PG-13...and that is wild.  Straight up wild.  A lot of the form of Moonage Daydream is a mixture of psychadelic imagery from concerts, interviews, music videos, and films.  A lot of these films aren't Bowie's because they reflect Bowie as an artist.  One of those images is straight up two people having sex and you see everything.  I kept on wondering what I was going to write in this section because the movie touches on questionable territory.  But when I saw that scene, I was like, "Easy answer. This movie is R."  Nope.  If that scene wasn't in the movie, I could squint and see the PG-13.  Bowie dresses provocatively and there are some questionable camera angles.  But that shot was, like, "Whoa."  So, an odd PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Brett Morgen

I am all over the place with this documentary.  I'm between loving this movie and thinking it's "meh."  I hate the term "meh" for this movie because this is the quintessential passion project.  This is such unfiltered passion towards a subject matter that I cannot help but think that Brett Morgen is somehow obsessed with Bowie.  But from an outside perspective, there are moments where I could not wait for the documentary to be over.

I'm going to give you the key to my enjoyment for the movie.  The last thirty minutes are exactly what I needed for the film.  Morgen is crazy smart.  Watching this documentary, you can't help but see more than a little bit of genius.  But this is not a documentary in the sense that you learn much about Bowie.  Morgen intentionally stays away from the Wikipedia version of a documentary.  Most of this movie feels like a painfully honest love letter.  I don't know how much I learned about David Bowie from watching this movie in terms of fun facts that I could share on the blog.  Instead, the movie is kind of like falling in love.  I know more of the soul of David Bowie because of Moonage Daydream than I do about anything specific about the man.  And a lot of that love for David Bowie is an embrace of Bowie's philosophy, especially when it came to making art.

See, I really dig David Bowie.  I say that as an absolute outsider when it comes to music.  For all of the dorky things that I obsess over, music is my weak spot.  I listen to podcasts, audio plays, and audiobooks sooner than listening to music.  My thirteen-year-old daughter is now aggressively getting into music.  In the same way that my taste in music is somewhat unfortunate, she's kind of learning about dorkier songs.  But David Bowie's music --at least the era of Bowie that I bonded with --is kind of perfect for that world.  Bowie's more esoteric and psychadelic stuff appealed to the outsider and the mainstreamer alike.  It's really weird.  It's counterculture --despite the fact that it had mass appeal.  It was strange and bizarre and it reflected its creator.  When I say that I'm into Bowie, it's that Ziggy Stardust, I'm-a-weird-dude energy that I got into.

But if you ask Spotify to play Bowie, it's rarely what you want it to be.  I'm sure that lots of artists who really hang on there experience this problem, the music of Bowie isn't one thing.  I used a billion words to say that the documentary, without being completely explicit about it, is about how David Bowie refused to be the guy who just did one thing.  As much as I love that early Bowie sound, much of Bowie's catalogue wasn't that.  After all, Bowie did a commercial for Pepsi with Tina Turner.  That's quite a distance away from a guy who dressed up in feminine clothing and frustrated TV hosts who tried to pin him down.  I mean, the doc even teased that his song, "Changes" is probably the most appropriate song to encapsulate an artists who strived to find himself.

And that's where the paradox of David Bowie lies in Moonage Daydream.  For a two-hour-and-fifteen minute film, there is a continual throughline of the notion that David Bowie is constantly about discovery.  For the most part, that's a noble notion.  Bowie, as he should, should be uncomfortable in his art.  He states something that I've heard a thousand times before.  Forgive my poor paraphrasing, but a comfortable artist is a bad artist.  As much as me, the music luddite, really likes Bowie's early stuff and dislikes the more jazzy Pepsi generation stuff, it's all about those changes that he sang about.  That's admirable.  Bowie wouldn't have been Bowie if he stayed Ziggy Stardust the entire time.  

But what I dig, and Morgan devotes the last section of the movie to, is that not all change is healthy change.  He's not going as far as I am, saying that some of Bowie's stuff is kind of not great.  This is never a critique on taste.  Instead, he does include moments from Bowie segueing to the '90s.  Part of Bowie's transition to the '90s was this almost intentional choice to go apolitical.  He keeps saying that there's no real lofty messaging to some of his songs.  When he's asked if he's selling out, he gives that patented response saying that income doesn't have tie to artistic merit.  Maybe it's because I'm getting so gosh darned political nowadays, but I can't help but scoff a little bit at this attitude.  I believe Morgen also kind of has thoughts on this commentary because the film doesn't leave off with "vanilla Bowie."  It acknowledges that this era brought a lot of listeners and those listeners are valid Bowie fans.  But it also leaves Bowie in this unfulfilled era.

That's where the core of change is.  Bowie's desire to go through all of these change come from an admitted not understanding himself.  Like how the media who interviewed Bowie found him to be enigmatic, Bowie reflected the same frustration in himself.

PG-13.  When I vent about how every live action summer blockbusters is automatically PG-13, I'm talking about The Fantastic Four: First Steps.  I mean, Superman totally needed to be PG-13.  I get it.  But we took our entire family, ages 2 to 13, and outside of a stray curse word, the movie is incredibly tame.  And that's including the fact that the bad guy wants to eat a planet and steal a baby.  Do you know how the Bond movies influened the Bourne movies and the new Bond movies are influenced by Bourne?  The same thing is true with this and The Incredibles.  This movie is as tame as The Incredibles.

DIRECTOR: Matt Shakman

Oh, I'm so glad the MPA section got a blue background for being approved for most audiences because I would be bummed it if was red.  By the way, if I can knock this blog out in a reasonable amount of time, a good deal of stress will be taken off of my plate.  I'm not going to turn a bunch of heads with this blog.   What you'll probably get is what you get from a lot of my Marvel blogs:  I'm going to go way too deep into comic book lore, often really stressing how the core themes are more important than the dirty details.  But the big takeaway is --and I'm totally stealing from the Internet --genre nerds are eating well this summer.

There was something almost a little depressing about The Fantastic Four: First Steps being in the shadow of Superman.  I mean, I'm still raving to people about how good Superman was.  And I'm going to give points to the Internet for the first time, but I think that people seemed to get that it wasn't a competition this time.  There's always that expectation that there can only be one amazing superhero movie of the summer.  Instead, it seemed like a lot of people were rooting for both of these movies to succeed (which kind of stresses my point that superhero fatigue is more about people thinking it's cool to hate on superhero movies).  But I was glad to see the fandoms out there agreeing that two good superhero movies, back-to-back, was actually a great thing.  And I'll tell you, while Superman is always going to hold a special place in my heart, First Steps is one of those special Marvel movies.  It's honestly top tier and I'm feeling a little awkward repeating that phrase so many times.

My buddy Bob said years ago, way before First Steps was in production, that Marvel should make Fantastic Four set in the '50s or '60s.  As cool as an idea as I thought that was, I rolled my eyes at him pretty hard.  I mean, we have a pretty well explored MCU at this point.  You'd think that someone would have mentioned the Baxter Building and that canon of silver aged heroes at this point.  But I'm actually going to high-five the notion of the Multiversal Saga right now because it allowed us to get the Fantastic Four movie that we've been begging for since we've first saw the OG one (the one that came out).  On top of that, it's borderline the same story as Rise of the Silver Surfer.  I mean, that's a pretty moot point.  It's one of the quintessential Fantastic Four stories and it is the most deserving of a feature length film.  It's just so funny that it took this long to get it really right.

Now, I'm going to be dogging on the 2000s Fantastic Four movies quite a bit. But I do feel that I have to explicitly state that I actually really dig those movies.  From almost any metric, those movies aren't great.  It didn't mean that I didn't like them.  What I will go to bat for is that those movies had heart and an understanding of the characters, which is enough to keep me hooked.  I'll also say that those movies walked so this movie could run.  I'm not talking about Fant4stic Four.  That movie was rough.  And it apparently came out long enough ago that I didn't write a blog on it.  (The evil part of me is thinking when I can schedule a rewatch, which is bound to go down as a hate watch and I don't care for that instinct.) But if it wasn't for the 2000s Fantastic Four movies, I don't know if we would be allowed the same shorthand into the universe as we got with this movie.

Both Superman and Fantastic Four kind of get that.  The new Spider-Man movies also kind of get that.  The origin movie, as nice as it is, can never really reach the heights of having a world well-lived in.  I don't know how First Steps really pulled off giving us a whole new world parallel to the MCU that needed no explanation, but it was refreshing.  I like the idea that, within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, that the world feels really lived in.  And props to Shakman and his team, he takes some swings about how influential the Fantastic Four are in this world.   I mean, Sue Storm is borderline the most important person on the planet.  There were even some little notes of utopia going on, which probably could lead to some dark stuff if I'm being honest.  But all that meant that we were seeing the Fantastic Four at the top of their games.  How nice was that?  Instead of having that constant growing pain stuff that we got from the early pages of Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four comics, we had a well-honed machine similar to the stuff we have today.  And because we've been through the trenches with other Fantastic Four movies, that well-honed machine felt well-earned.

(Note:  I did not finish in time.  My family came home and then I did a million things.  Here's my attempt to maintain the tone of what I was writing earlier.) 

But I need to go back to the '50s and '60s aesthetic that makes this movie special.  Retro-futurism is fun and absolutely matches the Fantastic Four.  I can't deny that it just works with these characters and differentiates the movie from the many MANY other Marvel movies that came out before this. But this isn't retro-futurism in isolation.  The thing that gave this movie so much soul was that it was vocally and explicitly a love letter to Jack Kirby.  I do miss those Stan Lee cameos.  Part of me feels like the complaints about the MCU started once Stan passed away.  But having a Jack Kirby and Stan Lee quasi-cameo?  That was exactly what the movie was about.  I can't say that I've always been in the Jack Kirby fandom.  He's great.  He's objectively one the most talented comic book creators of all time.  But his stuff got weird.  

But it's Kirby's run on Fantastic Four that brought us Galactus.  And I'm going to say that Galactus and this specific story illustrates the genius of Jack Kirby.  It's not like comic books have shied away from plots to destroy the world.  It's the fodder of pulp storytelling.  But Kirby took the idea of a world-destroyer and reminded us about the importance of finding hope in the hopeless.  There's a big purple guy with a goofy helmet and nothing is going to touch him.  You have the world's smartest man and his family all offering to stop this guy and they don't have answers.  So where do they turn?  They turn to their strengths and cooperation.  Now, the movie actually has a better answer for how to defeat Galactus over the comics' kinda / sorta stupid answer of an Ultimate Nullifier.  But what the movie gets right is that it is how you have to sort of believe that you can do that.

Now, the reason that this movie works, besides getting every beat right, is that it allows characters to be the best versions of themselves.  I'm going to give Sue her due.  Sue is the powerhouse of this movie and she absolutely needs a round of applause for how she was portrayed by Vanessa Kirby.  I'm a little nervous to do the following, because I don't want to make this movie about the patriarch of the family from the male perspective.  But I do want to give so much credit to Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards.  I was one of those people who completely wanted John Krasinski and Emily Blunt to be Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman.  When Multiverse of Madness showed me that Reed Richards, I begged for more.  But Pascal gave this character nuance.  He's still the obsessed guy, but he's trying to play it cool at times.  He's a loving father and he is often at odds with his worse nature.  Immediately, I saw what he was shooting for in this movie.

And then we have Ben and Johnny.  I love these guys.  I have always loved these guys.  The reason that the Fantastic Four are fun are because of these two knuckleheads.  Do I wish that Ebon Moss-Bachrach had a little bit more to do?  Yeah.  But that's only because of comparison.  The stuff he had in the movie is absolute gold.  Reminding audiences that The Thing is Jewish and a neighborhood hero on Yancy Street?  Perfect.  That stuff with Natasha Lyonne (whom I aware is not Alicia Masters and am weirdly cool with)?  Perfect.  He's an amazing uncle.  The thing that surprised me, though, was Johnny Storm.

It's hard to play Johnny beyond the one note.  I'm not throwing shade at Chris Evans.  That dude is charismatic as can be and I loved his Johnny Storm.  But Joseph Quinn's Johnny Storm?  Yeah, he's a bit intellectually buffed up.  But I also love the idea that we don't have to divorce charming from intellect.  This dude was a space pilot.  He lives in the Baxter Building.  The Fantastic Four has always been so STEM heavy, the notion that someone could be brilliant in the humanities and that helps the world is also pretty lovely.  Sure, it's a bit of a stretch to think that he can descipher and speak an alien language given time.  But also, it's the Fantastic Four.  Let Johnny do something incredible.  (Also note:  One of my few complaints about the movie is that I have no idea how much time is passing.  The same movie is in theaters the entire time.  But Ben also grows a bananas beard?)

My wife didn't care for Silver Surfer, even if we're huge Ozark fans.  Okay.  I disagree, but I also really like the other Silver Surfer played by Doug Jones.  That's okay.  Silver Surfer was a tank in this movie and I dug it.  Also, and this seems completely surface level reading of the film, it was nice having that parallel of motherhood between Shalla-Bal and Sue Storm, especially when it came to the end of the film.  Because, as I tend to get distracted when writing, this is a story from Sue's perspective.  

How much of this movie was about motherhood and the value of life is the core of Sue's character.  Sure, if you want to dumb it down, the movie is a trolley problem.  But it also reminds us that life is sacred and that problems aren't black-and-white arguments.  Galactus asks for Franklin Richards in exchange for the planet.  The easy answer is, "Give the purple alien the baby."  But she would have been a monster had she done that.  Instead, they tried everything.  They were about to move the planet somewhere else and we had this mother remind people of the value of every human person so much so that they moved past their worst natures and banded together to fix the planet.  (Again, a good summer for human decency movies.)  So when she shoves Galactus into the wormhole, it's the mother lifting the car off of the baby.  It's absurd, but also so inherently human that it makes an amazing scene.

Also, was it so hard to get a comics accurate Galactus?  We have been dancing around this for far too long.

The movie was incredible.  Incredible.  It doesn't matter if I thought that Superman was a better movie.  This was a great time.  This is one of those Marvel movies that I'll watch again and again because it just gets it.  I honestly wish I owned it right now because now I feel like watching it again.  

R.  And it might be the movie most deserving of the R-rating.  I'm officially in what I'm calling "Bergman's Pervy Period."  Maybe I'm just getting tired in my Bergman retrospective, but if it was any other director, I might be accusing him of being "shocking-for-shocking-sake."  I know.  It's incredibly disrespectful to treat one of cinema's greatest auteurs as someone hacky.  But I can't help it.  It feels like he's going out of his way to be as sexual as possible, even in scenes that are hurt from nudity and sexuality.  The movie also touches on incest.  Also, this is one of those movies where I have to disclaim, "A kid was in this scene.  Is this necessary?"

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

You are going to read a stressed out blog from a guy who did this to himself.  I put off The SIlence blog for a minute because I thought I'd find time to sneak this in some other time.  But then I watched another movie.  Then I got two more letter of recommendation requests.  Then it's the church festival this weekend.  Couple with that the fact that I have five kids, walk four miles a day, and read a bunch and am working on lesson plans for the new school year and I'm officially behind on this one.

This is the Bergman that I'm afraid to touch.  I've not been wholly afraid to go after some of the greats on this blog.  For example, I actively don't like David Lynch.  I'm sorry to all of the cinemaphiles out there and the family of David Lynch for my disrespect for someone I acknowledge was significantly smarter than I am.  I don't care for Lynch.  I can't say the same is true for Bergman.  I actually adore a handful of Bergman movies.  I really like a lot of other Bergman movies.  But sometimes...just sometimes, I really don't like other Bergman movies.  Some people may say that's down to taste.  Maybe that's true honesty.  But I know that the movies that I tend not to like are the ones that some people consider sacrosanct to having taste.  I honestly don't like The Silence.

Here's something that I have to be very clear on.  I like the idea of The Silence.  There's a floor plan behind The SIlence that I'm all about.  I love the idea of two sisters traveling to a country where language has to be interpreted entirely by context mirroring the silence between the family.  I love the idea of a kid has to explore a strange world and cannot rely on language to connect with people while his family is falling apart.  That's some gorgeous stuff.  But I've learned that Bergman is a dirty old man.  He was also a dirty young man.  It's kind of that same problem I have with binging all of the Woody Allen movies.  When you talk about sexual deviancy enough with the assumption that these moments are universal when they, in fact, may be quite subjective, it's hard to think that you have more than one idea going on.

Now, I've learned from experience on this blog that I sometimes need to read some stuff about the movie if I feel like I'm not getting too much about it.  I read some film criticism about The Silence because I knew that there was a dimension that I had only a loose grasp on.  The thing about all critical thinking is that it is valid as long as it can be defended.  But part of my role as someone who is entering into the discourse is to either agree or disagree with the discourse.  Now, I'm going to say that my dumb brain who can't wait to write about The Fantastic Four: First Steps disagrees with a lot of the discourse.  Not to bring up Woody again, but Woody Allen claims that both women play two sides of the same person.  From a humanities teacher, that's a great read.  If a student wrote that paper for me, I'd be excited to read it.  That being said, I don't agree with that at all.

See, masters' classes love jumping to Freud when it comes to reading anything.  The sheer amount of citation that was tied to Freud in grad school was staggering.  Here's where I kind of floundered (despite doing super well in grad school, if I may say so myself).  I don't ever agree with Freud.  I was always so bummed when we fell down the rabbit hole with philosophers who used Freud as a foundation for theory because I disagreed with Freud himself.  That's kind of me disagreeing with Allen.  I like the notion that the two women represented the same woman as an experiment.  But a lot of the text actively fights against that read.  

Part of my frustration with that read is the use of Johan as the avatar for the audience.  Ester and Anna spend much of the movie in building tension leading to a climax where the two emotionally vomit all of their anger at each other.  Now, Johan spends more time with Ester because Anna is out finding her sexuality with strangers.  Again, I think that Bergman is trying too hard with this one, but you are completely allowed to disagree with me.  Anyway, Ester is kind to Johan, building into the notion that Ester and Anna are two sides to the same person.  But Johan is affected by the conflict between Ester and Anna.  The scene reads far more as "Mommy and Daddy are fighting" more than sometimes Johan dislikes his mother.  It's when Ester acts as a mother that Johan withdraws within himself and hurts Ester.  I mean, sure, there's a read that says that Johan doesn't like that part of Mommy.  But Ester is far more maternal to Johan than Anna.  

Again, you can absolutely read into the story that maybe Johan views that part of his mother as the side that tries to hard.  But in contrast, when Anna is all sexed up and being cruel to Ester, it's not like Johan runs to Anna in those scenes.  If anything, the few times that we see Johan viewing Anna as a loving mother is when she's tempering her anger and acting more like Ester.  So the notion that these two women could be two sides of the same person almost ignores the fact that there is a child in the center of this story.  This is a child going through it.  He's not a great kid.  There's something very upsetting about a kid walking up and down hallways of a hotel pointing a six-shooter at janitors without a smile on his face that almost telegraphs that he's alone in this world.  Also, there's a reference to the fact that he has a dad...somewhere out there.  It's just a lot.

So what is it?  I hate giving surface level reads on here.  And if I was talking to my students, I would demand that they take a bigger swing than what I'm offering here.  I think the title The Silence is the point of the movie.  They are vacationing / on sabbatical in this coded Eastern European wartorn country, there a silence and a violence that these people cannot understand.  The two / three of them also have a violence and a silence between them.  While they learn something about themselves in this silence, they also have an impossible job trying to communicate their learned experiences with one another.  The reason that I am so annoyed by Anna's sexual awakening is that the epiphany that she has can be anything.  The fact that it is sexual seems lazy at this point.  She could, if going for a deviant discovery, hate her kid.  I mean, Kate Chopin did it with The Awakening if we want to go on the nose for the whole thing.

So, yeah, there's a read out there that's probably better than mine.  But I also don't hate my read on this one.  I am bored with Bergman constantly thinking that sex is the only thing that people need to discover in their characters.  It might be why I like The Seventh Seal so much.  But The Silence is yet another movie that isn't for me.

Rated R for all kinds of horror movie stuff.  Besides the fact that this is a pretty brutal vampire movie (which is a good thing!), the movie also gets pretty graphic when it gets to sex, even though I don't remember any nudity in the film.  As good genre cinema is wont to do, the film goes into challenging content.  In this case, the movie tackles issues of race, which brings some pretty hateful content with it.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Ryan Coogler

You guys need to stop overhyping movies for me.  I don't deny that Sinners is incredible.  It absolutely is a top tier vampire horror film.  I don't think I'll have anything negative to say in this blog.  But do you understand how I was expecting transcendence?  Everyone kept saying how Sinners was one of the greatest movies that they've ever seen and I don't even know if it will make the greatest films of 2025.  Do you understand how petty that makes me sound?  I know it's a great movie.  I have no notes.  I still don't love it and it's all your faults.

Like many of the blogs I write, this thing is going to go pretty stream of consciousness.  Sometimes I go with with a strategy.  But Coogler does his all to really cover his bases.  Maybe this is going to be a commentary on cinema as a whole.  See, most of the classics we talk about have a lot to unpack.  But Coogler brings a lot to think about...but he unpacks a lot of it for us.  It feels like anything I talk about will be fairly obvious when it comes to it.  That's the thing about vampire stories.  Vampires tend to be really good when it comes to Monster Theory.  (I used Monster Theory for my master's thesis.  It's been a minute, so I apologize for the lack of detail when it comes to explaining this.  From what I remember --and became a mild expert at --is that what monsters and villains we choose for genre storytelling tends to reflect concerns within contemporary culture.)  Vampires have always been kind of amazing stand-ins for societal fears.  I mean, Dracula is about the fear of the immigrant.  But the vampires in Sinners outright tell us what we have to fear.

In the case of Remmick, he voices the fears that Stack has when it comes to the Klan.  I actively love how vampires in Sinners become one hive mind because it makes them far more attractive as the story progresses.  Remmick, when we first meet him, is kind of pathetic.  He's on the run from the indigenous people.  He's collapsing over himself and only finds shelter with the Klan.  When he converts the bigots, he teaches them music and these two slugs become appealing to the juke when they can perform as well as Remmick.  When Remmick gets a hold of Mary, he abuses his role as ally to begin slaughtering the survivors of the juke one-by-one.  I mean, it takes the characters a lot of effort to trust Mary enough to be allowed into the juke.  The initial fear, before the vampire stuff, is that Mary is going to abuse her role as White ally to bring down the juke.  It's Smoke and Stack's joined fear, that Mary is not good for business.  But when she is allowed in, there's always the fear that she's going to bring the whole place down.  But when Remmick learns what it means to be an ally, instantly we have a White people abusing the privilege of being allies to start killing everyone. 

And Remmick becomes a very different seduction than Dracula does. If Dracula's appeal is debauchery, Remmick's seduction is progress.  The movie takes place in the '30s post WWI.  While I'm sure that there was a temptation from Coogler's perspective to make the movie during slavery, he wisely places the film in the '30s, reminding America that life has never been easy for Black people.  While the characters live in a town mostly segregated from White people, there are vestiges of slavery all around them.  Most of the characters are sharecroppers and pick cotton for a living.  The land has enslaved them as has the agricultural industry.  So when Remmick confesses that Hogwood is the Grand Wizard of the Klan and that the juke was never a permanent institution, there's a temptation from the survivors' perspective that vampirism would not only give them equality, it would also grant them with the first advantage that they had in their lives.

I won't lie.  When that Klan confession shows up, that desire for immortality seemed like a pretty good deal.  But the format of Sinners doesn't really let us sit with that temptation.  (I suppose the end gives us a little hope that there is some humanity when it comes to vampires, but that's more of a fun post-script for the characters of Preacherboy and Stack rather than a commentary on the role of temptation.)  The real takeaway is that progress is hard, but achievable.  While watching Smoke completely wreck the Klan in town with a military blitzkrieg, the true point is that Smoke doesn't need to compromise who he is to make change.  Sure, Smoke and Stack are both morally dubious characters in the story, but one of the selling points is that morality doesn't always look the same.  Smoke sacrifices himself to destroy the Klan, upholding the promise that the brothers offered in the first act of the movie.  But the important part is that he is still himself.  There's a second commentary that not all evil lurks at night.  While the conflict of the film is tied to the setting of "night" due to vampirism, there is an expectation that the characters would be safe in the light of day.  However, the Klan operates in both the day and the night.  These Klansmen don't show up in robes.  They don't really need to hide their faces.  Instead, there is the confidence of riding up to the juke in everyday clothing, their faces blazing in the open.  

Okay, there's a love / hate moment in the movie.  Because I love most of it, but I wanted to love it more.  I adore --AFREAKINGDORE --the notion that art and music is a transcendent vehicle for the supernatural.  Absolutely.  For all the people who listed Sinners as their favorite movie of the year because of its fascination with music, I get it.  I completely support your argument and I want you to preach it from the rooftops.  That being said, as well as that scene was filmed --and it was filmed as impressively as it could be --there was something a little corny about it as well.  Maybe that comes with Coogler's need to spell things out for us a bit.  For those who don't know, there's a scene where Preacherboy finally takes the floor and shows that he understands the Blues, even though he's significantly younger than Delta Slim.  Okay, he plays his song and this life-changing moment happens where time rips open and the juke becomes something out of Babylon.  It's all playing in the world of metaphor.  I'll even allow that the movie permits this moment to be literal and nothing changes.  But in this moment, musicians from all over time and geography show up in the juke and we get that there's something unifying about the role of music.  And it's cool...but cool can also be a bit silly.  I was leaning hard into, "This is all just a little bit silly, isn't it?"  Again, conceptually and even executionally, I was impressed.  But in terms of making me fall in love with music, I kept on being, "Come on, brain...love this."  And it just wasn't happening.  It's such a vulnerable moment and I'm sure it tracked for a lot of people.  I just didn't really make that emotional leap that made me fall in love with it.

There's little things that I could complain about.  I don't love that movies only shoot part of the film in IMAX and then release the film with varying aspect ratios.  That didn't do much for me.  But that's so small.  I'm sure if I saw this on an IMAX screen, those moments would have crushed.  But instead, this is just a really good vampire movie that has some cool things to say, but not much to unpack.  I want to love it  more than I do.  Maybe it's because I've seen my fair share of vampire movies and I kept on thinking back to From Dusk Till Dawn, which seems to share a lot of DNA with this film.  Still, it's incredible and I'm down for Coogler to keep making stuff of this caliber.

Not rated, but far-and-away the most un-family friendly of all of them.  I mean, this movie is as vulgar as it gets.  I've mentioned in my other Zatoichi blogs that the questionable content varies based on whoever is directing.  It seems like Zatoichi star Shintaro Katsu when given the reins to direct, wanted to make the most hardcore Zatoichi movie ever.  It's incredibly bloody and over-the-top sexual compared to the other companion pieces.  But there's one scene that is one of the most offensive scenes I've seen in a movie, even though you technically don't see this rape.  It's absolutely horrifying.  

DIRECTOR:  Shintaro Katsu

It is almost 5:00 in the morning and I'm not allowed to go to bed.  So I decided that I should get my writing done now so I can sleep all day when I am allowed to sleep.  We'll see how this plays out because I just wrote a tank of a Superman blog and Zatoichi blogs are hard to write.  The good news is that I often give myself permission to cut these guys short because it seems that there are only so many words that I can write about Zatoichi.  

Okay, I mentioned in the parent advisory section that this is the most offensive Zatoichi movie.  It's 1972 and we're starting to enter the Taxi Driver era of filmmaking.  I know that Taxi Driver didn't come out until 1976, but the '70s often screamed "gritty filmmaking" and it seemed like Shintaro Katsu was so tired of making the same kind of Zatoichi movie over and over that he decided to make a movie that somehow felt like real cinema.  I mean, that's really harsh on the other movies.  I don't think that the Criterion Collection put a lot of hours into remastering about 30 movies just for the penultimate one to be the one that they consider worthy of the collection.  But I will admit and side with my fictionalized version of Shintaro Katsu that the other movies often were written and filmed with a formula in mind.  Often, this formula kind of felt like what Hollywood did in the hayday of Westerns.  Pools of extras and rookies on a soundstage often did the trick.  Well, Katsu wasn't having any of that when it came to this movie because this movie looks absolutely fantastic, even if it is wildly offensive occasionally for no good reason.

I have to admit something here that I was going to put up top if I wasn't writing this at the crack of dawn:  I watched this movie in the worst way possible.  I watched the first hour and then waited 10 days before finishing the second half.  To my defense, we did go on vacation and that would have been a weird flex asking my wife to wait for me to finish another Zatoichi movie.  But if I don't have some of the details right, I am incredibly apologetic, especially consdiering that I actually really liked this movie.

There was this great episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I know!  I'm proud of me for making this base connection as well!) where we saw the world of Buffy through Xander's eyes.  This is not a blind joke.  I'm just using colloquialisms.  Anyway, the entire conceit was that there was this whole world that wouldn't find the happenings of Sunnydale all that normal.  While Buffy was having her epic fight to the death with the monster of the week, we'd see the struggles regular old people do in this world.  I think that Katsu knows that his character is borderline a god at this point.  Nothing can touch Zatoichi.  Even when he's hurt...he's not that hurt.  So in a movie where you have a borderline Mary Sue doing his thing, movie-in-and-movie-out, what can possibly be interesting...especailly considering that there are a billion Zatoichi movies.  While Katsu doesn't stray super far from the eponymous protagonist, he does almost go out of his way to show how terribly life is for people in this era.  Everyone he meets, even if they are only tangentially tied to Zatoichi, lead these absolutely awful lives.  Sometimes, I wonder why Katsu shows some of these characters.  After all, one of the sex workers in the brothel where a lot of this movie takes place, loses a little brother and then commits suicide.  (I should have included this moment in the parental advisory section of this blog.)  This is where the mentally disabled man (who is played without a moment of self-awareness or study.   It's a pretty bad performance) is raped. Katsu goes out of his way to show how Zatoichi's presence affects the every day man.  

I would say that this, oddly enough, is successful.  I don't like how he did it.  That mentally challenged caricature is rough.   I know.  Some boomer out there is probably talking about how the woke mind-virus has gotten me.  (Note:  I also loved Superman.  Come at me, my guy.) The odd thing is I think it works because Katsu somehow knows his way around the camera.  (I'm not going to bother to look up the cinematographer on this movie.  Let's pretend it's Katsu because this one definitely has a different vibe than its peers.)  But beyond the visuals, focusing on the smaller charactes actually fixes many of the problems that I claimed many of the other Zatoichi movies had.  

I always had a problem with nothing really mattering in these movies.  The times that I applauded a Zatoichi movie was when we were given a reason to care about people.  Often, this involved simplifying the plots so we could fall out of the trappings of the Zatoichi formula.  Well, Zatoichi in Desperation is really rough on plot.  What plot there is happens to be excellent.  I won't lie.  When the old lady falls to her death at the beginning of the movie, I was honestly shocked.  It is such a hard open for a movie.  While the image of the woman falling to her death plays out over the course of the movie, I wish that her death mattered a bit more. It seemed like Nishikigi didn't care a bit.  I don't mind a major character in a movie being aloof to death.  I just wish that it tied into the story more than it did.  Instead, we get a supporting character who often doesn't make a lot of sense.

I'm being harsh on the film.  Nishikigi was somehow both progressive and awful at the same time.  (Boomer, I told you to sit down.  You are going to throw out that hip.)  I don't think that Katsu was going for open-minded with this movie based on a lot of the sequences in the film.  But oddly enough, Nishikigi has this speech about how Zatoichi isn't really saving her because she is in need of saving.  Instead, he's more concerned about having accidentally wronged this woman.  Nishikigi goes further, arguing that while Zatoichi finds sex work as morally offensive, it is the life she chose.  But here's where I think Katsu falls.  We're supposed to be on Zatoichi's side.  And, if I'm being completely honest, as progressive as I try to be, the world that Nishikigi lives in is one based on exploitation.  Yes, she recognizes that Zatoichi is a good man who may have personal motives for helping her.  But that doesn't change the fact that he is a good man.  Where I'm frustrated is that I recognize that Nishigiki is meant to be a redemptive, dynamic character.  But I have a hard time reading her.  And, yeah, part of that comes from the fact that she doesn't care that her mother died trying to visit her.  Maybe that's a bridge too far.  She's coded as a villain for a good chunk of the film.  While she seems to have that moment of epiphany that she's not a good person, there's not a lot of time to rest on that emotional beat because we have the final fight sequence with the sword strapped to Ichi's wrist.

I so love/hate the end with a secret lean into love.  I commented on how the fact that, by this point, Zatoichi is borderline a god of fighting.  No one is going to beat Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman.  These movies tend to find his Kryptonite and then it does nothing.  I watched this one and thought, "Well, there's no coming back from this."  See, in this one, Zatoichi allows his hands to be destroyed kind of crucifixion style.  (At 5:27 am, my brain don't work so good, you see?)  We're all thinking the same thing, right?  There's no hospital to fix that.  Zatoichi's hands are done for.  Well, we have one more movie left.  I'm incredibly skeptical about whether or not they can have a blind master swordsman without functioning hands.  Still, watching Zatoichi make a workaround, albeit silly, kind of was fun to watch.  It's just the point of believability, but my sense of "That's kind of rad" won out over my brain in this one.

I think I really like this one because it is so visually interesting.  I like the fact that Shintaro Katsu refused to make "just another Zatoichi movie.  The way that I'm justifying the stuff that I find offensive is that Katsu was shooting his shot in 1972.  He was aiming for edgy (which isn't the best target to aim for) and went too far.  For the one thing that really bothered me, there are a dozen or so innovations that made this movie truly worth watching.  It took the formula and looked at it from another perspective and I totally dug that.

PG-13 despite having a near-perfect tone for families.  It's always such a hard line deciding whether a movie deserves to be PG or PG-13.  I mean, all summer blockbusters are pretty much PG-13 if there's even a modicum of action, so all of this is moot.  Despite being such an uplifting and optimistic film, the violence is pretty intense at times.  While Superman goes out of his way not to swear, it seems like the other characters often pick up the slack for his lack of language.  Also, Lex Luthor is just plain ol' scary in this one in the best way possible.  Really, it's hitting a lot of buttons --enough that I didn't bring my four and seven year olds to the movie.  Still, I can't wait to show it to them...eventually.

DIRECTOR:  James Gunn

Yes, I'm writing this at 3:37 in the morning.  I have something to do at 4:00, so I thought I'd get a little writing in, despite the fact that I absolutely should be sleeeping.  This is the blog I've put the most thought into.  I should have written this immediately after watching Superman on Saturday.  But it was so intimidating!  I had so much to process.  I don't know if I've been subtle about this, but I've been so excited to see this movie since it was announced as Superman: Legacy.

There are multiple reasons why I've been excited for this movie.  I'm a huge Superman fan.  I have always been a huge Superman fan.  One of the most depressing things about Batman Begins was that I thought that there would never be a Superman film that was that emotionally thrilling.  But here we are.  Is it better than Batman Begins?  I don't know.  That feels like an apples and oranges question.  But besides being a huge Superman fan, I've also been extremely critical of the Zack Snyder approach to the DC characters, in particular the film Man of Steel.  I know.  There are a lot of fans of that movie out there.  Many of them are toxic.  Some are not.  The Synderverse has been this divisive cesspool of a franchise and when they announced that James Gunn, the guy from The Guardians of the Galaxy movies, was going to take over, I was thrilled.  It's funny, because pre-Guardians, I was not a Gunn fan.  Gunn often was a shocking director who really played up the offensive genre stuff that I didn't care for.  But as a mainstream director?  Man, that man knows how to cook.

For those looking at my quick take without any explanations, Superman (2025) may be the best Superman movie, even if it isn't my favorite Superman movie.  I can't help it.  When I say that I'm a huge Superman fan, I've been obsessed with the original Richard Donner Superman starring Christopher Reeve.  It's a movie that I try to watch as many times as possible.  For a guy who tends not to rewatch films because there are so many great movies out there and only so many years on this planet to watch them all, the fact that I have a few movies that get cycled back into rotation regularly is incredibly high praise.  The Richard Donner Superman does that for me.  It's that good.  It's so good that I convinced myself that Supeman Returns is a great movie because it hits a lot of the same notes as the Donner Superman.  

But the thing that James Gunn made?  My goodness, it might be the most impressive balancing act that holds onto the thesis statement of understanding who Superman is as a character.  Now, it took me a minute to get used to David Corenswet's portrayal of the Last Son of Krypton.  That's not a bad thing.  I just have to admit that it took some getting used to.  One of the things that I've always looked to Superman for is his ability to inspire.  Reeve had that in spades.  There was the Superman persona that he put on that was unflinching.  Corenswet's Superman instead wears --ironically enough --vulnerability on his sleeves.  Without a doubt he's incredibly powerful and he always tries to do the right thing, which is inspirational by himself.  But this is the Superman that has a little bit more Clark Kent in him than Kal-El.  

See, I tend to find the secret identities far more interesting in superheroes.  The public personas have to match the moral codes of the secret identities.  But the struggle of being a person was always really fascinating to me.  I think I've pointed this out a few times by this point, but I always really liked the Peter Parker sequences in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy more than the Spider-Man parts.   Reeve's Clark Kent struggled about whether or not he should embrace his powers, turning to Jonathan Kent to understand his place in the world.  That's why I always dug CW's Smallville because it was that focus on the non-superhero world that was always interesting to me.  But what Corenswet does is have his Superman not always get things right.  His heart is always in the right place.  There's no doubt about that.  But in terms of being perfect all the time, Superman --in this film --is all about trying his best and learning to forgive himself when he can't be perfect all of the time.

I know that the internet is losing it over this movie.  I'm sure that there's a fair share of people out there who are already sick about reading about Superman.  (I actually don't know how long I'm going to be writing this thing out just because I have so many thoughts and am trying to find a throughline to connect all of those thoughts.  Sorry, people who wanted just a quick take on Superman.  I'm going to be like the rest of the Internet and not shut up about it.)   I read a comment somewhere that Superman is kind of doing what Barbie did a couple of years ago.  For those who don't remember the Barbie phenomenon, Greta Gerwig (another indie director who got shepherded into the mainstream?!) took what ultimately an incredibly commercial property and explored the history of the character to remind us what it means to be a good person in a world that wants you to fail.   For women, it was a way to open the door to men to show how stupid their behavior was, even if it was unintentional while offering honest ways to improve.  Superman...kind of does the same thing.  

The thing that annoyed me and many other film viewers off about Snyder's Superman was he was bleak.  He kept being God all of the time, almost unconcerned with the problems of the little guy.  Gunn's Superman is all about the little guy.  It's about loving one's neighbor and never considering himself more than others.   There's a shot (admittedly, I think in a dream) in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice where people are grasping at Superman as a deity.  It's very people clamoring for Jesus's cloak to have their blindness cured.  This Superman would be mortified by that thought.  He's grateful to a dude who gave him a free hot dog and remembered his name.  I mean, one of the things that has always been teased about Superman is that he's a boy scout.  He's too good.  He rescues cats from trees.  I always liked that about Superman, but Gunn goes the extra mile and shows that Superman actually cares that much for life.  I know you've probably already heard about this, but he saves a squirrel in the middle of a kaiju fight.  He even tries to save the kaiju.  I love that.  I love that so much.  

The reason?  Superman treats kindness like it is normal.  One of the things that's being thrown out in the atmosphere of this movie is "Kindness is punk rock."  If you watch the movie, you'll get where this is coming from.  There's almost something metatextual about the fact that Superman is both a dork and kind of punk rock in this movie.  Gunn's aware of it.  He has Lois Lane comment on Clark's lack of self-awareness when it comes to how lacking in cool he is.  But Gunn also has his way saying that the person who doesn't care about being cool ultimately is the coolest guy of all.  He's a guy who doesn't mind that he's a bit of a dork.  Heck, as frustrating as Clark is for Lois, that's probably why she loves him.  It doesn't hurt that he looks handsome.  But when Lois is walking around the Kent farm and analyzing Clark's childhood bedroom, she sees that he might be the most earnest guy in the world.  And that's coming from someone who has a secret identity.

I'm so itching to go into the poltical stuff, guys.  If the purpose of this blog is to throw up all of my thoughts as if I had an enthusiastic group of people deconstructing the movie around a TGI Friday's table full of appetizers, you know that I would be leading with politics.  But also don't want to simply tag the ending with another big win for Gunn.  The way that this movie is cast is so dead-on, no-notes perfect that I don't know who stole the film.  I know that Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific is getting a lot of love right now. I can't blame anyone for thinking that.  Mr. Terrific was incredibly cool.  That fight sequences with the T-Spheres was one of my favorite sequences in the movie and I don't know that anyone would think that was a hot take.  But this is also a movie with Nathan Fillion as a pitch-perfect Guy Gardner.  It's like Fillion is just playing up a version of his own public persona.  I'm not saying Fillion is obnoxious.  But he's been the object of a lot of people's obession for a while now and he's now weaponized it into Guy Garner.  I want to list.  Skyler Gisondo?  Oh my goodness, do I have a new favorite Jimmy Olson?  He's perfect.  I knew that was going to be the case.

But then we have our leads.  I've talked about Corenswet and I stand by him.  But the real standouts were Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane.  I got on a pretty hardcore Mrs. Maisel kick and I knew --I KNEW! --that Brosnahan was going to be the quintessential Lois Lane.  And this is coming from a guy who thought that no one would ever beat Erica Durance.  (Ms. Durance, you are still a marvel and incredible in that role.  I'm just very impressed by Brosnahan.)   Listen, the long and short is that this Lois doesn't take anyone's crap, she is an incredibly capable reporter, she's got her own emotional baggage that she's dealing with, and she is a 10 when Superman is an 8.  Heck, she makes Superman an 8.  Do you get that?  That's incredible.  

But Lex?  Oh, my goodness...Lex Luthor!  Now, I have to put Hoult at a tie with Michael Rosenbaum for best Luthor.  Hoult himself admitted that he grew up obessed with Rosenbaum's Lex.  (I hear that Rosenbaum himself cameos as one of the Luthor thugs.) But I don't think I've seen the Lex Luthor from the comics really make his way to any form of visual media before.  We've gotten billionaire Lex Luthor.  We've had criminal Lex Luthor.  But ur-genius billionaire criminal who thinks that he's the good guy of the story?   We haven't had that until Nicholas Hoult took over the role.  The fact that he's calling plays instead of punching is absolutely perfect for the character.  We get the hate and the self-righteousness of his actions when it all really boils down to old-fashioned racist xenophobia.  

And now I got to the political part.  Somehow, Superman is both way more political and progressive than I thought and almost non-political at all.  Part of that is that Gunn didn't make this movie today.  That's one thing that conservative pundits don't get.  While there are moments that absolutely align with what's going on now.  I mean, people look at the plot to stop a war between two countries as Israel and Palestine (even though I see it as Russia and Ukraine) and that's been going on since the movie started filming.  But did not one look at the Alligator Alcatraz prison that Luthor sets up for people who criticize him?  That's some pretty messed up stuff.  But the thing that's actually frustrating about the whole thing is that the part that bothers most conservatives like Dean Cain is the stuff that is central to who Superman is.  He's an immigrant who desperately wants to be like every other American and the way that he does that is through constant kindness.  That's the part that bothers them.  Come on.  It's who he is.

I almost forgot my favorite part: the end.  I have been rallying against Man of Steel because it's a bummer.  But the bigger problem that I had with that movie was the read on Jonathan Kent as a parent.  Now, the Kents in this movie were divisive, at least when it came to me and my wife.  The Kents in this movie are exactly who I never knew I needed them to be.  One of the things that Gunn really pushed for was a look at what it really meant to be a Midwestern farmer.  The Kents have always been a bit too well off for people with money problems.  One of the key points of Smallville was that the Kents were always struggling to make money, yet they lived in a house that should have been on a puzzle.  Instead, now they live in a double-wide.   Their health probably isn't the best.  But these were two folks who raised this kid they found and did the best job they could with him.  He probably didn't have much, but they gave him everything that they could.  I never understood the Superman who was obsessed with Jor-El and Lara.  While it is lovely that he wants to know about where he came from, I always saw Jonathan and Martha Kent as his parents.  That final shot, where he wanted to watch films of his family, I nearly cried.  It was beautiful.  That's the story of what it means to be a good person.  Superman is Exhibit A about how it is more important how your raised than any kind of genetics.  The Kents taught Clark everything he knew about how to be a good person, down to the avoiding cursing.  That's why Superman is good.

From a film perspective, I couldn't even tell you how Gunn got such a complicated movie to land right.  There are so many beats to this film and it's not even that long of a movie.  But the further this movie went on, the better it got.  I don't know how he did it, but he made the best Superman movie of all time.  I love the Donner Superman and probably always will.  But I have to chalk a lot of that up to nostalgia.  But from an objective standpoint, Superman 2025  is an incredible movie that I can't wait to watch again.