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

DIRECTOR: Nancy Meyers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR:  Akira Kurosawa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: John McPhail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR:  Irvin Kershner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Fowler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTOR: Todd Phillips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rated R for nudity, sexuality, language, mild violence, child abuse, molestation, suicide, blood, and domestic abuse.   Ingmar Bergman, for making pretty intellectual films, does get cruel sometimes with his characters.  This is one of the more cruel films and sometimes I wonder if it absolutely needed to go this hard.  While there are long stretches of people just talking to each other, there are some pretty rough moments as well.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

He made a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage?  What?  I was not prepped for this.  When Criterion throws a second movie on the disc, it tends to be one of the forgotten films of Bergmans.  You know, for the real completionists out there, like me.  I was ready for Saraband to be another black-and-white movie about how it is okay to cheat on your spouse as long as there's love involved.  Nope, I have to go back to the world of Marianne and Johan a third time.  

But here's the kicker!  I actually really like this movie.  

It's not without it's faults.  Oh my, there's no reason for this movie to go as hard as it does.  Bergman really wants you to hate Henrik and Johan for the majority of the movie.  Okay, that's a bit of a broad stroke. He wants you to both feel sympathy for Henrik while utterly detesting him.  There.  That's the more accurate read of the character.  I refuse to dance around this.  A lot of the movie hangs on Henrik's abusive relationship with his semi-prodigy daughter.  She's a talented cello player, but not as talented as her father makes her out to be.  In a rage of frustration over her failing to meet his expectations, he hits her, forcing her to flee the house.  That's as cruel as the movie needs to be.  Part of the implication is that Henrik isn't the same man since his beloved Anna died and he's taking that rage out on his daughter.  From a storytelling perspective, that's as much as we need to consider Henrik a bad guy in the context of this story.  But the more we watch this movie and the further you get into it, we discover that he is in a sexual relationship with his daughter.  He has supplanted Anna with Karin, his daughter, and it is the most troubling hat-on-a-hat addition to the movie.

I mean, I get what Bergman is doing here.  He doesn't want to keep it subtle that Karin has become the new Anna to Henrik.  In an attempt to treat this relationship as normal, he goes against his dead wife's wishes to allow Karin to be her own advocate when it comes to her studies in music.  But because he already has a spouse in the form of his daughter, he doesn't listen to the message that his actual spouse gives him, which is as explicit as it can be.  I often criticize Bergman for his return to motifs and themes that tend to get tired, but I can't believe that I'm frustrated that he's not trying to mold a more human person into that idea that his daughter has become his spouse.  It just seems so gratuitous by the time the revelation happens.  I know.  That's me.  But what starts off as an engaging drama that's mostly talking heads having dramatic dialogues turns into something quite upsetting.  And that's where the movie doesn't really do it for me.  (Remember how I said that I liked Saraband?) This is 2003.  I don't want to imagine Ingmar Bergman as the kind of director who does exploitative things for their shock value.  But I'm watching this movie that has nudity, incest, and a graphic suicide attempt and think "This is the same guy who made The Seventh Seal."  To his credit, Bergman has made other things that can be upsetting to watch.  It just felt compacted into Saraband more than what I am used to.

But the big sell for me is that I did enjoy this movie, warts and all.  The thing about Scenes from a Marriage is that it hit on a lot of the same notes that Bergman had been playing with in terms of infidelity.  I didn't think I wanted more of Marianne and Johan because the television version just kept hitting me over the head with their toxic relationship. I still think that Marianne is a fool for having Johan in her life.  But these characters have the benefit of being both similar and different from the people we left at the end of Scenes from a Marriage.  While Johan was always a jerk in the original movie, I always felt like Bergman was giving him a pass.  Saraband, in little ways, makes Johan what I wanted him to be.  Saraband Johan is absolutely contemptable while still being loved by Marianne.  Marianne seemed to ignore Johan's crimes in the first movie, forgiving him and indulging in these toxic little moments.  In Saraband, until the end of the movie, Marianne and Johan's relationship is mostly non-sexual.  She misses her friend, even though he's terrible to her.  While I condemn the fact that she even visits him, she seems to maintain healthy boundaries with this man.  Part of that comes from the fact that he is a borderline invalid.

But the thing I really like is that we kind of deal with the consequences of a selfish life with Saraband. Johan has proven to be an awful father, something that Scenes from a Marriage addresses, but smooths the edges off of.  The children are an afterthought in Scenes from a Marriage.  But Johan's obsession with self leaves these families with generational trauma.  I love that Karin is the focus of the film, not Henrik.  Henrik is the antagonist of the film.  He's a darker version of Johan.  Like a good villain marred by trauma, Henrik confronts Johan and lays it all out for him.  He spills his hatred out and we see the almost apathetic Johan calmly reveal his disdain for his child.  The thing I love?  That's absolutely Johan. Johan has always been the selfish academic.  He's the criticism of the thing that I might fall into (if I wasn't aggressively an empathetic millennial who won't stop curling into a tiny ball when the world is unfair to others).  (Also, yes, I referred to myself as an intellectual.  I'm writing a blog about every movie I watch and this entry is me dissecting a Bergman sequel from a Criterion box. I think I have enough boxes checked to self-identify as that.) 

There is one thing that I'm still absolutely processing.  I acknowledge that I don't have all of the answers after one viewing of a challenging movie.  One of the things that the movie refers to and then, subsequently, ends on is Marianne's relationship to Martha, who has spiraled into madness.  It's addressed a few times, but it almost seems like an afterthought.  For a minute, I thought it was a way to write off a character who didn't come into play with Henrik and Karin's life.  After all, Henrik and Karin are Johan's children from yet-another-marriage.  But I think it is also easy to throw stones at Johan because he sucks so much.  This is not meant to be a condemnation of motherhood, but I think it is a condemnation of Marianne.  Marianne, in Scenes from a Marriage, mentions the children post-divorce to Johan a few times.  But often, it is in the context of needing money. I can't deny that Marianne was the one doing the work and  I don't want that to be throwing stones at her. But rarely do we have any understanding of what Marianne and Johan are putting the children through.  

My thoughts on this are complex.  There was a time that I thought that divorce was the worst thing you could do to a child. I'm the product of a marriage that stayed together, but might have potentially fallen apart had my father not died when I was young.  I don't know what going through divorce does to a kid.  My current standing on divorce is that some people absolutely should not be together and maybe divorce is the healthiest and sometimes safest response to toxic coupling.  But I also get that much of Scenes from a Marriage is about Marianne and Johan finding joy for themselves in a crappy situation and not how their actions affect others.  That's the characterization of these two specific people.  Part of that comes from the fact that the film is mostly structured as a two-hander.  We only really understand Marianne and Johan from their interactions with each other and the world passes out of sight from the audience when they aren't together.  That's not a guarantee.  We do meet other people in the course of the film, but the story is about their relationship and nothing else.

My take on the Martha scene at the end is Marianne coming to terms that Johan wasn't the only toxic element in their relationship.  Especially post Fanny and Alexander, there is that element of "out of sight; out of mind".  While Marianne mentions Martha, we don't necessarily get this wracked guilt over putting Martha in an institution.  That visit at the end is an attempt to fix the past, something that Johan seems incapable of doing.  We always bonded with Marianne because she was the victim of adultery.  But she also is the more agreeable person in that couple.  And as such, she might have more malleability when it comes to seeing her own faults.  Johan's anxiety attack and Marianne's visiting of Martha might be the same moment from two separate personalities.  Johan's anxiety attack is almost his body telling him that he's done a lifetime of evil, but his personality is not prepped to make change based on what he now views as comeuppance.  Marianne, on the other hand, is healthy enough to view her own flaws and, instead of trying to fix Johan's family, she can try fixing her own.

It's good stuff.  With the namedrop of Fanny and Alexander, I do get more Fanny and Alexander vibes.  I used to think that I liked early Bergman and tolerated middle Bergman.  But realistically, I think I like late Bergman the best.  It has that gravitas and emotional resonance that is cryptic where it needs to be and explicit where it needs to be as well.  

Rated R for nudity, sexuality, language (especially the same word over-and-over), and drug references.  The movie isn't quite sure if it wants to be an all audiences rom-com or a raunchy comedy.  It goes for the R, but also keeps the tone of a traditional rom-com.  Regardless, there's nothing here that makes it necessarily all-audiences.  But you also don't feel as skeevy as watching something like Porky's.  

DIRECTOR:  Will Gluck

The biggest issue that you'll probably hear from me is that I teach Much Ado about Nothing.  I'm the one who picked this when my wife asked to watch a rom-com.  She was looking at her phone.  I just hit play.  Any complaints that I may have are mostly my fault.  And I'll be honest with you, I didn't hate it. For a guy who doesn't care for rom-coms to say that he didn't hate a rom-com, that's kind of a win.

That being said, I didn't exactly like it either.

In the pantheon of rom-coms, there are a select few that are modern adaptations of Shakespeare plays.  The language is contemporary, as are the locations.  Often, there are nods to the original shows.  Names tend to be variations of the original character names.  Anyone But You, for instance, has Ben and Bea for Benedick and Beatrice, respectively.  The rest of the cast has playful variations of their respective counterparts.  It's fun.  These movies tend to be made for audiences who want to have a good time first and Shakespeare fans second.  I get it.  Why pigeonhole your audience with something that is too inside baseball?  Now, I get that people still talk about Ten Things I Hate about You.  I saw it back in high school.  I hate to admit, but high school was a long time ago.  I remember being unimpressed, but more along the lines of it just being another movie. I don't want to judge the whole subgenre.  

If you don't know me, I adore Shakespeare.  I'm, unfortunately, a fan of the things I've seen and am wildly overwhelmed when it comes to the things I haven't.  I'm ashamed to say that I like what I like.  But what I like, I love.  Much Ado has slowly risen in my estimation to be one of my favorite Shakespeare comedies.  That's not a hot take for a lot of people.  If you met me in high school, you'll remember my obsession with A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet.  (I know Hamlet isn't a comedy.  I'm just dropping that because I'm still obsessed with Hamlet and that will probably never change.) But since teaching Much Ado, I've kind of become obsessed.  I have a version with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, which is scratching a lovely part of my Doctor Who fandom. So when I start talking about a different version, a version that seems to like but not love Much Ado, you have to keep this all in mind.  It might be too precious for me.

The thing about Much Ado, as well as a lot of Shakespeare's comedies, is that --as silly as they can get --there are moments of true gravitas and pathos in these stories.  While a lot of us take the Benedick and Beatrice exchanging barbs for laughs as the memorable part of the story, Much Ado about Nothing gets quite dark in the second half of the play.  For a guy who infamously wrote a play that doesn't understand women (The Taming of the Shrew), he also wrote Much Ado about Nothing, where Beatrice --in defending her shamed cousin --screams "If I were a man...I'd eat his heart in the marketplace."  It's amazing.  See, I enjoy all of the quirky wacky comedy of errors stuff that Much Ado offers.  But honestly, it would be just another story if it was just that. What makes me love Much Ado are the highs and lows that Shakespeare takes us on.  

Which all leads me to Anyone But You.  Anyone But You is a fun rom-com.  It's meant to sell popcorn. I get it. Drama sells popcorn.  But Gluck and his company here want this to be a paint-by-numbers rom-com.  Ironically, to make the movie safer for audiences, they kind of have to tear into the conceit of Much Ado, the very movie they're homaging.  One of the motifs of Much Ado is the role of masks.  In the original, there is a literal masquerade where characters --mostly wholly aware of who is wearing what mask --pretend to be other characters.  I applaud the filmmakers, in their attempt to turn Much Ado on its head, use this motif in their reinterpretation.  Much in the way that the cast knows each other in the masquerade to be lying, I do kind of applaud that Ben and Bea pick up on falsehood quickly.  (In the case of Bea, far quicker than Ben.) I have a love / hate thing about Ben and Bea faking their relationship for the sake of others.  Yeah, it's something different in terms of looking at the Shakespeare play.  But as different as it is, that's more of a modern rom-com trope, isn't it?

The faking being lovers thing is kind of hack.  We pretend to be into each other until we ultimately are into each other.  I know that there are probably people claiming that Shakespeare romantic tropes are hack.  That's a bit unfair because he was the foundation of the hack.  When you make something popular, you aren't a hack.  The people copying you are hacks.  At one point, even though all of the setting and characters have counterparts in Much Ado about Nothing, the story is so far off the rails that it isn't really a send up of Much Ado anymore.  One of the little gimmicks that the movie does is try to insert one of the Shakespeare lines into modern conversation. Often, the running gag will be "Ooh, that's good!" But just to show how far off the play is from what it is intended to be, it misunderstands the actual words being said.

Perhaps one of the most famous lines in Much Ado ties to its theme: "Some Cupids kill with arrows; some with traps."   Now, in the original, I'm pretty sure that Hero says this to Ursula so that Beatrice doesn't here.  But with Pete / Pedro saying it directly so Ben hears, it ultimately shows that the line is contradictory to the actual goal that Pete has.  Pete's trying to convince Ben that Bea is in love with him, so they have this whole dumbshow where they feign a conversation about gossip, hoping that Ben will hear.  But when he shouts out "Some Cupids kill", it's meant to make Ben believe that the entire plot is real.  Why have that line there?  I know, this is me complaining about something stupid.  But it is indicative of how the whole thing is almost a misunderstanding of the text.  If the entire thing is a nod to the original, where is the meat of the story.  Honestly, Much Ado, as much as the barbs are fun, is about how far people will go for love.  When Beatrice says "Kill Claudio", we as an audience are forced to ask how we would our own moral codes.  This?  This is just the same as every other rom-com with a Shakespeare skin.

In terms of quality of movie, Anyone But You mostly does the job. I have to be honest. I feel like people are really mean to Sydney Sweeney.  Ms. Sweeney, if you are reading this, I apologize for any criticism I throw your way.  Sweeney isn't great.  I'll admit that. But she's also not as terrible as people make her out to be.  And this next comment makes me even more of a jerk because I think that Glen Powell's newfound fame is totally deserved.  I don't know what makes a leading man, but I feel like it is me upholding the patriarchy by saying that he's got it.  Like, that dude is charming as heck and sells every line perfectly.  Why am I part of the problem here, guys?  I give Glen Powell a pass for being good in something meh while I acknowledge that Sydney Sweeney is not great in something meh as well.  I WANT THEM BOTH TO BE GREAT!  

Sure, the jokes mostly work.  I got a couple of laughs out of it.  I do find the characters to be all over the place in terms of behavior.  Their Meet Cute is so different from the follow up of these characters.  We're meant to like these characters from moment one.  Anyone But You does something interesting with the Much Ado thing by letting us see their first relationship. Much Ado has Benedick and Beatrice together, implied by the line "You always end with a Jade's Trick; I know you of old."  But there's the comedy of errors things.  Bea leaves, afraid of this relationship. She returns to find Ben ragging on her.  Here's where the movie loses me.  They see each other again, clearly upset about how their first date ended up.  I get that.  But the problem is, they both spell out exactly what happened.  It's insane that these two don't forgive each other enough to stop yelling at each other over events.  Once the mix-up is made plain, shouldn't there be some reconciliation?  It makes both of them look like bad people.  It bugs me! 

You can see that I'm pretty strung up about this.  Again Much Ado is precious to me.  I wish that I could be a guy who just watches rom-coms and shuts my brain off.  But between being generic enough and taking all of the meat out of the original, this movie is just okay.  I want to like it, but I don't.

PG-13 for language, including the f-bomb.  The movie also grapples with euthanasia as a concept.  This movie is about Christopher Reeve's tragedy in context of his films.  While it often glorifies Reeve for his commitment to both the arts and the rights of the disabled, it also talks about his romances, which leads him to abandoning his wife and kids.  While he never outright shuts them out of his life, his family remember him being distant and a bit selfish when it came to their needs.  

DIRECTORS:  Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui

The trailer almost made me cry, guys.  Of course I was going to see this.  And, I'd like to point out, this might be the closest I've gotten to outright weeping.  I'll tell you the exact moment --and I will also apologize for butchering the line if I get it wrong.  Dana Reeve tells the recently paralyzed Christopher Reeve that "You are still you and I will always love you."  That stopped him from committing suicide.  Come on. That's going to be one of those moments that is going to get to me.

I love this documentary, yet I almost hate it at the same time.  I'm a complex dude.  As Christopher Reeve was complex, that means I'm allowed to be complex too, okay?  I've not been subtle about it.  The original Superman: The Movie is one of my favorite films. I'm unashamed of that.  (Okay, I'm a little ashamed.  I'll never put it in my Top Four because it makes me feel basic.  See?  Complex!) The reason that I watched this movie is because I'm such a Christopher Reeve Superman fan.  I love a lot of different interpretations of Superman.  Not all of them.  You probably know which one I'm talking about.  But when I think of Superman, I think of Christopher Reeve.  This is a documentary made by the new DC Studios.  It's literally called Super/Man.  They're not avoiding the tie to the character that Christopher Reeve portrayed in films.  It's the role he's most famous for.  (I originally put "probably" as a sign of respect, but it undoes the argument. Christopher Reeve will most notably be famous for Superman, despite the fact that there are Somewhere in Time fans out there.)  

But I want this documentary to exist without the connection to Superman. I thought I wanted Superman to be the center of the piece.  I really did.  After all, like I just stated, the reason that I watched the documentary about Christopher Reeve is because he played Superman.  But the constant reminder about the Superman imagery almost undoes the story of Christopher Reeve himself.  

The way that the film is structured is intentionally chaotic.  There's an audio clip that the movie plays that has Reeve talking about what his thoughts were after the accident.  (For those who don't know or don't remember, Christopher Reeve was paralyzed from the neck down after falling off a horse.  I think that's pretty common knowledge, but I can't assume anything because not everyone is the biggest Superman fan like I am.  Things that seem like common knowledge to me might be incredibly niche.) The quote says something like, "When I woke up, I thought about my whole life in those moments, but the order was all scrambled."  The directors chose to run with that and told his story out of order.  In reality, we're kind of looking at two different time periods in his life until the two meet up.  There's the pre-accident Christopher Reeve and the post-accident Christopher Reeve.  Because the directors embrace the quote, there's a bit of intentional chaos to the presentation of those two moments.  I don't blame them one bit.  It's entirely effective. 

But one of the elements of the pre-accident Christopher Reeve was Reeve's paradoxical opinions about Superman.  If there is one cautionary tale about Hollywood, it's Reeve and Superman. George Reeves had the same relationship with the same character.  Both men were launched into the public eye with their portrayal of the Man of Steel. It made them famous.  The problem was that they were both instantly typecast as Superman forever.  It was hard for either them to get work that gained them equal notoriety.  The difference between Reeves and Reeve (I know!  The odds!  I'm not going to even get into how George Reeves also met a tragic end...) is that Christopher Reeve, as angry as he was about being typecast, didn't seem to hate the character.  George Reeves openly thought that Superman was kids' stuff.  Christopher Reeve seemed attached to the role and understood that he was the caretaker of something larger than himself.  That's what makes the movie fascinating.  It's why I always liked Reeve.  He was incredibly frustrated that he couldn't go anywhere and not be seen as Superman, but also loved much of the material that he got to play with.  (I mean, until Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.) 

But when the movie separates him from being Superman, ironically, that's when it flies.  (Pun intended.) The chair is a lot.  One of the movies that I need to watch again is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  There's something so haunting about the notion of being stuck.  Reeve was this guy who prided himself on his athleticism.  He's not me.  The most I do is the treadmill, and that's because my body hates me and wants to gain all of the weight all of the time.  Reeve was a guy who constantly tried to suck the marrow out of life and that is conveyed to the point of detriment.  Like many of these Hollywood documentaries, the story focuses on how this actor had a darker life than people would have guessed.  Christopher Reeve was a man who --I apologize for the shorthand for a complex relationship --hated his father.  Throughout his life, he would harken back to "At least I'm not like him." His father was a harsh man who wanted nothing to do with Christopher.  (I hate using his first name alone, but I'm talking about the relationship between a father and son, both of whom have the same last name.)   But in trying to not be his father, he ended up distancing himself from his children much in the same way.

When he's paralyzed, as awful as everything is, he has almost the opportunity to stop putting his father as the cause of all of his misery.  I don't know what the man thought.  I have this documentary.  I have special features on Superman DVDs.  I have my obsessive fan personality.  But I don't know what the man really thought.  But the movie embraces this tragedy as something that also had a silver lining.  His accident forced this man, who seemed to be constantly running, to stop.  One thing that the movie makes clear.  Christopher Reeve was incredibly driven.  Whatever he was doing, he'd do 110% as a means to impress a man who didn't care.  The same is true of his commitment to getting out of that chair.  Listen, I know how the story ends.  I know that he dies at a young age, never walking again.  But there's a moment, when he's moving is foot in a pool, that I wondered if there was more to the story than what I knew.  (The answer is, "No". He would never get off the ventilator.)  But that obsessive personality needed family.  It was that understanding that people need others in their lives to get through the horrors of the every day might be my favorite part of the story.

But the movie does one things incredibly well.  I've heard the name "Dana Reeve" because of her work with the foundation.  Today, the foundation is known and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation and that's probably for a good reason.  Christopher Reeve, for all of his heroism (and I do believe that he was heroic in many ways) was a very selfish man.  I say that with all due respect.  His children seemingly would admit as much.  He wanted more and more out of life and sometimes that meant putting others on the backburner.  But he also cared about humanity to such a level that gave him purpose.  Again, deeply complicated individual if your heart can bleed for people, but also give them a wide berth so you can do your own thing.  But Dana Reeve?  She's a good egg from moment one.

The one consistent story throughout the film is that while Christopher Reeve was a beautiful human being who was flawed, everyone saw Dana Reeve as someone who lacked Chris's selfishness.  She made friends with the mother of Chris's first children.  She stayed with Christopher and, while giving him what he wanted much of the time, put healthy limits on this man who didn't know how to proceed forward.  Her children and those around her seemed in awe of what she was able to accomplish.  Honestly, what I got most out of this story was the story of Dana Reeve, who led a silent tragic life of her own without the mental scarring to be a True Hollywood Story.  Her story is one of true love and what it should look like.  If they ever make a documentary out of my life, I really do hope that it comes across more as Dana's story than Christopher's.

But here's where the Super/Man title really works.  As much as I'm talking about the heartbreaking stuff that Christopher Reeve did, it's all in context of the fact that he was in a constant state of inspiring people.  I have to remember that DC Studios made this and that my confirmation bias is pretty fast and loose sometimes.  But I always said that the reason that Superman resonates with me so much isn't because of superpowers.  I think that people who don't like Superman tend to be put off by a guy who can do anything.  But what Superman and Christopher Reeve had most in common was their inspire humanity to be their best selves.  Christopher Reeve, when he was in that chair, stressed that he would almost die regularly when a tube got loose or kinked.  He would struggle to breathe and hope that an aid got to him in time to fix the machine.  He's incredibly fragile and yet would do these events that would exhaust him beyond most people's breaking points.  He helped a little boy get off a ventilator.  As selfish as I accuse him of being, I probably would have wallowed in my own self-pity.  He changed the world for the better.  Sure, there are people who are anti-stem cell.  I get it.  But we are in a stage in science where adult stem cells are the norm and people still complain, so I just have to empathize with a man who wanted hope.

Before I close up, I feel like I should write a bit about Robin Williams.  In a way, this documentary is almost a Robin Williams documentary.  Again, for those not in the know, Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve were roommates in college.  They were best friends.  But we also hopefully know that Robin Williams ended his own life. There's even a line by one of the talking heads (I want to say Meryl Streep?) that said, "Had Christopher Reeve not died, Robin Williams might be here today."  I have such thoughts about Robin Williams and they are always changing.  I don't know these people.  They are celebrities.  I know about them from their fame, but I will never know these people personality.  It's borderline a crime that I write about them.  Please, understand, I am just writing for a love of writing and for a need to find an outlet to express opinions.  Do you know what I love about this doc when it comes to Robin Williams?  It makes me want to hug Robin Williams and thank him for being a good friend.  Yeah, this is a celebration of Christopher Reeve.  But the movie does almost a better job at celebrating Dana Reeve and Robin Williams.

I'm grateful for that.

This documentary does mostly right things.  Do I wish that it was divorced a bit from Superman?  Yes and no.  I don't know.  It seems to make a complex person Superman in all of our hearts.  I get that the irony is right there.  We all saw that the image of the invulnerable man can't even get out of his chair to stand up.  But Reeve was more than just Superman and, as much as I adore the character, I wish people would see that.  The movie addresses it in what it says, but not what it feels.

PG, despite nudity, language, sexuality, and domestic abuse.  I think the same thing happened with the TV version.  For a guy who spends a lot of times claiming that MPA ratings are too tough, this one is far too lenient.  This is not a PG movie.  If my kids walked into the room, I would quickly shut it off.  It's not like the whole thing is offensive, but it's not not offensive either.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Guys!  Guys!  First of all, it's a crime that I haven't written anything on this blog since Wicked.  This movie was long and I had to do alternative exercises that didn't involve watching a movie while I exercised.  Secondly, it's really weird that I'm writing another blog about a movie that I both disliked and watched recently.   It's a different cut of Scenes from a Marriage that was on TV instead of in theaters.  That means that the TV cut was longer.  But it's in the Bergman set and I feel like I wouldn't be a completist if I didn't write about every movie in the set.  I'm wired in a very specific way that I'm not entirely proud of.  

Well, here's the take.  While Scenes from a Marriage the theatrical cut is better, it doesn't really change my opinion about the story itself.  I could write intellectually (I think I could.  If I haven't done it so far, why start now, I guess?) about the role of pacing and focused storytelling.  But the long and short is that anything that makes this infuriating movie shorter is good in my estimation.  The movie is still incredibly long.  We're looking at almost three hours when it comes down to it.  That's not exactly a quick romp nor is much of the movie excised from this version.  It takes out the credits from each scene, which is good, I guess.  There's probably some smaller stuff that has been tightened.  It does make the movie more watchable as a movie.  But golly, the content is still borderline all there.  I'm trying to find a comprehensive list of changes between the two cuts and people are being really dodgy about the changes.  (I'm apparently the only one who slightly likes the theatrical cut better.  Trust me, if I liked this movie, I would be all about the television cut.)   Apparently, some of the secondary characters are minimized.  I mean, I remembered Johan's other lover.  But honestly...and this is a hot take...but the focused story is the theatrical cut.

I know!  Absolute blasphemy.  Again, I get it.  I get where the blasphemy lies.  I love how I'm advocating for a cut of a movie where I don't like either cut.  But the (and here's my intellectual read on this whole thing that I said I wasn't going to do) thing about the theatrical cut is that this is called Scenes from a Marriage.  The theatrical cut, while not being absolute in this format, is almost exclusively Johan and Marianne. We look to see what their actual marriage looks like.  It becomes a much tighter piece where we have to question what is truth and what is outside behavior.  While Marianne moves on from her separation from Johan, we never get to meet her new significant other. Instead, we have to trust that everything is above board.  From a marriage perspective, we get to see a more accurate version of Marianne to what he experiences on the reg.  The film version still shows how Johan flirts outside of his time with his wife.  I honestly feel like the theatrical version has that element of gaslighting that the television version doesn't have.  It also spirals out of control faster.  The movie starts with the implication that these two will never lose each other, despite the fact that their friends offer them a template of misery.

When the two split up, it seems like one moment shattered the whole thing.  I find that far more interesting than the death by a thousand cuts that the television version offers.  It's almost inevitable, which is kind of the point of the movie.

Oh, that's the major realization that I came to.  The first read of the film when I watched the TV version was that this was about infidelity.  Bergman, if you've been reading my Bergman blogs on this page, has been obsessed with infidelity.  But with the other Bergman infidelity movies have been mostly forgiving of infidelity.  And to a certain extent, Scenes from a Marriage is forgiving of infidelity.  Marianne constantly allows Johan back to have these sexual moments with her.  Sometimes these moments are meant to be attempts to fix a marriage; some of these moments are genuine moments of infidelity.  That's how the movie ends, by the way.  The two are away from their respective spouses on a tryst with each other.  That's the end.  It does imply that infidelity should be forgiven because it seems inevitable.  But I'm going to say that Bergman may be supporting infidelity even more than that with Scenes from a Marriage.

The behavior between these two is toxic.  We get that.  At one point, Johan beats Marianne quite badly almost to the point where I think that he tries to kill her.  (It's incredibly upsetting to see her go back to him and I think I went into this with my last blog about Scenes from a Marriage.) Initially, I thought that this all stemmed out of infidelity.  But I believe that Bergman is criticizing monogamy instead of infidelity.  It is because the two are married that they take sexual deviance as a slight against their natures.  The problems come from the fact that they are viewed as failures for keeping their marriage intact when everyone else is failing.  After all, the only other couple in their lives hate each other.  I even forgot that Johan and Marianne were married previous to this marriage, implying that no marriages last.  

It's only when the two are sleeping with each other when they aren't supposed to be that the two are happy.  That's kind of a bummer.  The more that they ascribe to a traditional happy family, the more that they seem to hate each other.  When they're being rebellious, that's when they find each other attractive.  (I honestly don't know why Marianne finds Johan attractive.  There wasn't one moment in the movie where I found him tolerable.  There were moments where I found him less intolerable than others, but I never found him to be a descent person worthy of love.) 

The whole thing bums me out so much, guys.  I want to be the guy who likes Bergman movies.  I mean, I still have The Seventh Seal, which is objectively a masterpiece. Ooh!  I also have Fanny and Alexander! It's just that I may be the only person who finds these other movies frustrating.  It's not that I'm against watching infidelity movies.  It simply seems like Bergman is trying to justify behavior that he partook in.  When he keeps coming back to the same well, it feels a bit like "She dost protest too much."  Fine.  Be sex positive.  It's not a me thing, but crapping all over marriage over and over and having people treat each other like dirt makes me sad.  There's the implication that if everyone was sex positive like Bergman, they'd be happier.  But people do fall in love.  People do get attached.  It's nice on paper, but it gets messy fast.  

The funny thing is that I still want to watch the Apple TV show.  I don't know what's wrong with me.