PG-13 for violence.  There's some sexual assault stuff that is glossed over for the sake of tone, but it is in there.  There's a fair amount of death because it is about a gang war.  I seem to be jumping all over the racism stuff because it seems so obvious, but West Side Story is fundamentally a story about racism and privilege.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

This is the most unfair thing I might ever write.  I feel bad about it because he may be one of the most talented people of our generation.  Here it goes: "Steven Spielberg may have lost his touch."  

Geez, I actually feel horrible about writing that.  The man oozes talent.  He's got more filmmaking skill in his pinky finger than I will ever have.  But West Side Story may be the most telling thing about Steven Spielberg that I could imagine.  Spielberg stopped making summer blockbusters.  One could argue that Ready Player One was an attempt to do what he did best, but Ready Player One was fairly forgettable and kind of lacked soul.  I mean, I don't think that anyone was comparing Ready Player One to Jaws.  But Spielberg was also --originally! --one of the Netflix detractors.  He stated how Netflix movies weren't real movies.  I mean, I get the emotional element of it.  But Spielberg has aged poorly. It's not surprising because Spielberg is also aggressively nostalgic.

I mean, he had his period of what he considered artistic films.  These were movies that were artistic for him.  I'm talking about movies like War Horse and Lincoln.  These weren't barnburners.  They were introspective.  Schindler's List gave him a taste for gravitas and he started chasing that over-and-over again.  It's fine. I'm glad that he expanded. While these movies are all technically impressive, I don't know how many people are dropping War Horse on their favorite films list.  But taking all of this into consideration, Spielberg is painfully lost in his own shadows and his own comfort zone.  Yeah, drama was a departure for him.  But he's really afraid to adapt with the time.  Because he is the master of what he does, I have the feeling that he isn't inspired by anyone but his contemporaries.  I'm sure that he gets nervous when sitting at a table with Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola.  But the next generation of directors somehow seems beneath him.  Instead of learning and expanding, he's just doing what he likes to do without being questioned.

West Side Story looks really pretty.  It's an absolutely gorgeous movie.  I can't fight that whatsoever.  Heck, part of me wants to just enjoy it for the visual elements and the new actors.  I now kind of like musicals.  That trailer got me so excited for this movie and I wish I just left it to the imagination of the trailer.  But Spielberg as a personality got in the way of this movie.  Because I want to crescendo my issues with this movie, I'm going to start off with the most superficial and obvious:  the book doesn't match the aesthetics.  There's this tone in the movie stressing the hard edges of gang life.  Everything both bright and washed out. Gone are the vivid colors of technicolor (for the most part) and in its place comes this new color palate that is supposed to give this film an edginess.  That's fine.  In terms of content, this is about a gang war / race war that leads to the death of many of the characters. Cool.  But the music hasn't been updated since the original West Side Story.  

While the story is the same and a lot of the book is the same, the tone of the original film embraced the theatrical elements of the stage.  The heightened reality of musicals was embraced in 1961.  The fact that the staging and the coloring (I'm not going to be talking about THAT coloring in this unless I rewatch the OG West Side Story) has an appropriately hokey element to it where songs like "Officer Krupke" have a copacetic home.  But this is not the home for this. Couple it with the dancing and it just comes across as inappropriate.  Honestly, a member of the Jets makes a lot of jokes about sexually assaulting a transgender character and then it leads to a tongue-in-cheek dance about how "we just ain't no good"?  There's this break in the verisimilitude that is very hard to overcome.  Spielberg seems a bit slavish to the source material, which leads to the biggest problem with this film that actually really bothers me.

Spielberg changes very little from the original musical.  It's a remake in the strictest way possible.  In the same way that Gus Van Sant remade Psycho, Spielberg was in love with the original West Side Story.  As such, the music stays exactly the same.  No edge given to match the tone.  But this is troubling in a very real way.  From an artistry element, the new West Side Story has no reason to exist beyond Spielberg's consistent return to nostalgia and history.  He saw something he loved from his youth and thought that he could make it better.  That's not an artist talking.  While I can completely appreciate art about art, this isn't that story.  This is a story of racial divide and violence between teenagers.  When the original West Side Story came out, there was an issue with juvenile delinquency across America.  There were straight up task forces asked to address this epidemic of violence in America.  So when the original book came out, it took Romeo and Juliet and focused on America's youth.  It had an artistic reason for coming out.  The absurdity that teens were killing each other over empty territory was something that needed to be addressed through art.  

There's a new epidemic of violence across America.  Gun violence in schools has become commonplace.  The racial divide has gained such a momentum that we can't help but hear about racial issues in the news any day of the week.  But West Side Story chooses to talk about none of this.  It's letting us do all of the heavy lifting on this discussion.  It makes it seem like racial violence was a thing of the past.  West Side Story wasn't treating race issues as a nostalgic thing.  It was talking to a contemporary audience. Spielberg releasing West Side Story, few changes made, is implying that this era was quaint.  "Look how far we've come."  He saw a movie he liked and he wanted other people to like the musical as well.  How is that challenging us as a culture?  I refuse to let this be a rhetorical question: it doesn't.  It's screaming old man politics.  It's a simplicity that doesn't really hold weight anymore.  It's a little bit of how Disney won't take any real risks with its filmmaking, instead mirroring the majority in its controversial choices.  (That being said, I'm going to go nuts on Turning Red soon.  Pay attention that!)

​West Side Story itself is a better story than I remember.  When I was younger, I appreciated it only from the perspective of a musical.  But there's some really good stuff in there.  Yeah, the music is still good, even if it doesn't fit with the visuals here.  But West Side Story should be controversial as heck in the same way that Romeo and Juliet should be controversial.  It should be talking about the problems that we're still having instead of the problems that we used to have.  That's maybe me getting on my soapbox a little bit.  But it is also why I'm slowly losing respect for one of the most talented directors of the modern era.  He's so darned talented and he has the ability to move audiences to tears if he allowed himself to be vulnerable and learn from his contemporaries.  He's too good to be making stuff like this safe version of West Side Story.  This movie is wholly unnecessary and it is a crime that it is up for Best Picture.

Unrated, but there's a lot of sex.  Like, a lot of sex. For about half-an-hour, I wondered if this was going to be a three-hour movie about sex and nudity.  It's not.  It then becomes about sadness and misery.  There's some mild violence stuff, but that is mostly off camera.  There's drunkeness and smoking.  They also talk about some horrible things with the flattest affect imaginable.  Still, it's unrated.

DIRECTOR:  Ryusuke Hamaguchi

No, it's true. Absolutely true.  I don't think I've almost quit on a Best Picture nomination like I did with Drive My Car.  I mean, I'm really glad that I didn't.  But the movie starts off with a topless woman narrating an idea she has during sex.  Then a good percentage of the movie is them discussing this implicitly sexual story that she's writing.  I didn't know if I could handle three hours of that.  It makes me sound like a prude, but it was more along the lines of the fact that I wasn't really getting anything out of it.  But then the actual movie started and that's when I got something so out of it that I would cautiously recommend it to people.  

I have a degree in theatre.  I am married and I'm obsessed with humanities. I mean, I talk about books and characters and movies all day because it's something that really interests me.  If you didn't guess that, then this blog has no purpose.  There's something really inside baseball about Drive My Car.  Mr. Kafuku is the alternate reality version of me.  Like, if I took myself a lot more seriously, then that would be me.  Like, if I didn't take my anxiety meds and just allowed myself to wallow, it would probably look a like Mr. Kafuku.  I was going to talk about how the only difference in my life is that he didn't have any kids, but then I remembered the odd tragic backstory of Kafuku and Oto.  They had a kid.  She died when they were very young.  Sure, that would probably be me if I had no one to keep me on track from being really depressed.  There's never really talk about suicide or anything like that.  Sure, there's blame and all that, but there's just this void where Kafuku powers through life because he has to.  He falls back on his comfort zone, which is drama.  Yeah, I take it back.  If I lost everything, I would be Kafuku.

But considering that the lynchpin of the film is how people treat relationships, I don't know if I can necessarily relate.  Kafuku walks in on Oto with Takatsuki and he just allows it to happen.  I don't know if I would ever be that broken.  I'm such a scorched earth kind of guy that this scene doesn't play for me.  But the thing is, there's something very otherworldly about Kafuku to begin with.  He doesn't necessarily view the world in the same way that we do.  He's very okay with being an observer in his own narrative, which is ironic considering that he's a director of plays.  His very nature is to make major artistic decisions from minute to minute. He is presenting the world of Uncle Vanya through his soul.  So for him to be so passive about all these interactions is odd.  The reason that we find his relationship with Misaki so symbiotic is because they both treat the world from this outside perspective.  I'm really playing film critic here with this next observation, so please be patient with me.  Perhaps their careers reflect their world views.  While Kafuku is a director and he has to make a lot of choices, he isn't the face of those choices.  He views the play like an audience member, detached from the final production.  It's why he finds the portrayal of the eponymous character so taxing.  He doesn't want to be part of that world anymore.  It forces him to emote.  The same is true for Misaki.  Everything Misaki takes in comes from the frame of a windshield. While she is the one driving, she is following instructions.  She doesn't interact with those things.  It's almost like she is watching a film of the countryside flying by her.

Misaki has always been that way though.  She confesses to allowing her mother to die in the landslide.  It is where the movie takes a weirder turn than normal.;  The funny thing is that a major criticism I would normally have is that the movie entirely tells instead of shows.  The intentionally flat delivery of these heart-wrenching stories make these moments entirely logical reactions instead of emotional ones.  While we judge Misaki for allowing her mother to die, we also have to come into a moral and logical quandary on the role of mental health when it come to child rearing.  Because her mother may have had a real mental break, it's odd to think that Misaki may have killed two people in her catatonic state. I would like to point out that, even if Misaki's mother was a noble character, it would be completely understandable if young Misaki just froze in horror at the destruction of the house.  But Drive My Car really sells the notion that there was something willful in Misaki's choice not to save her mother.  Even Kafuku comments that other people would say that it was not her fault, but he acknowledges the very real decision to leave her to die.  So there's that moment that shows how broken of a person Misaki is. I have nowhere else to go with this, but I get how these broken individuals found each other.

There is one scene that puzzles me and I love that it does.  Tatatsuki plays a lot of mind games. If there was a villain in the story, it's him.  His life is falling apart because of horrible choices associated with youth.  He slept with another man's wife and he beat someone to death. Those are some compelling reasons to make him the villain.  But if you watch the film, it isn't necessarily that cut and dry. I still stand by the notion that he's the antagonist of the story, but you should be able to understand why that analysis might be considered overly simplistic.  Anyway, the scene I'm talking about is the confession that Tatatsuki knows the end of the story that Oto was writing.  How does he know?  He was sleeping with her, so the two address the elephant in the room.  They both know that Tatatsuki was sleeping with Oto.  But I'm not sure if this is a moment of bonding with Kafuku or torturing him.  Part of me thinks it is both.  Tatatsuki is spiraling ever since the two year time-jump.  He went from being the It-Guy to committing career harakiri.  It's like he wants love from someone and he is going to get it from the one person who is off-limits: Kafuku.

But there is a dark healing that happens there.  The best way that I could describe it is breaking a bone all the way through so it heals right.  Kafuku never healed properly from his wife's death because there's always this element of resentment towards her.  And while Tatatsuki's confession and trap hurts like all get out, he seems somehow clean after that.  The movie never really needs to paint it that way.  It understands that a lot is up for interpretation.  But that's my read on the scene.

I'm never quite sure about Kafuku's intentions though.  He casts Tatatsuki as the lead in his very eclectic version of Uncle Vanya...why?  The surface level, which makes sense in-universe, is that everyone is cast against type.  Everyone speaking a different language is this automatic barrier between real communication, a metaphor for what is is going on between the characters in reality.  But there has to be a deeper read on Kafuku's casting choices.  Part of me thinks that he wants Tatatsuki to flounder in a part that he can't really play.  That read mostly scans.  But even more so, I also think that he's torturing himself by surrounding himself with the man who seduced his wife.  The movie is almost a form of cutting just to feel something.  Maybe that's why the road trip towards the end of the film is so cathartic.  After not allowing himself to feel anything, he submits to his own vulnerability, allowing him to finally play Vanya, despite the pain that it causes him.

It's a tough movie.  Murikami, who wrote the original book, is a difficult author to unpack.  Drive My Car thrives when it stops being so quirky and allows itself to get really vulnerable.  It's not a perfect movie, but it is an interesting one.

PG-13 for, once again, reminders of how the world is a terrible place filled with sadness, death, human trafficking, and torture.   While there isn't anything too graphic on screen, the content itself is heavy.  While I don't specifically remember language, I'm sure its there.  (These are the problems that you run into when you watch a lot of movies that have heavy content.)  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Jonas Poher Rasmussen

I'm writing in the morning.  It's a weirdly scheduled day and I think I might have to write in the morning to ensure that this gets out. Trust me, there are times that I would just settle with pushing this back.  But I also am a creature of habit who really enjoys meeting goals to stave off depression. (I didn't think that sentence would just pop out the way it did, but I'm not going to fight it.)  It's kind of satisfying to have the morning sun meet the clacking of my keyboard.  I'm blasting Mozart partially to distract the part of my brain that would look to procrastinate, but also to seem super intellectual at the same time.  I hope I can keep this up.

Flee should hit me harder than it did.  I don't think that's anything to do with the movie.  I'm obsessed with the plight of the refugee.  I think the first time I really saw my liberal fury engulf into flame was watching the Trump crowd rally around a refugee ban.  As the child of refugees, it scared me.  Had the refugee ban been around when my parents were escaping Nazis, I wouldn't exist.  True story.  As such and realizing that my button is the plight of the refugee, I've been watching and reading a lot of these stories.  I've been sharing news articles and videos about refugee rights.  I've advocated for the easing of restrictions regarding entrance to the United States.  But the consequence is that I've now heard a lot.  Like watching horror movies and not getting scared anymore, I can't help but flash to the other tales of sadness when it comes to refugees.  Amin's story is objectively heartbreaking.  But there's something about the presentation that kind of bothers me.

If I spent the entire last paragraph establishing how empathetic I am to the plight of the refugee, I have to confess the fact that I'm a complete butthead when it comes to aesthetics and visual arts.  I'm a guy who marvels at fantastic art.  I can't make images have depth or perspective to save my life. Like my toddlers' drawings of Spider-Man (spelled "Sit-Man"), everything is in two dimensions.  But I also really appreciate an artist destroying my mind with gorgeous art.  So when something isn't visually appealing, it really bums me out.  And the thing is...this story has been told in an absolutely gorgeous fashion.  I hate comparing who has the more affective refugee non-fiction story because these people's lives aren't horrible for my entertainment.  These are real people going through real misery.  But for my awful bottom dollar, I have to say that Persepolis did a very similar story, but did it better.  While Flee weaves in the story of Amin's homosexuality in the backdrop of the Muhjadeen, there's something very clunky about the whole story.  It's disjointed.  It's not overtly bad, but it is somehow undercooked.

But where Flee really crushes and it got to me is the insanity of normality for the refugee.  There's a part of the movie where they are hiding out in Russia.  Their visas have expired.  Russia is collapsing under the fall of the Soviet Union.  Nothing is good for these people and they are being crushed under the boredom of not living as people.  In Russia, because they don't want to get deported, they have to hide all day in an apartment watching telenovelas.  It's the only thing that they can get that they can understand, so they watch it all day, every day.  That doesn't sound so bad, but there's a reality that we kind of ignore.  People are not meant to be one thing.  There is the inevitability that they will get caught and they can only do one thing to maintain their sanity, which has to be slowly slipping away.  That's something that got to me.  They can't even work and contribute to society just to get out of the country.  To do this whole thing right, they have to continually run and watch these stupid TV shows in the hopes that they can just continue to do this tomorrow.

But where Flee really does shine, beyond the horror of infinite and dehumanizing boredom, is to shine a light on the evil of the coyote.  For those who might not know anything about illegal immigration, there are people who are willing to break the law to help people go from one country to another.  This is the realm of human traffickers.  From one perspective, these people can be considered humanitarians.  A person wants to escape a country and these people will take risk upon themselves to make that happen. Sure, they're getting paid.  But I'm also getting paid to teach.  Okay, I'm barely getting paid to teach, but that's a different story.  But the other perspective of the coyote is something far more horrible.  It's the perspective that we're meant to take about the role of immigration: the complete disrespect for human life.  Flee stresses that the traffickers are not good people.  They don't care about your survival.  They want money and they don't want to get caught.  If things don't work out after they get their money, that's collateral damage.

Maybe the biggest problem I have isn't burnout. Again, that's a me thing.  But maybe the fact that it is animated detracts a lot for me.  Because Amin's damage is so palpable and honest that I want to talk about that.  He has a hard time having healthy relationships, even with good people.  Amin and his fiancé get along.  He seems nice and patient.  But Amin also can't be completely honest with him.  His natural inclination is to hide things, like he hid a lot of his identity for his life.  The fact that he has a family and starts with the lie that they are all dead kind of is telling of who he is today. There's little chance of him going back, yet there is so much here that is meant to preserve his identity. That's so interesting and I think that a lot of it is buried under the need to make this animation work that honestly doesn't.  I know that I might be alone in this response because I keep hearing about how the animation is amazing.  I just don't really get that vibe.  It seems scattered and rough and just impedes over a story that can stand on its own two legs.  Yeah, I get it.  It is for the sake of anonymity.  But it still doesn't really play well with me for the most part. 

So it is a gorgeous story told in a simplistic manner.  There are moments where emotionally moving elements don't hit as well because of the execution.  It still is worth watching, but it isn't perfect. 

PG-13, but I think that's only because the movie is intentionally and gloriously political.  There are things that people are going to find wildly offensive and / or dangerous.  Despite being a concert film, it is a movie about the right to be Black in America.  That involves questioning moments of racial violence on either side.  It allows itself to get uncomfortable, which it absolutely should.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Questlove

Disney + had this for streaming!  Do you understand how much respect Disney + has gotten from me?  The answer is: a lot.  A lot of respect for Disney +. Now, part of that comes from the fact that it was bound to be nominated for an Academy Award.  It's smart on their part posting that.  But it is controversial as heck.  Here's the deal: I love me some really good concert movies.  It makes about zero sense that I like concert movies as much as I do, considering that I'm not that into music.  But a really well cut together music documentary like Woodstock or Gimme Shelter can absolutely crush.  When I worked at the video store, between putting on Superman Returns, I would throw on Monterey Pop because it was just too good of a time.  (I just realized how long it has been since I worked at the video store and I feel remarkably old right now.)  

But there's something gorgeous about a good concert film.  (Note: Dave Chappelle's Block Party is worth a rewatch pretty soon.)  But something like the documentaries that I mentioned give us a glimpse into a reality that may not have happened had not someone documented it.  (I think I just defined "documentary", but I'll explain.)  There's something very of-the-moment when it comes to a rock concert.  There are X number of rock concerts every week and a small percentage of people see those concerts.  Often, these concerts are for the superfans.  After all, concerts are expensive and they are simply a reproduction of a series of songs that have pretty much been memorized by the crowd.  The experience is almost one of complete appreciation.  It is a love of art for art's sake.  It's probably why I haven't been to that many concerts.  Because my artistic soul is satisfied with the glory of the consumption of the song itself, I rarely have the need to appreciate the technical craft of playing it live.  I mean, I like live music.  I don't deny that there's something special about seeing something live. But concerts rarely can make the transition to something more permanent like a feature length film.  

I love that Questlove made this.  There's so much going on with Summer of Soul (sorry that I don't write the full title because that will get tiresome after a while).  It is a concert film done by a guy who knows and loves music.  If you took everything out of the film, cutting out the interviews and the historical footage, the movie works as a concert film.  I mean, there wouldn't be that absolutely amazing context for the importance of the Harlem Cultural Festival.  But as a concert film, you could have it on in the background and absolutely jam to this movie.  It's so good.  It's an appreciation for the art in itself.  But Questlove, like any great director, refuses to simply let the film speak for itself.  Instead, he imbues this movie with importance. Rather than simply the role of the Black community as entertainment for the White man, he establishes the importance of Black voices and the range of voices that they take.  

Honestly, this is a better Civil Rights Movement movie than it is a music movie.  Oh, and it's a great music movie.  Every performer on stage is a lesson in both music history and Civil Rights history.  The festival that we watch in Summer of Soul took place at the exact same year as Woodstock.  It was for the Black community and it offered a lineup that dropped jaws. Yet, the fact that no one knows about it is a crime.  There's proof that there's a crime because this footage has been sitting in storage since 1969.  This is a gorgeously shot, completely marketable documentary and no one wanted to distribute it because it was too Black.  From a Capitalism perspective, there's the notion that people aren't going to distribute something that they can't sell.  But it's not like this was a small performance for an intimate audience.  The Harlem Cultural Festival was packed to the gills.  While it may not have had Woodstock numbers, this wasn't a joke.  There were police monitoring and providing security.  People wanted to swarm the stage at times.  You could see a ripple effect in the crowd, it was so dense.  That's an audience.  That's one borough in one city in a country.  If this was released, Black America might have swarmed to this film and it sat in a basement.

But the film is an education.  I almost want to use this to teach my Civil Rights unit coupled with John Lewis's March.  The documentary is long.  I can't deny that it almost might be a bit too long.  But something about this format almost wants me to say for Questlove to make it longer.  I've been trying to continually educate myself about Civil Rights in America.  It's a full-time job that a lot of people around me don't appreciate.  So I knew a lot of the touchstones that Questlove was addressing.  But if I didn't, it might have come across a little rushed.  I say that because I use my own younger self as a litmus test.  I always hate the me of a decade ago.  Maybe I hate the me of a decade ago now less than he hated his counterpart, but that's up for debate.   A decade ago, I could see this movie rubbing me the wrong way.  I mean, I'm glad Questlove was going for that because that's good storytelling and good evangelization, but I also know that pissing off your audience might make it hard to get your message across.  There are moments where Questlove was honest about the role of violence in the Civil Rights movement.  It talked about the Black Panther.  When Nina Simone read that poem, it was a call to violence.  I understood it and contextualized.  The pacifist part of me grew uncomfortable, but I respected it.  But that's part of the reality for Black America.

I was going to say, "Especially in the '60s", but life ain't so good right now either.
There is one section that I need to grow with.  1969 was the year of the moon landing.  It happened while the Harlem Cultural Festival was going on.  I always viewed the moon landing as the moment from Star Trek where we made first contact with the Vulcans.  When Zephram Cochrane broke the warp barrier, we united as a human collective and became something better than ourselves.  History has always viewed the moon landing as one of those moments that began healing America.  But from a Black perspective, especially a poor Black perspective, it was more White people dealing with White problems, all surrounded by feeling good about ourselves.  The intellectual part of me wants to defend the race to the moon.  As a people, we need to keep pushing forward.  Jumping to "whataboutism", stating that the money could be used to feed the hungry makes me want to raise all kinds of arguments about the Either / Or Fallacy.  But the emotional and moral elements of me completely sympathize.  It has to suck to worry about keeping a roof over your head when we're spending oh-so-many dollars to get to the moon.  Should we have stopped the moon landing?  Probably not.  But should we have prevented Black America from becoming institutionally poor so it wouldn't be a problem?  Absolutely.

Questlove made a documentary that didn't only make you feel good, but forced you to think and question your beliefs.  Yeah, it's a little bit long and some parts drag.  But it is a fantastic concert film because of how much attention went into presenting this info.

Rated PG back when PG meant absolutely nothing.  Sure, I'm fighting for those days again.  But as long as it wasn't overly offensive, it got a PG rating.  Maybe this is all having to do with the obliteration of the G rating. Anyway, Soylent Green borderline has nudity in it.  I mean, IMdB calls it mild sex, but you can see the outlines of two people having sex in a steamy shower.  But the real messed up stuff is the treatment of human life, whether through violence or poverty.  PG.

DIRECTOR:  Richard Fleischer

Should I be writing this?  I absolutely know that I should be writing, but do I have the authority to write about this?  Let me give you the pros and cons.  If you think I have to rewrite this after you make the decision, then...well, that's your opinion and I probably won't do it.  But still.  I started watching Soylent Green on New Year's Eve.  I tend to watch movies while I exercise, thus building good habits.  But I knew that I was going to take a week off to celebrate a year of non-stop exercise.  Well, one week turned into two months.  So I watched the first half of Soylent Green on New Year's Eve and the second half in March.  

But here's the thing:  I've seen it before.  The only reason that I watched it again, oddly enough, wasn't the fact that it took place in 2022.  I didn't even know that when the movie started.  (That moment of kismet was wonderful.)  So when I split it in two, it's not like this was a new film.  Yeah, I acknowledge it's not the best way to watch a movie. But sometimes life happens and I have to split things up.  I'm back to exercising mostly, so hopefully there'll be more consistency,  Regardless, I still have a couple of takeaways from this movie.  

I lump this and The Omega Man together.  Like, tonally and casting make these movies just one giant movie to me.  The funny thing is that they really are very different movies.  I know that there's some meat behind The Omega Man, but Soylent Green is just calling out humanity for its bad choices.  While we're not at the unconscious eating of other human beings (as far as we know), we're not exactly at our most proud moment in history.  The role of science fiction is to comment on society. It's why I like Star Trek so much.  Star Trek is the optimistic response to how the world was going. The Civil Rights Movement finally started uniting humanity together enough to make what should have been real change.  Gene Roddenberry, in response to that, made Star Trek imagining what the future would be like if we continued progress.  But Soylent Green refused to look at the world in such a sunny disposition.  It was a cynical look at the role humanity would take.  It was the environmentalist's nightmare.  It unfolded a world where we had choked the air and water so that no plant life would grow.  Subsequently, only the super-rich could a sense of basic normalcy.  

The insane thing is that this stars Charleton Heston, future NRA president and ultra-conservative.  Now, I heard on Pete Holmes's podcast that Heston is actually a wonderful human being, despite having some pretty abhorrent views.  Take from that what you will. But Soylent Green is the most hippie, progressive film I've seen in a while. That's saying something considering that I watch all kinds of stuff that is meant to push me to a progressive result.  It's not perfect in terms of its message.  But I will tell you what it is: on-brand.  I don't deny that Soylent Green is a science fiction film first, but it is almost a precursor to Blade Runner.   Rather than simply be a sci-fi movie, it takes the trope of the film noir of the flawed protagonist looking for justice while lining his own pockets.  I also see elements of The French Connection in this movie.  The French Connection made the world a pretty dirty place and it took a dirty police officer to clean it up.

But considering that this movie was just itching to take a swing at society, it's view of police officers is pretty dumb.  It kind of glorifies the dirty cop. I'm sure Heston didn't hate that. I mean, nothing looks fun about Thorn.  He lives in squalor.  But then again, so does everyone else. He seems genuinely unhappy, but we also know that he's in the right, despite the fact that he steals from crime scenes.  But Fleischer doesn't exactly give this character nuance.  There's a cool attempt to make Thorn layered.  But we also know that from moment one that Thorn is ultimately the hero of the story.  It's his relationship with Sol and his empathetic nature when it comes to the struggling poor of the shelter that make him the character we're rooting for.  Don't get me wrong, Thorn's relationship to Sol is my favorite part of the film.  But it also means that the dynamic change that Thorn goes through isn't that dynamic.  Yeah, Thorn is willing to stick his name on the line to ensure that the Soylent company is taken down.  (Let's take a breath and establish that a soy-based food company, in reality, saw a movie about secret cannibalism and named their healthy drink after it. How the heck are they still a company?  Them and the Baby Bullet...)

It's not insane that anyone would try to save a world that was unknowingly eating their own population.  Yeah, it costs him his life.  If we're arguing dynamic change, seeing Thorn go from a guy who valued his own life first and foremost to someone who is willing to die for others is good.  But it's almost like a studio was afraid of making Thorn too unlikable. His name is Thorn, for goodness' sake.  But that's all getting nitpicky.

There's a good story behind Soylent Green that isn't handled too well.  I love that there's an attempt to get complex with this plot when really the film wants to just scream its last line of "Soylent Green is made of people!"  (How much of a bummer was it when the marketing team revealed the big twist in the trailer?) The whole murder of Mr. Simonson should be a compelling story.  It forces the character to make twists and turns throughout the story and explore this dystopia with all of its foibles.  But the story makes almost no sense unless you read the Wikipedia article on it.  And it is in the reading of the Wikipedia article that I get frustrated.  There's a cool element of the movie that is buried under Charleton Heston's scene chewing.  Heston plays the movie like a tank in almost every scene.  One element of the story that is kind of lost on the audience is that the priest of the mission knows that Soylent Green is made of people.  He's going nearly insane holding that in because he can't share any information gained in the confidentiality of confession.  But the movie almost seems like Thorn is shaking down a drugged out priest rather than someone who is taking his spiritual vows seriously while dealing with an insane moral dilemma. 

But the movie makes the Simonson case the center of the film and the Simonson case is not well ironed out.  There are all of these relationships and characters that seem to know each other without a ton of background to how they know each other.  Even the most powerful scene in the movie, Sol Roth's assisted suicide, is kind of buried under the importance of maintaining a secret ending that would ultimately get spoiled by a trailer.  But knowing what I know, there's something very telling about Sol Roth's death: Fleischer wanted to film an assisted suicide scene, even if it didn't make any sense.  

I'm going to go on a limb.  Thorn represents the selfish.  He takes what he wants and justifies it by saying that the world is a terrible place full of terrible people.  I commented that his obsession with getting the truth out there makes sense that anyone would do the same.  But Sol is fundamentally a good person.  He's obsessed with truth and art and history.  When Sol discovers the truth, his natural inclination is to kill himself?  Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate here because I like the scene so much.  I could imagine that Sol is tired of discovering that the world is worse than he previously thought.  But that ends his life on the most selfish note imaginable.  Not only does it treat a lovely (not excusing it, but just saying it's a cool scene) suicide as a cowardly act, but he's also allowing people to continue to eat other people.  Instead of doing anything that would do something good for humanity, which would probably lead to his death similar to how the truth led to Thorn's near death, he takes the secret with him to the grave, only telling Thorn to do something. That's an uphill battle for Thorn, as proven by the film's one and only action scene, filled with conveyor belts and ledges.

So Soylent Green is a better movie than I remember, but it is hampered by a poorly constructed murder mystery that is just a build up to the final line.  It takes down the rich, the government, and humanity, which I love.  But it is also a muddy film that needs a good scrub.

Rated R, for some truly heinous things.  There's a fair amount of shock value to this movie, especially when it comes to the stuff involving the creation of a geek.  But beyond that, it's about murder and selfishness.  If a movie could comment on its view of humanity, Nightmare Alley thinks that the world is a cesspool.  There's language and some sexual stuff.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Guillermo del Toro

I was warned that this picture was terrible.  That's not even a  little bit accurate.  Is it perfect?  No.  Considering that I used to be obsessed with del Toro, Nightmare Alley can fall into the category of "It's fine." There's a lot here that is amazing, sure.  But the problem with Nightmare Alley is that it has one element that is really underbaked when the rest is actually crafted pretty darned well.

I'm reminded a little bit of Tales from the Crypt with this movie.  I think I'm misremembering Tales from the Crypt because I simply think that they all had a supernatural element to them.  That's not true. They were definitely meant to be spooky, which Nightmare Alley definitely is.  But moreover, Tales from the Crypt were always these little morality plays.  They were short little tales about how the protagonist, because of the evils he had embraced, brought about his own ironic downfall.  I don't mean to be so glib about this film, but that's Nightmare Alley.  The first act has Willem Dafoe talking about the most horrific thing that one man can do to another.  It's foreshadowing.  We treat the hobo as a person who continued to make the worst choices until the final result is brought about.  Then Stan makes those choices because of his own hubris.  And we want to see him fail.  The opening shot of the movie is him covering up the death of his father.  He's unlikable from moment one.  He only has value in comparison to Willem Dafoe's character.  

That geek setup, by the way, that's classic.  That's del Toro showing his ending and having us figure out how to get to that point. The odd thing is, Dafoe's carny is still somewhere in the morally sound area according to the rules of the movie.  Dafoe is the one who is doing all of these evil acts.  He kidnaps people and gets them addicted until they debase themselves to death. But he never gets his comeuppance.  He, as far as we know, is bought out by the other carnival.  Yet, we need Stan to fall.  It's not that he necessarily broke the rules of society.  No, he murders his father before the events of the film.  What he's actually a criminal of is breaking the carny code.  (Note: I don't love using the word "carny."  It just is the vernacular of the film so I'm sticking with it for the sake of clarity.) It's perfectly reasonable for Stan to sucker rubes out of their fortune.  If anything, Stan's upward mobility makes him a more sympathetic character because he's suckering the upper crust instead of poor carnival goers.  He's allowed to lie to them, as long as he doesn't do the ghost act.

Everything that he's doing with Dr. Ritter is an extreme version of the ghost act. It's this moment that's a little underbaked.  Dr. Ritter is the femme fatale of the movie.  Here's my problem with Dr. Ritter.  Dr. Ritter, as the femme fatale, is meant to seduce the male antihero into doing her bidding, leading to his downfall.  Fine, that happens.  It's part of the tropes of the film noir and this movie keeps that trope going on.  But Dr. Ritter is also completely underdeveloped.  There's not a lot going on with her motivations for suckering Stan.  There's a moment that is meant to be the shoe drop.  It's the precise time when Stan realizes that Dr. Ritter is using him and not the other way around.  It's supposed to be this big revelation for the audience, but there isn't anything really there.  We're supposed to be surprised that she has manipulated the whole thing.  But we don't really have a reason for her manipulating the whole thing.  If anything, the entire situation with Stan and Ezra Grindle seems like a completely unnecessary risk for her.  It draws a lot of attention her way and might completely ruin any long-term plans for success.

But now I have to place myself in the crosshairs.  The reason that del Toro has Ritter betray Stan is because he needs to be punished for going too far.  By embracing the ghost con, he hurts Molly, which is the real crime.   Does it matter that Dr. Ritter doesn't serve the plot as tightly as she should?  I mean, the character stuff lies on Stan and Molly's shoulders.  Stan represents corruption.  He's a small time grifter who becomes a big shot. We know that he's going to get in trouble for his meteoric rise to success.  Molly represents salvation.  Her innocence is this sympathetic heart to the film.  We want to see her escape Stan or drive him into the arms of redemption.  Del Toro tells these two elements extremely well.  Heck, if it wasn't for the Dr. Ritter stuff, those elements would have me raving about the movie.  I think the reason that the Dr. Ritter bothers me so much in the movie is that del Toro sets up her reveal to be a trick.

It's not a trick.  It's a reveal and del Toro needs a way to end the film.  He needs to get Stan to be a geek and that's the way he pulls it off.  It's emotionally weak as a choice. But it does lead to that moment where, not only does Stan become a geek. He actually knows that he's being manipulated into becoming a geek.  It's a great ending that kind of skips a beat to get there.

What this kind of leaves me with is the idea that this is a gorgeous movie.  As much as I hated The Shape of Water, I had to admit that it was a very pretty movie.  While Nightmare Alley is a better picture than The Shape of Water, it suffers from the fact that the prettiness of the film doesn't exactly match the content of the film.  It's a bummer, because I think that del Toro is one of this generation's great visual storytellers.  But he's also kind of shackled by his own tastes.  I have a strong vibe that he had an ending that he desperately wanted to get to.  He missed a beat and --instead of questioning whether this ending belonged with this movie --forgave a moment that was vital despite being incomplete.  The ending was too precious to him and it came at the expense of the movie.  If the Dr. Ritter ending didn't lead to him becoming a geek, there might have been a stronger resolution.  Instead, I get the vibe that he thinks that the geek ending wouldn't have gotten a second chance.  After all, there are few directors who have just shelves of unused scripts like Guillermo del Toro.

Rated R for language and infidelity.  There's nothing ever graphic on-screen.  Honestly, if you watched the movie silently with subtitles and your kids can't read....well, maybe teach your kids to read.  But most of everything is in concept.  It's very Aaron Sorkin.  You aren't going to see anything offensive.  It's just thinking about the horrible world we live in.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Aaron Sorkin

Javier Bardem is horribly miscast. Please check again tomorrow for another Academy Award nominee.

Okay, I can't get away with that.  If you want to skip the vibe of the whole blog, realize that the only thing that I didn't really care for was Javier Bardem's casting. But the movie is pretty good.  It helped that we went in with low expectations.  We didn't know that this was an Aaron Sorkin joint.  I mean, I suppose I should have figured that out pretty early because it has a lot of elements of his other works wrapped up in it.  But also, my wife and I both have relationships with I Love Lucy.  Appropriately, my wife loved I Love Lucy.  I really enjoyed it.  When the '80s and '90s were Nick at Nite evenings, I more associate I Love Lucy with fond memories.  My life was a lot simpler then.  My parents would watch these shows with me, knowing that the content would be entertaining and family-friendly.  So I never got wrapped up in the drama behind Lucy and Desi.  For me, Lucille Ball was the lady from the multiple Lucy shows and the lady who made Star Trek happen.  I also would imitate Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy when he did his over-the-top Desi Arnaz impression.  My wife never really cared for me doing that, but that's my relationship.

But Being the Ricardos is far more than the biopic of Lucy and Desi.  When I was writing recently about Spencer, I criticized that the story took place over the course of three consecutive days.  Those days portrayed Princess Diana as emotionally unstable and it was bleak throughout.  With Being the Ricardos, the film takes place over the course of a week that brought about a perfect storm.  Desi Arnaz was being accused of having an affair; Lucille Ball had to let the higher ups that she was pregnant; and the most fascinating element, HUAC was going after Lucy for being a communist.  Honestly, you could have made this movie just about the American response to the Red Scare and I would label this movie, "Two Thumbs Up!  Fine Holiday Fun!"  Instead, Sorkin --whether accurately or Sorkinly --raises the stakes to an insane level.  There's this vibe of a pressure cooker throughout the film.  When the silent font of a "Day X" pops up on the screen, slowly and ominously, it almost feels like a horror movie as the characters of the story march to their doom.  While we have the benefit of history to build on the dramatic irony --Lucy would be okay --we knew also that Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball would divorce because of infidelity on the part of Desi Arnaz.

It's stressful, but it is compounded by the fact that Lucille Ball definitely wasn't Lucy Ricardo.  To do what you did as a woman in Hollywood during the Red Scare is unimaginable.  The film points out that a lot of credit goes to Desi Arnaz, who has the benefit of being a man in a male-driven society.  But we also have to remember that Desi Arnaz was of Cuban descent.  Cuba.  We still have knee-jerk reactions to Cuba half-a-century later and this guy was the head of Desilu.  So of course, Lucy and Desi weren't crying like a baby or singing "Babalu" all day.  No, these were powerhouses.  They were rude without realizing it.  Sorkin toes this line with the portrayal of these characters.  Lucy does some awful things, yet it still portrayed as friendly.  Desi is an alpha male --often times to a fault --and has a thread of absolute devotion to his wife.  Heck, the movie is about him cheating on her and yet there's this strong idea that he would do anything for Lucy.  Let's be clear:  I'm totally in favor of her kicking him to the curb.  But Sorkin allows for both emotions to play out in the film and allows the audience to sort out their feelings.  So, you know, great movie.

But then there's the point I started with.  It's weird to think of how many movies that make it to the Academy Awards are either based on true stories or are straight up biopics.  Maybe it's a tie to the idea that we're valuing the subject of the movie rather than the quality of the movie itself.  This kind of leads to the argument of whether or not a person is doing a really good impersonation of the person or captures their essence.  As part of that, I have a hard time seeing Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz.  That could be okay.  I mean, people have played against type many times.  I also really love Javier Bardem.  When I see his name attached to a film, I normally lose my mind.  He's borderline genius.  But Javier Bardem is almost the antithesis of Desi Arnaz, at least what he presented to the public.  The only thing that Javier Bardem seemingly has in common with Arnaz is that they both come from Spanish-speaking countries.  But Javier Bardem isn't one for impersonations.  He's always a version of Javier Bardem.  In this, he's a tank.  He's honestly the largest I've ever seen him.  He's straight up muscular.  Desi Arnaz was this Teen Beat heart-throb.  He was svelt and wore thin ties because his body suited that.  He was smiles comprised of all teeth.  I'm sure that he could have been a powerhouse behind the scenes. But he demonstrated this element of whimsy with everything he did.  Bardem still gives me a No Country for Old Men, Skyfall vibe.

It's not that Kidman exactly screams Lucille Ball.  There are times that I'm desperately looking for something that matches my image of Ball.  But do you know who she doesn't look like? She doesn't look like straight up Nicole Kidman.  My mind allows me to lie to myself when I look at her.  Couple that with the fact that Kidman is doing a voice that might not be a perfect imitation, but captures the essence of Lucy's voice goes a long way.  I see her getting credit for this performance because it's nuanced and makes you feel like this might be Lucille Ball.

But the MVP in terms of playing the biopic rules is earned by J.K. Simmons.  I don't care that he's in everything.  I don't think the man has let me down yet.  He nails William Frawley perfectly.  He looks like the dude and carries himself the same way.  It is uncanny.  He honestly steals the show in every scene he's in, which is saying something because his peers in this film are phenomenal.  Honestly, outside of the oddly cast Bardem, the movie is a powerhouse of performances.  It has a bunch of people that I adore.  

So it's a  far better movie than I ever imagined.  Is it the pinnacle of Sorkin's career?  Probably not.  But it hits every button that I like in a biopic, which is especially high considering that I roll my eyes at many biopics.  It is a superb film with mostly great performances and is tight as can be.  I loved it.

PG-13 for language mostly.  It's got sci-fi violence that is associated with video games.  If I had to pick the sandbox game that is getting most spoofed in this movie, it's Grand Theft Auto.  But this is a much tamer Grand Theft Auto.  It's on Disney+, so it can't be that offensive.  That being said, I'm glad we didn't let my kids watch it.  Regardless, PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Shawn Levy

Okay, people need to stop recommending comedies to me.  I love Ryan Reynolds.  He's a very funny human being and I respect the whole vibe he's got going on.  It's a bit aggressive, but that's cool.  It really works for him.  But my buddy, whom I often trust when it comes to comedies, raved about this movie.  It's fine, I guess. We all have to take the following into account:  The man is in love and he watched it with his girlfriend.  Of course it was hilarious.  There's something about the communal experience that makes or breaks a comedy.  My wife and I, who are also in love, were watching this as a distraction.  As a distraction, it kind of works.  But as a fully fledged comedy, it's very meh.

There's a lot that bugs me about this movie.  It feels like I'm the salty old man who only likes snobby films.  It doesn't help that I'm watching Free Guy because it has a Visual Effects nom for the Academy Awards.  That means that I've been watching top tier art and then chased it with a spoof about video games.  But Free Guy owes way too much to The Lego Movie.  I keep coming back to The Lego Movie and for that, I apologize.  But the story and the characters are the exactly the same.  I hate this kind of writing, so bear with me.  Emmett and Guy are background characters in someone else's story.  They pride themselves on how mundane their lives are, down to purchasing overpriced coffee.  (The same joke is in both movies, guys.) He encounters a hot lady rebel who wants to take down the system and is shocked by how vanilla this guy is.  Together, they team up and Emmett / Guy learn how to really manipulate their game based environments to make them the most special characters in history.  It's the same movie.  Okay, I'm aware of tropes.  But this really is beat-by-beat.  It's so similar that there was almost nothing to look forward to except for wondering how Guy was going to end up with Millie.  

Spoilers:  He doesn't.  My ending was better.

My ending was that Guy gives up on the fact that they come from separate worlds and that Millie was going to learn to love Keys, which is what happens.  But then they program a virtual NPC Millie with the same algorithm that made him a real character.  Come on.  Instead, Free Guy relied on my least favorite rom-com trope:  one of the guys ends up being such a mensch that he can just appreciate that Millie ended up with someone that made her happy.  Come on.  Where is the consequence there?  If there is a relationship that Guy finds universe-changing, there should be some fallout when he gets rejected.   Even just making him sad would have been a real option.  But we need happy endings in our films, so that apparently isn't an option when it comes to storytelling.  There's no real consequence to his actions.  Heck, even Buddy is brought back to life for no real reason.  (Remember, the server that held Buddy's code was completely wiped.  I'm following the rules of the film here.  Buddy coming back, while welcomed, doesn't make a lick of sense.)

I'm just going to continue griping because it is easy writing right now.  I'm going to give this movie a middle-of-the-road review on Letterboxd, so don't worry.  But there's so much holding this movie away from being great that it just irks me.  Taika Waititi is completely wasted in this role.  He's honestly one of the funniest human beings on Earth.  The man is a borderline super-genius and he's playing the villain in this movie?  His plan makes no sense.  Antwan wants Free City 2 to be the biggest game ever.  So he's going to wipe Free City 1?  Okay, let's pretend that there's some logic to that.  When Blue Shirt Guy becomes a social media sensation, it draws a lot of attention to Free City 1, which eventually makes Antwan mad?  The movie tells us that pre-sales for Free City 2 go down because of all of the attention to Free City 1.  This is a game that promised to port over everything from the first game into the second game, so why would people stop wanting to see Blue Shirt Guy in the sequel?  If anything, it reads like a stunt from the company to draw attention to Free City 2.

Then, Antwan wants to purge Free City 1 because it has code that was stolen from Millie and Keys.  That actually could be a reasonable motivation.  But why doesn't Antwan just settle out of court if they have evidence against him?  Instead of wiping out all of the users and destroying the game, implying that the consequences of such an action would be devastating, just pay them for the code?   Or just stretch out the lawsuit as far as it could go.  But he literally takes an axe to the company servers.  Downing the game while it is being streamed to the world seems like a way more economically suicidal move than simply taking a slap on the hand.  Now, if I was being a little more even-keeled about this movie, which I admit that I should be, I could analyze this and realize that the villain has more of an issue with pride and humility than money.  But it is just so weird.  It seems like inflated stakes when the movie doesn't really justify these stakes.

But if you are looking for a movie to make you laugh, there's some cute stuff in here.  I don't think I ever guffawed, but it's a fun time.  The themes are pretty empty.  There's that element of finding the value in the self and the mundane.  There's the American Dream of worthiness and the transcendental self-actualization that can be inferred by Guy's stepping out of his bank teller role.  But I can almost guarantee that no one behind the making of this movie was shooting for lofty ideals.  They were making a movie about video games that got nominated for a visual effects award, despite the fact that the visual effects were super-duper forgettable.  If anything, the stylized world of Free City inhibits really impressive special effects.  Also, considering how good the visuals are for movies like Dune, it's kind of hilarious that Free Guy is even on this list.

Honestly, Free Guy is okay at best.  I wish it was great.  There's a lot of talent here, but it is a Lego Movie knock-off with less investment.  I actually would sooner watch The Lego Movie again than Free Guy. 

TV-MA, which is a bummer, but it totally needs to be TV-MA.  I'd love to show this to everybody, but it has actual evidence of the worst of humanity. There's nudity, violence, and torture that isn't recreated, but original photographs. It's really rough to watch.  The problem is...people should totally see this.

DIRECTORS:  Traci Curry and Stanley Nelson

​Documentaries are hard to write about.  I'm going to add to that. Documentaries are hard to write about even when you feel like writing.  My life has been through the wringer lately.  I'm sure that everyone is feeling pulled at the strings and sometimes self-care is kind of important.  I just have to remember that I find joy in writing to a certain degree.  I get to listen to music and talk about something that I enjoy discussing, even if it isn't a dialogue.  But documentaries are especially hard to write about. The point of a theme in a work of fiction is that the reader is meant to approach the subject material and glean the author's message.  Based on cultural background and personal history, there is a spectrum of interpretation that can be seen in film. But with documentaries, the filmmakers want you to come away with a very clear perspective.  Now, that would be easy to write about if I disagreed with the documentary.  After all, I'm one of the three people who thought that Free Solo was complete bunk.

But I almost completely align with the message of Attica.  I'm in that place where I've gone so completely hippie-dippy liberal that I'm considered out-of-touch with the common man, despite the fact that I pretty much am the common man. I'm the audience that gets criticized for being self-congratulatory.  Maybe it is because I watch so many movies.  I mean, this website is evidence that I'm potentially brainwashed to the Hollywood agenda with the sheer number of movies I watch a year and write about.  But the story of Attica absolutely needs to be told.

For me, Attica was always a punchline.  More than a reference to the actual event at Attica State Prison, Attica was a Dog Day Afternoon reference.  It's odd to think that the allusion played a bigger role in history than the actual event, which is what the documentarians were focused on in this movie.  I mean, I know that something went down at a prison and that people were talking about it.  That doesn't make me culturally literate.  But the shock of Attica is that none of it was a secret.  When we look at older events, we have to assume so much wasn't catalogued because censorship was at an all time high.  In my head, Rodney King was the first hate crime that the world watched in real time.  But the events at Attica State Prison were so darned public, but people just didn't seem to care.  Okay, let's be honest with that sentence:  White People didn't seem to care.

I can see why this story got buried in history.  I mean, I keep saying "buried", but I'm really talking about WhiteWashed.  The word "Attica" didn't disappear.  It's one of the moments listed when it came to prison reform.  But it also was a tense situation.  The me-of-high-school, Conservative Tim, might have jumped on board what most of America probably believed:  a prison riot needed to be quelled.  Prisoners didn't have the same rights and that Americans shouldn't negotiate with terrorists.  Okay, these are valid points.  I mean, I was closer to this philosophy when I wrote about 13th.  But Attica, as a film, makes something very clear --there would be no prisoner rights at all if it wasn't for the events of Attica.

I'm always going to be an aggressive pacifist.  It's just woven into me.  I honestly would like to make it through this lifetime without directly causing or contributing to the death of another human being.  Call me crazy.  But there's a moment in the documentary that you realize that one side is acting sane and the other side is the industrial prison complex.  This all starts with an act of violence.  The inmates of Attica State Prison manage to take a wing of the prison, severely injuring a prison guard.  Now, based on all of the stories we've been told through both fiction and non-fiction, that prison guard should have been killed or tortured. That's something that we have all placed on prisoners everywhere.  Has that happened?  Probably.  But that didn't happen at Attica.  That man was protected by the prisoners and rushed to get medical attention.  But the prisoners knew that this prison riot was going to have insane consequences.  They kept that man hostage.  Yeah, I really feel like I'm excusing sin right now, but I'm making the bigger point that I think that there is no right behavior and that it was a bad choices among worse choices.

But when the movie breaks down beyond the facts of the case, it becomes this giant moral and emotional drive into the heart of what institutionalized racism is.  John Oliver just did this whole thing about CRT and how it is fundamentally misunderstood by most of White and Conservative America.  But Attica stresses how actual CRT comes into play in reality.  The completely watered down understanding of what CRT is that, post-Civil Rights Era America may claim that it doesn't develop racist policies, but it may intentionally or inadvertently uphold racist practices in its policies.  The events of Attica are examples of that.  While White prisoners had a hard time in the Attica State Prison, the Black members were treated abhorrently.  The events of the prison weren't an attack necessarily on the competence of prisoners v. guards.  It was a part of Black America getting the voice out through the failure of White America to silence those voices.  When you watch this, the final act is Day Five.  Day Five, everything goes down and it is way more brutal than you are ready for.  But it is in the stripping of pretense that we have to say that CRT might have value.

It is genocide in a microcosm.  This was cruelty reflecting the attitudes of the Civil War in New York. Yes, people were sad and afraid for their loved ones being held hostage in the prison.  But when the green light was given to storm the prison, the charade of protecting other Blue Lives went out the window. I think nine guards were killed and all of those deaths came from the other guards.  It was a free for all, with guards shouting the N-word with a level of pride.  People were calling dibs on Black prisoners and that's the stuff that BLM is fighting against.  Because these things keep on happening.  Yeah, it was a while ago.  But the reason that people at all talk about prison reform is because of the events at Attica.  

It's an insane documentary that feels like it has more in common with a Holocaust documentary than a look at American history.  There are so many of those moments that make me question whether or not Americans are fundamentally better than countries whose atrocities have been made public in history books.  Maybe we're just getting around to making these moments more truthful through pictures and film.  But this documentary is one of the more important documentaries out there and it needs to be watched, regardless of how tough the subject matter is to digest.