TV-PG which might be the most inaccurate rating in all of my history with doing this blog.  This movie has nudity, domestic abuse, and is almost first-and-foremost about sex.  It's about adultery and two people who treat each other terribly.  I know it's 1973 Sweden and that standards are different.  I even acknowledge that the TV-PG isn't even accurate because that rating system didn't exist in 1973.  Still, man...it's a lot.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Do you realize how tempted I am to watch Berlin Alexanderplatz after this?  I mean, I'm doing so much writing, that this has to be the time to knock out some of the longer movies that I'll have a hard time getting to later.  This movie...took a lot out of me.  Besides the fact that it is five hours long, this might be the first Bergman movie that I genuinely got frustrated at.  

There might be an unsaid criticism (or perhaps it's stated very clearly in some circles) that Bergman is too intellectual.  Now, so far I've been quasi-enjoying my trip through the Bergman box.  I mean, I just came off of the television version of Fanny and Alexander, which I thought might be a perfect film.  And I would be the first to admit that watching all of these Bergman movies might be the most intimidating film projects I've attempted.  After all, I've been called out on some truly awful insights into some of his movies.  As an apology, I'm going to say that almost all of my blogs are written in the light of a first viewing with little to almost no research.    But part of that intimidation is that Bergman is often equated with high art through his complex direction and narratives.  But Scenes from a Marriage might be a step too far in the wrong direction.  Also, I'd like to point out that I'm almost guaranteed in the minority for people who probably don't care for this movie.  Let's pretend that I'm brave for writing all of this.

At its core, this movie has the right idea.  I think it is fascinating watching a marriage that is thought to be safe falling apart.  There's a story to be told there and, if I had to summarize the movie, Scenes from a Marriage has everything needed to tell that story.  I might even shift a little bit when I watch the shorter theatrical cut because a lot of my frustration comes from how much time we spend with these two awful people.  But after watching so many Bergman movies in such a short time, I can't help but notice the repeated motif of casual affairs.  Maybe it's a cultural thing that we might not have as prevalent in the States, but Bergman almost exclusively tells stories about what I'll refer to as the "intellectual logical affair."  There's consistent discussions about how everyone has affairs.  It's not like the concept of the affair doesn't involve cruelty on the part of the Swedes.  It's just that they compartmentalize that fury into calm and collected responses.  Scenes of a Marriage does have emotional moments, where Marianne responds appropriately to the injustices thrust upon her.  It's just that they are in all of the wrong moments.  Also, they are always following these few and far between emotional outbursts with logical, stilted discussion. 

Honestly, they are insufferable.  The entire movie, both of them are the most chokable human beings that ever lived.  Even more insane is that we have to somewhat bond with Marianne because Johan is never likable.  The first episode establishes that Marianne and Johan believe they have a solid marriage.  Marianne is enamored with Johan (although in context of the later parts of the film, that may be a lie that they tell themselves) and I don't know why.  There's no moment where Johan shows himself to be a sympathetic character. He starts the film tooting his own horn as Marianne, for some reason, lives in this modest mouse kind of attitude.  We find out later that she is not the character that she portrays at the beginning of the movie.  It could be that Marianne has gone through so much pain that she grows into the character that we see by the end of the film.  But we also found out in the last fifteen minutes that Marianne was the first one to have an affair.  But Johan straight up beats his wife after admitting to beating Paula.  He is the one who abandons his family, which includes two girls and that's just part of the way people act in this world.  Heck, Marianne helps Johan pack.  Not in a passive aggressive way.  Instead, she just wants to be helpful to the man who is abandoning her.  It's really a bit much.

Now, here's me trying to be gracious.  There is this idea that Bergman is almost fighting the notion of the melodrama, even though the entire film feels like a black box melodrama that leans way too much on script over performance.  Maybe he wants to intentionally subvert archetypal adultery stories by saving the emotional moments for the post-intellectual discussion.  But if this is about a marriage that is falling apart, it feels so off.  I'm not saying that some people don't approach affairs with an aura of aloofness.  It's just that I don't see a marriage here.  Everything is about the selfishness of the couple.  There's a lot of talk about the children, but almost no appearance of the children.  Marianne, who is stuck with all of the fallout that Johan's leaving.  is barely ever seen with the children.  She occasionally mentions how hard it is on her and the children, but it seems to be the last thing on her mind when it comes to reuniting the children with their father.  (It should be noted that the girls see Johan because they mention that in dialogue.)  But this movie is about the moments over the course of years following their separation and we get the distinct impression that the girls have almost no influence over their lives.  They meet up for secret meals at restaurants.  They have torrid affairs all of the time.  They are constantly in some form of having a date.  Then they complain how hard their lives are.

Maybe my biggest concern is that it never really feels like a marriage, especially in the light of children.  If this was a two-income-no-children house, I could potentially seeing this being kind of accurate from an "I imagine this to be accurate" perspective.  But we only get one shot of Marianne refusing to pick up some Donald Duck comic books and that's really the only parenting we get out of this film.

And also, five hours?  Five hours.  The one thing that the five hours accomplished in terms of watching this movie is the idea that a lot of time has passed since the first episode to the last.  But the movie's only real progression is the fact that the two get more toxic the further that the movie progresses.  I mean, it's got the same issue that watching too many Woody Allen movies do.  These movies try to imbue a universal truth to what is fundamentally an Ingmar Bergman thing.  I just Googled "Did Ingmar Bergman have a lot of affairs?" and the answer was "Absolutely."  Similarly, he seemed to intellectually justify his affairs, claiming he was a different person to many different people.  That's where the movie alienates me a bit.  A movie called Scenes from a Marriage takes a core relatable moment and seems to do anything it can to make it only about Bergman's attitude towards marriage.  Heck, I would even say that Bergman is indulging in some self-flagellation by making Johan's character seemingly Bergman himself.  (Sorry, I don't know enough about Bergman himself to confidently say that.  But my headcanon says that he had that same sense of intellectual greatness that allowed him to be divorced from morality like Crime and Punishment. 

It's been a while since I've been so annoyed by a movie.  It might come from the fact that I adored Fanny and Alexander so much that I expected another Bergman super-sized story to be something as glorious as that masterpiece.  But I watched every minute of this movie, including the voiced-over credits on every episode.  One of my least favorite comments that people have about movies is that there are no likable characters.  Well, now I'm in that camp.  This was five hours of two people who drove me up the wall. They were just both so comfortable with ruining people's lives through affairs.  They also live in a world where affairs are so commonplace that people can have casual conversations about them and who they would like to have affairs.  Again, I get that there probably a world out there that lives like this.  But from my perspective, this is a world that I don't want to live in.  It's a world where no one takes another person's feeling into account and that's just not fun. There's nothing fun about this movie.  It's intellectual acrobatics that makes it feel like you are watching a script heavy play at an alternative black box theater.  It's almost rage inducing. 

Not rated, but we're back to the more PG-13 content.  It's not as gory or as sexual as Zatoichi the Outlaw, but it is more than Zatoichi Challenged.  It's got that very special paint red blood.  People are being dismembered.  There's also attempted rape and some mild sexuality.  Still, it isn't exactly an over-the-top R-rated gore fest.  It's just...more than usual.

DIRECTOR:  Kimiyoshi Yasuda

I mean, it's no Zatoichi Challenged, but few things are.  Maybe it's because I've lowered my standards.  Maybe it's because it's the final movie in a self-appointed trilogy of Zatoichi movies that all on the same discs. Maybe...just maybe, the folks behind the Zatoichi franchise are finally figuring out that there need to be some stories --however basic --between each entry in the franchise.  But Zatoichi and the Fugitives was actually pretty darned good.  Well, most of the movie is kind of mid and then the last twenty minutes get really good. But I'll tell you, this isn't the first movie that has been salvaged by a solid conclusion.

Again, my main beef with this series is how repetitive it gets.  The fine folks at Letterboxd redefined it as "episodic", but I have issues with minimalizing it like that.  While Zatoichi films are episodic, in the sense that they have a formula and are ultimately about a blind yakuza (something I just discovered in this movie is that Zatoichi is yakuza...which doesn't really happen on camera?) helping the helpless in his own superpowered way, "episodic" shouldn't necessarily mean "the same."  I watch episodic television from today.  But even more to the point, I watch / have watched a lot of episodic television from yesteryear.  Right now, while watching dishes, I am doing a rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Star Trek, as a franchise, wouldn't go into mythology episode storytelling until later on Deep Space Nine, so I can say that TNG is full-on episodic.  But I can seriously point to the plots of individual episodes and talk about the uniqueness of that story.  It is episodic, yet unique.  Zatoichi often didn't have any sense of uniqueness between individual films until these later movies.  

Ultimately, the formula of these movies isn't bad.  It's just seductive for writers.  But it doesn't really take a lot of effort to tweak the Zatoichi formula to make a more interesting movie.  With the case of Fugitives, it really isn't a massive change to make a story more interesting. It still has the corrupt village boss making a town miserable, but adding the four fugitives who act outside the bounds of a traditional gang attitude makes it so much more interesting.  While this may be an unintentional consequence, these characters become agents of chaos for Zatoichi.  The funny thing is, these criminals are way more intense for Zatoichi specifically than a traditional bad guy.  There was a Superman Returns game after the movie came out.  I had it for XBox 360.  These details don't matter.  The point of this reference is that Superman himself never had a health bar; Metropolis did.  If Metropolis got destroyed, you lose.  We get that Zatoichi is really good at massacring tons and tons of bad guys.  But those guys follow rules.   Yeah, the criminals have more skills than your rando yakuza. But we also know that Zatoichi would kill them in a hot second given free reign.

But my frustration comes from the fact that I mentally have a better story than what is presented here.  It's just as simple.  If anything, it's more simple because it would remove that yakuza staple that we keep getting over and over again.  How much more interesting would it be if the fugitives were all equally skilled to Zatoichi?  That's a story.  Zatoichi kills one of the lower level guys in the gang, just in the same way that he does in the beginning, and the four guys --who all have their own special murder skill set --come after him one-by-one.  They all put him through trials, Man with the Golden Gun style and Zatoichi dispatches them until he realizes that his buddy, the doctor's kid, is the head of the group who is messing with him and observing his skills.  We get that end fight sequence like we did in this movie and that's something to watch. That there is a movie that I would pass around.

I can't complain though.  I do love the end of this movie.  There's been this push that shows that Zatoichi is willing to die for any cause that he adopts lately.  In Zatoichi Challenged, he throws his sword at a stray bad guy, leaving him defenseless against the big bad. In this case, he takes a bullet early in a fight.  He's borderline dying for the entire last act of the movie.  He also escapes, because he's Zatoichi.  But in his weakened state, he takes out all of these dudes, including the doctor's kid.  That's some good action.  Yeah, I knew that Zatoichi was going to survive.  We all knew Zatoichi was going to survive.  I have a few more discs to go in the series.  Also, it would be weird if these were the dudes who won.  But I loved that it was actually difficult for this guy. One of the problems of having a Mary Sue character like Zatoichi is that everyone is worse at fighting than he is.  But with this, there was a real threat to survival.  It's kind of what was introduced in another entry with the loud noises, but actually effective.  (Who knew? His weakness was bullets!) 

I was shocked to see Takashi Shimura in this movie. I don't have the cultural context for how influential the Zatoichi movies are, but this is the first time I recognized a celebrity in one of these movies.  I loved his performance, but he's also part of the more inconsequential parts of the film.  Like most Zatoichi movies, there are parts that I do not care about.  I want to care about them.  I'm not saying that these parts aren't necessary to make a movie.  It's just that I wish that these scenes were somehow quintessential.  Instead, we have these moments that will never come into play with the protagonist.  Zatoichi has all of these moments where he says that he's never met anyone like [insert name here] before.  But these characters never carry on to other movies.  With the case of the doctor, he is this man who gives away medication and Zatoichi is moved.  I guarantee that we'll never hear about this dude again.  (Watch, Zatoichi 19 is his team up with this man just to make me look like a jerk.)

The good news is that I'm having a better time with these movies that I was in the past.  It's actually kind of surprising that it happened when I watched three of these movies in a row. It isn't perfect, but it is definitely watchable.

Not rated, and weirdly less intense than its predecessor, Zatoichi the Outlaw​.  That's kind of surprising, because that movie was gory and sexual.  This one has a little bit of blood and drawn nudity, but no actual nudity or sexuality in this one.  Sure, we have to be reminded that Zatoichi is just slaughtering dude after dude who comes after him.  But since they got rid of all the blood, it somehow makes it more palatable.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR: Kenji Misumi

See, I normally don't write any film blogs on weekend.  Here I am, writing two separate Zatoichi blogs in the same weekend.  I stand by my choices.  This one, I don't necessarily have anxiety about writing.  Besides the idea that I have to knock this out before I'm given some kind of job that distracts me from writing, I don't really have anxiety.  Do you know why?

This might be the best Zatoichi movie.  I know that I still have a healthy amount of Zatoichi movies after this.  Normally, after you say that you've watched seventeen movies in the same franchise, you'd have to assume that I'm near the end.  Spoiler alert:  I still have a billion more movies to go.  But I never thought that the franchise would find its glorious moment with film seventeen.  Now, I keep writing this over and over, so I apologize to those happy few who have stuck through the Zatoichi blog entries time and again.  The biggest complaint that this franchise has is a complete lack of creativity. Once they figured out their format, they were so afraid of deviating from that formula that these movies became a straight up burden.  Yeah, I would have purchased this box set regardless, even knowing that they get pretty boring.  I love me a pretty Criterion box set.  

But Zatoichi Challenged did the smartest thing ever.  It still fits in the tone and aesthetics of a Zatoichi movie, but it actually simplified the plot to something that is fundamentally character driven.  Add to the fact that someone really cared what this movie looked like, I can't help but be more than a little impressed by this movie. For the first time since watching the first movie in the box (which I will have to return to one day), I was actually invested in one of these movies.  Part of that came from the fact that we had a concrete plot that could easily be understood.  For those who really want to know why Challenged works, it's because Zatoichi has a concrete goal.  After a boy's mother dies, he's tasked with returning a six-year-old to his father, who is unaware of his existence.  It's not like Challenged doesn't have any of the Zatoichi trappings.  There are still local lords and bosses who make Zatoichi's life miserable.  Of course, there are going to be conflicts, some of which I'll lack the cultural context to completely understand and relate to.  But this is fundamentally a story that should have been named Zatoichi and Son.  To give credit where credit is due, we kind of got a better version of this with Lone Wolf and Cub. But those movies wouldn't start showing up until 1972.  I couldn't tell you when the manga was written.

While I dig the Zatoichi versus a million dudes sequences, those moments get old.  Instead, when Zatoichi is playful (beyond his standard "messing with people trying to trick him at dice" bit), that's when I really like the movies.  The back and forth between the kid and Zatoichi is honestly priceless.  One thing that it brought to my attention that, for all of Zatoichi's charm, he's kind of a grumpus.   It's kind of like Captain Picard (I'm really expanding my coolness base with these Zatoichi and Picard references!).  We kind of forget that he's kind of a grumpy mess most of the time when he's juxtaposed to children. Zatoichi knows how to chat with everyone and have a good time, but his disdain for children gives him room to grow.  And the thing is, Zatoichi actually goes through character growth because of his time with the kid.  We're even given the Shane ending, with the kid chasing after him as he leaves the boy to bond with his father.  (If you yell at me about spoilers, come on.  You knew where this was going.)  But unlike the Shane ending, we actually get to experience the growth of the character from the eponymous perspective. It's really good.

Also, can I tell you how much I enjoy something that others might not think ages very well.  This is another Zatoichi film from 1967.  They were really cranking them out that year, huh?  Anyway, it's nice to see that the franchise embraces the cultural changes that are happening throughout the world.  I thought the same thing when Bond started addressing that they should start changing for the times.  It's not all the way throughout the movie, but there is this cool hippie moment where there's a music number that feels way to poppy than feudal Japan would offer.  I don't know.  It just feels so light for most of the movie.  Now, as I'm writing this, I realize that Zatoichi Challenged is unfortunately in that subgenre of film where a barbarian hangs out with a baby, like The Pacifier.  But this movie nails the feel of what this movie should be.  Because it's movie number 17, we are more in touch with Zatoichi as a character than something like The Pacifier, which ultimately relies on archetypes and shortcuts to develop character.  We know who Zatoichi is.  We know his moral code and all of the things that he stands for.  When this kid is added to the story, there's an understanding that whatever choices that Zatoichi makes has to stay true to his character.  It's pretty rad.

And, as much as I'm praising the dynamic between Zatoichi and the kid, there's this whole other plot that we don't really have a read on.  Okay, I should have been more concrete about the fact that the samurai and Zatoichi were going to have to fight by the end.  I knew that it was a possibility, but I refused to commit to it.  But there's this whole B-plot of this noble ronin who befriends the wandering Zatoichi and child.  We get the idea that they're going to be partners in goodness coming from different places in life.  But then the samurai starts doing all of these morally dubious acts and the film just goes to another level.  The final sequence in these movies tends to be the moment that a lot of people are waiting for.  I mentioned that they stopped really knocking my socks off a while ago, but this one absolutely slaps.  Yeah, I know.  Snow shouldn't make things look artsy.  But guess what?  That duel in the snow is one of the coolest samurai sequences I've seen in a while.  

Also, they made that moment flipping worth it.  So worth it.  There is an understanding that Zatoichi is constantly putting his life at risk for the greater good.  But that was always balanced with the concept that Zatoichi was always so skilled that there was no scenario where he'd really get beaten.  With Zatoichi's Cane Sword, another Zatoichi movie that I really dug for taking some risks, we got that Zatoichi kind of risked his life knowing that the next hit would have destroyed his weapon of choice.  That was more out of his hands.  Instead, there's this amazing duel with two guys who don't want to kill each other (although Zatoichi's comment about samurais being so full of themselves was pretty great) leads to Zatoichi full on surrendering his life by getting rid of his sword to save Shokichi.   He's there, ready to be slain for this man he just met, but really for this child who has a chance at happiness.  Just there, kneeling in the snow...it's all perfect.  Such a good dismount. 

It's been so long since I've been excited for this franchise and I never thought that there would be good entries past the original.  It's weird, because I'd almost recommend this as a movie to start with if you wanted a good Zatoichi movie.

Not rated, but this one feels way more R-Rated than its predecessors.  Besides just upping the gore, there's a fair bit of dismemberment of all kinds in this movie.  It's almost as if you swing a sharp sword, body parts are going to come flying off.  Add to that a bit of swearing, a suicide, and sexual harassment, you have a movie that I now feel uncomfortable with my kids walking in on.  But since this is a Japanese movie from 1967, it's still considered "Unrated."

DIRECTOR: Satsuo Yamamoto

I almost have to write about this immediately after watching this.  My new method is to watch the whole Blu-ray full of Zatoichi movies before moving onto something else.  That means that they're probably going to bleed together (no pun intended) if I don't try to just word vomit my thoughts on the movie immediately.  If I ever have all of the Zatoichi movie blogs in one bingable place on my Collections Page, you'll see the common complaint that these movies are ultimately the same movie over and over again.  

I suppose that's true about Zatoichi the Outlaw as well.  The place that I'm going to give  it a little bit of difference comes from the fact that this movie is a little bit more R-rated than things we've seen in the past.  It never reaches levels of movies like Lone Wolf and Cub, but it definitely seems to be entering a new era of how hardcore these movies are actually getting. It's that really sweet, late '60s violence with the bright red paint blood that's all over this movie.  I may choose to believe this in my head, but I also feel like the head honchos behind the Zatoichi movies are aware that they never really make anything new in the franchise because Zatoichi the Outlaw almost feels like a commentary on the Zatoichi movies.  Now, I did notice that this was the first production of a certain producer.  I don't know details.  But in some ways, Zatoichi the Outlaw is both the most unique of the Zatoichi movies while completely embracing the formula of Zatoichi movies.

In terms of what's standard, we have the old chestnut of Zatoichi meeting a new village, finding gangsters terrorizing the town, and then he slices everyone up.  Like usual, he meets men he admires and women that he disappoints.  We've been through this before.  But what is somewhat of a new offering is how that information is presented.  The first third of the movie almost is a Zatoichi movie in summation.  We see him welcomed into this town.  He gets involved in the dastardly behavior of the greedy gang lords, even down to him disrupting a gambling game --a moment in Zatoichi movies that is becoming so old hat that it feels like Bart Simpson screaming "Aye Carumba!"   But then we kind of see the fallout of what happens in this town when Zatoichi leaves.  Admittedly, this moment is actually essential to the plot.  Zatoichi is leaving the town before the big bloodbath and we know that he's going to be returning to this town once tensions have died down. 

The cool part of it all is that we have a little bit of a twist on the traditional villain in this movie.  Zatoichi meets a couple of pretty rad dudes in the first third of the film.  The first guy, Ohara (whom I think of as O'Hara, an Irish ronin --despite having nothing Irish about him), is this message about the value of pacifism.  This guy, as much as I like him as a concept for one of these movies, is wasted in this film.  Ohara can talk pacifism all day, but Zatoichi murdering everyone in a more gory manner undercuts whatever the movie was trying to say about bloodless protests.  If anything, it treats Ohara's message as quaint and stupid in an era of samurai swordplay.  I mean, Ohara is still considered the noble character at the end of the piece, so take from that what you will.  But Zatoichi never really learns a lesson from him and it is Zatoichi's skill with his incredibly violent side that saves Ohara from the misery that the Yakuza subject him to.

But I was going to talk about the villain!  The other guy that Zatoichi admires in this one is Boss Asagoro.  Asagoro might be my favorite villain of the franchise so far.  I mean, he's not great with a sword.  His general threat level is pretty minimal.  But what he completely excels at is pulling the wool over Zatoichi's (blind) eyes.  Part of this movie sells the notion that not all criminals are the greedy jerks that we've been fed for film after film.  (You think I'm exaggerating?  Zatoichi the Outlaw is the sixteenth film in the franchise!) He reminds me of Teresa's father in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.  This is a Yakuza gambling den owner who, while profiting on the citizens of this small peaceful town, seems to genuinely care about the residents.  He buys out their debt to free them from the more nefarious members of the Yakuza.  He claims to do so because he understands that the town needs farmers and that he can't stop them from returning to their vices.  The first third of the movie, Zatoichi and Asagoro gain a mutual respect for one another.  But that's what makes the betrayal all that more impressive.

Asagoro is a dirty liar the entire time and Zatoichi falls for it.  Heck, I fall for it too.  I'm so used to these big bads being in Zatoichi's crosshairs (I need to stop using colloquialisms that have some kind of tie to sight.  I swear, I'm not doing this on purpose) from moment one and Zatoichi just plays with them.  This one, because Zatoichi is duped by Asagoro's charity, leading to his rise to power, it just feels personal.  I dig that it feels personal.  On top of that, Asagoro is the one guy who seems to really injure Zatoichi physically and it's not through any kind of amazing swordsmanship.  Instead, he hides behind a dead body and then cuts open his leg.  Sure, this moment never really plays a part in the overall ending of the film, but I dig that it went there.  

My expectations for these movies is meh.  I enjoy what the base product is.  I enjoy the notion of Zatoichi movies.  But do you see how much I preached just a minor change to formula.  I can't believe that they kept making these movies so many times and just kept sticking the same dog-and-pony show.  Don't worry, though.  I have two more movies on the disc to get through before I get to the long version of Scenes from a Marriage.

Rated R for being a quasi-raunchy comedy that includes sexuality, nudity (specifically, dudity), language, violence, scares, alcoholism and all kinds of stuff that is involved in raunchy comedies. It's not even that raunchy.  It just has raunchy comedy vibes.  Here's the deal.  There was the feeling that I should always have my finger on the pause button in case one of my kids decided to come downstairs and say that they were thirsty.  Parenthood is great.  R.

DIRECTOR: Paul Briganti

I often complain about how much I'm not feeling like writing right now.  Today, it might be the most intense, distilled, almost phobia about writing.  Sure, no one is making me do this.  I could just put it off until tomorrow.  Today was almost supposed to be a break from writing my novel or the blog.  But I also didn't want this to be on my To-Do list, so that pile of groceries that's sitting in bags on the floor?  Those are going to have to wait until I knock out a blog about a fairly silly comedy that I have really no hot takes on.  I am the most intense hobbyist that ever existed.

I'm on the outside of the Please Don't Destroy community.  My wife really digs Saturday Night Live.  Often, she'll request that we watch highlights from the previous Saturday when a new episode comes out.  As such, I get these guys.  They're the spiritual successors to the Lonely Island.  That description is so dead-on that I don't know if anyone can really fight me on it.  I'm not saying they're a copy of The Lonely Island.  I'm just saying that they do their own Digital Short thing that's a little off from the standard humor that SNL offers.  As such, they often are the best parts of SNL.  But The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (a title, by the way, that I'm really struggling to get right every time I have to type it) is almost a commentary on how the SNL crew needs to consider whether the transition from the small screen short to the cinematic format of a feature length movie is the best move.

I'm almost exclusively writing this as a review as opposed to an analysis at this point because that's probably where the greater commentary lies with this movie.  One of the more shared quotes from Star Trek: The Next Generation is Picard telling Data that "It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose.  That is not a weakness.  That is life."   That's the most apt review of this movie.  The Please Don't Destroy guys bring their exact sensibilities and unique humor, nail every single joke in the way it is supposed to land, and I still left the movie going "Meh."  It's a really weird reaction considering that they didn't screw up.  They took something I liked, didn't compromise, made a feature length movie, and still...I just didn't care.  There was a point where I was genuinely laughing at the beginning, thinking that this movie was genius.  But at one point, I found myself kind of exhausted.  

Maybe the Please Don't Destroy sense of humor works better in small doses.  That's really unfair to them, but it also might be true.  Things that, on paper, should have absolutely destroyed me, left me lightly blowing air out of my nose.  Seriously, in retrospect, one of the gags at the end of the movie should have had me telling everyone to watch this movie.  Spoiler alert for a movie that doesn't really need a spoiler alert, but when the hawk steals the Macguffin and just flies off, leaving everyone without the treasure, that moment should have destroyed me.  I kept looking over to my wife during that joke, hoping subconsciously (if I can't analyze the movie, I can analyze myself!) that I would have that communal sense of humor.

I would like to think that's what is going on. From what I understand, this was a movie that was a Peacock original.  It never saw a theatrical release.  I might be really wrong about this, but I'm writing against the clock and have no time to really look this up.  (I'm literally writing about how I'm phoning this whole thing in.) But comedies like this thrive on a communion of an audience.  It's interesting.  I can watch scary movies at home, and almost enjoy doing so more, but understand that a scary movie with a lot of people in a dark theater is significantly a more intense experience.  But with a jokes-per-minute comedy?  I think it is essential to the viewing experience.  Maybe that's where the fault of this movie lies.  This is one of those movies that needs a packed theater all cracking up at the same time.  That could be the reason that we aren't seeing intense comedies in the theaters anymore because they are so codependent (I was going to use the word "symbiotic", but I don't want to make it sounds like they help each other, but actually need each other) that the theater can't risk a comedy not being attended.  

I refuse to turn in a blog entry without at least an attempt at analysis.  Also, I really haven't written anything besides the notion that comedies to better with a large audience and I chose to watch it with just my wife who was on her phone audibly watching clips of Donald Trump saying stupid things this week.  The kid of humor that Please Don't Destroy offers is always colored with a metacontextual element that takes the expectation of silly comedies and just almost makes fun of the whole lot.  That sounds like A) they're disrespectful of what came before and B) it sounds mean.  Neither of those statements is necessarily true.  If anything, Please Don't Destroy is almost homaging everything out of a sense of reverence while taking it a step further.  They sit on the shoulders of silly legends and out-silly them.  It never really reaches the level of Adult Swim absurdism.  Rather, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain takes three larger than life characters and never really lets any of them be the actual straightman.

That's actually a pretty solid read on why their comedy comes across the way that it does.  Gun to head, John has to be the protagonist.  He's the one with the primary conflict.  His friends have grown up while he has stayed the same.  Again, if there are only a handful of plots in Hollywood, we know where the movie is going through here. But John also doesn't really live in a reality that exists.  At any moment, a silly situation will be looked on with complete normality.  (I got commented on how a movie took Mystical Realism and adapted it to Horror Realism; The Treasure of Foggy Mountain turned it into Comedy Realism.) Any attempt to bring in a straight man is instantly subverted.  When you cast Conan O'Brien as your disappointed dad, you know there's going to be some Conan standards in there.  The optimistic way to look at this is that the guys who made this movie never really cared if it appealed to mass audiences, but I have a feeling that Lorne Michaels wanted it to.  (Is Lorne Michaels' name on the credits?  Who knows?)

The funny thing is, I kind of liked the movie.  As much as this whole thing is a criticism why it didn't hit, we have to look at the core of what I said.  They technically didn't do anything wrong.  If anything, this is more of a criticism of me and the fact that we don't get silly comedies on wide release.  It is objectively pretty funny.  These guys are doing what they loved.  Heck, honestly, with a different attitude and in a different point in my life, this movie probably would be lauded as much as I hyped up movies like Super Troopers and films like that.  But it did everything right and just didn't really hit?  I liked it, but didn't have fun with it.

Rated R for all kinds of reasons.  Besides being a movie fundamentally about cruelty and greed, the movie has on-screen brutal murder, language, blasphemy, child abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, and other such things.  It's one of those movies that just feels bleak, which is fine because it was never really intended for children.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Paul Thomas Anderson

I'm letting the grand experiment begin.  I'm back to writing the novel and --God forbid! --it's actually going well.  When I wrote the first draft of the book, I avoided movies so I wouldn't have to write blogs.  But I have enough study halls where I can be productive writing and still maintain the blog.  I won't lie.  I'm going to stick some longer films in here so I don't have to write blogs as often.  But I'm seeing if I can write a blog after spending multiple hours a day already writing.  It's a bit much; a bit extra.  But I also like the idea that I'm the most productive human alive.

There Will Be Blood might be one of those perfect movies.  I have this theory that there are a handful of perfect movies.  They might not be my favorite movies, but they might be perfect.  There Will Be Blood is really hard to criticize in my head.  It's not a surprise that I worship at the altar of Paul Thomas Anderson.  But There Will Be Blood might be the movie that got me into PTA.  (I did it.  I called him PTA.  I was wondering if I would ever be that guy and I just proved that I am.)  There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece that sits on the foundation of a movie that should be unsellable.  Honestly, if you summarized this movie to me, I would think that this is an incredibly boring idea.  Oddly enough, I own the book that the movie was based on and I haven't read it.  (It's on the list to be read soon.) There seems to be nothing fun about this movie.  In retrospect, it might not actually be fun at all.  But what should be an incredibly boring film is, scene-for-scene / shot-for-shot one of the most fascinating pieces of cinema ever created.  (Again, I tried to figure out how to get it on my Top 4 movies on Letterboxd and I can't move the other four.  I kinda / sorta want to move Seven Samurai off of that list, but each time I watch that movie, I love it more.) 

What makes There Will Be Blood is that it is the perfect storm of every element.  My gut wants to say that this is an engaging study of the human condition through Daniel Plainview, a man who is so aggressively flawed, juxtaposed by his bizarro mirror, who is also evil. That's absolutely true.  Daniel Plainview and Eli are the perfect two-hander.  Daniel is a monster of a human being who has snippets of humanity.  While the movie ends with Daniel telling H.W. the reality of his birth, claiming that the child was nothing but a mask for Daniel's demonic selfish nature, the flash implies that --for as much as that may have been the initial choice that Daniel made --H.W. was a loved child.  Yet, we see this kid hate Daniel the further that H.W. is plunged into silent isolation.  The pride that Daniel has at H.W.'s wrath seems genuine.  When H.W. returns home from San Francisco, he starts striking out at Daniel, he praises the child.  Daniel takes what is fundamentally immoral and finds value in the displays of the immoral.  One of the more quotable moments in the film is when he is being baptized by Eli.  It's the "I've abandoned my child" scene.  This moment is Eli's revenge.  It goes as far as Eli using this baptism to hit Daniel without chance of recompense.  Daniel's humiliated at the notion of having to wear the weakness of Christian virtue, despite knowing that Eli is a fraud.  But once Eli starts with the hits, there's a hint of a smile on Daniel's face.  There's a respect for the perversion of religion for the sake of revenge.  

Counter this with Eli.  Both Daniel and Eli are characters that wear masks.  With the case of Daniel's mask, it's a little straightforward.  He starts his presentations in every town saying, "I'm an oilman." Translated, "I'm a businessman" or "I'm a conman."  There's almost a tacit understanding that Daniel is there to roll out a product and present it in the best possible light.  But Eli inverses that.  Eli is a monster, much in the same way that Daniel is.  The odd thing is that he is in conflict with another monster.  (All these Godzilla movies are helping me with this blog!)  Eli wears the mask most of the time.  We see Daniel lose the facade while Eli stays as the character the entire time.  This is very much The Prestige.  Daniel calls Eli on his showmanship the first time that he visits the Church of the Third Revelation, but we don't really need that explicit observation to really pick up on that.  Eli's character is seductive for him.  It gives him importance.  He loves being a big fish in a small pond.  While Daniel may derive joy from the beating he receives, to Eli, that is the worst thing that can happen to him.  Being humiliated like that shows that he is untouchable.  For Eli, his position as God's representative on Earth is quite literal.  He wants to be treated as God.

As God, he humiliates those around him.  He is the wrathful God who will not stand for human weakness.  If we remove Eli's title as the pastor of the Church, Eli is a guy who beats his father for giving away land to Daniel Plainview.  That's pretty messed up, but that's what is happening in that scene.  He is mad at his own weakness and decides to shame those around him.  It is a grasp for gaining power back and it works.  These two characters, Daniel and Eli, drive each other into further misery for their own selfish needs.  But that dynamic isn't necessarily the same.  There's a specific power dynamic that we don't see very often.  Eli, from Daniel's perspective, is so beneath him.  He should be a bump in the road, at most.  But this is a kid that he ends up beating to death with a bowling pin, not because he embarrassed himself, but because he allowed himself to fail.  Eli highlights Daniel inherent flaw: his hatred for failure.  When H.W. goes off to form his own oil company in Mexico, Daniel hates H.W., but allows it to happen.  But Daniel gets violent when his competition drops the ball.  With Henry, that moment of vulnerability showing that the con man couldn't maintain the illusion causes Daniel to shoot Henry.  When the man from Standard Oil tells Daniel how to do something that he's not good at (raising his son), he makes an enemy for life.  But he only beats Eli to death when Eli comes begging for money.  He's hated Eli the entire time, but there's at least a weird respect between game-recognizing-game.  Eli becomes a reflection for Daniel's own failures, which mostly include leaving the game.  As greedy as Daniel is, the real failure is allowing himself to live a life of luxury.  It's probably why Standard Oil's offer of a million dollars is so insulting to him.  It's  offering him a life without purpose, much like Star Trek: The Motion Picture with Kirk.

But everything in this movie is so good.  It's minimalist plot coupled with amazing visuals is what makes Paul Thomas Anderson so darned impressive.  He does so much visual artistry with so little to work with.  Everything is visually stunning.  I was almost angry looking for photos of this movie because none of them were high res enough to really show off how good this movie looks.  (Scans were probably made in 2007 and not updated.)  

But then there are the performances.  I know that Daniel Day Lewis will always be praised as one of the greatest performers ever.  He's earned that reputation.  But this might be his best performance.  Daniel Plainview, a guy who wears his intentions on his sleeve, is somehow still a nuanced character.  There are levels to be extracted from every choice that Daniel Day Lewis makes that are teases and behind the eyes.  And this is the movie that introduced me to Paul Dano.  Up to today, I will still say that Paul Dano is one of the greatest actors.  I go to movies knowing that Paul Dano is in the movie and it's because of There Will Be Blood.  Eli has those intense, wrath of God scenes.  But he also is this guy who has evil behind the quiet moments.  Eli is terrifying.

One thing if I had to criticize the movie.  It is my job.  Asking Paul Dano to do double duty as both Paul and Eli is incredibly confusing.  I read the story about why they did that.  It needed to be addressed way before the end of the movie.  Even Daniel Plainview questions this moment when he meets Eli.  He thinks he's being played.  But Daniel has knowledge that we don't.  He knows what happened to Paul that we never got.  The fact that the family never really talks about Paul made me question whether or not Paul was real or simply a manipulation by Eli at the start of the film.  It's really confusing, but I'm glad there's resolution at the end.

Okay, I didn't write as much as I usually do.  Writing this much is exhausting.  That being said, I also have a hard time writing about movies that I adore.  I just need to remind myself that more doesn't always equal better.

PG-13 for the typical summer blockbuster stuff.  Again, I cannot stress enough how this franchise has massive casualties that never are really addressed.  Like, so many people die and you never really think about it unless you choose to.  Then there's some swearing and scary moments.  Big monsters get hurt.  If you think about the incredible amount of casualties, you would be horrified.  But it's the same as playing Rampage.  It's just part of the storytelling experience.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Adam Wingard

Why?!  Why do I keep returning to this franchise?  I know that I don't really like it.  I can almost assuredly say that I keep returning because I've invested so much into it.  Listen, as many movies that are out there that I would watch, I am even further behind on TV shows.  But as I was slogging through what was ultimately the same movie I've seen time and again, I was trying to figure out when I would watch the Monarch TV show spin-off of these movies on Apple TV+.  That's how wired I am for closure on something.  I want to know that I've seen everything, even if I don't really care for the original product.

Part of me was resigned to watch this.  I had just finished the five-plus hour Fanny and Alexander and I needed something way dumber to relax the old mind-grapes. I also had the horror of realizing that Ingmar Bergman also has a five hour Scenes from a Marriage in the box set that I will be knocking out ASAP, especially considering that I'm about to start writing the novel again come Monday.   Keeping all of these things in mind, I decided to watch Godzilla x Kong because I needed something completely vapid.  And vapid it was.  Man alive, this movie is paradoxical in its storytelling.  There's just so much jam-packed nothing going on.  It's not just that there was nothing going on.  That would make the movie seem boring.  Instead, we're constantly reminded of all of the different characters and plotlines in play and none of them seem to matter.  There is a hierarchy of story though and, oddly enough, Godzilla isn't in a ton of those main plots considering that he's the first word of the title.  The movie has the human protagonists putzing around the jungle of Hollow Earth (a concept I'm having a really hard time getting past my critical sensor) while Kong is looking for his own kind.  The human story...isn't much.  There's a little bit of a story when it comes to what it means to be an adoptive parent and I suppose I can applaud the movie for giving their plot a modicum of meaning.

But oddly enough, it seems like the actual protagonist of the movie is King Kong.  He gets a lot of screen time.  Good for him.  He's a king. Anyway, I do applaud the odd humanization of this giant ape.  Honestly, the first few moments of this movie, I thought hat King Kong was portrayed by a silent Sam Elliott.  He's a guy just fightin' his way through the wilderness.  He can't eat because his tooth hurts and he's just lookin' for his family.  There was one moment where I thought that Kong was going to lower the brim of a massive cowboy hat and sleep in the orange sunset.  Yeah, it gives Kong characterization and someone that we can latch onto in the big fight sequences, but it's almost a bit much.  The point of the original King Kong was that animals had souls.  "Twas beauty that killed the beast" or whatever.  But Godzilla x Kong takes it to a level where Kong has capability for incredibly complex thought.  This is the kaiju movie where King Kong has the capability to make Rambo  / Kevin McCallister traps.  Like, I don't know why I need that separation between Kong and the human characters, but I just do.

I'm really trying here.  I want to give an in-depth and thoughtful blog, but this is a movie that is almost so dumb that there's nothing. I firmly believe that almost every movie has something to pick apart.  I could talk about my favorite scenes.  I knew that somewhere in this blog that I would be mentioning that Kong, during the awful Meet Cute between him and the other apes, uses Mini-Kong as a weapon and that was highly satisfying. But that's not analytical in the least.  And that's the movie.  This is a movie that almost fights to be about nothing.  The weird part about that is that it also kind of lowers the stakes of the film.

The bad guy of the movie is the Scar King, a character that is so incredibly underdeveloped that I'm not really sure if this is a blip on the radar for most people living on Earth.  While Kong using a baby ape as a pair of nunchuks might have been the high point of the movie for me, there's a scene where Dr. Andrews (whose name I absolutely had to look up for the sake of this blog) reads what is supposed to be ancient lost-culture hieroglyphs.  It's her specialty.  After all, she has an Iwi (?) daughter.  But she is reading what are clearly just loosey-goosey cave drawings and telling a complex story about the Scar King. But all of that is happening in a exposition dump that should never have happened.  There's no way that's the level of detail that is happening in those drawings.  Anyway, we never really get to understand how much of a threat that Scar King is beyond what we're told.

I mean, obviously, we're meant to see the parallels with the two monsters mirroring Godzilla and Kong.  I just wish that there was some kind of tie between these characters besides the fact that they are similar styled monsters.  I get that the Scar King is a really bad dude who enslaves his own people.  I just don't really see him as a threat that Kong couldn't take care of without a little bit of planning.  After all, he made those absolutely absurd Rambo traps when he was being chased down...another moment that I call complete shenanigans on.   It seems like we're meant to believe that this jerk of an ape is the end of the world character, worthy of waking up Mothra.  (Is it weird that while I find Mothra as a deity absurd, my mind can rationalize it because I've seen enough of the classic Godzilla movies?)  It honestly seems like Kong should have been willing to rally the troops and stage a revolt against this guy who can't be on his game all of the time.  That might have been a more satisfying ending because what this movie (and really these movies) are simply equate to CG creatures punching each other until the credits roll.  There's no real smart epiphany these things have.  They punch until the obvious advantage is balanced and then the movie ends.

Let's talk about what I'm conflicted with.  That old ape, right?  That was a mirror of Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained, right?   That was literally all the thought that went into it. I'm not crazy, right?  Also, completely anticlimactic death for that ape.  

Anyway, I didn't hate this movie.  I just don't care at all for this film.  It makes me really wonder what attracts these actors to come to this movie because this cast is too good for this movie.  I want to talk about Dan Stevens and Brian Tyree Henry in this film, but I have nothing to say outside of "How big was that paycheck?"  Maybe they were having fun, but I don't see much about these movies that shows quality.

Not rated, both because this is an international film, but also because it was a TV mini-series in 1983.  Isn't this a blog about movies?  Well, it counts as a movie because it is the expanded form of a theatrically released film.  It is not for children, although it never really feels outright offensive.  I mean, the movie has sex and nudity, domestic and child abuse, language, adulty, sexual boundary issues with children, discussions about abortions, and some pretty brutal deaths.  Despite its tone being tame, it actually has a lot of objectionable content.  Also, blasphemy...

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

I've technically gotten a few days off from blogging because it takes a minute to watch a five-and-a-half hour movie / mini-series.  I did it on purpose.  I wanted a nice little break and I knew that I should knock out one of the editions of Fanny and Alexander so I wouldn't have to write about them borderline back-to-back.  So I skipped ahead so I could just get this one out of the way.  Now, the crazy part is that I've seen this version of the movie before.  I actually haven't watched the theatrical cut yet.  But I'll tell you what.  I didn't remember much about this movie until I started rewatching it.  It was the right amount of time, too.  While things came back to me, it was kind of like watching the movie anew.  And let me tell you something.  I remember why I liked this movie so much.

There's so much that I kind of want to say and they're all kind of half-formed.  Please be patient with me.  Fanny and Alexander feels like a fusion between the Brontes and Henrik Ibsen.  Heck, Ibsen even gets name-dropped in this movie.  There is something just elevated about this that puts Fanny and Alexander almost in the academic canon.  Sure, cinephiles are wholly aware of this movie, if only because Cinefix often uses stills of this movie when discussing color choices.  But Fanny and Alexander is just a smart and meticulously crafted film that has some of the themes and motifs that we see in classic literature.  The greats seem to take small stories about individuals enduring unimaginable hardships and elevating them to epic proportions.  Now, I'm not quite sure why the movie is named Fanny and Alexander, because this is fundamentally Alexander's story.  (I mean, I get that Fanny is with him for a lot of the film, but we experience the traumatic events through Alexander's eyes.  Fanny barely speaks the entire film and often isn't the one making decisions or taking risks.)   I can't speak to the theatrical version yet, but Bergman slowly builds up the world of the Ekdahls, a flawed family that is --for all of its toxicity --incredibly functional.  When the lynchpin of the family is removed because of what seems to be a stroke, a grieving widows quick rush to normalcy ruins everything for the core Ekdahl family members, most notably the children.

Again, my Daddy Issues are what bind me to this story.  Okay, I wasn't locked in my room by my stepfather.  He and I just butted heads similarly to Alexander and the bishop.  But the story is just a well-crafted version of what other people have attempted.  Bergman, especially the later Bergman, rarely takes so focused and explicit of an approach when it comes to storytelling.  It's not that he's being lazy with Fanny and Alexander.  Quite the opposite.  There are still moments to analyze and interpret in this story, especially when it comes to Alexander's relationships to potential ghosts coupled with a hatred for God.  But Fanny and Alexander seems to carry Bergman's most intense development of character that isn't hidden under layers of abstract storytelling.  While it may take about an hour to mentally chart the personalities and conflicts of the large Ekdahl family, these characters, by the time the conflict is in full swing, are so well-explained that each of their choices makes sense in the grand scheme of the story. 

I hate to use the word "villain" when it comes to the antagonist of the film.  "Villain" has an almost simplistic connotation.  Often, action movies have villains.  But Bishop Edvard is such a terrifying villain because he's this character that, no matter what is levied against him, he always seems to be holding the cards.  When Emilie threatens to leave him, he has the law on his side.  When he is seemingly backed into a corner by Gustav Adolf over a matter of money, he prides himself on loving the simple life.  He is this constantly flowing river of underestimation that he becomes honestly quite frightening as an antagonist.  Now, part of me wants to criticize that.  Edvard kind of teeters on the edge of realistic and moustache twirling.  Remember, characters can be antagonists and still be morally right and good.  That's not Edvard.  Villains tend to do things because they embrace the notion of being evil.  Selfishness and sin is their primary motivators.  See, I still see Edvard as an antagonist and a villain (which is normal), but I don't think that Edvard sees himself as the villain.  There are moments where Edvard tells Emelie that she should not hate him.  He begs for her love and once even concedes that he will treat the children nicer. 

But Edvard's motivation is also incredibly terrifying.  Every time that Edvard does something horrible, he claims that he does so out of love.  Yet everything in his world is built upon a world of misery.  Even the ghosts in Edvard's attic are malevolent.  When Alexander is locked in the attic for telling damning lies about Edvard (which was told to an awful spy who never really gets her comeuppance, unless she burned in that fire too), he sees these two girls who claim that he shouldn't disparage their father by telling stories that the girls wanted to escape.  (I should note, I love that Bergman never really gives us a clear indication that this is an outright ghost story or not.  It seems like Fanny sees the ghost of their mutual father, but that could be the imagination of children.) In the weirdest way possible, Edvard does see himself as the hero of the story.  You can see this internal conflict within him when he sees that his very intense behavior is both morally deplorable and the only way for a man of the cloth to live.  Coupled with that is the fact that Edvard has his own universe inside of his home, creating an echo chamber for his bankrupt personality.  It's really interesting.

I love the plays, guys.  I love that Bergman wholeheartedly embraces some of the foundational walls of Hamlet to tell the story of an abusive stepfather coupled with the ghost of a father.  Now, I don't want to be the guy who throws Emilie under the bus.  She deserves to, but I want to be really careful as I discuss Emilie. "Frailty, thy name is woman" is such a great line that I don't think is in this movie.  Just to be completely clear, the final play that kills Alexander's father is Hamlet.  Of course, he plays the ghost of King Hamlet, which is some pretty on-the-nose foreshadowing.  But Emilie tells Alexander that he is not Hamlet and that Edvard is not Claudius.  It's just that...he is?  And all of that really fits with Emilie's story.  Emilie is perhaps one of the most frustrating parts of this story.  To a certain respect, you understand her perspective.  She doesn't want to be alone.  She's vulnerable and this confident guy who is respected in the community makes his intentions clear.  But we're all in Alexander's shoes (partially because he's the avatar for the audience) in thinking that this is a terrible idea.  After all, he's really introduced to Alexander as a major character through a disciplinary action that is far too intimate for an outsider to be discussing.  But Emilie can't see it.  She spirals as Edvard gets continually more and more abusive to the family.  But "Frailty" works really well tied to Hamlet because she keeps ping-ponging back and forth.  She is grateful for Isak's intervention in kidnapping her children, but then she begs Carl and Gustav Adolf to bring the children back.  My only read of that scene is that he has coerced her, but also that she really wants her kids back.  It's an odd moment.

Can I tell you what moment locked the film for me?  It's the final shots of the film.  Alexander has gone through hell to get out of that house.  The epilogue shows the rejuvenation of the main cast.  The Ekdahls still have their hang-ups, but people are happy.   As Alexander walks down the house, a new ghost has come to haunt him and that is the ghost of Bishop Edvard.  Listen, my final takeaway about the ghosts is that they are just as real as the movie needs them to be.  But the honest truth is that, as good as things are for Alexander, he has been traumatized by his time with this monster of a man.  Edvard claims that Alexander will never escape him and that is the most relatable moment of the movie for me.  It's so good and I can't explain how this movie needed this ending.  The movie is depressing and it needed a bittersweet ending.  The dismount is mostly positive, but that moment is a healthy dose of reality.  Emilie's choices will stay with that boy forever. He no longer has a relationship with God and, honestly, his interactions with adults is probably permanently skewed.   Still the movie works with that.

Golly, I forgot how good the movie was.  Is it long?  Yes.  Will I admit that there were times that I didn't want to watch it?  Sure.  But there are also times when I don't want to read, despite the fact that I love reading.   It's one of those masterpieces of cinema that, between the visuals and the narrative, everything just works.  I'm curious how the theatrical version is going to play out because the nuanced storytelling goes a long way to making this thing greater than the sum of its parts.  Still, I am excited...eventually.