Not rated, but --if you couldn't guess --this movie is a movie about vulgarity.  It's tackling that line between art and filth.  As such, it really tries pushing that line as much as it can.  The entire last scene is pretty darn in-your-face. Per usual, Bergman uses infidelity as a form of passive cruelty and that is something that happens all throughout.  There's nudity in this film, coupled with what is meant to interpreted as a rape scene.  The movie is trying to push limits, which only makes me roll my eyes.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Guys, I'm so tired. Like, so tired.  I don't want to be writing about this.  I'm reading this really fascinating novel right now that is incredibly dense.  It's long and it isn't a fast read.  As such, I've been trying to find a few moments to knock this blog out.  It's not like I have nothing to say about this movie.  It's just that I'm starting to actively dislike Ingmar Bergman.  I know.  It's blasphemy.  Ingmar Bergman is one of the greatest auteurs of all time.  He's unimpeachable.  But The Rite almost encapsulates everything that frustrates me about Bergman.  And my takeaway about the man is that he is incredibly insecure.

To a certain extent, The Rite is almost an attack on me. It's almost in response to what I've been writing on this blog for the stretch of watching this box set.  Bergman is in that place where he, as a filmmaker, has crossed a societal line.  Bergman, with a streak of movies, has toyed with sexuality in both explicit and implied ways.  In some of these cases, I can see why sex has played such a forward and obvious role.  It isn't often, but some of his movies are shattering barriers and using the taboo to get there.  But my frustration is that it kind of became a bag of tricks.  When I am teaching either writing or acting, I say that the creative's worst enemy is their bag of tricks.  When I say that, I mean, that the artist knows what gets applause.  The problem with a bag of tricks is that it gets really repetitive.  My biggest criticism is that Bergman keeps returning to the same bag of tricks.  With the case of Bergman, his bag of tricks is infidelity and sex to push his audience out of their comfort zones.

But when sex becomes unsurprising, there might be a problem.  The conceit of The Rite is that an acting troupe is under investigation for performing lewd acts in their routine.  It's vague until the final reel of the movie.  Even in that case, barring the erotic costuming, the acts are more described than enacted.  Still, the point of the movie is that this is a movie that puts art on the stand. If there was ever a metacontext, it's this.  It's not very subtle to make a literal interrogation room as the alternating scenes in the story.  After all, if Bergman feels under attack (I know I'm doing the laziest form of analysis right now, but it's a miracle that I'm upright right now), the notion of being dragged in front of the interrogator is something that probably resonates quite a bit right now.

This is where it gets a little bit self-indulgent.  I mean, it's the part of the movie I like.  I won't even deny that I like self-indulgent stuff from time-to-time.  A lot of the movie is almost painfully cryptic, playing on the nature of reality.  After all, we see Sebastian set himself on fire in his Black-Box-style hotel room.  We also have a rape sequence that is treated so non-chalantly that we're not even sure what we saw in those moments.  But the final sequence flips the notion of the interrogation on its head.  As much as this entire film has been a brow-beating of the perverted artists, the real criminal is the interrogator.  And that's where society is put on the stand.  Yeah, when I say that this is self-indulgent, it's that Bergman makes his metaphor "Society is the real pervert" in this situation.  As much as Abrahamson is this bastion of morality and purity, going even as far tearing up a bribe given to him, he instead fetishizes the entire experience.  He goes into a prolonged confession, promising not to interrupt the performance at the end...only to continue to wedge himself into the story over-and-over.  

It's Abrahamson who sentences himself to death.  It's a really weird moment in a really weird moment, so we kind of forgive it.  If anything, the ritual that the trio perform, shy of being clothed in perversion, is fairly tame.  I actually give props to Bergman for this choice because, at this point in the film, nothing that Bergman can describe can live up to the expectations that society's perversion has already crafted for this final scene.  If anything, it is evokative of The Aristocrats, being something so ribald that anything that Bergman could have described would have only disappointed.  When he dies of a heart attack, the lewdness almost becomes symbolic of some greater imaginary horror that doesn't really affect the artists.  Yeah, the afterword tells that the artists were not allowed to perform those acts domestically.  But the almost apathetic tone that the final section offers is more of a commentary on Abrahamson than it is the artists.

There is the title.  And the costumes.  The title, juxtaposed to the costumes. I know that this was a TV movie in 1969.  From what I understand about the cultural zeitgeist, I don't think that The Rite was exactly one of those really impactful films that changed the way that we talked about art and sex.  But I can't help but make the connection to Eyes Wide Shut, the combination of the outfits with the masks and the acts involved.   As part of all that, the notion that this is something beyond the performance element that the movie says, but doesn't seem to believe is something that should be explored.  Honestly, the more noble and heady version of myself wants to preach that all art is a form of creation that mirrors God's relationship to the universe.  But if I'm grounding myself, as I should, that final sequence reads more like a religious ritual more than it does a stage performance.  After all, the performance doesn't happen in a theater.  The time of the performance is during the sunrise in a spot that offers sacrifice.  Couple this with all the fact that the actions that the trio performs is without narrative story, instead evoking a sense of a relationship with a higher being.  

Why does Bergman go to religious lengths?  I do think that he views art as the closest thing to spiritual ecstacy.  While there are a handful of his films that show moderate respect towards the religious, the canon of his films scream of a frustrated atheism.  When he creates a work, often one where he has to treat something that could be considered uncouth as a form of entertainment, there is a sacrificial element to that.  Yeah, I think that sacrifice loses all meaning because I'm binging all of his films over the course of a year.  But from his perspective, that's what's going on.  He is the artist and he is willing to sacrifice his audience for the sheer messy act of creation.

It doesn't change the fact that I don't like this one.  The Black-Box Theatre style of design isn't helping.  The fact that we're now tapping a much-drained well is also frustrating.  Maybe it's that I am more guarded getting behind the avant-garde, but this movie doesn't really do it for me.  Yeah, it's interesting exploring Bergman's relationship to his art, but it's all a bit on the nose for me.

Not rated, but this is another Bergman movie about adultery and the casual cruelty that people inflict on one another.  There's a lot of what I'd describe as "kinda nudity".  It's at a distance.  The characters are naked.  Often, you don't know if you are actually seeing what you are seeing.  There is one shot that clearly has nudity up close.  The film also has a scene that can at least be labeled as sexual assault if not full-on rape.  This leads into a character prostituting herself.  There's also a little bit of violence and blood and a character attempts suicide.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Do you know how happy I would be if I could just get this whole thing done while I have time?  I mean, I absolutely don't have the time to write this blog in one sitting.  But I'm going to be in a stage of constant overwhelmed-ness for as long as I can think and it would be nice to have a really nice, completed blog about Sawdust and Tinsel before what few insights I had about the movie disappear from me.

I am honestly worried about that, by the way.  I was watching this movie and I had these lovely thoughts about the film.  But I'm stressed out now and all of those thoughts seem to be leaving me.  I'm worried that, the further I get out from the film, the more this blog will turn into something about overall vibes as opposed to poignant analysis.  There's a slight burden to write about Sawdust and Tinsel as well, considering that it might be one of Bergman's bangers.  I mean, I liked it.  I actually liked it more than a lot of the other ones that I watched in the box set, but I wonder if I'm burdened by the knowledge that this is one of his classics.  I always feel like I have to open my heart a little more to the movies that carry a certain amount of renown rather than simply absorbing it with a blank slate.  Is it a bad thing that I liked a classic, even if it falls into a lot of the tropes that Bergman often hits?

I mean, I am honestly brutally tired of the fact that Bergman keeps making movies about infidelity.  With this case, maybe Bergman is landing on the same page I am about infidelity.  This is one of the movies where the characters' problems all stem from the fact that they are cheating on the person that they promised that they wouldn't cheat on.  That's, at least, progress for Bergman, who often treats infidelity as simply a fact of life.  But Sawdust and Tinsel doesn't exactly fight that thought either.  Like many of Bergman's other films, these characters keep welcoming infidelity into their lives.  These moments are almost dictated by fate rather than the product of willful choices coupled with negligence. Albert and Anne's relationship is one that is based on infidelity.  It's one of those weird Bergman relationships where she's a 10 and he's a 4.  But that seems to be the norm of these things so I choose to ignore that fact.  These two are the product of workplace infidelity.  Albert hasn't seen his family in three years because he lives a nomadic lifestyle with the circus.  Anne is aware of the fact that he technically is married with children and not-so-secretly curses that Albert must interact with these people, albeit irresponsibly and sparingly.  Still, she knows what's up.  The thing that Bergman perpetuates is that, even though Albert and Anne seem to thrive in each other's companies, they are bound to find partners in other places.

In the case of Albert, which treats the Albert-Anne coupling as the healthy relationship, Albert yearns for a life with his wife, who is thriving without him.  If anything, it is because she does not need him.  I can't help but think to Scenes from a Marriage, knowing that the power dynamic has shifted that makes the characters somehow more attractive.  Anne does the thing that I just saw in the last Bergman movie (which I'm ashamed to say that I don't remember the title to) that had this chaste character tease (IT'S CALLED THE DEVIL'S EYE!) Don Juan only to become actually seduced by him.  Maybe I don't necessarily like Bergman's characterization of women.  There's this idea that women go around gaining pleasure at titillating men only to become enraptured by them.  Anyway, with the case of Sawdust and Tinsel, at least it all falls apart because of their respective cruelty to the others.

But what I found fascinating is the cruelty of everyone.  Bergman movies aren't exactly the healthiest places to hang out.  What's funny is that I keep viewing any artist in these movies as representations of Bergman himself.  If my job is to analyze these movies, I'm going to make these leaps.  Albert, in my head, is Bergman.  Oddly enough, I think that many of us view Ingmar Bergman as a hoity-toity, artsy-fartsy type, more in line with Mr. Sjuberg (I hope I have the right character).  But I view Bergman more as the type that views film as a subserviant medium to classic theatre.  So, if my forced analysis holds true, Bergman views himself as the circus director, trying to wrangle his troupe of actors from one project to another with the hope of moderate success.  Anyway, there's almost this expectation in the film that Sjuberg and Albert would be comrades in the trenches.  Both of these characters have had to be vulnerable to their audiences, presented exaggerated forms of themselves for audiences.  They both have sacrificed a sense of normalcy for art.  But with the dynamic of Sjuberg and Albert, it becomes this bullying project of high art versus low art, tying into the title of Sawdust and Tinsel.  The sawdust and the tinsel, not being literal in the case of the movie, are how the circus achieves a sense of wonder while the high art theatre embraces pagentry and high brow performance.  These two should get along, but instead there is a scorn for the lower art.

For such a smarty-pants film, you'd think that I would have the presence of mind to ignore something completely arbitrary, right?  I mean, this is a movie from a smart person for smart people.  But the entire time, I just kept thinking that Albert would have destroyed Frans in that fight.  For the sake of the story, Albert needs to get to a real low point.  Losing to Frans is the thing that drives him to partake in a one-player game of Russian Roulette, ultimately leading him to slaughter the bear.  But from a practical perspective, Frans is a bit of a wimp.  He's a guy who has had it cushy his entire life.  (I'm imbuing this character with a silver spoon in his mouth, despite the fact that we get criminally little about the character.)  I say that he doesn't really have the gumption because he treats sex like a power grab.  He dominates women because that is whom he is able to manipulate.  He's a weak dude who likes playing sexual games because he gets off not on the act itself, but on the humiliation that comes along with that.  Albert, however, has been on the road for three years.  He's built like a cement truck and has probably fought his way out of more than one scrap.  He's pissed and this is his house.  You would think that a guy like that would completely destroy someone like Frans.  Still, we have this moment.

Before I forget, I don't know what it was about Sawdust and Tinsel, but it reminded me more of a Kurosawa movie, like Rashomon, than another Bergman movie.  Oddly enough, it was the clown Frost and that despondent look in his face that reminded me of that movie.  Okay, moving on.

The funny thing about this movie, once again about cruelty, is that none of the characters are all that likable.  The movie starts off with the humilation of Frost.  Frost is our most likable character and he's a wet mop throughout the movie.  He's threatened by an insane Albert, who is willing to take Frost's life at the end almost as a suicide pact between performers. But Albert acts like Frost and he are friends who are willing to die for one another.  But we have to remember that the film starts off with the other circus performers getting the giggles knowing that Frost's wife is unfaithful to him and likes to seduce soldiers by the shore.  I have to imagine that Bergman is commenting on the myth of the found family.  Sure, these people stick together at the end of the movie and continue their travels together, even sticking together during the fight between Albert and Frans.  But they all still derive joy from Frost's lowest moment.  In fact, we see Albert guffawing in the flashback to their saddest time together. They find joy in the fact that Frost, who never really seems to do anyone harm, is the most overwhelmed by life's constant sadness.  It should also be pointed out that, as much as the circus folk stick together during the fight in tent, none of them really try breaking it up.  Even beyond that thought is the notion that the audience for the fight seemed to glean more joy out of a fight between a cast member and a member of the audience.  Bergman thinks very little about the integrity of humanity. 

Sawdust and Tinsel is pretty great.  I don't quite know why.  I think when Bergman gives us characters that are a little bit more esoteric, there's something about the storytelling that becomes fascinating.  Had this been one of my first Bergmans, I think I would have enjoyed it more.  I am very tired of the notion of cruel infidelity as a casual act. The next movie I'm writing, also a Bergman, does the same thing and it's just depressing.  But he does what he does and I guess I can't complain about that too much.

PG-13 for a bit of language that almost hits an R-rating.  There is definitely one f-bomb in this.  There's also a lot of era-accurate anti-semitism, coupled with some some characterization that is less than flattering about Jewish people.  While the movie wasn't really all that offensive, the language did catch me off-guard more than once in the film.  This is one of those movies that talks a lot as opposed to showing anything that may be questionable.

DIRECTOR: Robert Redford

I keep thinking that I'm giving myself a vacation from writing the blog...and then I watch another movie.  I'll be honest...I'm not sure that I've seen this one before or not.  Like, part of me is fairly convinced that I've seen it.  But I can't say that I remember any part of this movie outside of simply being part of the cultural zeitgeist.  Quiz Show, like a lot of movies from the '80s and '90s, might be the byproduct of a fading understanding of modern classics.  In my head, of course I have to watch Quiz Show.  People have made Quiz Show references.  But I am also painfully aware that, as people are consuming less and less non-FOMO media, this may be one of the last blogs about Quiz Show shy of novelty blogs who watch things ironically.

I want to dive directly into the moral ether here.  I desperately want to explore how I am a fundamentally different person than I was in 1994.  Admittedly, I was 11 at the time, which is the same age my son was.  He watched this with me until his bedtime.  But I also want to explore how I'm a different person than I was in 2016.  There was a time that I would have held Quiz Show as the quintessential film about the role of integrity and truth.  I'm pretty sure that, if I have seen Quiz Show before, it probably would have been in my early 20s.  Either in college or after college.  There was a period where I had watched so many movies in a contained period of time that I was sure to lose memory of if I've seen the movie or not.  But the thing that I like to think that I hold fast and true to is the notion of representing truth.  Ultimately, what Robert Redford made here was a movie about the importance of truth, even when nobody is really looking.  One of the central themes of the film is the notion that Dick Goodwin's investigation of Twenty-One comes out of the belief that the American people are being lied to and that is wrong.  

I should point out that I mostly liked the movie.  I might kvetch about Redford's take on 1958 is a bit too nostalgic and White.  But if we're looking at a movie that takes apart nuance, that's where Redford shines.  Okay, just be aware, that as I gripe and moan, it's part of the investigation of the nuance of the film.  Back to my central idea!  Dick Goodwin is looking into Twenty-One because they tout to be one of the most honest and challenging quiz shows on television.  When there are rumblings that things may not be completely above board, Goodwin becomes this one-man taskforce investigating how corrupt television is.  In the process, he realizes that he might be destroying a lot of people's lives, which is not his intent.  Redford goes even a step further, adding a lot of moral grey area for the contestants.  Van Doren, considering that he's the most charming and genuinely intelligent men you could possibly meet, comes across a little bit like a puppy / puppet in this grand design over at NBC.  He wants to make the most entertaining television possible.  He wants to advance the social cause for the advancement of education, championing his own vocation as professor while being a compelling and marketable contestant on this show.  He keeps hearing that this is how television is made.  He initially has hang-ups, but also had the issue of being a fish out of water.  After all, the guys who are telling him that it is okay to get the questions ahead of time do this all the time. He's the rookie who doesn't seem to know any better.  When he's wrapped up in a federal investigtion, he has come so far that he has almost no option but to lie.

Bravo, Redford.  It's what makes the movie interesting.  The bad guy is a guy who means well.  The foil to Van Doren, Stempel, is correct in his commitment to the truth, but is also wholly unlikable.  I don't love that Herbie Stempel, played by John Turturro, is often marred by Jewish stereotypes.  I would say that it might be something that is unconsequential to the story, but Stempel's entire argument --and rightly so --is that Jewish contestants tend to get dethroned by more likable and more traditionally handsome White males.  Sure, it makes the movie more complex knowing that Stempel is right and that he's the voice of truth in this movie.  But he's also incredibly unlikable, often harming the people around him for the sake of getting ahead.  He's not there as this bastion of truth, fighting for the underdog. Herbie Stempel is only bringing this to light because of his addiction to the limelight and that brings up all kind of questionable reads on the film as a whole.

But this is about me, right?  I made that my central point.  Quiz Show has the ironic position of being a movie that is commenting on 1958 Tinseltown from the position of 1994 when really, I view this movie commenting on the naivete of the '90s in the shadow of Trump's America.  Yeah, I'm going to go there again.  I've mentioned many times on this blog, simply due to the sheer glut of entries, that I'm a Star Trek fan.  Often, Star Trek roots its argument as one of integrity above all things.  After all, lying is not befitting of a Starfleet officer.  And I can get behind it.  As much as my faith has directed me to make moral choices, I can't deny that optimistic, ethically-challenging space operas have had almost more of an impact.  I do believe in truth.  (I also believe in justice and a better tomorrow.  I'm going to put "The American Way" on hold for this time period.) Quiz Show, at its core, is about the danger of the white lie.  The voiceover by Dan Enright as a dejected Charles Van Doren walks away talks about how everything is a lie.  No one was hurt.  People wanted to see a winner get all the questions right and that's what NBC provided for them.  It makes this whole idea kind of murky because we're meant to find Dan Enright a bit of a slimeball.  

Dan Enright, as the movie progresses, gets grosser and grosser.  He tells dangerous lies for the sake of protecting the show and avoiding the corporate bigwigs at NBC and Geritol from feeling any blowback that might come from negative press.  It doesn't take a lot to get me to rally against millionaires and billionaires on this blog.  If anything, I'm itching for the opportunity to take them down. I, too, hate NBC in this.  We're supposed to.  So when Dan ends the film with those words, excusing the comfortable lie, we're meant to hold him to task.  The problem is...Dan Enright's kind of right.

I think that Redford, as much as he made a movie using this line as the foundation for the story, might also agree with that.  After all, he intentionally muddied the waters.  Dick Goodwin doesn't get what he's shooting for, the studio heads.  Instead, the people he's trying to protect, like Charles Van Doren, come across as the real victims.  Redford presents something that is meant to be debated and not come to terms with.  And here's why I think that Dan Enright might be correct.

Illusion is art.  Sure, the game Twenty-One might be a cash grab.  But, as I'll be talking about in my next blog about Sawdust and Tinsel, there is value in both high art and low art.  For those unaware of George Melies, please watch Hugo.  It's a gorgeous movie about a fascinating man.  Yeah, it's historical fiction, but the history part is still mostly intact.  Melies, like many magicians, presented illusions as reality.  It's the reason that we find magic to be something so beautiful.  We know, in the back of our minds, that the laws of physics --when it comes to magic trick --are not being broken.  But those people who allow their minds to believe in the impossible, even if for a moment, appreciate magic all that much more than the broken skeptic.  The reason that Twenty-One presented all of the showmanship of locking up the questions in a bank vault is the magic trick.  That is an extra step that is unnecessary to a quiz game.  We don't tend to do that anymore.  Game shows, as fun as they may be, aren't required viewing as much as they used to be.  It doesn't change the fact that we have replaced the bank vault for moving lights and lavish sets.  There's a line in The Incredibles that my son and I quote all the time.  Bob ask the little kid what he's waiting for and the kid replies, "I don't know.  Something amazing, I guess?"  What Twenty-One provided was the notion that people were capable of amazing, impossible things.

Now, does this mean that all truth is dead?  No.  I think the problem I have is that there is truth that matters and truth that doesn't matter.  Sure, the commandment is "Thou shall not bear false witness," implying that lying, from any perspective, is morally awful.  (Note: In my intro level ethics class, I fought that some lying was not only morally neutral, but a good.  I was debated for a long time by a professor who did not convince me, but I also acknowledge that this man spent his entire career doing this and I wasn't going to have ground to stand on as a layman.)  It's just that I like the notion of the magician being coy about truth while I hate the President demolishing the White House after saying he wasn't going to touch it.  I hate that the same man sent a legal resident to a foreign country and called him a human trafficker / gang member because it made his job easier.  I hate that he sent the military into cities because they're war-ravaged hellholes when, in truth, he just wanted to flex dominance.  That's lying.  When an artist tells you to "trust me," there's joy in knowing that, ultimately, knowing the emotional truth of something is far more interesting than the reality of what happened.  When I look at conflicting moments in the Bible, I don't think that the Bible's lying to me.  I think people are telling a story where the reality may miss the details, but the core of it is the truth of the moment.  

Yeah, the NBC people deceived its audience.  Some people might be mad about it.  But I also know that there are millions of wrestling fans who are told by non-fans that wrestling is fake, but they still choose to believe.  I know that The Blair Witch Project scared me pretty good when I was in high school because the producers told me it was real.  I cherish that illusion because, for a second, I had to question the world around me.  Yeah, was I glad when I found out the reality of the situation?  Sure.  I'm going to deep dive anything.  Do I hate AI?  Sure.  I hate it because that lie hurts people.  But an artist, even as low art as something like a game show, tells its audience that they are making the impossible possible?  I don't hate that.  It's not a moral good, but it is the choice of an artist and I think that might be something else.

Also, everyone watch F for Fake.  That's a better version of this story.

PG-13, but that's only by a hair.  If you have any memory of the Leslie Nielsen franchise entries, the point is to push the line of what is considered in questionable taste.  As such, the movie has both sex and sexual innuendo.  There is also a lot of death, but the death is all silly nonsense.  If anything, one consistent trait is that there is a lot of inappropriate stuff, but all done in a lighthearted and intentionally silly tone.  

DIRECTOR: Akiva Schaffer

Guys!  I don't have to write about another horror movie.  I just found out that a horror movie that I was mildly excited about watching just dropped on Netflix and I said, "No, thank you."  I'm in the mood for lighter stuff now.  We actually had a  bit of a discussion in class today for what genre is most appropriate for November.  My argument is that November is for rom-coms.  It's cozy.  It's nice.  We're not fully Christmas, but we're detoxing from the mass death that was Spooky Season.  I don't know.  You tell me.

I have to apologize for this blog, by the way.  I watched The Naked Gun in the least condusive way imaginable.  In fact, it was so bad that it gave me a very specific perspective on the movie.  I watched the first half of the movie three weeks ago and then finished it up two nights ago.  I know!  It's not that long of a movie.  We planned to getting around to it, but then we discovered that our lives are horribly busy and it slipped our minds.  Now, how does this give me insight into a movie like The Naked Gun?  My theory is that comedy is all about circumstance and environment.

I remember watching The Wedding Singer in the theater.  It was packed.  These were in the halcyon days of people actually going out to the cinema in droves, especially when it came to opening nights.  People saw everything and that was heaven.  (Note:  It was in this moment that i realized how much I miss going to the movies, let alone going to the movies regularly.)  Seeing The Wedding Singer with a loud and boisterous audience made that movie seem like the funniest thing that had ever existed.  It was so good that I had to purchase the movie on home video as soon as it was available.  (I don't have a date in my head, so I don't remember if it was VHS or DVD.  I think DVD because I owned that DVD for a while.) But when I watched it at home, by myself, it wasn't all that funny.  If anything, I remember being kind of put off by the movie.  Now, I wasn't sure if it was a matter of having already seen the jokes, the surprise element was gone or if it came down to the fact that I was watching the movie alone that damned the film.  I do believe that film should be a communal experience.  But even more than just film, I do believe that comedy thrives on the symbiotic relationship of the people in the theater.  

When it comes to The Naked Gun, I loved the first half.  My wife and I watched the first half and I found myself giggling throughout.  So was she.  I was surprised.  My wife is a classy lady and The Naked Gun movies have never shied away from their targeted audiences of juvenile men.  But watching it together, we were chuckling pretty hard.  But we started it late and we had to get up.  Three weeks later, I was excited to finish the movie.  I don't think that my wife gave it a second thought.  If anything, she was doing anything that she could to tune the movie out.  She was on her phone and on her laptop throughout the film, so I felt like I was watching it alone.  And, as a result, I thought the second half of the movie wasn't very good.

Now, the odds that Akiva Shaffer made a movie where the first half was comic genius and the second half was unfunny buffoonery can't be accurate.  Instead, I realized that it was most likely the circumstances.  A lot of you are saying, "Of course that's how it works.  That's life."  I'm not a complete moron.  Just a partial one.  The bigger problem is wondering how to approach a film when writing about it when you have so much user baggage determining if something is funny.  It's not like I didn't laugh at all in that second half.  (Although, the snowman scene that everyone talked about made me want to laugh, but that was me trying to meet the movie halfway.) 

Part of what I need to come to grips with is that I miss comedies and the theatrical experience of those comedies.  While there is mounting evidence that movie theaters are dying a prolonged slow death, I don't know how much of that data is subjective or if they actually are dying.  Let's say this: I miss going to the movie theaters.  If I didn't have so many kids and so much responsibility, I would be going to the movies all the time.  The Naked Gun is a movie that needs a packed house to work as well as some of the bits allow.  I refuse to call this movie a "stupid comedy", although my guts desperately want me to.  For a long time, I've held onto the notion that many of the comedies that we dismiss as "stupid" might be some of the smartest writing that is out there.  I'm a guy who laughs going on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disney World.  I find puns and timing to be something that brings me great joy.  From a writing perspective, a lot of The Naked Gun works.  Golly, there are a lot of beautiful cornball jokes in the movie.  

But, then, why do I hate the Scary Movie franchise?  I mean, I kind of liked The Naked Gun.  The Naked Gun, all of the movies, including stuff from Police Squad!, are in the same genre as Scary Movie.  These are all spoof / parody films.  I also liked most of Mel Brooks's canon, especially when I was in high school.  Is it because I'm a snob?  Maybe.  So much of The Naked Gun was me saying, "Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson have no right being this good in this movie."  But I do question whether or not it was their straight talent or if it was the novelty of it all.  That really might be the case for how I'm feeling about the movie.  It does feel like a bit of a novelty to revisit the world of The Naked Gun.  These movies are incredibly silly and have no pretense of being more than what they are presenting.

Maybe that's the frustrating thing when it comes to trying to write about these movies.  I am a different person than I was when Leslie Neeson was my Frank Drebin.  (This very vague and indecisive blog was brought to you by "Subjectivity."  It's what's for YOUR dinner.)  I'm now in a world where I'm looking at all art as something that's meant to change its audience.  For the most part, with the exception of my favorite joke in the movie, the movie is apolotical (which I cannot stress enough, is a form of politics.) While I want more movies like The Naked Gun, I honestly don't see much point in them.  I've probably used this simile dozens of time on this blog in various entries, but this feels like just eating frosting.  There's no substance to The Naked Gun outside the fact that it has some absolutely silly jokes and it seems like I should be happy for Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson.  Every part of this movie is executed to what the director wanted.  There's nothing wrong with the movie.  But I also know that, when my wife stopped watching the movie, I found it unfunny.  That's frustrating because the movie did nothing wrong outside of fail to deliver anything of deep meaning, which was the movie's goal.  

Why do I have to hold The Naked Gun to a standard of quality of a Criterion picture?  There is value to high and low art.  We need low art to appreciate high art.  Similarly, low art has value in itself.  The jokes work, but gosh darn it if 90% of the jokes seem to have dislodged themselves from my brain because they were mostly fine.  I want to like this movie more than I do and that's a huge bummer.