Rated R for just about everything. It's extremely sexually explicit, but I could argue that it was probably less explicit than people made it out to be. (I'll talk about that later.) There is nudity, drug use, violence, gore, suicide, murder, and lots of sexual acts. I know. I just said it wasn't that much. Again, I'll talk about that. Just know that it isn't necessarily for the faint of heart. R.
DIRECTOR: Emerald Fennell Okay, you guys made me think that I was going to watch Salo again or something. (Now you know not only that I watched Salo at one point, but that I was willing to do so again because people kept on asking me about this movie.) I don't get a lot of requests for movies. But oh-my-goodness, people kept asking me about Saltburn. I didn't want to dismiss it. I know that people have strong opinions on the movie. I'll tell you what. It's pretty good. Now, I know that I'm blaspheming on some level here. I bet that if I walked into the video store back in the day, I'd probably get ripped apart for liking Saltburn. I don't quite know why I would get ripped apart. I just get the vibe that it is gauche and basic to like this movie. Objectively, it's a gorgeously shot film with solid acting and an interesting story. Is it perfect? I don't know. I don't think so. There's a part that I'm going to discuss, but part of that I'm still unpacking. Hopefully, I can process a lot of that as I write, so maybe we'll determine whether one of my complaints is valid or if it is just a scene that doesn't belong in the movie. I don't know everything. I just pretend that I do. First of all, let's talk about graphic content. It is graphic. I won't deny that it is graphic. I actually hate that I'm not more scandalized by this. Honestly, it isn't an attempt to be a flex or anything. I've now seen so many horrorshows out there that I kind of hate that I'm desensitized to a lot of stuff. But everyone looks at you when you say that you've seen Saltburn like you are some kind of deviant. This is a movie about people being cruel, often sexually cruel, to one another. And you absolutely should be scandalized by the things that happen in this movie. But that feeling comes with a mixture of investment, empathy, and imagination. If you are invested in the story and see these as real people doing these real things, it comes across as brutal. I get that. But these shots are gross only if you think that the actors are really doing those things. I'm going to use the code that everyone else is doing to describe "the scene." I'm talking about "the bathtub scene." I was ready for a lot worse than that. You know that's just water, right? It's just water. I know that is being incredibly dismissive. After all, The Thing special effects still scare me and I'm aware that those are just gross looking puppets. But my brain instantly distanced itself from what people thought was going on and I was able to power through a lot of those scenes without cringing too much. Here's the big victory that Saltburn won that should be noted. I'm not a big fan of The Talented Mr. Ripley model of story. Fundamentally, Saltburn is just a more sexually explicit Talented Mr. Ripley. (Also, the other Ripley movies, including the one that is coming out soon.) My buddy in high school was obsessed with that movie and it didn't do much for me. Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley also opened the door for similar films. The film I'm kind of talking about is the creepy outsider lusting not only after a person, but after a person's entire lifestyle. Through emotional manipulation and cruelty, this person weaves themselves into someone else's lives,coveting that life until it is theirs. The thing that the Ripley movies always did, though, was to leave their protagonist (in the sense that we're following this character's goals, not in a heroic sense) a blank slate. We know so little about Ripley. Often, we have to identify with the object of their desire and Ripley becomes this menacing figure. But with Saltburn, Oliver is with us the most in the story. We don't know most things about Oliver until the end. (I want to discuss that a bit.) Oliver is our protagonist. We see him in his ups and downs. Through the course of the story, it almost feels like there are two Olivers. It feels like the real Oliver is the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses character. He does anything for love and attention because he's been starved for that. Man, that character is relatable as heck. He knows he's out of Felix's league and he's constantly paddling to keep up. But that's why Oliver's other personality is so horrifying. He shows up first with Venetia in the garden and it is so polarizing compared to the first guy. We have to wonder which character is the real Oliver and which one is the mask. As the story progresses, ultimately solidifying this with a retelling of the story in the final act, we find out that the mastermind latter character is the real Oliver and that the sympathetic nerd is something completely fictional. Ripley doesn't really give you a ton by design. I like knowing the complete psychopathy of Oliver though. But I did say that one scene frustrated me. The bathtub scene is such a memorable scene because of the disgusting sensory experience that it elicits. The bathtub scene exists because the movie outright lies to us at the beginning. I don't like that. I had a discussion and it was posited that the movie never really lied to us, but I don't know if that works either. I'm being too cryptic. I apologize. Keep the bathtub scene in the back of your mind for this part. The movie bookends with a parallel scene. The opening of the film is Ollie confessing a deep intense love for Felix. He says something along the lines of "I am not in love with him. I love him." The phrase "I love him" repeats, mirroring Oliver's obsession with Felix. The film ends with Oliver, grown up and standing over Elsbeth's comatose body starting with "I love him" and it devolves into "I never loved him." Eventually, he chants how much he always hated all of them, implying that Oliver was always playing the long game, bilking the Catton family out of their undeserved estate. Now, here's my problem. The bathtub scene was something done alone. What graphic thing that Oliver does over the grave kind of works, despite being alone because I can see that all of the evil that Oliver does to the Catton family as a form of sexual assault. I get that. But the bathtub scene almost doesn't work with that. Oliver told us that he loved Felix, so the bathtub scene works. But if he never loved Felix, if all of that was an act to assert dominance, I don't think he would do the bathtub scene. Now, if I'm really getting into the nuance of the scene, it could have been an opening salvo as his power starts to emerge. But it seemed that the bathtub scene happens because of his own arousal to the spying that he just perpetrated. I don't know. I'm a little worried that the bathtub scene was only left in the movie both as a misdirect (which would make it unearned) and for shock value. After all, I kept on hearing about the bathtub scene. It just seemed to make less sense knowing what I know about the ending of the film. But the movie just mostly works. Every casting choice is perfect. Golly, I don't know how I got a movie that was so demented that somehow triggered my sympathy and my disdain at the same time. Like, Oliver is absolutely evil. But his target constantly does things that makes Oliver look human by comparison. Felix doesn't know that Oliver is a sociopath. Felix is treating Oliver like a pet. The constant reminder of a previous guest that Felix treated like a pet and then disposed of makes this entire scenario a story of comeuppence. Absolutely Oliver is a monster. But no one knew that Oliver was a monster, so the events that unfolded present like a very specific horror story. Honestly, it's why horror movies tend to make victims bad people. They break a rule; Jason gets them. In this case, we've changed the rules of what makes a victim, but there is no final girl. We almost celebrate Jason as victor and it's really messed up. But that's why we break formula sometimes.
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R, almost exclusively for language. Not only that, but the language in this movie is almost used ironically. Because Monk has to put on this character, he uses curse words to hide behind the fact that he knows almost nothing of this lifestyle. The movie does have violence, as Monk imagines someone being shot to death. There is some drug use in the movie, coupled with discussions of sexuality. R.
DIRECTOR: Cord Jefferson "You know, this movie is making fun of you." I know, my wife. I know. That's the thing about liberals. They tend to be able to laugh at themselves pretty well. At least I do. The topic of race, as grounded as it is in the past with bigotry springing up to the present, is a deep and many-faceted discussion. When I used to teach Things Fall Apart, we would study the TED talk "The Dangers of a Single Story." There were two main ideas: people of a culture should have the definitive voice in that culture and that a culture cannot be defined by a single voice. Ultimately, American Fiction is the natural progression of this idea. As much as we want Black voices to speak out about injustice and oppression, Black voices cannot be only about injustice and oppression. I mean, some of you have to be scoffing at the obvious right now. I think you kind of are supposed to. By the way, I wasn't prepped for two great surprise movies in the Best Picture categories. The two movies that I probably enjoyed most out of the Best Picture category are American Fiction and The Holdovers. Maybe I'm just in the mood for a tightly knit dramedy. I knew the conceit of American Fiction before watching it. I mean, the trailers were everywhere. Just by watching YouTube every so often, you'd catch one of these trailers. I liked the idea, but I thought of the concept as limted. But American Fiction is the right level of smart in all the ways that count. I kind of pigeonholed American Fiction into a subcategory of film: the deceit film. I don't think that's an actual term, so let me spell out what I mean by "deceit film". Using dramatic irony to tell a story, the film revolves around a lie. In this case, we have the lie that spirals out of control, leading the protagonist to gain fame and notoriety, ultimately having to deal with the downfall and exposure of the deceit. The funny thing is...there really isn't any exposure. God bless this movie for messing with me. I thought I had the whole thing written out in my head. Monk, as far as he pushes the lie, never really gets caught doing it. I mean, we know that he shares the reality of the novel with Wiley, who will be making the story of his deceit into a movie. But we don't actually deal with any of the consequences of Monk's lies. Monk actually seems pretty happy towards the end of the movie, not because his conscience is cleared about the lies. The movie steers away from the guilt of lying to the point of Monk making peace with his choices to write a parody book to begin with. Monk is the kind of character I want to write, by the way. I sympathize with Monk. He's a great anchor for this movie (and points to Jeffrey Wright for being just a top notch actor, which I hope to address more in this blog). Monk is a character who is a little bit caustic, but that comes out of being frustrated, not being a bad person. He's passionate about quality writing and the world isn't allowing him to express quality writing because we live in airport bookstore world. (OH! To be a published author whose books crush at an airport! His lamentations are my dreams!) Now, that's even an oversimplification of the character. See, Monk could come across as completely unlikable. But Monk, for all of his self-involvement, is actually quite vulnerable as a character. He made a choice to leave his family. It's one of his defining moments. He wanted to become a writer, so he left behind all of those things that distracted him from becoming the best writer he could be. On one end, it could be seen as selfish. On the other, it could be seen as practical. But when Monk is back to being entrenched with the people in his life, he instantly steps up to the plate. His sister's death redefined him as a person. As such, he cares for his mother when his brother Cliff holds resentment towards her. (Note: I don't know if it shocks you that Sterling K. Brown is also amazing.) But he snaps at people. Again, I love me a complex character. And people are always diagnosing him. I see this guy with a lot on his plate being awful to people that he cares for. I get it. I hope that Monk is not me in that regard, but it's incredibly sympathetic, even if you want to scream at him a bit. It's a film about being a writer and I can't deny that. But it is also a story about family and wanting to take care of yourself. Monk has a million reasons to lie about the book he wrote. American Fiction creates a compelling case for immorality. He technically doesn't do anything illegal, as far as I understand. Perhaps there's an element of fraud, creating the characters of Stagg to inspire readers to purchase a convict's book. But really, it's just all in bad form the behavior he's illiciting. But Monk is his own worst critic. He's the reigning defender of good writing, of academic writing. His character faces the greatest rebuke of his actions: he has contributed to the filth of society. Maybe that's what makes the conversation with Sintara so fascinating. Throughout the movie, Monk goes from loathing Sintara to seemingly admiring her. She shares his concerns about the role of Black fiction, especially that which is written to absolve white guilt. They are the only two who think that the book is trash. But Monk is a character who cannot let things go. After all, it is the content of Sintara's novel that he's parodying to begin with. He loathes the notion of her novel, with misspellings and the archetypal Black characters running throughout. But Sintara creates something almost undigestable with her argument. She both absolutely agrees with Monk about the role of Black voices in fiction while being abhorred at how simplistic Monk's views on Black fiction are. Monk wrote his book as a parody. He was angry and venting. I mean, he clearly took a long time to get that out of his system. I wrote the first draft of my book in two months, fast by anyone's standards. Two months to vent is a long time, especially as a joke. (Question: he still gave his agent a copy of the book that he didn't want to sell?) Both Monk and Sintara have points during that argument. If the point of writing is to find the authentic voice, Sintara's book would have a certain degree of blasphemy. She's more authentic than Monk is. I mean, she is putting her own face and history out there, unlike Monk who creates Stagg to cover his own shame. But she is writing someone else's story without injecting any of the self into the story. But she's also saying that we should be lifting authentic stories of adversity up. She says that people like her characters exist. She comes from a place of thorough research, not just gut instincts, borrowing from pop culture to giggle at lesser writing. It's all so complicated and I love that it doesn't have a right answer. As much as that argument doesn't have an answer, I end up mostly on Sintara's side in that fight. There's just so much to unpack. I also can't help but love that this is an English teacher's movie. Golly, talking about books and what makes books work. Part of me is on the outside, looking in. It's a world that I desperately want to be involved in. I said that I wanted to talk about Jeffrey Wright in this movie before I close up. Jeffrey Wright might be one of the most adept and powerful actors we have in a generation. There are so many great actors out there, including Sterling K. Brown, whom I mentioned earlier. Not to diminsh from Brown's role in this, but Brown plays variations of a type. He does this very well. He's often confrontational and charismatic. But Wright is all over the place with his choices of roles. He does genre as well as subdued incredibly well. You really can put that guy in everything and he absolutely crushes it. This felt like he was rounding out the Bingo card with great and varied performances. He just nails every scene and I'm continually impressed. American Fiction works on all levels. I wouldn't hate to see this do well at the Academy Awards. Rated R, mainly because the film is determining whether or not someone's death was a murder or a suicide. Both topics bring their own traumatizing elements. Spriraling out of this, because this is the story of a trial, much of the film tries to bring out the defendant's illicit behavior. This means that sex and drugs are discussed, if not seen. We also see the corpse, which is gory. R.
DIRECTOR: Justine Triet Like, it's really good. I can't deny that this is a really good movie. But is it Best Picture good? I mean, we are starting to run into this every year. Now, I will say, I've been looking for an argument that Greta Gerwig should have been up for Best Director for Barbie. Then everyone said, "Who are you going to pull off?" And my takeaway? Justine Triet. Yeah, it sucks that I'm pulling another director off of the Best Director page. But also, Anatomy of a Fall is a decent courtroom drama that doesn't really break new ground. It's weird, because I'm going to be writing this blog with the knowledge that Anatomy of a Fall doesn't really do anything wrong. It just doesn't do anything better than other movies have done. If I had to be gracious and say that it did one thing better than anything else is to remind me that I should not get arrested in France. Geez, one of my bigger running gags in the movie was just shouting "Objection" and then a thing that I heard from American courtroom dramas. First of all, let's go with the dumbest stuff right now. It seemed like one of the major points of the movie was that the judge absolutely seemed to hate Sandra, right? Like, I kept waiting for that to be a plot point and that someone was going to bring it up. But do you know what actually happened with that? Nothing. No one was going to say a darned thing about how the judge really seemed to have it out for the defense, even though it seemed like the defense was just doing its job, you know, defending the client? Again, I know little-to-nothing about the French legal system. I just know that I shouldn't get arrested there because they'll treat you terribly. One of the reviews of Anatomy of a Fall called the film a prestige film that was turned into an airport read. I kind of agree with that. Maybe it colored me too much before sitting down to write this. Again, I gave this movie the least chance for success out of any Best Pictures out there. Someone mentioned to me that Anatomy of a Fall was just alright and I think that was the vibe I went into it with. It is dramatic as heck. Golly, the pacing and the storytelling is pretty darned good. In terms of understanding that this is one of those stories where we'll never really know the truth about whether Samuel jumped or was murdered, it doesn't quite leave the end one-sided. I mean, we never see the event in real time. Because this is a story more about the trial and the fallout of the trial, it does highlight the limited nature of a trial. Anatomy reminds us that it isn't necessarily an exporing of the objective truth. It is a reminder that the justice system is really more about who can argue better. That was the weirdest thing. As much as the story was about presenting evidence, which it only did occasionally, almost everyone who went up on that stand presented potential theories and you had to pick the best one of the group. I suppose a good ambiguous story gives you a lot of evidence and you have to go back and forth whether or not the defense did it or not. I don't know. Anatomy of a Fall made the justice system such an environment of bullying that I instantly stuck with Sandra from moment one. Heck, she could have even done it and I still wanted to defend her the entire time. Naturally, I want to compare the movie to Doubt, a film that never really tells us what happened. But with Doubt, you are left with the horror of two very different, equally bad scenarios. With Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra, despite potentially having murdered her husband, comes across with so much sympathy even if she did it that it doesn't create the same result that Doubt injected into its movie. I'm never going to advocate murder. It's my thing. But let's say that Sandra did murder her husband. It seems like he was borderline emotionally abusive and cruel to her. She would have to abandon her son. That's all terrible. But the best case scenario, a murderer would be in prison. I suppose that's the majority of crime dramas. But the alternative, which is the way that I viewed the movie, is way more tragic. First of all, I consider nothing more tragic than an innocent person going to jail. The corrections system is a system of punishment, not rehabilitation. But this would be a woman who lost her husband to suicide. A child would lose both parents in the wake of an unfathomable tragedy. But the bigger thing that the movie kind of touches on, but doesn't really hit very hard is the fact that Sandra's career is over. She has one of those careers that rests on the goodwill and support of a community of readers. People judge her art based on her morality. Remember, I'm the one who had lots of questions about the appearances of Amber Heard in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. I'm part of those masses who has a hard time divorcing the art from the artist. But the prosecutor in the story brings in Sandra's novels as evidence towards her character. If Sandra is a modest public figure, it would be hard to separate her art from her reality. But when the prosecutor brings in her novels as forms of evidence towards her mental health and her disposition, that inexorably makes the work the same as the artist. The only benefit that would come out of a trial like this is the macabre out there, who would read her work as a means to glean insight into a killer. It's upsetting. What Anatomy of a Fall absolutely crushes is the effect that it has upon Sandra's son. The very nature of being put on trial is a stigmatizing event. Those people around Sandra are fallout when it comes to trying to defend her. Remind me to be a little critical when it comes to how Daniel processes this. I'm going to be a bit of a bully, but I just can't come to terms with what this character does. Anyway, I almost care more about Daniel than I do about Sandra. I feel for Sandra. Absolutely. The performance that Sandra Huller gives Sandra the character is what cements the work. But Sandra is intentionally reserved as a character. She's holding it all in only to let go at times in the movie. She's willing to have everything out there about her relationship with Samuel, partially to stay out of jail, but also because it seems that she's very open with her life as an author. If she pulls from her real life, the notion of hiding things just because some things may be considered icky is beyond her. But she also doesn't go out of her way to tell her ten-year-old about her sexual proclivities. When he's exposed to all that, it's a bit much. That's the stuff I watch this movie for. I'm more interested in what happens to Daniel, in light of all of the trauma that he already went through. Okay, let's bully Daniel a bit. The experiment with the dog? That seems a bit much. I don't know. I'm going through anecdotal evidence for things. But it seems like a kid wouldn't poison his dog, especially given his visceral reaction to that dog's near death experience, for the sake of proving something that ultimately didn't have a lot of say in court. Maybe the bigger problem I have is the sequence of events with Daniel. A key idea to the story is that Daniel doesn't know if his mom is innocent or guilty. Marge, who clearly doesn't understand the crux of her job of keeping Daniel neutral, tells him that he just has to go with his gut and follow it hard. I don't get that logic. I don't see how poisoning the dog stems from these conversations. It seems like, if the dog didn't vomit, it wouldn't really change the narrative of Mom's guilt. Sure, it gives Mom a little bit more leeway when it came to collecting evidence. But I don't know if it helped her as much as he thought it would. I hate to be crapping on this movie because I enjoyed it. But I do agree with the New York Times. It has elements of a prestige movie, but it seems kind of forgettable in the long run. It's got that crime drama thriller thing going on, but without the gravitas to make me remember the movie in five years. PG-13 mostly for superhero violence. Since Aquaman and its surrounding characters have gone for amore optimistic tone, these movies are pretty watchable for kids of all ages. I guess that would be mostly true if it wasn't for the real casual use of the s-bomb. I mean, boy-oh-boy, that's the go-to curse word for superhero movies, isn't it? Also, if you don't care for Amber Heard, she's also all over this movie. I'll address that in a minute.
DIRECTOR: James Wan I can tell you right now. More than anything else right now, I don't want to be writing about Aquaman 2. I'm going through some self-loathing nonsense. I already wrote about a movie today. I want to shut down and play some Alan Wake 2, but I also know that --if I've done my job right --I'll have a plate of movies to write about on Monday coupled with a lot of grading to get through before the end of the quarter next Thursday. So here's to me powering through some writing that doesn't sound appealing to me at all. Here's something that will make this blog completely unrelatable. I'm the one dude who absolutely loathed the first Aquaman movie. With that perspective, you have to understand that I think that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is a big improvement. Now, is it a good movie? I won't go that far. It's still a rough film from my perspective, but I don't see the hate that it got from viewers. It's my last time to talk about the DCeU while the DCeU is still going, but it might come from the fallout of "What an odd farewell story". I get that. I get that some people really invested in the whole concept of a cohesive DCeU. I know that the Snyderverse fandom --potentially the most toxic fandom out there right now --really needed this whole thing to come together. I know that post-Snyder, there was this feeling of betrayal towards anything either DC or Marvel related. It was Snyder's vision or bust. Then there were the people who just wanted these DCeU movies to keep going. I was in the camp of what's happening right now. I wanted to let it die and to come back with a clean slate under a focused banner. For those people who said Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was bad because it's a weird foot to end up on, I kind of get that and even support that. It's a bummer when something you love dies an unceremonious death. For me, what made Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom completely watchable --if not great --was that it was a way more focused story that the first one. The first Aquaman was trying to do the entire mythology and canon of Aquaman in one movie. It didn't understand that there was a large gulf between complicated and complex. Golly, they touched on everything in that movie and all of it felt --pun intended --watered down. This is a straightforward movie. Occasionally, the way-too-many writers of this film through in a couple of light curveballs in an attempt to complicate the movie. Honestly, some of Lost Kingdom felt like it was trying to pad out a two-hour runtime. I also know that this movie got really butchered in some edits and reshoots. A lot of that comes down to the reviews and response to The Flash, which I honestly believe gets more hate than it deserves. Okay, Ezra Miller is a hard sell, but the rest of that movie is mostly fine. But Lost Kingdom, like The Marvels, is a simple story. I'll take a simple story done well over a complicated story that sacrifices gorgeous story for fan-service. But the problem is that Lost Kingdom, as simple of a story as it is, doesn't really do that one story well. It's not bad. I don't think it is a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination. Like I said, it kept my attention for the entire runtime. But there are so many moments that just feel like set-pieces and skewed logic. In terms of set-pieces, it's really weird how Orm's prison works. Orm is kept prisoner in the desert. I love that. Very smart. The guy is powered by water, so keep him water-starved. But his prison in the desert is right by the ocean. It's almost like we desperately didn't want to answer how to get an emaciated Orm from his prison back to full power, coupled with the broey moment when Orm hulks out and takes out all of his captives. But the biggest problem is that this movie is about reconciling Arthur and Orm. That's a cool concept and I absolutely love it. Too bad no one had a nuanced reason for putting Orm in this movie. Arthur's big problem is that he has to do something off-the-books. As King of Atlantis, he would not be sanctioned to investigate this problem that they are having. The Atlanteans are hesitant to have any kind of relationship with the surface world and this is a problem that needs cooperation with the surface world. Now, that seems like a problem that Aquaman would have to deal with. But his first and only suggestion to solving this problem is busting Orm out of prison. See, that doesn't scan at all. I get it. We need Orm out of prison so the brothers can be brothers again. I love the goal. It's just just the "how" doesn't make a lick of sense. I don't know why they need Orm for this problem. They are looking for Black Manta. Why would Orm know where he is? I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here. What ultimately happens in the movie is that Orm uses his knowledge of the seedier parts of the ocean to make a connection to get information about the location of Black Manta. But there are lots of people in Atlantis. Heck, Mera seems pretty knowledgable about these things. Where's her input? On top of that, Arthur Curry is really tied to the greater DCeU. From what I understand, Michael Keaton's Batman was supposed to be in this movie at one point. Again, the failure of The Flash movie may have had the studio scrambling. I can see a studio making knee-jerk edits to a movie to make everything that failed in a movie dowmn to a mathematical formula. It's what bad studios do. But there were so many other ways for Arthur to get the information or help that he needed and none of them made sense that you would bring in the old bad guy. (It's not shocking that it happens in a James Wan movie. That's what happens in every Fast and the Furious movie.) This whole tirade about how to get Orm into the movie is indicative of every other sequence in the movie. It's not that I hate Orm. (I mean, I don't love Orm, but I like the idea of this being a story about family and forgiveness.) There are so many scenes that are just meant to look pretty. At one point, on the island where Black Manta is, there is a jungle filled with giant creatures that are trying to kill them. Was it necessary that this island had giant creatures? Not really. These giant creatures never really came back into play outside of the fact that it created a fun and visual action sequence. Ultimately, this movie felt like scenes were only there to keep people chowing down on popcorn. You could set these characters anywhere and give them things to punch and it would be the same movie. Honestly, right now, I could put these characters in New Zealand fighting biker gangs and the movie would fundamentally have the same flow. Everything is only remotely related to the main plot of stopping Black Manta from freeing this monster who was pretty easy to take down. Yes, I kinda / sorta liked the whole global warming message. If you make an Aquaman movie without talking about how humans are ravaging the planet, you kind of missed the point of Aquaman. But like with the first one, there's nothing in the movie that was built on nuance. Instead, we're constantly fed action sequences to keep our attention. There are some lovely parts, to be sure. But just the constant conflict was hurting the more vulnerable, character building moments. Were they successful at bringing Orm and Arthur together? Sure. But could it have meant something more? Probably. Can I have a hot take? I love Jason Momoa. I'm almost tempted to say that we should give him any role he wants. But the hot take is that...maybe he's not the best Aquaman? I really want to like him in this role. I've been saying that DC needed to have the same fun that the Marvel movies have. Here's my own hypocrisy at work. If you were a hardcore fan of Iron Man before Iron Man came out, you might have been angry. Robert Downey, Jr. injected some perfect humor into that character. (See, how I wrote "perfect"? That's not fair or equal measured.) I know that Aquaman is not a great IP, but neither was Iron Man. It's just that it felt like Robert Downey, Jr. took the template of Tony Stark and made him snarky. In the comics, Aquaman is intense. He's way too intense. His personality is a big ol' grumpus. Namor and he have too much in common. While I love the idea of Aquaman being this giant of a man who can rock people when they go toe-to-toe (giving him some validity as a superhero), Jason Momoa might be having...too much fun? This is coming from a guy who crapped on the DC movies for being too serious. It's just that I think we need to pick our movies that are serious and which ones are fun. Superman, Flash, Guy Gardener, Shazam, those are fun time movies covered with the jokey-jokes. Batman, Aquaman, Swamp Thing? Those guys can get darker. Okay, let's talk Amber Heard. What am I supposed to think about Amber Heard right now? (What? I'm being honest. Apparently the wind has changed.) Last time I checked, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp were both terrible toxic people and that we were going to be done with them. Has there been an update? Amber Heard was all over this movie. Okay, here's me sounding that I want someone to stay cancelled and I'm not sure what I'm really saying. There are times when the actor overshadows their characters though. I had a hard time coming around to Mission: Impossible III because Tom Cruise was jumping on couches at the time. The same thing kind of happened with Amber Heard. I kept thinking that her scenes were done and then there was more Amber Heard. Mera wasn't a huge character in this movie, but they just kept bringing it back. Part of it came from the fact that Arthur's a dad in this one. But the one thing that really didn't get sold is the role of fatherhood. Parts of the movie were all about being a dad in the lightest way possible. But that story kept disappearing when it was convenient. The final beef I have with the movie was something that impressed me in the early DCeU. When Atlanteans were underwater, they looked rad. Their hair floated and it was super cool. Their hair still floats, but was I the only one who got the vibes that people's faces were just filtered onto their heads? It looked so weird at the time. I don't know. It's a fine movie. It's not great. I'm not going to miss the DCeU, but I didn't hate this movie outright. PG-13 and a lot of it comes from the first act. It's not like there isn't mature content in the later parts of the movie. But the first third has the absolute torture and forced prostitution of Fantine. Without going too much into it, there's also a very gruesome suicide at one point in the story. Violence and death pervades this story. It just has a lot, but it rarely feels manipulative. PG-13.
DIRECTOR: Tom Hooper I know that REAL Les Mis fans don't care for the movie. Maybe that's not absolute. Maybe it's just anecdotal. But it feels like the real Les Mis musicals find this to be some kind of abomination. Me? I love it. Like, I really love it. In fact, I kind of secretly love it more than the play...of which I've only seen once. Listen, I get that the voice of Javert is way more impressively operatic than Russell Crowe. And yeah, if there's a weaker casting...it might be Russell Crowe. But also, like, he's fine? Like, he's not terrible at what he does in this movie. Yeah, it's one of those things of comparison. I was also positive that I've written about this before. I've seen it so many times in the past ten years that it is unfathomable that I haven't written about it up until now. I tried linking the Les Mis blog to a reference I made in a previous entry and I was flabbergasted that I haven't done anything with this movie up to this point. So just be aware, I don't know where I'm going to take this. I teach The Count of Monte Cristo. No, I'm not going to show my class that movie. That movie is genuinely a perversion of the original book. (See my hypocrisy? I like the movie of Les Mis while the musical nerds love the play, but I won't play the movie of The Count of Monte Cristo.) I do so because, not only tonally and temporally are there a lot of connections between the two novels, but thematically and narratively as well. We do a compare and contrast thing with Les Mis and The Count of Monte Cristo. If I had infinite time, space, and patience, I would teach Victor Hugo's novel. But also, if you thought that The Count of Monte Cristo was a tank of a novel, Les Miserables puts it to shame. The thing about Les Miserables is that it might be one of those really rare perfect stories. Ironically, I didn't really care for it when I first saw it. I was late to come to the game and my wife's family was obsessed with this play. Me with my heavy weight of skepticism when it comes to obsession took a while to glom onto the story. They probably think it is a bit of blasphemy that I like Tom Hooper's version so much. I have a degree in theatre. I just proved that I do by spelling "theatre" with the "-re" ending. It's not that I don't love theatre. I really do. Ask my wife. My 40th birthday gift was seeing four plays in three days. I love them. But I also think that some stories actually lend themselves quite well to being filmed. I know that Tom Hooper is living under the cloud of Cats right now and that it is going to take a while to backpedal from that. If you want my opinions on Cats, I don't have one. I actively disliked Cats when it wasn't an abomination of a movie. They come out into the audience and no thank you. But Tom Hooper grasped the grandeur of the stage show and translated that as best as he could. So, I wrote this whole thing about how The Phantom of the Opera is kind of a travesty. I always considered that musical so spectacle heavy that it undermined an intimate story that could be happening. Les Miserables has its fair share of spectacle. It's why a lot of local theatre companies can't pull it off because it is a technical nightmare. Hooper refuses to let his version of the production to simply be a spectacle drive though. I mean, it is a spectacle. Golly, some of those shots. Jean Valjean tearing up his papers? But Les Miserables lends an emotional weight to a spectacle filled story. As much as some people remember the flag-and-the-ship or the barricade, that's all very nice. But this is one of those musicals where so much character is being revealed through song. Again, I read the Victor Hugo novel. It's a tank. It's not better than the novel (although it could be argued that I never want to read it again while I will watch Les Miserables annually without frustration). It's just that the use of song to explain the characters' inner monologues works better here than I've ever seen in musicals. The crazy part about Les Miserables is the French-to-English translation. I think I mentioned in Casablanca and The Grand Illusion that I get weirdly patriotic over the French National Anthem. Les Miserables hits a lot of the same beats for me. I am a big fan of protest rights and Les Miserables hits that need to be heard message pretty hard. The funny thing is, as emotional as I get over the barricade sequences, it might be some of my least favorite parts of the story. I'm a guy who adores Jean Valjean. I'm not the only guy out there who is mesmorized by this story either. Heck Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did their own homage to this story as well. One of the major reasons that I show this while reading The Count of Monte Cristo is that, despite both protagonists sharing similar origins, Jean Valjean goes left while Edmond Dantes goes right. Both men are able to redefine themselves in the face of grave injustice. But while Edmond Dantes finds value in the abject humilation of his antagonists, Jean Valjean uses his newfound wealth and anonymity to become the best man. Often, I'll lament that the world is a terrible place. I could quote Gandalf right now, but that would mean me Googling it and who has time for that in Late Stage Capitalism. What Les Miserables gets right is that it doesn't deny that that the world is a terrible place (hence, the name "The Miserable"). But instead of simply embracing the misery of existence and writing it off as an ending in itself, like The Bicycle Thieves, it stresses that mankind needs to be aggressively selfless in the face of evil. If we had to be critical of Jean Valjean, symbolized by lifting the flag and the cart on his back, he puts too much on his own shoulders. Fantine has every right to yell at Valjean because she's been through Hell. From her perspective, Valjean is culpable for her and Cosette's dilemma. He's not solely responsible, but his act of noninterference ultimately led her into the position she was in. But given the power of dramatic irony, we know that it wasn't so much that Valjean wrote off Fantine, but was almost unaware of this story as he was embroiled in his Javert drama. Yet, he still takes care of this girl. And the insane part is that he's trying to care for his pursuer for the entire length of the movie. Javert, who probably comes across as lawful evil a bit throughout, is so blinded by his own past and his own anecdotal experiences with criminals that he can't see the greater good and convoluted morality of his own actions. But Valjean keeps presenting him with reasonable requests. When he sacrifices his own freedom for the man misidentified as Jean Valjean, Javert comes full bore onto him. Valjean asks for three days to put right Cosette's home life. Now, we can demonize Javert here. Realistically, Javert has heard similar things before. But this continues throughout. Every time that Javert confronts him, Valjean offers a reasonable solution. He even offers to give himself up if he can just BLANK. In his own way, he's caring for Javert there. He knows that his own defiance of the law is an abhorrance to Javert and he wants to heal this man. Those final confrontations, he offers where he can be found. If Valjean knew that Javert was going to commit suicide, I wonder what his response would be. It's not that Valjean wouldn't turn himself in given the confrontations. It's just that there was always something incredibly pressing that required Valjean's temporary freedom. Like It's a Wonderful Life, we realize the value of one person to society. Unlike George Bailey who has a hard time seeing the forest for the trees, Valjean is only too aware of his responsibility for others. When the man accused of being Valjean is on trial, the true Valjean's concerns are for all of his workers who need employment. Never is it really for his own freedom beyond that initial choice to fake the death of Jean Valjean. It's this noble action. I need that stuff. I need the knowledge that our choices mean something. The world will be terrible and there will be a mass of people out there who are only looking out for themselves. But I do love that we have a character like Jean Valjean who is continually punished for his good deeds and his response time-and-time-again is only to escalate this notion of self-sacrifice. It's a beautiful story. Through and through. Each character has something they fundamentally believe in and they they explore it deeply. Even the Thenardiers, in their own way, break free of their caricatures at times and show their true evil beyond the jest. It's all great. I love complex characters and the world that keeps them all woven together. Les Miserables is just a marvel of a story and Tom Hooper crushes it. I know it was up for Best Picture, but I think some of the love for this movie has faded since its release. Yet, my students always seem to really dig it. TV-PG. I really need to qualify this. This is the toughest, most raw film that I have ever seen. I don't understand the TV-PG. I need to be as clear about this as can be. This movie needs to be seen. It is incredibly upsetting. This is war footage almost uncensored. People's faces have been blurred. But this is the mass slaughter of a culture and of a people. It does not draw lines based on age. This is a movie that will show you dead children and dead babies, killed from unfathomable violence. There is language throughout because basic humanity has been stripped from people. I don't know how it got a TV-PG, but I'm glad it did. Things that have restrictions on them tend to get fewer viewings.
DIRECTOR: Mstyslav Chernov If you think that you've seen this movie before, you can thank Vladimir Putin. Off the top of my head / a little Googling to make sure I get the names right, I am thinking about Last Men in Aleppo and The White Helmets. There was a time where I thought we were past the age of monsters. Perhaps it was just that I was a child and my parents hid me from the monsters out there. But the world has to be teetering closer and closer to a World War. With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is just following Adolf Hitler's playbook for the inevitable conflict between superpowers. I'm Ukrainian. My dad was Mr. Ukraine. He was so deep into the Ukrainian community that it colored everything we did. Yet, while growing up, when people saw our name, they kept asking if my name was Russian. (Once in a while, we'd get Polish. Never Ukrainian.) Since the invasion started, people now know what the Ukrainian flag looks like. I hear a lot less of "The Ukraine" and people just acknowledging that "Ukraine" is its own country. During the events of this documentary, there was footage showing the Western support for the war effort. Any kind of footage able to be extracted from Mariupol was shown to Western audience and I remember this big rise in awareness of the plight of the Ukrainian. This, by the way, isn't the first time that Russia has pulled this card with Ukraine. This is the first time that it's reached this outright scale since Putin took office a billion years ago. But it's happened before. I remember the love and outcry for Vladimir Zelensky as he fought back against this onslaught against a better funded, better weaponized military. What I'm about to write is a criticism of humanity, but in a way that can be looked at in many ways. We live in a tragic world. We have such an outpouring of news, often tragic, that reminds us that we have to pay attention to this or that. The current bombing of Gaza is one of those moments. But 20 Days in Mariupol is a visceral reminder that Ukraine is still fighting this battle. That criticism of humanity? It's the idea that we can feel so intensely for a place, but our empathy has a hard time maintaining the long fight. I'm guilty about the same thing. Ukraine is still important to me because I'm Ukrainian. The Ukrainians I know and have known me all my life are still waving that flag in the air. It doesn't minimize the tragedies going around the world right now. But movies like 20 Days in Mariupol remind us that war isn't just a word. That's how it feels most of the time. We know it is a word that carries stigma. But 20 Days shows us the reality of war, especially a war that comes from Russia. Based on all of the documentaries I've now watched that Putin would dismiss publicly as libel, Russia fights wars by committing war crimes. Will I acknowledge that the United States has a wealth of war crimes under its belt? Sure. Again, it is easy to throw stones at others because it is easy to see evil when distanced from the subject matter. But I also know that Vladimir Putin is a specific brand of evil. This is a documentary that lets you see exactly what level of madness the man has about him. There is a narrative here that emerges from the filming of the movie. Because the movie lies in the conceit of its title, we understand that this is a movie about escalation. Chernov is no stranger to conflict journalism. That's quickly established. He shows footage from all of the other atrocities that he's documented in the past. He has this prescient understanding of what is going to happen to this city. He's not always right. If anything, he undersells it a bit. One of the first things that Chernov does is tell a woman to hide in a basement, claiming that the Russians won't shoot civilians if they don't have to. The film then spends the rest of the movie disproving that statement. Considering that this is a story of war that has a handful of soldiers in it, the movie isn't about a war in any traditional sense. War is about soldier versus soldier. While civilian death is always a byproduct of war, 20 Days is something different. Chernov is hunkered down with people the entire time. "Hunkered down" isn't the best term because Chernov is always running towards the violence happening in Mariupol. But when he gets there, very little of it has to do with soliders. Part of that comes from the notion that the actual Russian forces don't show up until Day 15 or 16. Instead, as horrific as the violence and the military strikes are, it's never on actual strategic targets. Instead, it seems like bombs are going for the mass extinction of Ukrainian civilians. Every strike we see, there are scores of civilian deaths and dismemberments. I know that there would be military deaths as well. In no way am I trying to dismiss the military casualities. I'm more saying that so much of Russia's efforts are there as a form of mass murder on unarmed, non-military targets. And this is where I turn the onus on the United States. One of the key conceits of the movie is that Chernov shows longer, less cut footage to us. The cuts seem only to help tell the narrative of escalation in Mariupol. Then he sends the footage we have just seen to news sources around the world. We see how that footage is cut into news segments. The final way that we see those segments is the Russian department of propaganda manipulating those images into something that damns Ukraine, using outright lies of fabrication of tragedy. Ukraine comes across as the criminal. Okay. People will argue that all 24-hour news outlets manipulate their viewers into propaganda. Okay. I have to make peace that my outlet of choice, CNN, has done the same. But I'm now going to point the blame on Fox News with its obsession with building up the Donald Trump brand. Trump recently claimed that he's going to give Russia everything it wants. No more support of Ukraine. That guy loves Putin. Putin thinks he's a joke, but Trump is exactly who Putin wants in the Oval Office. He's easily manipulated. I talked about those early days of the war, where American support of Ukraine was almost universal. (I know that there were isolated voices claiming that Russia isn't that bad, but whatever.) But there's no coincidence that Trump comes out and says that he's going to stop aid to Ukraine and support Russia and then Tucker Carlson does the most evil, immoral interview with Vladimir Putin himself. That kind of puff piece is sickening. Sure, Carlson isn't Fox News anymore. That isn't slowing him down one bit. I dare you to watch those clips. Even Putin can't respect Carlson in those segments. He finds him to be a joke. But that's the message that is going on right now. The insane thing is that 20 Days in Mariupol and Tucker Carlson's interview can't exist in harmony. Sure, Russian subways look nice. It's because it is a police state where any crime is punishable by death. When I think of the great problems that America is dealing with right now, dirty subways aren't the issue. Fun grocery stores aren't the issue. (Jon Stewart pointed out that grocery stores may look cheap, but the living wage doesn't allow for most groceries to be considered affordable.) God, do you know what I want to do so much? I want to sit down Tucker Carlson and force him to watch 20 Days in Mariupol, then screen his interview. Then I want him to watch 20 Days again and defend himself. It's criminal what he did. And I'm not the first person to point that out, but he knows exactly what's going on in Ukraine. He just is that much of a sycophant of Trump that his integrity means nothing. We don't always get things right in America. But one thing that Biden did absolutely right was to support Vladmir Zelensky in his fight against this. I hate that Ukraine looks like Syria. Syria was our red flag. It was the thing that let us know that Putin was a sociopath who relished in the death of people in an attempt to return Russia to its former place of power. Yet, here we are. People are forgetting the violence that happened. Here is documentation of the atrocities happening out there and, in a way that continues to break my heart, no one seems to care anymore. Not Rated, but it the movie that established the American gory monster movie. There's some gnarly scenes of zombies (ahem...ghouls) eating people. Also, some of them zombies are straight up naked. The higher the resolution, the more you see. There's honestly a print of the movie where you probably didn't realize that there's full on nudity on screen. But the Criterion edition...?
DIRECTOR: George A. Romero Fun story. I went to a really conservative Catholic college. We weren't allowed to watch R-rated movies in public places. Heck, it was probably frowned on to watch R-rated movies privately. We weren't even allowed to watch things based on the MPAA. We had the Bishops' List, which rated things A-I, A-II, A-III, A-IV, or O. "O" was "Offensive." You couldn't watch an O movie publicly. You also couldn't watch an A-IV. That was just to salacious. But A-I to A-III, that was fine. The thing about the Bishops' List is that it was even more chaotic than the MPAA in terms of consistency. It was really up to the whims of the individual bishops to rate these things. While the bishops tended to lean towards conservatively rating these movies, somehow NIght of the Living Dead only got an A-III at the time. Well, not only did I watch Night of the Living Dead in a common room. That was too simple. I held a fundraiser in the theater showing this movie at Halloween. Man, people were really upset at the devouring of people scene with the naked people. Anyway, Night of the Living Dead was one of my staple movies back in high school and college. There's something so hip about being the guy who has that on his list. It's the movie that really got me into zombies. (I mean, it is the movie that got anyone onto the zombie culture. Sure, you could look at the Giallo zombi stuff, but I don't know if anyone made a bigger cultural impact on zombies than Romero. Everything we absorb today with zombies is standing on the shoulder of that giant.) Now, Romero's Dawn of the Dead will always be my favorite ...of the Dead movie. It's just perfect. But Night of the Living Dead is in my four. That's right. Despite being kind of a zombie fan (okay, really only kinda), I only have four zombie movies that I love. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and Shaun of the Dead. Besides setting the template for zombie movies to come, Night of the Living Dead is kind of a great story in itself. Notice that I don't have Day of the Dead on the list? It's because, the bigger that the world gets, the less effective the zombie story is. Night of the Living Dead is as intimate as it gets. People are stuck in a house. It's almost arbitrary that the monsters out there are zombies / ghouls. (Note: I am going to call them zombies because it's a Romero movie. He calls them "ghouls" and that's in-universe. Either works for me.) The great thing about a good zombie movie is that the threat outside is there. But the problem shouldn't be coming from the monsters outside. It's what Robert Kirkman made as the central concept of The Walking Dead. The real problem should be coming from the survivors. Barbra (whom I realize this viewing is a lot / Romero doesn't have a high respect for women during crisis moments apparently), even in her hysteria, outruns her pursuer pretty quickly. Her entire conflict is almost internal. Because of a mental break, she can't make good decisions. Ben's problem is that he has to wrangle a lot of big / toxic personalities in a contained space. For all of the threat of zombies, the bigger problem come from people not following the script. Now, I hate the fact that I write so much based on hearsay. I remember hearing that George Romero wasn't making this movie about race. I almost can't believe that. When I watch those Romero of the Dead movies, they all scream allegory, with different degrees of subtlety. But the first movie deals with the central conceit, "What if a Black man was given control in a situation where white people always get their ways?" Harry is as White America as you can get and Ben is a young Black man who has to smack around a white woman. My goodness, Harry is my nightmare. This is a guy who is used to yelling his way into every situation and getting his way. Now, let's talk about Harry and the weird plot dynamics of this movie. Harry's obsession is to get everyone in the basement. Now, for years --and still kind of today --I was always gobsmacked that Harry is technically right. Ben, by the end of the film, finds himself cornered in the basement. The ghouls keep pushing on the door and the door holds, unlike the door upstairs that Harry predicted. Now, Romero defintely makes Harry the antagonist of the story. But my frustration was that Harry ends up being right about almost all of the events of the story. Harry doesn't want to go out to get gas. He wants to hunker down right there and wait for rescue. Sure enough, the car goes up in flames. Tom and Judy die a horrible death. The doors on the house eventually give to the onslaught and Ben is in the basement. And to a certain extent, Harry still does have a point. Eventually, rescue would have come. In this case, they shoot Ben in the head. But rescue would have come and freed him. Heck, the ghouls eventually gave up on the basement door and Ben was able to leave of his own accord. The reason why I can live with it is because Harry basically made every bad thing in the movie come true. He's so obstinant and obsessed with being correct throughout the film that he stymies every plan along the way. Harry should have been the one to go with Ben to get the gas. Had Harry gone, Judy never would have run out after Tom. (Admittedly, I don't know what Judy was thinking in that scene. Again, Romero might not be writing his female characters as the most level-headed characters imaginable. Similarly, there would have been a reasonable chance that the ghouls might not have gotten into the house had Harry helped Ben shore up the house instead of going for the gun. That fight directly led to the ghouls getting in the house. Yeah, Harry was right that the door would have held. But on the other hand, had Ben gone to the basement with Harry in the first instance, Karen would have turned on them and surprised them, leaving them locked in with a handful of ghouls. (I now like writing "ghouls". Go figure.) Again, Romero stressed that this wasn't a movie about race. I really can't wrap my head around that. The movie ends with a cop (by proxy) shooting a Black man in the head before identifying him as a threat or not. Maybe that's the read that all liberals like me see in that scene. But it is also a scene that makes the movie. It's not just tragic that Ben survives the night when no one else does. The scene is tragic because they assume that he's a threat. If the other movies are all allegory heavy, I can't imagine that Romero didn't imagine the social implications of that scene. Maybe it's because of his later movies that he gains the reputation for being something heavier than disposable horror. But the movie is made by that last shot. The fact that his body is tossed unceremoniously on the bonfire. No one questions the fact that Ben has a gun next to him. The image of a firearm next to a Black man is also incredibly powerful in terms of how people perceive threats. I don't know. I'm a firm believer that everything should be political But the big takeaway is that Night of the Living Dead holds up. This movie is upsetting. Romero chose to make the movie black-and-white. It was probably a budget thing, but this movie learns from the language of horror from the B-movies of the '40s and '50s. But seeing the filmmaking techniques of those eras coupled with some visceral scary stuff is outstanding. Some of the performances are all over the board. Can I tell you one guy who needs MVP? Ol' Sheriff McClelland. That guy read as accurate. Everything in this movie is just a little campy except for that dude, who really seemed to believe that he was hunting killers slaughtering the population. I hope there's nothing gross about that guy or else there will be some mud on my face. Totally worth a rewatch. Somehow --SOMEHOW --by the grace of God, this movie scored a PG-13! I bet it's because it's a musical coupled with the fact that, despite being about a lot of questionable material, it mostly happens off-screen. This movie deals with rape, the consequences of rape, and the implication that the rape is incestual. There's violence, domestic and other, coupled with language, drinking, and all kinds of sexual behavior. This movie has a lot, but still manages to pull off a PG-13.
DIRECTOR: Blitz Bazawule Why? Why are so many movies downplaying that they are musicals? I get the logic --assuming that there wasn't any extensive thought put to this. Musicals tend to attract the musicals crowd. The box office only gets good if there's buzz about how good the musical is. So an opening weekend may be disappointing, but a generated buzz can keep a musicals theatrical run going by repeat viewers and word of mouth. By suppressing the fact that it is a musical adaptation, you get the people who want to see prestige films, which leads to a big opening weekend box office. But then those numbers fall off because you have people a little caught off guard and the wrong audience for the film. Maybe it's the fear that there would be no box office versus some box office first weekend? I don't know. I heard The Color Purple kind of suffered after its initial weekend. I've always had a difficult time with The Color Purple. At one point or another --college probably --I read Alice Walker's novel. It was brutal. The story is a cruel one. It is a book about misery and abuse and it gets really rough. I then bought (in an attempt to force myself to love this story) Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple movie. I still don't know why Spielberg did this movie, but I kind of love it. I don't love the movie. It was me twisting my own arm. Now I'm at my third version of the same story and...I don't know. I kind of like this one. But that's not the glowing review that I want it to be. I'll be honest. I really like a quality musical. I can tell that I'm watching a quality musical. The songs are solid. The performances of said songs are great. The dance numbers are solid. I just, unfortunately, feel a complete disconnect from the musical numbers and the subject matter being performed. It's not like all musicals are meant to be happy and joyful. I'm one of those dopes who really likes the Les Miserables film musical. (By the way, I can't believe that I haven't written about Les Miserables. I watch it almost every year while I'm teaching The Count of Monte Cristo.) Part of the logic, I suppose, is that I consider The Color Purple to be too bleak to have some of the dance numbers. But, again, Les Miserables has some real bangers in there and that's a story that literally translates out to "The Miserables." Part of it is that I don't really know if the tone of the songs match the tone of the scene. I'm not the first person to point out this old chestnut, but there's this weird "is the music real or is it just for the audience" element to musicals. I'm thinking of the musicals I really love and the music almost feels like a natural extension to the scene. With The Color Purple, we could be watching Celie going through some absolute hell. Then, there's an abrupt stop and a music and dance number happens. Maybe it's that there's dancing. Listen, my favorite part of musicals is the dance. What? I can be open like that. The Color Purple's dance numbers are just fantastic. I love every moment. But with something so bleak, I'm going to make that Les Miserables comparison. There really isn't traditional dance breaks in Les Miserables. The song is the telling of the story. There are things that are choreographed, but it's not really supposed to be these show stopping dance numbers. Because I really want to like The Color Purple, I'm going to give some points to the fact that Celie --because of all of her trauma --lives a good portion of the story in her head. The songs almost act as a form of escape from the misery of her real life. I like that. But that jump is always kind of abrupt and I'm not often emotionally ready for that transition from the horrors of reality to the bright nature of Celie's escapism. Is Taraji P. Henson only going to play this type of part from here on out? Ever since Empire, she's kind of been typecast as this one kind of role. Don't get me wrong, she's pretty darn good at it. But I miss getting surprised by a Taraji P. Henson appearance. She keeps being this fast-talking, no-nonsense character who dominates every scene she's in. That's great, but it also means that we never get many levels from her. It's not to say that Shug Avery doesn't have vulnerable moments. There are bits in the story where Shug has to get her guard down. But these are softer moments, not vulnerable moments. I never really feel like Shug has much to lose with her choices. There's even a plot that is almost an afterthought about her father, the preacher, and the role of forgiveness. But it is such a B-story that it almost feels like it wasn't going to be part of the movie or it was a much larger part of the movie that was cut down to practically nothing. Part of my dislike for The Color Purple, besides the nonstop torture of Celie until the final act, is the very muddy message of who Shug Avery is. Part of me absolutely loves Shug. After all, in such a bleak story, you need someone who is so full of life to get the film out of the doldrums. But Shug, as the moral anchor who pulls Celie out of her depression, is a really weird choice. Shug is defined by her hedonism and selfishness. The opposite side of that coin is that she's a self-defined woman who refuses to submit herself to the expectations of society, which is great. But really, Shug is making bad choices left and right. The only reason that she is even in Celie's world is because she's sleeping with Mister and keeping him obsessed with her. Part of Mister's obsession with Shug is what is making Celie's life absolute hell. (It should be stated that Mister is 100% responsible for the things that happen to Celie, but Shug's involvement simply colors the cruelty that he dispenses.) It's also really weird that Shug latches on so tightly to Celie. Part of the reason that Shug latches onto Celie is that she's the unique thing in Shug's world. She goes from bar-to-bar, man-to-man and sees all of this evil. Celie is through-and-through, a good person. I get that Shug would want to save someone like her. But I also have to call shannigans on that a little bit too. Mister has gone through wives before. Mister doesn't become a monster because of the arrival of Celie. Mister was a monster beforehand. Shug has witnessed other Celies in the past. Now, maybe she's sick of seeing the cycle. Maybe she's warmed by Celie's sexual desire for her. It just doesn't read that Shug, the big fish in a little pond, would bond so closely to a girl who has been silent around her up to the moment of arousal. It's just something that's always bugged me. I don't see that relationship making a lot of sense. Maybe it's the power dynamic or maybe I just see a conflict of personality. That's all. Colman Domingo's having a year, right? Man, I may not have loved this movie, but Colman Domingo is bringing that intensity to yet another charcter and I absolutely dig it. Danielle Brooks is nominated for best supporting actress, which originally raised an eyebrow. I forgot how big a part Sofia is in this story. The second half of the film? My goodness, Danielle Brooks destroyed in that scene. Honestly, it might be my favorite part of The Color Purple. I know that the film is about how Celie, through her resilence and good nature, fixed a community of broken people. (Sure, she probably shouldn't be friends with her rapist. I'm iffy about forgiving him, let alone bringing him into your life.) But the scenes of Sofia going from this force of nature to being thrown in jail, tortured, and humiliated was such a tightrope walk for Danielle Brooks. All the points to her. Guys, I think this is just me. There are a few stories that I really want to like out there. Every element of the plot is up my alley and these are well-made movies. The Color Purple and Blade Runner should be the stories that I'm selling to other people, but both don't stick to me like they should. I don't love the musical element of this one. I'm sorry, it's just not gelling the same way other musicals do. There are great performances, but the movie doesn't do much for me. Passed, but this is Capra being as wholesome as he can be. While it paints journalists as inherently irresponsible with their printing standards, the worst thing that happens is that people get drunk and fight. The movie does deal with suicide both with the respect that the topic deserves, but that feeling is not consistent throughout the film. Sometimes, suicide is the worst thing imaginable. Sometimes, it's the punchline to a joke.
DIRECTOR: Frank Capra I don't want to write. I never want to write again. I am having a rough weekend. But I got to watch a Frank Capra classic. How often does that happen? I love Capra. I love Capra too much. Having to write about a Capra that I haven't seen should be one of the highlights of my year and I'm just incredibly grouchy. That's not fair. I just know that I will fall behind if I am not constantly writing because I still have to write about The Color Purple today and that's a lot. My biggest question is "What is going on with the rights issue to Meet John Doe?" I've been a Capra nut for ages. like, I will lose friendships if they don't like It's a Wonderful Life or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I have done that, actually. I'm a very petty and spiteful person. But I've been trying to get a copy of this movie that is watchable for a while now. It seems like every copy is a bad VHS transfer. For Christmas, I got a copy of Meet John Doe. Again, we're looking at a public domain DVD that has a VHS transfer again. I couldn't. So I found a decent print on YouTube. I try not to admit to this because it's sketchy. I'm just so sick of buying DVD after DVD that is just trash. I now know that there is a really good print out there. It was the version that showed on TCM. I know I'm not breaking any rules. It's in the public domain. But what is it going to take to get a really good print of this movie for private collections? How has Criterion not made Meet John Doe part of the Criterion Collection? I mean, we have Night of the Living Dead. Why not Meet John Doe? It's just a weird history. I can't help but get political with this one. Meet John Doe is one of the more political movies coming out of an already political guy. My take on this is that we're living in the Dark Universe where John takes D.B. Norton's idea and runs with it. Capra knew the common man. It's why I like his movies so much. Capra, as an immigrant, had such a love for America. His America was the people who made the country something special. He had a distrust of the upper echilons of society and knew that the American Dream was a struggle worthy of fighting. Often, the consequence of extreme capitalism mean that corporate America stomped on the little guy. Guess what? He was right. But Capra also believed that people were inherently good. The rich were so blind to morals that they couldn't understand how people could be so moved by simple, New Testament ideals of being good to one another. The very notion of Meet John Doe is that the downtrodden need to be acknowledged. If the downtrodden are acknowledged and given dignity, they will listen to whomever presents them a common goal. Donald Trump did that. By the way, he's D.B. Norton. I'm not going to hide behind that at all. He acknowledged that there was a loud, upset, and ignored working class. He gave them dignity. Like Norton does in Meet John Doe, that dignity wasn't given out of a sense of duty. It was for self-promtion. It's weird how prescient Meet John Doe is. For a good chunk of the movie, I kind of giggled how simplistic I thought the news cycle was. Ann Mitchell is about to get fired, so she writes a fake news story about a common man who is fed up with the system and about to commit suicide. I thought it was absurd that the different news agencies fought over coverage for something so small. Then I remembered Joe the Plumber. The fact that Joe the Plumber has secured real estate in my long term memory kind of shows that maybe we are easily influenced by an appeal to emotion. Man, I miss having Capra's belief in people. There is something so touching about people finding community over a shared love of his fellow man. It's what brings me to this story. But I'll tell you what. Meet John Doe, as much as the second half of the movie really got me, took a long time to win me over. I suppose the true for the first time that I watched It's a Wonderful Life. But I'm in this place where I have a real respect for real journalism. It's kind of weird that the movie kind of washes over the yellow journalism that is the foundation of this movie. The movie starts with Henry Connell rebranding The Bulletin into The New Bulletin. Capra has this amazing exposition for this movie. The plaque, stressing the importance of honesty and truth, is replaced by a fear of modernism. Okay, Capra is accusing journalists of abandoning principles for selling papers. But Ann starts the movie as the OG Lois Lane in this. She's all about principles and the fact that Connell is downsizing his moral reporters for the flashier writers is accusatory towards journalists. But Ann becomes this corrupted helot pretty quickly. The odd thing is that Connell is the one who represents a love for America. It's Connell's involvement in this whole plot that causes him to get drunk and confess his anger towards what the John Doe movement has become. I love that scene by the way. For all my cynicism about the state of America, the reason that I get so worked up about politics is that I have this Capra idea of America. America is what Connell is talking about. It's about going into a war you, at your heart, hate because it means the deaths of innocents. But it also means going to war because there is an authentic evil out there and it means that people will suffer. It is the idea that Americans go to war because we are altruistic. We know that the notion of suffering is terrible and that we'll do the one thing we hate doing for the sake of someone else. I'm getting worked up because I was thinking about Trump's comments about NATO. God, this man needs to stop being a turd and to start watching some Capra. He wants people to pay for their fair share in the fighting for what's right. He wants Ukraine to kowtow to Russia because it's not our fight. But Meet John Doe lives under the assumption that Americans understand the core tenets of America. It's easy to read the John Doe Clubs springing up over America as "I am claiming what's mine." It's a rise to say that we're going to take care of each other. We're going to remind the world that we exist by how good we are, not by what we're owed. We're living in a world where the John Doe Clubs are all about who we're going to mutually hate and I can't stand that. Meet John Doe put out this message that Americans are good and we responded with this idea that Americans are the most selfish of the bunch. What happened? I honestly don't know how we got to this point. I suppose I do. Meet John Doe talks about it at length. There's this whole class of people out there that feel unseen and unheard. Meet John Doe unites these people under the banner of patriotism. Instead, the real world was told that America wasn't great anymore. Meet John Doe, a film from 1941, argued that it wasn't that America wasn't great anymore. It was a reminder that it was always great if people just cared about one another. Like, honestly, I'm a naive sentimentalist. I find beauty in the fact that humanity should be so beyond where we are right now. Now, I am using a work of fiction created by an idealist to talk about what Americans should or shouldn't be. I don't know if this was the prevailing attitude in 1941 or if (and I just realized that the war that Connell is talking about is The Great War, not WWII, which was a war fought despite being isolationists) attitudes have changed that much. I hate that I've been in the Generational tiff that has been posted all over social media. I hear how much Gen Z hates Millennials (by my students!) and I thought that was all exaggerated. But I have a genuine frustration with a lot of Boomers, simply because they tend to be the generation who are all for the infighting. Like, when I see pro-gun bumper stickers advocating the phrase "Come and Take It", that's so anti Meet John Doe that Americans don't look like Americans. "Try that in a small town"? Meet John Doe is all about how the small town in the friendliest place on earth. If anything, the dynamics have shifted. Meet John Doe shows the mean attitudes coming from the cities. John is going to jump off of city hall, a skyscraper. There's a general disregard for John's life shy of the headlines it would create and that's why Norton wants to stop him. But the people from the small towns are concerned about the value of the man. Instead, we're now getting messages from small towns that we're going to mess you up if you try any of that communist nonsense in these small towns. We saw it during the Civil Rights movement and we're seeing it today. In the past few years, I've understood that the Rockwellian America never really existed. There's the message of the self-sacrificing, noble American that MAGA perverted over time. I've compartmentalized that belief with the notion that Frank Capra, an immigrant, saw the beauty of Americans and how inherently good they are. Meet John Doe is both a wonderful film, but also something that hurts my heart because the world should be like Meet John Doe. It should be based on the idea that the love of God and neighbor means sacrificing for the other, regardless of idealogy. It should be about not needing to worry about politicians because we'll do the right thing, despite race, creed, or color. Instead, we have the opposite. We've been put through the wringer and we've come out more bigotted and more like helots than I thought imaginable. I love this movie, but it makes me more sad than anything else. We've almost proven Frank Capra to be something too good for this world. PG, which is kind of weird. I can't really fight against it, but it just feels R. At its core, Hamlet is a dark storyline. This RSC version isn't exactly shying away from some of the more upsetting content. There's murder, revenge, suicide, drinking, and a bit more sexuality than other versions of Hamlet. Maybe it's because we tend to give Shakespeare a pass, coupled with the fact that it's not like there's gore on screen.
DIRECTOR: Gregory Doran My Doctor Who club is on its last legs. The kids I started it with during Covid are all graduating. They're kind of over it. But you should know that I teach both Much Ado about Nothing and Hamlet in my World Literature II class. Because I have a bunch of sorta-Whovians in that class, I show them the Much Ado with David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Well, they kind of enjoyed that one. But one of the reoccuring comments about it was about how much they loved David Tennant as Benedick. This was not an accident. I am a master manipulator. (Exhibit A, for the prosecution.) Well, I normally teach the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet, just because it's so complete. But I know that by the time we get to Hamlet, there's a little bit of burnout to Shakespeare. So I thought I would change things up. If they liked David Tennant in Much Ado, they'll probably like him again in Hamlet. I didn't end up showing David Tennant's version. I started watching it and, between the cuts and the rearrangements, I thought it proved to be a bit too much. The students follow along in their plays and this version from the RSC is a bit all over the place. But even more than that, it really tries too hard. I'm going to gripe a bit. It's not all bad. David Tennant does something marvelous with the role that I haven't seen from other Hamlets and I absolutely adore it. But my English teacher from senior year of high school called me Hamlet Boy because of my devotion to this play. I invested a lot in this show. I really, really like it. I'm not a "First Folio" guy or anything. I'm just a dude who really likes Hamlet. Maybe that makes the work too precious to me, but there are choices in this version that are incredibly frustrating. I want to talk about Tennant first as Hamlet. One of the key ideas behind Hamlet is that we have to question what is madness and what isn't madness. Often, I tend to lean towards the notion that Hamlet isn't mad in exercising control over the events of the story ("hawk and a handsaw"), but mad in his understanding of morality. The events of the ghost (which I really want to be part of madness, but I can't get past the idea that other people can testify to the ghost's presence) have skewed him into a fever of revenge. That revenge corrupts more than makes him mad, but I get that there's a wealth to debate about Hamlet's mental state. Most actors tend to play it in line with what I'm saying. Kenneth Branagh, Lawrence Olivia, and Ethan Hawke seem to be quite in control of their faculties, especially when no one else is around. David Tennant might be the first Hamlet who embraces the notion of sheer lunacy regarding the whole thing. As such, some of those lines really hit differently. While I probably wouldn't make the same choices, Tennant's choices give validity to a version that might be considered simply the TV movie version of the play. The bigger problem I have is that the movie really tries to be the version that's different from the others. The theater community tends to be a little navel gazy when it comes to what makes amazing art. This is incredibly reductive and I apologize for lumping in all theatre artists into this category, but there's such a need to be different that we forget that our job is to service the needs of the play and the audience. I know that there are probably Shakespeare purists who think that every show must be set during the Elizabethan era or whatever era the show was intended. But I agree with most directors and producers of Shakespeare that many of the themes are so universal that these stories are easily transposed to other eras. But one of the things about dumping the show in another era, like modern day, is that we have to not make that the point of the show. Goodness gracious me, the constant reminders that surveillance cameras exist in Elsinore almost became more important that certain plot points. Honestly, this version gives more attention to the notion of the camera than the death of Polonius. I'm literally listening to the score of Picard season three right now. I often listen to Star Trek music. This should surprise no one. The reason that I bring this up is because, for the first time in my life, I question something that they do with Sir Patrick Stewart. I think that Patrick Stewart does a fine job with Claudius. This is such an annoying fanboy thing to say, but I have to say that I love Derek Jacobi's Claudius more. Part of that is that I don't know if this version of Hamlet gives Stewart much to do besides be a spectator at his own downfall. I need to get something concrete and annoying about Stewart's Claudius out first before I go into anything else. I'm sure that this isn't the first time that the actor playing Claudius also played the Ghost of King Hamlet. It's a very Frankenstein and his monster thing. I get it. I just find it weird that sometimes the text doesn't really make sense. Thank God that Tennant is playing Hamlet with an overwhemling amount of madness because it allows certain lines to make sense when they otherwise wouldn't. Let me be explicit. There are many instances where Hamlet refers to the fact that his father looked very different to Claudius. He's insensed at Gertrude for downgrading in her new marriage and forces her to look at the two contrasting images of these men. When Patrick Stewart plays both, it's a bit...confusing? I noticed that we don't actually look at those photos. It seemed like the movie wanted to power through those lines so that we wouldn't raise an eyebrow, but the speech comes across and disjointed and kind of silly. Also, I don't see...why. The logical version is that they're brothers, but it is also incredibly distracting. When you do that double-casting thing that we're seeing here, there should be a mirroring. After all, the movie really does play up the mirror imagery, especially the shattered glass. But Claudius and King Hamlet aren't exactly mirrors of each other. We don't see any kind of deeper meaning behind it. Gertrude views them as different people. There is no connection between the two that is explicit. If there was a change in performance, I'd say it would work. I almost feel bad for Stewart, who doesn't do a darned thing wrong in this. But the way that this version is formatted is that Claudius is almost undefined in his evil. I always like Claudius as a villain because he's kind of repentant. If he could do it all over, he wouldn't. But he's also a man who believes in self-preservation. We see his evil come out in his moments of desperation. But the movie is so incredibly focused on Hamlet that we never really give moments for Stewart to breathe into the character. It always feels like those scenes are rushed. Claudius almost becomes a tool of exposition more than a proper character. I love that Hamlet and Claudius are meant to be an unstoppable force versus an immovable object and that's just not the case here. Hamlet keeps hammering and hammering and Claudius just reacts. Part of that comes from the fact that the scenes are moved around to give Hamlet scene after scene together. Claudius becomes a bit of an afterthought. I mean, I didn't hate the movie by any frame of the imagination. It's actually one of the better Hamlets out there. I am subject to that thing happens to lots of other people. "It's not the version I like." I really love the 1996 version. It's the version that made me fall in love with the play. I watch it so often. But as an alternative, smaller-budget version, it does a lot right. Mostly, David Tennant as Hamlet. Sure, I could go with out the ab-shirt that is meant to reflect modern society. But his scenes work because he's doing something that is both new and WORKS with the text. He never really goes against the text. If anything, listening to him speak, I find elements that were meant to be emphasized compared to the more stuff and controlled Hamlets out there. Like, there's a good chance I'm going to watch this one again. It's an hour shorter and has some really good bits in it. It's just that...stop trying so hard. You have a good show in there with great performers. But constantly reminding us that "things are a little different here" is just hurting the stuff that really works. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
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