Rated R for all kinds of reasons.  Besides being a movie fundamentally about cruelty and greed, the movie has on-screen brutal murder, language, blasphemy, child abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, and other such things.  It's one of those movies that just feels bleak, which is fine because it was never really intended for children.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Paul Thomas Anderson

I'm letting the grand experiment begin.  I'm back to writing the novel and --God forbid! --it's actually going well.  When I wrote the first draft of the book, I avoided movies so I wouldn't have to write blogs.  But I have enough study halls where I can be productive writing and still maintain the blog.  I won't lie.  I'm going to stick some longer films in here so I don't have to write blogs as often.  But I'm seeing if I can write a blog after spending multiple hours a day already writing.  It's a bit much; a bit extra.  But I also like the idea that I'm the most productive human alive.

There Will Be Blood might be one of those perfect movies.  I have this theory that there are a handful of perfect movies.  They might not be my favorite movies, but they might be perfect.  There Will Be Blood is really hard to criticize in my head.  It's not a surprise that I worship at the altar of Paul Thomas Anderson.  But There Will Be Blood might be the movie that got me into PTA.  (I did it.  I called him PTA.  I was wondering if I would ever be that guy and I just proved that I am.)  There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece that sits on the foundation of a movie that should be unsellable.  Honestly, if you summarized this movie to me, I would think that this is an incredibly boring idea.  Oddly enough, I own the book that the movie was based on and I haven't read it.  (It's on the list to be read soon.) There seems to be nothing fun about this movie.  In retrospect, it might not actually be fun at all.  But what should be an incredibly boring film is, scene-for-scene / shot-for-shot one of the most fascinating pieces of cinema ever created.  (Again, I tried to figure out how to get it on my Top 4 movies on Letterboxd and I can't move the other four.  I kinda / sorta want to move Seven Samurai off of that list, but each time I watch that movie, I love it more.) 

What makes There Will Be Blood is that it is the perfect storm of every element.  My gut wants to say that this is an engaging study of the human condition through Daniel Plainview, a man who is so aggressively flawed, juxtaposed by his bizarro mirror, who is also evil. That's absolutely true.  Daniel Plainview and Eli are the perfect two-hander.  Daniel is a monster of a human being who has snippets of humanity.  While the movie ends with Daniel telling H.W. the reality of his birth, claiming that the child was nothing but a mask for Daniel's demonic selfish nature, the flash implies that --for as much as that may have been the initial choice that Daniel made --H.W. was a loved child.  Yet, we see this kid hate Daniel the further that H.W. is plunged into silent isolation.  The pride that Daniel has at H.W.'s wrath seems genuine.  When H.W. returns home from San Francisco, he starts striking out at Daniel, he praises the child.  Daniel takes what is fundamentally immoral and finds value in the displays of the immoral.  One of the more quotable moments in the film is when he is being baptized by Eli.  It's the "I've abandoned my child" scene.  This moment is Eli's revenge.  It goes as far as Eli using this baptism to hit Daniel without chance of recompense.  Daniel's humiliated at the notion of having to wear the weakness of Christian virtue, despite knowing that Eli is a fraud.  But once Eli starts with the hits, there's a hint of a smile on Daniel's face.  There's a respect for the perversion of religion for the sake of revenge.  

Counter this with Eli.  Both Daniel and Eli are characters that wear masks.  With the case of Daniel's mask, it's a little straightforward.  He starts his presentations in every town saying, "I'm an oilman." Translated, "I'm a businessman" or "I'm a conman."  There's almost a tacit understanding that Daniel is there to roll out a product and present it in the best possible light.  But Eli inverses that.  Eli is a monster, much in the same way that Daniel is.  The odd thing is that he is in conflict with another monster.  (All these Godzilla movies are helping me with this blog!)  Eli wears the mask most of the time.  We see Daniel lose the facade while Eli stays as the character the entire time.  This is very much The Prestige.  Daniel calls Eli on his showmanship the first time that he visits the Church of the Third Revelation, but we don't really need that explicit observation to really pick up on that.  Eli's character is seductive for him.  It gives him importance.  He loves being a big fish in a small pond.  While Daniel may derive joy from the beating he receives, to Eli, that is the worst thing that can happen to him.  Being humiliated like that shows that he is untouchable.  For Eli, his position as God's representative on Earth is quite literal.  He wants to be treated as God.

As God, he humiliates those around him.  He is the wrathful God who will not stand for human weakness.  If we remove Eli's title as the pastor of the Church, Eli is a guy who beats his father for giving away land to Daniel Plainview.  That's pretty messed up, but that's what is happening in that scene.  He is mad at his own weakness and decides to shame those around him.  It is a grasp for gaining power back and it works.  These two characters, Daniel and Eli, drive each other into further misery for their own selfish needs.  But that dynamic isn't necessarily the same.  There's a specific power dynamic that we don't see very often.  Eli, from Daniel's perspective, is so beneath him.  He should be a bump in the road, at most.  But this is a kid that he ends up beating to death with a bowling pin, not because he embarrassed himself, but because he allowed himself to fail.  Eli highlights Daniel inherent flaw: his hatred for failure.  When H.W. goes off to form his own oil company in Mexico, Daniel hates H.W., but allows it to happen.  But Daniel gets violent when his competition drops the ball.  With Henry, that moment of vulnerability showing that the con man couldn't maintain the illusion causes Daniel to shoot Henry.  When the man from Standard Oil tells Daniel how to do something that he's not good at (raising his son), he makes an enemy for life.  But he only beats Eli to death when Eli comes begging for money.  He's hated Eli the entire time, but there's at least a weird respect between game-recognizing-game.  Eli becomes a reflection for Daniel's own failures, which mostly include leaving the game.  As greedy as Daniel is, the real failure is allowing himself to live a life of luxury.  It's probably why Standard Oil's offer of a million dollars is so insulting to him.  It's  offering him a life without purpose, much like Star Trek: The Motion Picture with Kirk.

But everything in this movie is so good.  It's minimalist plot coupled with amazing visuals is what makes Paul Thomas Anderson so darned impressive.  He does so much visual artistry with so little to work with.  Everything is visually stunning.  I was almost angry looking for photos of this movie because none of them were high res enough to really show off how good this movie looks.  (Scans were probably made in 2007 and not updated.)  

But then there are the performances.  I know that Daniel Day Lewis will always be praised as one of the greatest performers ever.  He's earned that reputation.  But this might be his best performance.  Daniel Plainview, a guy who wears his intentions on his sleeve, is somehow still a nuanced character.  There are levels to be extracted from every choice that Daniel Day Lewis makes that are teases and behind the eyes.  And this is the movie that introduced me to Paul Dano.  Up to today, I will still say that Paul Dano is one of the greatest actors.  I go to movies knowing that Paul Dano is in the movie and it's because of There Will Be Blood.  Eli has those intense, wrath of God scenes.  But he also is this guy who has evil behind the quiet moments.  Eli is terrifying.

One thing if I had to criticize the movie.  It is my job.  Asking Paul Dano to do double duty as both Paul and Eli is incredibly confusing.  I read the story about why they did that.  It needed to be addressed way before the end of the movie.  Even Daniel Plainview questions this moment when he meets Eli.  He thinks he's being played.  But Daniel has knowledge that we don't.  He knows what happened to Paul that we never got.  The fact that the family never really talks about Paul made me question whether or not Paul was real or simply a manipulation by Eli at the start of the film.  It's really confusing, but I'm glad there's resolution at the end.

Okay, I didn't write as much as I usually do.  Writing this much is exhausting.  That being said, I also have a hard time writing about movies that I adore.  I just need to remind myself that more doesn't always equal better.

PG-13 for the typical summer blockbuster stuff.  Again, I cannot stress enough how this franchise has massive casualties that never are really addressed.  Like, so many people die and you never really think about it unless you choose to.  Then there's some swearing and scary moments.  Big monsters get hurt.  If you think about the incredible amount of casualties, you would be horrified.  But it's the same as playing Rampage.  It's just part of the storytelling experience.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Adam Wingard

Why?!  Why do I keep returning to this franchise?  I know that I don't really like it.  I can almost assuredly say that I keep returning because I've invested so much into it.  Listen, as many movies that are out there that I would watch, I am even further behind on TV shows.  But as I was slogging through what was ultimately the same movie I've seen time and again, I was trying to figure out when I would watch the Monarch TV show spin-off of these movies on Apple TV+.  That's how wired I am for closure on something.  I want to know that I've seen everything, even if I don't really care for the original product.

Part of me was resigned to watch this.  I had just finished the five-plus hour Fanny and Alexander and I needed something way dumber to relax the old mind-grapes. I also had the horror of realizing that Ingmar Bergman also has a five hour Scenes from a Marriage in the box set that I will be knocking out ASAP, especially considering that I'm about to start writing the novel again come Monday.   Keeping all of these things in mind, I decided to watch Godzilla x Kong because I needed something completely vapid.  And vapid it was.  Man alive, this movie is paradoxical in its storytelling.  There's just so much jam-packed nothing going on.  It's not just that there was nothing going on.  That would make the movie seem boring.  Instead, we're constantly reminded of all of the different characters and plotlines in play and none of them seem to matter.  There is a hierarchy of story though and, oddly enough, Godzilla isn't in a ton of those main plots considering that he's the first word of the title.  The movie has the human protagonists putzing around the jungle of Hollow Earth (a concept I'm having a really hard time getting past my critical sensor) while Kong is looking for his own kind.  The human story...isn't much.  There's a little bit of a story when it comes to what it means to be an adoptive parent and I suppose I can applaud the movie for giving their plot a modicum of meaning.

But oddly enough, it seems like the actual protagonist of the movie is King Kong.  He gets a lot of screen time.  Good for him.  He's a king. Anyway, I do applaud the odd humanization of this giant ape.  Honestly, the first few moments of this movie, I thought hat King Kong was portrayed by a silent Sam Elliott.  He's a guy just fightin' his way through the wilderness.  He can't eat because his tooth hurts and he's just lookin' for his family.  There was one moment where I thought that Kong was going to lower the brim of a massive cowboy hat and sleep in the orange sunset.  Yeah, it gives Kong characterization and someone that we can latch onto in the big fight sequences, but it's almost a bit much.  The point of the original King Kong was that animals had souls.  "Twas beauty that killed the beast" or whatever.  But Godzilla x Kong takes it to a level where Kong has capability for incredibly complex thought.  This is the kaiju movie where King Kong has the capability to make Rambo  / Kevin McCallister traps.  Like, I don't know why I need that separation between Kong and the human characters, but I just do.

I'm really trying here.  I want to give an in-depth and thoughtful blog, but this is a movie that is almost so dumb that there's nothing. I firmly believe that almost every movie has something to pick apart.  I could talk about my favorite scenes.  I knew that somewhere in this blog that I would be mentioning that Kong, during the awful Meet Cute between him and the other apes, uses Mini-Kong as a weapon and that was highly satisfying. But that's not analytical in the least.  And that's the movie.  This is a movie that almost fights to be about nothing.  The weird part about that is that it also kind of lowers the stakes of the film.

The bad guy of the movie is the Scar King, a character that is so incredibly underdeveloped that I'm not really sure if this is a blip on the radar for most people living on Earth.  While Kong using a baby ape as a pair of nunchuks might have been the high point of the movie for me, there's a scene where Dr. Andrews (whose name I absolutely had to look up for the sake of this blog) reads what is supposed to be ancient lost-culture hieroglyphs.  It's her specialty.  After all, she has an Iwi (?) daughter.  But she is reading what are clearly just loosey-goosey cave drawings and telling a complex story about the Scar King. But all of that is happening in a exposition dump that should never have happened.  There's no way that's the level of detail that is happening in those drawings.  Anyway, we never really get to understand how much of a threat that Scar King is beyond what we're told.

I mean, obviously, we're meant to see the parallels with the two monsters mirroring Godzilla and Kong.  I just wish that there was some kind of tie between these characters besides the fact that they are similar styled monsters.  I get that the Scar King is a really bad dude who enslaves his own people.  I just don't really see him as a threat that Kong couldn't take care of without a little bit of planning.  After all, he made those absolutely absurd Rambo traps when he was being chased down...another moment that I call complete shenanigans on.   It seems like we're meant to believe that this jerk of an ape is the end of the world character, worthy of waking up Mothra.  (Is it weird that while I find Mothra as a deity absurd, my mind can rationalize it because I've seen enough of the classic Godzilla movies?)  It honestly seems like Kong should have been willing to rally the troops and stage a revolt against this guy who can't be on his game all of the time.  That might have been a more satisfying ending because what this movie (and really these movies) are simply equate to CG creatures punching each other until the credits roll.  There's no real smart epiphany these things have.  They punch until the obvious advantage is balanced and then the movie ends.

Let's talk about what I'm conflicted with.  That old ape, right?  That was a mirror of Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained, right?   That was literally all the thought that went into it. I'm not crazy, right?  Also, completely anticlimactic death for that ape.  

Anyway, I didn't hate this movie.  I just don't care at all for this film.  It makes me really wonder what attracts these actors to come to this movie because this cast is too good for this movie.  I want to talk about Dan Stevens and Brian Tyree Henry in this film, but I have nothing to say outside of "How big was that paycheck?"  Maybe they were having fun, but I don't see much about these movies that shows quality.

Not rated, both because this is an international film, but also because it was a TV mini-series in 1983.  Isn't this a blog about movies?  Well, it counts as a movie because it is the expanded form of a theatrically released film.  It is not for children, although it never really feels outright offensive.  I mean, the movie has sex and nudity, domestic and child abuse, language, adulty, sexual boundary issues with children, discussions about abortions, and some pretty brutal deaths.  Despite its tone being tame, it actually has a lot of objectionable content.  Also, blasphemy...

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

I've technically gotten a few days off from blogging because it takes a minute to watch a five-and-a-half hour movie / mini-series.  I did it on purpose.  I wanted a nice little break and I knew that I should knock out one of the editions of Fanny and Alexander so I wouldn't have to write about them borderline back-to-back.  So I skipped ahead so I could just get this one out of the way.  Now, the crazy part is that I've seen this version of the movie before.  I actually haven't watched the theatrical cut yet.  But I'll tell you what.  I didn't remember much about this movie until I started rewatching it.  It was the right amount of time, too.  While things came back to me, it was kind of like watching the movie anew.  And let me tell you something.  I remember why I liked this movie so much.

There's so much that I kind of want to say and they're all kind of half-formed.  Please be patient with me.  Fanny and Alexander feels like a fusion between the Brontes and Henrik Ibsen.  Heck, Ibsen even gets name-dropped in this movie.  There is something just elevated about this that puts Fanny and Alexander almost in the academic canon.  Sure, cinephiles are wholly aware of this movie, if only because Cinefix often uses stills of this movie when discussing color choices.  But Fanny and Alexander is just a smart and meticulously crafted film that has some of the themes and motifs that we see in classic literature.  The greats seem to take small stories about individuals enduring unimaginable hardships and elevating them to epic proportions.  Now, I'm not quite sure why the movie is named Fanny and Alexander, because this is fundamentally Alexander's story.  (I mean, I get that Fanny is with him for a lot of the film, but we experience the traumatic events through Alexander's eyes.  Fanny barely speaks the entire film and often isn't the one making decisions or taking risks.)   I can't speak to the theatrical version yet, but Bergman slowly builds up the world of the Ekdahls, a flawed family that is --for all of its toxicity --incredibly functional.  When the lynchpin of the family is removed because of what seems to be a stroke, a grieving widows quick rush to normalcy ruins everything for the core Ekdahl family members, most notably the children.

Again, my Daddy Issues are what bind me to this story.  Okay, I wasn't locked in my room by my stepfather.  He and I just butted heads similarly to Alexander and the bishop.  But the story is just a well-crafted version of what other people have attempted.  Bergman, especially the later Bergman, rarely takes so focused and explicit of an approach when it comes to storytelling.  It's not that he's being lazy with Fanny and Alexander.  Quite the opposite.  There are still moments to analyze and interpret in this story, especially when it comes to Alexander's relationships to potential ghosts coupled with a hatred for God.  But Fanny and Alexander seems to carry Bergman's most intense development of character that isn't hidden under layers of abstract storytelling.  While it may take about an hour to mentally chart the personalities and conflicts of the large Ekdahl family, these characters, by the time the conflict is in full swing, are so well-explained that each of their choices makes sense in the grand scheme of the story. 

I hate to use the word "villain" when it comes to the antagonist of the film.  "Villain" has an almost simplistic connotation.  Often, action movies have villains.  But Bishop Edvard is such a terrifying villain because he's this character that, no matter what is levied against him, he always seems to be holding the cards.  When Emilie threatens to leave him, he has the law on his side.  When he is seemingly backed into a corner by Gustav Adolf over a matter of money, he prides himself on loving the simple life.  He is this constantly flowing river of underestimation that he becomes honestly quite frightening as an antagonist.  Now, part of me wants to criticize that.  Edvard kind of teeters on the edge of realistic and moustache twirling.  Remember, characters can be antagonists and still be morally right and good.  That's not Edvard.  Villains tend to do things because they embrace the notion of being evil.  Selfishness and sin is their primary motivators.  See, I still see Edvard as an antagonist and a villain (which is normal), but I don't think that Edvard sees himself as the villain.  There are moments where Edvard tells Emelie that she should not hate him.  He begs for her love and once even concedes that he will treat the children nicer. 

But Edvard's motivation is also incredibly terrifying.  Every time that Edvard does something horrible, he claims that he does so out of love.  Yet everything in his world is built upon a world of misery.  Even the ghosts in Edvard's attic are malevolent.  When Alexander is locked in the attic for telling damning lies about Edvard (which was told to an awful spy who never really gets her comeuppance, unless she burned in that fire too), he sees these two girls who claim that he shouldn't disparage their father by telling stories that the girls wanted to escape.  (I should note, I love that Bergman never really gives us a clear indication that this is an outright ghost story or not.  It seems like Fanny sees the ghost of their mutual father, but that could be the imagination of children.) In the weirdest way possible, Edvard does see himself as the hero of the story.  You can see this internal conflict within him when he sees that his very intense behavior is both morally deplorable and the only way for a man of the cloth to live.  Coupled with that is the fact that Edvard has his own universe inside of his home, creating an echo chamber for his bankrupt personality.  It's really interesting.

I love the plays, guys.  I love that Bergman wholeheartedly embraces some of the foundational walls of Hamlet to tell the story of an abusive stepfather coupled with the ghost of a father.  Now, I don't want to be the guy who throws Emilie under the bus.  She deserves to, but I want to be really careful as I discuss Emilie. "Frailty, thy name is woman" is such a great line that I don't think is in this movie.  Just to be completely clear, the final play that kills Alexander's father is Hamlet.  Of course, he plays the ghost of King Hamlet, which is some pretty on-the-nose foreshadowing.  But Emilie tells Alexander that he is not Hamlet and that Edvard is not Claudius.  It's just that...he is?  And all of that really fits with Emilie's story.  Emilie is perhaps one of the most frustrating parts of this story.  To a certain respect, you understand her perspective.  She doesn't want to be alone.  She's vulnerable and this confident guy who is respected in the community makes his intentions clear.  But we're all in Alexander's shoes (partially because he's the avatar for the audience) in thinking that this is a terrible idea.  After all, he's really introduced to Alexander as a major character through a disciplinary action that is far too intimate for an outsider to be discussing.  But Emilie can't see it.  She spirals as Edvard gets continually more and more abusive to the family.  But "Frailty" works really well tied to Hamlet because she keeps ping-ponging back and forth.  She is grateful for Isak's intervention in kidnapping her children, but then she begs Carl and Gustav Adolf to bring the children back.  My only read of that scene is that he has coerced her, but also that she really wants her kids back.  It's an odd moment.

Can I tell you what moment locked the film for me?  It's the final shots of the film.  Alexander has gone through hell to get out of that house.  The epilogue shows the rejuvenation of the main cast.  The Ekdahls still have their hang-ups, but people are happy.   As Alexander walks down the house, a new ghost has come to haunt him and that is the ghost of Bishop Edvard.  Listen, my final takeaway about the ghosts is that they are just as real as the movie needs them to be.  But the honest truth is that, as good as things are for Alexander, he has been traumatized by his time with this monster of a man.  Edvard claims that Alexander will never escape him and that is the most relatable moment of the movie for me.  It's so good and I can't explain how this movie needed this ending.  The movie is depressing and it needed a bittersweet ending.  The dismount is mostly positive, but that moment is a healthy dose of reality.  Emilie's choices will stay with that boy forever. He no longer has a relationship with God and, honestly, his interactions with adults is probably permanently skewed.   Still the movie works with that.

Golly, I forgot how good the movie was.  Is it long?  Yes.  Will I admit that there were times that I didn't want to watch it?  Sure.  But there are also times when I don't want to read, despite the fact that I love reading.   It's one of those masterpieces of cinema that, between the visuals and the narrative, everything just works.  I'm curious how the theatrical version is going to play out because the nuanced storytelling goes a long way to making this thing greater than the sum of its parts.  Still, I am excited...eventually.

Rated R for sexuality, violence, and language.  It's an upsetting movie at times with a character that is both unlikable and oddly elicits empathy.  (I was going to use the word "pathetic", which kind of means that, but it has such a negative connotation.)  While this is an A24 movie, it isn't nearly as upsetting as most of the things that A24 has offered in the past.  Still, definitely not for kids.

DIRECTOR: Kristoffer Borgli

I'm being productive well into the night.  I needed something that I really wanted to watch before I started Fanny and Alexander: The Television Cut.  I've seen Fanny and Alexander before.  I remember liking it.  That being said, after the string of homework-y movies, I just wanted to watch something that I was genuinely excited to watch.  The downside, for me, is that it's almost 1:00 am and I'm writing a blog instead of knocking out a few hours of a so-so Playstation game. (I've also been aggressively reading a book I dislike just so I can be done with it.  Really, I've let my downtime also become work.) 

It's always hard to write about things that I like.  I knew I was going to like Dream Scenario.  From the first trailer, I saw that it was going to be one of those movies that I absolutely adored.  And guess what?  It lived up to every expectation.  Nicholas Cage is going through a pretty sick renaissance right now.  I know.  He's still Nicholas Cage and I can't stop thinking that the protagonist is Nicholas Cage.  He's not necessarily doing the traditional performance that Cage puts on, but I kept thinking how miserable Cage must be doing the bald thing. In my head, he's bald with a hairpiece on for the receded hairline, but that's just me doing some guess work.  Do you know what?  It didn't matter that I kept focusing on Nicholas Cage.  There's almost a meta-narrative working with the idea that Paul Matthews became the most recognizable person on Earth and the same is probably true about Nicholas Cage right now.  (Okay, he's not the most famous person on Earth.  Like I said, he's having a good run currently.) 

This movie might get the rare perfect score from me, but it isn't a perfect movie.  There's a couple of things that are scratching at my noodle that aren't necessarily flaws, but I kind of wish that the movie just nuanced a bit.  Like many of the greats, especially from the avant-garde A24 movies of the past, Dream Scenario --for all of its high concept --has something quite timely to say.  As much as we focus on Paul as the protagonist, coupled with all of his flaws, the movie is more of a commentary on the fickleness of society.  Yeah, Borgli wrote a pretty complex character in Paul, who is kind of the worst and yet worthy of empathy (I already wrote this!).  It's weird that Janet loves her husband because the guy is completely self-involved.  He's kind of this pathetic (there's the word used tonally correctly!) because he's a guy who is always about to do something without actually doing it.  When people start having dreams about Paul, he's this completely passive element to the dream.  (I don't actually know why Molly is having sexual dreams about him when no one else is.  Maybe it's the notion that Janet thought of him in a sexual way, thus Paul projects that into people's minds?)   But we're kind of meant to hate Paul at times.  When he cheats on Janet in the most pathetic (again!) way possible, we're kind of meant to hate him.

But it is when the societal bullying happens, that's when the movie flips the script.  Borgli created this character that gets punished in spades.  We're never really meant to like Paul because he's kind of the most weakling version of ourselves.  He wants to be special without really doing anything all that special, shy of coining the term "antelligence". But Paul is mostly right.  The world starts hating him because he's become the subject of countless nightmares.  These nightmares, admittedly, are pretty brutal.  But there's this divide between the logical self understanding that the real Paul wasn't actually doing anything (besides feeling rage when reading that his ideas were lightly plagiarized) that caused people to be harmed, because they weren't harmed.  It's just that Paul Matthews the character lacks the self-awareness to see how he comes across to people.   This gets into the cancel culture stuff.  There's no red flag here, but there is a bit of a yellow flag for me.

See, as much as we can be annoyed by the waking world's Paul Matthews, he's not an evil dude.  The world doesn't know that he cheated on his wife.  His wife probably doesn't even know that he cheated on his wife.  I can see not liking a dude if his extramarital affair became public.  I'm actually kind of down being done with people based on bad behavior. But the world cancels Paul for something he actually didn't do.  On top of that, the cancelling is really mean.  I'm starting to split into different arguments, so give me a pass if this gets a little sporadic.  The movie uses the term "cancel culture," not me.  While Borgli claims that this isn't a movie about cancel culture, he couldn't dodge the parallels that happen in the movie.  The thing that makes me a little bummed in this movie is that Paul, from everyone's perspective, didn't actually do anything worthy of being cancelled.  (Again, we know the reality.)  There is a somewhat inherent message that victims of cancel culture are actual victims.  I do feel for Paul when people start bullying him. But I also want to stress that all of the actions against Paul are actual examples of bullying.

Instead of communicating more valid concerns towards Paul, someone scribbled "Loser" on the side of his car.  Not "Monster".  Not "Leave us alone!".  "Loser."  Yes, Paul is a loser.  He's an incredibly awkward dude who is convinced of his own superiority. That makes him a loser.  But people don't hate him for being a loser.  They hate him because he gives them nightmares.  The guy spits in his food.  The movie states explicitly that Paul isn't the character in people's dreams.  The sex scene with Molly kind of confirms that.  He's completely incompetent and non-threatening in the waking world.  It's just that character in people's heads that is horrifying.  I can't believe the guy spit in his food despite the association that he had with Paul in his nightmares.

What's really interesting is the odd track that this movie has on the concept of fame.  Early on, Paul learns the dark side of being famous.  When a mentally ill person breaks into his house and threatens him with a knife, you would think that Paul would want to distance himself from the dreams.  It's not like he has any control over them, but he doesn't take any pro-active steps to remove these dreams from his life.  Now, I almost can't begrudge Paul his attempts to get a book published with his newfound fame.  It's a lemons-into-lemonade thing that I completely understand. But the second half of the film gets incredibly dark and scary. It seems like Paul would want to get rid of this thing that is making him a social pariah.  But the one thing that stays consistent with Paul is that he never really wants this curse removed.  He hates it.  When he's sleeping in a propane soaked basement with a sterile light that won't shut off, it seems like Hell.  But he never really wants to get rid of this curse.  When the curse just disappears, he does anything to send himself into his wife's dream.  This is an amazing ending and pays of the David Byrne / Talking Heads Chekhov's gun that is introduced in the first act.  But I also think that he's still so unaware of his own place in society that he needs anything that would make him special.

By the way, of course someone would find a way to monetize dreams in this world.  I am a big fan of "unless you have a perfect explanation, don't have any explanation at all" in high concept stories.  You don't need to tell me why the dreams are there.  You don't need to tell me why they went away.  Nothing would really be a valid answer.  It is a bit of a shift to get behind the technology guru who figured all of the ways to invade people's dreams.  I accept it because it's great commentary on how people would market traumatic feelings.  But it's also this sad moment for society that we have to admit that we would come to that. Also, I love how the dream guarantee just doesn't quite work all of the time the way that it is promised.  I personally would hate ads in my head.  I'm not quite sure if the dreams are going to everyone or just to those who signed up for the service.  Regardless, they have to have some kind of premium rate going, right?

Anyway, Dream Scenario is a wonderful high concept drama that kind of hits a slightly more adult tone than something like Groundhog Day.  These two movies share DNA in the sense that they start off a bit silly, but hit some real truths about the human condition.  I dug this movie a lot.  Maybe if I play it smart, I'll have a break.  But I kind of just scheduled a watch of The Fall Guy with my wife for tomorrow, so I'll be back to writing soon.

Not rated.  It's an early (if not the first) truly experimental film.  As such, it's hard to discuss such things as narrative issues.  Everything is about the image with this movie.  As such, there's nothing visual that could be considered offensive.  Because there is a shred of a story kind of running in the background of the movie, I do have to point out that someone is having an affair, but very little could be considered explicit.  

DIRECTOR: Mario Piexoto

I am burdened with having too much ambition (and other modest things that one starts a blog with).  The school year is around the corner.  I have a million goals that I want to accomplish, all of them self-imposed.  But the frustration of the day is that Limite needs to be discussed (again, completely self-imposed).  I can't imagine giving up this blog at this point.  I've been writing it for almost a decade at this point and it is such a sense of accomplishment having written as much as I have, but I also have other things that I want to do.  Also, I honestly don't know what I'm going to say about Limite.  I thought of a good stinger for it.  Okay, I thought of a subpar, but usable stinger.  "This movie pushed my good will past its Limite."

Honestly, when Criterion embraces completely experimental films, it's a bit of a chore.  I established with Revenge that the Martin Scorsese set is becoming a bit like homework, I'm really talking about Limite.  Academically, I get what what Limite brings to the cinematic canon.  It may be the first full length experimental film (although I doubt when I read that if it is true or not).  Heck, I even argue if it's completely an experimental film because there is the tiniest narrative running through the images on screen.  Do I think it's experimental?  Absolutely. You'd have a hard time finding people to disagree with that.  But one of the things that I realized quite early on that it is almost the responsibility of the viewer to ignore the narrative.  I know.  The movie creates paradoxical attitudes. For the first half, I really tried to follow the limited story going on.  I needed Wikipedia to help with this, by the way.  When I paid attention to the narrative, I gave specific value to images and motifs flowing throughout the picture.  But soon, I found myself judgmental about a limited narrative and wasn't getting the experience that Piexoto probably wanted from me.  So then I started watching it as a collection of images coupled with a soundtrack that does an incredible amount of heavy lifting.  It got me in mood, but I also felt like I was missing the purpose of the movie.  

Sure, there's probably a natural balance out there.  I mean, that's what cinema is.  It's the role of the audience to determine investment and it's not like I got nothing out of Limite. Earnestly, most of the imagery, especially for a movie from 1931, is darned impressive.  (Sure, I wish that Martin Scorsese didn't tell me about the bookended imagery and that it was just a copy of an ad.) It's a gorgeous movie and I can't even slightly pretend that it wasn't mostly impressive as could be.  But also, the movie becomes so meditative that I almost felt like I wasn't watching the movie.  There were three seconds where I had to turn away from the screen.  With silent movies, there's a special amount of intense concentration that is needed because everything comes from the visual part of the film.  But I realized, despite looking away for three seconds, I wasn't missing anything.  At one point, I realized that I wasn't really paying attention to anything.  There were long sequences of repeated imagery.  For about three solid minutes, we were just shown water.  It was pretty water, that was to be sure.  But it was just looking at water.  It was like someone chose to tell me what to meditate on as opposed to letting my mind drift to where it wanted to go.

It's not like the imagery was without purpose though.  If the movie was bookended with the image of the woman framed by handcuffs, the motif of incarceration --of one sort or another --did play throughout the film.  A lot of the movie is a juxtaposition between total freedom and being locked up.  The story, for what exists, shows the cast slowly perishing at sea.  Their prison is the water and each other.  But in their lives, from what I understand, there is something that is constraining them.  In some cases, as the woman shows, there is a literal prison that she escapes.  But the man is dealing with the imprisonment of an unjust marriage (from his perspective.  Methinks he dost protest too much.) Then there are transcendentalist ideas of escaping to nature.  Piexoto does all of these images of lush forests or high vistas and there is this automatic association with absolute freedom, which is ironic because the thing that is killing the characters is also nature.

Now, it is so unfair of me to criticize film techniques from 1931.  These are the people who are figuring out the language of film.  I have the benefit of having everyone else do the hard work and then I get to comment on it.  But for all of the beautiful techniques that Piexoto either discovers or adopts, there are some shots that are incredibly childish.  The one that bothers me less is the repetition shots.  I know.  There will be a rich history --especially in experimental film --to employ a repeated shot to pull an audience out of a grounded narrative.  Fine.  But there are moments where the film felt like watching a gif on repeat.  (At least the gifs I send are hilarious!)  But the thing that really bothered me is when Piexoto wanted to show chaos.

I'm going to give credit where credit is due when it comes to Piexoto's moving camera.  He does stuff that is insane for 1931.  But his chaos with the moving camera is dumb.  I'm sorry.  I know.  It's 1931 and he's trying stuff.   Normally, I would give the benefit of the doubt when it came to trying things out.  But why I find it frustrating is that there isn't much thought given to the spiraling camera.  Do you know why it irks me so much?  You hand any child a camera and tell them to make a movie, there's going to be a lot of that shot.  Sure, it gives the vibe of chaos.  But the most important thing about showing something that is out of control is that it has to look out of control while technically being in control.  This was just the cameraman doing what ever he wanted to do wtih that camera and it wasn't impressive in the least.  If anything, I felt like I was watching all of the footage on my iPhone after my kids got a hold of it.  Coupled with the fact that you have some absolutely perfectly crafted images, these moments kind of sully the surrounding footage.

90% of my gripes come from the fact that I don't typically love experimental film.  A movie can only shift into the avante-garde so much before my brain says "This is trying too hard."  It's the polar extremes that really bother me.  When a movie does nothing artistic, I get frustrated.  But get too artistic, and it almost feels like homework.  That's not an absolute thing.  There might be a certain mood where I would find Limite to be gorgeous.  But I kind of felt like I was watching more of a historical document than I was absorbing the movie with the intention that the director had when making it.

Rated R and Marvel is super proud of that.  While the f-bombs are akin to what we've seen with other Deadpool movies, Deadpool & Wolverine just amps up how much violence and gore there is.  I mean, the other ones are violent.  This one is priding itself on the gore going through the roof.  There are sex and drug references all through the film, but this movie is tamer in terms of sex and drugs.  The movie is trying to offend on a certain level, so keep all of that in mind when taking children to see the newest R-rated MCU film.  

DIRECTOR: Shawn Levy

Be forewarned!  I'm not the biggest Deadpool fan in the world.  Things that I think are true: 1) Ryan Reynolds is very funny and a perfect Deadpool.  2)  These movies are fun and incredibly watchable.  3) Ultimately, these movies are fine. Like, I get it.  The jokes are funny.  But the whole meta thing sometimes gets to be a bit much.  I absolutely think that these movies should exist and I always have a pretty good time at these movies, but I'm never going to be part of the Deadpool Parade.  So keep all of that in mind when I'm not absolutely in love with Deadpool & Wolverine. 

I remember a time when there were three MCU movies in the theater at the same time.  A lot has changed since then.  Disney has limited MCU films to apparently one per year.  The crazy part is that the only MCU movie we're getting in 2024 is an R-rated MCU movie that I can't take my kids to. Sure, we got a couple of TV shows.  Heck, we got Loki season 2, and that's some of the best stuff that the MCU has made.  (By the way, for all of the cameos in this movie, how is Owen Wilson not in this film?)  As the only MCU movie this year, there's a lot on this movie's shoulders.  Part of it comes from the idea that I want the meta-narrative to be pushed forward.  Now, I'm in the minority (which has been confirmed by Deadpool & Wolverine itself) that actually really likes the Multiverse Saga.  I think Marvel, for the most part, has kept up its tradition of excellence.  But on top of needing to continue the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, Deadpool & Wolverine is also the movie that is responsible for bringing Hugh Jackman out of Wolverine retirement for a movie that should, by all intents and purposes, be the ultimate Wolverine movie.   There's a lot on this movie's shoulders.

While that responsibility falls on Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and Kevin Feige, I don't know if it lived up to that expectation.  This movie got sold hard.  Like, really hard.  Like, it was going to be some top tier Marvel according to them.  I will say, it does exactly what it should, but it should not have been lauded as this great return to greatness for Marvel.  Really, Deadpool & Wolverine is a great Deadpool movie and an even better Wolverine movie, but it isn't objectively one of those movies that is going to change things.  We've been waiting for mutants.  Mutants still kind of only exist in another timeline. We've been waiting for Deadpool and Wolverine to join the main canon.  That still isn't true.  Instead, we have this as a finale to a different universe that has nothing to do with main MCU canon.

As a fond farewell to the 20th Century Fox movies, this movie absolutely slaps.  It's such a lovely goodbye to an effort that pulled off a proto-MCU before Marvel Studios formalized what is considered the Sacred Timeline.  I don't think anyone would deny that first and foremost, this movie is a roast of what came before it.  Deadpool movies are silly.  They're meant to be silly.  But these are jokes told with love.  After all, Feige cut his teeth on these movies.  He learned what it meant to make quality superhero movies.  And, sure, the 20th Century Fox Marvel movies have probably been more miss than hit.  But these were movies that were made with an intention to bring quality storytelling to the big screen.  As much as we kind of giggle in Deadpool & Wolverine, I was genuinely happy to see some of the characters that showed up from non-MCU films. 

Honestly, there's a top-tier movie in here if you really trimmed it down.  When the movie takes itself with a modicum of seriousness, there's a pretty solid film.  A lot of that comes from MVP Hugh Jackman, who hasn't lost a step as Wolverine. Sweet mercy, I was ready to give him a little bit of a pass when it came to this character.  Sure, he's done it a million times before.  But I've been watching the press circuit with goofy, giggly Hugh Jackman, seemingly giddy to be hanging out with Ryan Reynolds, and I forgot that the guy knew how to give old knifehands so much pathos. Honestly, the dude delivers on every single beat that he's in.  He never breaks character.  I know that we had an R-Rated Wolverine in Logan before, but somehow he never got lost in the campiness that is a Deadpool movie.  Part of me was going to be disappointed that this wasn't the Wolverine from the X-Men movies.  I don't know why that bothered me.  Maybe because I invested so much into that character that seeing someone who had the same actor, but a different story seemed disingenuous.  But honestly, Jackman made me really like this Wolverine.  He's a little bit of a "What If...", but I didn't mind that at all.  The movie works with what we have with this character.  I cannot stress this enough: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in this movie fit like a glove.  He seemed like a young man doing it all over again.

But that leaves me with the rest of the movie.  I can't stress this enough.  This movie is incredibly funny.  It absolutely nails what Deadpool is all about.  But if a Deadpool movie is a balancing act between diagetic storytelling and meta jokes, this movie might be going too far into the meta world of the MCU. We all get it.  Deadpool is aware of the world of comic books.  He's aware that he's in a movie.  That's fun.  But this was some inside baseball stuff that went a little too far.  There were a lot of moments where I could feel myself being totally insufferable and explaining a lot of the jokes to my wife.  Having to explain Blade: Trinity jokes was almost a step too far.  That's kind of the problem with Deadpool though.  Deadpool desperately wants to do both.  He wants to be a satire of the comic book movie character while simultaneously being the quintessential comic book movie character.  I don't know if Deadpool really grew in the ways that I wanted him to go with this movie.  Considering that this was the movie that everyone seems to really like, I found myself a little tired of this deep dive into the cinematic history of Marvel movies.

But again, it's all well and good.  There's a very good chance that I'll end up owning this movie on Blu-ray.  I'll watch it a few times.  I'll have a good time each time I watch it.  Seriously, it's that fun.  But in terms of actual comic book storytelling, I got really bored with the Void.  The Void was slightly tiring on the few episodes of Loki that we got.  Having a big budget tentpole movie take place almost entirely in the Void seemed like a bridge too far.  The MCU really hadn't advanced that much because of this film.  It kind of felt like another inconsequential side story, despite the fact that it opened the doors to a lot of potential superheroes showing up in a potential future Avengers film.  I wanted a "Can you believe that they changed everything?" and really ended up with "I suppose that you could use these elements later on."   

It's good, not great.  Hugh Jackman?  Great.  The movie as a whole?  Fun, but okay.

Not rated, but this movie involves the murder of a little girl.  Also, there's a weird sexual sequence involving blood that I really can't explain.  Yeah, this movie should be R-rated,  but also has the tone of confusion, which makes it seem somehow more scandalous.  Honestly, if I could beat-for-beat explain what was going on in this movie, it wouldn't be that bad.  Most of the movie is the protagonist walking around, delaying revenge.  Oh, and the death of Yan is pretty intense.  There's some animal cruelty in the film as well.

DIRECTOR: Yermek Shinarbayev

Oh man, there are so many things that I want to do way before writing about Revenge.  This is another entry in the Martin Scorsese World Cinema Collection from Criterion.  I think Revenge exactly nails what most of these movies feel like. My gut reaction is so disrespectful that it isn't even a little bit fair.  Part of what I honestly feel is that I'll probably forget every single movie in this collection.  Scorsese's right.  These movies need to be shown to the world.  Just because we haven't heard about these movies doesn't mean that they don't add to the cinematic canon.  But there's also something about these movies that almost feels like homework.  Revenge kind of nails that vibe perfectly.

One of the coolest things about Revenge is that it is a fairly modern movie that looks gorgeous.  Most of the things that Americans associate with Kazakhstan is what we get from Borat.  It's kind of why the joke works so well in those movies: we have no idea what Kazakhstan is actually like.  In my mind, it is mindblowing that Kazakhstan, Korea, and Russia aren't that separated.  I'm going to admit that I'm not used to Asian cultures speaking Russian throughout the movie, let alone the fact that Shinarbayev was trained at the VGIK.  Ultimately, the thing I like about Soviet era cinema is the very specific tone that is nailed in these movies.  I'm always kind of impressed by how they manage to get an epic scope with a bleak tone throughout.  That sounds like I'm dogging the film.  I'm not.  But I did say that this did feel like homework and that often comes from the fact that the movie dances between experimental film and traditional narrative.  From a traditional narrative perspective, a lot of Revenge works.  I don't know what it is about the chapter format when it comes to movies, but I like digestible stories that lead to a larger whole.  Mostly this works.  But there are parts that are either completely abstract and unproven or just a mess.

The film wants to get to the point of whether or not the young protagonist, Sungu, should actively pursue a revenge that fundamentally isn't his.  That's a really nifty story.  All of the stuff with Sungu is the stuff that makes you think and question morality.  A good revenge story should do that, by the way.  It's critical of the one getting revenge.  But this is a story that really spends a lot of emotional and philosophic real estate trying to get us to question Sungu.  So the middle of the movie, while sometimes abstract, is well-developed.  Getting there and getting out of the movie are weirdly raw and make not a lot of sense.

The film starts out with Yan, a teacher, just murdering a little girl.  The class is lightly giggling at his attempts at classroom management.  He then resorts to slaughtering this little girl who did nothing wrong. Now, that's pretty weak.  But as a character, we're meant to believe that he didn't want to kill this girl.  He was pushed too far on the wrong day.  (All off my complaints about this movie are silly and superfluous.  I know this story isn't about the narrative.  I'm just complaining because these moments irked me.) Okay, it's weak, but I can live with that narrative.  I invest in that moment.  But in Book Three or something, Yan visits Sungu.  He's there to brag.  What is his entire intention for doing this?  I know that Tsai failed to kill Yan when he had the chance, but it seems really out of character for him to intentionally hunt down the elder Tsai and remind him that Yan killed his daughter and there's nothing that he can do about it.  

The crux of the film is that Sungu would have made a great poet.  He was this kind boy who was literally bred for revenge.  He never knew his sister (although even that is kind of betrayed later in the movie when he sees the ghost / hallucination of his sister outside of Yan's home).  The frustrating thing is that Tsai gave up, something that also didn't make a lot of sense to me.  Tsai pauses when it comes to killing Yan because the healer distracted him.  But he kind of just...stops?  The married couple comes up with this idea to impregnate a mute concubine and that Sungu should be the vessel for revenge?  It's all...odd.  I get the notion. We wanted to have a naturally good person searching for a revenge that wasn't his.  But also...how did we get there?  There are all of these moments that are a bit of a bridge too far.

The insane thing about this is that the parts that are good are actually great.  Much of the movie is just this exploration of a life abandoned. Again, that is a movie I can get behind.  The worst part of me complaining?  That's most of the movie.  Most of the movie is about Sungu, taking a right when he should have turned left.  It's not even about this kid who is fully devoted to murdering Yan.  It's not that he avoids his destiny.  It's just that he's in this holding pattern for the majority of the movie.  Instead of being a poet and living with his mother, he works in a saw mill and lives a hard life.  He could have bee-lined it for Yan.  I suppose a lot of that comes from the fact that he lives in a pre-Internet society and he's not trained to be the World's Greatest Detective.  But a lot of that is just the notion that the Sungu that was meant to be cannot exist.  Even when he wants to find comfort in sexuality, there's the image of the bleeding genitals.  It's a weird moment guys and I'm unpacking it as I write.  While this moment is meant to tell that Sungu is suffering from the same ailment that killed his father, I get the idea he's just not allowed to have a moment of happiness.  It reflects the curse that his father placed upon him: no joy or sorrow.

The thing is...he feels a lot of sorrow.   The entire movie?  Sorrow.  It's a terrible life.  He's just this guy who floats his way through life because he's living someone else's life.  Now, I thought that this was going to be a movie outright commenting on the folly of revenge.  I don't think the movie gives me that kind of satisfaction.  Through Sungu's tarrying to kill Yan, Yan lives a far worse life than you could imagine.  The coolest part of this movie is that Yan spends his entire life looking over his shoulder, expecting retribution for the murder he created (coupled with a weird boasting that just made things worse).  He leads a terrible life as an alcoholic that is bullied by school children.  (Also, these school children confirm my theory that children in foreign films are real psychos and make American children in movies look like saints.) A flaming rat (yup) catches the barn he's sleeping in on fire and he burns to death, alone and drunk.  It's a lot.  That's a cool ending.  The weird part is...that's where the story of revenge should end.

Then...Sungu gets revenge even though Yan's burning to death seems like it's a way better revenge than sickle murder.  The woman that helps him, the healer, with whom he bonds, is somehow killed by a truck towing some absurd piece of metal?  Then he cuts that lady's head off using the sickle.  What?  Why?  That's not an ending.  That has little to do with the story.  At best (AT BEST!), I can see it in the sense that she was married to Yan and the closest thing to killing Yan would be killing the wife that hated him?  Or maybe because she interrupted Tsai's initial attempt to kill Yan?  Either way, kind of a messy ending and I'm going to go as far as to say that it was there for shock value.  I don't know.  I told you.  The beginning and the end of the movie are a mess.

I do still think that it is unfair that I'm poo pooing this movie as hard as I am.  It's just that, as good as the good parts are, so many moments are a mess.  The funny thing is, the next movie on the same Blu-ray is pulling the same card.  For as many pretty moments are in the film, there are some that are sloppy and rough to watch.  I wish that I was really sold on these movies as being classics.  But they do feel like homework.  I guess I'm glad I watched them, but they are a bit of a burden.

PG-13 for some mild language, racial themes, hate speech shown in a negative light, and mild sexuality.  Honestly, the sirens scene might be the only thing that slowed me down from showing this to my kids.  The racial stuff, it's done in the context of saying that Americans are racist, especially in this time period with the Klan.  The Klan look like jerks.  I can get aboard the Klan looking like a bunch of jerks.  Oh, and there's some animal cruelty and death in the movie.

DIRECTORS:  Ethan and Joel Coen

Do you know what is incredibly dumb on my part?  It's a little after 1:00 am.  I just finished posting my Twister blog moments ago, but I wanted to close up my "to do" list before going to bed.  So I thought that I would have a late night / early morning cup of tea and knock out O Brother, Where Art Thou? and hoping that I'll find what I want to say as I write it.  There are a couple of blasphemous confessions that I'll have to make early on.  The first is that, even though I'm an English teacher, I'm pretty sure that I never read The Odyssey.  There's a chance.  On my Goodreads account, I apparently gave The Iliad a one-star review way back in the day.  This sound like me, by the way.  It makes absolutely no sense, but Greek mythology does almost absolutely nothing for me. To apologize for this gap in my education, I started slowly reading it on my Kindle, reading annotations as I go so I can really grasp this.  The second confession is that, the first time that I saw O Brother, it did almost nothing for me.

That has changed.  I'd like to put that out there right now.  O Brother, Where Art Thou might be one of those perfect films and it is straight up a crime that I didn't care for it the first time.  I have always criticized Young Me's tastes.  When O Brother, Where Art Thou? came out, I think one of my favorite movies was Moulin Rouge.  (One day, I'll have to write a blog about that movie and I think I'm going to be ashamed for a long time.)  Part of my dislike for O Brother stemmed from the fact that I thought that it was going to be a very different film than it was.  "Man of Constant Sorrow" was the entire trailer for me.  I heard that song everywhere.  For some reason, I thought that the movie was going to center around that song when I first saw it.  That song is in the movie twice and it kind of is not about the song.  If anything, this is a somewhat silly look at character and setting and that's what makes it absolutely great.

Do I wish I knew what The Odyssey was like besides a general idea?  Yes.  That might be the only thing that can make an already great movie already better.  But even if I took O Brother as an original work, the concept is kind of brilliant.  The "Escaped Convict" movie is kind of a win-win for any storyteller.  Ultimately, it has the best genetics from the road movie, but it also gives a sense of stakes and impermance that is necessary to make a road movie great.  The trio in this film, as silly as they behave, ultimately have to be emotionally up and down constantly throughout the movie.  Part of this comes from the idea that Johnny Law is always on their tails, but it also comes from personalities that might not match the depths of their characters. Clooney's Everett is a bit of a mislead from moment one.  For the lion's share of the movie, Everett comes across as a con man.  He's even got the hair treatment to go with the Slick Willy persona that he outwardly manifests.  It's heavily implied that he's an armored truck thief, but we discover that Everett's crime is far more noble.  He's accused of practicing law without a license.  The Coens aren't dummies.  While they never harp on this point and never give him a free pass, Everett's crime is one of technical altruism.  We never really get details on Everett's slightly illegal law practices, but my natural inclination is that he tried to do right by someone and got caught doing it the wrong way.  Honestly, Chaotic Good alignment and all that.  

Contrasted with Everett is Pete.  No one in this cabal is truly evil. After all, Pete was supposed to be getting out of jail in two weeks if it wasn't for this mythical reward that Everett spun. But Pete is potentially the most criminal out of the three.  He's not a bad man.  But he lives in a world where crime is almost part of the moral fabric of day-to-day life.  He has a sense of right and wrong and the law is not a motivating factor in those decisions.  I adore that Pete is mad at Everett for stealing his cousin's watch, despite the fact that his cousin reported them to the police.  And, as silly as it is, he kind of has a point.  Everett does all of these immoral acts before they end up being justified by someone else's actions.  Yet, he doesn't mind all the crime that is happening around him.

Delmar is the comic relief.  He's a lovable moron.  

But O Brother, Where Art Thou? is just a playground. Yes, we deal with morality and friendships that develop through the story.  I honestly want to talk about God a bit in this movie, but I have to put the playground first.  One of the things about the road picture is that every story is a bit of a fish-out-of-water story.  These three, in their pursuit for a treasure that doesn't exist, run into every scenario that is meant to test comfort zones.  But what makes the movie such a joy to watch is something that the Coens and Wes Anderson share in terms of attitudes.  These characters find the absurd to be mundane.  That's where the comedy really hits.  I'm thinking of a handful of other road movies.  These road movies are great, so I'm not trying to disparage them.  I'm just saying what makes the Coens and Wes Anderson so great.  If you look at National Lampoon's Vacation, Clark Griswold is continually flummoxed by his bad fortune throughout the story.  That's normal.  As much as Clark is an over-the-top character with some abhorrent character traits, he's meant to be our avatar for the movie.  The trio here act in the most absurd ways imaginable.  They meet George "Babyface" Nelson (but don't call him that!) on the run from the police.  When he tells them to get into the car to help him with directions, despite seeing the approaching police on the horizon, they don't even question Nelson's request.  When Nelson robs a bank, they find the whole thing a bit much, but that never really slows them down.  They're eager to help their new friend, even though he seems almost psychotic in his desire for infamy.  And that's the film.  Clark Griswold probably would have robbed the bank as well, but the comedy there would have been him trying to get out of the situation.  Instead, the Coens painted their protagonists as guys who are going to see every situation through until the end, no matter how silly.  A Bible salesman beats Delmar silly, Everett is going to see where this is headed.  That's the movie.  

And that's perfect.  This ties into some of the message of the film.  The movie has two contrasts between Everett's grounded nihilism in the form of vocal atheism and Delmar and Pete's newfound religion.  Delmar's innocence is so intense that it becomes contagious for Pete.  Delmar, the second he sees a chance to save his soul, bee-lines it to the front of the line to get baptized.  Pete watches, more confused than skeptical, and sees the man get submerged.  Delmar, in all his simple-minded stupidity, explains that his sins were forgiven and that he's no longer guilty.  That absurd notion is enough for Pete and that colors the rest of the film.  Everett becomes our avatar then, understanding as we do that it doesn't quite work that way.  But the story is partially about how Everett isn't really part of the gang until the end.  Throughout the film, Pete is questioning Everett's de facto leadership.  It's because he's not really one of them until he gets down and prays.  If anything, this is a case for God, which is fascinating.  It's not like Everett will ever truly abandon his atheist spin, despite evidence to the alternative.  Instead, he becomes almost more respectful for the boys' joy in their faith.  He's the one who ends up looking a little silly when he sees the oracle's prophecy come to fruition in the river. It's almost as if Everett and God make a little deal to treat each other with a little bit more respect and that's enough.

But as much as I can wax poetic about themes that make the movie work, this is just Joel and Ethan Coen doing what they do best.  The aesthetics of a Coen Brothers movie is so specific that I've never really seen anyone nail it exactly the way that they do.  The Coens have an appreciation for a specific shade of Americana that takes a very specific personality to really enjoy.  And the thing about that look at Bluegrass attitude comes with it a slightly teasing tone.  I almost said "mocking", but I don't really think that it is it.  These guys keep making movies with these cultural touchstones because they are almost immersed in these kinds of characters.  They can poke fun at the things that they love and there's really nothing wrong with that.  It's teasing someone in a best man speech, not a roast.  

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a masterpiece.  I'm ashamed that I didn't really give it the time of day when it came out.  But between the Coens being on the ball with their comedy coupled with a visual and audio aesthetic that can't be beat, this might be one of those few perfect films.

PG-13 for language, including a hidden f-bomb if you have the subtitles on.  I think the subtitle even pops more if you have a room full of nieces and nephews with your kids watching it on a big screen.  The movie is a disaster movie, which means you are going to have some scary moments involving death, destruction, and blood.  But besides the random language and a radio tower to a guy's face, the movie is more tame than I remember.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Jan de Bont

Yeah!  We watched Twister, just like everyone else in America.  It's right there, sitting on Max.  Nobody's stopping you.  Crank that nonsense on.  We watched in the garage at night with the garage door open.  It was a beautiful night, which felt like a lost opportunity because this movie would have slapped even harder in a thunderstorm.  It's been a minute since I watched this one.  I honestly have more memory of the Universal Studios experience than I actually do that movie, so it was fun coming back to it.  I'll be honest.  As much as I'm a fan of a silent film watching experience, I just had to talk all the way through this movie.  And I'll tell you what.  In this case --IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE --it made the movie better.

Twister is its own thing.  Okay, it's not.  But Twister is both an absolutely terrible forgettable movie and a pretty darned good movie at the same time. Like, it's a dumb movie.  It's almost absurd what goes into this movie.  It's a bunch of dumb, but lovable characters, doing incredibly dumb stuff over and over again.  I get it...partially.  From Jo's perspective, she's doing this for a cause.  She wants to stop what happened to her as a child from happening to anyone else.  But also, like, what?  There's a lot of times where I wonder what the grand plan was.  Okay, I'm just going to go into my major gripe for the movie that I kept shouting out.  Dorothy, the weather system that Bill (Bill Paxton plays a character with whom he shares a name), needs some time to set up.  Sometimes.  SOMETIMES.  The entire plan:  Move this Dorothy unit in front of a tornado and then get out quickly.  Yet, they really dawdle on setting up Dorothy.  (The reason I stressed the "sometimes" bit is that the climax of the movie, Jo just flips a switch and it's good to go.)  (Also, UPDATE!  It's way too late, yet I am deciding to stay up and knock out two potential blogs?  That's stupid, but I'm doing this because my summer is practically over.) So much of the movie is them getting close to a storm, then getting wrecked by that storm because they drove into a storm.  

The crazy part is that the conflict of the movie is almost entirely arbitrary.  Again, this is a dumb fun movie.  The first draft of this movie had to be "We're driving towards that storm."  "Nope, not the right storm."  To fix this, they added scientist bad guys (whom I want to discuss ad nauseum besides the fact that the entire plot device is hilariously dumb) and non-flying sensors.  I'm going to talk about the sensors first because I'm locked into them, but we're going to do our best to turn this around on the scientist bad guys.  The sensors in this movie often get wrecked before they have a chance to get them airborne.  Okay.  Honestly, a lot of that comes down to lack of prep time because the container that the sensors are in gets knocked over all of the time.  The movie doesn't really make clear whether or not the Dorothy container is important to the sensors working.  In some ways, it's kind of like that "Is the Kool-Aid man the glass or the liquid?" meme, only with a Macguffin.  So in one of the rewrites, someone said that the sensors had to be somehow the problem with driving into storms.  So they called up the Pepsi corporation and asked if they wanted to be the reason that people stopped dying in tornados.  I'm not the biggest fan of product placement.  I was going to try and defend myself by pretending that product placement never really bothered me, but between the box of Cheerios in Superman: The Movie and the fact that I can't give Cast Away a reasonable chance, I think I'm pretty anti-product placement.  When Bill said that they need to find as many aluminum cans right now, I called shannigans because there's clearly no recycling plant in a town that just got leveled by a tornado.   But even more insane is that every single one of them was a Pepsi product?  Come on.  Sure, there's a version of the story where Dustin goes into a convenience store and buys out every case of Pepsi, downs a handful and spills a whole bunch into a ditch.  Sure.  But I don't by that.  That doesn't ring true.  Instead, what does ring true is that Warner Brothers got some quick funding from the New Generation to pup Pepsi all over these little sensors.  This bugs me.

Evil Scientists.  I told you they bugged me.  I'll tell you why.  When I was a kid and I saw Twister, this raised no red flags.  After all, Cary Elwes was born to play the sleazy competition in a movie where you kind of have to shut your brain off.  I even get that it is immoral to steal Bill's tech and try to deploy it yourself.  But do you know what doesn't really match this story?  Rushing to see whose tech can get into a tornado first.  Let's imagine that this story went a little bit differently.  After all, Bill didn't know that the F5 for sure was going to drift into Jonas's car.  He suspected that it might have, but he wasn't sure.  And let's say that Jonas got his sensors up into the air before Bill did, despite the fact that Pepsi wasn't sponsoring Jonas's cube drones (which had to fly worse, right?).  Jo's entire internal conflict was about the fact that she needed to pursue the weather to make sure that no other kid had to go through what she went through.  (Oh, I need to talk about Meg's mandate to Jo before I close up!) If Jonas's thing worked, it would have soured a good thing.  But let's remember.  It still would have been a good thing.  The goal was to get information on how tornados worked.  If these storm chasers could have figured out how tornados worked, then people would have been saved.  Yet, a lot of this movie is them almost killing each other trying to get to the tornados first.  Seems kind of morally weird and such an odd choice for an antagonist for a film.

I don't know if I have enough meat on this bone to provide a weighty argument worthy of a blog.  Meg, Jo's aunt, gives Jo a command.  After Meg is almost killed in her house, Jo says that she's going to stay with Meg until she gets better. Meg, aghast as such a prospect, gives her a real Jonathan Kent speech, saying that Jo has a responsibility to stop the F5 that's heading for more of Oklahoma.  I think all of our brains made the leap to "What she meant was that Jo has to finish the job so, in the distant future, tornados could be detected quicker and easier."  What she actually said was something along the lines of "Stopping the tornado." That's not the plot of this movie.  Jo, nor anybody else, really has that kind of power.  Stopping the tornado was never on the docket, Aunt Meg.  But it is one of those rally cries that gets everyone on board.  After all, if Meg, who has just lost everything, tell you to pick yourself up, you gone done pick yourself up.  

I think this might be a '90s thing, but I forgot how much of a romance this was.  It's got some heavy rom-com vibes and formulae to it. Add Dr. Melissa Reeves to the pile of jilted significant others who really didn't deserve what they had coming to them.  Dr. Reeves was there to be supportive.  Yeah, she's a little confrontational.  She's a therapist.  Okay, she's a reproductive therapist, but she's at least trying to start a dialogue with Jo when things get awkward.  Like Jo, she knows to get ahead of the storm so it doesn't take you by surprise.  She does almost nothing wrong, but Bill kind of mentally cheats on her.  Okay, give him points for not actually cheating on her and hooking up with Jo until after Melissa dumps him.  The only actual crime that Melissa did was being too cool with Bill about the entire events of the day.  She really could have vocalized that this behavior was inappropriate early on and that's a bit on her. But she also had some reasonable expectations that Bill would have considered her needs over that of the group. Still, rom com vibes.

As much as I'm teasing this movie, it still kind of slaps. (Oh yeah, the CG is hilariously bad and I fully blame 1996.) This movie is worth it almost entirely for the drive-in movie sequence.  Yeah, I teased it by saying that you can't make a movie better by showing a better movie in the middle of it, but that scene genuinely is incredibly memorable.   But that doesn't mean that the entire movie wasn't dumb.  I read somewhere that Jan de Bont was caught off guard by the announcement of Twisters because he wasn't consulted.  In my head, I started equating Twister to this cinematic masterpiece that couldn't be touched.  I now get why they didn't contact him.  There really was no need to.  This was a movie that hit right and does a lot of the disaster stuff right, but ultimately is a fluff piece that capitalized on the Amblin vibes that we don't really see anymore.  Is it perfect?  Far from it.  Instead, it's just a really good movie to watch in an outdoor theater, as long as you have good speakers.

Not rated, but almost as innocent as a movie can get.  There's one thing in the movie that could cause someone to look away.  One of the recurring images is that the subjects of the documentary are watching a magic show.  One of the magic tricks / gags is that the magician puts a knife through his arm, causing it to bleed.  But he even warns you that it is not for the squeamish, coupled with the fact that this is clearly a trick.  Besides that, nothing I can think of.

DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda

I've been trying to find the time to write this all morning.  Hazel is having another "Hold me, I'm a baby" day.  I might have a few minutes to knock out a couple of sentences, but we'll see.  Her nap is in the next twenty minutes and I might get ten to do something with this.  I'm in the weird place, blog-wise, where I have too many massive Blu-Ray collections and I'm trying to do all of them.  That's a great place to be, by the way.  I'd rather be in this pickle than the alternative and having to scrounge the bottom of the barrel looking for movies.  But with all of these box sets, I realize that it's been kind of a minute since I've really broken down an Agnes Varda movie.

I think it will always be true that I'll prefer a traditional fictional narrative from Varda than watching her documentary work.  But I also have to say that I'm more familiar with her later documentaries than I am her earlier documentaries.  Daguerreotypes might actually hit a sweet spot with me because this is Varda at her most pure.  Varda is someone who just loves having a camera.  When she overthinks things, I feel like it comes out like an imitation of Varda rather than something truly authentic.  Again, the gall on me to even question one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.  But Daguerreotypes feels incredibly authentic.  Varda (I think it's Varda!) narrates the movie sparingly, which I really appreciate.  But in that narration, she's almost diary style, discussing why she's making this movie.  She loves this street.  She loves the vendors who live on her street, so she made a documentary showing what it must be like to live in their shoes for about an hour.  Using mostly cinema verite methods (with Varda's obsession will mildly scripting moments), we kind of get an understanding of why Varda is so moved by the people who surround her geographically.

There's a bunch of clever things she does in this movie.  Remember how I just told you that she gets out of her head in this one.  I kind of still stand by that idea, but I feel like some of the real genius moments in this documentary probably happened in post.  I can't deny that the introduction of a magician had to be somewhere in the planning stages for the movie. But also, the takeaways from the magician sequences had to be just a moment of joy for Varda to find with her direction.   The magician, in this movie, does a bunch of stuff for the film.  One of Varda's themes in the film is the necessity for both practical manual labor and the joy that art brings.  The movie has a lot of themes.  That was one of them.  Don't fight me on this.  But she does so by having the working class people watch this magician.  I've mentioned this sentence ago.  I'll try to keep up too.  (Note:  There was a break there where I had to put the baby down for a nap and then the day got away from me.  I told you this would happen.) It's this moment that me as the audience sees these folks having a good time, but ultimately looking at this buffoon put on an illusion act.  It's in these moments that we have to have people who want to have a good time.  Thank goodness that's the way that the room went, but it almost didn't have to.  Watching these people have incredibly repetitive lives that is backbreaking, how can they contend with the notion that someone is going to sell them on fantasy?

And that's where Varda really sells me.  She has been microdosing me a theme for the majority of the movie.  I watch these people who are happy enough, but doing the same thing on repeat and she straight up asks these folks if they dream.  Some of the business owners respond very literally, talking about the process of sleep and repetitive dreams that they may have.  The clock owner, appropriately enough, talks about repairing dreams and that the same dream --pun intended! --comes to him like clockwork.  But there are others who get the double-meaning of dream.  While few people feel outright oppressed by their chosen professions, they still think about the path not taken. It's a little heartbreaking, if only because we're all dealing with a variation of that.  Varda herself has a modicum of celebrity by this point in her career.  Heck, I could mention the name "Agnes Varda" to a room full of people that I regularly talk with and I'd probably be the only person not only knows about her, but has a strong opinion about her work.  But Varda kind of becomes the distant observer who is part of the story.  One of the things about Varda is that she's one of these directors who embraces her humanity through her work.  She's always in a state of self-discovery.  That self-discovery comes with a little bit of a character that she puts on, but she's woven into this narrative.  Her asking these people if they dream is both a moment of common bonding and also, subconsciously, an affirmation of her own choices.  She is the one who is always doing what she wants to do, regardless of what is expected of her.  There is little repetition in her life because she's always pursuing the next thing.  As much as I criticize her later work, it's probably healthy that not all of her movies slap.  That means that she's not just doing the thing that she knows works.

Can we talk about the sub-documentary in this movie?  I'm talking about the perfumery owners.  There's a joy to all of the subjects of the documentary.  They're so happy to have a little bit of spotlight on their small lives that they're smiling and desperately not trying to look at the camera, with the exception of the talking heads portions. But the perfumery owners?  He's an incredibly old man who is happy to be there and seemingly loves his wife and his wife?  She has some degree of dementia.  She looks so sad and so lost and of course she exists in that space all the live long day.  It's a place that has existed longer than the other places.  It relies on almost no outside commercial involvement.  The bottles of perfume are found bottles with handwritten labels and this poor woman just seems like one of forgotten bottles that they sell.  It's incredibly emotional and Varda seems so sympathetic towards this woman.  Good!  We all have souls.

Listen.  I'm not sure why I like this movie.  I kind of spelled it out, but I admit that another day, I might have hated it.  While it will never be one of my favorite Varda films, it's incredibly peaceful and --even more importantly --incredibly personal.  I love myself some vulnerability and this movie is vulnerable.