Rated PG.  WAIT, what?!  No.  This movie isn't rated PG.  There's no way that this movie is rated PG.  Like, even a little bit.  Yeah, the movie is long and there's a lot of PG content in this movie.  But this movie is a straight-up R in my head.  I don't care if it's 1975.  There's a scene of Barry with two topless ladies having his way with them.  There's a weird sexual undertone to a lot of the movie.  One of the main plot points is Barry's adultery and predisposition to child abuse.  What a hot take.  PG?  PG!

DIRECTOR:  Stanley Kubrick

I am still shaken to my core to discover that this movie is PG.  Like, for a minute, I thought that this might be a PG film.  After all, it's all old-timey.  Old-timey movies get a bit of a pass from the MPAA.  But then there's the scene towards the beginning of Act II and I was just like, "Nah, this is an R-rated movie and I hope my kids don't walk in on me watching this movie."  Like, all of the themes and motifs are more mature in nature.  It's a Stanley Kubrick movie, for goodness' sake.  Heck, I couldn't imagine showing children this movie.  I would even have a hard time giving this movie a PG-13 rating, even knowing that PG-13 didn't exist when this movie was made.

Barry Lyndon was always the gaping hole in my movie knowledge.  I teach elements of Barry Lyndon when I'm talking about light in film.  I may be saying the obvious to some people, but I always use opportunities to teach in productive way.  Barry Lyndon was shot (as far as I understand) with natural light.  It's something that isn't really done in cinema.  To capture that cinematic feel, almost every movie blasts incredibly powerful lights from many directions to blow out shadows and create a heightened experience.  Also, film is infamously finnicky.  Often, natural light can be quite detrimental to how a film looks.  After all, look at every project that a high schooler has turned in and you get the dangers of relying on natural light.  But in the hand of an auteur coupled with an incredible cinematographer, natural light can actually be one of the most gorgeous experiences while filming.  Let's pretend that Kubrick couldn't tell a story. (He, beyond a doubt, can and has done so in Barry Lyndon.  This is a hypothetical.)  Why I teach Barry Lyndon in my film class is that Barry Lyndon is possibly one of the most gorgeous looking movies of all time.  I'm pretty sure that it is was Kubrick's mission statement to make every cel of this movie a Renaissance-era painting.  A lot of that is the lighting coupled with the mise-en-scene.  Kubrick scouted the crap out of his locations.  He made sure that everything was exactly the way he wanted it to be.  Then, he lit it with natural light.

Natural light is a bear to work with.  It is wildly inconsistent.  The very existence of clouds are a bane on the director who wants to work with natural light.  One of Kubrick's biggest cinema sins (besides the fact that apparently he was cruel to his actresses) was that he was a director who wanted a million freaking takes for everything.  With natural light, that is seemingly a masochistic task.  An editor looks at all of the takes and has to not only pick from the best performances, but the one where the light looks the best.  The sexy appeal of artificial light is that it is always going to look the same.  Once a set is lit artifiically, it takes a large consideration off the board.  Geez, the nightmare that this movie must have been to film. 

And that's just for the outdoor stuff.  A not-nothing percentage of the film takes place indoors in these amazing castles / chateaus.  Natural light, in many cases (besides when he reflected the sun into large windows) involves candles.  There are scenes that are entirely lit by candlelight.  Do you know how many candles that invovles?  There are scenes where there are a hilarious amount of candles in the scene.  Again, couple this with the fact that Kubrick was the dictator of a billion takes.  Those candles are constantly melting down.  (As, too, was the director.)  I can't stress enough: the reason that there were a million candles was because it is nearly impossible to light a scene with candlelight.  Luckily, for the sake of cool aesthetics, a billion candles look awesome.  It just seems like this exercise in frustration.

(Fun fact:  I took a break right here because I ran out of time writing.  I have to confess that my headspace is not the same, so I apologize for the change of tone.)  I need to stop talking about Kubrick and his insanity for a minute.  There is something insane that I have to talk about that is going to make me question any blog that I've ever written.  Am I the only one who found the first half of this movie pretty darned funny?  I'm watching this movie and I was surprised by how cheeky the film was.  Now, I'm watching what I think is a comedy and I have the epiphany that I should look up whether or not this movie is a comedy or not.  After all, I didn't think it was supposed to be a comedy.  Lo and behold!  It is labeled on Wikipedia as a historical drama.  Now, given the fact that Act II is significantly more morose than the first half, I suppose that there might be some logic to that.  It's not like the tone of the second half changed.  If anything, the genre seemed to change while maintaining the tone.  But I'm watching this movie and I'm watching the story of a commoner and his constant upwards failure and I find it very funny.

Okay, not very funny.  I'm doing that thing where I exhale out of my nose a little harder than normal.  It's funny in the same way that Pride & Prejudice is funny.  Okay, a little more than that. But Kubrick made this story about an incredibly unlikable protagonist and kept it going for a fairly long runtime.  Like, we're never really supposed to be onboard Redmond Barry's quest for satisfaction.  The movie starts with a slightly erotic game and then, like a petulant child, he possesses his cousin to an uncomfortable level.  One of the things that tends to happen in movies with an unlikable protagonist is that they have to make everyone kind of terrible.  This is a movie full of kind of terrible human beings being kind of terrible to each other.  The only reason that we're behind Redmond Barry is that the camera is on him for the majority of the movie, the narrator is talking about him, and that people are treating him kind of terribly --which tends to excuse a moderate amount of his behavior.  But ultimately, Redmond Barry sucks.  Like, it's really odd that I'm excited for him to escape the British army --despite the fact that we can rally behind his pugilism --because he is a deserter.  But the reason that we tend to excuse something that is really considered rather cowardly is because he wouldn't have to be in the army if it wasn't for the fact that he was part of a small conspiracy to trick him into committing a murder that didn't happen.

If you see the movie, that sentence makes sense.

But I find the movie genuinely light for something that is supposed to be quite dark.  Okay,  I find the first half light.  But that second half is brutal.  The thing about it is, I feel like Kubrick (intentionally!) takes Redmond Barry and turns him into Barry Lyndon, a despicable human being.  If Redmond Barry, young Irish scallywag, is kind of charming in his tomfoolery, Barry Lyndon sucks.  Like, Lord Bullingdon is worse...but it's because of how bad Barry Lyndon treats him.  (For the sake of making a decision, from here on out, I'm referring to the evil, more serious Redmond Barry as Barry Lyndon.)  Redmond Barry, when he steals away Honoria Lyndon from her husband, is oddly charming --despite the fact that I'm very anti-adultery even in movies.  But he immediately starts cheating on her.  Actually, we can probably chart when Redmond becomes unlikable by the fact that there is no strife for him to work through.  We can rally behind Redmond because, as much as he's partially the cause of his own strife, he has outside forces oppressing him.  When he's Barry Lyndon, there is no opposition.  When he does bad things then, he's just a punk.  When he becomes a cad, golly, we're just begging for him to get his comeuppance.  (Maybe Barry Lyndon is forcing me to use a lot of this dated parlance.) 

Yet, Lord Bullington might be the proof against my argument.  Bullington has every right to hate Barry.  As much as I should bond with him because we both didn't get along with our stepfathers, Bullington seems to lack any sympathy in the movie because he's just through-and-through awful.  Yes, Barry hits him.  Yes, Bullington misses his biological father.  But throughout the story, Bullington just becomes more and more awful.  He becomes the full-on villain of the piece, not just in a way that ties the story together.  His climax --from his perspective --is shooting Barry.  However, there's a lot going on in that duel scene that is fun to unpack.  

From Barry's perspective, he's making the quasi-honorable choice for the first time in his life.  His son has died.  His wife hates him.  I get the vibe that he's thinking about someone else for a change: his wife.  His wife has already lost two children --one from death and the other from exile.  To kill the exiled child is just an exercise in torture of someone who is already suicidal.  I also think that there's something truly pathetic about Bullington having this whole duel to begin with.  It's a parallel to Redmond's childish duel at the beginning.  The large difference between the two scenes is that the instigator of the respective duels acts differently in both scenarios.  When Redmond duels with Captain Quin, Quin is shaking (despite never really being in danger).  In the second duel, it is Bullington who is tripping over himself.  When Barry shoots into the ground, he's doign the honorable thing.

It's the fact that Bullington's perspective makes Bullington the most unlikable character in the film.  Bullington knew that there was a chance that Barry would get the first shot.  He's so confident that Barry was going to die in round one that, when his shot discharged by accident, you see this pathetic little child trying to muster the courage to face death honorably and failing.  The fact that Barry gives him an out and Bullington still proceeds to maim Barry gives us an ending that is somehow bittersweet.  Barry wins by not being the worst character in the story.  That's a low bar to cross, but it is ultimately what we're left with.  He survives on an insulting salary and probably dies depressed. 

But at least he's not Bullington.

Man, I kind of dig this movie.  Yeah, it goes a little long.  And my biggest complaint about the movie (and I hate doing this) is Ryan O'Neal.  Golly, I know that Kubrick knew what he was doing.  But O'Neal's performance really sticks out in this film.  Everything seems nuanced except for O'Neal, who seems to be doing an American accent in exchange of Irish.  Except occasionallly.  Sometimes it sounds like he's trying to pull off an accent.  Still, what a choice.  I wonder if Kubrick was playing the long con on O'Neal, but I did not care for that. 

Still, the movie is a masterpiece.  It'll never hit my favorite Kubricks.  But gosh darned it if it wasn't impressive.

PG-13 almost exclusively for language.  It's not like there's a-lot-a-lot of language, but it's definitely not nothing.  (This is some top tier writing, guys.)  I'm pretty sure that I heard an f-bomb in there somewhere.  Because Christopher Nolan isn't exactly tailoring his films for younger audiences, it feels like this is a more rebellious movie than it is.  It's sense of scope is daunting and it's definitely anxiety inducing.  There's even a little bit of scuffle and death in the movie.  (Technically, there's a lot of death, but it's all off-screen.)  Still, PG-13 is probably the right call for this one.

DIRECTOR:  Christopher Nolan

I can't believe that I don't have a blog on Interstellar.  2014 was the year before I started this class, so it feels like this movie is new enough to be on this blog.  But I can safely say that I haven't seen this movie in twelve years.  And here's the thing, I have talked about this movie with borderline every film class ad nauseum.  Not because I brought it up.  Heck, no.  This is one of those situations where kids discover the movie and then that's the movie that is passed around the class.  

And I'll tell you what:  For a second (FOR A SECOND!) I thought my opinion on this movie was going to change.  The first time I watched it, I remember being thoroughly in awe of the scope of this film only to be disappointed by the end.  That's exactly how I feel now.  That's not being dismissive.  When I use the word "awe", I honestly mean "awe."  The lion's share of this movie is one of the most impressive feats of cinema that the 21st Century has produced.  Between the visuals, the characters, the themes, the imagery, the plot...it's all right there.  It's something to behold.  But the end?  Man, I really think that this movie doesn't stick the end.

And it's not that the end is bad.  It's just the weakest element in an incredible presentation.  I have to tell you, I was prepped to be a little bored.  I was watching this movie and I know that it kind of reeks of anticlimax.  (Again, not holding anything against anyone who loves the ending of this movie.  It's not for me.  I'll probably end up writing a thousand words on why the ending is meh.)  But I'm watching this movie and I'm thinking, "Was I wrong about this film?"  Like, there are threads that tease the end.  That's great.  I love that.  Then all of the emotional character stuff.  The stuff between Coop and Murph on Earth (heh, rhyme) is so intense.  Sure, I think "Why not take your kids to space?"  In my reality, it's safer on Earth.  But from an Interstellar perspective, it seems like space is the right call.  As likely to die here than there.)  Then there's the intense tension between Coop and Brand.  I mean, that's a whole movie in itself.  To pile on the fact that Coop and Brand have this deep respect for each other makes that conflict all the more palpable is something else I have to account for.  On top of that (!), we have the fact that Brand is almost a psychopath who had to make this unimaginable choice to let everyone on Earth die and the fact that he manipulated Coop to take off to the stars, knowing that Coop had no scenario that he'd ever see his kids again.  That's incredible.  To top it all off, I forgot that Matt Damon was in this movie.  (I mean, he's even almost got a nod to The Martian going with his spacesuit.) 

Then there was the scene that destroyed me.  Realize that I'm showing this to a class.  We had to watch in forty-five minute chunks.  There was one of those 45 minute chunks that was so painful.  I'm talking about the part where Coop and Brand get off the planet (and Brand is more than a little responsible for the death of their crewmate) and they have to confront the astronaut who lost 27 years.  On top of that (I KEEP HAVING TO WRITE THAT PHRASE AND IT IS FLIPPING KILLING ME AS AN ENGLISH TEACHER!) Coop gets a glut of messages from his now adult children and he witnesses the tragedy and fallout of his leaving.  I mean, this is all incredible stuff.  It's so good.  I was so overwhelmingly invested that I questioned my entire take on this movie.  If all of these beats are as solid as I felt that they were, I had to be wrong about the ending, right?

Reminder: the ending is not an abomination.  It's just the weakest element of this film.  There's a lot of balls in the air in this movie.  Nevermind, we're changing it to plates.  Nolan has too many plates spinning and it is wildly impressive.  The finale of the film is meant to tie-up more than its fair share of threads.  So the end of the movie is meant to give an answer to Murph's ghosts.  Murph's ghosts are a choice.  They are a heck of a choice.  While most of the real raw stuff in the film is character based, Murph's ghosts are a plot beat tied to character drama.  It's a very risky puzzle box that needs to have a top tier answer.  Because Interstellar has so many plates in the air, I'm sure Nolan became aware that there is no way to end this story in a way that matches the scope of the other beats.  He's also a litlte bit of a magician, very much in vibe of M. Night Shyamalan.  He's a guy who cut his teeth on the twist ending.  He's the Memento guy.  I will say that he's normally very good at pulling the rug out from under us, to introduce yet another mixed metaphor.  But the scope of this film almost demanded that the film had to have a moment of unpacking.  Nolan loves what he loves.  He loves time and manipulating what we're seeing.  I, too, love time.  I love messing with time.  I love time travel.  Nolan and I tend to be copacetic on wanting to talk about time.  But his love of time also makes me more critical of conventions that don't really work.  I think that the end of Interstellar is almost the seed that ended up messing up Tenet.  

See, Murphy's ghosts almost don't make sense.  Murph, in the first act, begs her dad to stay on Earth.  That's a character beat that is important.  Her pleas go beyond just a child trying to hold onto her dad.  Literally, the universe (or, in this case, ghosts) are demanding that Coop stays with Murph on Earth.  (It will never not make me giggle.) There needed to be something outside selfishness that makes Coop sin.  In some ways, it's God.  (For the sake of shorthand, I'm just going to talk about the fifth-dimensional beings from this point.)  The third act shows that Coop made a mistake by leaving his family and he tries --in a very stupid way --to undo it.  Nolan is introducing the notion of the closed loop.  Whatever Coop does, it's going to be what he's always done.  When he realizes how he's going to communicate with Murph, he writes the phrase "Stay", realizing that Murph once identified the lines in the gravity and dust as binary code / morse code.  (He says "Morse" at the end, for some reason.)  He remembers to do that because he knows that Murph will figure out what the ghost is trying to say.  But for some reason, he doesn't remember that the phrase "Stay" doesn't cause him to stay.  It's a weird thing that he remembers Murph's ability to understand the ghost, but not the fact that Coop doesn't stay when commanded to.  

In a thematic attempt to tie the whole thing together, implying that Coop is the product of fate, not will, we discover that the fifth-dimensional beings is humanity in a late stage of evolution.  Coop is the product of a Bootstrap Paradox (sorry, Lauren.  I will always point out a Bootstrap Paradox when I can).  Because Coop was fated to save humanity by interacting with the fifth-dimensional beings, the fifth-dimensional beings pulled him to this point in time.  The second problem I have with this is the fact that the fifth-dimensional beings...are kind of an afterthought.  This is not a story of fifth-dimensional beings.  There's a throwaway line about the potentiality of some creatures inside this black hole.  It's not quite a Chekhov's gun.  The camera isn't lingering on the gun.  The camera is panning quickly past a gun and we're asked to invest in something that is intentionally hidden.  Nolan doesn't want us unpacking the fifth-dimensional beings until we're actually interacting with them.   

Also, the movie plays really fast and loose with the stakes of this movie.  Why doesn't Coop die in a black hole?  Because these magic fifth-dimensional beings meant him to survive.  It feels all a bit "plot-armory".  He survives because the movie needs him to survive.  Fate says he can't die so he doesn't die.  How did humanity find him?  The fifth-dimensional beings let humanity know where to find him. There's almost a silly conceit that these all powerful gods / fifth dimensional beings needed Coop to just exist when it seems like they could have handled all of this misery on their own.  Coop seems both super important and arbitrary at the same time.  (Also, does Coop do a lot of math from the inside of a black hole because that second hand on the watch gave a lot of data.

The thing is, in a lesser movie, I could accept a lot of the end.  It just feels like the bulk of the film feels so crafted and so detailed that the end seems more like an emotional resolution, but not a tonal resolution.  It doesn't make the movie bad.  It just makes the movie flawed.  So much of this is so good so that when the end doesn't quite live up, I get bummed.  Do I respect when people make this their favorite movie?  Absolutely.  Is it ever going to make my list?  Nope.  That end keeps on leaving me a little let down. 

And there's my thousand words about the end of this film.

PG-13 primarily for swearing, including one f-bomb.  I mean, sure, it's technically a horror comedy.  There's a not-nothing amount of gore in the movie.  But it's all kind of silly.  Like, the tone is absolutely going for absurd goofiness.  (I almost wrote "absurdity" and that's not accurate.)  I watched it with my twelve-year-old son who thought it was just perfect.  Sure, it could be a little scary.  But honestly?  It's heavy on the comedy and light on the horror.  

DIRECTOR: Tom Gormican

Why are people mean to movies like this?  Honestly.  Okay, I've probably been mean to movies like this, so I'm not one to talk.  But Anaconda (2025) seems to be absolutely hated.  That I don't understand.  Will I admit that Anaconda is a bit too silly at times and is probably going to be forgotten?  Sure.  Am I going to be disappointed if I see it on a student's Top Five list.  Also, true.  But what people dont really seem to get is that Anaconda aims for a very specific target and I think, for the most part, hits that target.  This is meant to be popcorn silliness, not a great reboot to the Anaconda franchise.

I was never a fan of the original franchise.  If I had to bet, I've probably seen the first one (I've lost all street cred when it comes to the previous sentence) and I haven't seen any of the others.  I don't know.  The original Anaconda was such the product of its era.  This was a time when there was big name talent thrown at popcorn screams and that's about it.  Golly, I've seen so many movies like Anaconda.  And maybe if you were a fan of this genre of film, I could see getting annoyed at a reboot that acts more as a silly commentary of an era that we just don't see in movie theaters anymore.  Yeah, this is a straight up joke about the original Anaconda movies.  But honestly, you could palate swap Anaconda with a lot of other movies and it still works.  It's more of a shot at my generation's movie tastes growing up in the '90s and 2000s.  (I was born in 1983.  This doesn't feel like an attack on '80s movies.)  This is a movie that reminds you what it meant to be a Blockbuster Video kid.  I choose Blockbuster specifically because Blockbuster was infamous for having hundreds of copies of big budget B-movies than any other video store.  Golly, they loved that stuff.  I think I watched the original (if I remember correctly) just from the sheer numbers of copies they had sitting on the shelf.

And, honestly, this era of movies may be precious to some.  I actually applaud those people who probably get nostalgic watching Dante's Peak or Deep Impact.  Heck, even respect for the Lake Placid folks out there.  I enjoy these movies from a completely superficial level and that's fine.  I hope these people enjoy their favorite kinds of movies.  It's just that it never feels like Anaconda (2025) is making fun of the original Anaconda or any of their ilk.  If anything, this feels more like a silly celebration of movies like this.  The guy who made this movie also made The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, one of the best action comedies of the past decade.  What made that movie great was the fact that it was about friendships and passion.  It just so happened that these two were in an action film by accident.  The same can kind of be said for Doug and Griff.  These are stories of friends.  Yeah, while Nick Cage [sic] may be a bit more introspective than these two guys, they are ultimately in the same situation.  These guys want to live a small life and the one time that they bit off more than they could chew, a giant snake tries to eat them.  I know that it is simple, but that's also an excuse to make the movie about anything other than the snake.

One of the running gags of the movie is that these two goofballs are patting themselves on the back for including "themes" and "character", but that's oddly enough what is probably getting attacked by those who don't care for this movie.  I'll tell you right now:  I don't give a crap about the snake.  The snake is silly.  The snake doesn't have rules and nor should it.  We need the snake to make the movie an Anaconda movie.  But the movie is about keeping these goofballs talking about friendship and passion projects.  These are the guys who made Raiders!  If you don't know the Raiders! doc and you don't feel like reading yet another overworded blog, these guys --as kids --remade Raiders of the Lost Ark.  While this is a movie that owes a great debt to the Indiana Jones movies,  it really doesn't matter because the story is about friendship and filmmaking.  It's about a love for cinema and how adulthood puts stress on that friendship.  For our entire lives --as Americans --we've been fed the narrative of the American Dream.  As long as you work hard, you can become anything.  But the American Dream often is ignored by most people because of security.  Would I have taken different risks if I knew that I didn't have to be present for a family?  Maybe.  That's Griff and Doug.  Griff went to Hollywood to flounder for a good long time and Doug decided to settle down and take care of his family .  While animosity grows between the two of them, especially when Doug discovers a natural talent that evolves into confidence, there is conflict on the two.

If I have to stop defending the movie --because it is a little weird that I'm defending it as much as I am --it is a little formulaic.  I can't deny that there is rarely a moment of genius in this movie.  But I am also saying that Anaconda never went for that.  It's sending up a franchise that is more derided than it is celebrated.  The whole shtick is that it is kind of silly that anyone is even talking about this movie so far down the road.  Anaconda as a franchise became the perfect franchise for the Sci-Fi (or SyFy) network at its lowest.  There is something incredibly meta about the jokes being as low-brow as they are.  The movie isn't The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent because this does feel like a bit of a corporate shill project for Sony Pictures, a company that continues to disappoint me.  

But silliness isn't really all that bad.  Yeah, I don't want all the movies to be the reboot to Anaconda.  If anything, I can safely say "We got it."  Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, and Thandie Newton made a very silly comedy that I could watch with my kid.  It's all of them doing the thing that they do in other movies, only together.  Does it play?  Yeah.  On top of that, it takes the formula and gets a little cheeky with it.  There are some twists that are so silly because the takeaway is "Who cares?"  But that's what made me giggle.  Do I need any more of this?  Absolutely not.  Maybe once in a blue moon, you toss me a little giggle film.  The closest thing that I could compare it to is Jumanji and even that's a little bit off.  Still, go into this with low expectations and optimism and you'll probably have a good time.