It's that time again!  I thought I was going to get a little break from blogging for a while.  Then they released the nominations.  Please head on over to the Academy Awards Page to find links to the nomination entries!

R for being pretty much all around offensive.  There's just an abundance of vulgar language, which probably shouldn't be the sticking point in my head right now.  Really, I should be talking about just the violence and the criminal activity throughout.  But this movie also screams the incorrectness of 2000, with cultural insensitivities, homophobic jokes, animal cruelty, and other taboos that we thought were oh-so-hilarious back-in-the-day.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Guy Richie

This is going to be a blog that contains an unpopular opinion.  I think the demographic who absolutely loves this movie isn't going to take the fact that I don't really care for it quite poorly.  See, Snatch is one of those movies that people are obsessed with.  I never got into it.  I remember always thinking that it didn't look that great, so I never sat down and watched it.  If you want to take it a step further, this movie probably aged pretty poorly, all things considered.  Between the fact that this movie wasn't exactly made for me coupled with the fact that I'm watching it in 2021 for the first time, I'm going to say that this is exactly the movie I thought it would be and that I'm fairly disappointed.

It sounds like I'm riding a pretty hard confirmation bias right now.  I thought that the movie was going to suck, so thus it did.  Besides the fact that Snatch has always been part of our cinematic cultural lexicon, it was on my Must-See-Movies List scratch-off poster.  That poster is almost entirely scratched off, so I felt like it was my due diligence to finally watch the movie.  But I have been known to go into a movie with a bad attitude and come out to enjoy it.  I mean, while I'm not the biggest fan, I actually enjoy The Fast and the Furious movies now.  But I can't deny that, as I write this, that I'm fighting a pretty intense hipster vibe to be too good for a movie that I mentally consider to be basic.  Part of it can be attributed to the fact that this is a bro-movie.  It's in the same category as something like The Boondock Saints, where it just kind of reads as extreme and gross.  

I really got over Guy Richie with his Sherlock Holmes movies.  I know that he did the live action version of Aladdin and that was actually pretty fun.  It's just that he screams all style over substance.  Sure, Snatch offers a moderately okay story.  It seems more complicated than it it is, but that I really don't have a problem with.  Richie actually kind of succeeds in making a storyline that kind of all ties into all the disparate elements of the film. However, I knew pretty early on when he decided to make title cards for all of the characters that Richie was hiding behind an attempt to be cool instead of just being a storyteller.  He did the same thing in Sherlock Holmes, having Robert Downey, Jr. plan out his fight sequences.  It's all this hiding and not enough being in the moment.  Is this to say that stylized directing is bad?  Not at all.  It's just that Richie puts every bad impulse of the late-'90s / early-2000s into one film.  The cuts are quick.  People swear a lot.  It thrives on its irreverence.  While I care about the characters, none of them feel all that human.  It's that rock star attitude that really turns me off for a lot of the movie.

And, as part of that, there are scenes that just seem like they would be fun to make, but don't actually contribute to the story as a whole.  One of the most memorable parts of the movie is the dog eating a squeaky toy whole.  Cool.  I find that funny too.  But the squeak doesn't really tie into the overall plot.  It is alluded to time and again and the only thing that it really offers is the knowledge that the dog will eat anything, including a diamond.  There are easier ways to get to that result.  Maybe if the squeak offered something more than a joke, I could get behind that.  The entire getting-dressed-as-Orthodox-Jews and talking about the vulgarities of Catholicism thing doesn't really hold water. We have all these character quirks and none of them are tied to the characters' motivations.  Take, for example, Franky Four Fingers.  Franky Four Fingers has a bizarre dialect.  He is obsessed with gambling and has gotten in trouble for botching jobs because of his gambling obsession.  He also is really into costuming, filling his vans with disguises that he could use for future jobs.  But does gambling actually get him in trouble?  Nope.  Do these disguises lead to his undoing?  Nope.  Richie sets up all these foibles, but none of them actually mean anything.  He's taken out before the story even really begins by a trio of bumbling thieves.  

So all of the discussions and world building stuff really is there for coolness's sake, not for actually having meaningful interaction.  This kind of causes the protagonist, Turkish, to have little actual investment in his own storyline.  Things kind of just happen to Turkish, but Turkish has little choice over how things are going to go.  He fails at the bet, which he kind of believed he was going to do.  But the rest is him just walking around confidently and being clever at people.  This cleverness actually solves any of his problems. It's just him saying funny things a lot without directly affecting his sphere of influence.  

Honestly, my favorite part of the movie was Bullet-Tooth Tony.  Yeah, his origin story didn't really help his plot that much, but I like the complexity given to his random hitman coupled with Cousin Avi.  They have this fun juxtaposition and I kind of wish the movie was about these guys.  I find Vinny, Sol, and Tyrone against Tony and Avi a far more compelling story than Turkish, who almost seems removed from the story.  Why couldn't the movie be about Vinny, Sol, and Tyrone?  These characters are hapless characters in a world full of clever one liners.  They are potentially the only sympathetic characters in the movie who actually make a bit of sense. They aren't awesome at everything.  They are the only characters who are actually fallible throughout the film and that makes them the most interesting characters to watch.  But instead, we end up leapfrogging from character to character, trying to remember who is related to whom and what individual character arcs actually are.

Is it weird that Brad Pitt's Mickey is front-and-center on every poster?  Like, I like Mickey as a character and I like that he comes across as pretty human, considering he's a tank.  But there's this meta element to the movie that says he's clearly Brad Pitt playing a stereotype.  It's really awkward.  I'm trying to read up on the word "Pikey" because of this movie and it seems like it is pretty offensive to be making fun of this group of people, as proven by the Top Gear folk.  But the only reason that we really have any investment in Mickey is because Brad Pitt is a famous American superstar in a movie full of Brits.  It reads more like a novelty than a serious character choice.  Yeah, it's fun.  But like much of this movie, it feels more fun than risky.  

It's just that this movie didn't have a lot of substance to me.  While I was watching it, I questioned why I always dug Ocean's Eleven, another heist movie (starring Brad Pitt) that oozed style, over Snatch.  And a lot of that came from the fact that Ocean's Eleven feels effortless.  It never really feels like Ocean's Eleven is compensating for the problems of its own script.  And I don't think Guy Richie needed to worry about plot issues.  All it really needs was a simplification of the story to make it work a bit more.

Rated R for lots of violence, including blood and stabbing.  But the big thing that seems to aim for an R rating comes from the completely unnecessary nudity that is in the first ten minutes of the movie.  The protagonist accidentally visits a prostitute and that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie.  It's done as a joke, but it involves full body nudity.   Also, the movie is very 1970s homophobic. That stereotype is gross. R.

DIRECTOR: Bruce Lee

Do you understand how close I was to getting a break from blogging?  I had finished my round of movies and was starting my TV watching...and then they announced the Academy Awards.  So no break for me for a long time.  But as part of that, I find myself writing about The Way of the Dragon when I should be writing about the Best Pictures.  Seriously, I now have Sound of Metal on my To-Do list and I have to write about The Way of the Dragon.

This is a huge step back.  I enjoyed The Big Boss, for all of its cornballery.  I enjoyed Fist of Fury.  It wasn't a perfect movie, but it was an improvement over the first film in the box set.  But The Way of the Dragon really highlights the weaknesses of Bruce Lee's work.  He kind of keeps making the same movie over and over again.  With the case of Fist of Fury, there is an attempt, albeit slightly cheaply, to do something larger than the format.  But The Way of the Dragon kind of finds safety in exploitation films and it just rings as blah.  The Way of the Dragon is the same film: a group of gangsters is harassing the locals.  The locals wish that they could fight back, so this awkward guy who knows Chinese boxing comes to town and beats everyone up.  The bad guys get the leg up and Bruce Lee has to save everyone.  With the case of The Way of the Dragon, there's even less story than normal.  It actually has to repeat beats simply to fill in the length of a film.

So the movie is formatted in the case of: gangsters attack Chinese restaurant.  Bruce Lee beats those guys up.  They come back and try again.  But this keeps happening over and over again.  Like, so many times.  Lee confronts the big boss, says that if it happens again, he's coming after him, and then the guy comes after him again.  That threat becomes more and more empty until the final act.  Why doesn't Tang Lung just beat up the boss?  It's not like Tang Lung has a moral code.  With The Big Boss, there was this arbitrary code of honor that the protagonist had to enforce.  But the criminals keep on escalating the situation and the movie really stresses that Tang Lung gives these guys ultimatums.  He is constantly beating guys up.  Why does the big boss get a pass in this one?

I really have a problem with the twist.  Maybe it was because I didn't see it coming and it was what the movie needed.  But the twist doesn't make a lick of sense.  Uncle Wang murders his entire staff of guys who are looking out for Uncle Wang.  They are trying to force Uncle Wang out of a restaurant that he doesn't want to sell.  So when Tang Lung disappears to go fight Chuck Norris, Uncle Wang (I mean, his name forshadows everything!) just stabs them all.  What?  I mean, I was waiting for an explanation for why he does this change of character in the final act.  But apparently, Uncle Wang wanted to payoff all along.  He wanted to live high on the hog in Hong Kong instead of struggling in Italy (Why is the movie in Italy?).  There's a million ways to handle this moment without Uncle Wang becoming a straight up bad guy.  I mean, why didn't he just take the money when it was first offered to him?  Why did they call Tang Lung's uncle to get help from him to begin with?  Also, you are totally allowed to sell your restaurant anytime you want.  There's literally no law against that.  Like, this jaw dropping moment totally helps the film if there is even a modicum of sense behind it.  What if the Boss threatened to kill Chen?  That would make sense.  Sure, it would make the character more sympathetic and Bruce Lee wanted to have Uncle Wang get his comeuppance.  But it succccckkkkkssss...

Finally, I'm going to do my favorite thing and take the unnecessary moral high ground.  I think back to Diamonds are Forever with Mr. Winn and Mr. Kidd.   There is a history to demonizing the homosexual character and The Way of the Dragon is remarkably shameless about this.  Yeah, I get it.  1972. It was a different time.  But there's nothing funny about Ho (yeah, I'm reading it too.) I don't think I can remember a more unlikable character.  Golly, the movie is very uncomfortable with masculinity that it has to make this joke all the way through the movie.  It's very one note and just makes this movie go from dumb to gross.  

Maybe I just had expectations that Criterion would include the best of the best in this box set.  I'm sure that there are people who swear by this movie, perhaps only because Bruce Lee fights Chuck Norris.  But it is a really bad movie that I found myself yawning throughout.  I wanted to like it, especially considering that the next movie is the excellent Enter the Dragon.  But this feels like such a cheap movie and it is going to be this definite shift to get to a level of quality that is expected from Criterion.

Rated R for excessive language and blood.  It also probably reinforces some pretty gross gender stereotypes as well.  But mostly, this is a movie about gun violence all throughout with heavy doses of red blood on white outfits.  Also, John Woo thinks that desecrating sacred imagery is automatically artsy versus me, who says that it is low hanging fruit that is borderline offensive.  R.

DIRECTOR:  John Woo

I went off on this whole thing with Hard Boiled that stated that The Killer wasn't that good either.  While I'm not going to be really loving on The Killer either, I might have to backpedal a bit.  I was ready to hate-watch this movie and a lot of it is pretty hatewatchable.  But I can also see that John Woo is trying, at least, to include artistry in his gun shooty-shooty movie.  I mean, why else would I watch this, unless it was to brag that I finally got a non-bootleg copy of the Criterion for this one.  (I know!)  

Before I decide to deep dive, I do want to point out how much I would hate being Lee Ying from a metacontextual perspective.   It's not exactly new that movies feature antiheroes. Heck, it's actually an entire subgenre that I tend to gravitate towards.  It's the reason that I like Breaking Bad.  But imagine that you are a cop who spent a lot of his time giving up his life.  You've watched the death of good cops at he hands of monsters and no one in your department is supporting you.  So you put in all these extra hours and put your life on the line only to find out that everyone relates to Ah Jong, the mercenary who seems like an overall nice guy?  That's really about it.  I mean, Lee falls for it as well. The movie waxes poetic about the nature of friendship time-and-again, but really it just comes down to the fact that the titular killer is a handsome and charismatic dude who doesn't let little kids die.  

There's something there to explore, but I don't necessarily know if John Woo has sold the tale of the inverted expectations like something like Les Miserables has done.  The movie really fights to make this unlikely friendship happen and I'm not really sure why it does.  We get the idea that Ah Jong is not a monster, at least not on the level as other monsters are.  He is compassionate when it comes to revenge because he doesn't outright murder his friend who tries having him killed.  He feels bad about blinding this poor girl who was just a singer in a club.  He carries a bloodied little girl to the hospital after she took a bullet intended for him. These, on the surface, are all noble acts.  But the thing is, none of these moments really make him a good guy, so much as not-as-bad-as-other-characters.  Refusing to kill Fung-Sei isn't necessarily a noble act.  It is the absence of an evil act.  Also, Fung-Sei's survival almost feels like it is in there to progress the plot.  Fung-Sei is there to get John his money and that needs to happen to keep the characters in the story.

And I really do feel gross about the whole Jennie plot.  John hangs out with Jennie out of guilt.  She wasn't part of this whole world and then she loses her sight?  It seems like this is a noble trait, but he gaslights her the entire movie.  He lies about the fact that he's the guy who took her sight.  He then continually lies to her about the danger she is in.  It's like he has the gross version of the good-guy syndrome.  Jennie is infantilized for the entire film by John, who really is only looking out for himself and his conscience.  This all leads to Jennie almost murdering a cop?  Like, he completely grooms her from hating him to loving him, so much so that she pulls the trigger on a cop. The only reason that she isn't completely an emotional wreck is that she missed him due to his blindness.  But even in that moment, she feels this deep regret.  It's bad enough that he blinded her, but he turns her into a killer (which is the title of the movie!).  Yet, Woo keeps selling this relationship as romantic.  We see that John jumps through hoops for this girl, but all of her problems have been caused by him.  It's really gross.

I don't really get the friendship of John and Lee.   A lot of what is coming out of this movie is John Woo's obsession with the West's attitude towards action movies.  Taking liberal cues from Lethal Weapon, Woo tries playing up the mismatching of two very strong personalities.  By giving them nicknames like Butthead and Numb-nuts, it really kind of feels forced.  I kept wanting to believe that this rivalry would turn out to be an awesome team, but it never really makes sense from the police inspector's perspective.  John doesn't really have to make the change from his comfort zone.  He enters the film ready to leave the assassin business.  So all of the character stuff comes from Lee's perspective.  It's all very tell-not-show.  I have all these questions about character motivations, but the movie keeps telling me to shut that up and just live with the notion that these two will be shooting bad guys side by side.  

Do you know one part of the movie that really bugged me?  At one point, John makes the vow to never kill again.  After all, if he wants to be with Jennie, he needs to change his ways, right?  Apparently, the no killing rule only applies to major characters in the story.  In no way does John slow down on the oodles of bad guys who die in this movie.  Like, it doesn't even slow them down.  They all decided to wear white and show up to be cannon fodder spackled in blood.  The movie really wants to be this redemption tale for the killer who has seen too much and wanted to get out, but it just keeps killing more and more dudes because John Woo almost seems like a child.

As much as I think that this was a better effort than Hard Boiled, John Woo seems really immature in this movie.  This is what a high schooler thinks vulnerability looks like.  So much of it is based on "cool."  Maybe I'm just getting old.  I feel old when I watch movies like The Killer.  Honestly, I'm about to write about Snatch.  It just feels like there isn't a chance at a real moment because everything feels so stylized.  For example, the movie takes place in an abandoned church.  Part of me is aware that this is a cliche because John Woo made it a cliche. But instead of letting me experiencing the turmoil that John actually experiences, there's a cool shootout in a church that's lit exclusively by candle.  Heck, something even happens to the church between the first scene of the movie and the end gun-battle.  It's just that it often feels like a student film.  I can't say that this feeling is absolute.  There are honest moments where I feel that there's something really quality in there.  It's just that it often feels belabored by the fact that so much of it seems motivated by being cool as opposed to being honest.

I know I really tore into this one.  I didn't hate it as much as I made it sound like.  It's just that I know that if you took away the gun violence, which feels icky to me in some ways, there isn't much actual substance.  Yes, the story is actually a story and a story worth watching.  But so much of it is hidden behind action and '80s tropes.  I don't regret owning this movie, but it is far from being one of the masterpieces that people claim that it is.

PG, despite what James Bond movies entail.  This is the one that set the mold and added a whopping dose of racism to bat.  While I'm kind of dismounting from the intensity of the Daniel Craig Bond movies, Dr. No has Sean Connery seducing women, killing people without remorse, gambling, smoking, and causing ecological disasters.  And there also is the very uncomfortable line about Honey Ryder describing her rape which ends in a very uncomfortable joke.  While tame for 2021, it still has stuff.  PG.

DIRECTOR: Terence Young

Yeah, I finished the box set.  What about it?  I'm ready to sit down and watch No Time to Die, whenever that movie eventually exists.  But am I really?  See, I started watching the James Bond box set when it came out...for the 50th anniversary in 2012.  I took a long break in there because I wanted to watch them all in my garage movie theater.  But then I realized that people I know aren't exactly up for binging Bond movies like I am, so my Blu-rays sat on a shelf.  But that also means that I hadn't watched those initial Connery movies in almost a decade.  (Time flies when you are an adult.)   So that also means that this blog only has Diamonds are Forever with a blog entry for it.

I have a confession that I'm kind of making to myself right now.  I keep saying that I like Dr. No more than I really do.  A lot of me excuses things because it was the first James Bond movie and I loved James Bond so much.  It also is a Connery Bond, so saying anything against this sacred era of James Bond seems like a bit of sacrilege.  But I'm going to be out with it: Dr. No is not a great Bond movie.  Yes, it set up a lot of the tropes and formula that I would revere for film-after-film.  But Dr. No itself...is only okay at best.  The color scheme and the Blu-ray transfer are very appealing and bring me joy.  But in terms of story structure and entertainment value, there really isn't a ton.  I always tend to get bored pretty early.  And part of that comes from the very muddy script happening here.  

And part of me has to jump back in time to 1962.  Before James Bond was a cinematic icon, he was literary controversy.  It's so funny to think that the James Bond novels were the 1960s equivalent to Fifty Shades of Grey.  It makes sense.  Both Bond and Christian Grey are sadists (I think that was his name.  Not trying to sound too defensive, but this book series never even had a blip on my radar).  Bond was violent and sexual, which --at its base --is the basic problem that people have with Christian Grey.  But, Tim, isn't Fifty Shades of Grey borderline pornographic?  That's the same accusation that was thrown at Fleming's Bond.  I've read all of Fleming's novel.  Thanks to a very generous uncle who kept buying stuff at a used book store, I have multiple printings of each of them.  In the past year, I made it part of my quarantine to eventually read all of them.  If you were wondering what they are like, imagine the 1950s / 1960s versions of Tom Clancy novels with a bit more melodrama weaved in there.  

So Dr. No wasn't necessarily the start of the longest running film franchise in history.  They were a way to make these extremely topical films that were mumbled about in ladies' sewing circles and chortled over at the Knights of Columbus a thing that could be seen on screen.  There was a made-for-TV adaptation of Casino Royale before this, but it was changed to American CIA agent Jimmy Bond and, again, it was TV.  So there are these guys trying to make one book: Doctor No.  And there is a lot of attempts to make this movie commercially viable while pleasing novel fans.  The more Bond movies that are made, the further they stray from the source material.  Dr. No's big issue stems from the attempt to both stay true to the source material and to do something that could be shown in theaters. 

Doctor No wasn't Fleming's first novel.  It's a really weird place to start actually.  It's the sixth in the series.  Now, this is me really deep diving into this (not for radioactive shells).  Fleming is a continuity guy.  His stories really build upon one another.  There's a mythology to his novels.  The movies really try to avoid too much mythology.  Shy of the death of Tracy in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the Daniel Craig entries, the movie shies away from all continuity.  You should be able to jump into the Bond movies in any order.  So when a film franchise starts with the sixth in a series of high continuity books, the filmmakers want to get Bond to the same place that his literary counterpart did, but find other ways to get there.  And in the process, the story is completely muddled.  Part of that is, undeniably, a tonal issue.  Dr. No hadn't really understood the concept of spy-fi, even though it definitely has some over-the-top elements of the spy-fi subgenre.  Instead, it takes elements of film noir, the detective story, the hardboiled crime genre, and the adventure and mashes them all up into one.  

I think that Terence Young, along with Broccoli / Saltzman, thought that they were making a detective story.  Honey Ryder asks what it is like being a detective.  I always read that as a long that Bond plays along with because Honey seems uneducated and he's constantly simplifying things for her.  But Dr. No himself also refers to Bond as "nothing but a stupid detective".  And when I thought about it, Dr. No shares more in common with detective novels than it does the action spy genre.  Connery's Bond is there to investigate the death of an agent named Strangways.  In the course of the story, his leads take him to Crab Key (shouldn't it be Crab Quay?), a radioactive island guarded by a dragon designed tank where the evil Dr. No is planning on throwing off missile guidance systems.  But Dr. No is barely in the movie.  I have a still of him up top because it is the right aspect ratio, but he maybe had an hour of filming total on this movie.  Five minutes of screen time.  

Heck, my summary of Bond's adventure is actually more compelling than the actual film.  Because most of that summary is really about Bond following leads about who killed Strangways coupled with people trying to stop him from getting to the truth.  M has one throwaway line about missiles being diverted through radio signals and that's it.  It was this viewing of the movie where I realized: I don't know why Dr. No is a villain.  I mean, I get that he has a radioactive island where he kills trespassers.  I know that he has an underground lair with fish everywhere.  I know that he has metal hands.  But I didn't actually know why he was a bad guy.  I didn't know what his evil plan actually was.  All I knew is that it involved harnessing radiation because they all wore radiation suits.  Like many undercooked detective stories, there's an intuitive leap that the audience needs to make between the A-storyline and the B-storyline.  Strangways finds radioactive rocks at Crab Key, which Professor Dent denies.  His lie leads Bond to Crab Key, where M's throwaway line gains merit.  (The Bond movies live in a world where the world is very small indeed.  Sure, Strangways was trying to solve the same mystery.)

Also, Dr. No wins # 2 for being the most uncomfortable in terms of showing its age.  The first place, with a bullet (pun intended), is the Blaxspoitation entry Live and Let Die.  But setting the film in Jamaica reflected Fleming's own cultural racism.  He lived in Jamaica.  The Pierce Brosnan entry GoldenEye was named after his estate there.  As such, he has the Black characters, while heroic, steeped in funny alcoholism and ignorant superstition.  Quarrel...isn't great.  He really comes across quite dated and dies this completely ignominious death.  Then there's the way that the movie just wraps itself in Chinese xenophobia.  The Chinese have elements of those propaganda pictures that the Japanese were subjected to during World War II.  They are cold and calculating.  It makes it worse that the named characters are white actors played in Yellowface.  Perhaps there's a bit of wiggle room for No himself to be a white actor considering that the character is half German.  But Miss Taro is straight up in Yellowface.  It's very dated.

I can't believe how deep dive I got into this one, but Dr. No really comes across as a museum piece.  It establishes a lot of the Bond tropes and cements Sean Connery as the default face of James Bond.  The Bond theme is here, admittedly really overused and poorly edited in for many scenes. The gunbarrel is there, despite the goofiest opening credits sequence of the lot.  But it isn't a great movie.  The next entry, for decades, was my favorite.  I am looking forward to writing about that one.  But Dr. No kind of left me bored.

Rated R for being a disturbing horror movie with overtly sexual elements.  Aronofsky is known for disturbing imagery and a lot of that reputation comes from movies like Black Swan.  While there isn't a traditional horror movie villain, the movie is meant to make you fear for the protagonist's life.  There's violence and blood, language, drug use, and really aggressive sexuality on screen.  There is no nudity, but not a lot is left to the imagination.  R.

DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky

The great news?  I got all of my grading for the quarter done early.  The students can leave school today knowing exactly what their grades are, probably before anyone else in the building.  The bad news: I now have to write against the clock to get this out before I have to head home. I also have parking lot duty, which is a double-edged sword.  The good news: I can't go home because I have parking lot duty, so it gives me a little time to write.  The bad news:  I have to be out of the building the second that my parking lot duty starts v. finding a few more minutes to put finishing touches on this blog entry.  Basically, I'm giving a lot of context if this one feels just a smidge off.

I can't believe that All About Eve and Black Swan ended up being an accidental double feature.  I don't plan these things.  I have a system --an algorithm, if you will --for determining which movie I'm going to write about next.  It stops me from just watching things I like a lot.  But then we ended up getting, through kismet, two psychological horror movies about the trauma that comes with art and fame.  These movies are so specific in their content area that it's just beyond serendipitous that it worked out that way.  I remember really resisting the tag "horror movie" for Black Swan when I saw it the first time.  I don't know what it was about it that really rubbed me the wrong way when it came to labeling this movie as a horror film.  I think the topic and the lack of formal antagonist made it seem like it was just a disturbing drama.  But I was also just discovering the work of Darren Aronofsky.  I mean, mother! hadn't come out yet, so I thought that he was much more in the vein of The Fountain than he was trying to outright shock an audience.  

But horror movie it is.  Yeah, I can see you really fighting the notion that All About Eve as a horror movie, unless you consider psychological issues and mental breakdowns to be something that wouldn't necessarily be something of a horror trope.  But Aronofsky absolutely wants to horrify his audience.  There is some really troubling imagery in this movie and it's so odd that I actually have a harder time watching something like Black Swan than something like The Evil Dead. Perhaps it is because he finds trauma in the mundane.  Like, one of the most upsetting moments in the film, despite the fact that it is filled with absolutely abhorrent imagery, is the cuticle scene.  She's picking at her fingers and tears a piece of flesh.  We've all done a smaller version of this on a regular basis.  But because we have that real experience in our heads, that moment comes across as a violation of what a film is supposed to do.  When Jason or Freddy rip someone apart, it is gross.  But we're also supposed to find some form of entertainment.  It's not considered too uncouth to howl with laughter at the creativity of a co-ed getting wrecked.  But when Nina pulls on that piece of skin, I tend to vocally bemoan that moment.

I want to explore the weird irony that makes Black Swan flow into mother!.  I'm thinking about his career starting at Pi.  I know that he has other movies, but that's the starting point for me.  He goes from Pi into Requiem for a Dream and he becomes this director who deals with the visceral.  But then we have two movies in his catalogue that almost distract and deviate from that reputation: The Fountain and The Wrestler.  While The Wrestler has disturbing imagery, it really grounds itself in the drama of this man, free of supernatural influences.  (If I'm off about this, it has been a while since I've sat down and watched this movie.)   But then we kind of have a return to form with Black Swan.  It's not quite as insane as Requiem for a Dream, but it absolutely is an upsetting film.  It almost comes across as a hybrid from his early work to the things he's evolved into.  

But there's this message throughout Black Swan that feels like Aronofsky is talking to himself as a director.  The film is about the creative process and the pain that a creative type must go through to give the perfect performance. It doesn't feel like too far of a jump to think of the director of a movie to the ballerina.  There's a kindred spirit there that is being explored.  But one of the themes of the movie is letting go.  Nina makes a perfect white swan from the beginning of the film.  She's obsessed with perfection and has every movie technically down.  (I know that dancers had a problem with the fact that Natalie Portman isn't a professional dancer and would never be viewed as perfect in any light.  Again, I get it.)   But she's so closed off from her emotions that she can't emote the black swan.  She has the dance moves down, but she seems guarded and removed. If we use this analogy for the film, it kind of holds up.  The first two thirds of the movie are perfectly executed, but guarded.  Aronofsky shows restraint in terms of his directing.  Natalie Portman isn't allowed to leave a certain range of emotional intensity because everything has to be closed off.  

But it is in that final act that people remember the film Black Swan as a whole.  When Aronofsky allows himself to get a little crazy, that's when the movie becomes something beyond the frustration of being a woman, vulnerable and artistic.  I'm not saying that we shouldn't view the story of Nina, a good girl in a bad world.  I actually want to explore that in a bit.  But people aren't really watching for the first two acts.  They want to see the Black Swan in all of her violent fury.  And when Aronofsky takes off the chains for the third act and follows his own advice, it becomes this absolute nightmare of a film in the best way possible.  It's gory and upsetting.  Dance becomes something more than simply a performance.  There is this transcendence that occurs that shames the White Swan's mistake when she is dropped.  Things go crazy and there's nothing holding the direction or the performances back.  

But this is where I have to attach this movie to mother! (I am seriously running out of time now).  I bet it felt good to return to form.  It had to be intoxicating, getting all of that praise for making one of the most insane ballet movies ever, even more aggressive than The Red Shoes.   (Do you know how much I wanted to write a whole section on The Red Shoes in here?)  So Aronofsky comes to mother! with the same formula he brought to his Academy Award winning Black Swan. Only he tries to capture lightning in a bottle twice.  The first two acts are decent dramas. But I'm sure that he probably scolded himself for not even going more crazy in the movie about letting go.  He was going to show us how nuts a movie could get.  And that's when he made the mistake of trying too hard.  He didn't evolve.  If anything, he got caught up in this own reputation and that's where the movie fell apart.  Because unlike Black Swan, I liked the boring part of mother! a lot.  But I loathed when he decided to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the movie.

I do want to talk about the White Swan element of this movie.  I mean, Mila Kunis just looks way more comfortable in her role before Natalie Portman lets loose, right?  But there's this odd misconception that good means weak, right?  As critical as the movie is about sexual abuse and power, as portrayed by the director of the film, it does kind of seem to glorify it.  Nina is apparently so miserable being a good little girl that she has no power.  I get that the Black Swan is meant to be attractive.  That confidence that Nina doesn't have is encapsulated by the Black Swan.  But the movie never even toys with the notion that Nina's power comes from her goodness.  It makes goodness synonymous with repression.  I can see Nina losing her goodness and that being an effective storyline.  But it seems like it is the best thing for her to abandon herself for the sake of the Black Swan.  That part always feels a little undercooked.

I am tempted to explore the idea of duality and what is real and fake in this.  But between running out of time and knowing that Darren Aronofsky's films are meant to be thought about without nitpicking the nuanced canon of the whole thing kind of holds me back.  Yeah, maybe if I wasn't rushing this thing, there might be something fun to explore.  But I also feel like Black Swan isn't about the twist or the "gotcha", but about the emotional experience of a performer losing herself to a role.

Passed.  For as bright as the promotional material is for All About Eve, it gets pretty dark.  Like, we don't get a whole bunch of murder or sex on screen, but it is about emotional manipulation and using sexuality to gain control in situations.  It also has some potentially dubious sexual politics, but that is up to interpretation.  Passed.

DIRECTOR:  Joseph L. Mankiewicz

I seriously need everyone to look at the poster / DVD box art for All About Eve right now.  Years ago, I had watched this movie and fallen in love with it.  But it's been some time and my memory of the movie was replaced mostly with the box art image.  I have seen so many movies that sometimes plotlines elude me.  But when I was ready to enjoy a light movie about women and their men, I was complete overwhelmed when I started remembering what this movie was really about.  I mean, what happened?  Why the old bait-and-switch when it came to promoting this movie?  Was it an attempt to get the bored housewives to give a chance on the women's picture?  I mean, some of the greatest women's pictures were heavy melodramas, so I don't know what the attempt for the genre shift was.

But the good news is that I remembered why I like this movie so darned much.  I love bleak stuff.  I love when a movie really gets into the dark elements of the soul.  But I especially love when a movie explores some uncomfortable material while offering a metanarrative to the whole thing.  It's just this swirl of so many things going right.  We're really in the sweet spot of cinema where I absolutely go weak in the knees.  There's this balance of trying to go into some really heavy stuff while dealing with the strictures of 1950s Hollywood.  I'm all for complete freedom when making a movie.  But sometimes, and just sometimes, the restraints placed on a movie in terms of what could be done while maintaining an atmosphere of artistic integrity makes something special.  

Just to give some context for this, I'm currently watching John Woo's The Killer.  While I'm enjoying it more than Hard Boiled, Woo is completely free to do whatever he wants to achieve the atmosphere that he wants.  Because of this, there's a lot in there that reads a little cornball.  But Mankiewicz, with his enormous talent and focus on nuance, allows All About Eve to be this sinister character piece that embraces the paranoia of microaggressions.  Remember, this movie is in 1950 and it talks exclusively about the double talk that women experience in friendships and comradeship every day. I don't want to go into this whole dynamic of how men and women view different conversations.  As a guy who tends to lean heavily into culturally effeminate likes and behaviors, I don't love when it comes down to "Men do this; women do this" kind of discussions.  But I do see when women in my life read into things that I view as completely innocuous.  

And that's what makes All About Eve horrifying.  Mankiewicz establishes in the background  of his film that Eve might be a parasite. But he doesn't do so by having a bunch of bubbly characters.  He has one objectively nice character in his cast, and she almost acts as an avatar for the audience. She is kind of an outsider in this world of artists.  Not an artist herself, she is friends with this whole cabal because she is married to a writer.  Yes, her place in the story is important and we should care about Karen because her soul is on the line like everyone else's, almost more so.  But Eve is just there.  Anne Baxter presents Eve as this absolutely lovable character that just seems slightly off.  We know that she can't possibly be this injured starling, like she presents at the beginning of the film.  But we want her to be.  Oh my goodness, we want her to be this good person. When she is in the shadow of Bette Davis embracing her real life personality, Eve almost seems to be this guardian angel figure.

Yet, Mankiewicz presents this scathing look at Hollywood through the eyes of Bette Davis's Margo.  Margo is Davis, through and through.  She is the aging starlet.  She still has a career, but it only exists through clawing and backbiting.  Davis's real fears seem to permeate Margo.  It makes Eve so much more sympathetic, that is, until we learn the truth.  We want to live in a world where women like Eve can simply find joy in the kinship of a sorority of art lovers.  But when Eve reveals herself to be a lie, a fiction created to steal Margo's real successes, it casts this pallor over humanity as a whole. The real irony, of course, is that Margo probably got her own start being an Eve.  The film ending with Eve receiving her very own manipulative fan is telling about how women view success.  (Again, I mentioned that the gender politics in this movie might be a little more dubious.)  Instead of an environment of support and raising each other up, it comes down to "I want what you have."  

This even goes into an area where it becomes personal.  There's something logical about Eve going after Margo's stage career.  Margo has the job that Eve wants and she's going to go after that with the tenacity of a pit-bull.  But when Eve goes after Lloyd Richards (I think), that's when she goes from being cold villainess to real bad guy.  Mankiewicz may be equating professional power with emotional power.  It really reads like Eve only wants Lloyd for the scripts that he can offer her.  It's just that we see Karen as the victim and target of Eve, completely unjustly.  There's something almost acceptable about Eve going after Margo.  They are both forces of nature.  But Karen seemed to be Eve's real friend.  She was the human being who saw past the façade of Hollywood and saw a girl who wanted to meet her idol.  That scene, where Eve is riding the fence between her perceived persona and her reality is absolutely chilling for this very reason.  Eve so desperately holds onto the idea that she is this character, begging Karen for forgiveness.  But when Karen can't go that extra mile, there's this relief that comes from being able to be honest with her intentions.  It's that sinister element that is soaked in verisimilitude that is terrifying.

Why, oh why, then have this ad campaign?  It's this slight against an absolutely gutsy and painful film.  I adore this movie so much.  I'm glad that I came back to it.  Now I want it on Criterion...because it's on Criterion.

Rated R for murder, language, and sexuality.  There are times where the movie seems like it is going to be the most safe-for-TV version of a horrific crime.  Then it goes and does something absolutely nuts.  Like, it accuses someone looking for "butt", which sounds like a child trying to say something vulgar.  But then, we'll have a section of vulgarity.  Also, the murders, especially for 1967, are pretty brutal on screen.  There's no nudity, but the sexuality is pretty overt.  R.

DIRECTOR: Richard Brooks

This was something special.  I'm not going to be preaching about how amazing the film was or anything.  I don't even know if I full-on enjoyed it.  But my wife and I read a book together.  Okay, we read it back-to-back.  I read it, preached it.  Then, my wife read it.  So what do we do when we read a book together?  Watch the movie.  Don't be surprised if Capote also ends up showing up on the blog.  I'm sure we'll probably get around to that pretty soon as well.

I think I'm generally turned off by Neo Noir.  I know that I can't say that absolutely.  I mean, I preach Touch of Evil pretty hard.  But there's a novelty to the way those movies are shot and the way that they are paced that always leave me a little bored in the middle. I'm the guy who always says that boredom isn't exactly a bad thing.  But when you are really sleepy from a long day's work followed by a long evening's cooking and cleaning and settling little kids disputes...it sometimes gets to be a bit much.  Also --and I've noticed this more than once-- when you know a story pretty well and you are watching an adaptation of said story, there's very little to be surprised about.  Yeah, I always get a little jazzed to see what a director has done with source material, but the surprise always seems to be missing from the experience.  I never get to experience it for the first time.  Instead, I watch, criticizing odd choices and elements that are either left out or oddly included in the final product.

I can't help but talk about the experience of In Cold Blood as a whole.  We, like many Americans, have an odd obsession with True Crime.  It's grizzly and probably bordering on inappropriate, knowing that we glean entertainment from someone's personal tragedy.  But there is something fascinating about deep-diving into the psychology of the twisted and sadistic.  There's that justification that comes in hiding behind the need for justice or the remembering the victim's tale.  In Cold Blood is the OG true crime story, though.  Reading Capote's book gives the vibe of a story told long-form, stressing the elements of a crime that can't be explored in a news report or an article.  With the book, both my wife and I couldn't separate the knowledge that Truman Capote had to take a lot of liberties, forcing the text to be partially fictional.  There are things that no one would possibly ever know, but he includes as part of his tale.  With the film, there's almost another layer of distance from reality. Because the film isn't a documentary, but rather a morbid biopic, there's the attempt to create a straightforward narrative of Dick and Perry.  Yes, Truman Capote makes Dick and Perry the focus of his book, but he breaks that up a bit more with the townspeople of the tiny Kansas hamlet who have been affected.

The reason why In Cold Blood is so loved and respected as a book comes from the sympathetic look at two killers.  It never forgives them for what they did.  Capote and, by proxy, Brooks never try to explain away the choices to murder this family in a way that would make them look like innocents.  But they do come across as remarkably human.  Their choices to murder come from the fallibility of humanity and the lifetime of moments that led a person to becoming a monster.  While Capote definitely gets credit for introducing this element, I have to give Brooks the props for taking that humanity a bit further. Maybe it is the difference between concept and concrete, but the film really sells Perry's backstory as this torment that is over him the entire crime.  Because we see so much of Perry's neuroses manifested in the film, that turn that he makes by the end of the film is haunting.  Brooks and Blake (whose future history is as troubling as the character he portrays in this movie) show Perry as a child dealing with adult issues.  He's emotionally this innocent, a child smashing his toys when things get overwhelming.  We see that Perry knows the difference between right and wrong.  He stops Dick from raping the Clutter girl because he's repulsed by the immorality of sexual sin.  But then, he takes a shotgun in a fit of insanity and murders everyone in the house over a matter of fifty dollars.

Yeah, the pacing may not be the most compelling element of the film, but that's not why someone would want to watch In Cold Blood.  It's about the psychology.  While I don't really have a hankering to watch In Cold Blood again any time soon, the movie almost needs to be watched a second time.  Brooks hides the events of the murder for the last act of the film.  Capote kind of does the same thing, leaving us always to wonder which man did what action in the house.  But the movie shows that they did...something... in the house, but we don't know what.  So when we see Perry trying to maneuver his way post murder spree, we have to wonder what he did.  Perry almost murders someone else.  If we had a story of Dick being this insane bloodthirsty killer, we might sympathetically view Perry as this guy who is about to cross a line.  But when we see that Perry is this guy who really has a violent streak in him, the movie reads as something very different.  

When I started writing this, I saw Dick and Perry as the two protagonists.  The more I think about it, we don't really get the psychology of Dick in the movie.  Played by Scott Wilson, who would later play Hershel on The Walking Dead, Dick almost acts like this devil on Perry's shoulder.  There's something definitely wrong with him, but we're never quite sure what.  A lot of this stems out of the fact that Brooks keeps the camera on Perry.  Perry is the one who views sexual acts from a place of distance.  He's the one with the mommy issues.  While we meet Dick's father, we can only make an intellectual association between Dick's actions and his history.  Perry, we feel it because we see what he sees.

But, like I said, Neo Noir only works so well on me.  I really want to love a lot of Neo Noir, but it just gets to be a bit tedious for me.  It always feels a little cheap and under-budget.  It has this weird pacing that makes me wait for scenes to get interesting.  I'm ashamed of this feeling because I know it is all about the experience.  But I also know that my mind starts drifting when nothing happens on screen for long periods of time.  It's a good movie...but a movie that really requires me to be awake and jazzed to watch it.

PG, for nonstop violence towards animated animals.  Like, the entire thing justifies the Itchy and Scratchy parody without the blood.  It's just silly hijinks of two animated characters trying to hurt each other for the majority of the film.  It is a kids' movie and there isn't much in terms of questionable content besides the hour-and-a-half of cartoon violence.  But that's just what is going on.  You knew what you signed up for.  PG.

DIRECTOR:  Tim Story

​It's my fault.  I'm the one who said that he wanted to watch this.  There's a bunch of stuff leading into today's blog, so I  think I'm just going to dump them all here.  I'm writing against the clock because it is my week on parking lot duty.  Also, I have all of these fancy-schmantzy, artsy-fartsy movies coming up soon, so to discover that I'm writing about Tom and Jerry to start the week is a bit of a bummer.  But like I said, this is all my fault.

I suppose it is the knowledge that it is going to be on HBO Max for 30 days and I don't have to pay to see it at the movie theater.  There was a time in my life that I would simply drive to the movie theater and watch whatever was playing next, assuming I hadn't seen it already.  Our local theater had $5.00 matinees and I certainly took advantage of that deal.  But here I am, trying to relive the glory days.  The irony, of course, was that my glory days never really involved Tom and Jerry.

Oh, I know that is sacrilege in a lot of circles.  Tom and Jerry was a lot of people's childhoods.  For all my love of Looney Tunes and Disney products, Tom and Jerry was always super annoying to me.  This is probably true for a lot of things that people find defining of their childhoods. Tom and Jerry, Transformers, Scooby-Doo?  Nothing.  None of things interested me in the least. So what was it about the trailer for Tom and Jerry, besides the fact that it would be free on HBO Max, that made me want to watch this?  I blame Sonic the Hedgehog.  

When I saw the trailer for Sonic, I wondered what abomination had man created?  I mean, sure, Sonic was still in his original design.  But even shy of a terrible design, the movie just looked bad.  But then, because of my son's insistence (by the way, I just heard that he's being a monster today, so I don't know what to do about that), we saw it and that was a joyful surprise. Yeah, it's not like Sonic the Hedgehog was a masterpiece, but it certainly was a good time.  And when I saw the trailer for Tom and Jerry, I thought it would be just that: a good time.

Yeah, I was wrong.  I don't know why I ignored everyone along the way.  There wasn't exactly any glowing recommendations for it.  Even my kids were lukewarm about watching it.  My son liked it, which is fine.  It's just that Tom and Jerry didn't really offer anything that would make me interested in the piece as a whole.  From a superficial perspective, the movie is about a cat and mouse combination that I never cared about.  The jokes often are flat and there are a bunch of disparate plots that somehow are supposed to coalesce into a single narrative.  That doesn't really happen.  It's actually bizarre, because the mute Tom and Jerry (I don't know why they are the only cartoon animals who don't talk) don't really seem to be the protagonists in their own film. It's a bit too childish and I feel like we've covered everything in this movie in other forms.

But there is something that really confuses me about the film as a whole: the avoidance of Blackness.  This is going to get really dicey because I'm a thirty-something white male writing from the safety of a blog while the director, Tim Story, is a Black man who is straight up movies regularly.  He's doing what I wish I could be doing.  (I love being a teacher and writing is a hobby now; all this should be taken into consideration.) But Tim Story seems to keep coming back to the same problems.  He keeps making movies starring white people that don't really need to be white.  I know Tim Story from Fantastic Four and its sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the SIlver Surfer.    I know that he directed Shaft as well, which both breaks up my theory while confirming it at the same time. But with Tom and Jerry, the titular characters are mute cartoons.  They are, by definition, devoid of race.  But the other characters are complete wild cards.  Anyone can play the other roles and be okay.  Instead, we only have a smattering of ethnicities in the roles and white people with upper middle class problems seem to dominate this film.

But Story seems like he wants to do more with it.  The soundtrack is peppered with hip hop.  Cool.  There are Black people in this role.  But that's where it really gets weird.  There are a lot of Black artists in this movie: voicing characters that don't reflect race at all.  Every single Black actor in this movie is voicing an animated character.  Is there a reason that you have to do a deep dive to find the Black people doing things behind the anonymity of animated.  It kind of feels like they are being written out.  When I think of Fantastic Four, that movie seems remarkably white.  It is the safest version of those characters imaginable.  When I think of Shaft, I think of someone who wanted to tell this tale, but decided to fall back on stereotypes.  Is Tim Story, I hate to say, someone who is the acceptable Black director for a white audience?

I know, I'm getting pretty heavy with Tom and Jerry.  But it seems like Tim Story keeps getting these ultra-nonconfrontational jobs where he simply makes what anyone else can make.  There's nothing special or challenging about this film.  Instead, we have Chloe Grace-Moretz, a talented actress in her own right, going through a color-by-numbers kids' comedy that dares not do anything that would upset the apple cart. It's so vanilla that when I hear a hip-hop soundtrack attached to zany madcap antics, it feels like an old man trying to relate to his grandkids.  The music doesn't at all make me want to think of anything except for selling toys and HBO Max subscriptions.  I want something real and aggressive.  Just because a movie is aimed at kids, it doesn't mean that it has to be one thing that is easy to write off. That's what's happening with this movie.  It really begs you not to think.  It wants parents to buy a crapton of candy and soda and hope that the kids are grateful for an afternoon with their parents.

Yeah, I don't know what I would do with Tom and Jerry​.  But I know that I wouldn't hide every Black actor behind animation cells.  I know that I wouldn't have an almost exclusively white cast, with the exception of Michael Pena or Pallavi Sharda, just because they might be more marketable.  It's just uncomfortable the more I think about it. And, yeah, I feel like a White Knight, but that's kind of the vibe I got by watching those end credits and realizing that every Black voice was covered up by animation cells.

PG-13 for just mass death.  That's a thing.  We tend to ignore it because it happens off screen, but there is just a genocidal amount of death happening constantly in this movie.  Like, there's no coming back from this.  There's some language and a sex joke, but we should be absolutely mortified by what is happening in this film.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Michael Dougherty

I really didn't want to write today.  I guess I still don't.  I know that I gripe about this a lot, but it also builds a bit of momentum for writing.  After all, I should just be writing about what's on my mind and then somehow transition into Godzilla: King of the Monsters.  But just enough annoying things happened today and that's something that makes me want to say, "Man, I'm going to kill an hour or so of my life writing about a movie that had borderline no affect on me."  And that, my friends, is how you find your segue into Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

The only kaiju / titan / giant monster movie that ever really nailed it for me was Pacific Rim.  Knowing my personality and my likes / dislikes, this might surprise quite a few people.  I'm deeply into fantasy and sci-fi, especially stuff that is pretty accessible.  On paper, giant monsters fighting each other should be my bread and butter.  But I keep trying to come back to this well and it never produces water.  Heck, I still have plans to watch the Godzilla anime films on Netflix.  Beyond that, the reason that I decided to watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters was because I was jazzed that I got to watch Godzilla v. Kong on HBO Max.  I had watched the OG Godzilla / Gojira and really wanted to like it.  It's just that there's something that is either remarkably underwhelming or overwhelming about two hours of people getting killed. Maybe it is the sheer carnage of it all that makes it not my cup of tea (speaking of which, the kettle just finished boiling).  But there's a real tipping point where human life becomes absolutely worthless.  King of the Monsters doesn't really get that.  It places such a high respect on life when it comes to the main characters, but completely lacks empathy when cities are wiped away.  

Now, I'm really not trying to take a moral high ground here.  I'm a fan of a lot of genres, including horror movies.  I can't say that I haven't cheered or guffawed at a particularly clever death scene.  But the complexity of people being wiped off the map doesn't really have degrees of anything.  The cities that collapse in the last Godzilla movie are very similar to the ones that collapse in this Godzilla movie. I had a few moments of intellectual awareness to how much destruction was happening and I was mortified that it didn't really affect any of the characters.  The movie kept telling me that this was the worst tragedy that had ever happened, but that never really struck a chord with anyone.  I know.  Monarch was trained for this particular eventuality, but it doesn't mean that we have to strip away the humanity of the sequence.  There are some amazing actors in this movie.  Why can't the movie ever revel in the vulnerability of the events?  It's odd, because the protagonist and the antagonist feel more about something that happened in the past than what is happening in the present.

But the real problem with Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the fact that it desperately wants to mythologize a shared universe.  Everyone who wants to be Marvel needs to take a chill pill right now.  Marvel's shared universe is very special.  It is slow and calculated.  It has earned its payoffs and complex movies because it slowly built up a lot of movies without the guarantee that they'd ever hit an Avengers: Endgame level.  But all of these studios are pushing these properties out the door with the hopes that they'll get to that appropriately named Endgame.  So what happens in movies like Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the story needs to try to have a degree of complexity to it that completely ruins the purity of what should be going on.  See, as much as I didn't like the 1954 Godzilla as a movie, it has an absolutely perfect and haunting allegory behind the movie.  Japan, finally starting to put itself together post nuclear attack, is witness to mankind's horrible relationship with nuclear energy.  As a commentary on that, nuclear energy creates this unstoppable beast that ruins lives and will never truly go away.  

But fast-forwarding to today's Godzilla, we have completely forgotten the point of having a Godzilla movie.  In this one, nuclear weaponry is the only thing that saves us.  The bad guys in the movie are the environmentalists, who like with Endgame want to clear the planet of humanity to allow the return of natural resources.  The message has always been about criticizing humanity for the evils it has wrought on itself and the planet and now we have a movie that espouse the opposite message?  I know that King of the Monsters isn't the first movie in the Godzilla legacy to tweak the original allegory, but I haven't seen those movies.  Having Godzilla as this mythical beast meant to protect humanity feels like we lost the point.  When the ignorant military and government want to kill Godzilla and the rest of the titans under Monarch's watch, it kind of makes a ton of sense.  Godzilla, even when he's fighting other bad guys, brings unimaginable destruction in his wake.  It's that whole Man of Steel argument I keep coming back to.  (By the way, apparently I'm a masochist who is considering rewatching that movie just so I can write about it before Zack Snyder's Justice League.  Again, HBO Max has its hooks into me.) The Hulk goes out of his way to keep people alive, despite the massive wreckage behind him.  But even Bruce Banner would advocate for a way to get rid of the Hulk.  It just doesn't make sense.

Then the movie gets phenomenally stupid.  The more complex that the plot tries to get, we have to start questioning the motivations of people like Jonah.  Also, casting Charles Dance as the over-the-top villain is just straight up lazy.  We know he's bad because he's played by Charles Dance.  Emma, for a scientist who has studied these titans so closely, has to be aware that the death following titan attacks is horrifying. I mean, she lost her kid to Godzilla.  Why is she thinking that the world needs to be purged?  Making her an eco-terrorist doesn't really match her origin story.  But there is one thing related to this choice that the movie really wants to make me forget: Madison.  Madison, as much as the movie insists that she's  a good guy who didn't really know what was going on, has more than her fair share of culpability.  She accuses her mother of losing control of the situation and saying that things weren't going to plan.  That means...she knew what the plan was.  How am I supposed to view her as a heroic character when she was part of the bad guys' secret plan the entire time?  

There's just so much dumb in this movie.  I don't know why I get so excited for these movies.  I remember when I saw the trailer for the first of the reboot films, I thought that my mind was going to be blown.  It looked so artsy and heavy that I had to believe that it was going to be good.  Then I hated it.  But then I saw the trailer for the second one.  It had a blue color palate instead of a red one, but it just looked so intriguing.  Sure enough, it made a lot of the mistakes that the first movie did.  I don't know why they can't just show me two giant monsters punching each other, but these films love to obscure what you are watching with bad weather.  Maybe Michael Doughtery believes that, to be scary, the clouds have to be on fire.  But what actually ends up happening is a digital mess, which is the reason that I can't stand the Transformers films.  It just all feels like visual overload and adrenaline when I want to see choreography and smartness.  None of that happens.  

I really was bummed by how this movie turned out.  It's cliché and hack.  People make decisions that don't make a lick of sense.  I feel like Bradley Whitford, Kyle Chandler, Ken Watanabe, and Thomas Middleditch were all just on a soundstage and were given directions to do what they do in every movie.  Again, I want to like monster movies.  But they keep on doing stupid things like King of the Monsters.  I might to have to admit that these movies just aren't for me.  I mean, I'm still going to watch Godzilla versus Kong, but that's just because it's free.