Not rated.  I can't actually think of all that many offensive things in this movie.  Most of the controversial stuff is more thematic than it is on-screen or explicit. Like many Bergman movies, people are intentionally cruel to one another.  There are discussions about adultery and abortion in the movie, but nothing visually confirming anything untoward. We are also witnesses to a possible rape.  Again, a lot is left up to interpretation.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Again, the real world is a place that stops people from being truly happy.  That's both thematically part of this movie and how I watched it.  I'll take the first bit of responsibility.  Wild Strawberries, despite being distraction free, is an incredibly serene film.  There were moments where I mentally started to drift away from the long car ride that was this film.  I'm not being glib.  The movie is about an incredibly long car ride. The second is...everyone decided to call me or text me during this movie.  I didn't respond to any of the texts because I was trying to focus on the movie.  But I got three phone calls in the middle of an hour-and-a-half movie.  I don't know how the universe knows that this was Tim Time, but somehow it wanted to ruin Wild Strawberries for me.  If I don't have the best read on this movie, just now that the real world kept trying to sneak its way into the screening of a Bergman classic.

Finally, we had a Bergman movie in the box set that only danced around the idea of a romantic situation between two mismatched family members.  There was nothing explicit.  It wasn't the plot of the movie.  If anything, I have to meet them halfway to get to that read of the movie.  Bravo, Mr. Bergman!  I was starting to worry.  But I'm starting to get the vibe that Bergman is a positive nihilist.  Bergman movies tend to be a bit bleak.  People really feel comfortable saying the rudest things to each other and those cruelties seem to roll like water off a duck's back until someone says something completely innocent.  If you say something childish, that's when people get really mad. Someone almost broke someone else's arm over the concept of the existence of God. You know, that shouldn't have been the line.  The same two dudes who fought over the existence of God were constantly being prodded by the third person in a love triangle who kept teasing their infatuation.   In those scenes, totally cool dudes.  Okay, they looked a little grumpy.  But the explosion came out over a theological debate.  Now, that's not something that's completely off-limits in storytelling.  Heck, I'll say its even the standard.  But the protagonist of this movie has some really mean things said to him and he just takes it.  I think he might have even thanked the person who said it to him.  I would say that was a cool moment in a movie, but that's pretty standard for Bergman.

I'm going to talk about mortality (if my baby stops coming over here to get picked up.  Yes, I'm a bad father.) and some of the other motifs of the film, but I do want to look at the concept of positive nihilism.  Note: I've seen my fair share of Bergman movies before I started the giant Criterion box set that I'm unpacking in Criterion order. It's not like I'm coming at this only four movies in.  While not being an absolute truth, Bergman movies tend to exist in a world where people are just sadly moving through life as they power forward to the grave.  People tend to be cruel to each other (I've said this!) and we tend to glom onto the one person who is sadly just shouldering the burden of this world without making it a worse place. Since we're talking about Wild Strawberries in particular, I want to use Isak as such a character.  Marianne tends to have a certain level of disrespect towards Isak for a good chunk of the film.  Ultimately, it isn't really Isak who changes in this movie.  Isak is the static character while Marianne is a bit more dynamic.  Now, we discover later in the film, Marianne is going through stuff that mostly colors the way that she views Isak.  She's more angry at her husband Evald than she is at Isak, the man who raised Evald.  But she unloads that he has this history of cruelty and that everyone thinks that Isak is a good man when she knows the truth.  That kind of stuff colors the viewer's characterization of Isak.  As the film progressed, the more positive things said about Isak, the more I questioned the validity of those statements. But from what I understand, Isak is a saint and he's just being this martyr character throughout.

I don't know if a Bergman movie can not avoid a conversation about God.  This movie seems to really pull out the stops, considering that Isak doesn't really have any strong opinions about the notions of an all-powerful deity.  I already talked about the fist fight that broke out over the existence of God. But the bigger shout to the audience was the portrayal of the Catholic character.  This man's only concrete background besides being married was that he was Catholic.  And boy-oh-boy, was he a jerk.  He's this guy who belittles his wife at every opportunity.  She, in turn, responds by hitting him. He's not in the story very long.  But it is an active beat in the story.  Part of me wants to think about juxtaposing the Catholic to Isak, who seems so fundamentally removed from the notion of religion that makes him seem like the good man.  The irony of the scene, the man who preaches the faith, is a monster while the man who silently stews with his own troubled thought might be the better man.

I said I'd talk about mortality, so I'm going to talk about mortality. I relate to Isak. Isak is being celebrated for being a doctor, but there's a bit of coding behind that.  While he is a medical doctor who has done great things, especially for a community that he left behind in a different lifetime, he's often referred to as "Professor."  He's a learned man who has spent much of his life improving himself to the point where others have noticed who he is.  He led a loveless life because the woman who was meant to be his first wife cheated on him with a family member who was a bit of a rogue.  Yet, Isak is plagued by both dreams and memories that all imply that, somehow, Isak failed.  In his dreams, he has hauting visions of time running out and odd distorted faces.  Again, we're adding a lot of ourselves to these interpretations, but the concept of guilt and redemption somehow keep spiraling through these images.  The memories are bittersweet at best.  He keeps seeing the love of his life leave him, despite the fact that it is a beautiful day with his family.  We see a lifetime of sadness and yet he can only seem to grow more introspective as opposed to enjoying a day that is celebrating him.  

I'm really glad that  Bergman didn't end on the fishing shot, by the way.  Isak straight up verbalizes that he's dying and the movie eventually concludes with him forgiving himself, mostly because Marianne apologizes for her treatment of this good man.  That outer affirmation has now colored his inner affirmation.  We also find out whose opinions in life actually matter and, in this case, it's his son's wife.  But the movie kept on mentioning death and I needed to see that the home of the eponymous wild strawberries wasn't going to be Isak's afterlife.  It would have been a bit on the nose and I didn't want to have him spend time in a world without love.

Can I tell you that I love having Sara and the bohemians in this movie?  Golly, even though they were a lot and I would probably loathe them in real life, Sara's constant validation of someone that she should --by all intents and purposes --disregard.  Isak is a liminal figure in her life, but he oddly becomes inspiring to her.  It's not like Isak and Sara are kindred spirits.  He's quiet and bears the brunt of society and Sara lives life in surround sound.  Yet, she's the one who sees this award --an award that Isak himself views with humility --with the grandeur beyond its scope.  She doesn't see it as simply something that someone gets.  She imbues it with value celebrating the culmination of a life well lived.  It's honestly very touching and I hope someone does that for me if I receive an award at 90 or whatever.  

It's a very touching movie.  I threw out the word "bittersweet" and I think Bergman might be the king of that.  It's incredibly depressing while being sweet at the same time.  I get why this is regarded as Bergman's greats.  But that doesn't stop it from being just a little bit too sad at times.

Not rated.  While the tone is definitely aimed at children, there's some pretty questionable morality in here.  The protagonist is a jerk who uses the ability of flight to trick people into giving him things, some things that may be considered sexually manipulative.  The movie also shows a suicide attempt.

DIRECTOR: Albert Lamorisse
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Two!  Two full length movies in what I thought was a collection of shorts.  I don't know how much I'm going to write about this, but it will be enough for this to have its own entry.  I would like to apologize for that abomination of a photo that I just posted.  It's difficult to find a picture from this movie that is high enough resolution.

Circus Angel somehow is great and terrible at the same time.  It doesn't really shock me that this might be one of the lesser known Albert Lamorisse movies simply because it is a bit of a mess.  The funny thing is that this might be the most traditional narrative out of all of Lamorisse's movies.  He's going for making an outright comedy here and, for the most part, succeeds.  It is actually more funny than it is a good movie.  I think my frustration really comes from the fact that the protagonist doesn't necessarily follow the tropes that we are expecting with a movie like this.  I know.  I should be all excited for a movie to defy convention, but in this case...it almost feels like a sin to sell this movie.

Fifi (and I'm just discovering that this is the character's name) is a jerk from moment one.  He's one of those lovable thieves. He steals watches and lives one of those lifestyles that could only be described as trampish.  Considering that Lamorisse is a big fan of "the easiest way is the best way", Fifi finds himself in the middle of a lion tamer's act.  Now, this is where Lamorisse steps into the world of convention.  While Fifi is objectively wrong, Billy Madison style, he's up against an unlikable bully vying for the attention of a beautiful girl.  We automatically hate the lion tamer, although from his perspective is probably doing the morally correct thing throughout this film.  

When he is given the gift (and curse!) of flight, I simply assumed that he was going to start becoming a better person.  The movie ends that way because we needed to have some kind of happy ending.  But it really does become a light switch that doesn't make a lot of sense.  I thought that the love of a woman would be the driving force to turn Fifi (pun intended) to the world of angels.  He goes from being the Birdman into something more angelic.  And while Lamorisse is somewhat teasing the concept of faith in this movie, it really does take a long time for Fifi to pick up that these people are genuinely in need of an angel.  

Maybe it's because he goes from being a lovable bad guy to a completely selfish monster.  When he falls in love, it seems like he has turned over a new leaf.  He highlights the toxic masculinity of the lion tamer / strongman and it seems like he has finally found a reason to think beyond his own selfishness.  He does work really hard to make his girl love him.  Yes, he uses immoral means to impress her by stealing a clock while the strongman, presumably, does the same act in a traditionally moral stance.  Lamorisse plays it really weird with the sequence of events that follows.  He saves a man from hanging himself (and it's a dark joke which I have to excuse to simply being the product of yesteryear).  It seems like Fifi has no reason to help this man beyond the fact that he has empathy for a man who is willing to end it all for the love of a woman.  Maybe there's a sense of brotherhood of losers with this man.  But it seems like Fifi is going to help his suicidal acquantance only to try to seduce his fiancee?  He then decides to rob the family blind all for the sheer chaos of it.

This is where Lamorisse loses me.  What these scenes are to the movie is comedy.  It's just joke telling as a flying man dressed as an angel annoys bullies, runs away from law enforcement, and does naughty things.  But it's also fundamentally against what the message of the movie was up to this point.  When Fifi goes to the circus, as much as he finds it to be a burden, he does start developing a sense of purpose.  His relationship with the acrobat seems like this whole narrative about the redemptive love of another.  But the second he gets the chance, not only does he return to a life of crime, but he escalates it.  This all climaxes when he intentionally eats of all of a starving man's food.  There's nothing all that likable about Fifi by the end of the film.  While Fifi is rescued by a family who have faith that he is an angel, this hardly seems like the transformative moment that the movie wants it to be.  If anything, it just seems like a beat.  I can almost read the chart saying, "Start closing up the movie."

Thank God the movie just takes a hard turn and makes Fifi a good man at the end.  It doesn't really make sense.  But for all of the moral shannanigans that the film throws in, all of the plot threads seem to tie together to offer solace for the crimes that this man has committed throughout the film.  It's a bit odd that the strongman is taken to prison, considering that he just sucks but is not evil. 

It's a cute movie that succeeds despite the crimes of the film.  It's not a great film.  Again, it's for the reasons that I stated above.  He's just that much of a jerk that it is hard to root for such a guy throughout the movie.  But did I enjoy it?  Yeah.  It's a funny movie that very much has that Lamorisse charm throughout the movie.  It's nice to see a movie that has a straight up story coming out of Lamorisse as well.  But I'm going to take this more of a loss than a win.

Rated R because George Miller loves his particular brand of Australian cult chaos.   If you know the Mad Max universe, then you know that these movies are about crassness and ultraviolence.  People die horrible deaths and are deformed.  People lose appendages and are gnawed upon by maggots. Death and carnage coupled with bad language.  There's no real sex or nudity in this movie, but it feels like it could be behind any corner.  R.

DIRECTOR:  George Miller

This is one of the places that I drastically differ from my father.  My dad was a refugee in Australia from World War II.  He never gave up his Australian citzenship, even when he moved to the United States.  Now, I remember him being really into The Road Warrior.  I never disliked the Mad Max movies.  Heck, I think I really liked The Road Warrior and kind of liked Beyond Thunderdome.  But the Mad Max movies never really stay with me in any way.  I don't leave the theater telling everyone how much I like these movies.  Part of that comes from the fact that I think that these movies are more about setting than actual character stuff.  George Miller seems to enjoy the environment more than the people in his worlds.

There's nothing wrong with Furiosa.  If you loved Fury Road, which I was only "meh" about, Furiosa will hit a lot of the same buttons.  Heck, Fury Road was beloved by most cinephiles, so I know that I'm the exception to the rule on this one.  To say that Furiosa hits  a lot of the same buttons as Fury Road states that George Miller actually has another triumph on his hands.  The thing is...I really don't care.  Both movies, to me, is about cool insane fight choreography and people being mean to each other.  See, I don't necessarily hate that.  But between you, me, and the wall, I get a better version of this watching Fallout, which is a show I'm enjoying but also do not love.  I'm apparently very hard to please with my post-Apocalypse. Honestly, these movies kind of suffer the same issues that The Walking Dead kind of face.  These are great stories that need to get their message across and get out.  Again, I'm the only person saying this, so feel free to ignore me.  It's just that I don't know if Furiosa really adds a ton to the discourse about the problems with humanity after the rules have been thrown out the window.

The oddest thing is that George Miller does a really good job of making his protagonists of each film the least important person in the movie.  In Fury Road, we care way more about Furiosa than Max.  Max is almost a passenger in his own film.  In Furiosa, it almost seems like there are moments where Miller is reminded that his protagonist hasn't been on screen in some time.  Dementus, by far, steals the show.  Realize that I'm saying that Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't steal the screen in this movie.  She's an absolutely incredible actress who doesn't do a darned thing wrong in this move.  The problem is how the character is written.  Dementus, as the villain, is charismatic as heck.  He's evil through and through.  But he's one of those villains who really just enjoys being a villain.  He's fun to watch.  Furiosa, in contrast, prides herself on her silence.  It kind of worked for Mad Max.  Mad Max was often quiet in these grandiose, over-the-top sequences.  But it worked, becuase Max was a hunter.  There was almost a Punisher vibe to the entire character. That silence creeped up on his prey.  Instead, Furiosa's silence, while not being empty, was almost used to make people ignore her.  It's smart, from a character's perspective.  A silent girl can't get abused.  But she's also driving a movie (no pun intended). 

A movie like Furiosa is incredibly hard to make because these movies tend to be intentionally low on plot.  George Miller might be the king of being a genius filmmaker and someone who can turn in something that is almost exclusively a guilty pleasure movie.  I don't deny that Miller is talented.  He really is.  He knows how to shoot a movie that is action packed.  But 41-year-old me really wants more to a movie than just two-and-a-half hours of nonstop choreographed violence.  I would say that's a me thing.  After all, the first time that I watched the first John Wick, I had the same complaint.  It was only after multiple viewings did I really learn to love that movie.  But it was through watching sequels that made me reevaluate what made a John Wick movie work.  I've seen all of the Mad Max movies.  While I have a place in my heart for The Road Warrior, even now I have to admit that I barely remember the film.  The more entries into George Miller's universe I get, the less I really care about anything that I watched before.  Ultimately, Miller doesn't have much to say outside the fact that vehicular murder is kind of fun to watch.  Yeah, Furiosa herself is a sympathetic character, but I don't know if that's even why Miller is making these movies.  He knew that Furiosa was a pull-away character in Fury Road and that he was being accepted as a respected auteur.  Making a Furiosa prequel probably gave him the opportunity to do what he's been fighting to do his entire life.

I said that I was going to write less in these things because I can't maintain a heavy writing load while trying to write a book at the same time.  In this case, I don't really need an excuse to cut and run.  The movie is so simplistic that I can't really say that the movie stuck to my ribs.  While interesting and well-made, it's nothing really all that new to me.  I really liked Chris Helmsworth's Dementus.  I kind of think that the end sticks the landing.  The fight choreography is cool.  But I also don't think that we get the arc that I want to see in these movies.  I don't think that there's much vulnerability with this movie either.  It's what we have seen before and that's fine, I guess.  But when this one comes to the Oscars (if it does), I know that I'll only be rooting for it because it is one of those rare genre pieces that get embraced by the Academy.  If all is on the table, it's just a fun movie without a lot of meat.

Not rated.  But there's absolutely nothing that can be considered objectionable besides some minor peril.  You also might have "Balloon Boy" flashbacks if you are the right age.

DIRECTOR:  Albert Lamorisse
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Okay, Criterion. That's not fair.  I simply assumed this was a box set of short films.  You can't stick two feature length films as "...and Other Tales".  I don't know if I would have formatted this blog this way.  But you know what?  I'm going to milk all of this for content because it's my blog and who is going to stop me?  (I swear, if Square gets oddly specific about a rule I don't know about, I would be disappointed.)  No, I'm going to post this blog entry both as part of the "The Red Balloon and Other Tales" page and as its own blog.  I feel like I can do that.  I'll also do the same thing with Circus Angel, thus making me feel like I'm really crushing all of this material.

I wasn't ready for how much I loved this movie.  I have this one student, who may be reading this but is probably not, who is all about Hayao Miyazaki.  I love Miyazaki, but this student love-loves Miyazaki.  He's not necessarily one who would give something like Stowaway in the Sky a chance, but I saw him today and overtly recommended it.  Stowaway in the Sky is Miyazaki before Miyazaki.  Maybe that's what I need to take away from all of this Albert Lamorisse stuff.  I simply assumed that Stowaway in the Sky  was going to be marketing on the success of "The Red Balloon."  Maybe, at one point in the development, that could have been true.  After all, the opening titles say "The Voyage of the Red Balloon" in them.  But while "The Red Balloon" may have served as an inspiration or a starting point for this movie, that's really where it ends.

I have the feeling that Lamorisse is not a fan of actual conflict in his stories.  Sure, we could look at "Bim, the Little Donkey" or "White Mane" as stories that are all about conflict.  But the conflict in those stories are so simple and lack any complexity that it becomes more about the tone of the films in themselves.  Stowaway in the Sky even peels it back a little more.  Golly, it sounds like I'm ragging on the movie (despite the fact that this might be one of the best movies I've seen this year), but every time a conflict is introduced in the story, it's resolved in an almost hilariously short amount of time.  The boy doesn't get to go on the balloon?  He goes on the balloon?  They can't land the balloon?  Nope, they can land the balloon.  The girl is stuck in the balloon?  They get her down before the owner of the balloon even wakes up from his nap.  The balloon is supposed to blow up, not once but twice?  No one injured or in range of the explosion.  To top all of that off, they even have a spare balloon.  It's just...peaceful.

Miyazaki goes to certain wells for his material.  Lamorisse and Miyazaki probably share the same wells.  I was going to say that this is the first of his movies that I've seen where he doesn't share a deep love for animals.  But that's not even true.  The most gripping part of the story is when the two in the balloon come upon a stag being hunted.  It's that very European kind of hunting where there are hounds and horses and a bugle.  But Lamorisse comes down hard on the side of the animal.  There's something absolutely gorgeous about this sequence that harkens back to "Red Balloon" and "White Mane."  While the hunters in this film are almost devoid of any attempts at characterization, unlike the counterparts that I just cited, their role in the film is the same.  Intellectually, we can all instantly understand that there is a value to hunting.  But spiritually and emotionally, there's something fundamentally cruel about the entire concept of hunting, especially something that is so meant to instill fear in prey. Back to Miyazaki, it isn't too much of an emotional leap to go from taking care of animals to Miyazaki's affinity for environmentalism.  He hasn't shied away from telling stories abou taking care of creatures.  I know that both Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke have imagery where humans take care of injured animals.  

But the real connective tissue between these two directors is a love for flight.  Honestly, much of my love for this movie is wrapping my head around how these shots worked in this movie. I had to Google it just now.  I just needed to know.  (Short version?  It's actually a helicopter with the facade of a balloon basket for a lot of the shots.  But back to the love of flight that these two directors share.  Lamorisse bets everything on the notion that the beauty of the sky will sell the film in itself.  I have the vibe, based on the minimal Wikipedia page on this movie, that Stowaway might not have been the smash hit that a lot of people probably wanted it to be.  I also am terrified that I'm going to go on Letterboxd later and be the only one giving this movie five-stars.  Anyway, it's all about the visuals.  I've seen movies with grand visuals.  I write about them a lot.  But there's something about the visual language of Stowaway that actually makes the characterization work.  While "Bim, the Little Donkey" emphasized pantomime to convey emotions, Stowaway goes the other direction.  I love the kid and his grandfather, who just stare in awe at the world around them.  There's never moments of fear when the kid (even in real life!) is aware of how high they are. (Note: I do love that there's an attempt to build tension by saying if the balloon rises too high, it will explode.  But in one of the shots of the two eating dinner, they're up higher than they would be during the Alps sequence.) 

We're going to France this summer.  I know that my kids will probably roll their eyes when I recommend watching a movie from 1960.  But this is also a showcase of France.  It's also France in a very specific time in history.  We can kind of take movies like this for granted.  After all, I know that my brother-in-law uses a drone on every vacation to get that arial view.  But Lamorisse is doing this almost in a completely analogue way.  If I had to criticize the movie in an attempt to now fawn all over it so much, maybe he does that arial shot a bit too aggressively.  But it also accurately gives us that subjective lens to view the film from.  Because the two characters are in the balloon the entire time, we connect with these characters more.

And as grandiose as I'm being about the artistry of this movie, I have to give so many points for this movie being genuinely funny.  I know nothing about Maurice Baquet, but that man can do physical comedy.  It's rare to see those kind of gags outside of the Harold Lloyd / Buster Keaton era.  He does some absolutely amazing dangerous jokes that both work narratively within the movie and as jokes in themselves.  Sure, like M. Hulot, there are moments you question why he does things the way that he does things. But if this is a children's movie, which I absolutely believe that it is, no one is really questioning his methodology.  It's the joke that he's giving us and it works every time.  It's honestly one of the more impressive spectacle films that I've seen and those physical stunts are part of it.

This is a joyful movie.  I love this.  I'm probably going to be the only person who loves it, but it is so nice and so gorgeous.  Also, an hour-and-twenty-three minutes?  *chef's kiss*

It's a PG-13 movie that I genuinely thought was R-rated.  There's an f-bomb in the movie with a lot of other language.  But the bigger thing that might be upsetting is just the sheer brutal death that happens in the movie.  We're not talking about horror movie death, but it isn't old Godzilla movie death either.  This is a movie about war using guerilla tactics.  It often isn't pretty.  Couple the fact that war is directly tied to fundamentalist religion, and you have some heavy content.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Denis Villeneuve

Oh my goodness, I have too many prefaces to make before I actually start writing.  First of all, I'm going to be slowing down on the writing.  Really, that means I'm probably going to be writing less per blog entry coupled with fewer entries.  It's summer and I just got my notes back on my novel.  That means that I need to invest more time in that I just don't have the hours in the day to write two things at full blast. Since the novel takes priority, I hope you are cool with shorter entries less frequently.  Secondly, I watched Dune: Part Two under horrible circumstances.  Everyone's been preaching this movie.  But when this movie came out in theaters, we had just had a newborn.  Since I had already read the book, I knew that there was no rush to see this in theaters.  I have a nice setup at home.  I didn't need to worry about spoilers.  But I got my 4K and my life got insane.  We kept starting these late projects and we would watch only fifteen minutes at a time of this movie that I was insanely excited to see.  Do I acknowledge that it's genius?  Yes.  Do I need to watch it sometime in one sitting?  More than anything I've ever done.

The book of Dune never really grabbed me.  I probably wrote about this in my first Dune blog.  It's a book of space politics that I find incredibly slow and belabored.  I know that Dune was always one of those movies that seemed impossible to film because it grounds the concept of heroism and archetypal tropes into something very complex and nuanced.  Again, I used to watch the 1984 Dune all of the time, thinking that it was the adventure story that a lot of people expected from the first movie. Our brains are wired to think that Paul Atreides is the hero. Heck, he's got all of the attributes of the White Savior.  But Dune is more genius than I really even gave it credit for.  While I always kind of understood that Dune was more than a story of a revolution on a desert planet, my brain always found that narrative comfortable.  Yeah, intellectually I got that Dune touched on some pretty dicey subjects matter when it comes to religious fundamentalism and violence.  But I had never read the second book, which kind of spells it out for me.

That's why I find the fact that Dune: Part Two is all about embracing the messiness of religion and war. And points to both Frank Herbert and Denis Villeneuve for understanding that they aren't going to give me an easy answer.  At the end of Dune: Part One, Paul is in this place where there's nothing that can help him.  He is first-and-foremost a victim of cruel governments who have robbed him of his family.  He is the pawn of a religious order who have been manipulating him for tens of thousands of years before he is born. If he tries to do the morally best thing, he's abandoning a people to the ravages of a parasitical order and he would probably die himself.  But the takeaway from Dune: Part Two is that there are far worse things than death and that's the selling of one's soul.  

It's really weird.  Paul basically, partially through his own fault, manipulates a religion to wipe out all of his oppressors.  From the Fremens' perspective, they're happy.  For the first time in eons, these people finally have control of their own land.  They are self-governing.  And goodness me, if only the other houses were smart enough to leave that well enough alone, there might be a very clear delinition between good and evil.  But like the real world, there's something about men that absolutely need to vanquish their enemies before them. It's really messed up but that's what makes good storytelling, right?  I adore that the Fremens, at least in these stories, are completely sympathetic.  The weird part is that, from moment one, entire factions and regions of the Fremen are called "fundamentalists."  Still, all of us are hooting-and-hollering for these fundamentalists.  It tickles my brain.

Smartest thing about this movie?  Putting Chani as such a predominant character.  One of the things that I never remembered about the book was the other perspective.  As Paul rises to power and starts pushing this notion that he is the Lisan al Gaib, it's through Chani's eyes that we see the horror of what Paul is becoming.  Golly, Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya have good chemistry, even if they are only friends.  But we see someone who from moment one stresses that she has no religious notions behind Paul.  If anything, she and Paul bond over the fact that Paul is an ordinary man. The only thing that makes him special is that he's an outsider.  But as time progresses and the power of religious fervor changes the course of the politics of this planet, Paul goes through something that I have to question.  Part of me thinks that Paul never really believes in the entire prophecy.  He's this guy who doesn't want to push that button and manipulate people.  He sees the evil behind taking advantage of these people desperate for a savior.  But there's another part of me that thinks that Paul starts to believe his own press.  It's after that whole Water of Life sequence.  He goes from being this underground freedom fighter to being something very upsetting.  And every time that I think that Paul might have some kind of powers that would make him a deity, there's always kind of a throwaway line from a member of the Bene Gesseret explaining that Paul was basically either trained to do godly things or genetically predisposed to have traits that others would find godlike.  I mean, you have a movie that questions the validity of violent religious fundamentalism; it's not shocking that it even questions the very notion of a deity.

The movie is so good.  I didn't think that I would like Austin Butler as this very creepy Harkonnen villain, but he works so darned well.  Part of that comes from the look of the character, but he makes a lovely mirror to the hero.  The end conflict betwen the na-Baron and Paul is something to behold.  These are both people who have crossed lines.  We still bond with Paul.  He's been our protagonist for a lot of hours at this point and there's something to be said for the fact that he doesn't look like the devil. But then there's the absolute, over-the-top evil of Feyd-Ruatha as he just comes full force at something that is considered beneath him.  It's good stuff.

One day I'll sit down and watch the movie again.  It's pretty darned good. I wish I had time in my life to actually do both movies in one sitting, but that's probably never going to happen.  Either way, Denis Villeneuve made a movie that was considered unfilmable and pulled it off.  Heck, to be a little blapshemous, I'd go as far as to say that he did even better than the book.  Again, not the biggest book fan, but Villeneuve made a story that I found overwhelming to the point of getting boring and made it engaging for a really long single narrative.  That man can cook,

All unrated.
"The Red Balloon" -Kids are mean.  They destroy a balloon, which doesn't sound that bad, but the balloon has living traits to it.
"White Mane" -Horses are mean to each other.  There's biting and kicking and you know the horses really did that.
"Bim, the Little Donkey" -There's some animal cruelty with this one.  A kid almost chops the ears off a donkey.  
Stowaway in the Sky -Honestly, nothing.  There are fleeting moments where there's a chance that someone might die in a balloon, but those moments are quickly alleviated.
Circus Angel -Perhaps the most controversial of the group, the film centers around a thief who seems to take advantage of the people around him, occasionally for romantic gain.  While tonally a children's movie, the movie deals with suicide and morally dubious behavior. 

DIRECTOR: Albert Lamorisse

It's another collection of short films!  As per precedent, I'm only writing a little bit about each movie.  But it kind of makes me wonder.  What if I wrote a whole bunch about "The Red Balloon" itself?  I mean, there's stuff there to decompress.  I could probably find some really interesting stuff about this movie.  I'm sure that a master's thesis or two have been written about this movie.

"The Red Balloon" (1956)

Something awoke in me when I put the disc into the Playstation.  (Oh, that's right.  I watch Blu-rays on a PS4.  Like some kind of hobo-king.  I judge myself so you can't judge me.) I think that I used to watch this movie on repeat when I was a little kid.  Honestly, I think I may have formed my entire identity based on this film.  Golly, I related to this kid.  Maybe that makes me feel like I have victim status for the entirety of my life, but I just vibe with this movie so hard and it may have formed my entire moral schema.  

"The Red Balloon", for those not in the know, is the cottage core of short films until the last few minutes.  Lamorisse is clearly a guy who has a relationship with animals because the balloon is clearly a pet.  (Remember how I said that his movie defined me to a level that would be considered formative?  Yeah, I also am not a pet person.  My arguement falls apart quickly.) If pets are meant to make children understand mortality (you knew that, right?), "The Red Balloon" is meant to help children understand that pets die and that the world is a terrible place.  Honestly, one of the messages of this movie is "This is why we can't have nice things."  

This is one of those movies that covers a lot of ground absolutely simply.  There are nice adults and then there are mean adults.  Often, the mean adults are oblivious, not hating the child so much as afraid of change.  But most of the world is full of terrible people.  While Pascal was blessed with a balloon and shouldn't necessarily have ownership over it (THAT'S WHY THE BALLOON IS RED!) (Just kidding.) the other kids are so itching to do awful things to this balloon.  I mean, we get sad when bad things happen to pets.  But that last scene of the balloon slowly dying only to get stomped on my a kid, that's a lot.  Sure, we have the follow-up by all of the balloons chearing Pascal up, but the real hit comes in that moment.  Honestly, most of my moral stance comes from this.  Every time something nice and joyful happens, the majority of people decide to destroy it for fun.  (Just to date this blog even more, look at the Portal in Dublin.)  

​"White Mane" (1953)

This guy and pets, right?  Trust me, he does the same thing with "Bim, the Little Donkey".  Normally, I tend to watch a director's work in chronological order.  But when Criterion drops a box set, I watch it in the order they give me.  Maybe that's because I'm deferrent to people who I assume are smarter than me.  In this set, "The Red Balloon" came first.  I get it.  It's the hit.  I'm also going to say that it's the allegory that Lamorisse wanted to get across without the browbeating that some of the other movies really get to.  I know, when you anthropomorphize inanimate objects, it sells the message a bit better.  "White Mane" is not bad.  It's very pretty and almost pastoral.  

It's just that we get the message of cruelty.  I think that the villains of "White Mane" are both simultaneously more annoying and more villainous because they don't follow their own moral code.  They're jerks from the beginning, but a lot of it could be chalked up to what it means to be a rancher.  There's a wild horse; they fail to tame it.  Again, not a big animal guy, so I tend to be more forgiving of that stuff.  But when they tell the kid that he can keep the horse if he tames it then welch on that deal?  That seems beyond the pale.  I mean, breaking off that agreement gets the kid eventually killed.  It's pretty crummy.  But again, we hit a lot of the same beats as "Red Balloon".  The male child protagonist bonds with a rebellious animal and people want to take it from him, ultimately leading to its destruction.  "Bim, the Little Donkey", mostly the same thing.  Is this the only kind of movie that Lamorisse made?

​"Bim, the Little Donkey" (1951)


You know, I may have seen all of these before.  Maybe my dad was a Lamorisse fan or maybe our VHS had all of these short films on them.  Something in the back of my brain says that I know these stories beyond just a glance at them.  Again, "Bim, the Little Donkey" hits a lot of the same beats that both "The Red Balloon" and "White Mane" do.  If every one of these stories were stories that were made for children, "Bim" is the one that's most true of purpose.  What I mean by that is that it almost feels like the story was written by children.  Not necessarily Axe Cop style, but it is very children-at-play with its narrative.  There's a bad kid, but he turns good.  There are evil guards wielding scimitars. There's action and there are theives and people shaking fists at one another.  There's a chase and the kids are the ones saving the day.  

Also, the performances are childlike.  I can't help but be inspired by early silent films while watching this movie.  Like Lamorisse's other films, most of the film is silent. So much of the movie resorts to pantomime to really sell these moments.  True confession: Intellectually, I like silent movies.  Emotionally, like most people, I find them to be tedious. (I'm probably more gracious than most people, but I also don't begrudge people who hem and haw over silent film).  But there is something genuinely charming about a lot of the way silent film is shot.  While "Bim" is not a silent film, much of the technique mirrors it and it kind of steals the best parts of silent film.  As such, "Bim" plays this paradoxical thing with me.  It's partially a kind of dumber movie than the other two, but I also really enjoy it for what it is.

Stowaway in the Sky (1960)

Okay, Criterion. That's not fair.  I simply assumed this was a box set of short films.  You can't stick two feature length films as "...and Other Tales".  I don't know if I would have formatted this blog this way.  But you know what?  I'm going to milk all of this for content because it's my blog and who is going to stop me?  (I swear, if Square gets oddly specific about a rule I don't know about, I would be disappointed.)  No, I'm going to post this blog entry both as part of the "The Red Balloon and Other Tales" page and as its own blog.  I feel like I can do that.  I'll also do the same thing with Circus Angel, thus making me feel like I'm really crushing all of this material.

I wasn't ready for how much I loved this movie.  I have this one student, who may be reading this but is probably not, who is all about Hayao Miyazaki.  I love Miyazaki, but this student love-loves Miyazaki.  He's not necessarily one who would give something like Stowaway in the Sky a chance, but I saw him today and overtly recommended it.  Stowaway in the Sky is Miyazaki before Miyazaki.  Maybe that's what I need to take away from all of this Albert Lamorisse stuff.  I simply assumed that Stowaway in the Sky  was going to be marketing on the success of "The Red Balloon."  Maybe, at one point in the development, that could have been true.  After all, the opening titles say "The Voyage of the Red Balloon" in them.  But while "The Red Balloon" may have served as an inspiration or a starting point for this movie, that's really where it ends.

I have the feeling that Lamorisse is not a fan of actual conflict in his stories.  Sure, we could look at "Bim, the Little Donkey" or "White Mane" as stories that are all about conflict.  But the conflict in those stories are so simple and lack any complexity that it becomes more about the tone of the films in themselves.  Stowaway in the Sky even peels it back a little more.  Golly, it sounds like I'm ragging on the movie (despite the fact that this might be one of the best movies I've seen this year), but every time a conflict is introduced in the story, it's resolved in an almost hilariously short amount of time.  The boy doesn't get to go on the balloon?  He goes on the balloon?  They can't land the balloon?  Nope, they can land the balloon.  The girl is stuck in the balloon?  They get her down before the owner of the balloon even wakes up from his nap.  The balloon is supposed to blow up, not once but twice?  No one injured or in range of the explosion.  To top all of that off, they even have a spare balloon.  It's just...peaceful.

Miyazaki goes to certain wells for his material.  Lamorisse and Miyazaki probably share the same wells.  I was going to say that this is the first of his movies that I've seen where he doesn't share a deep love for animals.  But that's not even true.  The most gripping part of the story is when the two in the balloon come upon a stag being hunted.  It's that very European kind of hunting where there are hounds and horses and a bugle.  But Lamorisse comes down hard on the side of the animal.  There's something absolutely gorgeous about this sequence that harkens back to "Red Balloon" and "White Mane."  While the hunters in this film are almost devoid of any attempts at characterization, unlike the counterparts that I just cited, their role in the film is the same.  Intellectually, we can all instantly understand that there is a value to hunting.  But spiritually and emotionally, there's something fundamentally cruel about the entire concept of hunting, especially something that is so meant to instill fear in prey. Back to Miyazaki, it isn't too much of an emotional leap to go from taking care of animals to Miyazaki's affinity for environmentalism.  He hasn't shied away from telling stories abou taking care of creatures.  I know that both Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke have imagery where humans take care of injured animals.  

But the real connective tissue between these two directors is a love for flight.  Honestly, much of my love for this movie is wrapping my head around how these shots worked in this movie. I had to Google it just now.  I just needed to know.  (Short version?  It's actually a helicopter with the facade of a balloon basket for a lot of the shots.  But back to the love of flight that these two directors share.  Lamorisse bets everything on the notion that the beauty of the sky will sell the film in itself.  I have the vibe, based on the minimal Wikipedia page on this movie, that Stowaway might not have been the smash hit that a lot of people probably wanted it to be.  I also am terrified that I'm going to go on Letterboxd later and be the only one giving this movie five-stars.  Anyway, it's all about the visuals.  I've seen movies with grand visuals.  I write about them a lot.  But there's something about the visual language of Stowaway that actually makes the characterization work.  While "Bim, the Little Donkey" emphasized pantomime to convey emotions, Stowaway goes the other direction.  I love the kid and his grandfather, who just stare in awe at the world around them.  There's never moments of fear when the kid (even in real life!) is aware of how high they are. (Note: I do love that there's an attempt to build tension by saying if the balloon rises too high, it will explode.  But in one of the shots of the two eating dinner, they're up higher than they would be during the Alps sequence.) 

We're going to France this summer.  I know that my kids will probably roll their eyes when I recommend watching a movie from 1960.  But this is also a showcase of France.  It's also France in a very specific time in history.  We can kind of take movies like this for granted.  After all, I know that my brother-in-law uses a drone on every vacation to get that arial view.  But Lamorisse is doing this almost in a completely analogue way.  If I had to criticize the movie in an attempt to now fawn all over it so much, maybe he does that arial shot a bit too aggressively.  But it also accurately gives us that subjective lens to view the film from.  Because the two characters are in the balloon the entire time, we connect with these characters more.

And as grandiose as I'm being about the artistry of this movie, I have to give so many points for this movie being genuinely funny.  I know nothing about Maurice Baquet, but that man can do physical comedy.  It's rare to see those kind of gags outside of the Harold Lloyd / Buster Keaton era.  He does some absolutely amazing dangerous jokes that both work narratively within the movie and as jokes in themselves.  Sure, like M. Hulot, there are moments you question why he does things the way that he does things. But if this is a children's movie, which I absolutely believe that it is, no one is really questioning his methodology.  It's the joke that he's giving us and it works every time.  It's honestly one of the more impressive spectacle films that I've seen and those physical stunts are part of it.

This is a joyful movie.  I love this.  I'm probably going to be the only person who loves it, but it is so nice and so gorgeous.  Also, an hour-and-twenty-three minutes?  *chef's kiss*

Circus Angel (1965)

Two!  Two full length movies in what I thought was a collection of shorts.  I don't know how much I'm going to write about this, but it will be enough for this to have its own entry.  I would like to apologize for that abomination of a photo that I just posted.  It's difficult to find a picture from this movie that is high enough resolution.

Circus Angel somehow is great and terrible at the same time.  It doesn't really shock me that this might be one of the lesser known Albert Lamorisse movies simply because it is a bit of a mess.  The funny thing is that this might be the most traditional narrative out of all of Lamorisse's movies.  He's going for making an outright comedy here and, for the most part, succeeds.  It is actually more funny than it is a good movie.  I think my frustration really comes from the fact that the protagonist doesn't necessarily follow the tropes that we are expecting with a movie like this.  I know.  I should be all excited for a movie to defy convention, but in this case...it almost feels like a sin to sell this movie.

Fifi (and I'm just discovering that this is the character's name) is a jerk from moment one.  He's one of those lovable thieves. He steals watches and lives one of those lifestyles that could only be described as trampish.  Considering that Lamorisse is a big fan of "the easiest way is the best way", Fifi finds himself in the middle of a lion tamer's act.  Now, this is where Lamorisse steps into the world of convention.  While Fifi is objectively wrong, Billy Madison style, he's up against an unlikable bully vying for the attention of a beautiful girl.  We automatically hate the lion tamer, although from his perspective is probably doing the morally correct thing throughout this film.  

When he is given the gift (and curse!) of flight, I simply assumed that he was going to start becoming a better person.  The movie ends that way because we needed to have some kind of happy ending.  But it really does become a light switch that doesn't make a lot of sense.  I thought that the love of a woman would be the driving force to turn Fifi (pun intended) to the world of angels.  He goes from being the Birdman into something more angelic.  And while Lamorisse is somewhat teasing the concept of faith in this movie, it really does take a long time for Fifi to pick up that these people are genuinely in need of an angel.  

Maybe it's because he goes from being a lovable bad guy to a completely selfish monster.  When he falls in love, it seems like he has turned over a new leaf.  He highlights the toxic masculinity of the lion tamer / strongman and it seems like he has finally found a reason to think beyond his own selfishness.  He does work really hard to make his girl love him.  Yes, he uses immoral means to impress her by stealing a clock while the strongman, presumably, does the same act in a traditionally moral stance.  Lamorisse plays it really weird with the sequence of events that follows.  He saves a man from hanging himself (and it's a dark joke which I have to excuse to simply being the product of yesteryear).  It seems like Fifi has no reason to help this man beyond the fact that he has empathy for a man who is willing to end it all for the love of a woman.  Maybe there's a sense of brotherhood of losers with this man.  But it seems like Fifi is going to help his suicidal acquantance only to try to seduce his fiancee?  He then decides to rob the family blind all for the sheer chaos of it.

This is where Lamorisse loses me.  What these scenes are to the movie is comedy.  It's just joke telling as a flying man dressed as an angel annoys bullies, runs away from law enforcement, and does naughty things.  But it's also fundamentally against what the message of the movie was up to this point.  When Fifi goes to the circus, as much as he finds it to be a burden, he does start developing a sense of purpose.  His relationship with the acrobat seems like this whole narrative about the redemptive love of another.  But the second he gets the chance, not only does he return to a life of crime, but he escalates it.  This all climaxes when he intentionally eats of all of a starving man's food.  There's nothing all that likable about Fifi by the end of the film.  While Fifi is rescued by a family who have faith that he is an angel, this hardly seems like the transformative moment that the movie wants it to be.  If anything, it just seems like a beat.  I can almost read the chart saying, "Start closing up the movie."

Thank God the movie just takes a hard turn and makes Fifi a good man at the end.  It doesn't really make sense.  But for all of the moral shannanigans that the film throws in, all of the plot threads seem to tie together to offer solace for the crimes that this man has committed throughout the film.  It's a bit odd that the strongman is taken to prison, considering that he just sucks but is not evil. 

It's a cute movie that succeeds despite the crimes of the film.  It's not a great film.  Again, it's for the reasons that I stated above.  He's just that much of a jerk that it is hard to root for such a guy throughout the movie.  But did I enjoy it?  Yeah.  It's a funny movie that very much has that Lamorisse charm throughout the movie.  It's nice to see a movie that has a straight up story coming out of Lamorisse as well.  But I'm going to take this more of a loss than a win.

PG-13 for people who are afraid of spider, people, or spider-people.  Fundamentally, Spider-Man should be scary.  But this takes the premise, "What if he was just a little creepy?"  There's some murder and attempted murder in this movie.  There's some mild superhero language.  There's sad death.  Also, if you are overly upset by jump scares, there's a lot of mild smash cuts in the movie.

DIRECTOR:  S.J.  Clarkson

Y'all be some hyperbolic, dramatic turds.  No, Madame Web is not a great movie.  I'll agree with you.  But to make it out to be this blasphemy, that's going a bit far.  Also, some weird diagnoses about why this movie is no good.  I think I have a lot to say about this, but maybe I'll be disappointed and Peter (Parker) out after a few glib paragraphs.  I don't know.  All I know is that there's a movie in here and I think I know what makes this movie the cause of derision.

First of all, you know what this movie really is?  People wanted a Spider-Man movie.  It's not a Spider-Man movie.  If anything, the Spider-Man stuff hurts it.  There's a bit of kismet that this movie is set in 2003 because this movie is so 2003 that I am reminded what cinema in 2003 consisted of.  2003 cinema is an era of high premise sci-fantasy that is ultimately forgettable.   We're talking about movies like Next, Jumper, Knowing, Limitless.  That kind of stuff.  Madame Web is one of those movies.  Now, those movies aren't good.  I find it weird when someone makes a Limitless reference today. There's a shot in Madame Web where an ambulance flies by a Blockbuster Video right after the film is established in 2003.  Yeah, this is a movie that you would see a million copies of in a Blockbuster.  It honestly shares more DNA with those movies.  It takes a weird premise.  Someone discovers that they have some kind of unique ability and they don't quite become a hero.  Instead, they find out that there is some kind of weird society or parallel character that also has to deal with the same issues. The only problem?  That person is using it for selfish reasons and it puts the protagonist(s) in danger.  That's this movie.  That's a fine movie.  It's not a good movie.

Now, people have been throwing stones at S.J. Clarkson, the director of this film.  There's absolutely zero things wrong with the actual direction of the film.  Clarkson had a middling script that was a big push from a studio.  From what I hear, there were regular script changes and that had to be frustrating.  I don't love that a studio would do that, but it is Sony, the dumbest film studio on the planet with the exception of their animation division, which is crushing it right now.  Everything in the movie is shot competently.  There's some fun special effects.  Things that are supposed to look creepy look a little creepy.  Things that are supposed to be epic and large scale are effectively epic and large scale. Clarkson made almost zero mistakes.  Unless you consider "acting" to be the responsibility of the director.  If so...

...DON'T BLAME SYDNEY SWEENEY!  You thought that's where I was going to go?  Listen,  I haven't seen a ton of Sydney Sweeney stuff.  This actually might be my first thing with her.  I just know that people are either in love with her because she's attractive or that she's a terrible actress and doesn't deserve to be in movies.  Um, has everyone just become a bully?  While Madame Web might not be the Oscar reel that Sweeney might want it to be, she basically does the job.  Sure, wardrobe tried stressing that this was an attractive young woman based on the outfits given to her.  But she does what she can with a limited script.  I just read something from Chris Helmsworth that I really liked.  It harkened back to his days as a soap opera actor.  I'm paraphraphing here, but it went something along the lines of "I wasn't there to give great performances to the good lines.  I was there to make the bad lines sound good."  Sweeney pulls that off.  There are a lot of cornball lines, but she created a character that was allowed to say goofy things and it sounds believable enough that I understood the character.  Yeah, I think people love blaming things on Sydney Sweeney.

Nope, the real crime in this movie (shy of dealing with a middle-of-the-road script) is Dakota Johnson.  Normally, I don't come after people so hard.  I'm usually incredibly apologetic.  Johnson is rough in this movie.  She's the anchor for a giant setpiece that could have been okay had the performance been better.  Now, I have two theories and I'm leaning heavier into the second one.  The first theory is that Dakota Johnson is not a good actress.  I don't know.  While I heard that Fifty Shades of Grey was rough, Johnson has kind of gotten a certain amount of street cred between roles.  But I haven't really seen her.  Again, I watch a lot of movies, but apparently Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney don't tend to fall under the banner of "Literally Anything".  In my mind, there's a kernel of truth to this.  But I'm leaning harder into the second theory.  Second theory: Dakota Johnson hated working on this and hate acted through every scene she was in.  Immediately after Madame Web started getting bad press, she was the first to voice how bad the movie was.  She distanced herself from that movie hard.  Now, if she was great and then bad mouthed the movie, I might have a little sympathy.  But she did the same thing with Fifty Shades of Grey.  She couldn't wait to tell everyone how much she hated working on that.  

Now, could it be that there was nothing to work with in the movie?  Again, I'm going to preach that this is an incredibly forgettable movie under the best of days, but it isn't outright awful.  I've seen way worse movies. But everyone else seems to be trying really hard to make this movie good.  The supporting cast is honestly pretty fine.  Case in point?  Adam Scott's Ben Parker is charming as heck.  Adam Scott is amazing as a charming dude.  He shares a lot of that with Paul Rudd.  You know that they can do charming very well when needed.  While Ben Parker actually shouldn't be in this movie (I get it, the studio.  You want to remind everyone that Spider-Man is connected to this without actually using Spider-Man.), he does a solid job with the part he has.  And Adam Scott is a pull for this movie.  If anyone should be dragging their feet with a bad script, Adam Scott probably has the career that's more at risk from this movie than anyone else.  Yet, still there. Still putting in the work.  

Yet, Dakota Johnson just looks annoyed to be in anything.  If anything, the script adapted to her performance of being annoyed at everything.  There are so many crappy moments of Cassie just being a turd to everything, even down to a scene where she can't accept a thank you card from a child.  She looks downright mad to be in that scene. I almost can't believe that it would be a character choice.  Also, it doesn't look like Cassie Webb is annoyed.  It looks like Dakota Johnson is annoyed.  So many lines are given to other people in those scenes.  Honestly, Ben Parker is the only one talking in that scene.  Dakota Johnson's direction is just to stand there.  It almost feels like she's sabotaging the entire film.  Like, it's bad.  

But, that being said, I still have to acknowledge that the script is all over the place.  Here's where I'm going to complain because this is how I would have reacted that the audience not made the biggest vocal stink of the movie.  There are so many lather-rinse-repeat moments in the movie and they somehow escalate.  Cassie, for some reason, loves abandoning these three girls.  It's weird that they don't just hang out with her. Cassie will have a flash of the girls in trouble, often murdered in her visions, and then she'll run to their rescue.  Then she'll abandon them again.  At one point, she goes to Peru. Man, that was a beat that absolutely didn't need to happen.  Cassie's big master plans don't make a ton of sense.  And I also get that Cassie looks cool when she lands in water and tall of the ripples in the water form a web around her.  But that image is done too many times in this movie. 

Okay.  This next complaint is just a bummer for me and only for me.  I really like Ezekiel Sims.  It was at a weird time for Spider-Man comics, but I also really liked them mainly because we didn't harp on them for too long.  I think that this was during the J.Michael Straczynski period of The Amazing Spider-Man.  Ezekiel Sims posited that Peter Parker was always supposed to be Spider-Man.  If anything, the radioactivity was a hampering to the true connection that Peter was supposed to have with his spider side.  It's a bit silly, but Ezekiel himself was kind of cool.  He was a guy who had spider powers and had no desire whatsoever to become a hero.  As far as I remember, his interactions with Peter brought out something heroic and self-sacrificing, ultimately leading to his death if I remember properly?  It's been a minute.  All I know is that this ultimately led into the Morlun storyline and Morlun does the same thing that Doomsday does for me wtih Superman.  I like knowing that there's a villain out there that really terrifies the hero.

Instead, Ezekiel comes across as a very Sony bad guy.  It's a parallel of the villains that we see in both Venom and Morbius.  They love rich guys who come into power and want more power.  Sure, at least Ezekiel has a quasi-sympathetic reason for becoming a bad guy.  His version of spider-sense only lets him see his death.  He's going to kill his killers before he gets killed. If Ezekiel wasn't a bad person up to this point --gosh darn it-- he could have been the hero of his own story.  But no, he killed Cassie's mom and he keeps making morally bankrupt choices, making it cool to hate him.  But, give the movie some points.  I do kind of like the scary evil Spider-Man that this movie created.  While not nearly as impressive as Brightburn with Superman, there are some notes that absolutely work for the character.  But the problems even with this portrayal is that Ezekiel's powers are mostly undefined.  He seems very Spider-Manny throughout the movie, but he can also Kylo Ren himself to Cassie for some reason?  Also, if he has spider-sense, it's all over the place because he gets hit with a lot of cars in this movie from behind.

Honestly, you pull the superhero tropes out, and a lot of the movie is okay.  It's a salvagable movie.  But I also think that people really want to hate this movie.  There have been some abysmal movies out there that might be worthy of such hatred.  Like, that last Fantastic 4 movie was pretty rough.  We just love hating things that aren't perfect today.  I think it's fair to complain about this movie.  But to say that it is one of the worst movies ever?  That's a bit much.  It's, at best, incredibly forgettable.  Stop enjoying your dislike of things so much.

G.  It's rated G.  Literally, the photo I have is a guy choking an alien to death to steal his key.  So many people die.  Sure, you don't really see that death on screen because they're smooshed under buildings left and right. Also, women continue to be treated poorly in this series.  Oh, someone is vaporized on screen.  Again, G.

DIRECTOR:  Ishiro Honda

I'm in a foul mood today.  Now, writing should do one of two things.  It may reset me and give me a sense of productivity, which is what healthy people probably get out of writing.  Or, I'll spit out some vitriol here and treat this movie poorly.  Since I'm being so critical of myself (which other people may call "objectivity"), I'm going to take the time to say that this movie isn't a good movie, but it is leaps and bounds better than the last entry, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, which is weird considering it is a direct sequel to that movie.  

Invasion of the Astro-Monster is almost exactly what it sounds like, with a bit of a twist.  The real victory comes from the tone that it evokes.  While a Godzilla movie through and through, Invasion of the Astro-Monster feels like the height of B-movie Hollywood sci-fi.  It has flying saucers on strings and weird aliens in matching outfits that are clearly just...dudes.  They're just dudes in funny hats and visors.  Again, we're in a point in the franchise where even the concept of a message or some greater theme is lost on both the filmmakers and the audience.  If anything, this is a movie that harkens back to the isolationist era of Japan, despite the fact that one of the protagonists of the movie is an American dude who speaks very confident Japanese.  (It's a dub, right?) The twist of the movie is that there is no new Astro-Monster.  If anything, the real bad guys are the aliens, not the kaiju who tear up Japan like it was nothing.   I oddly kind of like that.  A turn in the franchise isn't the worst idea.  It's really weird that the decision to keep these movies fresh was to make the bad guys just human-sized humanoid aliens.  In a franchise where the bad guy is someone who trampled villages, the bad guys are dudes with laser beams and a convenient weakness to loud noises.

I really want to talk about my favorite moral dilemma in this movie.  It's such a hilarious beat.  Now, I'm going to joke about this with the knowledge that all of this is part of the Xiliens' absurd plan.  Me making fun of it is almost inappropriate because the absurdity is right there on the surface.  It's just...the reactions that some people get.  The movie starts with these mysterious Xiliens from the Planet X seemingly benevolent.  They have a Ghidorah problem and they want Godzilla and Rodan to deal with their Ghidorah problem.  It makes sense.  After all, Godzilla and Rodan teamed up to beat Ghidorah in that last movie.  They did it once, they can do it again! 

Okay, all of that is great.  I love that this is a favor from the Xiliens perspective.  "Aw man, we don't want to deprive the humans of their greatest natural resources, Godzilla and Rodan."  As humans, we're filthy with kaiju.  They are begging for these destructive forces that have killed scores of people.  These are such valuable resources that they trade the cure for cancer for these monsters.  Now, we're all thinking the same thing.  "Absolutely."  Take those monsters.  Heck, we'll throw in a Mothra if it sweetens the deal.  Yet, these astronauts feel bad for Godzilla and Mothra.  Is there some kind of weird bittersweet relationship between Godzilla and people?  I know that, starting in the second or third movie in the series, that Godzilla has solved a couple of problems when it comes to kaiju issues.  But Godzilla himself hasn't exactly been pro-people yet.   He's been, at best, an accidental help.  Okay, that's fine.

Can we talk about the Council of Housewives who have a seat at the U.N.?  I don't think I've ever seen a more coded symbolism for "The Woman Vote" as a separation from what is considered the human vote.  Now, part of me is really curious what this is saying about 1965 Japan.  What I mean, is Japan being incredibly progressive with this inclusion?  After all, the Council of Housewives' stance is incredibly even keeled.  Sure, they're wrong about the Xilians' intentions, as is everyone else but the astronauts.  But it kind of feels like this was both a big step forward for representation of women in these stories and a huge step back.  I'm still processing a lot of this, so be aware that I may step on some landmines.  (I love all this effort for a two second sequence in a Godzilla sequel.)  Like, it's not that it was just a woman playing that part in the U.N.  Nope.  It's specifically that it was a union of housewives.  No other profession represented.  Housewives were almost their own thing.  I am not minimizing the stresses of being a housewife. Lord knows I'm not itching to be a house husband anytime soon.  It's just that it was clearly, "Look at what the ladies have to say about aliens" that made my eyes go a little wide.

But let me tell you why Invasion of the Astro-Monster is better than Ghidorah. It didn't exactly follow my rules.  Golly, this movie gets pretty bananas at times.  (Although, it didn't NOT follow my rules either.)  The human story in this one is very sci-fi.  It's two astronauts going to Planet X.  That is as B-movie sci-fi as it gets.  There is a grounded story.  Of course, the astronaut has a sister (which is very Ghidorah) and she loves this guy who can't support her.  I'm playing fast and loose with some of the cultural stereotypes, but apparently it is okay for a brother to forbid a relationship between grown consenting adults based on a suitor's profession, especially when it comes to bringing pride or shame to the family.  I'd like to point out, we're all team Tetsuo, right?  This forward thinking, nerdier and less successful Tony Stark actually has a point with that alarm.  He's just not a marketing guy.  He ends up saving the world with that thing, by the way.   I just wish that Tetsuo and Haruno Fuji were bigger characters because most of the story invovles Astronauts Fuji and Glenn.  There's all kind of goofball stuff there.

But it mostly works because it does seem to be a focused story.  Ghidorah really played up the small world elements, where a bunch of disperate storylines, each more bombastic than the last, all converged into a tenuous and tedious storyline.  While Astro-Monster mostly keeps with the one plot, the biggest complaint from me is the complete lack of conclusion to this movie.  I'm not talking about an intentional lack of conclusion to a movie, like Empire Strikes Back. I'm talking about the fact that the last three minutes of the movie is Godzilla, Rodan, and Ghidorah all coming out of their stupors and fighting.  It's not that I wanted more fighting.  But to say that the movie's over because they're all awake and this fight will be over in a second is darned silly because all of the other movies started the plot of their respective movies where this one ended its film.  It seems that Ghidorah, Rodan, and Godzilla fighting would still take out a bunch of Japan.  For this film, they consider it a pretty solid victory.  Ghidorah just bounces and the other two monsters look like they died...but totally didn't as established in dialogue.

It's a really dumb movie, guys.  Like, incredibly dumb.  Is it more fun and more watchable than Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster?  Absolutely.  But the only reason that I'm giving it such a pass is because the last movie was so bad.  It's a little charming and it's not horrible, but that's not exactly a resounding win.

TV-14, despite the fact that this is the true story of a brutal murder, coupled with a drug dealing side story in the movie.  It's pretty dark, yet it's funny to think that this, if only taking the rating as a guide, might be something that my little kids would watch.  I'd like to point out, it is not at all appropriate for little kids.  But TV-14 is TV-14, I guess.

DIRECTOR:  Jenny Popplewell

More like, what DIDN'T Jenny do?  Am I right?

Okay, it's actually pretty straightforward.  If you were waiting for some other shoe to drop, don't.  Your first instinct was mostly the right one.  It's more of a matter of how she killed her parents more than if she killed her parents.  I watched this one because one of my students said some good things about this.  I actually feel a little bad because I watched the wrong true crime doc before this thinking that it was the recommendation I got in class.  Odd coincidence that actually kind of scans?  It was made by the same production company, RAW Productions.  Is What Jennifer Did amazing?  No.  Did it fill up an evening.  Yeah, kind of.  Honestly, it's more one of those stories where the viewer needs to invest the self to really find something to talk about.  Lucky for me and this blog, I have some thoughts.  Not a lot.  Probably not completely profound.  But I do have some thoughts. 

There are two things that Popplewell wants to get across.  1) Empathy is one of those things that can mask logic.  2) Cultural pressure for success is a powerful motivator.  It's not that the movie doesn't completely condemn Jennifer.  There's enough of that dramatic footage coupled with haunting music to imply that Jennifer was a real psycho.  Literally, at one point, it was just a photo of Jennifer in high school sticking her tongue out and that true crime chord boomed over the image, making it upsetting.  There's a lot of that.  But honestly, the beat-to-beat unpacking of this story isn't necessarily the story of a mastermind.  It's just the juxtaposition of this little girl who seemed to have it all together compared to the brutal murder of the girl's mother.  The movie starts with the emergency phone call to the police.  Jennifer seems like she is very much the victim of this story.  Her screams seem real and troubling.  But the gosh-darned thing is called What Jennifer Did.  Geez, I mean, there's no scenario where this story wasn't going to go to some weird dark place.

​This is me completely talking with no expertise at all, just intution.  I think we're all aware that there are people who study psychology and what makes people tick.  But the only thing that really stuck to my ribs about Jennifer was the fact that the crying was almost paradoxical.  The movie really sells the notion that there was no regret or emotional attachment to her parents.  There's this moment in the movie where someone came forward and said that Jennifer had tried this in the past.  It wasn't that she backed down.  It was that circumstances didn't allow for her to commit murder.  That's what really kind of gets under my skin a little bit.  Jennifer, throughout interviews, cries a lot.  But knowing that the tears were either part of her mask or were only there in fear of imprisonment, the scary part is that she probably has no real moral code.  Okay, I laughed at the cliche that the lead detective brought up in his interview.  He described Jennifer Pan's crime as "pure evil" or something like that. While incredibly dramatic, there is something there that can be said about that read of the murders. It's not like she slept on it and then changed her mind.  

Part of it comes down to acting.  That phone call sounded real.  Like, I knew she totally did it.  Everyone did.  But do you know what what we tend to do when we knew that she did it?  We listen for the inconsistencies.  (Note: the officer's arguement that she couldn't make a phone call if her hands were bound didn't make sense in a post-Siri universe.) But that phone call seemed totally real.  The tears in the interview room sounded totally real.  That's the upsetting element of the movie.  To invest oneself that deeply into a lie, I wonder what the real tears are.  That's where my brain goes, by the way.  It says that there is no such thing as real tears.  There's screaming and there's hate in my brain.  But I think that Jennifer doesn't cry like that when things get real.  Or, she's just one of those actors who can bring reality to life.

Now, it's not like the movie goes into victim blaming...much.  It might be a bit of a shorthand to show an Asian family and then say that the reason that Jennifer murdered her family in an absolutely horrific way was that they were pressuring her to succeed.  Now, there's both something universal about this, her sense of arrested development coupled with a massive spiral of lies.  It just seems like there's something that is being said that is meant to be specifically cultural.  I don't know.  I kind of wish the motive was something a little less on the nose.  Part of what really bothers me, besides perpetuating a stereotype, is the idea that there's a one-to-one connection between familial disappointment and the urge to murder.  There were times in my life, especially in my early 20s, where I just felt like an absolute piece of trash.  The expectation for success versus the comfort of just being my own person got me into scrapes that I didn't necessarily love.  Mind you, I never dated a drug dealer.  I also probably am not wired for this.  But for all of the times that I just wanted to get away, the intrusive thought wasn't homicide.  It was running away with an occasional suicidal coloring to the whole thing.  It's odd that the police just jumped to "I lied about college" to "I will hire a hitman to kill my whole family."

It's so odd because, like I mentioned, I watched the other Netflix original true crime thing by RAW Productions.  That one seemed far more critical of police, who seemed to be using a lot of the same shorthand to get what they wanted.  Sure, American Nightmare balanced it out by stressing that there was a good cop who understood what it meant to be a woman and a police officer rather than just opening and closing cases.  Maybe watching these things back-to-back was a bit much, but it was odd how the look of something stayed the same, but the message almost seemed to be completely different.  I even noticed that some of the language of the film was the same.  For the interview scenes, both productions used the exterior of the interview room with the little light to stress that things were happening back there.  It's just that the messaging went in two wildly different places.

True crime is weird to write about, especially when you've watched a fair amount of it.  Part of it is a commentary on the storytelling, but there's almost a language to the true crime documentary that almost minimizes anything outside of the norm.  I keep teasing that I mean to rewatch F for Fake by Orson Welles because I love the nontraditional storytelling that happens in it.  But it is hard to analyze movies like What Jennifer Did because real world horror tends to be told the same way over and over.  It's either pro-police, where we are trying to unpack why someone goes off the wall and kills someone.  Or the other end is that it is anti-police, where we look at how shortcuts lead to bad policing.  It's a bit of lather, rinse, repeat, honestly.  It's not that it isn't interesting.  It is just that we have a narrative coloring the events that almost minimize things that could be done with these things.  Until we get something revolutionary, these blogs will be the same.  I can comment on how crazy Jennifer Pan comes across, but I don't have much beyond that.

Also, I could have sworn that "Homie" or "Homeboy" was just bad improv until they got a warrant for the phone. Sure enough, labelled in there as "Homeboy."  I just loved the Canadian police continually say "Homeboy."

Not rated, mainly because it actually probably shouldn't be watched.  It's more chaos than anything inappropriate.  For the sake of being really technical, there are assassination plots throughout the movie.  You know, nothing offensive.  Just an attempt to murder this woman, who gets shot in a completely nonfatal way.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR: Ishiro Honda

Whut?

Like, seriously.  What happened?  Most of us are aware of the idea that there is a steep decline in quality when it comes to the OG Godzilla franchise. The '90s teased these movies mercilessly.  But I seriously thought that I was still in the Golden Age of Godzilla.  Like, this is Ghidorah!  This is one of the big bads.  This is a movie that even me, a novice, knows about.  This is supposed to be one of the good ones and it is an incoherent mess.  Honestly, I'm a little flummoxed how I'm going to make it through the rest of this box set if this is the movie that already breaks me.

The frustration is that a Godzilla movie should be incredibly easy to make.  Honest to Pete, there is a low-bar to what would make an incredible Godzilla movie.  Again, I'm writing this from a place of comfort.  I have a cup of tea.  I have a blog.  I'm sitting with the windows open. The sun is shining.  My stress level is low.  Of course I can give you the formula of what makes an interesting Godzilla movie.  If you actually asked me to make the movie, then I would turn in a turd and blame it on society, Jerry-Seinfeld-style.   You want to know what makes a functional Godzilla movie.  You tell a grounded story about people. To them, their real-world problems seem like the end of the world.  Godzilla and crew show up, wrecking the place.  It doesn't matter if Godzilla is a good guy or a bad guy.  His fighting is going to throw everything into chaos.  The real world, grounded-folk, because of this shared trauma and displacement, realize that their problems, while valid, are ultimately moot given the sense of community that has been built around surviving a kaiju attack.  The end.  

What did Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster give us?  Besides telling us that he's the most rad monster of all time, nothing that was salvagable.  I'm going to try my best and piece this apart.  There's very little that can be analyzed besides some broad strokes at environmentalism, so please be patient at my criminal amount of summary.  There's a million plots all attempting to gain footholds, so I'm not sure what to start with.  The protagonists are a brother-sister team.  He's a cop who has just gotten word that there's going to be an attempt on a princess's life.  I don't know why he's ground zero for this news, but he is.  She is studying the supernatural beat for a news agency.  She's also got a so-so crush in a college professor who is interested in UFOs, even though all of his collegues treat her as subhuman. That's not a plot point.  They just do.  Anyway, cut to the princess.  Sure enough, there's an attempt on her life, but right before she's killed by explosion, a Venusian kidnaps her and takes over her body.  She tries warning civilization of the coming of Ghidorah.  

That should be enough to get the film going, right?  Nope.  The assassins, seeing that she's alive, keep trying to murder the Venusian.  In the meantime, brother and sister fight over whether she's from Venus or a royal dignitary.  Also, the Infant Island Mothra girls somehow interject themselves into the story to warn of the coming of Ghidorah.  That's the movie.  It's weird that when four giant kaiju are all duking it out, that's the most sane thing that happens in the movie.  You realize, there have been so many movies in the Godzilla spinoff series that people are just finding monsters wrecking Japan commonplace?  It's a weird take.  Also, as I've written with previous Godzilla movies, the franchise has already lost its thesis statement about nuclear war.  Honestly, Gojira was a story deeply critical about man's folly when it came to the use of nuclear weapons.  It was a punishment for what we had unleashed on this planet.  

But Ghidorah tries passing the buck to the monsters.  For absolutely no reason, Godzilla and Rodan fight.  It's not like Godzilla is protecting Japan from the Rodan attack.  Also, I didn't know who Rodan was. (I mean, I know from cultural knowledge.  But in-universe, Rodan had yet to show up.  Apparently, he had his own movie somewhere else that I would have to watch to be completely caught up on the franchise.) But at one point, King Ghidorah shows up and Mothra the slug (who gets wrecked in this movie, which is extra funny because we're reminded that Mothra isn't the Mothra we know; this one's a baby) tries to get the other two monsters to put away their vague emnity for the sake of the planet.  Now, the humans comment that the monsters are just as fickle and pig-headed as humanity is.  The bigger takeaway is that the kaiju are 100% sentient characters capable of complex morality and language.  That seems like a huge step backwards for what the series is trying to say.

Again, the theme for Godzilla is that if we keep destroying nature, nature is going to defend itself violently.  But then when we have to start talking to these characters with a mediator kaiju and translator tiny women, I think we missed the point.  That whole scenario and outline for a good Godzilla movie above?  It's supposed to somehow emotionally tie into the destruction happening all around them.  Man alive, there was no characterization in this movie.  There wasn't a human, non-plot element to be found in this movie. The protagonists didn't have to move into some uncomfortable zone where they learned to see the humanity in each other balances against the backdrop of nature.  Nope.  Instead, we had goofy assassins trying silly ways to kill this princess who had been possessed by a lady from Venus.  It's a lot of that.  By the grace of God(zilla), she keeps ducking these hairbrained schemes, like electrocution or sniper attack.  

Do you understand?  I have nothing to write about this movie. The movie is so vapid and devoid of soul that anything I write from here is something I fundamentally don't believe.  Here.  Here's something I don't actually believe about the film, but it gives me something to write about.  I suppose that I could write about how the entire film is an allegory for the complexity of faith.  Again, I don't believe this.  I think this is just a dumb movies about monsters punching each other.  But it's kind of amazing, in this world at least, how quick this Venusian is instantly raised up as some kind of prophet or Christ figure.  Listen, sometimes, this is the best I can do.  Sure, the Christ figure is killed by a bullet from her own people. Sure, there's almost a stigmata element to her wound.  But that's a read that I'm really forcing.  Round hole; square peg.

Anyway, this is...a fundamentally dumb film.  I mean, if you enjoy it, continue doing so.  I just was amazed by how seemingly little effort went into making a coherent plot.