Rated R because it's a horror drama about an active shooter. It's incredibly upsetting, especially how casual the violence is shown. There's a lot of death and all of it is horrifying. It's one of those things that gets really upsetting, not because of how over the top the whole thing is, but because how understated the violence in this movie gets. There might be some language in here. The second place thing in this movie is the drinking. There's also some 1968 racism happening, but it's pretty tame and almost a commentary on how casual racism gets. This really is an upsetting film.
DIRECTOR: Peter Bogdanovich It's a little after 1:00 in the morning. My right arm has been tingling all day and it's bugging me. I should be going to bed because it was just a whirlwind of a day. But I have had a productive evening and getting this blog out will really just be icing on the cake, especially if I have the wherewithal to knock out another blog tomorrow morning and read another 100 pages. (I have alluding to the fact that my hobbies are almost a profession in the summer. It's the only time that I really have to put attention on the things that I enjoy.) I wasn't prepped to like this movie. I had never really heard of it. I think that I threw it on my Amazon Wish List because it was a Criterion Blu-Ray that starred Boris Karloff. Targets might be one of the best surprise watches that I've had in a really long time. Part of that comes from the fact that I never really respected Peter Bogdanovich. I know. I'm this guy who wants to give everyone a fair shake. But my experience with Peter Bogdanovich has mostly come from the fact that, for a really long time, he was the guy who showed up on special feature documentaries as a talking head, often commenting on auteurs. I also have an intense need to like The Last Picture Show, and honestly, that ain't happening. Someone told me that the only really great thing that Bogdanovich made was The Last Picture Show, so that seemed to write off anything else that he created. I need to learn to just like what I like and not care what other people have to say. The thing that blew my mind is probably pretty obvious for people who have seen this movie. I've always kind of hated that Boomers have always blamed all of the problems of the 21st Century on younger generations. I always found it funny to pretend that Millennials and Gen Zers were responsible for all of the juvenile delinquency that happens out there. There's this false memory of history as it being a better time, but the 1950s were loaded with genuine problems with kids. There were JD squads stopping mass violence, yet current generations keep on being treated as immature and irresponsible. But there's also this false narrative that is out there that guns have only been a problem post-Columbine. Targets is one of the most loud voices against gun violence that I've ever seen in a movie. Heck, this movie addresses the notion of the White active shooter way before I ever saw We Need to Talk about Kevin. Part of the movie is Peter Bogdanovich just being Peter Bogdanovich. He's literally in the movie as a director who is obsessed with Boris Karloff, who is doing the most meta performance of his life and in 1968. Part of me really wanted to roll my eyes for this entire half of the movie, but Karloff is so good that I can't fault him at all. Honestly, I even liked Bogdanovich. He gave himself such a sympathetic role that I just kept giggling at the pretense that these two were playing sympathetic characters. This stuff is great and you can just feel Bogdanovich being able to write this half of the movie in his sleep. It's commentary on the studio system and what it is really like trying to make a movie. It's coupled with the fact that it's a reminder of Old Hollywood and how it's losing ground to splashier, more vapid films --even though the movies that Orlok is in seem to be pretty trashy. But the Bobby section of the film is the stuff of nightmares. I give Bogdanovich so much credit. I tried writing something like this and it's something that I'm going to have to work on without outright stealing elements from Targets. Golly, there's so much of this section of the film that is so prescient. It's not even that. I'm getting all angry liberal here, but there's been this recontextualization of what gun violence in America is in America. It's something that has been with us far longer than we care to admit and we keep thinking that the real scary things come from anything besides bored White men. It's like there's this separation between active shooters and psychopaths like John Wayne Gacy. We're looking at 1968. If Mindhunter gave me any insight into what the FBI was up to, there were so many active serial killers in this country and it's odd that we never really connected killers with guns to killers with knives. Bobby is this guy who just had an overwhelming desire to kill his whole family and a bunch of strangers with a gun. We really sit with Bobby for a long time before he starts killing people. I mean, we know where the movie is going to go from the moment that we meet Bobby in the gun store. Bogdanovich is no dummy. His introduction to Bobby is him doing a practice shot on Byron Orlok from across the street in a gun store. But it's not like we go right into Bobby going ham on the general public. No, we see this long list of red flags that conservative America would list as healthy behavior. Instead, we're exposed to all these telltale signs of megalomania (I may be using the wrong word. It's almost 1:30 and I wasted time watching a wicked storm outside.) That trunk full of guns is what a healthy person would probably refer to as an arsenal. (Also, I'd like to point out that the gun store owner coming into work with the flu probably wouldn't have respected Covid restrictions with that attitude.) But because Bobby looks the way he does, he can get away with all of it. By the way, Bogdanovich, chef's kiss on the casting of Bobby and his family. You couldn't make that dude look more Rockwellian and that's the absolute point. This is a horror story not like Jason, who is deformed and almost supernatural in concept. This is a guy who just felt like it. Sure, we can talk mental health and we absolutely should. But Bogdanovich isn't hiding that Bobby's entertainment of choice was cruising by the gun store and putting yet more stuff on his dad's account. He asked for 300 rounds and said that he was going to kill pigs. I don't know what it is like to work at a gun store. I have been to one in high school because my friends worked at one. But there has to be this intentional disconnect to say "What are people doing with these guns?" Like, probably most of them are going hunting. But this is a kid who owns oodles of handguns. Then there's all of that ammuntion? It's just something that I'll never understand. If you haven't guessed already, I'm pretty anti-gun. But Targets almost says the quiet part out loud and I applaud the movie for that. There's one moment that I don't love and it's a really important one. Bogdanovich has these amazing shots in the movie. There was something Hitchcockian about the father going to set up the targets shot that I can tell that he loved the auteurs. (If you really want to argue, it might have been more Powell and Pressburger, but it's also been a minute since I've seen Peeping Tom.) Most of the movie is just perfectly done. I honestly love it. But the two narratives are doomed to run into each other. We have Byron Orlok slowly making his way into confronting Bobby. These two disparate worlds need to collide and there's this cool idea that Bogdanovich really wants to try. Bobby, in his skewed perspective, can't differentiate between the Byron Orlok of The Terror and the real Byron Orlok (who, for some reason, has larger-than-life Hollywood bravery). He fires at the Orlok on screen. No damage. He fires at the Orlok in real life. No damage. Eventually, the real Orlok just slaps him around a bit and he cowers in the corner. I really wanted to like this moment because I saw what he was trying to do. But my brain couldn't handle it. On one hand, I'm really glad the movie wasn't resolved with a "good guy with a gun", which it almost was. But also, no one really bought that Old Man Boris Karloff really took out an active shooter, especially with an old man shame slap. Ed Wood really gains a couple of points knowing that Targets exists. I don't write expletives on my blog, so I ask you to watch Ed Wood on your own. There's a think that Bela Lugosi says about Boris Karloff repeatedly in that movie and that quote has so much more resonance knowing that Boris Karloff almost ended his career on Targets. Bela Lugosi got Plan 9 from Outer Space, infamously known as one of the worst films ever made and Boris Karloff got Targets, an extremely poignant movie that tries to take down the NRA and has quite a lot to say about aging in Hollywood. This might have been one of my favorite surprises this year. While the one scene is done rather poorly, the movie as a whole is a knockout. I even applaud the closing credits. A single shot with anything gory or obvious is a haunting shot and I adore this movie.
0 Comments
PG, mainly because this is a Jim Henson vehicle in 1986. Honestly, we watched it with the kids. There wasn't anything too upsetting. It's messed up in the sense that the '80s as a whole were messed up. There are creepy arms reaching for Sarah. Some of the monsters can be a little upsetting. A baby is in peril. The biggest red flag? Some of Bowie's outfits, which leave little room for the imagination. Still, it's pretty tame. It's not The Muppets, but it also doesn't really do anything to traumatize anyone too much.
DIRECTOR: Jim Henson What I want to be doing is playing a video game. I'm at that place where my hobbies are all vying for my attention, which is a pretty sweet place to be at in some regards, but also incredibly frustrating because my hobbies are starting to feel like jobs. I told you guys that I was going to be watching this with my kids. The seed was planted in my wife's head when we watched Idea Man and we just kind of followed through from there. The biggest issue is that Labyrinth keeps on getting ironically watched by a lot of people, mainly for the really weird musical element of the movie (provided by David Bowie.) While I don't necessarily always bond with Gen X over a lot of things, the one thing that we probably agree on is that you don't need to watch Labyrinth ironically. I am in the camp that the movie holds up on its own. I mean, it's not perfect. While I think that Labyrinth may have wired me to have a youthful crush on Jennifer Connelly, her performance here is really weird. She's an incredibly talented actress, but I think she falls into the category of people who don't really know how to act with puppets. Don't get me wrong. I'm always a little floored when people turn in amazing performances across from Muppets, so I can't fault her for not being the most on the ball with this. Also, I gleaned from Idea Man that Henson himself was probably more wired to figure out the technical aspects of how to make a movie like Labyrinth work more than giving smart comments on how to help Connelly get through these scenes. Also, I do have to say that Labyrinth might not be the best way to introduce kids to David Bowie. I tried explaining to them that David Bowie might have been one of the coolest people to ever live and then they see "Dance, Magic, Dance" and I have an uphill battle in front of me. I didn't remember how much Sarah is really unlikable at the beginning of the movie. I mean, I get the formula. The protagonist has to have done something wrong so that she can come out of the labyrinth a better person. We're all on the same page there, probably. But this movie makes Sarah unlikable from moment one. We don't really have a grip on why Sarah is being kind of a lot shy of the notion that teenagers tend to be slightly awful by their very makeup. But Sarah doesn't really have the arc of the film. Really, Sarah instantly backpedals her evil when she realizes that she was playing wtih supernatural forces. Immediately upon Jareth's arrival, Sarah tries to rectify her poorly worded wish. From that moment on, Sarah steps into the role of hero. She doesn't really have challenges that address her selfishness. She just keeps on making the moral choice. It's not great for a movie, which is why we have Hoggle. The only character to actually grow through this movie is Hoggle. Sarah, as the hero, has a clear external conflict. She has to get her brother back before the time runs out. She's entirely focused on that external conflict. But because Sarah treats Hoggle well, we start seeing his character ultimately become the dynamic force of the film. He's a truly awful person. Let's get that out of the way. Part of it comes from the fact that he's terrifed of Jareth, which is reasonable. But that almost just makes him slimy as opposed to sympathetic. But we see that Jareth enjoys torturing Hoggle a bit throughout the movie. There's a great scene in Doctor Who where Clara threatens to take the TARDIS away from the Doctor unless he helps her. He gets the upper hand and forgives her anyway, saying something along the lines of "Do you think that our friendship means so little that it would affected by your betrayal?" That's Sarah. Sarah knows that Hoggle isn't a good person. But the great thing about Sarah is that she sees that Hoggle is struggling with morality throughout the piece. But the one thing that I've kind of noticed about Jim Henson fantasy films (based almost entirely on Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal) is that, for all of his world-building, he doesn't really explain a lot of what is going on in the movie. Labyrinth is almost too straight-forward to really be considered a fully fleshed out film. Again, I'm really a fan of this movie, especially after this watch of the movie. But ultimately, Henson's entire plot is to point Sarah into a direction and have her run into a lot of characters along the way. If I'm being intentionally rude and closed-minded about the whole thing, I suppose I can say the same thing about The Lord of the Rings. The difference, however, between these two stories is that I'm never really lost on the motivation of characters in Lord of the Rings. That's not true with Labyrinth. Sarah is the first question. The opening shot of the movie is an intentional mislead. Sarah is following the owl who will be the avatar / animal form for Jareth at the beginning of the film. She's dressed in a Renaissance Faire get up and speaking in all of these "thys" and "thines", making us thing that we're in medias res. It's a fakeout and Sarah is actually reciting lines from a book (play?) called The Labyrinth. We're not really sure why she's doing this. My real takeaway is that she's just a big nerd for this book and she's LARPing by herself, but that's a bit of a stretch. This play, by the way, is the way she beats Jareth in the climax, so having this section being woefully underexplained really does hurt the movie a bit. The second character question I have is Jareth himself. Jareth's moral code is really undefined. All characters have rules to how they work. There are things that they consider sacred, even if that sacred choice would be morally dubious by any objective standard. Jareth and the goblins wait for Sarah to say the phrase that would allow him to steal the child. When she immediately demands Toby's return, Jareth presents her with a challenge. If she can get to the center of the labyrinth before the expiration of the clock, she gets Toby back. However, if she fails, he gets to keep her in the labyrinth. He's definitely playing it like a sport. He enjoys the challenge. It's very Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Toymaker. (Sorry for the multiple Doctor Who references.) But Sarah proves herself to be more resourcesful than the inhabitants of the labyrinth and she makes her way to the castle. But Jareth then starts actively cheating. He unabashedly cheats. And the kind of cheating he does doesn't really provide a narrative about character. Jareth gives Hopple a magic peach that would have Sarah forget about Toby and her quest to get him back. Now, it's not like there's a moral component to accepting a peach from a friend. There's no message or warning to her that she should not eat this peach. I mean, if we're going for the Eve and the Tree of Knowledge comparison, Eve at least knew that it was wrong to eat from the Tree. Sarah's just had a long day and Hopple offers her fruit. That's a completely morally neutral choice. Thank goodness that Sarah's become shrewd enough that her subconscious fights against the effects of the fruit. But really, there's nothing all that moral about her overcoming the peach. She doesn't really grow. If anything, the labyrinth helps her return to her singular focus. But this is just a weird Jareth plot where he enjoys torturing Hopple as much as he enjoys beating Sarah. I would get if Jareth was the kind of guy who delighted in an opponent's incompetence. But the cheating doesn't seem to be in line with the guy who offered her a chance to get Toby back. Anyway, the movie actually kind of holds up. It's not perfect. You have to be incredibly forgiving of some stuff. But visually, the movie is incredible. If Henson takes ten swings at completely changing the way you look at cinema, he only really fails once in there. Most of the effects are insane. The creature shop absolutely crushes it in this movie and, despite having a simple plot, it is a spectacularly watchable movie. PG-13 for language, a funny scene with mild gore effects, and implications of potential sexuality without actually doing anything all that scandalous. Probably the gore scene is the one that might push this movie into PG-13. Yeah, I guess the language is pretty constant throughout, but it all feels mild. Oh, there's also a murder (again, a ghost is part of the title) and a bunch of attempted murder. Still, it feels pretty tame. PG-13 makes sense, but you could probably watch this with a younger audience.
DIRECTOR: Christopher Landon See? I told you I would watch this one! It just took me a minute to get to it. Okay, I watched this at the request of one of my former students. We're having an alumni get together to watch Psycho and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, assuming that I can stay awake that long. (Realistically, I can only handle one movie because I'm an old man with a family. Anyway, We Have a Ghost is definitely one of the movies of all time. Let me back up. I was warned that this movie wasn't amazing. There was complete disclosure that this student just really enjoyed this movie, despite the fact that it wasn't necessarily anything special. I, for some reason, really hoped that I would be moved by something with that description. After all, I'm the guy who rallied behind Flamin' Hot this year because it was a movie that caught me off guard. We Have a Ghost didn't do much for me. While I kind of enjoyed it for the first half of the movie, I was almost a little annoyed by the movie at the end. It's not like the movie really creates any cinematic crimes, per se. It's just that it's a movie that keeps escalating instead of turning inwards. That's not a problem because it's not like the movie does what it does by accident. Christopher Landon is starting to earn a little bit of a reputation behind his specific subgenre of horror movies. (It's really weird to call We Have a Ghost a horror movie, by the way. This is closer to Casper the Friendly Ghost than it is to Poltergeist.) While it seems like Landon does like horror and scares, he's far more interested in turning a genre on its ear a bit. He likes to laugh at tried-and-true formulae and I kind of appreciate him for it. But We Have a Ghost really gets its premise out of the way fast and never really looks back. Fundamentally, this takes the notion that it is absurd that people find ghosts scary. Don't get me wrong. Often, I find a good ghost story or a haunting story the most frightening of the stories, despite the fact that I don't believe in ghosts even a little bit. But Landon's kind of right. If we tend to follow lore and other ghost stories as canon, most ghosts are victims of horrible circumstance. Why would they be scary? Everything about the ghost narrative says that ghosts, when they complete their unfinished business, can move onto another plane of existence. Ideally, this would be some kind of afterlife. Cool. But ghosts in all of these stories are killers. What kind of closure are they looking for? In the case of Ernest / Randy (whom I will be referring to as Ernest because he's called that for the majority of the movie), he's just a dude who got the short end of the stick and never got to see his daughter again. That's technically the stuff of ghost stories. It's just that a guy who got killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time shouldn't be scary. He should just be...a dude. The odd thing was that, as much as the movie wanted me to bond with Ernest, I didn't. I don't know why. Maybe because I found Kevin far more interesting. I can't explain it. There's a movie about a guy being murdered and the fame that comes with being a ghost and I was interested in the kid who had no friends. (AM I THE KID WHO HAS NO FRIENDS?) Part of it comes from the idea that Ernest can't talk and can't remember anything, so Kevin becomes a far better avatar for the audience. Now, there's something I'm going to explore here that is both a compliment and a complaint, so bear with me. Kevin's story is interesting. Kevin has a lot of baggage with his character. He's a kid who absolutely adores his father and can't stand him. Kevin starts the film with a chip on his shoulder. I think we've all been programmed to love Anthony Mackie. There's a reason that he's the current Captain America. He's just likable. (Although I'm going to be really bummed when everyone says that he's not their Cap, mirroring the racism that the comic book predictred a decade ago.) But then we find out that Anthony Mackie as Dad is a bad man. The problem is...we are often told that he's a bad man and he's not often shown as a bad man. This B-plot is handled quite poorly. The movie is really afraid for us to hate Dad in this movie. We see him do awful things, but he does them in a charming way. Mackie does a really good job of having his character believe that he's doing the right thing, despite the fact that he's hurting everyone around him. Part of that comes down to how the rest of the family reacts to Dad's choices to exploit Ernest for personal gain. Kevin's the only one who is really mad about it. Mom is slightly annoyed at times, but can't deny the financial gains that have been coming to the family. So when the government (this movie really escalates, guys) decides to capture Ernest, Dad feels bad but no one really hates him by this point. It's just because Anthony Mackie is so darned charming.The movie just has a bit too much wholesomeness. It wants to give us conflict between father and son, but not so much that we can't forgive Dad by the end. What? You want me to argue that this movie is too wholesome? The movie's climax involves the real Ernest, who killed Ghost Ernest years ago, confront Kevin and his family. It seems like Real Ernest got away with it (You know what I mean, Vern?) That guy takes Kevin hostage with a gun to his head. (My moment of applause showing that the true threat to humanity is an old white man with a gun. We may continue.) Kevin elbows him, gets away. Dad tackles Real Ernest. But somehow, old White guy beats up (let me check) Anthony Mackie and leaves him incapacitated. Kevin gets away, but older brother Fulton also gets taken down by this septegenarian. A reminder: Ernest is holding a gun that he intended to use to kill this family because he thought that they knew his secret and that he might go to prison. Fulton is left unshot, as is Dad. What kind of killer is this? He keeps beating the people he's trying to kill and not killing them. I'm not saying that the Presley family should be killed. I want them to live. Again, I'm preaching the fact that Kevin is a likable character. But it's weird that he's not shooting all of them considering that he's holding a gun and they can't fight back. Do you know why? This movie is too wholesome. But the movie isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's just...silly. Ghost Ernest, for a guy who can't talk, is charismatic. The fact that America falls in love with Ernest is a little funny and also understandable. While the movie doesn't have a political message (shy of a BLM poster out of focus in one shot), it does kind of take down American obsession with social media. Sometimes, people are all about Ernest. Sometimes, they're really scared by him. The silliness, as fun as the movie is, does hold the movie back. I wanted to love Tig Notaro's character. The whole government thing is an ingredient too far. We just finished season three of The Bear and that entire ingredient needs to go. Simplify. There's too much stuff on that plate. Ultimately, the government stuff didn't go anywhere. There's an implication that Real Ernest had a tentative relationship with the government, but that didn't make a ton of sense and seemed odd that they kept nodding the eagle connection. (My takeaway was that Real Ernest didn't actually have anything to do with the government and that he just used the bust of an eagle to clobber Ghost Ernest over the head.) The movie kind of added the whole government plot to give the movie an action sequence and a car chase. Also, what was Kevin being arrested for? It seemed weird that Ernest getting next to a girl was enough for a warrant. The whole government thing? Remove this from the movie. Anyway, it's fine. I'm on a long string of "It's fine" movies. When you watch a lot of movies and you basically like everything, there's a lot of movies that you write "It's fine" about. I wanted to love it more, but there's just a lot of things that are done for silliness reasons. I'm probably going to watch a Bergman movie next, so we'll see how much I needed just a little silliness in my life. PG. If you are looking for one thing that will be an interesting discussion to have with your kid, it's going to be explaining puberty. Guys, we should be talking about puberty anyway, but Inside Out 2 might be the movie (or, may I suggest, Turning Red?) that forces that conversation to the forefront. But if this is a parent's guide to whether a movie is right for a family member, just remember that Pixar is really good at making us scared about the everyday coupled with making us cry a lot. There's stuff in the movie that is just scary, even though it might be hard to define why. PG.
DIRECTOR: Kelsey Mann Guys, you need to stop hyping me up for movies. I get such unreasonable expectations for movies that no movie can possibly live up to the expectations that I have for the film. Honestly, if the first movie didn't exist, this might be one of my favorite Pixar movies. But because the first one exists and I think that this one isn't as original as the first film, I honestly only have "meh" reviews for it. I acknowledge the following: "Just because a movie isn't as good as its predecessor, doesn't make it bad." So if you find me griping, just know that I liked it. Part of it is that I wanted this to be an unabashed exploration of puberty. I'm going to say, the first movie really teased that these were Riley's first steps into puberty. The movie ends with a "Puberty" button on the console. The trailers for Inside Out 2 show the Puberty button going off and Riley's brain getting wrecked. But really, that was all a device to get Anxiety to become the antagonist of the piece. I don't mind a movie that explores Anxiety as a concept. Heck, having Riley being a representative of teenage girls dealing with anxiety is also kind of brilliant. But I was promised this big, complex look at what it meant to be a teenage girl and I feel like we only got one facet. Don't get me wrong. It's a huge facet. It's a facet for every person. Note that I'm already backpedaling, thinking that my life will be ruined if I don't handle this with kid gloves. But this is a movie about anxiety and that's fine. I just found the movie to be hyperfocused instead of tackling all of the things going on. My frustration is that there is a pantheon of other emotions that have been introduced in the movie and they are wildly underrepresented. (I suppose the same could be said about the other emotions from the first film. Joy and Sadness are the MVPs. The other emotions are often used for comic effect.) But with the OG emotions from the first film, these characters are well-developed and stay true to their purposes within the film. With these new characters, particularly Envy, they often seem like minions as opposed to fully realized characters. Anxiety is the big bad. She's a dominant force. I'm very cool with that. But when you have that strong of a character, they can't just talk to themselves the entire time. So Envy, who is supposed to be the avatar of jealousy and greed, just echoes Anxiety. Envy isn't copying people. It's wanting what they have. And the thing is, we're huge The Bear fans. Ayo Edebiri is one of the best actresses out there. I wanted her to have this nuance and character and she's just this sounding board for Maya Hawke's Anxiety. That's not fair. But the bigger problem (again, I liked the movie) is that this very much feels like a sequel. Often, the task of a sequel is to bring people back into this world again. But the movie just can't be a carbon copy of the first film. It's this tightrope walk where you have to bring back the nostalgia of the first film (hey, there's Nostalgia!) and offer something new. I don't know how much new was brought into this film. The first film had Joy and Sadness booted out of the control room and having traverse the facets of Riley so that she could experience those emotions again. Because this is the sequel, they needed to up the same concept, so all of the emotions from the first film must now traverse Riley's personality to ensure that she can feel those emotions. There's some problems with that. The first movie established that emotions are complex. Often, we can have happy / sad memories at the same time. When someone is dealing with anxiety, they're often dealing with other emotions as well. If anything, we feel them more intensely. (Hence the console being hyper-sensitive to touch.) But if Anxiety locks up Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger, is Riley no longer feeling those things? While Anxiety can feel like a color of Fear (and that is discussed), Riley often finds herself angry at other characters. For the sake of sequelizing a concept, the story makes...less sense? This feels like I'm being incredibly picky, but the first movie does such a good job of explaining the complexities of the pre-teen mind that moments like this takes me out of the film. It was so well figured out in the first movie and this feels like we have to shut down part of what made the first one so well made to make this movie work. Now to undo everything I said. Inside Out 2 is actually a pretty great film. From a completely visceral place, Inside Out 2 mostly works. The jokes are great. I'm genuinely invested in Riley's journey at hockey camp. I kind of love that we don't have the insane stakes of the first film. The first film threatened to make Riley a homeless preteen. This movie makes us believe that not making the hockey team might be the worst thing that can happen to a person. Really, it imbues what is just a moment in time with such gravitas that we care for this character in the same way that the emotions really care for Riley. And I kind of love that the Inside Out movies are better advocates for mental health and care than anything else that I've seen. Anxiety is this compelling bad guy. Again, the best villains are ones that think that they're the heroes of the film. Inside Out 2 colors Joy as a flawed protagonist again. Let's talk about that for a second. Many sequels retcon the first movie and have the protagonist forget all of the lessons from the first film. Immediately in this film, Joy has grown as a character. Joy and Sadness are the best of friends. She's not blind to the fact that Sadness is kind of a mess. But Joy is working to better herself. But she's making all new mistakes. Do you understand how much of a pleasure it is to see a movie where the protagonist makes all new, yet logical, mistakes? Also, the hero's journey to defeat the villain is what illuminates the mistakes that the hero has been making. The best part? While Anxiety's issues mirror Joy's, it isn't a one-to-one thing. Instead, we see the maturity that Joy has experienced allows her to approach the issue from a different perspective. That's pretty cool. I wish this was a slam dunk. It's not fair that I have to come to a movie demanding a slam dunk. Instead, we get a very good sequel that runs into some sequel problems. I don't know why people are losing their minds over this one. My guess is that it handles the concept of anxiety extremely well, but doesn't really touch on the nuance of everything else introduced. Still, it's worth a watch. If I've done anything, I hope I've tempered expectations so you can just watch a very good movie instead of expecting a life-changing experience. PG, despite some crazy language and continued potty humor. Also, this is about violence that ends up killing people in mildly bloody ways. When you have to write about the offensiveness of a movie, everything kind of takes a different context. If I watched this as a kid, it probably wouldn't have raised any red flags, despite the fact that the protagonist is a really creepy dude when it comes to kissing women. There are a ton of consent issues that probably weren't addressed that often in 1978, so keep that in mind.
DIRECTOR: Wei Lo It's funny how these things work out. I plan to not watch that much stuff so I don't have to write too often and then I basically stack a bunch of movies in the same day. It's not like I was planning on doing that. I have this pretty intense regimen when it comes to watching movies while on the treadmill, so that seems out of my control.. (Spoiler: It's not.) Then we took our kids to see Inside Out 2, because of course we're going to see Inside Out 2. Then my wife says that we should show the older kids Labyrinth and, yeah, we absolutely needed to do that. (Although, she's watching it to make fun of it and I'm in the camp of "Let's enjoy this unironically." I'm always going to lose that battle.) Anyway, there's a lot going on in my life when it comes to this blog and I guess I'm going to write every minute of my vacation and never get around to playing video games ever again. You know what? I started Spiritual Kung Fu and I thought, "Now here's a serious movie." Just cinematography wise, it looks way more professional than Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, which is insane because it came out the same year as Half a Loaf of Kung Fu. And in the first ten minutes or so, I got the vibe that this was going to be a serious action comedy. (Serious action comedy is hard to define. It looked like it was going to go legit.) Then Jackie Chan starts peeing on ghosts and farting on people, with the response being "It stinks" and then I was completely lost. Is it a better movie than Half a Loaf of Kung Fu? I suppose so. I don't know. There's a plot that I can kind of follow. It seems a lot more focused. The twist at the end kind of got me. Okay, it only got me because I was not expecting there to even be a twist. Some of you are probably saying, "Duh, that's what a twist is." No, a twist is often a curveball solving a problem. See, I wasn't invested enough to even know that there was something I was trying to deduct... ...despite the movie constantly telling me that there was a traitor inside of Shaolin Temple. See, part of that's on me, but the other half of the problem comes from the tone of the film. There are movies where we're trying to piece together a mystery before it is revealed to us. But tonally, Spiritual Kung Fu is doing some stuff that is more in line with a screwball comedy than it is with a murder mystery, which I just realized this kung fu movie technically is. Part of my brain was often frustrated with the idea that there was something to unpack in this movie because I was focused on the wrong thing altogether. Despite the fact that there was a mystery of who was murdering the Shaolin monks, I was focused more on the most bananas motivations that I've ever gotten out of characters. See, the movie is called Spiritual Kung Fu because there are a bunch of ghosts (who it took me a while to confirm were ghosts. I thought that they were aliens based on that comet that hit the temple) who are trying to teach Jackie Chan's Li-Yiang this secret fighting style that is the only fighting style that can defeat another stolen fighting style. The bigger issue is that the movie doesn't really establish that ghosts exist in the universe. Maybe that is a cultural thing, but the movie starts off a lot more like a traditional kung fu movie. There's a problem that is somehow linked to kung fu and it takes a lot more kung fu to solve that problem. Out of nowhere, a comet hits the temple, revealing an ancient manuscript that will give Li-Yiang the ability to beat this other fighter. The weird part, beyond a comet coming out of nowhere, is that the manuscript is haunted / invested by wacky ghosts. Okay, the movie takes a hard right at this moment. But the movie is called Spiritual Kung Fu. I should have been ready for ghost kung fu masters who have wacky hijinks, right? Yeah, the reaction that people have to these ghosts make not a lick of sense. The movie, as convoluted and soap-opera-y as the beginning is, at least stays consistent with reactions. When the ghosts show up, character development and choices go right out the window. The initial monks who discover the ghosts are rightfully scared. I appreciate that. Then Li-Yiang goes to investigate the ghosts because he's a skeptic. The ghosts mess with him...and he's remarkably cool that his entire belief system should have been rocked to the core. No change in him. He sees ghosts. They mess with him. He's fine with that. Meanwhile, the ghosts move downstairs and mess with the monks down there. This is where the movie just makes no sense. For some reason, in some shots, the monks are terrified of the ghosts. In some shots, they're just wacky. One of the elders uses manuscripts to see the ghosts and the lower members think that it's funny to steal these manuscripts and see the ghosts? I don't know what the motivation behind these choices are. They were scared of the ghosts moments ago. When the elder uses the manuscripts to see them, it seems proactive towards getting rid of the ghosts. Instead, we start getting bits. I hate bits in Jackie Chan movies. They're there to buff up a thin script and I don't get these sequences. They're just too wacky for my taste. Anyway, Li-Yiang, immediately after fighting off ghosts and confronting them, sees the elder fighting the ghosts and thinks that he is drunk. It's like the filmmakers were just stuffing jokes into every moment, even if the jokes contradicted each other. But the rest of the movie, shy of the kissing fight sequence, is fine. I wrote about this earlier. It's a scene where Li-Yiang, who has never seen a woman, demands a kiss from the first one he meets. She fights him off. He escalates with his kung fu. Even worse, he has the ghosts teach him about better kung fu so he can claim that kiss from this girl, who is definitely not into it and he beats the crap out o her. Not a great scene. But if you can ignore this very uncomfortable bit that keeps going on for way too long, the action comedy afterwards is pretty watchable. Again, I waxed poetic about how Jackie Chan has a lot in common with Gene Kelly when it comes to choreography. There are some insane sequences in here and a lot of them. Honestly, and this is me really whining, some of the scenes are so impressive...but they go on too long. I hated that I was growing disinterested at certain points because I was overwhelmed with long and laboriously choreographed fight sequences. My biggest complaint, though, was the fact that the two plots were a bit disjointed. I was really happy when the ghosts got in on the final fight. It kind of cemented the two disparate plots into a loose singular plot. See, the ghosts stuff and the hunt for the Seven Deadly Fists didn't make a ton of sense. I didn't understand why Li-Yiang, who found this long lost manuscript, didn't share it with everyone considering the seriousness of the predicament that they were in. But he didn't. If the ghosts didn't show up to fight the bad guy, who was kind of amazing at fighting and was a way bigger threat than the guy who we thought was the Big Bad, then the movie just wouldn't have made any sense whatsoever. But still, there is a lot of movie where the ghosts don't even play a part in the story and it's just about kung fu. It's a lot of odd choices. Maybe my disappointment in this film comes from the idea that it looks so much better than Half a Loaf. I was earnestly invested in the movie early on and then it just spiraled into some very odd decisions. It's still pretty fun, but there are just so many weird choices made for this movie. Not rated, but let's pretend that it is an R for language at minimum. Mostly, the movie is incredibly immature, relying on pee and poop jokes occasionally. While the film is all about kung fu and the violence that stems out of kung fu, most of the violence is pretty innocent...except when the bad guy uses his kung fu. Then it gets a little brutal. Still, the movie is aimed at a teenage sensibility. It's crass when it wants to be, but never really tonally leaves a goofy place. Not rated.
DIRECTOR: Chi-Hwa Chen Do you know what? Part of me is kind of jazzed to write this. I have a hand covered in blisters, so this is mild torture. But I'm home now and this feels like a productive return to normal. Also, I'm starting with an absolute cracker of a goofy kung fu movie. It's so funny that, for all of Criterion's hoity-toitiness, they really love Jackie Chan. (Note: I'm not sure whether to write his name out of "Jackie" or "Jacky" based on credits in these movies.) I remember finding out that Supercop was on Criterion LaserDisc and that blew my mind. Now that I own the Police Story box set and have started this Jackie Chan box set, I'm glad that Criterion can be a little cool about goofy movies. If you were ever going to sell me on the notion that I was going to like a box set of kung fu movies, naming the first one in the set Half a Loaf of Kung Fu was perfect. Immediately, I knew that I was going to get something absolutely absurd and corny, which sometimes works when it comes to kung fu. Samurai movies, considering what I have seen, normally take themselves pretty seriously. In my head, Jackie Chan has a lot to do with the directing of this film, despite the fact that it is credited with Chi-Hwa Chen. But Jackie Chan is credited as the martial arts director and from what I get about this guy, he's a big fan of not taking his amazing craft too seriously. I know, down the line, Jackie Chan will get into some pretty serious films. But I'm always in the mindset that he's the guy who loves making stuff that will get a bloopers track at the end of a movie. And the opening of Half a Loaf really establishes exactly what the purpose of the film is. The beginning of the movie parodies every other marital arts movie imaginable. When I saw the Zatoichi send up, I knew that I was going to be in good hands. I didn't recognize all of them. While I've probably seen more kung fu movies than my friends, it's pretty safe to say that I haven't seen a lot. I gotta say, the opening of the movie is fun. But it does kind of send an interesting message, potentially accidentally. The opening of the movie, with all of its jokes, kind of feels like the filmmakers don't really treat Half a Loaf of Kung Fu like a real movie. As fun as it is, it really has nothing to do with the movie itself. Now, Half a Loaf is unabashedly silly. But most of the movie exists diagetically within its own universe. I say "Most" because every time that there hasn't been a funny bit on screen for a while, the movie likes to remind you that you are watching a movie. Much like the Genie in Aladdin, there are anachronistic references that make no sense within the universe you are watching. Some of them are winks. For example, a non-diagetic track might play, winking at the audience that Jiang views himself as Popeye the Sailor Man. It's a gag, but at least it's only winked at. But later in the movie, the movie straight up name drops Zatoichi and Bruce Lee. Considering that the movie is meant to be a period piece, it's really weird that the movie decides to get that meta. I don't mind the movie being funny. It's perfectly in line with my expectations of Jackie Chan. But the movie really has a hard time defining what is appropriate and what can just be too silly. The movie often feels like just a screwball action comedy. I love when the movie does this. But then there are times when the movie almost becomes a parody film. It's in these moments where I feel like the movie is just doing bits that kind of irk me a little. There's a moment in the beginning of the film where Jiang is dreaming of learning kung fu. It kind of works. It establishes the character's motivations, so the appearance of a kung fu scene this early in the film has an in-universe explanation for why it is happening. Okay. That's fine. I also know that this movie is promising half a loaf of kung fu, so we can't wait for Jiang to learn kung fu by the final act. So we get this sequence where Jackie Chan is just wrecking dudes with silly kung fu. The problem with this sequence is that it stops the movie narratively so that Jackie Chan can do bits. I can't stand the bits, guys. If something funny happens during the course of the narrative, I'm all for it. There's a lot of it here. I applaud that movie. But there are a lot of times where the movie is almost trying to inject more laughs into the movie. These are the scenes that really get under my skin. I've always vocally complained about adding silly music to silly sequences. There's a lot of that in this movie. Maybe this is the difference between funny and zany. I like funny. I hate zany. There's a lot of zany. But what Half a Loaf of Kung Fu does right is showcase how much of a genius and a talent Jackie Chan is. Honestly, Jackie Chan is the still living Gene Kelly. My musical tastes tend to lean towards the Gene Kelly / Fred Astaire stuff. Gene Kelly beats Fred Astaire, by the way. I don't care if you disagree. My arguement is that Gene Kelly made his physical talent into something that was both impressive and hilarious. The opening to Singin' in the Rain where he's doing the "Fit as a Fiddle" bit is incredible and funny as the day is long. Do you know what else that applies to? Jackie Chan in his fights at the end with the young beggar. They're both about tight choreography coupled with comic timing to make something that almost no one else in the world can do. That's what makes Jackie Chan Gene Kelly. While I would love to say that we live in a world that appreciates people like Gene Kelly, Jackie Chan understood that sometimes fighting can also be a comedic artform. As fun as Half a Loaf of Kung Fu is, it has so many insane choices to it. I dare you to tell me what a new Simpsons episode is about based on the first act of the episode. The beginning of The Simpsons is always a mislead. The beginning of "Das Bus", the Lord of the Flies episode, starts with Bart and Lisa staying up all night to watch The Ten Commandments. The same structure is used for Half a Loaf. Because these movies are showcases for physical comedy, Jiang has to get into all kinds of unrelated scrapes to keep the plot going forward. (I'm typing terribly today.) The plot of the movie is that a silly con man wants to learn kung fu and does whatever he can to learn. But golly, there are so many plots floating around this movie that I'm not quite sure what constitutes a B-plot int his movie. If you are taking the side stories seriously, you are a better man than me because I couldn't tell you who was related to whom and what the goal was. The movie has a Battle of the Five Armies attitude because the it couldn't be bothered to solve the problems individually. It's just so much and I don't actually care that much. And that's the best way to watch this movie! I know. It's a cop out. The movie doesn't take itself seriously enough. The plot is all over the place. But the movie is fun. I actually had a really good time with it, even though I was groaning through most of the humor. It's because it is a showcase of talent, pure and simple. I think I'm going to like the box set for the same reason. It's just really impressive kung fu choreography with a likable lead. That's what makes Jackie Chan a star. It doesn't have to be a great movie to be a great time. PG-13. In my mind, this was one of those R-rated movies with all kinds of creepy gross stuff. Nope. Nothing all that offensive. The parental advisory on the plane said that this movie had language. Even that, I don't remember. There's a pretty intense gunfight that was grounded enough to be a bit upsetting. But, honestly, not much happens in this movie outside of blood. People do die, but it never stays in the moment long enough to make it too upsetting. I suppose a child in danger is a trope that could raise a few flags. Still, PG-13.
DIRECTOR: Jeff Nichols Normally, when I take a Trans-Atlantic flight, I have a whole bunch of movies to write about. Nope. Not this time. I knew that I didn't want to write a blog ten days after having seen a movie, let alone multiple movies. I read books. I know that this is a blog called "Literally Anything: Movies", but books are great too. So I watched Midnight Special...yesterday. It's fresh. And it's the only movie I watched. (I was thinking of watching other things, but I was being a dad and even Midnight Special had to get paused a million times. Midnight Special, since its release in 2016, has always been my ignored plane film. I keep finding it on airplanes and I've always put it off. It's something that has itched the back of my brain forever, mainly because the aesthetics of the trailer seemed rad. And for a minute, I thought that Midnight Special was going to be one of my favorite discoveries. After the first twenty minutes, I turned around to my wife and said, "This movie is going to be rad." From that opening, I thought that this was going to be one of the best films I had seen in a while. It set up this fun mystery involving a cult and numbers. The vibe of the movie felt very A24 without the gore element. It felt sleepy and dramatic and I was on board. But then the movie started answering questions. Sometimes, I want a movie to give me every answer imaginable. I think Midnight Special did better with a sense of mystery and should have held it a little closer to the vest. Once we found out what was going on, it was just Starman or E.T.. I didn't mean to make a Ghostbusters 2 reference, but those movies basically have the same plot. A group of people, against the wishes of the U.S. government, have to move an extraterrestrial / supernatural creature to a special spot in the country so that they can return home. Cool. These movies have legs because they're a sci-fi road movie. With Midnight Special, it became about the family that came together to save Alton, the Starman of this movie. I'm just going to get the spoiler out of the way because I don't really have the time to dance around it. Alton's big reveal is that he comes from an alternate plane of reality. Even though he was the child of these two human people, he's from somewhere special and technologically advanced. (I might unpack the trans or euthanasia allegories in a second.) Sometimes, we care about the alien. Sometimes we care about the group. Honestly, Alton isn't a very fun part to play. Like E.T., there's the fear that he's dying the entire time. But we care more about the relationship between Roy, Lucas, and Sarah. If you are really invested, you also care about Dr. Sevier. Midnight Special does something a little laudable. It makes you deal with trauma. With Starman or E.T., it's very much an adventure. With Starman, Karen Allen is on this romantic journey with this otherworldly person. She, too, is recovering from trauma, but her adventure with Starman is bringing her out of her trauma. E.T. is about coming out of your shell as well. The kid finds a friend and ultimately the adventure makes him a better person. Midnight Special is about emotional survival. There's a lifetime of trauma that these characters are reeling from, especially the last two years where Alton was being raised by a cult leader. We don't see much of that. Instead, Roy and Sarah find fleeting moments of happiness where they actually have what they wished for. For the course of these three days, they have a semblance of a family. Sure, that family is in constant chaos, on the run from the law and worried about the death of their son. But they have moments of tenderness. But these moments aren't making them better. If anything, these moments are so imbued with pain that they seem to be dying parallel deaths to Alton. Yes, Roy becomes a better person by the end. But this isn't some grand moment for him. This is about putting his son to rest. We understand that Roy loves Sarah, but we never get to see it because they are in triage mode. And, unlike the other stories, we know that there are going to be real world consequences to the events of the story. Like, it's weird that Elliot (that's his name!) isn't locked up in a facility for the rest of his natural life. Roy knows he's going to jail. Lucas walks around the entire movie knowing that he's given his life up for his friend's kid. There's also the odd consequence of defining oneself in the shadow of knowing that this was either going to end in death or prison. Lucas has to turn on Roy because he's trying to hold onto a morality beyond the concept of consequences. Roy is single-minded. He has to get Alton to this location or else Alton will be vaguely destroyed. (It sounds like I'm dumping on this concept. This is one of my favorite vaguaries that stays through the film. I like that Alton's alternatives are undefined, but terrible.) But Lucas won't kill people just for this kid. He has the understanding that his life is forfeit to this kid, but others didn't sign up for it. It's pretty interesting. So it's this kind of stuff that separates Midnight Special from other movies. But I don't know if it's enough. Like, I really like the character dynamics. But this specific road movie keeps having the same format. Also, as cool as Alton's world is, it's not really all that original. There's this cult out there that has so much promise and we don't really have that paid off like I want. Also, if we are making a kinda-sorta action movie, the government seems really disorganized in this movie. Part of that comes from the fact that it is absurd that these three po-dunk former cultists (okay, two cultists and a state trooper) could take down the U.S. government without a real plan. My big red flag is Dr. Sevier's contribution to the plan. We get that Adam Driver's performance is something that is worth gleaming onto. The good-natured scientist in the midst of this whole government conspiracy is fun. But it's weird that he gets carte blanche, enough to walk that kid out of a facility. Also, I get that Sevier cuffs himself and pretends like he was overpowered, but that doesn't answer a lot of questions. I said that I would touch on a potential trans or euthanasia allegory and I suppose I kind of have to. A lot of this feels like me adding something to the narrative, but I also feel like 2016 is a different time to tell this story than the '80s. Alton is dying. Roy seems to really be pushing Alton harder than Lucas is. Lucas is in this world that Alton's survival as he is might be the most important thing. It's not like Lucas is wrong. Roy comes across as a huge jerk. He's holding onto this motive that we don't understand. As the kid bleeds out of every oriface, we wonder why Roy is not more concerned. But the movie also stresses that there is no happy ending for Roy or Sarah. Alton was going to be gone at the end of this journey. A hospital isn't going to change that. It seems like Roy's agenda is to have Alton die with dignity. But then Alton begs to go out into the sun. Roy seems like that's shortening his life, but he allows Alton to make that decision. Sure enough, Alton perks up after a sunrise. (I don't really understand what exactly happened the other times that he was out in the sun. How much sun does he need? Is there always a surge of energy with each contact with the sun? Also, nice Superman comparison in the movie...) But Alton is ultimately asking his parents to let him be the person that he wants to be. The parents are trying to be protective, but Alton knows what his body needs. I'm holding your hand a little bit with this one, but it seems like that allegory might be intentional. I was so jazzed for the first twenty minutes of the movie, but the rest of the movie just fine. There are a lot of stupid parts and the government seems really bad at what they do. But it was a pretty movie with a lot of good acting. I can see why people don't really chat about this movie after it got a little bit of hype. Not rated, but it is pretty innocent. I'm going to make a lot of Downton Abbey comparisons. Well, at least one. I have that one planned out. Like Downton Abbey, there's a lot of talk about things that could potentially be scandalous without actual real scandal. Also, most people's definition of scandal and this movie's definition of scandal are night and day. There is some smoking and some drinking. I suppose that people could be offended by that. Some peopel aren't nice? Is that something to point out to parents concerned about content in film?
DIRECTOR: Kon Ichikawa For those who didn't read the MPAA section, this movie is basically Japanese Downton Abbey. I loved Downton Abbey. I didn't think that I would. Despite the fact that I'm a "Literally Anything" kind of movie watcher, I rarely put "elevated romance" as my genre of choice. But I really got into it. It seemed like their problems were so different than mine. Normally, people would consider that off-putting. But there's something so fascinating about people making bananas choices because there's a hint of blue blood in their family. Now, I will say that Downton has honed the elevated romance genre to a sharp point. If you consider Downton Abbey boring --which I consider a completely valid criticism --then this movie will be even more boring. For all of the "Who will marry whom?" and "How are we going to keep this offensively large estate in the family?", Downton Abbey is a melodrama that really rides the line of soap opera. The Makioka Sisters isn't quite that. There's no evil gay butlers who want you to trip on soap. There's no Titanic plot. The closest thing that we get with The Makioka Sisters is a reminder that Japan during World War II was war minded and that's a pretty far stretch. The Makioka Sisters begs you to pay attention to a lot of dialogue. If anything, even though this is an adaptation of a novel, it feels like a play because there are long sequences of people just sitting in a room discussing their emotions and who should marry whom. (It seems weird that I used the phrase "Who should marry whom?" a couple times now. Honestly, it's proper grammar coupled with the most efficient way to say that idea. I'm not going to apologize, despite the fact that it sticks out like a sore thumb.) Mind you, I gave this movie my all. I paid attention to the whole thing and fully invested myself. This may be blasphemy to a lot of people, but I watch a lot of my movies while on the treadmill. There's a method to this madness. I rarely have time to myself, but I do need to get a workout in. I tend to put on movies that no one else would want to watch with me while on the treadmill. Criterion movies tend to fall into this category. I would say that The Makioka Sisters is pretty aggressively Criterion. It's slow and a little bit arty. This makes both good and bad traits for a Criterion film and let me explain that. It's great because the treadmill makes you focus on the film. There's no looking at your phone on the treadmill. Also, the movie is meant to sweep you away from focusing on the misery that is the treadmill. But also, it's not so good of a movie for the treadmill because treadmill movies should really force your attention. But I did pay attention and there's a couple of elements that I don't get. I would love to blame 1930's Japan for these problems, but Ichikawa does an excellent job of filling in on social norms just using context to explain away parts. The thing that I didn't really get was all about Tatsuo. I think it's Tatsuo. First of all, Tatsuo's name is Makioka. He's married to the older sister. Why do all of the sisters have the last name "Makioka"? Secondly, and I really don't know what I'm doing with this one, is what is Tatsuo's relationship to either Yukiko or Taeko? There are times where the movie paints him as a saint and there are times where the movie paints him as a philandering deadbeat. I'm not sure what to make of this character because of the Downtonness of it all. Because people don't actually say what they mean in these upper crust societies, there's a lot of stiff upper lip about how things are actually terrible. If I'm not mistaken (and I probably am because all of the names elude me outside of IMDB right now), Tatsuo seemed to be putting on the moves with Yukiko. Maybe it was Taeko. I don't know. I'm a bad blogger. He always seemed partially relieved when Yukiko would reject her suitors. When the movie ends, he's sitting and confessing that he is sad that "a woman that he loves" is going to get married. When he's called out on being too young to be a father to such a woman, he just looks sadly out. If everything that I think is true about Tetsuo, are we supposed to feel bad? I mean, he's married to one of the sisters. (Again, I'm such a bad blogger sometimes.) No one treats him badly. He's just a guy who seems nice, but also cheats on his wife? And the movie isn't really about him. The movie is aptly named The Makioka Sisters because they're the ones who matter in this movie. The reason that I'm not all that up on Tatsuo and his shannigans is because he plays such a small role in the movie. Heck, dudes don't play a big part int his movie to begin with. The most fascinating dude in the movie is Okuhata, the villain of the piece, and he's a caricature of a human being. But let me tell you why I love Okuhata in this movie. It's because I find Taeko the interesting one of the group. She's the youngest child and the bad seed of the family. Taeko is the lynchpin of this movie. First of all, we all know so many Taekos. This was the most realistic thing I had ever seen in a movie and I just started listing people who were Taekos in real life. But if Taeko didn't put a timer on everything happening in the movie, the rest of the family would be insufferable. I mean, I love these characters and I'm all about trying to find a perfect mate for Yukiko. But without Taeko constantly throwing a spanner into the works, I would find this movie incredibly whiny. Let's be as clear as I can. Even with Taeko, their real problems are pretty hilariously small. They live in a world where they are marrying for status. There's subtext that the Makioka's were once a big deal, but are slightly Grey Gardensing it up a bit. (I'm going to start just taking movie titles and adding "-ing" to give my blog a youthful vibe.) I find that fascinating. Like, we don't really know what happened to the greatness of this once epic family and yet, without a sense of whining, take these marriages incredibly seriously. I don't know. The movie isn't fun. It is incredibly boring. Do you know what else? I don't even care. There are a lot of movies that I just watch that are boring as sin and I don't even fight that. This is one of those movies. Almost nothing happens. One guy just dies out of nowhere. An ear infection just kills him. There's no lead up to this guy dying. He just gets too close to Taeko and dies. Also, the family is extorted for something that they didn't do and that problem just seems to go away. Again, it might be part of the film's attempt to show Tetsuo's silent suffering. Regardless, I just kind of liked it. But again, I don't always hate boring. I found myself recommending it to my mother-in-law at Father's Day brunch. That's pretty high praise, right? PG-13 for language, suggestive behavior and comments on sexuality, teenage drinking, and general overall cruelty. Like, it feels more offensive than it actually is. (And for some, it probably isn't offensive at all.) It's a movie that both glorifies and chides teenage drama and stereotypes. It's probably not appropriate for the very young. Also, while I do believe that elements of Mean Girls is representative of high school culture, it doesn't really give a lot of nuance to social elements.
DIRECTORS: Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr. Yeah, out of all of the photos that I found from the new Mean Girls musical, I chose an image of Tina Fey as an AP Calc teacher. What? I like Tina Fey and every other photo made me feel like a creeper. Also, the more I look at that photo, the more I question the effectiveness of that board. I'm one of those teachers who fought to keep my chalkboard, but I'm also aware of chalkboard real estate. Where is she doing any work on that board? Don't waste perfectly good space with posters on a board! What is that? Anyway. The past few (maybe just two) are going to be blogs about paradoxes. Again, two things are true for me. 1) I hate when movies become Broadway shows for the most part. 2) I will absolutely watch those things and don't understand the fear that people have about watching musicals. The first point I want to explain first. If someone handed me tickets to Back to the Future: The Musical, I would gleefully run to see it. But that being said, it seems kind of...disappointing. I want new content. I don't want the old content with songs. Part of it always feels like going to Disney World or something and seeing a staged production of one the animated classics. It's fun and all, but I rarely am satisfied. I don't feel like I've grown at all. Instead, I want something that makes me think. Instead, I kind of get to see how they adapted things that I already know about. The entire time, I'm just waiting for Regina George get hit by a bus. I suppose for the die hard fans of something, it could be fascinating to see another interpretation of something that is so beloved. Now, I'm one of the suckers who went to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway. I didn't go to New York to see it. We were in New York and that's the show that I wanted to see, despite the abysmal reviews. Now, maybe I took my disappointment from that absolute trainwreck of a musical and applied it to all future musical adaptations of films. (I get it. "Spider-Man" is more of an IP than it is a movie adaptation. You know where I'm going with this. Stop being so ornery.) But I'm a guy who loves Spider-Man. I thought it would be really neat to see Spider-Man fly through the air, despite all of the stuntman deaths. It's just that I was more disappointed than someone who came in just to see a musical. So who is Mean Girls the musical for? Musical nerds. Don't get me wrong. That's a bigger demographic than die hard Mean Girls fans. (By the way, I'm going back and forth on this one. Should I have rewatched the 2004 Mean Girls before watching the musical or did I get the better experience forgetting a lot of the jokes of the film?) 2004's Mean Girls is an amazing movie that I've only seen once. Trust me. There are a lot of movies that I've only seen once. The Mean Girls musical movie is...okay. That sounds like I really didn't like it. (I mean, the word is "okay". It should be pretty clear, but I already read my tone as being dismissive.) I think there's something incredibly fun about movie musicals for the most part. I mean, that's not absolute. I still don't really like The Producers movie musical. In terms of hitting all of the spectacle and catchy tunes that a movie musical should, it nails it. The performances are great. The style and the flair are pretty darned good. I'll even go as far as to say that some of the songs add some depth to the characters. I'll give extra points to Cady's songs, which help her character quite a bit. Cady's entire personality before meeting the plastics is one of silence. She wants to blend into the background. Mostly, intentional silence does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to character development. But since musical songs tend to be non-diagetic, she's allowed to say a bunch of stuff that just directly characterizes her. Since it is so effective with musical nerds, what is the problem? Honestly, not much if you just want a good time. It's just that adding a movie that stands really well on its own and then committing a lot of it to a musical, something gets lost in terms of being a classic. I remember that the reviews for the newer Mean Girls movie musical were not exactly spectacular. I can see why. Mean Girls, for all of the showmanship, loses a lot of the punch that the original one had. I keep going back to this image in these blogs, so I apologize. There's something a little punk rock about the original Mean Girls. It took the aesthetics of Disney Channel teen comedies and said something completely subversive. That's something that Tina Fey and Robert Carlock were really good at. They smiled while delivering these gut punches. But 2024's Mean Girls feels like eating candy a lot of the time. It's a tribute show to when things were a little bit more raw. The characters feel like they are setting up for these punchlines instead of actually being cutting. Regina George, while Queen Bee of the original movie, is larger than life. I guess she's supposed to be, but I don't know how much of that is earned. One thing I also have a harder time grasping onto is who Regina George as a character is. I know. I'm poo-pooing complexity here. But this Regina George often feels inconsistent. There are times that she sees, and almost envies, Cady's vulnerability. But then there are other times that she is a cat playing with a dead mouse. Partly, this comes from Regina's back story with Janis, an attempt to reclaim one's innocence. Now, I would love if this was the filmmakers' intentions, but I really just get the vibe that Regina George kind of just becomes what the musical needs her to be. Don't get me wrong. One of the key concepts of the story is that stereotypes are humanized and, as much as Cady is the hero of the piece, her manipulation of the Plastics inverts the norms of good versus evil. But this movie doesn't really hit that with any degree of nuance. It's a sledgehammer. Maybe there's something to criticize about the main story itself. Again, I think that the original, for my limited memory of the film, is kind of amazing. But one thing that the movie really revels in is the idea that, even though villains are villainous, they are human first and foremost. But one thing that is pretty consistent is that, even though we get to see what made Regina Regina, she is still pretty unlikable. Like, even in that tender moment when she claims that she's medicated to wazoo, she's still a pretty hateful person. I'm all over the place with concessions though. That's true about real life. We can humanize jerks all day. They tend to still be jerks, even when they're trying not to be jerks. Performance wise, it almost all works. I feel so bad for Busy Phillips though. Busy Phillips is talented, but she's really in someone else's shadow with this one. With the other obvious recasting in this movie, the actors are bringing something new to the role because they have to sing. There's a nice deliniation between the performances where it is hard to compare apples and oranges. But Mrs. George...has nothing new to add to the character. She's doing an Amy Poehler impression the entire time. And Amy Poehler nailed that role so hard that no one could really do much with it besides an impression. Golly, it's hard to really watch those scenes because that was one person's performance and she's not in this movie. (Although she totally could be.) I guess it works. It just doesn't really stick to the ribs. It's a movie that I'm already forgetting because I just didn't invest that much in it. It made me chuckle. Auli'i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey absolutely steal the film from everyone else. They're scenes are what make the movie worth watching. But the rest of the movie is...fine. TV-PG. Jim Henson, according to this documentary, is a story of a fundamentally unproblematic man...with the exception of maintaining a healthy work / life balance. That problem is there. While this is a celebratory documentary about the guy who made Sesame Street and The Muppets, the Henson family do seem to have unresolved issues with their father's priority with his art over being a present father. There is a reference to sex and violence, but in the most ironic way imaginable.
DIRECTOR: Ron Howard Two truths. 1) This is a very touching documentary about a great man who changed the face of entertainment and influenced the cultural zeitgeist in an undeniable way. 2) Disney seems to be in the fluff piece documentaries, even if the guy was probably unimpeachable. It's not like Ron Howard made a movie that completely avoided controversy. It just seemed like Jim Henson's life was mostly a softball when it came to making an appreciative documentary. The funny thing is, I knew what I signed up for. I was the one who was showing the trailer to anyone who would watch. There's something about Jim Henson that I think I like more than I actually do. My dad was mildly obsessed with The Muppets. Well, he was as obsessed as a reserved man probably was about things. I remember episodes of The Muppet Show being treated as the apex of family friendly comedy in the house. To a certain extent, I've passed that down to my oldest daughter. Admittedly, she in the new Muppets camp. I'm talking about the Jason Segal one. She's not wrong. To be a little bit blasphemous, the Jason Segal Muppets movie is probably the funniest thing that the Jim Henson company has ever made. It seems like I'm really dumping on the guy who created a whole new world of storytelling and changed the way that we think about entertainment. But I think I probably need to be more honest before I start discussing the ins-and-outs of a documentary that absolutely adores its subject matter. I'm in the camp of "I get the genius, but not everything that he made was necessarily a homerun." The best thing that the documentary does is sell me on the notion that Jim Henson was a genius. Not only was he a genius, but he was one of them tortured geniuses. Through intereviews and historical footage, we kind of get this picture of a man who really just wanted to create. It wasn't necessarily about puppets. Henson was almost a guy who learned to love his creations after they were created. Instead, Henson was a guy who was just wired differently. Sometimes that comes across as awkward or weird. But mostly, Henson was a guy who wanted to play around with a camera until he saw something he liked. There's that whole mantra, "If you enjoy what you do for a living, you never work a day in your life." This is where me and Henson are on the same page. There's something incredibly sympathetic about how Henson views work and art. Creation, especially when it comes to artistic expression, is seductive as heck. By the way, the novel is on hold until the school year starts. As insufferable as the following is, it's true. Writing, when done under ideal conditions, is one of my favorite things to do. Often, I find myself filling in moments between other things because I'm trying to avoid becoming Jim Henson. But Henson understood that he would only really be fulfilled if he did things his way. It's an odd investment into both himself and his sense of a future. It's why I love this documentary. It's almost a warning of what could happen if obsession goes too far. But there's something that's weird about the whole thing. I think I'm just realizing this now. As much as the name of this movie is called Idea Man, this movie absolutely be more of a cautionary tale. I knew that Jim Henson died young. In my head, it was cancer or something totally unavoidable. Not so much. This is the story of a man who worked himself to death. And yet, it's a celebration of that spirit. Henson was a guy who worked through pneumonia multiple times. One of those times killed him. It's this really weird tone that the movie takes. (Note: I started writing this in less than ideal conditions two days ago. I am now trying to finish, replicating the vibe I had a couple days ago. I almost guarantee that I'll fail to finish the thought that I had two days ago.) Lord knows that I am not one to stifle genius or creativity, but there were lots of tortured artists who didn't pneumonia themselves to death. There's almost a sense of admiration for a man who was so driven to keep working and keep creating that he just died because of his devotion to his work. I love this guy. He created amazing works. But you are almost inhaling the subtext of a group of people who wish that Jim Henson was more self-aware about his priorities. Brian Henson, throughout this film, is probably the most honest of all of his family about his father's death. Again, all of this is done out of love, but Brian Henson seems like he would have loved to rewrite his life with a different outcome. He's a guy who desperately needed a dad. I get a lot of that out of Lisa Henson as well. Part of the narrative that I picked up on this story was Henson's poor wife who seemed to understand him better than anyone on the planet, but also refused to march to the beat of his obsessive drum. The funny thing about all of these comments from me is that Jim Henson genuinely seemed to be a mostly unproblematic person. But this documentary, for all of its great stuff, kind of irons over the stuff that really was a problem. There's that old adage in therapy, when people tend to trivialize their own trauma and problems, that people need to understand that their problems are important to them. It may seem minor in the grand scheme of all of the horrible things out there. But trauma is trauma and it should be treated as such. I was a guy who loved Won't You Be My Neighbor? and I had none of these complaints. But I also think that Fred Rogers was a guy who had different ambitions that kind of reflected the good he put out in the world. While I love the things that Jim Henson made, there's something entirely too isolated about what he was creating. Fred Rogers (good human being) was devoted to helping children. Jim Henson (also good human being) was trying to find an outlet for his creativity. I think that's probably why I'm a little harsher that some of the rough edges are kind of sanded out for this doc. I hate that I harped on the negative stuff here because I loved watching this with my kids. It's one of those things that made me want to rewatch Henson's stuff. Part of me wanted to crack open some Muppet stuff. The other part immediately started scheduling a viewing of Labyrinth in the garage. And a lot of the burden of my criticisms lie on the fact that Disney+ seems to really embrace the overly adoring documentary. I also don't deny that sometimes things don't hit me as hard as they hit other people. But for what it is, Jim Henson: Idea Man mostly 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
July 2024
Categories |