PG-13.  Yeah, that reads about right for this movie.  It's a high school dramedy, which means there's going to be a lot of high school related behavior.  I mean, the movie is primarily about bigotry, so attitudes of bigotry are really heavily stressed.  But the movie also seems to also consider Christians to be the worst.  The language isn't exactly the cleanest.  So, yeah, PG-13.  

DIRECTOR:  Ryan Murphy

I miss movie theaters.  I know that they are open and that a vocal amount of people are saying that I should be going to the movie theaters or else they will be shut down.  But I'm also very much in the camp of "Coronavirus be killing people and I don't have to go to the movies."  Yeah, it is awful that businesses are hurting, but I do appreciate the opportunity to watch movies from my streaming services.  Keeping people at home is what we need to be doing right now, so bravo to big budget films being released from home.   So I watched The Prom (which I honestly thought was only named Prom) because it was a theatrical release and we were wrapping Christmas presents.  I didn't know much about it, but I like James Corden sometimes and my wife digs these kinds of movies.  Man...I'll tell you: That was rough.

Okay, it might be dangerous to be wading through these waters, so I will talk about the things the movie absolutely nails first.  I can see this being an important film for the sake of representation.  In terms of being unafraid to say what needs to be said, The Prom goes all in.  It really sells its message of bigotry and leaves nothing to the subtext.  (I'll comment how that's a negative thing later.)  For the people who loved this movie and needed this movie, I'll never try and take that away from you.  Some people straight up needed this film to come out and, just because I'm not one of those people, doesn't mean it doesn't detract from the good it accomplishes there.  Also good is the amount of money thrown at this movie.  It doesn't look cheap at any time.  There are big name actors and the singing and dancing works.  In terms of throwing a big-budget spectacle at us, that was --indeed--accomplished.

And now I lay into this movie.  I know I'm not alone in disliking it.  When I put it on, my wife stated, "I heard it was getting awful reviews."  I knew almost nothing about it except that it was going to be a major release on the same day as it got into theaters.  But I also know that she loves-loves-loves musicals and I've been trying to be more open-minded about contemporary musicals.  So we powered through it.  The first major takeaway I can give is that I thought we were past a lot of this kind of stuff.  I'm not talking about the themes.  The themes are fine.  I'm talking about playing stereotypes for laughs, especially by the straight community.  I know that James Corden is a straight man who is heavily involved in the musical theater community.  He's very talented.  But Barry Glickman isn't a nuanced character at all.  James Corden is playing the gay best friend as offensively as can be imagined.  

Barry Glickman, two decades ago, would have been brave as get-out.  He would have turned heads and started controversy.  But we now live in an era where gay characters exist that have levels.  Their single most trait isn't being gay.  Instead, they are multifaceted.  "But aren't there people like Barry?"  I'm sure.  But that's true about all stereotypes.  Someone lives up to the stereotype.  That's probably where a lot of stereotypes root themselves, besides in the bigotry of others.  Everything that Barry seems to do is fabulous.  His backstory, while tragic, is a cookie-cutter backstory.  There's nothing in Barry's arc that didn't get telegraphed from the beginning of the story.  I guess the same could be said of Meryl Streep's Dee Dee Allen.  I get that Meryl has a very devoted community and that it almost seems blasphemous to comment at all negatively on the work of Ms. Streep.  But her musical characters (I'm basing this entirely off of Mamma Mia!) don't exactly shock me.  Dee Dee is an archetype.  Heck, almost everyone in this movie is an archetype.  There's no actual character work in this movie.  It's all tropes and archetypes with music.  That's not challenging to me.  Considering that the movie is here to challenge, why would the same old thing done again be so challenging?

The Prom is a message movie.  It should be.  Great art challenges its audience.  A message, seemingly by definition, should challenge its audience to change its mind.  There's nothing actually challenging in this film.  I've rarely seen a movie scream, "I'm right, so deal with it!" louder than The Prom.  And this is where character work comes into the story.  The one character who actually kind of works is Emma, who might or might not be the protagonist.  A protagonist is the one who has the goal and does things to change her environment.  Emma has the most to gain or lose according to the plot.  But very little time in the movie actually devoted to Emma.  Emma, played by Jo Ellen Pellman, is kind of subservient to the notion that we haven't really heard of Ms. Pellman.  (She's a Cincinnati girl, so she gets points from that alone.)  Instead, we're focused on the celebrities in the movie, most notably Meryl Streep, James Corden, and Keegan-Michael Key.  Yes, these characters have arcs and goals, but the stakes are really low for them.  Dee Dee and Barry are already trying to do the right thing, but they are doing it for the wrong reason.  When they realize that it is for the right reason, that's when they become heroic.  That's pretty low stakes right there.  Keegan-Michael Key, starts the story pretty heroically and ends the story pretty heroically.  The only thing that changes is that he has a relationship at the end that doesn't really make a ton of sense.  (I hope I'm not more ageist than I think I am.)  But Emma has everything to lose.  Her life is a mess and these people seem to be making it worse. 

But Emma's personality is way too go-with-the-flow.  Emma should be the center of this movie, but she's kind of treated as a Macguffin.  Emma's happiness is key to the whole story.  But Emma is excited to have these people fight for her.  She's way too optimistic for things to work out.  When she's hurt, it is genuine hurt, but it really doesn't cause her to have agency.  Even when she says she's going to take on the battles herself, she really keeps on delegating it to the actors from Broadway.  Emma needs to be the hero of this story, but she's completely passive to much larger personalities.  That's where the movie completely falls on its face.  Emma didn't do much to change the outcome of what happened.  Instead, she leaned heavily into people who had only a tertiary investment in the story.  It's really a weird call.

Why is Nicole Kidman in the movie?  I get why you would hire Nicole Kidman.  She's great.  We just started The Undoing.  Don't spoil it for me more than it already has been spoiled.  I'm saying...her character has nothing to do in this movie.  It's almost as if Nicole Kidman was visiting her friends on set and they just asked her to stick around.  They even gave her a song.  That's fine.  But she has no investment in this story.  She's kind of one of the spoiled actors, but then she really isn't that out of touch with everyone in the story. I mean, I get why Trent Oliver is there.  He's there to be comic relief to the already abundant amount of comic relief characters in the story.  Also, he's there to have varying degrees of intellect.  Sometimes, he's super dumb.  Sometimes, he's somewhat wise.  But he's also super judgmental.  It's just that this movie needs a few characters and it gave us too many characters, a lot of them who have nothing to do.

But the biggest disappointment of the group is Ryan Murphy.  Ryan Murphy isn't my favorite.  He's very It right now, which is good for him.  I loathed Glee.  I liked American Horror Story.  But the one thing that I kind of got out of Ryan Murphy is the fact that he will push the envelope.  He's kind of daring in his creations, but nothing in this movie feels...special?  It feels actually kind of vapid. Like, this feels like the fan draft of a script and everyone just seems to embrace it.  Again, I love seeing Broadway shows, but a lot of those shows don't translate out to make the greatest movies?  That's what kind of feels like it is going on here.  It feels like a sanitary version of what should be way gutsier.  I'm actually mad that Ryan Murphy's name is on this.  Like, do this movie, but do something amazing with it.  Instead, it just feels like another movie that I will forget over time.

I really didn't like this movie, guys.  I never got to the point of hate watching it, but it is just constantly filled with disappointments and missteps.  There was an opportunity there to make something amazing and instead, we just got judgey garbage. (I never went on my litany about how Kerry Washington's character was the most lightswitch character since Anakin Skywalker, but know that's on my heart.)

PG-13, but it really teeters on the R-Rating.  There's implied sexuality.  There's lots of low-key language in the movie.  But the biggest thing I noticed is how different the culture was.  There's some jokes about being too PC in the movie.  Men are constantly referring to women in derogatory terms.  There were just a bunch of moments where I visibly cringed based on what was considered acceptable a little over a decade ago.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Marc Webb

Gosh darn it, (500) Days of Summer!  Because you have parentheses in your title, my formatting above just looks stupid now.  What's the title?  What's not the title?  Why is it all bookended like that?   This is all going to affect my blog entry in a negative way.  Take that, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2's Marc Webb!

Real background for this movie:  When I was still teaching the film class, my first assignment was to make a chart of my students' favorite movies with explanations of why their movie was supercool.  It gave me some touchstones to use when discussing film techniques, which went a long way to simplifying ideas.  I also liked to see when a students' movie tastes changed due to the course of the film.  (I rarely tried to change their minds about movies, but I did often comment on The Green Hornet being someone's number one film.) One of my students, Number-One-with-a-Bullet was (500) Days of Summer.  Every project somehow referred to this movie, usually as a central means of support for an argument.  Now, I had seen this movie before.  I even remember being kind of impressed by it.  There's even a chance that an old Flixster account has an entry by me (probably containing far more offensive language)  (Also note: Flixster is now very different than it used to be.) about this movie.  

But I saw this movie in 2009.  In 2009, I was super happy.  I had just started dating the woman who would become my wife.  I started my teaching profession.  I had slipped out of that stage of arrested development and found purpose for my life.  2009 was a great year.  So did I want to be watching a movie telling me how miserable relationships can make you?  Listen, I hear my student instantly chiming in, talking about how I completely missed the point of the film and that relationships are celebrated in this movie.  I firmly disagree that Webb effectively communicates this idea.  The closest I think that he gets is the notion that relationships are not always rainbows and sunshine, but rather a combination of neuroses and hang-ups that may or may not lead to you finding the one.  

I had a stack of movies that really spoke to the inner cynic for years.  See, before 2009, dating was terrible.  Finding the right person in your life definitely shifts how you view everything.  It's not to say that everything in my marriage is always about happiness.  That would be crazy.  But I would say that my wife has made my life infinitely better.  So this stack of movies, which would include High Fidelity, The Science of Sleep,  and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, would absolutely reaffirm my cynicism for years.  Now, these films are good films.  I would put (500) Days of Summer on this list as well.  These are all good movies.  It's just that...many of these movies don't speak to me any more like they used to.  Eternal Sunshine, that's something special.  It still might be my favorite movie.  But there's also so little to relate to that it almost becomes a form of voyeurism.  "Look at those sad people," I'd say.  "Aren't they sad?"  And that's probably a very snooty way to look at unhappiness.

But there's probably one thing that is very common in all of these stories:  they are very clearly and loudly written by men.  I used to find this praiseworthy.  I would consider these men heroes, talking about their feelings and talking about feelings that I would share with these people.  Women were the worst and can't a good guy just catch a break.  Tom is a good guy.  He is nice.  He works hard on the relationship.  Sure, he calls the girl he likes the b-word (again, very dated) when she doesn't reciprocate his feelings.  And now, looking back, I can't help but read the film without a sense of entitlement.  Tom and his friends are entitled punks who actually have it pretty good in life.  One of the more tone deaf elements of the film is how the movie portrays the life of Summer.  The movie shows how Summer is this unicorn.  Everyone in the world wants Summer.  This has always been the case.  But the movie also implies that Summer is completely ignorant to that fact.  Instead of viewing this as a problem, considering that Summer is ogled everywhere she goes, it is something that makes her special.  So the fact that Summer might have agency is almost completely lost on Tom.  There's a hint of that in the movie, but only a hint.  Summer likes Tom of her own free will.  Okay, that's cool.  But Tom assumes that, when he receives even the slightest invitation to come into her life, that it means that he has to pursue her romantically.

Eventually, the movie will get to this point.  When Summer invites him to the party towards the end of the 500 days, his expectations are absurd.  The problem is, by this point, I think I dislike Summer too. There's a scene where Tom is on a blind date post-Summer.  It goes comically bad and the date says, after Tom bemoans Summer's behavior, that he didn't have it that bad.  She was up-front with him about her expectations.  She didn't cheat on him and wasn't abusive.   The commentary is "Well, what was wrong?"  I applaud the writers and the directors for at least exploring this avenue.  Tom's obsession with Summer was toxic and he did have it better than he made it out to be.  But on the other end of the scale, that's one of the places that Summer kind of sucked.  Summer's justification of her aloofness gave her too much power.  Because she refused to let herself be vulnerable around Tom, there was no chance that the relationship was going to grow naturally.  It wasn't mutually beneficial.  It is an example of Summer trying to get what she wants versus what they want together.  I suppose I could accuse Tom of the same thing, but there's no way for that to be a joint issue.  There's no compromise there and it's a little bit uncomfortable.

Then there's the idea that Summer is completely aware that she's keeping Tom on the hook.  The wedding scene is kind of gross all around.  It makes sense that he has unreasonable expectations when she's being secretive around him.  And there's no real way for Tom to not have unreasonable expectations when arriving to the party.  He has made his intentions with Summer very clear.  She's so adamant that the two of them are friends that she intentionally avoids telling him about a fiancé?  It's because Summer likes being liked.  Now, I'm kind of backpedaling here and being gross, but that's where my commentary comes back into play.  The male authors and the male director don't really make Tom out to be that bad of a guy.  Instead, anything that goes wrong with the relationship is Summer's fault.  There's a line in there where Tom is encouraged to turn his pain into art.  While that's a good idea, I don't think the script, whatever it was based on, is anything near being objective.  If anything, this feels like a Facebook public breakup.  The authors are moving on through art, but it does kind of leave the Summers of the world to fend for themselves with an unfinished narrative.  There are moments where the creators seem to be gracious with Tom's spiraling, but it probably doesn't get anywhere close to the truth of the situation.

But in terms of moviemaking, (500) Days of Summer is pretty.  It's everything I love out of indie romantic comedy.  Sure, I'll always love Zooey Deschanel's Jessica Day from New Girl more than Summer, but I get the idea behind idolizing someone.  The movie, with its music and imagery, sells the concept of a fun relationship well.  Summer, in some ways, becomes the ideal girl.  Yeah, I would probably be annoyed by her pretty quickly.  But the filmmakers have given her taste and just the right amount of twee to make this a great love story.  Yeah, I don't love that it is super-broey in its creation, but that doesn't detract from Marc Webb's vision for the film.

R for language and alcoholism.  Mank drinks like a fish and does horrible things when he drinks.  He drinks to the point where he vomits in front of a group of high-fallootin' big-wigs.  Realize, I'm stating that you see vomit in all its barfy glory.   In terms of visual things, it probably would be considered pretty tame.  Someone kills himself, but you only see the flash of the gun firing.  Still probably a genuine R-rating.

DIRECTOR: David Fincher

A former student actually wrote me about this one.  I got a Facebook Messenger announcement out-of-the-blue from a student I haven't talked to in years begging me to watch this movie.  I mean, I was planning on doing so already.  But knowing me, I would have sat on my hands about it for a while, hoping that my wife would be excited about watching it one day.  But when my rental copy of Silence had a scratch on it, I used that opportunity to push Mank up the list, thus giving this blog a bit of timeliness to it.

One of the things about Citizen Kane, besides the fact that I've seen it far too many times, is that it is one of those movies that is an impressive watch, but rarely do I have fun with it.  I'm never going to attack that movie in my wildest dreams, but there is something that maybe doesn't transcend the way that it used to.  Part of it comes from knowing that there's a greater metanarrative happening with the film that gives the events on screen a degree of importance that it otherwise wouldn't have.  I mean, it would always be an impressive film regardless, but knowing that Orson Welles was directly taking on William Randolph Hearst is what makes the film so captivating.  But Hearst has always been a historical figure for me.  And he's not even a part of history where we have an association with.  I knew that he had a media empire and that he was always greedy for more, and a lot of that I gleaned from Citizen Kane itself.  

So seeing Mank does a lot for me.  Its goal is to make Citizen Kane personal again.  I'm eventually going to steer away from this point.  But its primary goal is successful.  I was tempted to watch Citizen Kane again.  I mean, it's just sitting there on the shelf and I haven't written about it yet, so it should be a win-win.  The only thing that is really stopping me is the notion that I have other movies that I'm really itching to watch, so that's all put into perspective. But this does make the story far more important.  See, Citizen Kane was always kind of an intellectual task for me.  It was about Orson Welles going up against corporate Hollywood and releasing possibly the most influential movie that ever existed.  And the logical historian about me always understood that.  But Mank does something that I didn't really think possible: it made me root for the movie.  Because I am burdened with the knowledge of the future, I have a hard time empathizing with the people who really fought this battle.  It also didn't help that Welles himself is a larger-than-life personality and that makes it hard to relate to him.  But Mank is a drunk.  He's a smart drunk, but he's a guy who keeps making mistakes.  He was never meant to be Hollywood's messiah.  He wanted to be part of the establishment, but his darned morality kept getting in the way.  That's what I find really interesting.  

Mank is this guy that would be criticized by the Church.  He has a very strong set of morals.  He hates the corporate system and the studio heads who get rich while the poor get poorer.  He sees poverty around it and wants it to end.  But he's also a man who enjoys his comfort a little too much.  He likes what he does and he enjoys his notoriety.  He has become a caricature of himself and he revels in it.  He bemoans the greed of the upper crust, but never really does much to stop it.  Instead, he thrives on being a thorn in people's sides.  But when push comes to shove, he causes more misery than he fixes.  What ends up becoming of this is that Citizen Kane becomes a film of redemption.  Mank's key fault, which is the root of his alcoholism, is his narcissism.  He's disappointed that despots aren't being as efficient as they could possibly be.  He realizes that he would make a truly evil bad guy and that oddly sours his reaction to other people.

It's so odd that Mank is the protagonist of this piece.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm thrilled that he is.  But he's also the guy who screws things up for everybody.  I went into this movie hoping to get the emotional attachment needed for Citizen Kane, which I again got.  But I really got spellbound by the Upton Sinclair stuff that the movie offered.  Perhaps it's because I've evolved into a truly vocal hippie since I've seen the despotism associated with President Trump.  But Mank is playing the sidelines to both Orson Welles and Upton Sinclair.  He's this guy in the center of history who has the power to change the world and he makes things worse.  It all comes down to the tragic moment with the King Kong metaphor.  We live in an era of yellow journalism once again.  Fox News and the like have created these stories out of thin air and I wonder what history would look like had Fox News never been created.  But Mank has that moment very concrete for him.  Despite his vocal progressivism, he's the guy who came up with the idea for a Fox News.  He states plainly that the movie studios have the power to change minds.  And he didn't do it out of a sense of patriotism.  He did it because he wanted to be right.

Mank, for as alcohol-ridden and cocky as he is, is oddly sympathetic.  Like, he sucks.  I would never want Mank in my life.  He would be insufferable.  But he's sympathetic because he's the Icarus narrative.  He was always so right about everything, minus the gambling situations, that he wanted credit for everything.  But the entire film is about the road to redemption.  The broken leg is symbolic of a man who is broken and struggling to health.  It's odd to see that it involves the embrace of his greatest vice, the sauce, to get him back to where he's supposed to be.  But it is embracing the Mr. Hyde that he has that makes him oddly lovable.  There's a line in the movie where Mank's nurse confesses that Mank spends his paycheck saving people from despots.  That's this eye-opening moment to who the man really is.  But we also realize that everything he does is an attempt at self-flagellation.  The audience should realize that Mank hates himself more than any enemy he has.  It's actually pretty bizarre that Orson Welles forms such an animosity for this guy because the more heroic that Mank becomes, the less Orson seems to like him.  

Why doesn't Orson like him?  Part of it seems to come across as wanting to be Hollywood's one and only bad boy.  I know a lot about Orson Welles.  I studied him a lot.  Welles thrives on being downtrodden and oppressed.  I mean, I totally dig him and some of the greatest things in my life come from the oppression that Orson thrust upon himself, notwithstanding wine commercials. So when Mank out martyrs himself in front of Orson Welles, I can see that being this moment of contention.  It's interesting to watch.  It's so bizarre, actually, that Welles is not a bigger character in this story because it is impossible to divorce Orson Welles from Citizen Kane.  But I think it really works.  Orson Welles has always stolen the spotlight and this movie shows that there's more to this era of history than Orson Welles himself.  Similarly, I can't believe how little of William Randolph Hearst we get.  Instead, our peek into the world of Hearst comes from Marion Davies.  I'm not quite sure what the relationship between Davies and Mank actually is, but there's something larger than life about the whole thing.  

Davies is a hard one to nail down.  She genuinely seems like an innocent in all of this.  She is oddly optimistic, despite the muck that is surrounding her at all times.  From a cold-hearted perspective, she seems like she is using Hearst for his money.  But she seems to see the best in people, regardless of who they are.  She also is smarter than anyone gives her credit for.  She comes across as this bimbo, but she's someone who chooses the world around her.  It's not that she doesn't know about the horrible elements of the people around her.  It's that she chooses to forgive these people because she can.  It's weirdly refreshing to see such a wholesome character.

I dug this movie.  Yeah, it's long and yeah, you probably need an intimate relationship with Citizen Kane to appreciate a lot of it.  But Fincher made something that not only doesn't necessarily feel like Fincher, but something that is riveting and emotional at the same time.

Not rated.  The movie toys with the joke of adultery and the concept of the casual affair.  There's one joke that almost involves a low-key curse word.  It's a musical from 1935, so actual ribald content was pretty minimal.  (We're not looking at the pre-code Forbidden Hollywood stuff.  This was a major release.)  But the way that this movie looks at the institution of marriage is pretty gross, so keep that in mind.  Not Rated.

DIRECTOR: Mark Sandrich

I'm going to tell you about one of my purchase regrets.  See, I'm still a fan of physical media.  Even though I've cut down on my physical media purchases by a lot, I still have an appreciation for DVDs and Blu-rays.  But part of that neuroses involves how the box looks on the shelf.  When I was still buying Simpsons DVDs, I hit an impasse because one of the seasons was almost exclusively released as a giant Homer head.  I couldn't have that on the shelf naturally and it would break the cleanliness of the shelf.  (Part of this is why I completely appreciate what Monk did with its DVDs.)  But I was working at Thomas Video when I bought the DVD for Top Hat.  I also bought The Gay Divorcee at the same time.  I think it was Warner Brothers that was releasing these slim packs within box sets at the time.  Well, both of these films were part of the Fred Astaire / Ginger Rodgers box set and I was dealing with completely disposable income at the time, so I bought these two used copies broken up from the box set.

Lo-and-behold, I have these two thin cases on my shelf and I don't know what to do with them.  But if you were wondering, "Is Tim going to be writing about the entire Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers box set?", the answer is "Probably not, because I only own two of them."  But these two movies are very telling.  Trust me.  I am not opposed to watching any more.  A very large part of me absolutely loves these movies.  I'm always shocked that one of the big musical set pieces finds its way into a movie that may not be the most famous musical ever.  See, Top Hat is the home to "Dancing Cheek-to-Cheek".  Yeah.  There's one other kind of famous song in here, but my sleepy brain can't get "Cheek-to-Cheek" out of it right now.  I know that, out of the box set, Top Hat may be one of the more classic films.  But between these two movies, I kind of realized that they're all the same film.

I was kind of a butthead about musicals in college.  I have a theatre degree (as proven by the way I spell "theater"), but that degree focused on traditional drama. We didn't do musicals.  We were focused on Stanislavski and The Method.  So I became a bit of a snob and thought about musicals as second-class stories.  After all, it seemed like cheating to have the characters just sing their internal conflicts and thoughts when we were so busy emoting.  But since I've become a film fan, musicals are now pretty good.  But during this time, you would probably have heard me say something like, "All musicals are the same!"  And boy, I would want to punch that guy today.  

But the problem is, these Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals do seem to be the same, based on the fact that The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat are way too similar to try to separate them.  I know.  I like Christopher Guest movies and he tends to have his troupe of actors follow him from movie to movie.  The same is true about The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat, but these movies kind of do something criminal about the whole thing:  the actors play the same characters (different names), and the jokes are pretty much the same.  Now, I'm going to deflect once again and say that The Marx Brothers get a free pass on this because their jokes are really well crafted.  But instead, we have Erik Rhodes playing the Italian stereotype all over again.  There's also Edward Everett Horton playing Richard Gilmore once again.  (Admittedly, I think that was his schtick for a lot of films during this era.)  Fred and Ginger are being Fred and Ginger.  They're bound to be together, but Ginger can't stand Fred until everything is cleared up at the end.  Fred, once again, is way too aggressive of a suitor for 21st Century audiences and kind of comes across like Pepe Le Pew.

This all boils down to the idea that, sometimes, maybe it is all about the spectacle.  A lot of this is just about how the film really offers nothing new.  Some audiences just want to see these two people do the thing that they do time and again with a new title attached to the film.  I guess it might be easier with something that involves performers like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers.  Both of them revel in spectacle.  The dancing is a little different.  The music is a little different.  I bet both of these performers crushed live performances because there wasn't the plot to depend on.  Both Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee feel like the plot is there so this could technically be considered a movie that could be in cinemas nationwide.  Perhaps the choreographer (in my head, Astaire) comes up with the moves ahead of time and the story is plugged around it.  It could explain why Fred Astaire is once again playing a performer.  I'm always a little disappointed when the big song for the movie is for a play-within-a-play.  These scenes don't advance the plot, but are just there to add one or two more songs to the film.  

I kind of feel bad for Ginger Rodgers.  (There's a lot of my hang-ups and misconceptions attached to this, so be aware that a lot of this is spitballin'.)  Fred Astaire is definitely the protagonist of these movies.  While there is very little deep characterization in these films, he's the one who gets all of it.  The major show-stopping numbers go to Fred Astaire.  The thing is, Ginger Rodgers has to be as talented as him.  The only time he actually dances with another character, it's with Ginger Rodgers.  He has backup dancers, to be sure, but none who ever fill the role of featured dancer.  Ginger only shows up at the end, once the plot has been resolved.  It also looks like she's dancing on heels or lifts.  And she's matching Fred's choreography absolutely flawlessly.  I know that she gets top billing, but her screen time has to be half of what Fred Astaire's is.  I don't dislike Astaire by any stretch of the imagination, but Ginger kind of deserves more attention, no?

Part of me wants to talk about the Comedy of Errors format of these films.  The less famous the musical, the more I notice that it hinges on the concept of dramatic irony and suspension of disbelief to keep the story afloat.  This one is one of those extreme cases.  The further the movie progresses, the harder it is to to understand character motivations.  The movie almost forgets how absurd the central concept is because it doesn't remind us about it.  Jerry Travers is apparently super famous for being a dancer, but not so famous that people don't recognize him?  Also, the idea that Jerry Travers's success hinges on the concept that people don't know where he's staying for his performance even more bizarre.  Instead, we have this guy who will stop at nothing to find Dale Tremont and marry her, but he still has this loyalty to not give out his name?  It's not like Travers's central personality trait is loyalty to a promise.  He promises not to propose as well, but he breaks that promise at the first opportunity he gets.  Dale Tremont then also has to act like a crazy person to make the plot work.  The fact that she is aware that she could just leave the hotel to avoid getting married, but chooses to marry Beddini is insane.  So I get it: a comedy of errors really forces you to go along with the plot, but there are some really weird choices in this one.

But again, I gripe all day.  In terms of fluffy fun (there's the snobby theatre major coming out again), it delivers on the goods.  Honestly, if you hadn't watched The Gay Divorcee or another entry in the Fred and Ginger box set, this one might actually be considered somewhat of a classic.  But where it stands right now, it was only some fun that seemed really repetitive.   

PG, but I suppose this really could be G rated.  I mean, there's nothing all that bad in the movie.  One of the main characters is divorced.  There is that.  I feel like there could have been some innuendo.  A trucker thinks that Eleanor is on drugs.  Yeah, I guess there's a couple of jokes that only adults would get.  But overall, it is a very tame movie and fairly typical Disney fare.  PG.

DIRECTOR:  Sharon Maguire

What?  I liked it!  Stop being so judgmental.  Yeah, I know.  It's a heck of a pivot to go from Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to Godmothered in one move.  If anything, it is a testimony to how the title of this blog, Literally Anything: Movies, is accurate.  Because I saw this trailer and kept dropping little hints to the fam that this would make a lovely movie night.  And yeah, I was probably the one paying the most attention to it. It was charming and bright and just the right amount of Christmassy to make me feel all warm inside.  (You go too Christmas, you lose me.  You hear that, Hallmark Channel?)

I don't know if this shocks anyone, but Godmothered is borderline Enchanted all over again.  It won't have the same cultural permeability as Enchanted.  But it isn't like even Enchanted has that respected in the great Disney canon.  (I just heard a splinter group of Disney enthusiasts wake up and head for the pitchforks.)  It's just that I have a feeling that, down the line, Godmothered will be mostly forgotten.  I'll say, "Hey, remember Godmothered?" and I might get an "Oh yeaaaahhh!"  Because it does share so much DNA with Enchanted, the film rarely has time to stand on its own two feet.  But that's okay sometimes.  It's not like we've been overwhelmed with movies like Enchanted.  

And when I say, "Movies like Enchanted", I'm talking about live-action commentary on animated fairy tales that aren't bleak as can be.  Because tonally, both movies love their source materials.  There's nothing cynical about either of these movies.  They are joy-filled romps that actually make you want to go back and watch the works that they are parodying.  That's pretty high praise.  There's lots of stuff that bums you out about the source material, including some of the live-action Disney adaptations, like Maleficent.   But Godmothered seems to absolutely adore the overall attitude of the Disney canon.  Yeah, a lot of the nods in the movie are directly aimed at Cinderella, but this feels like a love letter to the Disney films of yesteryear.  Everything in the movie just seems so wholesome.  I love that there's not really an action sequence in the movie.  I know that, for some reason, every Disney movie needs to have a scene that is going to terrify one of my kids.  There's a little bit of menace from, of all people, Jane Curtin.  But really, nothing really gets to be a threat shy of hurting people's feelings.  I can get behind that.

I love that Disney's been kind of pulling away from the "one true love" mode of storytelling.  Godmothered starts off with narration addressing that "Happily Ever After" should be the beginning of the story.  I know that I've heard that at enough weddings that we should focus on how marriage is the real adventure, not the part about finding one's true love.  The idea that everything will be happy and that we don't need support after people get married is almost a bit silly.  I'm actually thinking about how much ease their was back then.  I'm not saying everything was easy before I started dating the woman who would become my wife.  I remember some dark days there.  But the dating part of life was fun.  We had disposable income and had the time to go on a date anytime we wanted.  It was rad.  Maybe fairy godmothers should cater to the parents out there who are struggling to get through the days.  (Again, I'm pretty blessed.  One thing that parenthood really reminds you that, as much as you miss infinite video game time, you wouldn't trade it for the world.)

But keeping all this in mind, I don't know if I've ever seen a character on screen quite like Mackenzie.  Mackenzie is clearly a likable character.  We sympathize with her, especially when we find out that the love of her life died young.  It's tragic and a huge bummer.  She's been raising two daughters and hasn't thought of herself once during the course of the film.  But that being said, man alive, is she a grump?  Mackenzie has some of the worst attitudes towards things imaginable without becoming unlikable.  She straight up crushes her daughter's dreams to be a singer because she wants to protect her.  How the film managed to hit that specific sweet spot without making her unlikable is absolutely a testament in itself.   But it makes sense that Mackenzie has to be kind of a jerk throughout a good chunk of the movie.  Eleanor is so darned sweet and saccharine that you would need a curmudgeon to balance anything.  Heck, you'd need a Gloomy Gus just to have a plot.  Because the entire conflict is dependent on Mackenzie embracing Eleanor's help.  It's really hard to sell the idea that Eleanor just becomes un-inept at things as a central crux to the story.  Instead, the concept of that being a wrinkle in the plot works a lot better.  Because Eleanor isn't in the wrong in the film.  Yeah, she gets reamed out for having selfish motives in helping Mackenzie, but we all acknowledge that the rationale is a little bit off.   So we need to have a protagonist without an antagonist.  Yeah, we have Moira, but I'm not quite sure what Moira's motivation is.

Actually, now that I wrote that sentence, I am confused about Moira.  The Disney movie wanted to have a villain.  I can't hold it against the film.  But Moira's big thing is that she's the last bastion of a forgotten society.  She's the last godmother who remembers what it is like to be a godmother.  So she holds fast to the old ways.  She remembers what the glory days were like and, to save her culture from dying off, she doubles down on what used to work.  But Eleanor and Moira technically have the same goals.  They know that the godmothers will soon all become tooth fairies, but Moira is oddly just cool with that?  I don't really understand that. She actually sees Eleanor as a threat, so much so that she has to stop her?  What's the point of stopping Eleanor if the agreement that they're all going to become tooth fairies is already in the works?  I get the idea that she wants to hold onto the past.  That's a perfectly good motivating factor, especially for a villain of the piece.  But the fact that both of their desires are aligned, it kind of makes no sense that she shows up as the third act villain.  

Yeah, it's an imperfect movie.  It's never going to be one of those Disney classics.  But I really liked it.  It is a quality live-action movie, which doesn't always happen.  It's sweet and nice.  It's got a lot of heart.  I have few complaints.  

Not rated, but there is full on nudity and there are recurring moments of adultery in the movie.  Also, the film is just full of racism mainly because it is a criticism of racists in Germany.  There's a lot of drinking and smoking.  While tonally, it may be innocent, there are just many moments that scream adult content.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR:  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I don't know why I'm dragging my feet to write about this.  I have plenty to say about it.  Maybe I'm just sleepy.  Sleepiness often kicks my butt when it comes to being productive, so I guess some of this is my fault.  But if I want to breathe out and get my other stuff done, I need to use my little amount of time and write about Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

One of the greatest bummers about HBO Max was the fact that it had all this great content, but I couldn't stream it to my downstairs TV.  That's where I watch most of the movies that I write about on this blog.  It's while I exercise that I do these things, so I really wanted to make sure that I could watch some of the quality content available while I work out.  But luckily for me and many other Fire Stick owners, HBO Max is now available.  So I said, "Watch something on HBO Max and the first movie that tickles your fancy, watch it."  Now, I knew the name Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.  I knew it was one of the Criterion movies that was on HBO Max.  But I knew very little else about it.  It's always intimidating, going in completely blind.  But then I found out that Fassbinder directed this.  It took me a second to place why I knew Fassbinder.  I had seen a handful of his films, but the most notable was Berlin Alexanderplatz.   So at least I had a foothold.

If I was to leave after saying one line about this film, it would have to be that I can't stop thinking that this is a more tonally serious version of Harold and Maude, but with a lot of extra racism involved.  Germany's post-World War II attitude towards racism is oddly rarely discussed.  We all know that deep sense of nationalism that led to Hitler's rise to power, coupled with the notion that he massaged this resentment of the other into a furor.  (I refuse to make the pun happen there.)  But rarely do we see the shift happen from the end of the war to something like Ali, the mid-1970s.  In my head, for some reason, I thought it was going to be an environment of overcompensation.  Perhaps realizing that the world had attributed intense racism to Germany, there would be open-mindedness in spades, but Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is quite the opposite.  If anything, Ali might be one of the films to point out that, just because the war was lost by Germany, hearts and prejudices run deeper.  I mean, I'm more than a little worried that we're going to see the same thing here in the United States post-Trump.  Just because regimes fall it doesn't matter to the inhabitants of a country like Germany.  Fassbinder injects almost every character, including the protagonists, with at least some degree of xenophobia.  Everyone in Emmi's life has a strong opinion on keeping the races separate.  Emmi herself, even though she is the most open to change and love with Ali, can't divorce the notion that she's attracted to a minority to simply seeing him as a man.

Emmi is the least damning, but we see moments where she can't help but bring in that philosophy into things she does.  There's a plot shift when Emmi brings home her co-workers to meet Ali.  Ali is forced to put on a show for these women.  Emmi's primary internal conflict is balancing what she knows is right, which is embracing the fact that she should find value in her marriage instead of outside sources, and maintaining the semblance of her old life.  It's worthy of empathy.  But when the women of her work embrace Ali in the way that they know how, it's oddly dehumanizing.  It would actually be better if the women had chosen to scorn him because outright racism throughout the film actually causes Emmi and Ali to find solace with each other.   But Emmi treats him like the exception to the rule in this moment.  I mean, it's not as overtly racist as the other people in Emmi's life, but that also might be dangerous by itself.  Ali pulls the same card on Emmi.  When Emmi shows up at the shop looking for him, he full on pulls a Judas.  At least Emmi attempted to do the right thing and failed.  Ali actually gets a full belly laugh out of his actions.  It's a shot that shows everyone, but the first Moroccan grandmother joke makes Ali laugh.  The second doesn't, but Emmi's gone by that point.

Listen, I White Knight on this page all the time.  I'm aware of it.  I'm about to go a little outside the box on the following thinking.  Fassbinder crushes it when talking about racism and agism in the movie and I won't pull any punches when it comes to that.  But there are moments when the agists and the racists have sympathetic moments that kind of bum me out.  Maybe I'll have to take a long look in the mirror and see if I deserve to White Knight all these situations from the comfort of my computer.  I don't know.  But the big one is that Emmi's family kind of has the right to be mad.  I mean, Emmi's family is the worst kind of mad.  They instantly go towards the race thing more than anything else.  Also, calling their mom a whore is downright evil of them.  Yes, Emmi is a grown woman who can make her own choices, but that marriage is rushed as can be.  I don't care who she marries.  That's not the important thing.  The family has a right to be mad because they have a new father and know nothing about him.  Heck, Emmi knows nothing about Ali by the time she marries him.  She had no idea that couscous would have such a tempting influence on him.  There's a reason that there's a long term dating period.  Making major choices like that at the height of emotional bliss is just a terrible idea and it plays out pretty poorly here because of it.  But these grown children have a new father.  Their relationship with their mother has fundamentally changed, regardless of how they received the news.  It's super awkward.

There's also one moment that really bothers me.  It's the idea of living up to a stereotype.  I acknowledge that it is not Ali's job to be the representative for all Moroccans.  That's undue pressure for any one human being.  Okay.  But that being said, one of the racist characters insists that Ali will cheat on Emmi because those people just use women for sex.  Of course, it's complete nonsense and it is vitriolic.  But then...he does just that.  Instead of talking through his feelings, he immediately goes to the temptress character of the movie all because she knows how to make couscous.  (I'm forever going to be using "couscous" as a euphemism for adultery.)  He says he doesn't like her, but he keeps going back.  When he leaves Emmi's apartment, he is the victim of mistreatment and has the moral high ground.  But then, when he cheats, he's significantly less sympathetic.  All of those comments somehow gain an odd validity.  It's really gross.  Then he keeps going back and it is simply expected for the two of them to have sex.  He also gets blitzed, which is horrible.  Because of this, Emmi only lowers her self-esteem and allows him to have these affairs because he is so lonely.  Like, when she gives him permission to do that stuff, it isn't romantic for me.  She just seems so desperate for companionship that she allows something atrocious to be part of the norm.  And then, he just kind of gets sick?  Fassbinder ends with the notion that foreigners in Germany die from stress given their daily lifestyles?  That's just a sour note to a whole bunch of bleakness.

There's one moment that really reads like an unfired Chekhov's gun.  Emmi and Ali's neighbors hate Ali and try getting rid of him for the majority of the film.  It's all old turds being racist for a long time.  But then there's one moment where Emmi's neighbor asks Ali to put a bunch of her son's stuff in Emmi's storage area while he's in Norway.  It really reads like this plot to accuse Ali of stealing, but it just goes nowhere?   Why is this scene in there?  Is it to say that people will still ask for favors even though that they don't like you?  Is it part of the montage of normalcy that eventually befalls everyone?  I don't know.

Anyway, I liked the movie a lot.  Going in blind was probably the best choice.

Approved.  It's a war movie, so there's going to be things related to war movies that might upset some audiences.  There are moments that the Nazis live up to their names when it comes to atrocities.   Characters we really like die.  I suppose that I could say that the movie glorifies alcohol at times.  But I remember watching this movie as a kid.  Nothing really bothered me, even the scene involving barbed wire.  Regardless, the whole thing is considered Approved, and that's close enough for government work.

DIRECTOR:  John Sturges

Sometimes, when I watch these movies, I am only thinking about the hook.  There are half-a-dozen different hooks I want to play with.  The ironic part is that, having half-a-dozen hooks created this very hook, which is a meta-examination on the role of writing a hook.  Anyway, I know it's no Stalag 17, Guarinos, but we can all acknowledge that this movie is pretty darned great.  This is one of the first movies that I saw that fell under the banner of a true classic.  I mean, it might have been tied with the works of Alfred Hitchcock.  But I just remember sitting through this almost three hour movie time-and-time again.  There's something about the escape film that is fascinating.  I keep watching movies like this and Le Trou.  

There's something honestly patriotic about the whole thing.  Maybe this is the exact kind of valor that I would suck at.  The Great Escape starts off with a binary choice:  relax and we can all sit out the war in peace with hobbies or escape and make both our lives miserable.  I think the one thing that I would be really good at is embracing the comfort of hobbies.  Instead, not only is this an entire POW camp that is completely devoted to escape (a logic system that makes little sense to me), but everyone is completely devoted to the cause for escape, pulling every trick they know out.  They devise the most insane plan ever for tunnels.  It becomes this Ocean's Eleven style breakout where there are so many clever little tricks that these soldiers use to escape.  It's just that it is all about the details.  A tunnel?  Boring.  Three tunnels, exciting!  Hide some dirt?  Boring.  Making special dirt smuggling pants?  Exciting.  There's all these little things that go into these movies and the knowledge that it can all fall apart at the drop of a hat is what really makes these movies worth watching.  

I want to talk about the most exciting scene in the movie.  Think about it.  Okay, the most exciting scene is actually Steve McQueen jumping barbed wire on a motorbike.  I didn't want to put an image of Steve McQueen's Cooler King as the image because I think it really pulls away from the core focus that this movie is an ensemble piece.  No, I want to look at the most emotional moment in the movie: the moonshine sequence juxtaposed with Ives's death.  Again, I know.  Stalag 17 did it first.  I also own that movie and will hopefully get around to writing about it one day.  The movie builds up such a degree of hope by this point in the film.  The first tunnel is almost complete.  There's a moment of real celebration.  Never have emotions been this high and dropped so low so quickly.  (Okay, that's probably completely disputable, but I love this scene.) It's in this moment where I find the movie incredibly patriotic.  While the film injects a lot of Americans into a story where none were present in reality, the jibes and ribbing that takes place between the British and American soldiers is kind of great.  They form their own little nation against a sea of Nazis and it is perfect.  They're drinking stuff that should make them go blind and they're having the best time of it all.  The murmuring around the camp about the forthcoming escape is inspiring and it all comes crashing down, causing Ives to kill himself.  It is these moments, where the perfect plan goes to pot because of a silly mistake is what is oddly cathartic.  Ives's death is the death of hope, yet the soldiers power through.  

Which is, despite the soundtrack being so optimistic, why this movie is all about tragedy.  There's a bright and peppy tone about the movie as a whole.  But the film does surround tragedy.  In some ways, I can't help but make the connection to The Prisoner.  The music is grand and boisterous.  The camp is clean.  There's all this fun stuff to do.  But everything in the movie is almost fighting the tone of the film.  These men could subject themselves to a war of comfort.  There is plenty there to keep them amused.  But the men are constantly facing failure and sadness.  For all the swells of crescendo when prisoners try to escape, like jumping into trucks with trees or disguising themselves as Russian workers (it's weird that the Polish guy doesn't know more Russian), they're instantly caught and thrown in the Cooler.  I mean, we get Hilts, who doesn't seem to mind being the Cooler King.  But for every one Hilts, there are a hundred Iveses. 

And that's what makes the tragedy so much more tragic.  Danny is this guy who comes across as a strongman the entire film.  It is almost a little unbelievable when his neuroses start firing.  But that's what makes Danny's story all the more compelling.  I think the movie stated that the last tunnel he made was his seventeenth tunnel.  He's a tunnel man who is claustrophobic.  He's been pushing past his phobia until he's been asked to make the most intense tunnel of his life.  There are times that I scoff at Danny, wondering if he's being a little dramatic.  But then I think about how I'm not claustrophobic and I still wouldn't do a great job in that tunnel.

The same is true for Colin.  There's a little bit of The Twilight Zone, "I finally had time" element going on with Colin's blindness.  Out of all the people to lose their sight, it's the guy who finds joy in the visual.  He's an artist.  He's a forger.  His hobby is birdwatching and the film robs him of his vision.  Part of me thinks that the movie is implying that his obsession with perfection when it came to forging is what robbed him of his sight.  But it does kind of seem to come out of nowhere.  The film insists that many of the elements of the movie are true, but I don't know if this scene is dramatized for the sake of Hollywood.    But between Ives, Danny, and Colin, there's kind of a lot of tragedy surrounding the movie.

I think it comes from the fact of successfully managing a paradox involving a peppy tone and a dour theme.  Early in the film, the CO meets with the German Kommandant.  It kind of feels like there's a Hogan's Heroes thing happening (which I will admit to never having have seen).  There's a respect between officers, similar to something that would have been in The Grand Illusion.  But Roger quickly steps in after this scene and reminds his men, but mostly the audience, that there is no such thing as a good Nazi.  As lovable as the Kommandant or Werner come across, they are both supporters of an army that exterminates people it considers lesser.  We can make things pretty and optimistic all day, but the film will not let us forget that these people are monsters.  The film is dedicated to the fifty men who were executed for escaping the prison camp.  The soldiers are plenty aware of what the Nazis are capable of.  That's what makes the camp kind of haunting.  It would almost be better  for the soldiers if the camp was a dump because there wouldn't be a lie about the whole thing.  The promise of quiet to placate the troops would be almost a form of brainwashing.  "Maybe the Nazis aren't so bad."  When the Kommandant leaves at the end, it is with the implication that he will be shot for his failure to prevent an escape.

There's a great Eddie Izzard bit about The Great Escape.  The movie decided to really limit how many cultures were in the camp.  The film has mostly Brits, three Americans, and Australian, and a Polish recruit.  But it kind of has Steve McQueen just be his own thing.  (Again, I commented on this.)  It is really weird that the Americans are allowed to not get shot to death?  I feel like Hilts would be the first to be executed because he keeps on trying to escape.  Like, there's no breaks.   He tries to escape, gets captured, goes to the Cooler, does it again.  How is that fair?   Most of those guys weren't even the bigwigs of the escape plan?  I mean, Roger I get.  He's Mr. X.  But a lot of them were just guys.   It seems like Hilts survived because no one wanted to upset the Americans.  

Side note:  How would you feel to be the guy who is caught almost immediately and ruined it for everyone?  Boo for that guy.

But this is one of the greats for a reason.  I adore this film.  Yeah, 3 hours is an ask.  But the movie keeps holding up each time I watch it...and now I own it on Criterion.

Rated R, because zombies, I guess.  I mean, there's language.  There's a lot of gore.  But a lot of it is silly.  Like, I'm not going to liken it to the Disney Channel Original, Zombies.  But I will say that this is more like Shaun of the Dead, but without an attempt to be vulnerable at any point.  A few characters sleep around, but it's never really shown.  There's a lot of gross out humor, but mostly involving gore and vomit.  (The way I worded it makes it sound like vomit humor is okay in anyone's book.)  It's probably an appropriate R.

DIRECTOR:  Ruben Fleischer

The short version:  Zombieland: Double Tap has a lot of the same problems that most sequels do.  See, I'm in the camp of not thinking that it is the end of the world when a sequel isn't as revolutionary as the original.  Yeah, I'm always a little disappointed, but I tend to have a good time.  When the OG Zombieland came out a decade earlier, it was a welcome treat.  A lot of people tried capitalizing on Shaun of the Dead's success and there were a bunch of weak copies of the same formula.  (Comedy + Zombies = Cult Hit). But, honestly, I can't think of another great zombie comedy from this era.  We were saturated with zombie content to the point where I even kind of almost swore off zombies.  I will say that I was heavily on the zombie train when Shaun of the Dead came out and all I had was Romero and the Italian horror directors to turn to.  But the wealth of zombie content eventually diluted the waters.  That's when the 2009 Zombieland offered something good.  It offered something different.

Zombieland's entire foundation, along with the sequel's foundation,  relies on being self-aware.  There's something really fun about killing zombies in unique and different ways.  But the thing I always liked about the zombie apocalypse was the apocalypse element of it all.  While the zombies were a real threat for the heroes of the story, what we cared more about was what it was like to live in a world without society.  All of the joys of generations of progress was there.  You could go hang out in a movie theater or rollerskate on the Golden Gate bridge.  These movies, like one of my favorite shows, The Last Man on Earth, understood that there was something absolutely absurd at looking at the silver lining behind the slow extinction of mankind.  Double Tap's use of the White House is probably my favorite element of the whole film.  I like that we can juxtapose absolute absurdity over things that we considered sacred.  I don't know why it works, but putting post-it notes over the eyes of Abraham Lincoln so he stops looking at you is positively adorable.

But Double Tap is part of the trend of sequels, especially nostalgic sequels, (I didn't know that ten years was the cutoff line), that is so beholden to the original movie that nothing really new is said.  The first movie, to my decade old memory, focused on an unlikely combination of people forming a post-apocalyptic family.  Columbus and Wichita were an unlikely couple.  But over the course of the film, they put aside their differences and became romantically involved.  But a sequel that has nothing new to say has to find ways to undo the first movie.  Characters make mistakes that don't really seem plausible.  

I'd like to stress this next point because it is going to be the crux of my argument for why nostalgic sequels are real problems, despite the fact that I will watch a nostalgic sequel any day.  Ready for it?  Ten years have passed.  Ten years.  That means that Columbus and Wichita have been together for a decade.  We meet them in the comfort of relationship bliss.  So, to get to the story we had in the first film, these characters have to be split up.  But these two characters are treating their relationship like it is something unsure.  Ten years into a story, people should be having difficult discussions without running off, just because.  I mean, from the audience's point of view, nothing really happened between the two movies.   But these characters have had a decade to evolve and to become something better off.  The idea that Wichita would run off because of the possibility of a difficult discussion makes no sense.  The idea that Columbus would sleep with someone else after a dedicated ten year relationship is silly.  These moments were simply excuses to return to the conflicted state of the first movie.  And with that conflicted state, we could return to some of the same jokes as the first movie.  The non-diagetic elements of the first film were some of the best moments, having Columbus sharing his rules with the audience.  But guess what?  It's the same joke.  It's a good joke and I don't mind hearing it again.  But when I want actual new content, it doesn't do very much for me.

Also, Little Rock's story seems a  little unfair.  She definitely had the Hawkeye -from-the-first-Avengers-movie problem happening.  She's an interesting character, but the movie did everything it could to minimize her interaction with the main characters.  Tallahassee, Columbus, and Wichita are fundamentally the same characters that they were in the last film.  They were all technically adults in the first film and their neuroses are still firmly in place.  But Little Rock was a kid in the first movie.  Ten years later, Abigail Breslin is now an adult.  Little Rock was a kid who learned what family and survival were about in the zombie apocalypse.  Every event that she had was skewed by a sense of normalcy.  She should have weird questions about stuff that a kid would.  Did she have an education?  She acts like she knows a lot about stuff, despite the fact that none of the other characters seem aligned to educating her.   It's even more confusing when she's hearing plagiarized music.  It brought up a really good question:  What would Little Rock really know about civilization?  Yet, she's kind of dumped into a very far removed B-storyline.  Sure, she's the Macguffin, but that's not much of a satisfying role.  

And a lot of this comes from a lack of vulnerability on the part of the movie.  The first Zombieland was fun.  It kind of felt like a kegger for the zombie nuts out there.  What's the funnest way to kill a zombie?  Let's make a movie to find out.  But the thing about all that mirth and partying is that it almost becomes like only eating dessert.  The reason that dessert is so satisfying is that it is a stark contrast to the savory meal that happened ahead of time.  When a dramatic moment happens in contrast to the funny, both moments matter so much more.  The death of Shaun's mother in Shaun of the Dead was absolutely heartbreaking because it followed the funniest bit in the film, the choreographed attack to "Don't Stop Me Now".    There was this opportunity to really make us feel something in the movie.  My wife called that Tallahassee would die in the movie and I completely agreed.  There was a moment where it was almost teased, which makes me think that the filmmakers really considered it seriously.  But then, nothing.  In fact, there is even a point in the movie where the heroes are completely overwhelmed by the new zombie, the T-800s.  (Again, Zombieland thrives on being meta.)  Then, Rosario Dawson's Nevada just shows up in a monster truck to kill all the zombies?  That's a pretty intense deux ex machina.  What happens is that the characters kind of become untouchable.  It's okay to feel sometimes.  Nevada is there almost as an excuse for Woody Harrelson to be back or not.  It's this cake-and-eat-it-too scenario and it's kind of a bummer.

But this is why Madison works so well in the movie.  Besides the fact that I love that her name is Madison, her jokes work really well, despite being not that complicated.  (It's a backhanded compliment, but I'll explain.)  Madison is an archetype.  We get the ditzy valley girl as a character.  We know what they can do and what they can't do.  In most films, that character tends to be overused and forgettable.  But the reason that Madison works in Double Tap versus in other films is the fact that she's really the only new thing in the movie.  Yeah, we know Nevada.  But Nevada is just Tallahassee III.  (I do appreciate Albuquerque and Flagstaff jokes, but those characters are more bits than fleshed out characters.)  She is there exclusively to compliment Tallahassee.  But Madison is almost an anti-Zombieland character.  She's not good at killing.  She's not a perfect character.  If anything, the joke is that she's nice when no one in this world is all that nice.  I mean, even Columbus is appreciative of her niceness because his only trait is being neurotic.  The fact that she Mr. Beans her way through the apocalypse is kind of great.   It's something different and new and that's what I like.

So it all comes down to the problems that most sequels have: it is too in love with the original.  Instead of ever being critical of the first film, it treats it like a hallowed text.  Going off the rails may upset the die-hard fans, but it also creates something interesting and new that may be able to stand on its own two feet.  This felt like a rewatch of a movie that I hadn't seen in a while, which is its own experience.  But in terms of offering something new, it's not there.

PG-13.  Good for you, little known X-Men spinoff.  I thought you were shooting for that hard R.  It is weird that the same audience that can have backpacks and kids' clothing can also apparently go see a horror movie where someone's ripped apart, survives, and is covered in bleeding claw marks all over her body.   There's also a suicide attempt and lots of scary imagery.  Some of that imagery implies that one of the characters was the victim of sex trafficking.  The movie also seems to hate Catholicism, which isn't my favorite element of the film.  So, you know, PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Josh Boone

My excitement for this movie just kept changing, guys.  Nerds out there will know the very troubled history of The New Mutants.  The time around my birthday tends to be the B+ movies.  These are the movies that I give my hopes up for.  (For those wonder, it's mid-April.)   These are the movies that tend to creep into the slate.  Occasionally, some work of genius will fall in here.  The genius movies tend to be directed by Edgar Wright and they don't get the press they deserve.  But also, movies that sit on shelves that studios don't know how to market show up here.  The New Mutants was supposed to be my birthday movie...

...two years ago.

There was a trailer two years ago and it looked rad.  There have now been so many superhero comic adaptations that someone out there decided to change the genre and create a new subgenre: the superhero horror.  Now, since then we've gotten another entry in this subgenre, namely Brightburn.  But The New Mutants was going to take an already established Marvel property and adapt it to the horror genre.  I loved it.  I looked bleak and scary.  It had some cast members that I was slightly excited to see in superhero roles.  It took two things that I loved and then mashed them together.  This was going to be the chocolate and peanut butter of movies for me.  

But then it got shelved.  It got shelved and it got shelved harder than almost anything else I've ever seen.  It got shelved as hard as The Cabin in the Woods got shelved.  That's pretty hard.  Then the dreaded term --reshoots --appeared.  And that's when the rumor mill started.  Apparently, 20th Century Fox got really cold feet about this movie after the trailer was released.  I think a lot of it came from the aftermath of X-Men: Apocalpyse and hearing rumblings of the problems that would plague Dark Phoenix.  20th Century Fox, pre-Disney, was a very gittery company.  I've commented on this before.  They weren't exactly Sony bad, but they were up there on the studio system suits list.  It wasn't something I was excited about.  There was talk about start to finish reshoots.  They were talking about making it scarier.  (Does that mean the original version wasn't that scary?  Or did it mean that they were doubling down on the risk?)  I really need to learn to take entertainment gossip with a grain of salt because, since then, I heard that the reshoots were pretty mild and that the version I ended up seeing was pretty close to the original.  Who knows?

But what I can say is that The New Mutants ended up being a perfect April release in terms of quality.  I mean, it is far from my favorite mid-April release movie (and considering that it didn't come out in April, as far as I remember, that's even more of a thing.)  See, I'm always disappointed when something like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or The Cabin in the Woods don't get their massive summer blockbuster releases.  Those movies totally deserve it.  April is for "Hey, that movie was pretty good" or "It was better than I thought it was going to be."  By the time this movie came out, and all of the drama was rolling the red carpet out for the film, I had pretty low expectations.  Instead, what I got was a fairly servicable horror movies that had X-Men universe characters in it.  Sure, we'll never get the A-List guys to show up for a movie like this, but they got name-checked for sure.  (Okay, nods, but overt nods!)  

I spent a lot of time explaining what happened behind the scenes here, so I suppose that I should actually talk about the movie itself.  (Note:  I had a nightmare where one of my friends critiqued how badly I wrote these.  Dear subconscious, I'm aware, but I only have so much time to actually write these things on a daily basis.) The smartest thing that The New Mutants does is to tear something out of the Smallville handbook.  This is a world where superheroes exist, along with superheroic powers.  But not everyone in the world starts off as a superhero.  Yeah, nerdy old me knows the fates of a lot of these characters, but that's not the point of the film.  It's not even an origin story.  The best thing about the X-Men is that you really don't need to have an intricate origin story.  While we do get some of the background on Moonstar, the only thing we have to no is that she is a girl who bottles up her trauma.  That trauma, in turn, manifests itself through psychic hallucinations that can actually hurt others.  Sure, that's a bit of a twist, but it is also telegraphed way ahead of time.  It's, like, a tiny twist in a movie that really doesn't need twists.  But having them not act like heroes is great.  If anything, it creates a vibe more akin to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors.  I'm one of the few people who wasn't obsessed with Dream Warriors, which makes me a bad person.  But The New Mutants kind of gives that movie some validity.  There is something there.

But the movie also has this weird thing that bugs me.  I'm going to try to find a way to verbalize it because it is a little bit of me complaining about myself happening here.  (That sentence got away from me.  Sorry.)  The images that Moonstar produces are pretty effective.  I especially like Illyana's fear of the smiling men.  These images work very well and are pretty darned creepy.  But the fact that the protagonist is producing these fears and phobias is a little bit...disappointing?  I think my logic comes from the fact that this place is very scary.  These kids are isolated in an abandoned mental hospital that has an old, dilapidated church coupled with a spooky cemetery.  While I don't know if a traditional ghost story is best coupled with the X-Men, having the protagonist doing all these things without control makes her less of a sympathetic hero.  I know, I know.  I hear myself too.  After all, she's a poor girl who is constantly exposing herself to trauma and if that's not a metaphor for the self-sabotaging behaviors that the 21st century teenager deals with, I don't know what is.  It's just that there is a villain in the piece. Dr. Reyes is straight up crazy evil.  She works for Mr. Sinister (which the movie is afraid to name drop) and is recruiting for an evil X-Men.  (See, that's a twist...that I also saw coming.)  When she puts away her professional persona and tries to kill Moonstar, she becomes a very cool villain.  But the horrors aren't about her.  Instead, Reyes is simply a low level mutant and that's not interesting to me.  The movie starts with Moonstar having these abilities and not controlling them.  But she kind of ends the movie with not really controlling them either.  The big fight isn't between Reyes and the kids.  The big fight is trying to get Moonstar to wake up.  That's a conflict I can't really get behind.

There's a metaphor right there waiting to be picked up and explored.  From what I remember, Moonstar's gender has been changed?  (I could Wikipedia this, but I have zero minutes and zero seconds of time today.)  The center of our film is a girl who has lost everything.  She is experiencing powerlessness.  She's bullied by other members of her own gender and species and she should be a dynamic character who finds herself by overcoming her traumas.  That's kind of the purpose of the scream queens.  Characters like Ripley or Laurie Strode start off as marginalized characters who show their true colors through the adversity that follows them.  They end up becoming a bigger monster, a monster for good, than the creature that is stalking them.  But Moonstar never really has that moment.  Instead, she is unconscious for the bulk of the finale.  Reyes ends up being a non-threat and why should we care about that?  I mean, the movie still works despite my hopes for a stronger protagonist, but it did definitely rub me the wrong way.

However, there is one absolutely great thing about this movie.  While it feels like a technicality, having The New Mutants being the last X-Men film released by 20th Century Fox / 20th Century Studios is a mitzvah.  Dark Phoenix was borderline unwatchable and it left such a sour taste in my mouth.  Instead, The New Mutants kind of owns.  It's not a perfect film, by any means.   If the studio system got one thing kind of right, it does feel like the audience for this movie would be miniscule.  Regardless, it is the last film in the franchise and I can't complain about that for one second.

Rated R for a lot of violence, but also a really weird scene of a striptease that has absolutely nothing to do with the storyline, yet is played out slowly and in full.  I was so jazzed to say, "Ah, Fist of Fury only has a lot of violence and cartoonish blood."  Then there's this whole nudity thing that seems completely to play up how shameless some kung fu films get.  I also suppose I should mention that the movie discusses racism, but I'm not quite sure who is being more racist.  R.

DIRECTOR: Wei Lo

There's a lot of great things that come out of watching a lot of movies, especially if they aren't all from one genre or one country.  The more I branch out, the more I learn about cultural norms and I end up becoming interested in the politics of a region or a time period.  Like, I wouldn't say, "I know this history because I watched such-and-such of movie", but it does open some doors to cultural literacy.  But to truly understand something, you can't just watch one movie and say, "Done.  I now know everything."  I'm dancing around the fact that, because my knowledge of kung fu films is limited, I don't exactly know if this movie is racist or not.

Yeah.  I'm trying to judge something entirely based on an exploitation film from the 1970s.  I can't help it.  I have known that, in the past, that there has been animosity between China and Japan.  I think I gleaned this from a YouTube video.  (Again, I'm a history minor and an English teacher.  I should do better.)  I think a lot of it came from Japan's long history of being an isolationist country.  But that was always just a fact that I didn't have much investment in.  Like a lot of history, it may just sound like a fact until you find out the cultural relevancy of such a fact.  With the case of Fist of Fury, the film centers around the fragile and volatile relationship between the Japanese and the Chinese in Shanghai about a century prior to this movie.  Again, this is very specific, yet crucial cultural knowledge that affects the movie.  Fist of Fury paints the Japanese in an extremely poor light.  They are bullies who instigate the events of the movie for almost unknown reasons.  Honestly, it seems like the film's only motive for having the Japanese as the bad guys is because they seem like overt racists.  And the message of Fist of Fury is that sometimes, racism just needs to be kicked in the face.  

But the problem is, is that accurate?  I have no idea.  The film, starting off with the death of Chen Zhen's teacher, is simply "because."  I am probably going to talk a bit about how the plot itself is extremely flimsy, but I want to steer back to the racism element of the whole thing.  The movie posits that the death of the teacher is a mystery.  This mystery aggressively points to the Japanese as the culprits.  Post-funeral, the Japanese insult the mourning Chinese kung fu students with a plaque labeling the teacher as "The Sick Man of the East."  They had it framed and everything.  It kind of seems like they really went out of their way to insult everyone for what seems like no reason.  This is the kind of over-the-top racism we see in cinema, but rarely in life.  (Racism is a very real problem.  It just rarely looks like what we see in Fist of Fury.) Sure enough, the Japanese were behind the death of the teacher and the only explanation behind it was, "Because they're Japanese." 

See, this is where I can't pick a side.  The racism behind the whole story is almost comically implausible.  The Japanese murder the head of this school.  Let's pretend it is because this teacher was the head of a rival school.  (That also seems silly, but it allows me to say the murder wasn't entire race based.  Also, it seems like there would be a lot more Chinese people to kill than simply the head of a kung fu school.)  They do so through stealth, opting to poison the leader and make it seem like natural causes.  Why come forward then, waving the insult in the deceased's face?  There was a lot of effort to ensure that there would be no investigation into the murder of this man, but the swagger of the Japanese in this film adds a motive for murder where none existed previously.  So again, back to racism.

I suppose that we have similar cultural shortcuts in America.  I'm definitely not trying to compare the Japanese in Fist of Fury to the Nazis of American cinema, but we do have shorthand for cultures that are bad.  The Nazis deserve to be scorned in every form of art and entertainment.  We kind of do the same thing to the Russians.  If America needs to punch someone in the face, we have two cultures that kind of allow it simply based on a rich history of distrust and opposition.  I can't be wagging a finger so hard at Fist of Fury because, for all I know, the Japanese served the role of the Russians in a lot of our cinema.  (Maybe I should be looking at how Hollywood continues to divide two countries in the name of nationalism.  Who knows?)  But there's a lot of "We're not being racists!  They are the ones who are the racists!" going on in the movie.

But even with the racism in or the racism out, the story is really flimsy.  Like, I enjoyed Fist of Fury way more than The Big Boss.   This is a year's difference for Bruce Lee and it just seems like a more put-together film.  It feels cinematic as opposed to studio lot.  (Although we DO get a lot of shots of that one road...almost like it is on a backlot.)  The Big Boss wasn't exactly a think-piece, but it did understand that maybe there needs to be some level of plot.  Maybe the story should hold back on Bruce Lee going right into punching.  But Fist of Fury ignores that concept and allows Lee to just start punching people to death almost from moment one.  And we get the Bruce Lee that we kind of associate with.  He makes all of the noises in this one.  The punches are held longer, trembling fist and all.  Heck, we even get one of my favorite memes in this movie.  (In Giphy, type "skeptical" and you'll see what I'm talking about.)  I'm never going to preach Fist of Fury because of its lack of plot, but I do really respect the spectacle going on.  Fist of Fury may be far more cinematic and epic than The Big Boss, but it also never really tries to step out of its britches.  It is a movie that understands that people just want to see a lot of death by punching and that's cool.  Lee is a rock star in this movie.  It's all about fight choreography and pushing the lines of plausibility.  It's so odd that Chen Zhen is able to take on the entire school himself when he's in the mindset of not killing anyone, but his entire kung fu school is decimated by the opposing school when he is not there.

Because I'm obsessed with morality in stories, I do want to look at Chen Zhen as anti-hero.  There isn't exactly a winning situation in the story.  Because the Japanese school is so antagonistic in the movie, the option to do nothing doesn't really seem plausible.  I mean, the absolute right thing to do, if this were reality, is nothing.  If I owned a kung fu school and someone called someone I love "The Sick Man of the East" or something, I would do nothing while they were there, then talk about them constantly with people who shared like-minded views before stalking them on Facebook and scoffing at their posting of Daily Wire, Breitbart, and Church Militant articles all over their pages.  But that wouldn't make much of a film.  We cheer when Chen Zhen takes justice into his own hands because that's the crux of the film.  But he is constantly rebuked for his willful disobedience of his master's rules.  We know that Chen Zhen is in the wrong for his actions because the other students comment on this regularly.  Also, we know that Chen Zhen isn't the one who has to deal with these consequences.  (It's implied that Chen Zhen is shot to death at the end, right?)   Like The Big Boss, the Chinese studio system kind of mirrors the film noir era of needing crime to be punished, regardless of how justifiable it may seem.   Is he killed?  Like, it really really nods towards it, but I hear that there's a sequel to this movie?  Sure, it stars Bruce Li, but that ending is a little ambiguous.

Anyway, it's a very watchable movie, but it doesn't exactly knock it out of the park.  That script is super lazy and really relies on Bruce Lee's abilities and charisma to hold the film together.  That's okay, I guess, but I hope that the following films have a little more meat on them.