Not rated.  This more conceptually upsetting than actually anything that would be worrisome.  I mean, there's a lot of sick kids and a lot of those sick kids drink foot water.   But the movie is mostly about religious trauma and how it affects a family.  Yes, it is very upsetting.  But if I had to point to one thing that was really a red flag, I don't think I could really point to anything.   

DIRECTOR: Satyajit Ray

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R and for good reason.  We're in the place where a movie knows it might have a bit of a cult following.  As such, the f-word --among other swear words --flows freely.  We're going to get some pretty dark stuff, including the gory deaths of major characters.  It also shoots for an uncomfortable tone for much of the film.  One of the key motifs of the film is school shootings, which is simultaneously taken very seriously and, oddly enough, with a sense of humor.  This is a well-deserved, but interesting R.

DIRECTOR:  Gore Verbinski

I think I love this, but I'm not in love with this. 

But I don't know if I'm shocked about that.  Let's back up.  God bless Gore Verbinski for making a movie that goes so hard at AI in 2025.  Like, it's really bizarre that we've all kind of gotten to this point, considering so many of us were raised on The Terminator.  But we're also living in a world where a tech company that exclusively collects information on the American people named themselves "Palantir", so who knows what our human morality really is at.

Before I go too far, I do want to --oddly enough in a blog about a movie named Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die --talk about Pope Leo's encyclial Magnifica Humanitas.  Trust me, there's a direct connection.  I'm part of my church's social action committee.  As part of that, we're doing this breakdown of Pope Leo's first letter.  For those unaware of what Magnific Humanitas is, it's the Vatican's stance on artificial intelligence.  (See, I could have led with that, but I needed at least a sentence or two to build up suspense.) Now, I love this text.  Like, it might have gone harder than anything I've read in a long time.  He's the pope.  I get that he has the opportunity to go on the offensive.  But I haven't seen anything as intense and powerful as this encyclical.  I loved it.  It was more than simply a take on artificial intelligence --which it absolutely rips apart.  But instead, it is the reasons why artificial intelligence is so dangerous to the dignity of the human person.  

Now, I consider Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die to be the darker side of the same argument.  This is a movie that wants to be as fun as it can be while simultaneously traumatizing its audience.  That's not quite Magnifica Humanitas.  But beyond its treatus on artificial intelligence, it is also one of those movies that tries to remind us what it means to be human and how quickly we have forgotten some of our base code (pun intended) when it comes to putting humanity first.  The unnamed protagonist, in his zeal for bringing down this system that places humanity on the back foot, comes across as an anti-hero.  (Please note: you shouldn't take the unnnamed protagonist's stance completely.  He's very cool with undue loss of life, mainly because he's a time traveller who constantly resets people's deaths.) But he also, despite having a cavalier attitude towards all of the people that he meets, seems to understand that life used to mean something.  Yeah, it's a bit of low hanging fruit to show teenagers on their phones as mindless zombies.  I will talk about that later (if I remember it).  But, do you know what?   It's also wildly effective.

Okay, I'm going to talk about the teenagers now because I know I'll forget.  I usually hate when generations are crapped on by their elders.  I got a lot of that as a millennial.  I thought I would never do that.  But I also notice that empathy is at an all time low when it comes to Gen Z, at least as a high school teacher.  It's not absolute and I still want to defend Gen Z.  But I remember a time when I was teaching and my students were deeply moved by the plights of others.  But now, it's stuff like this.  All media consumed comes in small snippets that's meant to appeal to every already embraced facet of their personas.  That scene when Mark touches the screen just to see how they would react?  That scene reads as a violation because to a lot of kids, that would be a violation.  I hate that the commentary is base and old-man problems, but when it works, I guess it works.

I can't help but think that this lives in the shadow of Black Mirror.  Like, if Black Mirror never existed, would we have a Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.  I say this because the movie takes some big swings.  Because Black Mirror is an anthology show with a thematic tie of the dangers of dependence on technology, the tones can vary.  Sometimes a Black Mirror episode can be quite intimate.  Other times, we find ourselves laughing at incredibly bleak humor.  But that's kind of the tone of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.  For the most part, this is an over-the-top film.  Rockwell's performance is so big and so perfect, it sets a pace car for some of the absolutely bananas things that happen in this film.  I mean, that's smart.  We know that Black Mirror works.  (To a certain extent.  We still have wider and wider allowances for what artificial intelligence is allowed to do, despite the fact that this show has been warning us of the dangers for more than a decade.)  

And, yeah, this movie needs to be fun, but bleak.  I actually think that this movie is doing mostly everything right.  Does it feel like a little bit of a knock-off of Black Mirror as opposed to a successor?  Yeah, kind of.  But I also think that this is a much more interesting take on AI than something like Terminator.  The thing about Terminator, as groundbreaking as Terminator was, is that it concentrated on being a great sci-fi action movie.  Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die --for all of its silliness --doesn't really let humanity off the hook.  Yes, there are action moments.  Nothing Terminator-y, but action moments nonetheless.  But the key concept that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die presents is that big explosions and stong morals aren't necessarily going to have an effect on AI.  

There was an X-Files episode a while back where Mulder and Scully discovered that there was going to be a dangerous piece of technology brought into the world and that they had to stop it.  (I barely remember this and I'm really rooting into the back of my memory to even go that far.  Because The X-Files was mostly episodic, Mulder and Scully stopped the guy from inventing that piece of tech, only to discover that someone else across the planet was having the same breakthrough.  That's kind of the point of Good Luck. Technological progress is always going to keep going.  We've proven, as a species, that we are incapable of heeding reasonable warnings when it comes to making destructive choices.  Instead, this movie ends up being a criticism more of humanity than of artificial intelligence itself.  

The film is divided into the mainplot and a series of flashbacks giving us insight into the individual members of the team and their respective horror stories when it came to artificial intelligence.  Big ups to Gore Verbinski for even sticking his toe into the school shooting epidemic that we're in now.  But one of the stories had a character who was allergic to Wifi.  (In the same way that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die knocks off Black Mirror, we can probably accuse the film of also borrowing heavily from Better Call Saul when it comes to that character beat.)  She finally finds a kindred spirit with a pizza delivery driver who embraces more of a technophobic luddite lifestyle.  But that scene also illustrates how addictive technology actually is.  (Note: Only hours ago, Meta settled a lawsuit basically admitting that it makes social media addictive to children.) 

But I have to complain.  I wouldn't be me (that's not true.  I tend to love everything too much) if I didn't point out the fact that this movie seems to hinge on a twist that is almost telegraphing itself to us.  Like, the movie goes out with a twist ending.  But I'm not sure if it was always structured that way.  The movie goes bizarre.  Truly and honestly --sometimes in the best possible way --bizarre.  There is an understanding early on that anything can and will happen in this movie.  As the team gets closer and closer to the boy's house, more and more enemies get in the team's way.  Almost because he could, Verbinski has a cat centaur act as a kaiju barrier between the team and the house.  Now, Rockwell's character straight up verbalizes that this is a lazy prompt written by an AI.  Still, somehow, Ingrid and Rockwell's character seem to have the epiphany too late that they didn't stop the AI and were horrified that they were in the system.  

Maybe there's a beat in the movie that I don't understand, but it seems like the characters just started the film in the AI.  According to Rockwell's character's rules, the AI was going to present them with things that they wanted to see and hear and give them the impression that they were defying the odds.  There is no moment where we question whether they screwed up.  Ultimately, it shouldn't matter that time travel happened.  No matter how many times Rockwell's character goes back in time, it seems like he's already in the AI.  (I'm working out my understanding about the knife wound and AI.  At first, I didn't think that the knife wound would get healed.  But if that timeline was erased, would that have stopped the knife from ever stabbing him?  I mean, he has memories of that timeline.  Why wouldn't those memories get erased if the knife never happened?  Does time travel itself cure travellers?  Who knows?  This is what I think about a lot.)

There was one thing that I hoped would be explained that never got put in there.  At one point, Darren tells Susan that there's a secret tunnel under the diner.  In that secret tunnel, it felt like a nerdy set designer decided to pay tribute to Portal by putting "The Cake is a Lie" as graffiti.  I thought that might have been too obvious, but then Darren's room had a Portal poster on it, making me think that corporeal Darren may have tagged that wall and that he wasn't part of the AI.  But, nah, it seems like people on the design team just liked Portal.  Bummer.

Anyway, I dug it, but it also seemed to not exactly have all of its rules clearly established in its own bible.  I'm still going to heavily recommend it, even if it has some beats thrown in there without explanation.

Rated PG for a lot of Looney Tunes-style cartoon violence.  If anything, it's the core of the movie.  One of the big questions asked is if physical pain matters if there are no permanent consequences.  I'll talk about that in a minute, but I do have to mention the other things that are questionable.  The movie, while definitely staying in the realm of "appropriate for kids", really pushes the envelope when it comes to almost or kinda swearing.  It's mild, but my fourteen-year-old and I exchanged glances when things bordered inappropriate.  Still, it's a mostly family-friendly movie, if not a little heady for younger audiences.

DIRECTOR:  Dave Green

Like, not Coyote v. Acme, huh?  Like, a legal comedy, you didn't decide to go the Batman v. Superman route and made it seem like it was going to be a slugfest, huh?

I need to stop getting my hopes up.  I do have to say that Coyote vs Acme isn't a bad time.  My kids, for the most part, liked it.  My fourteen-year-old weirdly really liked it.  I simply thought it was okay.  The problem is that this is one of those movies that's not allowed to be only "okay."  Next weekend is opening weekend.  This is a movie that needs to absolutely dominate at the box office to show the Warners that they can't just bury art for tax breaks.  Will Forte really seemed to care about this project and he believed in it.  I mean, it's a fine movie.  Heck, it even takes some amazing swings and overall connects when it does.  But in terms of being one of those great movies that I'll talk about for years?  This isn't one of them.

I do have to preface that I'm not a big fan of Space Jam or movies that really remind me of Space Jam, despite being one of the few fans of Space Jam: A New Legacy.  My dad was weirdly into Looney Tunes, but that might have been more of a thing that we could have shared together.  I mildly enjoyed Looney Tunes.  It was something that I wanted to like more than I actually did.  That's kind of how I feel about this.  There are moments.  The joke about the model full-on caught me off-guard.  Like, it's such a good joke.  Even some of the violence bits, hilarious.  But when I saw that Will Forte was the face behind this movie, I thought it was going to be more Will Forte humor.

I can't help but compare this movie to the Jason Seigel The Muppets.  I do think that The Muppets is something special, even though I hold the Muppets in similar regard to Looney Tunes.    But The Muppets was the product of Jason Seigel.  As much as it was a send up to the characters, it feels very much like it was directly plucked from the mind of Jason Seigel.  I know that Will Forte didn't write the script to this one.  Actually, apparently James Gunn had his hand in a lot of this movie.  But Will Forte, for the most part, plays a straight man to Wile E. Coyote, who is silent for the majority of the film.  Here's the deal: When I shut my brain off, I enjoyed it.  

But the good news is that the movie doesn't really let you shut your brain off.  As much as I wasn't howling with laughter the entire time, I do think that Coyote vs. Acme is a way smarter movie than I was prepped for with a bit of an appropriate plotline, given its release history with Warner Brothers.  This is a movie that is unabashedly criticizing oligarchs and big corporations.  It's an absolutely insane idea to turn a franchise that lives and breathes unconsequential violence and then makes a movie about the legal world where things like that happen.  Honestly, I am flummoxed on how this movie broke the hour mark, let alone an hour-and-forty-one minutes.  Remember, this is technically a movie for kids (even though I really wonder who the target audience for this movie really is).  A lot of this movie is devoted to courtroom shanannigans as a personal injury lawyer goes against Amazon.  Did I say Amazon?  I meant Amazon.  

Yeah, Acme could be a lot of different companies.  And be aware, I'm going to write a spoiler for a movie that doesn't come out until next week.  When we watch movies about the underdog going against the all powerful corporation, especially given a family tone, you would think that the little guy is going to win his legal battle.  Um...not really.  That was the gutsiest ending that I've ever seen.  Yeah, the movie backpedals it a bit when Bugs drops off this convenient evidence.  But if we're looking at the climax of the film, yeah Will Forte loses.  Do you get how much I love the fact that the movie is just embracing the fact that the United States government will do just about anything to ensure that the rich gets richer and that this is the message of a children's film?  I love it.

The only issue I have with the ending of the movie is that there's a really schmaltsy moment that was honestly pretty touching.  The problem is that it is really undeserved.  There is a problem with the conceit of the film, despite the fact that I really like the whole notion.  The deuteragonist (the first time I've used that word), whose name is in the title, is Wile E. Coyote.  Yes, there is something mildly sympathetic about Wile E. Coyote because he always gets his comeuppence in spades.  But the bigger issue is that he's the villain of the piece.  When he's in the Roadrunner cartoons (They're even referred to as "Roadrunner cartoons!"), he's the guy who is doing something awful.  Because both the roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote are archetypes, we instantly understand that Wile E. Coyote is the bad guy who never learns his lesson.  He's only the protagonist because we see most of the story from this character's perspective.  We actually know hilariously little about the Roadrunner (a word that I keep capitalizing because I'm treating it as his name).  The problem with this story --and it is baked into the plot --is that we're supposed to be on Wile E. Coyote's side.  This is a legal dramedy (okay, a legal comedy).  While the movie takes the positon that Wile E. Coyote is using these devices against suggested usage, the bigger issue is that he's using these devices to ultimately to try to murder the Roadrunner.  

The movie needs those characters to acknowledge that their friends, not for the sake of the story, but so we don't really revolt.  We see Wile E. Coyote tear up when the Roadrunner claims that the two of them are the closest of friends.  But nothing in decades of Looney Tunes cartoons even implies this.  Heck, I don't think that Wile E. Coyote even reciprocates those feelings.  It's heavily implied that if Wile E. Coyote caught the Roadrunner, even after the events of Coyote vs. Acme, that he would still eat him.  I'm glad that the movie theater got all teary eyed at the Roadrunner's revelation that he cares for Wile E. Coyote, but I call outright shanannigans.  It makes not a lick of sense.  The only dynamic that these two have with enough citations to make a tome out of footnotes alone is that this is a predator / prey dynamic.  When The Lego Batman Movie made the same claim about Batman and Joker, it was way more self-aware that it was a joke.  This was a touching moment that just didn't make a lot of sense.

The reviews for this movie are through the roof.  I am super glad that they are.  I want movies like Coyote vs. Acme to succeed, if for no other reason than to stick it to corporate executives who have forgotten what it means to make art, even if that art may not be lofty.  I'm actually going to follow box office for this movie in the hopes that it absolutely destroys.  I have a feeling that it isn't.  When I talked in front of the school how I just saw this  movie, no one knew what I was talking about.  Still, despite the fact that I only kind of liked this movie, I want to see it succeed.  It's a movie that seems like a passion project, despite the fact that it is an adaptation of a franchise.  And I also really like Will Forte and he seems to really believe in the movie.  Don't let my milktoast blog talk you out of this.  I clearly am in the minority of people who didn't love-love it.  (Although, honestly?  I think that a lot of reviews might be inflated knowing the turbulent hisotry of this film's release.) 

R and I'm not quite sure what made this version R version its PG-13 counterpart.  If anything, it took some of the sexual stuff out of the original film.  (I had to look up what the differences were from its theatrical cut.)  The movie was pretty upsetting to begin with.  This is about human / organ trafficking.  People die horrible deaths on and off screen.  Also, one of the main characters of the film is a convicted pedophile.  While none of the sexual assault happens on screen, there's a lot of talk about it.   The X-Files always kind of pushed the limits on what was comfortable to watch and the same holds true for this movie.

DIRECTOR:  Chris Carter

I'm such a sucker for The X-Files.  Like, that's not necessarily a compliment or something I'm proud of.  As a guy who is obsessed with completion and having absorbed every bit of media, I keep losing my mind when Chris Carter releases something new about The X-Files.  The thing that I really (and unfortunately) believe is that Chris Carter's later forays into The X-Files actually sully (or...Scully?) the goodwill that the early seasons had with me.

I loathed this movie when it came out in theaters.  Like, I know that it is almost universally panned.  I wasn't the only one who came out that movie wondering what the heck that was all about.  But I also have to take into account that I am a fundamentally --almost on every level --different person.  I was bringing a lot of baggage into that movie in 2008.  When the trailer released for this "Vrach Frankenshteyn" version, I thought it looked pretty darned good.  I don't know what it is that makes me desperately wants The X-Files to be good again.  But I saw that trailer and said, "Man, I'm definitely seeing that."  

After all, I'm less protective of Catholics being slandered on screen.  Yeah, I Want to Believe bothered me a ton because it seems like it's coming full bore at the Catholic church with the subtlety of a rocket launcher.  Even then, I hope I wouldn't be completely closed to criticisms of clergy abuse.  Still, one thing that I still hold true is that Chris Carter has never really portrayed Scully's Catholicism with any skill.  Considering that faith --tying to the title --is a central motif in this film, I was super annoyed the first time I saw this.  Again, not the same dude I was then.  This time, I don't know.  I want to kind of break that apart.

I still think that Carter kind of sucks at portraying authentic Catholicism on screen.  The man is a sledgehammer.  "Vrach" is meant to be a director's cut, advertising a wholly different vision.  If anything, this is simply a better cut together vision.  There's some better editing, better pacing, and the film has been overall recolored to make it feel far more like an X-Files episode.  Okay, so that means I'm stuck basically analyzing the same film because we don't really have anything additional to pick apart.  (I also hope that this means that I'm never compelled to watch the theatrical cut as a means to write about the comparison between the two.)  

But back to the Catholicism.  I don't hate the idea of Scully coming face-to-face with a defrocked clergyman who claims to still be faithful.  Removing the entire mythology of the show, I do believe that Carter is attempting to take news headlines and address real concerns that Catholics might have had with their faiths.  For 11 (?) seasons, Scully embodied more archetypal ideas than fully developing as a character.  I don't blame Carter for this.  (I know that there was some character growth with everyone, but let me explain.)  A lot of the problems that X-Files had was trying to get blood from a stone.  This show initially started with a solid mythology that had to be scrapped because it was stretched beyond comprehension.  The way to make people keep watching the X-Files going was ensuring that the characters, from a certain perspective, had to stay stagnant.  Mulder was still a zealot; Scully was always the skeptic, no matter what evidence came her way.  (Sure, XPhiles out there.  There are moments where Scully balances her scientific grounding with an enthusiasm need to discover the truth.) 

So fundamentally, Scully is skepticism and Catholicism.  (A great archetype for her paradoxical nature.)  And now that I've been through a dark night of the soul, I suppose I do appreciate a story of Scully confronting her anger with Fr. Joe.  In fact, it might be the best part of this movie.  I do have to confess here, when talking about Fr. Joe, I remember this movie playing out very differently.  I remember this being a movie where Mulder ends up disappointed that the events of this movie are not an X-File, but rather Fr. Joe being a fraud.  I remember none of the Frankenstein stuff with the body mutilation.  I thought this was  just a disappointing story about a defrocked priest getting one last giggle in the face of misery.  

And maybe it was a blessing that I didn't remember how this movie played out.  That made it kind of watchable.  The big win that "Vrach" brings to me is that it really authentically feels like an X-Files episode now.  I'm in the camp that believes that the freak-of-the-week episodes were way better than anthology episodes.  But when I saw this in theaters, I thought that maybe I was wrong about this.  It's kind of shocking that there are two X-Files movies and the sequel decided to almost completely avoid any attempt at mythology.  We got the notion that Mulder was in seclusion and that a romance between Mulder and Scully had taken off.  But that was about it.  But because this movie was recut and recolored, I do think that this movie works almost exclusively as a freak-of-the-week episode.  Sure, the budget is bigger and the story is longer.  But it ultimately is one of the many episodes that kept me entertained.  I don't know if it sails to a point of being one of the memorable scary episodes.  But it is a functional episode.

That does kind of brings me to one of the more awkward things in the movie.  When I watched this the first time, I was so concerned about the anti-Catholic bashing that I kind of missed the insensitivity it gave to the LGBTQIA+ community.  Spoiler that ultimately doesn't matter:  the bad guys of the movie are a gay married couple.  One husband is stealing organs to help his husband survive his lung cancer, leading to the husband getting a new, female body.  It's almost glossed over in the attempt to shock.  But it does come across as transphobic, right?  I mean, this guy is killing and torturing women, seemingly emotionless to the pain that he's causing these women all for the sake of giving his husband a new body.  It's very scary, but also insensitive at the same time.

I kind of wish I outright hated this or outright loved it.  I am thrilled that I enjoyed this movie more than I did the first time.  But that being said, it's kind of a slump of a movie.  The running thought that I had throughout the movie is that much of this movie doesn't need to actually be an X-Files movie, but rather just a supernatural thriller.  I would say that the final act feels very X-Files-y.  I don't think it's because of an out-of-nowhere appearance by Skinner.  But it does feel like the kind of bananas horror that the Fox TV show did.  It's fun and it's good to see the team back in action, but it ultimately feels unnecessary.

Also, like, the FBI just was able to forgive him?  Doesn't that undo a lot of the tension of seasons of TV?

Rated R for mostly swearing.  Honestly, I had to look it up.  Apparently, according to IMDB, it has 34 f-bombs. There is one gory scene of violence where a guy's head explodes after getting shot.  That should probably be the real reason for an R-rating, but I barely remembered it because the movie felt mostly innocent.  Considering that the movie used guerrilla film tactics like Borat, the improved stuff wasn't offensive.  

DIRECTOR:  Matt Johnson

Okay, apparently I do know these guys from the "Update Day" video involving the Wii store.  Cool.  I feel like I'm less out of the loop.  All I know is that Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie kept making people's best of lists and I had to figure out what was going on.

I have to say, the same thing that happened with Naked Gun happened with Nirvanna.  I hate that it did and I'm starting to think that it was my fault to a certain extent.  With both Naked Gun and Nirvanna, we started the movie crazy late and then agreed to finish it the next day.  Day One?  Laughing my head off.  I saw where the love for the movie was.  My wife seemed to dig it too.  But night two, my wife was distracted by her phone and I found myself watching it alone.  Like, it was still good.  I think it's actually pretty great.  But it killed it, guys.  It really killed it.

There's something about comedies that they need to be watched with someone else.  There's something incredibly contagious about laughing with a group of people versus laughing alone.  It's a sense of community.  I feel that, no matter what I write, I probably didn't have an accurate experience of watching this movie.   I even broke my own rules to watch this.  I guess my dumb obsessive brain likes things better if I have the entire catalogue as backup.  Still, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie ultimately doesn't need anything to set up the film and exists as distinct from the stuff that came before.  

But let's treat this as my opening to these guys, Wii-shop music aside.  There seems to be a rise of viral video creators being able to show their stuff in more formal ways.  I mean, Obsession was one of the biggest movies this year.  That was started by people making internet videos.  Now, I have no idea what these guys' backgrounds are.  For all I know, they all went to some prestigious film school and know how to handle a camera.  But Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie might win most of its points simply by the fact that it refuses to follow rules.

I already threw the word "guerrilla" around.  Don't worry, I stole it from Wikipedia.  But the thing that makes Nirvanna so great is that it did what Borat did, only on the cheaper and less offensive.  This is a cheap movie that has an astronomical scale.  These two guys are performing stunts that land them in prison (sometimes) and they get away with these stunts (sometimes).  It's almost frustrating that these guys have found the loophole in terms of movie making.  What was that movie that was filmed at Disney World without the knowledge of the Disney Corporation?  Escape from Tomorrow?  I saw that one and I was stressed out that a big corporation was going to get mad and take their movie away.  Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie thinks that's kids' stuff.  These guys brought parachutes to the CN Tower and somehow got in.  Reading the lengths that these guys went to in order to get crazy shots is almost what makes the movie worth it.  I can't help but also think that this movie might be a nicer version of Jackass simply because these guys put themselves at risk to tell a joke.

But the more insane version of the movie is how much the film pushes the rules of parody law to the limit.  I've seen enough parody movies.  Every time there seems to be a bit of parody in film, the silliness is so over-the-top that we understand that there's a wink to the camera the entire time.  Like, no studio would ever go after those movies because it's almost in homage of the original source material.  Things are different with this movie.  Like, the almost score to Back to the Future is so close to the original score that I thought it was the original score for a lot of the film.  Heck, the fact that the movie actually shows clips from Back to the Future and references the film throughout is almost daring Amblin Entertainment to seize every copy of the movie and burn it, a thing that even gets pointed out by Matt.

But I do wonder what makes it one of the greats of this year?  Is it the silliness of it all?   Part of me felt more of a nostalgia for 2008 than anything of substance at all.  Sure, we like the dynamic between Matt and Jay.  Sure, there are huge stunts that these two choreograph for the sake of insanity.  There are even moments that are riddled with kismet, having usable footage from 2008 (the heyday of the webshow) that would somehow interact with modern film.  But these are all cool moments.  Yeah, the movie is crazy fun.  And again, I have to stress that I didn't see it under ideal conditions.  I kind of think that there's a little bit of people wanting to like the movie because it's charming instead of being an actual great film.  If this was created by two dudes who got their starts making web videos, that actually makes a lot of sense.  Here might be the most damning thing:  This technically is a movie about two guys who are friends rekindling their friendship.  But the movie, in all of its silliness, doesn't really invest in that being the core of the film.  This might be one of those movies that never really attempted to get vulnerable at any point of the movie.  

I am treating silliness as a bad thing.  For what it is, it is genius.  But I also acknowledge that it might not be a movie that sticks to my ribs as much as I wanted it to.  Maybe if I was a fan of these guys beforehand, that might play out differently.  But for what it was, it was just a good time, which isn't the worst thing.

Rated R for all kinds of vulgar reasons.  It's not that the movie itself feels vulgar.  It's just that this is the cocaine-fueled manic insanity that was the early days of Saturday Night Live.  There's swearing.  There are gender and race-based jokes.  But the worst part is when a man exposes himself just to establish dominance.  Yeah, there's swearing too, but is that the thing you are really worried about?

DIRECTOR:  Jason Reitman

I'm finally out of the Jane Birkin / Agnes Varda blogs.  If I can knock this one out in half-an-hour (which is unlikely) and then knock out one more blog, I'll be caught up on all my stress until I start teaching again tomorrow.

My wife was pushing for a movie.  I never want to overlook these opportunities.  I don't know what it is about movie date night that I can't help but lose my mind over.  But the only movie I could think about was Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die and I didn't think that she was in the mood for that.  But my wife has always been a fan of Saturday Night Live.  I don't know what part of my brain reminded me that we always meant to watch this movie.  But I picked the right movie for the night...even if it wasn't the most incredible watch in the world.

I think that a lot of people at least have a Saturday NIght Live phase.  I'm probably not the only person to really worship at the altar of whatever they saw in high school.  For me, it was the '90s cast.  Yeah, I got into the early 2000s cast too.  But I'm in the Mike Myers / Chris Farley era.  It's not a bad cast to really get behind.  I remember just leaving Comedy Central on and just playing the same SNL episodes on a loop.  I tried showing my kids some of these clips and they think that they are funny enough.  

But I also listen a lot of comedy podcasts.  Right now, I'm trying to knock out the incredible canon that is You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes.  With comedy podcasts, you tend to get comedy themed guests.  Sometimes they are from the SNL world; sometimes they're not.  But a common discussion point is why SNL works the way it does.  Pete won't really let it go.  After all, he has a point.  SNL, fundamentally, works the same way it did in the '70s.  There is a level of stress that goes on all week.  Cast and writers stay up to God awful hours and work on a constant diet of adrenaline and --depending on what era you are in --drugs and alcohol.  But Pete also points out that most people in contemporary casts are actually fairly even-keeled individuals.  Every SNL guest kind of admits that the job absolutely could be a 9 to 5, but there is something mythical about pulling all nighters while worrying about how the show is going to look.

It's hard to pin down exactly what Saturday Night, as a movie, is.  Because SNL itself is such an ensemble show, I don't want to say that this is a movie about one man's attempt to bring the show to the air.  Yeah, if we had to have our collective arms twisted, we could say that this is the story of Lorne Michaels and how he grew into the mega creator that we all know and love today.  (Note:  I should point out, just for my own gratification, that Michaels left the show for a little bit.  Still...)   

I have to say something clearly before I get too far away from it.  As much as I love Jason Reitman, I don't think this movie works like it wants to work.  Very few things are wrong with it.  I just feel like I've seen this movie done better as the first episode of The Bear.  The entire movie hinges on dramatic irony.  Like with most biopics, we know that Saturday Night Live is going to be a television phenomenon.  It's part of our cultural zeitgeist and it is hard to imagine television without SNL being put up.  I also know that there was a big book of SNL released a few years ago (I don't remember the title.  I never read it and I don't have internet right now to look it up.  That's right.  I loaded the Weebly page and then just typed everything out without a safety net, hoping I'll get to digital civilization before I lose everything.) But there's more of an oral history of SNL.  John Belushi was always known for being aloof and unmanagable.  Chevy Chase was and is still known as a horrible human being.  Everyone loved Gilda Radner.  The stories of excess and irresponsibility colored this show that ended up being the foundation of late night NBC.  It's fascinating...

..but it also seems a little bit contrived.  The insane thing is that Saturday Night, as a biopic, is a success, even if it's a mess.   The goal was to show how insane it was that this program ever made it to air and the way that Reitman films it really sells that notion.   There are people who care way too much that this goes up.  There are people who seem to want to pigeonhole the whole thing.  And then there are the people who seem so distanced from reality and how things work that they're just along for the ride.  The movie sells that, telling the chaotic story in real time of the hour and change leading up to the first episode going up.  We switch perspectives to remind ourselves that SNL wasn't just one person's stories.  Some of those stories are interesting.  Some of them are not.  I'm wildly shocked that I didn't give a fig about the John Belushi story, considering that I often think of the early days of SNL as the Belushi-era.  

Oddly enough, I found the Garrett Morris element of this movie incredible.  It doesn't hurt that Lamorne Morris played Garret Morris and I have adored him since New Girl.  But Morris acts almost as the avatar for the audience.  He shows the world through the lens of a Black performer.  I stress his racial background because it is through his eyes that we all can get a little frustrated.  (Epiphany: It is because of Morris's perspective on the things around him that I get frustrated with the rest of the movie.)   Let me explain.

The thing that is incredibly frustrating is that none of this has to happen.  I respect Lorne Michaels right now.  The man is probably a billionaire.  But like with the fact that SNL absolutely could be a 9 to 5 job, there is this understanding that the whole thing could be sdettled (and we know will be settled) by Michaels just making a quick judgment call to which sketches will go up and which ones won't.  Honestly, that's the climax of the film.  Lorne Michaels tells Billy Crystal (that performance might have been the most accurate performance in the entire film) that he cannot perform that night because his act is too long.  As the audience, we're wholeheartedly aware that this tension is self-inflicted and artificial.  We know that he has to pick something or else the show doesn't go up.  I am actually frustrated for the actors in the movie, who also seem lackadaisical about Michael's inability to do a basic production job.  Yes, Michaels has a lot of plates spinning and he's putting out constant fires throughout the story.  But the core of the show is that he just has to make calls and he seems unconcerned by how close the show is up to air.  (Another note:  apparently SNL still runs on cuecards because changes are being made at the time of air even today.)

So let's apply that to Garrett Morris's internal conflict.  The one thing that is his throughline is the question "Why am I here?"  Out of all of the performers in the Not-Ready-for-Primetime Players, Morris is the only one who has multiple talents to fall back on.  He finds himself more at home with the Saturday Night band than he does with his fellow cast members.  He's being relegated to racial stereotype roles, filling in the background of scenes just to offer a hint of diversity in this cast.  But the frustrating part that both he and I share is the notion that just a smidge of professionalism would mean that everyone would get paid.  He's a Black actor.  He was struggling before he got there and all these kids who have never been on television before seem not to care a lick about making a good product.  If anything, they're all treating it like some psychadelic experiment when he's probably the only one with the sense of awareness that the quality of the show could make or break everyone there.

To that respect, there has to be a conversation about the role of the artist.  The only thing that I really respect about some of the characters --most notably John Belushi --is that he doesn't care about where his next paycheck comes from.  He wants to be an artist.  He wants to do things his way.  It's hard for him to listen to authority of any kind and he hates being manipulated.  But that's a really cushy perspective to have considering that it never really felt like Belushi suffered.  (But then again, I didn't read the SNL book that really dived deep into this kind of stuff.) 

So the movie is more interesting than good.  My wife and I both had the same takeaway that this felt more like a Netflix film than an actual cinematic release.  But as a stressful-yet-funny experience, it mostly works.

Rated R for being a genuinely insidious movie.  Golly, I feel like I'm pearl-clutching here, but this is one of those movies that the right throws stones at when it comes to art.  I think there are ways to tell a story that might make you feel uncomfortable.  This feels like Varda and Birkin are trying to be controversial rather than telling something that makes the world a better place.  It's, through and through, about the sexual exploitation of a child and tries to make the whole thing romantic.  While you don't see any nudity, it is aggressively a sexual movie.  There's underage smoking, drinking to excess, swearing.  Basically, if kids could do something bad, they're doing it in this movie.  

DIRECTOR:  Agnes Varda

Imagine someone got around to making a Pac-Man movie.  Then you go to see it, and it's about a forty-year-old woman being attracted to a 14-year-old.  That's Kung-Fu Master!  Kung-Fu Master! is a real video game.  I think I played it a bunch of times when I was a kid.  Thank goodness there were no single 40 year old women hanging around the arcade because my life would be very different.

I'm just going to say this outright:  I hate this movie.  I really do.  This is Agnes Varda embracing the worst impulses of what she thinks being an artist means.  Yeah, I'm regulating what is and isn't art.  It's one of those "I know it when I see it" situations.  In this case, Varda thinks that she's really pushing the envelope of the art scene.  But this is also, "Was it all worth it?"  Varda and Birkin push so many buttons for what feels ultimately like a selfish attempt at glory.  I have absolutely no sympathy for any of the impulses that went into this film.

I mentioned this in my blog for Jane B. par Agnes V., but I watch the introductions that Varda recorded in 2012.  I have to stress, Varda does not seem apologetic in the least for what went into this movie.  Listen, I'm going to high horse this sucker real bad.  Jane Birkin came up with the idea.  They didn't read something great that came their way.  There wasn't a novel (but I can't help but make the comparison to Lolita).   Jane Birkin said to Agnes Varda, "I want to make a movie where my character falls in love with a 14 year old and I want to make it kind of romantic."  Agnes Varda then responded, "Why don't we involve our families?  I'll have my fourteen-year-old son play the love interest and you guys will do sexual things together."  Jane Birkin said "Great!  I love this idea.  Let's stop filming Jane B. par Agnes V. right now and film this movie where I have an affair with a fourteen-year-old, who is played by your son.  I'll get my kids involved in the movie too!"  

Even worse, the kids hated this.  The kids had more self-awareness of how inappropriate this whole thing was.  Varda and Birkin had a great time making the movie.  It seems like this moment is a dark spot for the kids.  While I treat art as one of the great highlights of humanity, everything should have have limits and consideration.  It felt like these were artists who put their own emotional desires first and the futures of their children second.  I hate this movie.  If I spend most of my life defending art, I have no retort to this.  It's so selfish.  I'm sure that a lot of people probably like it.  Do you know what?  I don't feel like a hypocrite for this one.  I always had a hard time with Call Me By Your Name, not because of any homosexual content.  No, I had a problem with the fact that it glorifies an adult / child relationship.  But even Call Me By Your Name is less controversial than this.

Just because I don't want to give a half-completed blog entry (and because I feel like I haven't really explored this movie beyond its controversial nature), I'm going to try to write about other elements of this movie.  Be aware, the only thing that I really have thoughts about are the controversial things.  But I don't think I would allow my students the same grace if they watched something controversial and wrote about it.  So be aware, from this point on, it's probably going to be some obligatory sludge of a writing assignment.

The only thing that I really liked, in terms of seeing something unique, was the opening shot of Julien embodying the eponymous kung-fu master.  It was fun, maybe because there was so much attention to the way that the character moved.  It was novel, which is fine I guess.  But I want to tie it into why the movie is named Kung-Fu Master!.  Do I think that Varda is trying to force the title a bit?  Yes.  I absolutely think that she's being a bit too clever for her own good, tying the notion of this video game that was probably mildly entertaining to the culture of 1988 to her movie.  It's a fun title that has little-to-nothing to do with the rest of the story.

The counterargument is that the title has everything to do with the story.  (I disagree with this point, if I haven't made myself clear.)  What I think Varda is doing with the title and the obsession with this one specific arcade game is talking about childlike joy.  Julien is infatuated with Kung-Fu Master.  From our perspective, it is one game like any other.  In fact, the movie makes a point that not a lot of the arcades carried that game when Mary-Jane went around looking for it.  (And I can imagine Varda losing her mind of the English-language dialogue between Sylvie and the Kung-Fu Master.)  But Julien's real passion happens when he's playing the game.  Mary-Jane coming into his life is something that just happens to him.  One of the schticks of the movie is that all of these teenage boys try to play it cool about drinking, smoking, and sex.  But Kung-Fu Master?  That kid loses his mind.  

It also makes Mary-Jane way more predatory when she involves Kung-Fu Master into their relationship.  She prowls the city not looking for Julien at first.  Instead, she looks for a copy of Kung-Fu Master to prepare for a time when the two of them could be together.  Perhaps there's a lovely irony that she played that game and still played terribly in front of Julien, which only made him disappointed in her.  

I struggle unpacking one thing and it ties into Jane B. par Agnes V.  One of the things that is repeated in each movie, especially when Mary-Jane is questioning her own morality, is the notion that every adult woman falls in love with a teenager at least once.  I'm not an adult woman.  I'm a 43-year-old man.  I can write from the male perspective.  I don't think that's a common thing.  I know that there's something potentially interesting about trying to reclaim one's youth, but I don't really read the same message that Mary-Jane is trying to get at in the movie.  I think that's a weird assumption that both Varda and Birkin are trying to make normal.  Are there people out there?  Absolutely.  These people are called sexual predators.  (And I'm back on my high horse.)  Or maybe it is more common and people are just mature enough to not explore that.  Lord knows I think it's offense.

I don't want to write about this anymore.  I don't care if this blog is shorter than normal.  I have to get out of here anyway.

Not rated, but this movie has just an abundance of nudity and questionable content.  It's a little hard to write the parental guide for this movie because I'm really trying to divorce it from Kung-Fu Master!, a movie that Birkin and Varda made in the middle of this movie that they discuss during this movie.  That movie is all about statuatory rape of a 14 year old boy, but told through a inappropriately sympathetic lens.  There's language and discussion of gross things.  There's also some violence, but it is comical how badly it is filmed.

DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda

I've already talked about how hard this movie is going to be to write about.  Immediately after writing this blog, I have to follow it up with Kung-Fu Master!, and that is where my real loathing of these two movies really lies.  If I'm going to go off on that movie, I suppose I have to write about everything outside of the Kung-Fu Master! stuff that Jane B. par Agnes V. talks about.

I wanted to love this movie.  I really did.  The Criterion box set for Varda's films sometimes has little introductions by an elderly Varda talking about the movies back in 2012.  When she was describing the intent behind Jane B.,  I thought it was brilliant.  Varda always wants to be part of the experimental film movement.  I often roll my eyes when it comes to Varda fulling embracing the weirder stuff in her repetoire.  It all feels so forced.  But when Varda was describing the premise of this movie, I thought that it seemed organic to make something just a little bit counter-cultural.  

Like many of my blogs, I'm dancing around things, especially considering that Jane B. par Agnes V. is probably one of the lesser seen movies that I've written about.  (And I've written about some weird movies on this blog.  I know me.  I don't hide from it.)  The short version of the story is that Jane Birkin saw Vagabond and wrote a fan letter to Varda.  I'll admit that I know almost nothing about Jane Birkin outside of what I read on a Wikipedia page.  I have more knowledge about Charlotte Gainsborough than I do of Birkin.  But I understand that Birkin was a pretty big deal in France in 1988 when Vagabond came out.  Anyway, she writes Varda a fan letter and wanted to make a movie with Varda.  Varda comes up with a cool idea of doing a retrospective documentary on Birkin.  But just because Varda's just a little bit off, she wanted to stage the interviews and compile clips from movies that didn't exist.  It was a fun, alternate history that oddly revealed more truth about Birkin than any flattering documentary could.

Here's the problem (and I've mentioned it before!):  Agnes Varda sometimes just can't get out of her own way.  There's something incredibly egotistic about Varda.  Sure, a lot of it is earned.  The movies of hers that I like, I adore.  But there are times when she makes the movie all about her.  She markets so hard on her name that there seems to be something a little bit insecure about her.  Now, I have to keep my privilege in line.  Am I being harsher on Varda because she's a woman?  It's entirely possible and I'm not ready to discount that.  But the prevailing theory that I'm writing under is that I catch myself treating the things I make with that fear.  I mean, my face is there, to the left, big as life.  (Unless you are reading this on a mobile browser, in which case, bravo true fan.  I didn't know anyone really did that.) 

There are beats that I do think are genius in this movie.  The opening of the film, separate from the very intense nudity that Varda puts front and center (I do admit that I'm a prude from time-to-time), is visually incredibly impressive.  If this is a love letter to Jane Birkin with Jane Birkin involved, making her the subject of a renaissance-era oil painting is actually quite effective.  I'll even go as far as to admit that having some of the fictional clips alude to ideas seen in other clips pretty well.  The fact that Birkin is trying to scam a criminal who sells art books, just as an excuse to discuss the use of women in chests as a motif in Renaissance art is kind of fun.  

But beyond that, I do feel like we get the meat of a short film in the length of a full length film.  I invested in the first twenty minutes.  I really did.  I paid attention to every word that Birkin said.  I tried to get to know her, despite the fact that I have no personal attachment to Jane Birkin.  I even gave Varda a little bit of grace, pretending that maybe another director could have made these imaginary movies.  But about twenty minutes in, I realized that the movie was really just saying nothing.  It was in that context that I rested on the notion that Varda was just going to Varda the entire time.  All of the clips really feel like Varda was leaning into her comfort zones.  In most sequences, the scenes had philosophical statements narrated by Birkin over action.  

And the crazy thing is that some of these sequences are outside of Varda's traditonal genres.  But golly if these things feel like more of a spoof of the genre than an actual amazing performance that shows off Birkin's acting range.  For all I know, Jane Birkin is an incredible actress.  When I saw Blow-Up, I don't know if I automatically thought Birkin was amazing or not.   But these sequences --and mostly because the artificiality of each sequence --made Birkin look like a novice.  Nothing felt authentic because it felt like an imitation of a movie rather than an authentic movie in itself.  Some of that came from the fact that Varda felt the need to explain the premise of each movie in the clip itself.  When we watch clips of movies, we aren't looking for a complete narrative.  It's meant to establish tone and character.  But golly, if we didn't get a whole film when it came to Birkin looking for that money.

I don't know.  It all felt really self-indulgent.  I'm trying to separate the movie from Kung-Fu Master! where I have so many concrete opinions.  But as an art piece, it doesn't speak to me.

PG.  It's --in the loosest sense of the term --a bit of a rom-com.  Like, I'll never think of it as a rom-com, but it is fundamentally about the romance of these two people in the midst of a high concept story about the afterlife.  As such, there's a moderate amount of talk about sex.  It's not over-the-top or anything, but it is there.  But that's not the thing that parents should be watching for if considering this a movie to watch with the kids.  Besides some language, there are some really outdated racial stereotypes in this movie.  Golly, we have to remember that it was 1991.  Not that it makes it okay, but at least it gives us context.  

DIRECTOR:  Albert Brooks

I had no idea when I was going to write about this movie.  I was getting concerned.  But my wife confessed that she was feeling pretty darned sleepy and that left me the opening to get caught up on my writing.  I've seen most of Defending Your Life dozens of times.  This was one of the movies that played on old school Comedy Central back in the day.  I never caught it early enough to see how long Daniel was on Earth, but the conept is so in your face that it doesn't really take any time to figure out what is going on in this movie.

Albert Brooks is a legend.  I do think he's a genius.  I do think that there's something incredibly special about this man.  But I also think that he's a guy who somehow exists outside of the expectations that are placed on other filmmakers.  He's only directed nine movies.  He's only written twelve.  I mean, who am I to throw around numbers like that when I haven't had anything completed or published?  But Albert Brooks is one of those people you really can't throw stones at.  I mean, I'm going to toss a few pebbles at Defending Your Life, but it is kind of hands off when it comes to Albert Brooks.  

The funny thing is, I'm in this holding pattern of figuring out if Defending Your Life is incredibly brilliant or a movie that has a lot of weak moments.  I have to reiterate, this is the first time I'm sitting down and watching Defending Your Life, start-to-finish, with purpose.  Every other time I've watched it, it's because I've stumbled upon it.  But it was one of those formative films for me.  When I found that filmmakers tend to have a healthy respect for Albert Brooks, I always snapped to, "Well, Defending Your Life kind of proves that true."  

But I think that Defending Your Life gets a pass because it took big swings when no one else was taking risks.  For those not in the know, Defending Your Life is a comedy about a mediocre man who dies.  I can't help but make comparisons to The Good Place, but Defending Your Life presents an alternative afterlife than the traditional Heaven or Hell route.  While Defending Your Life concedes that there is a version of Heaven that we, as an audience, won't see in the film, it focuses more on the idea that people are judged in a longer period of time than simply seeing St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.  Brooks's afterlife posits that there is some form of salvation, but the real alternative to Heaven isn't Hell, but reincarnation with the intent that people are given a chance to get it right.  It's a mix of Christianity and Buddhism with a heavy dose (as I understand it) of Buddhism.  Sure, they tease the notion that some people are so far from the mark of ever getting it right that they are eventually discarded as flaws in the system, but Brooks never really pursues this.

Like I mentioned, we have The Good Place today.  While I believe that Hollywood doesn't really make comedies like it used to, the ones we do see tend actually to lean into high concept.  The notion of the high concept, make-you-think-about-it comedy is actually fairly commonplace.  And maybe if I hadn't been such a fan of The Good Place, I could see that Defending Your Life might be the best comedy about the afterlife.  But I do have to give Defending Your Life a pass.  After all, I really don't think that Michael Schur would be making something like The Good Place if Defending Your Life didn't lay down the foundation to make a movie where people had to contemplate life and the afterlife.

I also have to state something clearly now.  It's not like I've ever been the biggest fan of Defending Your Life.  But I do have to admit that there was something in this movie that I've been potentially accidentally plagiarizing for a comic book series that I've been tossing around.  The only think I'll tell you about it is that it also has the notion that mediocrity might be one the biggest sins in itself.  My protagonist was a guy who lived a middle of the road lifestyle and never got into heaven.  The same could be said about Daniel Miller.  Brooks stresses that the greatest sin imaginable is the opportunities missed out of life.  I can't help but see the transcendental in this, but I think  he's seeing it more of a joie de vivre attitude while we're here.

While the worldbuilding of Judgment City may be some of the things that really keep us entertained in the movie and give us the comedic trappings that strings the trial together, the meat of the story is the accusations against mediocrity.  It seems like Daniel Miller might actually be one of the more interesting people while he's on Earth.  He's a guy who can throw around a joke at a board meeting and get laughs.  He buys expensive cars and listens to music loudly.  Ironically, if we used the opening shots of the movie as part of the testimony to show that Daniel led a lifestyle that pleased him, free of fear, the opening might have worked for the defense.  If we were using that as indirect characterization, Daniel Miller might be a more interesting person than a lot of the people I know.

This is where the movie starts to feel undercooked for me.  Brooks argues that fear is the cause of one's downfall.  A running gag throughout the movie is that humanity is stuck using only 3% of their brains.  (I can't stand this misinformation, but it works for the sake of storytelling.  The residents of Judgment city tend to use between 40% and 60% of their brains and it lets us know the hierarchy of this society.)   I am all about the notion that life should be lived to its fullest.  This very blog (as sad as it is) is the notion that I have one life to live.  I want to learn and absorb as much art as I can before I die and I want talk about it with the world.   That's great.  But because the thing that brings people out of Heaven is fear, I don't really know how that plays into sin.

Now, there are real evils that stem out of sin.  That notion of self-preservation that hurts others?  I can see that being something evil.  (Note:  I am aware that I refuse to let go of my Christian upbringing with morality hinging on right and wrong, despite the fact that Defending Your Life has little to do with how many people you helped.  There's a joke where Bob asks Daniel how much he donated to charity, but that idea isn't really explored.)  I suppose when Daniel ends up retracting his good deed against his friend and his friend gets expelled because of that narcing, there's something there.  

But a lot of Brooks' argumentation is slightly Ayn Randian.  (Please remind to talk about Julia because her character gives me hope.)  While many of Daniel's early evidence is about good v. evil things, the later evidence presented both for and against Daniel seems to be more about being a successful capitalist rather than being a good person.  One of the pieces of damning evidence against Daniel is the fact that he didn't invest in Casio when given the opportunity.  Sure, there was probably something that came with fear when it came to making that choice.  But, more importantly, Daniel isn't a mind-reader.  We all have the benefit of sitting there as an audience saying, "He lost out on a fortune because he was scared."  Any investment is about taking guesses.  Yeah, he lost all of his money on cattle, but that's as dumb as anything else out there.  

Even the positive footage of Daniel, choosing to buy a ticket for a private vacation and upgrading it to first class, despite having little money, is pathetic.  I get that it is supposed to be pathetic.  But the movie really presents this moment, from at least Bob's perspective, as something admirable.  Bob saves this moment as his piece de resistance.  I don't necessarily think that Bob thinks that he's going to win with this evidence, but he also sees it as Daniel's most fearless moment and that seems pretty weird to me.  Heck, I'd at least save the snowmobile incident as something that might be a bigger homerun than the vacation scene.

But the thing that gives me a little bit of hope about morality in the afterlife of Defending Your Life is the fact that everyone is swooning over Julia.  We don't know much about her except for the fact that she's given the VIP treatment in Judgment City while Daniel gets the economy tour of the place.  We get to see one of her sequences, a comedically over-the-top brave moment of her saving the family cat from a house fire.  It's great.  But also, that's a scenario where fear and morality are aligned.  (Although it is a bit irresponsible to leave your children to fend for themselves if you die in a house fire trying to save the cat...) It gives me hope that Brooks isn't arguing that money and dangerous investing is the making of the '90s man.  

I do remember the end differently.  I do remember the fact that Daniel breaks out of his seatbelt, jumps off the tram, and tries to get to Julia as his lawyers watch on a viewscreen. I just remembered wrongly, thinking that he was doing it to save Julia, who deserved a much better afterlife than he got.  Again, this is a moment that is undercooked.  It's less about goodness and morality and more about taking what you want.  The entire third act is a condemnation about Daniel not sleeping with Julia when he got the chance.  Instead, I actually like that Daniel didn't sleep with Julia.  Yes, he almost drops the word "afraid" when talking to Julia, but it seems like a far more healthy fear than the movie would allow.  (During the trial, he admits that he was afraid.) So if Julia was going to The Good Place and he was headed back to Earth, it doesn't really seem altrusitic so much as, trying to put back what he messed up on.  It should be even noted that he even tried to do that earlier when he called Julia in the middle of the night.  Still, I suppose it worked.

I want to say something and it seems dangerous to say.  I used to love Woody Allen.  Annie Hall is still one of my favorite movies.  I just can't really watch it because all of the Woody Allen stuff makes this great movies completely ruined by the creator.  Now, it doesn't take much to make the leap of what I could be implying here, but Albert Brooks's humor, at its peak, tickles me in the same way that Woody Allen's does.  Yeah, I know what that sounds like.  Instead, I think there's something about the wordplay and the delivery that I don't really get in contempoary movies.  When the jokes in Defending Your Life hit, they really hit.

Rated PG-13 for some scary stuff.  I thought that this movie was going to go full Man-Spider and make the film terrifying.  Even if you use "The Other" storyline as a foundation, it still doesn't make the film as disturbing as that.  Really, I could have brought my five and eight-year-olds, but that's really kind of pushing it.  There is the regular amount of superhero violence.  A lot of the film is about mental health, which can get a little heavy.  The Punisher swears a lot, even if it is a comfort with the s-word.  Still, it feels darker than it is.

DIRECTOR:  Destin Daniel Cretton

I got to see one of the biggest movies on opening weekend!  That's a nice little treat.  I'd also like to say that I got to see this with my older two kids in 3D!  About a decade ago, I was the biggest advocate for 3D films.  In fact, I probably spent way more money than I had to trying to get 3D tickets for movies that, frankly, didn't need to be in 3D.  But my son and I agree.  The perfect film for 3D might be Spider-Man: Brand New Day.  Here's the deal.  Spider-Man swings through buildings in all of his movies.  And I can't attest that this is true or false because I haven't seen the 2D print of this film, but I feel like Cretton made this movie with a sense of agorophobia.  (Okay, I was shooting for "fear of heights", but I don't have good internet and I can't look up the term I'm really looking for.) 

I'm not going to say anything too controversial in saying that Tom Holland is an incredible Spider-Man.  (Maybe a spectacular Spider-Man?)   But I'm going to rile some feathers in saying that Tom Holland's Spider-Man movies are all exactly what they need to be.  Even Spider-Man: Far From Home?  I'm going to say especially Far From Home.  I love these movies.  Now, I know that this is the first movie from Tom Holland's serise of Spider-Man movies directed by Destin Daniel Cretton.  It's a new trilogy and I was wondering if the same wonder was going to be caught in this new series of movies.  Somehow, Brand New Day feels like a new trilogy with a new tone while still capturing a lot of the magic that the previous movies really touched on.

If the "Home" movies were about a young Peter Parker embracing the fact that he's a rookie on the grand scheme of things (despite the fact that he's been to space and fought Thanos), this is the first movie that talks about the world weary Spider-Man.  I'm a guy who owns every Amazing Spider-Man comic book.  I've read a lot of books with this guy.  I have to think that this choice is a conscious decision to mirror the comics.  Peter has never had it easy.  The "Home" movies acknowledged that it's hard to be a young Spider-Man.  But there was always kind of a lightness to those early Stan Lee / Steve Ditko movies.  Sure, Peter cried a lot.  Sure, he screwed up his life a lot.  But he was also still a kid who had a roof over his head.  But a lot of Spider-Man's career has been about the isolation that comes with being a superhero.

I like that Marvel is actively addressing mental health crises.  I wonder if it was just kismet that Florence Pugh's Black Widow was the surprise cameo (sorry for spoiling that, but it really doesn't change the movie).  The Thunderbolts movie was all about the problem with trying to survive in the world on your own when community is so important to thriving in the world today.  With the way that things were left at the end of No Way Home, we were kind of promised the culmination of three movies of promise: that we'd have a street level, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.  But the thing about that street level Spider-Man is that he's alone in the world.  If things didn't work out in high school, things really weren't going to go well when Peter was an adult.  The safety net was gone and Peter has to kind of figure out what adulthood really looks like.  Yes, Dr. Strange's spell to make everyone forget Peter Parker is a nice fantasy convention to get people there, but it doesn't change the fact that Peter Parker deals with what a lot of adults deal with: friendships disappear.

Part of me doesn't want to understand why Peter is so self-sacrificing.  A lot of me thinks it's unnecessary.  After all, MJ and Ned were great in his life.  While Spider-Man is thriving as an institution to the city (something that we also saw in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3), Peter's life is falling apart more than normal.  He's physically in pain due to the fact that his mental health is being ignored.  (Remember, mental health care is also health care!) But I also somehow believe it in this story.  Maybe I'm lying to myself because I want the movie to work.  But I also genuinely believe that Peter thinks that he's doing the right thing for Peter and Ned.  After all, watching the two of them thriving without Peter injecting their lives with chaos has to be pretty painful.  Sure, MJ looks sad all the time.  But if you made a checklist of all the wins that she has in her column, I get the need to see yourself as a burden on someone else.

But I want to get back to street level Spider-Man!  As much as I love the "Home" trilogy, both Far From Home and No Way Home have a scale to them that never really felt like Spider-Man was someone who handled the small, important problems. You know, the problems that Black Widow refers to as "small potatos."  And I have to give Cretton so many props.  I don't know how he injected so much into this movie and still made it feel really intimate.  There are a thousand plots in this movie.  There are so many references.  There are emotional turns and shifts.  Yet, the whole movie feels cohesive.  I think that has to come with the character of Spider-Man himself.

One of the things that makes Peter Parker such a loser while Spider-Man is such a hero is the idea that he has too much on his plate.  Maybe that's the movie's thesis statement.  The opening of the film shows Spider-Man absolutely crushing it.  He takes on (a live action!) Tombstone, Scorpion, Boomerang, the Hand, and that guy who is like the Juggernaut --but isn't.  Jean DeWolff (two The Bear alumni in one movie!) is both proud of Spider-Man and concerned for the young man underneath it all.  There's something earnestly toxic about DeWolff as a character.  She's constantly saying that Spider-Man needs to take a break, yet will still send him out for these death-defying missions that seem suicidal, regardless of how you look at it.  But all that stuff is saying that while Peter may be handling the small potatoes, there are so many small potatoes that it is overwhelming.  Yeah, Jean Grey (oh, sorry about that spoiler too) freezes a kilometer of New York City.   But the reason that she explodes like that is pretty small.  It's a girl looking for her sister.  Yes, it seems like a huge deal because young Jean Grey's powers simply involves body swapping.  But that story is far more chaotic because Peter is worried about a change and the fact that he's dealing with headaches and he's losing his sense of self.

I want to talk about Jean Grey for a second.  I love that this is how we're being introduced to X-Men characters.  I noticed that Brian Michael Bendis got a thank you in the credits because I think a lot of this movie owes a debt to Bendis's run on both Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men.  Yeah, I know that the comics has Peter and Kitty Pryde as a romantic pairing, but I see a lot of that dynamic happening with Jean Grey.  It's really weird because we don't often see Jean Grey at this point in her development.  Jean always kind of started at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.  Seeing what it is like to be an Omega level mutant before she knows how to do any of that stuff brings up interesting questions about morality.

See, I was bothered with one shot in particular.  There are moments where Jean does some morally dubious things.  The whole hunt for MJ is pretty gross.  But I want to talk about the fact that Jean let a construction worker get hit by a car. However, her frustration kind of makes sense given the fact that her life is miserable.  Marvel's been pretty good about making their antagonists sympathetic.  In fact, Brand New Day does it so well that Jean isn't even a bad guy by the end of the movie.  She's going to be a hero, right?  (I hear that she might be in Avengers: Doomsday.)   But for all of the other X-Men films telling us that it is hard to be a mutant, Brand New Day actually made it very real and very grounded.

Golly, there are a ton of beats in this movie.  I cannot reiterate enough how many disperate storylines there are in this movie.  I was worried about how Jon Berenthal's Punisher would work with this Spidey.  I'm really back and forth on the Punisher.  He's a character that I wish would die with time because he's so problematic.   Also, while I love Jon Berenthal's performances and take on the Punisher, I don't love what the One Shot One Last Kill said about what the Punisher should be.  But I do like the fact that there are certain people that should be in each other's orbits.  Two of those characters should be Spider-Man and the Punisher.  I don't like how friendly these two got, especially by the end of the movie.  Peter is glossing over how violent Frank Castle gets, but I do like that they have a relationship.  

I don't even have anything to say about the Hulk, despite the fact that he was magnificent in this movie.  Sure, I think Spider-Man should absolutely be dead based on some of those hits, especially if a bullet can rip into him that hard.  I also kind of want Peter to go back to webshooters.  Still, I dug that the Hulk scene played as well as it did, especially involving Punisher's limited involvement.

Hey, before I close up, I want to talk about something that absolutely doesn't matter.  My stupid headcanon is that MJ remembers Pete.  There's a bit of debate online about who remembers what.  Let's go from firmest belief to least firm belief.  I absolutely believe that Hulk remembers Pete, but that's because I'm slightly cheating.  Beneath that, I believe that Ned remembers Pete, simply because of the delivery that Jacob Batalon gives.  But finally, if the first two are true, I believe that MJ remembers Pete, but understands that there's too much chaos to simply go back to the way things were.  She's also probably reeling with a lot in that moment.  Also, the assumption that she can just meet Pete where he is is completely unfair.  Just thoughts.  

Anyway, maybe its some recency bias, but this might be my favorite Spider-Man, at least from the Holland trilogy.