PG and what a weird world we live in that this is something that everyone can somehow watch.  Like, I don't think it is offensive in the least.  But if I had to pick it apart, the body count in this movie filled with quasi-scary demons is almost hilariously large.  One of the things that I thought going into the movie was that the demons were bad in concept only.  Nope.  Those demons are straight up evil.  Like, a lot of people go missing after their souls are taken.  Also, like, it's kind of violent.  Still, PG.

DIRECTORS:  Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans

Yeah, I finally got around to it.  The only reason that I didn't write about this before is because I intentionally fell asleep for it the first time.  One thing that I have to come completely clean about is the fact that sometimes, I bet on whether or not I want to watch a movie.  I get really sleepy and I love naps.  I didn't know that KPop Demon Hunters was going to be such a thing.  From  my perspective, I wasn't that into K-Pop.  This was a Netflix animated movie.  I thought, "Yeah, I do like sleep and people leaving me alone."  Then everyone started losing their minds over this movie and I realized that I needed to play some catch up.  The really good news is that my family wasn't going to let me off the hook and they said that I had to sit down and watch this movie.

Not surprisingly, it was pretty great.  If you were wondering what hot take I was going to have about this movie, that's as crazy as it gets.  I think I learned more about this movie going into my first viewing than I had about any other film.  Once again, Sony, as a corporation, did something really boneheaded and sold this movie to Netflix as a means to recoup what they thought were going to be overwhelming losses.  What Sony, as a film studio, didn't realized and never realize, is that their animation department is a heavy hitter now.  They make good product.  Someone watched this as shelved it as a industry loss.  Instead, Netflix is making all the money on KPop Demon Hunters and that makes me laugh.  Now, I don't know the ins and outs of Sony Animation.  I'm really basing a lot of this on the success of KPop Demon Hunters and the Spider-Verse movies.  But these are movies with style and substance.  These are fun movies.  And not only that, but I feel like someone at Sony Animation is giving these movies a vibe that I don't see at Disney or at Dreamworks.  There's a certain look to Sony Animation movies that I'm really liking.  So as much as I'm poo-pooing Sony as a film studio, someone at Sony Animation probably needs a promotion.  (See, I can deal in nuance.)  

The thing that mostly blew me away is how much Buffy the Vampire Slayer was in this movie.  Honestly, that should be a negative for a lot of people.  But I kept watching this and pointing to my wife while mouthing "Buffy."  That seems weird to write that.  Somehow more shady than what was actually going on.  But from moment one, I felt like I had a shorthand to what the movie was about.  I'll be honest with you.  I kept hearing the term "Honmoon" and I didn't know what that was.  But "sealing the honmoon" was just "securing the Hellmouth" and I was all on board.  Seriously, in every generation was born a slayer, a girl chosen to stop the evil.  In this case, we have three of them and they sing songs on top of just fighting with Buffy powers.  I loved it.  Ji-noo is just evil Angel.  I love all this.  I don't know why this feels so comfortable to me.  Sure, KPop Demon Hunters stands on its own two feet.  I don't want to diminish anything that I saw on screen as something other than the creative work of a bunch of people who wanted to create something.  But I also think that KPop Demon Hunters hit a very special nostalgia that I haven't gotten to enjoy for a while.

There was a period of television that KPop Demon Hunters tapped into. It was the world of a mythology where archetypes battled against expectations.  When I evoke Buffy, I suppose that I'm touching on Smallville and Supernatural as well.  I'm not particularly proud to be a superfan of these things, but I am proud to say that they were shows that tickled my brain a little bit.  They were entrenched in genre, but weren't afraid to mess with genre.  I really stick with Buffy because of the notion that there's something cool about women, without commenting on it, fighting monsters and saving the day.  I'm trying to tap into my flabby knowledge of feminism here to talk a bit, especially considering that Buffy has been tainted by the hypocrisy of Joss Whedon, its creator.  But one of the things that both KPop Demon Hunters and Buffy the Vampire Slayer did right was the notion that there's nothing inherently unfeminine about girls fighting demons.  This is a film that embraces femininity and never feels the need to vocalize its own "badass" trope.  It simply is.  Part of what makes it easy is that the world --for some reasons --is completely unaware of demons.  The fans of HUNTR/X, despite having seen every single thing that they've created live, don't understand that what they're seeing is the battle between good and evil in every song.  But rather than being a copy of male machismo, HUNTR/X simply puts on an amazing show while brandishing day-glo weaponry.  I kind of am all about it.

This might be my shortest paragraph ever, but I wish that I could comment on the K-Pop elements of the movie.  I've watched a lot of Korean film, but the only Korean dramas that I've watched have been the three seasons of Squid Game.  I know my in-laws are into everything Korean.  I can't really attest to the vibes that the movie gives off as a celebration of Korean culture.  My wife says that it does an incredible job with the small stuff and I'll have to just believe her when she tells me that.

I can't stress this enough.  I did love the movie.  But there is something that kind of bothers me.  It is such a small beat, but it is one that I kind of feel is necessary.  I can't believe I'm advocating for a kids action musical to be a little bit longer, considering that I love a short runtime.  But the third act is throwing a lot at us and it misses a character beat.  There are things in this movie that are underdevoloped.  It's possible that subsequent movies will answer these questions.  Celeste confuses me. I get that she's the Giles of this movie, but I know nothing about her.  That's not even a big deal. I'm sure that other movies will touch on that.  I'm more concerned with Rumi's secret kind of getting glossed over.  Okay, I said that this was a movie that embraced some tropes that I really enjoyed.  All the Buffy stuff is great.  But the trope that I thought was a bit lazy was the "I'm keeping a secret" trope.  "I can't tell my closest friends my secret because they'll look at me differently."  I don't hate that.  It's something that we've seen in film before. That reveal has to have a certain look to it.  When Rumi is exposed as part-demon (a story beat that isn't really ever explained), there's a separation between the girls.  But there isn't really a coming to grips about how people behaved in that moment.

So much internal conflict is hinged on Rumi coming to grips with who she is.  When she is exposed, she is abandoned by the other two hunters, who would --if I'm reading the scene right --abandon the world rather than chat about what they are seeing.  I suppose I do have to give them a little bit of leeway, considering that this is a major revelation and changes their entire worldview.  But ultimately, aren't Mira and Zoey a little bit racist?  From their perspective, they saw these demons as completely soulless.  And from all the demons that they fought, they saw that they were eating souls.  (Soulless and eating souls wasn't my favorite grouping of words, but I've come too far!) But they know Rumi.  Rumi has always been a bit secretive, but has also put her life on the line to maintain the Honmoon.  I hate to be this guy, but there's a little bit of the "coming out" of Rumi that happens and Mira and Zoe fail the test.  Not only do they fail the test, but they're cool with the fallout so much that they are hypnotized by Gwi-ma.  Up to this point, they are free from Gwi-ma's influence.  Instead, they are so self-involved that they can only view themselves as victims.  That's why I don't love that there's a real chat about what happened in those moments.  Instead, all it takes is Rumi singing. She has to be the bigger person when the other two should be the ones taking the lead, especially after Zoey points her blade at Rumi.  It's just an odd brushing over what should be a major part.

But the movie is pretty darned great.  I'm sure that there's going to be more lore with subsequent movies.  As long as the film pays attention to the heart of the piece while maintaining a quirky and oddball aesthetic, I'm all here for it.

Not rated, but apparently Disc 17 in the Ingmar Bergman collection is the sex comedy disc.  I applaud this movie so much.  It's all about sex, but the meta-narrative won't allow for anything visually scandalous.  One of the bits in the film is from the shot above, which uses a mild tango to represent the act of lovemaking.  There is one hard-to-see instance of rear nudity.  But we should all realize that the movie is non-stop talking about adultery, so that should be taken into consideration.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Do you know what?  Thank you, Ingmar Bergman, for making All These Women.  I was starting to think that I was being a bit of a prude for constantly pointing out your obsession with infidelity.  And yet, here we are, another movie about infidelity and I like it.  For once, I'm not going to call myself a hypocrite.  If anything, All These Women justifies what makes a movie about infidelity work versus films that don't really play the motifs as well.

I always thought that Bergman couldn't do comedy.  I've now seen a good amount of Bergman comedies and most of them I consider pretty quaint.  They are tonally comedies, but the executions of them leave something to be desired.  Now, I will be the first to admit that comedy is incredibly subjective.  It totally is. Maybe I'm just wired for the zany absurdist sex comedy over something that is meant to be a wholesome family story about cheating on each other.  (I stand by that statement for a lot of Bergman's comedies.) 

I think it is the zaniness that makes All These Women work as a film.  I get the vibe that I might be the only person on the planet who liked this  movie more than some of the other Bergman standards.  I know.  There's something very appealing about the naysayer.  But let me cook a little bit.  (It should be noted that there is almost no chance that I'm going cook with the following words and you should ignore my valiant efforts to explain why I think this movie works.) All These Women, shy of the music cues and the fast-motion sequences (which I stand by my belief that fast motion jokes are never funny) read more like absurdist theatre.  I could honestly see a lot of this movie being performed on a stage.  I respect the fact that Bergman hasn't really abused his fourth wall all that much in his cinematic canon.  I'm going to give him a little bit of leeway when it comes to All These Women because he establishes the rules for this movie early on.  The only way that All These Women really works is if we abandon all pretence of reality.  From moment one, Bergman shows the widows of the maestro weeping over the unseen corpse.  They all say the same thing.  Part of the joke is that death has become a cliche, both in the world of All These Women and in our own reality.  We all come to the same epiphanies and that's something to be sent up to the gods of satire. 

But at the same time, the over-stressing of the same beats.  Even in its variety, it only highlights the sameness of it all.  As much as it is a commentary on death, the rules of All These Women play up the fact that none of this is based in reality.  With Bergman's use of intertitles to explain the passage of time, we realize that he's swinging with a sledgehammer, not performing surgery.  Bergman wants to say something and he wants to have fun while he's doing it.  I don't think I've really seen Bergman have fun before.  His other films are good and probably intellectually stimulating. But All These Women is a temper tantrum that results in hysterical, cathartic tears.  Now, part of it comes from the fact that this is a parody of Fellini's 8 1/2.  I really wish that I didn't look that part up because I like it better when the movie was just this absurdist romp.  Gosh darn it.  Can I still write this blog with my initial read?  

Okay, let's course correct.  If this is just a parody of Fellini, I have to take everything back.  I can see how this movie kind of sucks if that is the case.  All of the points that I gave Bergman are accidents.  The very thing that Bergman is mocking, if taken seriously, would be fascinating.  Let's pretend that it didn't exist and why making this a parody of something else only hurts the film.  From my perspective, who watched this ignorant of parody, saw this as a movie about the absurdity of the artist.  In my head, I couldn't help but put Bergman as the maestro.  The entire film, Cornelius is depserate to understand the Maestro, who never makes himself available to his own biographer.  Cornelius, himself, isn't all that obsessed with integrity.  He's there almost by commission.  Upon entering the estate, he confuses the butler for the Maestro himself.  (Canonically, the butler has a passing resemblance to the Maestro, whom we never see.)  He can't be that much of a fan.  Similarly, he's quickly distracted by the women that can probably only be described as a harem of muses.  As frustrated as Cornelius gets with the Maestro's isolation, he's more confused by the dynamic that these women have in the household.  It ultimately becomes a story about fandom with an artist versus the actual art itself.  When Cornelius is finally given the opportunity to interact with the Maestro's bizarre art, his death becomes the performance piece itself.  That's great.

And had this not been a parody of Fellini, I would have said that Bergman is taking the mickey out of himself.  We learn, when the artist is dead, that the artist himself didn't really matter.  Their grief is a kind of performance piece in and of itself.  They instantly adopt a new Maestro, whose face is visible immediately.  He's a child and we find out that the Maestro himself didn't matter, it's the community based around the maestro that matters.  It was the women in his life who made him who he is.  I can't help but see Bergman as that invisible Maestro.  This fandom around him becomes artificial and self-depricating.  Tying back to my initial statement, it makes the affairs quite silly.  The other films have always treated infidelity as a way of life. But if the Maestro is a stand in for a strawman, we realize that all this attention for someone who didn't matter, even sexual attention, is silly.  These are people who should be out there living full lives.  

But it's not Bergman, now is it?  It's Fellini.  And that's kind of spiteful.  Because what I read to be a commentary on the role of the artist isn't really a commentary.  It's a commentary on how someone else, someone specific, makes art.  Since 8 1/2 is the template of the movie, we can't slot the Beatles into the role of the Maestro as much as we can't really say that Bergman is just a guy making movies and he's been raised up on this golden pedestal.  That is so much more of a fun movie than "I'm just parroting something else."  I'm going to be critical of myself because who else would be critical of me.  I feel like I'm treating the entire concept of "parody" as less than BLANK.  Parody has its role and for all I know, that's what Bergman was shooting for.  But I think that All These Women just works better as satire than it does as parody.  It's silly.  It's fun.  It's self-depricating.  That's the kind of stuff I like.  But I have a feeling that I wasn't supposed to like this movie.  That makes me sad.  

Should I be sad for liking something that I wasn't supposed to like?  I don't know, man.  But I'm going to be picking this apart for a while.

Not rated, but this is supposed to be a bit of a sex comedy without any of the nudity or actual on-screen sexuality.  There's a Patton Oswalt bit where he notes that euphanisms for vulgarity -with the intent of being for all audiences -often gets way grosser.  That's what's going on here.  There are so many moments where the words they say are technically clean, but the intent behind them is wild.  This isn't exactly a family friendly film.  

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

OH MY GOSH, INGMAR BERGMAN!  I get it!  Move on.

It will be a miracle if I get this done.  I have been on a roll today and have been catching up on all of the blogs that have been creeping up on me.  I'm happy to say that I finished The Devil's Eye in the last hour.  However, if I can knock this bad boy out pretty quickly, I am going to be in a good place productivity wise for the long weekend.  It's really weird being me.

I get so frustrated with Bergman.  Maybe Bergman never thought that all of his collected works would be in one massive box set.  But watching every single Bergman movie shows a lot of the cracks and breaks in this master's ouevre.  Part of what frustrates me about Bergman is the same thing that bothers me about Woody Allen.  (There's an irony here.  As I write about how easy it is to note Bergman's faults when binging all of them, you can probably say the same thing about my commentary on Bergman.  I tend to write the same things.)  As much as I find both Bergman and Allen's works incredibly impressive and genius, I often criticize both of them for being so invested in their comfort zones.  Both men were prolific in making movies about infidelity and that's just disappointing.  Mostly, I find Bergman disappointing because he treats what must be a subjective lifestyle as a universal truth.  Now, I just experienced The Devil's Eye for the first time.  I know very little about it. I didn't read any essays on it.  I didn't do any research.  So anything that I'm saying is simply an emotional and critical response from an individual's perspective.  If my guesses are accurate, good for me.  If not, please understand that I'm trying to unpack someone who is significantly smarter than I am.

As much as this might be an original work by Ingmar Bergman, there is an element of fairy tale here.  I can't help but think that Bergman is adapting a morality play probably from the era of strict religious restrictions.  After all, this is a story about the importance of keeping chaste.  It follows a lot of the same beats that we'd see in classic theatre, having the literal devil send up his servants to tempt good people into sin.  With the case of The Devil's Eye, it plays up what must be a culturally relevant adage saying something along the lines of "A woman's chastity is a sty in the devil's eye."  I don't know if it really matters whether or not the story is wholly original or simply an adaptation of a cultural standard.  But what the real point is that Bergman is settling into something that has been beaten to death when it comes to storytelling: marriage is a bit of a sham and that cheating is a part of love.

Now, I will say that Bergman does some clever things with this thing.  There are two women from two different perspectives when it comes to marriage.  The virginal Britt-Marie represents the affianced.  Renata represents the comfortably married wife.  Both women end up breaking their vows to certain extents.  Bergman paints Renata as the character who seems more stalwart in her beliefs about marriage.  The fact that she cheats on her husband is meant to be a little bit of a surprise, especially considering that her pastor spouse seems to be the moral grounding of the movie.  But Britt-Marie comes across as the one who is willing to sacrifice her maidenhood.  It's actually odd that she doesn't because she kisses the demonic Don Juan without much arm twisting.  Now, to Bergman's credit, he comments on this for the first time.  I'm so overwhelmed with Bergman movies treating this kind of kiss as a non-issue.  It is the epilogue of the film, condeming Britt-Marie for this kiss despite the fact that she spurns Don Juan until her returns to perdition.  I kind of applaud Bergman for allowing his narrow world view to open to some criticism.  

But the thing that really bugs me about Britt-Marie's kiss with Don Juan is how casually she allows it.  That initial kiss is frustrating because a lot of Bergman's movies have such an important moment as a matter-of-fact thing.  If anything, it is not only a criticism of women, but on humanity itself.  Britt-Marie, from moment one, declares her undying love for Jonas, who is shown to be imperfect by the second act of the film.  However, when Don Juan, who has barely started his crusade to steal her virginity, asks her for a kiss, she not only obliges, but becomes the dominant kisser in that scenario.  It's frustrating.  The rest of the movie is a nonchalant shrugging off Don Juan.

Now, the joke apparently lies in the tragedy of Don Juan.  I say "joke" because Bergman tells us that this is a comedy.  I'm kind of thinking that this is a comedy much like some of Shakespeare's works are comedies instead of tragedies: evil is overcome and it ends in a marriage.  But Bergman attempts to build Don Juan into a sympathetic character.  I mean, I applaud that. But it also is a weird take considering that Don Juan does little soul searching in the film.  What Bergman is shooting for is that love has made a slave out of Don Juan.  He has finally met his match and that love that he has is torture for the lethario who has made a name for himself based exclusively on lust.  I can see how this is trying to be a comedy, but I'm not having it. 

Instead, what I see is Don Juan not wanting to be a better man, but instead feeling spurned.  It's meant to be wildly romantic.  I don't get any of that.  I get a sad man who has always gotten what he wanted out of life and the afterlife, only to be rejected for the first time.  We're supposed to feel bad, but rejection is part of life.  Britt-Marie is not meant to be a prize to be won and the movie kind of forgets that.  I know that she is unobtainable because she is with Jonas, but that's kind of missing the point.  It shouldn't matter that she is with Jonas.  Britt-Marie shouldn't be a prize in any scenario.  I kind of wish that Jonas ended being as much of a butthead as he started off being through the entire movie and she still rejected him.  That's a far more interesting movie for me.

What I am struggling to unpack is the entire story of the pastor.  See, the pastor, who is the father of Britt-Marie, is a self-proclaimed simpleton for the Lord.  He may not be the smartest apple in the bunch, but he is devoted to the Lord and his family.  Now, the closest thing to a hero that this movie has to offer because he traps a demon in his wardrobe.  It's great.  It's the stuff of old timey folklore.  As much as everyone views him as too naive to do anything great, he's the only one who gets an upper hand over the devil.  That's cool.  And in typical devil form, he tempts the pastor with forbidden knowledge.  The devil knows that the pastor's wife is cheating on him with another devil and offers him a key so that he can be broken by her infidelity.  But because the pastor has a simple faith, he resists the devil.

But even once he's resisted, he is still basically forced into the same outcome.  This is the part that frustrates me.  Part of what I give Bergman credit for, which is different from a lot of his other films, is his gracious attitude towards the symbol of faith.  As bumbling as the pastor is, he has the faith of a child.  Yet, he still has to eat from the tree of knowledge by having confirmation that his wife, indeed, was unfaithful with a demon.  That almost seems like it's cruelty for cruelty's sake.  Like, the point of that moment is that the pastor is so secure in his faith that he forgives his wife for her indiscretion.  But why bother put him through his first trial if he doesn't reap the rewards of his good behavior.

I so wanted to love this.  Parts of it, I'll even concede, are pretty good. But honestly, it felt like something that I would put on in youth group --minus the raunchy bits.  Considering that we've gone over this a bunch of times in better forms, The Devil's Eye doesn't do a lot for me.

Rated R for nudity, suicide, violence towards women, language, drug use (I think) and other stuff.  It's a dark underbelly in the form of a dramedy.  Heck, I'm sure that many people would simply refer to this as a dark comedy.  Still, it isn't always easy to swallow.  There were always moments where I hope that no one just walked in on me watching it.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Martin Scorsese

I think that a couple things can be true at the same time.  I don't think that Martin Scorsese is good at comedy.  The second thing, which seems in direct conflict with that first statement, is that After Hours might be one of my favorite Martin Scorsese movies.  I will admit that it might be a recency bias.  It may also be something that might be sprawling out of my headcanon, so if I'm way off on my read of this movie, please just let me enjoy the movie for the way that I watched it.

I'll be honest.  The first ten minutes of the movie frustrated me.  I got the "comedy" vibes from the font of the opening credits coupled with the music.  I also saw, in the first few moments of Paul teaching Lloyd the ropes at his data entry center, bits that were just not landing.  They were set up as bits.  The problem was that the "jokes" weren't all that funny.  It wasn't in the delivery; it was in the edit.  I was ready to strap in and watch a comedy that wasn't landing its jokes.  And, in a weird way, that mostly stays true for most of the movie.  There were a couple times that I chuckled.  There were some running gags that kind of worked on me.  But in terms of "ha-ha" funny, After Hours is terrible at that.

It's hard to like a movie once you are determined not to like it.  I mean, not for me.  I like everything.  This blog is really a waste of everyone's time because I tend to come around on most movies, which is probably annoying for you, the reader.  But I was convinced that this one was going to be a chore for me.  As much as I love Scorsese, there have been multiple Scorseses that I just did not care for.  I mean, that's not unfair.  Everyone has their flops.  I thought I was going to add After Hours to that pile.  But where Scorsese kind of fails as a comedian, he absolutely thrives as a storyteller.  I'm not saying that you have to watch After Hours as a serious piece of drama.  Lord knows that I still watched this through the lens of dark comedy.  But Scorsese got me with one thing.  I'd like to think it's intentional.  It was a key for the rest of the movie.  Paul is sitting down at the diner with Marcy in what is supposed to be a clever back-and-forth.  The dynamic between Paul and Marcy is already pretty weird.  But Marcy tells Paul the story of how her ex-husband was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz.  It is a monologue typical of most indie films of the '80s, so I wasn't shocked.  

But that Wizard of Oz diatribe did something for me.  This was Scorsese's dark Wizard of Oz.  It wasn't the same beats.  It wasn't a send-up of The Wizard of Oz.  Instead, it was spiritually a sequel to The Wizard of Oz.  Paul, a jerk no matter where you put him, is thrown into a world where there are no easy answers.  Everything is just a bit off.  His goal is to get home.  But because there is no easy way home, Paul has to keep encountering the people of Oz and dealing with immediate crises so that he can finally go home and put all of this nightmare behind him.  That's a Dark Wizard of Oz.  And when I watched it through that lens, the whole thing clicked with me.  Trust me, if the movie was closer to Oz, I would have been disappointed.  I didn't want a full on commentary on The Wizard of Oz.  I didn't want The Wiz for the '80s.  But I also like the idea that Oz doesn't have to be one thing.  It doesn't have to follow the beat for beat plot points of Dorothy going down the Yellow Bricked Road.  Instead, it's just being thrown out of one's comfort zone and looking through the world with new eyes.  If you watch After Hours with the Wizard of Oz thing, the movie absolutely crushes.  

Although I think Alice in Wonderland might be an even better comparison.

What's even more bizarre is that I'm really torn on the protagonist of the piece, especially in light of The Wizard of Oz.  Paul is no Dorothy.  If anything, the introduction to Paul Hackett is that he is no innocent.  If anything, he's so world wise that he's world weary.  When he meets Marcy, he's looking for a dirty good time.  It almost feels like slumming it might be a sexual thing for him.  He likes that Marcy isn't from his neck of the woods.  She's a damsel in the distress and he views himself as the Big Bad Wolf.  (I'm doing all kinds of fairy tale stuff with this blog today.  It's what the movie did for me.  I'm sorry!)  Paul sucks from moment one and I'll be honest, there's no redemption for him.  I honestly thought that his final just desserts were going to be him trapped in the papier-mache statue.  It's almost a little odd how hard Paul holds onto his own personality.  It often seems that we have elements of A Christmas Carol, where Paul has to come to terms with the harm that he's caused in the world.  Often, Paul will be incredibly rude on a whim because he just wants to get out of awkward situations.  But the movie almost never lets him off the hook for his behavior.  Instead, he regularly confronts the people in his life that he treats terribly.  

The odd thing is that he almost refuses to recognize anyone's humanity in this version of Oz or Wonderland.  Yes, these are people with big personalities.  Marcy has some history with being a burn victim, but otherwise is forthright with Paul.  Julie has a thing with the hairstyles of yesteryear and is a bit insecure, but really offers Paul the most safe space to stay while he's spiraling.  Tom is willing to give Paul money to get a ride home, but is processing the death of his girlfriend --whose death is Paul's fault.  Gail is trying to make Paul smile.  Admittedly, she's not reading the room to Paul's mental state, but her intentions are good.  If anything, Paul is the one who is causing the most pain in the film and yet he never learns his lesson.

But doesn't that kind of align with Dorothy as well?  I mean, Dorothy does change.  She goes from being an angry girl to a less angry girl.  But it is a story about the journey, not the character.  Ultimately, as much as the elements of Oz mirror Dorothy's Kansas life (at least in the film), she's simply a means to explore setting.  If anything, making Paul the victim of his own superiority complex makes his Oz more interesting.  

And that's why I find After Hours an incredibly engaging movie, despite failing at the comedy elements.  It's more absurdist than comedy.  It is Bukowski's (I'm so sorry for dropping that name) version of Oz or Wonderland.  It doesn't have to be funny.  It has to be engaging.  And engaging it is.  It was a pleasant surprise.

PG-13 for very scary dinosaurs.  There's some gore.  After all, dinosaurs, in these movies, tend to eat people.  Gareth Edwards isn't exactly afraid to show when someone gets eating by some of these animals.  Most of it is jump scares, which I absolutely adore.  But, again, when people get eaten, there is some gore.  But that's really about it.  There's some mild swearing and that's as far as this franchise will really go.

DIRECTOR:  Gareth Edwards

I didn't expect to like this.  I really didn't.

Before I go full bore into this, be aware that I'm writing under the umbrella of procrastination.  In a perfect world, I get two blogs done and then I can be free of all responsibilties before I go on a trip to Seattle.  Although, even that's not true because I'll be finishing another movie today and have to write that one incredibly quickly.  These are problems that I have. But what I should be writing about is the fact that there's a Jurassic Park sequel that is low key pretty darned good and I'm not quite sure why.

One of the things that I need to hold myself accountable to is the notion that I like too many things.  As part of that whole identity is the fact that I am very forgiving of Jurassic Park movies.  But intellectually, I know that they are plenty flawed.  Many of these movies lack any of the true greatness that the original film presented.  The only one that I outright didn't like was Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.  I even really liked Jurassic Park: Dominion.  But at least with each movie, there's a reason that I liked it more or less.  On paper, Jurassic World: Rebirth spits in the face of innovation.  It lacks any original notes.  It follows so many rules that it is barely a film.  These characters are almost archetypes more than they are real people.  (I'm sorry that I'm dogging on this movie so much.  I'm trying to make a point that this film works despite the fact that it has no reason to.  I'm probably wrong about everything that I just wrote.)

Yet, there's something incredibly fun in the movie.  I threw a lot of accusations around in that last paragraph.  My hopes are that, while analyzing why things didn't work, I might have an epiphany on why it's okay.  We're on this journey of discovery together.  For all I know, sometimes absolute trash is the best thing out there.  Let's look at this from a perspective of plot first.  I've always stated that, the reason that the first Jurassic Park movie works so well is that it is often misinterpreted as simply a sci-fi disaster movie.  I have always stated that the first movie is actually an industrial thriller with dinosaurs.  Now, I'm not the only one who has picked up on this idea.  Many of the sequels, in an attempt to recapture that spark that Michael Crichton put in his original novel, have somehow tried weaving in some kind of corporate inGen nonsense.  But in the way that Crichton had made inGen a fully fleshed out corporate stand-in, the other movies tended to get a little maniacal with inGen.  I'm pretty sure that Rebirth only really mentions inGen once.  Instead, we have a nameless stand-in for EvilCo in this one, which is fine.  The issue that the other movies didn't really know what to do with their corporate villains.  There was always this threat that dinosaurs were going to be used for military advancement. As silly as the mission is in Rebirth, I might kind of like that Rebirth returns to the the original movie's mission statement that what corporations deem as altruism is actually greed and hubris.

Yeah!  That's what this movie does.  InGen, once they were exposed for being greedy turds in the first two films, became big and evil.  We get early on in Rebirth that this corporation that these mercenaries are working for are gross, mainly because they are working with mercenaries to do something illegal.  But what is thematically symmetrical with the original film is that it is hard to fight against what they hope to achieve.  With the case of the park, it is an attempt to reverse extinction and stimulate intellectual curiosity.  WIth the case of Rebirth, these characters are here because they are creating some kind of miracle heart cure.  Now, Edwards and Rebirth don't shy away from the fact that these guys aren't saints.  We have the slimy corporate stooge, who is more than happy to let innocent children die in exchange for this miracle drug and the profits that follow it. I'll even accuse the movie of being a little lazy in terms of trusting its audience.  While we had Ian Malcolm vocalizing the dubious nature of his corporate benefactor in the original films, the other characters were forced to mire through a grey area before coming to the conclusion that the Park was moral net zero.  Rebirth just says it.  It says, "We should be open sourcing this medications and screw the corporations."  Yeah, I know.  It's lazy.  But I love it.

Okay, this is going to be more of an uphill battle:  the characters.  I love ScarJo.  I love Mahershala Ali.  Those aren't the characters.  Those...are the actors.  And I'll even give them points.  The actors are doing a fine job with the characters...who are kind of shallow.  Zora Bennett is hard to like.  I'm sorry.   I know that we're trying to get her from A to B and show growth of a character.  But she's a character that starts the movie with absolutely no integrity.  She says she's not going to take part in this little island expedition.  She has no reason to.  But then she's offered a check and that changes her mind.  That's a pretty rough start.  Again, I get it.  You have to have your protagonist grow.  When Loomis offers that they take the samples and open source them, I don't know what changes her mind.  Besides hating Krebs, I don't know what her motivation would be.  Honestly, Loomis doesn't press her very hard.  He just offers to it to her with a hope that she's a good person.  And guess what?  She automatically is a good person.  Part of it is that the movie doesn't really know who Zora is. Because of Kincaid as her foil, she's on Team Save the Family.  That doesn't tie directly into the motivation to get 10 million dollars, does it?  Like, I'm really glad she open sourced that medication.  It's a very optimistic take on what humanity is all about.  But it also doesn't really make sense with her character because there isn't really a direct tie between surviving on a Jurassic Park island and turning over medication to people for free.

And I'll be honest...there is stuff in this movie that straight up annoys me.  I don't love the fact that we're playing in the waters of hybrid dinosaurs again.  Do I think that the D-Rex is creepy as crap?  Yes.  I love that.  It is more kaiju than dinosaur. It's got four arms and a big ol' misshapen head.  I like that it has more eldrich energy than the Indominous Rex.  Is it stupid?  Yeah, absolutely.  Is it also scary?  Totally.  I also really hate that Kincaid immediately survives.  That whole sacrifice scene was great.  It also doesn't make sense that the D-Rex is just that incompetent at hunting down Kincaid.  So we're left with a, "That scene was for nothing and I don't even know how he escaped that super dinosaur."  That's not a great conclusion for a movie that asks me to trust it when it comes to taking me on a journey.

But now I can tell you what absolutely what does work!  Gareth Edwards made an incredibly stressful survival movie.  I know.  I just said that this was another corporate espionage movie.  But Gareth Edwards has a thing about anxiety when it comes to massive things attacking people.  I don't love everything that Edwards does.  But he's got Rogue One under his belt and I think he has one of the better Godzilla reboots under his belt too.  But even more than that, Jurassic World: Rebirth does something that I haven't seen in a long time...

...it made a T-Rex a full on bad guy.

Even the first movie tempered the T-Rex out a bit.  As scary as that initial T-Rex scene was, the T-Rex comes in as the hero at the end of the first one.  Then it does it in the second one. And the third.  All the Jurassic Park movies and their sequels plays with the notion that we're supposed to sympathethize with the T-Rex.  Not Rebirth.  The T-Rex finally delivered on the promise that it was going to wreck you.  And I'll tell you what?  It did a scene from Jurassic Park better than Jurassic Park did.  The teeth scratching at the raft was scary as heck.  I don't know the tensile strength of a rubber boat, but I don't even care because I was horrified by that whole raft sequence.  Also, what was she doing dragging that thing?  She opened it right by the T-Rex too?  (Note: I kept thinking of Siegfried and Joy from Instagram Reels when the T-Rex was gone behind the curtain.)  That whole sequence made the movie.

Maybe it's just that I wanted to have fun with this movie.  Maybe because I'm an easy sell or I just like feeling a good scared. But Jurassic World: Rebirth, as dumb as it can be at times, might be the second best Jurassic Park movie.

Rated R for a lot of brutal violence and gore.  While language plays a not insignificant role, this is a movie about the brutality of war and how people can become desensitized to such insane atrocities.  Main characters die in sad and tragic ways.  It is an incredibly bleak movie that almost tries to break its audience.  There's an especially upsetting scene that involves a mass grave.  R.

DIRECTOR: Alex Garland

When I saw this trailer a few years ago, I thought I was going to be there on opening night.  I really did.  I wouldn't shut up about the trailer.  I showed it to film classes, guys.  I showed it to film classes.  Then my film students went to go see this movie.  But do you know what else was true?  I rarely get to go to the movies.  And I'm going to call out the elephant in the room.  This week, with the vocal shouts for civil war against the left, I realized that it was time to watch his movie.  I wish I watched it as an Alex Garland film.  I wish I watched it as simply well-crafted storytelling.  Instead, I watched it because I had to react to people wanting to throw this country into disarray.

And I did that thing that I always do.  I get too invested in wanting the movie to be great, meaning that I had insane expectations.  I do think that Alex Garland is a genius.  I do. The man is very very smart and his movies often challenge me more than his contemporaries' films do.  But I'm going to be honest with you:  Civil War is good, not great.  I'm sorry to one of my students who embraced this film as one of the best movies that he's ever seen.  It's very good.  I love that he loves it.  It's just...not what I needed the movie to be.  

Civil War is a tightrope walk.  There are two things to balance: the setting and the story.  Sometimes, a story works in any environment.  With the case of Civil War, the story should be enough.  It really should be.  Because I'm dancing around this, I'm just going to spell it out.  The core of Civil War is Garland's commentary on the dehumanization of journalists.  Much like The Hurt Locker, these are people who are so traumatized by war that they tend to have inhuman responses to things that should be destroying them.  When these characters are reminded of their own humanity in their darkest of moments, those moments are so painful that they have no sense of self because healthy coping mechanisms are so taxed that it all becomes somehow unreal.   If I was looking at the film through that lens, I would have thought the film mostly effective.  If anything, I'm quasi-applaud Garland for being as straightfoward as he is about the characterization of these journalists and the moral grey area that they exist in.  Sure, I wish there was an extra element that can only be found in a Garland film.  But instead, that Hurt Locker element works.  I kind of see, without the set dressing of a second American Civil War as the background, Civil War working more as a Katheryn Bigelow film.

But the movie is set in contemporary America during a violent civil war.  And that's where my gripes about the movie lie.  This is a movie that needed to get made.  Again, I lost my mind over that trailer, showing the brutal reality of American fighting against American.  It was political commentary and I was here for it.  But the trailer was more effective when it came to selling the political reality than the film itself was.  Garland kind of digs himself into a hole for this one.  He's a guy who takes a weird conceit and then humanizes it.  It's what makes him an amazing storyteller.  But the story of Lee and Jessie is so character driven that there is almost no opportunity to create a world of moral justice.  Garland doesn't adapt our Trump / post-Trump environment.  There are elements of Trump in there, most notably in Nick Offerman's attempt to spin reality to make himself look good.  There are archetypes and stereotypes of the far-Right.  Jesse Plemons's racist serial killer probably aligns with a culture allegorically.  But the movie, in no uncertain terms, creates a grey area where everyone kind of sucks.  Real war is probably a world where everyone sucks.  But Civil War treats the Western Forces, or WF, as bloodthirsty killers who can't wait to put a bullet in someone's head.  Garland crafts a world where we are not sure if we want to see the White House fall or not.  

The reason that we can't really tell that is because the journalists in this story are so divorced from their subject that we get no commentary.  For all I know, this is a story about how reporters need to abandon objectivity, but I don't quite get that.  What that comes down to is that these two ingredients don't quite mix well.  This should either be a story about the downfall of civilization with open commentary about potential answers to this problem or be about journalists finding their souls in the midst of all of this inhuman misery.  I don't think it works as both.  Honestly, if I stick Lee or Jessie in the middle of another country, even if it is fictional, I think the story works better.  Because Lee and Jessie aren't mortified that these are Americans who are perpetuating these war crimes.  They aren't moved by anything.  Instead, Lee is more having a Ghost of Christmas Past moment by seeing Jessie make the same mistakes that she did as a kid.  The United States stuff has little to do with that journey. Ultimately, this is a battle for Lee to find her soul.  And from that perspective, that works.  Again, stick them somewhere where America doesn't play a part in that, and it works better.

There are consequences to that mismatching of ingredients.  I do think, that with its attempt to shock audience with American violence (which, again, I think needs to be in a movie just about that), that the Jessie and Lee relationship is sacrificed.  Lee, for the most part, is kind of passive about Jessie's spiral into brokenness.  It is supposed to be a shocking moment when Jessie captures Lee's death on camera because the movie is heavily implying that the inverse is going to happen.  After all, Jessie asks Lee if Lee would photograph Jessie's body after she dies.  (We know she wouldn't because she deletes the photo of Sammy's body when alone.) But Lee's internal conflict is that she regrets her callous life so much that she is fighting for the soul of this girl.  (Sure, Jessie is 23, but Lee thinks of her as a child.) Lee doesn't do much to change Jessie's mind.  If anything, Lee goes more introspective than anything else, which makes sense considering that her conflict is mostly internal.  It's just that we don't have a ton of beats where Jessie's soul is laid bare.  She vomits when she escapes the Neo-Nazis, but that's mainly because she was about to die.  Honestly, Lee is more moved in the scene where Sammy dies than Jessie is.  If anything, Sammy's death galvanizes her to become a hardened reporter.  So when Lee because of Jessie's selfishness, of course Jessie wouldn't be moved like that. I wish there at least was some flicker of the human in Jessie when she snaps those photos.  Instead, it simply read as a pupil replacing the teacher.  Lee's death was treated as matter-of-factly as anything else that Lee captured on camera.

But, again, I needed more of that interaction to make the story worthwhile.  Either that, or get rid of it entirely and make it about survival in Trump's Civil War.  But I don't see both of these elements working because neither gets the proper weight or commentary.  It's too short and the elements don't gel like they should.  If this wasn't Alex Garland, I would say that this movie would have been a powerhouse.  But it is Alex Garland and I tend to expect more from him.

Not rated, but goodness gracious, the sheer glut of gratuitous nudity is staggering!  Every time you get comfortable with the narrative of a young woman taking care of her son, Varda reminds her audience that this is a woman who has sexual needs.  But these moments linger.  And linger.  And linger.  For a movie that runs just over an hour, a sizable percentage of the movie is lingering on nudity and sex.

DIRECTOR:  Agnes Varda

I don't know what it is about my life that I can't find time to write as much as I want to anymore.  (I just had the epiphany that this film also deals with that confrontation and now I want to just talk about this.)  I also am kind of mad at myself for not picking more accessible movies.  Sure, I know I just wrote about My Cousin Vinny, but I feel like I've been mostly avoiding new movies and some more schlocky stuff in an attempt to whittle away at my owned movies.  Still, I'm glad to say that I've finished the "In California" disc of my Agnes Varda box set.

This is the honest to goodness truth:  I don't think I've ever seen a movie that has given me so much of a love/hate reaction.  Part of it is Varda; part of it is me.  I vascillated pretty hard on this one.  The first day I watched this, I questioned, "What is this avant-garde nonsense?"  It was a lot of philosophy over documentary images like we saw with Mur Murs.  I really liked Mur Murs and what I liked about Mur Murs is not what happens with Documenteur.  Even though the opening shot of the movie is one of the final shots of Mur Murs, the two --tonally --are worlds apart.  Mur Murs's genius lied in its effortlessness.  It is an organic tale of the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.  It's gorgeous.   It's art speaks for itself.  The artists are vulnerable and emotional.  It's perfect.  Documenteur keeps changing its philosophy from, vascillating between avant-garde and documentary.  It's not insane that an artist or a director uses documentary footage in an avant-garde film.  I mean, that's what is going on with Koyaanisqatsi and that film is as avant-garde as it gets.  But I find Varda often insufferable when she completely embraces the avant-garde.  She's such a talented narrative storyteller and she makes compelling documentaries.  But her avant-garde stuff, unlike her documentaries, seem strained with effort.  With the case of Documenteur, it's her combination of almost poetic verse coupled with the long shot of nudity.

I am feeling a little bit awkward writing about the nudity.  Remember how I said that much of my dislike for this movie comes from my hangups?  Yeah, this is that hangup on display.  One of the motifs of Documenteur is acknowledging that Emilie is balancing her role as a mother against her role as a woman.  As someone who finds herself raising a child by herself, she ignores elements of self, which include her sexual desires.  I don't want this stuff cut from the movie.  The problem with Varda's take on this is that she goes all in on this element of self.  And I don't think it is because Varda believes that woman is entirely defined by sexual desire.  If I voiced that to the late Varda, she would probably be mortified.  (Mind you, in that scenario, Varda would still be alive and would be able to respond.)  But Varda uses sexual need to represent everything that isn't motherhood to Emilie.  It becomes a shorthand that loses its value very early on.  Like, it comes across as somewhat lazy.  For example, one of the more damning moments in the movie is towards the end, when Emilie leaves Martin at home as she lies in a bed nude, staring out the window.  I get this moment.  But it's the nude element of this scene that dilutes the meaning of what is really happening here.  Varda, in an attempt to be the artist she always fights for, places actress Sabine Mamou in the nude as a sign of freedom. But the nudity cannot be divorced from the notion of sexuality.  If you stuck Mamou in the same scene completely dressed, the scene becomes one of anxiety coulped with avoidance.  Instead, there's an element of horniness that almost comes across as unsympathetic versus relatable.

But I stressed that this is the most love/hate movie I've seen.  When Varda forgets that she's a fancypants director who makes stuff that plays in museums, the simple narrative is good.  With such a short runtime, I feel like Varda feels the need to justify what seems like almost a lack of plot.  Instead, she's cutting away from an incredibly poignant story of a woman trying to start her life over with her son.  Yes, it is a simple story.  But I also think that is Varda's sweet spot.  Varda absolutely nails simple, psychological tales of real world problems.  Cleo from 5 to 7 has a similarly simple plot.  That story is about waiting for test results.  Both of these are universal ideas that build suspense on telling us on whether the world is a fair place or not.  Sure, Varda does a good job stressing that Emilie has needs other than motherhood or surviving poverty.  But there is more to being a human than simply daydreaming of sex so she can get away from her kid.  Varda builds a small world in a small apartment and talks about how she is separated from everything in her life that made sense.  She is separated from her husband.  She is separated from her lover.  She's even separated from her employment and her language and nothing makes sense.  That's a story.  And when we get those moments, I'm capitvated by it.

Part of it comes from the experience of being a father. Martin is appropriately needy.  Varda's direction of this kid is brilliant because Martin is almost on the periphery of his own life.  He knows that his sense of normalcy is gone.  He understands that he can't be in his old home, but he doesn't fully absorb why he isn't in his old home.  He is obsessed with his mother because she represents stability.  And yet, as much as Emilie needs Martin, she also needs time when she's not Emilie the mom.  It's heartbreaking, watching Martin beg for things that he deems reasonable while Emilie is tempted by the border she sets for her child.  The fact that Martin has to sleep alone in his own room is appropriate.  But her disappearance only happens because she has a modicum of freedom from her son.  We see moments where she views Martin as a lead weight around her neck.  And it hurts.  The kid's pain is real and it doesn't need a lot of hoity-toity artistry to explain it.  No.  He just begs his mom to stay and play with him and that's what makes sense.  

The reason that I bought the Varda box set is because I love when Varda is firing on all cylinders, she is one of the best of all times.  But when she's conscious of what she is doing, standing in the shadow of her own greatness, it feels almost like mimickry of what she has done naturally.  Documenteur is more successful than not.  But I also can't ignore that there's a lot of "trying too hard" Varda in this one.  The story works.  I'm not even saying that she shouldn't challenge the text on this one.  I'm saying that not everything has to be a museum piece.  Don't pull away from what makes the important parts poignant.

Rated R for a lot of swearing.  That's really about it.  I mean, the movie is about a murder.  But the murder stuff, despite being the fulcrum of the movie, is almost more in concept than in --pun intended --execution.  There's some implied sexuality.  But the worst stuff is the implied prison rape jokes.  That gets to be a little bit much.  Never mind, I take it back.  If you are looking for nuanced looks at culture, this movie is going to only offer you offensive stereotypes.

DIRECTOR:  Jonathan Lynn

I am unburdened by any ties of nostalgia when it comes to watching this movie.  Think about it.  I was born in 1983.  This movie comes out in 1992.  It's straight up an R-rated movie.  I know.  My generation was infamous for watching movies that they shouldn't have been watching at younger ages.  But my parents would have had no reason to show me My Cousin Vinny considering that I was nine-years-old.  I know.  It's a classic to a lot of you. But for me?  This was one of the movies that kind of passed me by.  The only reason that I decided to watch it now is that I have always prided myself in watching all of the movies that are cultural talking points and My Cousin Vinny has always been one of them.

I'm going to hurt some feelings right now. In the same way that The Breakfast Club doesn't really do anything for me, My Cousin Vinny is more annoying than it is good.  I'm not saying that I don't see what's appealing about this movie to other people.  I get that in spades.  This movie is so buried in 1992 that I can see people in the theaters rolling with laughter over what can ulimately be attributed to lazy filmmaking.  I feel like I'm being really rough with this movie and I try to be nicer about things.  Part of me is really frustrated with a lot of this film because there is something pretty good about My Cousin Vinny, namely, the third act.  From what I understand, Dale Launer was a law school guy who wanted to make a trial movie.  I was even told that some law schools show My Cousin Vinny as a crash course on procedure and decorum in a courtroom.  It's just that...that final third of the film feels like what the entire movie should have been.  Instead, we get two disparate films.  The first two-thirds of the film are steeped in stereotypes and easy dramatic irony jokes.  It's very '90s VHS comedy.  I honestly could imagine having rented this at the Meijer video rental section while on vacation and finding it charming, if completely forgettable.  The final third reads as a short story of how an auto mechanic could solve a murder mystery only using tire treads.  And that final third is polished.

So what's my problem with the first two thirds besides the fact that comedies about lazy stereotypes don't often resonate with me?  The movie offers us a conceit:  Vinny Gambini has a talent for arguing, but is terrible in a courtroom because he's never actually tried a case.  To save these two boys' lives, he's going to have to get his act together, put his ego on the shelf, and learn about what it means to be a lawyer, despite whatever challenges go his way.  But that's not what those first two-thirds are about, despite what Vinny tells us.  If anything, Vinny keeps failing upwards.  No matter what he does, the judge dings him with contempt of court because Vinny doesn't know what he's doing.  It's played as a gag.  And it's a cute gag.  But one of the things about jokes is that they have to serve the narrative.  The external conflict for the story is that Vinny is a fish out of water in a world that wants to see him fail.  That's a great story.  Keep that.  But Vinny's internal conflict is that he is so stuck in his ways that he is going to have to degrade himself to become something better.  And, you know what?  He does.  But none of the degredation happens through Vinny welcoming those moments.  Instead, things happen in spite of Vinny's poor behavior.  I want to see him sitting in on other trials.  I want to see him taking notes.  I want to see Mona Lisa distracting him and him deciding to read that law book front to back.  It's actually absolutely bizarre that the movie ends and it seems like Vinny hasn't finished that book.  You gave me this specific Chekhov's gun and the answer can be found in the first few pages?  

I actually find Mona Lisa a far more compelling protagonist in this story.  One of the things that drives my point home about how uninvested Vinny is in these boys' worlds is that Mona Lisa, out of sheer boredom, decides to read the Alabama law statues and is able to cite things that Vinny should absolutely know before he goes into a courtroom.  Vinny, compounding his selfish attitude, tells her to stop reading the book because his ego can't handle it.  It's not that I don't think that Vinny should win this case.  I do.  The issue is that everything in the movie kept telling me that Vinny wasn't doing the work and, somehow, the third act makes him a skilled and nuanced defense attorney.  That final act is perhaps the most unearned final act I've seen in a movie.  Vinny just becomes good.  None of the moments in the story lead up to that.  If anything, his boorishness works in his favor.  Sure, there is a truth that Vinny's cultural values might throw some good ol' boys for a loop and that should be played up.  But the obstacle of the story just goes away and that drives me crazy.  Tying back to my commentary on Mona Lisa, she's the one who saves the day.  

That actually drives a hole through my big "The Third Act" praise.  It isn't Mona Lisa, the one who is actually working hard on the case and is a car savant, who discovers the loophole in the prosecution's case; it's Vinny.  Now, one thing that I will give the story.  One of his estabished traits in the movie is that he's observant.  We get that whole story from Bill that Vinny takes down magicians at parties, revealing the truth behind every illusion.  But the revelation of such a bit of obscure trivia flew by a bunch of forensic experts, including Mona Lisa, to fall into Vinny's lap?  That's great, but that beat absolutely belongs to Mona Lisa.  If anything, Mona Lisa is going against character.  I respect that she is willing to throw Vinny out onto the street because he's a bit of a sleezeball.  But her entire motivation is to help Bill and Stan.  Yet, in the third act, to make the story about Vinny, she has to be treated as a hostile witness?  It makes little sense.  I get the idea of being cold to Vinny.  But to leave Bill and Stan up for the chair, a concept the movie doubles down on throughout the film.  It just seems so odd.  

I swear I'm not trying to high horse the movie, but the salvation of the movie is right there.  While I seem mostly annoyed by Vinny Gambini and the whole shortcutting of characters, Marisa Tomei's Mona Lisa is actually kind of a fun take on stereotypes.  Don't get me wrong.  She's doing a lot with that voice.  But Mona Lisa takes the notion of cold, self-involved Brooklynite and not only dispels that stereotype, but grows beyond that point.  If my big complaint is that Vinny should be dynamic when he's actually static, I'm impressed what Tomei does with this part to make her far more compelling.

Yeah, the stereotypes bother me.  I don't love the notion that judges are that far biased against people in his courtroom that he hunts down reasons to throw Vinny in jail.  If anything, there are no other characters besides Vinny and Mona Lisa in this movie.  Everyone else is playing some degree of setting rather than actual characterization.  Still, I get it.  It's 1992.  It's played for laughs.  I just...didn't find myself laughing very often.  I wasn't trying to be a stick in the mud.  I just didn't find much all that funny to laugh at.  The one joke that got me was the running gag of being woken up at 5:00.  I liked that.  I also liked the payoff that Vinny can only sleep with consistent noise.  That bit worked.  But as a whole, this movie...isn't funny.  I wanted it to be.  But it wasn't.