PG-13 for the hero biting people's heads off.  Like, it's not like the movie ever embraces the concept of an R-rating, but it keeps things edgy.  Like, it's the Mountain Dew of superhero movies.  They swear...just enough to get the PG-13.  They kill people and it's just gross enough to be edgy without actually being over the top.  It's almost something all the time.  So keep all of this in mind when watching because it's not for kids, but it's also not for adults.

DIRECTOR: Kelly Marcel

Aw geez. 

I only have Kraven the Hunter left and then we can all say goodbye to the Sony Spider-Man Universe of Heroes and Villains (or something like that.)  Before even I talk about the odd masochism of watching these movies, I'd like to establish that I've never cared for the Venom movies.  Golly, there was a push to say that the Venom movies were amazing.  I knew that Venom, as a film concept, was a terrible idea.  My big foundation for my argument was that Venom couldn't even sustain a proper comic book, let alone a movie franchise.  But things changed since the first Venom movie.  Donny Cates wrote one of the most amazing Venom runs of all time, shifting my perspective on whether or not that character had legs.  And I'll tell you what, Venom movies are still pretty bad.

But I know that there's this push to really throw Sony under the bus for making Razzie level bad movies.  (I hate the notion of the Razzie, so I don't want to harp on that too much.) These movies are bad.  I'm glad that they are stopping with the extended universe Spider-Man related movies.  I have written the following diatribe too many times at this point.  Sony is the last company producing films by the old rules.  Maybe this doesn't apply to their animation division.  But the way that they approach big budget action movies is by the late '90s and early 2000s attitude of "extreme is better."  They honestly refuse to do anything that is vulnerable or subdued.  Instead, everything is showing off what could be done with a character instead of what should be done.  I think that's the second time I've quoted Ian Malcolm in a review in a couple of days.

So let's specifically talk about Venom 3.  It was the close of a franchise.  But is it?  This is not the crux of my argument about why this movie is so phenomenally dumb.  (By the way, I'd like to point out that, for some reason, my brain lights up with genuine excitement to watch these Sony Spider-Man spin-offs each time they show up on Netflix.  I don't want to watch them ironically.  I want to watch something new Spider-Man related and I tend to like things.  That means I go into a lot of these movies with unjustified hope.  Also, I like these movies more than others do, which is not to say I like them.  I just don't think that they are the abominations that people make them out to be.  They're normal bad.) One of the biggest frustrations about the Star Trek franchise, especially when it got to The Next Generation films, was Star Trek: Nemesis.

Nemesis was a bad movie. It was bombastic.  It lacked soul.  It was throwing everything at the camera, which ironically made the movie boring.  It was trying to hard to close out something on a bang that it ultimately sacrificed what goodwill the franchise had been slowly spending since First Contact.  But the worst part was that you could feel the studio putting its hands all over that movie, hoping to squeeze out the potential for more money down the road.  Both Venom and Star Trek promised the close to a franchise, wrapping up whatever threads were open to these characters.  We were offered a sense of closure, but the studios decided to keep opening those doors to future adventures.  Why?  The characters didn't need those future stories.  The studio wanted to make a lot of money.

I don't think the version of Venom: The Last Dance was probably the story that fit the movie best.  I bet there's a Last Dance draft that is far more interesting because it took bigger chances.  The reason that I'm saying this is obvious to some people.  The movie ends with a tease of Knull promising to destroy Earth. But, also, if you were making a final Venom movie, you'd have Knull be in it.  I mentioned Donny Cates above.  Knull is Donny Cates's creation.  He make the symbiotes actually have a story worth telling.  Knull was a top tier villain.  If you can believe it, Knull is Thanos level.  The King in Black storyline took a long time to tell and when the confrontations in those books came to fruition, holy moley was it worth it.  Someone behind the scenes of Venom: The Last Dance read the Knull comic book.   They knew that they could print money with Knull.  The problem was...Knull needed a minute.

You know how Thanos took a while to build up?  Even DC understood this with a version of Darkseid that never really happened outside of Zack Snyder's Justice League.  When you have a truly awful threat, you need to build it up.  Now, Venom: The Last Dance decided to introduce Knull.  They knew that this was a character worth giving gravitas to.  Unfortunately, they also wanted to be the guys who said that this was the story that was going to close the Venom / Eddie relationship.  They wanted both.  Oh my goodness, they wanted to have the benefit of drawing in audiences, promising them that the character that they loved over the course of these three films, was going to have some kind of consequence.  You can't have both.  You can't prop up a future movie and also sell that this emotional resolution was going to happen.  It's corporate crap all over this movie.  In an attempt to do both, they ruined either potential story.

Knull is absolutely wasted in this movie.  I've made it clear that there clearly was supposed to be a Venom 4 or other stories that would have made this story set up. But let's talk about how even this movie ruined Knull.  I've read the Donny Cates books.  I was so interested in this character that he created that I read back issues and played catch up.  They were honestly that good. But Knull is complicated as crap.  Even after all this time, I only kind of understand the inner workings of this character.  So when you start your movie with a "Once upon a time" two minute story of a character that we had no association with?  What are you doing, my guy?  I don't want an off-camera villain.  I want to understand what makes that character tick.  And then, The Last Dance even butchered that.  They took words that were said in those comics and just used them as Macguffins.  

The Codex frees Knull because Eddie died?  What kind of logic is that?  Honestly.  I don't understand that at all.  The movie just wants me to believe something because it told me to.  Yes, in the comics, Knull was collecting the Codexes.  But they were a database of every human who had bonded with a symbiote.  These xenophages (dumb, by the way) shouldn't even exist.  It's an entire race of creatures that exist for a specific scenario?  On top of that, they're functionality is really suspect.  For those who are just reading my blog because they weren't planning on watching the movie, the creatures can only see the Codex if Eddie is fully Venomed up.  I'm talking about "fully".  The monsters can't even see Venom if he's using his powers.  It's only if Venom is completely covering Eddie.  That's too much of a weakness, guys.

Which leads to this movie dumbing down everyone, not just its audience.  Eddie even verbalizes that they shouldn't go full Venom.  Venom says to Eddie that he can't go big and Venom is terrified by the xenophages.  Okay.  Seems like you have a pretty concrete plan on how to survive this mess.  So why in the holy hell did they Venom up just so they could dance with Mrs. Chen?  The pivot of this movie's third act is founded on a joke fan service moment.  Honestly, the character actually had to change motivation so the story could go on.  For a long time in the movie, Eddie's doing just fine.  It seems like he dug himself out of the hole that the character had gotten himself into only to acknowledge that the plot wasn't moving forward, so he got himself captured.  What?  And the movie has a bunch of these moments.  

And the narrative backpedaling?  My goodness, Venom: The Last Dance.  You keep teasing the notion of Spider-Man.  You even played ball with the MCU's Multiverse stuff.  The first few minutes, you embrace that multiverse stuff.  At the end of your last movie, you have the symbiote remember all the memories of the other universes.  And nothing?  That has nothing to do with the movie?  Again, I cannot stress how much corporate interference is in this movie.  When this whole multiverse thing started, Cristo Fernandez was just finding the mildest amount of fame on Ted Lasso.  But now that Ted Lasso is next level and Fernandez is well sought after, the movie wanted to use that character despite his tie to the Venom series is something that they didn't want to use.  Do you know what backs that up?  Juno Temple is also in this movie!  They're trying to appeal to a specific market in direct opposition to the story trying to come out of this film.

How did so much talent get attracted to this movie?  It is all charts and slides from the first movie going to talent agents saying "This movie is going to make a billion dollars?"  I don't know what part of this movie feels like a passion project.  It is cold and dead throughout.  The emotional reveal of the symbiote sacrificing itself for Eddie might be one of the most meh sequences I've ever seen.  It was a franchise that never really hit any highs, but I also didn't want to see it go out on such a corporate, dead low.  Geez, there's very little about this movie that is redeemable.  Again, I like these movies more than others do.  I think I probably still had a mildly good time occasionally.  But if you tell me that I saw a good movie, I would have to fight you tooth and nail there.  This is quintessentially what is wrong with Sony and they need to learn from their mistakes instead of constantly doubling down.

PG-13 which, honestly, is pretty baffling.  Maybe it's because America is wired to be afraid of only sex stuff in R-rated movies.  But let's assume that the fictional gore wasn't enough to earn it an R-rating.  I'm referring to a scene where a character takes shotgun pellets to the face, potentially losing the eye in the process.  The movie, as a form of protest to the Iranian government in real life, show real world death footage from the Internet.  It's throughout the film.  Also, characters are tortured and killed.  Still, somehow PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Mohammad Rasoulof

My eye is twitching from stress and annoyance.  That's a thing.  What I have to do is to try to distance myself from an annoying day and try to write about The Seed of the Sacred Fig with objectivity.  Because I'll say this as clearly as I can: The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an accomplishment both from a political position and from a cinematic position.  Is it a perfect movie?  No.  It absolutely does not need to be as long as it is.  But at the end of the day, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is too important to be forgotten, which unfortunately, it probably will be.

It's kind of a glorious thing to live in an era of Wikipedia.  While I try staying intentionally blind to anything about a movie before watching it, especially when it comes to the Academy Awards, it definitely helped to know the backstory of this movie.  The movie is strongly anti-theocracy.  It is a direct criticism about the Iranian government.  Now, that's a gutsy move to begin with.  The Iranian government is notorious for its obsession with censorship.  The very nature of an Iranian film criticizing the Iranian theocratic regime is insane.  But the fact that this movie was quasi-made in secret?  I've seen one other movie made in secret.  It didn't look like this.  As a film, every bit of this looks impressive as can be.  I don't deny that a lot of the movie takes place inside an apartment, limiting the danger of filming something that might get the actors or the director imprisoned.  The director, during the filming of the movie, found out that he was to be imprisoned and knocked out the movie in 80 something days.  

And I'll tell you this, narratively, the story works really well.   It takes a minute to figure out what the story is about.  I can't help but bring Persepolis into this because Persepolis is what taught me about the theocracy in Iran, especially when it came to fighting oppressive regimes.  Like Persepolis, The Seed of the Sacred Fig spends a lot of time explaining the real world setting of Iran.  The entire first act is almost meant for foreigners who are unaware of the social structure of modern Iran.  We meet the girls (who have to be older than what they're playing.  No judgment!  I'm a big fan of saving younger actors from dangerous or unhealthy situations.) who almost epitomize the duality of what it means to be a woman in Iran.  Yes, we get strong characterization for these girls.  We get to know their intentions and personalities. But the real use of the first act is to show how violent the world has gotten in Iran.

When the story turns to give attention to Iman, it's actually kind of shocking.  I read Iman to be a minor character in the story for a good chunk of the narrative.  He's the threat that's out there.  Najmeh seems to come down on the girls because their 21st century behavior might offend him.  But the first act feels like it is a story of a mother who keeps using the father as an excuse to keep her children repressed.  When Sadaf becomes friends with the girls, it is almost a galvanizing of a new age.  That's honestly what I thought the story was going to be about, how Sadaf makes a tiny crack in these girls lives and Mom is going to have to see on which side of history that she stands on.

But the loss of the gun is when the film shifts.  Listen, I took the movie mostly seriously.  It's incredibly bleak and tense throughout.  But, man, Iman is not good at his job.  The movie starts with him having a bit of a conscience.  He's horrified that he has to sentence someone to death without ever having investigated this man.  It seems like he's a good dude (which I think is the point.  We're supposed to see how easily he's corrupted.)  But Najmeh is afraid of this guy from the beginning.  All of Najmeh's excuses are because "Father wouldn't tolerate any of this."  There's this fear of this man who seems like he has a soul at the beginning of the story.  There's something a little muddy about Iman's embracing of a structure that he fundamentally hates.  The problem is that Iman has two fundamental problems with his character: he doesn't believe that his work has a moral core and that he's bad at his job.  The first issue, which is far more important, is undercooked at the expense of the second point, because that guy makes every mistake in the book.

Once the Sadaf story is concluded, the real story of Iman and his spiraling out of control begins.  And, yeah, it's compelling.  I like the idea that a father / husband can turn on his family for the sake of a perverted sense of faith and duty.  Iman becomes this maniacal bad guy and he's truly scary...even though he isn't great at his job at being competently evil.  All of his motivation is that his family is spitting in the face of God with their obsession with freedom and progressiveness.  Unfortunately, there are moments, in an attempt to make Iman a  valid threat, that the movie gets a little silly.

These aren't bad moments.  They were just moments that pulled me out of the movie.  I had to be this guy, because these moments are so stupid that I can't help it.  The entire last act is meant to almost be an action thriller.  The girls go from being ideologically threatened (fighting a battle of willpower) to literally having to escape their father, who has locked them up in individual cells.  The individual cells is a weird moment for me.  The reason that the family is out in the middle of nowhere is because Iman got doxxed and the family's life is in danger.  Okay, that's interesting.  The family escape a protestor who is following them and Sana saves her father.  It seems like Sana is going to be on Dad's side for the conclusion of the movie. But the movie throws that moment out to provide a more climactic ending. 

That moment when Sana turns on the protestors and reveals that they have no bars, that's a big moment for Sana.  Sana, for a good chunk of the movie, has her allegiances a bit guarded.  While she tends to hang out with her sister, Rezvan, Sana almost echoes what she hears.  But in the moments before Dad is about to murder these people on live camera, we discover that it was actually Sana who stole the gun.  She doesn't even tell Rezvan that it was her.  (Although Rezvan probably could have figured it out.)  Now, there's a read of this that is also pretty accurate.  The reveal of the thief wasn't to protect Iman.  The purpose of revealing the gun and the lack of phone signal was to save the protesters.  But it is almost a fight for her dad's soul.  I get this.  But we don't really get the wrap up from this because Dad goes more nuclear as the story progresses.

The weird part that pulled me out was that this safehouse in the middle of nowhere had individual jail cells.  Now, I can write off the fact that this safe house was provided by his weird buddy (who seemed to really enjoy Iman's constant failure.  Am I the only one who read that in the character?) But do all safehouses have secret dungeons for torturing your family?  Part of this is that the movie needed Iman to make a definitive move against his family that would have seemed realistic.  While I believe that he was open to the notion of murdering them after they had escaped, it probably would have been a bridge too far to have Iman instantly jump to murdertown as his go-to response to being questioned or embarrassed.  It all seems incredibly escalated, considering that I see some plausible solutions to still keep him evil and simultaneously grounded.

I think I want to like this movie more than I actually did.  It hits a lot of amazing points and the story behind the making of this film is inspiring.  But it also feels like three separate films and often, character motivation is a bit all over the place.  Does that come from having to film it in secret?  Does it comes from having a limited shooting schedule?  There, after all, were few opportunities to reshoot sequences or fix it in post.  But it's a good movie that's important, but I never quite get to "great movie."

Rated R for some really densely packed swearing throughout.  Man, there is some cursing on a next level.  There's also a pretty explicit sex scene that doesn't show any nudity.  It doesn't change the fact that it is incredibly graphic.  And like with most music biopics, there's an impressive amount of drugs in this movie.  Here's the deal.  I wish that the movie wasn't R so I could watch this movie regularly.  But if it wasn't R, it wouldn't be this movie either.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Michael Gracey

I don't even understand me anymore.  I rally against music biopics.  I say they're all the same.  They're always about musicians falling into drugs and being terrible people only to come out the other side seeing freedom through music.  Better Man?  Same deal.  But do you know what?  Better Man might be one of my favorite movies of 2024.  I wasn't prepped for that.

It might be that it was because I wasn't prepped for that.  I was so ready to write this movie off.  I mean, for all my pop culture obsession, I know nothing of music.  From what I understand, Robbie Williams is a huge deal internationally who never really penetrated the cultural zeitgeist in America.  These should be points against a movie about him.  From my perspective, he's a dude.  But do you know what?  It might actually help a movie like Better Man.  Better Man might be playing on my lack of investment, completely destroying anything that I thought I was going to get out of this movie.  Honestly, I can not speak more highly about this movie.  I do have an inkling about why I really loved it.  

As much as I've been rallying against the music biopic subgenre, there has always been one exception to the rule: Rocketman.  Well, Michael Gracey was a producer on Rocketman and it shows.  I might like Better Man better than Rocketman.  It's almost like the title is meant to be a commentary on the quality of the same sub-sub-genre of film.  Crazy, right?  The jukebox musical is either a love it or hate it thing.  But what makes Better Man a better version of Rocketman is its freedom to get a little weird.  Honestly, Better Man is more grounded than the trailers make it out to be.  I guess I should discuss the monkey in the room, but the monkey stuff doesn't matter.  As much as I'm saying the movie is free to get weird, the monkey stuff isn't what pulls it into a bizarre place.  It doesn't hurt.  I can't deny that.  But you get used to the monkey stuff pretty quick.

The great part, which makes me like Better Man more than --say --A Complete Unknown is that the movie is about knowing who Robbie Williams is as a human being over simply being a glorification of his music. The music gets its play and is super valuable.  I don't want to downplay any of that.  I'm more long the line of the notion that the movie is obsessed with getting Robbie Williams's take on each beat of his life.  Because Williams is the protagonist coupled with narrator, there is a glorious bias (I'm not being sarcastic --he imbues each historical event with his perspective coupled with unfiltered opinions on that moment) to each thing.  On top of that, while much of the film does hit on music biopic tropes, it almost seems like it doesn't care so much that Williams is a mega star so much as he is a deeply flawed individual.

Yeah, other movies have tried.  I'll even say that other movies have succeeded at this.  But there's the opening with little Robbie (again, an ape) failing at being a soccer star.  The movie builds on the idea that, while he wants superstardom, it is because he's desperate for even the slightest bit of love from anyone besides his grandmother.  I will admit  --and I've posted this in other film blogs --that I'm a sucker for dad issues.  Man alive, did this movie sell the "dad issue" story.  Like, I was close to tears by the end.  If I'm trying to prove that this is more about acceptance than fame, I think that most of my evidence comes from Dad.  This is vulnerable stuff here, so please be patient with me.  My dad died when I was 12.  (Already you feel bad for me.  I don't blame you.  Like Robbie Williams, I am desperate for your acceptance.) The man was incredibly smart.  No joke, he was a full-on member of MENSA.  Do you understand how many dreams and daydreams I have about meeting my father and trying to impress him?  Honestly, I write an essay about every movie I watch.  There's something fundamentally broken about that.

Before I get off the dad thing, I do want to talk about my bittersweet reaction to the movie.  Again, this is a true story made by the guy who lived it.  In real life, Robbie Williams threw his deadbeat dad a bone and let him do a duet of "My Way" by Frank Sinatra, despite the fact that his father was addicted to trying to get fame.  My bittersweetness comes from the fact that I adore that Robbie Williams, through therapy and rehab, got to a point in his life that he was able to forgive his dad and give him the thing that he wanted the most.  But I also am in this camp that says it almost would have been happier to cut his dad out of his life.  Again, there's something toxic about that too.  There are a bunch of things in the movie that Robbie Williams is morally responsible for. There are things that he needs to atone for.  But I feel like there had to have his father make the moral choice to beg for an apology.  Like, I feel like his dad leaves just as broken as he started the movie.  But that might be actually more of a commentary on Robbie Williams's mental health.  He doesn't need his dad to apologize.  He can sing a song with his dad simply because he wanted to sing a song with his dad.  As much as it was making his dad's dream come true, Robbie does it to be selfish in the best way possible.

And, Geez Louise, this movie aggressively talks about mental health. Now we're talking about the ape thing.  (I've shifted out of "monkey" as a term because I think "ape" is more accurate.)  From a practical perspective, you want Robbie Williams to play himself.  But Robbie Williams is also significantly older than he was during these events.  I know that there's another actor playing Williams and I'm not quite sure about the beat-for-beat moments when the handoff is made.  Doesn't matter.  The movie never gets explicit with its choice to make a real human look like an ape the entire time.  But I love the little teases to the imagery in the movie.  Throughout the story, there are moments of Robbie describing himself as an animal.  As much as there are real villains in this story, most notably his father, Robbie hates himself.  Again, the movie is about acceptance.  The idea of distancing himself from humanity proper is the notion of other.  As an ape, Robbie has a difficult time settling for what other people have accepted as normal.  He stands out from the crowd.  His behavior is often written off because "That's just Robbie."  But when he's an ape, it's almost saying that there's something biological behind his actions.  

Then the imagery gets more intense. One of the recurring motifs is the notion of seeing his younger selves in the crowd.  Robbie hates himself. I get it.  I often hate myself too.  (Like Robbie, though, I also think I'm the greatest thing to walk Planet Earth.  Keep this paradox in mind when you talk to me.) But those apes serve multiple purposes.  The first thing is that they stand out.  They aren't people in the crowd.  You stick a human Robbie in the audience, he gets lost immediately.  You stick an ape in that crowd, that creature comes across as threatening.  It wants to kill Robbie in his present form.  And do you know what is spectacular?  These are other forms of Robbie that we saw previously in the movie who were also threatened by other versions of himself.  It's incredible.  The fact that it all becomes this surreal brawl at this event, without giving much context to what is real and what is imagined, lets us feel what it might mean to disassociate as Williams.  It works really well.

I don't know, man.  Maybe I don't hate biopics.  Maybe I hate safe biopics.  There has been such a string of safe biopics that I need stuff that kind of blows the roof off of the subgenre.  I can't keep going to the same well.  It needs to get bizarre.  It needs to get vulnerable.  Better Man works not only as an expose of a persona, but also as an incredible musical.  Musicals are allowed to play with reality more than other movies are.  (I don't even believe that sentence...but it is a shorthand for a much larger concept that I don't have the energy to explain.) By embracing this as a weird musical, I learned to love an artist I know almost nothing about.    Better Man is incredible.  I know that A Complete Unknown is going to get all of the attention, but Better Man is where it's at.

Rated R and it absolutely didn't need to be rated R.  I mean, there is language in the movie.  That's why it officially is rated R.  But there isn't even that much language.  This was a movie we held off until the kids were in bed for and our oldest absolutely should have been able to watch this.  I mean, sure, she probably wouldn't have had the attention span coupled with the interest to watch a movie about the attacks on the Munich Olympics.  But whatever.  While there is death, it is all off camera.

DIRECTOR: Tim Fehlbaum

And now we're going to have the discussion.  These blogs that I'm writing right now are my least favorite to write.  These are the movies that I couldn't finish writing about before the Academy Awards, despite having watched them before the Oscars were televised.  (Okay, mostly televised.  Hulu decided not to show Best Actress nor Best Picture.)   There is very little drive to get these on the website because that page is now going to be an abandoned mall of information.  We know who got the Academy Award.  We know who didn't.  September 5 did not get the Academy Award.  I'm writing this because I watched it.  If you want an insight into what it is like to maintain a blog where you write about everything you watch, this is one of those moments that is willpower in the face of wanting to take a nap.

My wife kept asking me if I wanted to know how the entire thing ended.  For some reason, I got really defensive at this.  I mean, I have a minor in history.  I had seen Munich when it came out all those years ago. In my head, I remember that there was an attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, but I didn't remember how the whole thing played out --except tragically.  In my head, there was a bomb threat or something.  I don't know.  September 5 is a heck of a way to present this information.  Putting it in the perspective of the sports / news team exclusively gives the the movie a ship-in-a-bottle form of storytelling that is oddly compelling.  The weird thing is that I traditionally don't love these kinds of stories.  I mean, I still hold some grudge against Spotlight for ultimately doing the same thing.  But I don't know if September 5 was necessarily about recounting the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics.  

I can't say that the movie isn't about the Palestinian Liberation Army and their attack on Israeli Olympians.  The timing doesn't seem to be an accident.  I want to talk about this a bit in a second (and hopefully will be focused enough to remember that I set this up for discussion later).  But if you take that element of it out (not completely, because the  subject matter is important to the story), it is more of a look at how journalism has a toxic element to it.  The journalists in September 5 are never evil. This isn't a story about media manipulation, nor is it really about propagandizing events for public consumption.  You could make an argument that the journalists in this story are propagandizing the events for consumption with Americans and I probably couldn't fight you very well.  But the point of the story is how seductive the spotlight is.  (Hey, Spotlight!)  

Roone Aldridge, played by Peter Sarsgaard, is the only character who is meant to rub us the wrong way from the beginning.  Aldridge doesn't really hide his ambition from moment one.  There might be a narrative that the character (who was a real dude) tells himself saying that he's doing what has to be done for the better news story.  There's a way to make Aldridge look altruistic.  But the movie is painting the character in a far different way.  Because Aldridge is juxtaposed to many other characters who seem to temper their zeal for media, Aldridge comes across as dangerous.  But we have Aldridge in the movie for a specific reason.  Aldridge's perspective is initially gross with his disregard for safety measures.  But as the film progresses, Aldridge stays static while the other characters start morphing into versions of Aldridge.  Sorry that I struggle with some of the character names, but even Hank Hanson (?), the man who epitomizes the antithesis of Aldridge ends the movie with apologizing to Aldridge despite ultimately being wrong.

The funny thing is that I'm on their side almost immediately.  September 5, whether intentionally or not, is a movie about compartmentalization.  It's not that these reporters don't care about the Olympians.  The movie makes it clear that there is an emotional tie to the people being held hostage.  But these emotions are tainted by success of ABC News.  The reason that these people are thrust into the spotlight is because they are the only ones who can cover this tragedy.   There's a great moment where ABC Sports / News (If you watch it, you know where I'm going with that constant dual naming system) exposes the plan for the police to breach into the Olympic Village to save the hostages.  Now, again, I am on Team News.  As betrayed as I felt during the election cycle with how the news sanewashed Donald Trump, leading to where we are now politically, I also have that narrative that journalism is meant to push back against censorship.  

But that moment where they accidentally tell the kidnappers law enforcement's plan for breaching the Olympic Village, there's a moral grey area there.  Now, the film goes out of its way to stress that a lot of the problems that came out of the Munich Olympics came from the police, who were not trained to handle hostage situations.  That's the film's perspective.  Historians may agree or disagree with that read.  I'm just telling you what the film presents as the reasoning behind why things went so south with the events.  But it doesn't really take the onus off of ABC News.  It's that old Ian Malcolm chestnut, "We were so busy wondering if we couldn't, we never considered if we should." (If I butchered the quote, I don't have the willpower to look it up and slow my momentum.) The movie posits that there is a responsibility to the greater good that stresses that human lives are more important than ratings.  There may not have been a willful desire for hostages to get hurt, but there was also a negligence on the part of ABC to do the right thing.

Now, I just read that the Alamo Drafthouse employees tried to shut down showings of September 5 because of accusations of promoting Zionist ideologies.  The articles I'm reading after (which aren't exactly the most legit sources I've ever looked at) seem dismissive when it comes to the employees' concerns.  While, as a whole, I think there is a place to tell this story, even in today's climate, I can't help but think that the movie had to consider this when making the film. There's a straight up discussion about what to label the members of the PLO.  When the word "terrorist" pops up, there's a discussion showing how the word has political connotation.  But the rest of the movie isn't an attempt to talk about the weight of this word.  Now, my place isn't to come down on this.  But the movie never does present a Palestinian perspective.  But if I'm being honest, it doesn't really go much into the politics of either side beyond the fact that this is a movie about trying to get Olympians free from hostage takers.  Is the film Zionist propaganda?  Probably not.  But it's also not welcoming a deeper discussion beyond what is compelling for a human interest piece.

But if everything is out there and the Oscars are over, what do I think of the movie overall?  The movie is pretty darned good.  But do you know what else?  It's pretty darned forgettable as well.  Part of that comes from the title.  A year from now, I will not know what September 5 will be about.  It's one of those movies that is going to only hold digital real estate on my blog.  If I ever read my own blog, I would be able to remind myself what I thought of it.  But honestly, it's a good movie that never really hits greatness.

Not rated.  It's a movie that is centralized around an assassination attempt.  There is real world violence in here that is not for everyone.  But most of the movie is supplied by file footage, which tends to be a little bit more tame than anything filmed by a documentary crew. Some of the subject matter can be controversial, but there's nothing technically that makes the movie too hard to watch.  

DIRECTOR:  Johan Grimonprez

Oh dear.  This is going to be me whining for a good long time.  Actually, it might not be that long because I had a hard time making heads or tails of this documentary.  Someone out there in Internet land might make a fair assessment saying that I might be too dumb for this documentary.  I think, to a certain extent, that might be true.  But it's not that I had a problem with the subject of the documentary.  I had a problem with its execution.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat might be the longest movie I ever watched.  I know it's only two-and-a-half hours.  It was the longest movie I've ever seen.

About a decade ago teaching, I remember when a kid presented a project using Prezi over Powerpoint.  Prezi blew my mind.  It had this aesthetic flair and personality that PowerPoint, overall, seemed to lack.  It was about fluidity.  It seemed so streamlined that I couldn't help but be taken aback by it.  But then more and more kids started to use Prezi.  It wasn't long before Prezi became the norm and the visuals that I considered revolutionary became ho-hum.  I consider Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat to be the Prezi of documentaries.  That's step one of my complaint.  I don't know how to explain the specific visual style of Soundtrack.  (I refuse to write that title over and over.  It's a tank.)   Aesthetically, it offers something incredibly charming. Starting with retro footage of jazz musicians, the entire movie is scored to the jazz greats like Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and more.  The movie insinuates that these jazz greats have a tie to the events happening in the Congo at the same time. 

The problem is that the movie almost fails to make that connection explicit / important. The title and soundtrack to the movie really imply that music is going to play an important part in the narrative of the events with the nation of the Congo gaining independence.  While there is a connection, it only really gets to a "Gee, that's interesting, I guess" level.  I think there's a way to tell the story of how music played an important part in international events.  Heck, I think a podcast could make that connection well where this movie almost had parallel narratives with an occasional crossover from time-to-time.  It's central conceit is lost to a cooler idea that doesn't really exist in this movie.  Again, I'm saying that the events of this movie need to be told in documentary form.  I don't deny that the events that happened between 1958-1961 don't need to be told.  I'm just saying that there's a lot being thrown in here and none of it is explained all that well.

One of the things that I tell my students is not to let the evidence speak for itself.  You need that evidence, but the meat and potatoes of good writing is in the analysis of that evidence.  Now, I am teaching high schoolers as they get ready for college level writing.  If they go into a master's program or a doctoral program, they're going to need to move into a different style of writing that depends far more on bulk evidence.  Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is like reading a doctoral thesis.  It is an info dump of primary sources.  That's very impressive from an academic perspective.  The problem with presenting a doctoral thesis is that most of the people who would read a doctoral thesis come to the thesis with a fairly decent knowledge of the events in question.  What they are looking for is a different perspective on a complex subject matter.  Unfortunately, we're not the doctoral thesis crowd.  I'm not saying that it's forgivable that we don't know much about the CIA and the UN's interference in a democratically elected president.  I'm saying that you need to give us way more context and analysis of the people involved in this story.

There are so many pieces in play here and the movie just gives me long stretches of text and footage of people without a lot of talking heads.  There are a few.  There's a few old timers who were there at the event, explaining what they were doing there.  But these talking heads are few and far between.  Honestly, the need to make a documentary in a unique way may be the worst part of this film.  It is a totally different way to present information.  But that format gets in the way.  It gets in the way hard.  I really wanted to learn a lot about this event and I was actively trying to make connections between all of the different events.  I needed the documentary to hold my hand a little bit and explain why I should care about these seemingly disparate events to make a unified argument.  I get that the assassination of Lumumba had ties to the Civil Rights Movement, coupled with the music scene?  I get that it would have been nifty to have Dizzy Gillespie as president.  I just didn't quite understand how all these points really made sense with one another.

Honestly, I get that this movie is very smart.  I get that there's probably an audience that have been waiting for this movie.  But me, who came into this movie with a good attitude, wanting to learn all about the rise and fall of Lumumba?  I got very little out of it.  It was pulling teeth and I started this movie on board.

Rated R mostly for language.  Like, this movie is pretty easy to edit down into a PG-13 cut, but the prestige of having the R seems to grant it verisimilitude.  It should be pointed out that Bob Dylan slept around a bit and cheated on significant others.  There's also a lot of rudeness, coupled with some almost contractually obligated drinking.  Still, it's a pretty tame R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  James Mangold

I don't know how I'm going to do it.  I realistically can't do what I want to do.  I am practically done with the Academy Award list before tonight's Oscars.  It's just that I watched a lot of movies in the past 48 hours and I don't think that I'll be able to write about them all before the Oscars start.  It would probably make me a bad dad and make my writing crap.  Still, I'm going to write when I can.  Whatever I get done is what I get done.  I understand my own limitations and I am going to write what I can.

This blog is going to be fairly predictable.  I'm so sick of this movie.  This is the movie that shows up every Oscar season.  It rarely sticks with me.  The music biopic is such Oscar bait that I actively get mad when I watch these movies.  The worst part is that I finished Better Man moments ago and that's a significantly better version of this movie, so I'm confused about what I'm really getting out of this movie.  I never actively liked this movie, but I think I'm feeling a bit more rough with this movie right now in the shadow of Better Man.  The nicest take on this movie is that Timothee Chalamet did a great job, Edward Norton needs to do more roles like these, and James Mangold is a good director.  But does this movie have any reason to exist outside of just appealing to Bob Dylan and nostalgia heads?  Not really.

Before we started this movie (and this might highlight my bias / frustration with this subgenre a bit), I decided to watch the trailer to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.  I think I might have to watch Walk Hard again before watching another music biopic. While A Complete Unknown doesn't hit all of the tropes that Walk Hard lampoons, it does hit quite a few of them.  My wife started off this movie by even stating, "This is going to be one of those music biopics where the main character has a sweetheart while he's still an up-and-comer.  He'll cheat on her, but he'll always treat her as the one that he really loved."  Congrats, my wife. You nailed this movie exactly.

I get that there is an audience that wants to explore the world of Bob Dylan.  That makes a ton of sense to me.  I've always said that, as much as I am a pop culture nerd, music was always my weak spot.  I know that Bob Dylan means something special to a lot of people.  I just think that Bob Dylan might be the worst subject when it comes to making a biopic.  Part of the reason that we get biopics is that we want to understand the person behind the persona.  Bob Dylan has always been incredibly enigmatic.  The fact that I know that I have a Bob Dylan impression behind me without ever really caring about Bob Dylan means that he's impacted the cultural zeitgeist enough that we can understand the ego of Bob Dylan without needing to find out who he really is.

The problem with A Complete Unknown is that I don't think that James Mangold or Timothee Chalamet know who Bob Dylan is.  They get part of him. There's a lot of speculating.  But instead of being an actual examination of what makes Bob Dylan tick is that this is a movie more about how Bob Dylan affected the world around him as opposed to figuring out who he is.  We meet Dylan at a unique spot in history.  He's already musically proficient. He has this reverence for music, causing him to go on a pilgrimage to see an ailing Woody Guthrie.  In this moment, Guthrie and Pete Seeger see Dylan for what he is: raw talent.

But instead of really getting Dylan through the trenches of what it means to be a once-in-a-lifetime artist, Dylan keeps just succeeding because Pete Seeger believes in him.  Honestly, this is where I make the case for a Pete Seeger movie because I understand that character incredibly well.  Seeger loves music and he loves passion.  He's a guy who sees his genre of choice disappearing to the energy of rock 'n roll and he wants to hold onto the purity of music.  He's not a zealot.  He's not a guy who sticks his head in the sand, hoping that the music of yesteryear takes over once again.  Instead, he's a guy who loves music.  Dylan coming to him offers him a chance to see his genre take the spotlight once again.  It's a great character.  But that's Pete Seeger.  That's not Bob Dylan.

Instead, we kind of just understand that Bob Dylan is a jerk.  His only redeemable quality is that he loves music.  I happen to like that he's on the right side of politics, but that's more of a lucky thing for me as opposed to something that is a choice on behalf of Dylan.  The issue is that he's really mean to everyone.  I wish I could understand where it came from.  But it almost seems like Mangold is forgiving himself a motivation for this character with the idea that most biopics have the protagonist turn into a monster because they are performers and for no other reason.  A lot of this movie is Dylan choosing to be a monster to those around him because he rose to fame quickly.  But we don't see Dylan hiding from the spotlight.  It's almost like he just enjoys the chaos of ignoring reasonable requests.

While my wife was right about Dylan's casual nature of affairs, it's always really weird when he's mean those women in his life.  That girl that is his first love is Sylvie.  Now, I'm not saying that Dylan is locked into being with Sylvie his entire life.  That's not a reasonable thing outside of movies.  Maybe they didn't click.  I'll even go as far as to say that Dylan might regret his relationship with Sylvie because of his obsession with Joan Baez.  But he's really mean to her for no reason.  He has this aloof, alien attitude towards people with the sole purpose of driving them away.  But it's hard to sympathize with a character who is chasing after Sylvie despite constantly being mean to her.

But the same thing can be said about Joan Baez.  Dylan's first interaction with Baez is complimenting her, implying that he's a sweet guy.  But he refuses to do comply with the most simple requests. Like, it's like Bob Dylan enjoys hurting those people around him without really a motive behind each choice.  Now, if I'm trying to meet the movie in the middle, I could write it off as Dylan is a genius and has a hard time relating to the common man.  But here's the bigger problem.  Joan Baez is also a genius and she doesn't really deserve any thing that Dylan is throwing at her.  You know how I said that Pete Seeger needed to have a movie about him?  Same thing is true about Joan Baez.  A Joan Baez movie about how Bob Dylan was a jerk to her the entire time would have been a far more intriguing movie than what A Complete Unknown offered. 

It's just another music biopic.  In some ways, it's a lazier music biopic than most.  Again, I stand by my stance that James Mangold makes a good movie.  Aesthetically, this movie is pretty good.  It's not even un-entertaining.  It's more along the line that a biopic is meant to help us understand someone else's life.  I know nothing about what makes Bob Dylan tick outside the fact that he feels more special than anyone else in the room.  

The real nail in the coffin was the climax of the film at the Newport Folk Festival.  The level of stakes that the movie gave to Bob Dylan playing --by today's standards --fairly tame rock at a folk festival was just stupid. The amount of vitriol that the crowd gave Dylan was something that we see in movies.  What was a row of axes doing just sitting by the booth?  The attempt to make a minor moment into something catastrophic completely took me out of the movie and spent what little emotional investment I had left.

As I've harped upon, I'm so tired of this same movie over and over.  There has to be better storytelling than just returning to the same well with a new skin.  Oscar season shouldn't be a rehash of the same movies over and over.

PG-13 for horrific acts due to racists being, once again, terrible.  There's some language, especially when it comes to hate speech.  But a lot of this is stuff that happens behind the scenes.  The film is shot in first person, so the audience is limited to what the boys actually witness.  There's also some alcoholism and potential molestation, although that is left a bit ambiguous.

DIRECTOR:  RaMell Ross

I so wish that I read the book before seeing the movie.  I was this close to getting it from the library, but I dismissed the idea as stressful.  I have a million books that I own that I wanted to get through first.  But now, seeing what I've seen, I want to see why RaMell Ross chose to do what he did.  Also, once again, I'm very stressed to write this.  If I can knock this out in the next half-hour, I will be incredibly happy with myself and try to give myself a gold star.  It won't clear my "To-Do" list, but it will get me significantly closer.

My wife sewed some doubt into my head. She's a very smart lady, my wife.  Because we're two separate people (although with the whole marriage making two people one, you could argue...), we disagree on some things. But often, our tastes tend to align, especially when it comes to high art cinema.  Superhero stuff we can disagree on all day.  But when it comes to Oscar stuff, we tend to agree.  She planted this seed in my head and it is causing me to doubt what I watched.  See, I watched Nickel Boys and, for the most part, I thought I loved it.  I'll get to the why in a second.  But she said that she wanted to like it and now I'm thinking that I might be in the same camp.

I mean, I know I liked it more than she did.  While I liked the story and thought that the tale was a story that needed telling, I really fell in love with the visuals of the whole movie.  Like I mentioned in the MPA section above, the film is told in first person.  Ross goes beyond that, messing with the chronology of the movie.  As such, the movie forces its audience to stay engaged.  Often in the movie, there are moments when you have to question whose perspective you are getting, Elwood's or Turner's.  Now, as I type that, it makes a ton of sense why the perspective is always switching.  I'm going to be spoiling the end of the movie right now, so you can quit reading if you haven't seen the movie yet.  The notion that Elwood and Turner's perspectives keep jumping all over the place is because Turner is Elwood.  I figured it out about twenty minutes before the reveal.  That has nothing to do with the quality of the movie.  I just want the applause.

First person narratives are tricky.  Nickel Boys is not the first movie to play with the first person narrative.  These movies tend to be more novelties than anything else.  The only one that touched me as much as Nickel Boys did was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  But the use of the first person narrative kind of works for Nickel Boys as Nickel Boys reminds us of something that is almost metatextual.  Again, my wife is very smart.  She did point out that there tends to be a movie like Nickel Boys every year.  It's kind of a crime that stories about race in America have been relegated to Oscar bait.  They should get the attention of the Oscar, but it sucks that people kind of treat them as a throwaway term like "Oscar Bait."  But Nickel Boys is almost --and in only a subtle way --commenting on that.  

The use of the first person, at least from my read, is the notion that the story of Elwood and Turner is the story of Black America.  There has been this tendency for an audience to distance themselves from the protagonist of a story, especially when it comes to racial discrimination. Perhaps the reason that we keep coming back to this well of systematic racism is that we don't get that there's something universal about the experience for Black America.  It's always kind of treated with the experience for the other.  Do I think that I felt like a Black American feeling the racial prejudice of police indifference?  No.  But do I get the logic of having people looking right at me and saying the most awful thing, assuming that I was doing wrong thing?  Intellectually, I get it.

When I put my chips on the table, what the first person perspective does is more along the lines of offering me cool shots.  There were a stream of films (my brain isn't braining right now) that used the mundane to cover up the fact that horrors were happening in the next room.  Again, brain not braining, but the closest thing I can think of right now is The Zone of Interest.  There is something gorgeous about seeing how normal life is when this overwhelming moments are encroaching on these characters.  Ross keeps setting up his characters in moments of almost boredom.  The beginning of the movie, Elwood is hearing the argument in the other room about what is going to happen to him when it comes to getting sent to Nickel Academy.  He's not pacing.  There's no desperation to get away or to flee.  Instead, he's staring at his arm as the light hits it.  There's a certain verisimilitude that comes with those kind of moments.  Nothing feels play-acty because real life is powering through those miserable moments in quiet silence.

On top of using the first person perspective, there are haunting images of history passing.  Now, I'm sure someone who was sitting there and taking notes could point out the importance of each image.  What I got, as someone who wasn't taking notes, was an intention to disrupt the scene with the grander imposition of history in the background.  You would think that every image that we saw would somehow tie into racial history.  (I suppose all history is racial history.  But I'm talking about stuff like marathon runners moving backwards.  I could see the metaphor about turning back progress and regressing as a people, but that was one image out of a billion.)  The movie kept on showing an allegator, often appearing out of a place it should not be.  It's cool imagery and I could attribute meaning to many of these images.  For example, the idea of danger appearing where it is least expected could be part of that.

But I'm also a guy who writes a film blog and gets content out of unpacking every visual choice.  I'm actively trying to ascribe meaning to every shot that Nickel Boys presented to me.  I don't know if a lot of people were doing that kind of heavy lifting.  I mean, I don't know a ton of people who went out and saw Nickel Boys. (I now own this movie, by the way.  Maybe I'll watch it again down the line.  Heck, maybe I'll read the book and then teach it in the future.) Again, there is the intention of the choice and the actual result of that choice.  I do believe that Ross may have chosen these images to have deeper significance juxtaposed to the narrative moments in the film.  But what the actual result is just a general sense of artiness.  The movie has a general arty vibe to it.  That's not a bad thing.  In fact, it might be my favorite element of the movie.

I told you that I predicted the switcheroo at the end.  I saw that Elwood was too pure to exist in this world.  It would have been even more odd if Turner died.  (I guessed that Turner and Elwood switched places when Turner died because no one would mention him in the flash-forwards.)   But if that little seed that my wife planted in my head is sprouting, does the switch make sense?  I do like the idea that Turner had to stay off the grid.  I get that he chose Elwood's name as a tribute to this kid that he loved and got killed.  I understand all that. But also, it feels like a fictional choice.  That doesn't feel like reality.  I spoke of verisimilitude a minute ago.  It feels like something an artsy film would do.  It played on the idea that nonchronological narratives eliminate certain choices and the film chose to do the oddest ending it could.

The problem is that Nickel Boys doesn't need a twist.  There have been a bunch of stories told about the roles that juvenile detention centers did to minorities.  It's not just juvenile detention centers.  Sugarcane told about religious schools in Canada who were wiping out the Indigenous population that had registered to be students there. The story already flies without the need for there to be a switch.  Again, I think I like this movie a lot.  I'm all for it.  But I don't think that there's been a movie twist that had less of an impact on me than simply having one character adopt the other character's moniker.  The movie is good enough.  There is a visual artistry coupled with a compelling character dynamic to make this story work without the big reveal.

After unpacking the movie (to the best of my exhausted ability), I do think that my wife's seed isn't accurate.  I do like the movie a lot.  I don't know if I would ever put it on a "love" list though.  While it is one of the better movies that the Oscars offered up this year, it is a weaker year for Oscars.  Honestly, in other years, Nickel Boys would kind of be forgotten as simply a pretty movie.  I'll be honest.  I'm kind of surprised that it isn't up for Cinematography.  That's where I think that this movie shines the hardest.  But it is a good story and I'm still interested in reading the book.  Maybe Goodreads can manipulate me into reading it because it is one of their reading challenge books.  Still, the story works, even if it didn't need the twist ending.

Rated R for over-the-top brutal violence.  Ironically, that brutality comes from how matter-of-fact the violence is.  It is quick and intense and often, bullets rip people apart.  There's also a bit of language and there's the implication, especially when it comes to the novel, that Llewelyn married Carla Jean a bit too young.  This is an upsetting movie.  R.

DIRECTORS:  Joel and Ethan Coen

I have to do this quickly.  I keep putting off things until they become overwhelming, leaving me in a constant state of self-imposed stress.  It's weird having to write about No Country for Old Men.  I read the novel two weeks ago in preparation for this watch.  The thing that makes No Country hard to write about is the fact that there are so many objectively supported interpretations that anything that I write here will either be straight up wrong or simply a rewritten read of what someone else has written.  There's no win on my part.  The only thing that I get to do by writing about No Country for Old Men is to add a great movie to a list of films that I have on my page.  Oh, I also get to update the Criterion Collection page.

While No Country for Old Men was not my first Coen Brothers movie, it was one of the early ones.  I think my first one was The Hudsucker Proxy, which is kind of impressive to have as a first Coen Brothers movie.  But one of those things that comes with the Coens is a very specific vibe.  But people kind of pigeonhole the Coen Brothers as one thing.  I think, instead, that the Coens find projects that tend to align with their sense of storytelling.  (I'm basically defining how someone becomes an auteur.)  One of the thoughts that kept popping into my head was both how much the film of No Country both stayed absolutely true to the Cormack McCarthy book while simultaneously being almost an insult to the McCarthy book. (Okay, I'm being dramatic when using the word "insult", but the use of the backspace key seems like moving backwards here.) 

There are large swaths of the film that are one-for-one the book.  If you read the book, almost every other chapter is a narration by Ed Tom, the sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones.  It's meant to be his inner monologue about the events of the story coupled with thoughts on what it means to age, especially in today's society.  (Or, you know, 1977 / the '80s).  Now, I'm in a little bit of a weird place.  I had seen No Country back in college.  This was the era of little film nerd who was just dipping his toe in the water of cinema.  But when I read the novel, I had all of the casting in my head.  Tommy Lee Jones was Ed Tom.  Josh Brolin was Moss.  I think it is impossible for me to imagine a different type for Anton Chigurh than Javier Bardem.  Heck, that's how we all met Javier Bardem was from that role. So I had a little bit of a cheat when reading the novel, knowing how the film was going to adapt it.

But as much as this is a Cormack McCarthy book, mirroring the text of the novel so closely, there is so much of the movie that screams the Coen Brothers.  I'll say this.  Llewelyn and Chigurh are beat-for-beat the book.  There are some moments that might not completely align with the story.  But tonally, those characters are lifted right from the page.  But I'm talking about the extended world of No Country.  Part of what makes No Country almost a unique thing from the film is the world of the Coen Brothers.  No Country is an oddly intimate story, where the camera is focused on the primary characters incredibly closely.  While there are smaller interactions, like the boy who gets paid $500 for his shirt or the kids on the bike who find Chigurh, not much is given to these moments.  Instead, it's characters like the lady who runs the trailer park that the Mosses live in.  There are cab drivers.  Carla Jean's mother is straight up Coen Brothers thoughts personified in a person.  

And the insane thing is that these creators were meant to be married in this film.  Golly, rarely have we had a source material and an adaptation that seem to enhance both things perfectly.  I am one of those people who hates when a novel puts the movie poster on the cover.  I must have been in a really weird headspace when I bought my copy of No Country for Old Men back in 2007 or 2008.  I was obsessed with the movie and I wanted to read the book. But this was also a time in my life when I wasn't reading as ravenously as I do today, so it sit on a shelf.  My point behind the movie poster cover is that I don't know if either would have had the same cultural impact if it wasn't for the symbiotic relationship between the two.

One of the biggest epiphanies with this watch of No Country was the fact that it almost has more in common with the slasher film than it does with the modern crime thriller / Western.  (I need you to remind me to return to this idea?  Capisce?) I want to talk about the slasher element of the movie first.  Part of the structure of No Country is the idea that there is no scenario where Chigurh will not leave Moss alone.  He is an unstoppable force.  There are moments where Moss gets a little bit of an edge of Chigurh.  But like a Michael Myers, Chigurh takes whatever injury without a physical reaction.  At one point, Moss and Chigurh are trading gunshots on the U.S. / Mexican border.  Moss gets wrecked.  He hobbles across the border covered in blood and really hurting.  It's a miracle that he makes it over the border, eventually collapsing on a step in town.  We are meant to experience that misery as he fights for survival.  It seems like Chigurh is simply scared off.  Nope.  Chigurh is equally injured.  In fact, we're given gory details on how injured Chigurh is.  But he is emotionless as he patches himself up.  That scene matches James Cameron's The Terminator, when the T-800 patches up his own skin without reacting in pain.  

Coupled with the notion that this might be a slasher movie over a thriller is the idea of Moss's morality.  One of the odd moments I noticed throughout the story is the idea that Moss basically doesn't make waves in his life.  When the sheriff's office points out that they recognize Moss's truck, the question is brought up whether or not that Moss would run dope.  The narrative becomes quickly clear that, no, Moss doesn't run drugs.  Instead, everyone figured out that Moss was just a guy who discovered two million dollars and got caught up in something that got out of hand quickly.  This is the violation of the code that tends to get the protagonist into trouble.  In the same way that a group of camp counselors get into trouble for something that should be innocuous, Moss is punished for a single mistake.  That punishment is unforgivable, especially considering that what gets him caught by the cartel is his empathy for a thirsty man in the desert.

When it comes to the thriller or Western element of the story, there's something that is contrary to the history of cinema that No Country manages to pull off.  (This is me trying to return to my point, but the interruptions of writing has me pivot a bit from my forgotten point.)  Most film noir and crime films had a dictate from the self-regulating body that the studios all agreed to.  Studios agreed to make edgy crime stories as long as there was an agreement that virtue was rewarded and villainy was punished.  Often, this led to eleventh hour moments where the bad guy, through some cruel irony or twist of fate, got his comeuppens.  No Country violates that idea head on, leading us to a conclusion that actually has more in common with the horror genre.  Llewelyn invokes a trope.  He is threatened by Chigurh, which only makes him more mad.  He did that old chestnut, "You don't have to come to me.  I'm coming for you. You're my personal project."  When the hero of the story says that, we get the Kevin McCallister plan unfold.  He's going to prep for Chigurh only to save his wife.  

Instead, we get the most insane ending.  Not only does Moss lose his fight for survival and fails to intercept Chigurh, but he doesn't even get to confront Chigurh.  He's killed unceremoniously because his mother-in-law told the cartel where they were staying by accident. Moss's death happens off-camera.  Now, I'm not saying that the horror genre would kill off its protagonist off camera.  But there are many horror films where the protagonist thinks that they have the upper hand only to lose in the last moments.  Crime dramas have to have a chance for virtue to succeed.  Instead, we have Carla Jean, an innocent in the story, most likely killed by Chigurh.  She refuses to play by his rules and is left to suffer the consequences (in my read of that ambiguous ending).  Not only that, but it seems like villainy would be punished.  Much like the crime dramas and thrillers of yesteryear, Chigurh is hit by a vehicle and it looks like that's the end of the bad guy.  Instead, he does what he always does.  He dispassionately walks off, licking his wounds without repercussions. 

But now I have to talk about the idea that I have been avoiding.  What's the read on the movie?  It's been a minute since I've read the take on this film.  I know that it has a fairly common read.  The title itself is the film's theme.  If we look at the film from the perspective of Ed Tom, an aging sheriff who has watched the world grow more violent, it seems to be a criticism of the current generation.  The world is going to heck in a handbasket and Ed Tom seems powerless to stop the oncoming storm.  When I first saw this movie, I probably disagreed with the message that McCarthy infused into his tale. There was always that narrative that "Things aren't as good as they used to be."  There seems to be this misconception that the past was some Rockwellian utopia that is being strangled by the advent of technology and the stripping away of manners.  I always hated that, because the reality of that narrative was that there was more terrible stuff in previous generations.  After all, there was a need for the Civil Rights movement and let's not forget the crisis of juvenile delinquents.

But now as I get older, the movie has a bit of a point.  It may not be the exact point that the movie wanted to make.  We're in a crap society, everyone.  Things are really bad.  So many rights are being stripped away and I see my students completely lack empathy in even the remotest sense.  I hate when teachers crap on the following generation.  The message from No Country, criticizing a degraded younger generation, was always annoying to me. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to lack empathy.  I see this mostly in the young men I teach, but it is there.  Instead, the real evil is that the return to the values of a previous generation are ruining the current generation.  So as much as there was "no country for old men", the current situation is that old men are reshaping the country so that there would be a country for them.  It's depressing, but the message of the film almost reads better.  It's hard to think why the world is devolving, much like how Ed Tom questions what makes people so violent.  Instead, we're looking at people embrace the worst elements of yesteryear to bring about a world where the Ed Toms of the world can judge others without repercussions. 

But man, the Coen Brothers know how to make a movie.  While there have been a couple of weaker entries in their ouvre, when they hit on a drama, they really hit.  No Country is a tank of a film.  It holds up today.  It's one of those movies where each shot is a masterpiece. It's pretty incredible.

Rated R entirely for language.  There were times that we were wondering if the movie was PG or PG-13 because there wasn't that much offensive stuff in it.  Then someone would just curse up a storm and then we remembered that the movie took place in a prison.  But there's no violence.  There's references to violence that took place before the events of the film, but nothing on screen.  

DIRECTOR:  Greg Kwedar

Oh my goodness, if I can get this blog knocked out in the next 35 minutes, I will have been the most productive human being that ever existed.  No matter how long I make my "To Do" list, there's always just enough time to get the whole thing done with maybe a minute to spare in either direction.  I don't know how it works, but I seriously pushed myself really hard to get caught up with life as a whole.  And the crazy thing is?  I needed to do very little of it.  (NONE OF MY TIME WAS WASTED AND YOU DON'T GET TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.)

Is there such a thing as "too inspirational"?  It's a weird take to have, especially considering the slate of Academy Award nominated movies that 2025 has given us.  I've been writing so much about each and every Academy Award nominee and they've mostly been bummer movies.   On top of that, many of these bummer movies haven't been all that great.  I'm not talking about all of them.  I'm talking about more than usual.  But then we get Sing Sing, which might be pushing too much in the other direction.  Maybe all of the other Academy Award nominees pushed me too hard in one direction that I needed a bit of a middle-of-the-road movie.  But sweet Christmas, how do you give me a movie about convicts putting out plays and finding a brotherhood in that theatre troupe and expect me to take it seriously.

Now, "Based on a True Story" movies often leave me cold, mostly because the movie is probably far removed from what actually happened.  This movie is almost an experiment of cinema more than it is a play on what is reality.  Don't get me wrong: there's a lot of stuff going on here that feel heightened for the sake of storytelling.  After all, there was a documentary about this exact program in Sing Sing that probably does a more accurate job telling the stories of these actors.  But because Sing Sing needed to be a movie, there had to be liberties made.  But out of all the Based on a True Story movies I've seen, this one has to have a special place because the actors are playing versions of themselves. 

This made for an interesting debate between me and my wife.  A lot of the movie was us shouting that someone was a professional actor or if they were playing themselves.  It's pretty recognizable.  But there's a fabulous choice going on between Colman Domingo and Divine Eye.  Now, from what I understand, Divine G is in the movie playing another part.  (What is that like?  Colman Domingo is this intense actor who is the lead of this movie and your story is being played by this guy when you yourself are an actor?  The mind races!)  I don't mean to be rude at all.  The story is inspirational and these guys do a heck of a job for the movie.  But there's a bit of a gulf between what Divine Eye is doing and what the other guys are doing in the movie.  What are the odds that the story that they came up with between Divine G and Divine Eye would need to have Divine Eye be so good that he could hold his own to Colman Domingo?

That might be the biggest yellow flag for me in terms of verisimilitude.  Those two guys are powerhouses when it comes to performances.  I love it a lot.  But some of those story choices seem a bit artificial.  If anything, that's my major frustration with the movie as a whole.  With a documentary, the story of these actors putting on a quality show in spite of being inmates is more about reactions.  I'm sure that the documentary probably talked about the captivity of the soul and how against incredible odds, these guys put together that brought people joy.  It talked about the value of the arts to soothe the savage beast.  But that's not a narrative in any sense.  And I'm sure that there was fighting similar to what we saw in Sing Sing as a whole.  But the actual story is a little bit weak.  

Maybe it is because we've seen the prison story before.  I love Divine G as a character.  He's a bit pretentious, but I like that as a writer.  He's got this very specific celebrity within this prison.  In the world of Sing Sing, he's a published author.  Nowhere else is that true.  And he's got fans!  That's fantastic. But everything else has elements of The Shawshank Redemption to it.  Like, the parole hearing is just like every parole hearing we've ever seen in cinema.  There's someone who is speaking over the inmate, who is desperately trying to plead his case.  The conflict between Divine G and Divine Eye is one between the noble inmate and the thug.  And that's where the movie kind of suffers. 

Both Divine G and Divine Eye are dynamic characters.  Divine G is a character rooted in calm.  He is convinced of his own innocence and he believes in the system.  He understands the intellectual and spiritual value of having a rehabilitative theatre program.  But that foundation is shook when he loses his parole hearing.  I get that.  We get an adequate look at what makes Divine G tick.  It all makes sense when he starts finding himself through the program and with his brothers.  I like all that. But Divine Eye is the secondary protagonist.  He comes in as the stereotype.  He goes through the program, much like Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a means to dodge the world of the prison.  And, no surprise, he becomes one of the most important parts of the project.  He embraces his failures to become the best Hamlet they've seen (although we don't have much context and the soliloquy ends at "Aye--there's the rub!").  

But we never have those growing pains moments.  We have a time when we have Divine G talk to him.  But even Divine Eye calls him out on this moment, claiming that this isn't going to change him and that's the stuff of movies.  So what made this hardened criminal who was using the system for his own comfort, come to understand that they were doing something noble and good up on that stage?  Instead, the movie just takes a shortcut and makes Divine G and Divine Eye best of friends.  I wanted to have the labor pains that this movie refused to give me.  If anything, a lot of the conflict in this movie is mostly "get over yourself" conflict.  There's no real come-to-Jesus moments for these characters where they are led kicking and screaming to the point of breaking down.  No, characters are just sad or angry for a while and then they hug it out.  That's probably how it was in real life, but it doesn't necessarily make for compelling cinema.

Honestly, the whole thing felt a little hokey to me.  It felt like an R-rated Hallmark movie.  I almost felt bad for Paul Raci, who had to play acting coach Brent Buell.  Clearly, a lot of this was a tribute to this guy who put these inmates together and got them to get over any preconceived notions.  But man, his characterization was thin.  It was a lot of corny stuff, maybe because the real guy was a bit corny.  It's hard to play something when the conflict doesn't really align with the characters portrayed.

But here's me, complaining on the Internet about a movie that is meant to make me feel good.  These guys went through a lot of crap and they came out on top.  If anything, I should be celebrating the complexities of the human soul and how art can bring out the best in anyone.  But I'm more complaining that I didn't enjoy the movie much.  Realistically, I probably would have enjoyed the documentary more.  Still, it was better than being bummed out once again with a real downer of a movie.

PG-13 for traditional Marvel stuff.  There's a lot of violence.  I suppose the big not-all-that-secret bad guy looks a little gross, especially in the clear light of day.  Also, there's a lot of stabbing.  Cap's wings in this one have these blades that tend to stab a lot of Hulk flesh.  That could be a bit much.  There's also that family-friendly swearing that Marvel really seems to embrace.

DIRECTOR: Julius Onah

The way I watched this movie was not ideal.

I took my son to go see Captain America: Brave New World last Saturday.  Then the power went out.  As much as I write about movies, it is incredibly difficult for me to find time to go out to the movies.  I have five kids and life is always insane.  So we go through a good chunk of the movie.  We found out who the big bad guy was.  We got the plan.  Then the power went out.  So my son and I, post Boy Scouts, finally got to see the rest of the movie.  We, luckily, were able to jump into a show already in progress.  We only had to rewatch a few minutes of the movie.  That being said, some of the cinema purists out there would be horrified that I watched the first half and the second half of the movie a week apart.  That being said, I have strong opinions on the movie and feel like I can accurately write about this one.  

Post Endgame, y'all love dunking on Marvel.  Some of you will swear that "But this one wasn't bad."  And you should be critical of movies that aren't that solid.  I didn't necessarily love Eternals (and one day, I'll get around to rewatching the movie.) I feel like I keep coming back to this well when a Marvel movie is being attacked.  Brave New World is a bit of weird one because the distance between the audience score and the critics score is so wide.  But honestly, Brave New World is a pretty great movie.  I will give some caveats.  It may be the worst Captain America movie, but that may be more telling of the quality of the franchise than it is about this movie.  Some of you might not really consider it to be a Captain America movie.  Some of you might have an argument there with the idea that this is more of a sequel to The Incredible Hulk or Eternals than it is a Captain America movie.  I'll give you some points for that.  Some of you might say that Captain America is not in this movie.  To that, I'm going to tell you to shut up.

Here's what I liked about it.  Again, it is always hard to say why you liked a movie.  But here's what worked.  While Brave New World might not be the tightest political thriller, it was compelling enough to get me to want to unpack the film as a whole.  Yeah, I'm a little upset that we got to know about Samuel Sterns before the movie was even released.  But there is enough political intrigue to keep the movie going.  There were even mild revelations that kept me intrigued.  A lot of that comes from Harrison Ford's Thunderbolt Ross.  (And so begins the apologizing on my end.)  I thought it was weird initially when they recast Thunderbolt Ross.  I've always said that Marvel needs to get over its recasting issues, especially when it came to Jonathan Majors's Kang.  But someone needed to finish up the story started by William Hurt.  Golly, I didn't know that I needed an ultimate conclusion to that storyline.  But Brave New World kind of showed that it was necessary.