Not officially rated in the United States, but it's your standard PG-13 fare.  If you are using other countries' metrics to determine what we would give it, it would be PG-13.  There's a decent amount of violence, but nothing that would even raise an eyebrow.  I suppose the final fight gets a little brutal to the point of being unbelievable.  But the bigger issue is that this is a story of revenge where there are only small shifts towards a moral high ground.  Still, the movie would be considered unrated.

DIRECTORS:  Alexandre de La Patelliere and Matthieu Delaporte

I know I don't have the time to give this blog my all.  It's probably going to be split up again, so if there's a shift in tone at one point, please forgive me.  I teach The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  I have for the past four years, I think.  I love this story.  It might be my favorite epic, even more than Les Miserables.  (I think that I like the musical better than the very long novel, which seems like heresy.) But the biggest problem when teaching The Count of Monte Cristo to high school seniors who are desperate to get out of any kind of actual work is the lack of payoff when it comes to movies.  Now, you guys are all thinking, "What about the Guy Pearce version?"  Do you understand what kind of heresy you are awakening within me?  The Count of Monte Cristo, as a novel, has a very specific message about revenge and redemption.  That movie completely butchers it.  

So when I was in Paris last summer and saw billboards for The Count of Monte Cristo all over France, I got really excited.  I watched a trailer and I thought I found a mildly accurate version of the book on the big screen?  Did I succeed?  Nope.  I mean, to a certain extent, some of the movie matches the book exactly.  If I had to explain the premise of the book without the richer tapestry of what Dumas did, the movie does a pretty good job.  I would pretend to wonder why no one has adapted The Count of Monte Cristo properly.  But I know exactly why.  The book is 1,400 pages long.  It's really in-depth and the slow parts kind of matter to making the final revenge all the sweeter.  But that doesn't exactly work for film all the time, does it?  I mean, this version of The Count of Monte Cristo is already pushing the three-hour mark and it still rushes a lot of the story.  This almost feels like it would need to be multiple movies and even then, I don't know where you could make the cut.  I suppose that there is a reason that ABC made Revenge into long-form storytelling.

The Count of Monte Cristo somehow seems to be simultaneously big-budget and cheap at the same time.  I am actually having a hard time verbalizing what exactly is wrong with the visuals of this movie.  Like, when you watch that trailer, it looks impressive as can be.  And there's nothing in the movie that necessarily negates that when watching the film.  I kind of want to applaud the movie because it does a lot to create the sense of grandeur that the epic novel has within it.  But at the same time, it also feels like there's something in the sauce that's off. There's almost something a little PBS about it.  Maybe it feels like a filmed TV show more than it does a theatrical release film, but I think --and this is awful! --that the fact that it is a big budget French movie has something to do with it.  There's something that's almost like an imitation as opposed to original in the way that the movie looks.  It looks like it is trying to capture a spectacle that comes across as just a little bit off.

I won't deny that I'm having a harder time writing about this movie than I do most movies.  I think when they hit a solid 3/5, I have difficulty writing.  Part of what I like about The Count of Monte Cristo is an attempt to get the vibe of the novel down while missing some of the elements that make the story the story.  For example, out of everything in the book, Pierre Niney as Edmond Dantes --while having major character changes --feels always like Dantes.  Dantes is a character that is incredibly sympathetic, even when he's doing horrible things to people.  If the goal was to make a small intimate story into something that plumbs the depths of human morality, putting Niney as Dantes as the foundation of that is perfect.  He seems so pitiable, yet when he spirals out of control, it is easy to dislike him. And the movie gets that.  The movie gets that Dantes's obsession with getting his revenge is killing the good man inside of him.

I think I realize what I don't like about the movie.  Now, the easy and dumb read of this take is that it isn't accurate.  I mean, sure, I was really hoping that the movie was going to shoot for being the quintessential adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. I would have loved that as a teacher.  It's just that the changes that they made almost felt like they were there for being cool.  One of my favorite things about It was that it took the novels and, through its changes, made the story --at its core --the same while the scares were different.  I liked that a lot.  I feel like the directors really tried to pull that card with The Count of Monte Cristo, but more shot for "cooler" reveals.  For example, as much as I preach about how Niney nails Edmond Dantes and all of his various personas, the side characters almost completely missed their marks.

One of the key concepts in the novel is the notion that Dantes will sacrifice anyone to get what he wants.  The way that Dantes has Benedetto as the son that he always loved doesn't really gel with the original Monte Cristo story.  Again, I get that a lot of this would be done for shorthand.  I'm sure that the team behind the movie were clapping themselves on the backs when they found out that they could merge characters together to get more emotional collateral when things went south.  Benedetto's sad ending in this movie doesn't quite read the way that Dumas has it.  There are so many moments in the very long novel where Dantes has to move his moral compass just a sliver to understand what is necessary to get revenge.  And I need to remind you that the Benedetto story is only an example, but it works.  When Benedetto dies a horrible death because of Dantes's actions, the move is too great.  There are so many moments that are tragic that Dantes feels, but he has shifted so much that these moments come as another grain of sand added to the pile.  It's different from the movie when he has to come to grips with the morality of his own choices.  

When Dantes comes to the realization that the Count has killed Edmond Dantes through all of these small moments (and partially because he can never truly be with Mercedes), it's a lifetime of mistakes.  His second life is as much of a prison as his first life.  Instead, the film's epiphany moment (which I appreciate is still in the movie) comes from a direct regret from an immediate action.  It feels more like the revenge that Dantes achieves is somewhat lacking.  The book has this idea that Mercedes reminds him of what it means to be a good man and to take care of those around him.  

And this is a stupid reason to complain.  I already stressed that the book is 1,400 pages long.  I get that it's intense.  But the book is really good at making each revenge kind of mean something.  Each time you get a little bit bored, one of the coolest revenges happens to remind you that you are part of this cabal of evil schemers.  Instead, the movie dumps them all as this one moment in time that comes across as both unsatisfactory and unbelievable.  There's times when I tried explaining to my wife what the revenge was trying to be and we both stared at the screen, questioning how these moments made any sense.  And trust me, I really wanted to make these moments make sense.  I did that thing that I always do and try to apologize for a movie's mistake because I wanted there to be a reasonable explanation.

I hate when movies are just fine.  I don't know.  I want to love this movie because it really tried at times. It's night and day from the Guy Pearce version, so please understand that this movie holds a good deal of value for me.  I don't regret owning it because I'll still probably use it in my class, despite how inaccurate it is. But it doesn't change the fact that I can't find a version of The Count of Monte Cristo that nails the most important elements of the story.  Instead, we get a vibes-accurate, but heart-inaccurate version of the movie.  But at least I have a French version of a movie that is an adaptation of a famous French novel, so I have to give the movie credit in that way.  Even if it doesn't have a digital copy.

R, and it had every opportunity not to be R.  If I'm going to go off on how Sony is the most studio studio that ever studioed, part of the R rating is part of that.  They amped up the violence a bit and added a couple of f-bombs to attract the Deadpool crowd.  It's such a dumb reason because this is almost a cookie-cutter of every other Sony Spider-Verse project they've made.  Absolutely no reason to be R outside of some desperate attempts to be violent.

DIRECTOR: J.C. Chandor

You guys finally put me over the edge, Sony.  I have been "Team Like-Everything" despite having major problems with the other movies.  My goodness, Sony.  You kind of left it all on the floor for how much trash you could shove into one movie.  I'm the one guy who thought that Madame Web got more hate than it deserved and you still made me mad about Kraven the Hunter?

Here's the thing.  Sony's Spider-Man Universe was a bad idea from the start.  In general, it is really hard to make movies about villains.  They tend not to work, at least not in franchises.  I've pointed this out when Disney did stuff like Maleficent.  To make a movie where the protagonist is the villain of the story, but in a manner where there is action and it is entertaining like the hero's story, you need to make a worse villain.  With stories like these, the villain character that we're all hoping to see over the course of two hours tends to have justifiable reasons for abhorrent behavior.  To do this, you need to introduce people who are worse.  But the point of these stories is to show how messed up the villain protagonist is.  So we now know that the villain protagonist isn't the greatest villain.  We know that they're kind of just a scarier version of a hero.  Like, in no way do I want to see Kraven fight Spider-Man.  It almost makes no sense.  There was this shot of Kraven fearing spiders for no reason, but that doesn't really align with anything else that the story set up.  (If anything, there are a lot of people in Sony's Spider-Man Universe who have an unnatural aversion to spiders as their main motivation to encounter Spider-Man.) 

So what corporate Sony (again, the most studio driven movie conglomerate) does is fundamentally misunderstand what their character is about.  I swear, when all is said and done, Kraven in this movie is more animal-themed Punisher than anything else.  They even went as far as to give him superpowers.  Yes, I know that later in the Spider-Man comics, Kraven mutates himself to give himself an edge on Spider-Man. But the very nature of giving him powers as an origin story misses the point of Kraven altogether.  Let me go off because this is important.  The character of Kraven is someone who can't see the forest for the trees.  In an attempt to gain valor and glory, Sergei Kravinoff hunts creatures that cannot be killed by man.  It's all about hubris.  These are not threats to anyone.  Instead, Kraven thinks of himself as the world's greatest hunter.  As an extension of that thought, he hunts down Spider-Man, a trophy that he considers the alpha predator.  When Spider-Man defeats him (despite Kraven getting some shots in), it's so humiliating because Spider-Man has no interest in killing him.  It's only after multiple defeats that Kraven turns to manipulating his own biology to give himself a leg up on Spider-Man.

You know, villain stuff?

But this is a movie about a fundamentally good kid who was born into a crappy situation.  So he doesn't get sucked into this world of crime and moral depravity, he runs away after being transfused with some tribal and culturally-dubious super soldier serum.  He then uses his abilities as a mercenary to take down bad guys.  While the "being paid to do it" element is a little gross, the villainousness of the whole thing is absent.  If anything, he only hunts bad guys makes him the Punisher.  I mean, the movie starts off with Kraven getting himself thrown into prison so he can take down a mob boss.  That's Frank Castle, guys.  That's his entire playbook.  I have seen that movie.  Man, I don't even like a lot of the Punisher movies and I have to say that Punisher does that move better than Kraven does.

Honestly, Russell Crowe's Nikolai Kravinoff does a better job getting to the root of Kraven than Aaron Taylor-Johnson does.  I know.  You would never watch an aging Russell Crowe (sorry, Mr. Crowe!  I don't want to age shame you whatsoever) tracking down Spider-Men, but the character you are playing is more in line with the character that is supposed to be on screen.  Even the side characters, which are named and have a vague attachment to their comic book counterparts are way off from their basic storylines.  The Rhino is just a mess of a character.  I mean, I'm impressed that he has the Russian name and the Russian accent, but that's the only thing that these two characters have in common.  I know that Miles Warren probably injected rhino DNA into you or something to give you a full on rhino transformation, but that's almost arbitrary.  

I don't love that the Rhino is a mob boss.  There was always something so tragic about the Rhino as a villain before.  Like the Scorpion, these were small time criminals who were paid to honestly mutilate themselves for the sake of powers.  But the Rhino was always a little not smart. He seems like he was tricked into getting this suit grafted onto him and now he would do anything to get out of it.  It's why there are some really lovely Spider-Man comics when Rhino plays a little bit of a grey area villain.  He's a character of regret.  Instead, you missed on Rhino's fundamental emotional core: he's supposed to be stuck in the suit.  In the movie, for most of the film, Aleksei looks human.  His curse is that he wears this backpack that keeps him looking like that.  But that's not the story.  The idea is that the Rhino never has a normal moment whatsoever and that's sad.  

And the bigger issue is the lack of originality in these movies!  Why is it always a mob boss?  What is the Sony Spider-Man Universe's obsession with some big rich guy causing all kinds of problems?  I'm not saying that rich guys aren't terrible and shouldn't be punched.  I'm the last guy who should say that.  I'm saying that there's no attempts to find stories where there's just people trying to have sympathetic storylines.  One thing that Marvel has gotten really good at is making the sympathetic villain.  To a certain extent, had these movies kept going, Dima's Chameleon might have an element of sympathy.  I mean, I have no idea why the character is acting like a villain at the end of the movie.  I wish that there was a throwaway line saying that he kept copying everyone else's behavior until he learned to make it his own.  But that didn't happen. I just made that up on the spot right now.

I hate when my blogs get so complainy.  I want to like stuff.  I enjoy liking stuff.  But there's so much to this movie that is incredibly dumb.  I talked about the origin story of Sergei Kravinoff.  He goes off the grid, becomes Kraven the Hunter, a boogeyman for criminals.  You know, animal Punisher?  Anyway, the funny thing is that it is a huge epiphany for everyone in this movie when they discover that a guy named Sergei Kravinoff is Kraven the Hunter.  No one put that together.  I'm pretty sure that "Kraven" was never supposed to be a secret identity.  I'm pretty sure that it is just...his name.  You know, his name?  Yet, everyone, "Who is Kraven the Hunter?"  "He doesn't exist?"  Yet, Sergei Kravinoff who was really into hunting with his dad arrives into town and people have to do facial recognition matches to prove that Sergei is Kraven?  What is going on with this movie?

I have to keep complaining because this movie is rough.  The movie looks bad.  This might be the first time I mention this point, but all of the Sony Spider-Man movies that don't have Spider-Man in them look bad.  They are all these really safe productions where nothing is all that challenging.  I'm not talking about the CG animals.  I've learned to make my peace with CG animals.  I'd rather that than using actual animals as some form of torture.  No, I'm talking about having a model of visual imagery when it comes to their angsty characters that is so boring and uninspired.  I want people to watch the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again and see what they do with Matt's hearing when he's using it.  It's clever.  It's dynamic and unique.  Then compare that to when Kraven is constantly using his telescopic vision.  

Oh my goodness, I was about to close this blog up without talking about The Foreigner?  What?  He might be the most underbaked villain that I've ever seen.  Listen, I own every Spider-Man comic minus Amazing Fantasy # 15.  I kinda / sorta remember The Foreigner.  But there was no attempt to tell me what allegiance The Foreigner had.  His powers didn't make sense.  Heck, Kraven didn't even beat The Foreigner. He was sucker punched by Calypso, who has no attachment to the character from the book.  Oh my goodness again!  The end?  The reveal that Nikolai was the mastermind behind all of this?  That makes no sense.  It makes no sense.  Honestly, there's no way that was Nikolai's plan.  It took that old trope of making the bad guy someone close to the family and nuking it beyond comprehension.  

Golly, this movie is stupid.  For a guy who tolerated these movies better than most, I hated this film.  I'm glad the SSU is dead.  Normally, I'd be barking for more stuff like this.  I thought that I would rather have less-than-stellar content out there than nothing.  Nope.  Kraven is a hot mess of a movie and I'm glad that my viewing of these movies is done.

X.  This was a movie banned in the United States.  Now, for those people who want to fight whether or not this movie actually deserves this rating, I'm not the guy who rated this.  Are there more vulgar movies?  Absolutely.  Is it pretty graphic?  Yes.  There's a lot of sex and nudity in the movie.  Is the movie all about that?  Not really.  There are long stretches of the movie where it's borderline a political documentary.  It should be noted that there is also a rape scene.

DIRECTOR: Vilgot Sjoman

I didn't think I'd have to rewatch this movie.  I'm also now aware that I'll probably have to rewatch Salo, In the Realm of the Senses, and The Passion of the Christ.  (What?  I don't love brutal torture.)  Out of all of those movies, the easiest movie to watch is I Am Curious.  While it absolutely borders on vulgarity (although, is it really?), there have been umpteen films that wouldn't have batted an eye in American cinemas.  I suppose it's hard to say that I Am Curious isn't that revolutionary when it was the court case that helped decided vulgarity and censorship laws in the United States.

I'm a different person than the last time that I watched this movie.  It's always so weird to watch the same movies through different eyes.  I'm going to go introspective and try to be a little flowery with my language, so I apologize already to the few people who are reading this --most likely --buried blog entry on my page (despite the fact that my readership is falling through the floor!).  I have always loved movies.  But after college, I tried to see everything.  If you know me even a little bit, all of this probably scans with you.  I'm still very wired to be that guy, the guy who sees everything.  This blog is almost a perverted evolution of that same attitude.  But with trying to see everything, I was learning.  I'm not scolding myself for trying to watch I Am Curious before I was ready.  After all, that's how we learn.  I'm having a hard time reading Don Quixote as well right now.  I'm doing all of this supplemental reading to help me through it, but I'm watching it from a place of trying to be informed.  But I'm going to call something out for what it is (Note:  I was informed that "Calling a spade a spade" might be racist terminology, so I'm shifting out of that).  When I was working the video store, people rented I Am Curious because they tended to lean into more pervy movies.

I honestly don't think that I Am Curious is as pervy as I perceived it back in the day.  It sounds like I'm desensitized towards stuff.  I don't know if that's true.  If anything, as a guy with a wife and five kids, I'm probably more sensitive to sexuality in film.  But I don't think that I Am Curious (Yellow) is as pervy as I remember it to be.  Does it have incredibly graphic content in it?  Yeah.  But the way that I kind of view the movie is about comfort with one's body over something that is only vulgar.  In a rare case of sex in cinema, much of I Am Curious (Yellow) isn't about exploiting its female lead.  If anything, Lena and Borje just feel comfortable around each other, like two people in a relationship might be.  Now, I'm not saying the story of Lena and Borje should be applauded.  Both Lena and Borje are incredibly immature when it comes to healthy.  Nothing like another movie from Svensk Filmindustri to present adultery and promiscuous sex as something that is normalized, but I'm still reeling from the Bergman box, so please bear with me.

But now that I'm far more political than I was after college, I kind of like what I Am Curious (Yellow) does for the narrative of activism.  Like with many of my blogs, my writing often acts as a vessel for unpacking difficult ideas. Yellow (Note: I'm going to be watching Blue fairly soon, but I'll probably write about Blue as a companion piece and as a sympathetic movie than as a standalone movie) has a lot of feelings about Lena as a protagonist and they don't always gel.  The beginning of the film presents Lena almost as an intellectual guerrilla journalist.  She is headstrong and wants to change the world with her camera.  Now, with the meta element that Slojman incorporates into his movie (a filmmaker making a movie that we're currently watching), I get that this is the Lena closer to the reality that the actress Lena really is.  (God, I hate that sentence, but it's late and I'm frustrated.  The real world Lena is inspirational.  While that scene goes on way too long (reminding me of the movies that my friends and I made in college.  Scenes would go on way too long because we had what we considered "good footage"), it shows that Lena has an ethical core coupled with a good head on her shoulders.  

But that Lena isn't the Lena of the entire movie.  As the movie progresses, it distances itself from the Slojman and Lena taking on the world narrative, going as far to really interview Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Instead, the movie branches out further and further into Lena's sexuality.  Now, there are moments where Lena seems incredibly grounded.  But as the movie progresses, she shifts further into almost a parody of herself.  There's this sequence that is played for laughs where Lena goes to a retreat to improve herself.  She's topless the entire time and we're supposed to giggle at the absurdity of her mortification. These scenes don't align with the Lena that we're introduced at the beginning of the movie.  Now, I have two different reads on this and both of them are probably wrong.  Slojman infamously didn't have a script while making this movie.  He says so in the introduction to the film.  As such, the beginning of the film is the discovery of what the story is going to be. It seems like the fictional version of Slojman wants to introduce us to the Lena he knows and the Lena he wants to work with.  He instantly imbues his fictional counterpart with jealousy, knowing that Lena will be doing these graphic sex scenes with another actor later in the film.  But as the movie progresses out of the planning stages that the beginning of the film presents, the movie gets more movie-y.  By the end, "real" Lena and character Lena have merged.

The alternative is that it is commenting on the absurdity of the movement as a whole.  Lena's personality is almost defined by her counter-culture rhetoric.  She files information about old boyfriends in boxes and surrounds herself with the commandments for being a revolutionary.  While the beginning of the movie shows her to be wise and committed to a cause, the more that we get to know her, the more silly she comes across.  By the end of the movie, we almost just see her as a tragic, sex-crazed hippie who seems pretty vapid in Slojman's eyes.  I'm talking about the meta scene in the car where she gets annoyed by having to wear her sunglasses  in the scene.  If the silliness and absurdity of the movie tonally shifts away from the seriousness of the first third of the film, it could be that it making us question the reality of what we see when it comes to revolutionaries.  I don't necessarily love this read of the movie.  After all, I Am Curious (Yellow) is counter-culture and revolutionary in itself.  Why would it throw all of these protesters out on their rear ends if it is trying to encourage free thinkers.  

It's weird to write about I Am Curious (Yellow) without having seen blue recently.  I was actually in a little bit of a pickle when it came to approaching this.  I'll tell you right now.  If I watched Blue immediately after watching Yellow and waited to write about Yellow then, I wouldn't be able to separate them.  I remember being so baffled by the symbiotic nature of the two movies to the point where they bled together.  But as a standalone movie, I'm still left with questions.  This movie is almost the perfect amount of avant-garde for me.  It's still incredibly frustrating, but that's something that I kind of just live with.  

It's not like I'm closing this blog up.  Treat this as a To Be Continued...

PG, but this one is super brutal!  Like, there was a huge jump in what is acceptable to show in these movies.  People die.  I know that they died before.  But this one reminds you that mass casualties are composed of individual people.  So many people die on camera in gnarly ways.  Also, it feels like Godzilla took a beating in this one compared to the other movies.  Also, a main character dies!  Plus, Godzilla needs to eviscerate the monster to kill him, so there were lots of times when Godzilla plunges his fist into the creature.  Like, this movie pulled out a lot of stops.  Still, PG!

DIRECTORS:  Yoshimitsu Banno and Ishiro Honda

The answer to my last blog was "Yes, I am taking on too much to be effective."  I'm playing that older millennial game called, "If I can make it through this week and the next, life will get easier."  The novel is almost put entirely to bed before I have to go off and pitch it and I'll be done with Don Quixote, which means two of my major distractions from life will be gone and I'll be able to simply deal with my other absurd to-do things.  Trust me, for me this is exciting.

Guys, I thought that the later Godzilla movies were all going to suck.  That was the notion I had.  After all, it seemed that, for a while, many of the Godzilla sequels had forgotten their political core.  Then comes Godzilla vs. Hedorah, a movie I was barely willing to watch if it wasn't for the next movie in the box set.  (By the way, I'm closer to the end of this box set than I realized!)   But holy crap, I love Godzilla vs. Hedorah.  Now, is the political statement the most surface level messaging done in a movie?  Absolutely.  You have to understand.   Hippie movies during this age were in your face and simple.  I don't hate that.  As a guy who made it through all of the BBS films with Nicholson and the Monkees, I mostly dig this kind of stuff.  Hippies managed to boil stuff down into the most basic nuggets and then railed against it.  Trust me, we need some of that today (you know, if the hippies weren't the same people as Boomers who started nuking culture).  As a hippie movie, it's beautifully political, but the songs are insufferable and many of the characters act like complete morons.

But what does the movie do?  The movie understands that Godzilla movies tend to work when they have something to say about humanity ultimately causing their own destruction.  With the case of Hedorah, the monster is made from pollution.  Yeah, it's pretty basic and there's not a lot of thought going into that.  But if you asked me to make a pollution monster, I couldn't make one as cool as this one is.  Part of what makes Hedorah cool is the fact that he's killing people who just get near him.  Gone is the guesswork that says that the building that Godzilla just toppled is either empty or full.  Nope.  Hedorah spews toxic waste which burns people's faces off.  He also emits a gas that causes you to instantly rot in the street.  And, no pun intended, none of this is sanitized.  My biggest frustration with the Godzilla movies is that they often become action movies without consequences.  It's kind of hilarious how destroyed Japan has gotten over the course of all of these films. But this is the first time that I feel like the stuff that happens here is permanent.

But beyond that, I felt like Godzilla became a character here.  I won't deny that I still don't understand Godzilla's motivations.  (Look how pretentious this blog is!  I want Godzilla's motivations!) We know that he kind of shows up where he's needed, even though that should be against his character.  But there were times in this movie where Godzilla was being wailed upon.  Like, I was looking at that burn to the eye and, while I can guess that it isn't permanent, it felt permanent.  Maybe something that came out of the choreography that made the movie feel more visceral.  At one point Hedorah throws Godzilla into a giant hole and starts drowning him in acid.  That's a lot more than just guys in rubber suits wailing on each other.  Do you know what it reminded me of, besides Doomsday wailing on Superman?  King Kong always felt way more brutal to me than Godzilla ever did.  But watching Hedorah rip into Godzilla almost felt mean at times...and I oddly enjoyed it.

But there are some stuff that gets really weird.  Let's talk about silly hippies.  I already talked about how this movie paints a serious issue with goofy large strokes.  Again, no shame!  It is the product of its time and it thought that it was doing the Lord's work.  I can't complain about that.  I'm just talking about how silly the hippies are overall.  There's a lot of movie that is trying to play out the clock.  There's the protagonist family, the one with the professor who gets his face burned off.  But then there's the hippies who go to Mt. Fuji.  Apparently, it's a "going out with a bang" attitude that I just learned from the Wikipedia, which forgives a lot of the issues I have.  But still, they seem to be giving up hope pretty quickly.  If anything, there seem to be a billion steps before drawing attention to Mt. Fuji.   Think about how much frustration those people were bringing to the military.  They had to bring all that equipment up a giant mountain.  But then they vaporized Yukio and that kind of blew my mind.

But the biggest shock of the movie is the fact that it doesn't look like other Godzilla movies.  In some ways, I'm comparing this to Live and Let Die, when the politics of the era had a direct effect on the way that the film franchise looked.  Someone cared about this movie.  Honestly, this doesn't feel like something that was floated out there.  There are these weird animated interstitials that give the whole movie a certain hippie vibe.  When people care about what they're making, they do things outside of the formula.  And I know that I'm losing my mind over a Godzilla sequel.  But this one is honestly delightful and dark.  There's effort here and that goes a long way.

PG-13 for some fairly brutal murder parts.  When Helm Hammerhand (with a name like that!) can kill people with single punches, you know that the violence is going to be more than the norm.  Honestly, the only thing that really justifies the PG-13 rating is the violence.  Lord of the Rings tends to get a bit more violent than most more family-friendly action films.  But the rest of it is tame...

DIRECTOR: Kenji Kamiyama

I think I'm starting to bite off more than I can chew, especially when it comes to Lent.  Here's some of the things in my daily To-Do List:  Exercise for one hour.  Read 50 pages of a novel (if the novel is over 400 pages, read 100 pages).  Write an essay over any movie I see.  Make sure your work is done before having fun.  Clean.  Cook dinner.  Edit two chapters of the novel I'm writing.  Do you know what I have to add to that list during Lent?  Read 50 pages of Don Quixote, on top of the other 50 pages.  Don Quixote is a slow read, guys.  I don't know how I'm staying upright.  So when I seem burnt out on some of these blogs, just understand that I'm being overtaxed.  I need to purge something soon.  

Rights issues are silly.  It's weird that we've all become low key experts on how the MCU works in terms of rights issues.  We know that there's Marvel and then there's the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  But it's also bizarre that we're aware that some movies exist simply so a studio doesn't lose the rights to a franchise.  New Line Cinema, in an attempt to hold onto The Lord of the Rings, fast tracked this movie into production just to hold onto a property.  That's never my favorite phrase when I hear a movie is coming out.  I want people to put their hearts and souls into a project.  I don't want to know that something is out there just so a studio can stay happy.  I hate studios.  They seem to be the worst.  

I will admit that, for a streamlined movie that's there just to be spiteful, The War of the Rohirrim isn't terrible.  That's not a glowing review because it shouldn't be a glowing review.  War of the Rohirrim most glowing review is that it is functional as a movie.  And I have to give points to the writers for doing most of the heavy lifting on this movie.  While the story of Helm Hammerhand is not quintessential to the Lord of the Rings mythos, it is mildly entertaining at best.  Henson and I were joking about the movie, saying that War of the Rohirrim might be one of those origin stories that no one was really asking for.  When Eowyn declares herself to be a shield maiden of Rohan, we all kind of get what that means.  The term "Shield Maiden" seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of making things make sense.   I didn't really need to find out about Hera, the last of the shield maidens.  That's fun and all.  But in terms of important storytelling, not so much?

This movie is really a film for the die hards, who probably don't really appreciate the movie for the quality of the presentation.  I tend to be more die hard about everything, even though I don't consider myself to really be a Lord of the Rings nerd.  I've read the novels.  I've watched the movies.  But do you know what I haven't read?  The appendices nor stuff like The Simarillion.  I like the story of The Lord of the Rings.  It's part of our cultural literacy at this point in time.  You kind of need to get into these stories to hold a conversation nowadays.   But even I don't think that this would appeal to the die hards simply because the movie looks ugly.  Now, if I read this out loud to the creators of this film, I wouldn't want them to become defensive.  10% of me thinks that this movie is ugly because of a general skepticism towards anime. I know.  It's unfair and probably not the best when it comes to trying to sell the notion that anime is a medium, not a genre. 

But 90% of me thinks that this movie is ugly because it is rushed.  As shameless as this is of me, part of what makes Lord of the Rings such a big deal in cinema is the majesty and grandeur of it all.  While I love the story and the characters, the cinematic Lord of the Rings sits on the shoulders of Peter Jackson, coupled with WETA workshop and the cinematography of the film.  Just looking at that movie, you think that it looks pretty.  This is not a joke nor is it an exaggeration.  I've often fantasized what the afterlife might be like and wondered if I could sit down with J.R.R. Tolkien and showed him the Lord of the Rings films.  Tolkien was always a skeptic about making his books into movies because the language of cinema could never meet the reaches of his imagination.  But I always thought that Peter Jackson might have hit that mark.

The War of the Rohirrim doesn't do that.  Honestly, the movie looks cheap.  There has been animation that has knocked my socks off and this is not it.  Now, I tried finding ways to explain away my frustrations with how the movie looks.  I mean, action and war scenes tend not to look like live action.  When watching Peter Jackson's movies, the spectacle of these action sequences is partly awe inspiring because we see actors doing things that are seemingly impossible in live action.  The War of the Rohirrim tries duplicating some of that cinematography and choreography that the live action counterparts did.  But all of it fell flat. 

But then I thought of Into the Spider-Verse.  My goodness, those movies sold animated fight choreography.  If anything, it shows that animation can do things that live action simply can't do.  But it needs to be filmed in a dynamic way that takes advantage of the format rather than simply film things in the most basic way possible.  The climax of the movie is a fight between Hera and Wulf.  There's a moment that is meant to be inspiring where Hera leaps over Wulf vertically.  Not only did it not match the epic intention that it was aiming for; the scene was straight up goofy looking.  I know.  This makes me feel like I'm complaining that "the lightsaber sequences aren't cool enough."   I'm more in the camp that, if you can't do it well, don't do it at all.  While Jackson did impressive things with action and choreography, just tell a simple story well.  There's a simple story in here.  But you sell the movie with the name The War of the Rohirrim, I suppose there is some desperation to earn that name.

Now, I did say that the movie wasn't a complete wash.  I probably enjoyed it more than most.  The actual story of Hera and Helm Hammerhand had oddly more legs than I was ready for.  I'll be honest.  It was only on the most recent viewing of The Two Towers that I grew to appreciate Rohan.  I always thought that the Rohan story was a bit of a distraction from the main story.  Now, I kind of dig Rohan.  If you go into the whole mythology of Rohan, there's a story to be told here.  Again, I had incredibly low expectations based on the trailer.  But if you know me at all, you also know that I tend to like way too much stuff.  

Hera is a compelling lead character.  She has this depth that I wasn't prepared for.  The weakest part of her, however, is her sharing screentime with Helm Hammerhand.  As a guy who hasn't read the appendices, I have a feeling that the original story that Tolkien wrote was about Hammerhand.  But I like the idea that Hera has a history with the antagonist.  Sure, Wulf comes across a lot like Kylo Ren.  Like, a lot.  Wulf is a guy who seems a bit more whiny than he should be for a guy who wields so much evil power.  From moment one, Helm Hammerhand kills his dad.  But his dad is the only one who is pushing for the fight between himself and Hammerhand.  When Hammerhand kills him in one punch, it's sad.  But is it "Destroy all of Rohan" sad?  He was a guy who picked a fight with a guy named "Hammerhand."  Yeah, Wulf might be underdeveloped, but Hera makes up for that in the course of the movie. 

But there are a ton of questions that I still didn't understand by the end.  The "Wraith of Hammerhand"?  What was up with that?  In my head, I left with the Occam's Razor answer saying that Helm Hammerhand just got better and started punching people to death.  It doesn't really explain how he did that.  Also, why didn't Helm Hammerhand, instead of freezing to death outside the gate, just burn down the siege tower.  No one could kill him.  Why not do some good?  I don't understand these things.

The takeaway that I'm offering is the most obvious read of this movie.  It's  a wildly imperfect addition to the Lord of the Rings canon because it was rushed into production.  If you go in with a good attitude, there's something to watch.  But to really enjoy it, you have to forgive a lot.

Rated G because there's less mass murder.  There's still violence.  In fact, in a way, the violence is a bit worse because it's aimed at a kid.  I know.  I'm being silly.  I mentally compare the violence of this movie to the violence in Home Alone.  Sure, there's the risk of the little kid getting stabbed, but that's it.  There's also some questionable language in the movie.  If anything, the morals of this movie might raise some yellow flags.  But still, G.

DIRECTOR:  Shin'ichi Sekizawa

It's barely a movie.  Can we all acknowledge this?  It feels like an afterschool special.  It clocks in at an hour-and-nine minutes and a lot of those minutes are devoted to clips from other monster movies.  For a guy who is trying to keep his head above water with a million stupid things and is insanely stressed out, to sit down and write about All Monsters Attack seems like I'm ignoring all the steps of self-care.  But part of my stupid self-care routine is writing.  After all, no one is going to die.  It's all a dumb circle of nonsense.  Just realize that the effort I'm putting into this is both therapeutic and toxic at the same time.

Here's where I'm going to be a little controversial:  I didn't hate it.  There's something absolutely brilliant about All Monsters Attack that loses a lot in the budget and the execution.  Do you know why I know it's brilliant?  All Monsters Attack is a way worse Home Alone.  All of the foundations for Home Alone are there.  Sure, Ichiro is a good kid who has some really rough lessons to get through.  Sure, he has a probably bad takeaway given the fact that I watched this in 2025.  But fundamentally, this is Home Alone.  Honestly, it's more Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, but I tend to ignore that Home Alone 2 exists.   It's a kid who is left alone all of the time.  Like Kevin, Ichiro has all of these problems in his life outside of the events of the story.  It is through his isolation that he discovers who he really is as a person.  That's not a bad idea.  I even like the idea that the Toho monsters are able to help him come to grips with it.

...but not that much.  The weakest parts of the movie are the kaiju stuff.  Now, I think we can all pick apart why I don't like the kaiju stuff with this movie.  I don't like the Godzilla-fighting-creatures sections of these movies on a good day.  But when the majority of the Godzilla stuff are clips strung together from previous movies, much like the clip shows of yesteryear, man, there is almost nothing to appreciate here.  To a certain extent, the clip show format works for the narrative.  Ichiro falls asleep and dreams of Minilla and the other kaiju from other Toho releases.  They cut him into these scenes as if he has always been in these scenes.  That's fine. Whatever.  It's not good, nor will I find a way to make it good.  But I can tell you that the movie pushes its luck when it comes to this storytelling device.  

Ichiro's initial "travels to Monster Island" is because he takes a nap.  Okay, I can get behind that.  But the movie, desperate to get to a place where Ichiro can interact with other Toho Monsters, keeps falling asleep.  That kid is the most well-rested kid in history.  This takes place over the course of an afternoon into the evening.  Literally, Ichiro is kidnapped by the equivalent of the Wet Bandits and is tied to a chair.  Guess who thought it would be a good time to take a nap?  Honestly, I know that this is a movie that's trying to make a buck on the cheap.  There is probably this Monster Fever in Japan and they need to release something on the quick.  So they release this movie with all of these old clips taking up a notable percentage of the movie and they string the story together so people aren't visibly mad at how cheap the movie is.  But that many returns to Monster Island?  What little is believable about this movie is sacrificed for Godzilla punching another monster.

But, let's pretend that the Monster Island stuff wasn't so prevalent in this movie.  I have to admit that I thought that this movie was going to be one giant clip show.  But once the first packet of clips went away, I actually kind of got invested in the kid's story.  I think my favorite parts of the Godzilla movies have always been the human element. There's why I got so excited for Godzilla Minus One, because Godzilla is incidental to the story.  But while Godzilla Minus One was imbued with a heavy dose of gravitas, All Monsters Attack is appropriate kids' fun.  I don't think that Godzilla should be tonally one thing.  If the franchise fell off the rails as hard as it did with those early movies, it makes sense to make them for different audiences.  If anything, All Monsters Attack is almost a commentary on how these fantastic monsters have influenced children.

That's a question I have.  Is All Monsters Attack an in-universe story?  Listen, it seems like a lot of the characters know what Ichiro is talking about when he talks about monsters.  He doesn't have to explain who these characters are too often.  It feels, aesthetically, that All Monsters Attack exists in the world of Godzilla and Monster Island, but with an understanding that the Japanese people of this universe seem to like Godzilla and Monster Island.  Ichiro's room has a bunch of Godzilla toys, including a Mechagodzilla (?).  At least, I think that's Mechagodzilla.  These movies don't really stick with me from film-to-film, so that's on me.  But as a commentary, from a real world perspective, the story could be a defense of these movies beyond the typical read that "guys in monster suits" punching each other around has no value.

Listen, I hate the message that All Monsters Attack gives.  If anything, it is an advocation of violence.  Ichiro is bothered by a bully.  He's undersized compared to the other kid, who even has an avatar in Monster Island.  But there is this commentary all through the movie that Ichiro needs to stand up to that kid when I'm on Ichiro's team to begin with.  He needs to give Gabara a wide berth and that's the only way to go about it.  And that's Ichiro's natural inclination.  Yet, the movie goes out of its way to say that Ichiro can absolutely destroy this kid that's a whole head taller than he is.  As a kid who was bullied and tried this, I can tell you definitively that it does not work.  That kind of stuff is the stuff of outdated movies.  But I need to acknowledge: this is an outdated movie.

My biggest takeaway is that there's a reason that Pokemon exists.  I never got into Pokemon, so please bear with my outside perspective.  From what I understand, Pokemon comes from the idea of "Pocket Monsters."  In the case of Pokemon, a youth collects these Pokemon and has them fight.  Holy moley, if you watch All Monsters Attack, you have Ichiro yelling out monster names and he watches them fight each other.  He's even got the baseball cap and everything.  That's fun that we can kind of see the entire mindset behind the creation of this franchise.  But also, like, is it great storytelling?  Probably not.  Still, it's fascinating to see how much of an impact Toho's kaiju characters had on Japanese culture.  All Monsters Attack is a pretty terrible movie because of it, but I'm going to be brave and say that it's not the worst thing out there.  Considering that so much of this movie was clips from other movies, it's mildly watchable at times?  That's not an overwhelming sell of the movie, but I'm sure that they'll take it.

PG-13 for the hero biting people's heads off.  Like, it's not like the movie ever embraces the concept of an R-rating, but it keeps things edgy.  Like, it's the Mountain Dew of superhero movies.  They swear...just enough to get the PG-13.  They kill people and it's just gross enough to be edgy without actually being over the top.  It's almost something all the time.  So keep all of this in mind when watching because it's not for kids, but it's also not for adults.

DIRECTOR: Kelly Marcel

Aw geez. 

I only have Kraven the Hunter left and then we can all say goodbye to the Sony Spider-Man Universe of Heroes and Villains (or something like that.)  Before even I talk about the odd masochism of watching these movies, I'd like to establish that I've never cared for the Venom movies.  Golly, there was a push to say that the Venom movies were amazing.  I knew that Venom, as a film concept, was a terrible idea.  My big foundation for my argument was that Venom couldn't even sustain a proper comic book, let alone a movie franchise.  But things changed since the first Venom movie.  Donny Cates wrote one of the most amazing Venom runs of all time, shifting my perspective on whether or not that character had legs.  And I'll tell you what, Venom movies are still pretty bad.

But I know that there's this push to really throw Sony under the bus for making Razzie level bad movies.  (I hate the notion of the Razzie, so I don't want to harp on that too much.) These movies are bad.  I'm glad that they are stopping with the extended universe Spider-Man related movies.  I have written the following diatribe too many times at this point.  Sony is the last company producing films by the old rules.  Maybe this doesn't apply to their animation division.  But the way that they approach big budget action movies is by the late '90s and early 2000s attitude of "extreme is better."  They honestly refuse to do anything that is vulnerable or subdued.  Instead, everything is showing off what could be done with a character instead of what should be done.  I think that's the second time I've quoted Ian Malcolm in a review in a couple of days.

So let's specifically talk about Venom 3.  It was the close of a franchise.  But is it?  This is not the crux of my argument about why this movie is so phenomenally dumb.  (By the way, I'd like to point out that, for some reason, my brain lights up with genuine excitement to watch these Sony Spider-Man spin-offs each time they show up on Netflix.  I don't want to watch them ironically.  I want to watch something new Spider-Man related and I tend to like things.  That means I go into a lot of these movies with unjustified hope.  Also, I like these movies more than others do, which is not to say I like them.  I just don't think that they are the abominations that people make them out to be.  They're normal bad.) One of the biggest frustrations about the Star Trek franchise, especially when it got to The Next Generation films, was Star Trek: Nemesis.

Nemesis was a bad movie. It was bombastic.  It lacked soul.  It was throwing everything at the camera, which ironically made the movie boring.  It was trying to hard to close out something on a bang that it ultimately sacrificed what goodwill the franchise had been slowly spending since First Contact.  But the worst part was that you could feel the studio putting its hands all over that movie, hoping to squeeze out the potential for more money down the road.  Both Venom and Star Trek promised the close to a franchise, wrapping up whatever threads were open to these characters.  We were offered a sense of closure, but the studios decided to keep opening those doors to future adventures.  Why?  The characters didn't need those future stories.  The studio wanted to make a lot of money.

I don't think the version of Venom: The Last Dance was probably the story that fit the movie best.  I bet there's a Last Dance draft that is far more interesting because it took bigger chances.  The reason that I'm saying this is obvious to some people.  The movie ends with a tease of Knull promising to destroy Earth. But, also, if you were making a final Venom movie, you'd have Knull be in it.  I mentioned Donny Cates above.  Knull is Donny Cates's creation.  He make the symbiotes actually have a story worth telling.  Knull was a top tier villain.  If you can believe it, Knull is Thanos level.  The King in Black storyline took a long time to tell and when the confrontations in those books came to fruition, holy moley was it worth it.  Someone behind the scenes of Venom: The Last Dance read the Knull comic book.   They knew that they could print money with Knull.  The problem was...Knull needed a minute.

You know how Thanos took a while to build up?  Even DC understood this with a version of Darkseid that never really happened outside of Zack Snyder's Justice League.  When you have a truly awful threat, you need to build it up.  Now, Venom: The Last Dance decided to introduce Knull.  They knew that this was a character worth giving gravitas to.  Unfortunately, they also wanted to be the guys who said that this was the story that was going to close the Venom / Eddie relationship.  They wanted both.  Oh my goodness, they wanted to have the benefit of drawing in audiences, promising them that the character that they loved over the course of these three films, was going to have some kind of consequence.  You can't have both.  You can't prop up a future movie and also sell that this emotional resolution was going to happen.  It's corporate crap all over this movie.  In an attempt to do both, they ruined either potential story.

Knull is absolutely wasted in this movie.  I've made it clear that there clearly was supposed to be a Venom 4 or other stories that would have made this story set up. But let's talk about how even this movie ruined Knull.  I've read the Donny Cates books.  I was so interested in this character that he created that I read back issues and played catch up.  They were honestly that good. But Knull is complicated as crap.  Even after all this time, I only kind of understand the inner workings of this character.  So when you start your movie with a "Once upon a time" two minute story of a character that we had no association with?  What are you doing, my guy?  I don't want an off-camera villain.  I want to understand what makes that character tick.  And then, The Last Dance even butchered that.  They took words that were said in those comics and just used them as Macguffins.  

The Codex frees Knull because Eddie died?  What kind of logic is that?  Honestly.  I don't understand that at all.  The movie just wants me to believe something because it told me to.  Yes, in the comics, Knull was collecting the Codexes.  But they were a database of every human who had bonded with a symbiote.  These xenophages (dumb, by the way) shouldn't even exist.  It's an entire race of creatures that exist for a specific scenario?  On top of that, they're functionality is really suspect.  For those who are just reading my blog because they weren't planning on watching the movie, the creatures can only see the Codex if Eddie is fully Venomed up.  I'm talking about "fully".  The monsters can't even see Venom if he's using his powers.  It's only if Venom is completely covering Eddie.  That's too much of a weakness, guys.

Which leads to this movie dumbing down everyone, not just its audience.  Eddie even verbalizes that they shouldn't go full Venom.  Venom says to Eddie that he can't go big and Venom is terrified by the xenophages.  Okay.  Seems like you have a pretty concrete plan on how to survive this mess.  So why in the holy hell did they Venom up just so they could dance with Mrs. Chen?  The pivot of this movie's third act is founded on a joke fan service moment.  Honestly, the character actually had to change motivation so the story could go on.  For a long time in the movie, Eddie's doing just fine.  It seems like he dug himself out of the hole that the character had gotten himself into only to acknowledge that the plot wasn't moving forward, so he got himself captured.  What?  And the movie has a bunch of these moments.  

And the narrative backpedaling?  My goodness, Venom: The Last Dance.  You keep teasing the notion of Spider-Man.  You even played ball with the MCU's Multiverse stuff.  The first few minutes, you embrace that multiverse stuff.  At the end of your last movie, you have the symbiote remember all the memories of the other universes.  And nothing?  That has nothing to do with the movie?  Again, I cannot stress how much corporate interference is in this movie.  When this whole multiverse thing started, Cristo Fernandez was just finding the mildest amount of fame on Ted Lasso.  But now that Ted Lasso is next level and Fernandez is well sought after, the movie wanted to use that character despite his tie to the Venom series is something that they didn't want to use.  Do you know what backs that up?  Juno Temple is also in this movie!  They're trying to appeal to a specific market in direct opposition to the story trying to come out of this film.

How did so much talent get attracted to this movie?  It is all charts and slides from the first movie going to talent agents saying "This movie is going to make a billion dollars?"  I don't know what part of this movie feels like a passion project.  It is cold and dead throughout.  The emotional reveal of the symbiote sacrificing itself for Eddie might be one of the most meh sequences I've ever seen.  It was a franchise that never really hit any highs, but I also didn't want to see it go out on such a corporate, dead low.  Geez, there's very little about this movie that is redeemable.  Again, I like these movies more than others do.  I think I probably still had a mildly good time occasionally.  But if you tell me that I saw a good movie, I would have to fight you tooth and nail there.  This is quintessentially what is wrong with Sony and they need to learn from their mistakes instead of constantly doubling down.

PG-13 which, honestly, is pretty baffling.  Maybe it's because America is wired to be afraid of only sex stuff in R-rated movies.  But let's assume that the fictional gore wasn't enough to earn it an R-rating.  I'm referring to a scene where a character takes shotgun pellets to the face, potentially losing the eye in the process.  The movie, as a form of protest to the Iranian government in real life, show real world death footage from the Internet.  It's throughout the film.  Also, characters are tortured and killed.  Still, somehow PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Mohammad Rasoulof

My eye is twitching from stress and annoyance.  That's a thing.  What I have to do is to try to distance myself from an annoying day and try to write about The Seed of the Sacred Fig with objectivity.  Because I'll say this as clearly as I can: The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an accomplishment both from a political position and from a cinematic position.  Is it a perfect movie?  No.  It absolutely does not need to be as long as it is.  But at the end of the day, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is too important to be forgotten, which unfortunately, it probably will be.

It's kind of a glorious thing to live in an era of Wikipedia.  While I try staying intentionally blind to anything about a movie before watching it, especially when it comes to the Academy Awards, it definitely helped to know the backstory of this movie.  The movie is strongly anti-theocracy.  It is a direct criticism about the Iranian government.  Now, that's a gutsy move to begin with.  The Iranian government is notorious for its obsession with censorship.  The very nature of an Iranian film criticizing the Iranian theocratic regime is insane.  But the fact that this movie was quasi-made in secret?  I've seen one other movie made in secret.  It didn't look like this.  As a film, every bit of this looks impressive as can be.  I don't deny that a lot of the movie takes place inside an apartment, limiting the danger of filming something that might get the actors or the director imprisoned.  The director, during the filming of the movie, found out that he was to be imprisoned and knocked out the movie in 80 something days.  

And I'll tell you this, narratively, the story works really well.   It takes a minute to figure out what the story is about.  I can't help but bring Persepolis into this because Persepolis is what taught me about the theocracy in Iran, especially when it came to fighting oppressive regimes.  Like Persepolis, The Seed of the Sacred Fig spends a lot of time explaining the real world setting of Iran.  The entire first act is almost meant for foreigners who are unaware of the social structure of modern Iran.  We meet the girls (who have to be older than what they're playing.  No judgment!  I'm a big fan of saving younger actors from dangerous or unhealthy situations.) who almost epitomize the duality of what it means to be a woman in Iran.  Yes, we get strong characterization for these girls.  We get to know their intentions and personalities. But the real use of the first act is to show how violent the world has gotten in Iran.

When the story turns to give attention to Iman, it's actually kind of shocking.  I read Iman to be a minor character in the story for a good chunk of the narrative.  He's the threat that's out there.  Najmeh seems to come down on the girls because their 21st century behavior might offend him.  But the first act feels like it is a story of a mother who keeps using the father as an excuse to keep her children repressed.  When Sadaf becomes friends with the girls, it is almost a galvanizing of a new age.  That's honestly what I thought the story was going to be about, how Sadaf makes a tiny crack in these girls lives and Mom is going to have to see on which side of history that she stands on.

But the loss of the gun is when the film shifts.  Listen, I took the movie mostly seriously.  It's incredibly bleak and tense throughout.  But, man, Iman is not good at his job.  The movie starts with him having a bit of a conscience.  He's horrified that he has to sentence someone to death without ever having investigated this man.  It seems like he's a good dude (which I think is the point.  We're supposed to see how easily he's corrupted.)  But Najmeh is afraid of this guy from the beginning.  All of Najmeh's excuses are because "Father wouldn't tolerate any of this."  There's this fear of this man who seems like he has a soul at the beginning of the story.  There's something a little muddy about Iman's embracing of a structure that he fundamentally hates.  The problem is that Iman has two fundamental problems with his character: he doesn't believe that his work has a moral core and that he's bad at his job.  The first issue, which is far more important, is undercooked at the expense of the second point, because that guy makes every mistake in the book.

Once the Sadaf story is concluded, the real story of Iman and his spiraling out of control begins.  And, yeah, it's compelling.  I like the idea that a father / husband can turn on his family for the sake of a perverted sense of faith and duty.  Iman becomes this maniacal bad guy and he's truly scary...even though he isn't great at his job at being competently evil.  All of his motivation is that his family is spitting in the face of God with their obsession with freedom and progressiveness.  Unfortunately, there are moments, in an attempt to make Iman a  valid threat, that the movie gets a little silly.

These aren't bad moments.  They were just moments that pulled me out of the movie.  I had to be this guy, because these moments are so stupid that I can't help it.  The entire last act is meant to almost be an action thriller.  The girls go from being ideologically threatened (fighting a battle of willpower) to literally having to escape their father, who has locked them up in individual cells.  The individual cells is a weird moment for me.  The reason that the family is out in the middle of nowhere is because Iman got doxxed and the family's life is in danger.  Okay, that's interesting.  The family escape a protestor who is following them and Sana saves her father.  It seems like Sana is going to be on Dad's side for the conclusion of the movie. But the movie throws that moment out to provide a more climactic ending. 

That moment when Sana turns on the protestors and reveals that they have no bars, that's a big moment for Sana.  Sana, for a good chunk of the movie, has her allegiances a bit guarded.  While she tends to hang out with her sister, Rezvan, Sana almost echoes what she hears.  But in the moments before Dad is about to murder these people on live camera, we discover that it was actually Sana who stole the gun.  She doesn't even tell Rezvan that it was her.  (Although Rezvan probably could have figured it out.)  Now, there's a read of this that is also pretty accurate.  The reveal of the thief wasn't to protect Iman.  The purpose of revealing the gun and the lack of phone signal was to save the protesters.  But it is almost a fight for her dad's soul.  I get this.  But we don't really get the wrap up from this because Dad goes more nuclear as the story progresses.

The weird part that pulled me out was that this safehouse in the middle of nowhere had individual jail cells.  Now, I can write off the fact that this safe house was provided by his weird buddy (who seemed to really enjoy Iman's constant failure.  Am I the only one who read that in the character?) But do all safehouses have secret dungeons for torturing your family?  Part of this is that the movie needed Iman to make a definitive move against his family that would have seemed realistic.  While I believe that he was open to the notion of murdering them after they had escaped, it probably would have been a bridge too far to have Iman instantly jump to murdertown as his go-to response to being questioned or embarrassed.  It all seems incredibly escalated, considering that I see some plausible solutions to still keep him evil and simultaneously grounded.

I think I want to like this movie more than I actually did.  It hits a lot of amazing points and the story behind the making of this film is inspiring.  But it also feels like three separate films and often, character motivation is a bit all over the place.  Does that come from having to film it in secret?  Does it comes from having a limited shooting schedule?  There, after all, were few opportunities to reshoot sequences or fix it in post.  But it's a good movie that's important, but I never quite get to "great movie."

Rated R for some really densely packed swearing throughout.  Man, there is some cursing on a next level.  There's also a pretty explicit sex scene that doesn't show any nudity.  It doesn't change the fact that it is incredibly graphic.  And like with most music biopics, there's an impressive amount of drugs in this movie.  Here's the deal.  I wish that the movie wasn't R so I could watch this movie regularly.  But if it wasn't R, it wouldn't be this movie either.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Michael Gracey

I don't even understand me anymore.  I rally against music biopics.  I say they're all the same.  They're always about musicians falling into drugs and being terrible people only to come out the other side seeing freedom through music.  Better Man?  Same deal.  But do you know what?  Better Man might be one of my favorite movies of 2024.  I wasn't prepped for that.

It might be that it was because I wasn't prepped for that.  I was so ready to write this movie off.  I mean, for all my pop culture obsession, I know nothing of music.  From what I understand, Robbie Williams is a huge deal internationally who never really penetrated the cultural zeitgeist in America.  These should be points against a movie about him.  From my perspective, he's a dude.  But do you know what?  It might actually help a movie like Better Man.  Better Man might be playing on my lack of investment, completely destroying anything that I thought I was going to get out of this movie.  Honestly, I can not speak more highly about this movie.  I do have an inkling about why I really loved it.  

As much as I've been rallying against the music biopic subgenre, there has always been one exception to the rule: Rocketman.  Well, Michael Gracey was a producer on Rocketman and it shows.  I might like Better Man better than Rocketman.  It's almost like the title is meant to be a commentary on the quality of the same sub-sub-genre of film.  Crazy, right?  The jukebox musical is either a love it or hate it thing.  But what makes Better Man a better version of Rocketman is its freedom to get a little weird.  Honestly, Better Man is more grounded than the trailers make it out to be.  I guess I should discuss the monkey in the room, but the monkey stuff doesn't matter.  As much as I'm saying the movie is free to get weird, the monkey stuff isn't what pulls it into a bizarre place.  It doesn't hurt.  I can't deny that.  But you get used to the monkey stuff pretty quick.

The great part, which makes me like Better Man more than --say --A Complete Unknown is that the movie is about knowing who Robbie Williams is as a human being over simply being a glorification of his music. The music gets its play and is super valuable.  I don't want to downplay any of that.  I'm more long the line of the notion that the movie is obsessed with getting Robbie Williams's take on each beat of his life.  Because Williams is the protagonist coupled with narrator, there is a glorious bias (I'm not being sarcastic --he imbues each historical event with his perspective coupled with unfiltered opinions on that moment) to each thing.  On top of that, while much of the film does hit on music biopic tropes, it almost seems like it doesn't care so much that Williams is a mega star so much as he is a deeply flawed individual.

Yeah, other movies have tried.  I'll even say that other movies have succeeded at this.  But there's the opening with little Robbie (again, an ape) failing at being a soccer star.  The movie builds on the idea that, while he wants superstardom, it is because he's desperate for even the slightest bit of love from anyone besides his grandmother.  I will admit  --and I've posted this in other film blogs --that I'm a sucker for dad issues.  Man alive, did this movie sell the "dad issue" story.  Like, I was close to tears by the end.  If I'm trying to prove that this is more about acceptance than fame, I think that most of my evidence comes from Dad.  This is vulnerable stuff here, so please be patient with me.  My dad died when I was 12.  (Already you feel bad for me.  I don't blame you.  Like Robbie Williams, I am desperate for your acceptance.) The man was incredibly smart.  No joke, he was a full-on member of MENSA.  Do you understand how many dreams and daydreams I have about meeting my father and trying to impress him?  Honestly, I write an essay about every movie I watch.  There's something fundamentally broken about that.

Before I get off the dad thing, I do want to talk about my bittersweet reaction to the movie.  Again, this is a true story made by the guy who lived it.  In real life, Robbie Williams threw his deadbeat dad a bone and let him do a duet of "My Way" by Frank Sinatra, despite the fact that his father was addicted to trying to get fame.  My bittersweetness comes from the fact that I adore that Robbie Williams, through therapy and rehab, got to a point in his life that he was able to forgive his dad and give him the thing that he wanted the most.  But I also am in this camp that says it almost would have been happier to cut his dad out of his life.  Again, there's something toxic about that too.  There are a bunch of things in the movie that Robbie Williams is morally responsible for. There are things that he needs to atone for.  But I feel like there had to have his father make the moral choice to beg for an apology.  Like, I feel like his dad leaves just as broken as he started the movie.  But that might be actually more of a commentary on Robbie Williams's mental health.  He doesn't need his dad to apologize.  He can sing a song with his dad simply because he wanted to sing a song with his dad.  As much as it was making his dad's dream come true, Robbie does it to be selfish in the best way possible.

And, Geez Louise, this movie aggressively talks about mental health. Now we're talking about the ape thing.  (I've shifted out of "monkey" as a term because I think "ape" is more accurate.)  From a practical perspective, you want Robbie Williams to play himself.  But Robbie Williams is also significantly older than he was during these events.  I know that there's another actor playing Williams and I'm not quite sure about the beat-for-beat moments when the handoff is made.  Doesn't matter.  The movie never gets explicit with its choice to make a real human look like an ape the entire time.  But I love the little teases to the imagery in the movie.  Throughout the story, there are moments of Robbie describing himself as an animal.  As much as there are real villains in this story, most notably his father, Robbie hates himself.  Again, the movie is about acceptance.  The idea of distancing himself from humanity proper is the notion of other.  As an ape, Robbie has a difficult time settling for what other people have accepted as normal.  He stands out from the crowd.  His behavior is often written off because "That's just Robbie."  But when he's an ape, it's almost saying that there's something biological behind his actions.  

Then the imagery gets more intense. One of the recurring motifs is the notion of seeing his younger selves in the crowd.  Robbie hates himself. I get it.  I often hate myself too.  (Like Robbie, though, I also think I'm the greatest thing to walk Planet Earth.  Keep this paradox in mind when you talk to me.) But those apes serve multiple purposes.  The first thing is that they stand out.  They aren't people in the crowd.  You stick a human Robbie in the audience, he gets lost immediately.  You stick an ape in that crowd, that creature comes across as threatening.  It wants to kill Robbie in his present form.  And do you know what is spectacular?  These are other forms of Robbie that we saw previously in the movie who were also threatened by other versions of himself.  It's incredible.  The fact that it all becomes this surreal brawl at this event, without giving much context to what is real and what is imagined, lets us feel what it might mean to disassociate as Williams.  It works really well.

I don't know, man.  Maybe I don't hate biopics.  Maybe I hate safe biopics.  There has been such a string of safe biopics that I need stuff that kind of blows the roof off of the subgenre.  I can't keep going to the same well.  It needs to get bizarre.  It needs to get vulnerable.  Better Man works not only as an expose of a persona, but also as an incredible musical.  Musicals are allowed to play with reality more than other movies are.  (I don't even believe that sentence...but it is a shorthand for a much larger concept that I don't have the energy to explain.) By embracing this as a weird musical, I learned to love an artist I know almost nothing about.    Better Man is incredible.  I know that A Complete Unknown is going to get all of the attention, but Better Man is where it's at.

Rated R and it absolutely didn't need to be rated R.  I mean, there is language in the movie.  That's why it officially is rated R.  But there isn't even that much language.  This was a movie we held off until the kids were in bed for and our oldest absolutely should have been able to watch this.  I mean, sure, she probably wouldn't have had the attention span coupled with the interest to watch a movie about the attacks on the Munich Olympics.  But whatever.  While there is death, it is all off camera.

DIRECTOR: Tim Fehlbaum

And now we're going to have the discussion.  These blogs that I'm writing right now are my least favorite to write.  These are the movies that I couldn't finish writing about before the Academy Awards, despite having watched them before the Oscars were televised.  (Okay, mostly televised.  Hulu decided not to show Best Actress nor Best Picture.)   There is very little drive to get these on the website because that page is now going to be an abandoned mall of information.  We know who got the Academy Award.  We know who didn't.  September 5 did not get the Academy Award.  I'm writing this because I watched it.  If you want an insight into what it is like to maintain a blog where you write about everything you watch, this is one of those moments that is willpower in the face of wanting to take a nap.

My wife kept asking me if I wanted to know how the entire thing ended.  For some reason, I got really defensive at this.  I mean, I have a minor in history.  I had seen Munich when it came out all those years ago. In my head, I remember that there was an attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, but I didn't remember how the whole thing played out --except tragically.  In my head, there was a bomb threat or something.  I don't know.  September 5 is a heck of a way to present this information.  Putting it in the perspective of the sports / news team exclusively gives the the movie a ship-in-a-bottle form of storytelling that is oddly compelling.  The weird thing is that I traditionally don't love these kinds of stories.  I mean, I still hold some grudge against Spotlight for ultimately doing the same thing.  But I don't know if September 5 was necessarily about recounting the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics.  

I can't say that the movie isn't about the Palestinian Liberation Army and their attack on Israeli Olympians.  The timing doesn't seem to be an accident.  I want to talk about this a bit in a second (and hopefully will be focused enough to remember that I set this up for discussion later).  But if you take that element of it out (not completely, because the  subject matter is important to the story), it is more of a look at how journalism has a toxic element to it.  The journalists in September 5 are never evil. This isn't a story about media manipulation, nor is it really about propagandizing events for public consumption.  You could make an argument that the journalists in this story are propagandizing the events for consumption with Americans and I probably couldn't fight you very well.  But the point of the story is how seductive the spotlight is.  (Hey, Spotlight!)  

Roone Aldridge, played by Peter Sarsgaard, is the only character who is meant to rub us the wrong way from the beginning.  Aldridge doesn't really hide his ambition from moment one.  There might be a narrative that the character (who was a real dude) tells himself saying that he's doing what has to be done for the better news story.  There's a way to make Aldridge look altruistic.  But the movie is painting the character in a far different way.  Because Aldridge is juxtaposed to many other characters who seem to temper their zeal for media, Aldridge comes across as dangerous.  But we have Aldridge in the movie for a specific reason.  Aldridge's perspective is initially gross with his disregard for safety measures.  But as the film progresses, Aldridge stays static while the other characters start morphing into versions of Aldridge.  Sorry that I struggle with some of the character names, but even Hank Hanson (?), the man who epitomizes the antithesis of Aldridge ends the movie with apologizing to Aldridge despite ultimately being wrong.

The funny thing is that I'm on their side almost immediately.  September 5, whether intentionally or not, is a movie about compartmentalization.  It's not that these reporters don't care about the Olympians.  The movie makes it clear that there is an emotional tie to the people being held hostage.  But these emotions are tainted by success of ABC News.  The reason that these people are thrust into the spotlight is because they are the only ones who can cover this tragedy.   There's a great moment where ABC Sports / News (If you watch it, you know where I'm going with that constant dual naming system) exposes the plan for the police to breach into the Olympic Village to save the hostages.  Now, again, I am on Team News.  As betrayed as I felt during the election cycle with how the news sanewashed Donald Trump, leading to where we are now politically, I also have that narrative that journalism is meant to push back against censorship.  

But that moment where they accidentally tell the kidnappers law enforcement's plan for breaching the Olympic Village, there's a moral grey area there.  Now, the film goes out of its way to stress that a lot of the problems that came out of the Munich Olympics came from the police, who were not trained to handle hostage situations.  That's the film's perspective.  Historians may agree or disagree with that read.  I'm just telling you what the film presents as the reasoning behind why things went so south with the events.  But it doesn't really take the onus off of ABC News.  It's that old Ian Malcolm chestnut, "We were so busy wondering if we couldn't, we never considered if we should." (If I butchered the quote, I don't have the willpower to look it up and slow my momentum.) The movie posits that there is a responsibility to the greater good that stresses that human lives are more important than ratings.  There may not have been a willful desire for hostages to get hurt, but there was also a negligence on the part of ABC to do the right thing.

Now, I just read that the Alamo Drafthouse employees tried to shut down showings of September 5 because of accusations of promoting Zionist ideologies.  The articles I'm reading after (which aren't exactly the most legit sources I've ever looked at) seem dismissive when it comes to the employees' concerns.  While, as a whole, I think there is a place to tell this story, even in today's climate, I can't help but think that the movie had to consider this when making the film. There's a straight up discussion about what to label the members of the PLO.  When the word "terrorist" pops up, there's a discussion showing how the word has political connotation.  But the rest of the movie isn't an attempt to talk about the weight of this word.  Now, my place isn't to come down on this.  But the movie never does present a Palestinian perspective.  But if I'm being honest, it doesn't really go much into the politics of either side beyond the fact that this is a movie about trying to get Olympians free from hostage takers.  Is the film Zionist propaganda?  Probably not.  But it's also not welcoming a deeper discussion beyond what is compelling for a human interest piece.

But if everything is out there and the Oscars are over, what do I think of the movie overall?  The movie is pretty darned good.  But do you know what else?  It's pretty darned forgettable as well.  Part of that comes from the title.  A year from now, I will not know what September 5 will be about.  It's one of those movies that is going to only hold digital real estate on my blog.  If I ever read my own blog, I would be able to remind myself what I thought of it.  But honestly, it's a good movie that never really hits greatness.