PG-13 for horrific acts due to racists being, once again, terrible.  There's some language, especially when it comes to hate speech.  But a lot of this is stuff that happens behind the scenes.  The film is shot in first person, so the audience is limited to what the boys actually witness.  There's also some alcoholism and potential molestation, although that is left a bit ambiguous.

DIRECTOR:  RaMell Ross

I so wish that I read the book before seeing the movie.  I was this close to getting it from the library, but I dismissed the idea as stressful.  I have a million books that I own that I wanted to get through first.  But now, seeing what I've seen, I want to see why RaMell Ross chose to do what he did.  Also, once again, I'm very stressed to write this.  If I can knock this out in the next half-hour, I will be incredibly happy with myself and try to give myself a gold star.  It won't clear my "To-Do" list, but it will get me significantly closer.

My wife sewed some doubt into my head. She's a very smart lady, my wife.  Because we're two separate people (although with the whole marriage making two people one, you could argue...), we disagree on some things. But often, our tastes tend to align, especially when it comes to high art cinema.  Superhero stuff we can disagree on all day.  But when it comes to Oscar stuff, we tend to agree.  She planted this seed in my head and it is causing me to doubt what I watched.  See, I watched Nickel Boys and, for the most part, I thought I loved it.  I'll get to the why in a second.  But she said that she wanted to like it and now I'm thinking that I might be in the same camp.

I mean, I know I liked it more than she did.  While I liked the story and thought that the tale was a story that needed telling, I really fell in love with the visuals of the whole movie.  Like I mentioned in the MPA section above, the film is told in first person.  Ross goes beyond that, messing with the chronology of the movie.  As such, the movie forces its audience to stay engaged.  Often in the movie, there are moments when you have to question whose perspective you are getting, Elwood's or Turner's.  Now, as I type that, it makes a ton of sense why the perspective is always switching.  I'm going to be spoiling the end of the movie right now, so you can quit reading if you haven't seen the movie yet.  The notion that Elwood and Turner's perspectives keep jumping all over the place is because Turner is Elwood.  I figured it out about twenty minutes before the reveal.  That has nothing to do with the quality of the movie.  I just want the applause.

First person narratives are tricky.  Nickel Boys is not the first movie to play with the first person narrative.  These movies tend to be more novelties than anything else.  The only one that touched me as much as Nickel Boys did was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  But the use of the first person narrative kind of works for Nickel Boys as Nickel Boys reminds us of something that is almost metatextual.  Again, my wife is very smart.  She did point out that there tends to be a movie like Nickel Boys every year.  It's kind of a crime that stories about race in America have been relegated to Oscar bait.  They should get the attention of the Oscar, but it sucks that people kind of treat them as a throwaway term like "Oscar Bait."  But Nickel Boys is almost --and in only a subtle way --commenting on that.  

The use of the first person, at least from my read, is the notion that the story of Elwood and Turner is the story of Black America.  There has been this tendency for an audience to distance themselves from the protagonist of a story, especially when it comes to racial discrimination. Perhaps the reason that we keep coming back to this well of systematic racism is that we don't get that there's something universal about the experience for Black America.  It's always kind of treated with the experience for the other.  Do I think that I felt like a Black American feeling the racial prejudice of police indifference?  No.  But do I get the logic of having people looking right at me and saying the most awful thing, assuming that I was doing wrong thing?  Intellectually, I get it.

When I put my chips on the table, what the first person perspective does is more along the lines of offering me cool shots.  There were a stream of films (my brain isn't braining right now) that used the mundane to cover up the fact that horrors were happening in the next room.  Again, brain not braining, but the closest thing I can think of right now is The Zone of Interest.  There is something gorgeous about seeing how normal life is when this overwhelming moments are encroaching on these characters.  Ross keeps setting up his characters in moments of almost boredom.  The beginning of the movie, Elwood is hearing the argument in the other room about what is going to happen to him when it comes to getting sent to Nickel Academy.  He's not pacing.  There's no desperation to get away or to flee.  Instead, he's staring at his arm as the light hits it.  There's a certain verisimilitude that comes with those kind of moments.  Nothing feels play-acty because real life is powering through those miserable moments in quiet silence.

On top of using the first person perspective, there are haunting images of history passing.  Now, I'm sure someone who was sitting there and taking notes could point out the importance of each image.  What I got, as someone who wasn't taking notes, was an intention to disrupt the scene with the grander imposition of history in the background.  You would think that every image that we saw would somehow tie into racial history.  (I suppose all history is racial history.  But I'm talking about stuff like marathon runners moving backwards.  I could see the metaphor about turning back progress and regressing as a people, but that was one image out of a billion.)  The movie kept on showing an allegator, often appearing out of a place it should not be.  It's cool imagery and I could attribute meaning to many of these images.  For example, the idea of danger appearing where it is least expected could be part of that.

But I'm also a guy who writes a film blog and gets content out of unpacking every visual choice.  I'm actively trying to ascribe meaning to every shot that Nickel Boys presented to me.  I don't know if a lot of people were doing that kind of heavy lifting.  I mean, I don't know a ton of people who went out and saw Nickel Boys. (I now own this movie, by the way.  Maybe I'll watch it again down the line.  Heck, maybe I'll read the book and then teach it in the future.) Again, there is the intention of the choice and the actual result of that choice.  I do believe that Ross may have chosen these images to have deeper significance juxtaposed to the narrative moments in the film.  But what the actual result is just a general sense of artiness.  The movie has a general arty vibe to it.  That's not a bad thing.  In fact, it might be my favorite element of the movie.

I told you that I predicted the switcheroo at the end.  I saw that Elwood was too pure to exist in this world.  It would have been even more odd if Turner died.  (I guessed that Turner and Elwood switched places when Turner died because no one would mention him in the flash-forwards.)   But if that little seed that my wife planted in my head is sprouting, does the switch make sense?  I do like the idea that Turner had to stay off the grid.  I get that he chose Elwood's name as a tribute to this kid that he loved and got killed.  I understand all that. But also, it feels like a fictional choice.  That doesn't feel like reality.  I spoke of verisimilitude a minute ago.  It feels like something an artsy film would do.  It played on the idea that nonchronological narratives eliminate certain choices and the film chose to do the oddest ending it could.

The problem is that Nickel Boys doesn't need a twist.  There have been a bunch of stories told about the roles that juvenile detention centers did to minorities.  It's not just juvenile detention centers.  Sugarcane told about religious schools in Canada who were wiping out the Indigenous population that had registered to be students there. The story already flies without the need for there to be a switch.  Again, I think I like this movie a lot.  I'm all for it.  But I don't think that there's been a movie twist that had less of an impact on me than simply having one character adopt the other character's moniker.  The movie is good enough.  There is a visual artistry coupled with a compelling character dynamic to make this story work without the big reveal.

After unpacking the movie (to the best of my exhausted ability), I do think that my wife's seed isn't accurate.  I do like the movie a lot.  I don't know if I would ever put it on a "love" list though.  While it is one of the better movies that the Oscars offered up this year, it is a weaker year for Oscars.  Honestly, in other years, Nickel Boys would kind of be forgotten as simply a pretty movie.  I'll be honest.  I'm kind of surprised that it isn't up for Cinematography.  That's where I think that this movie shines the hardest.  But it is a good story and I'm still interested in reading the book.  Maybe Goodreads can manipulate me into reading it because it is one of their reading challenge books.  Still, the story works, even if it didn't need the twist ending.

Rated R for over-the-top brutal violence.  Ironically, that brutality comes from how matter-of-fact the violence is.  It is quick and intense and often, bullets rip people apart.  There's also a bit of language and there's the implication, especially when it comes to the novel, that Llewelyn married Carla Jean a bit too young.  This is an upsetting movie.  R.

DIRECTORS:  Joel and Ethan Coen

I have to do this quickly.  I keep putting off things until they become overwhelming, leaving me in a constant state of self-imposed stress.  It's weird having to write about No Country for Old Men.  I read the novel two weeks ago in preparation for this watch.  The thing that makes No Country hard to write about is the fact that there are so many objectively supported interpretations that anything that I write here will either be straight up wrong or simply a rewritten read of what someone else has written.  There's no win on my part.  The only thing that I get to do by writing about No Country for Old Men is to add a great movie to a list of films that I have on my page.  Oh, I also get to update the Criterion Collection page.

While No Country for Old Men was not my first Coen Brothers movie, it was one of the early ones.  I think my first one was The Hudsucker Proxy, which is kind of impressive to have as a first Coen Brothers movie.  But one of those things that comes with the Coens is a very specific vibe.  But people kind of pigeonhole the Coen Brothers as one thing.  I think, instead, that the Coens find projects that tend to align with their sense of storytelling.  (I'm basically defining how someone becomes an auteur.)  One of the thoughts that kept popping into my head was both how much the film of No Country both stayed absolutely true to the Cormack McCarthy book while simultaneously being almost an insult to the McCarthy book. (Okay, I'm being dramatic when using the word "insult", but the use of the backspace key seems like moving backwards here.) 

There are large swaths of the film that are one-for-one the book.  If you read the book, almost every other chapter is a narration by Ed Tom, the sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones.  It's meant to be his inner monologue about the events of the story coupled with thoughts on what it means to age, especially in today's society.  (Or, you know, 1977 / the '80s).  Now, I'm in a little bit of a weird place.  I had seen No Country back in college.  This was the era of little film nerd who was just dipping his toe in the water of cinema.  But when I read the novel, I had all of the casting in my head.  Tommy Lee Jones was Ed Tom.  Josh Brolin was Moss.  I think it is impossible for me to imagine a different type for Anton Chigurh than Javier Bardem.  Heck, that's how we all met Javier Bardem was from that role. So I had a little bit of a cheat when reading the novel, knowing how the film was going to adapt it.

But as much as this is a Cormack McCarthy book, mirroring the text of the novel so closely, there is so much of the movie that screams the Coen Brothers.  I'll say this.  Llewelyn and Chigurh are beat-for-beat the book.  There are some moments that might not completely align with the story.  But tonally, those characters are lifted right from the page.  But I'm talking about the extended world of No Country.  Part of what makes No Country almost a unique thing from the film is the world of the Coen Brothers.  No Country is an oddly intimate story, where the camera is focused on the primary characters incredibly closely.  While there are smaller interactions, like the boy who gets paid $500 for his shirt or the kids on the bike who find Chigurh, not much is given to these moments.  Instead, it's characters like the lady who runs the trailer park that the Mosses live in.  There are cab drivers.  Carla Jean's mother is straight up Coen Brothers thoughts personified in a person.  

And the insane thing is that these creators were meant to be married in this film.  Golly, rarely have we had a source material and an adaptation that seem to enhance both things perfectly.  I am one of those people who hates when a novel puts the movie poster on the cover.  I must have been in a really weird headspace when I bought my copy of No Country for Old Men back in 2007 or 2008.  I was obsessed with the movie and I wanted to read the book. But this was also a time in my life when I wasn't reading as ravenously as I do today, so it sit on a shelf.  My point behind the movie poster cover is that I don't know if either would have had the same cultural impact if it wasn't for the symbiotic relationship between the two.

One of the biggest epiphanies with this watch of No Country was the fact that it almost has more in common with the slasher film than it does with the modern crime thriller / Western.  (I need you to remind me to return to this idea?  Capisce?) I want to talk about the slasher element of the movie first.  Part of the structure of No Country is the idea that there is no scenario where Chigurh will not leave Moss alone.  He is an unstoppable force.  There are moments where Moss gets a little bit of an edge of Chigurh.  But like a Michael Myers, Chigurh takes whatever injury without a physical reaction.  At one point, Moss and Chigurh are trading gunshots on the U.S. / Mexican border.  Moss gets wrecked.  He hobbles across the border covered in blood and really hurting.  It's a miracle that he makes it over the border, eventually collapsing on a step in town.  We are meant to experience that misery as he fights for survival.  It seems like Chigurh is simply scared off.  Nope.  Chigurh is equally injured.  In fact, we're given gory details on how injured Chigurh is.  But he is emotionless as he patches himself up.  That scene matches James Cameron's The Terminator, when the T-800 patches up his own skin without reacting in pain.  

Coupled with the notion that this might be a slasher movie over a thriller is the idea of Moss's morality.  One of the odd moments I noticed throughout the story is the idea that Moss basically doesn't make waves in his life.  When the sheriff's office points out that they recognize Moss's truck, the question is brought up whether or not that Moss would run dope.  The narrative becomes quickly clear that, no, Moss doesn't run drugs.  Instead, everyone figured out that Moss was just a guy who discovered two million dollars and got caught up in something that got out of hand quickly.  This is the violation of the code that tends to get the protagonist into trouble.  In the same way that a group of camp counselors get into trouble for something that should be innocuous, Moss is punished for a single mistake.  That punishment is unforgivable, especially considering that what gets him caught by the cartel is his empathy for a thirsty man in the desert.

When it comes to the thriller or Western element of the story, there's something that is contrary to the history of cinema that No Country manages to pull off.  (This is me trying to return to my point, but the interruptions of writing has me pivot a bit from my forgotten point.)  Most film noir and crime films had a dictate from the self-regulating body that the studios all agreed to.  Studios agreed to make edgy crime stories as long as there was an agreement that virtue was rewarded and villainy was punished.  Often, this led to eleventh hour moments where the bad guy, through some cruel irony or twist of fate, got his comeuppens.  No Country violates that idea head on, leading us to a conclusion that actually has more in common with the horror genre.  Llewelyn invokes a trope.  He is threatened by Chigurh, which only makes him more mad.  He did that old chestnut, "You don't have to come to me.  I'm coming for you. You're my personal project."  When the hero of the story says that, we get the Kevin McCallister plan unfold.  He's going to prep for Chigurh only to save his wife.  

Instead, we get the most insane ending.  Not only does Moss lose his fight for survival and fails to intercept Chigurh, but he doesn't even get to confront Chigurh.  He's killed unceremoniously because his mother-in-law told the cartel where they were staying by accident. Moss's death happens off-camera.  Now, I'm not saying that the horror genre would kill off its protagonist off camera.  But there are many horror films where the protagonist thinks that they have the upper hand only to lose in the last moments.  Crime dramas have to have a chance for virtue to succeed.  Instead, we have Carla Jean, an innocent in the story, most likely killed by Chigurh.  She refuses to play by his rules and is left to suffer the consequences (in my read of that ambiguous ending).  Not only that, but it seems like villainy would be punished.  Much like the crime dramas and thrillers of yesteryear, Chigurh is hit by a vehicle and it looks like that's the end of the bad guy.  Instead, he does what he always does.  He dispassionately walks off, licking his wounds without repercussions. 

But now I have to talk about the idea that I have been avoiding.  What's the read on the movie?  It's been a minute since I've read the take on this film.  I know that it has a fairly common read.  The title itself is the film's theme.  If we look at the film from the perspective of Ed Tom, an aging sheriff who has watched the world grow more violent, it seems to be a criticism of the current generation.  The world is going to heck in a handbasket and Ed Tom seems powerless to stop the oncoming storm.  When I first saw this movie, I probably disagreed with the message that McCarthy infused into his tale. There was always that narrative that "Things aren't as good as they used to be."  There seems to be this misconception that the past was some Rockwellian utopia that is being strangled by the advent of technology and the stripping away of manners.  I always hated that, because the reality of that narrative was that there was more terrible stuff in previous generations.  After all, there was a need for the Civil Rights movement and let's not forget the crisis of juvenile delinquents.

But now as I get older, the movie has a bit of a point.  It may not be the exact point that the movie wanted to make.  We're in a crap society, everyone.  Things are really bad.  So many rights are being stripped away and I see my students completely lack empathy in even the remotest sense.  I hate when teachers crap on the following generation.  The message from No Country, criticizing a degraded younger generation, was always annoying to me. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to lack empathy.  I see this mostly in the young men I teach, but it is there.  Instead, the real evil is that the return to the values of a previous generation are ruining the current generation.  So as much as there was "no country for old men", the current situation is that old men are reshaping the country so that there would be a country for them.  It's depressing, but the message of the film almost reads better.  It's hard to think why the world is devolving, much like how Ed Tom questions what makes people so violent.  Instead, we're looking at people embrace the worst elements of yesteryear to bring about a world where the Ed Toms of the world can judge others without repercussions. 

But man, the Coen Brothers know how to make a movie.  While there have been a couple of weaker entries in their ouvre, when they hit on a drama, they really hit.  No Country is a tank of a film.  It holds up today.  It's one of those movies where each shot is a masterpiece. It's pretty incredible.

Rated R entirely for language.  There were times that we were wondering if the movie was PG or PG-13 because there wasn't that much offensive stuff in it.  Then someone would just curse up a storm and then we remembered that the movie took place in a prison.  But there's no violence.  There's references to violence that took place before the events of the film, but nothing on screen.  

DIRECTOR:  Greg Kwedar

Oh my goodness, if I can get this blog knocked out in the next 35 minutes, I will have been the most productive human being that ever existed.  No matter how long I make my "To Do" list, there's always just enough time to get the whole thing done with maybe a minute to spare in either direction.  I don't know how it works, but I seriously pushed myself really hard to get caught up with life as a whole.  And the crazy thing is?  I needed to do very little of it.  (NONE OF MY TIME WAS WASTED AND YOU DON'T GET TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.)

Is there such a thing as "too inspirational"?  It's a weird take to have, especially considering the slate of Academy Award nominated movies that 2025 has given us.  I've been writing so much about each and every Academy Award nominee and they've mostly been bummer movies.   On top of that, many of these bummer movies haven't been all that great.  I'm not talking about all of them.  I'm talking about more than usual.  But then we get Sing Sing, which might be pushing too much in the other direction.  Maybe all of the other Academy Award nominees pushed me too hard in one direction that I needed a bit of a middle-of-the-road movie.  But sweet Christmas, how do you give me a movie about convicts putting out plays and finding a brotherhood in that theatre troupe and expect me to take it seriously.

Now, "Based on a True Story" movies often leave me cold, mostly because the movie is probably far removed from what actually happened.  This movie is almost an experiment of cinema more than it is a play on what is reality.  Don't get me wrong: there's a lot of stuff going on here that feel heightened for the sake of storytelling.  After all, there was a documentary about this exact program in Sing Sing that probably does a more accurate job telling the stories of these actors.  But because Sing Sing needed to be a movie, there had to be liberties made.  But out of all the Based on a True Story movies I've seen, this one has to have a special place because the actors are playing versions of themselves. 

This made for an interesting debate between me and my wife.  A lot of the movie was us shouting that someone was a professional actor or if they were playing themselves.  It's pretty recognizable.  But there's a fabulous choice going on between Colman Domingo and Divine Eye.  Now, from what I understand, Divine G is in the movie playing another part.  (What is that like?  Colman Domingo is this intense actor who is the lead of this movie and your story is being played by this guy when you yourself are an actor?  The mind races!)  I don't mean to be rude at all.  The story is inspirational and these guys do a heck of a job for the movie.  But there's a bit of a gulf between what Divine Eye is doing and what the other guys are doing in the movie.  What are the odds that the story that they came up with between Divine G and Divine Eye would need to have Divine Eye be so good that he could hold his own to Colman Domingo?

That might be the biggest yellow flag for me in terms of verisimilitude.  Those two guys are powerhouses when it comes to performances.  I love it a lot.  But some of those story choices seem a bit artificial.  If anything, that's my major frustration with the movie as a whole.  With a documentary, the story of these actors putting on a quality show in spite of being inmates is more about reactions.  I'm sure that the documentary probably talked about the captivity of the soul and how against incredible odds, these guys put together that brought people joy.  It talked about the value of the arts to soothe the savage beast.  But that's not a narrative in any sense.  And I'm sure that there was fighting similar to what we saw in Sing Sing as a whole.  But the actual story is a little bit weak.  

Maybe it is because we've seen the prison story before.  I love Divine G as a character.  He's a bit pretentious, but I like that as a writer.  He's got this very specific celebrity within this prison.  In the world of Sing Sing, he's a published author.  Nowhere else is that true.  And he's got fans!  That's fantastic. But everything else has elements of The Shawshank Redemption to it.  Like, the parole hearing is just like every parole hearing we've ever seen in cinema.  There's someone who is speaking over the inmate, who is desperately trying to plead his case.  The conflict between Divine G and Divine Eye is one between the noble inmate and the thug.  And that's where the movie kind of suffers. 

Both Divine G and Divine Eye are dynamic characters.  Divine G is a character rooted in calm.  He is convinced of his own innocence and he believes in the system.  He understands the intellectual and spiritual value of having a rehabilitative theatre program.  But that foundation is shook when he loses his parole hearing.  I get that.  We get an adequate look at what makes Divine G tick.  It all makes sense when he starts finding himself through the program and with his brothers.  I like all that. But Divine Eye is the secondary protagonist.  He comes in as the stereotype.  He goes through the program, much like Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a means to dodge the world of the prison.  And, no surprise, he becomes one of the most important parts of the project.  He embraces his failures to become the best Hamlet they've seen (although we don't have much context and the soliloquy ends at "Aye--there's the rub!").  

But we never have those growing pains moments.  We have a time when we have Divine G talk to him.  But even Divine Eye calls him out on this moment, claiming that this isn't going to change him and that's the stuff of movies.  So what made this hardened criminal who was using the system for his own comfort, come to understand that they were doing something noble and good up on that stage?  Instead, the movie just takes a shortcut and makes Divine G and Divine Eye best of friends.  I wanted to have the labor pains that this movie refused to give me.  If anything, a lot of the conflict in this movie is mostly "get over yourself" conflict.  There's no real come-to-Jesus moments for these characters where they are led kicking and screaming to the point of breaking down.  No, characters are just sad or angry for a while and then they hug it out.  That's probably how it was in real life, but it doesn't necessarily make for compelling cinema.

Honestly, the whole thing felt a little hokey to me.  It felt like an R-rated Hallmark movie.  I almost felt bad for Paul Raci, who had to play acting coach Brent Buell.  Clearly, a lot of this was a tribute to this guy who put these inmates together and got them to get over any preconceived notions.  But man, his characterization was thin.  It was a lot of corny stuff, maybe because the real guy was a bit corny.  It's hard to play something when the conflict doesn't really align with the characters portrayed.

But here's me, complaining on the Internet about a movie that is meant to make me feel good.  These guys went through a lot of crap and they came out on top.  If anything, I should be celebrating the complexities of the human soul and how art can bring out the best in anyone.  But I'm more complaining that I didn't enjoy the movie much.  Realistically, I probably would have enjoyed the documentary more.  Still, it was better than being bummed out once again with a real downer of a movie.

PG-13 for traditional Marvel stuff.  There's a lot of violence.  I suppose the big not-all-that-secret bad guy looks a little gross, especially in the clear light of day.  Also, there's a lot of stabbing.  Cap's wings in this one have these blades that tend to stab a lot of Hulk flesh.  That could be a bit much.  There's also that family-friendly swearing that Marvel really seems to embrace.

DIRECTOR: Julius Onah

The way I watched this movie was not ideal.

I took my son to go see Captain America: Brave New World last Saturday.  Then the power went out.  As much as I write about movies, it is incredibly difficult for me to find time to go out to the movies.  I have five kids and life is always insane.  So we go through a good chunk of the movie.  We found out who the big bad guy was.  We got the plan.  Then the power went out.  So my son and I, post Boy Scouts, finally got to see the rest of the movie.  We, luckily, were able to jump into a show already in progress.  We only had to rewatch a few minutes of the movie.  That being said, some of the cinema purists out there would be horrified that I watched the first half and the second half of the movie a week apart.  That being said, I have strong opinions on the movie and feel like I can accurately write about this one.  

Post Endgame, y'all love dunking on Marvel.  Some of you will swear that "But this one wasn't bad."  And you should be critical of movies that aren't that solid.  I didn't necessarily love Eternals (and one day, I'll get around to rewatching the movie.) I feel like I keep coming back to this well when a Marvel movie is being attacked.  Brave New World is a bit of weird one because the distance between the audience score and the critics score is so wide.  But honestly, Brave New World is a pretty great movie.  I will give some caveats.  It may be the worst Captain America movie, but that may be more telling of the quality of the franchise than it is about this movie.  Some of you might not really consider it to be a Captain America movie.  Some of you might have an argument there with the idea that this is more of a sequel to The Incredible Hulk or Eternals than it is a Captain America movie.  I'll give you some points for that.  Some of you might say that Captain America is not in this movie.  To that, I'm going to tell you to shut up.

Here's what I liked about it.  Again, it is always hard to say why you liked a movie.  But here's what worked.  While Brave New World might not be the tightest political thriller, it was compelling enough to get me to want to unpack the film as a whole.  Yeah, I'm a little upset that we got to know about Samuel Sterns before the movie was even released.  But there is enough political intrigue to keep the movie going.  There were even mild revelations that kept me intrigued.  A lot of that comes from Harrison Ford's Thunderbolt Ross.  (And so begins the apologizing on my end.)  I thought it was weird initially when they recast Thunderbolt Ross.  I've always said that Marvel needs to get over its recasting issues, especially when it came to Jonathan Majors's Kang.  But someone needed to finish up the story started by William Hurt.  Golly, I didn't know that I needed an ultimate conclusion to that storyline.  But Brave New World kind of showed that it was necessary. 

Once again, not rated.  But this one has some nudity almost thrown in without purpose.  Oh, and if you think that Bergman got all of that animal slaughter out of his system with the first movie, this one somehow gets a little bit worse.  I don't know why slaughtering a sheep seems less horrible than slaughtering a pig, but we watch the pig die in this one.  

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Do you know what I don't want to write about when I have too much to write?  I mean, if you guessed a follow-up to a regional documentary that I just had a hard time writing up, you'd be right.  I mean, I struggled to give what little content I could for the first Faro Document.  That was an uphill battle.  It was pulling teeth.  I didn't want it to be.  But now I have three more blogs to write today and I have to find a billion words to say about a movie that I basically covered.  I can't promise that this blog will have anything genius to contribute.  If I am covering a lot of the same stuff, it's because Bergman is covering a lot of the same stuff...

...only longer.

Yeah, the movie is longer.  I know that I watched Louis Malle's Phantom India and found it riveting.  But it's almost like Bergman is stressing that, as much as things change, things really stay the same.  The movie ends with Bergman saying that there was going to be a Faro Document 1989, which inevitably did not happen.  I'm going to go with "No offense, but that's okay."  Faro Document 1979, while being a perfectly fine documentary about the residents of Faro, beats a little bit of a dead horse.  I'm surprised actually that I didn't see the movie literally beat a dead horse because that would be in vein with what the movie already presents.  It's not that the people of Faro don't deserve the attention that Bergman is bringing to them.  The life of a farmer on a remote island in Sweden is hard.  I get that.  It ages people terribly.  But also, maybe have a bit more new stuff.  I know that the films were initially released a decade apart.  It's the conceit of the documentaries.  But I watched both of them over the course of a week and change.  It was just the same thing over again.

But the thing that 1979 does add to the narrative is the element of aging.  One of the cooler moments in the original Faro Document was the smash cut to the kids on the bus. (I remember writing about that.  Do you know why?  It's because I just wrote about it this week.) Well, while the kids were in bright color in the first documentary to juxtapose the vibrant youth and joie de vivre of the children to the monochromatic fuddy duddy elders of Faro, now the kids were in black-and-white.  I liked this sequence a lot.  Honestly, had Bergman decided to do a short film following what happened to those kids, kind of like Seven Up.  The key idea behind Bergman's documentation of Faro was the idea that Faro seems to breed its own.  While some of those kids made good on their promises to leave Faro, many of those kids who swore that they'd beat it ended up being tied to the town.  Sometimes the kids didn't mind being stuck there.  Some of them seemed depressed by the notion.  But even the kids who did leave seem to have meh jobs.

This is me coming across as very judgy.  I just retook my Myers-Briggs test and I'm still an ENFJ.  I always said that I put the "J" in ENFJ.  (The result was actually shocking was that I was only slightly more J than the alternative.) I'm trying to align with what Bergman is getting across in this sequence.  There were a bunch of kids who got off Faro.  But even these kids when they grew up didn't seem to travel far.  They had jobs like train conductor and things like that.  Why I'm crapping all over what is a completely noble profession is that I can't help but notice that none of these kids grew up to be involved in the humanities.  There weren't any artists.  They were incredibly practical jobs.  My take on this is the fact that everyone on Faro is almost wired to be a practical part of society. 

Faro is an island of farmers.  The teachers that are highlighted in the film seem frustrated that they are only able to manipulate the system so far for basic supplies for teaching. There's something wired into the children from early on that jobs are the most important thing and the only real jobs tend to be farms that tend to be in the family for generations.  (There was one part that I didn't quite understand where the government, under Socialism, gave the farm to another family yet it still had to be tended.  Before all the right wingers say "See, told you!", I just don't know enough about the rules or laws in 1979 Sweden to come down hard in any direction.) Maybe it's the fact that I'm constantly talking about the American Dream in my American lit courses, but the notion that you can be anything in Faro is almost an absurdity.

With the themes of aging dancing throughout, the movie --either intentionally or no --shows how rough aging in Faro really is.  I'm definitely writing this from 2024 America in an era where Millennials are aging gracefully (you're welcome!), but there wasn't anyone who looked middle aged.  It was either young people with bad moustaches (who I would have paid dollars to donuts to guess that he was a hipster if it wasn't for the farm he was running behind him) or the most elderly person that you've ever seen.  That's the world of Faro.  And Bergman is oddly celebrating them in this movie.  The first film had Bergman weave in the message of the Social Democrats into the movie.  Only one person really talks politics in this one and it isn't pro-Social Democrat.  

It's almost like Bergman is appreciating the fact that this is a hard life to live.  Yeah, I would really have preferred not to watch the pig get slaughtered, especially when it came to having to break the pig's feet off.   Oh, I didn't love the cutting off of the hooves either, but that's something distracting.  You can see why a job like this ages someone. It's grueling work.  Perhaps the reason that I don't see the most elderly people in the world is because I live in the suburbs and I don't smoke.  But this is a place where there are very few happy outlets.  I am glad that Bergman highlighted a dance that everyone wet to.  Bergman is not ignorant of the specific kind of fun that the people of Faro indulge in.  After all, that DJ was competing with a bird's nest above his head. But that kind of life only offers so many outlets.

This is probably how much I can write.  Like the first Faro Document, there's only so much to say that can have any degree of depth.  Bergman is madly in love with Faro.  As part of that, it is an attempt to bond with the people of Faro in an intimate way.  But Faro Document 1979 doesn't offer much beyond the notion that Faro will forever stay the way it is, despite the passage of time.  I'm actually going to be stopping over in Sweden this summer.  As meh as I am about Faro Document 1979, I do want to see what has become of Faro.  Sure, I could Google it to see if Faro is still a popular tourism spot.  I am curious to see if a Hyatt or something has been built on the island.  For all I know,  that bridge that they were talking about in the first one has been raised.  But in terms of wanting to watch more Faro Documents, I'm good.

Like, really.  I'm good.  Don't go through Bergman's stuff.  I don't need a surprise third entry.

Rated R as it absolutely should be.  Like every other Academy Award nominee, it has a fair share of nudity and some pretty sexual moments throughout.  That somehow takes a backseat to the copious amounts of gore and horror throughout.  Also, the tone of the film matches Robert Eggers other films, so it's meant to be a deeply uncomfortable watch.  Well deserved R.

DIRECTOR:  Robert Eggers

Man, I feel like every blog I write on here is tied to a confession.  Yes, I'm the big bad film teacher who has seen everything.  Do you know what I haven't seen?  Either of the other Nosferatu movies nor Shadow of the Vampire.  Yeah, I know!  You'd think that a film teacher who is into vampire movies would have gotten around to it at this point.  I actually haven't.  I might watch it soon.  But do you know why I don't feel necessarily compelled to watch Nosferatu?  It might be because I just discovered, upon watching the 2024 version, is that Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

And do you know what I think about Dracula?  I'm burned out on the actual Dracula storyline.  I'm talking about the Bram Stoker novel.  I read that novel.  Heck, I read that novel on my honeymoon.  It's fine.  It did the job.  But I've now seen this story so many times that it does nothing for me.  And since this is a time for confession, the OG Dracula story is actually kind of boring.  It has things to say.  It is a bit scary.  But by contemporary vampire storytelling, man alive Dracula is kind of boring.  So when you make a movie like Nosferatu, that is a skin of the original story, you have to be able to appreciate it more of a commentary on cinema than the actual vampire legend.  After all, if you were really obsessed with Dracula, you would just make Dracula again.  And even then, I'd be having a similar confession saying that the original Dracula is a little bit boring.

If anything, this is a vehicle for Robert Eggers to do his thing.  Now, does Robert Eggers do his thing?  Absolutely.  He Robert Eggerses the crap out of this movie.  It looks haunting.  It's full of vibe and he makes a spooky spooky vampire movie that actually kind of nails some of the weirder elements of the story better than what other adaptations have done.  And, again, I haven't seen the original Nosferatu.  I feel like that's a huge slight on my normal film watching attitude.  I'm almost obsessive about seeing every version of something before the remakes, simply as research for writing this kind of stuff.  But right now, I'm drowning in film blogs and thirsty for time.  I have too much to write about.  I'm writing a million words a second because I am so far behind when it comes to writing these things.  I also have a million movies to watch before the Academy Awards this weekend.  It's not a pretty sight.  Am I going to knock out three extra movies when I don't have time to write about the movies that need to be written about?  I don't really think so.  Besides, these are my own stupid rules and no one is holding me to them.

There are some weird things about Dracula that are almost compounded in Nosferatu, especially Eggers' version.  Dracula, to a certain extent, indulges and harks on the fear of the foreigner.  Just so I have to stop writing Dracula in a movie that technically doesn't have Dracula in it, I'm going to start referring to Count Orlok as the focus on this.  I cannot stress enough that the story is exactly the same, so my criticisms should apply to both.  Count Orlok is meant to be this foreigner from another land who comes to England (which is a substitute for home or the West) to seduce women, ultimately leading them to their downfall.  Now, I've actually been kind of a fan of some of the Dracula (I did it again!) adaptations.  I'm one of the five people who really likes Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola.  But with the Dracula adaptations, the eponymous vampire tends to present himself as a handsome aristocrat who hides a monstrous form underneath.

With Count Orlok, especially given Eggers' visual style, he accentuates the fact that he is not traditionally handsome.  This version even has Bill Skarsgard of It fame to play Orlok.  I know a lot of people have had issues with Orlok's moustache.  I don't have an issue with the moustache.  If anything, it's a nice delineation between the two vampires.  But what it does do is accentuate the fact that this man is incredibly Eastern European.  There's nothing seductive about Orlok.  Instead, he comes across more as a barbarian than an aristocrat.  So my big question, if this is a story about the fear of the foreigner, is why?  Part of me thinks that the thought of what is being communicated isn't part of what is happening here.  Sure, I know that Eggers is probably smarter than I am.  But I also think that Eggers might have a different priority.

Eggers is making something that is a horror tank.  He wants you to feel uncomfortable from start to finish.  What Dracula traditionally offers is a shift from seductive to horrifying.  There are moments where we know that Dracula isn't going to attack. He may be in a public place looking all charming and handsome.  The big scary parts are when the vampire hunters take the fight to Dracula.  With this version of Count Orlok, he's just a brute throughout.  Every time he's on screen, he's menacing.  Now, this sounds like it would be an improvement, right?  If I thought that Dracula was boring, this seems like it would be more intense.  Honestly, and I don't know how this happened, but I got bored every time that Orlok was on screen after a certain point.  There was the torture of Hutter / Harker (Geez Louise, that's close) that was on point.  But there was never a moment of "When is Orlok going to strike?'  He's constantly in scary mode and that made him honestly a little forgettable in the grand scheme of things.  By the final act of the movie, I was walking around just so I wouldn't fall asleep.

But where Nosferatu kind of cooks is through Ellen Hutter, the Mina Harker character of the story.  Lily-Rose Depp deserves a little bit of attention for this movie.  I know that this might be the breakthrough role for her after a series of indie films that let her practice her craft.  What I like about Nosferatu over other Dracula adaptations is the notion that Ellen Hutter is the prize for the story.  Mina Harker tends to be more of a concept than a character in other versions of this story.  We know that if the vampire hunters don't do something to stop Dracula / Orlok, Ellen / Mina will be the victim of this.  But we never really get a visual understanding of the misery that Ellen / Mina is going through.  Instead, there's a desire from Ellen's perspective to embrace the evil that surrounds her.  It's kind of what makes the ending of Nosferatu more interesting than Dracula.  Ellen seems to submit to the evil that is infecting her by sleeping with the monster. But when she holds him to the light, it gives her far more agency than other Dracula tales allow.

It almost makes the von Franz character almost unsexy to play.  It's the Van Helsing part.  I'm kind of surprised that Willem Dafoe agreed to play this part considering.  I mean, I'm sure he didn't mind.  I get the vibe that Dafoe signs up for things just to play and hang out with gnarly dudes like Eggers.  But von Franz, unlike his Dracula counterpart, is slightly incompetent.  He's the most competent person there.  I can't deny that.  He's supposed to be.  But he's the guy who is trying his best in the face of what seems to be an impossible battle.  But Van Helsing always seemed to be a bit of a butt-kicker.  He's the guy who is ready for a fight, even if it means his own death.  Von Franz, on the other hand, is a guy who is over his head.  One of the most telling and interesting parts of this character is when he admits to not knowing how to defeat this vampire.  That seems damning but it also seems the most pragmatic.  This is a world where the evidence for vampires is probably scant.  How would someone have a guaranteed ending for a vampire?  As unsexy as it is, it's at least something new in the vampire canon.

I've said it a couple of times.  I got really bored with this movie. Maybe I'm starting to distance myself from horror.  I've probably seen so much at this point that it doesn't affect me like it normally does.  There were moments when I thought some of the visuals were great.  I loved everything done with shadows.  I mean, if we're going to do a sendup of German Expressionism, you have to do something with shadows.  I also learned that I'm more hesitant to go into Nosferatu from 1922 with an open mind because it should have been called Dracula.  That's something that my brain can't unlearn.  Still, there are things to be taken away that are positive from the movie.

PG for practically nothing offensive.  Honestly, the fact that this isn't G rated is gobsmacking.  (Gobsmacking probably isn't a word, but I am properly gobsmacked.) There are a few moments where there's the mildest anxiety produced.  For example, there's a really mean bird in the movie.  Also, a lot of us --and I'm including myself in this --get some anxiety about large, underwater creatures.  There are large, aquatic creatures that make me a little anxious.  But this is a tame movie.

DIRECTOR:  Gints Zilbalodis

I can't stress this enough.  Watch this movie with your kids.  There's nothing wrong with the movie.  Also, if you have a kid who is mildly obsessed with cats, then you are going to be parent of the year for a while with this one.  Penny lost her mind.  Completely enraptured with a movie about a cat who acts like a cat and there's no talking throughout.  That's Penny's jam.  The least cat thing that cat does is to steer the ship like a person would.  Sure, my brain screamed, "How are those animals steering the ship so well?  Shouldn't they have run into something by now?"  But the rest of me was totally cool with that.  Of course that's something that the movie needs, so I'm going to be cool with animals handling a rudder.

This is one of those rare combinations of being both a Best Animated nomination coupled with a Best International nominee.  That's something that, oddly enough, my brain has a hard time wrapping my head around.  I also heard that this thing has been sweeping up the awards circuit.  I don't know if it has a chance at the Oscars, which tends to go to big budget, animated tentpole movies (or Studio Ghibli...).  But there's something really good about this movie.  I will talk about what the movie is not.  This movie isn't a traditional kids' film.  There's nothing funny in the movie.  It's incredibly subdued, even though the animals are constantly fighting for their lives.  Now, I'm just going to get this out there and it did affect how I watched the movie.

I mean, the movie is just a less sci-fi version of Stray, right?  I know.  It's  a film blog.  I should be sticking to movies only.  But I've been preaching Stray, a game I played on PS5 last year.  For those not in the know, you control a cat who is lost in this city.  The cat has no real powers.  The cat stays mostly catlike the entire game.  There's no moment where they start talking or walking like a person.  That's Flow.  Heck, both Stray and Flow even sound like they could be the same project.  Also, both kind of make your brain work the same way.  The story in both stories are rarely explicit, but you can work out most of the story through paying attention and crafting a narrative that makes sense given the information presented.  (Isn't that true about all stories?  Shut up.  Just watch / play both of these things and you'll get where I'm going.)  Now, is Flow stealing from Stray?  I don't know, man.  I don't know how intellectual theft works.  There are scenarios where one influences another.  That's entirely possible.  In fact, it's even plausible and acceptable.  There's also a scenario where great minds think alike.  After all remember all of those summer blockbusters that followed similar concepts.  Either way, I couldn't get Stray out of my head for the bulk of this movie.  

Part of me wants to talk about the politics of the movie. I mean, with the almost blank slate that the movie presents, it is easy to add a narrative over the film that reflects your own beliefs.  I don't think that it is much of a leap to say that the setting is a direct reflection of climate change.  Mankind is long gone.  There are monuments to mankind's presence on earth in the form of both art and consumerism.  But man is gone and only animals have adapted to the tumultuous world left behind.  The cat, as horrified by moments of intense danger, seems understanding that the world is not one of safety.  Again, I'm putting my own perspective over this because the avatar of the movie can't express frustration or vocalize theories to what is happening.  But when the wall of water comes at the cat at the beginning of the movie, none of it seems shocking.  The cat has lived in the abandoned house for a good deal of time, comfortable with the entrance through the broken glass.  When that water comes, it seems only natural that the cat has to make peace with the other animals to find a place of safety.

But as a good dystopian story should, it uses the setting as a place to play, but not make the story only about that.  Where Zilbalodis succeeds the most is the fact that there are relationships between the animals in ways that give them defined personalities. Heck, I can even see that these characters even have animal-specific moral codes.  That's where the story flies.  The cat seems to be the most noble, constantly open to the idea that other animals, despite traditional predatorial roles, are worthy of survival.  The bird is an alpha character, using intimidation to frighten others (even though the bird that we get to know is far more open-minded than the other birds.  The lemur is the consumer, obsessed with objects to the point of self-destructive hoarding.  The capybara is the lazy one, along for the ride, yet caring for the others.  The dog's an idiot.  A lovable idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

And now I'm going to do a little bit of reaching.  I tell my students to choose evidence before writing.  Flow is silent and almost beyond the need for a plot.  It explores a world that has been destroyed by climate change and puts its characters through the wringer.  But ultimately, this might be one of those fantastically woke stories that manages to affect people in a better way.  There are few groups of animals.  The bird separates from the birds because they are violent jerks.  The lemur seems to distracted to stick with the other lemurs (who also seem to be wildly distracted).  The other dogs are bullies.  But the animals who stick together come from all walks of life.  I pointed out their motivations earlier.  They seem incongruous to maintaining relationships.  Yet, these are the animals that are the ones who are defying the end of the world.  As gorgeous as this world is, it is falling apart in a tragic way.  The last shot of the movie, after all, is the slow death of the mysterious sea creature.  But these creatures have to abandon clan to form a new family that may be considered non-traditional.  My overly hippie nature can't help but be a little moved by that.  Sure, it's not the first story that weaves that theme throughout the film.  But with a story so sparse that I'm almost forced to imbue the story with my own background, I'm glad to see that the filmmakers were probably shooting for that as an idea to be spread.

The only thing that leaves me pause with Flow is some of the visuals.  At times, Flow is an incredible piece of visual art.  I posted an image above showing how the movie absolutely stuns most of the time.  I'm going to say that much of the cat is fantastic.  But there are times when the movie looks a little rough.  Like, depending on when you walked in on this movie, you'd probably have a different opinion on the visual impressiveness of the movie.  Sometimes the movie looks like it would take Pixar down a notch.  Sometimes it looks like a bad video game cutscene.  I wonder if it was a budget thing or a timing thing or a just-settling for pretty good thing.  But the visuals are wildly inconsistent.  When they work, they really work.  But the art as a whole isn't necessarily fluid.

Still, Flow is honestly a masterpiece.  I don't know if there was an animated film that knocked my socks off as hard as Flow did.  The only thing that is probably going to stop it from winning at the Academy Awards is the fact that it is a foreign film that not a lot of people saw.  But who knows?  Right now, I'm probably putting money on Flow.

PG-13 for all of the drug references mostly.  A lot of this movie is dedicated to Elton John's years on cocaine.  During this time, he had multiple partners.  The movie never gets explicit, but it does talk about the fact that he felt empty not connecting to people in a more permanent way.  But again, most of this is probably about the cocaine.  That's the PG-13 in my mind.

DIRECTORS: R.J. Culter and David Furnish

I thought I was done!  I had reached the last movie on my "to-write" list for the day.  Then I realized that I never wrote about the Elton John documentary.  Come on.  I was so close to seeing the light of freedom that this is just a kick in the pants for me.  Now, normally I don't write about a movie out of order.  I try to keep everything fresh. But I think I finished this movie within the week.  It's fresh enough and that's going to be made clear by my general disregard for the movie.

The first thing that I have to put out there is that Elton John slaps.  Honest to goodness.  If there is one thing that I've discovered in my adult life is that Elton John is way more talented than I ever gave him credit for when I was a teenager.  He was always kind of a presence in the music scene.  But I wasn't a guy who wanted to go out there and buy Elton John albums.  (For the youth, buying albums was the sole indicator of respect for musicians.) It was only once Rocketman came out that I learned to really get into Elton John.  I'm not talking about the Harland Williams Rocketman.  I'm talking about the one music biopic that I actually like.  Why did I like it?  I mean, you could click the link and it would give you an in-depth read of that movie. But the short and the long of it was that it embraced the musical format for the betterment of storytelling.  

I still encourage you to read that other blog.

But why wasn't I a fan of the documentary?  Part of it comes from the fact that this was a documentary for fans.  I know it was well made.  I'm not dismissing that Never Too Late does its job and does its job well.  What I am saying is that a fan doc tends to be a way to say that you should appreciate the material more than you already do.  There's something deeper there and the true fan needed to know these things.  Is this documentary a little bit tragic?  Oh, absolutely.  A lot of the movie is Elton John finding himself in the wilderness of drug use and loneliness.  But I will say, as a guy who simply digs Elton John, this movie is a bit much.  Part of that comes from the fact that everything that made me appreciate Elton John came from Rocketman in a far more entertaining package.  

Part of the problem comes from the fact that it acknowledges that his Farewell Tour was this great moment in history.  I don't deny that there is something to celebrate with the idea that Elton John was finally done touring and that he is able to spend time with his family.  It's very touching.  But there's me watching, not an Elton John superfan, seeing this moment as a glorified retirement party.  That's not the point of the movie. One of the running visual cues is the name of major cities on the tour, coupled with a countdown to Dodger Stadium.  Because of Rocketman got me a far more entertaining version of the same story --admittedly with different beats --I found myself tuned out.  Sure, there is the interesting story of John Lennon. Sure, I get a better understanding of the relationship between Elton John and Bernie Taupin.  That stuff is great.  

But honestly --and I keep coming back to this well --I can't hear one more story about the music industry and drugs.  I have complete sympathy for John.  He seems incredibly innocent, which seems in line with the Hero's Journey narrative.  When he says that he didn't know what was up with cocaine, while it's a little silly that he didn't, I kind of believe him.  It's all very tragic.  But it's also watching the same story over and over almost without shifting.  You could plant almost any number of artists into the Elton John spot and it would be the same story.  That's so depressing.  If anything, Never Too Late was more depressing than anything else.  It wasn't he cocaine.  It was because, in my mind, Elton John was more interesting than the movie made him out to be.  And if you took the wealth of moments that the movie talked about, you'd think I'm a lunatic.  I just got so tired seeing through the lens that the movie presented the information.

But if I have to look at it with the most rose colored glasses ever, Never Too Late, as its title suggests, is a film about aging.  While most of the movie is about the past (along with some stylisticly bizarre animation at times), the moments in the present show an Elton who both relishes being celebrity megastar Elton John and seeing how the past has caught up with him.  Much of present day Elton John seems to be a man who regrets not being a father earlier in life.  Coupled with the fact that Elton John is a significantly elderly father to two boys, he isn't even home to be a father in a quasi-normal sense.  There's this weight that he seems to carry around with him that screams that, even though he's taken the plunge into being a father, he doesn't feel like he's a dad.  This is so condescending and I'm ashamed of this, but my heart breaks when he's FaceTiming his kids and it feels like a conversation that they are having with a moderately close grandparent.  I don't mean to be ageist, but it doesn't feel like a father-son conversation.

And this is a completely mindboggling takeaway, but as bored as I was for most of the movie, there's a major gap where the story should be.  The flashback / documentary part of the movie is a ramping up of this by who was scorned by his father into this mega-star who was addicted to cocaine.  But then Elton John decides to get clean and the rest of the story is relegated to headlines ultimately leading to the present day.  But if this is a movie about addiction and how Elton John learned to hate music.  But the movie dovetails into him loving music.  Isn't the story in those years that we don't see?  Now, I can see maybe John wanting to avoid talking about this time in his life.  I can't imagine that this isn't an incredibly personal time with some dark soul-searching going on.  But the film sets up this story of misery and redemption.  The problem is that we don't see the journey of that redemption.  Instead, we get cool stories of Elton John meeting famous people and that's fun, but not deep.

So why did I watch this?  It is up for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and you'd think that the Elton John doc would have the Best Original Song on lock.  Not so much.  It was incredibly unmemorable.  But then again, I can't say that I have one that is screaming out at me right now, so maybe it will win.

I'm sorry that I'm not a bigger Elton John fan.  I think his music is incredible, but I'm never going to want to know more about Elton John.  For his fans, maybe this is crucial watching.  I don't get that vibe.  Instead, I get a slightly overproduced and disparate story about a man who rocked pretty hard like every other rock star and now he's kind of done.  That's not the most interesting story in the world.

The most R-rated movie for the year...probably.  Okay, it seems like the connective tissue between this year's Academy Awards is having a strong sexual content with nudity.  Honestly, the first third of this movie felt exploitative.  Again, this is another one of those movies that seems to be talking about the tragedy of sexual exploitation while simultaneously exploiting the actresses in those roles.  The rest of the movie has a ton of drug, alcohol, and tobacco use coupled with violence and assault.  Language is throughout the film, so much so that I would have a hard time finding a clip without language.  Well deserved R rating.

DIRECTOR:  Sean Baker

Do you know how happy I would be if I could knock out a top-tier Anora blog right now?  I'm so swamped with all of the things going on in my life that I should shove this ten-or-eleven year blog into the trash and just move on with my life.  But here's the thing!  And it's a kicker!  I actually was quite moved by Anora!  I was!  That's not insane in itself.  It's just that I went from thinking that I hated this movie to now putting it in a prestigious category of "Academy Award Best Picture nominees that I actually liked!"  Honestly, this has been a meh year for Oscars, and this is coming from a guy who tends to like everything.  So when I say that I really dug this movie, that's insane.

The even more insane thing is that the first third of this movie almost made me turn it off.  Okay, I wasn't going to turn it off.  My wife and I were going to power through.  Some of you are dubious of this.  At this point, the Oscar nominees have gotten so sexual that it seems like you can't get nominated without showing just an abundance of sex and nudity.  I get why Sean Baker put some of the sexuality in the movie.  Fundamentally, Ali's character is often defined by her profession.  I'm stealing some of my wife's take on this and adding onto it, so all credit goes her way.  Ali is one of those protagonists that's not quite an avatar.  After all, Ali's life and her profession is so specific that it appeals to most people viewing Anora as something "other."  In other words, most of us are watching Anora with horrific fascination.  "This is what this world is like?"  I mean, we have to take the movie's word for it.  Shy of being a stripper who occasionally dabbles in sex work, it's meant to be a weird world.

But my wife pointed out that Ani's dreams are almost non-existent in this movie.  Most of the time we get someone who gets a traditionally degrading job (which Ani never implies is that degrading), there tends to be a narrative that they are reaching for something great out there.  That whole tale of "working your way through med school" is not even remotely present for Ani.  Ani actually seems to enjoy her job, with the exception of the bureaucratic nonsense that her boss puts her through coupled with an annoying co-worker in the form of Diamond.  That's oddly mundane for work.  It's a universal template over something that is overtly situational. 

But when she marries Vanya, she holds onto Vanya tightly.  Her character is initially defined by her own apathy.  She doesn't even want to meet Vanya when Jimmy demands that she speaks Russian with him.  One of the things that Baker does better than anyone else is letting us know a character's silent intentions.  This could easily be a movie about Ani trying to hold onto a fortune that would take her out of her life.  No one could really blame her for grasping onto that life that Vanya has offered her.  But with money, Ani doesn't seem extravagant.  If anything, she settles into marriage quite traditionally.  She wants to stay home and hang out with her husband.  She never lies to herself about why Vanya likes her.  She understands her power over men with her sexuality, but their relationship, in her mind, has evolved past that.

When she fights for her marriage, she isn't fighting for cash.  She's fighting for the man that she's learned to love.  Listen, Vanya sucks from moment one.  He's kind of the worst.  But one of the things that the last moments of the movie show is that Ani is more broken than she lets on.  The fact that Vanya is willing to pay for exclusivity with Ani and spend any dollar amount to make that happen is the closest thing she probably has to being seen as more than a stripper.  The bridge that helped me understand Ani's perspective is that Vanya could absolutely afford any variety of woman that he wanted in America.  Instead, he kept on hanging out with her.  And as sexual as their relationship was, there were moments where they just hung out.  That was probably new for her.  It was someone who stuck around and let her watch him play video games.  (Note:  Yet another movie where that dude absolutely is not playing video games.  It does not look like that.) 

When Toros and his guys come in to separate the two, it's heartbreaking when Vanya runs off.  There was this crisis moment for me when I was wondering what kind of kid Vanya was.  At one point, this movie could have been about how Vanya was stupid enough to fight the Russian mob (or in this case, the oligarchy?) or if he was a selfish jerk.  And the movie was about how Vanya was a selfish jerk.  Listen, they're all children playing adults.  One of the repeated things that Ani kept screaming at Vanya was that he was an adult and that he didn't have to listen to his parents.  I mean, it's an on-the-nose moment, but I don't even care.  It makes for great citation.  But the story becomes a glorious mess of a love story after that.  Going back to my wife's point, Ani only gains her goal after she loses something that she was never looking for.  It's an odd tale.  

But the fact that the movie shifts over to Igor as an outside perspective looking in, Igor --for all of his dark nonsense --is closer to a traditional avatar.  Igor, as a hired thug, has no personal emotional loyalty to Toros or Vanya's parents.  Yes, Igor sucks.  One of the things I disagreed with my wife over was how much Igor sucks. She's in the camp of "He's cute."  I'm in the camp that Ani says at the end.  He assaulted her (even though he didn't think that he did).  I mean, Igor's got too many red flags to really make him a compelling romantic lead.  But what Igor does have that everyone else, besides Ani, lacks is a conscience.  He has a moral code that is not completely defined by loyalty.  Vanya thinks that he is put upon, but buckles immediately under pressure.  Vanya's parents --and this isn't even analysis at this point --are monsters who only care about social status and wealth.  Toros and Garnik will move heaven and earth for respect amongst the oligarchs.  But Igor?  Igor seems naive enough to see both the perspective of Ani and the line in the sand that he will not cross.

Yeah, his innocence is appealing, but only in contrast to the monsters he's surrounded by.  While Baker creates a narrative that has Ani and Igor overcoming a toxic meet cute, the rest of the movie stresses that Ani's escape is not through a romantic encounter with Igor.  Yes, it is touching that he holds her as she weeps at the end, but she also has just used sex as a thank you to conclude the film. Those tears come from the seeing of herself for a brief moment and not knowing how to just be Anora again.  In my head, Anora is the person who has needs and feelings.  Ani is the sex worker who closes herself off from being hurt for the sake of economic success.  When she "thanks" Igor, it's because she doesn't know how to talk to someone like that to express gratitude.  Yes, Igor is right to simply hold her at the end there.  But there has been this line crossed and it's a lot to unpack.

I have never gone so far from disliking a movie to loving a movie by the end.  It's an emotional and oddly funny movie.  Listen, when the Russians show up and the two are married, that's when the movie really cooks.  I get what is going on in that first part.  I would have pulled back a little, but the movie is a better version of the comedy thrillers that we saw in cinema's yesteryear.  It's really an oddly charming and deep movie.  But what can you expect from The Florida Project guy?

Unrated.  I think that one thing that I've learned from watching too many Criterion releases is that you have to get used to watching real animals getting slaughtered from start to finish without the camera moving.  Because this is about a farming community, you watch a lot of slaughter and a lot of lambs being born.  Like, so much.  At one point, I got desensitized and then REsensitized.  I don't think that's ever happened to me.  It's a lot.  Oh, my six-year-old walked in on one of the slaughters, but she didn't notice.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

This is how serious I am about completing everything.  You know that if I was a fly-by-night Bergman viewer, I would probably avoid the Faro Documents.  They are small, lightly political films about the farming community of his small island that he started living on.  Now, some people live for this stuff.  I tend to go into these movies with trepidation, but end up liking them when the whole thing.

Yeah, I liked it.  I didn't love it.  But I liked it.  Part of it comes from the fact that it is only 58 minutes long.  I probably could even excuse myself from writing about this when it's only got a 58 minute runtime.  But Bergman considered it a movie.  Thus, I too must consider it a movie.  And maybe this isn't the best selling point, but it felt way longer than 58 minutes. It does feel like I get to know the people of Faro Island pretty quickly, along with their frustrations with the way that the world is turning.  In many ways, the story is just the one of rural living fighting against the ever frustrating turn of progress.

I do love that this is a political movie.  I had no idea.  Honestly, when that conclusion to the movie pops up, where Ingmar Bergman tells how this is a movie talking about the benefits of Democratic Socialism, that's what got me.  Okay, the movie is fine up to that point. It feels very cinema verite documentary, something like the Sayleses would have made but in Swedish.  But beyond that, it felt like we were just getting a brutal look at what it meant to be a farmer on an isolated island.  But then there's that conclusion!  That conclusion is the most intense "I'm doing this for a reason" ending that came out of nowhere.  I mean, it's not shocking.  If you are going to pop in Faro Document to be floored by the end, that's not going to happen.  But it makes sense when placing Bergman in the context of his era.  He sees this small farming community and understands their plight. 

Yeah, they're a little backwards.  The movie almost embraces the notion that the previous generation will always vote against their own self-interests because that's the way that things have always been done.  I mean, the shattering smash cut between the black and white talking heads of old ladies (one that doesn't have a leg!) to the bright colored rock scored school bus full of children is telling about who this doc is meant for.  But it's a story Bergman probably hearing the complaints that this island has been holding onto since he fell in love with Faro and being proactive about the whole thing.  I don't know if he's being forthwith about his intentions to get a Democratic Socialist government in place.  But the movie looks at these grounded complaints and how just small electoral changes would revolutionize this tiny island.

I talked a little bit about the brutal parts of the movie in the MPAA section.  I know why he's doing it, but I have to wonder if there's a secondary point. So, because this is mostly a story of farming, especially when it comes to livestock.  Faro is known for their sheep and sheep processing.  One of the big points that Bergman touches on is the idea that, despite all of these sheep farmers, there's only one processing plant in driving distance.  As such, it talks about the monopoly that the slaughterhouse has over these people and how it all makes them miserable.  Now, I'm trying to be as open-minded as possible with the sheep slaughtering and the lamb birthing sequences.  They aren't short.  If anything, Bergman is mildly obsessed with segmenting his film into long sequences.  His interviews are as long as these slaughtering and birthing sequences.  In my mind, it's Bergman showing what the life of a livestock farmer is like.  He really wants to get in there, especially when the residents of Faro see this documentary that they are in.  But, do you think, even a little bit, that Bergman is also trying to gross me out?

I want to scale back for a second.  While this is a documentary for the people of Faro, first and foremost, this was shown on Swedish television as far as I understand.  These sequences are not easy to watch.  Part of the entire narrative of the documentary is that it is very hard to be a farmer, especially in a place as desolate as it is.  As much as it has a summer tourism business, Bergman seems to be trying to distance the summer vacations from what it really means to be a resident of Faro.  As part of that, he's almost Clockwork Oranging us (the second time I've used that description in the past couple days.  I lose all creativity when I have to mass produce these blogs).  He wants people to see that life is hard enough as it is without having to deal with this stuff.  The funny thing is that the farmers understand that both life and death on a farm are just part of what it means to be a farmer.  There's something entirely philosophical that loses all of its meaning when dealing with the real world practicality of slaughtering and birthing.

I probably need to close this up because I've started watching Faro Document 1979 and I really don't want the two movies bleeding together.  My big takeaway is that I kind of see Bergman without the pretense of being Ingmar Bergman is like.  My frustration with a lot of the Bergman box is that he gets so lost in talking about having affairs and intellectual monstrosity that he kind of forgets what it means to be a regular person.  If there's one thing that Faro Document absolutely nails is what it is like to be a normal person.  Listen, I'm always going to lean hard into art because I worry about a world without art.  But these are stories of real people dealing with real problems.  And Bergman, while we get little of him as documentarian in the actual film, seems to abandon any sense of class difference.  These people are his neighbors and he treats them as such.   He sees their suffering and how often their little worlds are immensely huge to them.  That's touching.  Maybe it's just a nice break from the constant reappearing of people being obsessed with books over human feelings that gets me with Faro Document.  

​Still, the movie works more than it doesn't.