PG, but I think that Disney+ labelled it as TV-14.  It's pretty innocent.  It's not very graphic.  We see some burns from being too close to a volcano, but even as gross as this is, it's pretty mild.  The big concern I have about watching this movie with children is the knowledge, from the beginning, that the Kraffts will die by volcano.  But most of it is pretty light, talking about a relationship built around volcanos.

DIRECTOR: Sara Dosa

​I had to pull teeth to get my family to watch this.  It was on Disney+ and it was up for an Academy Award and I thought, "Perfect.  I can get my kids into documentaries."  I assumed because my kids were really into Science Comics that this would be a natural extension.  And to a certain extent, I was successful.  Olivia ran upstairs and got her book on rocks and minerals.  But I don't know if my family necessarily has the attention span for something like this.  I don't know if it is a documentary thing or if it is borderline a nature documentary thing.  But Fire of Love is such a specific thing and, in this case, it means that it has a very specific audience.

At its heart and on its sleeve, it is a love story.  It sells itself on that premise. Maurice and Katia Krafft bonded over their love of vulcanology.  That's as unique as it gets.  I love this one line where they acknowledge that they basically have to be the only married vulcanologists on the planet.  It's not saying that vulcanologists don't get married.  They just don't get married to other vulcanologists.  And it's a nice story.  But there's a problem with documentaries to begin with, especially when it comes to love stories.  They either have to be the most unbelievable relationships ever or they are not enough to carry a story.  The story of Maurice and Katia is cute, but it isn't necessarily one wrought with twists and turns. Maurice is a bit of a thrillseeker.  Katia is more in awe of the majesty of nature.  Now, both of these personalities are drawn to volcanos.  Cool.  There's some conflict.  Maurice's fame coupled with his dumb ideas causes tension between the couple.  But we know from moment one that they have a pretty solid marriage.  Like all marriages, there are things that drive you crazy about each other.  But that's the nature of any relationship.  The onus on the film is to establish that those differences matter.  Really, they don't.

So National Geographic then leans heavily into the other element that they're good at.  I'm going to refer to this as the Planet Earth factor.  Fire of Love, thanks to the devoted documentation and filmmaking of the Kraffts, has a lot of really spectacular footage of volcanos.  Me, I'm not a big National Geographic guy.  I tend to want my documentaries to be either about music (I don't get it either) or about politics (I get that.  I'm fighting the world and want ammunition.) But straight up gorgeous footage of the world doing crazy stuff normally doesn't do it for me.  I'm going to dance around something for a while, so I apologize in advance.  But the gist of this is that while Fire of Love is effective in getting me to watch a lot of cool stuff blow up, it could be better.  Because the thing that kept me watching all this cool blowy-uppy stuff is that story of the Kraffts.  But as I mentioned before, that story is very thin.  Sure, the movie keeps it going for an hour-and-a-half.  But the story of the Kraffts is really about forty minutes tops.  Thank God that the movie decided to cop out at 1.5 hours because it started relying a bit too much on the film.

But there is one thing that really kept me going.  It's not surprising that, being the film snob I am, that I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson.  There's this back and forth between artist and inspiration with this movie.  Using The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as our foundational work, my wife and I couldn't help but make comparisons to that work.  The thing that I'm going to comment on that may seem a bit obvious is the notion that Wes Anderson had to be inspired by the Kraffts for Life Aquatic.  Geez, like it is on the nose. I just typed "Life Aquatic Fire of Love" into Google and I'm not the only one to jump on this train. It's everything.  The Kraffts, for as twee as it is to be romantic vulcanologists, define quirk.  They wear goofy colored hats.  They point at things and have the intense zoom on volcanos.  There are short shorts and everything is shot on Super 8.  (Okay, if I'm wrong about that, I apologize.  I'm mostly good at recognizing Super 8.) Trust me, thank goodness that the Kraffts were this way because I ship them so much harder for being Wes Anderson's template for everything. 

But there's something about Fire of Love, removed from the Kraffts' entire thing, that is also inspired by Anderson.  If Anderson was inspired by the Kraffts, Fire of Love was Inception-level inspired by Anderson. Most of that comes from Miranda July's flat affect delivery of narration.  Sure, the majority of the film is directly edited footage that the Kraffts used for films. But the transitions were basically made out of paper cuts outs and puppets.  I hate dealing in speculation, but the natural inclination for talking about volcanos and their affects on Earth would be impressive charts, graphs, and effects.  Instead, there's this intentional rudiment to everything that is presented on screen.  I can see this movie smoking a cigarette in a beanie, perhaps portrayed by Willem Dafoe.  It just embraces what it is.  It makes the movie somehow special to me.  I don't think that Wes Anderson would ever make a documentary (although I can be wrong; he did make animation), but this is what I imagine something from Anderson would look like.  It's almost fan service in the best way.  Sure, if you hate Wes Anderson, then I have nothing for you.  But this is almost a thought experiment on how something would look like.

The thing that I always have a hard time writing about when it comes to documentaries is about the subjects themselves though.  There's a weird personality behind the Kraffts that I find both incredibly romantic and incredibly frustrating at the same time.  I am going to preface this by saying, "Thank God they didn't have kids."  It does feel like the narrator is their kid, though, right?  I can't be the only one thinking that while watching this movie, can I?  Anyway, thank God they don't have kids because their life, for as joie-de-vivre as it is, also seems incredibly reckless.  Okay, there's the pursuit of science.  That part I get.  I don't get mad at astronauts, knowing that their rockets could blow up or absolutely anything could go wrong because what they do is done for the advancement of science.  The Kraffts are scientists.  Absolutely and I almost am about to undo my entire argument here, but they are scientists.  But it doesn't feel like a lot of this is for the pursuit of science.  It's almost thrill-seeking.  I suppose I can give Katia a pass because she's less than a thrill-seeker.  But Maurice is kind of selfish.  

There's this part that is probably going to stick with me.  At one point, Maurice and an associate figure out how to get a boat onto an acid lake.  It's horrifying.  There is this pretense of science that is put into it that quickly unravels when the line gets eaten by acid.  Then it just becomes this three hour trip to get back to land and free of the acid lake.  If Maurice learned his lesson there, I would write off the entire thing as cheeky.  It's because I want to be British and I'm writing, but cheeky is the word I'm going with.  But then Maurice won't stop talking about taking a boat down a lava flow.  Where is the science there?  How is the world becoming this better place?  I know that the Kraffts studying the most dangerous kinds of volcanos could save lives later and they may have saved lives later, but it feels like it is all part of the thrill-seeking, almost carnival attitude that Maurice is embracing with wanting to canoe down a lava flow.  Is there something more beautiful about the grey smoke volcanos than the ones that they approached previously?  It's oddly a death wish that ended up getting fulfilled?  Did they kind of want to go out in a blaze of glory?  I'm not saying that they were suicidal, but it seems like their deaths seemed somehow glory-seeking. I don't know.  Maybe because it's what I absolutely wouldn't do that I can't understand it.

It's a bummer that my family didn't really like the movie.  I think I might have enjoyed it alone a lot, but I do see the flaws of the movie through the people next to me.  It's like seeing a movie in the theater and the mood is infectious.  Regardless, worth my time.

Rated R for being an incredibly brutal war movie.  Many war movies are meant to be uncomfortable.  All Quiet on the Western Front is known for being intentionally anti-war.  As such, it pulls no punches and shows the gore and horrors of war throughout.  It's kids dying horrible, horrible deaths throughout the film.  Nothing about it is pleasant.  It almost even goes too far at times. R.

DIRECTOR: Edward Berger

Why do war movies have to be so long?  I don't understand it.  I know that we found the one exception to the rule, but I can't remember which one it is.  Before I go into a long diatribe about All Quiet on the Western Front, I do want to state that this movie would have been way more effective if it was 30-40 minutes shorter.  At a certain point, it becomes, "I get it.  The war is terrible."

A few years ago, I had a small class that had actually gotten through all my scheduled content.  This isn't something that happens very often, especially with an English class.  I gave them practically carte blanche on what they wanted to do with their last month before graduation.  Whatever part of the literary canon they wanted to study, I'd make up a lesson for that, assuming it was appropriate.  In that class, I had a military nut.  He would daily cite specifications for different tanks while inserting these tanks into historical military strategy to discuss how outcomes would change.  It was this student who recommended All Quiet on the Western Front.  I didn't want to be the one who broke it to him that All Quiet on the Western Front was infamously an anti-war story.  If anything, the evil liberal in me was secretly relishing being the genie who gave more than he bargained for. Realistically, he probably still really enjoyed the war elements of the book and didn't change his philosophy on war based on what the book offered him.  I believe in the power of literature, but I also know what is realistic and what is (pardon the pun) a bridge too far.  But luckily for me, that made me actually quite knowledgable about All Quiet on the Western Front.  I mean, it was recent enough for me to write about the 1930 edition of the same movie.

I would have a hard time discussing which is better.  It's what I tell my students not to do when writing.  But I also know that this is a blog that is written very stream-of-consciousness style.  In terms of cinema, the new movie is almost next level.  While I would never put it on my favorite movies list, I acknowledge that it is a powerhouse of a film.  Gripped with emotion and filmed fantastically cinematically, I could show scenes from that movie on how to properly film war.  But it is also way too long.  There's probably a problem when such a harrowing story becomes boring and tedious.  I know, wars are long.  Often, a long runtime is meant to make the audience feel the impatience that the soldiers feel as well. But as Paul becomes desensitized to war, so do I feel watching All Quiet on the Western Front, which is a real problem to the mission statement to the film.  I'm supposed to prep people for the horrors and instead, I'm just just waiting for the movie to be older.  Also, and this isn't so much a criticism as it is something that one probably needs to know: the movie veers off from the original book (which it initially holds great reverence for) and produces its own third act, also weaving in elements of the greater world outside of Paul.  It's a choice and I think it is meant to create a sense of epic scale.  But for a story about The Great War, All Quiet on the Western Front is meant to be quite an intimate tale.

Paul as a protagonist, in all versions of the story, is almost lacking a sense of characterness.  It's on purpose.  I'm not criticizing any version of Western Front.  It's just an odd experience.  I hate throwing around the term "anti-war propaganda" (despite the fact that we need more anti-war propaganda!), but Paul is the ultimate avatar for the audience.  Written after what was meant to be the war-to-end-all-wars, it was a signal that war was not glorious.  One of my favorite scenes from any war movie is the pro-war propaganda that is spewed at these children. The notion that one is bred to defend one's country is something that is still wired into children today.  The new version is missing my favorite part of the story.  In All Quiet in the Western Front, Paul is indoctrinated by an older teacher, who talks about the glory of the fatherland.  That first part is in the new movie and I adore it.  All these kids are riled up and jazzed to go fight for one's country.  Cool.  There's a quick turn to realize that there's nothing sexy about being in a foxhole.  Death is just the norm in these places.  People tell the incoming recruits that they won't last the night and, in a lot of cases, their prophecies of doom are correct. 

But Paul, as our avatar, survives quite a bit of the war.  He's actually given the opportunity to go back to that teacher and shame him with the realities of war.  Now, this part doesn't happen in the new version.  I kind of hate that.  Like, it's so important to the inclusion of the brainwashing in the first scene.  I know he's not a boomer.  Heck, he's probably generation-less in the sense that he came from before we named generations.  But I love that basically, Gen Z is taking down a Boomer.  (Did you read what I just read before that inflammatory sentence?) There's something really cathartic about the entire notion of confronting those who are brainwashing others. Listen, I liked the new Western Front.  But there's something that's lost by not having the scene of confronting the teacher.  If the message of All Quiet on the Western Front is to avoid war at all costs because it will rob you of everything, that's a message of avoidance. It's telling us "not" to do something.  That's a pretty passive role for the audience.  But if Paul is the everyman avatar, having him confront the criminal teacher is something that can be done.  When Paul confronts his teacher, he's shutting down the narrative that war is glorious.  Instead, war is seen as something that is inevitable, despite the fact that Paul forges a parent's signature allowing him into war at a young age.  

But I'm already starting to see a trend with this year's Academy Awards.  Maybe it's an every year thing, but it seems like movies this year are bloated brutality.  The world is a terrible place.  I've said it for a while.  Hopeful Tim is dead.  That being said, I don't know why we have the need to keep punching our protagonists over-and-over.  It's not like there's a ton of happy things in All Quiet on the Western Front as a novel.  But the punches keep coming towards Paul.  (Trust me, All Quiet on the Western Front is not the worst offender this year.) But this movie really stresses that the notion of hope is a foolish one. One thing that the new movie does is really toy with the notion of hope as a myth.  Paul dies in the novel too.  But this is one of those movies that stresses that war will get everyone.  Because the film plays with the notion of time and a finish line, it just messes with us that Paul is the last casualty of the war.  He's war's greatest victim (again, representing the audience), because he survived so long and he saw that the end was in sight. But he watched everyone die before he did.  He had to suffer all through the war.  He could taste home and then that was denied him,  It's almost a bit too cruel. In the novel (and I only kind of remember this), it's remarkably boring that Paul dies.  The message isn't that Paul the Avatar will die nearly tasting freedom.  It's in those little moments.  Paul cannot get a spectacular death as he does in the film. Instead, the mundaneness of his death is an insult to injury

Maybe only Germany could have made this movie.  It must be really odd to be a German and to be the world's bad guy for two major films.  But the notion of making an anti-war movie from the German perspective is really telling of what the German cultural identity must entail.  I'm looking both at the perspective of Remarque and of Berger as well.  Remarque is doing something that Steinbeck is really known for: commenting on things that he lived through.  But Germany in 2022 is running into the same things most Western countries are dealing with right now and that's the notion of extremism.  I don't know if I'll be alive for when America starts telling the stories of its atrocities as cautionary tales to other countries, but that's what All Quiet on the Western Front offers.  As much as I see people wearing pro-gun shirts and I hear threats of war and violence as an American, we keep trotting forward not understanding that war is in no way sexy.  It's one of those things that should make us wrech at the notion of it.  Yet, it is glorified time and again. There are those in Germany (for all of the radicalism that is returning to all Western countries) who at least can understand what it means to be German and to be sattled with the burden of history.

It's a good movie.  It's a really good movie.  But it is long and there's a lot of bleak storytelling going on this year.  But that being said, the movie works as a whole. Yeah, it runs into the problems that many war movies run into.  But if you are into war films and are cool with the notion that war is terrible, this might really do it for you.

Rated R.  It's not a brutal documentary.  I mean, it's a gut-punch and I want everyone to watch it.  But in terms of visuals, there isn't so much that one would consider offensive.  But there is one thing that you should consider: the attempts on Navalny's life are not fiction.  This is real violence happening to a real dude.  Yeah, there's language, but we should be bothered that we're witnessing the real pain of a human being.  R.

DIRECTOR: Daniel Roher

I'm a little ashamed that I don't know more about Alexei Navalny.  As a Ukrainian who just ate up the news around this time, I don't remember much about Alexei Navalny.  Admittedly, I was watching American infrastructure collapse in real time.  Maybe I had marginalized the knowledge of international affairs to make way for other tragic information.

We've entered a weird time in cultural literacy training.  Everything has become a paradox when it comes to absorbing the news.  I'm a CNN guy.  If I look at a bias chart of different news network, it means I skew left and I absorb information that isn't always the most accurate.  I find solace in this because I see where FOX News falls on the scale and that only helps me accept my confirmation bias.  It's true.  We all have a bias.  I looked at the bell curve for accuracy and the dead center, most accepted and accurate news sources were so devoid of morality that they read like robots were transcribing human events.  At the center of Navalny, for all of its breakdown of complex politics, lies the paradox of accepting truth.  There's an irony that the movie starts off with the CNN Films banner.  Me, I accept that immediately.  Of course CNN is fighting the good fight.  While I rant about hypocrisy and bias, I honestly believe that CNN is at the center of a cultural battle to bring truth, but ask a FOX News viewer and this entire blog is considered moot and tainted.  This is always running through my mind throughout this movie. 

It's kind of a bummer because documentaries like Navalny are the best way to understand who Vladimir Putin really is.  Yeah, we get a deep dive into who Alexei Navalny is and I'm really glad to know the man from the ground level.  But Navalny is a foil to Putin.  It's a little bit of what The Diary of Anne Frank does for the Holocaust.  Conceptually, we should all know that Vladimir Putin is a monster and I think, for the most part, we do.  But he's a monster in a movie sense.  He's this removed person who doesn't affect Americans in a blatant way.  Okay, he hacks basically all facets of American culture and turns us against each other.  But we don't see that.  But through the story of Alexei Navalny, the guy who decided to stand up to Putin, we get a greater understanding of the true villainy of Putin.  The apex of this movie is the proof that Vladimir Putin poisoned Alexei Navalny and they got the scientist who did it to accidentally confess.  It's a real Robert Durst moment.  Anyway, let's pretend that we can follow Putin's spin on it, that the whole interview is staged and there is no scientist who did that.  Okay.  But what we do know for sure is that Putin is a nutbar.

I'm looking at the fact that Putin won't say Navalny's name.  Geez Louise, so much is telling about that.  Okay, there's no scenario where I'm not believing Navalny over Putin.  But again, and I'm going to stop saying this, for the Fox News Crew out there, the fact that he refuses to say his name is so telling about his character.  Now, I know that this just makes him seem human to a bunch of folks.  To those people, I actively Justin Timberlake stare in judgment.   But it's the same tactics that Trump did.  (Do you know how much effort it took to avoid dropping his name?  What few far-right punks I had a chance of reaching, I've now completely lost.) I'm probably doing some faulty argumentation here, but it's something as small as not being able to say Navalny's name that really gives the whole game away. 

The culture war in Russia is the antithetical problem we have here.  Here, we have a glut of news that is probably mostly accurate.  Since I'm using CNN as a touchstone, I would like to point out that CNN regularly criticizes Biden, despite being accused of being lib fake-news.  Russia media refuses to criticize Putin any way because it literally is state-run media.  Everything that Putin wants to do, he has the people who are willing to do that for him.  Perhaps it is because of the completely abhorrent economy there, but it is easy to bribe the poor into doing something not on the up-and-up.  I can see that the Q-Anon folks and the alt-right feel like they are in Russia, proclaiming the truth against a wave of people telling otherwise.  But it's also something we have to consider in the cult of personality.  Vladimir Putin and Trump both tip their hands when it comes to criticism.  Listen, Joe Biden, in my mind, is fine.  He's not great.  He's painfully vanilla, to the detriment of the country a lot of the time.  But I don't mind calling him out for that.  He's been called out for worse and has kept his cool.  He keeps things professional and allows people to think poorly of him.

Compare that behavior to that of Trump and Putin.  Yeah, this is a documentary about Alexei Navalny.  But this is Navalny's message: Putin will never let go of power willingly.  He's a child who needs control and is willing to kill to maintain it.  As much as we're focused on Navalny as the subject of this documentary, he's just the microphone that we need to hear about Putin's regime.  There's something that I don't like, but also completely intellectually understand from Navalny's perspective.  Navalny, like Trump, refuses to alienate White supremacists.  It's a real bummer moment in the movie. (Again, CNN doesn't mind showing the whole truth about someone, despite the fact that this documentary paints Navalny in the most loving light imaginable.) I wish that Navalny ripped into White supremacists.  For all I know, he might have sympathies.  I don't know enough about him outside of this doc to make those claims.  But I do know that he is in between a rock and a hard palce with this sham of an election.  Navalny is in this place politically where there's borderline an impossibility to win.  The election isn't real.  It's, at best, to save face and to stress that democracy is a thing in Russia.  

To a certain extent, he has a point.  If Navalny comes out against White supremacists, he's censoring what people have to say.  Now, we can start talking the paradox and misunderstanding of tolerance.  I get the flaw in Navalny's thinking.  But Navalny is in a place of practicality.  Anyone who supports Navalny publicly is at risk of imprisonment.  It's amazing that he has people who show their faces on TV.  I was kind of freaking out for one kid in this documentary who looked right into the camera and realized that his life may be over.  (I'm surprised that CNN didn't think of that.) To turn away supporters means to guarantee loss.  Perhaps his weaponizing of zealots may have a role in changing things (assuming he didn't get arrested for 20 months.  Or now, 11.5 years).  But I also hate to see that happen.  I don't know.  It's these slow deals with the devils that bother me.  But also, I get it.  I really do.

Ultimately, this is the story of a martyr.  I get really depressed thinking about this movie.  I learned a lot about a man in about an hour-and-a-half, but what did I really learn?  Is the world a terrible place?  I know that those living under the oppression of the Soviet Union thought that the Cold War was never going to end.  I know that change seems impossible in the present.  It's only viewed positively through the light of history.  But I can't be the only one who sees the world that we're living in and watching everything rewind to a state where things were worse?  I'll be honest, I get sad a lot.  I'm told that I'm not supposed to share my feelings online, so I'll keep it to a minimal. I was raised believing that human beings are fantastic people.  Alexei Navalny seems like an exceptionally optimistic human being.  He fought a system that was built on oppression and control.  There are people in the streets cheering for him and fighting for him.  But Alexei Navalny's imprisonment and martyrdom was supposed to be the door for change.  Has anything changed?  Putin is going to be president for ending.  There will be no comeuppance.  It's going to be this.  Forever. 

​Bullies win.  

Rated R for a lot (and I mean A LOT) of specifically Irish swearing.  That's not me making a judgement call.  It's literally a lot of words that we acknowledge as foul language that we don't specifically use in the United States.  Also, the movie gets really dark, going into stuff like self-mutilation and violence towards animals.  The R-rating is pretty well-deserved here.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Martin McDonagh

I'm glad this is the official kick-off movie of awards season because, after seeing the trailer, it's the movie off of the Academy Awards list that I wanted to see the most.  Well, out of the ones I still hadn't seen.  Everything Everywhere All at Once made me lose my marbles.  But The Banshees of Inisherin was up there.  Just because I'm incredibly basic, I was in the mood for another In Bruges. I mean, it's the same director with the same cast.  What wouldn't make me excited to see this movie?  

Thank God it wasn't another In Bruges.  Okay, I need to go back and watch In Bruges again because I've only seen it the one time.  But I think I needed something else from Martin McDonagh that still somehow maintained his sense of auteurness about him.  (Auterness?  Auterity?  Auteurnidom?)  I kind of have a Danny Boyle appreciation for McDonagh now.  When you watch a Boyle film, there are certain hallmarks that really stand out in his work.  But Boyle infamously doesn't like doing the same genre twice.  I could have seen The Banshees of Inisherin as this very cool and clever takedown of friendship, set up against the backdrop of a civil war.  To a certain extent, it is that.  But The Banshees of Inisherin is as vulnerable as a movie gets.  I mean, that is my buzzword.  I love vulnerability in this movie.  McDonagh can't hide behind anything here.  As clever as his writing is, it's never trying to mask the fact that all of the weight falls on the likability of a village everyman against the boorishness of a snobby intellectual. Yeah, apply this to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Ireland and that's exactly what is going on.

The village is sparse.  That sparsity is what makes this borderline a play.  Yeah, there are people in the town of Irisherin, but they are color, not forces.  They make the world of Inisherin a spectacle of drama.  Let me explain.  If I had to summarize the story, in its most basic form, is that it is a friendship breakup over nothing.  One thing that Colm keeps on stressing is that Padaric has done nothing wrong.  Fundamentally, Padaric will never be more than average.  He luxuriates in his middling.  This story is so universal that it would be considered too basic to film.  Obviously, McDonagh knows what he's doing and he's not going to settle for simple.  But in the way that Arthur Miller made the mundane fascinating with Death of a Salesman, McDonagh elevates what should be just a spat between two friends into something grandiose and epic.  It is through the eyes of those secondary and tertiary characters that compounds what should be a hiccup into something that destroys worlds.

We, as the audience, become the town of Inisherin.  The only people who have any right to sway over Padaric and Colm are Siobhan and Dominic, and even Dominc is a stretch.  But it is Colm's dramatic nature, despite the fact that he seems calm as stone, that escalates all of the events.  Listen, I know that that allegory of the civil war is in the background of this movie and it should be what I'm analyzing.  Instead, I choose to analyze Colm and Padaric as a story divorced from the war coloring the setting of the piece.  If I get there, I get there.  But let me talk about Colm and Padaric because I find them fascinating.  Colm outwardly seems in control of the situation.  Colm thinks that he is the super-ego, rationally understanding that Padaric removed from his life is all that is stopping him from little immortality that he wishes to achieve.  But as dramatic as Padaric gets in the movie (and who acts as an avatar for me), Colm is the one who is dramatic as get out.  I honestly get the vibe that Colm is doing this as a form of self-destruction.

Colm is closest with Padaric.  He has few friends with whom he interacts in a vulnerable (that word again!) place.  He plays the fiddle and the town knows him because of his presence in the tiniest place on the planet.  But he knows how Padaric will react.  I refuse to think that he considers any of Padaric's behavior as a surprise.  Everything that happens in the story is Colm.  Sorry if I'm taking a side so hard, but I am.  Does Colm have the right to separate himself from Padaric?  Absolutely.  I don't like it. Like the priest tells Colm, it's not a sin, but it's not nice either.  But he does have that right.  But the way that Colm handles it.  Padaric is owed (sorry, but this is where I'm going to play it a bit conservatively) a real breakup.  But Colm's silence is intentionally confusing.  What Colm is doing is blaming Padaric for his own smallness.  (Grow up.)  The ultimatum that he gives Padaric is unreasonable.

From Padaric's perspective, the moral good is to rescue a relationship with his friend.  Again, we can start breaking down id, ego, and super-ego here and I ask a better man than I who has a bit more patience and time to do it.  But Padaric balances what he selfishly wants, his friend back, with the moral good, stopping his friend from self-destruction. Everything from Padaric's perspective, shy of burning down Colm's house with Colm in it, is done out of good.  All of the data he's receiving about the situation is to ignore Colm's words and to concentrate on not letting his friend flounder.  It would be easier for Padaric to allow Colm to suffer.  Yeah, he would be sad that he lost a friend, but he also knows that he wouldn't be the center of a attention in this small town.  Now, we have to be aware of the romantic breakup metaphor going on.  There's this idea that, mental health wise, have to discuss aloud. While there are no blatant homosexual overtones, one could easily view this film through a gay lens.  If this was a romantic breakup, we'd view Padaric as inappropriate.  He would be considered mopey and manipulative.  But gay lens or not, we would be denying Padaric his humanity.  

I don't see Padaric as mopey.  I see him as grieving.  In much the same way that death is often confusing and surprising to us, Colm's choice to distance himself from Padaric does.  All rational thought and a lifetime of input says that Colm should be close to Padaric.  We are built on the expectation of normality and routine.  Siobhan and Colm leaving Padaric, especially with a current of anger in leaving, is too much for anyone's mental health.  While Siobhan empathizes with Padaric, she doesn't understand that he's a child with a wholly new experience.  I don't see Padaric as manipulative so much as he is overwhelmed with emotion.  I'm citing the scene where he gets a ride from Colm or the scene where he is saved from the abusive police officer.  Leaving Padaric to his own devices may mirror the distancing from arrested development into adulthood, but it is too much without a safety net.  (I mean, that's the point of ending arrested development.)  But the Padaric shifts from a place of emotional death to literal death with the death of Jenny.  There's something morbidly funny in this, although you won't find me laughing.  Intellectually, I can state that the silly donkey is the one who dies in this scenario, directly caused by the selfish self-mutilation of Colm.  (I mean, I don't need to analyze that.  Colm says that his mutilation is tied to his artistic dreams being ruined by Padaric.)  But Jenny is the only thing that represents normality.  Jenny is given almost childlike qualities.  This is an animal that is spoiled and raised by Padaric.  As much as it is a joke, Padaric cares about the consistency of the tiny horse's excrement (very confused about what the final status of that animal is).  It's the same care that a parent gives to a child.

Just to go full academic on this movie, there's a parallel between parenthood and friendship as well.  Although Colm claims to be the more mature one, he only looks out for himself.  He has the responsibilities of the single.  He can play out at the pub every night and has nothing to really care for outside of his artistic talent.  Padaric seems to care for others.  He's almost entirely defined by caring.  He cares for Colm, Siobhan, Dominic, and Jenny.  Jenny, being the allegorical child in this situation, is the focus of his conversation. The conversation about analyzing her feces is the same converation that parents have about analyzing the diapers of a child for heath purposes.  Colm's frustration may be that Padaric is boring compared to his free and fancy-free lifestyle, but it also acts a commentary for the traits that Colm lacks.  Padaric, for his lacking intellect, has emotional maturity that Colm cannot fathom.  Yes, he cares for Jenny out of selfishness because he has bonded with his animal.  But he takes care of Dominic not because he loves Dominic.  He actually finds Dominic quite annoying, but recognizes that Dominic is being stripped of his intrinsic value by his father.  If fatherhood is about sacrifice, that's Padaric acting as the father that Dominic never had. 

It's appropriate that Colm bonds with Jonjo.  Jonjo, despite his label as literal father and public father (as police officer, caring for the town), he fails at meeting the requirements that it takes to being a father.  He cares only for himself and his own creature comforts.  He beats on Dominic (I'm not sure if the molestation was a real thing or a turn of phrase) and assaults those who don't respect his authority.  But Colm sees a kindred spirit in those who don't care for social conventions nor self-sacrifice.  It's while he is sitting with Jonjo that Colm has his speech about being famous for kindess.  While Padaric allows his true feelings to come out at this moment, he also should note that people aren't respected for their evil either.  Mozart may have been a blowhard, but he's not famous for being a blowhard.  (I have no idea.  I just know Amadeus.) 

So, yeah, I could analyze the civil war as the reason for this movie.  But I also really just grew to the characters.  I wanted to know what made them tick.  Is it the point?  Maybe, maybe not.  Did I overanalyze the relationship between these two men?  Probably.  But it's movies like this that have complexity in the simplicity (God I hate me for writing that) that allow me to write for long periods where I really enjoy writing. 

Not rated, but definitely deserving of an R-rating.  The central conceit is about a murdering rapist on the loose in the Korean countryside.  There's a man who pleasures himself to the perversion of the crime on camera.  It's a lot.  It's just a lot.  This has a lot in common with movies like Se7en in terms of brutal and mature content.  There's genital mutilation and all kinds of horrors done to women.  

DIRECTOR:  Bong Joon-Ho

I know!  I should be writing about Academy Award nominees.  But here I am, knocking out my last Netflix DVD before I can start writing about these things. I'm fascinated by Bong Joon-Ho.  One of my earliest discoveries at Thomas Video was The Host.  It was a horror movie unlike any I had seen up to that point and it completely blew my mind.  I'd seen a couple of different ones in there, but then came Parasite.   Parasite changed things.  I always treated the works of Bong Joon-Ho as some kind of underground thing.  Sure, I recommended these movies to people.  I insisted that people watch these movies.  The intellectual part of me wanted them to watch them so they would become culturally literate and to experience something different from the norm.  The selfish part of me wanted to be the guy who introduced them into this secret cult of Director Bong.  

But when he destroyed at the Oscars, the world had changed.  I wanted to have that seductive feeling of secret knowlege.  So I threw some of Bong Joon-Ho's film onto my Netflix DVD queue and now I have Memories of Murder.  I will say, that feeling I had of wanting to discover, is currently waning.  I almost didn't care when the DVD came in the mail.  Heck, I didn't even remember that Memories of Murder was a Bong Joon-Ho movie.  I was certainly glad when the Criterion menu popped up and Bong Joon-Ho's name was in giant letters. I knew that I was going to be in for something special. Maybe that's what made it so hard to get into the movie.  Memories of Murder took a long time snag me.  I do think a lot of it was chalked up to my expectations.  But it also took me a long time to realize what this movie was.  The thing with Director Bong is that, while he might dip his toes into established genres, his entire modus operandi of filmmaking is to break free of constraints and formulae.  

I went into this movie thinking that I was going to write about how this is just In the Heat of the Night without the racial component to it again.  The first half of the movie really feels like this.  There's a series of murders that the local country cops have no skills to investigate.  They use TV cops as models for how to run a crime scene.  They abuse people into confessing that they are criminals, despite mounds of evidence suggesting otherwise.  It's only when a big city cop, actually trained, starts poking holes in their methods that the film gets anywhere near a traditional narrative.  But that's when the film surprises me.  I thought, "Another big city cop embarrasses small time cops and they learn to be friends at the end."  It was only late in the movie that I realized, "Oh, this is something subversive."  For those who haven't seen the movie, which is probably the majority of my Facebook page, they never solve the case.  Not like Mulholland Drive neer solve the case.  I'm talking about, intentionally ambiguous not solve the case.

As much as In the Heat of the Night is damning of backwater police work, which seems to be the majority of policework (thus damning law enforcement overall), Memories of Murder is more an attack on policework in the sense that people, by their very nature, are corruptable.  I don't want to forget the following point, so I'm going to jump the gun: Because Seo Tae-yoon falls, it kind of forgives (in the worst way) everyone else.  Okay, I got that out, so let me go back.  The country bumpkins are shown as backwards hicks.  And they totally are.  They are what we fear about police work.  We don't want to imagine that society has no idea what we're doing.  The idea that this town is overrun by a murdering rapist and these are the guys behind the scenes is horrifying.  There's something very comforting by the arrival of Seo Tae-yoon.  He's that imagined character of legend in our heads.  As everyone else looks a little goofy, Seo Tae-yoon evokes a sense of confidence and cool.  He's handsome and aloof.  That archetype is really hard to break for audiences.  Heck, I know my in-laws often won't watch a movie unless the hero of the story has the same traits as Seo Tae-yoon.  It's something that's wired into us.  If he's being juxtaposed to the bumbling corrupt sheriffs, then he's supposed to bring the bad guy to justice.

That's what I realize about Bong Joon-Ho.  I do think that Memories of Murder might be weaker than the other stuff I've seen from him.  But it doesn't make it weak.  Bong Joon-Ho's films live or die on the turn.  I'm not saying that Bong Joon-Ho is anything like M.Night Shyamalan, who plays heavily on twists.  There's something similar happening in the emotional responses that Bong Joon-Ho's audiences have, that notion of a turn.  But his turn is a defiance of expectation.  One of the first chapters that I teach in my film class is that audiences either respond to expectations being met or expectations being subverted.  Bong Joon-Ho is almost working on a different level when it comes to the subversion of expectations.  I think the man is actually a genius.  From what I've heard in interviews, he just sees the world differently.  It's not that he's including these moments as "gotcha" moments.  It's just that he doesn't want to tell the same story that everyone else is telling.  The corruption of Seo Tae-yoon makes the movie something in its own category. Solving the murder is fun and satsifying. But it is ultimately forgettable.  I can think of the great serial killer reveals and they're fun.  But think about Silence of the Lambs.  Catching Buffalo Bill is necessary for the story because Clarice Starling is able to conquer her imposter syndrome, not because catching the killer is right.  Not catching the killer for Seo Tae-yoon is more important because he's willing to murder an innocent man simply for a sense of closure.

So, yeah, the movie is great.  It took me a while to realize that.  But the same thing happened when I watched Arrival.  I thought the movie was going to adhere to tropes and then those tropes were subverted for something far more interesting.  That's what Bong Joon-Ho does. He makes a quality film that is accentuated by the knowledge that he's going to be talking about something that other films aren't talking about.

R for being aggressively sexual at times.  I don't actually know if I saw nudity.  I know I saw near nudity for sure.  But it's more of the actions of sex than the nudity itself. Then it also gets a bit violent, often dealing with ideas of self-harm and suicide.  It's not an easy watch and often balances a horror aesthetic when least expected. Also, there are some questionable moments when it comes to imagery and race.  Very R.

DIRECTOR:  Olivia Wilde

I have so many movies to write about again thanks to Oscar season and here I am writing about Don't Worry Darling.  I have plenty of things to say.  Heck, I hope I have too many things to say.  But I'm also sitting under this bomb of Academy Award nominees and here I am, schlepping Don't Worry Darling, the last movie I watched before the nominees were announced.  (My next movie is the Netflix DVD I watched so I could start getting nominees from Netflix DVD.  My life is very specific and unique.) 

I gotta Elephant-in-the-Room this one.  I often have the following commentary about movies that make a  bigger splash through controversy than people who actually went to see the movie.  I don't know who to sympathize with here.  It's really hard to watch movies when there's controversy in personalities on set and off of set.  A few years ago, my students said I should listen to Harry Styles.  Now, I'm a grown man who didn't need to be listening to music aimed at teeny-boppers (again, proof that I'm of a certain age).  But I also have an Amazon music account and it's no skin off my back. So during dishes for a week, I'd put on some Harry Styles.  Not 1-Direction, mind you.  Just Harry Styles.  I discovered that, while he probably won't be making a ton of money off of me, he is kind of talented and I could listen to him if I was more into music instead of podcasts.  Then I saw that he was this guy who wanted to become an actor and I was very cool with that as well.  But then this is the movie that established him as potentially our next Jared Leto: a singer who becomes a complete diva and toxic influence on set.  It's a shame, because I'm kind of jazzed to see him as Starfox.  

But when we have this kind of drama on set, it taints everything we watch.  It all comes down to that argument of accepting the character over the actor.  As much as I loved Bullet Train, I'm watching old man Brad Pitt do some amazing stunts and amazing acting. Instead of seeing Alice, Jack, Frank, and Bunny; I was watching Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, and Olivia Wilde.  I know it is tempting to throw performances under the bus, but I had no problem with any of the performances. Heck, some of these performances were amazing.  It didn't change the fact that I kept on imagining Harry Styles spitting on Chris Pine.  Or Olivia Wilde dumping Jason Sudekis for Harry Styles.  Or Olivia Wilde begging Florence Pugh to stay and finish the movie because Harry Styles was toxic.  All of these things kept overshadowing a movie that, by its own right, wasn't that bad.  Yeah, the end probably needs a little more work and ambiguity, but it's a functional film that is now almost known for its infamy than its contribution to the cinematic canon. 

But it doesn't stop there.  I know too much about Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudekis at this point. Do I follow either of them?  Not really.  Have I ever Googled either one of them? Nope. Their relationship, somehow, has transcended into the cultural zeitgeist and I feel bad for them.  Okay, I feel bad for him, but that's because I'm a Ted Lasso fan and it probably had to suck to film divorce stuff for that show. What I know about their relationship can fit on a post-it note.  But still, that's more than I really need to know.  Here's my long-winded point: is this movie a commentary not on men, but on Jason Sudekis?  See, I shouldn't have to say that out loud.  I shouldn't have to.  Artists use their real lives as templates.  They write what they know.  But the role of the audience is to be an avatar in this world.  There's the notion of something being universal that needs to stick. Because this movie garnered so much attention behind the scenes, I can't separate (there's no way to not make a divorce or separation reference here) Olivia Wilde from Bunny or Olivia Wilde as filmmaker to include Jason Sudekis as part of the story. The thing is, it probably isn't Jason Sudekis.  It may be Olivia Wilde's anger about Jason Sudekis.

But the idea that Jack is the nice guy inverted archetype keeps resonating with me.  Jack is the villain of the piece.  Even more than Frank is the villain of the piece, the real villain is Jack.  Frank did something really gross to begin with. He extorted men and imprisoned women in a VR world.  Okay, fine.  (I really shouldn't put the crime against men in that sentence, but I did want to stress that he had a lot of crimes happening and none of it was done out of a false sense of altruism.) But if Alice is the main character, the thing keeping her in this golden prison is Jack.  Jack is the one keeping her alive and captive in a room.  Frank, for all of his bluster, isn't there to hold Alice in Jack's apartment. (There's a thin threat that they have to get to Alice's real body, but that seems like an impossibility from moment one.) Frank is society, where the patriarchy lock up their wives in sociological and emotional prisons.  He's the setting.  That makes Jack...Jason Sudekis?

Wilde gives Jack two seconds of sympathy in this movie.  I want to make this clear: there is a difference between likability and sympathy.  We're supposed to like Jack for a lot of the movie.  He's the fun husband who genuinely is attracted to his wife.  He listens to her and somehow seems less misogyinistic compared to his peers.  But that's Wilde setting up the carpet only to tear it away.  We're supposed to like Jack for the inevitable turn to have meaning. But Jack honestly only has a breath to make him sympathetic.  There's a moment told in flashback in the real world.  Alice, revealed to be a talented surgeon, comes home late.  She barely has given any consideration to her spouse (which is supposed to be okay.  To a certain extent it is, people are allowed to be tired.  But it is in this split second that I give him sympathy) and he seems desperate to save their marriage.  Now, Wilde is going out of her way to make him seem like a lunatic.  He hasn't eaten dinner, a passive-aggressive way to mope and manipulate.  It doesn't work, so he then goes to the extreme of kidnapping her and sticking her in a prison.  Okay, I get it.  It's allegory.  Sure. But let him get to that point.

There are almost too many influences on this movie.  Watching the trailer, I thought, "Oh, another Stepford Wives" adaptation.  I mean, that's me dismissing the movie too quickly, considering that I haven't seen any version of The Stepford Wives.  I mean, a lot of this is owed to Get Out and The Master, right?  Okay, Get Out, The Master, and The Matrix, right?  It just seems like there isn't its own movie in here.  I'm a guy who thought that this movie is alright.  But there also is a real problem with a lot of the elements of this movie trying to be other things.  It's because the imagery and the influences are so prevalent without a real understanding of that imagery.  This leads me into something big and it might be a real problem.

I mean, we acknowledge that this is meant to be a progressive movie, right?  I mean, it's a full-on assault against the patriarchy, as it well should be.  Okay, let's talk about that racial casting.  The film, like many Hollywood movies, is primarily White.  There are a few exceptions to the rule about this, most notably Margaret.  Margaret is the precursor to Alice's character.  What happens to Margaret portends what happens to Alice.  Okay, that's cool.  But I can't ignore the fact that Alice, played by Florence Pugh, is a blonde White lady while Margaret is Black.  Now, there is nothing about Margaret's race or status in this community that is analyzed.  You could force something in saying that she is the first community on the outs, but that kind of gets neutered when the same thing happens to the White lady.  The real issue is that Margaret, in a not subtle-at-all way, is meant to be a mirror reflection of Alice. Wilde literally does this.  Alice looks in the mirror to see her reflection as Margaret.  Now, Wilde has this entirely for artistic value.  She's juxtaposing them for effect.  But that means that Alice is not looking in the mirror and seeing race.  She's seeing color.  KiKi Layne is hired for this movie entirely for the shade of her skin, but none of the meaning, culture, or baggage that comes with it.  She's being relegated to a sense of "other" once again.  It's a striking image, but it's an entire backwards way at looking at who Margaret is as a person.

Don't Worry Darling, which is apparently a command --not direct address--isn't as bad as people make it out to be.  It's just mired by a bunch of content that should stay distant from the narrative presented in the movie.  There are parts that are gorgeous and fascinating.  But it also is messy when it shouldn't be messy.  It's unfair to expect perfection with any movie, but when one highlights its mistakes, one can't blame the audience for picking up on those flaws.

G, and let's really stress this...the G stands for Genocide.  How?  How is this G rated? Like, I get it.  It's 1953.  I played this while my four-year-old was in the room.  But there's a scene where a pastor gets point-blank vaporized.  It's great and it's old-timey special effects, but that guy got vaporized.  Also, the alien arms look upsetting.  People treat each other like human garbage.  It's brutal for 1953, that's why it's rated G.  

DIRECTOR: Byron Haskins

Like, I knew I had seen it before.  But I wasn't sure if I had A) seen it before when I was a kid and forgot about it or B) had watched it in the past decade and just gotten it confused with other B-movie sci-fi films from the '50s.  (Okay, it's not a B-movie, but it shares a lot of biology with the B-movie sci-fi).  The answer is: both?  Do you know how I remember that I had definitely seen it recently?  The main character's name is Dr. Clayton Forrester.  You know, from Mystery Science Theatre 3000?  That name always reminds me.  I actually question if I've written about this movie before.  But moving on...

There's something about the morality of the '50s that is really weird to me.  There was a time in my life where I might have been passing around copies of The War of the Worlds as an example of how to make Christian films that would appeal to the mass market.  Now, The War of the Worlds, as good as it kind of is, is just Left Behind in its messaging, something that I don't think H.G. Wells put in his original story.  My goodness, the imagery there.  There's a scene in the movie, straight out of Man of Steel, where a pastor decides to confront the aliens who are (let me check my notes) vaporizing everything in sight. Father comes out to the chanting of Psalm 23 ("Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death") and then gets completely obliterated.  He's slaughtered off camera, unlike the immigrant who first encounters the alien.  That dude dies the most rad on screen death in 1953, per my vote.  No, there's the hysterical screaming of the pastor's niece, which will become a thing all throughout the movie. Anyway, the priest bites it and I'm like, "Oh, the spirit is moving through me."  At least, the one in the past is.  Because the new me is deeply troubled by this scene.

See, the priest is in the right in this situation. Condemning war and violence, this lovely chaplain decided to confront monsters whose only personality trait is vaporizing people.  Okay, I'm not sure if the vaporizing thing was concrete yet, but there's evidence there.  But the pastor is there for one purpose only: ensuring that military action is a moral deed.  Two years prior to this movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still came out.  This is my favorite sci-fi movie from the era and it probably always will be.  It's full of moral ambiguity and paints humanity and war in a negative light.  We're always so quick to pull the trigger that The Day the Earth Stood Still yells its message at us that we're war-crazy.  But The War of the Worlds straight up has the title of "War" in the name.  It has to be about war.  There's going to be guns and rockets and missles and the whole lot aimed at these space invaders.  But if we're damned to be war dogs, at least justify it.  And the way that we do that is to sacrifice members of the clergy to show how much we tried to avoid war at all costs.  Cool.  I mean, I still respect how the clergy were presented in films in the 1950s, but it does seem like a tall order.

Anyway, all through this movie, the only havens from the aliens is religion.  Yeah, aliens are shooting down churches.  These things are from the devil, full of demonic imagery. They are smashing everything in sight, even attacking chuches.  There's no respect for the sacred with these aliens.  They are kill and destroy, without any notion of coexistence.  It's why we're allowed to nuke them, but I digress.  But notice, as many bad things that are happening in the world, Forrester and Sylvia survive the attack when in church?  The movie doesn't mince words with it either.  These aliens fall straight up dead while the two are in church, praying to God.  The movie ends with people on a hillside, praising the Lord for saving them from the aliens.  The funny thing is, I always read The War of the Worlds as a temple to science.  The creatures die because of their lack of planning when it comes to bacteria.  It's kind of sad and oddly sympathetic that they just can't survive things that we've grown accustomed to.  But we also don't feel bad for colonizers because they tend to be the ones who bring disease into the world.  

Wait, I'm having this epiphany right now.  Okay, The War of the Worlds uses the colonizers' model for how disease works. The aliens didn't prep an immune response to Earth's diseases, so they died within days of landing.  Okay, fine.  I like that as an end, for some reason.  It's very sciencey.  But isn't the reverse true?  The aliens are techinically bringing their Martian diseases to Earth.  I mean, isn't every ship that crashes and every alien that is to be studied just one giant smallpox blanket?  Sure, there are more of us and we'd eventually adapt compared to the limited landing party that comes to Earth in The War of the Worlds, but I guess we probably shouldn't be all high and mighty that the aliens couldn't survive our planet because Earth should be getting another surge of death.  

But everyone on that mountain is giving thanks to God. The Catholic in me wants to sing for joy that such a movie exists.  Ten years ago me is screaming the same thing. I don't deny the urge within me to embrace this message.  There's a part of me that sees The War of the Worlds as a ministry.  It's what I wanted all of my secular media to be.  I wanted things to be stories first and sacred as something that was just part of the human experience. It's the same reason that I got really excited for the "Kill the Moon" episode of Doctor Who.  But then there is also the other problem.  There's the intellectual hole that fills my soul.  It's where the faithful claim that the devil finds his power and that's in the knowledge that God also created the Martians.  God, the all-powerful, could have made Martians unable to exist on Earth whatsoever.  Heck, Mars has no air.  Why not see Earth as this toxic place from moment one and avoid the mass carnage that runs rampant throughout this movie.  I mean, The War of the Worlds has it mostly right.  It's tempting to accuse God of manslaughter when we should be grateful for the salvation he provides.  But it is still this really messy message that 2023 Tim has a really hard coming to grips with.

I don't mean to rail against religion and I really believe I'm not.  I just don't like overly simplistic religion and faith messages.  I was going to rail against Sylvia as the poster child for 1950s women. Sylvia is ground zero for most of this stuff going on.  She's completely aware of Dr. Forrester's complete line of work (by the way, the irresponsibility of 1950s doctors, completely publicly speculating on how these aliens work and being right most of the time).  She knows more than most of the population.  Yet her role in this movie to be both hysterical and serve coffee.  If a scream is needed, they bring in Sylvia Van Buren.  If someone needs to disappear into a sea of human chaos and not face things head on, welcome Sylvia Van Buren.  There was one moment where I thought, "Hey, it's something that isn't demeaning", she fails at that too.  I'm talking about the fact that she's driving the bus full of scientists and equipment.  But she crashes that bus too and then hides out in a church, emotional as ever.  I know. I'm covering well-examined ground here.  It's just very blah.

But where The War of the Worlds swings for the fences is its contempt for the downfall of society.  There's a part in the movie where humanity confronts the Martians and fails.  It's the best of us and we have failed.  But I do love that we should have lost The War of the Worlds.  There's a plan.  It's not a perfect plan to stop the Martians, but it is definitely a plan. All of the scientists have to drive to this place with a bunch of equipment. It's not the Martians who take out these scientists.  That would be depressing and say nothing. It's humanity.  It's people throwing other people off of buses and trying to buy ways to survival.  That's what's rad.  I think the Tom Cruise version kept this stuff in because that's the telling.  Honestly, The War of the Worlds might be kind of forgettable if it wasn't for this stuff.  Sure, I like a saucer crashing into a farmhouse (Forrester has both the best and the worst luck by the way. Big open field, saucer crashes into house). But the stuff that sticks is people ripping other people out of cars and causing their own downfall.

I enjoy this movie.  I do.  I wish the religious propaganda was probably handled with a touch more subtlety. It's not that I want it out of the movie because I'm both a Catholic and acknowledge that film should have a message.  It's just...you know, hamfisted and doesn't quite work.  

Not rated, but it is pretty innocent for a part of the French New Wave.  The only thing that I can count as a wildly uncomfortable bit was the drowning of kittens.  Despite the fact that this is a visual moment, most of the work is done by the foley, which is pretty upsetting.  I think that there's some conversation about infidelity as well.  Still, not rated is not rated.

DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda

Apparently, I've seen this movie before.  Oops. That's not my finest moment.  I watched the whole movie and then, BAM, I see that La Pointe Courte is on the other Agnes Varda set I have.  A natural mistake to be sure.  We all own multiple Agnes Varda box sets and sometimes we forget which Agnes Varda box set has which Agnes Varda movie.  *sigh* 

I love early Varda so much that it makes me overly critical of late Varda. That's an unhealthy relationship to have, first of all.  But how much can I really love it if I've forgotten that I've watched this movie.  Now, I'm going to keep mining this ore because it gets to the crux of my argument about La Pointe Courte.  La Pointe Courte is good.  It's very good.  I'll even go as far as to say that it's great even if it isn't the most fun movie I've ever seen.  (It's way more fun than a lot of French New Wave stuff, but it still is French New Wave.  Okay, French New Wave is fun too, but it's not Bullet Train fun, okay?)  But as good as La Pointe Courte is, it really is almost the epitome of the French New Wave, especially from a first time director.  (It's a work of genius, especially considering that it comes from a first time director.)  It has artsy shots.  It's mellow.  No one really gets up in arms about things they are saying, despite the fact that they are saying potentially incendiary things.  You know the parody of French cinema.  That parody has to come from somewhere and La Pointe Courte has a lot of those hallmarks.  It sounds like I'm saying it's a bad thing.  It really isn't.  But I have to acknowledge that culture has borrowed a lot from movies like La Pointe Courte.

I hate that I wrote that La Pointe Courte isn't fun.  "Fun" is too all-encompassing of a word.  It has a myriad of contextual definitions.  It's not like La Pointe Courte is bleak.  There are bleak elements to it.  I mean, one of the main stories is about the potential dissolving of a marriage.  Another is about how the government interferes too much with humble day-to-day existance of the working man.  But at the end of the day, it's almost a celebration of the small working town.  Yeah, it prods its subjects with sticks and makes them dance for the camera.  But ultimately, it is a rallying cry for the small fishing village.  It's the positive form of Death of a Salesman, championing the working man and all of his foibles. While all of this low grade misery is around them, the takeaway is that places like La Pointe Courte is full of the celebrated working man. Sure, they'll never get what they want out of life.  It will always be a bit of a struggle.  But because expectations are managed and that people kind of seem to love life, warts and all, there's something beautiful about it.  

But for some reason, and I hope to parce that out now, this movie screamed mortality to me.  I couldn't stop thinking about death, considering that this movie seems to fundamentally be about life.  (Split infinitive, thank you.) I think I know why I went to death with this movie and it has very little to do with the movie itself.  I've been listening to a lot of Pete Holmes talking about Transcendental Meditation.  I'm not going to get into that.  But one of the key concepts is the notion of a mantra.  It doesn't matter what it is.  The idea  of the mantra is that it takes up a part of your brain that tries too hard and allows the rest of the thoughts to flow freely.  He compares it to the thought process of saying a rosary, which is both interesting and terrifying.  But there is something so somber about La Pointe Courte that it made me almost get meditative.  With that in mind, I watched this movie through the lens that my meditative mind had ascribed to it, the lens of death.  I'm going to use the couple as my primary focus because I think that their story is the most fleshed out narrative in the whole piece.  

A couple goes to this quaint fishing village.  With the title being La Pointe Courte, Varda rightly keeps all of the action of the piece inside this village.  The microcosm serves all of the actions and the characters.  As part of that, it reminds me both of the limited freedom of life.  You can do anything you want, as long as it is within the walls of your life.  I think it's Lui and Elli, so I apologize if I have the wrong characters.  Lui is from here, and he finds it to be heaven.  It's my wife and Cincinnati.  I only kind of get it.  But Elli only views the limitations of this village. Lui seems adorably small, molded by the conventions of this town. Elli wants to be anywhere but here.  Because the movie is French, her protestation is more in her words than her emotions. But like how, as we become older, we grow more comfortable with the notion of death, Elli sees this life as one of opportunity.  Yeah, there aren't a billion things to do in La Pointe Courte.  But the people do what they do and they do it well.  It's an appreciation of simplicity.  As she sees the value of a simple life / a simple death, she also is reminded of the beauty of Lui's simplicity.  He may not be a jetsetter, but he is a good man.  Perhaps a good and simple life is all that is needed.

I will say, I don't see her in reality making the change that she does.  Her entire character arc is almost what I like from cinema, but it doesn't seem real.  Varda is smart for saying that this argument is going to happen again.  It's just that she seems so committed to leaving that I don't see her turning like that, especially from the lack of something.  Okay they have water-jousting.  That's something.  

But the movie is great as a form of mediation.  Everything I say sounds like an insult, but it really isn't. Varda's somberness causes me to accentuate my relationship between audience and avatar.  Those quiet moments are inviting to infuse the self and that's what makes it good.  Some say boring; I say peaceful.

I'm changing things up.  I have The Complete Films of Agnes Varda box set.  At first, I thought that this meant only the feature length films.  Nope.  This includes the short films as well.  Since I'm painfully a completionist, I'm watching all of these short films as well.  But I also know that I can't write an essay about each and every one of these movies.  So instead, I'll do some blurbs about each one as I watch them.  So I'll keep updating as I go along.

Les 3 boutons (2015) -I think I like Varda's early work a lot.  I've talked about this in Varda by Agnes and Visages / Villages.  It just seems like it was trying less to be art and simply was art back in the day.  Again, I don't mean to poo-poo.  Varda has more artistic merit in her pinky than I'll ever have.  To a certain extent, this movie felt like some of her earlier work.  It had a narrative.  It had a confusing narrative, but it was a narrative.  But in the mix of visuals, I kind of lost the point of it besides looking pretty and being artsy.

Ô saisons, ô châteaux (1958) -There is something incredibly satisfying about this.  There's an innocence to Varda as she's making what ultimately is a comissioned travel film. She seems worried about upsetting those who are hiring her while trying to maintain an artistic integrity and it is near perfect.  Yeah, it's a travel promo film.  It's the equivalent of a town asking for an extended infomercial.  But it works so well.  But not as well as...

Du côté de la côte (1958) -...this.  In the same year, she's hired for basically the same job with the French Riviera.  Then she just goes bananas and makes her own art film that happens to be emotionally about the French Riviera.  When the folks who hired her saw that she claimed that the best view is from the grave, were they all excited about it?  This is Varda that I adore.  She's spunky and adorable and has social commentary, even when she's hired for travel videos.

PG, but I almost want to say that this movie might not be for kids.  If the bare-bones, family-friendly Disney version of Pinocchio tends to terrify children, I can't stress to you enough how traumatizing this version is.  This feels like it is set in the same world as Pan's Labyrinth, especially del Toro's motifs of war throughout.  It's scary and messed up.  People straight up die horrible deaths here.

DIRECTORS: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

Why have I seen more versions of Pinocchio in the past few years than I ever thought that I would? Is Pinocchio somehow reflecting our current culture?  Is it a conflagration of ideas?  Is the universe telling us something or is it artists inspiring each other?  Or maybe it's all a coincidence that we keep getting Pinocchio as the story to talk about.  Regardless, we keep getting the message that Pinocchio was a jerk of a kid but ultimately deserved to become a real boy.

I tell my students to write outlines before writing, which is advice I tend to ignore with this blog.  I really should name this thing "Stream of Consciousness Movies" because so little thought is put into the organization of my arguements.  I really hope to remember to talk about the role of parenting later in this blog because I'm going to talk about the title of this movie before anything else.  I'm not saying Pinocchio.  I have no thoughts about the appropriateness of the title Pinocchio.  I'm talking about how this movie is named Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.  First, I feel bad for the co-director, who seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, especially when it comes to the animation element of this.  But I can see why this movie is named after del Toro  My goodness, he's unpacking a lot of his oeuvre in front of us.  The odd thing that I have to criticize myself for is the fact that I'll lambaste Tim Burton for having one gimmick, yet sit in awe of most of the things that Guillermo del Toro does visually. But this is just Pan's Labyrinth 2, right?  I mean, everything about this is ​Pan's Labyrinth.  Like, every element looks like it could be an animated sequel set in the world of Pan's Labyrinth.  I mean, if I'm going to spell it out (which is not a bad thing!), it's a children's story set against the backdrop of real world evil: war. 

I really need to learn more about del Toro as a person.  I know he's from Mexico and lived in Spain for a while.  (When I say that I "know" that, it's in the back of my brain.)  I know his dad got kidnapped and things got scary for a while.  But what is del Toro's interest with children having to deal with war?  Visually, it's striking.  And this might be the point where I transition into my point about parenting.  (You know, if I was an expert blogger, this segue would be seemless, but you would leave feeling special.  Instead, welcome to this ham-handed crap.) The war, besides being this haunting spectre over the events of a story that have been told before, is something for Geppetto to rage against. It's something fundamentally evil, especially from an Italian perspective.  It was a sense of nationalism that forgot what Italian culture was supposed to be about.  (How should you read this section?  From a very weary American who is aware that America is just sprinting in that direction.) But Geppetto is a victim who embraces his victimhood.  It's really bizarre.  While most versions of Pinocchio are morality plays about being a naughty little boy, warning real life children  to not act like Pinocchio.

Instead, this is a morality play for parents. I'm going to say that I love this because I am not a naughty little boy.  I'm a parent who probably screws up his kid because of unreasonable expectations.  It's not like we're supposed to hate Geppetto.  Geppetto reacts fairly naturally.  He had Carlo, a kid who was way too perfect.  When we just had our first daughter, we were convinced that we were the best parents who had ever existed.  She was so good.  She was so talented.  But then, the more children we had, the more problems we started running into.  Even from the oldest.  If Carlo and Pinocchio had grown up together, Carlo would start massively misbehaving.  But we sympathize with Geppetto.  He is dealing with something supernatural.  There's almost a monkey's paw element to Pinocchio coming to life.  The allegory is screaming, "Every birth is miraculous and cannot fit in a box.  Every parent is surprised by what their child is." 

The idea of Geppetto as the focus of the story actually alters the Pinocchio story quite a bit. Again, this coming from a guy who has never read the OG Pinocchio, it was always something that was preachy for kids.  After all, the OG Pinocchio slaughters Jimminy Cricket in the first minutes of meeting him.  But I like the idea that Sebastian Cricket is someone who can nudge Pinocchio in subtle ways.  He can never make Pinocchio do what is right, but he can condemn the heck out of Geppetto for finding Pinocchio to be a burden.  I do think that del Toro goes a bit far, placing the onus on the parents at times.  Like, the Nazi full on condemns Geppetto for Pinocchio not being perfect.  We should always disagree with the Nazi, but I do agree that Pinocchio is perhaps a bit too rebellious for his britches.  Like, cool it a little on the not-listening bit.  But I do like the notion that Geppetto should understand that Pinocchio is minutes old and that he can't have a full grasp of the complex morality of society.  Like, if you were born eight-years-old, you'd have eight-year-old needs and wants that have nothing to do with lofty philosophical debates.

But I really like what the message in the movie is.  Like, I really like it.  I was ready to hate the end of the movie because this version of Pinocchio is a bit unfair as a concept. In other adaptations of Pinocchio, Geppetto is just a lonely old man who has never had children.  While I really liked the notion that Geppetto had a kid before, making him a fallible character when Pinocchio comes around, it does seem like it is messing with the rights and wrongs of the universe.  In my head, he was going to get Carlo back, considering that Pinocchio and Carlo are both voiced by the same actor.  Or, alternatively, Pinocchio would learn his lesson and become a better behaved child that would stop giving his father grief.  Nope, and that's where I give points.  Sure, I'm not sure if I'm a fan of Pinocchio getting an extra life because that's also false hope for parents who have lost children. But I do like the idea that Pinocchio's "real boy" status isn't one of flesh and blood like Carlo.  His real boy status is one of mortality. It all ties together!  (I regret writing that, but I also stand by it?)  Pinocchio doesn't have to become a different person because society accepts that different person.  If he became a physical flesh child (gross), it would be symbolic that he wasn't who he was born to be: a wooden boy.  Yeah, it's dark and very del Toro-y that he will live an abnormally long life, like the Face of Boe. But I kind of like it too.

There are so many moments that I really like. But there are two that hold this movie back for me.  The first one is just criticism of quality.  This movie absolutely shouldn't have been a musical.  The music isn't very good and often, it's incomplete.  I'm sure it comes down to the fact that to animate a song-and-dance number with stop motion is unnecessarily challenging.  But, man, those songs are bad.  It would be an understatement to say that they aren't catchy or something.  They honestly don't even feel like songs.  It's like someone took lines of text from the book and tried to force them into a short song structure.  And Pinocchio doesn't need to be a musical...at all.  Like, nothing is forcing Pinocchio into a being a musical. 

The second complaint is a lost opportunity.  To get this rad moment where Pinocchio sacrifices his life for his father, he has to agree to become mortal.  The whole infinite deaths element of the movie is almost wasted for the sake of getting to this end.  The film is about war.  The fascists have conscripted the immortal Pinocchio into war.  For those who haven't seen the movie, I have to let you know the cost of Pinocchio's immortality.  The rules are, that every time Pinocchio dies, it takes him a little longer to come back.  That's the punishment.  Look at the opportunity there.  Pinocchio has been forced by the fascists to become this immortal soldier. Imagine waking up each time and find that the war is still going on, only to die moments later. That opportunity is there.  Because he was so foolish about his desire to become a soldier, he never sees his dad again.  Or maybe he sees him dying from extreme old age.  Yeah, it misses the original narrative.  But if you have these strong motifs running through a movie, you have to use both of them.  It's so weird that it doesn't work at all. It is just rushed through and Pinocchio actually escapes the war pretty quickly.  

So it's a great movie with flaws.  I don't know why we keep coming back to the Pinocchio well though.  It's a fine story, but I'm a bit Pinocchio'd out, if I'm honest. It's a movie that would have crushed had I not just seen a movie about Pinocchio last year.  Del Toro crushes it, with the exception of a few elements.