Rated R for nudity, sexuality, teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse, crime, and attempted rape.  Geez, while I absolutely think that this is an R-rated movie, it's weird to think that this movie has all of this stuff in it.  It has the tone of an older film, which makes the questionable content somehow less intense.  But all of those things happen in this film and that definitely is stuff that you'd see in an R-rated movie.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

So...Monika is a lot, right?  

Once I hit the midpoint of the film, that's the only phrase that kept going through my head over-and-over-and-over again.  I have to pivot the way that I'm viewing these movies.  Normally, if I watch special features and supplemental material (which I honestly should do way more often if I had time or patience for it) I tend to do it after I watch the film(s).  I think with how many Bergman movies I'm watching in quick succession, I need to slow down and watch a primer on Bergman because I'm running into the same problem that I have with Woody Allen.

Back in my Thomas Video days, I would regularly do what I'm doing right now.  If I didn't feel educated on a certain director, I would watch all of their movies in a short amount of time.  It was my own way of having retrospectives and it would make me incredibly knowledgeable incredibly quickly.  Some of you out there might consider this to be heresy, burning through a director's complete oeuvre in such a limited time.  Yeah, they blend together.  I understand that. But also, the world is full of great art and I was passionate to absorb as much as I possibly could while on this planet.  I still have that wiring in me, by the way.  But I noticed with some auteurs that not only was there a throughline to their films, but there was almost a sense of repetition.  Now, I love Woody Allen films.  Not all of them and my love for these films have been tempered the more I learn about the dude.  I will say that I generally like Bergman (although my gut is saying, "Not another Bergman" when it's time has come up).  He's got more hits than misses.  But Bergman, at this point, is almost a formula with a lot of his films.

Bergman has heady films and less heady films.  Honestly, I started by liking his less-heady films more.  He kept giving me the right level of melodrama with his earlier films.  They were almost kitchen sink dramas about young love and how it all spirals out of control.  And, besides the fact that it was easier to absorb, they were decent stories.  But now that I've reached Summer with Monika, I'm getting a little tired of the same narrative over and over.  From what I understand, Bergman wasn't probably the healthiest person when it came to relationships.  I'm probably going to be bummed the more research I do into this guy.  From what I understand, he was all about infidelity.  But the thing that is really a red flag is how quickly characters shift from being anti-violence to being domestic abusers.  But the story that Bergman tells often is that men are driven to beat their wives and that it is the wife's fault.

With the case of Summer with Monika, the eponymous character was raised in a home where domestic abuse was commonplace.  It's why she runs away with Harry.  Harry, from a characterization standpoint, is different from the other men in Monika's life.  She has all of these deadbeats around her and they fully embrace the villainous natures that men possess.  There are a handful of scenes where Monika is molested and almost raped, implying that she needs to get away from a world that treats her like a sex object.  When Harry not only treats her with respect, but also comes to her with grievances against society, the two run off, embracing an anti-capitalist lifestyle on a boat.  They pride themselves on having abandoned the expectations of society and there's almost this moment of pure romantic bliss.  But because Bergman seems kind of gross, it isn't Harry who changes; it's Monika.  Harry is the one who is willing to sacrifice for their life of simplicity. 

Once Harry discovers that Monika is pregnant, he's adamant that he needs to provide for Monika and their child.  It's Monika who says that she refuses such notions and the two devolve into thieves.  But while Harry views thievery as part of his appropriately named "Summer with Monika", Monika grows harsh and aggressive, attacking Harry for small mistakes.  She becomes this caustic, toxic personality and then, in the most gross way possible, Monika almost asks to be beaten.  Okay, this is me showing my grossness because she literally says, "Don't hit me.  Whatever you do, don't hit me."  From Bergman's perspective, he is stating the only actual punishment that Monika will listen to.  After all, Monika keeps pushing Harry.  He does that weird thing again, the casual adultery, that we keep seeing in his movies.  These all end up being stories about how easy it is to hurt other people.  With Bergman, it's often the people who cheat who aren't left with the fallout of the relationship.

But the biggest problem that I have with Summer with Monika is the fact that it was so easily turned into an exploitation film in the United States.  Not a long movie by any stretch of the imagination, the U.S. was able to cut Summer with Monika into a 62 minute exploitation film.  The insane thing about that is the fact that I guessed it easily could have been cut into an after-school special about the dangers of loose women fairly easily.  Summer with Monika, despite being incredibly similar to his other films from the era, is Bergman painting with his widest brush yet.  The teen pregnancy angle coupled with the notion that Monika just changes personality on a dime almost screams "morality play" at the audience.  That final shot, of Harry looking at himself and baby Monika (or June?) in the mirror is telegraphing what little subtext there is in the film.  It's just so heavy handed that there's almost nothing to derive from the film.  The title has more depth than the film as a whole.

Also, has Bergman ever raised a child?  There are some fundamental, basic things about rearing a child that this movie does not understand in the least.  That first night sequence, when Harry is the only one to wake up to the screaming baby --which is just a scene to really drive home that Monika is both an unfit mother and an unfit spouse --Harry just covers the baby with blankets.  I wish I could say that it was a commentary on how unprepared these two are to raise children, but the baby does grow quiet after Harry just almost SIDSes the kid.  Also, I know that maybe things are happening behind the scenes with the baby, but that baby needs to be fed.  Maybe it's getting formula, but we get this message that Monika is doing nothing for this child, ultimately leading her to abandon the child once she has been beaten.

Honestly, if I hadn't seen the other movies ahead of this, I would find Summer with Monika quaint.  But given how many of these movies I've seen at this point, this movie almost becomes infuriating.  It almost seems lazy.  The crazy part is that I know that this is part of the cinematic canon.  I think that this might be one of the Criterion films that was released separately from the box before this.  It's one of those kind of "must see Bergmans" and I don't really see what makes it special.  Maybe writing this made me more mad than I was initially, but this was just heavy handed preaching versus nuanced storytelling.  

Not rated, but the story of the Central Park Five is one of wrongful imprisonment based on race and lazy police work.  Because the crime is so heinous, the film must talk (and, to a certain extent, show) elements of a rape and a severe beating.  The movie also talks about drugs and abuses in the prison system.  It's not an easy movie to watch, but it should also be stated that this was a PBS special.  There's only so much that PBS will show.

DIRECTORS:  Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon

It's going to be a week of a lot of writing.  That's probably not the worst life to have. One of the things that I really try to push myself at (while actively patting myself on the back constantly) is to educate myself about talking points that everyone should know about.  I have always known the loosey-goosey talking points of the Central Park Five.  The title given to these boys has been in the news more often now that Donald Trump is ruining all of our lives with his constant threat of returning.  Now, I knew that Donald Trump put out of a full-page spread calling for the death penalty when it came to these boys.  (It's weird that he's been associated as the pro-life candidate.) But if I was going to be continuing the fight against Trump through discussions with people in my life, I wanted the deep dive into what exactly happened with the Central Park Five.

I wish I could say that the Central Park Five story was a unique one.  As someone who really gets into true crime --a phrase I never thought I would say before I got married --there have been too many tales of shortcuts from law enforcement when it comes to getting a suspect.  Now, I kind of get it.  This is not a forgiveness of the profession at all.  If anything, it's pointing out a chink in the armor of what we think of as police investigation, but being a detective seems way harder than what TV makes it out to be.  We've all been wired (no pun intended) to think that detective work is just like police procedural television.  We assume that everyone who is a detective is well-trained and is able to piece together crazy concepts using the evidence at their disposal.  It's documentaries like The Central Park Five that remind us that a lot of police work is about getting the public less fearful about a criminal out there on the loose.

What the Burnses and McMahon do is remind us that crime is scary, but that doesn't really excuse taking away individual liberty in exchange for a sense of calm.  I think I get yelled at for being too critical about law enforcement.  It is a dangerous and difficult job that a lot of people have respect for.  And, to a certain extent, I'm not necessarily anti-cop.  I'm anti-free passes.  One of the things that The Central Park Five reminds me of is the fact that certain professions aren't allowed to be criticized.  I'm a teacher.  One of the things that is meant to be applauded is when we hold each other accountable.  I was involved in having to report another teacher for inappropriate boundaries.  (Note: This was years ago.  If you are trying to figure out who I narced on, good luck.)  In almost any profession, if you see something shady and immoral, it's encouraged that you point it out.  But the fact that we keep hearing the same narrative come out of law enforcement, that there are a few rotten apples and the whole is good, that has to be somewhat of a myth given the story of the Central Park Five.

One of the key issues with these boys is the fact that multiple precincts worked in tandem to ensure that a structured plan was done to put these boys into prison as quickly as possible.  This wasn't one detective who was lazy or vindictive.  This was a whole police force colluding to get enough kids off the street almost exclusively because they were Black or Hispanic.  They were the perfect targets.  They were poor kids that lived in an area that was considered scummy by well-off white people.  They boys were mostly isolated from each other.  In reality, these boys were only linked through the moniker given to them by the media.  And they were borderline tortured through exhaustion to repeat a story that did not happen.  The worst part, though, is that --as a society --we ate this up.  It's what we do.  The narrative that a bunch of young minorities were doing abysmal things and that they were caught by law enforcement is something that the news is out there for. It's so depressing, by the way, to see Tom Brokaw talking about these kids like they were monsters.  I mean, from his perspective, given the information that he was given, he had little responsibility to give another opinion.  But it's Tom Brokaw!  I grew up watching him and, in my mind, he was the bastion of journalistic integrity.

The Donald Trump bit is only about a minute long in a two-hour documentary.  That makes sense.  In some ways, it's a bit of propaganda to bind Trump to the Central Park Five narrative.  But in a way that I actually believe, it's very much a part of Donald Trump's playbook.  This is me going off on Trump because I honestly think that he's one of the worst human beings on the planet.  But the Donald Trump playbook is to get a read on the room of White America.  Trump tends to find what white people are most afraid of and, from a distance and lacking information, just lets loose. People react poorly.  You know what he does?  (YOU KNOW WHAT HE DOES!?)  He loves turning the temperature up on an already crappy situation.  He presents himself as the voice of reason when he makes everything worse with each opportunity that he gets.  So yeah, he's barely in the movie.  But that's what he does.  He's really good at lighting the match and then running away.   (There!  I feel justified in my watching of a two hour doc so I have a one second talking point added to my piles of rants on Trump.) 

In terms of filmmaking, I've actually never sat down and watched a Ken Burns movie.  I know.  He's the quintessential subdued documentarian.  But I have no desire to watch Jazz or Baseball, so I watched this.  This film is pretty masterful.  True crime is such a difficult balance to achieve.  Often --and I'm part of the problem! --these things tend to be exploitative.  There's a ton of information, but the movies try to make you gasp.  Instead, The Central Park Five elicits a depressing horror at just how easy it was to destroy people's lives.  That's what Ken Burns kind of nails.  (Sorry for not constantly citing all three filmmakers.)   It's organized.  It's clear.  It's also incredibly respectful.  Maybe that's what makes this a little bit different from other true crime docs that I've absorbed.  There's a real lean into the format as opposed to just exploiting information.

Anyway, it works.  It does a thorough job of teaching, which is the point of renting this movie.  I needed to know everything and I got a complete breakdown without feeling like they were stalling for time.  It's fascinating in the most depressing way.

PG-13, but that is really pushing the limit.  There were two f-bombs that I counted.  Like movies of this type (which I'll be pointing out later), there's also a woven sexuality running all the way through the film.  Fincher has never shied away from uncomfortable visuals as well, which Benjamin Button has a few.  It's never overt or over the top, but it honestly is pushing the PG-13 limits sometimes.

DIRECTOR:  David Fincher

I was really hoping that I had watched this one in the last ten years so I wouldn't have to write about it.  It's such a healthy attitude, talking about how much I don't want to write at all times.  It's just that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is so...basic.  That's such a dismissive thing to say for a movie that probably changed a lot of people's lives.  It was a big deal in 2008, but I don't know if time has looked well on this movie.  Now, the dismissive answer would be to chalk it up to the uncanny valley special effects that seemed so revolutionary at the time.  But really, this is a movie that we've all seen almost too many times.

Just so I'm not beating around the bush, you've seen this movie even if you haven't seen this specific movie. It's both Forrest Gump and Big Fish.  That's also dismissive...but is it really?  It's  a certain subgenre that almost, as if by design, uses a lot of the same plot elements by design.  The English teacher part of me is yelling that "Flashback" is not a subgenre.  But in the case of this, we're dealing with the story of men who have been considered ultimately unimportant by society revealing their own almost-beyond-belief greatness through anecdotes.  The only thing that makes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button slightly different from those other movies is that the story is technically told with the involvement of the female lead. Now, I call shannigans on that a little bit too, mainly because the story is just a read aloud version of a man's diary.  You have a few moments when Daisy (is she named such because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the short story that this film is loosely built upon?) contributes what she was doing in some of these sequences?

Honestly, this movie is made in the last twenty minutes.  That has always been the takeaway for me.  If you asked me in 2008 my thoughts about this movie, I would say it was one of the greatest movies ever.  But a lot of that comes from my absolute adoration of the last twenty minutes of this movie.  Don't get me wrong.  The last twenty minutes really work because the first two-hours-and twenty minutes set up a character that is mostly likable and sympathetic. But the last twenty minutes actually kind of hits on a gold mine.  Ultimately, this movie is meant to be a commentary on how we view aging.  Okay, that's cool. But there's a chunk of the movie where the aging element really just feels like it is a conceit that isn't really doing any heavy lifting.  Now, it's a little unfair to throw that stone.  Benjamin entire middle age is fairly normal.  That's an idea behind the high concept.  But we kind of forget for a while that the aging really matters.  Basically, the concept works in extremis.  When Benjamin is born, the aging thing is fundamental to the story.  When Benjamin is about to die, the aging thing is important.  But that leaves a lot of time when this is just the story of a guy.

And just the story of a guy is interesting and terrible at the same time. Let me put this in context.  Big Fish, Forrest Gump, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button share one other element in common.  The other thing that they have in common is the fact that they all have justifications for why the male protagonist is an absentee father.  With Forrest Gump, he kind of gets a pass.  He didn't know that he was an absentee father, which makes it a little bit more sympathetic.  But Big Fish and Benjamin Button share in its DNA (pun intended) excuses for why someone can't be around.  Now, I'll go as far as to say that Benjamin Button almost lets Benjamin off the hook for his absentee parenthood.  It's only Cate Blanchett's delivery of a key line that puts a little bit of the onus on Benjamin. She says, "I wasn't strong enough to raise both of you."  But Blanchett gives a little bit of a bite to that line.  Thank God for that because that part genuinely upsets me more than it should.

Because it is told from Benjamin's perspective, we get this narrative that Benjamin is incapable of raising his daughter.  Daisy is adamant that she would rather have Benjamin in her life than outside.  The end comes across as this narrative that Benjamin made a noble sacrifice to take care of Caroline.  But Benjamin comes back looking like an older teenager and meets the teenage Caroline.  We get all of these flashes of Benjamin in India and he still looks an appropriate age to take care of another human being.  It's not like he's feeble.  One of the key ideas behind Benjamin Button when it comes to aging is that there are a lot of parallels between the very young and the very old.  Ultimately, it's difficult to raise a kid regardless of one's age.  It just looks different.  I don't know if Fincher really sells this idea as well as he could.  The movie feels like Benjamin did the right thing when that entire notion is ultimately absurd.  The movie never really condemns Benjamin's cowardice when it comes to his role as a father and I absolutely hate this element of the story.

This is annoying that I'm pointing this out, but I kind of hate the fact that the diary as a form of storytelling doesn't really work for the whole movie.  Benjamin Button is some kind of psychic prophet or something in this movie.  I know.  This is all so stupid to complain about, but I'm going to do it.  There's a really nifty sequence --admittedly about a concept that many people have done before --arguing that one little change would have saved Daisy's dancing career.  Benjamin reports on all of the things that had to align perfectly for Daisy to be in the way of a car heading down a road that would ultimately hit her.  Okay, it's a fun, if not overused, concept.  But this is a movie that is fundamentally a first-person limited perspective. Benjamin can only report on the things that he sees.  All of the sudden, Benjamin can see the gears of the universe.  That's kind of how the whole opening sequence worked.  Benjamin has this knowledge of a clock that existed before he was born, including all the details.  He saw the war from a million miles away.  It's all artistic, but it's also cake-and-eating-it-too.

Finally, these movies also have something else in common.  All of these narratives have a sexually aggressive woman and the helplessness of a man at her wiles.  Why do we have to make Daisy so predatory on Benjamin?  I actually kind of know the answer. These characters need to be kept apart until a certain part in the movie.  By having these character flaws, the story can be stalled until the right moment, meaning that there was some kind of grand destiny that put these two togethers.  It's just a trope that I don't like.  It always makes the male character so noble and the female character seem unthinking about other people's feelings.  It's just a lot.

There's nothing really wrong with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button except for the point that it is basic.  It's a decent movie that I'm just losing elements upon a rewatch.  It seemed like it was so grandiose at one point in time.   But this watch, I honestly got a little bored.

PG-13, which kind of surprised me just because this is an A24 horror-adjacent movie.  I think there's some language, but the real thing that is upsetting about the movie is there is one self-mutilation sequence.  There's also --and this is weirdly worded on my part --aura of suicide.  While suicide isn't outright stated, there is all of this self-harm behavior going on in the movie.  Also, at one point, a teenager smokes a cigarillo.  This is where I'm at with this MPA section.  Leave me be!

DIRECTOR: Jane Schoenbrun

You have to forgive me a bit.  I'm all over the place emotionally this morning.  I watched the debates last night and I don't think I've ever been so happy watching a debate.  That also being said, I Saw the TV Glow might be one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time.  I was thinking I was going to give it a 2/5 on Letterboxd just because I want to seem respectful.  But then I realized that I was being kind because I know that other people really like this movie.  Understand, I am both the target audience for this movie and absolutely the last person who should be watching this movie.

My one-line on Letterboxd will be "I Saw the Glow might be the most A24 film that ever existed and that's a bad thing."  It's clickbaity, I know.  But I'm also trying to get clicks.  I'm honest with you up front.  Jane Schoenbrun makes movies like I Saw the TV Glow.  Heck, if I remembered that she directed We're All Going to the World's Fair, I think I would have been way more prepped for what I signed up for.  Let's break down the A24 comment first.  If I wanted to make a parody film about A24, it would look a lot like I Saw the TV Glow.  Schoenbrun's entire thing is tone.  While there's a message in this movie that I probably want to support, everything in this movie is so dour and unfun that it is acting as a substitution for weight.  The movie feels artistic without actually being artistic.  (I get it.  Art is subjective.  Let me argue my point.)  Every line in this movie is given with the same despondent delivery.  Every shot is almost intentionally ugly (which is hit or miss with A24.  It's either the movies look flipping gorgeous or it looks underlit and on an old camcorder).  But there's something that comes across like fitting a square peg in a round hole (which as I write it, may be symbolic for the whole queer experience).  

While this is a movie about identity, something that I want to talk about at length, it comes at that identity through the lens of fandom.  While Schoenbrun may be pulling from a wealth of '90s TV shows, ultimately a lot of the weight falls on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  There are nods to the show --a show that I watched religiously in its entirety plus spin-off and read the extended universe stuff.  Like the characters who devoted themselves to The Pink Opaque, I get what fandom means.  The problem is, I don't think that Schoenbrun understands what fandom means.  There's partially this message, perhaps unintentionally, about how fandom can become toxic.  The second half of the film shows Maddy / Tara (I really don't want to deadname her) forcing Owen to become Isabel.  Owen --as a metaphor for embracing the shame of being closeted --flees Maddy a second time.  He hates Maddy and fears her once this happens, hiding in his room.  In response, he almost deliberately tries to be unremarkable.  He betrays his asexual confession by having a family and keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to purchases.  Fine.  All that is interesting.  I even can get behind the notion that fandom can become toxic, even though we --as the audience --tend to be more critical of Owen.

But the thing about fandom that this movie completely misses is the fact that fandom is a thing about love first.  I get the vibe that a lot of this movie is talking about the neurodivergent.  Maddy and Owen have a hard time communicating.  Maddy even hates her other friend because she grows out of the show that they were both obsessed with.  There is a breath of joy to their friendship when Maddy sends Owen tape after tape of inscribed VHSes of The Pink Opaque.  But they never talk.  And if the show they are watching is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it misses all of the fun of that show.  The reason why Buffy was such a good watch was because it mixed darkness with tremendous amounts of fun.  I mean, even if you watch the opening credits of the show, you get a pretty solid understanding of the tone.  Fans, while crushed by some of the moments on the show (for me, the episode named "The Body"), it's ultimately a story about friendship and the power that women have.  Watching The Pink Opaque, I was just bummed.  This show seemed to match the tone of the movie, low-energy and crap.  

On top of that, The Pink Opaque doesn't look fun.  They go out of their way to make the movie look like trash.  Honestly, I get that you are doing a send up of '90s genre storytelling, but Buffy, for all of its datedness, mostly holds up.  Am I asking Jane Schoenbrun to make an imaginary show with the quality of Buffy?  No, I am asking her to make a show that at least sells the idea of greatness.  Listen, I never got into Twin Peaks.  I watched all of it and hated it.  But I also understood that the show had something special for people.  Instead, we get this show that is just garbage looking.  It even doubles down on that idea when Owen revisits the show as an adult.  It almost feels insulting to people who really invested in something that defined an era in their lives.  Sure, I haven't sat down and watched a Buffy or Angel episode in ages.  But I watch clips from time to time and the nostalgia holds up.  It still looks good.  Not great, but I never thought that it was childish.

But I have to look at what Schoenbrun is doing in terms of making queer cinema.  Again, I'm not Schoenbrun.  I'm not Justice Smith nor am I Brigette Lundy-Paine.  This not my story, so I can only come from this from an outsider's perspective.  But this is a horror movie.  This is a film that is colored by tragedy.  Again, I can't stress enough how depressing every single moment of this movie is.  Even in friendship and arts, this movie just screams that every living moment is a huge bummer.  Okay, Maddy and Owen are trapped in this miserable world.  Maddy finds solace (through her words, not her behavior) in the show The Pink Opaque.  So in attempt to escape this burdensome lifestyle, she discards the Maddy identity and becomes Tara.  (It should be noted that Tara is the name of Amber Benson's gay character in Buffy and Amber Benson makes a cameo in the film as well.) But Maddy isn't happy in this lifestyle either.  In fact, the film drops the notion that this is the third time that Maddy has changed identities.  Part of that comes from the fact that Owen is unwilling to shed his Owen identity to become Isobel.  Sure, Owen is punished for this action by living in what Maddy calls the Midnight Realm, a depressing, boring, cis gendered life.  

BUT SINCE THERE IS NO HAPPINESS, why would Owen join Maddy? There's a message there that is so muddied down by its absolutely lazy tone that none of it seems like the right answer.   I appreciate that this is a story about identity, but it's not selling any identity in a positive light. The movie is so concerned with the vibes of a horror movie without actually being a horror movie that it forgot that horror movies can be fun.  We All Go to the World's Fair kind of works because it's a single person from a single perspective.  It gives the aura of a school shooter because we have a limited perspective.  I Saw the TV Glow is almost damning to Schoenauer because it shows that not only is the director a one-trick pony, but that trick isn't even that great.  

PG-13 for not-nothing swearing.  There's an f-bomb in here, which surprised me in front of my kids.  (It's weird that I have a line in the sand for things that they can and cannot hear.) There's a decent amount of violence and some death.  In terms of sexuality, it is a rom-com, but I can't think of anything that raised any red flags.  It's pretty mild in that camp actually.  PG-13 seems accurate.

DIRECTOR:  David Leitch

I don't know when to watch the Extended Cuts of things anymore.  I used to exclusively watch director's cuts and extended cuts of things because it felt special.  But if you don't really have a comparison on things, I never know what is the preferred cut of a film.  I did watch the extended edition on this one, simply because it felt like I was getting something special.  I just Googled it and it seems like there's no real consensus about the real version of the film.  That oddly makes me happy.  It means that none of it matters and that the universe has no purpose and oh-my-God-I'm-Going-to-Die-One-Day.  Sorry, I got too far into my head.

I'm actually going to have a hard time writing this one.  It's silly and I should be able to knock this out in two seconds.  It's a rom-com action movie.  It's kind of the perfect date movie...except for the fact that my wife finds no joy in stunts.  Listen, if you are looking for a good time for most personalities, The Fall Guy absolutely nails what it is supposed to be.  Okay, some people can now sign out of the blog and do their own thing.  But I do need to pick apart the movie now and talk about how this movie's biggest problem is that it nails exactly what it is setting out to do.  

The Fall Guy is not a great movie.  It's fun.  I'm even going to say that I deeply respect what this movie does.  If you wanted a perfect double feature with this movie, I'd suggest Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.  Considering that The Fall Guy is a film spin-off of a television show from the '80s, it kind of treats that premise with kid gloves.  Ultimately, what The Fall Guy does and does incredibly successfully is pay homage to the unsung hero: the stuntman.  (I say unsung right after saying that Death Proof also does the same thing.  You get what I'm saying, right?  The purpose of language is to communicate ideas.  If I do that, you can let things slide?  Let's not be pedantic.) I honestly think that his movie was conceived on the premise that the filmmakers were going to gather a bunch of stuntmen, have them come up with the most insane stunt gags that they could, film it, and then wrap a story around those stunts.  And if that's what the goal was, mission accomplished!  On top of that, the movie works enough to make those scenes work?  That's all very impressive.

It is heartwarming to watch these stunts.  This is a movie, as silly as the whole thing might seem, that was made out of love.  Perhaps it is the scream against AI and CGI when it comes to making well-crafted action sequences.  But when a bunch of people get together to make something that they're passionate about, that's something to celebrate.  With that in mind, The Fall Guy is pretty darned great.  It's hilarious.  I am often frustrated when people say that The Phantom Menace is one of their favorite movies because of the lightsaber fights.  I want people to like what they like, but I also want it to be because of substance.  With The Fall Guy, I'm incredibly forgiving of the exact same argument.  If you fall in love with The Fall Guy because of the gags that they set up as action sequences, then you nailed the purpose of the movie.  As much as we can find Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt shippable and charming --which I absolutely do! --it's really about celebrating this craft of creating elaborate action sequences. 

But like I said, my wife doesn't really lose her mind over crazy stunt sequences.  I got the best compliment the other day.  My wife said that she was grateful that I was like Tim Walz.  I wasn't an alpha male who spewed toxic masculinity.  I loved that.  I pride myself on just defining myself by what I genuinely like instead of what society expects me to like.  (I'm also incredibly full of myself right now, so I'll try to get out of this line of thought.) But one of those traditionally masculine things that I enjoy is a great action sequence.  Again, it isn't a make-or-break thing.  I don't actually care for The Phantom Menace that much, despite having admittedly awesome lightsaber fights.  I enjoyed the whole thing because the action sequences enhanced a story that I was mildly engaged in.  But my wife seemed to enjoy the movie for the rom com elements.  Here's where we disagreed, though.  I thought that Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt had incredible chemistry.  You might not be able to trust me on that because very rarely do I argue that people don't have chemistry.  My wife disagreed, but also put the caveat that she can only see Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, not Colt Seavers and Jody Moreno.  That can be a problem.  I had the same problem with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III.  So I can respect that.

So let's break down the big problem.  I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but I am struggling to come to a conclusion on this one.  1) The movie is good, but not great.  2) The movie accomplished all of its lofty goals, which wasn't necessarily to make the best movie ever.  3) I enjoyed it, but not enough to lose my mind about it.  Where does this leave me?  I mean, ultimately, this is the type of movie that you want to watch regularly, but not this specific movie.  We used to have a lot of these kinds of movies, but it's a lot of money to throw at something not to be remembered.  Ultimately, I have to go with my gut.  This is a recommendation for a low-stakes good time.  A lot of television spin-off movies have the same vibe.  Listen, it's a good time.  It's not great, but it will entertain the whole time.  Also, Gosling is borderline untouchable at this point.

Rated G, despite being potentially the goriest of the Godzilla movies.  There's straight up blood all over this movie.  Some of it is weirdly gross, considering people die in droves in these movies.  It bothers me more that someone has their earrings ripped off or is cut open for surgical reasons than the mass death of Tokyo being leveled or something.  Also, the wrecking of King Ghidorah is pretty darned violent.  Still, a G-rating is a G-rating.

DIRECTORS:  Ishiro Honda and Jun Fukuda

Welp, this movie was hyped up for me.  I'll say this much.  It's better than its predecessors.  There was actually a long period of time where I was actively invested in the movie, both because of tonal shifts and because of some plot stuff.  But man, the second half of the movie --the part that people probably enjoyed because there was a bunch of monster fights --almost killed whatever goodwill the first half of the movie built up.  I don't want to dislike these movies, guys.  I have a million more Godzilla movies to go.  It would be better if I just said a bunch of nice stuff about them and how great they all were.  But I almost think, despite being a better movie than the ones before, that Destroy All Monsters is a larger betrayal to the franchise than other entries in the series.

Because this movie almost got a good review until the halfway point in the film, I want to talk about what works about this movie.  Despite being a successful film franchise that is part of the cultural zeitgeist,  I feel like Godzilla should have been a one-and-done. That's coming from a guy whose favorite movie of last year was Godzilla Minus One.  As part of an attempt to tell more stories in the Godzilla universe, these movies reached out into space with a handful of space threats. If you can acknowledge that it's a little bit silly, you can get behind these movies pretty quickly.  It's kind of like accepting that the Adam West Batman is Batman, but just a different kind of Batman.  In the vein of the spacey Godzilla movies, Destroy All Monsters has a decent premise.  There are aliens who are once again trying to take over Earth.  It's a short trip to a plot. In this case, the aliens are sick of sending their own monsters (which they will do anyway), so they decide to take advantage of the monsters on Earth to do their dirty work for them.  That's pretty cool.  Watching all the monsters completely wreck the planet holds the same appeal that a Roland Emmerich movie does (I realize that he had his own Godzilla movie.  I'm not there yet).  

Similarly, I kind of love that anyone could be a bad guy.  It's a used trope.  But we have to accept that this is 1968.  Even though I loathe the politics of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the reason that the movie still works is because there's something haunting about the notion that anyone could be the villain.  And say what you will about campy special effects, you don't really need much to pull off the zombie / body snatcher fear.  I kept trying to piece together whether the people under control of the aliens were themselves, clones, or robots and that's a fun place for me to watch.  So well done, Destroy All Monsters.  You got me on the wanton destruction and the concept that people can turn evil through mind-control manipulation.

But the movie falls apart with a couple of key problems in the film.  I'm going to be petty first and talk about one that bothers me every time I see this in a movie.  I hate when movies become "toyetic."  I forget which movie this term came from, but I always associate "toyetic" with The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  I really want to like The Lost World.  I remember seeing it at the Birmingham 8 when it came out and thought it was amazing.  But I had dumb little kid brains back then, so I kept defending a movie that is fundamentally inferior to the first film.  The concept of being toyetic comes from the notion that certain scenes in the movie are just in there to sell toys.  In The Lost World, there's a scene where all these nifty cars capture all of these dinosaurs.  Even as a kid, I was thinking about the toy commercial that I was watching in the film.  Now, I can't speak to the commercialism of 1960's Japan.  I can't say that SY-3 was sold as a toy.  I can't say that it had a removable lunar rover with laser beams on top.  I don't know.  I might be able to Google it, but I don't know how accurate the answer would be.  But man, there were so many scenes where they were highlighting Rocket SY-3.  Do you know why I know it's called SY-3?  Because they kept saying the name, as if they were marketing that object.

There's a side-problem with something being toyetic.  If something in sci-fi is made to solve a problem that the characters are having, it just means that the problem is solved by that future toy coming to the rescue, the onus is taken off of character problems.  In the case of Destroy All Monsters, the problem lied with the heroes being unable to defeat the aliens' forcefields.  Okay, that's a problem.  Now, if this was character driven, there would have been an alternate option which forced the characters to think of a way to take forcefields out of the equation.  Maybe sneaking in before the forcefield could go up?  Maybe forcing the bad guys to come to them?  But by building an object that will become a toy, they have a machine that undoes forcefields.  That's frustrating.  Instead of being a valid problem for the characters, it is just a problem to be ignored, despite the fact that we were told that there was nothing that they could do.  In a weird way, it's a lie or a broken promise.  Being told one thing and then undoing it is weak writing.

Okay, but that's all small stuff.  What's the thing that really bothers me?  I've touched on it in a lot of Godzilla blogs, but I'm mostly talking about the Universal American Godzilla movies.  The original Japanese Godzilla was a stark commentary on the dangers of unbridled power in the form of nuclear weapons.  It was a criticism of what happens when man's hubris thinks that it can control the uncontrollable and how destructive that power is. While I didn't lose my mind over the original Godzilla, I appreciate that there was a purpose to the storytelling.  I agree with that message.  Making a disaster movie mean something beyond it's base message was important and I like that the movie worked hard to tell a powerful story.  Now, for a minute, I thought that Destroy All Monsters was going to continue the same commentary by showing the inverse narrative.  (The idea being that by thinking we had control of these monsters, we were lulled into a false sense of security.  Like the good Jurassic Park movie.) 

But Destroy All Monsters stands firm on the notion that humanity can control these beasts.  For a minute, it is wrestled away from the humans when the aliens take over.  But even when that control is destroyed, the monsters do the right thing and try to take down the aliens. If the point of the story is to not mess with destructive forces even for a good reason, what's the message of Destroy All Monsters?  Now, this is coming from a guy whose country wasn't bombed into oblivion.  You'd think that the Japanese people who were watching this in 1968 would remember 25 years into the past and think that the message was being ruined. But I like when a movie makes me question norms.  Also, it feels like we're spitting in the face of the original film, especially with something so vapid.  Because the movie is vapid.  Even the good parts, pretty devoid of substance.  It's a lot of scientists in rocket ships shooting bad guys.  

This artificial disc trilogy was a slog. I'm oddly excited for this era of the Godzilla films to be over.  I know. This is the stuff that Criterion put out.  But I just need something to have consequences.  I don't want to see all the monsters fighting together just to say that it was a giant crossover.  The reason why I like the end of Avengers: Endgame was because everything felt like it had a purpose building up to it.  This felt like it was just a bunch of guys in rubber suits improving a fight against another guy in a rubber suit.  Also, why did the aliens think that King Ghidorah would be more than a match for all of Earth's aliens?  He's been beaten twice by far less.  Sorry, movie.  But the second you get lost in your "rad" scenes, the movie gets dumb for me.

PG for surprisingly little death.  I mean, they torture the heck out of this little baby Godzilla for laughs.  But honestly, this might be the first Godzilla movie where no one dies.  I mean, you better be comfortable with bug phobias, but even that is pretty mild because of the quality of the special effects.  Someone gets shot with a gun.  There's some pretty dated gender roles, but nothing that would be considered egregious.  A well-earned PG rating.

DIRECTOR: Jun Fukuda

What is happening with these movies?  I mean, oh my goodness.  Before I get too deep into my flabbergasted blog about a movie that probably shouldn't exist, I would like to state ahead of time that today is a rough writing day.  Everything is taking longer than it should.  It's writing through molasses.  I'm way behind on everything and I'm trying to get this extra writing out, so please forgive me if this thing is hot trash ahead of time.  I'm a little bummed that I'm in the middle of a real slog of a Godzilla disc trilogy right now.  I think that Destroy All Monsters might have promise based on the fact that I know that title.  But these movies...what is going on?

Like, I dare you to put this as the second film in a Godzilla double feature with the original Godzilla.  This movie would make even less sense than it already does.  It's not like earlier Godzilla movies are known for making a ton of sense.  But this movie almost feels drug inspired.  Everything is being thrown at the screen and there's almost little concern for quality control for this franchise.  The most hilarious part is that these are all Criterion movies.  I own this franchise because they are on Criterion. I get it.  Not every Criterion movie is great.  I'm sure that, somewhere in Criterion's mission statement, lies the notion that these are movies that made an impact on arts and culture.  But right now, I'm just powering through these movies to say that I've done them.  That's horrible.  Most of you are probably yelling at me that I don't have to do this and it's probably pretty toxic behavior.  Do you understand that I still have hope for these movies?  I want to be a Godzilla fan, but then there are movies like Son of Godzilla that are just daring me to quit the whole franchise.  Is it that bad?  Honestly, no.  It's not even the worst Godzilla movie that I've seen.  I don't know which one is, but this one is pretty bad.  Part of it comes from the handoff that came with the last movie, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Both movies have the same tone and the same vibes, coupled with the fact that they both share the same director.  But I can't help make the comparison between Batman Forever and Batman and Robin.

Batman Forever is not a good movie.  I'm sorry to people who like those movies.  (Again, also apologies to the people who love Son of Godzilla.)  Batman Forever began the shortlived era of Batman that tried to reclaim of the poppy tone that the Adam West series held onto tightly.  The visuals were bright and the tone was overall optimistic.  While I don't like Batman Forever, I appreciate the fact that it tried something daring and new.  It reflected the culture of the '90s, giving us something different to look at when it came to being a sequel to a very bleak take from Tim Burton.  But then Batman and Robin came out, and it was too much.  It doubled down on the risks that the first movie took and kind of failed at.  While I tolerate Batman Forever, I loathe Batman and Robin.  It's the insane amount of excess that ultimately puts style over substance.  The same can be said of Ebirah and Son of Godzilla.  Both of those films share a lot of DNA, but Son of Godzilla is almost all style over substance.  The movie starts with a solid premise.  A bunch of scientists are discovered by an eager reporter, but they're now all stuck on an island.  We are told that the scientists, in an attempt to counteract diminishing food supplies, are doing weather experiments on this island to change growth conditions.  None of this has to do with the main story: Godzilla and son fighting a giant spider.

It feels like Godzilla kind of just stumbled into someone else's movie.  There was a plot there where the reporter finds things that the scientists had overlooked in terms of safety.  The human characters start getting interesting and then Godzilla shows up to just undo that plot.  Someone out there is arguing with the screen (if anyone who reads my blog has strong opinions about Son of Godzilla, I'm proud to facilitate that completely bonkers Venn Diagram) about the fact that the weather experiment comes into play in the final fight.  To that, I call "Shannigans!"  While the humans attempt to use their weather experiment to stymy the fight between Godzilla and giant bugs, that doesn't help or hinder Godzilla at all.  If anything, it just leads to a cool shot of Godzilla and son being covered by snow.  But Godzilla, at the end of these movies, just kind of goes away.  You don't really need to have snow to explain why Godzilla isn't following them.  Godzilla's personality, by this point, is semi-embraced by humanity.  It's weird that people forget how many deaths Godzilla causes regularly.  They're always trying to help Godzilla, probably because he fights other monsters.  But Godzilla --at this point in time --also enjoys tearing up buildings and destroying Japan.  

The neglect of the human story is frustrating.  But the more frustrating thing may be a cultural misunderstanding on my part.  I know that people don't like Godzilla's kid.  I don't know if he ever formally gets called "Godzookie" outside of the animated series.  For the sake of shorthand, I'm going to call him "Godzookie", just so I don't have to write "Godzilla's Kid" the whole time.  If Godzookie is genuinely a different character, then I apologize.  I don't like Godzookie not for the premise, so much as the character is largely undefined.  But even more than that, the entire bit is that the kid takes damage.  It's an opposite of Home Alone​.  Imagine that Kevin McCallister spent the entire film getting hurt instead of dealing out hurt.  Like, it's not meant for sympathy.  The goofy music in each of these scenes is meant to show how wacky the entire concept is.  It's not fun.  It just seems mean.  I know.  The kid ain't real.  I should be okay with it.  But if I'm emotionally trying to get invested in this character, none of that violence is helping.  

The second part is...who is Godzilla's kid?  Part of me thinks that the current Godzilla was Godzilla's kid. (Maybe it was a sibling?) But also, this egg is just underground.  The mantises dig this egg up and they start attacking this egg.  Why is the egg there?  Is Godzilla a lady?  Did Godzilla put that egg there?  Does Godzilla have a mate or do they reproduce asexually?  It's this weird story that no one in the movie is questioning.  Also, they saw this kid and instantly recognized it as "Godzilla's kid."  Godzilla wasn't even around for the beginning of the movie.  Why do people make that leap?  I suppose we're supposed to pretend that they look alike, but that's a stretch of the imagination.  It's just so much laziness in terms of developing a character that we're supposed to care about as this franchise progresses. (Also, I just discovered that Godzilla's son is known as Manilla, not Godzookie.)   These movies are coming out too often for any effort to be put into them.  I know.  I'm an old man screaming at a TV screen.  There never was an expectation for effort.  But there's also no reason that these movies have to be as vapid as they are.  

This movie was frustrating.  I don't want to watch more.  Thank goodness Destroy All Monsters is next because I need something to pull me out of this slump.

PG for '60s James Bond style villainy and some death.  There's actually one moment that is a pretty gnarly death if it wasn't for the incredibly rough special effects.  These two guys are skewered and then fall into the gaping maw of Ebirah, a giant crab monster.  But the rest of the movie is just silly. We're still on that kick of treating the residents of Infant Island as backwards natives, so keep that in mind.  That entire trope isn't disappearing as of yet.

DIRECTOR: Jun Fukuda

I really want to swear. I've worked really hard to make this blog completely family friendly.  Part of that comes from the fact that it started as a school project for my students that went off the rails and became this monstrosity.  The other half is that I don't want to fall into the habit of writing with cursing.   But what the heck is going on here.  This...this is chaos.  Someone along the way had to say "This is not how storytelling works."  My goodness, for a franchise that is infamous for not really having a coherent plot within films, we now have Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, a movie that has too much plot to make even the slightest bit of sense.

I'm going to gripe about this because my brain hated this while my heart --I can't say "liked" --didn't hate this.  Any griping you get from me should be put with an asterisk because, as absolutely bananas as this film is, it's not unwatchable.  It's just one of these movies that I acknowledge is a train wreck, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has no value.  The issue that I'm mostly having with the movie comes from the same scripting issues that The Simpsons often presents.  If you watch a Simpsons episode, there's a good chance that the Act I sting will be a complete misdirect.  The Simpsons will be doing something completely unrelated to the main plot.  If you tried to figure out what that episode was going to mostly be about, you wouldn't have a clue.  The same goes for Ebirah.  We're a bit in medias res when we start the film.  Ebirah has already destoryed Ryota's brother's boat.  He's looking for him.  But Ryota has already gone to a psychic to confirm that his brother isn't dead.  Okay, we get some characterization from this.  I don't hate that.  It's weird that we don't spend time with the psychic and Ryota coming to grips with his brother's questionable mortality, but whatever.  Instead, we go to the police, who don't help Ryota. It's actually weird that we see the police station because the police don't play a part in this movie whatsoever.

Instead, we have Ryota going to a dance marathon.  Not day one of a dance marathon. In a weird way, that would almost make sense.  The only reason that Ryota was there is because he heard that he could win a yacht by winning this competition.  This is where I completely lose the logic of this film.  Is Ryota a weird dude?  He knows how competitions and marathons work, right?  He gets there on Day Three of the marathon.  There are only a few people left on the dance floor.  Why does he think that he can just join this marathon in the last moments of the competition?  This raises so many questions about Ryota.  He's a weird dude throughout.  I get it.  But narratively, the only reason to get Ryota to a dance competition is so he meets the other supporting characters who are just fun teenagers.  They wanted fun teenagers on Devil's Island, so they had to go to a dance competition.  The thing about Ryota, he doesn't even get the boat from the competition.  They get it from stealing one from the harbor.  Why are they at the harbor?  It isn't because Ryota is looking for a boat there, which is probably the most natural reason to go to the harbor.  No, they're there because the two NPC characters that Nyota meets want to tease him about boats.  That's the whole story.  They end up stealing a boat because Ryota believes that God put him there.  Oh, and there's a safecracker on board.  He's going to be needed later.

All of these Ryota moments would be interesting if we explored what made Ryota neurodivergent or something.  Once they're on the island looking for Ryota's brother, Ryota basically becomes a normal dude.  The people writing this movie were just trying to connect a lot of dots.  Honestly, I thought that they were just trying to get scenes in  that the hip younger crowd might like.  And all of that Ryota chaos doesn't end the chaos of what this plot is.  It just changes where the chaos comes from.  The island is packed with the Japanese version of SPECTRE, an evil organization known as Red Bamboo.  The only evil thing that I understand that Red Bamboo does is that they keep the inhabitants of Infant Island prisoner so that they can make this yellow substance that keeps Ebirah away.  I'm not sure what their evil plan actually is, but they're obsessed with completing that evil plan.  Oh, and Godzilla is there too.

Why is Godzilla there?  Because this is a monster movie and someone needs to take out Ebirah. But here's my real complaint about the movie.  Ebirah absolutely does not matter to the movie named Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.   That creature is an afterthought and a poorly constructed one at that.  This movie doesn't know what it wants to be.  Ebirah is an excuse why people can't leave the island by boat.  That's it.  It's not like Ebirah is coming to destroy mainland Japan.  Nope.  Ebirah is just there.  How do you defeat an Ebirah, you may ask?  You get a Godzilla.  Does Godzilla really care about Ebirah?  Nope. He just happens to be there next to another kaiju and the two of them fight.  Also, Mothra.  Why not throw a Mothra in there?  I'll tell you this.  Mothra need to stop being these movies' get out of jail free card.  So many of these movies just have Mothra save the day because he's the nice one out of all of the kaiju. But people don't even hate Godzilla...even though they should absolutely hate Godzilla.  

I'm really locked into this place with Ebirah, Horror of the Deep where I'm quoting Glass Onion.  "It's so dumb it's brilliant." "No, it's just dumb."  That's where we are.  Aesthetically, especially when it comes to the color palate of this movie, we have a good time.  Ebirah is all good times, but golly, I don't know if you can sink a movie lower when it comes to being dumb.  These characters, none of whom are particularly smart, are constantly coming up with plans to foil the evil Red Bamboo.  But their plans work for no reason.  Red Bamboo, this really ambiguous villains organization, is so undefined that their entire threat to the movie is just "We're evil."  They come from a place called "Devil Island."  That's what makes them bad.  I don't understand.  Does Red Bamboo come back?  Is this something that I'm going to have to make peace with the more I watch these movies?  I mean, I just started the latest artificial trilogy (a trilogy for me simply because three movies are on the same disc).  Is this just part of the story?  The worst part is that I know that these movies will get dumber.   Mystery Science Theater doesn't even touch Ebirah, which makes me think that when I get to Megalon, I'm going to be so darned frustrated.

Again, pretty colors and a good time made me not hate this movie.  But this movie is so phenomenally stupid that it's even hard to write about.