Rated R.  While this is rated R for all of the reason that Academy Award nominated dramas are rated R, the movie really dives deep into almost exploitative nudity in a sexual context.  Like, I haven't seen a movie try these kinds of sex scenes since the '90s.  And these scenes keep happening and go for long periods of time.  And the movie, as a whole, isn't necessarily about sex.  But the movie also involves racism, drug use, homophobia, and all kinds of R-rated subject matter.  R.

DIRECTOR: Lee Daniels

I have so much work to do.  So much work.  I really want to have a work free weekend and I don't know if I can pull that off at this point.  I'm writing really quickly because I don't want this over my head and it is a break from grading a bazillion papers. We'll see if I can pull this off in a reasonable amount of time, okay?

If I was to make a guess which movie didn't deserve to be nominated before watching them, I wouldn't have guessed that The United States vs. Billie Holiday would be the stinker.  I mean, it has a lot going for it.  I know Lee Daniels only from reputation, so I wouldn't have thought that he would drop the ball in terms of direction.  The only thing that this movie has really going for it is Andra Day's portrayal of the titular heroine, which is what the movie is nominated for.  But man alive, this movie is almost straight up bad.  I had to stop the movie the first night because it, no joke, put me to sleep.  It's not like the story was bad. The things I learned about Billie Holiday, while heavily entrenched in speculation apparently, was fascinating.  But this is a movie that hits every biopic trope along the way while simultaneously committing a cinema sin that completely ruins the film: it doesn't know what it wants to say.

I've said before that I'm tired of the musician biopic.  I really went off on a rant when it applied to Bohemian Rhapsody. We get it.  The world of music is a tragic and lonely one.  I know that when looking at the life of Billie Holiday, you can't possibly ignore the tragic things about it.  But it shouldn't also be the thing that defines her character in this movie.  I'll get to that in a second.  If I was to tell you that there was going to be a biopic about a musician, you can guess that the movie is going to show about how the rise to fame has corrupted this person. This person would fall down a tunnel of vice, whether it be booze or drugs or both.  The protagonist will push everyone away, yet you will still be asked to root for this character, despite the fact that this character acts abominably.  Everything I just said applies to The United States vs. Billie Holiday.  But why have a title like that if the movie is going to be about the dangers of success?  

Because the movie wants to do everything.  It wants to do too much and it doesn't know that it needs to focus its lens on something and say that well.  If I take it from the title of the film, the movie should be about the United States government going after Billie Holiday for singing "Strange Fruit."  I love that as a tight, hour-and-a-half movie.  I've mentioned this before, but my nerd knowledge is weakest when it comes to music.  The story of "Strange Fruit", while underdeveloped in the movie, ended up being fascinating.  Holiday would sing this call of rebellion at these venues as a means to draw light to the lynching happening in the South.  The government, without any power to really stop it, decided to go after Holiday in other ways, both in terms of tearing down her public persona and arresting her on drug charges.  That should be the movie. 

Instead, we get a lot of threads.  I want to use Selma as an example of how to do this correctly.  (My goal of this blog was to write about every movie I had seen, but for some reason, as of the time of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, I hadn't written about Selma.)  Selma is a biopic of Dr. King.  It is an extremely focused storyline basically structured around King and Lewis's march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  It's a really tight story and it works really well.  Like with Holiday, the FBI wanted to go after King without really having a legal reason to do so.  So to tear him down, they decided to focus on King's vice: extra-marital affairs.  But the movie never showed us these affairs.  Instead, we have incrimination and inference that allows the audience to pick up on what's going down.  But The United States vs. Billie Holiday decided to show us about every bad thing that Billie Holiday did.  She alienated everyone around her.  She was rude and selfish. The story should be about the United States being the bad guy in this narrative. But by the time that the United States had gone after her, she had made herself really hard to like.

The role of the biopic, especially the ones where celebrity is involved, is to create a sense of empathy for the subject of the film.  With Billie Holiday, I started off empathetic.  She was a Black woman with a strong voice during a time of extreme racial disparity.  (I use this phrase implying that there isn't a divide today.  That isn't accurate.  We're at a new surge.)  But because Daniels focuses so much on Holiday as a polarizing figure, there's only so much that can be tacked on.  While the singing of "Strange Fruit" is a morally impressive act, it almost pales to the cruelty that she inflicts on others.  A lot of that comes from the fact that she led a traumatic life that caused her to behave in such a manner.  But that's a whole other story that gets kind of trampled on.

Because Holiday is not living in a void, her traumatic past is part of who she is.  But is the movie about Holiday and her addiction or is it about the United States government silence a voice that could topple society?  If that wasn't enough, the movie gives a third focus, which is even more insane.  Daniels tries marrying the two separate narratives with the inclusion of a Black FBI agent who must choose between his people and the admiration of his peers.  I don't really get why Jimmy Fletcher would fall so head over heels for Billie Holiday outside of her celebrity.  Fletcher knows the whole show.  He knows the drug addicted singer and he sees her personality.  My mind can't divorce the concept that Fletcher is almost attracted to the stardom of Billie Holiday because her personality doesn't really explain the element that a lot of stories like this have: "You haven't seen the real her."  We see the real her and it seems toxic as all get out.  Coupled with this grab bag is the notion that Billie Holiday may have had a female, white lover and definitely had an abusive husband.  This stuff is important.  That is its own movie. The Many Loves of Billie Holiday is a film. 

There's no reason that this movie should fall on its face as hard as it does.  There's very little redeemable about the film outside of a few standout performances.  There is this element that really annoyed my wife and I, mainly because this editing thing was so poorly executed. The movie wanted to give the old-timey feel to a lot of scenes by either going black-and-white or mimicking a Super 8 film.  But the actual product of these moments look like they were done in iMovie.  There wasn't also a consistency between these segments.  Is the past in black-and-white or is it in Super 8?  If the transitions tried matching time passing, it wasn't really made clear at any point how much time had been involved in the story.  It's just a bad movie that has no sense of progression or focus. There's nothing to root for except for the end of racism, which is a vague background player in the movie.

This movie had so much potential.  It has three great stories that really could have been their own films.  I would have watched a movie about Billie Holiday enduring the slings and arrows of a racist institution.  I might have tolerated a movie about a public figure going through the problems of drugs and fame.  I would have probably liked a movie about Billie Holiday finding her self-worth through her relationships.  But all three?  That's a movie that is just a KFC bowl of sadness.

Rated R because it is an overall bleak movie that seems to comment that humanity is just of rotten human beings.  There's a lot of vulgar talk during the film.  People treat each other terribly.  There's death and violence, often because of a cruel disparity of class.  There is a mild amount of sexuality.  I can't believe that I'm writing this, but the overly patriotic might be sensitive to some of the comments made about America.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Ramin Bahrani

They're all bleeding together.  It's all become too  much.  My brain is leaking out so much stuff about movies that I just feel like I'm in a haze.  A cup of tea, too hot to drink, is sitting next to me.  I hope it gives me the focus I need to write today.  If I'm way off about this one, forgive me.  I don't know when I'm going to have time to finish, but I promise to at least try my darndest.

The White Tiger kind of came out of nowhere for me.  I remember when Netflix recommended it to me.  I watched the trailer and thought "pass".  Maybe the cut of the trailer was weak, but it looked super cheap.  When it showed up as an Academy Award nominated movie, I was flummoxed.  I was beside myself.  That movie didn't look like it was quality.  I was wrong.  The White Tiger, in a year full of impossibly great movies, added to the pile of movies that you should probably watch this year.  My gut says to avoid saying the following, but I'm a sleepy peepy so here goes:  I can't deny that The White Tiger is kind of a way more pessimistic Slumdog Millionaire.  Maybe that is the story of India for the Western world.  The movies that we get about India is about how the hero is poor and abused for bulk of their lives.  It is through insane happenstance and the selling of souls that people are able to pull themselves out of their situations.  The theme that money is the root of all evil seems to be this common thread.  With movies like The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire, the storytellers choose to acknowledge that money is life.  

I have commented on this before with movies about India.  I didn't mention this in 3 Idiots, which really does paint a portrait of me in a poor light.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her TED talk entitled "The Dangers of a Single Story", comments on what I am doing as a dangerous way to look at a country.  I often look at what Western directors and storytellers say about India rather than what the Indian audience hears about India.  Directors like Wes Anderson and Danny Boyle have painted the country of India as a place of duality: the horrors of poverty against the sheer beauty of a rich culture.  Ramin Bahrani, with The White Tiger, seems to step out of the narrative that Indian audiences see with Bollywood, presenting the country of India as both up-and-coming and toxic.  But that toxicity doesn't come from the internal part of India.  Instead, it is India's attempt to compete on a global market.  The movie, like many of the stories paralleling the American Dream, is fundamentally about money.  Everything is money.  The characters in The White Tiger are triggered by money as a primary motivator, even if they say they are not.

Placing the caste system as the foundation of this piece, the film stresses that, if you don't have money, you are worthless.  Balram, not a moral character in his own right, continually stresses how the poor hate the poor more than the rich hate the poor.  As cruel as the rich are to the poor, they acknowledge that the poor are needed to survive and succeed in this society.  They beat them and underpay them.  But it is in Balram's treatment of his peers that we see what the rich have bred into the poor.  Balram, for somehow being the most innocent character in this society, has a Walter White way of treating the people around him.  He exploits the secret that his co-worker is a Muslim in a society that hates Muslims.  He pretends to pray to show how devoted he is to his master.  This breeds a very bizarre relationship with his employer.  His love for his master borders almost on a sexual love. The movie never implies that Balram is a gay man (although it doesn't necessarily deny that too much either.  He is attracted to Pinky, although almost because it is forbidden.)

Balram insists that this is the relationship that mirrors a relationship between a parent and child, but that's part of his entire schtick.  It's the show that he puts on for Ashok isn't necessarily accurate.  It is more complex than what I'm making it out to be, which is what makes The White Tiger so interesting.  But his obsession with his master is this idea that is fundamentally tied to economics.  Inside Balram blooms this conflicted personality.  He believes that his master is both a good man while knowing that he is fundamentally corrupt.  That's not all on Balram by the way.  Because Ashok behaves differently and more compassionately to the rest of his family, it becomes really confusing.  But we have to remember:  there is no heroic character.  Capitalism has bred society to always love / hate the other.  So watching this movie becomes really this complex thing.  I call the relationship between Balram and Ashok almost romantic because there is no better way to describe it.  It is this absolute adoration that Balram has.  And because that love is so intense, when that love fails, it is natural that hatred that boils out of this.  And it isn't really about Ashok.  Balram is in love with the idea of success.  When he is betrayed by Ashok's family, which is a genuine and deep betrayal, part of that hatred comes from the potential that is lost.  He cannot be Ashok and that's a major part of what is crushing him.

The weird part is that, for a majority of the movie, Balram is sold as the innocent character...despite the fact that we know that he isn't innocent. When compared to the other drivers, Balram is referred to as the country mouse.  But he's a character that turned his back on his ungrateful family. He's the character that destroys other people.  His narration is to convince a Chinese investor of his own ruthlessness.  Yet, Balram also attributes his spiral into darkness into the night that Pinky kills the peasant girl.  We get the sense that the show that Balram puts on for Ashok is partially honest.  I don't mean to degrade the entire blog that I'm writing (despite the fact that the last paragraph reads like unintelligible nonsense), but it kind of borders on how Clark Kent is both real and a façade.   Balram the servant is fake, but he's also probably a part of Balram that is human.  There is a death of this character once the peasant girl is killed and that death is tragic.  But it is also this dynamic that isn't typical.  The White Tiger has a story of characters who aren't good.  I can't think of a good character in this, with the exception of Balram's nephew who is bred to be corrupt.  

And it is in Balram's corruption that he oddly becomes heroic.  We get that rich Balram is kind of gross with his riches.  But he also combats the predatory natures that his financial contemporaries indulge in.  Yeah, he runs a car service.  He destroys his competition in absolutely despicable ways.  But also rewards loyalty.  He is the capitalist's dream and the capitalist's nightmare simultaneously.  Man, the movie hates people with money and what they do to society.  It's violent and conflicted.  And it also seems eternally pessimistic. Because of Balram's metamorphosis, it offers the best solution as a tragic one.  He has to abandon almost any likable traits, with the exception of ponytail that only works on Balram.  

But there are really no good people in this movie.  Part of me wants to exclude Pinky.  Yeah, that seems like a lame fight, considering that Pinky is the one who drives the car into the girl and is freed from responsibility.   But we tend to identify her as noble.  She fights her husband's family. She rarely does anything inappropriate to Balram.  She seems to have a strong moral code. She's the one who wants to report the death to the police.  But the fact that she does run is really a problematic element of her character.  If this movie is a commentary on money, Pinky might be the most damning character of all.  It apparently is easy to have morals if you have money.  Pinky fights for the morally right things every time she's confronted with things.  But when money can't save her, she flees.  That subtext is odd for a secondary character, but it also makes the film's primary message all that more palpable. 

While I don't know if everything I wrote was coherent, I didn't know I would have that much to say about this movie. Instead, looking this movie from an economic status gives it a lot of depth.  Yeah, I liked it even without the analysis element of this blog.  But now thinking about it, I adore this film.  It really is very good.

R for most of the reasons that you can think of.  The most obvious R-rating comes from the sheer despair brought about by almost daring alcoholism.  But then from there, it spirals into this world of sexuality, vulgarity, vice, language, vomit, and blood.  There's nothing pleasant about any of these things.  This is the heroic alcoholism of Charles Bukowski.  It blends the urban whispers of the nobility with leaving the system while embracing the sadness that comes with that lifestyle.  R.

DIRECTOR: Barbet Schroeder

And with that...I started taking requests.  The obsessed, dominant part of my brain screams at me for not just skipping over this one so I can get every Academy Award nominee up before the actual Academy Awards happen.  But then I realized, these movies would be largely ignored and that's no good.  By the way, this is not an easy movie to get a hold of.  It's been out of print for as long as I can remember in the United States.  I had to track down a Korean copy that was all regions.  I know, it's a big red flag about the legality of the movie, but the copy seems pretty darned legit.  The things I do for "all my friends!"

By the way, this blog will become significantly more entertaining to read / write if you read Barfly as an adverb.

I had a weird obsession about this movie a little over a decade ago.  Like, it blew my mind.  I think that's what post-college is supposed to be.  It's supposed to be this time where you discover Charles Bukowski and feel like you want to stick it to society.  I didn't know much about Bukowski shy of his name and his reputation.  But I watched Barfly and it was eye-opening.  There was this sexiness to misery that I had never really known before.  Henry, a thinly veiled avatar for Bukowski himself, leads an epically awful life that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy,  To call him an alcoholic is downplaying the whole thing.  He wears his alcoholism like a warm blanket.  The idea of eliminating this vice from his life would be abhorrent.  He revels in the misery that surrounds him.  He compares functionality and finances as being in a "golden cage".  (I'll discuss this imagery later.  Possibly indirectly.  Again, these blogs get a single pass and then I'm done.  I got too much to do.) For a guy in his twenties, who just spent college sleeping on a futon and eating $1.00 cheeseburgers four days a week, I got it.  At least, I thought I did.  I lead a very comfortable life and I pretended, at the time, that I had it rough.  For all of the head wounds that Henry receives, there was something attractive at being someone who never had to abide by society's rules.  This movie mesmerized me.  It was new and it was different and I wanted everyone to know that I liked Barfly.

But being out of print, I never really had a chance to watch the movie again until recently when I got the request.  Luckily, there was the Korean print.  You should see the adorable little sticker I got on the front of it from the guy who sent it to me.  He also assured me that this was a legal copy (which, to his credit, a lot of this disc looks legal).  And it is now from the perspective of someone who is near 40 and well established in his career that Barfly reads as something very different to me.  Part of me is in love with the establishment.  Mind you, a lot of me wants to tear down capitalism with every breath I take. A foot away from me sits a copy of Nate Powell's new graphic novel, Save It for Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest.  The anti-establishment thread runs through me deeply.  But it also paints the world of Charles Bukowski as incredibly immature.  I'm not going to lie: I found this movie that I used to love hard to endure at times.  It probably didn't age well with me and I encourage those people who still love this movie to continue loving it.  

A lot of this spin started when I read a book of poetry from a Bukowski knockoff.  I picked the book because of the title and the cover.  But as I read it, I realized there's something very infantile about the way that Bukowski views the world.  Barfly and Bukowski (coming from a guy who only writes a blog and has a novel half done that he's afraid to finish) are about justification.  It always has a bit of "She doth protest too much" about the whole life of a wino.  The glorification of misery ignores the notion that this is a story of misery.  Henry and Wanda live these lives where they don't really have a sense of self.  To Bukowski's credit, I think he's aware of this. Their humanity has been stripped down to this need for selfishness and vice.  Wanda warns Henry that she will leave with any man who has a fifth of liquor available.  Henry almost seems pleased with this horrific confession because it reads almost like a justification of his lifestyle.  It's only when Wanda leaves with Eddie, the personification of all the things he finds wrong with the world, that he becomes truly upset at the confession that Wanda offers him.

And I always found the story sexy because the movie focuses on Henry.  Henry brings all of the misery upon himself.  He revels at being a big fish in the scummiest pond imaginable.  He doesn't mind the beatings that occasionally come his way because he will get cheers one out of a hundred times when he gets lucky enough to win / go into a fight with a meal ahead of time.  But the nearly 40 version of me watches the movie through Wanda's eyes.  Wanda may be the most telling bastion for the male gaze imaginable.  We assume that Wanda is a paramour for Henry because she is the love interest.  We equate them as equals because it is easier to do so.  But Wanda is hurting way more than Henry.  Henry gets to enjoy this spiral into misery.  But Wanda seems truly sad.  She is used for her body.  She seems traumatized and the alcohol reads as a way to escape that trauma that chases her wherever she goes.  Henry, with his intentional abandon of society's rules, holds no element of society within him.  He almost voluntarily blows a perfectly good interview because that's the kind of person he is.  But Wanda understands that there's things that people need to do.  While I wouldn't ever label her a responsible human being, she does understand that responsibilities exist devoid of supervision.  She knows how to dress herself up and fake it for the sake of survival.

Because of the slight juxtaposition between Henry and Wanda, Henry really reads as scummier than Bukowski intends for him to be.  He leeches off of society, ignoring the small kindnesses that allow him to be enabled in his lifestyle.  Henry doesn't have to sleep with people he doesn't want to for a fifth.  He'd rather just keep walking the streets until booze appears.  Because he is a male extrovert with a scripted personality, he is allowed to only suffer minor indignities to continue his way through the world of vice.  Wanda, however, must completely humiliate herself.  The fact that she sleeps with Eddie is almost a commentary on that moment.  Bukowski wrote that scene to make Henry a more sympathetic character.  What it really does is paint a contrast for Wanda.  Wanda has to sleep with guys like Eddie to maintain her alcoholism.  Henry just has to take a punch, which he morbidly seems to enjoy.

There's also this metacontext that really bothers me about Barfly as a whole.  Charles Bukowski wrote a coherent script.  The fact that this movie exists kind of reads like the whole concept of Bukowski, the legend, is a façade.  Bukowski was a poet.  If he was anything like Henry, his poetry would stay written in a secret notebook, occasionally being sold off piecemeal for a little scratch.  But he's a poet.  It seems like a feature length film is almost the definition of the establishment.  I'm not saying cinema is part of the establishment.  Many movies are artistic attacks on the man and I love that stuff.  I'm just saying that changing media seems like this isn't from the soul or a message to society.  Instead, it kind of reads like cementing the mythology of the great Charles Bukowski into something that may be entirely artificial.  Again, I don't know Charles Bukowski on a personal level.  Maybe this was a passion project for him.  But a lot of it reads like he's hitting the highlights of a stereotype. 

To give Bukowski more credit than I have been so far allowing, he is the progenitor of this archetype. Henry isn't W.C. Fields, where his alcoholism is adorable.  To call what he does as "immature" like I've been implying is unfair.  When you start the archetype, that makes you somewhat special.  Yeah, culture has turned the Bukowski archetype into a cliché, but it isn't an archetype if you are the first one doing it.  Embracing the grotesque is now commonplace, but Bukowski's method of elevating depression is not only novel, but it was compelling.  There's a reason that my 20s were about Bukowski's counter-culturalism.  It's good that a movie like Barfly exists because this story needed to be told.  Yeah, it doesn't hit hard in my 30s as it did in my 20s and I tend to be flippant and sardonic about the whole thing.  But I also acknowledge that Bukowski is commenting on a culture that doesn't get the attention it deserves.  He takes the common man mythos of Arthur Miller and perverts it, which is great.

And, at the end of the day, I still kind of enjoyed it.  Yeah, it wasn't the slam dunk that I've associated with my rebellious side.  But it is still a solid movie overall.

PG mainly because it is a live-action movie.  Nothing really terrible or scary happens in the movie, but the animals get sad.  There are also sad kids.  Oh, an animal dies from natural-ish causes, but that can pretty much traumatize a kid, a 'la Bambi.   I'm going to talk about this soon, but the movie recontextualizes some questionable behavior to make it family friendly.  PG.

DIRECTOR: Thea Sharrock

Another blog entry that somehow slipped through the cracks.  My process involves watching a movie and then, when the movie is over, opening my Notes app to remind me what movie I watched in what order.  For some reason, I never entered The One and Only Ivan.  I apparently had the state of mind to put it in the Academy Award section without actually entering it into my phone.  It was only while I was updating the website that I discovered that The One and Only Ivan wasn't on the list anywhere.  Now that you know how the sausage is made, please excuse my lack of freshness with this blog entry.  I really don't think I'll get everything written about by the time that the Academy Awards come around.  It's weird how I'm prioritizing The One and Only Ivan, but I also know that if I delay anymore, there's no way that I'll remember anything about this movie.

Perhaps that may be a bit damning.  The One and Only Ivan has a couple things going against it. The first, and this tends to be a me thing (but I know I'm not alone here!).  Because The One and Only Ivan is a Disney+ exclusive made for Disney+, it has a bit of a disposable vibe to it.  Now, I've slightly changed my tune on original films made for streaming services.  Heck, if pandemic has done anything positive, it has made movies more available to a general audience.  The low stakes model has made me watch things that I know that I wouldn't have paid money to go see.  But the other end of that model often involves an element of low-investment / low-return.  The less I invest in a movie, the less I'll ultimately care about the movie's greatness.  For all I know, if I spent money on a movie ticket to go see The One and Only Ivan, I might find myself watching the movie more aggressively and appreciating it more.  

But the other element of this movie is that it feels wildly outdated.  I'm not talking about visual effects or really anything that involves storytelling.  It just seems like celebrating the concept of the circus has kind of died out. I know that with Tim Burton's Dumbo, that motif seems to had this attempt at reigniting the aesthetic and nostalgia behind the concept of circuses.  But the politics behind the circus is kind of gauche.  Heck, people are having a hard time politically supporting the concept of a zoo.  I don't know how much love the circus is going to get.  Compound this idea with the idea of a circus inside of a mall and there's this element of complete cynicism that washes over me.  The movie starts off with the tag, "Based on a true story."  Boy, this one really pulls at the threads of that story.  Yes, the movie ends with the photos from the real story.  But like Saving Mr. Banks, Disney has gone back to glorifying a problematic past by sanding out the rough edges to history.

I'm a big shot producer, okay.  (This is an imaginary situation. I'm a small time blogger / teacher in real life.  This is for the sake of argument.)  I tell you that I am casting Bryan Cranston as a failing circus ringleader inside of a mall.  I then pitch this as an escape movie where the animals flee the mall.  This sounds borderline PG-13 or R.  Why?  In my head, a circus owner inside a mall is probably wildly irresponsible.  In a post-Tiger King era, we get that the guy who probably unimaginably cruel to get the animals to do tricks.  There's no way that the actual story played out the way that the film presents.  The movie is absolutely terrified to present any point of view as wrong.  But the problem of the story is that there are two very contrasting philosophies going on here.  The first belief is that small mom and pop businesses can make it in corporate America.  To do this, they need to have the things that other circuses don't.  But a completely contrary belief is that animals shouldn't be held captive, especially inside of a mall in middle America.  Yet, the movie promotes both notions.

And in the end, it caves on both of these beliefs.  Mack sees Ivan's sadness in his painting.  (I refuse to believe that Ivan just became this amazing painter just because.)  He allows him to be freed. Mack's entire life has been taking care of this gorilla for the sake of exploiting him on a billboard.  When the animals are freed, Mack...doesn't have a business.  One of the subtextual motifs stresses that Mack is aging.  He has only known how to run a circus.  He borderline has no marketable skills in an era where circuses are dying.  But even if he's hired to another circus, isn't he just perpetuating the same issues that he did in his tiny circus?  But the other element of the movie that really gets under my craw is that the movie really redefines "freedom".  Ivan's goal, along with the other animals, is to return to the jungle.  After all, that's what his sadness painting was all about: a return to the jungle.  Now, I'm going to be a bit of a jerk and say that there is no wrong answer.  Ivan was never raised in a jungle, so returning him to the jungle might be a death sentence.  But the movie gives the characters their cake and allows them to eat it too.

When Ivan is placed inside the zoo, he's happy.  The camera pans back and we see this gigantic expanse that allows Ivan to roam free.  I call shannanigans on how big this pen is.  Perhaps the movie is justifying this choice by calling it a wildlife preserve.  I simply don't remember.  But Mack and all of the employees at the circus can visit Ivan whenever they want.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way in anything but a zoo.  So we're left with this story of Ivan's quest towards being a real gorilla in the wild, only to have him be satisfied with this fairly sad trick.  I hear that there's a sequel novel to this, but I'm going to simply assume that I won't be seeing movie about that.  Ivan is thematically still in the same prison that he was in the mall.  Yeah, you and I get that a zoo seems better than a mall.  But in reality, that pen has to be tiny.  It almost seems more like an answer to the human concerns of "What do you do with an 800 lb gorilla?" than actually servicing Ivan's needs.

But it is a cute movie.  My brain won't shut up, is the big problem.  As much as my kids enjoyed the film, I really don't feel excited for them to watch something like this.  A story like this should be watched critically.  While not necessarily being an overtly gross story, there's so much skipped to tell a functional tale that it defies reality.  I think we're beyond movies like The One and Only Ivan simply because we've told this story before.  I didn't hate it, but I can actively say that I didn't really like it either.

PG-13 mostly for language and cruelty.  Yeah, the movie gets a little bit scary at times.  I really can't deny that.  But it is a different kind of scary than something like a traditional horror movie, or anything else that Yorgos Lamphinos has his fingerprints on.  I'm actually kind of shocked that the movie is only PG-13, but I honestly have a hard time really finding anything objectionable in the movie. It still should be viewed by an older audience.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Florian Zeller

It's a play!  Do you understand how much I want to see the play now?  This would make an amazing stage production.  I mean, I kind of get it.  The guy who wrote the play also directed the movie.  But still, this movie is so trippy that my brain is scrambling to see the chaos that could happen on a stage.  Part of it is that I'm a snob and want to say that I'm referring to the play instead of the movie.  I know.  A guy who runs a blog named "Literally Anything: Movies" wants to be even more snobby by referring to the play instead of the movie.  I'm a hypocrite and I've never denied that.

My wife, on the whole, is smarter than I am.  She gets things that I never really get in film.  She tends to figure out the ending of a film before I do and I'm always a little jealous of what she discovers.  This is one of the rare examples of where I discovered what was happening before she did.  This isn't a brag.  Her track record is far better than mine.  But my wife also thinks in terms of chess strategies and I'm more of a "Red Rover" kind of guy myself.  If you went into this movie with a sense of grandeur and expecting twists and turns, you might be thoroughly frustrated.  From the first ten minutes of the movie, I was instantly aware that the movie was trying to give the audience the experience of dementia.  But there is that little itch in the back of the brain that really makes one question "Is this all a trick?"  And that's where Zeller's story kind of gains a sense of brilliance.  Because even though I knew that this was all an experience of losing oneself, there is always the question, "Maybe Anthony is sane and this is all an elaborate ploy."  (I'm not referring to Sir Anthony Hopkins as "Anthony" because I'm cocky or a poor writer.  I may be a poor writer, but that's completely unrelated.  The character's name is actually "Anthony".)

That meta-context is fascinating.  And what it does is make you actually question what the genre of the film is.  At the end of the day, this is a drama about a man losing his sense of time and feeling vulnerable by his own mental deterioration.  Note:  I really hope I don't get dementia.  At least this blog will be a formal record of a time that I was lucid.  We know it is a drama because the story is quite small.  For all of the actors in the movie, including a surprising appearance by Mark Gatiss (I'm a huge Doctor Who fan), this really is a story about an aging Anthony with his daughter and his new caretaker.  The only thing is, it feels like a much larger movie than that.  Because Anne may be a hallucination or played by another actress, there's this scope to this movie that doesn't quite match the content.  If I told you, "This is the story of Anthony Hopkins dealing with his dementia while he treats his daughter terribly", that would be an accurate description while also being a gross misrepresentation of the film as a whole.  Nothing really seems real in the film and I adore that.

But the thing I really like about the movie is the fact that it all seems effortless.  Florian Zeller, with the help of his editor, give the movie a vibe of a more vulnerable and subdued Michel Gondry.  This is the movie that would exist if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind aged and felt more confident about the story.  I will always love Eternal Sunshine more than ​The Father, but I won't deny that The Father is one of the riskiest movies that I have ever seen.  It's so high concept.  I make the connection because, as depressing as this sentence is, both movies are about brain damage.  Both movies thrive on the concept that we don't necessarily know the reality of our situation until the story is played all the way through.  Not knowing reality is completely haunting.  With these kinds of movies (and I know that Eternal Sunshine is unabashedly sci-fi), we get the vibe of science fiction and fantasy without actually participating in science fiction and fantasy.  Part of that comes from the notion of what we define as genre.  High concept film tends to be considered genre film because it doesn't necessarily have a traditional chronological or cause-and-effect storytelling method.

Instead, we're begged by the filmmakers to use our sense of critical thinking.  Zeller forces us constantly to question reality for the sake of building empathy with Anthony.  It goes beyond the idea of the unreliable narrator, but kind of goes into the world of unreliable content.  Yes, we view everything through Anthony's eyes, albeit the film does maintain a third person perspective. But like Rashomon, we're experiencing the individual's truth in the moment.  It is reality for Anthony, but for any other character --including us --it is all gibberish.  And that's terrifying.  I would fake it just as hard as Anthony does in these moments.  

Can I go out of my way and commend Anthony Hopkins?  I've, in the past five years or so, been pretty cynical about Anthony Hopkins.  Hopkins, in my head, was always a very talented actor.  But I always saw him as one thing.  He did that one thing over and over in movies.  I think I said this in The Two Popes.  He's an institution, but he keeps doing the same thing.  Finally, I felt like this movie was a bit of a challenge.  There's this vulnerable character that I hadn't really seen him do before.  I mean, he's still Hopkins and I don't even ask him to completely abandon his foundation.  But it feels like Hopkins plus something a little extra.  Teaming him up with Olivia Colman is just inspirational.  It's such good acting with a tight script and powerful editing.  I mean, I don't think it is going to win.  But I wouldn't hate if The Father won for Best Picture.  It has a lot going for it.  I just don't see it being a heavy hitter.

PG-13 for Van Wilder-with-a-sense-of-maturity hijinks.  There's a lot of urination jokes. There's some crass language.  It feels more rebellious than it is.  PG-13 might be the most accurate MPAA rating for this movie.  While there is nothing that really raises eyebrows that I can remember, besides sophomoric humor, the real issue is the constant --almost flippant --attitude toward suicide.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Rajkumar Hirani

I have a really big confession.  Like, really big.  While I've watched Indian cinema before, I haven't ever seen a straight-up Bollywood film.  You would think with the fact that I'm probably the guy who has seen the most movies that you know (unless you are in my film circles, where I'm the guy who has seen the least and how dare I have a blog?) that I would have seen a Bollywood film up to this point.  I mean, I get the genre, kind of.  I've addressed stuff like Slumdog Millionaire, which is almost an homage of the genre.  But I haven't watched a pure Bollywood film.  Part of it is that it is all so intimidating.  I know that I would have to scour through a lot of dreck to find the really good stuff and I'm already kind of cynical about the whole forced musical element anyway.

So why did I watch 3 Idiots?  I mean, it isn't horrible.  But I can safely say that I hadn't heard of it before.  My last birthday, I got a scratch-off poster with movies.  Just by opening it, I realized I had watched most of the list, both American and International.  But then there were four movies that I had never heard of.  And they all happened to be Indian films.  These weren't movies from The Apu Trilogy or Monsoon Wedding.  This was a movie that I even had a hard time finding to ensure that I was talking about the right movie.  Now what I'm basically writing about is my own ignorance.  One of two things happened.  The first option is that I'm wildly ignorant about Bollywood cinema and I feel insecure enough to blame the person who made this poster.  The second option is that the person who made this list is a huge Bollywood fan and he really wanted to put some of the more popular Bollywood films on this list.  Or maybe it is both.  Who knows?  

My take on this movie is going to be from a Western perspective.  I acknowledge and own my own ignorance.  Who knows?  Maybe by the time I completely fill in the poster, I might have a more informed opinion.  But 3 Idiots feels like an attempt to mimic the Western Hollywood sensibility while maintaining elements that would appease the Bollywood audience.  Immediately, I felt like there were elements of (500) Days of Summer mixed with the raunchy comedy of Van Wilder.  It wants to be a little bit of everything.  It wants to be stupid and goofy and deep and heavy all at the same time.  Does it work?  It works better than I thought it would, but that's not exactly saying much.  Fundamentally, the movie wants to be inspirational.  For all of its whimsy, the movie is kind of aiming for a Dead Poets Society element without all of the hard work and pathos needed to get to that moment.  I'm going to refer to Aamir Khan's character as Rancho for the bulk of this blog just for simplicity's sake.  Rancho's story is the same thing that we've heard time and again.  He's the anti-establishment genius.  There are times that he reads as autistic and times that he comes across as a rock star.  Perhaps the filmmakers really want him to be whatever the plot needs.  When he enters, he seems completely anti-social, mimicking Rain Man when he builds something to electrify urine.  But he also becomes this guy who makes raids on the administration building and helps make plans to switch speeches on the rich cocky stereotype who can't speak the language.

But the big thing about the movie that kind of gets under my skin is the film's message about suicide.  I'm not sure if this is something that activated a real memory or gave me that sense of false memory, but the movie reminded me / brainwashed me into thinking about the suicide rates in India, especially at the university level.  One of the recurring motifs in the film is characters committing suicide.  The first of the suicides is handled well.  It is a curveball.  In the midst of this zany comedy, a student who couldn't quite hack his final project ends up killing himself.  It's this smash cut to the reality of a situation.  The juxtaposition of the singing to the reality of this dead student who was overwhelmed with stress was a powerful tool.  The quick blame for this suicide falls to Virus, who is quickly established to be the primary antagonist of the film.  And that is a valid appraisal.  Had Virus actually taken into consideration the student's psychological needs and reasonable request, that student could have readjusted his priorities and finished the project in a reasonable timeframe.    But does no one blame Rancho even just a little bit for his decision.  Like, I can't go beyond negligence.  But Rancho really wanted to surprise the kid.  But at no point did he consider what kind of mental stress that could have been on his shoulders.  Rancho had no guarantee that he could have repaired the drone.  During that time, the student was convinced that he would be booted out of school.  A human being would have said, "Hey, let me help you fix this" instead of offering a surprise.  It's a really weird choice.

But it is the second suicide attempt that really bothers me.  All of these suicides tended to be in response to Virus's trigger-happy attitude towards booting students from his school.  But Raju kind of actually deserved it.  He urinated on Virus's door for fun.  He got drunk and woke up in a class.  All of these things are valid reasons for expelling someone from an institution.  Yeah, Virus takes things to a college comedy level with the joy he gets from expelling Raju.  But all things even, Raju kind of deserved it.  (Raju's story, by the way, is really weird.)   So Raju attempts suicide and this is where the tone gets bizarre.  One suicide in a movie is shocked.  I suppose two suicides could be chalked up to foreshadowing, but I don't really get that sense here.  But that second suicide is treated like a joke.  The first one has this impact when it is on a tertiary character.  But Raju is one of the titular 3 Idiots.  When he attempts suicide, it should be a bigger deal than it is.  Instead, the movie goes into all of these goofy subplots about tricking Raju out of his coma, including forcing another of the idiots to marry Raju's sister.  It's all very uncomfortable and it kind of killed part of the movie for me.

But in terms of fun, yeah, the movie's got it. Is that the point of Bollywood?  Is it steeped in making sure that a movie is constantly entertaining?  It almost feels like it is based on vaudeville than anything else?  It has this really sweeping story about these characters.  Sure, the movie is almost three hours for a comedy (which I understand is very typical for a Bollywood film), but it still maintains entertainment all the way through.  But there are also some things that really read as a soap opera. Anything involving medicine was absolutely goofy, especially when it came to delivering a baby during a monsoon.  It's just that every element of this movie really begged me to shut off my brain and accept the absurdity of it all.  To a certain extent, 3 Idiots almost solidified my expectations of what a Bollywood film was supposed to be.  It never really got to the proper level of vulnerability, but it also wanted the payoff from being this sweeping and epic film.  Did I enjoy it?  Okay.  Sure.  I didn't hate it.  But I also struggled to say it is a good movie.  It's got a lot of good moments and things that I enjoyed.  But it also lacked maturity in almost any way.

PG-13, but that's, again, a bit of a stretch.  This movie is so innocent that we actually woke up our nine-year-old to watch it.  Then, our seven-year-old got jealous and we let him watch it as well.  The most questionable stuff in this movie is a grandmother who swears in Korean occasionally and kids having to deal with the problems that come with aging.  It's PG-13, but I would 100% let kids watch this movie.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Lee Isaac Chung

Just to show you how tiny my readership has gotten:  I gained seven readers yesterday and it was a massive spike.

Oh man.  How is it that the year that we weren't really supposed to have Academy Awards that we get a whole bunch of really good movies?   Also, is A24 only able to make the most intense R-rated films or feel good movies about families making it in America?  I kind of love this.  For a long time, I was relishing that A24 was making these really over-the-top / gorgeous genre films that established horror as viable cinema.  But then I started getting bored with A24.  I didn't need things to be completely bleak all of the time.  And I know that A24 never really shied away from non-horror cinema.  It's just that a lot of those movies didn't really get the word of mouth that the other movies did.

It's nothing new to tell the story of the American Dream.  Heck, I teach an American literature class and every book --unintentionally, mind you --I teach somehow is a commentary on the American Dream.  Maybe we don't actively talk about the American Dream as much anymore.  After all, Chung set his film during the Reagan administration, which feels more "American Dreamish" than 2021.  But Chung kind of subverts expectations with this interpretation of the American Dream. By no mean does Chung imply that racism in America is over.  There is some mild commentary about racism, mostly coming from the reactions of children to a sense of otherness.  They never really experience active racism so much as ignorance and eventual acceptance.  The more I think about it, that might be the major difference between the Reagan Republican presidency and the Trump Republican presidency.  Both are --and this is me being more than generous --about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.  But with the Reagan administration, it was so aggressively about immigrants trying to take America away from white people.  So Minari celebrates the potentiality of America.  I'm a little bummed that my initial analysis of the movie focuses on the goodness of white people, but it does seem to be a thing in the movie that could be confused with white knighting, but definitely isn't.

I don't really see this movie as a White Knight film.  Will Patton is the heroic white character in the movie, but he's not exactly seen as the white man who has it all together.  If anything, the movie portrays the typical white American as kind of good-natured, but buffoonish.  He comes across as a religious zealot which reads as full on goofy, yet lovable.  Yeah, sometimes I wish that religious devotion wouldn't come across as crazy pants, but I get in the times that we live in, that choice holds water.  But he's this guy who really doesn't make the person of color succeed.  Instead, Paul is a great voice for Jacob to sound off his frustrations.  Paul is an innocent.  He's invested in Jacob's farm because he's nice to a point of naivete.  His role in the greater tapestry of the film is how darned simple he is, especially juxtaposed to the complex Jacob.  

It's because Jacob is so conflicted that we watch a movie like this.  Okay, we really watch for the sake of Soonja.  But Jacob is both the protagonist of the piece and a spectator.  Chung has two very intimate stories swirling around each other.  We have Jacob, who is a father who has a dream.  His dream forces him to drift further away from his family.  Meanwhile, David has to learn to embrace his distant Korean background with the aging Soonja as the representative of that culture.  With these intermixing stories, Chung gets to the point of the theme:  Americana is real; it just doesn't look like we think it looks.  

Jacob has moved his family to the middle of nowhere.  John Steinbeck paints the beginning of a farming career as a ranch with chickens and, of course, rabbits.  Chung paints the beginning of farming as a field that nobody wants with a trailer that looks like a death trap.  It's not baseball and apple pie idealism that Jacob carries with him, but the stick-to-itiveness of Korea.  It's hard work and stubbornness.  There isn't a rooster or a sunrise in sight.  There's no Cheerios box on the table.  Instead, Jacob is dirty and surrounded by Paul, absurd looking at all times.  Similarly, he both bonds with his son and distances himself from his son with this farm.  It becomes not just a matter of survival in America, but a point of pride for him.  After all, not only will his family starve if he is unable to make his crop grow; his wife will leave him as well.  That is the phantom over the horizon.  And that's where Chung's curveball really works.

Soonja seems to be the element that should be tearing husband and wife apart.  When the husband's mother-in-law moves in, it almost acts like a confirmation of all of Jacob's fears.  Monica wants to return to Korea and weaving the Korean lifestyle into David's life seems to be the thing to get that ball rolling.  But Soonja, for all of her bad habits, actually kind of ends up being the most supporting element to Jacob's dreams.  It's not like she gives him a free pass.  She definitely makes him work for it.  But watching David and Anne has represented the synthesis of two cultures coming together.  David becomes more Korean.  Soonja works to be more of the traditional American grandmother.  

But Chung isn't about writing fairy tales.  Yeah, there's a remarkably beautiful ending to the whole movie involving the titular minari.  But we're forced to deal with the realities of aging while all of this goes on.  Soonja's stroke almost shifts the entire film to a story of balancing priorities.  The fact that Jacob and Monica's life just isn't put on hold because of Soonja's stroke is extremely telling.  It isn't even really selfish that they don't devote all of their emotional energies to Soonja's rehabilitation.  Instead, it's a game of Jenga.  The entire tower is going to tip faster and, as an audience, we wonder what element is going to fall first.  It's all very impressive.

I adored this movie.  I absolutely loved it.  I would be very happy for it to win.  I mean, there's going to be jokes about Minari following up Parasite as  a Best Picture winner, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Not rated, but it 100% would be rated R given half-a-chance.  It's all about drinking too much for the entire film.  Some of it is glorifying alcohol (which I'm sure some people would fight me on) and the other scenes show the dark underbelly of alcoholism.  There's language and sexual content.  One of the characters is having an affair.  The movie also regularly dances around suicide.  Also, there's some wildly inappropriate interactions with students.

DIRECTOR:  Thomas Vinterberg

So I find myself writing less on vacation.  That's LIKE a vacation from writing, right?  At one point, when I was considering stopping this blog, I made the deal that it was about quality, not quantity.  As part of that, I started to write less and found myself happier.  But I'm back to writing these tanks that often get rambly.  Basically, I'm stating that I'm going to forgive myself whatever happens.  Sure, my readership is in the toilet.  (My numbers are hilariously low right now.  It's almost like I'm writing about a lot of movies that people hadn't even heard of.)  

When my wife saw the trailer for this movie (she's always on the quest for the Academy Awards with me), she thought it looked way too depressing.  Me?  I'm a big fan of movies like this.  It's a funnier The Lost Weekend.  I've never been one to drink.  I actively dislike drinking most of the time.  The only time that I ever partake is on fancy dates where they have very impressive drinks.  In my head, it is the equivalent of ordering a meal that displays the talents of the chef.  And even then, I drink very little if for cost alone.  Vinterberg's world of Another Round is a culture where alcohol is part of life for both youth an adults.  The Danes live a drastically different life from me.  Drinking at work is still frowned upon, but the idea of students thinking of their teachers as people who drink isn't exactly that bizarre.  

Starting there alone, this movie becomes almost a nature documentary.  I get to watch this whole different world from the safety of my home, imagining what my life would be like if alcohol was just part of the norm.  And for many Americans, it totally is.  But there's this very specific setting that Another Round lives in.  I can't help but bring my own background to bear when writing about a film like this.  

The central conceit is really very interesting.  Vinterberg is aware how absurd the conceit is.  The premise is that there is a philosopher that believes that the human blood alcohol level is too low for anyone's health or productivity.  To counteract this burden, the protagonists choose to drink to maintain a peak blood alcohol level.  Like I stated, I'm sure that Vinterberg probably doesn't wholly subscribe to this belief.   I can see the Fight Club crowd intentionally misunderstanding the message that Vinterberg is throwing down.  But I can see why more in the case of Another Round than with Fight Club.  With Fight Club, David Fincher allows the audience to see the consequences of a life built around the philosophy and rules of Tyler Durden.  It becomes the most toxic lifestyle, ultimately leading to this crisis that nearly kills the unnamed protagonist.  With Another Round, Vinterberg takes Martin to both polar extremes.  Martin leads both is best and worst life as a drunk.  When Martin drinks according to the initial experiment, his life actually seems pretty rad.  He pulls himself out of his mid-life depression and teaches like a man on fire.  He reaches these kids and becomes a favorite teacher.  He's reminded of his passion for his studies.  He becomes a better husband and father.  Vinterberg makes lo-key alcoholism seem rad.  It's only when Martin goes past the initial edict of drinking that his life falls apart.

All this brings me to the very confusing conclusion.  Vinterberg brings Martin to a place where many characters aren't allowed to go.  Martin borderline burns his life to the ground with his drinking.  He discovers that his wife has been cheating on him.  He goes from being laser focused to just a sloppy drunk.  His friend commits suicide.  In a moment of sobriety, Martin seems to discover the toxicity that enters his life.  But his friends don't equate their drinking to the suicide of a friend.  They continue drinking.  Vinterberg makes these guys look fairly pathetic in this moment and the message seems to be that people have a hard time really seeing their own vice.  But it is in this moment that Martin is given another chance.  His wife is willing to give the marriage another chance.  His students think of him as cool.  They have all done well in school.  So that ending comes across as both positive and wildly depressing.  All of the famous shots of this movie come from the absolute end of the film, by-the-way.  Mads Mikkelsen dancing in a circle with a champagne bottle?  That's the conclusion of the film.  And it makes drinking look really sexy.  Despite the fact that Martin ruined his life through booze, it makes me want to drink and I hate drinking.

And then there's the part with the nervous student.  This is one of my students, by the way.  This is the kid who is so darned talented and so darned smart that his own success seems unsustainable.  There's this really dark moment where the teacher replaces his water bottle with a bottle of vodka.  It isn't secret to the kid.  That was the plan.  Knowing that the kid had nerves, the plan was to sneak some booze to take the edge off of the presentation that he was giving for his final exam.  The kid goes from not being able to say a word about Kierkegaard to being able to sound quite knowledgeable about the topic.  Vinterberg makes this entire moment seem gross, but ultimately a logical success story.  I wonder about this moment.  It has me wondering what is going on with Vinterberg and this choice.  Me, sitting there enjoying the safety of my own home, scarfing down popcorn and enjoying the high horse that I constantly ride, sees this kid as the most intense alcoholic that ever existed.  From his perspective, he isn't functional unless he has booze in his system.  He has equated alcohol with freedom.  Yes, the booze helped him pass the test.  But he also has practically self-medicated himself into a rudimentary task.  That psychosis of educational superiority isn't being dealt with; it is being suppressed by alcohol.  When he gets older, he'll need more and more just to get through the day.  And yet, as an audience, we applaud when he finds himself successful in his final exam.   Maybe it is the American in me, but I seriously thought that scene was going to end with with the teacher getting caught providing alcohol to a kid during a test, not with a success story.

When I watched this, I was shocked by how muddied the water was with the message.  After all, this is a condemnation of alcoholism, but it isn't one way or the other.  But that's what kind of makes this movie somewhat special.  It's about complications.  It's not an after school special.  It's messy and rough.  Yeah, these are characters who should probably be getting some therapy.  But it also is interesting to see these characters succeed in moments that seem overwhelming for them.  Again, I'm not a drinker, so I have the benefit of never having to worry about being that way.

Because I am the greatest man alive, I shouted from my very high horse. 

Not rated.  For a movie fundamentally about elder abuse, the movie is really very tame.  The movie dances around some pretty innocent flirtation, with the notion that perhaps one of the residents in the nursing facility might have untoward intentions towards the protagonist.  It can get mildly depressing at times, which should be taken into consideration.  But the tone is light, so don't really worry.  Not rated.  

DIRECTOR: Maite Alberdi

It's kind of like a cute old James Bond who discovered that he was like James Bond in his eighties.

Part of this whole movie kind of feels fake.  That's really cynical of me, but the movie reads more like an elaborate prank show than it does a formal documentary. One of my hidden treasures is Windy City Heat.  I know that it isn't a movie that is discussed in a lot of circles, but it is the result of a long-running prank on a socially-bizarre gentleman named Perry Caravello.  He's given a series of missions, Perry digs himself into this story that is both heartwarming and depressing at the same time.  The Mole Agent,  I hate to say, kind of has a very similar feel to it.  Part of me thinks that this entire film is absurd.  Is there a detective agency that contacted a documentary crew and said that they should get this old man to investigate this nursing home?  Was there a nursing home that really wanted a documentary filmed at their location?  I mean, I read up on this movie in The Guardian (just now, because I didn't want to dig myself too deep) and this is a documentary that took a very different turn than expected.  But it all feels rather...engineered.

But I have to write with the assumption that everything that I watched was authentic.  What kind of comes out of this is a really small documentary that's actually very heartwarming.  I started this by saying that Sergio is this James Bond-like hero.  Sergio is this guy who was raised to be a proper gentleman.  In a world filled with functioning adults, Sergio is under the radar.  He is just average.  Now, there's a depressing undercurrent to this idea.  In a world like a nursing home, Sergio comes across as this heroic figure.  He's an Adonis, given liberties that the other members of this society don't.  I would do the whole "Men want to be him; women want to be with him" thing, but it seems like there are no dudes in this nursing home.  Sergio quickly rises to the role of Most Eligible Bachelor, despite the fact that Sergio is kind of dealing with his own stuff.  From what I read on the Guardian, the movie is successful because of the surprises, and I suppose that is the most interesting part of the movie.

As with-it as Sergio comes across, juxtaposed to the other residents, he's still an 83 year old man.  He has the problems of an 83 year old.  He is mourning the death of his wife.  He misses his family.  He also seems incredibly lonely.  There's something about Sergio that conveys the notion that he hides his loneliness because that's the way he was raised.  In terms of his psychology, Sergio sees this overwhelming sadness that comes from end of life issues with the people around him and deciding to take care of the people around him.  He has boundaries.  He's not going to indulge the attention of a woman who has planned their marriage, but he's not going to embarrass her either.  He instead befriends those people who have no one else in their lives.  Sergio condemns the audience of the film, demanding that they visit their aging loved ones instead of blaming institutions for problems.  

And that's what Sergio kind of sells in this story.  He has this confrontational, but respectful relationship with Ramulo.  But Ramulo is so removed from the world of nursing homes.  Ramulo is so used to seeing the worst of people.  He gets paid handsomely if the nursing home is failing the client's family member.  He can't help but hoping for the worst case scenario.  But Sergio comes from a world where the world is filled with good people.  He wants this scenario to work out positively.  And Sergio instead finds problems that he can start to solve.  He finds the value of talking to other people and dealing with their neuroses as a peer, not as an institution.  Because it seems like the workers at this nursing home are trying their best.  Maybe it is because of the cameras and I have to acknowledge that I'm pretty cynical about a lot of things.  But Sergio, as a member of the community, can make a far greater impact than those throwing big parties.  Yes, there should be big parties.  Yes, it is sweet that the workers do things to help the residents get through the day, but it really feels like a drop in the ocean.  There are some residents who have real problems.  But Sergio is filled with so much empathy that he can't help but infect others.

So, is it a great movie?  The actual direction is pretty meh.  It seems a little contrived.  But the accidents that happen over the course of the movie are actually very heartwarming.  I liked it, even though I acknowledge that it isn't a great film.  Sergio himself and the residents of this nursing home are the ones that intrigue me, not the movie itself.  Yeah, I should give the movie credit for shifting focus.  So it ends up being heartwarming, if not flawed.

TV-G.  It's got the same problem that Bambi does.  Yeah, it can be G-rated all day long.  It can avoid questionable content for a wholesome experience.  But you know why I'm not excited to watch this particular TV-G movie with my kids?  It's because nature is a cruel mistress who makes us fall in love with her only to torture us with death an predatory moments.  And My Octopus Teacher has lots of those.  TV-G.

DIRECTORS: Pippa Erlich and James Reed

It's 10:15 at night.  I'm on vacation.  I've been driving all day long and I told myself that I would continue writing.  My wife is getting work done and I knew that I had to write about My Octopus Teacher.  I checked my notepad and it wasn't there, but I knew that it was due pretty soon.  If I managed to write this blog before, I'll be very upset.  Part of that comes from the fact that I was really jazzed to watch My Octopus Teacher with the way that Netflix hyped it up and then got really bored with the movie as a whole.

But there is one thing that I really wanted to write about it.  It's the same thought that has been running through my mind from the moment I got into the movie.  I really need to talk about how Craig Foster's problems aren't valid.  I heard somewhere that therapists regularly stress that everyone's problems have merit.  For example, while I never have to worry about some of the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, such as food or shelter, my anxiety and occasional self-destructive eating habits are very real.  That being said --and I should remind my readers that I am a terrible person --Craig Foster needs to cool it on the justification for this project.  See, I knew that this was about a man's study of a single octopus based on the trailer.  That was a perfectly reasonable film study.  Heck, I'll go as far as to say that his topic is fascinating.  But the bulk of the movie is about how Craig Foster learned how to heal and bond with his son because of his relationship with this octopus.

I call shenanigans, by the way.  Let's go with the one that really bugs me: how this octopus helped him bond with his son.  It's low hanging fruit.  Foster is having this midlife crisis where he feels distant from reality and from his family.  So to do something about it, he decides to go swimming in the coral reefs every day to give himself some perspective.  That's a very lovely life.  Mazel.  But Tom, his son, is barely in this documentary.  There is so much footage of him going out into the water alone.  I get that there are things that the camera isn't picking up.  I get that.  But this really doesn't feel like a bonding experience with his teenage son.  This feels like a rich guy going swimming every day and sometimes his kid is there.  That's far from an attempt to bond with your kid.  I get that an experience with an octopus might bring two people together.  Heck, that's actually the movie I want to see.  All that being said, whatever bond happened with his son is almost incidental.  It happened because of Tom, not because of an octopus.

And the second thing?  Most people shouldn't give themselves a year of free time to swim everyday.  That's called retirement.  That's not something that the majority of the human race can experience.  Craig Foster must have such a comfortable level of income that he can decide to document his swimming experience well into his escape and call it a movie.  Because that was one of the things that he stressed when he was making the documentary.  He found the courage to pick up the camera again and start making movies because he found peace within himself because of his relationship with this octopus.  It's not the thing that's exactly going to ingratiate you to me.  You decided to run away from the world and go swimming by yourself because you were stressed out.  But the thing is, Craig Foster was documenting real people with real problems.  I just don't get it.

And because of the sheer pretentiousness of the whole documentary, I couldn't view this thing as a nature documentary.  I wanted to enjoy it as this really small scaled doc where the filmmaker just happened to learn something about himself over the course of watching this octopus battle predators while being a predator in its own right.  I wanted to watch about the beauty of the grotesque.  But instead, I kept watching how the filmmaker kept on getting in the way of a story that was telling itself all throughout.  Foster himself gets these amazing shots of this octopus doing these insane things.  He gives this animal human like traits.  He makes it really become something to root for, even though it is bizarre and inhuman.  But it's all of Foster's justification for being there that kept bumming me out.

So I left the movie very much like Foster left the reef: saddened and let down.  There was something beautiful on screen.  Maybe it isn't Foster's fault.  I am coming down on him way too hard.  I just never really believed his tale.  I don't know if that's the right wording. I believed that Foster believed these things.  But I also know that I will never have the luxury to go escape to an aquatic wonderland while my kids raise themselves.  I am blessed to be sitting on a place for vacation and writing at 10:30 at night.  But I don't claim that this is work.  I claim that this is just something that I do and I enjoy.  It is relaxing and stressful at the same time.