Rated PG-13, but I'll say that this one is pushing it.  I know that M. Night Shyamalan really wanted a PG-13, despite the fact that the content doesn't read as PG-13.  So it has the tone of a PG-13 movie with the content of a pretty graphic horror movie.  There's a lot of death.  There's some pretty gnarly stabbing stuff happening in it.  There's amateur surgery.  There's a dead baby.  There's so much that happens in this movie that doesn't sound like it belongs in a PG-13 movie...because it really doesn't.  Regardless, I don't make the rules.

DIRECTOR:  M. Night Shyamalan

Ask me if I want to write about this.  (The answer, clearly, is no.)  I want to be watching another Wong Kar-Wai movie.  Actually, on my way back from Kroger pick-up, I was debating which movie I wanted to watch.  I WANTED to watch a Wong Kar-Wai movie, but then I thought of all of the Italian cinema that no one has been watching with me.  Then I realized I have Bad Boys for Life from Netflix DVD just sitting on my counter, which is a movie that A) I don't want to watch anymore and B) stars Will Smith, which means that the blog basically writes itself at this point.  But none of that really matters, because there are a million Covid-positive kids running around my house right now (it's the part of the family that gave it to us to begin with) so I can't watch any of those things.  Instead, I'm writing on the computer, because it is the one part of the house that I can guarantee more than five-minutes without interruption.

I may need to write off M. Night Shyamalan.  I have this amazing Alfred Hitchcock box set from Universal in the basement.  You might have seen it.  It's the one with the felt box and it has the infamous Hitchcock silhouette embossed in the side.  On those documentaries, a young M. Night Shyamalan provides a lot of special features about Hitchcock's films.  He made these special features when he was a young up-and-comer.  The connection that I was making is that Shyamalan was going to be the next Hitchcock.  He had The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable under his belt.  His control of the camera was something we hadn't really seen in a while and his stories were just oozing with suspense.  But as he kept making movies, he became more and more of a joke.  His films were largely gimmicky and people stopped talking about him as if he was a marketable property.  I think he lost all of his street cred when it came to Lady in the Water.  I waste all of this digital space to get to the point that I stuck with him for far longer than I really should have.  For a long time, I thought that Lady in the Water was wildly under-appreciated.  (Unappreciated?  I'm not feeling like writing, but I add all this nonsense to give you a hint into my headspace.) 

Maybe it was the fact that I tend to watch Shyamalan's films now as filler on DVD or streaming and almost immediately forget them that brings me to this point.  I acknowledge that there is a glut of talent behind the camera.  But also...these movies, guys.  They're not great.  How does someone go from the cinematic canon into fodder that actively bores me?  The concept of Old has something there.  To Shyamalan's credit, he actually cites a graphic novel (or does IMDB?) as his inspiration for Old.  I mean, from an allegorical perspective, finding a beach that makes people age a lifetime in a day is something that could be talked about.  It's just that this movie wants to do two very different things.  It 1) wants to be cinematically magnificent and talk about deep things and 2) wants to be the popcorniest horror movie imaginable.  Now, with The Sixth Sense, he accomplished that.  I can't deny that The Sixth Sense, without the context of cinematic history, managed to change the landscape of film.  But now he's trying and it sucks.  I'm sorry.  This movie was dumb.  It was so dumb.  And it had no reason to be so dumb.  It had great actors and pretty solid cinematography.  It had a message that tried to transcend its genre.  But at the end of the day, this is a cornball movie.

I want to approach it from an allegorical perspective first.  Shyamalan has this mystery behind the beach.  Instead of simply being a supernatural phenomenon, there's a clear conspiracy woven throughout the film.  There's the light from the hills.  There's the fact that the van driver clearly wants to strand them on this island.  It's all this stuff that screams, "Oooh, there's something deeper."  And that something deeper is a freshman-level ethics course.  It's that old chestnut of killing a few people for the good of humanity.   Each person (family member) on this beach has something wrong with them.  Because the beach allows people to age a lifetime in a day, each test medication that they've secretly ingested can provide a trial time of 24 hours instead of 70 years.  Fun.  But ultimately a philosophical question that we don't have a lot of time to think about.  Like, that's its own movie.  Heck, we've seen that movie before.  I'm flashing back to a movie from the '90s that was named something like Drastic Measures.  (It wasn't named that, but I would have been really impressed if my memory allowed for something like that to cement when I can't even remember my garage code.)  But there's the notion of the importance of a moment.  Because I value vulnerability so much, I have to share that I'm convinced that I'm going to die before I grow old.  I've thought about this so much that I've actually kind of made a dark peace with it.  But there's the bittersweet element of the film of being able to watch children grow up.  There's the notion that it could be a metaphor for the fact that life goes by too fast and even the time that we're dealt on Earth is ultimately unfair.  That's all cool.  Heck, Shyamalan even touches on that stuff.

And that's where the movie is kind of cool.  Shyamalan has a little bit of a fun with both the literal and figurative idiom "Time heals all wounds."  Yeah, it's a gross-out moment when they remove Prisca's ridiculous tumor and she heals in seconds.  But it also is this great moment where Guy and Prisca work through some real problems in moments because they're aware of their own mortality.  Yeah, it's a little bit of fantasy to think that two people could work out tons of marital trauma in moments, but that's also saying something about the value of something being finite. That's the best part of the movie.  Shyamalan does some great stuff when the kids realize that being an adult simply means being a kid in an adult's body.  It is such a choice to not have the characters act wildly immature despite being mentally six-years-old.  When the two kids are in their 50s on the beach, they simply seem carefree rather than snotty.  It's great.  Yeah, the notion that adults have no idea what they are doing is one that I've heard before, but this does a nice job with subtlety.  

But then everything else is just a sledgehammer of "Shouldn't we experiment with the format as much as possible?"  When plotting this story out, Shyamalan must have asked every question about what would happen with rapid aging.  And then he just ignored a ton of his rules.  There are so many loopholes in the Old format that the best advice for people watching the movie is just to ignore it and realize that he's trying to make something that could be very dry and nuanced a popcorn film.  Like, every stupid scenario is played out with this group of strangers on the beach.  Because there's a fine line between aging and entropy that is playing out and Shyamalan just picks the rule that makes the movie more insane.  Removing a tumor on the beach?  Sure.  Let's do that.  Instant healing?  Why not?  But the most insane thing in the world is the decision for the real little kids who are the beach to have sex and instantly get pregnant.  That moment...come on.  It's such a bro-moment.  He wanted to film it so bad that he just completely forgot that he was making a movie that was meant to be a thinker and decided to go with the "Wouldn't it be cool?"  And you know what?  It wasn't cool.  It was stupid.  We don't have time to absorb why characters make choices?  I mean, where did those kids learn about their own bodies fast enough to get to that point?  Also, are we forgetting that menstruation exists?  If time works the way it does on this beach and that this girl matured super-fast, how about the rest of the stuff that comes along with pregnancy?  It's a lot of stupid, real fast.

Then there's the attempts to be relevant.  Shyamalan must have been a real awkward kid because his treatment of race is absolutely silly.  I'm sorry, I can't get over the dumb name of the rapper.  The hip hop artist calls himself "Mid-Sized Sedan"?  Goodness me.  I know that Shyamalan isn't White, but he's making his work for an audience that is.  It's so minimizing of a culture.  It's also a joke that I think we are way past.  Once the year 2000 hit, we needed to move on from that absolutely stupid joke.  I get that the Nicholson-Brando thing was something that he took from his own father's dementia, the idea that there wasn't this discussion about the racial tension of the film is odd.  Like, he wanted to include it without building the necessary stuff.  It's pointing to a cultural problem without actually thinking.  Golly, I hate to use this phrase because I find the term abhorrent, but I can see how this might be virtue signaling versus actually doing anything good.  It reminds me of when students make videos for class and really stress their own views.  Art is meant to be challenging, but I think it has to be challenging for the filmmaker as well as its audience.

I honestly left the movie thinking, "Boy, that was really dumb."  It never looked great, but I heard good things.  There wasn't much appealing and it actually made me question if I ever liked M. Night Shyamalan. 

Rated PG-13 for quite a bit of language.  I thought that the movie was going to take the responsible route and replace the s-word with "crap" the entire film, based on the opening scene.  That went out the window pretty quickly.  It mirrors the video games, which swear more than they probably should as well.  There's also violence and death, but similar in tone to something like National Treasure or Pirates of the Caribbean.  

DIRECTOR:  Ruben Fleischer

What?  I really like the video games!  Does that make me a bad person?  I mean, I knew better than to get excited about Uncharted the movie.  This was one of those movies that was over-the-top affected by Covid and the studio system.  I'm not saying it is even a bad movie because, by gum, I enjoyed it.  But I also know that it definitely isn't one of those great films.  Heck, if we get a sequel, which the movie itself desperately wants based on those after-credit sequences, even then I don't think it will drum up the attention it so desperately wants.  But I'll say this...this movie isn't awful.

The odd thing is that I was against the casting of Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.  I mean, I'm kind of right with that decision.   I thought that most of my dislike of the movie was going to come towards Tom Holland, whom I love, but don't see as Nathan Drake.  I honestly got behind Tom Holland as Nathan Drake (mainly because he wasn't being as Spider-Many as I thought he would be).  As the film progressed, I completely forgot that I didn't like that casting decision.  (Note:  I'm a big fan of Nathan Fillion as Nathan Drake, as proven by this very expensive fan short.) It's just that Tom Holland is so young.  So I thought that maybe this was going to be an origin story for Nathan Drake.  After all, the games do that.  Every so often, Naughty Dog --the creators of the Uncharted series --would show a flashback of young Nathan Drake, explaining how he got into the mess he is in today.  Well, this isn't quite the origin story in the sense that Nathan's origin is still kind of thin.  This is meant to be the Nathan Drake of the games and I steadily grew cool with that, knowing that they were appealing to a younger market.  Nah, my real issue came with Mark Wahlberg as Sully.  I mean, I like the Sully of the film that Wahlberg played (I'm giving you all kinds of conflicting information here!), but that's not Sully.  Really, the film presents Wahlberg as Nathan-Drake-before-Nathan-Drake.  Sully was always the guy in the chair; the guy in the plane.  He's occasionally in levels with you, but his skill lies in the fact that he's your escape plan.  Not so much in the movie.

I don't know why that matters to me.  I think it comes from the idea that Sully is meant to act both as father and friend to Nathan.  There are elements of that in the movie, to be sure.  But Nathan is far more mature than Sully is throughout the film.  If anything, Sully's journey through the course of this movie is to grow up because of his time with Nathan.  The more I think about it, the more I think that only Sully grows while Nathan stands still.  Sully acts as the gatekeeper to adventure for Nathan.  Nathan, who leads a life more exciting than mine, but less exciting than Indiana Jones, is inducted into a world where his life is on the line throughout the film.  The understanding is that, without meeting Sully, Nathan would never become this great treasure hunter that can lead a franchise into cinema history.  (I don't think that's happening, but I can't blame Sony for trying.)  But that also doesn't ring quite true for me either.  Nathan robs the girl (who I thought was going to be Elena and I should probably slow down on my nerding out over video games) and Sully, in turn, robs him.  Nathan has no difficulty breaking and entering into Sully's apartment.  If anything, he's remarkably comfortable with it.  While Sully still acts as a gatekeeper, it is almost like Nathan could have gotten into this adventure without Sully.  After all, Sam has been sending him clues to this treasure (which requires this suspension of disbelief to make it work).  It's almost like he was destined for this adventure.  Sully was just there to bounce jokes off of.

The odd result is that the film is overtly Uncharted.  Maybe this version of Nathan Drake doesn't tell as many jokes and is more pubescent than suave, but it definitely is Uncharted.  But it carves its own path, despite lifting some of the best set pieces from the video games.  Uncharted is an odd choice for a movie.  I thought this back in the day.  For once, I'm going to say that Sony was mostly successful with the final product.  But Uncharted, by itself, is epically cinematic.  There's a reason that a film nerd really gets into these games.  I really like story driven games.  It's why I never really get into multiplayer games.  I need a really intense story to keep me moving.  But Uncharted as a video game series already models itself more off of movies than it does video games.  I remember watching Max Payne, a vehicle which I now remember also starred Mark Wahlberg.  Max Payne was tonally perfect to the game and yet was an absolutely abhorrent film.  Like, it was really bad.  So how does Uncharted work when Max Payne failed.  If you asked me a decade ago, I would say that video game movies can't work, but after animated efforts like Castlevania and that League of Legends show (which I haven't watched) have been such successes, coupled with Detective Pikachu, we know that isn't true.  With Max Payne, everything was an info dump.  As much as the film conveyed the complex plot of a game, there wasn't that sense of earning any of that information.  It was just given to me, unearned.  While Uncharted does a lot of that, the action sequences seemed to be choreographed to keep pace with the fights of the game.  What happens is what happens with a good lightsaber fight.  That action sequence is fun in itself, but we are rewarded with an important element of plot.  And again, these games were meant to feel like movies.  That helps a lot.

I'm currently playing Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.  (I know I said I would scale back the video game talk. )  That game stars Chloe Frazier, the tritagonist of the film.  Is it bad that I don't remember much about Chloe, despite having seen that her Wiki establishing her all over the Uncharted timeline.  There's something glorious about her story in the film in the sense that it doesn't end up clean for Chloe at all.  It's odd that protagonist, Nathan Drake, has so little growth in this film, that the secondary and tertiary characters are the ones presented with internal conflicts.  But Chloe starts the film fairly damaged as a person.  She is the personification of distrust.  She is the rebel explorer archetype through and through.  She's this foil for Sully, who ultimately overcomes his internal conflict.  But we root more for Chloe, who is actually angry with the life that she has chosen.  We see her warm to Nathan throughout the film.  Nathan's innocence reminds her of the joys of treasure hunting and she does owe him for saving her life, despite multiple betrayals on her part.  But she has that moment we've seen in a bunch of films where she betrays him one last time.  It's expected that she would pull a Han Solo and come back into battle, acknowledging that her life of distrust is over.  Instead, she leaves the film completely emptyhanded.  It's such a great moment not because of anything that's done with it, but in the sheer understanding that it exists.  One of the likable characters gets a less than stellar ending and that's cool.

Can I talk about one scene that was toppling over in my brain since watching it?  A lot of the sequences of this film have been lifted from other Uncharted games.  Heck, Nolan North, the voice of Nathan Drake in the games, even comments on the fact that one scene is directly from Uncharted 3 in his cameo in the film.  But the one sequence that is totally new (as far as I remember) is the helicopters lifting the pirate ships away.  It's this blockbuster, over-the-top sequences that had me giggling because of its absurdity.  But I have to step back.  The only reason it struck me as totally bonkers is the fact that it was new.  When I play the games, the insanity of the sequences is what keeps me coming back to the games.  For some reason, my brain never questions them when I playing the game.  I'm always impressed, of course.  But I never think "no way" when playing them.  But the more I think about the climactic action sequence, I have to admit...it would really fit within the world of the games.  

Okay, games games games.  I'm not that obsessed with the Uncharted franchise.  I do like them.  But it also is fun to write about stuff that I'm knowledgeable about.  I'm sure this film probably wouldn't hit right to an audience unfamiliar with the franchise and that's a real problem.  My wife tuned out five minutes in.  My son wanted to play Kirby on the Switch.  So I ended up watching it alone.  Yeah, I was guffawing and exploding with applause from time-to-time.  But I can see how this would just be a knock-off of a genre that has already been exploited so many times.  Yeah, it's not as good as Indiana Jones, or National Treasure.  But it is as good as Tomb Raider, if not better.  Sure, maybe games shouldn't be films for the most part.  But this movie does more right than wrong.  I wouldn't hate a sequel, even if I'm the only one watching it.

R for language, sex stuff (that's probably the best way I can put it), and just inappropriate behavior.  My wife pointed out that there's a lot of drinking going on in this movie.  I can't fight that.  Even look at the picture above.  They're drinking.  They drink a lot and no one ever really comments on it.  There isn't nudity in this movie, but the sexuality is definitely a thing.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Jason Orley

I'm having a productive day.  It's 9:43 at night and my son is monopolizing the PS5.  I just finished a book.  I changed all the burned out bulbs in the house.  I put away my comics.  I folded laundry.  I still have Covid.  These are things that happened today.  But if I can knock out one blog today, I'll feel really good about myself.  After all, I have a couple of movies under my belt and I don't want to fall too far behind.  But I also have that issue where I'm writing about a rom-com again.  I don't know what it is about the rom-com that makes me spiral into the same territory time and again.  But that doesn't mean that I don't have anything to say.

The best part of I Want You Back is that it doesn't really break any of the rules that a rom-com tends to ignore.  There are consequences for bad behavior and I kind of love that.  Trust me, I have this long diatribe that I tell once a year to a room of students who aren't allowed to leave until the bell about how the last Harry Potter needed to have consequences for bad actions that never came. I lead an empty life, hence the bragging about lightbulbs.  But I like that as sympathetic as the two protagonists are, I'm glad that they aren't allowed to get away with stuff just because they are likable.  Yeah, they are forgiven for the most part, but that's a very different scenario then just accepting what they had done.  I think the neoclassical precepts are something that have warped me into becoming something either more or less than human because I need rules to my stories.  Peter is genuinely a good person.  Emma is a little more morally ambiguous, but hasn't done anything overtly evil.  But when the two of them decides to conspire to trick their respective others back, that does make them kind of the bad guys of the story.  

I mean, what is a bad guy in a rom-com?  Often, the real bad guys tend to be these significant others that cheat on their spouses.  But I Want You Back allows these characters to be sketchy without fully going out of bounds.  I really like this.  But often, our main characters have some kind of disgusting trait that they learn to purge by the end of the film because they've been overwhelmed by the power of love.  (I'm thinking of all those tropes of dating for the wrong reason and then really falling in love.)  These stories live and die on the notion of dramatic irony.  With the case of I Want You Back, we know that these two have created a web of lies and relationships that will eventually come back to bite them in the butt.  While my guess of exactly how this movie was going to play out wasn't exactly accurate, we all saw the consequence of these lies succeeding.  But the film doesn't take the A-B path that I expected it to.  These characters, who have done something wrong, don't really autocorrect their bad behavior, leading to hopeless mad love.  When Peter gets Anne back, I thought that it would instantly be something that would weigh heavily on his heart. Not so much.  He actually enjoys the spoils of his labor.  I acknowledge that he wishes that he could have Emma in his life, but that isn't a dealbreaker for him.  It's only when he meets her again and things start falling apart that he begins to like Emma for real.  It's not like he was pining for her.  He simply realized how Anne paled in comparison to Emma.

Can we talk about how an ending like this one is the only one that works for a good rom-com?  I don't want to see how madly in love they are because it has become trite.  I think the smartest thing is to do what I Want You Back did: leave it up to the audience.  (My wife is convinced that there might have been a post-credit sequence.  I actually turned it off too early because I normally wanted to check, but I had to make sure that the kid was asleep way past his bedtime.)  It has this great callback that may seem a little hackneyed. But that's what rom-coms are.  Everything is a bit hackneyed.  But that actually brings me to my main epiphany.

I'm the last person coming to this realization, but a good rom-com lives or dies by its cast.  It's probably why I hate so many rom-coms.  So many rom-coms are filled with people that do rom-coms.  It's especially why I hate Hallmark movies.  (Yeah, I said it.  I'll say it again.  I know that there is a devoted fandom and I tell people to like what they like...but there are so many good movies out there so what are you doing?) The reason that we picked this movie is because of Charlie Day and Jenny Slate.  They're really funny and they have this amazing comic timing.  It makes it tough for me to say if they had chemistry or not.  I'm going to say that they did, but I also really wanted them to have chemistry.  I may have accepted that they would make a good couple and not actually been a good couple.  But because they have this specific brand of humor, it really works that the movie embraced it.  I'm not saying that Charlie Day was playing his character from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  I'm saying that Charlie Day likes having his films be just a little bit R-rated and a little bit weird.  And that's what this movie is.  When something absolutely bananas happens in the movie, it's accepted because they leads imbue its audience with the understanding that bizarre things can happen.  Also, the world of rom-coms tends to be completely divorced from reality.  This is just a thing.

I have to accept that there will probably never be another Annie Hall.  But there are La La Lands out there and that's something new.  What makes a good rom-com is that it isn't like the massive pool of other movies.  I don't know if I Want You Back necessarily breaks new ground, but it also isn't directly ripping off other rom-coms directly.  Sure, there's a little bit of When Harry Met Sally in there that I can't ignore.  But what actually happens in the film is just the right amount of surprising to make it fun.  That's not even something that happens in rom-coms.  That is just something for comedies.  Watching Jenny Slate make her way through "Somewhere That's Green" is just precious as get-out.  It's this combination of hilarious and sweet that is just this tonal perfection that makes me both reaffirm Slate as a comedian and impress me as an actor.  It's so good.

​It's not an amazing movie, but it has heart in all of the right places.