Not rated, but the movie gets pretty dark.  In some ways, this is a horror movie.  But there's also some nudity, in typical Bergman fashion in the context of adultery.  There's also a couple of grizzly murders in this one.  To add a little more spice, these are nightmarish images that seem more insane than normal.  Once again, a Bergman movie not for kids.  For all those kids who are Jonesing for Ingmar Bergman deep cuts.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I don't know how much I have in me.  In a perfect world, I knock this blog out and I read a crap ton before the ball drops in Times Square.  Thus, I will enter 2025 as the most accomplished human being that ever lived.  I know.  None of this matters.  I'm already pretty darned accomplished.  If you look at the Film Index, you know that I'm not exactly joking when it comes to being self-motivated.

Hour of the Wolf might be my official entry into the weirder Bergman movies.  I'm going to make a confession that I've been dancing around for a while.  A couple of years ago (I think!) I watched Persona.  Persona was an incredibly frustrating film that hit my specific annoyance when it comes to surreal filmmaking.  I'd like to point out that Persona came out two years before Hour of the Wolf.  Bergman has earned a reputation, in the best way possible, of being a difficult director to pin down.  This entire blog, with its casual tone, lack of research, and laissez-faire attitude to proofreading, might not be the best place to unpack Ingmar Bergman.  Some of my blogs regarding his films might be too informal for someone who is universally recognized as one of the masters of cinema.  But when I wrote my Persona blog, I apparently crapped the bed pretty hard with my read on that film.  It's difficult!  It's an incredibly difficult film!  I think that the Criterion box gave me a lot of the Bergman softballs up to this point.  But between From the Life of the Marionettes and Hour of the Wolf being on the same disc, I think I might be in some of the more challenging works of Bergman.  I'm still mortified that I got called out on Persona.  But that being said, I think I still have to take wide swings when it comes to challenging cinema.  If I didn't, I can't promise that I was really engaging with the film itself.  What I'm saying is that if I'm off on my read of Hour of the Wolf or any of the following Bergman films, I'd like to apologize.  But I also would like to say that it makes blogging more interesting.  When I have a ho-hum read on something obvious, how is that interesting writing?

Now, I tend to shy away from movies that get weird for weird's sake.  I know.  Again, I'm being entirely flippant over something that is much smarter than I am.  Out of the weirder movies that I watched, Hour of the Wolf isn't terrible.  Maybe I'm being a hypocrite.  Maybe I really wanted to like it, thus I liked it.  But Hour of the Wolf does commit some of the sins of cinema that tend to bother me.  I'm going to lean hard into this read of the movie pretty hard, mainly because I have a modicum of evidence to support this read.  First of all, Hour of the Wolf is fictional even if Bergman started with a note that it was based on reality.  That's Wikipedia for you.  But even more than that, I have to say that this is another movie that is based on dreams and nightmares.  I don't know why these movies tend to get under my skin like they do.  If cinema is meant to discuss the human condition, dreams are part of the human experience.  (I'm really standing by that a lot of this movie is a dream rather than simply existential or fantasy.) But I also am rarely moved by the notion of dream imagery in film.  It hits a lot of the same issues I have when it comes to people telling me their dreams.  Dreams are weird and incredibly subjective.  Watching them in films doesn't really do a lot for me.  Hour of the Wolf does a decent job with them because the imagery is strong and it reflects many of the themes of the film.  But still...dream imagery.

Before I spiral out of this, I do want to stand by the notion that Bergman is cataloguing dreams more than he is going in other directions.  The title of the movie is Hour of the Wolf, which I didn't know much about going into this.  I would like to stress that I go into most Bergman movies completely blind.  But there is a almost mid-film break where we get the title card once again, followed up by Max Von Sydow explaining the title explicitly.  Now, Hour of the Wolf refers to the time when there are the most deaths, the most births, the time that people tend to have a hard time sleeping.  But most importantly, it is also the time that people have nightmares.  Yeah, I'm ignoring all of the other things that happen during the Hour of the Wolf, but I like the nightmare as the hard right turn that this movie makes.  "But, Tim," you may ask.  "Why would Alma be going through the same thing?"  I mean, I got two reads on this?  I do think that something supernatural is happening.  More psychological than supernatural, but you get where I'm going with this.  But also, there is this repeated line that couples that are together long enough start mirroring each other.  When Johan starts going mad, it's not surprising that Alma starts having a shared experience with that.  After all, the movie stresses that Alma is killed by Johan's pistol only to have Alma confess that only one of the bullets grazed her.  Yet, she goes through that nightmare in the woods stemming out of Johan's nightmarish experience in the large house.

I'm tempted to have each Bergman movie offer a different read on monogamy.  Each story shows the misery of marriage.  If anything, there are a lot of shades of Scenes from a Marriage happening here, even down to Liv Ullmann shouting at her abusive husband, Johan.  I'm now really concerned if there is an actual Johan out there and why he's always a terrible husband.  In this one, we get an almost entirely innocent wife, Alma.  But there's something matter-of-factual about the burden that monogamy places on a husband.  I can't ignore the fact that Johan is in the arts.  He's this frustrated artist who can't stand to be in this marriage with this lesser woman.  (I'm commenting on the film and in no way believe what he believes.)  He is so frustrated by Alma's goodness towards him that he attempts to murder her. Once again, there's something attempting to be sympathetic towards this jerk of a man.  But --and this is my read on this take of monogamy --his life is so much worse after he murders his wife.  The slaying of Alma is an afterthought to the nightmare that he encounters when he goes to the big house in search of his former lover Veronica Vogler.  There's never an expression of regret.  Instead, we get a lot of fear of the other guests at the party.  The entire scenario becomes like a macabre circus, down even to the clownish feminine makeup he dons.  I get a bit of Bergman griping about monogamy and marriage, only to understand that it is better than being alone or pursuing former flames who manipulate him into being something that he doesn't want to be.  We are still left with the notion that humanity is a terrible thing, but there are levels to the Hell that he is in.

I'm still trying to piece together why I don't hate this movie.  I think I was getting so annoyed by the same style of Bergman movie that I needed to get into the heavier stuff.  But I also think that, as difficult as Hour of the Wolf gets, there's something of the old fashioned horror story to this one.  The movie dances around the notion that there is something supernatural to this island.  Both Alma and Johan attend that first party where they get the marionette opera featuring real actors.  It's meant to be bizarre and the haunting thing is that no one treats the surreal as surreal.  Instead, there is the burden of the artist to accept the unreal as grounded.  Part of that might be the frustration that Johan feels as an artist.  The world is so much greater than he is able to capture that he must internalize his own fear until he becomes part of the madness parade.  Now I'm getting into weirder and into stuff that has less authority.  Still, as a horror movie, it's pretty good.  Here's how weird it gets.  I know that there are no wolves in this movie.  But with a title Hour of the Wolf, the movie wouldn't have surprised me if it turned into a good, old-fashioned, werewolf film.  

I don't know how generous I'll be later in the Bergman collection.  I feel like I've been writing about Bergman movies for so long and that I've made a ton of progress.  But in reality, I'm on Disc 9 out of 30.  That's not a lot.  Sure, I jumped around a bit and some of the Bergman movies have already been written about.  Still, I guess I'm ready to get into some more challenging stuff, even if I don't feel confident about many of them.   But Hour of the Wolf mostly works if for imagery alone.

Not rated, but there's some language and a phone sex scene.  Also, there's a running gag where it seems like the protagonist is being hunted and stalked by a neighbor.  Some of these scenes get mildly dark and scary, but nothing that most people couldn't handle, except for the language that the guy uses.  The movie is also about mortality and grieving, which isn't a parental advisory thing so much as it is just a thing that some people might not be prepped for.  Oh!  Also, a lot of drugs, but very little of it used.

DIRECTOR:  Trent O'Donnell

I don't know how I can stay ahead of my writing and be ahead of the game one day only to fall behind in 24 hours.  It's what happens when I'm watching two movies in the same day.  Still, I really thought that I wouldn't have to stress on New Year's Eve.  We'll see if I can knock this out.  I'm not even contemplating that I might have time for a second blog tonight.  But still.

Do you know how this movie crossed my path?  The library!  There's some stress when it comes to the library for me.  I'm wired to get things back as quickly as possible.  And do you know how many library movies I rented?  Three!  Three movies!  One of them needs to be back in four days and my wife has no interest in watching it.  (Note:  It's Longlegs.) But it's not like I went looking for Ride the Eagle. I got it entirely because of the cast.  When I saw the cover of this movie, I knew my wife would be excited to watch it.  I mean, I got two dark movies and then this.  Yeah, she was all about this movie.  And I'll tell you what?  While it's going to potentially be one of the more forgettable movies I watched this year, it was flippin' great.  

I mean, it really has indie comedy vibes.  I could drop the name Ride the Eagle in most circles and I can almost guarantee that no one has seen this.  (Also note: This might be on Amazon Prime and there was no reason why I needed to hold the disc from a library.) It has a lot of direct-to-streaming vibes.  But with the case of Ride the Eagle, that might have a charming element that was a bonus.  I'm such a snob.  I tend to dismiss streaming movies pretty quickly.  It's just that we get so many that make little cultural imprint.  Ride the Eagle feels like a passion project that has a lot of Jake Johnson behind it.  I saw that he shared writing credit on this movie and I applaud him.  Jake Johnson, honestly. has yet to disappoint.  I think everybody knew the scale of this movie when they went into pre-production. It was almost written to be on a shoestring budget.  The location is the woods.  Each scene is almost done entirely in isolation.  As a guy who has never directed a feature length film, I guess that this was probably filmed over the course of six weeks.  You had Susan Sarandon film all of her scenes in front of a camcorder with no interaction with other characters.  J.K. Simmons has a really short scene with Jake Johnson and the rest of his dialogue was probably recorded ADR.  D'Arcy Camden's scenes are entirely in one location as a phone call.  Much of her character is through text message.  Really, Jake Johnson talking to a dog is the majority of the film coupled with a couple of scenes with a guy who is in his band. 

And for what it is, it's got some heart to it.  The very notion is a bit beyond the pale, but it stays just this side of plausible for the movie to hold onto emotional vulnerability.  But in terms of dealing with the many facets of mourning, the movie does a fairly solid job of talking about alternative mourning.  I like that mourning doesn't have to look like one thing. If anything, Ride the Eagle's look at morning isn't about missing someone who is lost, but dealing with a life of regret that can't be changed.  For the protagonist, Lief, this could be a Scrooge story.  In terms of the character's background, he's a guy who didn't have a mom which could leave him broken and isolated.  He's isolated, but he's not broken.  If anything, the dude has a healthy disposition towards life. He's offered a sweet cabin in the will, but much of the movie isn't about him trying to win the cabin. Instead, it's someone who is willing to give his dead mother one last chance to be a part of his life.  God, if anything this is a commentary on burgeoning male vulnerability (second time I used "vulnerability" in this blog) and how it should look.  While Honey has plenty to teach him, it's not about a bad man being good.  Instead, it is about sucking the marrow out of life.  It's about enjoying the moment and celebrating life while he has the opportunity.

In no way should this work, but it becomes a lovely romantic comedy even though the characters aren't in the same room together.  Lief and Audrey honestly understand the value of apologies and communication.  One of the challenges that Honey gives Lief is to contact the one that got away.  Now, if this was grumpy ol' me, I think I would have been much more stick-in-the-muddish about the whole thing.  If I received a phone call from an ex and I was still single, I think I would be a huge turd. But that's never part of the narrative.  Instead, Audrey has this healthy outlook to the whole thing.  She knows that Lief didn't have to contact her (even though it is the conceit of the film) and she forgives him quickly.  Now, I don't know what broke them up to begin with.  But that apology, while being a little vague, is some healthy nonsense going on.  He apologizes for not fighting harder for their relationship and that felt like there was some understanding that things fall apart not for one reason, but for a lot of smaller things.  It is weird how quickly they jump to the intimacy thing after forgiving each other, but it is a comedy for adults.  It's part of the story.

But I might be too forgiving of this movie as well.  One of the recurring motifs of the movie is that Lief is getting to know his mom better.  Everyone, Mom included, understands that Honey should have been a better mom to Lief.  But it is a bit off that we never really get a righteous anger.  There's a lot of things that are emotionally charged in Honey's message.  (I really applaud the notion that Honey, from beyond the grave, misreads how Lief is handling all of her little plans.)   Perhaps it's because Lief has no one to bounce ideas off of beyond his use of a cell phone, but I kind of want him to get really angry at least once.  As fun as this whole "Discover Yourself" spirit quest is, it is a far cry from having Honey in his life.  Yeah, other movies have beaten this idea to death.  But I don't want the entire movie to be about that.  Instead, I want this to be simply an element of the way that Lief deals with Honey's death.  THe closest we get about that is J.K. Simmons aggressively mourning a woman that he seems to love, even if he is a bit unhinged.  (Also, as much as I love the joke, Simmons --for comic effect --seems entirely unhinged.  What if he killed Lief?  What a weird twist in the movie that would have been!)

But for a throwaway movie (which seems really disparaging and I don't want to sound like a negative nelly), it is a pretty solid movie.  Yeah, it's made on the cheap.  But just because something is made on the cheap, doesn't mean that it is all that bad. It's got a great cast. It's ethically interesting enough to keep me involved.  And it's funny enough that I want to recommend it to others.  I have nothing to complain about.  This movie was pretty solid.  It'll never be a favorite, but it worked pretty well.

But the title, Ride the Eagle?  Barely tied into the movie.

Rated R.  One of my big arguments that I made during this blog is that every director has their sexual sadist movie.  While I haven't gotten through all of Bergman yet, I have to believe that this is Bergman's.  In terms of questionable content, this movie hits it all.  Rape, nudity, necrophelia, language, dated stereotypes of homosexuals, violence, gore.  It's almost like he's trying to hit every button on this one.  I really wonder what Swedish culture is like considering that apparently, this was a TV movie.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

I already buried the lede.  (Okay, that's not the proper use of that phrase, but I really wanted to write "bury the lede.") I had the epiphany that all the greats have their weird sexual sadist movie.  There needed to be an over-the-top rape murder movie in the ouvre.  I don't know what it is.  The Archers had Peeping Tom.  Hitchcock had Frenzy (and technically Psycho,  but that feels tame compared to Frenzy.)  Bogdanovich had Targets.  Edgar Wright has ​Last Night in Soho.  This is Ingmar Bergman's sexual sadist movie.  And for a sadism film, it isn't bad.  But also, why does every white male director feel the need to tell the story of a white man on the fringes of society who feels the need to commit unspeakable crimes?  

The crazy part is that one of the things that got me into cinema and taking directors seriously were sadism films.  They were Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher's Se7en.  These are really screwed up movies, but they also pushed the limits of what cinema could be.  Maybe that's what the call is.  I mean, if I had to take what I think about white male storytelling, I think that there's something gross in all of us that makes us want to tell messed up stories.  I want to distance the comparison from someone like Fincher, who feels quite comfortable in the darker storytelling places.  I want to talk about the first set of examples.  I have a feeling that these directors are trying to step out of their comfort zones by making these kinds of movies.  

It's not like From the Life of the Marionettes is anti-Bergman.  It very much is a Bergman movie.  Do I think it really reminds me a lot of Targets?  Sure.  I can't possibly imagine that Bergman is knocking off Bogdanovich. After all, Bogdanovich is a director that stands on the shoulders of geniuses.  It's weird to think of that going the other way around.  But Marionettes is very Bergman while being something different from what we've seen before.  There seems to be an effort into going as dark as he can go.  It's not like Bergman has ever been afraid to go dark with his storytelling.  I even commented that Saraband seemed to be going dark simply for the sake of going dark.  But there's a conscious effort to go as blue as can be.  The movie itself starts with the topless sex worker fighting for her life against the protagonist of the film.  It lingers on her nudity.  The movie then goes to explain the ways that Peter Egermann sexually defiled her body.  I'm dipping my toe into something a little murky here, so I'm going to just address the question head on.  There's something in our history of storytelling when it comes to sexual sin and sex crimes.  It's a gross area where arguments can be made on either side whether or not the story needs to be told at all.  On the positive side, talking about such things brings about a dialogue.  After all, cultural puritanism nerfs real storytelling.  But on the other side, making entertainment out of rape and murder is pretty gross in itself.  This is the natural extension about the true crime obsession that many of us have.  Bergman is a heck of a storyteller and he does impressive things with Marionettes.  But I also get the vibe that maybe he's not exploring this thought too closely. 

It's the issue I had with Poor Things.  I know that I was the only dude on the planet who didn't care for Poor Things.  My frustration lied in the irony between the message of the film and the entertainment value of the film.  As the quickest summary ever, Poor Thing rallies against the sexual exploitation of women while basically sexually exploiting Emma Stone for the entire film.  Bergman actually has something fairly interesting to say with Marionettes and --good on him! --he's talking about the failures of the mental health industry in 1980.  But to do so, he really lets us linger with a ton of sexual imagery when, in all reality, we don't need to.  There are a litany of reasons why Peter Egermann murders Katarina Krafft at the beginning of the movie.  The bulk of the movie is devoted in showing all of the warning signs that led to this man killing this sex worker.  A lot of them come from the fact that people don't take Peter's warning signs seriously enough.  It never really lets Peter off the hook morally for his crimes, but instead accuses more than simply the murderer for the death of Katarina.  But one thing that the movie doesn't really do is say that Peter was in a sex mania that made him do this.  Yet, Bergman keeps on showing naked women performing sexual acts and lingers on that image.  These are images that are juxtaposed to violent images.  There's a sequence where we see Peter Egermann's dream where he slaughters his wife as she's nude in this white space.   We're meant to find these moments disturbing.  But Bergman keeps showing all of these sex acts without the context of violence almost as a form of titillation.  It's an odd decision.

I'm trying to approach Bergman from another position.  I've rallied that Bergman keeps making movies about casual adultery because he's letting himself off the hook for his own infidelities. I'm writing from another position because I want to be more challenged by Bergman.  Maybe he is doing what I've accused him of doing.  After all, it's a one-to-one thing.  But more than that, I don't know if he's saying that adultery should have less of a stigma so much as he's commenting that people are inherently terrible to each other.  There's something incredibly damning about the way that Bergman's characters all treat each other. I've watched a lot of stories where the central motif is love. Even in this movie where the husband and wife treat each other with utter contempt, Katarina Egermann swears that she's obsessed with Peter.  Yet, none of this obsession with Peter leads her to treating him like a spouse should.  Katarina Egermann almost prides herself on her ability to push his buttons.  She cheats on him and, even if she holds back, she doesn't do things to fix Peter's descent into madness.  (I'd like to really stress, almost all of this is Peter.  It's more of a matter that Bergman lets us know how we got to this point as opposed to laying blame on Katarina Egermann alone.) 

It's funny.  When I hadn't watched any Bergman, I always thought of Bergman as a director who had a pretty bleak look at humanity.  I thought of the images of The Seventh Seal and said, "Yeah, people are terrible to each other" without having seen those images in context to the rest of the film.  Then I watched Bergman and said, "Well, this guy has a problem with adultery being such a stigma.  He probably believes if everyone was cooler with adultery, the world would be a happier place."  But now that I've seen a lot of Bergman, I might be back to the notion that the world is a terrible place.  It's kind of that whole thing with the idea nihilism.  While nihilism tends to have a negative connotation (the notion that life has no meaning tends to lead people to think that anything is permissible under nihilism), there is the concept of positive nihilism (the idea that, because life has no meaning, it is up to humanity to give life meaning through a good lifestyle.) There might be something to that with Bergman.  If the world is full of terrible and selfish people, maybe it is the person who abandons his own selfish attitudes and learns to forgive himself and others that the truly heroic act is found.  It's a stretch.  But I also need to stretch myself if I'm watching a billion Bergman movies.  (Note: I just found out that we're going to Sweden this summer, so I want to have them all written up before that point.)

I'm going to close up by saying that this is a spiritual sequel to Targets.  Targets spends a little time with the notion of murder and a lot of time with the psychology / psychopathy of murder.  While we're looking at Peter Egermann's murder, Bergman is also pointing a light all all the elements that brings about murderers.  We're a factory that pumps out people like Peter Egermann.  And we're all so selfish that we see ourselves as the victims of Peter's choices.  In a way, the movie has a lot in common with Fritz Lang's M, looking at the fallout from a murder.  While I'm going to give the movie a positive review, mainly because it's interesting and well done, it's ultimately an unnecessary movie.  For all of Bergman's brilliance, there are so many times that the movie feels indulgent and missing the point in its very existence.

PG-13, for language mostly.  Some of that language tip-toes into hate speech. Admittedly, some of this messy speech is between friends.  Still, it does kind of use of some of that language and I can't deny that there's a bit of stigma to what is said.  There's also some sexual references, but nothing overtly sexual on screens.  There's some violence, involving death, and drug references as well.  It does really ride the fine line between PG-13 and R.  Still, it's PG-13!

DIRECTORS:  Shogo Furuya and Satoshi Kon

I should be writing my book right now.  Christmas break is hard for writing because really good writing, from my limited experiences, is built on the foundation of momentum.  Do you know what is really bad for writing?  Constant interruptions.  So if you have noticed me knocking out a fair amount of blogs, be aware that I'm more okay with my blog being hot trash versus something that is going to be published.  For those people who wish that my blog was given a bit more effort, I genuinely apologize for the trash I submit on the reg.  It's because it tends to get non-stop broken up by a baby doing something that she shouldn't be doing.

Instagram gave me my best gift the other day.  I got an Instagram reel in my feed that was "The Top 10 Holiday Classics You've Never Heard of."  If you don't get the central conceit, these are movies that are amazing and should be Christmas classics, but have somehow fallen under the radar.  I had heard of Tokyo Godfathers, but had no real desire to watch it.  It was just one of those films that I thought that anime nerds really liked.  I've always been hesitant to jump into anime.  Most anime has burned me with the exception of Studio Ghibli stuff.  Do you know what I always complain about?  I always say that "comic books are not a genre; they are a medium." Yet, I seem to treat anime as a genre.  So, Tokyo Godfathers fell under the radar over time.  But I watched the Reel and the movie looked incredible.  And do you know what?  Absolutely nailed it.  Honestly, it might be one of my favorite movies of the year.  There's one beat that doesn't resonate with me, but that's a pretty good record all things considering.

Tokyo Godfathers is one of those movies that is so inherently Christmas, but I can imagine that people might be pulling a Die Hard and claiming it isn't a Christmas movie.  For those people who need my two cents on if Die Hard is a Christmas movie, the answer is "I don't care.  The bigger issue is that you are using Die Hard as a Christmas movie to show how wacky and unique you are when everyone is also playing the same card."  If you need Die Hard to be a Christmas movie, by all means.  Just don't be loud at parties about it.  I want to argue that Tokyo Godfathers is a nearly perfect Christmas movie.  While the tenets of Christmas may be playing in the background as opposed to the central story, tonally Tokyo Godfathers does a heck of a job establishing that it should be considered a Christmas film.  First of all, I've always maintained that Christmas movies should be bleak.  They shouldn't stay bleak.  But we need to get to some pretty dark places before we are allowed to enter the light.  Tokyo Godfathers is critical as heck about who we are as people to allow homelessness to be a societal ill that we allow to happen.  It does that thing that a good Nativity story does and reminds us that the ones who are struggling are just as human as the well-off, if not more so.

When these three find this child, there isn't really a consideration that this baby should be left to freeze to death.  God knows that these three are struggling just to make it through the day.  Yet, the trio, despite disagreeing on the proper way to care for this baby, are all on the same page that they need to do something to ensure that this baby is alright.  It's one of those stories, like It's a Wonderful Life, that reminds us that the moral thing in life is rarely easy.  As George Bailey has to sacrifice his dreams to save the town from Potter, Gin, Hana, and Miyuki have to squander what little resources they have to take care of this child.  And like It's a Wonderful Life, it's hard for them to see how much better off they are for embracing this child.  The three of them care for each other from moment one.  But the three of them grow closer and closer throughout the film (despite getting wildly upset with one another)  because they have a shared love for this child that needs a parent once again.  On top of that, the stakes get to be astronomical.  Every two seconds, it feels like this kid is about to die.  The news that they get seemingly gets worse.  As much as they want to find the family of this kid, they understand that maybe people only look nice on the outside.  The idea is almost thrust upon the audience that these three, despite having nothing more to give, would make better parents than Kiyoko's actual parents would have.

But if it only takes two seconds to make the next logical leap, it's two seconds well spent.  Tokyo Godfathers does not paint a lovely view of humanity.  The trio is treated terribly everywhere they go.  Their circle of friends tend to be people who live morally dubious lifestyles.  They go to some shady places for information.  And the people who consider themselves good people?  Their lives aren't exactly cherry pie.  The original Kiyoko, Gin's daughter, is marrying a man that she doesn't seem at all attracted to.  She's doing it, seemingly, for money.  The guy's a bit of a punk too, despite being a doctor.  The world of Tokyo Godfathers is  a bit too much like our world.  It's a cruel world.  Clearly, people have made the world cruel.  But there's another step to be taken.  As much as it is a criticism of society, Tokyo Godfathers, like good Christmas movies should be, is a celebration of the individual.  Call it transcendentalism, if you will, but this is saying that people, when crossing a bridge between choosing the easy path and doing good in opposition to the stream, will choose the morally right action.  Yeah, people have dark times.  Hana rips into Gin for being a degenerate gambler.  Baby Kiyoko's mother and father are either broken or terrible human beings.  But it doesn't stop the fact that these three, who have nothing to give, keep giving of themselves to make sure that this baby has a chance at a normal life.

There would have been an easy gag.  Western movies would have had the character arc of doing all of this for money, only to give up the money for the greater happiness of the child.   I mean, I'm not saying that Tokyo Godfathers doesn't hit on  some of the tropes of homelessness.  But the three feel authentic to the point where my heart broke quite a few times from what they went through.  Yes, because this is animated, there are some larger than life things that happen, particularly with Hana.  But this is a story woven with verisimilitude.  While there are larger than life moments, at its core, it is a human story through and through.  It's a damning story of how a part of our society is ignored  for the sake of convenience.  And the movie doesn't shy away from how people view the lowest castes of society.  There are moments where they are dismissed simply because they are destitute.  This is a story that should have a moderate to easy solve.  (Admittedly, Hana's stubbornness is one of the reasons that there is a problem at all, but that also feels oddly forgivable.) 

I did say that there was one moment that went too far.  The end was almost perfect.  Honestly, that chase between the trio and the false mother was harrowing.  The fact that this woman, suicidal, is rushing towards a ledge holding the baby is a lot.  Miyuki's confrontation with the mother as a news helicopter circles overhead is anxiety inducing.  When the woman goes over, Miyuki, the smallest of the three, holds on for dear life to save the woman and the child.  I can even forgive if the movie hit the trope of the three of them holding each other as they form a daisy chain leading to safety.  But when the baby goes over and Hana has to ride a tarp to the bottom as a breeze turns the banner into a makeshift parachute?  A step too far.  It doesn't kill the movie for me, but it is just so close to perfection.  I don't even mind if Hana is holding onto a banner and emergency response teams has to get them down.  I like that.  But the parachute?  It's a bit much.

Still, Tokyo Godfathers might have proven to be one of my favorite movies this year.  I think I'm building a perfect alternative Christmas classics list with this and The Holdovers.  These movies understand that the reason that we celebrate Christ's birth this time of year is that it is physically the darkest and seemingly the most hopeless.  But we celebrate humanity when we stand up to the darkness and find the beauty in each other.  I adore this so much.  Top notch movie.  I'm recommending it all around.

PG-13 for one f-bomb and then some pretty standard PG-13 language after that.  I really wrote that first because I didn't want to forget the f-bomb, but the PG-13 is really for sexuality all throughout the film.  We don't see much, outside of Cameron Diaz in a bra.  But it is made plain that many of the characters are either sleeping with each other or sleeping around.  Also, there's some concerning alcoholic tendencies that really need to be addressed.

DIRECTOR: Nancy Meyers

It would be a minor miracle if I can knock this out before I go to bed.  I am writing against the clock and against anything that would be even lightly considered wise.  I just knocked out Yojimbo about an hour ago. I was about to play catch up with my movie blogs...and then I finished Tokyo Godfathers.  See, I'm going whole hog with this Christmas break thing.  I used these past few days to embrace some Christmas stuff that I've avoided for the longest time.  And now, I've watched The Holiday, a movie that many have watched every year and talked about to death.  It's not that I'm into rom-coms.  It's that I love being culturally literate.

And I went into this one with a good attitude.  Do you know who surprised me about The Holiday, though?  My wife!  Mrs. I-Love-Rom-Coms was cool about The Holiday.  I still haven't gotten a straight answer out of her on whether or not she's seen this movie before.  What I do know now is that she does not care for Cameron Diaz.  Now, this is not the first time that I've heard my wife say that she didn't watch a movie because someone in the movie irks her.   This has been a thing.  But she's also been known to 180 on many actors after seeing them in something good.  I remember the days when my wife would refuse to watch a Scarlet Johansson movie, but now thinks she's pretty darned good. But I hate to be this guy, but my wife might have a point about Cameron Diaz.

Now, I'm going to contextualize this because I've given an odd amount of thought to the career of Ms. Diaz since watching this movie.  If there is a really weak spot in The Holiday, it comes from Diaz.  I'm sorry, Ms. Diaz.  I hope my following explanation at least gives me some slack on the rope I'm hanging myself with.  Cameron Diaz is the product of a very specific time in Hollywood.  This movie came out in 2006.  That gives  me a lot of information.  People who have read everything I've ever written probably know my thoughts on the movies between 1999-2003.  That's peak insane film era.  The time before this is definitely not off the hook, especially when it comes to making Cameron Diaz a star.  But Cameron Diaz's career flourished when actresses were asked to make very specific choices when it came to movie making.  What choices were these?  The answer was "Big choices."  Everything was huge during this time, especially for A-list American celebs.  To give a bit of context, we're also looking at Will Smith a bit here.  Smith learned to pivot his career from this larger-than-life acting style when movies call for it.  But Diaz made her bread and butter from this style of acting.  I mean, we're looking at stuff like There's Something about Mary and Charlie's Angels.  She crushed in those movies, but these are also movies that absolutely lack subtlety.  They're fine because they are nailing what audiences are looking for.  These are movies that smack you in the face and want you laughing on the floor.  They don't want the chuckle.  They want the guffaw.  

The problem with Diaz in The Holiday is that she's across from a bunch of actors who are incredibly subtle, despite being in a fairly broad rom-com.  If you really want to chalk it up to British versus American, there's an argument to be had there.   But we even have Jack Black, who is probably a bit pre-Jack Black Jack Black here (Jack Black!).  We're looking at High Fidelity Jack Black here.  Maybe more Orange County Jack Black here.   This, by the way, is my favorite Jack Black.  But I think he also is still somewhat defining himself.  He's breaking through the cultural zeitgeist in this era.  Black would eventually embrace the lovable goofball that we've seen him in stuff.  But with The Holiday, he's trying out leading man.  He's charismatic as heck.  As much as he's holding back from going full Tenacious D here, there are moments when we get that counter cultural megastar with this movie.  It's kind of what makes him charming.  He's taking a script where he's asked to play the nice guy and just peppering it with elements of what makes his so charismatic.  It's great.  But it's also slightly damning because I don't think that Diaz is doing that.

Now, I'm playing headcanon again.  All of this is entirely inappropriate, by the way.  I'm speaking flippantly about someone's career where she worked long and hard for, and I'm just dismissing things out of hand.  I apologize to everyone, but I also want to understand what happened here.  Part of me thinks that Nancy Meyers loved having Cameron Diaz in her film and was just willing to let her do her thing.  After all, Diaz is probably at the height of her career in 2006.  Who is going to try to put the breaks on someone that large and in charge?  The second option is that Diaz is doing her own thing and assuming that, as Cameron Diaz at the height of her career, she knows how to make a rom-com.  After all, didn't Nancy Meyers see There's Something about Mary?  I hope it's not that.  I've been rooting for Diaz with all of the hulaballoo when it comes to revitalizing her career and coming out of retirement stuff.  But she does not fit in this movie.

I spent too much time talking about Cameron Diaz.  I'm going to accept that Diaz is a bit distracting for me and accept that her character Amanda just acts differently than everyone else in this movie.  One of the things that we have to take for granted is the notion that people have to fall head-over-heels fairly quickly.  The story --which I have to give Meyers credit for --has the burden of a deadline.  These are two women who do house exchanges halfway across the world from one another.  I just learned about house exchanges from this movie and was told by my wife that they are a thing that really happens.  I don't understand how people do this, but more power to them.  But the fact that both couples are doomed to be burdened by geography after a certain date is an interesting story that is oddly underserved at times, especially in the Iris / Miles storyline.  As such, Meyers really sells the Amanda and Graham relationship.  While I don't quite know what Graham sees in Amanda, especially given his specific familial situation, Jude Law sells it enough that we can invest in it pretty quickly.  We get what Amanda sees in Jude Law.  Again, from a writing perspective, I don't necessarily hate it.  I don't believe it, but I don't hate it.  It is great that we get the notion that Amanda doesn't really realize that the reason that she is unhappy is because she's kind of vapid.  It never makes her the villain.  The villains are pretty easily laid out here and we can understand how unsympathetic they are.  But I love that we don't have to have that spoon fed for us.  Instead, we're left with a sense of exploring juxtaposition.

When Amanda discovers that Graham has two girls and that he is a widower, we can understand her anger for being lied to.  It's a lie of omission, but it seems pretty flagrant.  But there's a moment where I yelled at the screen and Meyers got me good with that one.  There's a moment where Graham's daughter asks Amanda for a sleepover in her room.  Now, Amanda declines in an incredibly polite and mature way.  I read this as setting boundaries and not wanting the girls overly invested in a woman who is going to be leaving for America in no time flat. But I like better that Amanda is mentally unprepared to be a mother.  After all, Graham as an archetype represents irresponsibility through his drunken debauchery.  When he reveals that, not only is his life far more together than Amanda thought, but that he might be more together than she is, that's a fascinating dynamic.  (Also, I have to say that Jude Law never looked better.  I'm incredibly comfortable saying this.) 

The funny thing is, the Iris story, while way better in terms of delivery, is incredibly confusing to me.  It seems like a lot of the Iris story (We all like Iris way better, right?  She's meant to be the real heroine of the piece.  I'm not wrong on this.) is devoted to Eli Wallach's Arthur story.  And the weird WEIRD thing is that it almost reads as a rom-com between 90-year-old Arthur and maybe 30-year-old Iris.  Miles, even though he's the romantic lead of the Iris storyline, takes a back seat up until the end when he goes full bore at the story as the handsome male lead.  There are so many of those Arthur scenes where I'm thinking, "Oh my goodness, that old perv is in love with Iris."  And Iris is almost leading him on.  I know. The story is supposed to be showing how caring Iris is of all the people around her, which leads to gross people like Jasper taking advantage of her. But there are some scenes where I thought, "And this is where Iris and Jasper kiss."  Don't get me wrong, I aggressively ship Iris and Miles.  I get how they like each other.  But so much cinematic real estate is devoted to Arthur that I'm surprised that Meyers managed to stick the landing with Miles.

The one thing that bothers me about the Miles storyline is that Miles represents the "Nice Guy" archetype.  He's the perfect man. He's passionate about what he does and it makes him attractive.  He seems to genuinely care for Iris when she is a doormat for Jasper.  (Again, we're playing the juxtaposition game.)  He's funny, at least in the world of The Holiday.  But it does really read like he's cheating on Maggie.  It's not a sexual affair, but he seems to be actively flirting with Iris from the moment he meets her.  He keeps finding excuses to go over there.  Now, this opens the door to the question, "Can men and women be friends?"  I don't hate the notion that they are friends and, I'm sure that Meyers would confirm, Miles probably thinks the same thing.  But within hours of Maggie being out of the picture, he's going full bore at Iris.  The fact that he asks her out within the week of getting dumped by someone he claimed to be obsessed with (He sent her a Christmas present to Lake Tahoe!  I think it was Lake Tahoe...), that reads as not so much "Nice Guy" archetype as much as sleezebag archetype.  Still, I tend to be critical of rom-coms when there's any kind of adultery on the part of the leads.

I wish I liked this movie more.  Out of the modern rom-coms I've seen, I didn't loathe it.  It does some really good things.  But it also feels incredibly dumb at times.  That seems to be par for the course when it comes to movies like this.  Again, we're outside my preferred genres here and I hate crapping on stuff that I know that I'm not going to like.  Still, I was impressed with a bunch of stuff.  Perhaps it was the better attitude I went into it with.  Maybe I wanted to like it more because my wife was "meh" about seeing it.  But it wasn't horrible and that's a big step for me.

Not rated, but there's some pretty brutal stuff in here for an Akira Kurosawa movie from 1961.  It's not overly gory, compared to other movies like Lone Wolf and Cub or anything, but there are moments where I forgot how mildly intense the movie gets.  Like, the town establishes how corrupt it is by having a dog gnawing on a severed hand when the samurai enters the town.  Also, there's more than no swearing in this movie.  Like, a decent amount.  There's also some sex work going on, but it's really downplayed.

DIRECTOR:  Akira Kurosawa

It's a very Kurosawa Christmas!  I almost wrote about this yesterday.  I think I hit almost none of my goals on Christmas day itself, but I wanted to keep up because now I'm up to my neck in catch-up writing to do.  I lead a very hard life of self-imposed goals that no one really cares about.  But guess what?  I finally get to write about Yojimbo, a movie that kind of knocked my socks off the first time I watched it.  (Despite not watching it again until yesterday.) 

I kind of jumped the line on watching Yojimbo.  I was going to slowly get to Yojimbo by spine number originally.  It's a pretty early one, so I thought that it wouldn't be a problem.  But I've been so backlogged in my stupid algorithm for figuring out which movie to watch next that I accidentally had to insert Yojimbo earlier than planned.  (When I say that I "had to do something", none of that is true.  I don't have to do something.  I just fill my life with self-imposed goals that mean ultimately nothing.) See, I actually got to the disc in the Zatoichi boxset that has Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, a movie I've been incredibly jazzed to watch.  In the dregs of some of the Zatoichi movies, I had this light at the end of the tunnel knowing that I would get to see something else with Yojimbo, even if the character's name is "Sanjuro." 

And for a hot minute, I was wondering why I liked this movie so long ago. I mean, it's Akira Kurosawa.  I'm predisposed to liking Kurosawa in the same way that Hitchcock kind of gets a pass from me.  I was worried that Zatoichi had ruined the samurai movie for me. (The judai-geki, if you will...) I mean, I'm now seeing a lot of the formula playing out in these movies.  Samurai times were a times where small bosses and lords tyrannized little towns and it took a samurai with a heart of gold to murder the heck out of everyone before moving on somewhere else.  Now, for the first part of the movie, a lot of the movie played out exactly like a Zatoichi film. I know that it's Zatoichi that's borrowing from Yojimbo.  But it didn't change the fact that I've seen this set up before.   At least I was liking the characters.  Like the crotchety Gonji, the tavern keeper?  (Okay, I had to look that up on IMDB.)  He's great.  Considering that Zatoichi is the only charismatic one in his movies, it's great that this one has side characters that are way more likable.  I also love that Kurosawa is completely unafraid to play with archetypes (almost to the point of being caricatures).  It's silly, but it's also incredibly fun.

And once Sanjuro starts unpacking his plan, the movie becomes kind of lit.  I keep thinking that the story is almost over, Kurosawa keeps adding things that makes Sanjuro's life crap.   Now, here's one thing that I kind of want people to argue with me about.  The premise of this movie is that this samurai is going to use his cryptic reputation to get these two gangs to exterminate each other and Sanjuro's going to reap the reward for it.  (The reality is that Sanjuro is doing this out of the kindness of his heart because he keeps on giving away the money that he makes off of the gangs, making him a noble hero.)   And for a lot of the movie, that really works.  I mean, he keeps on tricking these morons into almost wiping themselves out.  But, of course, gun guy shows up and ruins everything (which is a headline for most days in American newspapers) and there is an actual threat to Sanjuro, who seems to have his act together.  (Also note:  "Gun Guy" is forever going to be known as "Gun Guy" because that is his entire personality.  His name, according to IMDB, is Unosuke with the description "gunfighter.") But when Sanjuro gets wrecked, he has to abandon his plan and just slaughter everyone with a sword.  I don't mind that.  There needs to be some kind of sword fight in this movie because so much of the movie is the build up of tension that a swordfight seems to be the only release available.  My question is that "Shouldn't he have led with that?"  All this espionage and tomfoolery only got him hurt and stretched out a war that had already gone on long enough.  Why wait if you could have just sworded them all to death?  Devil's advocate?   Maybe he got them to take enough of each other out that the sword thing was possible?

But there's an interesting thing that I hope that Kurosawa wanted me to think about.  Again, Kurosawa can do no wrong for me, so I assume that the insight I have right now is entirely deliberate and I'm just being a dope.  The movie starts off with the tavern keeper giving Sanjuro free cold rice with the promise that Sanjuro will leave town as fast as he can.  The tavern keeper is sick of violence and he will do anything to end it.  When Sanjuro says that he's sticking around and that he's going to solve the town's problem, the tavern keeper is flustered.  After all, he's probably heard this before and it's just another body for his neighbor, the coffin maker, to bury.  As the story progresses, the tavern keeper warms to Sanjuro.  A lot of that is because Sanjuro is different from the other fools who have tried and failed to stop the violence.  Okay, I get that.  But over the course of the movie, Sanjuro either directly causes the death of the gangs or gets the gangs to do it themselves.  The movie ends with Sanjuro wiping out the remainder of both gangs, including Gun Guy who wants to die with his pistol in his hand.  It seems like there are only three survivors in the town.  The survivors all seem happy that the gangs are all gone.  But there's also the other shoe?  Um...three people do not make up a town.  I get the logic of celebrating the destruction of the gangs.  The gangs are evil.  Although there are only a few residents who aren't tied up in the gangs, these few deserve to stay in their homes.

But the thing to unpack is that there is death on a massive scale.  Sanjuro, through his execution of the plan, has basically wiped out everyone in a town.  Sure, they were all bad and a lot of them walked into their own demise.  But it's also weird to cheer that three people get a town all to themselves.  From what I remember of A Fistful of Dollars, the Western remake of this movie, there were lots of townspeople who were able to enjoy the town afterwards.  There were no female characters who survived the bloodshed, from what I understood.  That has to be some kind of commentary.  It's a really bittersweet ending.  In terms of stakes, the movie works really well.  I mean, Sanjuro has to be work uphill to beat all of these guys who have a foothold in this community.  But still, man!  That's a lot of people who got ripped apart.

Why do I find Yojimbo so satisfying? I mean, I won't deny that I have a soft spot for Akira Kurosawa.  I was thinking that I tend not to think of Kurosawa as necessarily a samurai director.  But he totally is, isn't he?  I mean, I tend to like his jidai-geki more than his gendai-geki, with the large exception of Ikiru.  I mean, when you put Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune together, you get something incredibly special.  I will admit that I may have put Yojimbo a bit on a pedestal.  But still, this movie absolutely slaps.  It's cool.  It makes you worry about its protagonist.  I has some of those cool elements that we get from heist movies.  Honestly, Yojimbo is great and I'm a little bummed that Zatoichi kind of took my obsession with samurai movies out of me a bit.

Rated R for a lot of cheap lookin' gore.  It's that kind of splatter gore that you get with a lot of zombie movies.  Because it's a murder zombie killing spree, there also has to be a moderate amount of language. Sometimes, that language can be in song because the movie is also a musical!  There's also references to sex without actually having sexuality in the movie.  R.

DIRECTOR: John McPhail

I had heard about this movie in the past and I had the mildest curiosity when it came to checking it out.  I've been on a small warpath about watching Christmas movies that I haven't seen yet.  I got through a lot of The Holiday (which, by the way, is far too long for a rom-com) voluntarily.  But Anna and the Apocalypse should have been one of those movies that is a threshold movie.  It has what my wife is looking for (A Christmas musical) with what I'm looking for (zombie carnage).  And for the sake of checking boxes, Anna and the Apocalypse mostly nails that.

The real problem is me.  (Thank you, Taylor Swift, for making this part of my thought process.)  Anna and the Apocalypse is one of those movies that wears its influences on its sleeves.  I'm not the only one who recognizes it.   Heck, I don't even think that the production team would shy away from the fact that it uses a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and  Shaun of the Dead as its influences.  Without a doubt, McPhail is wildly indebted to Shaun of the Dead, unfortunately to the point of fault.  While Anna and the Apocalypse isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, it loses a lot of its legs coming from a weak foundation.  Without mincing words, Anna and the Apocalypse is an homage of other homages.  

The three things I recognize in its DNA is Buffy, Dr. Horrible, and Shaun of the Dead.  Those three things are already commenting on long running tropes.  The reason that they were so genius is because they were self-aware when very few things were self-aware.  I know Joss Whedon is the force behind two of those things, but between Joss Whedon and Edgar Wright, we see people who are deep lovers of genre coupled with an insane amount of talent.  (As much as Joss Whedon needs to be off-the-grid for a while, I can't deny that the man is incredibly talented.) When Wright and Whedon made their respective projects, they had pulled from a wealth of stories, crafting something that was poignant and challenging.  It never felt like a lesser product.  I hate to say, Anna and the Apocalypse, in its homage to these projects, feels more like a novelty than something that spans the test of time.  

Do you know what it really feels like?  For some people, this might be a positive thing, so I'm not going to talk about it too harshly.  Again, people should like what they like.  But the movie feels like an R-Rated Disney Channel original movie.  I know that Disney Channel made their own Zombies musical franchise, so I'm not that off the mark.  But because Anna is mostly a take on the zombie comedy without making a ton of references to zombie films outside of Shaun, it has that poppy feeling without a feeling of polish.  (Note:  I tend to do this a lot with my blog entries. I write negatively about something that I moderately enjoy.  Thus, I have to point out that I didn't actually hate Anna and the Apocalypse so much as I have to explain why I didn't love it.) 

Some of the issues comes with the songs.  Anna and the Apocalypse --and good on them for working through this --feels often pretty cheap.  It is a movie that is working on a budget.  I get that this was a fundraised effort, expanding on a short that was made prior to this.  Now, the movie doesn't go full synth.  If it did, we'd be having a conversation about how Anna and the Apocalypse is borderline unwatchable.  But musicals are tough.  There's a reason that a lot of them aren't part of the cultural zeitgeist.  It's a lot of work and a lot of money has to be thrown at it.  It's definitely the line between Broadway, off-Broadway, and community theater.  A lot of Anna comes across as off-Broadway (the most snobby thing I'll write today!).  It has a lot of good intentions.  There's technically nothing wrong with the music.  But there isn't one song that either sticks or makes me laugh with the cleverness of the lyrics.  It's all...functional.  I think a lot of people had that issue with Moana 2.  I think Moana 2's lyrics and songs are better than people make them out to be while acknowledging that Moana's songs are better.

But the thing that Anna and the Apocalypse does get mostly right is the characters and the fun.  While I wish that the lyrics did what good lyrics do in a musical and gives us additional insight into characters, the performances are pretty fun.  I also have to give credit to the fact that the last act does have some truly solid curveballs.  Ultimately, like many musicals, Anna sets up the world to follow the rules of a musical.  The eponymous Anna wants to leave this small town behind while leaving a best friend who is madly in love with her.  She's made bad choices, but nothing that defines her so much that she comes across as unlikable.  If anything, her choices make her incredibly sympathetic and flawed enough that she fills the role of protagonist well.  Anna is charismatic and enough of an archetype that we don't need a ton of backstory to figure out where she's coming from. But it's her relationship with John that is the fascinating part.  For a musical, we traditionally have two ways that the John story can go.  John can either win Anna over, showing her that Nick is as vapid as he comes across as --or! --show some truly disgusting obsessive behavior where he has to come to grips with the fact that Anna owes him nothing.  These were the two options I had going into this.  Um...dying a violent death at the end of Act II, I wasn't ready for that.  He does something noble dying, leaving us to like John for who he was the entire movie (a consistently good dude who simply isn't the one for Anna).  But considering that we thought that there was going to be some resolution for his conflict?  That was a bold move, movie.  Well done.

I have a hard time coming to terms with Steph, though.  Steph is one of the few survivors in the movie.  I don't want to say anything about Sarah Swire's performance because I --in all earnestness --don't think that there's a darn thing wrong with it.  (She's charismatic and fun, matching the action movie vibe of a zombie movie!)   But she is incredibly American in a very Scottish production.  Her performance is fantastic, but for a different movie.  It's almost tonally off from the rest of her peers.  I don't think that this is Swire's fault.  I'm going to guess one of two things.  1) She didn't receive a lot of direction, thus she couldn't get an accurate read from what the movie needed in terms of her character or 2) she comes in with this butt-kicking character that made her stand out from her peers at the auditions and the directors tried forcing it into a movie that didn't need that because it was so scene-stealing.  I swear, that character rocks, but she doesn't fit very well.  If, on the weird chance that Sarah Swire has a Google alert for her name where she reads this: I think you crushed it.  I'm one stupid dude on the Internet who is trying to write this between moments of my one-year-old screaming that she needs help getting down the stairs after she just re-climbed up immediately before.  You did a good job.  Something just felt off.  You are a valid human being and an incredibly talented performer.

I'm glad I watched it.  I'll even go as far as to say that I had a good time with it.  Now that I'm closing this thing up, I realize that there was new thing that the movie commented on: Dead Rising.  But it's just a fun zombie comedy.  There were a billion zombie comedies after Shaun of the Dead and this is definitely one of the better knockoffs.  It just has a hard time standing on its own.

PG, even though it is a bit more brutal than Star Wars.   Like, they borderline torture Han Solo.  Threepio gets torn apart.  Luke decapitates Darth Vader, only to see his own face.  There's some mild incest, if you want me to stretch the PG rating.  Also, that entire final confrontation between Luke and Darth Vader gets pretty bleak.   Am I crazy, but is there some mild swearing as well?  PG.

DIRECTOR:  Irvin Kershner

I've sold my soul.  I have a specific moral code and I've broken that moral code.  Why?  Because I wanted to watch a movie that would never be available to me.  I know that every nerd out there knows that George Lucas basically said that the original cuts of the Star Wars movies would never be available post-Laserdisc.  That wasn't exactly true because one of the DVD prints of the movie offered a special feature which did a transfer of the theatrical cut on the second disc that wasn't in anamorphic widescreen. 

Now, I knew that the Despecialized Editions existed.  Some hardcore fans went and SOMEHOW (I really don't know how) remastered the theatrical cut of the movie.  Maybe they got an original film print against all odds and nerded out over every frame.  Well, the long-and-short of it is, they made high-def remasters of the original pre-Special Edition movies.  Well, my buddy said that he saw them and said that they looked incredible.  My kids (who have no attention span and I'm a little mad at them for not watching these movies with me) said that they wanted to watch all of the Star Wars movies (see?  I have every reason to be disappointed!).  Well, I caved.  I couldn't get a copy of the special features version of The Empire Strikes Back and I really wanted to see the Despecialized Editions.  And you know what?

He was right.  They look incredible.  I may be going crazy, but I honestly believe that they look better than the Disney releases of these movies.  I don't know how.  I was just marveling on how good they looked.  And I have to say, The Empire Strikes Back, the best Star Wars movie out there, looks stunning.  My moral code says that I only buy licensed products and I don't support bootlegs.  But gosh darn it did someone out there made a really great print of a phenomenal movie.  Now, I will step back a little bit.  I honestly think that the Special Edition of The Empire Strikes Back is the least offensive of the three special editions.  While I adored watching Empire in its despecialized edition, it's really not all that necessary.  I kind of like the Wampa change up and Cloud City looks rad with updated effects.  But can I tell you what kind of masterpiece The Empire Strikes Back is?

In terms of being a sequel, it does everything right. I don't know if I talked about this in the last blog, but I feel like I had this epiphany while watching this movie.  There is such a gulf between Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.  (Note: Dear Star Wars nerds.  I'm using "A New Hope" as its nomenclature simply to avoid confusion.  I mentally think of it as Star Wars as well.)   A New Hope is an incredible movie that, as a stand-alone, does everything that it needs to.  It would be weird to think that other Star Wars movies might not have existed, but whatever.  But Empire doesn't retread over anything.  It pushes all of these characters into places that they aren't used to being in while simultaneously staying true to these character archetypes.  I, about two hours ago, wrote a Sonic the Hedgehog 3 blog where I contended that the movie was entirely plot and very little with character.  I'm going to say that Sonic 3 is inverse to Empire Strikes Back because Empire is almost an entirely character driven film.  It's a character driven film that looks freaking incredible. 

I know that we live in a world that George Lucas has been hands off of Star Wars since the Disney sale.  But there was a time when there was a certain disdain for the stuff that Lucas had his mitts on.  I don't deny that the man was a genius.  He created something incredible.  But I always contended that Lucas worked best in collaboration, not when he's the sole driver of the vehicle.  Lucas provided Empire with the story beats, of which there are few.  The majority of the movie is the heroes on the run.  Luke gets a bit more plot (yet plot that is meant to deepen his character) by having him train on Dagobah for the majority of the movie.  But the rest of the people who rounded out Empire, like Kirshner directing, makes the movie feel more like a movie. In A New Hope, we're kind of left with archetypes of characters instead of fully formed characters.  Han is the standoffish type until the final moments when he makes the moral shift towards the Rebellion.  But with Empire, Han (who I contend might be the protagonist of the film) is far more complex.  He's dealing with consequences.  He's both roguish and vulnerable without seeming off on either front.  Contrast that with Leia, who is far more interesting in this movie than she was in New Hope, because she outright recognizes that Han is bad news.  Yet, she also sees that she is attracted to him and is forced to acknowledge that he's grown as a person.  She has that line between political leader and human being and it's really interesting to watch.

I also like that Empire makes Luke far more frustrating as a character.  We're meant to like Luke a lot.  We bonded with him on Tatooine as he learned about a much larger world.  But we also see some of his less attractive traits when he becomes more accustomed to a world that sees him as valuable.  I mentally think of Luke as the Hero of Yavin IV, despite the movie kind of downplays that.  But it also explains a lot of his entitled behavior all through these movies.  Whoever wrote Luke in Empire really toes this fine line.  He's obnoxious without ever becoming a bad guy.  Luke whines not because he's entitled, but because he believes that the world needs him to be this great Jedi.  It's what makes the Yoda sequences so compelling.  You want to slap him because you are on the outside and you understand that Jedi training takes time, mainly because that is the crux of Yoda's argument.  But from his perspective, he's leaving a cause behind that desperately needs his help.  It's not necessarily an ego thing so much as he understands that the appearance of a Jedi on the side of the Rebellion could turn the tide.  

I also have some other headcanon that fits into this entire characterization.  I wonder if this is an intentional choice, but I always say, at least in the original trilogy, whoever draws his lightsaber first is at fault.  Luke is warned by Yoda not to take his lightsaber into the cave.  In the cave, he's confronted by specter of Vader, who eventually reveals himself to be Luke's reflection.  But Luke is the one to draw his sword first.  When Luke slays the reflection, he thinks that he's won.  The reveal of the face is an accusation of Luke seeing himself as a fledgling Jedi as a weapon to be harnessed.  The decapitated head tells him that his violence is making him like Vader.  Yet, when he sees the actual Vader, he is so stubborn that he repeats his mistake.  He doesn't try talking with Vader.  He doesn't wait for Vader to draw his saber first.  He extends the blade first and he gets wrecked.  As much as Vader claims that Luke's skills are "Impressive", it always feels like Vader is toying with him.  

There are moments in Empire that the nerd in me has a hard time wrapping my head around.  There's such a cool moment when Luke leaves Dagobah in his X-Wing.  It's filmed gorgeously (and we have puppet Yoda...my favorite Yoda in this scene).  But I have to wonder how much Lucas planned these moments.  Obi-Wan Kenobi says, "That boy was our last hope."  And in the most dramatic fashion ever, Yoda replies, "No, there is another."  Now, I always read the kiss between Luke and Leia as "Lucas didn't really plan ahead."  But that line implies that Lucas knows that he has a needle drop for Return of the Jedi with the Leia reveal.  But even more so, the prequels kind of screws that line up for me.  Why is he informing Obi-Wan Kenobi that there is another if Obi-Wan knows about Leia?  It's a funny bit and, man, that moment slaps.  But it's such a weird moment in retrospect, thinking of all the bits that go into the movie.

Empire is such a good movie that I want to talk about it, but it's a movie that I want to actually have dialogue about.  Watching this movie for the umpteenth time, there are still things that I am unpacking about the movie that I've never thought of before.  And yeah, I broke my own rule.  But do you know what else?  I'm going to try to knock out the Despecialized Return of the Jedi before the end of Christmas break.  I'm excited about it.  As much as I give my older two garbage, the younger two were really into it.  So maybe I waited too long to get them involved.  Either way, Empire Strikes Back still destroys.

PG mainly because the Shadow origin story involves the death of a child.  Also, um...Shadow has a gun.  Sure, it's more of a blaster than it is a gun, but that's very in the vein of Shadow.  Robotnik also dances around some innuendo. (It's that innuendo-y.  He has to dance around it!)  Also, the plot involves murdering everyone on Earth.  You know what?  When I write these things out, it seems pretty bad!

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Fowler

I am going to write this first part to make my kid happy.   He said that he couldn't wait to read what I thought about it.  Boy oh boy!  Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was definitely one of the movies of all times.  I loved seeing how excited my kids were for this movie.  They lost their minds.  In the post-credit sequences alone, they were happier than anything I tried to make them happy.  For kids, this movie might be their favorite movie ever.  Okay, Henry, stop reading here.

Is...is he gone?  Okay, adults.  This movie is fine.  It is absolutely fine.  There's nothing notoriously bad about the movie. The big thing that I have to remember is that this movie wasn't really made for me in the least.   Okay.  Maybe it is a bit.  I mean, just the talent alone behind this movie is pretty appealing for adults.  But I'm going to be honest, while Sonic 3 is the biggest movie of the three films, it also somewhat feels like the one with the least heart.  I mean, this is a movie where an alien hedgehog mourns the death of a little girl and I still say that the movie kind of lacks heart.  Part of the problem is that Sonic 3 is aggressively plot driven while the first two movies are far more character driven.  I even think that the writer of the movie is aware of this.  The third act of the movie has Sonic going rogue. Towards the end of the second act, the movie brings up the major plot hole in the movie.  Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ends with a rad fanservice moment:  Sonic turning into Super Sonic.  If you were a gamer in the '90s, Super Sonic was something special.  You had to be incredibly good at the game and you unlocked all the chaos emeralds so you could just nuke the world.  Well, considering that the Sonic franchise was really good at making the '90s stuff look cool again, the last movie ended with all-powerful meganuke Sonic the Hedgehog.  He could destroy anything.

But the problem with that powerful of a character is the question of "Why doesn't Sonic use that power every time that he has a problem to deal with?"  It's something that we ignored between games.  Sonic always had to start at Ground Zero in each game.  But this is a movie where continuity has to have some place in the overall story of the characters.  So Knuckles mentioned that the Chaos Emerald that gives Sonic his Super Sonic powers (yeah, I'm now becoming aware of how silly this continuity sounds in retrospect) cannot be used because it's too dangerous, regardless of how much trouble the world is.  I'm taking a really roundabout way to say that Sonic betrays Knuckles in the third act by taking the Chaos Emerald because he's really angry that Ted got hurt.  It's just that...most of the movie isn't about that.  Most of the movie is very much a superhero movie where the protagonist has learned all of his lessons in the previous movies and now he's just dealing with a villain that is way more powerful than he is.  It's got a little bit of that Fast and the Furious sequel going on.  Any kind of character stuff feels really tacked on.  

And I hate to be the guy who is saying this, mainly because I'm oddly rooting for the franchise to succeed, but the movie series might be running into the same problems that the video games ran into.  Sonic has always had the problem of being "so extreme" that people roll their eyes at the thought of the characters.  The movies did a lot to repair this, mainly by presenting an approachable movie that wasn't about being cool so much as it was just about being fun.  But we just had a movie about Sonic fighting Shadow, a darker version of Sonic with rollerblades and a gun.  The last movie had Knuckles, a more extreme version of Sonic.  Just to go even more spoilery, the next movie is going to have Metal Sonic.  If you were to say "more extreme", you could substitute "extreme" with "metal" pretty easily.  The story has kind of been told.  We're just having bigger villains and bigger consequences when, in all honesty, we've basically reached maximum capacity when it comes to plot consequence.  So, it's just dull when you don't really care.  And the weird thing is...

...I absolutely don't care about Shadow.  I don't know why.  The movie does Sonic Adventure 2 even better than Sonic Adventure 2.  It's that I'm bored with the entire concept.  So if I don't care about Shadow and find little empathy for him, what is there to really grasp onto?  Part of the issue I have with Shadow is that his revenge plan doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  He teams up with a newly introduced elder Robotnik to blow up the world.  Both of them want to blow up the world because...a little girl died?  I mean, I get that he'd want to get revenge on G.U.N. (a version of S.H.I.E.L.D. that was introduced in the Knuckles TV show...which is actually super duper fantastic).  But where does the extinction of the human race come in.  Okay, here's me REALLY trying to find connection with Shadow.  Shadow is an alien. He learned to love humans despite the tests that were run on him.  But then the same humans killed their own so he associated all humans with the people from G.U.N.  A stretch.  I even have to say that, as you can imagine, Shadow comes around to Sonic's perspective when Sonic refuses to stoop to his level.  It's such a light switch moment that it felt like Shadow's motivation was never really all that deep.

The one real win?  It's one that I'm oddly super happy for.  I don't think I've seen Jim Carrey have this much fun with a character in a long time.  It took me a minute to warm up to Carrey's Robotnik in the first movie, but now I'm all on board.  I know that he claims that he's being paid a ton to come back to these movies.  But Carrey is being funny as heck in these movies.  Sure, he's doing his Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events.  But he really seems to like these movies.  Maybe I'm seeing as Michael Douglas's transition from Ant-Man to Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Sure, a lot of it comes from the fact that he's playing double duty, almost exclusively playing across from himself.  But he looks genuinely happy even though he's coming out of retirement to make Sonic movies.  Sure, he keeps giving himself an out at the end of these movies because his character died yet again in this one.  But that's where the humor comes from and he's in rare form with this one.  Yeah, I'm not ashamed.  He's good and I'm going to comment on that.

The movie is fine.  It's aggressively fine.  I almost fell asleep at one point, but that's because I'm an old man at a Sonic the Hedgehog movie in the first moments of Christmas break.  Yeah, I fall asleep at things.  Still, the movie is fine.  I'll go as far as to say that I'll probably watch it with the kids again.  But it's a lot of noise without a lot of substance.

Rated R for near constant swearing, abuse, suicidal imagery, violence, self-mutilation, murder, gore, and a possible rape scene.  It's got a lot of stuff, as did the first movie.  It is slightly more tame than the first movie mainly because much of the movie is a trial film compared to the first movie that's about a killing spree.  That being said, it's still a lot to take in.  R.

DIRECTOR: Todd Phillips

I'm so sorry, guys.  Really, I'm sorry.  I'm going to hate me too after this.  While watching the movie, I knew that I was going to have to cross this bridge.  But I might be the guy who didn't hate Madame Web and straight up liked Joker: Folie a Deux.  Even worse, I'm one of the people who disliked the first Joker movie.

Now, I do have to put some qualifiers on this take of the film.  There are things in the movie that absolutely do not work.  The big miracle here is the fact that I like a movie that I shouldn't like.  I don't love it.  I probably won't watch it again.  It won't make any lists.  But did I earnestly like it?  Sure.  But since I'm bringing up the weak stuff, mind as well start there.  It's going to get spoilery, so please understand that as I harp on this.  The cartoon at the beginning is off-putting.  I tend to like this kind of stuff.  The idea of doing something different and out of the box tends to work with me, especially when it is meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia out of a concept.  With Warner Brothers owning the DC characters, I love the idea behind a Looney Tune being made out of the Joker.  There's something there, but this does not work.  When I see stuff like this, it has to be pitch perfect.  I'm looking at the alternate opening to Into the Spider-Verse where we see an alternate reality cartoon show for Spider-Ham.  When I watch that, it feels like it was a fully fleshed out cartoon that we're just catching a glimpse of.  The Joker opening?  It feels almost like a fan movie.  Immediately, the movie is trying to win me back.  Maybe the same thing happened for other people watching the movie and it never won them back.  For me, I could set that bit aside and move on.  (Note: I googled it and apparently people love the cartoon because it came from the Triplets of Belleville guy.  Great, now I'm really off the mark.) 

The other thing that bugged me was the end.  I'm talking entirely execution (no pun intended).  A lot of people were upset the fact that Arthur Fleck was not the canonical Joker that would fight Batman.  I mean, I'm going to go into DC Comics canon and talk about how there are multiple Jokers and that people shouldn't get all that hung-up on this idea, but that's besides the point.  I kinda sorta like the idea behind the fact that Arthur Fleck dies as the Joker only for the Joker to be a concept.  It's been played around with in DC media for a while.  I know Gotham made a meal out of that idea because, from what I understand, Gotham couldn't use the Joker for legal reasons so they kept creeping in closer and closer to the Joker concept without actually naming him Joker?  I don't know how much of that is true.  I just heard that.  (Another note: I powered through Gotham because my completist brain won't let me leave a show unwatched.) My biggest problem is two-fold.  1) It really feels like Joaquin Phoenix wanted to be sure to never return to this part.  A lot of what I like about the movie is that it is, while tonally very similar to the first movie, significantly riskier than the first movie.  That was Phoenix's stipulation for coming back for a sequel, the notion that he was going to be challenged to do something new.  But it also felt like a lot of arm twisting to get him back.  So the death of Arthur Fleck felt more about Phoenix than it did for the character.  2) It's very rushed.  There's a way to kill Arthur Fleck that feels more thematically appropriate to the way that the movie sets him up. He could have been killed in his escape as an effigy to his cult following.  It could have been one of the random masks in the crowd.  It could have been in a moment of Arthur finding success, knowing that the mantle of Joker is too big for even him to handle.  But instead, it's this scene that I feel like Todd Phillips really wanted to do in the first movie (which was kiboshed by Nolan) and he kind of just slid it in there.

The movie is actually quite cruel to Arthur.  The first one is too.  I don't deny that.  Joker, for all of its glorification of violence, is a condemnation of society that wants to build up evil.  We are our own executioners and I can kind of get behind that.  It has a lot of that Fight Club syndrome happening, where we celebrate the thing that we're supposed to be condemning.  But Joker 2 does some good things to remind us that the justice system is completely screwed over.  It builds this story that shows that Arthur Fleck needs the Joker to survive.  The movie starts with him in this liminal space.  He has done all of these things and he's a criminal celebrity.  But he's also someone who hasn't the freedom to be a fully embraced Joker, so why bother try?  Part of me argues that it backpedals the character a bit to get him to be the abused Arthur from the first movie. But I get more of a "If I can't do it right, why bother do anything at all?"  There's the scene where the guards trick one of the slower inmates who worships Joker to try kissing Arthur.  Arthur goes through with it, emotionless.  He's not this suffering guy. He's numb.  

The movie builds this Arthur to a crescendo.  His relationship with Lee pulls him out of this stupor not because she loves Arthur, but because she loves Joker.  If the movie argues one thing, it's that Arthur and the Joker aren't two separate people, as much as people want them to be.  Arthur sees Lee as someone who loves him.  She hates the face he has, but she has that idea that she can fix him.  The whole "Put on a happy face?"  That's a bit on the nose, but it works really well. It's only when Lee is disappointed that Arthur is first and foremost a person and not the face of mass murder that she leaves him behind.  It's a weird subversion of the Harley Quinn mythos, where Joker is the toxic one and Harley is the victim of his madness.  (That's where the term Folie a Deux comes from!  Neat!)  It's such a desire to split Joker from Arthur that Arthur himself starts to believe it.  It makes sense.  Joker and Arthur act differently.  He has this confidence that he traditionally does not have.  Why would he think any differently when it comes to splitting his personality?

But the possible rape sequence?  It's never clear that it's a rape.  I think we're meant to believe that it is a rape because of Arthur's reaction after the assault.  I oddly choose to view this scene as a sex crime mainly because Arthur is physically brutalized many times between both movies.  If anything, physical trauma only galvanizes his Joker persona. It's when he's abused in the subway in the first movie that he kills his assaulters execution style.  But after the moment with the prison guards, he's broken.  All signs of Joker are missing.  He puts on the makeup and that doesn't even bring that personality out.  He seems ashamed of his actions.  I even go as far as to applaud that Arthur confesses that he is not the person that the world wants him to be.  I do hate that it comes out of sexual assault (again, my read of that cryptic scene).  But it is also the only thing that makes sense if we're looking at his characterization as a whole.  Is it possible that it was just a beating that was the last straw?  Maybe.  Is it that they potentially beat him harder?  Maybe.  Maybe he was so high at the trial and so low at the beating that something in him snapped.  These are all options.  But he just seems so broken in that scene that I'm choosing to view the scene as a commentary on sexual assault.

Now, I think that people hated this movie for the wrong reasons.  I have a handful of reasons why this movie went down like a lead weight and that it is better than people understand.  The first reason is dumb and it makes me mad at audience and mad at studios.  People didn't want this movie to be a musical. Hollywood has been so scared about making musicals outside of Wicked.   Trailers for movies that are musicals hilariously avoid any sign of singing because musicals are a thing of the past.  Look at the Mean Girls trailer.  Yeah.  It's dumb.  As a continuation of that reasoning, it's the incel crowd.  I honestly think that the first movie --like that Fight Club in its attempt to satirize society but got lost in the coolness factor --was hoisted up as this piece of cinema that spoke to the darkness of a lot of bad people out there. When there was singing and love and that Arthur isn't lauded as a hero at the end of the movie, people lost their minds.  They wanted Joker 2 to be exactly like Joker 1, only with a bigger body count.  Instead they got a dancing, singing, courtroom legal drama.  Tone and characters can only go so far with a crowd that wants misery.  

The final reason is the most disturbing.  I bet you if you released that movie today, it would do significantly better.  I'm actually afraid to write this because I'm worried it will get flagged for something. For those people who saw this movie, can you imagine if it was released today?  I'm not talking about a Christmas release.  I'm talking in light of Luigi Mangione.  Yeah.  Now part of my SEO has that name under it.  I wonder how long until Facebook blocks my blog.  Joker: Folie a Deux is, at its core, a story about a guy who murders someone publicly and, instead of society getting upset, raises that murder to celebrity status.  Arthur Fleck gets copycat killers and people wearing his outfit out in public.  They call for his freedom, claiming that his victims got what they deserved.  Listen, I'm processing a lot of that assassination.  The one thing I know is that I hate gun violence so much.  I do.  I'm an aggressive pacifist, to the point of being stupid. But I also know that we're in a place in society where we have to consider what constitutes murder and what constitutes shareholder profits.  Now, release the Joker movie about a trial that has a hard time convicting him because so many people like what he did.  That's a different movie than it was in October.  

Anyway, I have to say that I liked the movie.  I think it was complex.  I think the musical stuff aligns with the better parts of part one.  After all, Arthur always did live in a fantasy world where he's the star of his own show.  Just because the show became a musical or a variety show, it didn't change the character's core.  If anything, it made it more complex when you added a second character to shift the little things going on in Arthur.  Am I going to be defensive about liking it?  Yeah.  I'm probably going to downplay it a bit.  But I'm the guy who liked Joker: Folie a Deux when he didn't even like Joker.  I'm the worst.