PG, and sweet mercy, I don't know what PG means anymore.  For blog after blog, I've been rallying that every movie has been too harshly rated.  Then, there's this movie about sex scandals all throughout, and it's PG?  My theory was always that the new MPAA was all about intended audience and I can't think of any young person who would want to sit through Conclave.  

DIRECTOR: Edward Berger

It's late at night and I just finished Conclave after we watched it in three separate nights.  (It's a long movie and I went back to work while the kids had off.) I'm trying to stay on top of writing blogs as soon as I watch them because there's going to be a glut of them for the coming months.  Honestly, if I had my druthers, I would have gone to see a movie at the theater.  But it's another snowpalypse in Cincinnati, so that seems like a dumb reason to make our children into orphans.  Especially considering that a ton of these movies for the Academy Awards shortlist are on streaming right now.

It's amazing that I started off with the most challenging out of the group.  I don't know how much I'm going to promote that I saw Conclave, simply because it deals with a subject matter that is incredibly sensitive and nuanced.  Normally, controversy and me are best pals.  I've always acknowledged that I'm a hypocrite.  But I think there might be more than simple hypocrisy here.  Part of why I might be less about promoting this blog isn't because of the gender stuff.  Heck, if it was just about the gender stuff, I probably wouldn't shut up about this movie.  (Although my more conservative friends calling this movie "silly" aren't entirely wrong from a realism point of view.  I'll probably get to that later in this blog.)  No, the problem I'm having is that I'm struggling with a lot of this stuff faith wise.

I haven't been exactly quiet over my crisis of faith over the past few years.  Since the rise of Donald Trump to political heights, I can't say that I've been in love with the way that the Church has responded to what I deem a dangerous precedent, especially when it comes to embracing Christian Nationalism.  For a long time, I thought that my faith was just washing away.  Instead, I think I've had to really question what I really believe versus what I think I believe.  Again, unpacking a lot of this.  I'm still figuring out exactly what I really believe.  I think I've grown closer to the actual teachings of the Gospels.  I think I love what the Church is supposed to be about.  But one of the things that I've had to dispel is that the Church --which is meant to be the Spouse of the Spirit --being more than a political grouping of adults who are all harboring their own political motivations, which includes backstabbing and, more importantly, horrible beliefs that should be considered in direct contrast to Christ's beliefs.

For those who aren't Catholic or struggling faith wise, you may find this not to be this big deal.  The thing is, I was raised to believe that there was nothing that could be really doubted.  The idea of a cafeteria Catholic was blasphemous.  These were people who weren't really Catholic in the eyes of the Church.  It's part of the Creed, after all.  But Conclave, at its core, is about watching how unspiritual the Curia really is.  I mean, it's all about ritual and ceremony.  Golly, Conclave is swimming in ritual and ceremony.  But it all feels like this is "Just something that we do" versus being moved by the intensity of these times.  Even the Pope, who is greatly loved in this film, is fundamentally just a man who makes some poor choices.  It's a lot to take in.  For Conclave to be kind of a big deal right now is hitting me in the feels.  And that's probably the movie's goal.  I don't know how they did it, but they decided to hold off on making this movie until I was going through all these crises of faith to confirm what I'm already struggling with.  (For those people not reading the irony, I'm stating that I'm aware that there probably is a surge of people feeling the same way and the release of Conclave is a response to that.)

When it comes to building this world and letting us see behind closed doors of the Curia, I have a vibe that Conclave nails it.   My wife and I had an immediate discussion after the movie ended and I think we both landed in the same place.  90% of the movie is phenomenal.  Between colors, cinematography, the whole mise en scene, and the performances, the movie absolutely nails it.  It gets you aggressively invested.  The movie intentionally pushes you into comfort zones only to rip you out of those zones immediately.  It reminds you that there is no perfect person, let alone a perfect pope.  The sheer amount of talent and skill behind Conclave is impressive as heck and, for that reason alone, I think the movie is incredible.  I want to recommend it to everyone.  But I also stated that the movie is, at its core, hilariously silly.

I talked about gender.  I'm going to call its commentary on gender subtle for most of the movie.  Others might disagree with me.  I didn't feel the sledgehammer until the end of the movie.  Before I talk about the silly part, I want to talk about the effective message throughout about gender.  I'm stating the obvious, but the Church is a boys' club.  Yes, women have their roles inside the Church, but Conclave is not afraid to remind you that men have the real power within the Church.  But when you cast Isabella Rosselini in a movie all about men, you know that there has to be a message about women.  The sisters of the film are the observers of the foolish notions that the men of the Curia hold.  While Lawrence might have good intentions, he is a fairly helpless dude.  He constantly needs help from outsiders.  Most of the time, he looks to his assistant, who is also a man.  Now, Archbishop (?) O'Malley is a lovely man who tries his best.  But his entire personality is "overwhelmed."  He gets information slowly.  It's Sister Agnes who is just sitting on a mound of information that desperately needs to be shared.  While the women of the story are mostly overlooked as even basic human beings in the Curia, their silent observation gives them a sense of tortured wisdom.

That stuff is great.  But the movie wants to end on a bombshell.  I get it.  The movie dances around the notion of progressivism versus toxic traditionalism throughout the film.  After all, the movie starts off with the forward thinking Bellini versus the Trumpian Todesco as the big fight.  As the votes keep being offered up and failing, a very Twilight Zone-y character starts gaining more and more traction.  Now, the movie is trying to fake you out a bit.  There's this atmosphere and implication that Benitez is not a real Cardinal.  No one has ever heard of this guy and he is so charismatic that there has to be something up with this dude.  At one point, you know that Benitez has to be a real contender for pope and that's the way that the movie is going.  Okay.  Interesting.  But when he becomes pope, you have to wonder what's the big reveal.  While I was ready for this guy to be an imposter, the silly part comes with its commentary on gender.  I'm spoiling it, but Benitez has some gender incongruous organs.  I'm dancing around the fact that he is male, except for the fact that he has ovaries and a uterus.  You know how you hear that gender is a spectrum.  Sometimes that is a physical thing as well.  In a loosey-goosey way, the movie teases the notion of trans rights without wholly embracing them.  

And it's such a bombshell that doesn't get the cinematic real estate that it needs.  The Benitez reveal is a movie all in itself and instead we only get a thirty second speech explaining that he decides to keep the organs because he's always had them.  We don't get a deep moral discussion about this moment.  If anything, it's meant to be this "Deal with it, audience" moment.  It's meant to make some people mad and other people cheer.  But the reality of the situation is that the whole thing is a bit silly when you think about how dodgy the Church is about gender.  Like, this movie is meant to be a criticism about how regressive the church is on gender, yet this guy fell upwards to the papacy.  First of all, there's a lot of hoops that the movie has to get Benitez in a point where no one would know this major moment for him.  Benitez also is incredibly coy about his secret until after he is elected pope.  Here's the deal.  Benitez is either super progressive (which isn't really his character.  He's empathetic, but also a practical dude because he's advocating for Lawrence to become pope) or just a weirdo who doesn't know how the papacy works.  Like, if O'Malley finds out Benitez's secret, does he think that the press won't find out?  It doesn't feel like Benitez is trying to take down the Church either.  If anything, it just feels like he hasn't thought it out.

Which is why he chooses the name "Innocent"!  Yeah, there's something to be said about Benitez's childlike view of faith.  It's great.  He has this great moment where he shames Todesco for not knowing what war looks like.  He also advocates for Lawrence because he believes that Lawrence's lack of enthusiasm for becoming pope makes him the ideal papal candidate.  But the reveal there is beyond the pale.  I either want the movie to make the movie about the gender reveal or don't do any part of it.  It all feels like it wants its audience to do its own heavy lifting, which feels more like a writing prompt than actual commentary that the movie is making.  It only feels brave of the filmmakers for a hot second.  I don't need that kind of bravery.  I want you to say SOMETHING, not just that it shouldn't matter.  Make the whole movie about it, not an afterthought to a movie that is about something else throughout.  This is me really trying to add thought to it and I could say that it is a commentary on those who think that they are progressive being terrified stupid about actual progress.

It's an incredible movie that's hindered by lack of depth at the end.  Again, I don't mind controversy when it comes to gender roles in the church, especially with topics that border with transgenerism.  But do it loud and proud.  Don't bury it at the end as a "gotcha" ending.  The rest of the movie is given so much nuanced depth and then this is thrown in at the end?  Nah, this movie didn't need the surprise ending. Do it from moment one and I'll find the movie way less silly. 

Not rated, but this one gets pretty gory.  There are some Zatoichi movies that are almost family friendly.   Then there are Zatoichi movies that really embrace the fact that a guy who swings a sword a lot should be surrounded by blood.  This is the latter kind of Zatoichi movie.  I'm also a little concerned that there's really brief nudity, but I can't be confident about that.  There's also some language!  So one of the more controversial Zatoichi movies!

DIRECTOR: Kihachi Okamoto

You know, considering that this is the best looking Zatoichi movie, I could not find one still that really reflected the cinematography of this movie.  It's a borderline crime how much time I wasted only to settle with the image that I had above.  Some of those other Zatoichi movies had immediate finds.  This one?  Both Google and Bing image searches.  When I hit Bing, you know that I'm desperate.  (Although I actually like their image searches better than Google's...)  This movie is the prettiest looking Zatoichi and I had to find an image where some of the eponymous protagonist's head is cut off.  Boo.

This is the movie that I was excited for.  Are you kidding me?  The hero of the Kurosawa film Yojimbo meets Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman?  I watched 19 movies up to this point just to get ready for this film.  But I have to tell you, this movie was bound to disappoint.  In some ways, it did exactly what a crossover film should do.  In many other ways, it kind of craps the bed.  When I eventually log this into Letterboxd after writing this blog, I'm probably going to give it a three out of five.  I hate to simplify movies into "out of five" breakdowns, but I know that I'm going to stray into some pretty whiny writing.  I can see it now.  Three out of five is fine.  We're all in the fine camp here.  But with a movie that I've hyped up a lot, three out of five might be the worst review that it can get.  I was almost let down in the first moment.  I was watching the opening credits and I had the weird epiphany, "What if it's not Toshiro Mifune?"  I thought it might have been the character from Yojimbo, but they couldn't get a big name like Mifune to show up for the movie.  The credits kept going and I didn't see Mifune.  Then, poof!  There's his name.  You'd think that would be enough to get me excited.

Here's the problem.  It is Mifune.  They even say "Yojimbo" a whole bunch in the movie.  The problem is, the character's name isn't Yojimbo in Yojimbo.  "Yojimbo" means "Bodyguard."  And for a lot of the movie, the word "Yojimbo" does stand for bodyguard.  But the character in Yojimbo is named "Sanjuro."  The Yojimbo character in Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo is not named Sanjuro.  He's named something else.  The idea is that Daiei couldn't get the actual rights to the Yojimbo character, so they called the movie Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo because the character is played by the same dude in a similar vein to the character he played before.  Yeah, there's a lot of dancing around.  So the weird thing is that we're supposed to treat and think about Mifune's character as Sanjuro without any of the mythology of Sanjuro.  It's some tap dancing that I should be more okay with, but I think we're in the same camp when we say, "I guess I'm excited that Toshiro Mifune is playing a cool dude in a Zatoichi movie".  Still, it's not Sanjuro.

There is some degree of specialness to this movie.  I'm sure it's not an accident that they saved this crossover for Movie 20.  I prepped for this movie by watching Yojimbo, but I also should have watched the OG Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman in preparation for this movie.  This is the movie where Zatoichi returns home.  The movie makes a pretty fine meal out of Zatoichi's return.  I'll have to be honest with you.  It's been a minute since I've seen the first movie.  It's been so long that when I finish this box set, I have to go back and watch the first few to say that I've written about every Zatoichi film.  While I don't remember the individual beats, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo does a lot to catch me up on what happened in the previous films.  And the movie is longer too.  Like, this is almost a full two hours.  In terms of grandeur, the movie feels bigger than the other Zatoichi movies.  But the runtime does not help the pacing of the film whatsoever.  I'll get to that in a second.  But as I've mentioned, the cinematography is something of scale.  I don't know if they necessarily spent more money.  We have a lot of the same "Stay in one village" tropes that the Zatoichi movies have employed in the other films.  

But if Samaritan Zatoichi did everything right by making the story a character film, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo makes the mistakes of previous movies by leaning heavily into a plot that doesn't make a lick of sense.  Sometimes, I'm convinced that it is just me, not understanding the dynamics of jidaigeki era films.  But I decided to read up on the plot of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo.  I wanted to be something special.  After all, I watched a lot of movies to get here.  And do you know what?  I don't think many people really understand the bulk of the plot.  I understood most of what other people had gotten about this movie and that was pretty minimal.  Some of those plot things brought about some great imagery.  For example, I knew that there was some hidden gold in the village.  I understand that gold was in dust form.  I know that the gold blew away in a storm, covering the fighters in gold dust and that all looked super rad.  But a lot of how the gold got there and why it was being treated the way it was eludes me.  Honestly, the dynamics of a lot of the criminals is odd.  I get that the guy hoarding all of the money has two sons.  The sons are trying to kill each other for the money.  But that's all I know.

Even beyond this point, I don't really get how Sassa (Yojimbo) and Zatoichi interact with each other.  They really play up that old chestnut of the two heroes refusing to get along, mainly because they're too alike.  But because we don't know much about Sassa --because he's not Sanjuro --Sassa really comes across as the villain of this piece.  His entire gag is that he's a bit of a bully when it comes to Zatoichi.  If you didn't know it was Toshiro Mifune (which I didn't for a minute!  He's older in this movie!), he would just be the villain of the movie.  He has some moral scruples, but I'm not quite sure what he stands for.  We get that he's in love with the woman that may or may not love Zatoichi.  But he's also a spy.  Zatoichi vocalizes his anger at men like Sassa, claiming he won't even pretend to be like him.  (Mind you, the last movie made a big hullaballoo over the fact that Zatoichi is a yakuza.)  Here's the deal.  If I had never seen Yojimbo (and it shouldn't matter because this isn't the same character!), I wouldn't know that Sassa was a heroic character.  Much of the movie, he complains about not being paid enough.  He doesn't really help the town except with his scheming with Zatoichi.  It's all about personality against a town's real problems.

I also don't think that there's enough mythology behind both Sanjuro or Sassa to really establish tropes for this character.  There are some beats of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo that are just rehashes of Yojimbo.  If I squinted, I could see that Mifune's character slightly plays the two warring factions off of each other as he keeps getting paid peacemeal.  That's something that happened in Yojimbo, but in a much more deliberate way.e  Similarly, we had the evil gunslinger character walk into town and be all mysterious.  That's something that happened in Yojimbo.  It's just that we don't get any character growth.  It feels like the production team just wanted to remind you about how good of a movie Yojimbo was, even if it has nothing to do with this film.  But by having Sassa tease Zatoichi's blindness, it feels like his aloofness that came with the original Kurosawa film is more about the protagonist being a jerk who simply got a happy outcome rather than someone who is pretending to be a selfish samurai when he's actually a good man.

I mean, thank goodness that the movie looked pretty or I would be pretty annoyed by the film as a whole.  I can't deny that the second act was a blur for me.  The final act, when the two are just massacring the bad guys left and right was actually kind of fun.  I even liked that Zatoichi struggled to beat the bad guys in this one.  (I'm still absolutely confused by the inconsistency of Zatoichi's blindness.  He's either hyper aware, "seeing" what others can't or he gets confused by steps.)  Yeah, it's great to see Mifune again in a similar role.  But this movie lacked the meat of the knockout that was Samurai Zatoichi.  But it will all work out in the end because I'm getting close to the home stretch.

Not rated.  Some of the Zatoichi movies try going hard edged.  Some of them try being a little bit more gentle.  We're back in the gentle era of Zatoichi.  I don't mind that one bit.  Zatoichi movies work better when they aren't trying to be Lone Wolf and Cub. There is still an incredible amount of violence --but with little blood.  Also, there's some implications of rape and sex trafficking.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR: Kenji Misumi

I have to write this quickly because I want to go back to work with no backlog of films to write about.  The funny part is that we're trying to get ahead of the Oscar season by watching some of the shortlisted films ahead of time, so I'm going to be really swamped.  The slightest bummer about the most blessed life in the world is that I got some video games that I would love to give some attention.  But if I'm to write about every movie I watch, then something has got to give.

Guess what?  No notes.  Samaritan Zatoichi is the perfect Zatoichi movie and I'm back on the Zatoichi train.  I know.   It took me a billion years to get back to that point.  But Samaritan Zatoichi did right what Prisoners did wrong.  (I'm acting like Prisoners is a terrible movie when it was fine.  Read what I wrote before.  I harp on the following point pretty hard.) Zatoichi films tend to work on a formula that makes a plot so complex that it almost becomes stupid.  I've always contended that I might be the stupid one in the equation.  But the story tended to always be the same.  If anything, in an attempt to churn out as many Zatoichi movies imaginable, they stopped trying to change anything about these films, even down to the weak plots.  But Samaritan Zatoichi works because it stops trying to offer plots that don't really matter.  If you don't know where I'm coming from, I'm going to try to unpack an idea that only comes from watching a lot of crappy Zatoichi movies.

Zatoichi movies tend to have the eponymous Zatoichi stumble upon a complex dynamic of a local lord or a boss trying to make a bunch of money off of messing with a village or town.  The movie plays up Zatoichi's blindness by trying to cheat him.  Eventually, everyone in town discovers that this is the mythical Zatoichi, the unstoppable swordsman.  Then people try manipulating him.  Sometimes there's a big bad.  There tends to be a small difference in the way that the bad guys confront Zatoichi.  Some of them give Zatoichi the chance to fall in love with someone who sees beyond his blindness.  And so on and so forth.  Some of the movies offer variation.  These tend to be the movies that I lose my mind about.  But Samaritan Zatoichi does something way smarter than what the other movies do.

It gets rid of the plot.

Old me would have lost his mind about this.  I thought everything was about the plot.  If you didn't have a good plot, what did you have?  Do you know what old me discovered?  If you don't have plot, it works if you have excellent characterization or themes.  Samaritan Zatoichi has both of those things.  What little plot there is builds on some of the issues that the Zatoichi franchise struggles with.  The basic plot is that Zatoichi is the cause of death of the female protagonist's brother.  He was a bit of a slimeball, but didn't deserve death.  When the other assassins try to tak advantage of the woman, Zatoichi alienates himself from the other assassins and bonds with the woman.  This is some great stuff because she is torn between being protected by Zatoichi and acknowledging that her brother would be alive if it wasn't for him.   That's the movie.  She hates him and loves him and that's a great movie.  Sure, a lot of movies do that.  But I really like that it is Zatoichi.

Samaritan Zatoichi does something that I wish the franchise I did more often.  Zatoichi is obviously a hero.  Doctor Who tried touching on this theme as well, but I like when the morality of a hero is questioned.  A few movies ago (You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't be able to tell you the title of the movie) the word "yakuza" was dropped.  I was thinking about how weird the very notion of a wandering swordsman was.  Now, the early films really played up the fact that Zatoichi's primary form of income was a masseur.  But the later movies really play up the fact that he's an assassin for hire.  As an assassin, he's forced to align his morality with the person who is paying his bills.  But if he's not being paid for something, he has to fall back on what he finds morally right.  Yeah, the brother was a bit of a sleezeball, but he was also backed into a corner.  Because Zatoichi signed up for a hit job, he didn't know the ins-and-outs.  He doesn't understand that this boy took a loan that had so many strings attached that there would be no way out from under the crime boss's thumb.  There's this guilt (that unfortunately is assuaged when he's given verbal forgiveness) that rides through a lot of the movie.  He feels bad that he killing this boy, but not enough to change his ways.

Can I tell you how much I like the fact that this is character motivated?  I'm not lying to myself when it comes to the fact that this will have almost no impact on the franchise moving forward.  (I mean, I'm on the home stretch.  Only with a franchise like Zatoichi that seven movies makes it the home stretch, but I'm there anyway.) But I like that Zatoichi makes this story personal.  They've done this a couple times in the franchise, but it always kind of felt artificial.  The fact that Osode has a hard time with Zatoichi makes the story all that more interesting.  I also kind of dig that the guy who is supposed to be the big bad guy of the movie is actually a pretty rad dude.  The governor is supposed to be this corrupt guy, but he's constantly mentioning that Osode is not a big deal and that his underling really needed to let this whole thing gone.  It comes down to the underling being someone who has to deal with a point of pride.  He doesn't like that Osode got away, especially with the help of a blind man.  That's way more interesting than a complicated plot that the other movies try doing.

I'm a little torn about the muscle of this movie.  In terms of what it offers, it's super cool.  Yasaburo (I hope I have the right guy) is the first bad guy in this very long franchise that is actually better than Zatoichi.  There have been threats to Zatoichi.  They tend to be gimmicky bad guys that play on his blindness.  But Yasaburo is the first guy who is genuinely better than Zatoichi.  I can't believe that I got this far in the franchise before running into a problem that a lot of movies introduce early on.  And the guy loses!  I don't know if that's really a spoiler.  But he loses because he's playing with Zatoichi.  If the message of the entire series is that people undervalue the handicapped, Yasaburo is the mascot for that entire idea.  It's really kind of cool.  But in terms of anything else with Yasaburo, he's way too cryptic to actually be considered a character.  That dude shows up everywhere, to an almost supernatural level.  At one point, Osode is running through the woods away from kidnappers, runs into a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and there's Yasaburo. He doesn't care about money, which is interesting.  But who is he?  Why is he so good?  It's almost like they set up a big bad for the entire franchise and then killed him.  That's fine, I guess. It's just not in line with the rest of the movie.  Still, I'll acknowledge that the movie needs him for the movie to end.  It's all pretty good.

I can't believe that it took this long to find the perfect Zatoichi movie.  There were a few other times that I lost my mind about these films.  But this one is solid as heck.  I can't deny that I'm the most excited for the next one.  But because I'm so excited, I'll probably be disappointed.

PG for all of the Star Wars-y action that you are accustomed to.  It almost seems like tradition that someone has to lose a limb, so there is another dismemberment.  Some kids are scarred from scary monsters.  It's weird that I'm even writing this, but the rancor and the sarlacc pit are pretty messed up and scary.  Also, characters die.  But we're at the height of PG here.  I have few notes that make this movie not okay for kids.

DIRECTOR: Richard Marquand

I had to Google if Ross Marquand was related to Richard Marquand.  The answer is yes.  He's a distant relative.  See, you learned something from reading this blog.

My kids got me really angry for this watching of what might be the best presentation of Return of the Jedi.  This has nothing to do with Return of the Jedi, but I've officially turned into the old man who gets mad at kids these days.  How do my kids have such a crappy attention span?  Seriously.  One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to watch movies with my family.  Like, it was the thing I looked forward to all week.  I'm going to guess that something is probably tied to the existence of streaming and the fact that they can watch anything at any time.  But a family watch of Return of the Jedi is supposed to be one of those bonding moments.  Oh my goodness.  It was like I was asking them to clean their rooms.  They did anything they could not to watch the movie.  There were a couple of tantrums on my end.  I just wanted my kids to sit down and watch the theatrical cut of Return of the Jedi with me.  They make Star Wars references all the time without actually having seen Star Wars.  Drives me nuts.

Anyway, this crime spree of watching the theatrical cuts of the Star Wars movies through the despecialized editions was a treat.  (Well, it would have been if they hadn't been so obstinate about watching a movie with their dear old dad.)  Maybe I'm nuts, but as beautiful as the print of Return of the Jedi was (absolutely justifying the purchase in my head), The Empire Strikes Back print seemed better.  It could be that Hoth just looks absolutely sick in high def.  I don't know.   But Return of the Jedi might have the most amount of changes between the theatrical cuts and the special editions.  I'm going to be a bit blasphemous here, simply because I can.  I adore the theatrical cut (that's not the blasphemy!), but the changes in Return of the Jedi, while massive especially compared to Empire, aren't as evil as the changes that happen in A New Hope.  There's a reason that we talk about the Han and Greedo sequence.  It is a character change that affects the whole franchise.  Now, again, I'm giving a lot more weight to something that ultimately shouldn't matter.  But I'm firmly in the "Han Shot First" camp.  But with Return of the Jedi, the changes are almost there knowing the legacy of Star Wars.

Let's be honest: George Lucas --as much as I respect the dude --claims that the Special Editions were the only version of the story.  He claims that, if he had the technology available to him back in the day, would have made the theatrical cut look like the Special Editions.  The Return of the Jedi special editions are exhibit A for the prosecution that these were never planned sequences.  The first and foremost argument is the ending of Jedi itself.  Me, I always loved "Yub Nub".  I was an insufferable nerdy kid who sang "Yub Nub" ironically all the time.  But it wasn't that ironic.  I genuinely loved "Yub Nub" and pretended that my goofy rear end was making fun of it.  It seemed like what the Ewoks would have done.  But even more so, showing all of the planets in the New Republic rising up and throwing of off the shackles of the Empire only really works when you understand that there is a much larger canon that would only be made present with the start of The Phantom Menace.  Star Wars as a franchise got way larger than Lucas had ever imagined it.  That last sequence is a testament to what these movies became versus what they were.  I'm all about celebrating what Star Warsbecame.  I just don't want to claim that this was always the plan.  Lucas was always really good at "This was always the plan." 

But Return of the Jedi Special Edition also is the birthplace of Sy Snoodles's "Jedi Rocks."  I don't hate the sequence.  Honestly, I don't.  It's very CG.  Like, VERY CG.  This might be the thing that aged the poorest.  But it's fun.  I'm a big fan of fun Star Wars.  But do you know what else it is?  Absolutely unnecessary.  If anything, it's distracting from the amazing pacing that Jabba's Palace offers in the theatrical cut.  Jabba's Palace is a place of tension.  It's a grimy and un-Jedi like place.  That's kind of what I love about the original trilogy; we kept getting thrown into places that Jedi would not find themselves comfortable with.  Jabba's Palace on Tattooine is similar to how we experience Dagobah.  Maybe that's what prequel trilogy kids seemed to dislike about the original trilogy.  Jedi in the prequels and the sequels are all about massive cities and Jedi temples.  Return of the Jedi makes its opening adventure (which takes up a lot of great runtime) in a grimy backroom of a slug mob boss.  And guess what?  It's freaking great.  I'll be honest with you.  A lot of me wants to argue that Return of the Jedi might be the best Star Wars movie.  (I won't because both emotionally and intellectually, I will hold up Empire as the perfect Star Wars movie.)   But you can split Jedi into two perfect parts:  Jabba's Palace and Endor.  Sure, a lot of you hate Ewoks.  But if Empire was aggressively bleak, Return of the Jedi rewards you for going through the Swamps of Sadness (I know, NeverEnding Story) to just an action packed romp.  Return of the Jedi works in tandem with Empire Strikes Back.  Sure, you could argue that Empire Strikes Back has nonstop action.  But its the repeated failure of these characters.  When we get to Return of the Jedi, there's this inherent fun all through the movie.  I mean, you scoff, but a blind Han Solo bumped Boba Fett into a sarlacc pit to his death.  And it still does all this while resolving its heavy themes.

Why do you hate Ewoks?  I mean, honestly.  Why do you hate Ewoks?  Sure, we all know that Lucas wanted Wookiees for the final film and couldn't afford them.  (I'm still trying to do the budget that would change tall people for short people and drastically change a movie.) But I saw Revenge of the Sith and Wookiees did nothing for me like what Ewoks did for me.  Ewoks are more fun.  Between being stand ins for indigenous fighters repelling a far superior force, they're kind of hilarious.  Sure, I'm the guy who probably railed against Jar Jar Binks because I never cared for Jar Jar Binks (which does not give people license to harass Ahmed Best).  But Ewoks balance humor and pathos in the exact way that scene should have.  The fact that Han, Luke, and Chewie are almost sacrificed to these adorable creatures makes the entire culture instantly understandable.  

I'm writing for the sake of writing at this point, despite the fact that I have another entry right after this.  Let's talk about Obi-Wan Kenobi and "From a certain point of view".  Now, I have to imagine that Lucas himself knew that his throwaway line from A New Hope was problematic.  When Obi-Wan explains what he meant by the death of Anakin Skywalker, Luke even looks at Ben incredulously.  It seems like Ben is doing some mental gymnastics to get to that point.  But what I will give Lucas credit for with the prequels is establishing the friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin.  Return of the Jedi is mostly strengthened with the prequels.  There are some moments that probably didn't work before the prequels.  A New Hope and Empire mostly don't thrive because of the prequels.  It's probably why the Machete Cut of Star Wars is watchable.  Return of the Jedi thrives most when Darth Vader becomes more than an evil archetype.  With Jedi, there's some humanity woven through the character.  Lucas has always been a bit of a problem with light switch moments when it comes to his characterization, especially when it comes to Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader.  One of the most frustrating parts of Revenge of the Sith is when Anakin turns on Mace Windu.  The thing that kind of excuses that moment is Darth Vader's betrayal of the Emperor.  It's such a light switch moment that I've always forgiven.  After all, it was only moments before then that Vader is torturing Luke and tossing lightsabers at him.  The fact that he shifts is only slightly helped by parallel frustrating character changes.

It's weird how little we know about the Emperor.  Seriously, we have action figures for the guy who stole the ice cream machine on Bespin, but the Emperor is just an evil dude.  I know that there have been stories in the extended universe and some of the new Disney+ stuff, but we don't really have a definitive origin for this character.  Yet, this character still positively works.  Maybe the Emperor's presence is what allows Darth Vader to become redeemed at the end of Jedi.  We needed a joint character to rally against and that's what Emperor Palpatine provides.  I adore Ian McDiarmid in this role.  Like, the fact that the man stayed as the backbone of the franchise is wonderful.  But I have no idea what is going on with this character.  Oh, don't worry!  I inherited a lot of Star Wars: Legends novels, so I'm probably going to know a lot about this character even though very little of it will be canon.

Listen, I'm not selling anyone on Return of the Jedi here.  I already wrote a ton about Return of the Jedi on the Special Edition blog.  Do I remember what I said?  No.  Will I read it?  Absolutely not.  But my big takeaway is that I wish my kids gave the movie a fair shot.  Regardless, it was a good time for me.

Rated R for torture, for the most part.  There's language, gore, and a lot of bad things happening to little kids.  It's one of those gritty thrillers that is meant to make you squirm.  As part of that, it hits a lot of those buttons.  It's pretty bad that I was more comfortable with the movie than I should have been.  It also has the tone of a lot of suspense movies.  There's nothing kid friendly about the movie, so just keep that in mind when watching this.

DIRECTOR:  Denis Villeneuve

Here's a paradox.  I'm writing this on a brand new laptop, which has a keyboard that is absolutely conducive to typing.  It's a joy to type on and I've been looking for an excuse to type.  That being said, I have had the least amount of motivation to writing the blog on Prisoners.  Like, this typing right now is laborious.  I don't know what it is.  Maybe it's because it's a really sleepy Saturday.  (For those with keen senses, you'll notice that the date doesn't match the day of the week.  I'm so low motivated that I started this little bit yesterday and I'm still low energy when it comes to writing my blog on Prisoners.) 

The reason that I watched Prisoners (potentially for the second time! I don't remember if I've already seen this movie or not!) is that it was my last film class's favorite movie.  I mean, they all lost their minds over this movie.  When I discovered that Denis Villeneuve directed this, way before Blade Runner 2049 or Dune, that was even more enticing.  Sure, I discovered that halfway through the film that he directed it, but it made me watch it with new eyes.  Now, I will say, there was a time in this movie where I saw where this movie was genius.  Maybe it's because Hugh Jackman is in this movie, but it felt like Prisoners shared DNA with The Prestige.  It's that whole wheels-within-wheels thing.  But the thing is, the further that I got into the movie and the deeper into the labyrinth, the less I liked it.  I know!  Probably the reason that everyone really liked the movie is the reason that I didn't necessarily love it.  As a thriller, it completely works.  Like, if this wasn't a movie by Denis Villeneuve or if it wasn't my film class's favorite movie, I would say that everything was done right.  And if we were in the halcyon Blockbuster days, I would also contend that this was definitely worth a rental.  Like, better than Enemy of the State good.  (There's a lot to unpack with that reference.  Take it with the knowledge that Enemy of the State was a run-of-the-mill thriller that I would have rented and probably moderately enjoyed during the Blockbuster era of films and that Prisoners was significantly better than that.)

The problem lies with the ethics of the piece.  Watch that trailer for me.  Tell me that this is not a movie about ethics.  The foundation of the piece is that Hugh Jackman's Keller Dover crosses a line that should never be crossed.  He does something absolutely evil for what he considers a moral act.  Now, a lot of the movie hinges on the commentary that Dover is doing something wrong.  As much as we all acknowledge that, as a parent, Keller Dover should move Heaven and Earth to bring back his kid, the fact that he's torturing an innocent man is the moral evil.  The movie telegraphs that Alex Jones (no, not that Alex Jones.  That guy deserves whatever he gets) is an innocent man and Keller Dover, in his blind righteous fury, strips Jones of his humanity.  Now, that is a story that I'm really into.  Villeneuve weaves in all of this religious imagery and commentary that makes Dover's choices all the more damning, especially as provided as satire on the religious right.

But here's where the whole thing falls apart.  Villeneuve is trying to get one of those amazing Christopher Nolan-esque (The Prestige!) plots to work with the theme of the piece and the two are in direct conflict.  The first half of the movie is incredibly damning for Dover, who keeps crossing line-after-line in his pursuit of a justice that is ultimately unfounded.  That's the core.  That's the thing that I want to think about and what I want to talk about.  I mean, on a surface level, I want to think whether or not I would do the same thing.  I'm going to talk now as if the entire movie was about this moment.  Spoiler for the end of this blog:  I don't love how Prisoners semi-sorta justifies Dover's actions.  I mean, round of applause for the ending where he's pseudo-punished for his treatment of Alex.  But the big takeaway that I had was that, if Keller Dover never tortured Alex, he wouldn't have saved his daughter.  Okay, so let's back up and live in a world where Prisoners forces Keller to draw attention away from the actual criminal Bob (which isn't true given the whole narrative unspooled).  There is so much to unpack in that version of the story and I want to explore that.  I want to talk about the rise of Christian Nationalism.  If the story went the way that it went in my mind --a version where Keller Dover, in his form of vigilante justice, impedes the actual investigation for his daughter --that speaks volumes about morality.  The entire movie would be a commentary on the Christian Right and the false conception of the right of the individual.

Again, all under the banner of my version.

If my version went through, Keller Dover is the poster child for the uninformed conscience.  From all perspectives, Dover sees himself as God's swift sword of justice.  Understandably so.  He's given this moral evil that he recognizes.  He recognizes as clearly as can be because he is the one suffering for the evil unleashed in the world.  Okay.  But Dover isn't informing his conscience.  Instead, he's taken his version of Christ, or more accurately, the Wrathful God of the Old Testament.  (I'm not saying that God doesn't intervene when it comes to miracles in either testament.  But Dover's use of the Lord's Prayer as the opening of the film gives me the impression that he has that image of Christ with a sword rather than the Sacred Heart of Jesus.) Dover, devoid of religion, has real issues with the torture of Alex.  Not completely.  Dover does let his natural violent instincts lead the charge early on in the torture sequences.  He's very comfortable with the bludgeoning of Jones with his fist.  But when the hammer comes in, he resorts to shattering the sink rather than use it on Dover himself.  All of this is pre-religious imagery here.  Here, he's the Libertarian father.  He doesn't trust government to take care of a job that he thinks he can do better himself.  But as torture fails to get him results, he builds a far more upsetting form of torture.  It's a torture that he doesn't have to see.  He locks Alex in a wall and showers him with scalding or freezing water.

It's here that Dover sees himself as doing the Lord's work.  He prays to God to give him strength to continue in his --what he deems --holy quest.  It's not that he asks God for what is right and what is wrong.  That's a very different story and one that I wouldn't mind seeing.  No, he's praying that he can continue doing something that is beyond what he considered part of himself as a man or as a Christian.  He has that image that Christians are nice as opposed to good.  This, in his mind, is one of those moments when goodness and niceness are in direct conflict and he needs to help him overcome any sense of Christian niceties if he is to find his daughter.  In fact, it's fellow Christians that bring up more moral complexities.  Both of his friends who also have a daughter missing verbally condemn his actions.  He thinks that they are simple and do no love their daughter as much as he loves his daughter.  He becomes Michael the Archangel, the one who is willing to level fields of demons for the moral truth.  But like Michael the Archangel, they --as much as they verbally condemn his actions --encourage him to keep going.  As long as they don't have to see the atrocities he's committing, they need him to keep doing what he's doing.  I've been kind of coming to this thought (and part of it is stolen from a pastor's argument) that Christians are really good and being moral and good when the evil is present and visible.  Someone in the parish lost a spouse?  People will come out in droves.  Someone is massacred in another state or another country?  Let those people sort it out themselves.  Franklin and Nancy are good at dealing with problems that they can seem, but actively choose not to see what Keller is doing to Alex so they can't engage with it head on.

I love all of that.  If that was the movie alone?  Fantastic.  I wouldn't shut up about that movie.  You'd hear me talking about it all the time.  Instead, we get a movie that also is incredibly plot heavy.  The problem with the plot is two fold (or two related points):  It needs Keller to torture Alex for the story to make sense, thus undermining the purpose of the film.  See, Alex did have something to do with the girls' deaths.  He's just too scarred to vocalize that issue.  Keller's first assault on Alex isn't the kidnapping.  Alex is released from prison when the police have a hard time tying the missing girls to Alex with the exception of being in the area and the fact that he tried to flee.  (Also, didn't the forensics find that the RV was completely clean of the girls being in the RV?  Did Mom do a really good clean, leaving only Alex's DNA behind?)  When Keller assaults Alex at the police station, that's what galvanizes him to connect Alex to the crime.  Alex says something really cryptic that makes Keller believe that Alex did it (despite being simply tangentially involved.) But if that moment never happened,  Keller would never have kidnapped Alex and that kidnapping would not have led Keller to helping Loki find Alex's aunt, who was the actual serial killer.  

It's very convoluted, but the movie not only makes the argument that one should take the law into one's own hands, but even more, it says that innocents should suffer if a good ending comes of it.  One of the most frustrating things about the Harry Potter franchise is that Harry uses one of the unforgivable curses for the greater good without punishment.  While Keller is, through karma, punished for his treatment of Alex, the result is that his daughter is found safe.  Keller, from moment one, is aware that his freedom is forfeit for what he does to Alex.  Even if his initial assessment of Alex was true, there were all kinds of crimes committed that Keller would have to answer for in some form or another.   But considering all of the religious and mythological imagery and motifs throughout the film, this is really a man reckoning with God.  And from Keller's perspective, he ends the movie among the just.  God answered his prayers.  Because Keller took a man's life into his own hands, God responded in kind by giving his daughter another shot at life.  It's almost miraculous how things unspooled.  But realize that both Alex and Bob not only weren't morally responsible for Keller's daughter getting kidnapped; they were victims of Alex's aunt.  She's not even Alex's aunt.  He's just a victim who has been a prisoner for so long that he thinks that he's related to her.

What a weird takeaway.  I don't like that at all.  I do believe that Villeneuve and the screenwriter want us to condemn Keller for all of his moral grey area.  It seems like that was the point of the movie.  But in an attempt to present a clever story, there's a lot of gross things that end up watering down the message of the film.   On top of that, there's also a cleverness factor that I wish worked a little bit better.  I like the idea of the labyrinth imagery all through the story.  Loki keeps on calling the labyrinth images "maps" and he feels vindicated when he sees the photo of Mr. Jones in front of the RV with the pendant around his neck.  That's not a map.  That's just confirmation of where Bob saw the image before.  But even more so, I don't think I like the name "Loki".  I straight up went down the Google rabbit hole trying to unpack the choice for the name being "Loki" and I got nothing good.  Part of it comes from the mythology element of the story.  There's borderline a minotaur in the center of the labyrinth, so we have that idea.  Keller's religion plays a big part in the story.  It feels like Loki is named "Loki" out of an attempt to have every corner of the world somehow colored by the notion of belief.  But we all know Loki now, thanks to Marvel!  Is Loki really a duplicitous character?  Heck, I know the Loki of Norse mythology is a bit more nuanced than the Marvel counterpart, but still, there is little there in the story that makes Gyllenhaal's character a "Loki".  It's just muddy.

So here's what I want.  I want either a Dark Night of the Soul version of Prisoners where society is damned for its Christian justification for violence OR I want a Prisoners that is all about twists and turns with misleads when it comes to solving this case.  What I don't want is both.  They're at odds with each other and I don't care for that.

Rated R for being fairly brutal and demonic.  Take the tone of Silence of the Lambs and add the devil to it.  That's the entire parental guide that I need for the movie.  Both movies spend a lot of time freaking you out about what you aren't seeing and then proceeds to show you some of the most upsetting imagery you'll see in a movie.  There's a pretty gory unique suicide in the movie that is pretty memorable and scarring.  Because it is a bit demonic, it also hits some pretty blasphemous points along the way as well.  While I can't think of language, I'm sure it's throughout.  You know a movie is pretty messed up if you can't remember if there is any swearing in it despite the idea that there is probably swearing throughout.

DIRECTOR:  Osgood Perkins

Do you understand how tempted I was to spend my New Year's Day writing about Longlegs?  Ring in the New Year with the previous year's most disturbing movie?  I know that people lost their minds about Longlegs last year and I'm glad that I was able to see it within the year it came out.  I got lucky at the library and there was a couple of copies ready to be checked out.  While I think that this movie would have spoken to me at a different age better, I can't say that it is a bad movie.

I will say that the movie is more frustrating than people made it out to be.  Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Nicholas Cage in the movie.  I know that his entire thing going on here is pretty polarizing.  For those who don't know, Cage is wearing a hilarious amount of makeup.  He's wearing so much makeup that you often aren't sure that you are actually watching Nicholas Cage as the eponymous villain of the piece.  For some people, his distracting look took them out of the movie.  Not me.  I kind of dug it.  He looks very creepy.  I like the fact that he looks a little inhuman, mirroring the motif of the dolls running throughout the movie.  To a certain extent, we're getting what even Cage acknowledges as "The Full Cage".  But I think that this performance is a bit different from what we've seen when he gives hellbent performances.  This one is weird, but it really works for what the movie is offering.  He's so unhinged with his performance, it makes Longlegs someone to absolutely fear because you don't know if the character has any limits or any social norms.  Anything that this character does is in character because of Cage's performance.  So, if you are wondering if Cage's performance had anything to do with my tepid response to the movie, I assure you, it's not it.

I really have to rewatch Silence of the Lambs again.  Right when I first was allowed to watch R-Rated movies, I gravitated to Silence of the Lambs.  It seemed so rebellious and culturally open at the time.  I went for the deep end of the getting scared pool real fast.  Now, I was in the snobby horror stuff already.  I mean, Hannibal Lecter seemed so classy.  It's why I know the terms "Bach's Goldberg Variations."  Namedrop that at a party and you might get some traction.  But that got me reading the Lecter books by Thomas Harris.  I got really into them.  Part of it came from the idea that these were both horrors and thrillers.  Soon, I realized that really great thrillers got you to treat the protagonist as an avatar.  If you can solve the crime before the investigator can, you are saving the character's life.  Sure, there have been many a thriller where I don't solve who the killer is or I make the same mistake that the hero makes.  But I tended to love that kind of investment.  It's kind of why I love the Scream franchise so much.  I throw myself into that world and try to solve the case with everyone else.  

But Longlegs kind of teases the idea that this is a mystery to be solved when it absolutely breaks all the rules of a thriller midway through the movie.  I mean, it doesn't break them break them.  From early on in the movie, we know that the protagonist may be a supernatural detective with mild psychic powers.  The way that the movie describes her is "half-psychic".  So we have to grant that the movie is also going to be half-supernatural.  But I'm going to go as far as to say the whole movie is supernatural and I can't do anything with that.  The answer for the entire film comes down to information that you could not have gleaned given the clues you received.  Yet, those clues are presented to us as if they are supposed to mean something.  For example, the movie makes a meal out of the this ball that is found in a doll's head.  It makes an ethereal howl when massaged.  The forensic pathologist stresses that he can take the ball apart and they'd find nothing.  It's presented much like Clarice Starling finding the Death's Head moth in Silence of the Lambs.  (Note:  The only movie that I'm bad at presenting the whole name of the movie is The Silence of the Lambs.  I don't know why I have to drop the definitive article every time I talk about this specific movie.) But it comes out to nothing really.

So, this means that my investment doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things.   What it then comes down to is the horror aspect.  If you are looking for the visual horror of what the movie can offer, then Longlegs probably delivers.  That wasn't what I was looking for.  It's not that I hate devil movies.  After all, I kind of dug Late Night with the Devil recently, so I know that you can make a devil movie pretty darned good.  It's just that I want my devil movies to be about the protagonist.  As much as I love Lee Harker as a character, nothing is really Lee's fault.  I mean, the movie tries to make the events of the film her fault.  Her mother, in an attempt to save her (which seems dubious) from Longlegs, agreed to be his harbinger of death.  It's all very "Blame Lee although Lee would have no way of understanding this."  It's also cryptic whether or not Lee remembers any of this.  Like, the movie introduces that she is intuitive to the point of being psychic.  But it almost betrays that first act of the film for the fact that she might just be remembering something that might have been repressed for the majority of the film.  

The funny thing, there is a way to make this movie far more appealing to me.  Lee Harker is given so much significance in this movie.  The entire story is basically her story in an Oedipal way.  (Not like she's in love with a parent, but the course of her investigation reveals that she is the lynchpin of the crime.)   Now, I think I had the same problem with Smile.  The protagonist of the movie is thrown into a hellish scenario where people around her are dying horrible deaths.  The monster is obsessed with her.  Now, with Silence of the Lambs, Clarice isn't the center of the story.  She stays entirely in the world of the investigation until she confronts Buffalo Bill at the end.  The crime isn't about Clarice; the investigation is.  But with Longlegs, they are one in the same.  With both Smile and Longlegs, the protagonist is put through the wringer for doing nothing wrong.  I tend to think that the horrors of a movie should reflect a mistake on the part of the protagonist.  Now, Lee makes a mistake fairly early in the movie.  When Longlegs is stalking her at her home, she doesn't report that.  I kept waiting for that shoe to drop.  Her need for independence and solitude is enough of a character flaw that we had the chance for a character arc when it came to growing throughout the film.  Like, if she learned to accept help from others, leading to the downfall of the villain, then we would have gotten something to root for in Lee.  But Lee is never really called out on her silence.  No one ever discovers that Longlegs came to her house.  For all of the tragic things that happen in the final act, none of it comes down to something that Lee did wrong.  

If anything, it didn't matter that Lee investigated any of these things.  The tragedies that this movie presents to its main characters seem to be irrevocable.  If anything, the more talented and the wiser that the protagonists are, the worse off they end up.  Really, the movie follows the structure of a Paranormal Activity movie more than a thriller at all.  The beginning of the film is trying to figure out the rules of the atrocity.  A lot of talking happens and a general spookiness exists.  The final act is about torturing the protagonist for not really doing anything but investigating too much.  I would like to point out, I burnt out on the Paranormal Activity movies pretty quickly as well.   (But because I'm a completionist, I always consider revisting these movies in an attempt to be the guy who has seen everything.) 

I kind of want to talk about a commentary on gender that I don't know is fully fleshed out or not.  Lee Harker seems put upon.  I'm pretty sure that the movie takes place during the Clinton administration.  I got a pretty silly joy seeing that everyone in the movie was patriotic enough to put up portraits of the current president to let us know what era we were in at what time.  But we have a woman who is as diminutive as can be partnered with an overly confident epitome of masculinity.  Now, there are times that I want to throat punch Agent Carter for the way that he talks to Harker throughout the film.  But the movie needs Carter for anything in this movie to get done.  As much as I'm on Team Harker for figuring out everything in this movie, her painful isolation and (I'm really not trying to be crass) spectrumy approach to FBI investigations seems impractical.  She simply portrays misery.  I mean, this is a movie where the devil convinces suburban men to murder their families and then commit suicide.  There's a gender narrative going on in the movie.  Maybe that comes from the real statistic that men tend to be serial killers.  More than just men, but white men.  But Carter becomes one of Longlegs's victims, murdering his wife.  Carter is a Black man.  I want this movie to be more explicit with its messaging if it exists.  If it doesn't exist, well then gosh darn it...I want it to exist.

It all comes back to imagery.  I don't want devil movies to just be devil movies.  While the spookiness was on point, I want the movie to have something to say about the devil.  I want it to be someone's fault that the devil is here.  This is a bit of an excuse for Osgood Perkins to do absolutely outstanding visuals.  But some of the stuff feels unearned.  I wanted to be able to figure out how to get that point.  Instead, I just get a scary movie.  As a scary movie, it's very scary.  I like that.  But it doesn't scratch my brain the way that a good devil movie should.  Visually great; narratively only okay. 

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.