PG-13 and, for my money, it might be the most family friendly of all the Ghostbusters movies.  One of the lines that Ghostbusters movies have to tread is that trifold line between horror, rebellious comedy, and being family-friendly.  It's managed to pull it off every time, to various degrees of success.  While still holding true to all three elements, Frozen Empire was way less scary than I thought it would be.  It's got language. It's got some inappropriate jokes.  They went over my ten-year-old's head.  If the kids can handle other Ghostbusters movies, this one is less offensive.

DIRECTOR:  Gil Kenan

Okay, the reviews are just upsetting me.   It's kind of like being a Snyderverse fan right now, only a lot of people don't like the Snyder stuff.  I don't know.  Because I'm being super cryptic, I'm just going to spell it out. I don't honestly know how you can detest Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.  I can see how you might not be in love with it.  It takes a lot to win love from an audience.  But considering that the reviews for this movie are abysmal, I'm going to question what is happening.  Now, I'm playing subject to algorithms.  From my perspective, there's a very loud audience who says, "This movie was super fun and the critics are wrong."  I happen to be in that camp.  That's a problem because the algorithm might be feeding me what I want to see.  I can't definitively say that audiences like this movie and it's just the critics because, honestly, I really liked the movie.

So I went to the mattresses and read the criticisms.  Most of them are very odd.  I want to talk about those in a second.  There is one review that is incredibly illuminating.  The review, which may have been the New Yorker, stated that the movie is too Gen X for its own good.  This brought up a paradox.  The thing about that review is that it is accurate.  I can kind of get behind that read of the movie.  The reasons I loved Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Ghostbusters: Afterlife is because they felt like really authentic Ghostbusters movies.  But the reason that they feel like real sequels to the original movie is that they use the original movie as a template.  To a certain extent, there is some degree of nostalgia fandom happening.  I can't deny that. I do argue that Frozen Empire is not a nostalgia movie so much as it is understanding that there is a way to make a Ghostbusters movie and they use the foundation to do that with these newer sequels.  But the problem with attacking Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire by saying it is too Gen X for today's market is saying that they fundamentally don't want Ghostbusters.

I'm all about changing things up.  Growth or death.  But it isn't like we've been getting Ghostbusters movies every year and that we're saturated with this franchise.  A lot of people keep pointing to the 2016 Ghostbusters: Answer the Call as wokeness destroying a franchise.  First of all, if you say "Wokeness ruined something," I automatically write you off.  It's not female ghostbusters that make a movie bad. I wanted to like Answer the Call so badly.  It was bad because it missed out on some of the specific tonal issues that make a movie a Ghostbusters movie.  I hate to be advocating for a formula when it comes to making movie, but Ghostbusters is a tough nut to crack.  The thing about Ghostbusters is that the original movie has the weirdest strucutre of any big budget movie.  I remember watching a Cracked video where they dared someone to tell me what the movie is about.  IGN came out very loudly and started saying that they actually wanted ghostbusting in their Ghostbusters movie.  That's actually a pretty hot take, because that's not what the original movie did.

A lot of both Ghostbusters 1 & 2 are the guys investigating this big bad on the horizon.  There are small moments in the story where they confront the forerunners of the big bad, but ultimately the third act is the confrontation with the beast.  Ultimately, the movies are based in a lot of exposition and character, leading to the duel between the ghostbusters and the well-explained evil.  Guess what Frozen Empire does?  Exactly that.  Part of the problem with people advocating that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has is that there isn't enough action.  These aren't action movies.  These are horror comedies that have some action in them.  I adore that thing that I only get out of a Ghostbusters movie.  I honestly don't know another franchise or film that nails exactly what it means to be Ghostbusters.  A movie like Frozen Empire is a rare film that isn't afraid to be with its characters through silly and serious times until the final act.  

Now, all of this sounds like that Gen X criticism is accurate.  The criticism that this is just another nostalgia trip seems like it might carry some weight.  I would argue against that.  While I adore Afterlife, I can give you some points that say that Afterlife is just fan service. (I really can't.  I think it's perfect.  I want to take that sentence back, but I'm making a point about Frozen Empire.)  Structurally, Frozen Empire owes a lot to the original films.  But in terms of actually straying from what is safe, Frozen Empire should get a medal for not checking boxes.  I'll give you one moment that I think is a bit of a sin: the explosion of the containment unit.  Okay, you're calling back a little too hard and I don't love that.  But Frozen Empire is establishing that there is a wide world of old gods who are willing to destroy the world and they're not all named Gozer the Gozarian.  On top of that, we don't always need proton packs to solve the problem.  One of the things that the previous films established pretty early on was that Egon was going to save the day through inventing a gizmo.  They might have to misuse that gizmo, like crossing the streams, but that was going to solve a lot of the problem.

Instead, Frozen Empire establishes that everyone can't be Egon Spengler.  Sure, there's an entire science division. I love that because it gives Winston agency over this entire franchise that he absolutely needed as a character.  But I like that a different group of heroes has a different approach to beating the bad guy.  Sure, we still have Phoebe who has a very Egon approach, closing her character arc showing that she can hold her own when everyone doubts her. I  like that. But the real resolve comes from the other nerds in this group who have different approaches.  One of the hearts of the Ghostbusters is Ray.  Ray, despite being the drive behind the entire franchise, both in-universe and out, really kind of gets ignored in terms of how to handle things. Ray's the guy who believes from moment one that the lore is real.  He's the guy who isn't trying to science everything away.  Instead, it's his passion for the history coupled with Spengler's obsession with numbers and facts that makes the entire concept work.  Having the ending that this movie does gives Ray a lot more credit than he's gotten in the past.

But the best part about Frozen Empire is the human element of the whole thing.  For a second, I want to talk about how Walter Peck, who worked for the EPA and was basically disgraced in the '80s for his annoying (albeit, real-world hero) views on ghostbusting.  For a while, I thought that he couldn't possibly be elected mayor, but I'm literally sitting and waiting for Donald Trump to lie his way back into the Oval Office. So I guess Walter Peck makes sense. But the human element is just all of the emotional connections that this movie makes.  Phoebe is in isolation and she almost gets into a relationship with a ghost named Melody.  I love that, because she's alone, she can't have a sounding board for bad ideas.  I also really dig that I didn't see the value that Melody has in the movie.  That's something that seemed pretty sick.  But then there's all of the commentary on aging and finding value plus the nature of the new family and the found family.  All of it works.  The B-plots work fabulously with the A-plot and I don't get how people can detest this movie.

The pacing is weird because that is the pacing of a Ghostbusters movie.  I don't want a super action movie where everything is tongue-in-cheek.  That's not the franchise that we're trying to sell here.  You can say it's copying too much, but that's only in terms of where things fall, not what things fall there.  It's a significantly better movie than critics made it out to be.  We, as a culture, seem to be done with a good time.  I'm not saying that every movie has to be a good time.  Bummer films are great.  But Frozen Empire delivers on everything promised and more.  It's a great movie that checks all the boxes.

Not rated, but there is some casual conversation about one of the protagonists threatening to rape one of the characters.  There's also a throughline about adultery.  A woman is also burned to death for being a heretic.  Nothing visual is really shown in any of these stories, but the stories are fundamentally about these immoral actions.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

1957?  Really?  I thought that this was way earlier of a movie.  This is the first time that a date caught me offguard.  Sorry.  Let me start again.

I'm no good at interpreting Bergman films.  I'll admit it.  I crapped the bed when it came to breaking down Persona.  Some things are just too smart for me.  It doesn't mean that I shouldn't write about these things.  After all, if I only wrote about the easy ones out there, that wouldn't contribute anything to the discourse. If I screw up again, like I realistically will, I apologize. I like the challenge.  Just know that I'm in an overwhelming state of anxiety when I write these things.  

The Seventh Seal is the Bergman that most people know.  The stills from the movie alone make every cinematic montage talking about the major movements in cinema.  I bet my dad loved this movie.  I mean, I really like the movie.  I don't think I love the movie.  I'll explain that in a bit.  But I think that my dad was probably all over this movie.  He was way smarter than I'll ever be and I need to stop comparing myself to him.  But this is more of a commentary on taste and hobbies than it is about braininess or bad self-esteem on my part.  My dad was into this era of history.  He loved the Crusades and King Arthur and legends.  I bet he loved The Canterbury Tales.  He died before I even knew what The Canterbury Tales were.  Me?  I can't stand The Canterbury Tales.  It's not a flattering trait for an English teacher.  We're supposed to be obsessed with The Canterbury Tales.  But between having a rough professor in college who taught that to me and having class after class find the text too frustrating without enough payoff, I can safely say that I'm not a fan.

But what I like about The Seventh Seal is that it makes me almost love the idea of The Canterbury Tales because The Seventh Seal, from my limited perspective, pulls off what the original tales tried to.  It doesn't hurt that we're looking at similar motifs and images between both works either.  The Canterbury Tales has a framing narrative of a wager during a pilgrimage about who can tell the most fascinating story.  It's a pretty loose structure, allowing the author to tell a variety of stories commenting on the different social aspects of society. The Seventh Seal gives a more concrete framing story.  Antonius Block is playing a game of chess against Death to win his life back.  The game is slow and he meets a variety of people while Death chooses his next move.  During this time, Block vocalizes his own frustrations while other people's tales --both involving Block and not --color society at the time.  Honestly, The Seventh Seal feels like a spiritual and more successful sequel to The Canterbury Tales.  (That was a sentence that frustrated generations of scholars because I took two seminal works about fate and society and simplfied that arguement into "one's better".)

Like most of Bergman's works, all of which are challenging, The Seventh Seal isn't about one thing. Bergman's really good at making me trip over my words in an attempt to distill art into concepts that are ephemeral.  I can only talk about the things that either I grasped or spoke to me personally.  And, Geez Louise, does The Seventh Seal reflect so much of what I believe when it comes to matters of faith.  I love the fact that the entire movie balances itself on an irony that the protagonist just cannot see.  The opening of the movie is the establishment of the chess game.  Block is talking to the embodiment of Death.  Now, one could argue that the personification of Death is a metaphor and that Bergman is only using an actor to play Death to stress that lower-case death comes for us all and cannot be tricked.  But Bergman makes it very clear in this movie: Death is a creature that looks human.  Block is not the only one to see this specific manifestation of Death.  Death is also crafty and disguises himself as other people, interacting with Block and others throughout the movie.  Death is a character that is both literal and figurative in this movie.

Yet, Block's major frustration is not the attempt to save his own life.  Don't get me wrong.  He's literally doing that.  But he doesn't want to die because he loves life so much.  He does so because he questions his own faith in God.  Now, this is where I love the movie as a Catholic and as a lover of film.  The English teacher / film nerd in me adores the notion that someone who is talking with a supernatural manifestation of Death questions the unimaginable.  He begs God to give him a sign to turn an abstract faith into something tangible while he's talking with something abstract and impossible to imagine. Death, ironically, is the very sign that Block pleads for and he can't comprehend that.  Part of that comes from the notion of the era that the film is set in.  But the reality is that Block laments not having a greater concrete understanding of the notion of God.  The Catholic in me --a Catholic who is often incredibly frustrated with his faith --understands Block's frustration.  Block and I have the same issue:  we may not believe in God, but we need to believe in God.  

I almost want to let that sentence lie because I'm having breakthroughs right now.  I want to add something to it because I want to make my life not seem as bleak as Block's.  I want to live in a world where God exists, thus I will continue to believe in something that naturally seems to elude me.  Block and I have a similar skepticism.  Sin is an active choice to do something wrong, to turn away from God.  But belief, true and earnest belief, is almost like an emotion.  When I don't believe in the chupacabra, there is an element of choice in there.  I can choose to research the chupacabra and that very choice to research is part of my belief.  But if the data says "There is no chupacabra", from that moment, there isn't a choice.  So much about just existing in the world is a test in the existence of God.  For all of the majesty of nature and humanity, there are more grounded explanations that can derived from science.  (I'm also in the camp, thank goodness, that doesn't treat science and faith as mutually exclusive things).  Block, from his confession to Death, has a similar yearning.  He wants to believe in God, especially if he's in sight of his end.  Oddly, I stopped fearing death a while ago.  That has little to do with this, but it's where Block and I separate.  I've made peace with a potential eternal silence.

But the thing that gets me is that there is this recurring theme of Christians kind of being terrible people throughout.  It's a time of the Crusades.  Plague has ravaged the land.  Things are bleak.  But one of the incredibly visceral images that I retain from this movie is the burning of the heathen.  It's very Joan of Arc.  All of the stories, even though they have slightly different focuses, are about people touching on elements of faith and morality.  (Okay, the guy who sees visions is his own thing.) But there's this whole discussion of faith being run through a world where the actual behavior that Christ encouraged is ignored, despite the notion of the moral majoirty seems to be causing problems. Yeah, it's a story about frustrating faith.  That's why this movie hits with me.  

Yeah, I could go deeper.  But sometimes a movie just talks to the things that are on my mind.  It may frame a story differently than what was intended.  But I don't even care.  I like this movie for what I think it is about.  

Not rated, mainly because this is a spectacle Vegas experience.  It's kind of like a Planet Earth or a Koyaanisqatsi​ where there's a lot of visually intimidating things, but nothing that would be even remotely considered offensive.  Considering that Aronofsky is a vehement atheist, there seems to be respect for the notion of religion in this one.  For an Aronofsky movie, it's actually quite tame...mainly because he knows this film's intended audience.

DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky

I really went back and forth about writing about this movie. It's only 55 (? I counted 45) minutes long.  It's more of a planetarium show than it is a traditional film.  But it's Darren Aronofsky and it does have a science-fiction plot running through it.  Listen, I'm going to write what I'm going to write and we'll see how much I get out of this.  It may not be much, but I'm already giving myself Brownie points for writing about this movie at all.

Also, I'm going to be one of the rare film blogs that has this Aronofsky movie on his page.

If you hadn't guessed, we went to Vegas this weekend.  The Sphere is the only place you can see this movie.  Listen, I love me a good planetarium IMAX movie.  If I want to avoid dancing around it, Postcard from Earth might be the most impressive IMAX movie ever made.  IMAX movies only tend to go so far.  In terms of expectations from an IMAX movie, there is some warping of the image, mainly because a two-dimensional image is being beamed onto a round space.  But Aronofsky does the thing that most people don't.  In a lot of cases (with some forgiveness for warping), Aronofsky uses such advanced technical techniques that makes the audience really feel the experience of seeing these things up close.  Like Planet Earth, it's a breakdown of everything that makes life on Earth the way it is.  As part of that, Postcard from Earth is one part nature documentary and one part social criticism.  

The thing about Aronofsky that I respect, but often don't enjoy, is the idea that he is going to be incredibly challenging with his movies.  Sometimes, it is at the expense of the story.  When I think about mother!, there was a lot that I liked, but his own hubris kind of got in the way.  This is him holding himself back.  There's something paradoxical about the very nature of making a spectacle piece like Postcard from Earth that Aronofsky is really treading here.  One of the things I've noticed about the big name Vegas shows is that they often aren't challenging.  That's an oversimplification, mainly because I'm trying to make a point.  The other show we saw was The Beatles: Love through Cirque de Soleil.  Was there something political?  Sure.  Was it the most easy to ignore political message in the world?  Also true.  Aronofsky is making Postcard from Earth in that vacuum.  He's making something that needs to be visually spectacular before going into his political message.  I know that the message that we're destroying our planet is polarizing (no pun intended) to some people.

But I also feel like it is a message that we were inundated with growing up.  I mean, we're the Captain Planet generation.  The notion that people are ravaging the Earth isn't anything all that new.  It's weird that this movie can get people riled up as much as it does.  Postcard from Earth does something really smart to get that message out though. The majority of the movie is the spectacle you want.  Transitioning from a standard 16:9 narrative about humans waking up from a deep sleep in space (which has meh special effects), the movie shifts into the full sphere full of 4K (8K?) visuals about the history of Earth and the dynamics of nature.  Because that shift is so impressive, coupled with rumble seats that give it that extra RPX experience, the movie wins its audience with an intense overwhelming of the senses.  In the final 30% of the movie, however, it reminds us of that science fiction element promised at the beginning.  It becomes critical of humanity and the notion that we are the ones solely responsible for this change.

I suppose in my current hippie years, I'm incredibly moved by such a message.  The movie works on the visuals of juxtaposition.  The first 70% of the movie in IMAX is about how gorgeous things are.  It celebrates man, despite damning him later.  It shows the greatness of man in his environment.  But then Aronofsky takes us through the visual consequences of that genius and specialness unchecked.  Yeah, if we can terraform distant planets and moons, why don't we just terraform Earth?  I think its a metaphor and a lovely shortcut story of how we can't afford to live on the place that gave us life. While I find effective, I know that it didn't necessarily work for everybody.

But it should be taken into account, this is a very impressive pseudo-documentary.  If this wasn't framed by a science-fiction premise of people awakening on a distant planet, ultimately, this would be Koyaanisqatsi.  It is an accusatory look at our world.  Me?  I love when things get political, especially when it is well-executed.  That's this.  But not everyone digs it.  It's a beautiful looking movie that may be pulling its punches for the sake of views, but it is pretty darned impressive.  Good art tends to change society.  While I think that the current climate (pun, unfortunately, intended) might not be receptive to such a message, I don't know if that falls on Aronofsky exactly.  In a perfect world, he'd hit even harder.  But it is impressive, in the way that things in Vegas should be impressive.

​

Rated PG-13 for some somewhat unsettling images.  It really depends what your buttons are.  For most, it is probably the animal cruelty.  For some, it's the mutilation and violence.  Sometimes, that violence leads to death.  But if I'm talking about everything that happens in this movie, there's also off-screen affairs and language.  But there's nothing really in this movie that feels R-rated, so rest in the knowledge that messed up stuff is often just messed up.

DIRECTOR:  Christopher Nolan

It's weird.  This was the first Christopher Nolan movie that I left thinking "It's alright."  I watched it back in 2006. I  own the Blu-Ray of the movie.  I may or may not have watched my Blu-Ray copy of The Prestige.  I can't promise in either direction if that is true or not.  But I was obsessed with Nolan before this point.  I was a big Memento nerd, which is now a movie I'm afraid to revisit because it might scream late-'90s / early-2000s a bit too much now.  It mostly comes down to the third act.  All these blogs get spoilery, so I'm just going to establish that this one is going to get spoilery really early.  One of my big thoughts on Nolan is his use of the twist.  He's never as bad as Shyamalan, who often needs his twist to work for the sake of the movie to work.  Nolan just likes turning things on their heads so that people don't necessarily see what's coming.  Like Interstellar, the twist in this movie could be seen as a bit polarizing.

See, the problem I have with the movie is that the twist is a genre swap.  I'm not talking about a Parasite genre swap.  The genre swap in Parasite is a swap between two realistic genres.  It goes from drama to thriller / horror.  If you were in a horror movie, most of your life probably looked like a drama or a comedy.  That's a natural progression of what reality would look like to you.  But The Prestige goes from realistic genre to science-fiction and that bugs the heck out of me. The conceit that The Prestige is that we have these two vicious geniuses of illusion.  The rules are that there is a trick behind everything.  It's about how far you would go to make that trick seem credible.  Now, to Nolan's credit, the key idea behind these illusions is that there has to be great sacrifice.  Borden's major sacrifice (among many) is that he has to split his life 50/50 with his twin brother.  When Borden is the twin, he has to live a life of anonymity.  His brother, reasonably, does not share his affections with his wife.  A natural result of that is the dissolution of a happy marriage with the woman he loves.  But Borden understands that.  It works with the story, especially considering that Cutter guesses Borden's secret to a certain extent.  

The issue I have is that Angier's secret is a bit of a cop-out.  To not mince words, Nikola Tesla never invented cloning.  It's actually kind of weird that Nolan would even imply that Nikola Tesla was even interested in cloning or duplication, considering that his passion was focused on dispelling fears about current and creating efficient means of power.  But instead, it's a science that, as far as I know, he had no interest in.  It's kind of like hiring Albert Einstein to make a sweet Vegan burrito. Like, I get that it takes a science to create a sweet Vegan burrito.  It's just that Albert Einstein was a nutritionist.  That's not his cup of tea.  The reason that we had Nikola Tesla in this movie is that we had to have a scientist who had a valid scientific background, but was also disavowed from his community.  Also, it's rad to put Nikola Tesla in things, especially if he's played by David Bowie.  

Now I'm writing for serious.  I've been writing slow and crappily this entire blog because I've been distracted and I've danced around a point that I absolutely need to make clear right now.  This second watch kind of changed things for me.  I was ready to put this movie as background noise. (Okay, that's not true.  I knew that I was going to be writing about this.  I was dismissive, that's true.)  Going into the movie with a knowledge that I wasn't going to like the cloning bit as a solution for the murder that is teased in the beginning of the movie, I watched it just as a movie about two obsessed magicians.  Oh my goodness.  This is a movie that works so darned well, especially if you can get over the cloning bit nonsense.  This is a movie about escalation.  I do love how many people side with Borden over Angier.  I'm on Team Angier for a lot of the movie.  Not always.  I would be real monster if I was always on Team Angier.  But Nolan creates a narrative where sympathies start dwindling given enough rope to hang oneself.  On top of that, I find it weird if you end up on any side completely.  Both men prove to be absolutely monstrous.

One of my students pointed out that the cloning story is almost its own movie that doesn't belong in this movie.  I then proceeded to tell him that movie was already made and it was called The 6th Day.  I'm sure that I just woke up a memory in someone out there reading who hasn't thought about The 6th Day in a God's age.  I kind of agree.  Like I mentioned, Nolan's obsession with giving a film a twist or a turn sometimes hinders him.  I'm not saying that Nolan's other films aren't about character. They have been and he really is marvelous about making strong character films. But like Oppenheimer, this is a movie about self-destruction.  As much as Borden hates Angiers and Angiers hates Borden, they are almost two people pointing guns at their own heads.  There's a sick level of respect for the enemy that drives these characters.  Angiers has an intense hate for Borden that is quasi/sorta valid.  It took a discussion with the students yesterday to understand why Borden didn't know if he tied the right or the wrong knot.  (I don't know why the other Borden didn't confess to the other brother outside of the understand that Borden literally was one part of an evil twin situation.) His wife dies and Angiers just needed an answer.  That actually is a valid reason to go full big-bad.

But there's the moment.  As much as you could say that there are two protagonists to the film, the movie really does follow Angiers far more than Borden.  The moment that I am talking about is when Olivia confronts Angiers on his motivation for revenge.  There's a shift that is absolutely well-earned when Angiers shifts his vengeance from his wife to jealousy over brilliance.  Now, Nolan's kind of a genius for how he sets this up.  There are steps all along the way that point to one direction and then there's the real drop.  It's the magic trick all along the way.  Angiers is wrathful about his wife's negligent death.  Borden gets a family and a career.  Borden has everything that Angiers wants.  Angiers keeps one-upping him in terms of showmanship, but not in quality.  It all seems like it is an extension of the initial death, but that shift happens oh-so-subtlely.  One of the key concepts in the movie that Angiers never understands is the notion of the trick being everything off-stage.  But in his own way, he's tricking himself by the  life he leads.  It's really this cool concept and I love it.

I am more cool with the cloning plotline in the movie.  After all, Angiers can't understand that living a life of illusion is where great magicians are made, so he feels the need to make real magic.  I get that it fits in his character.  But it still is this festering sore in the middle of a very well made movie.  The frustrating part is that the movie gets so close to perfection only to fumble something that is so crucial to the story's dismount.  

​

Rated R for a dude murdering folks not-like it's his business.  It is his business.  But then it also spirals into revenge killing for the entire movie.  A lot of the murder is especially brutal because it is so matter-of-fact.  With that, there is some language.  There's also some sexuality that doesn't have explicit nudity, but it is there enough that I feel like I should  comment on it.  R.

DIRECTOR:  David Fincher

Guys, I'm probably taking a break after this.  I got through the Academy Awards.  I've been writing so so so so so so much and I kind of...um...need a moment for me.  But I'm glad I get to kind of dismount on a movie that a lot of people were "meh" about, but I really dug.  There's something special liking a movie that everyone else was meh about.  Sure, I'm going to get frustrated  at parties when I bring up this movie.  But the joke's on them!  I don't get invited to parties!

The glorious thing about this movie is that it gave me back Fight Club.  I'm going to be old for a minute, so please bear with me.  Fight Club was a great movie.  It was amazing.  It was life-changing.  But you know who else thought so?  Everybody else.  Not just everybody else.  The Mountain Dew generation fell in love with this movie and wouldn't shut up about it.  Then, they all took it a step further and started having fight clubs.  (Okay, not all of them.  But there were some!) You know that was the opposite message from the movie.  So I watched Fight Club a bunch of times and thought it was super cool.  But then it became everyone's favorite movie.  I'll point out my weaknesses when I have them.  I definitely have them when it comes to everyone talking about the same movie.  Honestly, there are some fandoms that accentuate the source and some fandoms that make it way worse.  Fight Club fans, Dark Knight fans, and Rick and Morty fans?  They make things so rough.

But it feels like The Killer is a movie almost directly aimed at me.  It's for people who have grown too old for Fight Club.  They are people who still want that cool, counter-culture vibe to their stories while simultaneously acknowledging that late-stage Capitalism is probably toxic as can be.  The Killer screams cool.  I know a lot of people are criticizing it for being boring. It's mainly because, despite having action in the movie, it is not an action movie.  There's a long time where we just have a guy externally doing mundane things while thinking about the proper way to kill someone.  Yeah, there's a bit of try-hard (or as Gen Z says, "Pick Me Energy) energy to the movie.  I don't deny that. But that's kind of Fincher's thing.  There's a voiceover and that voiceover is both sadistic and charming at the same time.  I mean, both the Killer and Jack lack names.  ("I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.") And they almost have a lackadaisical attitude to some pretty heavy things.  Maybe that's what makes the narration so charming.  There's rarely an adrenaline fueled moment.  When things go bad, they keep their cool.

What's interesting is that, as much as this character is motivated by having a sense of control in an uncontrollable world, he kind of sucks at maintaining control.  One of the recurring bits of narration is The Killer stressing the importance of adaptation, not improvisation.  (I'm now not quite sure that is the quote, but I've come too far now!) Yet, much of the movie is having the character think on his feet. The entire point of the story is almost the importance of abandoning a set of comfort zones.  When the Killer does everything right, he still fails to kill his target.  When he does things wrong, he takes out Florida Man (who is way more terrifying than I ever thought Florida Man could be).  If anything, the entire film is about embracing chaos.  Sure, there are moments when his killer's training actually pays off for the positive.  When he's leading the Expert to her death, she pulls the old betrayal bit. This might be the first time in any story where I see that bit completely fail because the protagonist never really gives it a chance to play out.  I found it satisfying, is all I'm saying.

But it is hard to write of this as a perfect movie.  I mean, I really enjoyed it.  I think I've made that abundantly clear.  But there were two things that kind of got under my craw.  There's almost no story here.  Honestly.  I don't hate that the last target on the Killer's list was spared.  It almost doesn't make sense, but I felt like it made sense to the character, so I'm going to let it slide.  No, I'm talking about, once the inciting incident happens (the failure to kill the target), everything else is just checking off a list of murders.  Now, I'm going to apologize a little bit at the same time.  This is a movie about a character and that character doesn't necessarily grow.  Instead, we use the character to learn something about the non-traditional.  Yeah, it's a cop out considering that I really need my characters to learn something from the events of the film. But The Killer is meant to give an insight into a much larger world. 

The second thing to bother me is the sitcom names.  Supernatural did this as well.  They tended to replace their own identity with those of musicians, but it was a funny gag.  It's just that one of the repeating motifs of the film is professionalism.  The Killer lives the life of a Spartan.  Everything is built to make him the ultimate assassin.  The one thing that he has that is personal is his home and his wife.  It's implied that it's his wife, so go from there.  But there is no enjoyment of the money he receives. One of my favorite lines in the movie is that he has more money than he can actually spend.  He prides himself in his work.  So this cutsey "Archibald Bunker" stuff almost pulls me out of the movie.  I mean, yeah, that kind of stuff worked in Fight Club.  There were cutesy little moments in there to juxtapose the sheer bleakness of the movie.  But if this is a story about how seriously you take the craft, it plants a weird headcanon in my brain.  That weird headcanon?  I'm glad you asked.

Part of me thinks that this is all imagined.  It's that same level of headcanon that comes with Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Ferris not existing.  (For those not in the know, there are some people who think that Ferris is just a manifestation of Cameron's desire for independence and rebellion.) Part of me thinks that The Killer is all made up, the fantasy of a nobody.  I hate to pull the American Psycho element into this, but part of my brain leeches onto this.  (I mean, I want the movie to be about a trained soulless assassin who isn't to be messed with.  That's my ideal world.)  The sitcom stuff is a big vulnerability for this killer.  All it would take would be one person to be a pop culture savant, like the audience, and they would look at his face.  One of the key ideas behind the story is that he has to be as forgettable as possible.  But then he names himself names like Richard Cunningham or Lou Grant, someone's going to tie the face to a name. The first thing I would do would be to look that person in the face and potentially comment on their name.

Also, considering that he lives by this intense bushido code, how come everything constantly goes poorly for him?  You would think that this killer would be really good at his job. But we never really witness much go right.  Okay, The Expert goes right.  But was he always going to let that guy go at the end?  He repeats the notion of compassion being a weak spot, and lets the guy go.  Here's me coming to grips with something I don't want to admit is a weakness.  I really like that he doesn't kill Claybourne.  It doesn't make a lick of sense, but I think it's a far better than just assassinating him.  Maybe it's just because of the change-up of the norm.  But honestly, it doesn't make sense.  He kills the cab driver, who is way more sympathetic than Claybourne.  If anything, Claybourne comes across as the most deserving of the hit.  But I just...liked it? I don't know.  It's silly.

But this movie kind of slaps.  Maybe it was because it just fell off the radar and was considered one of Fincher's lesser movies that I liked it so much.  There's barely a story.  It's just cool character.  I should hate this...

​...but I don't.

PG-13 for language and violence.  Kids really like using their middle fingers all willy-nilly in this movie.  Like, this is a movie of escalation and how mean people can be towards educators.  There are also accusations of racism, which shouldn't really be an MPAA thing.  It feels like the movie is not for kids, so just take that into account before showing this to children.

DIRECTOR:  Ilker Catak

This is the last one!   We watched everything that was available to us before the Academy Awards.  I really want to knock this one out before the Academy Awards so I can post all of my thoughts on each of the movies before the Awards actually start.  In a pretty darn good year for movies, I end on one that gives so much anxiety.  My wife can't watch doctor shows like House.  I can't watch teacher stuff because all I do is yell at the screen.

I have to remember that this is a movie that exists to make a point.  It is a story of how the small things cause people to be awful to each other. Because I didn't know much about the movie before going in, I'm actually going to commit one of my least favorite writing sins: the unnecessary summary.  I do it from time-to-time.  But people tend not know much about the foreign film category.  The basic premise is that there is a thief in the school.  The eager beaver teacher takes it upon herself to figure out who the thief is by laying a trap in the teachers' lounge.   She leaves her wallet behind with her camera recording.  She then discovers that it is the administrative assistant who is probably stealing from people.  By the way, never accuse the administrative assitant.  That person is a saint.  That person is allowed to get away with murder.  Well, the assistant is incensed regarding the accusation and everything escalates from there.  Of course, the assistant's kid is in Carla's class and she wants to protect this kid from any ugliness.  But then the kid kind of becomes the worst one in this battle for justice.  

Now, to the anxiety.  Again, I get that this is a story about unnecessary escalation.  Many stories are.  But I have this really hard time understanding if Carla is the hero of the story or if everyone in this piece is generally unlikable.  I think the point of the story is that Carla is one of those once-in-a-generation teachers, who hold teaching as a noble and moral profession.  The problem is, she makes every first year teacher mistake.  So often in this movie, I kept screaming, "Those kids aren't your friends!" and "It's not your job to have them like you."  Now, I would like to point out, I don't know much about the German education system.  It just feels like Carla finds the notion of disciplining students so abhorrent that it causes the world to be worse.  Now, I think the movie is on my side.  I think the movie is also frustrated with Carla's choices.  Before the inciting incident, we see three students skip out on gym class to hang out outside.  That's pretty bad.  Lauren told me that German classes value the outdoors, so I'll ignore that one.  But then she finds that one of the students has a lighter.  Carla tells the student that she will be contacting mom.  The kid says, "Please don't do that."  So Carla caves.  Now, if I've ever seen a commentary on a character's values, that's it right there.  Absolutely Carla needed to be the bad guy in that situation.  If you say that you are going to contact the parent, you have to contact the parent.  I know that there has to be some discipline in Germany because the principal's favorite term is "zero-tolerance policy."  

But Carla is painted like a saint compared to the other characters in the story.  The named teachers in the movie tend to view Carla as too standoffish.  We're supposed to dislike the other teachers more than we dislike Carla.  There's a bit of a problem with how this is demonstrated.  Before the administrative assistant is accused. the school does this morally grey wallet search and discover that the immigrant kid has way more money than a sixth-grader should.  So they bring in the parents and it becomes this really uncomfortable thing where people are dancing around the fact that Ali, the accused, is not white.  Now, we should feel awkward about this.  But the follow-up to this scene is that the other teachers involved in this scene question Carla whether or not she believes the parents.  Now, this is where Carla borderline accuses them of bigotry.  Listen, I get that those characters may be bigots.  But the question that they asked is valid.  Lots of parents lie on behalf of their kids.  Heck, one of the motifs of this story is the notion that parents will do anything for their children's success.  

Just so much of the movie is incredibly frustrating.  Carla keeps making choices that I wouldn't make.  But even crazier is Dr. Bohm.  I get what she represents. She's the product of too much education and not enough common sense.   Bohm handles every scene with the grace of an elephant.  When the school paper is playing this game of "Truth above everything", despite the fact that they seem to research almost nothing, Dr. Bohm seems shocked.  Where is the newspaper advisor during all of this?  Why hasn't the administration ever seen this article before it went to press?  It's this big shocking story and it turns the school inside out.  Yet, Dr. Bohm is reactive, not proactive.  What is happening inside this school?  Again, so much of the film are just these weird moments making me ask "How does this school stay open?"  

What I do applaud is the duplicity and general unhappiness on behalf of both the parents and the students.  I guess it also applies to the teachers.  One of the key issues in the movie is that they have to figure out who stole the money?  Some people are upset that Carla violated their privacy by filming her own coat.  It weirds me out that there are no cameras in the school to begin with, but let's play pretend. But the parents are upset that they are sending their kids to school with a thief on the loose, but also mad that people have been accused and asked about the theft.  Like, there's no making anyone happy in this story.  That, unfortunately, is a world I know.  It's not all parents.  Heck, it's not even the parents I'm dealing with now.  I just get that idea that some people just want to be angry all of the time and the movie nails that concept really well.

But the biggest question I have is the end message of the film.  Oskar comes into school after a suspension.  He refuses to leave.  Carla finally calls for backup to make sure that the other students aren't affected by Oskar's rebellion.  But the final reveal is that Carla follows her gut and handles Oskar herself.  I don't know why that's the message of the film.  Every other time that Carla tries to handle the problem herself, it fails.  Even at the end of the movie, the credits roll as Oskar is being escorted (victoriously) by the police as he refuses to leave his seat.  So what's the point?  I mean, if the point is that the education system is cannibalistic and wants to be mad about something, nailed it.  But it also feels like a movie that does not have an ending because stuff like this just disappears, given a certain amount of time.

But the part that really bothered me, tying back to the notion that Carla isn't doing anyone any favors is the breaking point for Oskar.  Carla finally starts weaving Oskar back into the class.  It feels like she gets a real victory with Oskar when he, in a fit of anger, smashes his way into the room holding the video laptop (he gets that file was probably emailed, right?) and he full on assaults the teacher before throwing the laptop in the river.  That's some messed up stuff.  When Oskar returns, one of the student makes a school shooter joke.  And do you know why?  Because Oskar was showing all of the telltale signs of being violent and her need to "really connect" with this kid may have gotten her class killed.  This film wasn't about a school shooter, but it absolutely could have been and that's incredibly frustrating.

It's a good movie that gets a point across.  But the protagonist is frustrating as heck.  I don't know if we're supposed to sympathize with her or criticize her.  Just know, as nice as it is when students like you, it shouldn't be end goal.

Rated R and it was definitely trying to shoot for an R-rating.  I'll go as far as to say that the movie was shooting for an NC-17 rating.  It was trying to be as sexually explicit as it could possibly be.  It was wildly offensive in almost every imaginable concept.  The thing that might be more frustrating that, while a film should be clear with discussing sexuality, even to the point of showing it, Poor Things takes it to a point of absurdity.  The point is made and then that point is hammered over-and-over again.  At one point, we had a discussion, "Is this who we are?  People who watch Poor Things?"  Yeah, it was too much.

DIRECTOR:  Yorgos Lanthimos

I've seen my fair share of movies by Yorgos Lanthimos.  I mean, I get him.  I know what I'm signing up for.  I'll even go as far as to say that I don't typically hate Yorgos Lanthimos movies.  That's kind of surprising, even for me writing about this guy, that I kind of like most of his movies.  Rarely are they my favorites.  But do you know which one is my favorite?  It's the one that's on the nose: The Favourite.  Lanthimos comes from the school of thought that he wants to deal with the taboo.  He wants people to confront the uncomfortable.  But do you know what?  That message gets a little tiresome.  I don't think I've ever wanted to re-evaluate a complete canon of work on a director because of one movie before.  That all changed with my viewing of Poor Things.

Poor Things really wanted me to hate it.  It just kept hitting button after button in an attempt to get me to recoil from it.  We started it pretty late and at one point I was falling asleep.  Being a film love at 40 might be one the biggest asks in the world because, you give me too much of the same thing, I'm going to get drowsy.  We were watching Poor Things and it was just goofballery followed by goofballery.  It was discordant music coupled with a really obnoxious fish-eye lens with a bananas worlds colored by sexuality.  I mean, I like when people do things a little different.  I like when things are meant to shake things up.  But this was an attempt to alienate on a weaponized scale.  There  was so much discussion of sex and I don't think that was necessarily inappropriate.  But there was this line where, you know, we got it.  Thank you.  We get that Emma Stone was going to be sexually all over the place with this movie. At one point, I feel like sex scenes were being used to stall for a lack of progression in the narrative.  That's a real odd choice.  But again, I was falling asleep, so I stopped the movie so we could pick it up the next day.

Maybe we picked the best place to stop the movie because --for a while --the movie actually got pretty good.  We picked the movie back up when Bella found herself enraged on the boat.  She hated Duncan Wedderburn and there was something to watch.  Considering that this is a movie about a woman as tabula rasa, it took this long to get to the point where she finally started growing as a person.  I was really into it.  From a point where I wanted to like this movie, I found the growth of this character over the course of a movie fun.  I love that her language got more and more complex as she started learning about life's truths.  

But then they got to Paris.  And he went back to the same well that the first act of the film found itself.  Now, I get --and oddly even applaud --the fact that the character was definining her independence by a job that people found reprehensible.  Okay.  That's interesting.  I'm saying that you could even show that.  But the thing that got me is that we got stuck there again.  Golly, it felt almost cruel to Emma Stone to have her film so many exploitative scenes for the sake of a bit of shock value.  There's a way to show that time has passed and that she has lost and gained a little bit over the course of the time in a brothel than what we were shown.  But again, Lanthimos wants to feed off of our discomfort over the taboo.  It should be stated clearly that it's not the worst thing in the world to make the movie likable.  He's a very talented director who handles the weirder side of storytelling.  But that all kind of gets sacrificed under the greater umbrella of discomfort.

Also, I have a really important question about the world of Poor Things.  One of the central conceits of Poor Things is that Bella doesn't know how the world works.  She is colored by oddities that make people look at her as off.  It makes her character funny and sympathetic at the same time.  It's the Frankenstein's monster thing.  But here's the problem with Poor Things.  Bella is the creation of suicide.  She has the mind of an infant in an adult woman's body.  But we see Bella's previous life as Victoria where she's quite even-keeled.  Admittedly, we only see her suicide, but that looks like her problems seem quite grounded.  The bigger problem is that everyone in this movie is really off.  Everyone looks at Bella as a fish out of water because she says wildly abhorrent things. That doesn't really scan.  Bella talks about her sexual conquests at fancy dinners and people clutch their pearls.  The thing is, so does everyone else in this movie.  The older woman with whom she bonds asks about a lover's genitals at their first meeting.  She's wildly open about her sexual background and proclivities.  Why is Bella so weird in this?  Honestly, the entire world is so bizarre, match Lanthimos's tastes in the absurd.  Nothing really scans in terms of storytelling.  Instead, so much is given over the the mood of the piece, which dominates over everything else.

I know people are torn over Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of Duncan.  My wife really didn't care for him.  I thought he was the best part.  Why?  I knew exactly where he was as a character.  As silly as he was, I knew his goals and his intentions.  I laughed a lot.  It was interesting.  

To close up, we were showing the kids Barbie.  Both stories are about men using women as objects and playthings.  Over the course of the story, both women discover the value of their own nature and the good that they bring into the world.  But Barbie is far more effective of a film.  It seems silly and like Barbie would be the film that would be dismissed as fluff.  I can only hope that I can forget Poor Things given a certain amount of time.  It had so much going for it and it sacrifices all of that for the sake of being shocking.  

Rated R for all of the sex and gore.  In a movie about a famous general who led charge after charge in war, you'd think that the red flag in that movie would be the massive death.  Well, this movie has massive death and it is a red flag, but the bigger issue is the almost insistance of showing sad, graphic, on-screen sex.  It's just all a choice.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Ridley Scott

Whut?

Like, seriously. I heard that this movie wasn't great.  But it looked real pretty and it looked like it was going to just be a telling about Napoleon and the many conquests he made.  I mean, if it was that, what could go wrong?  And for all of the griping I'm about to do, there's a fair amount of attention given to making sure that the French Revolution and the reign of Emperor Napoleon looked accurate.  But then this is a movie that almost forgets that it has a duty to be a movie.  Considering that Joaquin Phoenix is in almost every scene as Napoleon Bonaparte in a movie called Napoleon, who the heck is Napoleon as a character?

Both Henson and I had the exact same response to this movie.  Ridley Scott's Napoleon posits the age old question of "What if one of history's most famous generals and people who saved the world was just a huge nerd that was completely unlikable?"  Honestly, Vanessa Kirby as Josephine?  I know what's going on with her.  She has a kind of a linear story.  She goes from popular socialite to cheating on her husband to being attracted to power.  That's incredibly watchable.  But Napoleon?  According to this movie, he was a person that history fell around.  He's the opposite of charismatic.  I bet the real Napoleon wasn't charismatic.  But in this one, he's a guy who gets a shot to take down the British, doesn't really have to convince anyone, and just keeps getting promoted very quickly.  At one point, he's just offered to be Emperor.  

Now, I don't deny that history probably reflects something along those lines.  But the reason that we have these historical biopics is to fill in the gaps between what history offers to us.  But every single one of Napoleon's scenes is just defined by chaos.  Some of it might be based on letters Napoleon wrote to Josephine.  After all, those are scenes in the movie where we hear him dictate letters.  As not a Napoleon expert, these might be accurate.  I honestly don't care enough about this movie to really look this up.  But Napoleon is supposed to be the grounding element of this movie.  I'm not even really blaming Joaquin Phoenix.  I blame this movie, script and director, for not knowing what to do with this character.  Everything is just throwing weirdness at the wall and telling me that those are choices.  Heck, there's even a way to make Napoleon Bonaparte a huge nerd and make the movie pretty good.  It all comes from a degree of consistency.  I'm thinking of Donald Glover's character in The Martian.  Donald Glover's character (a name I should totally look up) knows something that no one else knows that's vital to the survival of the mission.  He's social awkward.  He's probably somewhere on the spectrum.  But what makes him compelling is that he has to overcome his own awkwardness to tell people how he's seeing what no one else has the ability to see.  That's not really this story.

If anything, the story of Napoleon is that he wasn't that good of a general.  It's the story of a guy who fell to the top.  That's kind of the message of the story.  He's a guy who made a few good decisions, but then started to believe his own press.  That's not even accurate.  Napoleon in this movie sees himself as the best general of all of history.  He falls into the place of Emperor and wears that crown aggressively.  Now, part of me wants to understand if he covets that.  Is that his goal?  I have no idea what Napoleon's goals are in this movie.  He loves France.  I get that.  He's very all about France.  I likes himself because he demands that Josephine spend every moment waiting for his present like Padme does with Anakin in Revenge of the Sith.  But it's all about just a vibe, not a motivation.  There needs to be something that ties this whole movie together.

Instead, we kind of get a collection of scenes.  Sure, did I learn about the Hundred Days?  Yeah.  I learned about the Hundred Days, because I texted Henson and asked if Elba and Waterloo were that close on the timeline.  But that was me doing some heavy lifting.  Everything about this movie is almost screaming that Napoleon wasn't that important to history.  But the movie isn't ever explicit that is the message of the movie.  Instead, everything comes across as a bit muddy.  I love the visuals.  In terms of cinematography and attention to detail, sure, I'll support this.  But it's Tora! Tora! Tora! in a lot of ways.  I can't believe that I was getting bored considering that there was so much to look at throughout the piece.  

It's just so...meh. How do you spend so much money and put so much effort into a movie and it just comes across as unfocused.  I mean, I should know by the end of the movie if the director loves or hates his subject matter.  I don't know that.  Honestly, I'm a guy who hates having his phone within reach.  I kept going back to the phone under the auspices of asking what actors are in this movie.  I still haven't spotted Mark Bonnar and I know he's in this movie.  I even did a Google image search.  Nothing.  I just was a big ask for a meh movie.  I only feel good knowing that I'm not alone on this one.  I'm sure that there are people who are all about Napoleon.  

Also, why did they name the cake after that guy?  My Ukrainian grandmother made a bunch of those things and it's nothing like this movie.

It's PG, but I had to explain that old men bathing naked was just a thing that happened in certain places.  So, mild nudity is the biggest takeaway from this movie.  Yeah, yeah, I should pre-screen movies that my kids are going to watch.  The issue isn't necessarily that there is questionable content in this.  The issue is "Do my kids want to watch a movie about a guy who cleans toilets everyday?"  The answer is "No.  Only Dad wants to watch that."

DIRECTOR: Wim Wenders

Confession time:  I've never seen a Wim Wenders movie.  I thought I had.  Then I went down the IMDB credits of Wim Wenders and realized that I never actually sat down and watched Paris, Texas.  I'll get around to it.  I've seen a lot.  I haven't seen everything. We need to be gracious to the blog writer sometimes.

I don't know how this worked out to be the follow-up to The Zone of Interest.  Both, if you completely ignored context, are movies that almost remove themselves from traditional narrative structures. Now, that is a wild simplification.  I'm even slightly aghast at myself for comparing these two movies.  The Zone of Interest may lack a structural narrative, but that's because it is a commentary on the normality of ignoring horrors.  Perfect Days lacks a narrative because it is a celebration of the small, analog parts of life. Somehow, this becomes the worst and best double feature ever.  Now, I went off on Zone of Interest.  I appreciated it intellectually. I even would go as far as to applaud it as a powerful avante-garde work.  But honestly, I didn't really like it all that much.  While I probably won't be recommending Perfect Days to people, I actually kind of enjoyed it.  Now, Zone of Interest's biggest flaw (which I acknowledged was on me) was that it didn't keep up the level of intensity for me and I left the film a little bored.  I got a little bored with Perfect Days, leading to me almost nodding off in the final ten minutes of the film.

I kept slapping myself awake.  I saw it all, but there was a struggle.  Part of the problem is that, like its title suggests, the whole thing is about maintaining almost a sense of serenity or zen. Hirayama has problems, but nothing that normally would necessitate a movie to run a discourse over the topics covered.  The thing that really separates these two movies is that The Zone of Interest is almost not about characters.  Perfect Days is all about character, especially if you are invested in the character himself.  Hirayama is a bit of an enigma.  An aging man in the middle of a city, Hirayama embraces his solitude.  Hirayama --potentially an avatar for Wim Wenders...if I knew more about him --embraces the analog joys in life.  His books are used.  He listens to cassettes.  He takes care of saplings. He rides a bike to watch baseball games at restaurants.  He lives almost a monastic lifestyle.  Yet, he seems so happy. I  can't help but think that Hirayama is the intentional deconstruction of the archetype.

I need to watch this movie again, but I'm pulled to movies like Umberto D. and Bubba Ho-Tep.  (Okay, those two movies don't normally get lumped together.) These are both movies about the dangers and fears of aging.  Especially with Umberto D., the protagonist views the city as something isolating.  The ways of his youth have disappeared and there's something completely terrifying of dying alone surrounded by people.  Hirayama almost willfully ignores these fears.  Maybe not absolutely.  The movie ends with a bittersweet takeaway, potentially meant to act as a mirror for the viewer.  I'm talking about the final shot of Hirayama smiling broadly at his music in his van, but also transitioning into a state of almost tears.  But that's not the majority of the movie.  Instead, Hirayama takes what traditionally is considered a disgusting job --cleaning toilets --and turns it into something to take pride in.  It's not like the movie is unaware of the stigma of such a job.  Takashi (who can best be described as "a lot") points out the futility of such a job.  But he finds value in it.

There's almost a parable nature to the movie.  I can't help but view the movie as meditation.  It is so quiet and so peaceful.  Hirayama goes to work, gets the same can of coffee everyday, and enjoys the same pleasures every day.  There are small blips that remind us that every day, as similar as it was to the previous day, has a sense of variety to it. But Hirayama makes his very simple life look pleasing.  Because he has divorced himself from traditional capitalist values.  His apartment is spartan.  He has organized his cassettes into a really sexy looking shelf, displaying his collection.  While he reads a lot of challenging books (I find Faulkner to be mostly inaccessible), he only has a solitary bookshelf.  His plants aren't purchases.  He finds them during lunch hours.  He seems to eat the same egg-salad (we assumed) sandwiches across from the same awkward girl every day.  But he seems so happy.  A kid finds his mom.  He smiles.  He finds out that his deadbeat partner is a Down syndrome boy's favorite person.  He smiles.  He watches baseball and he enjoys the fact that people have strong opinions over a game.  He smiles.

The perfect days aren't perfect days by most people's perspectives.  They are days full of burdens and toils.  But to remind us that no one has a perfect life, Hirayama has conflicts.  Takashi (again, a lot) is just this force of chaos.  He shows up for work when he wants.  He wants rides.  He wants to sell Hirayama's tapes.  He needs money.  Hirayama clearly looks down on him.  (I have to infer because Hirayama almost takes a vow of silence in this movie, further pushing the narrative that he lives a monastic lifestyle).  But he's not a character who naturally wallows.  I wallow.  I think the world is a terrible place all of the time.  But it's also because I'm one of those people who continually complicates his own life.  It sounds like I'm dramatic.  I'd like to think that I'm not.  But I also know that there are so many things that seem like I need to do them when, in reality, I could just simplify my life. 

Hirayama chooses the things in his life that are valuable and almost intentionally purges everything else.  He likes people. It's not like he's a hermit.  It's just that he invests everything into the things he values.  As depressing as it is for me, one of the things that guarantees him a sense of peace is that isolation.  For a while, I wondered if he was asexual.  That would explain a lot.  But there is this implication that he's in love with Mama from the restaurant.  Those near-tears at the end, I think those tears are about her.  From Hirayama's perspective, happiness comes from controlling the self.  It's choosing the things that are important.  But there is an element of sacrifice to that lifestyle.  He values his books and his tapes so much that it almost seems like a relationship is incongruous to the lifestyle he has fostered.  It's sad, but it's not that he's necessarily just lonely.  When he meets Mama's ex, there's the fear that things will change.  The level of relationship that he has with Mama seems to be their exchanges at the restaurant.  She makes him feel special. He's the most polite, so she likes him.  The notion that someone else is more important than he isn't a slight against him.  It's more about change.

I kind of hate that I liked this movie so much.  It's sp lovely.  There's something so seductive about simplifying a lifestyle to just gain a sense of accomplishment or joy behind it.  It is a boring movie.  I can't deny that.  Not a lot happens in the film.  But it is also a pretty and serent film.  

PG-13 and I kind of get why.  Despite being about genocide and real world horror, the entire conceit is that you see none of it.  You hear it.  Especially if you have the subtitles on, you can pick up on things that are atrocities.  But you don't see almost anything.  At one point, the kommendant has sex with one of the prisoners, but it is off-camera and implied more than anything else.  

DIRECTOR:  Jonathan Glazer

Thank goodness I looked up that this was the Under the Skin guy, because that completely scans for the entire movie.  The thing is, I have to take avante-garde on a case-by-case basis.  That seems like a really obvious thing to say.  I mean, I take every other film on a case-by-case basis.  Why wouldn't I do the same thing with the avante-garde?  Part of that is that it is almost a bit of blasphemy to slander, libel, or even criticize something that is considered artistic.  In some cases, I get it.  After all, me criticizing something that is artistic may be simply because I'm a big dumb-dumb. I know that's not the case with Zone of Interest.  I completely get Zone of Interest.  I just find myself...fatigued at times?

The issue that I have is that I really like the concept behind the film.  For those not in the know, The Zone of Interest is almost lacking a story intentionally.  It is about the life of the kommendant of a concentration camp.  Like a rectory borders a chruch, the home of this kommendant is directly adjacent to the concentration camp that he runs.  It is a film about juxtaposition and what is not seen.  We live in a world where we have viewed the Holocaust narrative so many times that we are almost dulled to the pain of these people.  One of the sequences in Zone of Interest is actually the cleaning of the Auschwitz museum and the atrocities that happened there.  The cleaners, all doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, are cleaning things and displays that remind us that an unfathomable amount of people died and they are unemotional because this is their daily lives.  The purpose of The Zone of Interest is to show us the the things we never see.  In the case of this specific story, we see what it was like to be German during this time.  It is a story of a willful ignorance to the crimes that humanity perpetrates on a daily basis for the sake of comfort and self-righteousness.

The Zone of Interest isn't bad.  It's delivering exactly what it promised.  I'd even go as far as to say it delivers a little more.  We get some visual choices that make us question what it must be like to be part of the few who empathize with those behind the walls.  Those parts are actually my favorite parts of the movie.  Now, when I was in college, I remember having to argue that role of the director was to serve the plot.  I argued against someone who was adamant that character preceeded plot every time.  Over time, I tended to lean to my friend's perspective. Character was fundamental to storytelling. Lots of stories without plot completely work.  In the case of The Zone of Interest, I'm not quite sure that we get either. We get hints of character. Hedwig gets a lot of attention in this story and I know her needs.  She wants to create the nicest home for her family.  She wants success so that she is respected.  But Hedwig, despite being the most defined character in the film, is almost an NPC in this story. 

The story never follows Hedwig's goals.  We don't know much about her character except for the fact that she stands still as a character.  The Hedwig from the beginning of the movie is the same as the Hedwig from the end of the movie.  Now, because this is an avante-garde story that is not about plot or character, we're allowed to forgive that she doesn't go through a major change.  After all, lots of film movements aren't about learning something from the events of the piece.  Considering that this is a movie set during World War II in German, it would actually be a little bit inapprorpiate for Hedwig to come to some grand realization about the role that the Nazis had over the Jewish people. We have a little bit of that from Hedwig's other, but it really isn't about the Germans' changes.  If anything, Hedwig's mother is more put-off by the execution of the Jewish people, not morally righteous about the whole thing.

If anything, this is a movie about mood and tone.  Like with Under the Skin, Glazer absolutely crushes with that.  He gives this sense of ominousness to the whole film.  When the ashes start seeping into the river and there's this backwards "We have to save the children" moment, it's incredibly upsetting.  But it isn't necessarily about story.  I'm really bummed to say that, effective as the film is about bringing about an emotional response, I found myself constantly staring at my watch.  I had gleaned what I could from it. The one thing I didn't want was to grow bored with it and I'm ashamed to say...I did.  I should have been riveted with something like this.  It's beautifully made.  But I don't know if it is an-hour-and-forty-five minutes beautifully made.

Maybe that's the last criticism that the movie has for me.  As much as I care about the events, I clearly don't have the fortitude to keep hearing about it.  It sounds like this is a criticism of the film, but it is more about me and people like me.  We can get insensed for only so long before we're bored enough to move onto the next tragedy.  It's sick and I get it. I started off the movie straight up mad at the extended moment of silence and the film ends the same way.  It's a test.  I don't love to be tested, but it was a test that I failed.  My blessed life couldn't handle a little bit of discomfort and that's how I reacted.  It's a well-made test, but I still needed something to latch onto besides the subconscious idea of sadness.

Also, Cinefix?  Hot take making this the best movie of 2023.