PG-13.  I mean, sure, it's for violence and swearing.  I can't deny that it's not for violence and swearing.  But my kids decide to walk into the room, I'm foing to feel way more uncomfrotable with the nude group shower or the kid who is peeing into a river.  Also, the inclusion of a sex worker as a bit was mildly uncomfortable as well.

DIRECTOR:  Jackie Chan

Oh man, it's been a minute since I've written anything for this blog.  There was just a tear there where I didn't really have the opportunity to watch movies.  I mean, I kind of planned it that way.  I had a disc of the stage production of Spirited Away which was with an alternative cast that I wanted to watch.  Couple with that the fact that I'm watching Daredevil: Born Again and Andor and there's going to be stretches where I don't write about anything.  But I got a really good Jackie Chan kung-fu movie and that goes a long way to making me want to write.  I will admit, it doesn't help that I'm feeling more sleepy than I'd like to admit.  But here we go!

I thought that I was on the last disc of my Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar Criterion box set.  I knew that there were six movies in there.  I knew that the first two discs had two movies each.  I knew that there were four discs.  My brain?  Two movies per disc plus a special features disc.  Nope.  That last two movies get their own discs.  In my head, that's because they're better movies.  And if The Young Master is any indication, there might be something valid with that read of the movie. It's not that The Young Master is some kind of life-changing film.  No, there's still plenty that is kind of dumb and oddly structured about this movie.  But what The Young Master does that is pretty darned phenomenal is nail Jackie Chan's exact sense of humor and tone that would make him famous later.  That's a bit of an oversimplification because The Young Master is definitely the product of this cultural era of kung fu movie.

That being said, there's enough different about The Young Master to make it watchable.  Honestly, I was getting a little bored of the story of Jackie Chan, the guy who wants to learn kung-fu only to get good at it by the end.  There's something incredibly exciting knowing that Jackie Chan can do the tricks at any moment from the first scene in the movie.  From a writer's perspective, this is probably a pretty frustrating take.  After all, we want our characters to be dynamic and grow throughout a narrative.  But from a choreography perspective, Jackie Chan is allowed to do the thing that he does best: choreograph some absolutely incredible and pretty hilarious fight scenes.  I mean, this is both a good and a bad, but the last twenty minutes of the movie is almost exclusively a fight sequence.  A twenty minute fight sequence might absolutely define what makes this movie what it is.

That's kind of what I'm learning about Jackie Chan, by the way.  I think I've already made this comparison in one of the other movies, but Jackie Chan is Gene Kelly for fight sequences.  Both Gene Kelly and Jackie Chan have this fun sense of showmanship.  Both are immediately charismatic and know how to make the most of out a moment.  But both feel like they are there to show off the technical saaviness of their respective crafts.  As much as I'm lauding (and, partially, lamenting) a twenty-minute fight sequence.  It's just the dream ballet from stuff like Singin' in the Rain or An American in Paris.  Yet, seeing just the technical proficiency isn't enough.  It's why I never really jumped on board the Phantom Menace train for the rad lightsaber fights.  Maybe, when making a movie that relies so heavily on the technical prowess of the choreography, there needs to be some self-awareness that understands that the format needs to laugh at itself a bit.  On the last Jackie Chan movie I watched, ​Fearless Hyena II, Jackie Chan was miserable.  Yeah, he also phoned in the choreography because he was being forced to make the movie by the Triads, so I don't know if this example is going to hold as much water as I want it to.  But as good as the fighting was in that movie, golly was it a slog to get through.  Instead, we have this movie that seems to take a point of pride when it comes to choregraphing everything and --which is super important --the fighting is funny?

Now, is this to say that serious Kung Fu isn't great?  Nah, I mean, I already wrote about the entire Bruce Lee​ box on my Collections page.  And, as much as I'm praising The Young Master so far, I will take The 36th Chamber of Shaolin any day over anything I've seen in the Jackie Chan box.  But if you don't necessarily have an amazing story, Chan understands that you have to upsell the character and the tone.  The tone of the movie is fairly light.  I mean, this is a crap comparison, but this feels more in line with his work in Rush Hour or Shanghai Noon than it does with his other work.  Instantly, Chan's character in this movie is charming.  That charm provides a shorthand into the world of the movie.  As much as there are some very thinly drawn characters surrounding Chan's character (whom I refuse to call "Dragon" because I don't remember anyone actually calling him that), they almost don't matter because we instantly identify that Chan's character is a lovable protagonist.  Here's the reality of my hypocrisy.  If Chan wasn't so darned talented at everything he does, this would drive me insane.  Charm shouldn't replace both character and plot. But when handled by someone like Chan, I genuninely don't care. 

And here's the deal:  this is a me thing.  I hate the little voice in my head that screams "Martin Scorsese probably respects the heck out a young Jackie Chan.  Golly, this is going to get pretentious, but The Young Master might be pique Jackie Chan because it feels like he's doing it for the love of the game.  There's some real old school kung-fu filmmaking going on here.  The zooms on this movie are violent.  The scenes last incredibly long.  But Chan, as director, is making something that just feels fun.  I talked about the importance of tone when I started this whole thing.  Chan goes into this movie knowing that he has to balance his tone and the rest has to be borderline guerilla filmmaking.  Are there some overly silly things in this movie that might not work?  Sure.  But that kind of adds to the charm of the piece as a whole.  And, yeah, there's potty humor.  Jackie Chan gets his bare bum pinched.  Okay.  Fine.  Also, he almost drinks pee from down a stream.  But do you understand how elevated the humor in this one feels compared to the last few Chan films I've watched.  He gets that certain base humor is always going to be funny, but he's not putting a ton of weight on those jokes either.  Instead, there are things that are naturally crafted that are hilarious.  That final fight, when our tensions are all built up?  Having the bad guy of the movie act as the ref for the fight is borderline priceless.  Sure, the bit goes on and on, but it works.  Honest to pete, there are moments in that fight that made me giggle on the treadmill a lot like how I laughed at Rush Hour the first time I saw it.

But all of the stuff I wrote is way too forgiving of some of the lazy storytelling that we fall into again.  I can praise the fact that Jackie Chan embraced an imperfect premise and made the best of it.  But on the other side of that, there are a lot of moments where the movie doesn't feel cohesive.  Like many of the other movies in this box, these movies almost feel like a collection of scenes and bits as opposed to a coherent story.  The big bad guy of the movie?  (Not the one who acts like a ref.  The convict.)  What's his deal?  We know that he's a convict getting transported and that he's incredible at Kung Fu.  But he has almost no tie to the story.  There's a loose explanation that the evil school freed him for...reasons?  Like, regularly, throughout the movie, I kept wondering "Is this the plot?"  At first, I thought that this movie was about redeeming oneself in the school after losing a big match.  Then I thought it was about getting a brother back.  Then I thought it was about escaping a constable.  Then I thought it was about the convinct that I knew nothing about .  Finally, I had no idea what it was technically about.  Now, you could argue that these are all beats in a movie.  And to a certain extent, that's true.  But none of these scenes seem to have continuity or consequence.  When we see the school after Chan returns, it's almost startling.  "Oh yeah.  These guys."  Like, no part really stood out as "This is the movie."  

But again, I've been preaching the movie.  The Young Master (despite having a terrible name for this movie) is possibly the best movie in the box set.  Again, I have one more movie in the set, so it's not over for me.  But it is definitely a solid film.

Rated PG.  Probably the only red flag from this movie is the kind of scary bad guys.  There's something unsettling about the CG world of Minecraft when given film aesthetics.  What might be a simple thing when watching these characters in a video game comes across very differently when it comes to a film.  I can't think of much else that really would be upsetting about the movie.  

DIRECTOR:  Jared Hess

I know that I start all of these by saying that I don't want to write.  I'm kind of in a funk, so if I'm overly harsh on this movie, I apologize.  But I've been putting off writing about A Minecraft Movie long enough, so I suppose I should still write about it while it is still somewhat fresh.  (Note:  I have things that I absolutely need to write about and this is not helping.) 

By this point, you'll all have heard about the walking meme that is A Minecraft Movie.  Younger Gen Z and older Gen Alphas have been tearing apart movie theaters to ironically lambaste A Minecraft Movie.  Me?  I have younger Gen Alphas.  My kids loved the movie unironically and thought that the applause and the hooting that was going on during the movie was genuine enthusiasm for the movie.  I want to look at theater culture both to comment on the degradation of society when it comes to the movie while keeping myself also in check as I'm about to turn 42.  

I knew what I was getting into when I took my kids to the movies.  My son has been way too excited about this movie without any sense of irony.  Sure, his classmates are making "Chicken Jockey" references left and right.  But my kid, like many other kids, absolutely adore the whole Minecraft culture.  I kind of get it.  It's a game that isn't for me.  But out of all the games that he could be playing, Minecraft is oddly wholesome.  It's digital Lego.  I applaud that. Given time and effort, players can create anything that they want. While it's a bummer that it is digital, there's something wonderful about the notion that kids are creating worlds, many of whom are doing it without the thought that there could be something artistic or self-serving in the behavior.  For a culture that is so viral-video obsessed, many kids take those videos as inspiration as opposed to seeking instant fame and that's pretty great.  The fact that there is a narrative mechanic is also kind of fun.  I get Minecraft. 

So, for my kids, it was a movie that spoke to them.  Now, my son said it was his third favorite movie after Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and The Super Mario Brothers Movie. You can see what he likes more than movies, right?  I do think it is weird that we have A Minecraft Movie as a concept.  The lore is not exactly one of those stories that is easily adaptable.  But I also grew up in an age when no one had really cracked the video game movie code.  Now, decent video game movies are a dime a dozen.  To A Minecraft Movie's fault, some of them are pretty darned good.  A Minecraft Movie isn't great.  I'm putting that first and foremost.  The reason that all these pre-teen turds are ironically watching the movie is that there is quite a bit to pull apart.  But is it watchable, especially for kids?  Yeah.  Maybe.  Me, a 41-year-old man who never got into Minecraft?  I kept on watching it as a Jared Hess movie.

I know that I'm writing just to write here, but Jared Hess is the Napoleon Dynamite / Nacho Libre guy.  His directing style is so rife with irony to begin with that he almost lacks heart.  I know that Napoleon Dynamite is actually kind of a touching movie at times.  But that seemed like a balancing act and a passion project that allowed Hess to really figure stuff out.  A Minecraft Movie is not that.  If anything, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen here.  The sheer amount of people who have a screenwriting credit on this movie is borderline offensive.  I know that many movies have screenwriting credits that we never get to see.  But A Minecraft Movie had too many people writing this movie and you can feel it.  The entire opening had to be a draft of the film.  The movie opens with Steve explaining his entire life and a whole movie's worth of adventure.  The problem with that movie, probably, was that it didn't have enough characters in it.  Jack Black as Steve probably had to carry the movie himself, saying things to no one because Minecraft itself is a pretty solitary game.  (I know!  You can have people working on the same project in the same server.  But that seems to be the exception to the rule nowadays.)

But the rest of the story feels like a bit of a formula, leading to the big problem of saying absolutely nothing by the end of the movie.  Here's the problem:  Steve is not the protagonist.  Steve is almost more setting than he is a character.  If we're going to compare Steve to another character in my son's canon of great movies, Steve is Toad from The Super Mario Brother Movie.  He's there to show how insane this world is.  While he might be on the adventure, Steve does very little growth, going as far as abandoning the internal conflict that set him on this mission.  (Steve promises to betray the team for the sake of his dog.  From moment one, he's pretty open that he lied to Malgosha.)   Henry is the protagonist of the movie, which is shocking considering that most of the film is almost devoted exclusively to either Jack Black's Steve or Jason Momoa's Garbage Man Garrett.  

That's where the real problem lies: Garbage Man Garrett and Steve serve the exact same role in the film.  This is some studio nonsense.  It seems like every video game movie thrives with Jack Black in the movie somehow (Sorry, Borderlands...) and Jason Momoa physically looks different from Jason Momoa.  But both can do physical comedy.  The inclusion of both of these characters is, as Dan Harmon would most likely testify to, "a hat on a hat."  (I know he didn't come up with this phrase.  I feel like I'm defending myself from you guys more than normal today.)  Both of these characters play the goofy blowhard.  Neither one of them is particularly good at their jobs.  If anything, it's the parody of the blowhard American.  But having two of these characters was a bit much.  If anything, we have our main characters take a backseat because they act like everymen in this story. 

And, honestly, I love Danielle Brooks.  I love her.  She's fantastic in everything.  She's even fantastic in this.  She has nothing to do in this story.  If anything, the movie kind of regresses gender narratives by splitting the movie into "boys' stuff" and "girls' stuff."  While the men are having an adventure, the girls literally make a home.  That's the girls' story.  That's no good.  Danielle Brooks is there to be a sounding board to the white girl saying that she might be a bad sister.  The worst part?  I bet that "I'm a bad sister" plot was the crux of one of the drafts of the script, but doesn't even really matter in this movie.  It comes back to it every so often.  But from this perspective, Natalie and Dawn have borderline nothing to do in this movie.  It's bad storytelling.

But that brings me to the thing that frustrated me most about the movie:  Gen Z and Gen Alpha.  Here's where I want to not be an old man.  Part of me loves that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are turning out for A Minecraft Movie.  In some ways, it's The Rocky Horror Picture Show for a new generation.  I love audience participation.  From a guy who was raised with Mystery Science Theater 3000, I can't claim I'm above watching a movie ironically.  Mind you, I would never talk during a Mystery Science Theater.  Here's my point.  Where I lose Gen Z / Gen Alpha on this movie is the fact that Rocky Horror is a sign of loving the film unironically.  It's a complete embrace of the purpose of the film.  And when we watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 and laugh about how bad these movies are, they tend to be dramatic.  We're adding comedy to something that wasn't meant to be a comedy.  

When these kids are tearing apart theaters (too far, by the way.  Don't be jerks to people who are trying to show you a good time.), it's being ironic about something that is already ironic.  When Jack Black delivers a line completely over-the-top, he's aware that he's doing it.  We're supposed to laugh at the absurdity of what is going on.  Making fun of something that is making fun of itself misses the point.  Like, it's just broadcasting a lot of stupidity to the rest of the world.  And I'm being the old man again here, but it isn't a good look.  Also, how dare you make fun of the songs in A Minecraft Movie.  Mr. Jack Black is one-half of Tenacious D, a comedy-band duo that rocks so hard that it forgot more about comedy than you'll ever know.  Also, keep in mind, there's probably a studio head who wanted "Peaches", but for Minecraft.  Get off Jack Black's butt about it.

However, there is a certain joy that comes out from knowing that A Minecraft Movie is benefitting from all the attention it receives.  It's going to be a bummer, though, when Another Minecraft Movie (or whatever it's going to be called) comes out and tries capitalizing on the irony that was Gen Alpha culture.  They're going to be saying "Chicken Jockey" every so often (much like how this movie included "tots") and no one is going to laugh.  But whatever.  

​It is what it is.

Rated R for being pretty darned R-rated.  Yeah, I know what I wrote.  Judd Apatow's core talent is to mimic real-world vulgarity and then, somehow, escalate it.  As such, this movie is fully of language and graphic descriptions of sexual acts.  It also has a sex scene with nudity.  But I'm a guy who laughs a lot at Apatow's brand of crassness, so who am I to throw stones?  

DIRECTOR:  Judd Apatow

Do you know why I'm writing right now?  It's because I'm too sleepy to read.  Yeah, sometimes I have to prioritize my productivity.  And, sure, I won't be able to finish this in about twenty minutes.  But I'll get a good chunk of this done.

I'll tell you what.  Serendipity is a weird thing.  Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  I've been watching Funny People slowly over the course of a few days.  (Sure, that may be blasphemy to a lot of you.) But I got to the second half of the movie and then the whole thing felt like Gatsby.  Now, I dismissed a lot of this as something that has just been taking over my life right now.  I'm teaching Gatsby right now.  It was the 100th anniversary and I got all kinds of treats from my boss who is unabashedly obsessed with the book.  I couldn't help but think that this was the English teacher in me over-reading into it.  

Then I Googled it.

Sure enough, the IMDB page has that under the trivia section.  Apparently, that was entirely intentional.  Yeah, I'm not an idiot here.  I know that some people might fight this one pretty hard and I can't even throw stones at that.  The biggest thing that I'm fighting against with the Gatsby comparison is the first half of the movie.  Funny People is a great movie that I was surprised that didn't take off.  But the one thing that I understand frustration with is the fact that it feels like two movies.  It's  long movie, especially for a comedy.  The first half deals with the very real concerns of confronting one's own mortality, especially when it comes to securing a legacy. I want to talk about all of that because, if I'm being honest, I find that part of the movie far more interesting than the Gatsby part.  But the second half of the movie is aggressively The Great Gatsby.

The easy read of that Gatsby is that George Simmons is Gatsby, the rich man who regrets letting the love of his life go.  Admittedly, Simmons doesn't have the same motivations as Gatsby.  Gatsby makes money to win Daisy over.  Simmons lets Laura go to pursue his riches and wants a do-over.  (Aw, the fictional in-universe baby movie is called Re-Do.) But Laura is stuck in a terrible marriage with Clarke, who is just a nicer version of Tom Buchanan.  Apatow doesn't go as far as making Clarke racist, despite the fact that he's really into cultural appropriation.  But there are kids involved!  It's Pammy all over again.  But the real deep cut is the role that Ira plays in the story.  Ira is Nick Carroway.  The really interesting part of Funny People is that the story is about Ira, not George.  Admittedly, Ira is more invested in the whole story than Nick ever gets.  Because the protagonist of the story is Ira, Ira is allowed to have a bit more backbone than Nick ever does.  My frustration with Nick Carroway is always his passive attitude to all of the nonsense going on around him.  Golly, I actually like how, narratively, Ira works better than Nick.  (Don't tell my boss.  Gatsby is a perfect book for her.) 

I got onto the whole "rewatch Funny People" thing because of my comedy podcasts that I listen to.  Right now, I'm deep into You Made It Weird wth Pete Holmes.  But I remember when Funny People was first out, it was the movie to be talked about.  Listen, I'm not a standup.  I probably will never be a standup.  But one of the things that Pete Holmes talks about is the importance of paying dues.  He keeps comparing it to The Karate Kid, but it shows that it only helps to take the whole thing slow.  Appropriately enough, Pete Holmes would go on to work with Judd Apatow intimately on Crashing, the show that was semi-autobiographical about his life.  Apatow got deep into standup.  You can get the absolute respect that Apatow has for the entire standup world with this one.  It's funny, because I think about this being a movie about standup first, a movie about death second, and The Great Gatsby third.  There's a lot of plates spinning in the air here.  But if you want to altruistically live the life of an up-and-coming comedian, Funny People kind of does it great.  I assume.  I write a lot.

But I mentioned, to me, the real meat of the movie is the fact that we have a hard time processing death.  There's a truly great line saying that George is the only person to face death and not come out a different person.  Part of what makes Funny People stick to the ribs more than other movies is the fact that it refuses to pull punches a little bit.  I think I'm growing cynical in my old age.  I tend to like a depressing message more than anything else in movies.  But Apatow doesn't really seem to have George mirror the Scrooge story as a means to be shocking.  I think the narrative that Apatow is playing with is that it is hard to make real change.  A lot of the movie is devoted to George and the way that he processes death.  Yeah, George is a jerk from moment one to the end of the movie.  He's always kind of been a jerk. There's something endearing about him when he's a young man making prank calls.  But he's never outright a good person.  

I suppose you could argue that his hiring of Ira shows that he has a bit of a heart.  And, yeah, Ira melts George a little bit.  But George doesn't have his healthier moments because a desire to be a better person.  Instead, he's afraid.  A lot of his behavior is a manifestation of fear.  That's a little bit of a hard nut to crack because George is so isolated from humanity in that giant house of him, so the notion of him being a good person was always a bit of an uphill battle.   When George blows up in the first half of the movie, there's something inherently sympathetic about his reactions.  He's a scared man who completely lacks a support system around him.  That's why Ira is necessary to the story.  After all, Ira is the Nick Carroway of the story.  He has a distanced relationship with Ira because there's a power dynamic that can never really be leveled for a lot of the movie.

But that's why the second half of the movie works well with the first half.  The second half of the movie shows George thinking that he's made some major changes in his life.  (I mean, that Eminem scene is perfect, but it also plants that seed of immorality in him.) And that's kind of the truth that Apatow is spouting to a certain extent.  It's incredibly cynical, but it also is imbued with verisimilitude.  People don't change just because they're faced with tragedy or hardship.  Every movie we ever see, we have characters who go through some kind of trial and come out a better person.  (Unless the story is serialized.  Then, we have to do everything that we can to keep them the same person at all costs.)  

And I would like to point out that Apatow probably isn't screaming that people don't change.  The absolute denouement of the film is George visiting Ira at his old job.  The two of them put the past behind them and George becomes vulnerable, offering Ira tags for his bits. (See, I do listen to comedy podcasts!  I called them "tags" and "bits".)  It's because George wants to change.  The first time I saw this movie, it bothered me how everyone was mad at Ira in the movie.  Like Ira, one of my triggers is infidelity.  Ira, in a move morally culpable unlike Nick Carroway, tries to stop George from sleeping with Laura.  He points out that there are two little girls who would be affected by this decision and that it wasn't George's right to make that decision.  He then tries to stop Laura from dumping Clarke.  And, admittedly, it does backfire on him.  (I am bothered that Laura doesn't have the self-assessment abilities to point out that she lied to Clarke one last time.) 

But when George is driving Ira back from that debacle, he is unable to comprehend his own responsibility for the emotional train wreck that he caused.  Heck, Clarke --who is the Tom Buchanan of the piece --has more self-awareness than the actual Tom Buchanan.  He takes responsibility for his actions.  But it's because there is a direct correlation between his goals and his morality.  George keeps apologizing to Laura, but it almost is a sadness that he let her get away, not because he did things that were bad.  Again, these are all arguable points.  But at the end of the day,  I really don't see George as someone who is sorry so much as he regrets the road not taken.  

I honestly don't see why Funny People isn't considered top tier Apatow.  Apatow is actually a genius. But I tend to like his sleeper hits more than the ones that people preach all day.  Again, between Funny People and This is 40, I'm on board this guy's films for all time.

Not rated, but this one can mostly be condensed into one scene that is wildly uncomfortable.  While the way that people deal with mental illness can be upsetting for some viewers, the real scene that is troublesome is a scene of incest.  While most of this happens off-camera, the scene is still extremely uncomfortable.  Otherwise, this is a small story that is meant to mirror the format of a stage play.  Ultimately, there's a little bit of cruelty between characters, but what can you expect from Ingmar Bergman?

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Guys!  Guys!  I'm in the section of the Ingmar Bergman set where there is only one movie per disc.  That means I'm in the classics.  It's almost a prestige thing, I think.  The big movies are allowed the cinemartic real estate to have their own discs.  That's exciting for me.  As much as I've been slowly moving through the Bergman box / compared to how much effort I've put into moving through the Bergman box, I'm thrilled that I only get one movie per disc.  I get quality films in small doses.

I also have a delay in my flight at the airport so I have time to catch up on some writing.  I have 41 minutes before the flight begins boarding (fingers crossed!) and I'm going to try to clear off my blogging list!

Two things can be true.  I probably have seen this movie and I don't remember it at all.  I mean, I own this movie in two formats now.  I own it on DVD and I own it in the Criterion Bergman Blu-Ray.  The crazy thing is that I kind of like this one.  I mean, this is something very specific for Bergman.  The second that the movie starts up, you get this aura of quality.  Sure, the other Bergmans have quality.  I know someone out there probably hates all my reads on the Bergman films.  But honestly, there is something absolutely gorgeous about Through a Glass Darkly.  And I mentioned the play thing.  While the play thing gives the film an avant-garde quality, what it also does is focus primarily on performances.  

Maybe that's something that I haven't been giving the Bergman movies a lot of credit for in the past.  While they have all been artistic as get out, I haven't really paid attention to a lot of the performances.  Part of that comes from the fact that I don't speak the language.  That's a real thing.  I simply assume performances are functional because I'm so trying to wrap my head around the bigger ideas.  You can't fault me for this.  It's part and parcel of watching Bergman movies.  But what I'm not exactly used to in Bergman films is a straightforward character drama.  Yeah, we got a little bit of that in the early Bergman stuff.  The early Bergman era tended to lean towards melodrama.  Instead, Through a Glass Darkly sacrifices complex plots for focusing on a unsolvable problem.

I like when a problem is both internal and unsolvable.  There's something heartwrenching about Karin's situation.  Like most of my blogs, I'm always in a state of unpacking the films, so bear with me while I do some of that here.  Karin is a woman who oddly seems divorced from her medical condition.  The first act of the film acknowledges that Karin is dealing with schizophrenia.  However, much like many first acts throughout art, we're seeing what life is like before the conflict becomes too much of an issue.  Karin's life is focused outwards on her father.  The movie seems to mirror much of Bergman's other work, making it seem like about an absentee father obsessed with his art.  It's not surprising that Bergman is making a movie about a father who can't remember his own priorities when it comes to his art.  Bergman even admitted that much of this movie was a reflection on his own life.  

But the further that this movie progresses, the more we understand that little of David's obsession with having his novel published (note: the flight I'm waiting for is to Las Vegas, where I'm attending a writer's conference to pitch my novel to agents...so, like, I get it?) is the central conflict.  If anything, it seems like David might be mirroring Bergman's own impotence to balance real world problems with his own artistic agenda.  The movie only embraces its central conflict when Karin discovers that David is pessimistic about her treatment.  That's when she spirals and the schizophrenia takes center stage.  She has a full on manic state (I'm not even sure if I'm using that correctly) and the movie places her as the protagonist of the piece, despite the fact that she has little control over her own actions.

I don't want to take agency away from Karin as protagonist.  One of the few things that I don't want to let go of is that this is a woman's story written by a man.  I really do believe that he wanted to give Harriet Andersson an acting challenge through Karin.  It's who we care about through the story.  But I can't help but attach to the male perspective of this story.  It is written by Bergman.  As much as we root for Karin's health, the real meat comes from how the three separate men relate to Karin.  Again, I'm the worst and I hate myself for making this about the male gaze.  But it's what my brain does and I can't stop that.

The three men in the house all start the film as caretakers of Karin, even if they define themselves initally from the perspective of David.  David is a father who acknowledges that he's kind of a turd when it comes to being a caretaker.  His daughter is floundering through mental illness and that impotence enables him to hide away in his work.  It's almost a crutch.  When he wants to, he abdicates his responsibility to Martin, Karin's husband.  Martin might be the healthiest of the men.  Part of that seems to come from the fact that he signed up for this as opposed to was relegated to caretaker.  As a husband, he sees Karin for the woman first and then as relation second.  Honestly, Martin's perspective on Karin is the most sympathetic.  (I'm basing this all on a shot toward the end of the movie where they all hold her down and inject her with a sedative.)   

But Minus?  PRONOUNCED MEE-NUS?  Come on, Minus.  What is going on with you?  The dumbest read that I can offer is that Bergman created a character based on sexual repression coupled with a loose condemnation of pornography.  Minus rapes his sister.  And on top of that, Karin blames herself for it happening.  There's a lot to unpack here. 

Now, here's me swinging for the fences.  Without a proper understanding of psychology, I can't help but think of id, ego, and superego for these three characters.  It's a stretch.  I know.  Everything about Minus screams "id."  Here's a character who makes plays about his father's failures.  He looks at smut.  He denies any kind of control when it comes to being attracted to his sister.  David, as superego, is about being proper.  He's obsessed with art and obsession with his own status.  He can't balance two different elements of his life, so he retreats into his own sense of propriety.  Martin, however, is attracted to his wife.  Sure, it was uncomfortable that he referred to his wife as "child", but I'm going to ignore that to make my stupid idea work.  He's the one who is both sexually attracted to his wife, but is also able to care for her health and reprimand misbehavior.

Now, the image I was talking about in the end of the movie almost encapsulates the perversion of caretaker to sexual object.  I can't help  but see Karin as a woman who is being held down against her will.  For the sake of a narrative, she is being "helped" so she can make it to the hospital to treat her mania.  But that image is three men holding her down, two of whom have had a sexual experience with this character.  It feels morally gross.  Yeah, there was no other option to get Karin on that helicopter.  She was screaming and clawing at walls. But because two of those characters have uncouth motives with her, it taints the whole experience.  

Sure, I'm really adding a lot of my analysis to something that may be straight-forward.  This could just be a story of a family dealing with a family member spiraling out of control under her own mental illness.  But Bergman is a smart dude and I have this opportunity to unpack something rich and deep.  This is the Bergman I signed up for.  

Yeah, it's not the greatest of the Bergmans.  But we're in the good stuff now, guys.

Not rated, but the other one is rated X.  This may or not be accurate.  I mean, while there is quite a bit of sexual content (including nudity), it is somewhat less than I Am Curious (Yellow).  I still felt super awkward watching this one again.   The movie also has a lot of discussions about sexually transmitted diseases, so keep that in mind when watching the movie.  There's also the implication of rape in a scene.  The movie also, in its attempt to remind audiences of its political core, says quite a bit negative about the church.

DIRECTOR: Vilgot Sjoman

Do you know how tempted I was just to copy and paste my blog from I Am Curious (Yellow) and just switch Yellow to Blue?  I mean, that would have been wholly unfair to the movie and also too lazy for me to handle.  But there was a mischievous element in me that wanted to do just that.  And, honestly?  If I'm being the most honest?  This writing right here is the most intense demonstration of willpower ever because I have this blog and then I have to follow it up with Through a Glass Darkly, another film produced by Svensk Filmindustri.

This is going to be so hard to write about.  Part of it comes from the fact that this is meant to be a companion piece to a movie as opposed to a sequel or anything.  From what I understand based on the introduction from Sjoman on the I Am Curious (Yellow) disc was that he must have felt like the film was not quite what he wanted by itself.  Because both movies were made without a formalized script, there was something experimental about the whole thing.  I mean, watch this movie for even a few minutes and you get what Sjoman was shooting for in terms of being experimental.  We live in an era where formalized scripts tend to be optional.  If anything, a lot of the prestige television and cinema we make comes from loose drafts and improvisation.  So I get it.  But the relationship between Blue and Yellow seems oddly tenuous.  

The movies tout themselves to be the same movie, but different.  I might actually have a hard time accepting this as fact.  Maybe, in my mind, I am thinking that the same movie but different means the same story with different tones.  Instead, we get something that almost acts as a sequel.  These movies come out a year apart from each other.  They feature the same characters played by the same actors.  They have a lot of the same motifs.  But the story is different in each movie.  It's almost like the other movie doesn't exist, but the same characters exist.  Do you know what issue I'm having with this?  Back in 1967-1968, the notion of a reboot doesn't really exist.  What I Am Curious (Blue) is --as dumb as I sound writing this --is a reboot.  It's a reboot of Yellow.  Yellow didn't give Sjoman the satisfaction of a movie by itself, so he made another movie where the canon of the first movie is almost arbitrary.  The things that he wanted to keep about the film stayed the same.  What he didn't want to stick didn't stick.  That's fine.

I know.  I hate me too for saying it.  I'm already debating myself.  I, too, am being split into Blue and Yellow.  I get that there's more nuance to what I just said. But part of what Blue and Yellow are all about is coming to grips with some complicated thoughts.  At the films core, there is a shared intentional DNA.  Lena is a political activist who is open to sexual experiences.  In both worlds, she's frustrated by the world around her both politically and personally.  But with Blue it seems like the focus is on the movie itself.  Both films have a metatextual core to them.  Sjoman as a character making a movie about making a movie is happening in both stories.  Every time that we get invested in the grounded story, Sjoman appears to remind us that this is a movie.  It's very Bertolt Brecht.  

But I had an easier time grasping onto Blue than Yellow.  That kind of surprises me.  I mean, both stories are almost amorphous in their storytelling. There isn't a clear plot going on in either film.  But with Blue, it seems like Sjoman almost embraces the meta narrative for the benefit of the grounded world.  The Lena in Yellow seems to be finding her own spirituality.  There's something laughable about how Lena fails to embrace her own activism, always searching for the next high.  Blue, however, offers a Lena who seems human, despite the very weird metanarrative about making a movie.  She still lacks the maturity that Yellow's Lena has, but her maturity seems a lot more universal. She has a complicated relationship with her mother.  She's annoyed by annoying people who are important to her overall success in life.  It makes sense that Blue's Lena has a meandering lifestyle.  

There's also lovely motifs of disappointment.  The whole thing feels very upset at the lack of caring that people have.  I can't help but confess that I might be bringing a lot of my own neuroses to this movie because I have been so depressed about the way that politics has played out.  Part of what makes Lena upset (as a background concept) is the notion that prisons used to be something.  I have to confess that I only know about the Swedish penal system from memes.  I know that there was probably a complex political battle to get prison systems up to snuff and I am spared the burden of understanding the complex turmoil that got it to that spot.  But Lena seems to be the only person in this entire movie who is angry at the stagnation that the penal system has taken.  Now, because I don't know the intricacies of Swedish politics, for all I know that she thinks that more could be done with the prisons or that the prisons might be inhuman places of torture.  I don't know what exactly she is advocating for because I don't really have a baseline for her position.  All I know is that her actions seem to lack any real punch because the world seems happy with the misery that Lena has pointed out.

What does I Am Curious offer as a unified product?  From a certain perspective, I get the feeling that a lot of it is dealing with Sjoman's frustrations with a movie that he made.  While Yellow and Blue are solid in themselves, they don't feel like this transcendent work without the companion piece.  But if I didn't think of it in terms of artistic expression, I can't say that the two movies offer much to one another outside of seeing a bizarre experiment come to life.  Yes, Yellow needs Blue and Blue needs Yellow, but it's almost because of a novelty element.  Neither film is fully dependent on the other outside of the notion that these are two alternate movies to one another featuring some of the same talent and concepts as the other.  I wish I could say that these movies changed my life.  I appreciate how political they are.  I like some of the weirder stuff.  But that's not something that always gels in the movie.  It's good, but something is still missing.  

But thank goodness that he didn't create I Am Curious (Green), mainly because there is no green on the Swedish flag.