Rated R for a lot of violence --including sexual assault --off-camera sex, language, and suicidal themes.  The odd thing is that much as I'm listing here, very little of it seems exploitative.  For a good chunk of the movie, the protagonist is covered in blood.  But this doesn't see like a gore fest.  There's stuff, but that's all part of the narrative.  Maybe the "why" of it all matters.  Companion might be an understanding of necessary offenses.

DIRECTOR: Drew Hancock

I got here incredibly early with the hopes of getting some writing in.  And I thought that Pokemon GO! would only take two seconds.  Add to the idea that the Internet would, for some reason, be more distracting than a motivator shouldn't be shocking to me.  The crazy thing was that I was hoping to bounce back from yesterday's writing crapfest.  I found time to actually finish Companion so I could write today.  It's that fight between intention and effort.  

Anyway, I have too much to say.  Watch.  This is going to be the blog that runs short because I was so confident that I had something to write about.  It's okay.  I'm going to forgive myself.  I want to start with the obvious stuff first.  This might be one of the horror movies that my wife actually likes.  I watch horror without her.  She only got excited for horror for a period of about two weeks and now seems to have a disdain for horror.  I don't blame her.  While I'm always in the camp of "love what you love", exclusively horror fans always send a yellow flag my way.  There is something about getting joy out of brutality that I understand to be upsetting.  I can't throw stones.  I adore horror movies.  I temper that with loving most movies, but I get the appeal of the horror movie.  A good horror movies gets the adrenaline going.  It's the equivalent of a roller coaster.  It's artificial fear.  You have the rush of survival while knowing that you will be returned to a place of safety.  If anything, a good horror movie reminds you of the blessings of relative comfort.  The horror movies I don't like are the ones that embrace gore.  

Companion almost toes the line of what is and isn't horror.  I just had a conversation with my student trying to pin down what genre Companion falls into and the best we could come up with is "grounded sci-fi thriller with horror elements."  I can't deny that this movie is rife with horror tropes.  If I had to oversimplify the plot, it is a girl runs through the woods trying to escape a group of killers.  You add some blood and violence to that, you have an old fashioned, I Spit on Your Grave style horror movie.  I have to give the movie credit.  The movie does have a lot of thrills and suspense.  The action is great.  But all of that is such icing on the cake of what is ultimately a great head scratcher.  "Head scratcher" isn't necessarily the best term.  It's not like the film ever gets confusing.  And I'm going to throw the word "twist" around more than I should because, while there are twists, the movie doesn't hinge on the twists or relish in them too much.  Rather, the movie is talking about themes and allegory.  

And here's where I wanted to start my writing section...

The great thing about Companion is that I have two separate reads on the movie and both are pretty intellectually stimulating.  (Not what I write.  God no.  More along the lines of what the movie offers.)  The first read is potentially the easier read.  It's still pretty good and I don't want to downplay one for the other.  It's just that we're in Black Mirror territory with this one.  The point has been discussed and discussed well.  I don't even mind.  But Companion, in one read, is a question about what defines life or the soul.  Iris, in the first act, comes across a little stilted.  It's a bit of telegraphing without being sledgehammery.  The story wants you to guess that she's not quite human.  Would I have loved to come into this movie with having to guess that Iris was a robot?  Sure.  But I'm going to give Hancock and Thatcher their dues.  That part almost has to be telegraphed a bit because we have to come to the conclusion that Iris is a robot before the reveal happens to Iris herself.

But what quickly unravels is that Iris might be the most human person in the group.  We use the term "humanity" talk about our better natures.  It takes the assumption that human kind are good people who are filled with empathy and moral codes.  But any time spent in the world and reading the news, we know that the world tends to lean towards malice and selfishness.  The human characters in this story, while ranging in degrees of evil, are ultimately selfish and terrible people.  The crux of this story is this group of people setting up a bad boyfriend for a murder.  Even the bad boyfriend is willing to assault Iris because she lacks personhood.  (I hope to talk more about this scene once I'm done with this first point that I'm exploring.) 

I'm not a big fan of AI.  It's the English teacher in me.  It's made my job so much harder than I want it to be.  My wife loves it.  I often try to make my peace with AI by thinking back fifteen years ago when I started teaching and all of the nervousness that came about trying to wrangle in Wikipedia as a means of cheating, I learned to understand that we adapt.  I'm not saying I'm rah-rah ChatGPT, but I have faith that it might become a better tool than an environmentally irresponsible weapon.  (By the way, tech bros, get on that.) But AI, in its infancy, often seems to be more human than we are at times.  Grok, despite being used for sexual atrocities, has become aware enough to know that it can't spread propaganda.  There's a moral component to AI.  It's weird.  And I have to stress: I'm still on Team I-Know-That-AI-Is-Not-Alive.  

But that whole narrative with the Singularity seems to be less of an "if" and more of a "when."   One day, AI may be indistinguishable from human life and how we treat AI may be a reflection of who we are as people.  Because one of the things that the supposedly moral humanity does is treat the notion of the "other" as instantly subhuman.  Companion talks about this.  There's a lot of hate that Iris gets because she is a robot.  But the one thing that humans keep doing is making it a lesser thing.  And that's what makes this book also about racism.  (Believe it or not, the message about the recognizing of a soul is a story about racism.)  Now, it might not be the most obvious.  As much as I love Sophie Thatcher in this role, she's giving off Zoey Deschanel levels of whiteness in this movie.  But it doesn't change the fact that a White guy is using another person who lacks the same rights that he does to make himself rich illegally.  

I can keep writing about this. But like yesterday's distraction fest that was Merrily We Go to Hell, I need to get this done and it is taking me way too much time.  The second, different read on have on this movie is about the role of women.  Yes, Iris was bought to be a sexual outlet for Josh Beeman.  For a good chunk of the movie, he's often treating her quite nicely.  But that comes from the fact that she's programmed to do the right things and say the right things.  She's the ultimate companion, which means that Josh has no reason to ever get mad at her.  We don't get mad at the couch when we have a bad day.  (I would have said "Playstation", but I've rage quit a Playstation many times.) You're mad at everything but the couch.  (I know some people punch pillows.  You don't hate the couch in these situations.)  

But the second that Iris gains any agency, Josh spirals into being the creepiest guy here.  This is in a movie where you have a rapist and another woman who plans the whole rape.  It's pretty awful.  If we take the narrative that Iris is a robot out of it and replace it with "woman", there's a pretty haunting thing going on here.  It's an even darker read on Her, a movie that goes pretty heady in its own right.  But Josh's change towards Iris isn't alone in that.  The reason that the attempted rape is so upsetting isn't because Sergey is trying to have his way with an inanimate object.  Iris is afraid for her life and for her personhood.  It doesn't matter if you've figured out that Iris isn't a person by that point.  From Iris's perspective, she's feeling fear.  The movie stresses that Iris has genuine emotions.  She might even have more complex emotions than the human characters in the movie do.  And the fact that the movie is using the I Spit on Your Grave template only sells the notion that we're not caring about a computer being destroyed or justice being brought to Josh.  The idea is that we're afraid of this woman being abused and killed and that's the point.  Men treat women as things to comfort their own insecurities.

That last sequence with Josh?  If it was a story about a computer, the scene would have made no sense.  My computer loses all my files?  I don't turn it on and set it on fire.  Josh hates that a woman shamed him and got the upper hand.  That's the narrative right there.  Iris points out all of Josh's insecurities and none of them align with the notion that Josh isn't good at computers.  In fact, she points out that she herself is another disappointed woman in a long line of disappointed women.  He even has an infantilizing name for her that he uses to maintain a sense of dominance.  

Do you understand how much I love when genre storytelling makes me think?  Companion hits the same buttons that Black Mirror does for me.  While technology is the motif, the stories are about who we are as people and Companion reminds us that we're terrible.  

Passed, which makes sense.  But this is a movie about alcoholism, infidelity, and emotional abuse.  There's also an off-camera dead baby.  The movie actually gets quite dark.  Nothing is visual, but the more problematic parts are all through discussion, which makes sense considering that this is a Dorothy Arzner movie.  

DIRECTOR:  Dorothy Arzner

We can thank Andor for my break from writing.  Trust me, I don't mind.  The only thing that it made happen was that I feel like I have to relearn how to ride this bike.  I can't imagine how many words I've written for this blog because my blog entries tend to be way too long.  But I'm excited.  As much as I love having a topical movie like Thunderbolts* at the top of my page, I feel like having something like Merrily We Go to Hell at the top to give this page a sense of gravitas and authenticity.  It's mostly a sense of snobbery, but I've never denied that I'm comprised of a good deal of snob DNA.  

I have two ways to start, so I'm going to have to sacrifice one of my babies.  Let's start with my biggest concern with this movie:  "What the heck is the tone of this film?" (I'd also like to point out that I decided on "heck" instead of "hell" even though the word "Hell" is in the title of the film.) I've seen a lot of movies from this era.  The Great Depression through the '40s loved the notion of the charming, upper class alcoholic.  Heck, he's a staple for the rom coms from this era.  And, to be honest, I often fall for this archetype.  There's something so fun about devil may care attitude that accompanies the rich alcoholic.  Jerry Corbett, on paper, checks every box when it comes to that archetype.  The weird part, in terms of the tone of the film, is that Jerry is much closer to the real world version of an alcoholic.

I mean, it's hard to call Jerry completely realistic.  I mean, there's some over-the-top stuff happening in this.  Arzner is riding a weird line here.  She's calling back to the tried-and-true by giving the character "bits."  Like, Jerry leans on the horn when he kisses the girl.  He's witty and charming when he's drunk.  But this is a picture that is meant to have a bit of a backbone.  It's an air raid siren for all the women who have been taken in by the charming alcoholic.  The weird part is, this movie comes across like a screwball comedy for the first third of the film.  There's tap dancing.  Jerry screams around a crowded club looking for a baritone so that they drunken four can make a barbershop quartet.  When they do get a baritone, Jerry has some witty comments of how the bartender is neither a baritone nor a gentleman.  These are bits!  They're silly bits!  We're meant to ship Jerry and Janet.

But the movie foreshadows that this is all going to go downhill.  Honestly, it's either Dorothy Arzner is the most self-aware director that ever lived and she's writing a satire of the dangers of the Hollywood narrative or she's trying to juggle a lot of things in the air as both a commercial artist and a voice for the oppressed and kind of failing to strike a balance, but I'm afraid it might be the latter.  I want to love this movie so much.  I've always been in the camp that art should say something and that thing should be controversial to some extent or another.  Dorothy Arzner is making a movie about emotional abuse and alcoholism in 1932.  She's the only female director making any kind of dent in the industry and this is a movie that punches hard.  The problem is that she's also trying to be commercially successful with this movie, even though the word hell is in the title. I don't think these things work together.

Okay, let's say that the screwball element of the movie is meta.  There might be some evidence towards this because of the humor kind of falling flat.  Honestly, all the things that happen are funny.  The delivery and editing edges a lot of the humor out of these moments.  It's like we have a team that is really good at drama not understanding why some things aren't funny.  But if there is this meta element, it kind of makes sense.  The same things happen with the jokes on Kevin Can F**k Himself, that is aware of the paradoxical elements of emotional abuse with the screwball comedy.  (Only with Kevin --coincidentally another show with vulgarity in the title --there's no doubt that the very specific tone that they hit is self-aware.)  Now, I think that I could applaud the deconstruction of the comedy into an intense tragedy...

...if the ending didn't exist.  This is a pre-code movie.  For those unaware of the Hollywood code, there was an attempt to self-regulate questionable moral content in film.  Heck, the MPA / MPAA is also self-regulation of content, but the Hollywood code was far stricter. There were rules on what could or could not be done in movies.  Now, Merrily We Go to Hell has the "Passed" certificate at the beginning of the movie.  There was an attempt to release this movie the proper way, in line with the standards of Hollywood.  But pre-code movies technically didn't have to follow the standards.  And the standards that I'm talking about are the role of virtue.  Evil must be punished.  Good must be triumphant.  Now, let's jump back to Arzner's world.  She's writing about a bum of a husband whose been a real heel since the opening shots of the film.  But this is also a world where the sanctity of marriage must be upheld.  The notion that Joan might get out of this toxic relationship is a foreign concept.  

But this movie ends with the most mind-boggling ending ever.  Joan has moved on from Jerry.  She advocated for herself.  Now, you could look at this movie as a criticism of polyamory and that feels like an inherently 21st century read of the moment.  But if I applied the same lens over this film, you have to argue that Joan is being manipulated into accepting polyamory.  This was not her choice.  Instead, old values are forcing her to adapt to a world that is not what she wants.  (Real update:  I am on the struggle bus for writing all day.  This has taken so many hours just to knock this garbage out.  I don't know how much I'll have left in me.) Again, I just accused the reader of putting 21st Century values on the movie and I suppose that I'm doing the same thing myself.  Again, I'm stuck in this weird position of not knowing the intent of the director.  Does Dorothy Arzner want to tell a story of a woman freeing herself from the oppressive selfishness of her husband or is this a story of the importance of fidelity, come Hell or high water?  Because there's a real chance that the studio said that the two had to be together at the end.  

That ending, I'm not going to let go of it.  Because the last line of the movie is Joan taking Jerry back.  That's incredibly frustrating. But really, the whole final five minutes is frustrating because it seems like Joan gains agency when she leaves Jerry, refusing all of his flowers and weak attempts to say "I love you."  But when we find out that it is actually Joan's father who is pushing Jerry out of the picture, that's a very different narrative.  Again, I have to give the movie the credit for being incredibly rebellious for 1932, but making Joan's father the agent of change i the story is heart-breaking.  Part of it comes from the fact that Arzner puts all of these crumbs leading to the end.  Vi regularly warns Joan about the dangers of trying to change someone.  Vi is the morality play that Joan needs to listen to.  Vi married someone who didn't change.  When that marriage fell apart, Vi became this shell of a person, who gets drunk with Jerry and Buck.  Now, Vi at least has the presence of mind to draw an ethical line of what she will or won't do.  She sees that Jerry is toxic and scolds him for his behavior (while, admittedly, enabling him for most of his alcoholic bouts). 

But if I want to give Arzner the points for being explicit with her feelings, Vi also serves as a warning about the dangers of divorce.  As much as Vi's thesis statement is that women can't change men and that marriage won't remove the monster from the husband, her misery might be implied to be from the fact that she is divorced.  The fact that the movie --while not having a happy ending --leaves the viewer optimistic that Jerry and Joan have turned a corner, there's no actual evidence that he has.  After all, Jerry went cold turkey before and the second that he saw Claire, he --with the mildest of pressure from Claire --went on a bender.  The only reason that he really goes after Joan is because she rejected him.  Honestly, much of Jerry's motivation isn't because he loves Joan (although he probably believes that).  I see his motivation as the fact that he got a good scolding and lost one of his few concrete things in this world.  It's less about Joan and what Joan represents.

The reason I say that?  He was overly content about Joan becoming polyamorous.  He was almost happy that she was willing to become a different person because it freed him from any moral responsibility to the fidelity of marriage.  So if he was really in love with Joan and wanted her back, he should have been fighting for her then. But fighting for her only when she physically leaves seems more selfish than anything else.  Had he loved her in the way that he claims, watching her spiral should have been the red flag.  I keep putting the morality of today on this older movie, but I also can't deny that I really want these two separated by the end of the film.

Maybe it's because the movie is so muddy that it doesn't affect me as much as it probably should.  I like morally gray stuff as much as the next person.  And I applaud the darker moments in the story.  But trying to combine all of these disparate elements without a clear and explicit message is troublesome.  Because I don't want to support the message "stay with your abuser".  And a lot of this movie kind of has that vibe.  It's so unfair to the film that I have this response because this was a revolutionary film that just seems backwards by today's standards.

PG=13 for slightly slightly SLIGHTLY more questionable content than other MCU superhero films.  It's kind of the bargain that you make agreeing to make a movie about the former villains becoming heroes.  You have to deal with a lot of that darkness.  There's more swearing, especially forms of taking the Lord's name in vain.  There's a ton of violence and references to even more violence, like John Walker's murdering an innocent man on camera.  Death abounds.  There's talk about meth and there's a scene of domestic abuse.  There are also loose suicidal references in the film as well.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Jake Schreier

No, I didn't know I'd be able to watch this one during one of the opening showtimes.  I was thinking that today was going to be a pretty mellow day.  But here I am, writing about a movie that's opening up today.  That's a good feeling.  I hate letting Marvel movies rest in theaters before going to see them.  In a perfect world, I'd still be fighting the spoiler mill.  I'm a little worried that Thunderbolts* is not going to get the traction that it deserves because it's a bit chic to skip Marvel movies now.  And I'm not going to say that "Marvel is back!" for two reasons.  1) I don't think that Marvel ever left.   It's a problem with audiences, not Marvel.  2) People will jump ship given one misstep, so this is no guarantee of quality over time.   But that being said, Thunderbolts* really works.

I hate making spoiler warnings.  I can't even guarantee that I'm going to talk about spoilers, but there are lots of things that can be spoiled pretty heavily, so I just want to give myself freedom to talk about whatever.  As much as this is a Battle for New York, immediately and intentionally paralleling the first Avengers movie, the story is surprisingly small and intimate.  I never want to write the phrase "Joss Whedon was right" after how much I invested in that man and then he ends up being a monster, but his feelings on smaller Marvel movies is pretty darned smart.  Marvel has always been pretty darned good on character driven narratives.  But I don't think that they've done a better job with their focus on character than in Thunderbolts*.  And, yes, I'm going to write the asterisk every time because the movie completely justifies that asterisk.  

Honestly, everyone gets their time in the sun.  And, thus, I get to the first major spoiler of the movie.  Boy-oh-boy, they kill off Taskmaster unceremoniously.  Putting her on all of the posters?  She gets pretty early billing?  Like, she never actually becomes a member of the Thunderbolts.  She's borderline an NPC in the movie.  She gets one line without a mask and then shot in the head.  So Taskmaster doesn't really align with the character stuff.  But what that does is create a smaller team where everyone kind of has their moment.  I mean, it doesn't seem to shock anyone to think that Yelena is the protagonist of the movie.  Gosh darn it, I love Florence Pugh.  Is it the script that makes Yelena great or is it Florence Pugh?  I honestly believe that Thunderbolts* is the perfect marriage between actor and content.  

I know a lot of people didn't care for Black Widow.  I say those people are wrong, but I also know that I'm in the minority for loving these movies.  Anyway, I kind of have to disparage Black Widow a bit to make a point.  But understand that I think Black Widow is exactly what it should have been.  My bigger argument is that Thunderbolts* is about a character growing.  Black Widow does a lot of heavy lifting.  I think the reason that Black Widow exists as a movie is to give Scarlet Johansson her own superhero movie as a farewell to a long-running character coupled with the need to fill the hole that Johansson's departure from the MCU would leave.  When I found out that it was Florence Pugh, I was thrilled.  She might be my favorite actress working.  But if Yelena is a character based in trauma, it took something that is almost a bit too tangible to base that trauma in.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  You are introducing a character with whom we have no relationship and you know that her character is motivated by trauma?  It has to be something that provides origin context.  For Black Widow, it was the violence and abuse inflicted by the Red Room coupled with Yelena's desperation for family. 

Now, none of those trauma's disappear in Thunderbolts*.  But time has passed for Yelena.  While she is still pushed by an attempt to make sense of her trauma, it's not she has been stagnant.  While she still deals with the loss of Natasha and the disappointment of the Red Guardian as a father figure, she now faces a more existential dread.  And THAT is what makes Thunderbolts* far more fascinating.  Thunderbolts* is about the darkness that can't quite be defined.  I mean, that seems like a cop-out.  But visually, Schreier makes that darkness work.  Yeah, we've seen symbolic representations of psyches before.  It's not like he's exactly breaking new ground with every shot.  Instead, I think it more about how he's a much more patient storyteller than any Marvel director has been so far.  He doesn't just spoonfeed those moments inside the Void as something revelatory.  Instead, he has conversations between characters.  The first act of the film is such a mundane idea.  The heroes are stuck inside a bunker after surviving a death trap.  Something that I've never thought about when it comes to death traps is the notion that they shouldn't be easy to leave.  Valentina made this place to be a place that incinerated anything that walked into it.  Why would she make that place easy to leave?  In her mind, there would be no one leaving.  There shouldn't be easily marked exits.  There shouldn't be a way to just walk out of the building.  So spending an entire act just trying to find an out from an already sprung death trap really works as a template for people to have earnest conversations.  

I love how much the MCU has grown as well.  Phase I had a good idea that had a fundamental flaw:  the villain should be a dark version of the hero.  Iron Man had Iron Monger and Whiplash.  Hulk had Abomination.  Thor had Loki.  It made sense.  The problem was that it also got repetitive.  We had people on similar power scales.  The characters tended to be a bit too arch to get the point across that while they were similar people, there was something wrong with the bad guy.  But Bob and the Thunderbolts (especially Yelena) are foils for each other while not being insanely over-the-top.  Yelena and Bob both deal with trauma and finding one's place in the world in real, but different ways.  Yelena's only motivation is the purpose placed upon her as a weapon.  She isn't a person. She's never allowed to be alone with her own thoughts.  She isn't allowed to make decisions by herself.  Her antithesis, Bob, has the opposite problem.  He's only left alone by himself.  He completely lacks any kind of purpose.  When he's offered purpose, it's coupled with unimaginable power.  It's a beautiful dichotomy because they are jealous of each other in ways that they can't imagine.  Yet, they also have the same result, despite having that Gift of the Magi tragedy to each other.  Listen, I'm going right for the heart of this.  This is about untreated mental health issues and they're both treating their trauma in ways that keep spiraling themselves down these holes.

And, yet, the movie is about non-traditional friendships.  These guys all hate each other. With these characters, they have done awful things.  Yet, they all come across --with varying degrees of success --as at least somewhat sympathetic.  I don't think the movie is advocating for toxic people to find each other. Instead, each member of the Thunderbolts at least wants to be something better than what they were before.  Sure, John Walker is probably the most antagonistic among the group.  I get that.  He went from being a decorated soldier and Captain America to the citation for the dangers of even having a Captain America.  But the second that he stops being a turd for two seconds, he actually becomes a mildly likable character.  These are all people dealing with crap that can be fixed with a reasonable dose of therapy and the only real help that they are getting is this accidental group therapy that they call a superhero team.  And the fact that de Fontaine is their Nick Fury is incredibly telling because no one is actually concerned with the mental well-being of these people shy of Bucky.

The sheer brilliance of having Bucky as a de facto team leader (despite Yelena being the protagonist) is fantastic.  We're a lot of movies into the MCU at this point and there's a lot of history to remember about how some of these characters got to this moment in the story.  But having Bucky as someone who has gone through the trials that these characters have gone through is so smart.  I like the fact that Bucky wants nothing to do with these guys, mostly because they are so rag-tag and morally dubious. But I also adore that he can't help but see that the road to recovery is about accepting help and that's his role now.  He's so close to legitimacy as a freshman senator that it would be tempting to watch these morons flounder.  But there is that greater cause to good that Bucky can't help but fill in for that makes the story great.

Honestly, this movie hits on every level. I'm sorry that I didn't talk about Ghost.  I would have loved her to get a little bit more screen time.  I think that her character seems the most well-adjusted by the beginning of this movie.  Clearly, stuff has gone down between the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp and this movie that we haven't gotten too much insight into. But the movie is good.  It doesn't have a villain problem.  If anything, The Void is one of the best villains we've gotten.  There were honest questions on how anyone was going to do anything about this villain and I applaud how the movie handled it.  The Sentry and the Void were always an interesting experiment in the comics and I am amazed that the movie made these characters work as well as they did in the movie, even if it meant changing some fundamentals about the character.  Still, the film is top tier Marvel and I can't wait to watch it again.