Not rated, but this one gets a clear R-rating in my heart.  I mean, there's this one casual shot of a woman changing, involving nudity.  Couple with that the fact that the entire third act is about a botched abortion that leads to a woman dying.  The entire film is about sex shaming the protagonist, so all of this should be kept in mind before watching.  Also, one of the opening shots Just because something is black-and-white doesn't necessarily mean it is for all audiences.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Guys...I'm being a little naughty.  Two things I have to do everyday on top of my job and parenthood: exercise and read 50 pages a day. I exercised already.  Check that one off.  But I haven't read yet.  I tend to write these blogs only if everything else is done.  Well, I will have access to the novel I'm reading later, but I won't have access to a computer.  So I'm placing all my bets on knocking both of these things off and having a tremendously productive day.  Also, I'm in the homestretch of the box set, so I'm really jazzed that I'm almost done.

The fine folks at Criterion are smart cookies, I'll tell you.  I was a fool approaching Bergman the way I did.  (There might be some irony to that statement because I used to adore Bergman and now I'm incredibly skeptical.)  I previously watched The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander before watching the Eclipse box set of Early Bergman.  In my mind, that Early Bergman set was a one-to-one lead into waht would be some amazing storytelling later on.  Now that I've seen the bulk of Bergman's work, which all happens to reflect on the justification of casual sexual cruelty, the early work just reads different.  Part of me sees stuff like Port of Call as an attempt to push boundaries and figure out what it means to be an artist.  The really weird thing about Bergman is that he has always been an incredibly technically skilled director, even as a young man.  

Bergman's later work looks nothing like his early work.  The funny thing is that those early pictures feel so unobtrusive. They really look like Hollywood films.  I mentioned this in Thirst, but Bergman's later films embrace the minimalism when it comes to set and music.  There's straight up a score in Port of Call and I don't know why that stands out so much. This all comes down to seeing a young Bergman oh-so-desperate to rebel against a system that encourages standardization.  

I look at the end of the film as a bit of a travesty.  Listen, I'm not in love with Port of Call.  I don't outlike dislike it.  But it does feel like the Swedish version of Reform School Girls.  I've seen a lot of movies made by angry filmmakers who throw a bit of a temper tantrum through their films.  But even in the biggest tantrums, I at least appreciate that the directors have something that they want to say.  I don't think that Port of Call is necessarily a tantrum.  I will say that it is a bit of a sledgehammer, coming across as a mix of an exploitation film and an ABC Afterschool Special.  It wants to talk about the casual abuse of women in society as second class citizens and how girls with any degree of agency tend to be criminalized, leading into a heavy-handed commentary on underground abortions.  There are things I like; there are things I don't.  That's not where I'm coming from in this blog.  But what I really hate is the last shot.

In the film noir era, it was also the early days of self-regulation in Hollywood.  We're talking about the institution of the code, which would be the forefather of the MPAA.  Film noir, by ambiguous definition, was about exploring and almost glamorizing vice.  It's the same reason that we watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos.  We want to go on the other side of the tracks and see how attractive sin can get.  But because it was a time of self-regulation, every story --no matter how seedy --had to end with sin being punished and virtue overcoming.  It's why the cops burst into the hideout at the end of every crime film.  That was the deal.  That's very much how Port of Call ends.  

Berit and Gosta had escaped a trial that threatened to take Berit away for her complicity in a death that wasn't her fault. The entire film was a condemnation that said, unequivically, that this society was toxic for girls like Berit.  She couldn't succeed no matter what she did.  She was a moral character who lived with this scarlet letter for the entire film and things weren't getting better.  Gosta booking the boat to leave this place was the natural place that the film should have ended on.  After all, that scene exists.  Clearly, Bergman thinks that the reality was that the Sweden that Berit and Gosta grew up in was a prison.  But because, in the eyes of the law, that was a slander against society...they just decide that things will get better?

Can I tell you what I like versus what I dislike about this movie?  I can completely get behind Berit.  Starting the story in medias res, where Berit is committing suicide after something that we'll only discover later is a fascinating way to explore how Berit got to this point.  Yeah, heavy handed and melodramatic as heck, but I don't care.  It's still very watchable.  Okay.  But Gosta is a problem in this movie. Like a really big problem.

Absolutely this is Berit's story.  Honestly, I shouldn't care about Gosta at all.  If anything, Gosta is more of a sounding board so Berit can have a reason to tell her tale.  Okay.  I get that.  But Gosta is all over the place in terms of characterization.  What I'd like to think is that Bergman wanted a man who was better than the other men in her life, but also had a lot of those toxically male character traits.  Unfortunately, I don't know if Gosta read that way.  I hated Gosta from moment one.  Introducing your character as "aloof" might be a hard thing to get people to get past.  Yeah, Gosta is the one who sticks with Berit for the film.  He ultimately stands by her after putting her through a bunch of crap.  The problem is that Gosta's moral code is a bit of a mystery for the entire length of the film.  

I have no idea what Gosta is going to do from moment to moment.  I don't even know how Gosta feels about Berit for a lot of the film.  Yes, he gets into a fight over Berit's honor when three guys hurl sexual insults at her after a date.  Okay.  He then takes her to a hotel, faking a husband-wife relationship to be a bit naughty and to avoid scandal.  But then he flies off the handle when she reveals that she's had a past.  That past, by the way, is incredibly tame. Sure, I'm not in 1948.  But she's contextualizing so much.  Mom is a monster.  Dad was abusive.  The guy she met housed her when she was on the street.  Like, Gosta freaking out on Berit is meant to push the story, not based on what his character previously did.  

It's not like that characteristic hasn't been attributed to other male characters in romances.  I'm watching Nobody Wants This and Noah is gross sometimes.  There is a wide divide between Noah, for whom I am rooting, and Gosta, who feels like an old man casually hitting on a young girl.  Gosta is constant vascillating between human being and complete jerk and he's the guy we're meant to be excited about?  He is vanilla sometimes and spoiled cottage cheese the next.  The thing with Noah is that he's great most of the time, but has a couple of yellow flags.  Gosta isn't great at his best and feels like he's being stuck with someone he's not that into, despite the fact that he makes Berit tell him that she's in love with him.  Also, that stage business with the cigarette flip sometimes goes against what is necessary for the plot.

Either way, it's more interesting than good. It's not not-enjoyable.  But in terms of quality film, it's too safe while trying to be rebellious.

Not rated, but this is a movie once again about cruelty in marriage.  A man forces the protagonist to get an abortion that leaves her sterile.  Also, there's an image of murder (I have to word it that way because it is too complicated to explain).   There's also a scene that really borders on sexual assault and taking advantage of a drunk woman.  It's a pretty pessmistic film that has lots of stuff that kids shouldn't see.  Still, tonally, it isn't too explicit.  It's only if you are paying attention that you realize how bleak the film really is.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Oddly enough, despite being about infidelity once again, this one feels a little different?   The weird thing is that I've probably seen this one before, despite not remembering any of it. The good news is that, if I can knock this blog out, I might have two days before I have to write anything.   That brings me a little bit of comfort.  It's a weird productivity that doesn't need to exist.  Keeping all that in mind, I would like to say that getting a lot of views on the last blog in the first half-hour kind of made me have enough of a dopamine rush to finish out this streak of blogs.

One of the weirdest things about Thirst is that it borderline doesn't make sense.  It's not like Persona, which doesn't make sense because Bergman is being obtuse.  The plot of this story is so simple that when something doesn't make sense, it's baffling.  (I mean, I just defined "baffling" by saying "something doesn't make sense."  I'm not always a stellar writer.)   Here's what I'm trying to get here.  The story is about a married couple who give off just-past-newlywed vibes.  They are having problems because of his restlessness coupled with her traumatic history.  They go on a trip, bringing out both their affection and resentment of one another.  Very simple plot.  Every so often, we get a little context about why people act the way that they do through various flashbacks.  

But then the couple's story would be put on hiatus and we'd have this scene with this lady and her abusive therapist.  So I looked it up.  On Wikipedia.  Trust me, it tends to be my source for solving basic problems.  See, I pay attention to the movie better than most.  The treadmill kind of forces you to focus on the screen or else you are stuck focusing on how much time is left on the treadmill.  I don't have a phone in front of me.  Honestly, I recommend it a lot.  I mention all of this to stress that I give a lot of my brain power into unpacking movies.  And some things just stymie me enough to use Wikipedia.  And that's when I figured out that these minor characters were occasionally given a little extra cinematic real estate than I thought appropriate for tertiary characters.

Now, if I was reading this blog, I would be the first to argue that it's all one thing.  There are juxtaposing themes that might act as a foil to Ruth and Bertil's struggling marriage.  I bet that Bergman even justified some of his choices this way.  He was a young dude when he made this movie. It's one of his earlier films.  Sure, still a genius.  But those beats often didn't align.  That's when I found out that this was inspired by a book of short stories.  So much made sense when that puzzle piece was put into place.  Bergman is trying to adapt the best of the book, even if the book's individual elements didn't necessarily align with the film that he was trying to make.  The whole subplot with the abusive therapist leading into a homosexual encounter almost felt like it was its own side movie.  It shouldn't have mattered that Bertil knew her at one point.  That's all arbitrary.  Instead, we kind of have to make these logical leaps to moments.  In fact, I have to go as far as to say that I'm mostly going to be ignoring the Viola storyline because it seems wildly underdeveloped.  The only thing that I can really say is that it stresses the notion that women are often preyed upon and are expected to hold up unreasonable standards.  I mean, Viola's story ends in her suicide because of all of the horrible things that happen to her.

Actually, I do want to say one more thing about the Viola story. Valborg's seduction of Viola is meant to come across as predatory.  But here's the thing.  I want to apply a little historical queer theory to the film.  This is 1949.  Early Bergman.  Yeah, it's a little gross to assume that every lesbian out in the world is trying to trick heterosexuals into homosexual relationships.  But Valborg, as scary as she comes across in her final scene, isn't gross through the entire piece.  If anything, the scene comes across as "lonely."  (Note: I almost made a comparison to Port of Call, the other movie on this disc, because I forgot it was from a different film.  These are reasons that I have to push myself to get these blogs out because there is a line where information starts to blur.) Is this scene progressive?  I'm going to lean towards "no."  Is it impressive that it exists at all?  Maybe.  I don't know.  I do like that Valborg, for that final scene of manipulation, comes across more as sad than evil.  Also, Viola is no cup of tea, even if I do sympathize with her for most of the film.

Okay, back to the main story of Ruth.  Honestly, I don't care about Bertil.  I really don't.  Like, I'm going to talk about him in relationship to marriage.  But Ruth is the protagonist of this piece.  The funny thing is that I use Ruth's story as almost a cautionary tale against infidelity.  Don't get me wrong.  Bergman, for all of his justification for casual adultery in his later films, gives people heaps of misery.  But this is one of Bergman's early films.  I don't know if he's not the horndog that he'll be later in life or he's just playing the game.  After all, those early Bergmans all actually look more like Hollywood films than his later works.  Anyway, the movie starts out with Raoul coming across as an absolute demon when it comes to how he treats women.  He seduces Ruth, only to tell her that he's married once the deed is done.  When caught by his wife, he scolds both women for being so weak and then demands that Ruth get an abortion, which leaves her sterile.  

I mean, the very notion that Ruth comes across as simply ignorant of being the other woman in a relationship takes a lot of that responsibility off her shoulders.  Yes, she still deals with consequences for the events of the story. But Ruth also becomes someone with trauma that goes beyond what she caused.  On top of that, Raoul --despite kind of getting away with it --seems miserable in his relationship with his wife.  We don't really have such a clear indication of vice and subsequent punishment that we get in later films.  From a guy who is really annoyed by how mean people are in later Bergman films, there's something oddly refreshing seeing Bergman condemn something that he would champion later.  I have to be a prude because these are the things that get my gears working.

There is one thing that bugs me about the movie, shy of the confusing side plots.  This is a story about the slow poisoning of a marriage.  Neither one of the spouses is necessarily evil or at fault for the tension rising in the relationship.  But Bertil (I know, I said I didn't care about him) seems to want to save the marriage despite having some pretty crappy habits.  It's when we see him beat Ruth over the head with a bottle, trying to kill her, that it all kind of reads wrong.  Even worse, Bergman doesn't really stick with that image.  It's meant to be incredibly shocking, seeing him kill his wife in a fit of annoyance.   But then we have her resurrected (and teased in the dark) and it just feels like he wasn't allowed to do anything too shocking with his film.  It completely nerfs the film.  If the film is a grounded story about the slow growing cancer in the marriage, that moment seems to take a shortcut for something unearned.  The problem is that the film is stuck on a train.  A lot of stories intentionally take a small story --like a couple's train ride --and imbue it with life-or-death stakes.  In this case, Bergman wanted us to believe that a husband would kill his wife over a vacation.  It's just...I don't believe it.  It feels forced.  He wanted to earn it, but I don't see anything about his character that would explain that scene.  It would have felt important to purge it.  If he really wanted it, he needed to undo it immediately to let us not feel like it was a fakeout.  Instead, we have a scene in-between and explain it all away as a dream with a happy ending.

My biggest problem with Thirst is that it is a bit underdone.  Like, it's still an incredibly filmed movie.  But there's stuff that I would have avoided.  Hear that, Ingmar Bergman: one of the greatest directors of all time?  I would have done other things!

Rated R for a lot of vulgar stuff coupled with some pretty intense violence at times.  This is one of those movies where the implication of horrible discussion is sometimes worse than actually seeing some stuff. I'm not saying you don't see anything.  You see stuff.  But those scenes are oddly less horrifying than the dialogue that accompaines those upsetting moments.  Add to that a lot of swearing, sexual assault, and general all around misery, the R-rating is more than earned.

DIRECTOR:  Paul Thomas Anderson

I don't know if I have another blog in me.  I have yet another blog to write after this one and I actually have a little bit of time to knock this one out.  But also...I don't want to?  Like, I could.  There's almost nothing really stopping me except for dinner being ready in about eleven minutes.  But seriously, I'm tired and I never want to write another blog.  I also feel like I'm going to whine about this movie than I want to.

I did the thing.  Again.  I once again got caught up in everyone telling me how amazing this movie was.  Once again, my brain says "This is a good movie."  But my heart?  My heart didn't bond with the film.  It's going on a date where everything is fine and you acknowledge that the person across the table from you is a very lovel--you know what?  That never happened to me.  It either clicked or it was terrible and now I'm happily married and have five+ kids.  The intellectual part of me wants that metaphor to work because that's what it feels like.  Like, I really dug it.  I laughed throughout.  I found it fascinating and it was unique.  But do you know what else it was?  Or more like, wasn't?  It wasn't There Will Be Blood.  Because nothing ever is There Will Be Blood.  I don't care if it was made by Paul Thomas Anderson.  

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself.  I mean, I lost my mind over Licorice Pizza and that was also PTA.  (I just did the PTA thing.  Yeah, I'm one of those guys.)  It's just that everyone seemed to be losing their minds over this movie.  I mean, it's still very early, but people are talking about Best Picture at the Oscars.  The Golden Globes seem mildly obsessed with this movie.  I had to see it. I mean, I had to see it...not enough to go to the theaters.  But, you know, it's on HBO Max and it's the first week that it was on HBO Max.  That's kind of commitment.  And it did the job.  It's a three hour film that is funny and has something to say and has an amazing cast.  

It just didn't resonate with me.  I'm going to try to talk positively about it because I acknowledge that there's something here.  If I stray into some negative talk, that might be a bit of a blessing because that means I can figure out where my heart and my brain aren't talking properly.

Can I talk, at the most surface level, about what I loved?  I mean, it's my blog, so I can do whatever I want.  I just want to talk about the part that absolutely hit.  And it's a literal part.  Benecio del Toro absolutely crushes in this.  (By the way, the entire time, I thought, "If you can make it through One Battle After Another, you should totally watch The Phoenician Scheme.") I'm going to try to piece together what makes del Toro the most engaging part of this movie.  The world of the film is meant to be both alien and universal.  It's really weird that this movie slightly demonizes resistance fighters to fascism.  It's one of those things that people on the left scream, "There is no formal organization like Antifa" and then we see stuff like the French 75.  Of course there are organizations like the French 75 out there.  They don't look like that.  This is a fictionalized version played for laughs and for pushing the story.  But as messed up as the world of the French 75 looks, this is a story about regular folks in insane situations.  There's something so grounded about how insane this plot gets and no one performs that message better than Benecio del Toro.  Sensei Sergio St. Carlos shouldn't even be in this story.  He starts the film as simply Willa's martial arts instructor and then we find out that he's a captain of a sanctuary city who is trained in anti-government raids.  I love it. 

But where del Toro thrives is that, as things escalate, he maintains the same level of nonchalance against whatever he faces.  That's a Wes Anderson thing he learned, isn't it?  I mean, that's what I love.  Bob is all about spiraling.  In realistic ways, sure.  But Sensei never spirals, does he?  He gets arrested at the end of the movie for a drunk driving charge and the joke is that it is the most anticlimactic way for that character's arc to end.  I love it.  Everything else builds to a climax.  These two yahoos could have gotten to the convent unscathed had Sensei not brought beers.  Instead, these guys shoot themselves in the foot and complicate and already insane plot to a new level for no reason and I adore that.

I had to read a little bit about the movie.  Not too much. I never want to be overly influenced by what other people are saying about a film.  Still, I did read about the names.  The names were getting me.  I don't think I totally understand every bit of this because, despite owning a Thomas Pynchon novel, I haven't read it.  (I promise to get around to it.)  The absurdity is odd because it's almost like swearing in church.  You have these characters like Perfidia Beverly Hills and Colonel Lockjaw, clearly meant to be commentaries on the characters.  But these commentaries aren't subtle in a way other characters can be.  (I mean, Fr. Jud Duplenticy...?  Thanks, Wake Up Dead Man.)  The weird part is that the movie is actively silly at times.  There's a moment where Bob jumps off a roof, crashes into every tree limb on the way down and gets immediately tazed.  It's funny.  But the entire shtick is almost as somber as a heart attack.

(I would like to apologize if my tone shifts here.  I'm finishing this blog the next day and I'm in a drastically more annoyed mood.) There's a reason that they got Sean Penn to play Lockjaw.  I mean, Penn has infamously been characterized as one of the more vocal liberals in Hollywood.  Having him play the most evil conservative fascist I've seen on screen is something that I'm sure that he was itching to do.  There's nothing sympathetic about Lockjaw.  Penn, being able to play a guy whose motivation is to get into the Illuminati --named the Christmas Adventure Club (?) --is this feast of opportunity.  The guy doesn't even walk normally.  I'm sure that Penn built the character with a literal stick up his butt, explaining why he walks that way.  Still, fascinating stuff.

The funny thing is that this movie is about immigration and race while simultaneously having no clear stance on it.  I mean, we sympathize with Bob because he's our protagonist.  But Bob, who was at one point a left-wing terrorist war hero who liberated immigration facilities, turns into this kind of gross dude.  His daughter with Perfidia (let's just leave it at that) defines herself as Black and that's so much of her characterization.  After all, it's why Lockjaw is hunting her down, in an attempt to cover up his attraction to strong Black women.  Bob, however, despite being that deep into the cause, makes racist comments and reductive references to gender.  I have to believe that PTA is making a commentary that the extremists on both sides have weirdly more in common than either one of them would care to believe.

But I also hate that read.  If I had a chance to rename this blog, I would consider something to do with "Daddy Issues."  I'm going to always comment on the role of fatherhood when presented in movies.  Yes, Bob has lots of crappy baggage that I see inside Lockjaw.  And, despite Bob's vices, he's fundamentally a good person (who might be willing to kill...) while Lockjaw is unadulterated evil.  It's unclear whether or not Bob knows that Lockjaw is Willa's biological father.  I really think that he knows.  But beyond that, he doesn't seem to care.  I always like when storytelling does this.  For all of someone's faults, they love beyond reason.  Yeah, it doesn't forgive the crap that he does.  But it does make him a sympathetic and lovable character in the story, especially juxtaposed to Lockjaw, whose commentary is a perversion of what fatherhood is supposed to be.  I'm talking about stuff like accusing Willa of disrespect to her parents, despite the fact that he's actively trying to have her killed.  That kind of stuff.

Like, I know the movie is good.  I also know that if I keep pulling at strings, I would discover a lot more complexity than I've broken down here.  But sometimes the music just doesn't move me as much as I would have liked it to.

Not rated, but there's language, violence, and gore.  Like, tonally, this feels like a PG or a PG-13 movie.  It's something that I probably would have watched in 1994 without a second thought.  But comparing the gore in the early entries versus the gore in the later entires, it's kind of hilarious.  Like, one of the main characters gets a tendon ripped out of his leg and he just walks it off.  There's a lot of this.  Also, there's a mild sexual innuendo that is tame by any standard.  So take it from there.  It's not rated, but treat it as '90s PG-13.  

DIRECTOR: Hark Tsui

It makes no sense.  There is absolutely no reason that I started enjoying the Once Upon a Time in China franchise once I got to the fifth entry.  Like, it breaks so many of my rules for what makes a solid film.  Yet, here we are.  Me, turning around on this entire franchise because I like part five of a series.  To be fair, I'm one of the few people who actually kind of likes Rocky V, so maybe I just like being contrary and temper my expectations.

It's Boxing Day as I write this.  Traditionally, we have a big family party on Boxing Day.  But we cancelled it this year.  However, the reason that I'm mentioning my situation is that I'm buried in blog entires that I have to do.  I have three films to write about and one of them is Part FIve of a series and I kind of liked this one.  That's a dangerous combo.  We'll see if I can find enough things to say to justify this digital real estate.

The thing that frustrates me is that the one thing that this franchise actually intrigued me with is a political stance.  I don't know if I always agreed with the politics of the Once Upon a Time in China franchise, but I at least applauded that it had something to say, even if it was set in a world of epic action comedy.  Now, I've been complaining about these movies for a while now.  Between being drawn out and often incredibly muddy, there wasn't a ton to jump on board.  I mean, I was being generous sometimes.  But it seems like Once Upon a Time in China V finally stopped talking about isolationist zealots versus treasonous foreigners.  Like, I liked the commentary that the franchise as a whole offered, but even I had to acknowledge that the further that the films progressed, the less nuance that the conversation offered.  This one doesn't do that.  If anything, this movie kind of comes across as a '90s team superhero movie like X-Men​.  (Yes, I know that X-Men came out in 2000.  Maybe The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?  Oh, that 2003.) 

But there is a political stance in this.  Okay, sure everything is political, even and especially things that claim to be apolitical.  That's not what I'm talking about with Once Upon a Time in China V.  No, it's not aggressively political and that's a bummer. But the final act of this movie makes a statement on oppressive capitalism.  I mean, the movie is called Once Upon a Time in China.  But this is one of those stories, much like It's a Wonderful Life, that weaves in the notion that people shouldn't be so tight-fisted about their services.   I also am probably the only person on the planet who has made the connection --albeit forced --between Once Upon a Time in China V and It's a Wonderful Life, so I'll take that award now.  Much of the movie is a fun romp between Wong Fei-Hung's school and pirates.  Yeah, pirates.

Can I tell you how much I like the pirates in this movie?  Like, I'm not a pirate guy.  Those people who are huge Pirates of the Caribbean fans, I don't get it.  Those movie deliver on a very specific pirate archetype and that's fine for a lot of people.  But Once Upon a Time in China V serves up what I consider "the video game pirate."  These are so over-the-top brigands that they are almost laughable in how evil these guys are.  And the thing that's absolutely perfect?  It almost undoes the crime that Once Upon a Time in China II commits.  Once Upon a Time in China II offers a potentially supernatural villain.  Now, one of the things that this franchise does is establish certain rules, but pretends that it is grounded.  When the villain in II claims that he is immortal, there's this question all the way through on the rules of this world.  After all, while wire-fu is a key conceit to this franchise, the first movie takes what should be an extreme version of a grounded world, the second brings up the notion that perhaps there is something greater out there.  Well, that guy was a fraud and it was all tricks.  

Forget that in V.  V embraces that weird stuff happens.  And I don't know why the weird stuff makes me smile.  There's this sequence, oddly enough, in the second act, where Wong Fei-Hung fights a 120-year-old super pirate who is borderline magic.  And I don't know why that made the franchise way more fun.  I've been getting more and more annoyed by the casual use of wire-fu in this franchise.  But when you combine wire-fu and an absurd premise, it somehow becomes way more fun.  Like, I was way more forgiving of these epic wire-fu sequences because it was magic pirates.  Before, I lived in a world where everyone was a superhero trying to win a contest that seemed silly and now I have my super team fighting evil magic pirates and I'm all aboard.  It seems like such a smaller story than what I was dealing with before and I just liked that story where I could understand what was going on.

I also complained about Once Upon a Time in China IV about Wong Fei-Hung being the worst boyfriend in the world when they introduced 14th Aunt.  Like, it was such a step backwards in the story.  I thought they were just going to ignore 14th Aunt.  But it feels like Hark Tsui was desperately trying to redeem the franchise, so he took advantage of the goofiness that Once Upon a Time in China IV did.  I need to point something out from a relationship perspective.  Wong Fei-Hung's entire personality is being a genius at everything except for love.  Okay, I can accept that.  I don't love that sequels undoes some of the things that he learns in previous entries, but a lot of his growth has stuck by Once Upon a Time in China V, so I can forgive certain things.  But I was always so angry at Wong Fei-Hung for being such a dope in this series.  But I actively got mad at 13th Aunt / Siu-Kwan in this one.  One of the things that's kind of cute about her character in previous entries is that she's a little shrewd when it comes to flirting with Wong Fei-Hung.  But in this one, that line is crossed I didn't care for. Let's talk about the marriage that happens in this movie.

Sure, the two characters needed to move their relationship along by this point.  I wouldn't even hate a marriage between the two characters at this point.  They've been dancing around it for long enough.  But I don't like the idea that Siu-Kwan tricks Wong Fei-Hung into a marriage.  It's this moment that makes us sympathize with 14th Aunt, who absolutely should have no claim over Wong Fei-Hung.  There's this great fallout with these two sisters fighting over the same dude (I know, it's regressive, but it makes for fun storytelling.) But the bigger problem is that Wong Fei-Hung doesn't really have a chance to screw up.  It's almost like the movie is safeguarding Wong Fei-Hung from any scrutiny because he's constantly being manipulated in this relationship.  That's not healthy.  It makes the entire relationship that I've been low-key rooting for something gross.  Besides, we don't really know if they're married or not.  

Also, stop teasing me by saying that Foon and 14th Aunt are never going to be a thing.  He puts himself out there in a vulnerable way, which is huge for a comic relief character.  But the movie won't let him be a character.  II gave him moments of pain and this movie, given an opportunity to cash in on that pain, makes it a bit.  It's really weird because the script teases that he should have more from that moment than what he got.

Okay, I have nothing left to say.  This is a silly movie that embraces its own silliness.  I'm almost done with this franchise and I have a feeling that this entry won't have much say in the next film.  Still, I dug it against all odds.

PG-13, which is weird because --for some reason --I always associate these movies with R.  I don't think that there has been an R-rating in this franchise, despite the fact that they're a bit upsetting all around.  Obviously, these are murder mysteries.  Murder mysteries, by definition, must have murders in them.  With that, there's a bit of gore.  But the thing that escalates all of the violence and questionable content is the fact that it is in the shadow of the Church.  The villainous priest in this story tries to make the other priest uncomfortable by repeatingly stressing his sexual sins in detail.  Couple that with some blasphemous acts, you get a PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Rian Johnson

As a great Mon Calamari admiral once said, "It's a trap."

This blog is a trap for me to stick my foot into it.  I was asked to watch this movie and now I know why.  What is going to realistically happen is that I'm going to have a take on faith and the Catholic Church.  While much of it might be in the spirit of what the Church teaches, I might get some of the nuance of theology wrong.  The notion of faith is so at the core of this movie that to take either side is only going to get me into trouble.  Well, I'm tired.  Not just today.  I'm tired of it all.  In many ways, right now, I've never been stronger in my faith.  But I've also never felt more alone in my entire faith journey.  There was one time in my life when I left the Church.  It was only for a year.  What I realized in that year was that I have a harder time with Catholics than I do with the Church.  Because I've absorbed that philosophy, I'm far past that feeling I had when I lost my faith all those years ago.  But then I have stuff like this that is beautifully challenging.  Still, I'm just waiting for someone to quote one line or to pass this blog around to other people to prove that I'm some kind of weird heretic.  

Still, I try.  So let's take some of the melodrama out of this intro and talk about what is ultimately a fun murder mystery made by a guy who has a complex relationship with Catholicism.  One of the things that is abundantly clear when watching the complete oeuvre of Rian Johnson is that he tends to lean pretty left.  I rewatched Knives Out fairly recently.  Like with Agatha Christie's Poirot, Benoit Blanc mysteries tend to set up the background with a cast of characters for Blanc to scrutinize.  But I'm realizing that Johnson might really have a problem with the fringes of conservatives.  I watched Knives Out with the eyes of a second Trump presidency this time.  Johnson often doesn't harp on his suspects.  But he also realized that those who make their personalities based on far-right ideologies creates a shortcut to unlikability.  There is a crazy shorthand that happens in these movies when they are introduced as far-right that explains their behavior for the entire film.  Now, the first film is a borderline agnostic film.  If there was a religious commentary in there, gosh if I can remember it.  

But Wake Up Dead Man doesn't even try to shy from the fact that it is a story about faith.  In Glass Onion, Johnson gave us so much background on Benoit Blanc by making him gay.  Maybe Johnson is somehow a master at giving us as little information about characters as possible while letting us feel like we know everything about them.  When Blanc walks into Fr. Jud's church, he's as open as he can be about finding nothing spiritual about the building he's walking into.  He has respect for Fr. Jud (remind me to talk about Fr. Jud's name, okay?), but finds his conviction for Christ to be naive.  Yes, the movie ends with Blanc talking about how he's like Paul, the scales removed from his eyes.  But Johnson is very clear.  Blanc is no closer to believing in Christ than when he started. 

I've been listening to You Made It Weird, Pete Holmes's podcast.  Holmes, as his comedian origin story, was formally a borderline-fundamentalist who got married too young, was cheated on, and got divorced.  That divorce led him away from organized religion, but left him spiritually seeking.  I'm in 2018 on the podcast and, at that point in his life, he refers to himself not as Christian, but as Christ-leaning.  The reason that I tell you this is because Holmes closes almost every podcast with a talk about God and faith.  I find it fascinating.  Binging these episodes is fascinating because he tends to have a lot of atheists on the podcasts.  Some of them simply don't care.  Some of them are quite learned about faith and what drives them away from faith communities.  Now, the well-learned atheists tend to land on at least two key points.  1) If faith and religion is making you a better person, most atheists tend to be live-and-let-live.  2) They also tend to almost unanimously believe that you don't need religion to be a good person.  

Keeping these thoughts in mind, Benoit Blanc (and, by extension, Rian Johnson) takes this Saul / Paul moment at the end of the film and tries to get a happy medium on the role of faith.  Blanc, as I stated, is no closer to Christ than he was at the beginning.  He finds it all to be part of a fairy tale.  Okay, that's his prerogative.  But he was also dismissive of those with faith as foolish because he tends to view the Church as the die hards of Monsignor Wicks.  These are the zealots.  They are so obsessed with their own salvation that they confuse salvation for exclusivity.  They not only see themselves as sinners who are working to get to heaven, but also have something unsaid in the revelry that comes with others failing to get to heaven.  And boy-oh-boy, do they want things to be old school gloom-and-doom.

One of my favorite priests, weirdly enough, is very old school.  I'm being vague because, in my praise for this man, I'm actually going to do something accidentally insulting.  I don't want to insult.  None of this is meant to be mean.  There's something incredibly attractive, especially for Catholics, to find a spiritual leader who is going to treat faith as something under siege.  As long as I've been in the Church, there has been this narrative that "our way is not the world's way."   Catholics tend to get their strength from the notion that we are oppressed.  Sometimes in history, this idea is absolutely true.  Looking at the Church as something mirroring the early Church, where martyrs were thrown to the lions sets a precedent that has kind of carried us through modern times.  The problem is that sometimes Catholics aren't the oppressed; they often are the oppressors.  That's the line-up of suspects in Wake Up Dead Man.  None of them are likable.  The closest thing we get to a sympathetic suspect is Simone, who goes through life every day in incredible pain.  Her cruelty comes from the desperation that there has to be an option beyond medical science.  It's sympathetic, even if it leads her to be kind of awful.

Again, in contrast to all of this is Fr. Jud.  I've had an epiphany over the past two years.  Okay, two epiphanies that are intimately related.  No one hates Star Wars more than a Star Wars fan and no Catholic is hated more than a Catholic who has slightly different views than another Catholic.  I kind of get it.  Like, going to Franciscan University, by all rights a pretty conservative Catholic institution, led people there to turn their noses up to Jesuits.  But those Franciscan University kids were often scorned for having guitars at Mass by the Latin Mass crowd.  It all makes sense.  Catholics are fundamentally about objective truth.  But a lot of those truths are uncomfortable.  Everything, as far as I can tell, about Fr. Jud is in line with Church teaching.  He holds the belief that forgiveness is central to grace.  He is a man who killed someone in the boxing ring and needs the world to be a place where acknowleding sin is the first step to making oneself better.  Yes, Hell probably exists for this character.  But he also doesn't do what he does out of fear of Hell. He does what he does because that's what Christ did.  The amount of time that he talks about his relationship with Christ is empowering.

Still, Fr. Jud is alone in this movie.  Okay, we have the bookending of the film where Fr. Jud is in conference with Bishop Langstrom.  Fr. Jud is sent to this parish because it is so tarnished by what I would consider zealotry and Christian Nationalism.  While Monsignor Wicks's parish is perhaps a bit extremist (leading to a diminished congregation, which makes it perfect for a murder mystery with a limited conglomeration of suspects), Johnson probably also admits that Fr. Jud is a breath of fresh air to much of what the Church looks like today.  

Now, I don't think that Fr. Jud is a stretch.  There have been all these articles that I've seen that Wake Up Dead Man is the most Christian movie of the year.  That's neither here nor there.  There are things that I borderline applauded and there were things in the movie that hurt my heart.  I do think that there are more Fr. Juds out there than even Monsignor Wickses.  If I'm being the most optimistic I can be, probably a lot of parish priests are a mix of both.  Some have more Jud; some have more Wicks.  Still, it doesn't really change that the commentary about the faith is something to at least contemplate.  The movie almost makes us wonder why we need such strongman shepherds. 

Yeah, this is a murder mystery.  In fact, it's a really cool murder mystery.  Between the Benoit Blanc mysteries and Poker Face, Rian Johnson might be the best mystery storyteller out there right now.  And from that perspective alone, golly this is a good movie.  It pulls two very difficult cards to pull off: the locked room mystery coupled with a startling resurrection.  Both of these elements have great solves coupled with some cool character stuff. But in the same way that the first one is about family and the second one is about celebrity, the mystery can be cool all day and it should really be about the message afterwards.  And this is the one that straight up puts the Catholic Church on the scales.  Yeah, it's incredible.  Sure, it gets wildly uncomfortable a lot of the time.  There are so many times in the movie that I wondered who I could recommend this movie to.  But it ultimately doesn't matter because the movie has its own legs to stand on. 

It's a great movie.  It's scary and thoughtful.  Some Catholics are going to love it.  Some are going to hate it.  From a faith perspective, it depressed me more than it should have.  But it doesn't meant that it wasn't exactly what I needed it to be.

Approved, but I'm starting to realize that Josef von Sternberg might be a guy who is pushing the pre-code stuff pretty hard.  There's this montage of people being tortured by the Russian government and there seem to be some topless ladies in that sequence.  Like, are you supposed to be shocked by the violent torture of people or the fact that a lot of them seem to be topless?  Also, there's an implication that Catherine is sleeping her way around the Russian royalty and military to get ahead.  Still, pre-code approval?

DIRECTOR:  Josef von Sternberg

I can't be the only one who thinks that this movie is absolutely awful, right?

Seriously, it might be my least favorite in the box set.  (I'd also like to note that, despite never having been played, it stalled out at two separate parts of the film.  The disc looks pretty darned immaculate as well.) In a million years would I think that a Josef von Sternberg / Marlene Dietrich box set would be a slog to get through, but I've now educated myself.  There are a lot of reasons that I really disliked The Scarlet Empress.  But I gotta say, I'm going to be rough on this movie.  Just because something is black-and-white and Criterion doesn't mean it's automatically a great film.

Let's start with the most unfair criticism ever:  Marie Antoinette did it better.  There are so many reasons that I shouldn't be able to get away with that trite accusation.  I adore Marie Antoinette.  Every so often, it slips into my Top 5, so to compare The Scarlet Empress to Marie Antoinette is borderline rude.  Nothing is Marie Antoinette.  It's just that they have such shared DNA that I can't help but make that comparison.  Yeah, they are different royal stories.  But ultimately, these are two women destined to marry boorish royals for the sake of joining two nations and siring children.  Both of them are miserable by the men that they marry and struggle with a loss of identity at the expense of playing the games that royalty plays.  Sure, both are true stories.  But you know what is also true about both these movies?  You watch both of these movies and both movies scream historical inaccuracy.  The difference, however, is that Sofia Coppola made Marie Antoinette in an anachronistic style for the sake of tone and storytelling.  Josef von Sternberg made his film the way he did because he's kind of lazy.

Man, I must be in a mood.  Like, I'm not pulling punches that absolutely deserve to be pulled.  Lazy is too mean.  Josef von Sternberg, from me guessing, is trying to do two things.  The first thing he is trying to do is make an epic romance.  I'm going to apply a little bit of German filmmaking history to this film, despite the fact that von Sternberg was Austrian.  The era that von Sternberg cut his teeth on film was during the Weimar Republic.  While this era in German cinema was defined by German Expressionism (weird, Tim-Burtony design stuff), it was also known for the historical and literary epic.  When all these ex-pats made their way to America, they took the filmmaking skills they learned in Europe and applied them to the American studio system.  Epic romances were in vogue, hence why we see the sendup of them with The Dueling Cavalier in Singin' in the Rain. Golly, I could not get The Dueling Cavalier out of my head when I was watching this.  The handsome man giving inappropriate kisses?  The romance that's not really there, despite the movie screaming that the romance is there.  It's all a lot.  Marlene Dietrich isn't helping with this, by the way.  She's really leaning into the whole Marlene Dietrich vibe. Anyway, I'm going to go into that later. 

But secondly, I do think that this is something that von Sternberg was probably really into.  Yeah, I was hoping that he was Hungarian too to justify this argument.  I'm sure that if I do a deeper dive, there's a connection to this Muscovite obsession that this movie implies.  It feels like he really wants to pay homage to this woman who took the more savage elements of Russian society at the time and weaponized it for her own good.  Yeah, there is a story here.  It's not that there shouldn't be a story about Catherine the Second.  The story, however, should not be what we got.

A lot of my beef with these movies is that Marlene Dietrich is never really asked to act a lot.  I have a fairly devious thing that I say that often has people turn on me.  *Ahem*  I rarely get excited to see that Anthony Hopkins is in a movie.  Now, I think that Anthony Hopkins, if watched sparingly, is an incredible actor.  Silence of the Lambs is something special.  Watching him as Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the more inspired casting choices of history. But when you watch him too much, you realize he's kind of doing variations of the same thing over and over.  It's fine.  It absolutely does the job in almost everything he's played.  I just don't get excited because I can almost predict what the performance is going to be like.  Now, Marlene Dietrich isn't even at that level.  Marlene Dietrich gives the same performance and that performance isn't all that interesting.  Golly, I'm really going for the jugular in this blog.  I'm not usually this spicy, but Dietrich is giving off something very specific every time I see her.  That specific thing is "Lady who sleeps her way into power" and that doesn't really fill me with a lot of inspiration.

And this kind of performance isn't simply on Dietrich's shoulders.  If anything, she's the best part of this movie.  Golly, everyone in this movie is playing one emotion and playing it hard.  They're all about vibes.  The Grand Duke Peter, who is meant to be insane, just grins in every scene.  Catherine the First yells at everyone as a violent matriarch.  Count Alexei, geez...where do I start with him?  These aren't characters.  They are archetypes.  No one has motivation.  No one has nuance.  They represent obstacles.  But this is a story about real people.  I'm not saying that you shouldn't make the Grand Duke Peter not insane.  But also understand that mental illness is a nuanced thing fulls of highs and lows.  Catherine the First should be shrewish, but maybe make her a yelling character because she's scared what might happen to the kingdom if she lets her guard down.  I don't know what the heck to do with Count Alexei because he's there to be cold and handsome.  If he did the things that the movie says he did upon meeting the young Sophia, then lets figure out what makes him tick like that.

I'm not saying that story should never be told.  Yeah, there's something interesting about that idea.  But what Sternberg and Dietrich are presenting isn't a nuanced tale of a tortured person.  Instead, it's meant to be a romantic shortcut.  She is playing an archetype that is really never meant to be scrutinized because it feels like the final goal is pretty shallow.  These movies are kind of like reading trashy romance novels.  The original opening for this blog was just going to be an all-caps "MELODRAMA."  It's lowest common denominator versions of what relationships are supposed to be.  Yes, I appreciate that we don't have morally righteous protagonists.  That, too, would be boring.  But what we get is character change (I refuse to say "growth" in this situation) that honestly feels unearned.  

Even worse, this movie almost forgets why the overthrow of the emperor mattered in the course of history.  The movie starts with this torture scene.  When Peter ascends to the throne, there's a montage of violence across the land.  But really, the peasants and the citizens of Moscow are a complete afterthought in this story.  It should be about the people.  They are going through absolute hell throughout all of the events.  But what does the story focus on?  Sophia / Catherine.  Yes, her life in the castle was terrible.  But it was a cakewalk compared to what the citizens of Russia were going through that made this story inspirational.  And it's not like Catherine did all of these things with some political savvy that manipulated the innerworkings of government.  Instead, she took the advice of finding a lover and kept repeating that until she was able to escape the castle.  

Can I tell you my favorite silly moment?  To get Catherine out of the castle, the military dresses her up as a soldier so she can sneak past the guards.  But Sternberg doesn't give her a normal military outfit.  Nope, she gets a special, sexy military outfit.  Because she's Marlene Dietrich.  That's dumb.  That's so dumb.  

Ultimately, what this movie was shooting for was pagentry.  The goal was so that 1930s housewives could look at what they imagined Russia looked like and whisper to each other, "Isn't it all so majestic?"  That's not a great movie.  

Rated R for a myriad of reasons.  The movie starts off with a pretty matter-of-fact suicide.  The movie spirals from there.  There are multiple scenes of nudity, including a scene that involves dead bodies.  There are scenes of sexual assault and prostitution.  The language gets intense at times.  Because the movie is filmed before PETA started getting invovled with movies (and because it is a Criterion release), there's a scene of a real horse being butchered.  Take all of this into account and we're looking at a story taking place during the Weimar Republic setting up elements of the Holocaust.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

When you are down in the dumps and the world feels like a pretty bleak place, it might not be healthy to be knocking out Ingmar Bergman films. I have a stack of essays that need a quick grading (they aren't being handed back), but I know those will be done in a timely fashion.  Instead, I don't know when else I can write about The Serpent's Egg, a movie that a lot of Bergman fans call an outright failure.  While I can't say that The Serpent's Egg is a necessarily great film, I also find it oddly to be something more watchable than a lot of Bergman fans give it credit for.

I think the reason that most Bergman fans are fairly dismissive of it is because it really doesn't feel like a Bergman film.  From what I understand, The Serpent's Egg is Bergman's only real Hollywood film.  As such, boy-oh-boy does it look different.  Now, different isn't necessarily a good thing.  For me?  It's a great thing.  I'm really burned out on Bergman movies.  Every rational person out there is probably screaming for me to stop watching these movies and to come back to them fresh.  I also know that might be years before I ever finish the box set so I'm trying to watch these movies objectively, despite the fact that my sheer exhaustion from this set is obviously getting to me.  It doesn't feel like a Bergman movie.  Okay, let's look at the positives from that perspective.  Before I go too deep, there are elements that absolutely Ingmar Bergman.  Shy of the historical setting and the money just thrown at making sets seem legitimate, which includes extras in German outfits galore, you could probably recognize Bergman just from stills.  Part of what is more odd about these films, at least when keeping Bergman's entire canon, is the notion that he almost might thrive of minimalism.  It feels like a producer came in here and started dressing up the sets to make the film feel a little bit more marketable.  I wouldn't be surprised if that happened.  I'm sure someone was really rooting for an Academy Award.  After all, Ingmar Bergman --THE Ingmar Bergman --came to Hollywood to make a big budget movie discussing the Holocaust.  Yeah,  I don't know how to stick another buzz word in there.  I bet someone was relaly pissed that this movie kind of was considered a stinker.

The odd thing about the movie --and it's the same thing that scratched my brain --is that it is a challenging film.  Persona is the next movie in the box set.  I, infamously, did not understand Persona. I know that Bergman gets weird sometimes.  Sometimes he gets a little too weird.  As a guy who tends to dislike the incredibly avant-garde, The Serpent's Egg is about how much I can handle.  Honestly, the last act of the movie reminded me a lot of The Trial. We get that there is more than what we are seeing on screen.  Characters act in surreal ways, especially considering that much of the first first half of the film's bleakness is terrifyingly grounded.  I took a chance making a commentary on Persona and it bit me in the butt.  Well, you can yell at me for not learning my lesson because I'm going to put myself out on the ledge here.  The climax's weird tone I think is a commentary on what we dismiss as absurdism. The first two thirds of the film feels very much like a Bergman piece.  We have a completely unlikable protagonist played by David Carradine.  Abel, Carradine's character, is a Jew struggling to find himself after his brother dies and he has no circus to return to.  Okay, disparaging circus performer is very Bergman.  Instead of doing anything even remotely healthy, Abel gets drunk every night and frequents cabarets (Honestly, the first half of the film is almost a serious-as-a-heart-attack version of Cabaret) and seduces his brother's wife.  That's all on brand.  Once again, Bergman gives us an unsympathetic protagonist because it's Bergman.

But then the second half is unpacking the world of St. Anna's.  St. Anna's mirrors the look of the police station.  Because of Abel's connection to a dead body and the fact that he's always drunk, he's in-and-out of a police station a lot in this movie.  I mean, it's always fun to see Gert Frobe playing someone other than Auric Goldfinger, so there's that.  But the job that Abel finally gets mirrors the prison.  As bleak and miserable as his life is on the outside, it seems even more hellish --and like a ghetto --on the inside.  The world of St. Anna's seems impossible. To a certain extent, it is.  Abel is attacked in an empty elevator.  He decapitates the man and then is clean for the next scene.  He's allowed to view some of the inhuman experiments that Vergerus (again, a Vergerus) does in the bowels of this building.  But as the movie implies that Abel is going insane in this world that doesn't want him, there is something incredibly sane keeping in mind dramatic irony.  We know that the Nazis would perform insane experiments on the Jewish people.  We know that these kinds of things would be done.  From Abel's perspective, everything here seems too barbaric to even consider. But history would show that Vergerus was an archetype for Mengele.  Yeah, Abel is going nuts from the world around him.  He's hard to believe because nothing seems real.  But that's why when Vergerus kills himself at the end, it's so absurd that there's no way out of that scenario.

So why do people hate this movie so much?  I mean, the easy answer is that it is far more heavy-handed than other Bergman movies.  There are moments in Bergman where he hits his audience on the head with a sledgehammer.  I don't deny that.  But my goodness, Bergman is really not trying to hold back on the psychosis that this movie presents.  That's probably an answer.  I'm going to be a little bit of a turd and say that I don't love David Carradine in this or in a lot of movies.  I'm sorry to David Carradine posthumously and to Keith Carradine who probably doesn't want to read this.  I get why Bergman cast him.  I mean, it's very ni line with the stuff that I see coming out of Bergman (although Elliot Gould claims that he was supposed to play Abel Rosenberg and it was the studio who thought that David Carradine was a better draw).  It's just that Carradine really plays the movie with one note.  There's the always a little withdrawn and depressed that Carradine brings to the role.  That's something that I've seen with Carradine with a lot of the stuff that he does.  

But between Bergman always being a bummer, the Holocaust and the Weimar Republic, and not a moment of happiness, I run into the problem that I have with both Eli Roth movies and The Passion of the Christ.  I can only go so low before it feels like you are offering nothing that can be used as juxtaposition.  There's a scene in the movie where Abel is drunk. He has alienated himself from his brother's wife and is walking the street.  He sees the name "Rosenberg" in a shop window, so he smashes it with glass. When the old couple come to accost him for breaking their shop window, he beats the old man down and forces himself on his wife.  We're bleak enough.  This doesn't actually add to the story.  There's this silk-thin narratve that Bergman explores that says that just because there are bad people that are Jewish, it doesn't meant that the Jewish people are bad people.  The thing is, I don't think that the movie reinforces that.  Abel verbalizes that notion early on.  He says that he won't be an idiot...and then spends the rest of the movie being an idiot.  

I read somewhere that Bergman's worst impulses coincided with Hitler's.  It's a Reddit page, so please take it with a grain of salt.  But what if that is true.  I mean, I don't have enough data to say that is or isn't true.  Like, if Bergman was a Nazi sympathizer at points in his life, that whole narrative of Abel being representative of a culture is even weirder.   Maybe Manuella Rosenberg is a positive representative because she does believe in taking care of Abel, despite his sins.  But even Manuella is a bit toxic.  I don't know.  I don't think that this is the movie where Bergman is subtly implying that Abel deserves everything that comes to him and that he demonizes an entire culture.  But I also don't think that the movie is a slam dunk for bringing new light to atrocities.

But all that into consideration, I have to say why I didn't hate the movie, besides the fact that it was slightly different from other Bergman movies.  While I think the story is muddy and its weirdness can get in the way of what is trying to be accomplished, it is saying something.  It is a Hollywood film that has a strong poltiical bent and is meant to be a voice of dissent against injustice.  Yeah, it's bogged down by, once again, a bleak Bergman.  But I also regularly need reminders that, at one point in recent history, speaking out against fascism is important.  There's a great line in the last minute of the movie where Gert Frobe catches Abel up on what he missed when he was unconscious.  He talks about an inept Hitler who failed in a government coup, saying that there was nothing to worry about.  I mean, again, this movie was made in 1977 and now I'm sitting in 2025 and miserable about every news report that comes out.  So, yeah, maybe The Serpent's Egg flies harder in the face of the second Trump administration.  Or it's a bit of a mess and David Carradine isn't great here.  Both, I guess, can be true.

Rated R, as it absolutely should be.  I cannot stress enough that Ingmar Bergman keeps making movies about affairs and some get a little bit more...visual(?) than others.  Sometimes the affair is the B-story.  Not with The Touch.  This is just about an affair and there's a lot of sex in it, coupled with nudity.  Also, this is possibly the most unhealthy affair movie out there because a key component about this affair is how physically abusive the film is.  The movie dabbles in sexual assault and masochism.  There are also discussions of suicide.  There's nothing wholesome about this film.  R.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

It's official: I hate this film.

I have been more critical of Ingmar Bergman than I thought I would ever be as I make my way through this box set.  Before this box, I thought I actually mostly loved Bergman.  It's not that I hate Bergman.  I do hate this.  I find myself more angry at Bergman.  I am floored that I've gotten to this place in the box set where the guy who made The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander can get such a visceral reaction out of me that I can straight up say that something is outright bad.  I also can't help that a lot of my wrath towards this film comes from the fact that I keep watching him explore the same things, only each time get somehow more despicable with each viewing.

I have been writing this blog for a really long time at this point.  It's been at least ten years of writing this blog.  I've written about thousands of movies at this point.  Each one has gotten the same amount of attention that a student gives one of my assigned essays.  (Take from that what you will.) I'd like to think that I lean more into film analysis than opinion, but I don't deny that opinion plays an important role.  I don't want to review movies, even though that's what I inevitably end up doing between here and my Letterboxd account.  (Follow me at @thrusz for more of the same.) But the thing that's always been a love / hate thing about my writing is that I find morality to be a core component of how I view film.  I love talking about this kind of stuff.  I don't know what it is.  The really cynical part of me can't help but think that this is a high-horse situation.  But I don't know.  My wife says I capitalize the "J" in ENFJ, so maybe that's it.  I just find it all so interesting.  There has to be a consideration of whether or not I would ever want to hang out with the filmmakers based on the films they make.

Bergman probably hates himself.  I get that vibe.  Yes, he probably thinks that he is a genius.  I also think that he probably looks down on plebes out there.  I get it.  Being unique and brilliant must be incredibly lonely.  But after watching all of these films, especially juxtaposed to one another, he also seems to be trying to justify some pretty messed up behavior.  The most generous take on The Touch is that this is somehow a cautionary tale about the dangers of infidelity.  The reason that I use the term "generous" because I honestly don't believe it is meant to be a cautionary tale.  From Bergman's perspective, he wants complex characters.  David and Karin are complex characters.  He's creating this love story that is tragic for all of the wrong reasons and there's something that Karin would really appreciate about the film: the whole thing is masochistic.  

Yeah, David and Karin are complex, but that's mostly because they are completely unsympathetic.  This is a running motif throughout his films.  He keeps pushing the boundaries of how much the audience can take when it comes to making major characters completely unlikable.  Heck, I'm the guy who really likes stories about unlikable characters.  I'm in the Breaking Bad and Mad Men camp.  But when it comes to stories like The Touch, golly I want to scream at the camera.  A lot of romance stories use an affair as a component in the story.  Often, these characters are quite upset with their lives or their spouses.  Not Bergman.  Bergman keeps on finding pleasure in tearing apart what should be healthy relationships.  David confesses that he fell in love with Karin because of a moment of vulnerability when they met.  She seemed weak and that excited him.  It's a red flag, to be sure.  But I don't know how Bergman decided to put two completely horrible people in the same room together.  Karin, up to this point, admits that she had not had many lovers.  She actually seems quite pleased with her marriage --a point that Bergman seems to be going out of his way to establish --and that she isn't even all that attracted to David.  Sure, that will change by the end of the story.  But instead of a fairytale romance where the two discover something beautiful with one another, despite the fact that Karin seems to be arbitrarily nuking her family, their relationship keeps on getting worse and worse.

The thing that burns me up is the fact that all of this seems unnecessary.  Karin wasn't unhappy with her husband.  As I stressed, she wasn't even into David that much.  And then she only gets attracted to David when David is abusive and manic?  What kind of messed up story is this?  Again, I cannot stress that the tone is not that of a cautionary tale.  Instead, Bergman always kind of hovers in this place of talking about how humanity is comprised of terrible people.  Bergman is a bad guy.  Like, I'm reading more and more about Bergman and all of it is just leading me to think that he's an awful dude making stories.  Keeping all of that in mind, the story of a woman asking to be abused by a messed up dude comes across as something truly revolting.  Like, there's a line, right?  I loved Woody Allen.  But after I watched that doc, it really becomes hard to watch Woody Allen movies.  And as bad as Woody was, he never made a story like The Touch.  Golly, there's no level of brilliant filmmaking where I watch this movie and think "Romantic." 

Maybe it is a good thing that I have a Bergman movie where I'm not terribly conflicted about the whole thing.  It's a gross movie made by a gross dude who knows how to tell a story.  But it doesn't matter when a story is well presented.  Instead, we just have this narrative that makes me hate watch the whole thing.  It doesn't really matter that Karin leaves him at the end.  After all, she was given a reasonable ultimatum by Andreas and she still ignored him.  It's just an upsetting movie all the way through.

Not rated, which is funny, because I'm fairly certain the other entries --for some reason --are R rated.  This is one that actually kind of ups the content factor.  One, this one is pretty gory.  Not the worst thing that's out there, but it gets pretty rough.  One lady gets decapitated and then the head is desecrated.  There's some mutilation that happens.  That's on top of the normal violence that we tend to see in these movies.    But the insane thing about the whole thing is the sheer amount of animal cruelty in the film.  There's an entire character who punches horses only for the horses to get revenge at the end.  Still, punching horses.

DIRECTOR: Yuen Bun

You know that you can't have high expectations when you get to the fourth movie in a wire-fu franchise.  Geez Louise, I'm so ready to be done.  It sounds like I hate this.  I don't hate this.  Honestly, a different time in my life would have welcomed the entire franchise.  There would have been a whole thing about how I was the only one to watch these movies.  But there are a bunch of things about Once Upon a Time in China IV that are more annoying than they are bad.

The next statement I'm going to say is going to be pretty self-aware.  There's a lot of George Lazenby happening in this movie.  I'm referring to how George Lazenby was the guy who had to replace Sean Connery in the James Bond franchise for On Her Majesty's Secret Service.   The thing about On Her Majesty's Secret Service is that I actually really enjoy that movie.  I don't think that George Lazenby was a terrible Bond.  I do think that he's a bit of a silly human being whose con man attitude towards success borders on gross.  But I do like the film he was in.  This is the entry in the series that recast Wong Fei-Hung.  Jet Li, who is an incredible martial artist, was replaced by Wenzhuo Zhao, is is also --oddly enough --an incredible martial artist.  I wasn't ready for that.  There's an entry in the Jackie Chan box where Chan is replaced by another guy pretending to be Chan.  The problem is, Jackie Chan is the best at what he does.  Apparently, as impressive as Jet Li is, Wenzhuo Zhao is also pretty darned talented and looks enough like Jet Li that there isn't that much mental gymnastics (pun intended) happening to make the story work.  

But it's not just Jet Li who left.  13th Aunt is gone.  And, instead of recasting her like they did with Wong Fei-Hung, they just introduced 14th Aunt...who is very similar in personality and looks to 13th Aunt.  Why, movie?  Why?  The franchise spent three movie really milking every detail between Wong Fei-Hung and 13th Aunt only to potentially tease the notion that she could be replaced by her sister?  I am glad that both 13th and 14th Aunt show up for the next movie, but what were we rooting for?  

There's something very telling about the introduction of 14th Aunt and it feels like the producers of this film were more upset with putting out the immediate fires of actors leaving than they were with the overall story that they had worked to create.  Nothing feels more episodic in the franchise than part IV of this series.  So much effort was put into making sure that the audience didn't feel the loss of the two main actors in the series.  As such --and this is why I talk about On Her Majesty's Secret Service --we get a movie that really tries holding onto formula so badly while forgetting that there's an overall story to tell.  14th Aunt contributes nothing to the story.  Her motivations are simply to go along with the ride.  As such, she becomes the focus of the romantic gaze of this movie.  Honestly, there are two potential love interests for Wong Fei-Hung in this movie: 14th Aunt and the leader of the Red Lanterns.  But we're kind of put in a pickle.  After all, we've been rooting for 13th Aunt and Wong Fei-Hung for so many hours at this point that to simply abandon that for a character dismissal off camera seems rough.  So the issue is that we're not rooting for any member of a love triangle to do anything, which is odd because the formula that the previous movie set up is that there has to be an awkward romance throughout.

And, golly, does that formula hurt the movie.  I keep putting disclaimers in my blogs (which hurts my blog like formula hurts a movie!).  I don't have an emotional attachment to the Lion King Festival.  It clearly means a lot to the Chinese people.  For me?  I don't quite get the emotional obsession with this trope that we keep going back to.  I really didn't love Once Upon a Time in China III.  It's dependence on the Lion King battles was too much and it took away from character.  But because the producers wanted Once Upon a Time in China IV to remind audiences that, despite change, things were exactly the same, we were forced to have a lot of Lion King competition.  It's frustrating, because I don't really see foreigners putting a lot of stock into these competitions, especially when the villains of the piece don't have almost any time to actually comment on intentions.

Much of this movie kind of feels like Power Rangers.  Yes, I'm aware that Power Rangers are Japanese.  I'm not being racist.  But I'm talking about how unimpressed I am by stunts.  Part of this is me.  I've been watching a lot of these Once Upon a Time in China movies.  That's a lot of wire-fu.  The thing that I am discovering about wire-fu is that it can be really impressive or really awful.  When it is used sparingly, it is really effective.  The first Once Upon a Time in China, it took me a while before I realized that this was a full-on wire-fu movie.  Like, there were a couple of real bananas moments.  I think I even griped about that when I was writing the first one.  But now that I've finished Part IV, it's used so much in every scene that nothing really has any stakes.  Anything can happen.  I compared this to Legolas in The Two Towers backwards mounting a horse (that sounds filthy!) to Legolas in Battle of the Five Armies jumping up a collapsing bridge.  I remember the entire audience oohing-and-ahhing when that horse thing happened, wondering how they did that shot.  A bunch of films later, Legolas is hopping up a digital bridge and there's nothing fascinating about it.  He's done so many absurd things that everything at a certain point seems effortless.  It's a bummer.

I don't know what the villains really want in this piece.  There are two sets of villains: the Red Lantern and the Germans.  The Red Lanterns want foreigners out of their country.  That's been a repeated motif in all of these films. But there's a challenge that the lanterns present to Wong Fei-Hung that has almost nothing to do with the story because they still try to kill him after he completes the tasks.  Then there's the Germans.  Is the Lion King competition a repeated try of the last plan to take over China?  If so, why are we even watching this movie?  Why go through all of the ceremony and rigamarole if we're just going to have the German army try to take over the country through military force?  None of it really has any kind of meaning that makes the villains compelling.  We're in the point of the franchise where we're watching exclusively for spectacle.  

I'm a bit tired of these movies.  They aren't terrible.  It's just that they're coming out at an average of more than one a year.  That's too fast.  Something with this scale requires planning and investment.  Instead, they're riding the high of box office success to make more and more of these movies, regardless of quality.  They look like each other, but the quality doesn't matter.

TV-14, but that's because Stranger Things, the TV show is TV-14.  I mean, the fact that this movie bleeps out the f-bombs kind of says that this is more promotional material than it actually is proper film.  They want to have the kids who are watching Stranger Things as a form of teenage rebellion not to get into real trouble.  The things that you have to worry about in this one are the graphic clips of scenes from the Stranger Things TV show and the props that are used to recreate some of those effects.  It's honestly pretty tame if it wasn't for all of the swearing that is bleeped out...which honestly somehow makes it specifically more noticable. 

DIRECTOR:  Jonathan Halperin

I hate myself for writing about this.  It's not really a movie.  Okay, it kind of is a movie.  I refuse to sound like Steven Spielberg and start dogging on the fact that some things on Netflix aren't movies.  But I'm in the camp that this is a glorified special feature for Stranger Things.  I've been having one of those great parent bonding moments with my older two kids.  This is the first kind of hard-edged thing that they've watched and I wanted to keep the party going by watching the documentary on the stage play that I'll probably never see.  But, also, like, I want to know everything canon about Stranger Things.  If I get into a fandom, I have to know everything canon.  And if I really get into the fandom, I want to know extended universe stuff too.  I'm not there yet with Stranger Things. 

Well, the big reveal is that you probably should go buy a ticket to see this show before it disappears because I learned very little about what The First Shadow added to the storyline.  I also kind of feel a little dirty because I struggle with stuff like The First Shadow.  Part of it is the snob in me.  I'm a big fan of theatre on top of being a big fan of film.  Now, I can make peace with watching a dumb movie from time-to-time.  I actually enjoy a lot of dumb stuff.  But film has kind of evolved out of being a novelty into a valid form of art.  I suppose the same could be said about the theatre.  I want to drop the phrase "neoclassical precepts" because I studied that for so long.  In my brain, there is this assumption that theatre has always been this hallowed space for high art.  I know that isn't even remotely true.  But if we're talking about the theatre I've grown up with contrasted with the film I've grown up with, the variety of films out there make space for some less challenging films while the stage has always been the place to push me out of my comfort zone.  Well, I suppose my comfort zone is snobbiness because the notion of paying Broadway prices for seeing what amounts to a lot of fun spectacle makes me uncomfortable.

​Okay, but putting all that on the backburner (which, ultimately, should be saved for therapy), I need to look at this as a movie in itself.  Behind the Curtain is on the periphery of the fan documentary.  It's not quite a fandom doc because it isn't primarily about fandom.  Instead, it is a documentary almost exclusively for the fans of a certain fandom.  I've had a problem with most of the fandom docs that I have watched.  Ultimately, there is an assumption that what is being documented is somehow special.  The only doc that has kind of broken this rule is the oldest doc that I can think of that is a fandom doc, Trekkies.  But considering that this isn't specifically about the fans of a fandom, it does kind of work better than other docs in the subgenre.  

Honestly, the roots of this film are better than the actual film itself.  In analyzing this movie, it really ultimately doesn't matter that it is about Stranger Things, which is funny because that's the real reason that people are watching this.  What Behind the Curtain actually does is what the first part of the title suggests: what does it take to get a big budget West End play up on its feet.  There's something kind of smart --and a little bit manipulative --about the way that this play is kind of formatted.  The protagonist of the film is Kate Trefry, who is a staff writer for the Stranger Things television show.  She acts as the avatar for the audience.  She is an expert at the world of Hollywood, television, and film.  What she is completely new to is the world of the theatre.  Because theatre has different rules than film does, we have a lot of fish-out-of-water moments.  Trefry isn't ever the bad guy in the documentary.  However, she is the weakest element in a world that has no time to really wait for her.  She is used to writing in a communal environment where the rules of television apply.  She's using a formula that has worked for the screen only to discover that a lot of those tricks don't apply to when someone is doing something live every night.  That's kind of fascinating because, ultimately, the film is trying to convey the sense of anxiety for an outsider.  While there, no doubt, is a lot of anxiety when it comes to producing a television show, Trefry is aware and prepared for that kind of anxiety.  Because she's not part of the world of theatre, everything kind of comes as a shock to what is expected of her as things move on.  She's never the bad guy.  She does her job.  She pushes herself harder and harder.  In fact, her biggest critic is herself because she doesn't want to let people down.  This is a show that demands perfection and perfection is hard to achieve.

It is all kind of fake, though?  Right?  I'm not crazy about that.  This is a documentary that doesn't want to just be a special feature for a DVD or something.  Someone wanted this to be a worthy film-length Stranger Things adjacent property that people tuned into.  I get it.  But, really, it all feels like it was going to go the way it was going to go the entire time.  Yes, the stress is real.  I don't deny that the stress is real.  You have a lot of people at the top of their game making something that has real expectations to it.  But this isn't a story about how personalities clashed.  This isn't a story about doing the impossible.  From moment one, you had a lot of people who knew that this was going to be a challenging job technically and that the projects had large expectations.  But this wouldn't be a documentary about a failed Stranger Things play.  Netflix wouldn't release something like that.  They would have buried this special feature in the annals of the Netflix basement and we wouldn't have heard of it.  Instead, we get this heightened sense of urgency as the play kept going.  I'm going to cite the conclusion of the film to make my point.  There's a scene where the actors are watching the monitors and "oohing" and "ahhhing" special effects that are working.  From their perspective, they've seen these things go off every night.  That reaction is absolutely impossible in real ways.  They can be excited that things are going well.  But the idea that they are mesmorized by these special effects when they've had eight weeks of tech is kind of silly.  It's all for the sake of storytelling.  Halpern mined every bit of stress and anxiety for the film and probably left a lot of the boring, sitting-around-and-having-fun moments to the cutting room floor.  It's far more interesting thinking that this entire, big-budget production was going to fall on its face.

Which all returns me to the "why" of it all.  I don't know what to tell you, but I think I would have found this far more interesting to make this about Death of a Salesman or something like that.  Again, I'm a huge snob.  But what Stranger Things offers me, from a documentary perspective, is a binary.  Did the special effect thing work or didn't it?  Did audiences like the story or not?  Instead, there's nothing in this movie about nuance of performance.  We had moments where actors apologize for line deliveries, but what those moments are more concerned with are "Did the line get delivered properly so that an effect can work?"  Yeah, it's a tech heavy show.  People seemed to be more concerned on whether or not people got scared during the performance than actually moved by the events on the stage.  What I'm dancing around is the argument between high art and low art and I really don't want to be swimming around in those waters.  Yeah, I liked when David Harbour gave the new kid Hopper's hat because he did such a good job.  That's fun. But it also is very scripted.  What if Harbour brought the hat and the kid sucked?  Do you think that Netflix wouldn't want that moment anyway?  

I do say that it makes me want to watch the show, even though I've seen a lot of the technical elements on my screen at home.  I like Stranger Things.  I'm not part of the fandom like my kids are, but I find the story interesting.  Still, I don't know if my soul would be filled from watching it versus the itch in my nerd brain would be scratched.  

​But it still looks fun...