Unrated, because I have officially watched my first YouTube movie.  There's a lot of swearing and a fair bit of murder.  Because it's a horror movie, there's some brutal violence and I don't want to up-or-downplay.  Treat it almost like a short from V/H/S.  We're in that era of found footage where there's going to be something shocking often shown from a stagnant camera.  The specific violence I'm talking about is the kind of violence that doesn't cut away, which is often quite upsetting.

DIRECTOR:  Curry Barker

Yeah, I watched a YouTube movie. Do you understand what kind of leap of faith that was?  It's the first time a movie was texted to me.  I had debates about actually having to write about this.  Then I realized it was just my old man side coming out, being too snobbish for the way that things are released.  As of right now, I think my criteria for "What necessitates a movie?" is "Is it on IMdB or on Letterboxd?"  If those criteria are met, I guess I don't mind writing about it.

Now, there's something genuinely impressive about Milk & Serial.  I'm going to speak positively about this first because a lot of my frustrations with this movie come from a "me thing" more than a quality thing.  For a completely independent film, the movie mostly works.  The idea behind found footage horror is really a great idea for low budget filmmaking.  Now, we have to kind of shift our perspective when it comes to found footage films.  Rarely do we have the ability to criticize or analyze the cinematography or the technical elements of the film.  There still are technical things going on with the movie, but they are more functionality over aesthetics.  It's kind of what has burned me out on found footage horror to begin with.  (I used to be really into it.  Then the novelty wore off.) Acting wise, though, we have some things we can discuss.  Good found footage movies have to involve good improvisers.  Sure, Milk & Serial might have had a script, but there's an element of truth that comes from actors who can pull off natural sounding dialogue.  From that perspective, Milk & Serial is top notch, especially considering that it is a completely independent film.  These movies either have the most authentic dialogue or the least, and Milk & Serial comes out pretty good on that front.

There's also a fairly solid middle to this movie.  The beginning is what is needed for the film, but it also isn't potentially the most engaging. What the beginning of the film is ultimately doing is setting up for the needle drop.  Because I love petting myself on the back, I guessed 90% of the twist pretty early on.  But the final delivery of how it played out, it caught me by surprise.  And that surprise is fairly engaging.  I was invested in the characters. The story is fun and kept me going.  But with that in mind, the ending really drags.  From what I understand, these guys make a lot of horror and comedy shorts.  I kind of get that because, clocking in at 62 minutes, Milk & Serial feels like they're trying to pad out a conceit that does not support a 62 minute movie.  Once that mic drop happens in the first 40 minutes, the movie should bow out, knowing that we delivered our twist on how we viewed the entire first half. But the problem is, the movie tries to talk about the fallout of the revelation.  

I'm dancing around this not to spoil the movie, aren't I?  It's weird how sometimes I can just come right out and say what the twist was.  With the case of Milk & Serial, I'm playing it pretty cagey because I don't think a lot of people would have watched this movie.  I get the vibe that my limited readership mostly clicks my stuff to see if they gel with my thoughts on movies they've already seen. But I also get the vibe that people might click on the link because they want to know what Milk & Serial actually is.  So, just to cover my bases, from here on out, there will be SPOILERS.  Okay?   Cool.

The first third of the film establishes that Milk and Seven are comedy influencers who are known as the Prank Bros.  Their names make me think of Good Mythical Morning, especially considering that one of the side characters is named "Link".   The rules of prank movies closely follow the rules of con artist movies.  If one person is pranking another, there's an even deeper prank going on in the background.  I stand by this argument.  It's how you know that Milk is the one pulling all of the strings. Now, where the movie does a better job than I do is how insane Milk is.  Okay, I like that a lot.  But the issue is that once we found out how Milk got Seven to murder Gary, that's the end of the story.  That's the drop.  Everything beyond that is anticlimactic.  Honestly, the movie didn't need to wrap up everything with a bow.  The message of the film is how far people would go for fame and the movie kind of forgets that at a certain point. 

Heck, there's one scene that is completely superfluous for the sake of padding out of a film.  Milk kidnaps Lara.  We see how he does this through Milk's uploaded footage and it's pretty rad.  It heavily implies that he kills her.  The problem is, once the big reveal happens that Milk is the big bad guy of the entire story, we go back and we see that Milk has not killed Lara.  He says "Surprise, bet you all thought she was dead" or something like that.  Then he proceeds to kill her.  Why?  Outside of the fact that the movie needed more gore and minutes, it does nothing to serve the story.  We know that Milk is a psychopath by this point. Nothing character-wise hinges on this concept.  It's just brutality for brutality's sake, which is my least favorite horror trope.  

My other frustration with the movie is the title.  Oh man, that is a forced title.  It's the same problem I had with Across the Universe.  If you are going to do a musical using the music of The Beatles, it's a cop out to name a character "Jude."  In the early planning stages for Milk & Serial, they came up with the title first and reverse engineered it.  That bums me out.  I know.  It shouldn't be that big of a deal.  But it also has the bigger issue that we see in "Piano Man".  No one calls it "tonic and gin."  It's a gin and tonic.  The same is true for Milk & Serial.  It's cereal and milk.  That title, my guys, no bueno.  I know it's something small to complain about, but I have all of this digital real estate and, gosh darn it, I'm going to use it.

But the most important thing about Milk & Serial is its commentary on content creator culture.  I'm not sure if it is an intentional beauty or hidden irony that makes two guys who make internet videos the gatekeepers of internet culture.  The things that these guys get is the almost immorality of some content creation.  Listen, I'm a guy writing a blog (I see the irony!) who is obsessed with movies (a media that is seen as antiquated by Gen Alpha). And I know that there is ethical content creators, so this movie isn't exactly painting with a wide brush. But the notion behind prank videos seem a little sketchy.  It's this toxic environment where there's a fine line between "nobody's getting hurt" to "a place where no one feels safe."  Milk & Serial is almost a commentary on escalation and what real friendship is about.  I'm really showing my age in this, talking about these kids in this fashion, but that's kind of what the movie is getting at.  While I don't consider Milk & Serial necessarily elevated film, it is a movie with something to say, even if that thing is pretty specific.

At the end of the day, someone went out there and made a movie for $800.  It's a completely watchable movie that can stand on its own two feet and have something to say simultaneously.  While I probably won't preach this movie to anyone, I wouldn't begrudge people watching the film, especially during spooky season.  

Rated R, mainly for more than its fair share of sexuality.  There's also a lot of nudity, but hilariously not in the context of sexual situations. The movie really wears its R-rating on its chest, always being just a bit too much to recommend to one's in-laws, despite being a pretty solid movie.  There's underage drinking and smoking.  The movie is very comfortable with adultery and people just being out and out cruel to each other.  Also, after all of that, there's still issues with language. R.

DIRECTOR:  Luca Guadagnino

I just read a Time magazine article talking about that "bonkers but perfect ending" to Challengers.  Here's the deal.  I'll give them "bonkers", but I have a long way before I can even approximate "perfect" for this movie.  For a long time, I thought that Challengers was going to get close to being a perfect movie.  I don't know why I was so invested in the movie, but I was.  No doubt, the movie had sold me on a premise that I never thought that I would enjoy.  I tend not to like sports movies.  I don't like adultery in films.  But gosh darn it, this movie out Woody Allened Woody Allen.  I wasn't ready for how good the simple idea of recontextualizing scene after scene was going to work.  But it absolutely did. 

Which means I have to talk about how one moment ruined the movie for me.  Okay, it didn't ruin it.  I still adored this film.  Honestly, I lost my mind over how much I enjoyed this movie.  But I have to talk about the ending.  And the ending is a heck of a spoiler, so I have to bold it.  I hate myself for doing it, but that's the world I live in.  The movie has to have an emotional resolution to the tension that gets built up in the movie. It's about two friends who learn to absolutely hate each other because of their mutual love for this intense woman who seems emotionally distant to both of them.  Woven into that is a metaphor for tennis, talking about how real tennis, in the rare times that it is played honestly and furiously, is a relationship. Okay.  The two guys, by the end of the film, have developed a keen sense of hatred for each other.  Despite being sexually attracted to one another, they have put each other through the ringer and come out husks of their former selves. After the big revelation that Zweig has slept with Art's wife and plans to win the game anyway, Art, in a moment of blending sports and romance, embraces Zweig and they all feel something that they've never experienced before.

Now, I get the argument.  The movie is about that relationship that comes out of the sport.  It treats tennis more than what it is: a game.  It's Tashi's mission statement for tennis.  It's why she is so intense and refuses to distance herself from the sport.  It's also why she deprioritizes her marriage with Art because tennis will always be her true love.  Okay.  I'm on board. But the physical manifestation of that almost feels like a betrayal to the movie itself. I know.  That's some incredibly 21st Century Disney  Star Wars fandom nonsense.  My argument is how abrupt the whole scene is.  Hitchcock once said --and I'm paraphrasing badly --that it is about the suspense of the gun going off, not the gun going off itself.  My goodness, this movie builds up the tension. Each scene tops the last.  By the end of the film, we're watching bad people make worse people and there needs to be some kind of catharsis to the whole movie.  Instead, we get a hug.  It's too little.  It's comically little for what the movie is about.  But more importantly than the metaphor about the relationships built through sport is that there lacks a verisimilitude towards the entire sequence.  

It's unbelievable. Like, too unbelievable.  Let's pretend that this scene happens.  From my memory, it's Art who is about to spike on Zweig.  It really teases that Art is going to murder Zweig, but Art chooses forgiveness, despite that --moments before --Zweig does the unforgivable and cuts out the one thing that kept Art going.  Okay, it could be a noble moment to have Art choose to be the bigger man (despite everything in his character saying that it is impossible to find common ground between these two).  I don't buy that Zweig would just understand and reach the same emotional place.  Sure, the kiss earlier in the movie shows that the two are wired both for attraction and the way that they handle situations.  But that also leaves Tashi, whose repeated philosophy is that she's not going to be a homewrecker.  Her big character moment is that she confesses that she became the very thing that she refused to be.  I don't see her cheering for this moment.  

I don't know, everything about that final moment seems to be a betrayal of character.  Yes, the two guys have similar traits, but they're also fiercely competitive at the same time.  The movie spent two plus hours establishing the characters' motivations and moral codes only to have all of that abandoned for a message that "Tennis is about relationships?"  It all feels so...phony. AND I HAVE TO REITERATE!  This is an absolute banger of a movie.  The way that it builds these characters and makes us question intentions all the way through the film leading into an event that --for all intents and purposes --is mildly meaningless.  So much is invested in all of these things that a hug is a cop-out.  It feels like an afterschool special with that moment.   It's cheap.  It's there because it's surprising, not because it is what the scene needs.  Man, I might dislike this movie more than I thought I did because I'm really riled up about this.  (It's partially why I write this blog, so I'm forced to confront my thoughts on movies.) 

The funny thing is, I'm probably going to give it a 4/5 on Letterboxd.  Part of that comes from the fact that I like everything. (That's not true, but I am more forgiving than most.)  For so much of the film, the movie earned my absolute investment.  I was pausing the movie, talking it over with my wife, processing.  That rarely happens with me.  I'm usually about the uninterrupted experience, but this movie made me think.  I can't forgive that end.  Not where my head is right now.  I think it's a noble attempt, but it ruins a beautiful film. I want to like it so bad, but man, it just feels like such a disappointment of an ending that I can't process it.

Unrated, but this has some content.  This one has more to do with violence of all kinds.  One of the characters has a short fuse, causing him to get into all kinds of fights.  There's a stabbing at one point and people die.  There's also some domestic abuse.  There's male violence towards women.  Some children go through some harrowing situations.  It feels more R-rated than unrated.  It's not intensely R, though, despite all the things that I just listed.

DIRECTOR:  Edward Yang

See, they saved this one as the last in the box set because it slaps.  They know that they need me to buy the next box set (which, in my case, is Box Four) so they have to tell me that there are some good movies in these box sets.  The insane thing about this movie is that it almost doesn't belong in the World Cinema box set because it kinda / sorta breaks the rules.  I thought the mission statement of Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project was to shine a light on the cinema of underrepresented countries.  Um, China's films have been pretty well-viewed, especially in context of the Criterion Collection.  While Taipei Story may not be the most famous of Edward Yang's films, Edward Yang is a name that you can drop around cinephiles and there's a good chance that he's recognized.  Again, they need me to come back and spend more money on the next box set.

I know that Edward Yang directed this, not Wong Kar-Wai.  But I'm listening to a Wong Kar-Wai Spotify playlist to get myself in the headspace of Taipei Story.  According to Scorsese, Yang is one of the guys who started the Chinese New Wave...and I get that. Sure, you need to understand the cinematic history of a country to really proclaim a film part of the New Wave or not, but I'm going to trust him because a lot of this movie screams "New Wave."  Golly, Yang spends so much time and effort making a pretty movie about character.  Sure, there's a lot of plot here and I'll even admit that I didn't catch all of the plot beats.  I had to go to Wikipedia a bit because I wasn't sure what some of the dynamics of the film were, but that's just because I can be a big ol' dummy at times.  But there was never a point where I lost the character motivations of individual scenes.  Ultimately, this is the story of two people lost to Late Stage Capitalism (despite being in a Communist country!) and how they are husks of their former selves.

It doesn't mean that the characters aren't frustrating.  Both Lung and Chin (both body part names?) need to be shaken out of their self-imposed miseries.  I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but a lot of their issues would be dealt with a healthy combination of therapy and shaking them out of their respective malaises.  But these are two people who, while being colored by their flaws, are good people.  They live in a society (not unlike the Joker) that is filled with people who are self-involved and users.  Both Lung and Chin seem outside of the world of greed.  Chin's biggest issue is that she wants this moment of silence beyond corporate greed to last forever, despite having the depression that accompanies non-productivity.  But Chin's initial intentions are noble.  She has loyalty both Lung and Mrs. Mei, even if that loyalty isn't deserved.  She's devoted to these characters not because Lung or Mrs. Mei are necessarily good people. It's just that they look like saints compared to the other people in Chin's life.  She has these family members that are not only overbearing, but do not see her for her personhood.

It's so odd that Lung --pathetic Lung! --is the protagonist of the story.  It's a hot take to say that Chin isn't a protagonist, but a lot of Chin is sitting in a room waiting for something to happen to her.  (That's a little unfair, but is it?) But Lung is a really weird choice for a major character because his main trait is "mopey".  Lung is a real Charlie Brown in this movie --which is both a compliment and a criticism.  Charlie Brown is a good person who keeps getting screwed by the system, yet he keeps engaging the game.  I mean, the main difference between Charlie Brown and Lung is that Lung's natural tendency is to fight versus Charlie Brown, who is written to be the world's doormat.  But Lung is obsessed with a game that happened in his childhood.  He has these very Death of a Salesman like dreams, where he's convinced that, if he works hard enough, things will turn around for him.  Unlike Willy Loman, Lung lacks the self-delusion that he's great.  He's a guy who simply has that almost American Dream where --if he works and does the right thing --the world will work out for him.

The thing about Lung is that it isn't the world that brings him down necessarily.  It's the fact that other people don't follow the rules of society.  I don't think that Yang has created Taipei Story to admonish do-gooders.  Lung is in a constant state of fixing other people's problems.  When he sees injustice or a moral dilemma, he understands that investment in these people will lead to his own issues down the line.  We're supposed to be mildly angry at Yang for sacrificing his own desires for others, but we're supposed to be more mad at others.  Geez, I hate that I'm making all of these comparisons, but I can't help it.  Lung is George Bailey without the eventual happy ending.  Instead of having all those people stepping in and saving George for all the good that George did, Lung just dies stabbed to death, his anger and pent up rage getting the better of him.  Even taxi cabs let him bleed to death on the side of the road.  It's incredibly depressing, but that might be Yang's story to tell.  The one thing that Taipei Story does is avoid the fantastical in exchange for the gritty reality of a world that doesn't praise it's do-gooders.

I think I get more frustrated at Chin than I should.  If Lung is the character who is grounded to the past to the point of a flaw, one looking at the future should be the respectable one.  I mean, she gets the happier ending of the two, but even that ending is incredibly bittersweet.  She doesn't get to go to America, but that's mostly because she has woken up to the notion that any dramatic change isn't really going to bring her any real happiness.  It's going to be a Band-Aid in the grand scheme of things.  It's a solid message that Yang has for Chin, but I also am frustrated that Yang doesn't really offer any solutions outside of getting reabsorbed into the corporate rat race.  One of the frustrating things about the end --which is ambiguous in terms of the takeaways of Lung's outbursts --is that we're not sure if it's the right answer.  Lung outright tells Chin that America won't fix things and that marriage won't fix things either.  I kind of like the idea that life is slow and that we have to push through some of these moments instead of circumventing them.

But then Lung dies...he dies a sad and pathetic death.  So is the message that the two should have gotten married and run away to America?  Part of me also likes that.  I mean, two Band-Aids might have done the trick, right?  I'd love that as an argument, but it didn't seem like Lung and Chin really were romantically ever interested in one another.  To a certain extent, they loved each other in the sense that they cared for one another.  But also, Chin is all over the place when it comes to her feelings for Lung.  I mean, she hits him.  Tell me that moment didn't break your heart at all.  It's the takeaway of the movie for me.  But a movie like this is almost intentionally ambiguous.  It's more about how hard even a basic life is.  It's critical of existence without offering too many real solutions, which isn't the worst argument in the world.  Instead, it's more about the sympathy we feel for these characters.

I dug it.  This is a pretty movie with great acting and just fantastic, almost hypnotic, pacing.  And guess what?  I'll probably end up buying Box Four one day.  Just I need a moment from Law of the Border still...

Not rated, mainly because  this is more of an MSNBC special look than it is a traditional film.  There is talk about drug use and strip clubs in the movie. Really, there's some debaucherous behavior all through the film.  But in terms of showing stuff, it's pretty mild. Honestly, I'm exhausted and don't remember if there's swearing or not.  

DIRECTOR: Billy Corben

Okay, I was really trying to talk myself out of saying that this was a movie.  I mean, it's that fine line.  It's an MSNBC special report by Rachel Maddow in most ways.  But it is 90 minutes long and is made by MSNBC Films.  There's no bumper on either side and it was just presented as-is.  By my own rules of having to write about every movie that I watch, I guess I have to put From Russia with Lev on that list.  The worst part is that I'm exhausted and have a million of these to do.  Just...so much fun on my part.

As tired as I am right now, I'm always itching to gripe about Donald Trump.  If there is no other record in the future about how I tried stopping a dictator from reestablishing power, you have my unread blog about From Russia with Lev.  This was my wife's choice.  The blog kept on coming across her X feed and I said I would give it a whirl.  While ultimately effective for what it is trying to be, From Russia with Lev is ultimately useless to me in terms of trying to convince that Donald Trump is a monster to anyone who needs to hear it.  I mean, it's not like the information about Donald Trump isn't out there.  It's just that we're not going to change minds because Trumpians are in a cult.  They get news from people who already agree with them colored with so much spin that Trump can do no wrong.  The worse he gets, the more they like him.  We're in a country with bad people and that's something that I have to make peace with every day.  But if I was to argue that point, I also have to make the argument that MSNBC is not the best source for news.

I know! I know!  Apples and oranges!  MSNBC didn't inspire January 6th.  But I have to be completely honest.  There was this study that I found fascinating.  The title was completely clickbaity, so I have to explain.  The title was something along the lines of "Fox News Viewers Know Less about Current Events than Those Who Watch No News".  I was like, "Yeah!  Got 'em!"  Now, while Fox News viewers tend to be the most uninformed about current events, in second place were MSNBC viewers.  Then came "No news" people.  So to drop From Russia with Lev as definitive proof on people isn't exactly the selling point I want.  Do I believe the things that I see in From Russia with Lev?  Yeah.  I do.  I think that this doc contextualizes a lot of the Russia interference stuff that we've been hearing about for the past eight years.  I now have a face to put with events.  I have a timeline of things that happened.  I have the guy who did all of these things outright confessing to doing these things.  But can I take it as absolute truth?  Probably not.

In terms of how documentaries work, From Russia with Lev might have too many pieces.  Told mostly from anecdotal evidence by Lev Parnas --Trump's Ukraine guy who did most of this evil stuff --the movie speeds through a lot of information very quickly.  In my head, Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben probably had 14 hours of tape of Lev Parnas talking.  They cut it down into 90 minutes and still had such a glut of information that it comes across as chaotic.  It's not only Lev Parnas talking.  His wife and some investigators and lawyers chime in corroborating Lev Parnas's story from alternate perspectives.  But the lion's share of the movie is Parnas's testimony itself.  A lot of it is chaos.  Parnas isn't a terrible narrator.  He's just doing a lot of shortcuts.  He also, as remorseful as the whole thing is, colors the whole thing under the umbrella of "I thought I was doing the right thing."  That's one thing that is both good and bad about the movie.  Parnas admits that he was in the MAGA cult. This rich grifter basically fell upwards until he got into Trump's inner circle.   From there, he feels special because he has the President of the United States asking him for advice.  It all seems very seductive.  The thing is, I want a smoking gun.  Unfortunately, that smoking gun, according to Lev Parnas, is Rudy Guiliani.

For those not nearly as obsessed with the monsters in the GOP as I am, Guiliani used to be a decent dude (kind of / sort of!), especially during 9/11.  He was known as America's Mayor for the way he was the face of New York after the terrorist attacks.  But when that faded, he turned into a little troll under Donald Trump.  Trump put him first in the grand scheme of things.  Guiliani became an alcoholic and was willing to do anything to further the MAGA cause.  Now, Parnas throws most of the shade at Trump, but almost through the filter of Rudy Guiliani.  Now, the most convincing bit of information that shows that Trump and his cronies lie is that Guiliani is the godfather to one of Parnas's children.  Trump distances Guiliani from Parnas once Parnas goes down for crimes committed in the president's name.  He becomes this fall guy.  Now, one of the arguments that the right make is that Parnas is just doing this doc to bring everyone down with him, which might not make the most convincing argument ever.  But the real sell that Parnas does through this doc is showing clearly the lie that Trump uses to show that he doesn't know Parnas. That Guiliani godparent thing, plus SO many photos with him and a video of Parnas inspiring policy with a Trump who acts like a king sooner than a president is the damning stuff.

Now, what I wanted out of this doc is something a little bit more explicit about Hunter Biden's laptop. One of the things that the movie does really well is show that Hunter Biden was made to be a talking point despite having very little proven criminality behind him.  It shows how they got a guy in Ukraine who hated Joe Biden for losing him his job to invent propaganda against Hunter Biden to stymie the Biden campaign.  That stuff is great.  But I wanted the laptop thing off the table.  I'm so sick of hearing about Hunter Biden's laptop.  It's Hillary's emails all over again.  But the documentary keeps the laptop elements kind of vague and it is incredibly annoying.  Because the movie does something really nice with the end of the movie.  Since Hunter Biden was convicted of a crime, he's been such a decent human being about accepting responsibility for anything that befell him.  He is the antithesis of how Trump handles responsibility that it actually gives me hope for how politics are handled.  The end of the movie has Lev Parnas apologizing to Hunter Biden for unleashing this nonsense on this man.

But the biggest frustration I have with even writing about this is that From Russia with Lev is almost becoming that video that is passed around Q-Anon, only for progressives. When I see links put in social media to this thing, it feels very Sound of Freedomy.  That MSNBC banner is such a damning thing because it can't absolutely be trusted.  I'm just thinking if my in-laws sent me a documentary made by Fox News Films, I would instantly dismiss everything in it.  It makes me feel like I'm in a cult for the Harris / Walz campaign (BECAUSE I DO ABSOLUTELY LOVE THEM!).  Honestly, the biggest takeaway from From Russia with Lev is the idea that I can now talk mildly eloquently about Lev Parnas if he ever comes up, but that's only if someone comes to me first.  I almost want to do some more reading on the documentary from someone a bit more neutral than from seeing the confirmation bias that I intentionally watch.  Yeah, it's probably true.  But also, I'm not going to change anyone's mind with a documentary like this.  It's great for me, but it's another preaching-to-the-choir doc.

Not rated, but there's a lot of shooting and the movie uses a minefield as a central location.  While people walking through the minefield may be intense, the gore budget is pretty minimal.  No one loses body parts as much as their legs are painted to show injury.  The worst part is that sheep are genuinely scared by explosions in this movie.  It's more sad than it is upsetting.  Still...

DIRECTOR:  Lufti O. Akad

Martin Scorsese is messing with us, right?  This can't be one of the cinematic greats of the world.  I mean, I get it. Turkish cinema has a very specific vibe to it.  But this movie is borderline incomprehensible.  I honestly don't know what I'm going to write about it because it's barely coherent.  I get some major ideas that the movie is pushing, but this is a film that lacks some very basic things that would make it a functional narrative.

The biggest problem that I have with this movie is that it is a film about a setting.  I tend to get really frustrated when a movie is more about setting than character or plot.  It's not that there's no plot or no characters.  I get the loosey-goosey premise of this movie.  It's just that we don't spend a lot of time with any one character to say that there is a protagonist.  I get it, gun to head, I can say that Hidir is the protagonist.  It's just that I know so little about this character.  Part of that comes from the fact that this movie really needs you to enter with cultural context more than anything else.  If conflict is based on two diametrically opposed characters who are stopping each other from getting goals, that's in this movie.  The problem is that so much of this movie is talking about things that are going on instead of developing characters that we're supposed to sympathize with.  For about three-quarters of the movie, I was debating if I was supporting Hidir or the police chief.  I mean, good for Law of the Border making the antagonist a likable character and keeping him away from being a stereotype.  But I need to know what's going on with the movie, so give me some evil traits, okay?

There's something childish about the movie as a whole.  I don't mean to demean an entire culture's film industry, but a lot of Turkish movies from this time period have the same issue. (It's not like I've seen a billion Turkish movies, by the way.  It's just that there are a handful that I've seen that are laughably bad.)  It seems that, at the heart of Law of the Border, there's something vulnerable.  We have the story of a community fighting for freedom in the face of government oppression.  (I think!)  It seems like everyone is going to benefit if this school is built and that the rebels become farmers.  There's this repeated phrase that love grows out of shared work.  Okay, that's the message we're supposed to take.  Now, with a lot of stories with an objective moral good at the center, we have to have something to tear it all down.  That's okay.  But the movie doesn't really give the plan a chance to work.  The characters say that they are going to work the land and become a successful community.  But immediately, naysayers just start murdering everyone.

I said that this was childish and I'll tell you why.  This movie can't wait to get to its gunfights.  When I teach film and I have the kids do projects where they have to show camera techniques, I always have a group of boys who make the most violent gunfights imaginable.  That's what this movie feels like.  Every time there's almost a vulnerable moment in the film, the movie cuts to what looks like improv gun battles.  These aren't even choreographed that well.  It's a bunch of grown men going "pew-pew" to one another. I will concede that there's one gun scene that's really well shot, but it is almost a copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which came out the same year. But Law of the Border has these guys kill each other and I'm not sure who died and who did the shooting.  I'm also not entirely sure how it affects the story outside of acknowledging that the town won't have its school nor it's farming.  There are just these logical leaps that the movie kind of needs to spell out for me. 

I'm not going to write much more.  Anything else I write about this movie is me just filling up space.  Law of the Border, while potentially canonically valuable, is such a ramshackle of a film that it feels almost snobby to say that it's a great film.  I normally try not to be that harsh, but it has more in common with fan films and exploitation cinema than it does a fully realized film.  I honestly felt like I listened to a movie in another room and am asked to have thoughts on it, it's that unfinished.

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.