Rated R for a lot of sexual references, including clothed on-screen sexuality.  There's also a ton of drug use and drug use. There is death, but more of the issue is how people react to death as opposed to outright murder.  But there is some violence in here as well.  Along with language.  Along with adultery. Really, this movie has a lot.

DIRECTOR: Greg Jardin

There's so much writing today.  I wrote too much for the book today and now I'm trying to get this blog done.  Also, the weird part of it all is that this is my inaugural entry for 2024's spooky season, when really it's more horror adjacent.  That's okay.  I'm not looking for over-the-top gore in my spooky season, even though that's for sure happening soon.  Anyway, I had to throw this movie at the top. io9 did a whole article on it and how genius it was, so I had to check it out for myself.

They're right.  It's pretty brilliant.  Maybe I was a bit more forgiving because I'm often taken by a twist.  This is one of those movies that really caught me off-guard.  Part of the reason it might have worked on me so well is that I stayed away from anything informative going into it.  I just knew that, aesthetically, it looked like it could get creepy.  I mean, I wasn't wrong.  It's more of an upsetting movie than it is a straight up horror movie.  It's a commentary on how people are absolutely terrible and it takes very little for inhibitions to get wiped away.

The odd epiphany I had with It's What's Inside is what horror movies (again, bear with me) comment about teenagers generationally.  It's not a surprise that horror tends to appeal more to teenage audiences than other demographics.  There's something rebellious and new about being able to see horror. Horror for children stays away from tropes introduced in R-rated (and, now, intense PG-13 movies), which leads to these films having teenage protagonists.  Now, once again, we're dealing with semi-teenage protagonists.  The narrative technically starts in high school or college and these characters are in their early 20s.  I'm in my 40s, so I hate to say that I treat 20-somethings like children.  I'm a bad person and I'm working through my personality defects.  But let's treat these characters like teenage representatives.  I was thinking about slasher movies in the '70s and '80s.  There are characters who are unlikable, who tend to be cannon fodder for the killer.  But for the most part, there's a handful of characters who we are meant to like.  We lose some of these, but our final character (tends to be a final girl) is the paragon of virtue.  The '90s and 2000s had characters a little more callous towards death.  They host parties in spite of a problem happening around them.  But ultimately, most of them are loyal to, once again, the paragon of virtue.  

But since watching Bodies Bodies Bodies and It's What's Inside (which would make an amazing double-feature), Gen Z might be the natural evolution of the awful teenager.  I feel incredibly old complaining about "kids these days".  But Gen Z horror (and horror adjacent!) doesn't mind making the protagonists completely insufferable.  Now, part of me believes that it is because, as storytellers, we've become far more comfortable with making our protagonists --regardless of age --as morally complex to the point of being straight up evil.  I'm a guy who loves Breaking Bad.  But the characters in It's What's Inside are, top to bottom, all terrible people.  Now, part of that comes from the central conceit of the movie.  Everyone, no matter how morally grounded they seem, are awful people given the opportunity to take advantage of it.  There are a handful of moments that have whiplash like moments where morality is thrown out the window.  Sure, it's in the face of trauma.  (Hey, I get why the word "Trauma" is right beneath the balcony now!) 

The second that these characters get a pass to be their worst selves --especially culminating in the death of the two on the balcony --they instantly do horrible things.  Dennis (I think he's inside Cyrus's body) instantly frames Cyrus for murder. Admittedly, it's an odd choice considering that Dennis wants to stay inside of Cyrus's body.  But even Shelby is willing to completely destroy Nikki as a form of blackmail over someone that she not only calls a friend, but also partially idolizes.   Shelby, for the bulk of the movie, is the one that has our sympathies.  But Jardin does something really smart.  The movie demands concentration.  No one knows who is who, so there's moments where you have to actively be thinking about character motivations.  Yet, Shelby does some things that make us sympathize with Cyrus.  Listen, you're supposed to hate Shelby and Cyrus.  That's the point of the movie. But when Shelby goes dark with her motivations, she becomes a straight-up villain.

It's funny how both Bodies Bodies Bodies and It's What's Inside are about rich Gen Zers (Zoomers?) at a really swanky house, spending God foresaken amounts of money before something goes horribly wrong.  Both movies are stories of circumstance.  But I wonder if Gen Z is starting to return to the narrative of economic prosperity.  It's weird.  The story I've been hearing my entire life is the story of how nothing is affordable.  Yet, every single person at that table enjoys a moderate amount of financial and social success.  It's a story of jealousy among the upper crust.  I hate that I watched Metropolitan right before this because I keep seeing rich people having rich people problems. But I am thinking that if the previous generations commented on specific vices, like premarital sex and drugs, I wonder if the bigger commentary in these rich Gen Z movies is about empathy.  

These characters have sex and do drugs.  We haven't shifted off of those moral norms as reasons to kill of characters yet.  But it seems like the drugs and sex is almost an afterthought to the fact that these characters don't really care about anyone else.  In the same way that elder Millennials have a hard time relating to younger Millennials, I wonder if elder Zoomers have a hard time relating to younger Zoomers.  The elder Zoomers that I taught were incredibly imbued with empathy while the younger ones tend to look out for number one.  That's the movie that I feel like I'm watching.  It's odd, and mainly it comes from the fact that I'm seeing someone else's face attached to the wrong character, but I don't even feel bad for Forbes at he end of the movie. We have the joy of everyone's life being destroyed.  Lord knows I rooted for the big bad behind everything when the movie ended and I adored it.  But it's because everyone is really unlikable.

But even all of this generational analysis aside, the movie works. The movie works like crazy.  Greg Jardin has such a sense of style coupled with a really clever take on the body switch story.  Yeah, it's not outright scary.  But it is fascinating and the proper amount of brain breaky.  It's a fantastic good time.

PG-13 because a lot of stuff happens off camera or is heavily implied.  It's awful people doing awful things.  One part that is particularly offensive is the implication that one of the characters did a lewd sexual act to someone in the past.  But in terms of actual R-rated language, the movie keeps it pretty mild.  There's some drunkenness and vomiting at one point in the movie as well.  

DIRECTOR: Walt Stillman

See, now I have a predicament.  Usually, it takes me a minute to get into spooky season.  My friends tend to go spooky season early. I think I'm often too exhausted to be soaking in that much gore, so I tend to delay it.  But my list of horror movies this year?  Top tier.  There are some real bangers that I'm excited to watch for the first time.  But now I'm stuck writing about a movie that I am no longer mentally excited to write about, so please tolerate my malaise as I power my way through this slog of Metropolitan.

I think, if you really tried, you could organize Criterion releases into "Things that Criterion really likes."  This is the same category as Richard Linklater movies.  It's a celebration of late '80s and '90s indie cinema.  There's indie cinema that is actually pretty darned impressive.  But a lot of the American indie movies from this era tend to be talking heads almost espousing witty bon mots.  Now, during the '90s and early 2000s, I was really into this kind of stuff.  I was obsessed with Clerks because we were all obsessed with Clerks.  But something in me got incredibly exhausted with this kind of cinema.  This almost seems like the cinema of the college student.  It was so different from everything else we were watching.  It seemed so smart (man, I'm being really rough on an entire genre of film mainly because I wasn't in love with Metropolitan).  Maybe it was the constant "looking at the strings" and forgiving things that were meant to save on a budget.  After all, indie cinema is a celebration of pure cinema, removed from the control of the motion picture studios. But Metropolitan, especially dealing with the last twenty minutes, is incredibly frustrating.

Let's talk about the end of the movie first, because it made this movie from being a tolerable three-out-of-five star rating to a two.  (I'm assuming that I'm standing by that by the time I hit Letterboxd later today.) My initial take was that Metropolitan was the least romantic romantic comedy that I have ever seen.  Part of it, understandably, is a send up of the bourgeoisie.  (Note: despite teaching the word "bourgeoisie" means "middle class", every single real-world context for the word "bourgeoisie" illustrates upper class.  I need more information.) These kids, who have few problems, seem so self-involved that even the smallest slight seems to be a major deal.  I get that Stillman wants us to be critical of these kids because they, in many ways, are the absolute worst of the worst.  Even Tom, who is our protagonist, is kind of awful because of his hypocrisy.  Yet, I'm also criticizing myself with that commentary because I'm frustrated with the cast --particularly Charlie --for hating Tom and his few mistakes.  

Back to my topic sentence!  The end!  The entire thing, as critical as it is about the insular nature of the upper crust, is the white male wish-fulfillment fantasy.  Tom and Audrey's relationship initially is quite grounded.  Audrey likes Tom.  Tom is friends with Audrey, but is dating Serena.  Okay, that's reasonable.  He's allowed to not be in love with Audrey.  It's weird that he's keeping his relationship with Serena close to the vest, but that's also his own thing.  (Also, Serena sucks, but that's not really on Tom.)  But Charlie and Tom have a complicated relationship with Audrey.  Charlie has always been in love with Audrey, but she's not into him. (There's a wonderful irony that she can't understand why Tom doesn't love her but won't give Charlie the time of day.)  But the movie needed to make a bad guy.  Listen, Charlie and Tom both have lost their shot with Audrey.  She's frustrated with both of them.  The movie, honestly, should embrace the fact that she's lost to them and dismount on that.  Instead, we have to have a cardboard cutout of a villain: Von Sloneker.  

Von Sloneker is Clerks villain.  Golly, the ponytail and everything. The stiff delivery.   (I apologize greatly to Will Kempe, who played this part.  I often blame wooden performances in these kinds of films to directors.) He's everything a shortcut of a villain should be.  On top of that, any attempts to make him somewhat relatable are instantly undone.  He is an archetype unto himself.  The odds that Audrey, who completely out of character, runs into the arms of Von Sloneker --who has the most devious of intentions for this girl.  If we're talking about the White male fantasy, especially if we're throwing around terms like "beta male", this is it.  There's always this wish-fulfillment of the underdog beating up the bully to win this vulnerable woman.  Some grand romantic gesture will undo tons of self-involved, problematic behavior because that's kind of how we're wired.  For a movie that is divorcing itself from the studio system, it embraces a trope that, in no way, reflects reality.  Even if all of the elements of this narrative led to a confrontation between Tom, Charlie, and Von Sloneker, there's no way that the results would resemble anything that we actually see in the movie.  It just lacks verisimitude.

Perhaps my greatest takeaway from Metropolitan is Nick Smith.  (Is the naming of Nick and Tom homages to The Great Gatsby?  If so, why aren't these characters inverting their names?  Tom is the outsider looking in on the wealth of the aristocracy, carrying that imposter syndrome with him everywhere he goes.) Nick is meant to suck.  He's, again, the archetype of the upper class.  He's rude and boorish, not out of abuse but out of boredom.  We've seen this before. The odd thing is that --and a lot of this comes from the fact that Chris Eigemann is the most recognizable actor in this movie --Nick is oddly likable.  I kind of love the dynamic between Nick and Tom while I find Charlie insufferable. (We're meant to. Don't worry.) I love that, as awful as Nick's methods are, he's ultimately right about Von Sloneker.  Nick can easily be diagnosed as being perhaps the most childish and insecure amongst the UHB while demonstrating overcompensatory behavior to cover up his own insecurities.  Still, I like Nick and Tom.  That goodbye in disgrace is a great moment for the character and the rest of the film suffers for him leaving.

Unfortunately, a lot of my takeaway from this movie is that I've grown out of this era of filmmaking.  It's completely unfair and I'm commenting more on myself than I am on the film.  Sure, I loathe the end of this movie.  But I also didn't care for most of it, giving me more ick when it came to the end.

Rated R because it is fundamentally about fun crime.  These are guys who don't need to get into crime, but embrace the biker lifestyle.  Apparently, if you want to be a biker, you gotta like crime.  That means that there's a lot of violence, death, and sexual assault in the movie.  There's also a ton of alcoholism and drug use in the movie.  Add to that some pretty gnarly language, and you have The Bikeriders with an R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Nichols

Oh man, I'm kicking and screaming writing this right now.  I just wrote 1,667 words and now I have to write this?  I'm exhausted.  Honestly, I'm plum tuckered out.  The easy answer is to caffeinate myself, but my tum-tum is a little queasy and tea sounds like it wouldn't quite help that.  So what am I going to do?  I'M GOING TO POWER THROUGH THIS AND MAKE IT SOMETHING WORTH READING!

I was going to embrace spooky season.  I really was.  It's October 1st, and how exciting would it have been if every movie that I wrote about in October was somehow horror related?  But every year, Spooky Season feels more and more like a chore to me.  I was going to watch Abigail on Peacock, but then I saw The Bikeriders was also on there.  Now here's the reason that I'm really full of crap.  (Something I freely admit!) I know nothing about The Bikeriders outside the fact that I saw the poster all over France and the movie looked prestige as heck.  Spoiler alert: It absolutely was.  You know how you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover?  Yeah, I totally did that and succeeded.  I have to say, I'm a pretty big fan of this movie.  Not absolutely.  There was actually a long stretch of the movie where I did not care for it, and that mostly came down to poltiics.

There's something so fundamentally toxic at the core of The Bikeriders.  The Bikeriders harkens back to that Jack Kerouac, On the Road vibes.  There was something so counter-culture about getting on a bike and forgetting society's norms.  At its core, it should be transcendental as can  be.  It's forgetting that the world shapes people to match society.  Instead, it's embracing nature and the open road.  It's finding community in like-minded individuals and it values the individual members of the group.  Fine.  I get that.  But we also live in a world where the Proud Boys exist.  Now, if you didn't stay for the whole movie, you might think that The Bikeriders is a story embracing the chaos of biker gangs.  Johnny makes the Vandals seem to be the perfect club for finding oneself.  I should note here, before I get too far, that this is a movie based on a true story --the book being a long-form expose on the Vandals and their culture over the course of years.  I don't know how much of the adaptation is true because I never read The Bikeriders book.  Again, as much as I applaud the counter-culture element of it all, I'm definitely not into motorcycle culture.  Anyway, Johnny starts off the story as the most wholesome character imaginable.  He liked to race his bike with his friends.  He liked to talk bikes.  He's a big fan of The Wild One, a movie I now need to watch.  But because Marlon Brando likes to get into fights, Johnny models his bike club after this band of rebels that he watches on screen.

And for a while, there's something really sexy about being a rogue or an outlaw.  There's a reason that the rebel is such an appealing archetype.  THe notion of not playing by other people's rules is an appealing concept.  It's something I probably won't do.  I love me some rules too much.  But I get it.  It's that fantasy that I'm harboring.  But to bring it back to the Proud Boys, the Vandals under Johnny's watch gets pretty disturbing.  It's rebellion for rebellion's sake.  I kept having this thought that, as dark as the movie got at times when it came to violence and whatnot, that these were children out of something like Lord of the Flies.  Once these man-children had free reign and found out that no one was going to stop their awful behavior, everything had escalated to the point where it was no longer about the bikes.  That final scene with Johnny, most of the motorcycle club is sitting out in their cars, watching the carnage ahead of them unspool.  It misses the points of being passionate about what is liked.  

I'm having a stray thought that I want to follow.  I hope I don't lose my original thoughts.  Is The Bikeriders a criticism on fandom?  I tend to embrace some pretty healthy fandoms.  I'm a Star Trek and a Doctor Who fan.  I also like movies; hence the blog.  While there are incredibly toxic elements of any fandom, including the ones that I'm a part of, it seems like the more obsessive any fandom gets, the more awful it gets.  This is my whole sports thing.  Hardcore sports fans scare me.  They honestly do.  The amount of vitriol and investment that goes into that kind of tribalism is scary.  If today, I renounced my Star Trek fandom, few people would care.   Heck, the number might border on no one.  But when we look at The Bikeriders, people are almost killed for turning their back on their passion.  There's something repugnant about the shifting of priorities.  The most obvious example in the movie is Cockroach, who --in a drunken haze --reveals his passion for wanting to be a motorcycle cop.  Now, part of that comes from the anti-establishment guy embracing something that is so polar opposite from what Cockroach has embraced in the past.  But very little of it seems to be about the cop element.  It's the idea of turning in one's colors that illustrates obsessive fan behavior.  That's where Jeff Nichols sells me on the film as a whole.

The more obsessive the fan, the more it forgets the core of the belief.  Johnny is a victim of his own press.  He's a  guy who started a riding club.  The boys looked to him and he modelled himself after the rogue Marlon Brando.  It was boys playing dress up.  But as the film progressed, we see Johnny losing himself to the very cult he created.  The entire movie, he bemoans his position as the head of the Vandals.  He's always in a place where he wants to pass it off.  Part of that seems from personal exhaustion, being Johnny the Leader all the time.  But the other part of that is that he personally might not like what the Vandals have become.  The violence and debauchery is escalating.  Kathy is almost raped by the new members, whom Johnny laments as people who don't listen to him.  He has created a monster and he has to both feed it and kill it at the same time.  When he's gunned down by a zealot of the faith, it only makes the more sense.  Johnny goes from being the guy who is indulging in everyone's worst instincts to being the guy who has to be the stopgap on gangland criminality.  It's a fascinating role.  

I hate that I'm talking about Johnny so much, but his character was core to my initially not accepting this film to fully embracing it.  The part I actually liked throughout is the fact that Jodie Comer's Kathy is the main character of the film.  Okay, that might be easily debated.  She's definitely the narrator of the film.  We view all of the chaos from her, the closest thing we have as an avatar for a non-chopper culture. Comer is an amazing actress.  She's always been an amazing actress.  She might be the most underused and underrated actresses out there right now.  Comer takes Kathy and almost makes her a caricature, which is kind of brilliant. (This sounds like a backhanded compliment, so please bear with me.)  A lot of Kathy's relatability comes from the fact that we get that she was a Midwestern housewife who embraced a life of chaos because of love.  There's such a shorthand for how Kathy and Benny fall in love that we need Comer to make strong choices.  We get to understand that relationship that seems impossible and Comer does the heavy lifting on that.  I don't know what the real Kathy sounded like.  For all I know, Comer is dead-on doing an impression of the real Kathy and I'm giving her so much credit for making a strong decision.  But Kathy might be my favorite Jodie Comer role, and that's coming from a Killing Eve fan.  

Nichols challenges himself with this movie.  Considering that The Bikeriders isn't so much a traditional narrative --hence having a threadbare plot --it does act more like a cleverly crafted documentary.  Again, I'll always preach documentary over biopic.  (It's kind of a biopic, right?)   But he's got so many balls in the air, I'm amazed he lands them all.  The movie dances between Johnny, Kathy, and Benny.  Sometimes the three are all in the same scene. But Kathy's narrative is about what all three are doing, so she dances between all three personalities.  But every so often, we get this almost sympathetic story about a psychopath only referred to as The Kid.  The Kid is the White Walkers of the story.  He's there and he's closing in on our main characters.  We don't always know what The Kid's motivation is, but we know something major with this kid is going to happen.  Yeah, about ten minutes before the big Kid reveal happens, we can guess what that is going to be.  But by the time he shows up in the film, he feels inevitable.  It's a punch in the gut that the movie needs for the conclusion.  So good.

It's funny.  I haven't talked about Benny and I really consider a good chunk of this movie to be Benny's story.  Benny is the acolyte.  He's not a zealot, but he appears to be a zealot in so many scenes of the film.  I will clarify: Benny is unhealthy as can be.  I don't want a Benny in my life.  But Benny is almost the difference between a parishioner and a cultist.  The cultists need escalation.  Benny, for all of the crap that he doesn't want to do in this movie, is about the bike and the relationship.  The movie starts off with Benny refusing to take off his jacket in a bar.  Ultimately, this action leads to him in the hospital with a very real chance of losing his foot.  But the big fear isn't that he's going to lose his foot.  The real fear is that he will not be able to bike without a foot.  And for a long time, we're left really angry at Benny.  He makes his priorities clear.  The club comes first.  Kathy comes second.  His own needs come last.  (In a way.  He's incredibly selfish and self-sacrificing at the same time.) When that ending comes, it teases an element of doubt while still reassuring that Benny genuinely does love Kathy.  It's this really subtle change in him that had to be a nightmare to get just right.  Part of this probably goes to Austin Butler (who still has a bit too much Elvis to shrug off).  

The Bikeriders was something that I went into excited, lost that excitement, and then got it back in spades.  It's a mafia movie, if truth be told. But it's one of the good ones.