.  But I know that I only saw it because of the Best Song nomination (which would give him two of the letters for EGOT.  Too bad it's going to go to "I'm Just Ken").  I know that often film nerds don't follow my arbitrary rules for what constitutes an opinion about an Academy Award.  I just think that this movie needs to be seen.

​Rated R for a wealth of death, leading to cannibalism.  There's a lot of upsetting imagery in this movie.  To show how hungry the survivors were, there's a scene showing a character urinating a black stream.  There's some language, but that pretty much takes a back seat to the upsetting death that pervades the film.  

DIRECTOR: J.A. Bayona

I never saw the original Alive.   I knew the story, basically.  I feel most people from my generation knew this story, even if they hadn't seen Alive.  It actually became a weird talking point.  We all knew that it was a true story, but it almost became this urban legend.  Now, because I hadn't seen Alive, I treated the story in the exact way that I wasn't supposed to.  It was a scary story.  It was something joked about.  Now, I can't testify to Alive on its authenticity or anything.  But the most important thing that J.A. Bayona did for this story is to give it gravitas for a new generation.

One of the things that my wife tends to do after watching a biopic (although it has been known to happen while watching the biopic) is that she'll Google / Wikipedia the real story. Perhaps why Society of the Snow is separating itself from its peers is that it is apparently the most accurate historical movie out there about the subject.  Beat for beat, as much as could be recreated, it happens on screen.  Now, normally, I would guess that real life doesn't necessarily translate out to effective narrative.  With this, it is so much about character that the beats of the story just color how we perceive these characters. I won't lie.  There are so many characters in this story that it is often hard to keep track of who is who.  But I do know that there's a big mislead in the movie.  It's so hard to make a story about an ensemble and still have us care about these characters.  That's where Bayona does something kind of incredible.  Because there is no one leader of this plane crash, with people stepping into the role as needed, there needed to be something to (pun that needs absolute pardoning) ground the whole piece.  The fact that it is told from Numa's perspective, someone who doesn't actually survive the events, is fascinating.

Part of that comes from a whole defying of expectations.  Historically and culturally, we know that there were survivors of the crash.  One of the first things that my wife looked up was the number of survivors.  She was doing a mental checklist of who was going to make it through these awful conditions.  But the movie built Numa like he had plot armor.  (My deepest apologies for writing so casually about the dead.  While I acknowledge that these were real people who had real families, there still is a little disconnect with me beyond the fact that Numa, as I see him on screen, is a character.) Numa as the voice of the deceased gives agency to the departed in a way that this movie had to prove challenging.  The thing that everyone waits for in this movie, beyond salvation, is the idea of "When are they going to start eating each other?"  It's something so horrific that our darker insights kind of propel that thought.  It's the idea that screams louder than anything else.  It's not like they save that revelation for the end.  They start eating each other, in the grand scheme of things, pretty early on. 

But when corpses are being eaten and humanity is stripped away from people because of a horrible accident, giving voice to the dead is perhaps the most powerful a movie like this can do.  Society of the Snow is, without a doubt, about the survivors.  But even more than just the survivors, it is about the dead as people.  The movie keeps reminding us about the constant consent that was happening in that fuselage.  Now, if there was ever a thing that could be contested is whether or not they talked about permission to eat a corpse as much as the movie showed them doing. I don't know.  I wasn't there.  But Numa's reticence to cross that line made him the ideal voice for the movie.  Outside of understanding the outrage of "some things just aren't done", that skepticism is what ultimately contributed to his death.  Thus, Numa becomes us.  For all of the intellectual understanding that no one could survive for approximately seventy-something days out in the frozen mountains without having to do something abhorrent, there still is the morality of the heart. 

Numa, like us (ideally, chooses not to eat people.  At first, there are wisps of judgment coming from him.  But he also has this great empathy for others.  He personally chooses to avoid eating people for as long as he can --eventually submitting against his morals --but understands that there are people that he loves that he doesn't want to see dead. There's also this reminder that this wasn't cannibalism like we imagine.  This isn't Yellowjackets, where there's reverie and celebration over the discovery of an alternative food source. Instead, we see those who burdened themselves with the preparation of the bodies and how those tiny bites of food were done with chagrin and regret.  No one there wants to eat the bodies.  They do grow comfortable with it eventually.  I don't think the movie shies away from the notion that a repeated action, done over a long period of time, eventually washes away some stigma.  But the dead are always treated as people.  Perhaps it makes it even grosser when one of the survivor has to vomit up a body part that thaws as he gets to warmer climates.  

The scale of this movie is insane.  It's one of those incredibly filmed movies.  The survival movie isn't anything necessarily new.  But Society of the Snow takes what is fundamentally an isolated location and makes it the most claustrophobic setting in a grand tapestry of majesty.  The setting is what makes us question the events of the story.  There's almost something interactive about the whole experience of watching this.  I know that my students who saw this movie were doing this and I'm not guilty either.  The location of the Andes and how it looked instantly caused debate on how they would handle the same events.  Me?  I'm in the "go one direction and try your best."  After that miserable first night in the fuselage, with all of the luggage as a wall, I don't know if I would have considered the inside of the fuselage any better than the outside of the exposed nature.  None of that is fair.  I wasn't in that situation.  For all I know, I'm talking a big game right now when realistically, I would have been one of the people cowering in the plane, hoping someone else would make the hard calls.  But that's what Bayona does for the film.  He makes it something that we can't divorce ourselves from. It's never just noise on screen.  Those debates are the debates that we have and we invest ourselves in when watching the film.

Yet, I have a hard time giving this movie a perfect score.  I don't know if I can find a fault with the film whatsoever, beyond my lazy brain that has a hard time remembering people's names.  I mean, part of that comes from the notion that I don't know who to recommend this movie to.  Structurally and artistically, J.A. Bayona does everything right in this movie.  Part of what makes it hard to talk about is the gruesome content within.  I'd love to recommend this movie to my in-laws.  It's never a boring movie.  The characters are great.  It's well-filmed.  So why am I so hesitant to say "You need to watch Society of the Snow?"  I mean, that comes with the territory.  I tend not to recommend horror movies either. But I also know that it isn't one of my favorite movies this year.  Perhaps it goes on just a little too long?  The movie demands that we understand how long seventy-something days is.  If it was any shorter, the film would have detracted from the sheer magnitude of events and time.  But that also means that we have to watch a lot of people rotting away in the cold.   

Maybe it's the fact that it just isn't a happy movie.  Maybe if I watched this at a different time, I would be swearing by this movie up and down.  I think I'm in that weird place where I have a glut of great movies that are a bit more chipper.  It's objectively a great movie, but I have a hard time really selling it right now.

PG-13 for language.  Fun fact that I'm gleaning from reading parents' guides.  Apparently, you can have three f-bombs in a PG-13 movie if they are in another language and subtitled.  It's weird that methods of communication affect the severity of the language itself?  This movie is extremely tame shy of language.  It's people existing and talking.  There's some drunkenness, but that's me really reaching for something to write about.

DIRECTOR: Celine Song

I need to stop watching interviews with respected celebrities on Instagram. Honestly, if I see a Letterboxd interview with someone about their top four, I'm going to stop and listen.  Someone, maybe Emma Stone?, put Past Lives in her Top Four and said that she just saw it and it kept sticking with her.  Sure, there's a thing about recency bias.  But the thing about a Top Four, I have to be pretty amazed when a new movie can enter the list of best movies?  I know.  I'm the fool.  But my expectations were so inappropriate going into this movie.

Ultimately, this is a good movie about missed opportunities.

PG-13.  Be glad that I checked the parents' guide because I forgot about a ton of stuff.  Nyad is firmly a PG-13, with it's one f-bomb and a spattering of mild curses.  But one of the major conflicts of the movie is how Diana deals with how she was raped by a trusted person in her life as a child.  The movie also is uncomfortable with how much Diana tortures herself to achieve her goal.  PG-13.

DIRECTORS:  Jimmy Chins and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

​I don't think that there's ever been a movie that I've teased more while simultaneously unironically liking it.  There are so many checks against this movie that I should absolutely hate it.  I mean, you've heard me bemoan the glut of biopics around award season, right?  It's not like it even breaks the mold of the sports biopic.  It's incredibly paint-by-numbers.  I don't like sports movies, for the most part. There's a check.  Also, this is the worst kind of sports movie.  It's one of those things that, while impressive, is fundamentally stupid and selfish.  Somehow, through all of that, Nyad works.  Let's try to figure out why.  

As of right now, it might have just been the right movie at the right time.  It happens.  I'm wondering if my applause over Flamin' Hot was just a timing issue, based on everyone else's take on that movie.  I want to break down what I was feeling during the movie, just so you can completely grasp my headspace.  My wife and I kept on joking how stupid the entire notion of the film is.  One of the running gags we had going was the absurd locations to swim from.  The movie chief external conflict is Diana's choice to swim from Cuba to Key West.  The English Channel, the previous silly distance to cross, had been done by too many people and thus, the next insane swim would be a sixty hour swim from Cuba to Key West.  One of the key motifs is the phrase "It's can't be done." To some, that is a challenge.  To me, I'm kind of on Team Welp.  "Welp, guess that's that."  I know.  It makes the villain in these movies.  Sometimes, "It can't be done" is a valid challenge.  Sustainable energy?  Can't be done?  Let's try.  That's pretty good for humanity.  Explore space beyond our galaxy?  Yes, please.  That's great!  

But Diana Nyad's crossing of that large stretch of distance?  It's kind of just impressive.  That's it.  Here's me going on a limb giving it some significance.  It's a commentary on dismissing the elderly.  That's the big takeaway.  Fundamentally, one of the elements of the movie isn't that Diana Nyad did something dangerous and stupid that no one else could do.  It was that she was an old lady, way past her prime, and she still did what was impossible, mostly because she didn't give up and had a team that was willing to do whatever to make sure that she did it.  I mentally and emotionally could understand what made what she did impressive.  Heck, by the end of the movie, I needed her to make it to Florida.  If she didn't make it to Florida, I too would have rioted.  But there was this almost immediate letdown after it was all over.  I had this overwhelming feeling of "Well, that's done now, isn't it?"  Because nothing in the world really changed from that, did it?  I know.  I'm being incredibly dismissive of something that was incredibly challenging.  But from a guy who doesn't like sports, it kind of is the equivalent of me spending every dollar I have and devoting my whole life to making the most unimaginably huge tin foil ball that sat in a field.  

I wish I could say that the entire life story of Diana Nyad was what captivated me.  This makes me a broken person, so please forgive me, but I would have preferred so much more of the story devoted to the horrors she endured.  Somehow, that quintessential backstory was kind of rushed through.  I get it.  Diana Nyad didn't define herself by the rape and abuse she went through.  She refused to let that be her story.  She even goes as far, in the film, to confess that she has paradoxical feelings about her rapist's passing.  That's fascinating.  But I also don't know what to really talk about with these moments when they almost feel like afterthoughts to the film.  The film uses her abuse as a parallel for when things go rotten in the water.  When she struggles in the water, her thoughts go back to those moments when she wasn't in control and I suppsoe that it is effective.  But it is also a weird narrative device because I don't know if the real Nyad would have made the connection between being stung by jellyfish and her tragic backstory.  These moments were so important, but they aren't presented in a way that made me feel anything beyond "It was as painful as jellyfish stings."  That's not the intention, but it often was the effect of these scenes.

No, the movie works because of a couple of cool scenes and a chemistry between two actors who are absolutely nailing it on screen.  I don't think I've seen Annette Benning have as much fun as she's having in this movie in a long time.  She often is given stringent and abrasive women to play.  It's what Hollywood seems to give her. But this is one of these women who refuses to get pushed around and it seems charming in this one.  There's something both incredibly frustrating and simultaneously joyful about the way that she portrays Nyad.  There are times when I asked if Diana Nyad was supposed to be on the spectrum simply due to some quirky behavior, coupled with her failure to handle the nuance of group dynamics.  I never really got an answer to that, but I didn't care by the end.  Benning honestly might even deserve Best Actress for just having to be in the water that long.  Before you scoff at that, we kind of gave it to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant with the same reasoning.  But even beyond that, she's just giving her all with that performance.  It's quirky yet grounded and I get why she gets nominated here versus other years.

But are we about to give the MVP to Jodie Foster?  I mean, it's a little bit on a curve and let me clarify that.  Jodie Foster tends to play these introverted and dark characters all of the time.  She's always doing dark and horrible things.  When she's playing an out lesbian who cares about mental health and has friends, it's so weird!  Like I'm not used to this.  The weirdest part is that she's really good.  Benning portrayed Nyad intentionally as someone who is a little hard to love at times.  It's tough when the movie is named Nyad.  But Jodie Foster?  Jodie is both the avatar for the audience and the hero of the piece.  She's this absolutely beautifully grounded character who seems fun, yet self-sacrificing.  She's a little bit of a carpet that Nyad walks over, but has these moments where she can get in her face.  It's this real portrayal of someone who just felt real.  Again, not a sports guy.  I don't know what the real Diana Nyad was like.  I have a feeling that she probably was a bit much.  But Foster plays Bonnie in the way I imagine that the real Bonnie probably acted.  It's fascinating.

In a million years, shy of Silence of the Lambs, would I be lauding far-too-many words over a Jodie Foster performance.  This sounds like I don't like Jodie Foster.  I do.  I just think that she's been turning in similar performances for decades (which lots of actors do!  Anthony Hopkins fans need to be a little harder on themselves.  By the way, he was also in Silence of the Lambs.) 

PG-13 for a lot of violence and death, even death that I hadn't kind of processed in a traditional sense.  Like Short Circuit and movies of their ilk, The Creator makes the destruction of machines visceral and some how quite upsetting.  There's some language, but that usually gets thrown out with war imagery.  There is some implication of sexuality, but nothing on screen.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Gareth Edwards

So much to write!  I mean, it might not be in this blog.  We'll see.  But I am writing against the clock, so if my spelling gets all wonky, my apologies up front.  I oddly look forward to the special effects categories for the Academy Awards.  As a big sci-fi nerd, these tend to be the movies that don't really get nominated because they are too genre to be taken seriously as film.  It's a bummer, but it's also an excuse for me to catch up on movies that I meant to see earlier in the year and look very pretty.  I don't think that The Creator is necessarily a great movie, but it was stunning to look at.

Gareth Edwards, post Rogue One, kind of became this prestige director.  I watched that trailer and thought, "Ooh, the Rogue One guy?" I think that's what the studios wanted me to think.  I know that the same approach of "prestige director" was done with the Godzilla reboot a couple of years ago.  I'm not talking about Minus One.  No, I'm talking the beginning of the arcing Monsterverse that is going on right now in America.  What conclusion I'm coming to is that Gareth Edwards is a director who takes his time with storytelling, makes amazing looking movies that are often underlit, but ultimately makes a boring film from time-to-time.  I mean, Rogue One is kind of special.  As boring as that movie is, it gets points from showing that Star Wars can be something more than silly popcorn movies.  It set a whole new tone and I applaud him for that.  When I saw the trailer for The Creator, I was so on board for a movie that did Rogue One with an original property.  It never really achieves that.

For all of my lamenting on this movie, there's so much I can't really complain about, except for the fact that things just didn't click in the way that I thought they would.  Ultimately, so much of this movie is successful because the movie is a project that was done for the sake of world-building.  Gosh darn does this movie world build better than most movies I've seen.  Honestly, the visual style of the movie won me over from the opening shots.  It isn't hard to win over specifically me.  Throw in some retro-futurism and a mundane appropach to the bombastic and I'm pretty much puddy in your hands.  I tend to do this when I write, but I'm going to repeat that I don't hate this movie and I think he did all of the right things.  Part of my dislike for this movie is my dislike for hard sci-fi.  The Creator, to a certain extent, is both hard sci-fi and not that at all.  (I'm the worst.  I should just take a stand and stick with it.) 

Hard sci-fi leans pretty hard into accepting a world that is foreign to us.  For a lot of the movie, we get a good deal of canon on what the world of The Creator is like.  We know that Nihashi is a big deal.  We know that AI has had a long and turbulent history coexisting with humanity.  The movie really sells those elements hard.  So much of the movie is either a montage reminding us of what happened before this movie or people sitting around talking about why these two cultures can't possibly coexist.  I get it.  I've seen Terminator and A.I.  I know that there is inherently a fear that humans are unable to accept something that might surpass them, thus they get all violent and homicidal.  Part of me even sympathizes with them.  After all, if it looked like robots were going to wipe out humanity, I would have a hard time full believing in a sense of being.  Look at me, confronting my bigotry!  But so far, most of the things that I've said are about setting.  

Edwards does a lot to remind you of the delicate balance between two cultures.  We're constantly reminded that A.I. is not evil.  If anything, they are the more noble culture compared to the xenophobic humans.  Message received.  I'm even kind of on your team.  (Although I would never take a human life and would consider shutting down a machine because I can't make heads or tails of what sentience is.)  The thing about the actual story is that it might be a bit too minimal for me to really appreciate it.  I was wondering as I was writing this why I'm cool with Lord of the Rings and not The Creator.  Both are gorgeous worlds due to intense amount of world-building coupled with simple stories.  Then I realized that Lord of the Rings is not a simple story, but rather a complex series of interwoven stories around a simple story.  Frodo has to get to Mordor.  He has to survive all of these challenges.  That's great.  But also, every side character has a complex narrative that is fundmentally tied to Frodo's journey, even if they are unaware of it.

The Creator is really just Joshua and Alphie's story as they look for Maya.  While the information about their quest gets slightly more complex as details about Maya's reality are revealed, it is just their story.  We see all of these people acting as NPCs.  It is heartbreaking hearing their stories.  But we only view these characters through Joshua and Alphie's eyes.  Even Maya, who is the Macguffin for the movie, is an object.  She is Joshua's previously-thought-dead wife and Alphie's goddess.  That's fun, but we don't get to experience any of the stories that Maya has to deal with because all of this is off-camera.  On the one hand, it gives us a focused story on two characters, one of whom is growing as a person as he accepts this digital child as something that has inherent value.  But on the other hand, it also gets incredibly boring to see Joshua and Alphie going from place to place and not finding Maya.  It's like watching the NES version of Super Mario Bros.as a narrative story.  She's always in another castle.

I think I also needed a clear "come to Jesus" moment for Joshua too.  There's a lot of the movie where Joshua does not care for Alphie.  He's the cause of his misery.  But from moment one, because Alphie shaped like a child, Joshua sees a child.  His military background makes him compartmentalize those feelings, which is quasi-interesting.  But from moment one, we know that the box is already being unpacked.  Joshua never sees Alphie as "just a machine." He treats him as such, but we also know that this is a time game.  The more that Joshua is around Alphie, we understand that he's getting close to being a bit more evolved around his own prejudices.  I needed a moment where that really shifted.  I wanted him to see every element of his old life in a new way.  It kind of happens at times, but since so much of the movie is about him going against a system that he embraced before, the emotional climax happens pretty early on.  Is he going to get over his fear of AI?  Totally.  He does so by the end of the first act.  That leaves a lot of movie that just becomes about action.

When Joshua sacrifices himself (spoiler...sorry) for Alphie, it's because his journey ended, not because there was a shift in perspective.  That's a great scene.  I don't deny that.  I love John David Washington and he absolutely should be the next Kang.  But in terms of investment from me, it's all about a survival story, not a story of self.  The movie kept on telling me that Joshua needed to grow, but the journey itself is a confirmation that the major change happened too early.  

This leaves me in an interesting place.  I honestly got pretty bored by the end of the movie.  It's not like this is one of those movies that had too many set pieces.  It had some pretty cool stuff.  Again, the setting is rad and I love how alive the robots seem in the movie, even the ones that don't look remotely human.

PG and it's for one example of cursing?   If I had to throw a bunch of things around saying why an animated film is PG instead of G, mostly it is because "G" almost doesn't exist as a rating.  The movie is fundamentally about instituionalized racism and the place of the immigrant in society. But not much happens that would be considered all that controversial.  Still, PG.

DIRECTOR:  Peter Sohn

I have too much writing to do and no time to do it.  I know.  These are problems that everyone has, but I'm a guy who really likes having To-Do Lists checked off properly.  I always thought that Elemental wasn't going to be that great.  It kind of fell under the radar.  What few things I heard from the movie were "meh."  I don't think that colored by viewing of the movie, but I honestly thought that Elemental was a return to form for Pixar. Sure, it covers a lot of the beats that Zootopia also covered.  But this is Pixar's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and I don't hate that at all. 

Here's the thing that you have to understand before we talk further.  (After all, this is a dialogue!  Didn't you know?) I didn't think that Zootopia was all that subtle.  But it was subtle enough to go over my students' heads when I mention that Zootopia was Black Lives Matter for Disney.  If you fundamentally needed to understand perspectives in racial interaction, Zootopia is a fabulous starting point.  But Zootopia, for all the allegory that is throughout the film, goes harder than Elemental.  It really goes for the jugular in the best way possible.  Elemental, instead, goes more obvious.  But on the other hand, it isn't as damning as Zootopia is.  I could probably argue that Zootopia is Antiracist while Elemental talks about race, but doesn't really condemn a certain group of people.  

I'm about to really get down and dirty with it, so please bear with me.  I think that Elemental is ultimately an incredibly healthy movie for kids to be exposed to because Wade lives in a world mentally where race is so not an issue that the disparity between cultures doesn't even enter his consciousness.  That's cool...up to a point.  Again, if this is an intro to discussion about race and culture with children, Elemental nails it.  Wade, who seems to be coded as White America (despite being voiced by a Black man), is so open to his attraction to Ember that the only thing that stops him from going all in is the fear of hurting her. That's not a bad place to be.  Similarly, the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner scene is often colored more by misunderstanding than it is outright racism.  There are slip ups, but ultimately, people aren't hiding deep-seeded racial phobias so much as stepping out of comfort zones.  Cool.  

But this also means that Wade can also be written as a color-blind character.  He's the heroic character in the story, but he's also not the protagonist.  Ember is the protagonist.  We view the problems of the story through Ember's eyes.  Wade is on board from moment one.  He's a bit written as a dope, which is sweet because it gives him singular vision. He knows that he loves Ember and will do anything to ensure that the relationship will thrive.