PG-13 for some strong language? I honestly don't remember any strong language. Mind you, I was completely over-emotional about the whole thing. It could have been cursing the entire time and I wouldn't have remembered it. The thing is, I wanted to show my kid this movie and now I have to question everything? Oh yeah! The f-bomb on the wall of the hot tub! Anyway, PG-13.
DIRECTOR: Matthew Heineman I wasn't ready. Guys, I just wasn't ready. First of all, I didn't know that American Symphony was a doc, let alone a rock doc. That's all fine. I can pivot on that pretty easily. Since I knew nothing about it, I can sit down and watch a documentary. Then you give me a rock doc where the subject of the documentary seems like the sweetest dude ever and that's just bonus. But then you make it about the love story between Jon Batiste and his wife who is fighting leukemia? Yeah, you officially crushed me. Listen, I don't know who decided that this documentary wouldn't be incuded in the Best Docs category, but shame on you. We've had some amazing music documentaries in the past and this year could have used some American Symphony. I've always been honest with my lack of knowledge when it comes to music. I know a ton about movies, TV, comic books, novels, and video games. Music has always been my weak spot. It's always been a case of taking a long time to bond with a musician. It takes me a long time to decide whether or not I like an album or not. This documentary? This documentary right here? I'm now a fan of Jon Batiste. I knew nothing about him outside of the name and now I feel like I want to attend every concert of his...ever. Is it because of the movie being so moving? Do I deal with mortality in a weird and confusing way? Sure do. But beyond that, the man is incredibly talented. There's that fine line in artists. My wife brought this up, but I get where she's going with this. Musicians, the truly talented ones, often are a little more eccentric than your average bear. They often become incredibly hard to relate to. They are so passionate about their work that it takes a very intense person to become so granular about what they do. It's encouraged in the community. (I'm not part of the community. I'm not really a part of any artisitic community. I'm a high school teacher who lives outside of Cincinnati who likes to write.) But there is all this theory out there that encourages creatives to think beyond the immediate emotional response to artwork. A good artist needs to go to the theory and see beyond the "good" and "bad" of art. Instead, they need to live a life as a bit of an eccentric. Often, these personalities are incredibly frustrating. They are divorced from the problems of the every day. Jon Batiste, thankfully, is not this. He's got his things. I can't deny that I'm watching this man and thinking, "Well, that's a bit much." But the big pull towards this movie is how, as weird as someone can get about music (I'd like to remind you that Jon Batiste is tame compared to a lot of artists), he's so fundamentally human. It isn't simply because he is taking care of his wife with leukemia. That would take away so much of her agency. Instead, it is only part of the tapestry that we see in this documentary. There's something so modest and so humble about Jon Batiste. He's this guy who plays music every day. It's mind blowing that he was the house band on The Late Show because he got Album of the Year. In my mind, that's like Taylor Swift agreeing to being the house band. It still blows my mind that the Roots are a house band as well. But at the same time, he's just a guy who wants to be at home with his wife. He's a guy who has a hard time getting out of bed. He has to get out of bed, like we all do. But he has to get out of bed because he has to play Carnegie Hall. That's the thing that is very odd. The cult of celebrity has been talked about so much and it often is a story of corruption and change. If anything, he's becoming more and more human as he gets bigger and bigger. That's the role his wife plays. It's almost a little bit unfair to her to define her as the one with leukemia. Yes, that instantly tells us what Jon Batiste is focused on instead of building celebrity. But more than that, while Suleika is in remission, it is about building a healthy and loving relationship. Both of them are artists. They are very different artists, but they are artists nonetheless. They get the need to encourage each other's creativity. Golly, this makes such a good Valentine's Day watch because, the sicker that Suleika gets, the more you see his love pouring out for her. The fact that he gets married to her as things get tougher only screams to the commitment that he's always had to this woman. It's this intimate affair, with a few close friends telling stories on a floor. For all of the cool stuff that we see him do, including the finale of the Carnegie Hall performance, that's the moment I'll take away from the whole thing. He has this money and ability to make a huge hullabaloo and have the most expensive wedding of all time. Instead, the entire movie is about two people living within their means. Maybe things are a little nicer than most people could afford. But the things that they really need are paper, paints, a piano, and each other. There's a really fascinating B-story within the narrative as well, the story of being Black and young in a world of gatekeeping. This isn't one of those stories about how racist the world is. It is, but it never has that moment that we see in a lot of films where Jon Batiste wouldn't be allowed to play in clubs. Instead, he reads about how people are so skeptical to be considered in all of these categories in the Emmys. I know. Different problems than a lot of us have. But we shouldn't complain. He's a musician. He lives in a different world, thus gatekeeping would look different to him. The thing about genre is that it is really hard to pin down. Any time we deal with genre, there's a certain spectrum with a large amount of give and take when establishing what falls into what genre. Yet, there are all these people screaming out that he shouldn't be considered a classical musician if he's a jazz musician. There's all these people who are so defensive of things that are subjectively sacred that it's telling to think that this man suffers because he created something that can't be easily pinned down. That speech at the Emmys? What?! How do I not have that speech painted on my walls in my classroom? I was just thinking how American Symphony might be in my Top 5 for 2023 and the entire speech at the end was about how art finds people at the right time when they need it. It's such a gorgeous speech and I want that everywhere I go. And as much as I may fundamentally believe that speech, I also want to remind myself that I am guilty of not always listening to that idea that is so key to my entire philosophy. He's this guy who keeps getting criticism after criticism because people like what they like. He's just this great and honest person. Sometimes art isn't for everyone. It was made for everyone, but we bring so much of ourselves into our tastes that it is a crime to tell people what is good and what is terrible. I mean, I'm currently writing a blog unpacking movies. Part of the natural end to that is evaluative. But that speech is so important. Man, Jon Batiste is a smart guy. This might be my favorite documentary this year. Again, super disappointed that it wasn't nominated. Now, again, since I don't know the music community, I don't know how many waves this documentary made. For all I know, it might be required reading for the music scene. But I know that I only saw it because of the Best Song nomination (which would give him two of the letters for EGOT. Too bad it's going to go to "I'm Just Ken"). I know that often film nerds don't follow my arbitrary rules for what constitutes an opinion about an Academy Award. I just think that this movie needs to be seen.
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Rated R for a wealth of death, leading to cannibalism. There's a lot of upsetting imagery in this movie. To show how hungry the survivors were, there's a scene showing a character urinating a black stream. There's some language, but that pretty much takes a back seat to the upsetting death that pervades the film.
DIRECTOR: J.A. Bayona I never saw the original Alive. I knew the story, basically. I feel most people from my generation knew this story, even if they hadn't seen Alive. It actually became a weird talking point. We all knew that it was a true story, but it almost became this urban legend. Now, because I hadn't seen Alive, I treated the story in the exact way that I wasn't supposed to. It was a scary story. It was something joked about. Now, I can't testify to Alive on its authenticity or anything. But the most important thing that J.A. Bayona did for this story is to give it gravitas for a new generation. One of the things that my wife tends to do after watching a biopic (although it has been known to happen while watching the biopic) is that she'll Google / Wikipedia the real story. Perhaps why Society of the Snow is separating itself from its peers is that it is apparently the most accurate historical movie out there about the subject. Beat for beat, as much as could be recreated, it happens on screen. Now, normally, I would guess that real life doesn't necessarily translate out to effective narrative. With this, it is so much about character that the beats of the story just color how we perceive these characters. I won't lie. There are so many characters in this story that it is often hard to keep track of who is who. But I do know that there's a big mislead in the movie. It's so hard to make a story about an ensemble and still have us care about these characters. That's where Bayona does something kind of incredible. Because there is no one leader of this plane crash, with people stepping into the role as needed, there needed to be something to (pun that needs absolute pardoning) ground the whole piece. The fact that it is told from Numa's perspective, someone who doesn't actually survive the events, is fascinating. Part of that comes from a whole defying of expectations. Historically and culturally, we know that there were survivors of the crash. One of the first things that my wife looked up was the number of survivors. She was doing a mental checklist of who was going to make it through these awful conditions. But the movie built Numa like he had plot armor. (My deepest apologies for writing so casually about the dead. While I acknowledge that these were real people who had real families, there still is a little disconnect with me beyond the fact that Numa, as I see him on screen, is a character.) Numa as the voice of the deceased gives agency to the departed in a way that this movie had to prove challenging. The thing that everyone waits for in this movie, beyond salvation, is the idea of "When are they going to start eating each other?" It's something so horrific that our darker insights kind of propel that thought. It's the idea that screams louder than anything else. It's not like they save that revelation for the end. They start eating each other, in the grand scheme of things, pretty early on. But when corpses are being eaten and humanity is stripped away from people because of a horrible accident, giving voice to the dead is perhaps the most powerful a movie like this can do. Society of the Snow is, without a doubt, about the survivors. But even more than just the survivors, it is about the dead as people. The movie keeps reminding us about the constant consent that was happening in that fuselage. Now, if there was ever a thing that could be contested is whether or not they talked about permission to eat a corpse as much as the movie showed them doing. I don't know. I wasn't there. But Numa's reticence to cross that line made him the ideal voice for the movie. Outside of understanding the outrage of "some things just aren't done", that skepticism is what ultimately contributed to his death. Thus, Numa becomes us. For all of the intellectual understanding that no one could survive for approximately seventy-something days out in the frozen mountains without having to do something abhorrent, there still is the morality of the heart. Numa, like us (ideally, chooses not to eat people. At first, there are wisps of judgment coming from him. But he also has this great empathy for others. He personally chooses to avoid eating people for as long as he can --eventually submitting against his morals --but understands that there are people that he loves that he doesn't want to see dead. There's also this reminder that this wasn't cannibalism like we imagine. This isn't Yellowjackets, where there's reverie and celebration over the discovery of an alternative food source. Instead, we see those who burdened themselves with the preparation of the bodies and how those tiny bites of food were done with chagrin and regret. No one there wants to eat the bodies. They do grow comfortable with it eventually. I don't think the movie shies away from the notion that a repeated action, done over a long period of time, eventually washes away some stigma. But the dead are always treated as people. Perhaps it makes it even grosser when one of the survivor has to vomit up a body part that thaws as he gets to warmer climates. The scale of this movie is insane. It's one of those incredibly filmed movies. The survival movie isn't anything necessarily new. But Society of the Snow takes what is fundamentally an isolated location and makes it the most claustrophobic setting in a grand tapestry of majesty. The setting is what makes us question the events of the story. There's almost something interactive about the whole experience of watching this. I know that my students who saw this movie were doing this and I'm not guilty either. The location of the Andes and how it looked instantly caused debate on how they would handle the same events. Me? I'm in the "go one direction and try your best." After that miserable first night in the fuselage, with all of the luggage as a wall, I don't know if I would have considered the inside of the fuselage any better than the outside of the exposed nature. None of that is fair. I wasn't in that situation. For all I know, I'm talking a big game right now when realistically, I would have been one of the people cowering in the plane, hoping someone else would make the hard calls. But that's what Bayona does for the film. He makes it something that we can't divorce ourselves from. It's never just noise on screen. Those debates are the debates that we have and we invest ourselves in when watching the film. Yet, I have a hard time giving this movie a perfect score. I don't know if I can find a fault with the film whatsoever, beyond my lazy brain that has a hard time remembering people's names. I mean, part of that comes from the notion that I don't know who to recommend this movie to. Structurally and artistically, J.A. Bayona does everything right in this movie. Part of what makes it hard to talk about is the gruesome content within. I'd love to recommend this movie to my in-laws. It's never a boring movie. The characters are great. It's well-filmed. So why am I so hesitant to say "You need to watch Society of the Snow?" I mean, that comes with the territory. I tend not to recommend horror movies either. But I also know that it isn't one of my favorite movies this year. Perhaps it goes on just a little too long? The movie demands that we understand how long seventy-something days is. If it was any shorter, the film would have detracted from the sheer magnitude of events and time. But that also means that we have to watch a lot of people rotting away in the cold. Maybe it's the fact that it just isn't a happy movie. Maybe if I watched this at a different time, I would be swearing by this movie up and down. I think I'm in that weird place where I have a glut of great movies that are a bit more chipper. It's objectively a great movie, but I have a hard time really selling it right now. PG-13 for language. Fun fact that I'm gleaning from reading parents' guides. Apparently, you can have three f-bombs in a PG-13 movie if they are in another language and subtitled. It's weird that methods of communication affect the severity of the language itself? This movie is extremely tame shy of language. It's people existing and talking. There's some drunkenness, but that's me really reaching for something to write about.
DIRECTOR: Celine Song I need to stop watching interviews with respected celebrities on Instagram. Honestly, if I see a Letterboxd interview with someone about their top four, I'm going to stop and listen. Someone, maybe Emma Stone?, put Past Lives in her Top Four and said that she just saw it and it kept sticking with her. Sure, there's a thing about recency bias. But the thing about a Top Four, I have to be pretty amazed when a new movie can enter the list of best movies? I know. I'm the fool. But my expectations were so inappropriate going into this movie. Ultimately, this is a good movie about missed opportunities. PG-13. Be glad that I checked the parents' guide because I forgot about a ton of stuff. Nyad is firmly a PG-13, with it's one f-bomb and a spattering of mild curses. But one of the major conflicts of the movie is how Diana deals with how she was raped by a trusted person in her life as a child. The movie also is uncomfortable with how much Diana tortures herself to achieve her goal. PG-13.
DIRECTORS: Jimmy Chins and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi I don't think that there's ever been a movie that I've teased more while simultaneously unironically liking it. There are so many checks against this movie that I should absolutely hate it. I mean, you've heard me bemoan the glut of biopics around award season, right? It's not like it even breaks the mold of the sports biopic. It's incredibly paint-by-numbers. I don't like sports movies, for the most part. There's a check. Also, this is the worst kind of sports movie. It's one of those things that, while impressive, is fundamentally stupid and selfish. Somehow, through all of that, Nyad works. Let's try to figure out why. As of right now, it might have just been the right movie at the right time. It happens. I'm wondering if my applause over Flamin' Hot was just a timing issue, based on everyone else's take on that movie. I want to break down what I was feeling during the movie, just so you can completely grasp my headspace. My wife and I kept on joking how stupid the entire notion of the film is. One of the running gags we had going was the absurd locations to swim from. The movie chief external conflict is Diana's choice to swim from Cuba to Key West. The English Channel, the previous silly distance to cross, had been done by too many people and thus, the next insane swim would be a sixty hour swim from Cuba to Key West. One of the key motifs is the phrase "It's can't be done." To some, that is a challenge. To me, I'm kind of on Team Welp. "Welp, guess that's that." I know. It makes the villain in these movies. Sometimes, "It can't be done" is a valid challenge. Sustainable energy? Can't be done? Let's try. That's pretty good for humanity. Explore space beyond our galaxy? Yes, please. That's great! But Diana Nyad's crossing of that large stretch of distance? It's kind of just impressive. That's it. Here's me going on a limb giving it some significance. It's a commentary on dismissing the elderly. That's the big takeaway. Fundamentally, one of the elements of the movie isn't that Diana Nyad did something dangerous and stupid that no one else could do. It was that she was an old lady, way past her prime, and she still did what was impossible, mostly because she didn't give up and had a team that was willing to do whatever to make sure that she did it. I mentally and emotionally could understand what made what she did impressive. Heck, by the end of the movie, I needed her to make it to Florida. If she didn't make it to Florida, I too would have rioted. But there was this almost immediate letdown after it was all over. I had this overwhelming feeling of "Well, that's done now, isn't it?" Because nothing in the world really changed from that, did it? I know. I'm being incredibly dismissive of something that was incredibly challenging. But from a guy who doesn't like sports, it kind of is the equivalent of me spending every dollar I have and devoting my whole life to making the most unimaginably huge tin foil ball that sat in a field. I wish I could say that the entire life story of Diana Nyad was what captivated me. This makes me a broken person, so please forgive me, but I would have preferred so much more of the story devoted to the horrors she endured. Somehow, that quintessential backstory was kind of rushed through. I get it. Diana Nyad didn't define herself by the rape and abuse she went through. She refused to let that be her story. She even goes as far, in the film, to confess that she has paradoxical feelings about her rapist's passing. That's fascinating. But I also don't know what to really talk about with these moments when they almost feel like afterthoughts to the film. The film uses her abuse as a parallel for when things go rotten in the water. When she struggles in the water, her thoughts go back to those moments when she wasn't in control and I suppsoe that it is effective. But it is also a weird narrative device because I don't know if the real Nyad would have made the connection between being stung by jellyfish and her tragic backstory. These moments were so important, but they aren't presented in a way that made me feel anything beyond "It was as painful as jellyfish stings." That's not the intention, but it often was the effect of these scenes. No, the movie works because of a couple of cool scenes and a chemistry between two actors who are absolutely nailing it on screen. I don't think I've seen Annette Benning have as much fun as she's having in this movie in a long time. She often is given stringent and abrasive women to play. It's what Hollywood seems to give her. But this is one of these women who refuses to get pushed around and it seems charming in this one. There's something both incredibly frustrating and simultaneously joyful about the way that she portrays Nyad. There are times when I asked if Diana Nyad was supposed to be on the spectrum simply due to some quirky behavior, coupled with her failure to handle the nuance of group dynamics. I never really got an answer to that, but I didn't care by the end. Benning honestly might even deserve Best Actress for just having to be in the water that long. Before you scoff at that, we kind of gave it to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant with the same reasoning. But even beyond that, she's just giving her all with that performance. It's quirky yet grounded and I get why she gets nominated here versus other years. But are we about to give the MVP to Jodie Foster? I mean, it's a little bit on a curve and let me clarify that. Jodie Foster tends to play these introverted and dark characters all of the time. She's always doing dark and horrible things. When she's playing an out lesbian who cares about mental health and has friends, it's so weird! Like I'm not used to this. The weirdest part is that she's really good. Benning portrayed Nyad intentionally as someone who is a little hard to love at times. It's tough when the movie is named Nyad. But Jodie Foster? Jodie is both the avatar for the audience and the hero of the piece. She's this absolutely beautifully grounded character who seems fun, yet self-sacrificing. She's a little bit of a carpet that Nyad walks over, but has these moments where she can get in her face. It's this real portrayal of someone who just felt real. Again, not a sports guy. I don't know what the real Diana Nyad was like. I have a feeling that she probably was a bit much. But Foster plays Bonnie in the way I imagine that the real Bonnie probably acted. It's fascinating. In a million years, shy of Silence of the Lambs, would I be lauding far-too-many words over a Jodie Foster performance. This sounds like I don't like Jodie Foster. I do. I just think that she's been turning in similar performances for decades (which lots of actors do! Anthony Hopkins fans need to be a little harder on themselves. By the way, he was also in Silence of the Lambs.) PG-13 for a lot of violence and death, even death that I hadn't kind of processed in a traditional sense. Like Short Circuit and movies of their ilk, The Creator makes the destruction of machines visceral and some how quite upsetting. There's some language, but that usually gets thrown out with war imagery. There is some implication of sexuality, but nothing on screen. PG-13.
DIRECTOR: Gareth Edwards So much to write! I mean, it might not be in this blog. We'll see. But I am writing against the clock, so if my spelling gets all wonky, my apologies up front. I oddly look forward to the special effects categories for the Academy Awards. As a big sci-fi nerd, these tend to be the movies that don't really get nominated because they are too genre to be taken seriously as film. It's a bummer, but it's also an excuse for me to catch up on movies that I meant to see earlier in the year and look very pretty. I don't think that The Creator is necessarily a great movie, but it was stunning to look at. Gareth Edwards, post Rogue One, kind of became this prestige director. I watched that trailer and thought, "Ooh, the Rogue One guy?" I think that's what the studios wanted me to think. I know that the same approach of "prestige director" was done with the Godzilla reboot a couple of years ago. I'm not talking about Minus One. No, I'm talking the beginning of the arcing Monsterverse that is going on right now in America. What conclusion I'm coming to is that Gareth Edwards is a director who takes his time with storytelling, makes amazing looking movies that are often underlit, but ultimately makes a boring film from time-to-time. I mean, Rogue One is kind of special. As boring as that movie is, it gets points from showing that Star Wars can be something more than silly popcorn movies. It set a whole new tone and I applaud him for that. When I saw the trailer for The Creator, I was so on board for a movie that did Rogue One with an original property. It never really achieves that. For all of my lamenting on this movie, there's so much I can't really complain about, except for the fact that things just didn't click in the way that I thought they would. Ultimately, so much of this movie is successful because the movie is a project that was done for the sake of world-building. Gosh darn does this movie world build better than most movies I've seen. Honestly, the visual style of the movie won me over from the opening shots. It isn't hard to win over specifically me. Throw in some retro-futurism and a mundane appropach to the bombastic and I'm pretty much puddy in your hands. I tend to do this when I write, but I'm going to repeat that I don't hate this movie and I think he did all of the right things. Part of my dislike for this movie is my dislike for hard sci-fi. The Creator, to a certain extent, is both hard sci-fi and not that at all. (I'm the worst. I should just take a stand and stick with it.) Hard sci-fi leans pretty hard into accepting a world that is foreign to us. For a lot of the movie, we get a good deal of canon on what the world of The Creator is like. We know that Nihashi is a big deal. We know that AI has had a long and turbulent history coexisting with humanity. The movie really sells those elements hard. So much of the movie is either a montage reminding us of what happened before this movie or people sitting around talking about why these two cultures can't possibly coexist. I get it. I've seen Terminator and A.I. I know that there is inherently a fear that humans are unable to accept something that might surpass them, thus they get all violent and homicidal. Part of me even sympathizes with them. After all, if it looked like robots were going to wipe out humanity, I would have a hard time full believing in a sense of being. Look at me, confronting my bigotry! But so far, most of the things that I've said are about setting. Edwards does a lot to remind you of the delicate balance between two cultures. We're constantly reminded that A.I. is not evil. If anything, they are the more noble culture compared to the xenophobic humans. Message received. I'm even kind of on your team. (Although I would never take a human life and would consider shutting down a machine because I can't make heads or tails of what sentience is.) The thing about the actual story is that it might be a bit too minimal for me to really appreciate it. I was wondering as I was writing this why I'm cool with Lord of the Rings and not The Creator. Both are gorgeous worlds due to intense amount of world-building coupled with simple stories. Then I realized that Lord of the Rings is not a simple story, but rather a complex series of interwoven stories around a simple story. Frodo has to get to Mordor. He has to survive all of these challenges. That's great. But also, every side character has a complex narrative that is fundmentally tied to Frodo's journey, even if they are unaware of it. The Creator is really just Joshua and Alphie's story as they look for Maya. While the information about their quest gets slightly more complex as details about Maya's reality are revealed, it is just their story. We see all of these people acting as NPCs. It is heartbreaking hearing their stories. But we only view these characters through Joshua and Alphie's eyes. Even Maya, who is the Macguffin for the movie, is an object. She is Joshua's previously-thought-dead wife and Alphie's goddess. That's fun, but we don't get to experience any of the stories that Maya has to deal with because all of this is off-camera. On the one hand, it gives us a focused story on two characters, one of whom is growing as a person as he accepts this digital child as something that has inherent value. But on the other hand, it also gets incredibly boring to see Joshua and Alphie going from place to place and not finding Maya. It's like watching the NES version of Super Mario Bros.as a narrative story. She's always in another castle. I think I also needed a clear "come to Jesus" moment for Joshua too. There's a lot of the movie where Joshua does not care for Alphie. He's the cause of his misery. But from moment one, because Alphie shaped like a child, Joshua sees a child. His military background makes him compartmentalize those feelings, which is quasi-interesting. But from moment one, we know that the box is already being unpacked. Joshua never sees Alphie as "just a machine." He treats him as such, but we also know that this is a time game. The more that Joshua is around Alphie, we understand that he's getting close to being a bit more evolved around his own prejudices. I needed a moment where that really shifted. I wanted him to see every element of his old life in a new way. It kind of happens at times, but since so much of the movie is about him going against a system that he embraced before, the emotional climax happens pretty early on. Is he going to get over his fear of AI? Totally. He does so by the end of the first act. That leaves a lot of movie that just becomes about action. When Joshua sacrifices himself (spoiler...sorry) for Alphie, it's because his journey ended, not because there was a shift in perspective. That's a great scene. I don't deny that. I love John David Washington and he absolutely should be the next Kang. But in terms of investment from me, it's all about a survival story, not a story of self. The movie kept on telling me that Joshua needed to grow, but the journey itself is a confirmation that the major change happened too early. This leaves me in an interesting place. I honestly got pretty bored by the end of the movie. It's not like this is one of those movies that had too many set pieces. It had some pretty cool stuff. Again, the setting is rad and I love how alive the robots seem in the movie, even the ones that don't look remotely human. PG and it's for one example of cursing? If I had to throw a bunch of things around saying why an animated film is PG instead of G, mostly it is because "G" almost doesn't exist as a rating. The movie is fundamentally about instituionalized racism and the place of the immigrant in society. But not much happens that would be considered all that controversial. Still, PG.
DIRECTOR: Peter Sohn I have too much writing to do and no time to do it. I know. These are problems that everyone has, but I'm a guy who really likes having To-Do Lists checked off properly. I always thought that Elemental wasn't going to be that great. It kind of fell under the radar. What few things I heard from the movie were "meh." I don't think that colored by viewing of the movie, but I honestly thought that Elemental was a return to form for Pixar. Sure, it covers a lot of the beats that Zootopia also covered. But this is Pixar's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and I don't hate that at all. Here's the thing that you have to understand before we talk further. (After all, this is a dialogue! Didn't you know?) I didn't think that Zootopia was all that subtle. But it was subtle enough to go over my students' heads when I mention that Zootopia was Black Lives Matter for Disney. If you fundamentally needed to understand perspectives in racial interaction, Zootopia is a fabulous starting point. But Zootopia, for all the allegory that is throughout the film, goes harder than Elemental. It really goes for the jugular in the best way possible. Elemental, instead, goes more obvious. But on the other hand, it isn't as damning as Zootopia is. I could probably argue that Zootopia is Antiracist while Elemental talks about race, but doesn't really condemn a certain group of people. I'm about to really get down and dirty with it, so please bear with me. I think that Elemental is ultimately an incredibly healthy movie for kids to be exposed to because Wade lives in a world mentally where race is so not an issue that the disparity between cultures doesn't even enter his consciousness. That's cool...up to a point. Again, if this is an intro to discussion about race and culture with children, Elemental nails it. Wade, who seems to be coded as White America (despite being voiced by a Black man), is so open to his attraction to Ember that the only thing that stops him from going all in is the fear of hurting her. That's not a bad place to be. Similarly, the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner scene is often colored more by misunderstanding than it is outright racism. There are slip ups, but ultimately, people aren't hiding deep-seeded racial phobias so much as stepping out of comfort zones. Cool. But this also means that Wade can also be written as a color-blind character. He's the heroic character in the story, but he's also not the protagonist. Ember is the protagonist. We view the problems of the story through Ember's eyes. Wade is on board from moment one. He's a bit written as a dope, which is sweet because it gives him singular vision. He knows that he loves Ember and will do anything to ensure that the relationship will thrive. Rated R for being about statuatory rape all the way through. There's on screen sex and nudity. There's language. Really, the whole thing is incredibly sexual and there's no dancing around it. This is one of those movies you need to know what it is about before you start watching it. Once again, a movie about cruelty. R.
DIRECTOR: Todd Haynes Again, I'm in the camp that didn't enjoy this movie. Maybe it is because I'm becoming more of a prude or that I've always been a bit of a prude, but I don't enjoy movies that are entirely built on the foundation of sex. I suppose that's a very specific kind of prudishness. I just remember, as long as I have been alive, that movies that talk about sex as its driving narrative factor, always seem bad to me. I can't explain it. Maybe a therapist can explain it. It's why I'm usually turned off by the films of John Waters when everyone else loses their minds over him. I have come to terms with the fact that John Waters must be an incredibly talented director and it's my weird hang-ups that make me annoyed by movies of that kind of ilk. But while I tend to have respect for John Waters, his movies are at least a celebration of a culture. That's why I mentally, if not emotionally, respect these movies. May December isn't an awful movie. There's technical skill here and a story that has a compelling element to it. After all, there's a lot of Black Swan happening here and it's not just the casting of Natalie Portman. There's that beat of sexuality leading to a place of "becoming." But to detract from May December, Black Swan did it better. I just wrote about Four Daughters, which also dealt with the notion of becoming someone else through acting. I get that there's a story here to unpack. When does someone lose their sense of self when trying to become someone else? That's a fun story, but I just don't like how either of these movies handled this idea. Again, I know that a lot of people really enjoyed this film and talked about stand out performances throughout the story. But I'm not getting a lot of that. Part of that comes from the shock value that the whole movie presents. I know. I said that I was a prude sometimes. It's not that I'm pearl clutching. It's a lot of "I get it." Elizabeth keeps pushing boundaries of what is shocking as she tries living Grace's lifestyle. (Just because I don't have a paragraph for this, I would like to point out that I know that this is about Mary Kay Letourneau, but that's so out there that me talking about it ad nauseum might detract from my focus. I'm going to refer to this as Grace because that's in-universe.) The moments are cool. Haynes, to his credit, times these moments out really well to know that Elizabeth is potentially the more unhealthy of the two people. When given a lewd question from a high schooler, there's this cool moment where she considers herself being the professional and answering so honestly that it comes across as crass. She's encapsulating both Elizabeth and Grace here. She has the professionalism and voice of Elizabeth with the "aw shucks" faux naivete of saying wildly offensive things without seeming to have malice. As I'm writing this, I have to explain some things. I thing the elements of a truly great story are here. I don't think it is executed as a whole well, but some things are positively brilliant. I kept Googling, "What's up with the music in May December?", only with different words so I could get actual results. The music and vibe of the movie are...silly? I mean, honestly, the whole tone of the movie is seemingly intentionally Lifetime. It's elevated Lifetime movie. There's a reason in my head for why this is the way it is. It's one of the things I probably would have done with this movie. I just don't think it sells the way that it supposed to. The Latourneau thing was the fodder for stuff like Hallmark. The movie is about the fact that Grace has had all of these cheap, exploitative movies made about her. The reveal at the end is that Elizabeth is also making a cheap and exploitative film about Grace, despite doing all of this research and throwing herself into the role. The actual bit of footage we get to see about the movie within the movie is absolutely terrible. But the thing is, it's very sledgehammer. I have a hard time getting past it. There are moments where we have this interesting character study of Elizabeth who has to feign that she's not judging Grace when she absolutely is judging her. There's the odd sympathy that she has for Grace as well, wanting to feel the sexual feeling of embracing a taboo in the back of the pet shop. Then we have that shift to where Elizabeth comes across as emotionless and distant, referring to children by degrees of attractiveness. Grace, similarly, is a character who spirals and we get to see the toxic world she has fosterd around her family. This is interesting stuff. But when we're told through music and visual cues that none of this stuff is elevated material, it is hard to really say "My, how fascinating." Again, somewhere along the way, I might have gone the same way at Todd Haynes and tried this as a method for delivering some intense acting and storytelling. But when it didn't work, I would pivot. Haynes didn't pivot. It honestly makes all of this seem cheap and worthless when there is something to say here. Oddly enough, I really did like Joe's story. Elizabeth and Grace get these great moments of dialogue. Joe, however, is mute for a lot of the film. He's a character that we don't get to see even in film. He might be the first character I've ever seen in their thirties who has to deal with being an empty nester. His wife is aged and he lives this complicated life where he doesn't know what a normal family looks like. Part of that comes from the fact that he has to double down on a decision that he made when he was thirteen. He built this whole life that depends on him completely embracing something that has no real solid foundation. He believes that he's in love with Grace, but every moment is wracked with guilt and doubt. When Elizabeth seduces him, we realize that his feelings for Grace were not about Grace herself. It was the notion of something either taboo or just being seen. As much as Grace claims that she sees Joe as a partner in her marriage, she treats him like a child, bullying him to move his bug collection from room to room. I kind of love that Joe is hiding a relationship from his wife the entire time. This is something about maturity that comes with actual growth. Technically, there's nothing wrong about Joe having a text conversation wtih Michaela from the bugs group. He's being above board for the most part and focusing on the bugs. But he keeps the text messages secret from his wife. Basically, he's allowing this open door for a relationship to flourish (appropriately, like the butterflies that are changing throughout the film) because it's an escape plan. It's an alternative to a life without Grace. But that's the sign of an immature relationship. Secret friendships are problems because secret friendships bloom into other things. While Joe's kids look at him like he's Dad, he regularly collapses under stresses that should be easy for an adult. He's more of a peer to his kids than an actual father and he so wants to be them all over again. I honestly don't really invest in Elizabeth or Grace. I'm all about seeing this movie for Joe. Maybe in the course of writing this, I have a greater appreciation for the movie. I just don't like the delivery. It's so melodramatic and shock-for-shock value. But when the movie embraces vulnerability and lets us sit on a moment, the film actually gets some legs. I wish I liked it more. Again, it may be me. But I am glad to put this one behind me. Not rated, but the movie is about rape, murder, terrorism, and religious extremism. It's also just a very upsetting movie for many reasons. Most of this blog will be me belaboring these points. There's some physical abuse that is talked about quite a bit, but it also oddly isn't part of the story directly. Regardless, it's pretty brutal as a movie.
DIRECTOR: Kaouther Ben Hania I'm going to have the unpopular opinion on this one. I hate to be that guy. It's almost impossible to gripe about a movie that has an important message. The message here is so important. The movie is about the dangers of fundamentalism and I'm here for that. But I'm also writing a film blog about the quality and practices of the film. For that, man alive, I wish I didn't have to write what I'm about to write. First of all, I have to confess something that may taint my frustration with the movie. The subtitles on the film were slightly off. I don't know what causes this. Is it Amazon itself? Is it just a weird sync issue that is happening with the moment or is it something that the production company who released this movie did? I don't know. I wish I could be more open-minded about the movie keeping this in mind. It's just that there were times when I didn't know who was saying what and it was frustrating for me. That's not the crux of my frustration with this movie. But I can tell you that it did kind of dogpile an issue I was already having with the movie. I hope someone agrees with me on this one, but did the movie feel unnecessarily cruel? In an attempt to do something different with a topic that apparently has been covered in Tunisia, Four Daughters has the actual people who were involved with the events that the movie discusses reenact the events that caused them so much trauma. At first I thought that this was cool. There had to be a reason why they got the actual people to act out events alongside actors that portray the girls' mother and sister. (Olfa, the mother, played herself until it got too emotional, and then she was replaced by an actress.) From the beginning of the movie, we knew that two of the girls were no longer with the family. I'm going to get spoilery so just watch out. The movie really heavily implies that the two other girls, Ghofrane and Rahma, had died somehow. The story starts off with this story of an abusive husband and father and that he was somehow going to beat these girls to death or something. Then it turns into another dude, also played by the same man (for some reason, all of the men were played by one guy). We thought that guy, who was abusive and a murderer/rapist would have killed them.) The big reveal was that the girls are still alive, but in prison for becoming radicalized terrorists. The story of the four daughters needs to be told. I won't deny the value of this tale, even taking the twist into account. I know that a lot of people liked the twist. I think it's fine. The problem I have is the correlation between the conceit of having this be a documentary about making a documentary and the reveal of what is happening in the movie. One of my students just asked me to Google Piece by Piece, an upcoming biopic about the life of Pharrell Williams. It's going to be made in Lego...because Pharrell likes Lego? Listen, this movie hasn't been made and I am probably going to give it a chance. But doing cool things just to do them detracts from the story happening here. But the bigger takeaway is that the whole thing just seems mean. Maybe it is done because the story itself is not that long, so we have to have all of this footage of actors interacting with their subjects. (Oh great, I realize that my next blog is actually going to be May December, a very similar idea). The footage that the actors have with the subjects creates something interesting. (This is me giving credit where it is due.) The real girls seem to almost have a sisterly relationship with these actresses. They so want to see their long absent sisters in these girls that they laugh and cry with them. That's nice. I even like the actress who is playing the mother calling the real mom out on her crimes. That's all part of the documentary. It feels a little reality show, but some of those moments are actually pretty important to the story. But these are girls who went through real trauma. The movie is aware that it is crossing a line. The male actor, who is playing the rapist in the scene, feels really uncomfortable with how the scene is playing out with one of the real victims of rape and stops the scene. He asks that is concern not be filmed, so he goes off camera. While he did the best thing in that situation, that still gives the movie what it wants: controversy. Golly, it seems like they want these girls to break down and cry on camera constantly. I'm a guy who will watch true crime documentaries and listen to true crime podcasts. I mentally think that they are pretty icky by format. After all, someone is listening to real tragedy for entertainment. I don't deny that's pretty gross, but there's a degree of altruism in the format. The idea is that the victim has a chance to be heard and receive some justice. Those true crime stories ask some hard hitting questions. Sometimes they cross over a line, but I always feel like there is at least a line drawn in the sand. When the actors feel like they are manipulating perfectly fine people is there really a moral good that is happening? I think Four Daughters might affect Americans more than Tunisians is because the story is new for us. But if you are sitting in the writer / director's shoes for this, people know this story. This feels like shock value storytelling. It's not to say that there's nothing good in this. I've teased this a little bit, but there is something fundamentally human about the whole thing. The two surviving girls, Eya and Tayssir, have this light about the whole thing. They, luckliy, see elements of this documentary as a means to talk about woes that have come their way both from the actions of their sisters and with the tyranny of their mother. One thing that seems pretty clear is that this is a loving family, but I don't want to just leave it at that. The family unit is fundamentally toxic. One of the recurring motifs of the film is Olfa flying off the handle. Now, I'm making a lot of judgment calls as an American. Part of me can't help but see some of the cultural practices that Olfa and her family deal with as backwards. But there's even an awareness that Olfa regularly takes things too far. There's a scene where Ghofrane goes goth (I want to talk about that scene a lot) and shaves her legs. Olfa, upon discovering this, beats her for hours. Olfa, in the present, knew that she did something wrong. But on camera, there's almost an epiphany for how damaging that action was. Honestly, the stuff where Olfa becomes aware of what a problem she is gives the movie some value. Olfa seems wildly uncomfortable with some of the testimonials that her daughters give her. It's interesting because, through news footage, we see how young the two girls were when the events took place. Because the events that the documentary is describing took place oh-so-long ago, these are girls with different philosophies and a different degree of agency than what they had before. These confrontations are almost the price of all the trauma. But the crazy thing is, even as I write that, I realize that it didn't have to go down that way. I seem to be harping on this, but I don't like that I'm watching people probably undoing years of therapy just so a documentary can win an Oscar. It's really weird. The goth scene? There's no way it went down like that. There's no way Ghofrane and Rahma were jamming out the way that they were and Olfa just came in beating them. I get the importance of bringing up the goth stuff. Ghofrane and Rahma were desperately looking for a counter-cultural identity and they totally became goths. I'm just saying tha the scene we saw was absurd. It felt like it was made by someone who scoffed at goth culture and treated it with such simplicity that it became silly that they ever dressed that way. I'm going to be honest. A lot of those reenactments seemed pretty ham-fisted. I wanted to be moved by what was happening, but it felt like a Lifetime movie at times. Again, everything in this needed to be said. I just didn't like how it was said. I guess I don't have too much more to say about this movie. I know that I'm the loner who didn't like it. It was just so frustrating knowing that this was almost just traumatizing women who were doing their best to cope. Sure, they get some surrogate sisters and that was great. But I don't know why this had to border on abuse to make the documentary work. Rated R for a lot of innuendo, a lot of off-screen sex, some language, drug use, and all around misery. It's a bummer of a movie and it feels more R than it probably is. Mostly, it is about Leonard Bernstein's sexual history and makes it R. Here's the deal, if you watched with without sound or subtitles, it would only mostly be inoffensive.
DIRECTOR: Bradley Cooper Guys, he tried so hard! Do you understand how much I wanted to absolutely love this movie? I mean, I straight up dislike this movie. I don't hate it, but boy-oh-boy, I do not care for this movie at all. All my gripes about how biopics tend to get dull, especially around Oscar season. Not only has Maestro committed every biopic crime. It is somehow less than those other biopics. I hate beating up on Bradley Cooper. He put his heart and soul into this. If anything, the movie shows a deep commitment to a passion project and every single frame of the movie reflects that. There's all kinds of stuff going on with Leonard Bernstein's nose. I'm not the guy to forgive that, but I never actually noticed it. I think he just wanted to not look like Bradley Cooper for the movie and I kind of get that. It's one of those things that a lot of artists have to deal with. As much as a famous face is a money maker that opens doors to make movies like Maestro, I understand how it can detract from a performance. I think Clooney has to make that decision a lot. He's been in a lot of historical stuff and he always just says, "What if that guy looked and talked like me?" Honestly, I would have preferred that approach, but Cooper's choice to wear prosthetics kind of makes sense. It's almost a reflection to the dedication of such a movie. And as a director, he kind of directs the crap out of this movie. He uses different aspect ratios to reflect different time periods. Some of the movie is monochromatic, to stress eras of Bernstein. There's some color grading that is actually wonderfully effective. Bernstein in the '70s, which is the hardest to get right, looks beautiful. Maybe, if anything, Maestro gets a cinematography credit because some of those shots are phenomenal. Our introduction to a young Leonard Bernstein in a maze of corridors that transition into one another is just perfect. I have no complaints about the visuals or the music in the movie. It's just the story. (I hate all these gaps, but I really want to make that pause obvious. You're welcome.) This story is rough. The story is rough in the sense that there is no real story. Part of that comes from the fact that Bernstein really has no motivation. There isn't a tortured genius. This is a story of a genius who things just come easy to. Sometimes he's a little hard on himself. There's an interview in the movie where Bernstein is frustrated that he hasn't created more groundbreaking work. But for a movie about a famous musician / conductor / composer, this movie is shockingly devoid of focus on music. He says he likes it. He says that it is his life. But so little of the movie is about him creating music. Music of his plays throughout the movie to remind the audiences of the works that Bernstein has worked on, but it's never about the creation. Rather, when you take away all of the sex stuff and relationship stuff, it's just people telling Leonard Bernstein that he's a genius. Music just seems like it is so in the background of this movie when it should be the foundation of the film. Instead, what the movie focuses on is the fact that Leonard Bernstein felt like he was allowed to sleep around with anyone he wanted. I want to love Carey Mulligan's Felicia. I really like Carey Mulligan and she delivers some knock out performances in this one. (I don't know about Best Actress performances, but they're pretty darned good.) But Felicia is an incredibly reactionary character. She starts off the movie saying that she knows about Bernstein's proclivities and accepts them. I don't know whether this meant that she is okay with Leonard having an open relationship or not. It could just means that she knows that he's bisexual (leaning towards exclusively homosexual) and that's fine. I also don't know whether that means that Bernstein is not romantically attracted to her or whether that means that he simply loves her as the best friend who understands him most. But the movie then jumps all over the place, showing how much Felicia puts up with to make the marriage work. There's a peppering of the role of Jewish performers in America, but that takes a quick backseat to the Leonard Bernstein seducing anything that moves. Felicia grows weary of Bernstein's sexual nature and confronts him on it. But here's the deal... ...Bernstein doesn't care. One thing Cooper is trying to sell us is that Bernstein does love Felicia, despite the fact that he keeps sleeping around. There's a subtext that love is more than sexual love and that polyamory might be the most natural thing for a person like Leonard Bernstein. There's a couple of problems I have with that. The first is that Felicia is obviously hurt about how much he sleeps around. He does it publicly and she establishes rules that he shouldn't embarrass her with his outright sexual advances. He keeps doing that. He never even tries to slow down, even as Felicia spirals into sadness, ultimately dying of cancer. I know that the movie plays up that Bernstein took care of her. That's great and I'm glad that happened. But that's not exceptionalism. That's what a spouse does when the other one has cancer. Heck, the movie might have been more interesting if it was the story about how Leonard Bernstein didn't care for his wife while she was dying. PG-13 and probably pretty well-deserved. It's got a decent amount of mild language. The bigger issue is that the protagonist has a history with gangs, which mostly included drug dealing. They talk about drugs more than I'd like. Normally, I'd be fine with a lot of this, but we watched the movie with the kids on Disney+. Yeah, yeah. I knew it was PG-13. The movie is mostly fine with content, but it isn't squeaky clean.
DIRECTOR: Eva Longoria Sorry, I normally don't mess with the font colors, but I wanted to find something that would be genuinely "Flamin' Hot" red. I felt like the "Director" section was probably the safest place to go. I have to give you a little bit of context before doing a deep dive into what might have been one of my favorite movies of the year. We had started Maestro the night before. It was late and the baby was crying, so we called it at a certain point. Maestro wasn't grabbing us. The following night, the older two kids were up with us and we wanted to find something on the Academy Award nominees that would be fine to sit through with the kids. Flamin' Hot, up for Best Original Song, was on Disney+. Well, after the absolute slog that was Maestro, Flamin' Hot became the discussion topic of "Oscar Snub that Came Out of Nowhere". Honestly, I might be overselling it right now. One of my students said that almost nothing in this movie was based on fact and that bums me out. Again, these are things that I could be Googling right now, but I choose not to. Part of me wants the movie to exist both as absolute truth and a tall tale existing in the background of the cultural zeitgeist. I have so much that I want to break down, but I'm not sure what direction that I want to start with. Part of the conversations we've been having is the need to show films that highlight cultural differences to our kids. So much storytelling is about White, Cis-gendered Americans that look like us and are well off. I know. I'm sounding incredibly woke. Every time someone says that this is the story about this culture or subculture that isn't about a straight White male, the word "woke" is thrown around. But it seems when talking about racial issues, movies tend to be incredibly dour. Now, this brings up an interesting concept: where does the line sit when it comes to deciding whether culture is valuable only when exceptional or when it comes to its inherent value. Comedies, when it comes to race, tend to draw with broad strokes. There are some minor issues with Flamin' Hot that could be considered broad stereotypes. Richard-as-Narrator addresses this. He knows that Mexicans are often associated with gangs and drug deals, but he also states that the story wouldn't be the story without those things. The movie is aware that it could be going back to some of those same old wells that other movies have done with characters of Hispanic descent. Instead, the movie acts as a celebration of culture. Never is the Hispanic background something that should be laughed at. If anything, societal norms are the things that deserve a little bit of mockery in this story. Richard, as a child, sells bean burritos to the White students at his school. The happy reaction is that this kid knows how to hustle. But the derision comes from the closeminded White kid who scoff at anything different. Keeping all of this in mind, the movie taking racial inequality in the work force and making a comedy out of it. It embraces some hard truths: White people tend to be the group that fails upwards. Richard is so thrilled to have a job as a janitor because every other job that Richard would be qualified for is unavailable. While there are people in the film that come across as antagonistic, the real evil is Reaganomics and the lie of trickle-down spending. The minority characters highlight that there is a healthy culture that has to fall back on less-than-reputable sources of income because life is never easy if things are done in the wholesome way. It's a lot of that. Here's me as a parent and that's exactly how I show descrepency. Is there a day that I might show them something more serious? Yes, I can't wait. But since Disney has this movie available for me right now and it is completely accessible, I'm going to show my kids Flamin' Hot. It's the exactly level of approachablity that a movie about this topic should have. It is weird that I'm celebrating a movie that makes Pepsi / Frito Lay the good guys of the story. I mean, Pepsi really comes across as winners in this movie. Roger Enrico is shown to be the greatest human that ever lived. The way that he's written in this movie is that he's a guy who is entrenched in a corporate culture that silences voices while he is the guy who wants to raise up the little guy. I established that I don't know the reality of what happened with Flamin' Hot. I don't know if it's all malarky. I don't necessarily want to read the book that this movie was based on. But I do know that Roger Enrico comes across as a filippin' saint in this movie. The movie wouldn't really exist if Enrico was portrayed in any different matter though. There's this moment in the story where Richard steals the phone number to Enrico's office and calls him. Enrico's secretary is dubious, but secretly becomes the hero of the movie by patching Richard through to Enrico. It's stuff like that. I almost need to know how the real story. Unfortunately, that story isn't really out there. (I kept making comments how I wasn't going to Google this. I ran into enough roadblocks where I needed to find out the answer myself.) There's a dispute between the real Richard and the Los Angeles Times. I can see where the real Richard Montanez would want to attribute the development of Flamin' Hot Cheetos to the goodwill of Pepsi and the wisdom of Roger Enrico. After all, Montanez is the marketing director of the company and that yarn got him the notoriety that he was looking for. It's just that issue that I have when I go on a rant about Disney has it all together. I don't want to be the guy who is celebrating a major corporation that has probably done more evil in the world than good. After all, I watched Pepsi, Where's My Jet? I get that the folks at Pepsi have done more evil than good in the world. It's just that I want this story to be something glorious. I teach about the American Dream and Flamin' Hot is one of the first really outright celebrations of the American Dream out there. I doesn't sugarcoat America as a magical place. Rather, it is a portrayal of something that America should be. The greatest selling point of Flamin' Hot is that this movie is better than it has any right to be. Again, we were watching Maestro, a movie that is up for so many Academy Awards. I'm going to savage that movie pretty soon. I don't want to, considering that Bradley Cooper worked really hard to make that movie. But Flamin' Hot has strong characters, a great script, phenomenal direction by Eva Longoria, and is just darned funny. It took a concept that should ultimately be unfilmable and turned it into something that we had genuine fun with as a family. Flamin' Hot, for all of its absurdity, knocked it out of the park. |
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
May 2024
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