Not rated, but let's pretend that it is an R for language at minimum.  Mostly, the movie is incredibly immature, relying on pee and poop jokes occasionally.  While the film is all about kung fu and the violence that stems out of kung fu, most of the violence is pretty innocent...except when the bad guy uses his kung fu. Then it gets a little brutal.  Still, the movie is aimed at a teenage sensibility.   It's crass when it wants to be, but never really tonally leaves a goofy place.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR: Chi-Hwa Chen

Do you know what?  Part of me is kind of jazzed to write this.  I have a hand covered in blisters, so this is mild torture.  But I'm home now and this feels like a productive return to normal.  Also, I'm starting with an absolute cracker of a goofy kung fu movie. It's so funny that, for all of Criterion's hoity-toitiness, they really love Jackie Chan.  (Note:  I'm not sure whether to write his name out of "Jackie" or "Jacky" based on credits in these movies.) I remember finding out that Supercop was on Criterion LaserDisc and that blew my mind.  Now that I own the Police Story box set and have started this Jackie Chan box set, I'm glad that Criterion can be a little cool about goofy movies.

If you were ever going to sell me on the notion that I was going to like a box set of kung fu movies, naming the first one in the set Half a Loaf of Kung Fu was perfect.  Immediately, I knew that I was going to get something absolutely absurd and corny, which sometimes works when it comes to kung fu.  Samurai movies, considering what I have seen, normally take themselves pretty seriously. In my head, Jackie Chan has a lot to do with the directing of this film, despite the fact that it is credited with Chi-Hwa Chen.  But Jackie Chan is credited as the martial arts director and from what I get about this guy, he's a big fan of not taking his amazing craft too seriously.  I know, down the line, Jackie Chan will get into some pretty serious films.  But I'm always in the mindset that he's the guy who loves making stuff that will get a bloopers track at the end of a movie.  And the opening of Half a Loaf really establishes exactly what the purpose of the film is. 

The beginning of the movie parodies every other marital arts movie imaginable.  When I saw the Zatoichi send up, I knew that I was going to be in good hands.  I didn't recognize all of them.  While I've probably seen more kung fu movies than my friends, it's pretty safe to say that I haven't seen a lot.  I gotta say, the opening of the movie is fun.  But it does kind of send an interesting message, potentially accidentally.  The opening of the movie, with all of its jokes, kind of feels like the filmmakers don't really treat Half a Loaf of Kung Fu like a real movie. As fun as it is, it really has nothing to do with the movie itself.  Now, Half a Loaf is unabashedly silly.  But most of the movie exists diagetically within its own universe.  I say "Most" because every time that there hasn't been a funny bit on screen for a while, the movie likes to remind you that you are watching a movie.  Much like the Genie in Aladdin, there are anachronistic references that make no sense within the universe you are watching.  Some of them are winks.  For example, a non-diagetic track might play, winking at the audience that Jiang views himself as Popeye the Sailor Man.  It's a gag, but at least it's only winked at.  But later in the movie, the movie straight up name drops Zatoichi and Bruce Lee.  Considering that the movie is meant to be a period piece, it's really weird that the movie decides to get that meta.

I don't mind the movie being funny.  It's perfectly in line with my expectations of Jackie Chan.  But the movie really has a hard time defining what is appropriate and what can just be too silly.  The movie often feels like just a screwball action comedy.  I love when the movie does this. But then there are times when the movie almost becomes a parody film.  It's in these moments where I feel like the movie is just doing bits that kind of irk me a little.  There's a moment in the beginning of the film where Jiang is dreaming of learning kung fu.  It kind of works.  It establishes the character's motivations, so the appearance of a kung fu scene this early in the film has an in-universe explanation for why it is happening.  Okay.  That's fine. I also know that this movie is promising half a loaf of kung fu, so we can't wait for Jiang to learn kung fu by the final act.  So we get this sequence where Jackie Chan is just wrecking dudes with silly kung fu.

The problem with this sequence is that it stops the movie narratively so that Jackie Chan can do bits.  I can't stand the bits, guys.  If something funny happens during the course of the narrative, I'm all for it.  There's a lot of it here.  I applaud that movie.  But there are a lot of times where the movie is almost trying to inject more laughs into the movie.  These are the scenes that really get under my skin.  I've always vocally complained about adding silly music to silly sequences.  There's a lot of that in this movie.  Maybe this is the difference between funny and zany. I like funny.  I hate zany.  There's a lot of zany.

But what Half a Loaf of Kung Fu does right is showcase how much of a genius and a talent Jackie Chan is.  Honestly, Jackie Chan is the still living Gene Kelly.  My musical tastes tend to lean towards the Gene Kelly / Fred Astaire stuff.  Gene Kelly beats Fred Astaire, by the way.  I don't care if you disagree.  My arguement is that Gene Kelly made his physical talent into something that was both impressive and hilarious.  The opening to Singin' in the Rain where he's doing the "Fit as a Fiddle" bit is incredible and funny as the day is long.  Do you know what else that applies to?   Jackie Chan in his fights at the end with the young beggar. They're both about tight choreography coupled with comic timing to make something that almost no one else in the world can do.  That's what makes Jackie Chan Gene Kelly.  While I would love to say that we live in a world that appreciates people like Gene Kelly, Jackie Chan understood that sometimes fighting can also be a comedic artform. 

As fun as Half a Loaf of Kung Fu is, it has so many insane choices to it.  I dare you to tell me what a new Simpsons episode is about based on the first act of the episode. The beginning of The Simpsons is always a mislead.  The beginning of "Das Bus", the Lord of the Flies episode, starts with Bart and Lisa staying up all night to watch The Ten Commandments.  The same structure is used for Half a Loaf.  Because these movies are showcases for physical comedy, Jiang has to get into all kinds of unrelated scrapes to keep the plot going forward.  (I'm typing terribly today.)  The plot of the movie is that a silly con man wants to learn kung fu and does whatever he can to learn.  But golly, there are so many plots floating around this movie that I'm not quite sure what constitutes a B-plot int his movie.  If you are taking the side stories seriously, you are a better man than me because I couldn't tell you who was related to whom and what the goal was.  The movie has a Battle of the Five Armies attitude because the it couldn't be bothered to solve the problems individually.  It's just so much and I don't actually care that much.

And that's the best way to watch this movie!  I know.  It's a cop out.  The movie doesn't take itself seriously enough.  The plot is all over the place.  But the movie is fun.  I actually had a really good time with it, even though I was groaning through most of the humor.  It's because it is a showcase of talent, pure and simple.  I think I'm going to like the box set for the same reason.  It's just really impressive kung fu choreography with a likable lead.  That's what makes Jackie Chan a star.  It doesn't have to be a great movie to be a great time.

PG-13.  In my mind, this was one of those R-rated movies with all kinds of creepy gross stuff.  Nope.  Nothing all that offensive.  The parental advisory on the plane said that this movie had language.  Even that, I don't remember.  There's a pretty intense gunfight that was grounded enough to be a bit upsetting.  But, honestly, not much happens in this movie outside of blood.  People do die, but it never stays in the moment long enough to make it too upsetting.  I suppose a child in danger is a trope that could raise a few flags.  Still, PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Nichols

Normally, when I take a Trans-Atlantic flight, I have a whole bunch of movies to write about.  Nope.  Not this time.  I knew that I didn't want to write a blog ten days after having seen a movie, let alone multiple movies.  I read books.  I know that this is a blog called "Literally Anything: Movies", but books are great too.  So I watched Midnight Special...yesterday.  It's fresh.  And it's the only movie I watched.  (I was thinking of watching other things, but I was being a dad and even Midnight Special had to get paused a million times. 

Midnight Special, since its release in 2016, has always been my ignored plane film.  I keep finding it on airplanes and I've always put it off.  It's something that has itched the back of my brain forever, mainly because the aesthetics of the trailer seemed rad.  And for a minute, I thought that Midnight Special was going to be one of my favorite discoveries.  After the first twenty minutes, I turned around to my wife and said, "This movie is going to be rad."  From that opening, I thought that this was going to be one of the best films I had seen in a while.  It set up this fun mystery involving a cult and numbers.  The vibe of the movie felt very A24 without the gore element.  It felt sleepy and dramatic and I was on board.  But then the movie started answering questions.  Sometimes, I want a movie to give me every answer imaginable.  I think Midnight Special did better with a sense of mystery and should have held it a little closer to the vest.  Once we found out what was going on, it was just Starman or E.T..

I didn't mean to make a Ghostbusters 2 reference, but those movies basically have the same plot.  A group of people, against the wishes of the U.S. government, have to move an extraterrestrial / supernatural creature to a special spot in the country so that they can return home. Cool.  These movies have legs because they're a sci-fi road movie.  With Midnight Special, it became about the family that came together to save Alton, the Starman of this movie.  I'm just going to get the spoiler out of the way because I don't really have the time to dance around it.  Alton's big reveal is that he comes from an alternate plane of reality.  Even though he was the child of these two human people, he's from somewhere special and technologically advanced.  (I might unpack the trans or euthanasia allegories in a second.) Sometimes, we care about the alien.  Sometimes we care about the group.  Honestly, Alton isn't a very fun part to play.  Like E.T., there's the fear that he's dying the entire time.  But we care more about the relationship between Roy, Lucas, and Sarah.  If you are really invested, you also care about Dr. Sevier.  Midnight Special does something a little laudable.  It makes you deal with trauma.

With Starman or E.T., it's very much an adventure.  With Starman, Karen Allen is on this romantic journey with this otherworldly person.  She, too, is recovering from trauma, but her adventure with Starman is bringing her out of her trauma.  E.T. is about coming out of your shell as well.  The kid finds a friend and ultimately the adventure makes him a better person.  Midnight Special is about emotional survival. There's a lifetime of trauma that these characters are reeling from, especially the last two years where Alton was being raised by a cult leader.  We don't see much of that.  Instead, Roy and Sarah find fleeting moments of happiness where they actually have what they wished for.  For the course of these three days, they have a semblance of a family.  Sure, that family is in constant chaos, on the run from the law and worried about the death of their son.  But they have moments of tenderness.  But these moments aren't making them better.  If anything, these moments are so imbued with pain that they seem to be dying parallel deaths to Alton.  

Yes, Roy becomes a better person by the end.  But this isn't some grand moment for him.  This is about putting his son to rest.  We understand that Roy loves Sarah, but we never get to see it because they are in triage mode.  And, unlike the other stories, we know that there are going to be real world consequences to the events of the story.  Like, it's weird that Elliot (that's his name!) isn't locked up in a facility for the rest of his natural life.  Roy knows he's going to jail. Lucas walks around the entire movie knowing that he's given his life up for his friend's kid.  There's also the odd consequence of defining oneself in the shadow of knowing that this was either going to end in death or prison. Lucas has to turn on Roy because he's trying to hold onto a morality beyond the concept of consequences.  Roy is single-minded.  He has to get Alton to this location or else Alton will be vaguely destroyed.  (It sounds like I'm dumping on this concept.  This is one of my favorite vaguaries that stays through the film.  I like that Alton's alternatives are undefined, but terrible.) But Lucas won't kill people just for this kid.  He has the understanding that his life is forfeit to this kid, but others didn't sign up for it.  It's pretty interesting.  So it's this kind of stuff that separates Midnight Special from other movies.

But I don't know if it's enough. Like, I really like the character dynamics.  But this specific road movie keeps having the same format.  Also, as cool as Alton's world is, it's not really all that original.  There's this cult out there that has so much promise and we don't really have that paid off like I want.  Also, if we are making a kinda-sorta action movie, the government seems really disorganized in this movie.  Part of that comes from the fact that it is absurd that these three po-dunk former cultists (okay, two cultists and a state trooper) could take down the U.S. government without a real plan.  My big red flag is Dr. Sevier's contribution to the plan.  We get that Adam Driver's performance is something that is worth gleaming onto. The good-natured scientist in the midst of this whole government conspiracy is fun.  But it's weird that he gets carte blanche, enough to walk that kid out of a facility.  Also, I get that Sevier cuffs himself and pretends like he was overpowered, but that doesn't answer a lot of questions.

I said that I would touch on a potential trans or euthanasia allegory and I suppose I kind of have to.  A lot of this feels like me adding something to the narrative, but I also feel like 2016 is a different time to tell this story than the '80s.  Alton is dying.  Roy seems to really be pushing Alton harder than Lucas is.  Lucas is in this world that Alton's survival as he is might be the most important thing.  It's not like Lucas is wrong.  Roy comes across as a huge jerk.  He's holding onto this motive that we don't understand.  As the kid bleeds out of every oriface, we wonder why Roy is not more concerned.  But the movie also stresses that there is no happy ending for Roy or Sarah.  Alton was going to be gone at the end of this journey.  A hospital isn't going to change that.  It seems like Roy's agenda is to have Alton die with dignity.  But then Alton begs to go out into the sun.  Roy seems like that's shortening his life, but he allows Alton to make that decision.  Sure enough, Alton perks up after a sunrise.  (I don't really understand what exactly happened the other times that he was out in the sun.  How much sun does he need?  Is there always a surge of energy with each contact with the sun?  Also, nice Superman comparison in the movie...) But Alton is ultimately asking his parents to let him be the person that he wants to be.  The parents are trying to be protective, but Alton knows what his body needs.  I'm holding your hand a little bit with this one, but it seems like that allegory might be intentional.

I was so jazzed for the first twenty minutes of the movie, but the rest of the movie just fine.  There are a lot of stupid parts and the government seems really bad at what they do.  But it was a pretty movie with a lot of good acting.  I can see why people don't really chat about this movie after it got a little bit of hype.

Not rated, but it is pretty innocent.  I'm going to make a lot of Downton Abbey comparisons.  Well, at least one.   I have that one planned out.  Like Downton Abbey, there's a lot of talk about things that could potentially be scandalous without actual real scandal.  Also, most people's definition of scandal and this movie's definition of scandal are night and day.  There is some smoking and some drinking.  I suppose that people could be offended by that.  Some peopel aren't nice?  Is that something to point out to parents concerned about content in film?

DIRECTOR: Kon Ichikawa

For those who didn't read the MPAA section, this movie is basically Japanese Downton Abbey.  I loved Downton Abbey.  I didn't think that I would.  Despite the fact that I'm a "Literally Anything" kind of movie watcher, I rarely put "elevated romance" as my genre of choice.  But I really got into it.  It seemed like their problems were so different than mine.  Normally, people would consider that off-putting.  But there's something so fascinating about people making bananas choices because there's a hint of blue blood in their family.  

Now, I will say that Downton has honed the elevated romance genre to a sharp point.  If you consider Downton Abbey boring --which I consider a completely valid criticism --then this movie will be even more boring.  For all of the "Who will marry whom?" and "How are we going to keep this offensively large estate in the family?", Downton Abbey is a melodrama that really rides the line of soap opera.  The Makioka Sisters isn't quite that.  There's no evil gay butlers who want you to trip on soap.  There's no Titanic plot.  The closest thing that we get with The Makioka Sisters is a reminder that Japan during World War II was war minded and that's a pretty far stretch.  The Makioka Sisters begs you to pay attention to a lot of dialogue.  If anything, even though this is an adaptation of a novel, it feels like a play because there are long sequences of people just sitting in a room discussing their emotions and who should marry whom.  (It seems weird that I used the phrase "Who should marry whom?" a couple times now.  Honestly, it's proper grammar coupled with the most efficient way to say that idea.  I'm not going to apologize, despite the fact that it sticks out like a sore thumb.)

Mind you, I gave this movie my all.  I paid attention to the whole thing and fully invested myself.  This may be blasphemy to a lot of people, but I watch a lot of my movies while on the treadmill. There's a method to this madness.  I rarely have time to myself, but I do need to get a workout in.  I tend to put on movies that no one else would want to watch with me while on the treadmill. Criterion movies tend to fall into this category.  I would say that The Makioka Sisters is pretty aggressively Criterion.  It's slow and a little bit arty.  This makes both good and bad traits for a Criterion film and let me explain that.  It's great because the treadmill makes you focus on the film.  There's no looking at your phone on the treadmill.  Also, the movie is meant to sweep you away from focusing on the misery that is the treadmill.  But also, it's not so good of a movie for the treadmill because treadmill movies should really force your attention.  But I did pay attention and there's a couple of elements that I don't get.  I would love to blame 1930's Japan for these problems, but Ichikawa does an excellent job of filling in on social norms just using context to explain away parts.  

The thing that I didn't really get was all about Tatsuo.  I think it's Tatsuo.  First of all, Tatsuo's name is Makioka.  He's married to the older sister. Why do all of the sisters have the last name "Makioka"?  Secondly, and I really don't know what I'm doing with this one, is what is Tatsuo's relationship to either Yukiko or Taeko?  There are times where the movie paints him as a saint and there are times where the movie paints  him as a philandering deadbeat.  I'm not sure what to make of this character because of the Downtonness of it all.  Because people don't actually say what they mean in these upper crust societies, there's a lot of stiff upper lip about how things are actually terrible. If I'm not mistaken (and I probably am because all of the names elude me outside of IMDB right now), Tatsuo seemed to be putting on the moves with Yukiko.  Maybe it was Taeko.  I don't know.  I'm a bad blogger.  He always seemed partially relieved when Yukiko would reject her suitors.  When the movie ends, he's sitting and confessing that he is sad that "a woman that he loves" is going to get married.  When he's called out on being too young to be a father to such a woman, he just looks sadly out.

If everything that I think is true about Tetsuo, are we supposed to feel bad?  I mean, he's married to one of the sisters.  (Again, I'm such a bad blogger sometimes.) No one treats him badly.  He's just a guy who seems nice, but also cheats on his wife?  And the movie isn't really about him.  The movie is aptly named The Makioka Sisters because they're the ones who matter in this movie.  The reason that I'm not all that up on Tatsuo and his shannigans is because he plays such a small role in the movie.  Heck, dudes don't play a big part int his movie to begin with.  The most fascinating dude in the movie is Okuhata, the villain of the piece, and he's a caricature of a human being.

But let me tell you why I love Okuhata in this movie.  It's because I find Taeko the interesting one of the group.  She's the youngest child and the bad seed of the family. Taeko is the lynchpin of this movie.  First of all, we all know so many Taekos.  This was the most realistic thing I had ever seen in a movie and I just started listing people who were Taekos in real life.  But if Taeko didn't put a timer on everything happening in the movie, the rest of the family would be insufferable.  I mean, I love these characters and I'm all about trying to find a perfect mate for Yukiko.  But without Taeko constantly throwing a spanner into the works, I would find this movie incredibly whiny.  Let's be as clear as I can.  Even with Taeko, their real problems are pretty hilariously small.  They live in a world where they are marrying for status.  There's subtext that the Makioka's were once a big deal, but are slightly Grey Gardensing it up a bit.  (I'm going to start just taking movie titles and adding "-ing" to give my blog a youthful vibe.) I find that fascinating.  Like, we don't really know what happened to the greatness of this once epic family and yet, without a sense of whining, take these marriages incredibly seriously.

I don't know.  The movie isn't fun.  It is incredibly boring.  Do you know what else?  I don't even care.  There are a lot of movies that I just watch that are boring as sin and I don't even fight that. This is one of those movies.  Almost nothing happens.  One guy just dies out of nowhere.  An ear infection just kills him.  There's no lead up to this guy dying.  He just gets too close to Taeko and dies.  Also, the family is extorted for something that they didn't do and that problem just seems to go away.  Again, it might be part of the film's attempt to show Tetsuo's silent suffering.  Regardless, I just kind of liked it.   But again, I don't always hate boring. I found myself recommending it to my mother-in-law at Father's Day brunch.  That's pretty high praise, right?

PG-13 for language, suggestive behavior and comments on sexuality, teenage drinking, and general overall cruelty.  Like, it feels more offensive than it actually is.  (And for some, it probably isn't offensive at all.)  It's a movie that both glorifies and chides teenage drama and stereotypes.  It's probably not appropriate for the very young.  Also, while I do believe that elements of Mean Girls is representative of high school culture, it doesn't really give a lot of nuance to social elements. 

DIRECTORS: Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr.

Yeah, out of all of the photos that I found from the new Mean Girls musical, I chose an image of Tina Fey as an AP Calc teacher.  What?  I like Tina Fey and every other photo made me feel like a creeper.  Also, the more I look at that photo, the more I question the effectiveness of that board.  I'm one of those teachers who fought to keep my chalkboard, but I'm also aware of chalkboard real estate.  Where is she doing any work on that board?  Don't waste perfectly good space with posters on a board!  What is that?  Anyway.

The past few (maybe just two) are going to be blogs about paradoxes.  Again, two things are true for me.  1) I hate when movies become Broadway shows for the most part.  2) I will absolutely watch those things and don't understand the fear that people have about watching musicals.  The first point I want to explain first.  If someone handed me tickets to Back to the Future: The Musical, I would gleefully run to see it.  But that being said, it seems kind of...disappointing.  I want new content.  I don't want the old content with songs.  Part of it always feels like going to Disney World or something and seeing a staged production of one the animated classics.  It's fun and all, but I rarely am satisfied.  I don't feel like I've grown at all.  Instead, I want something that makes me think.  Instead, I kind of get to see how they adapted things that I already know about.  The entire time, I'm just waiting for Regina George get hit by a bus.

I suppose for the die hard fans of something, it could be fascinating to see another interpretation of something that is so beloved.  Now, I'm one of the suckers who went to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway.  I didn't go to New York to see it.  We were in New York and that's the show that I wanted to see, despite the abysmal reviews.  Now, maybe I took my disappointment from that absolute trainwreck of a musical and applied it to all future musical adaptations of films.  (I get it.  "Spider-Man" is more of an IP than it is a movie adaptation.  You know where I'm going with this.  Stop being so ornery.) But I'm a guy who loves Spider-Man.  I thought it would be really neat to see Spider-Man fly through the air, despite all of the stuntman deaths.  It's just that I was more disappointed than someone who came in just to see a musical.  So who is Mean Girls the musical for?

Musical nerds.  Don't get me wrong.  That's a bigger demographic than die hard Mean Girls fans.  (By the way, I'm going back and forth on this one.  Should I have rewatched the 2004 Mean Girls before watching the musical or did I get the better experience forgetting a lot of the jokes of the film?) 2004's Mean Girls is an amazing movie that I've only seen once.  Trust me. There are a lot of movies that I've only seen once. The Mean Girls musical movie is...okay.  That sounds like I really didn't like it.  (I mean, the word is "okay".  It should be pretty clear, but I already read my tone as being dismissive.)  I think there's something incredibly fun about movie musicals for the most part.  I mean, that's not absolute.  I still don't really like The Producers movie musical.  In terms of hitting all of the spectacle and catchy tunes that a movie musical should, it nails it.  The performances are great.  The style and the flair are pretty darned good.  I'll even go as far as to say that some of the songs add some depth to the characters.  I'll give extra points to Cady's songs, which help her character quite a bit.  Cady's entire personality before meeting the plastics is one of silence.  She wants to blend into the background.  Mostly, intentional silence does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to character development.  But since musical songs tend to be non-diagetic, she's allowed to say a bunch of stuff that just directly characterizes her.

Since it is so effective with musical nerds, what is the problem?  Honestly, not much if you just want a good time.  It's just that adding a movie that stands really well on its own and then committing a lot of it to a musical, something gets lost in terms of being a classic.  I remember that the reviews for the newer Mean Girls movie musical were not exactly spectacular.  I can see why.  Mean Girls, for all of the showmanship, loses a lot of the punch that the original one had.  I keep going back to this image in these blogs, so I apologize.  There's something a little punk rock about the original Mean Girls.  It took the aesthetics of Disney Channel teen comedies and said something completely subversive.  That's something that Tina Fey and Robert Carlock were really good at.  They smiled while delivering these gut punches.  But 2024's Mean Girls feels like eating candy a lot of the time.  It's a tribute show to when things were a little bit more raw.  The characters feel like they are setting up for these punchlines instead of actually being cutting.  Regina George, while Queen Bee of the original movie, is larger than life.  I guess she's supposed to be, but I don't know how much of that is earned.

One thing I also have a harder time grasping onto is who Regina George as a character is.  I know.  I'm poo-pooing complexity here.  But this Regina George often feels inconsistent.  There are times that she sees, and almost envies, Cady's vulnerability.  But then there are other times that she is a cat playing with a dead mouse.  Partly, this comes from Regina's back story with Janis, an attempt to reclaim one's innocence.  Now, I would love if this was the filmmakers' intentions, but I really just get the vibe that Regina George kind of just becomes what the musical needs her to be.  Don't get me wrong. One of the key concepts of the story is that stereotypes are humanized and, as much as Cady is the hero of the piece, her manipulation of the Plastics inverts the norms of good versus evil.  But this movie doesn't really hit that with any degree of nuance. It's a sledgehammer.  

Maybe there's something to criticize about the main story itself.  Again, I think that the original, for my limited memory of the film, is kind of amazing.  But one thing that the movie really revels in is the idea that, even though villains are villainous, they are human first and foremost.  But one thing that is pretty consistent is that, even though we get to see what made Regina Regina, she is still pretty unlikable.  Like, even in that tender moment when she claims that she's medicated to wazoo, she's still a pretty hateful person.  I'm all over the place with concessions though.  That's true about real life.  We can humanize jerks all day.  They tend to still be jerks, even when they're trying not to be jerks.

Performance wise, it almost all works.  I feel so bad for Busy Phillips though.  Busy Phillips is talented, but she's really in someone else's shadow with this one.  With the other obvious recasting in this movie, the actors are bringing something new to the role because they have to sing.  There's a nice deliniation between the performances where it is hard to compare apples and oranges.  But Mrs. George...has nothing new to add to the character.  She's doing an Amy Poehler impression the entire time.  And Amy Poehler nailed that role so hard that no one could really do much with it besides an impression.  Golly, it's hard to really watch those scenes because that was one person's performance and she's not in this movie. (Although she totally could be.) 

I guess it works.  It just doesn't really stick to the ribs.  It's a movie that I'm already forgetting because I just didn't invest that much in it.  It made me chuckle.  Auli'i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey absolutely steal the film from everyone else.  They're scenes are what make the movie worth watching.  But the rest of the movie is...fine.

TV-PG.  Jim Henson, according to this documentary, is a story of a fundamentally unproblematic man...with the exception of maintaining a healthy work / life balance.   That problem is there.  While this is a celebratory documentary about the guy who made Sesame Street and The Muppets, the Henson family do seem to have unresolved issues with their father's priority with his art over being a present father.  There is a reference to sex and violence, but in the most ironic way imaginable.

DIRECTOR: Ron Howard

Two truths.  1) This is a very touching documentary about a great man who changed the face of entertainment and influenced the cultural zeitgeist in an undeniable way.  2) Disney seems to be in the fluff piece documentaries, even if the guy was probably unimpeachable.  It's not like Ron Howard made a movie that completely avoided controversy.  It just seemed like Jim Henson's life was mostly a softball when it came to making an appreciative documentary.

The funny thing is, I knew what I signed up for.  I was the one who was showing the trailer to anyone who would watch.  There's something about Jim Henson that I think I like more than I actually do.  My dad was mildly obsessed with The Muppets.  Well, he was as obsessed as a reserved man probably was about things.  I remember episodes of The Muppet Show being treated as the apex of family friendly comedy in the house. To a certain extent, I've passed that down to my oldest daughter.  Admittedly, she in the new Muppets camp.  I'm talking about the Jason Segal one.  She's not wrong.  To be a little bit blasphemous, the Jason Segal Muppets movie is probably the funniest thing that the Jim Henson company has ever made.  It seems like I'm really dumping on the guy who created a whole new world of storytelling and changed the way that we think about entertainment.  But I think I probably need to be more honest before I start discussing the ins-and-outs of a documentary that absolutely adores its subject matter.  I'm in the camp of "I get the genius, but not everything that he made was necessarily a homerun." 

The best thing that the documentary does is sell me on the notion that Jim Henson was a genius.  Not only was he a genius, but he was one of them tortured geniuses.  Through intereviews and historical footage, we kind of get this picture of a man who really just wanted to create.  It wasn't necessarily about puppets.  Henson was almost a guy who learned to love his creations after they were created.  Instead, Henson was a guy who was just wired differently.  Sometimes that comes across as awkward or weird.  But mostly, Henson was a guy who wanted to play around with a camera until he saw something he liked.  There's that whole mantra, "If you enjoy what you do for a living, you never work a day in your life." This is where me and Henson are on the same page.  There's something incredibly sympathetic about how Henson views work and art.  Creation, especially when it comes to artistic expression, is seductive as heck.  By the way, the novel is on hold until the school year starts.  As insufferable as the following is, it's true.  Writing, when done under ideal conditions, is one of my favorite things to do.  Often, I find myself filling in moments between other things because I'm trying to avoid becoming Jim Henson.  But Henson understood that he would only really be fulfilled if he did things his way.  It's an odd investment into both himself and his sense of a future. It's why I love this documentary.  It's almost a warning of what could happen if obsession goes too far.

But there's something that's weird about the whole thing.  I think I'm just realizing this now.  As much as the name of this movie is called Idea Man, this movie absolutely be more of a cautionary tale.  I knew that Jim Henson died young.  In my head, it was cancer or something totally unavoidable.  Not so much.  This is the story of a man who worked himself to death.  And yet, it's a celebration of that spirit.  Henson was a guy who worked through pneumonia multiple times.  One of those times killed him.  It's this really weird tone that the movie takes.  (Note:  I started writing this in less than ideal conditions two days ago.  I am now trying to finish, replicating the vibe I had a couple days ago.  I almost guarantee that I'll fail to finish the thought that I had two days ago.)   Lord knows that I am not one to stifle genius or creativity, but there were lots of tortured artists who didn't pneumonia themselves to death.

There's almost a sense of admiration for a man who was so driven to keep working and keep creating that he just died because of his devotion to his work.  I love this guy.  He created amazing works.  But you are almost inhaling the subtext of a group of people who wish that Jim Henson was more self-aware about his priorities.  Brian Henson, throughout this film, is probably the most honest of all of his family about his father's death.  Again, all of this is done out of love, but Brian Henson seems like he would have loved to rewrite his life with a different outcome.  He's a guy who desperately needed a dad.  I get a lot of that out of Lisa Henson as well.  Part of the narrative that I picked up on this story was Henson's poor wife who seemed to understand him better than anyone on the planet, but also refused to march to the beat of his obsessive drum.

The funny thing about all of these comments from me is that Jim Henson genuinely seemed to be a mostly unproblematic person.  But this documentary, for all of its great stuff, kind of irons over the stuff that really was a problem.  There's that old adage in therapy, when people tend to trivialize their own trauma and problems, that people need to understand that their problems are important to them.  It may seem minor in the grand scheme of all of the horrible things out there.  But trauma is trauma and it should be treated as such.  I was a guy who loved Won't You Be My Neighbor? and I had none of these complaints.  But I also think that Fred Rogers was a guy who had different ambitions that kind of reflected the good he put out in the world.  While I love the things that Jim Henson made, there's something entirely too isolated about what he was creating.  Fred Rogers (good human being) was devoted to helping children.  Jim Henson (also good human being) was trying to find an outlet for his creativity.  I think that's probably why I'm a little harsher that some of the rough edges are kind of sanded out for this doc.

I hate that I harped on the negative stuff here because I loved watching this with my kids.  It's one of those things that made me want to rewatch Henson's stuff.  Part of me wanted to crack open some Muppet stuff.  The other part immediately started scheduling a viewing of Labyrinth in the garage.   And a lot of the burden of my criticisms lie on the fact that Disney+ seems to really embrace the overly adoring documentary.  I also don't deny that sometimes things don't hit me as hard as they hit other people.  But for what it is, Jim Henson: Idea Man mostly works.

PG, but 1967 James Bond PG.  This is a movie with...stuff.  Most James Bond movies are about objectifying women, encouraging promiscuity, murdering people in droves, and drinking to excess.  All that is still included in this movie.  But also, some weird choices for yellowface.  While the purpose of yellowface is either to mock a culture or to hire a white actor to play an Asian person, You Only Live Twice has a diagetic reason for Bond's yellowface.  He's undercover, so he becomes an Asian man.  Nothing about it is handled with self-awareness and the results ultimately just look like Sean Connery with a different haircut.  Still...PG.

DIRECTOR: Lewis Gilbert

I think I did it, guys.  I think I finally made it through my 50th Anniversary James Bond Blu-ray box set...eleven years later.  I mean, I watched them all a few movies ago.  I can't say that I didn't get my money out of this set.  But I hadn't been writing the blog when I bought this box, so I had to go back and add all of the Sean Connery's before I could say that I watched them all.  In a perfect world, when I post this blog, I will soon post something on the Collections page.  It's a personal victory.  I think I probably care about it more than anyone else will.

I read an article by Charlie Higson, the guy who writes some of the James bond and Young James Bond stuff today.  I'm talking about the novels.  For what I understand, he has nothing to do with the movies.  It was a defense of people saying that Bond has gone woke.  I loved what Higson said, saying, basically, that James Bond isn't one thing.  He's a character that adapts to the needs of the mission, regardless of what it calls for.  The reason that he was a misogynist in the past was that it was what the world needed.  While I would be hard-pressed to find anything "woke" (a word I absolutely despise because of the way it has been co-opted from the right), I would love to live in a world where Higson was right.  I mainly point at this era of James Bond.  Sean Connery, as much as I love the dude, was infamously uncomfortably traditionalist.  There's an interview you can probably watch on YouTube where he advocates for giving women hard smacks to get them in line.  You Only Live Twice might be Connery at his most Connery.  The worst part is, I really like this movie.

People really rally that Sean Connery is their James Bond.  I have no real fight with that. I'm in the camp, "Like what you like".  In some ways, I have a fondness for every Bond era.  I, at one point, lauded my love for George Lazenby because I --without reservation --adored On Her Majesty's Secret Service.   But I honestly view Connery hardliners as people who simply like tradition.  It's not hard to stand by "Connery was the best Bond" because he's the guy who established the role.  It's just that...this movie feels like Connery is bleeding through more than Bond is.  (Again, I'm going to talk about how much I like this movie.)  He looks slightly annoyed for a lot of this film.  I remember that there were all kinds of issues by the time this movie came around.  Connery hated being typecast as James Bond and he was already starting to distance himself from the franchise.  (I watch a lot of special features and documentaries when it comes to James Bond movies.  I'm sorry for this glut of extra information.)  There are times where I'm watching this movie and I just think that Connery himself must feel silly at times.  He, honestly, flies an adorable attack helicopter at one point and never cracks a smile.  Maybe that's a character choices. But I get the vibe that it is a character choice that is being motivated by what the actor might be feeling.

This is a movie that was written by Roald Dahl.  I almost want that to be a paragraph all by itself.  That one sentence.  "A movie written by Roald Dahl."  The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory guy.  The James and the Giant Peach guy.  It blows my mind every time I see it.  Now, does it make a weird sense that Dahl had a broad view on Japan, often colored by being Welsh?  I don't know.  Maybe.  But it's hilarious what he sees as what it must mean to be Japanese with this movie.  Mind you, he's going loosely from Ian Fleming's source material, an equally-if-not-more silly understanding of Eastern culture.  Dahl's involvement creates problems for this movie itself, but I also think that he has a sense of wonder about the East.  This is a movie that doesn't despise Japan.  It's someone who is in awe of Japan and wants to create the great adventure there.  (Again, there's a good chance that Roald Dahl just got a dumptruck full of money at his front door and wrote a movie loosely based on a novel that did pretty well.) 

The thing that the Connery movies do really well is almost embrace their setting harder than the following movies.  Dr. No was an embrace of the Carribean.  From Russia with Love, ironically, was about a love for Turkey.  Goldfinger was as rootin' tootin' American as it comes.  Thunderball might have been the one that slipped on that front more than other films, almost revisiting the vibes of the first movie with Nassau.  While this is a movie that finally pays off a confrontation wth Blofeld after all the previous movies teased him, ultimately Roald Dahl is just fulfilling a love-letter to Japan.  Sure, it's a Japan that doesn't really exist.  While I get that this version of Japan is based on something, You Only Live Twice is almost an idealized travel video.  Now, when I say "idealized", I'm aware that this movie almost prides itself on the notion that the Japanese are misogynists.  After all, "In Japan, men come first.  Women come second."

You Only Live Twice also really set the stage for future Bond movies to steal a format.  Now, I do want to back up a little bit by saying that the third act of Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice are all the same final act.  The Roger Moore movies would also subscribe to this as well as George Lazenby's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But I'm talking more about the threat that presents itself in this movie.  It's amazing how much of the Space Race plays into the plots of some of these OG Bond movies.  The fact that there's a James Bond space theme that reoccurs in multiple Bond movies kind of states that it is almost a conscious choice.  But a lot of that is a reflection of the era.  It's odd that we're almost bored by the notion of space and the concept that the next battlefield might be in the stars.  You Only Live Twice is a fun look back at what we considered to be real threats.  It's bizarre too.  This is the first time that I really watched You Only Live Twice with a sense of criticism about the plot.  It's so bizarre to think that the United States and Russia were so close to the brink of war that any inconvenience to either superpower was an act of war. But if you think about it, if either country really wanted to declare war on the other, would they go through the most convoluted way of creating a space vehicle that captured other space vehicles?  Also, big red flag (no pun intended), but no one on either side of the Iron Curtain picked up on the fact that they weren't stealing the other side's rockets?  It kind of screams "third party", right?

My final thought (I think!) about You Only Live Twice is the absurd framing device of the movie.  The movie starts off with James Bond being murdered by Chinese agents and then being buried at sea.  That's a really fun opening and it is one of the more memorable things in the early Bond pre-credit sequences.  But it plays almost no part in the film itself.  The idea that Bond fakes his own death to take the heat off of him fools only Sato, who isn't exactly that important of a character.  It's almost like they fit the event to match the title of the novel, realizing that the title had no value based on the events of this story.  (Note: Ian Fleming's James Bond novels often had little to nothing to do with the screen adaptations.  WIth the case of You Only Live Twice, some of the characters appear in both and Japan plays heavily into both versions.) It's silly, but that's okay.

Anyway, this might have been the most fun Connery to watch.  It's been a while since I wrote up a Bond blog, and it's nice to know that I ended on a good note, despite being an absolute goofball-fest while watching it.

PG-13. I watched the movie with my kids and I'd say it's on par with a Jurassic Park movie in terms of horror.  The actually upsetting thing is that it often deals with suicide (in the form of a kamikaze pilot) and PTSD.  But I will give points to Godzilla Minus One for actually addressing the issues I've had with other Godzilla movies.  When Godzilla rampages through Japan, people actually die.  Instead of just muting that like the other films do, Godzilla Minus One wants to remind you that actual people are getting killed by this attack. A lot of people die and the movie doesn't want you to forget that.

DIRECTOR: Takashi Yamazaki

This!  This is the Godzilla movie I've been waiting for.  I waited a long time for this movie to be available and my waiting paid off.  I mean, sure, I stared down my wife and kids as they started joking through the first third of the movie.  But eventually, they shifted into where I was and realized that this movie had some meat to it.  Now, while I've now watched a good handful of Godzilla movies, I know that I haven't gotten through the bulk of them.  But I think I have enough to say "Why did it take so long to figure out what was right in front of us the entire time?"  

I want to get to my epiphany early because I can't promise that this idea is going to stick with me. (I've been going to bed incredibly late because it is summer and I've been playing video games almost methodically.  It's become a job because I know I won't have time to play video games for most of the year.  So 2:00 bed time and 8:00 wake up.  It's a pretty sweet life.) What makes Godzilla Minus One really work is that it focuses on the human element.  I'll be talking about that for probably the bulk of my blog today.  But the one thing that has hindered the rest of the Godzilla movies is that Toho always makes you kind of root for the monster.  Even with the first one, which is better than a lot of the other ones, the eponymous Godzilla is incredibly likable.  Sure, we're  meant to bond with whatever protagonist is thrown at us in these films.  But we're really ready for Godzilla to start tearing up the place.  Godzilla Minus One...doesn't do that.  

You know how Godzilla is King of the Monsters?  Yeah, he's actually a monster in this one.  The movie actually gets upsetting with what Godzilla is doing because most of the movie is devoted to making the human characters well rounded.  Now we're at what I've been talking about with all of my other Godzilla entries. I'm going to say that 75% of this movie is devoted to a human story and real problems that a character can face and the other 25% is Godzilla monster movie.  There was this thing that happened on Star Trek, in particularly Voyager.  The Borg were these big bad guys that, when they showed up, you knew stuff was going to go down.  Lives would change.  The status quo would go out the window.  But then in Voyager, the crew had to travel through Borg space.  Soon, the Borg were every other episode.  The problem with making the Borg show up too often was that it Nerfed the Borg.  They became beatable and escapable.  The same thing is true for Godzilla.  When you defeat him in every movie and no one's lives really change all that much, who cares anymore?  

My point is that Godzilla Minus One gives Godzilla gravitas.  When he shows up, people's lives are going to get way worse.  People are going to feel the effects of this monster who destroyed their homes and killed their loved ones.  It's not some party of giant creatures punching each other.  Godzilla's final acts up to this point are kind of like the last act of The Avengers.  When the Avengers fight the Chitauri and the city gets torn up, we get that it was the natural consequence of an alien invasion and that the Avengers were just doing their best.  Godzilla shouldn't be that.  There's a scene where Noriko is on a train going to a city where Godzilla is doing his thing.  That entire sequence is scary.  Honestly, I haven't watched one of these movies before and been scared.  Noriko, by this sequence, had built up so much goodwill and potential that meant that her life mattered in that scene.  It's the thing that horror movies forgot about.  We need to care about these characters so that scenes have meaning and consequences.

And the really funny thing?  I wouldn't necessarily call this a horror movie.  I mean, it is scary at times.  That train scene is anxiety inducing.  There's a scene that I intentionally won't talk about (even though I go spoilery) because I want this blog to get people out there watching this movie.  Instead, I'd say that this is a post-war drama.  Godzilla, for all the franchise has accomplished, has always kind of failed to deliver  on its social commentary in the way that I wanted it to.  Again, the first Godzilla was about the horrors of the nuclear age on real people.  The first movie made me intellectually understand that even though I never got the emotional resonance of that concept.  The rest of the franchise almost started gleefully enjoying the concept of nuclear monsters, often tampering with nuking Godzilla again. (That was pretty prevalent with the American Godzilla iterations.) 

This is a complicated story about the value of life, the role of family, and how people deal with real trauma.  Listen, I'm going to preach this as one of my favorite movies of 2023 (even though I just watched it and am pretty distant from the 2023 films now). Do some of these concepts get presented in pretty silly ways?  Yeah.  I won't deny that.  There are some goofball moments and moments where I feel like I'm just watching a disaster movie.  But what Yamazaki does with the disaster movie is what good sci-fi does with setting.  The reason that The Walking Dead works so well (for the most part) is that it ultimately is a human story and the zombies are just an element of chaos that escalates the natural drama between the characters.  Koichi is so filled with pathos.  It's a story about a man left with no good choices and the conflict between his choices of doing the right thing and his desperation to submit to his worst instincts and choose the immoral.  It's this sympathetic character that we want to scream at, not because he's ultimately an idiot, but because he's tortured and we can't scream at mental health issues.

Also, let's not ignore that Yamazaki somehow made a movie about a shared cultural trauma.  It's a movie about the end of World War II from the Japanese perspective that couldn't have been made in the 1950s.  It's a movie that reflects on the fact that 70 years have passed and that self-reflection can finally be made in the wake of lost patriotism / nationalism.  Guys, this is an impressive movie.  I have a very small window of kaiju movies that really hit the mark.  This might be my favorite kaiju movie.  Golly, I can't believe something is moving Pacific Rim out of first place, but this movie is fabulous.  So worth the wait.