Not rated, but this is a story that has just a lot of swearing.  That seems like it wouldn't raise any flags.  The thing is that the movie is more heartbreaking and depressing than anything visual.  But it is also one of those movies that hits differently if you aren't comfortable with war footage.  But in terms of visual things, it's just a lot of swearing.  Also, as much as I love Pavel, I'm a fan of keeping relationships with students more professional.  That's a teacher thing in me.

DIRECTORS: David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin

Okay, I've found a (mostly) kindred spirit.

The Academy Awards tend to choose similar themed documentaries every year.  As a Ukrainian, I tend to lean towards the docs involving the Ukraine / Russia conflict.  They're heartbreaking and they are hard sells for people to watch because they are mostly comprised of war footage.  But the thing that always drove me insane about Russia is that, from an American perspective, it's shocking to hear how pro-Russia the Russian people are.  Internationally, Vladimir Putin is probably one of this century's greatest villains.  And when we watch Russian propaganda from an American perspective, it's easy to see how silly it all comes across.  But what Mr. Nobody Against Putin does (which is a terrible title considering how effective the documentary is) well is let us know how propaganda works in an hour-and-a-half.

Now, the easy read on this, unfortunately, is that --if I showed this to my Trump supporting circle of people --folks would see this as "Look how immoral Russia is."  And you know what?  Russia, especially under Vladimir Putin, is a hellscape.  The propaganda is so thick that it is a miracle that people like Pasha exist.  Like, we get that rules in major cities tend to skew differently than suburbs or, in the case of Pasha, the most toxic place on earth.  When you get people so densely packed together in a city hub, the challenging of ideas is normal.  But out in the middle of nowhere, where it seems like no one cares about the residents, that message is palpable.  But I can't help but make the comparison to suburban Cincinnati.  The fact that the word "Ohio" has become synonymous with "fly-over-state", implying the very existence of the State of Ohio is boring in itself, there's a desperation for identity that propaganda does really well.  If I asked one of the people around me to take care of an immigrant who was staying at my house, they probably would be welcoming and throw a party for them.  But the second I talk about immigration as an issue, it's part and parcel of an identity that is impossible to break.

I love Pasha because I get him too much.  It's funny that he is incredibly aware of his home town of Karabash's repuation.  He knows that it is the most polluted, unlivable place on Earth.  He knows that the buildings are dirty and that, because the entire town is industrialway, there are pipes that go back and forth.  But he also is hurting because he loves his homeland so much.  Pasha is a young dude.  I don't know if he remembers a time when things weren't under Putin's thumb.  But the war with Ukraine was an escalation that went too far for him.  I mean, he was fighting the system even before the Ukraine invasion, so I really like Pasha then.  But he has the same logic that I have for America.  I get really emotionally moved by what is happening in the country now.  The assumption is that, when you protest what is happening in your country, it is done out of a lack of patriotism.  I don't think that was it.  In fact, I might have believed the same thing at one point, wondering if I was at all patriotic.  But the truth is that I'm overly patriotic.  I just hate Nationalism that much. If we're talking about doing the little things that are going to get you in trouble, Pasha understands John Lewis's attitude of "Good Trouble" quite well.

But this is all happening here.  Yeah, we're not in those final days of having to record our indoctrination courses in schools.  But there are things we cannot say out loud.  Heck, I got into a lot of trouble this week where I almost got fired for speaking out for what was actually happening in this country that aligned with Church teaching.  I don't regret what I did.  Heck, I guarantee if push-came-to-shove, I'd do it again.  But that's the attitude that Pasha has.  He's a guy who knows that teaching lies to children is wrong.  (I'm really soapboxing with this blog and I apologize.  I just like having a blog that I actually want to write a lot about.  Imagine when I have to go back and finish the Bergman set!  Yeesh!) But that first half-hour was mirroring what is going on here in spades.  It's kind of horrifying.  I think a lot of that comes from the notion that propaganda is comforting.  It's nice to think that your team is always the good guy.  (Please note:  I continually am disappointed with everyone, so I know that I don't have a team.  But I also need to keep examining that attitude so I don't actually get on a team that I don't acknowledge.)  Watching those cars wave Russian flags outside their windows without any encouragment?  That's the stuff that scares me.  I don't want to have that kind of warmongering Nationalism as a form of comfort.  Maybe that's the only way that you can justify a questionable war and still be able to sleep at night.  Knowing that people are going to die is a hard sell, so giving the war a glorious cause is the ultimate sleep aid.

I keep looking for the name of the scumbag history teacher, though.  I need an entire documentary on this guy.  From what was implied, that history teacher was a full-on plant by the Putin government.  He was there with the expressed purpose of misinforming students.  Golly, that teacher of the year award (which seems like something that the Hallmark Channel made up) is painful.  The thing is, it's weird to think that Pasha actually thought that it might have gone to him.  Yes, we are hopefully all brimming with self-awarness and have the benefit of being outside the film.  But that history teacher, as much as that whole thing was manipulated to show that the Putin government is the one that people want, is actually the one that the people want.  It's actually odd to think that, in an interview with Pasha, that he wanted to be the cool teacher.  That guy, even as a teacher completely divorced from his words, was the worst.  Like, he's just a bummer of a dude.  I actually wonder what the history teacher's relationship to Pasha was like.  After all, Pasha did stuff that would get anyone else killed.  He played "America the Beautiful" over the speakers.  He put images of the underground on the windows.  He had a democratic flag in his office.  Why did ol' history teacher agree to be interviewed by him?  And not to be the worst, that guy even looked evil.  Like, you couldn't cast a better secret police guy.  Holy moley.

I don't necessarily love Pasha's relationship with his students.  I know that there's something that is trying to be communicated in the film.  The idea is that Pasha cares for the students under his care more than your average teacher.  He created a safe space for these kids to be themselves in an environment that actively stifled any creativity or free thought.  It was aiming for that Glee relationship.  But guess what?  I also hated the relationship on Glee.  His obsession with his one student kind of sours a lot of the film.  I get that he cares for his kids, but the teacher in me needs to establish boundaries.  

Anyway, the movie is a tank.  I like this guy a lot.  I teach John Lewis's March in my classroom and I make my students understand that the term "Good Trouble" is so vital for active citizens.  Pasha's tale is the ultimate "good trouble" story for Russia.  I wish that he didn't have to leave his home, but I hope that he's out there making more trouble.

Rated R because this is about a real murder.  While there isn't any gore in the film (that I remember), the entire thing is pretty brutal. This is a movie that addresses racial tensions, coupled with the tensions that come from class differences.  There is a solid amount of language and the movie is meant to make you mad.  Still, if you are worried about seeing visual things, that part is the only thing that is pretty tame.  But if you have any degree of imagination, maybe go in with caution.  

DIRECTOR: Geeta Gandbhir

Oh man, these things are getting harder to write.  Again, if I can knock this one out by the end of the day, I can get caught up to where I'm supposed to be.  (Assuming I didn't forget to write about one somewhere along the way.)   This one is a weird one because it absolutely does not feel like an Academy Award nominee.  Not to say it is bad, by any means.  But this feels like your standard Netflix True Crime doc as opposed to anything beyond what is obvious.  The thing is, there is something incredibly important about watching The Perfect Neighbor.  It's almost like this is one of those situations where someone is taking their medication because it's baked into the pie.

Because I don't really know how I want to approach this yet, I want to say the obvious thing.  As much as this is an interesting true crime story about how Susan Lorincz killed Ajike Owens, this is fundamentally about racial justification for murder coupled with the dangerous precedent about the Stand Your Ground laws in Florida.  But I had a conversation with a student who saw this movie as well and the Stand Your Ground thing didn't even really come into play.  Honestly, as a true crime doc, it works better than a movie with a message.  That's no good for me.  I want it the other way around.  I want this to be a story about the Stand Your Ground laws that happens to be interesting to watch.  The Stand Your Ground thing is definitely an afterthought.  That conversation doesn't really show up until the last half-hour.  And while it is important to how things play out for Susan Lorincz, it reads as an afterthought to the whole story.

There's also an unintended consequence for how the film is presented.  This is a story about Ajike Owens, a mother of four, who was standing up for her kids after Lorincz harassed them for years.  But Ajike Owens is almost the "surprise" of the movie, and that seems wildly inappropriate.  Her death was a massive tragedy.  It brought a community out to memorialize her.  Like, that was so much more important.  Okay, I'm dancing back and forth over this.  Here's me, trying to learn as much as I can about communities and how that they have suffered.  But I couldn't point out Ajike Owens's name out as it stared me right in the face.  Heck, I knew that this story ended in a murder.  I even kind of guessed that it was Owens who would be killed by Lorincz.  But my brain never put two-and-two together that this was national news.  No, in my mind, this was a small story that never made the circuit.  And would I have been invested in this story had it not been marketed as a true crime documentary?  Probably not.  There's so much misery out there and some of it is going to fall through the cracks.

Before I get too overwhelmed by side thoughts, I do really like how this documentary is formatted.  Ultimately, this is almost a found-footage doc compiled mostly of police body cams.  One of the key conceits in the film is that Susan Lorincz is a miserable human being.  I do suspect that there's mental health issues, but I also don't want to diminish how terrible of a person she actually is.  She's the kind of person who has swallowed this narrative that her rights are way more important than anyone else's rights.  She, on a dime, will call the police on children who aren't doing anything illegal.  By having the story told by the body cams, we're reminded how much she's abusing that 9-1-1 call by having these officers come out monthly to complain about kids playing football on a neighbor's yard.  I'm trying to at least relate to Lorincz (even though I really don't and don't really want to).  Do I find neighbors' behavior annoying?  Honestly, not really.  I had an annoying neighbor once.  But I always think that the squeaky wheel neighbor is always way more toxic than a live-and-let-live neighbor.  The one phrase that is repeated all the way through the piece is "They're just kids."  Yeah, they are just kids.  I don't even like football, but I'm glad that these kids are playing football rather than sitting inside watching TV...like my kids tend to do.

The messed up part of me wants to know everything that there is about Susan Lorincz.  I think we're all reading mental illness.  But the fact that I want to make that deep dive into what would make Susan Lorincz the way she is might be completely inappropriate.  Lorincz is the product of disappointment in the American Dream.  She has been told her entire life that she could be anything that she wants.  She was told by people in government that her right to bear arms was to protect her from all of the minorities out there and she created these fantasies in her head about defending herself from the savages outside her door.  There's a scene that almost makes the movie really worth watching.  When the film doesn't use bodycam footage, it uses CCTV footage to fill in those gaps.  At one point, towards the end of the story, Susan Lorincz is being interrogated for a second time.  In that narrative, she constructs this detailed breakdown of all the events that led her to shoot Ajike Owens.  There's a phone call to 9-1-1 and, according to Lorincz, Ajike Owens started breaking down the door.   In reality, we know this to be untrue because there's only two minutes between the phone call that Lorincz is worried about what might happen and the killing of Ajike Owens.  She was waiting to shoot her.  She wanted to shoot her.  She wanted to show that she wasn't someone who was pushed around and that all came from the narrative that she heard that poor people and Black people wanted to kill her.

And the really crazy thing is that I really believe that Lorincz probably believed the yarn that she was spinning. In every scene you see her, there's this victim mentality.  There's no moustache twirling.  It's just this lady who doesn't understand why she is the one in police captivity.  There's a damning moment at the end of that second interview.  She is given an opportunity to write a letter to the kids of Ajike Owens.  Instead, Lorincz doubles down and insists that their mother was trying to kill her, just so the police read that note.  But the piece de resistance is that she just refused to go with the police to the holding cell.  If there was a greater commentary on how a certain class is privileged, it's in that moment where an older White lady, after being arrested, refused to move for police officers and the officers had to beg her to go is a telling tale of the separate police states we have.

As a message about Stand Your Ground, it's definitely there.  I don't think that it hits as hard as it could, especially considering that Lorincz is found guilty of manslaughter.  But as a memorial for Ajike Owens, it at least is a good start.

Rated R for a lot of cursing.  Not a lot a lot.  But, like, it seemed like they knew that they were going to get an R-rating, so they just threw the cursing in there.  Like, there are people on fire, but it's all kind of tame in terms of graphic violence.  It's intense because you are worried about a school bus full of kids dying in a horrible fire.  But it seems like it got the R-rating because of the language.  It's also weird that the two of them swear in front of the kids.  (Okay, I know it's a life-or-death situation.  Still.) 

DIRECTOR: Paul Greengrass

One of my least favorite feelings is being behind on the blog.  It is such an unnecessary thing in my life and it slows me from watching other movies.  But I've also been so exhausted when I get home that I haven't been watching movies anyway.  So now that I think that I'm through the woods (pun not intended), I can get caught up on...let's check...oh.  The Lost Bus.

So my wife and I try watching all the Academy Award nominees before the actual Academy Awards.  It's something we both love to do.  But I also know that there aren't enough hours in the day for us to sit down and watch every movie on that list.  I already established that I am a very sleepy puppy.  So I watch the categories that she's a little less excited about.  These tend to be "Best Original Song," "Documentary Feature", and "Visual Effects."  The Visual Effects category is the one that she least minds me watching.  Some of these movies tend to be rough.  I don't think that The Lost Bus is rough.  I do say that I wouldn't be watching The Lost Bus if it wasn't for the Oscars though.

It's funny.  The Lost Bus and Deepwater Horizon feel like the same film to me.  Both of these movies I watched for the Academy Awards and the Academy Awards alone.  They are both survival movies based on real recent events with a slightly environmental tone (that seems almost to absolve issues with environmentalism).  But there is one thing that absolutely drives me bananas.  These are both stories about how "common sense wins out against intellectualism."  Don't get me wrong.  We're supposed to care about Mary in this story.  But Mary, as a dynamic character, changes way more than Kevin does.  If anything, this is a story about how Kevin is the only perfect character in the story.  

Yes, we're supposed to have sympathy for Kevin.  I'll even go as far as to say that's a solid message.  I like the notion that the working poor have so much more to deal with than employment. It's a lovely message.  But I don't like the fact that it's an either / or situation.  I know.  The movie implies that Kevin's respect for Mary grows as she steps up to more and more dangerous situations.  But the story, intentional or no, has the message that only certain people live in the real world.  Kevin is the product of "the real world."  He has kids who get sick.  He has an ex-wife who is unsympathetic to his father's death.  He's the one who has to mourn a father that he never cared for.  He did the right thing to take care of Shaun.  But having a protagonist where nothing is really his fault and everyone else kind of sucks, it undoes Die Hard.  

John McClane has ultimately becoming the template / archetype for this type of movie.  He's the guy who is down on his luck and has such a specific skill for keeping his head during a crisis.  While John is good at taking down terrorists, Kevin is good at: Bus.  He's good at bus.  But John McClane has real flaws that brought him to this place in his life.  He's hot-headed.  He is emotionally illiterate.  When he's trying to get Holly back (and ultimately loses her in the sequels), it's because of his own stubbornness.  Kevin --who I have to remind everyone is based on a real dude --has none of those faults.  It really does seem like his wife was being irrational.  It did seem like Shaun blames his dad for all of his teenage problems.  The worst thing that Kevin does is misdiagnose Shaun's stomach flu, which is part of parenting.  (Also, does Linda leave Kevin's very fragile mom at a rescue shelter as she drove Shaun away?) I think you need to have something for the protagonist to overcome.  It's a bummer that this movie keeps hitting the same beat over and over.

The funny thing is, that this is a movie with something to say.  Yes, it's a little bit of that "Our government is the real hero" mentality, but in a fairly good way (because I like firefighters?).  However, there is this final message at the end of the film given as text explaining the real story.  The movie ends with this text where we find out that a lot of the problems that happened were because of Pacific Power, which is an anti-corporate message.  But the thing is...the movie doesn't hit it that hard.  I feel bad for the actor who had to play the Pacific Power rep because that had to be the most thankless roll.   They hired a guy, made him look smarmy, and had him continually apologize for the power not being off when it was supposed to be off.  It's this thing that seems like it could be pretty important.  But instead, it's an afterthought.  Like, we needed a bad guy for this movie, so we have this Donald Gennaro type from Jurassic Park.  Maybe the frustration I have in this movie is that everything is just a bit too simple.  Kevin is a bit too noble.  Mary is a bit too naive.  The heroes are so heroic and the bad guy is only a bad guy.  It's kind of one of those things that roots for common sense as the only attitude to advance.

It's such a basic movie that there's almost nothing to talk about.  Now, I associate Paul Greengrass with the Bourne movies.  These movies are amazingly shot.  And, to be fair, The Lost Bus is pretty well shot.  It's a tricky concept, having the location being one giant blaze while the characters stay on the bus.  But the thing that I don't think that my brain would let go of is the idea that the Bourne movies are almost too complex while The Lost Bus is almost too simple of a film.  Like, it feels like there are beats in the movie that are thrown in there simply to give the film any kind of complexity.  There's this thing about Mary.  I don't know if this is true about the real Mary or not.  I don't think it really matters because I have to believe that this film took its fair share of liberties.  But Mary had never left her home town.  The big regret for her character isn't getting back to her family.  It's the idea that she's embraced her small life to zealously.  But I can tell you, I never really cared about that beat.  I know that Greengrass wants me to give something for Mary.  But I found Mary to be a one note character that never really felt human.  

As a visual effects thing, which is what the film is nominated for, it's pretty good.  And if you really shut your brain off and have a good time with it, it's pretty easy to do.  But in terms of any kind of meat to this story, it's a little bit of that backdoor patriotism that is fine, but not fulfilling.  I don't think that there's a challenging idea in this entire film.

Rated R for being an honest look at facing one's mortality.  Life is simultaneously beautiful, funny, bright, joyful and gross, vulgar, and painful.  There's nudity, but it's not in a sexual content.  There is some crude speech about sexual acts, but no on-screen sexual acts.  This is the story about a woman facing those final moments and these moments are not edited for the sake of an audience's comfort.  It does need to be R-rated because the world is R-rated, especially when fighting something that is killing you.

DIRECTOR:  Ryan White

I want to stress that, if I misgender Andrea Gibson, it is an accident.  I struggle when I'm writing quickly.  On top of that, my head is not in the right space.  I have been making so many basic mistakes over the course of this weekend because I have the world on my shoulders right now.  I've done even the simplest of tasks wrong.  Please understand, for Gibson's sake, that I embrace their pronoun.  But I also am giving myself the grace to understand that I have to understand when something is done out of malice and something is done out of best intentions.

My dad died of cancer.  I've probably mentioned it a time or two, but it hasn't always been the center of attention. To be the guy who is openly responding to a story about cancer with "Cancer is bad" seems like a pretty low bar to be meeting.  Come See Me in the Good Light is my least favorite thing about cancer.  It's the weird sense of hope and the notion that you can do something to change things.  The movie starts off with Andrea saying that they want the movie to start with their funeral as their words play over the film.  I thought, "That's a really good idea.  But does this mean that Andrea survives cancer?"  I mean, if the film didn't have that footage, wouldn't have made sense to respect their wishes?  

But as much as this is a story about mortality, this is a story about hope.  Okay, it's a story about all of those elements that goes into a cancer diagnosis.  When we see cancer in fictional films, we see the Hollywood version.  We see the person walking around on a ventilator, hacking up a lung and coughing blood into a toilet bowl.  They're more crochety and offer sage wisdom at the most important part of the film.  Cancer isn't that.  Cancer, for as life-changing as the diagnosis is, is about knowing what parts of life are disappearing every day and finding ways to discover normality.   (Note:  I stopped writing here and there was a long gap between the first part that I wrote and this section.  If there is a disconnect, I apologize.)  Maybe that is part of the human experience too.  Let's separate ourselves from literal cancer for right now.  We're all destined to encounter tragedy.  I don't know if this shocks anyone, but there will be good times and there will be bad times.  What Come See Me in the Good Light understands that there's this need for anything normal.  Even when the abnormal keeps going on, it's an attempt to quarantine that weirdness.

One thing that hit hard is the notion of living in three week increments.  For Andrea and Megan, these three weeks are the time periods between tests to see how much the cancer has progressed within Andrea.  For the sake of storytelling, one of these three week stints is waiting to get permission for Andrea to do one final spoken word performance.  For me, that was exciting to see Tig Notaro, whom we might have tickets to see fairly soon.  Andrea's story of having to do their last performance kind of hit me the hardest throughout the piece.  There's so much out there that I really want to do and I don't know if I'm going to Willy Loman my life away waiting for retirement, only to curl up and pass away before I get the artistic satisfaction that I have been craving.  I suppose the transcendentalist in me wants to go off in the woods now and write that Great American Novel before the world gets too far away.  Still, Andrea positioned themselves into a place where there is simultaneously an abundance of time and no time whatsoever.  

I think I would go crazy if I had Andrea's specific breakdown.  I don't deny that this is a celebration of a relationship and of a life.  Andrea doesn't seem, by any means, paralyzed by the reality of their situation.  That cross weighs over them, but it seems like the Andrea we get in this documentary is the Andrea that was probably the Andrea before the cancer and after the cancer.  But I also know that, when things go bad in my life, I know that I have a litany of responsibilities that I can't afford to indulge in.  That has to be maddening, knowing that final moments are determined by a number at the end.  And when that number was a "10" (which, by context clues, was a very good thing), I wondered if that was either a misread or something else.  The cynic in me said, "That test wasn't done correctly for it to swing so strongly in one direction than the other."  But it also might be part of that unknowable element of medicine.  I mean, I'm a pretty strict follower of Western medicine.  But I can't help but hope that Andrea wanted to do this show so badly that they biologically held the cancer back for enough time to do this performance.

Here's where I feel like a real punk.  Honestly, this entire time I've felt like a  punk writing this.  Come See Me in the Good Light is Andrea and Megan's cancer journey.  It's not mine.  I don't have cancer.  My father died of cancer, so I'm projecting all of my own trauma onto this movie (which is slightly permitted, to a certain extent.)  But the bigger thing that I have to do is that I have to criticize this as a movie.  And, as a movie, I didn't want to let go of the sympathy that I had for Andrea and Meg.  But at a certain point, my mind started to wander.  Yes, I absolutely felt for them.  Once again, this was a story about life as much as it was about death.  I needed to see how Andrea viewed themselves as a teen.  I needed to see what Meg saw in Andrea.  And all of that stuff was very moving.  But there were moments in the movie --and maybe this is completely unfair --where it felt like the movie was padding to be the length of a movie.  Yes, I did learn something about why some LGBTQIA+ people stay friends with their exes.  I liked that a lot.  But I also kept being distracted by people who seemed on the periphery of Andrea's story.  

Do you know what wasn't really communicated much to me?  As much as this is about Andrea and their art, I never really dealt with the scale of someone being a poet laureate.  There was one moment where it really hit me.  Andrea's final performance was sold out on the marquee.  I thought, "Man, it's hard to fill a theater with a poet."  Because as much as this is about Andrea's poetry, Andrea seems almost too normal to be a poet laureate.  Okay, there's definitely things in there that I only saw in my artsy-fartsy literature circles.  But from any stretch of the imagination, Andrea's story is almost one of how normal they are compared to what we associate with this prestigious title.  One of the things that Andrea clings to, especially when it comes to writing, is the idea that they don't know a lot of words.  I mean, I get frustrated by that entire concept.  But realistically, I kind of applaud the fact that the key element of any kind of communication is clarity.  It's not like their poetry is necessarily easy to process.  It's just not raising its nose to its audience. At that to the entire piece of Andrea being a small town basketball player who found an outlet in spoken word and all of the choices that we see lead to a consistent image of Andrea as someone who just wants to talk.  

Is this movie going to change me?  I'm such a jerk, but I don't think it will.  I think we've talked a little bit about how much I feel the pain of cancer.  But, as effective as this is as a tribute to a beautiful human being, it almost acts as a better tribute to their families and friends than it does to a general audience.  What it does for me is give me awareness of an artist I was unfamiliar with.  But this thing acts as something sacred to those who knew Andrea.  This work should exist, but I don't know as an all-audiences thing.  The people who love this would treasure this forever.  Regardless, it gives us a photo of someone who moved mountains in their own way.