PG-13 for language and violence. Kids really like using their middle fingers all willy-nilly in this movie. Like, this is a movie of escalation and how mean people can be towards educators. There are also accusations of racism, which shouldn't really be an MPAA thing. It feels like the movie is not for kids, so just take that into account before showing this to children.
DIRECTOR: Ilker Catak This is the last one! We watched everything that was available to us before the Academy Awards. I really want to knock this one out before the Academy Awards so I can post all of my thoughts on each of the movies before the Awards actually start. In a pretty darn good year for movies, I end on one that gives so much anxiety. My wife can't watch doctor shows like House. I can't watch teacher stuff because all I do is yell at the screen. I have to remember that this is a movie that exists to make a point. It is a story of how the small things cause people to be awful to each other. Because I didn't know much about the movie before going in, I'm actually going to commit one of my least favorite writing sins: the unnecessary summary. I do it from time-to-time. But people tend not know much about the foreign film category. The basic premise is that there is a thief in the school. The eager beaver teacher takes it upon herself to figure out who the thief is by laying a trap in the teachers' lounge. She leaves her wallet behind with her camera recording. She then discovers that it is the administrative assistant who is probably stealing from people. By the way, never accuse the administrative assitant. That person is a saint. That person is allowed to get away with murder. Well, the assistant is incensed regarding the accusation and everything escalates from there. Of course, the assistant's kid is in Carla's class and she wants to protect this kid from any ugliness. But then the kid kind of becomes the worst one in this battle for justice. Now, to the anxiety. Again, I get that this is a story about unnecessary escalation. Many stories are. But I have this really hard time understanding if Carla is the hero of the story or if everyone in this piece is generally unlikable. I think the point of the story is that Carla is one of those once-in-a-generation teachers, who hold teaching as a noble and moral profession. The problem is, she makes every first year teacher mistake. So often in this movie, I kept screaming, "Those kids aren't your friends!" and "It's not your job to have them like you." Now, I would like to point out, I don't know much about the German education system. It just feels like Carla finds the notion of disciplining students so abhorrent that it causes the world to be worse. Now, I think the movie is on my side. I think the movie is also frustrated with Carla's choices. Before the inciting incident, we see three students skip out on gym class to hang out outside. That's pretty bad. Lauren told me that German classes value the outdoors, so I'll ignore that one. But then she finds that one of the students has a lighter. Carla tells the student that she will be contacting mom. The kid says, "Please don't do that." So Carla caves. Now, if I've ever seen a commentary on a character's values, that's it right there. Absolutely Carla needed to be the bad guy in that situation. If you say that you are going to contact the parent, you have to contact the parent. I know that there has to be some discipline in Germany because the principal's favorite term is "zero-tolerance policy." But Carla is painted like a saint compared to the other characters in the story. The named teachers in the movie tend to view Carla as too standoffish. We're supposed to dislike the other teachers more than we dislike Carla. There's a bit of a problem with how this is demonstrated. Before the administrative assistant is accused. the school does this morally grey wallet search and discover that the immigrant kid has way more money than a sixth-grader should. So they bring in the parents and it becomes this really uncomfortable thing where people are dancing around the fact that Ali, the accused, is not white. Now, we should feel awkward about this. But the follow-up to this scene is that the other teachers involved in this scene question Carla whether or not she believes the parents. Now, this is where Carla borderline accuses them of bigotry. Listen, I get that those characters may be bigots. But the question that they asked is valid. Lots of parents lie on behalf of their kids. Heck, one of the motifs of this story is the notion that parents will do anything for their children's success. Just so much of the movie is incredibly frustrating. Carla keeps making choices that I wouldn't make. But even crazier is Dr. Bohm. I get what she represents. She's the product of too much education and not enough common sense. Bohm handles every scene with the grace of an elephant. When the school paper is playing this game of "Truth above everything", despite the fact that they seem to research almost nothing, Dr. Bohm seems shocked. Where is the newspaper advisor during all of this? Why hasn't the administration ever seen this article before it went to press? It's this big shocking story and it turns the school inside out. Yet, Dr. Bohm is reactive, not proactive. What is happening inside this school? Again, so much of the film are just these weird moments making me ask "How does this school stay open?" What I do applaud is the duplicity and general unhappiness on behalf of both the parents and the students. I guess it also applies to the teachers. One of the key issues in the movie is that they have to figure out who stole the money? Some people are upset that Carla violated their privacy by filming her own coat. It weirds me out that there are no cameras in the school to begin with, but let's play pretend. But the parents are upset that they are sending their kids to school with a thief on the loose, but also mad that people have been accused and asked about the theft. Like, there's no making anyone happy in this story. That, unfortunately, is a world I know. It's not all parents. Heck, it's not even the parents I'm dealing with now. I just get that idea that some people just want to be angry all of the time and the movie nails that concept really well. But the biggest question I have is the end message of the film. Oskar comes into school after a suspension. He refuses to leave. Carla finally calls for backup to make sure that the other students aren't affected by Oskar's rebellion. But the final reveal is that Carla follows her gut and handles Oskar herself. I don't know why that's the message of the film. Every other time that Carla tries to handle the problem herself, it fails. Even at the end of the movie, the credits roll as Oskar is being escorted (victoriously) by the police as he refuses to leave his seat. So what's the point? I mean, if the point is that the education system is cannibalistic and wants to be mad about something, nailed it. But it also feels like a movie that does not have an ending because stuff like this just disappears, given a certain amount of time. But the part that really bothered me, tying back to the notion that Carla isn't doing anyone any favors is the breaking point for Oskar. Carla finally starts weaving Oskar back into the class. It feels like she gets a real victory with Oskar when he, in a fit of anger, smashes his way into the room holding the video laptop (he gets that file was probably emailed, right?) and he full on assaults the teacher before throwing the laptop in the river. That's some messed up stuff. When Oskar returns, one of the student makes a school shooter joke. And do you know why? Because Oskar was showing all of the telltale signs of being violent and her need to "really connect" with this kid may have gotten her class killed. This film wasn't about a school shooter, but it absolutely could have been and that's incredibly frustrating. It's a good movie that gets a point across. But the protagonist is frustrating as heck. I don't know if we're supposed to sympathize with her or criticize her. Just know, as nice as it is when students like you, it shouldn't be end goal.
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Rated R and it was definitely trying to shoot for an R-rating. I'll go as far as to say that the movie was shooting for an NC-17 rating. It was trying to be as sexually explicit as it could possibly be. It was wildly offensive in almost every imaginable concept. The thing that might be more frustrating that, while a film should be clear with discussing sexuality, even to the point of showing it, Poor Things takes it to a point of absurdity. The point is made and then that point is hammered over-and-over again. At one point, we had a discussion, "Is this who we are? People who watch Poor Things?" Yeah, it was too much.
DIRECTOR: Yorgos Lanthimos I've seen my fair share of movies by Yorgos Lanthimos. I mean, I get him. I know what I'm signing up for. I'll even go as far as to say that I don't typically hate Yorgos Lanthimos movies. That's kind of surprising, even for me writing about this guy, that I kind of like most of his movies. Rarely are they my favorites. But do you know which one is my favorite? It's the one that's on the nose: The Favourite. Lanthimos comes from the school of thought that he wants to deal with the taboo. He wants people to confront the uncomfortable. But do you know what? That message gets a little tiresome. I don't think I've ever wanted to re-evaluate a complete canon of work on a director because of one movie before. That all changed with my viewing of Poor Things. Poor Things really wanted me to hate it. It just kept hitting button after button in an attempt to get me to recoil from it. We started it pretty late and at one point I was falling asleep. Being a film love at 40 might be one the biggest asks in the world because, you give me too much of the same thing, I'm going to get drowsy. We were watching Poor Things and it was just goofballery followed by goofballery. It was discordant music coupled with a really obnoxious fish-eye lens with a bananas worlds colored by sexuality. I mean, I like when people do things a little different. I like when things are meant to shake things up. But this was an attempt to alienate on a weaponized scale. There was so much discussion of sex and I don't think that was necessarily inappropriate. But there was this line where, you know, we got it. Thank you. We get that Emma Stone was going to be sexually all over the place with this movie. At one point, I feel like sex scenes were being used to stall for a lack of progression in the narrative. That's a real odd choice. But again, I was falling asleep, so I stopped the movie so we could pick it up the next day. Maybe we picked the best place to stop the movie because --for a while --the movie actually got pretty good. We picked the movie back up when Bella found herself enraged on the boat. She hated Duncan Wedderburn and there was something to watch. Considering that this is a movie about a woman as tabula rasa, it took this long to get to the point where she finally started growing as a person. I was really into it. From a point where I wanted to like this movie, I found the growth of this character over the course of a movie fun. I love that her language got more and more complex as she started learning about life's truths. But then they got to Paris. And he went back to the same well that the first act of the film found itself. Now, I get --and oddly even applaud --the fact that the character was definining her independence by a job that people found reprehensible. Okay. That's interesting. I'm saying that you could even show that. But the thing that got me is that we got stuck there again. Golly, it felt almost cruel to Emma Stone to have her film so many exploitative scenes for the sake of a bit of shock value. There's a way to show that time has passed and that she has lost and gained a little bit over the course of the time in a brothel than what we were shown. But again, Lanthimos wants to feed off of our discomfort over the taboo. It should be stated clearly that it's not the worst thing in the world to make the movie likable. He's a very talented director who handles the weirder side of storytelling. But that all kind of gets sacrificed under the greater umbrella of discomfort. Also, I have a really important question about the world of Poor Things. One of the central conceits of Poor Things is that Bella doesn't know how the world works. She is colored by oddities that make people look at her as off. It makes her character funny and sympathetic at the same time. It's the Frankenstein's monster thing. But here's the problem with Poor Things. Bella is the creation of suicide. She has the mind of an infant in an adult woman's body. But we see Bella's previous life as Victoria where she's quite even-keeled. Admittedly, we only see her suicide, but that looks like her problems seem quite grounded. The bigger problem is that everyone in this movie is really off. Everyone looks at Bella as a fish out of water because she says wildly abhorrent things. That doesn't really scan. Bella talks about her sexual conquests at fancy dinners and people clutch their pearls. The thing is, so does everyone else in this movie. The older woman with whom she bonds asks about a lover's genitals at their first meeting. She's wildly open about her sexual background and proclivities. Why is Bella so weird in this? Honestly, the entire world is so bizarre, match Lanthimos's tastes in the absurd. Nothing really scans in terms of storytelling. Instead, so much is given over the the mood of the piece, which dominates over everything else. I know people are torn over Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of Duncan. My wife really didn't care for him. I thought he was the best part. Why? I knew exactly where he was as a character. As silly as he was, I knew his goals and his intentions. I laughed a lot. It was interesting. To close up, we were showing the kids Barbie. Both stories are about men using women as objects and playthings. Over the course of the story, both women discover the value of their own nature and the good that they bring into the world. But Barbie is far more effective of a film. It seems silly and like Barbie would be the film that would be dismissed as fluff. I can only hope that I can forget Poor Things given a certain amount of time. It had so much going for it and it sacrifices all of that for the sake of being shocking. Rated R for all of the sex and gore. In a movie about a famous general who led charge after charge in war, you'd think that the red flag in that movie would be the massive death. Well, this movie has massive death and it is a red flag, but the bigger issue is the almost insistance of showing sad, graphic, on-screen sex. It's just all a choice. R.
DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott Whut? Like, seriously. I heard that this movie wasn't great. But it looked real pretty and it looked like it was going to just be a telling about Napoleon and the many conquests he made. I mean, if it was that, what could go wrong? And for all of the griping I'm about to do, there's a fair amount of attention given to making sure that the French Revolution and the reign of Emperor Napoleon looked accurate. But then this is a movie that almost forgets that it has a duty to be a movie. Considering that Joaquin Phoenix is in almost every scene as Napoleon Bonaparte in a movie called Napoleon, who the heck is Napoleon as a character? Both Henson and I had the exact same response to this movie. Ridley Scott's Napoleon posits the age old question of "What if one of history's most famous generals and people who saved the world was just a huge nerd that was completely unlikable?" Honestly, Vanessa Kirby as Josephine? I know what's going on with her. She has a kind of a linear story. She goes from popular socialite to cheating on her husband to being attracted to power. That's incredibly watchable. But Napoleon? According to this movie, he was a person that history fell around. He's the opposite of charismatic. I bet the real Napoleon wasn't charismatic. But in this one, he's a guy who gets a shot to take down the British, doesn't really have to convince anyone, and just keeps getting promoted very quickly. At one point, he's just offered to be Emperor. Now, I don't deny that history probably reflects something along those lines. But the reason that we have these historical biopics is to fill in the gaps between what history offers to us. But every single one of Napoleon's scenes is just defined by chaos. Some of it might be based on letters Napoleon wrote to Josephine. After all, those are scenes in the movie where we hear him dictate letters. As not a Napoleon expert, these might be accurate. I honestly don't care enough about this movie to really look this up. But Napoleon is supposed to be the grounding element of this movie. I'm not even really blaming Joaquin Phoenix. I blame this movie, script and director, for not knowing what to do with this character. Everything is just throwing weirdness at the wall and telling me that those are choices. Heck, there's even a way to make Napoleon Bonaparte a huge nerd and make the movie pretty good. It all comes from a degree of consistency. I'm thinking of Donald Glover's character in The Martian. Donald Glover's character (a name I should totally look up) knows something that no one else knows that's vital to the survival of the mission. He's social awkward. He's probably somewhere on the spectrum. But what makes him compelling is that he has to overcome his own awkwardness to tell people how he's seeing what no one else has the ability to see. That's not really this story. If anything, the story of Napoleon is that he wasn't that good of a general. It's the story of a guy who fell to the top. That's kind of the message of the story. He's a guy who made a few good decisions, but then started to believe his own press. That's not even accurate. Napoleon in this movie sees himself as the best general of all of history. He falls into the place of Emperor and wears that crown aggressively. Now, part of me wants to understand if he covets that. Is that his goal? I have no idea what Napoleon's goals are in this movie. He loves France. I get that. He's very all about France. I likes himself because he demands that Josephine spend every moment waiting for his present like Padme does with Anakin in Revenge of the Sith. But it's all about just a vibe, not a motivation. There needs to be something that ties this whole movie together. Instead, we kind of get a collection of scenes. Sure, did I learn about the Hundred Days? Yeah. I learned about the Hundred Days, because I texted Henson and asked if Elba and Waterloo were that close on the timeline. But that was me doing some heavy lifting. Everything about this movie is almost screaming that Napoleon wasn't that important to history. But the movie isn't ever explicit that is the message of the movie. Instead, everything comes across as a bit muddy. I love the visuals. In terms of cinematography and attention to detail, sure, I'll support this. But it's Tora! Tora! Tora! in a lot of ways. I can't believe that I was getting bored considering that there was so much to look at throughout the piece. It's just so...meh. How do you spend so much money and put so much effort into a movie and it just comes across as unfocused. I mean, I should know by the end of the movie if the director loves or hates his subject matter. I don't know that. Honestly, I'm a guy who hates having his phone within reach. I kept going back to the phone under the auspices of asking what actors are in this movie. I still haven't spotted Mark Bonnar and I know he's in this movie. I even did a Google image search. Nothing. I just was a big ask for a meh movie. I only feel good knowing that I'm not alone on this one. I'm sure that there are people who are all about Napoleon. Also, why did they name the cake after that guy? My Ukrainian grandmother made a bunch of those things and it's nothing like this movie. It's PG, but I had to explain that old men bathing naked was just a thing that happened in certain places. So, mild nudity is the biggest takeaway from this movie. Yeah, yeah, I should pre-screen movies that my kids are going to watch. The issue isn't necessarily that there is questionable content in this. The issue is "Do my kids want to watch a movie about a guy who cleans toilets everyday?" The answer is "No. Only Dad wants to watch that."
DIRECTOR: Wim Wenders Confession time: I've never seen a Wim Wenders movie. I thought I had. Then I went down the IMDB credits of Wim Wenders and realized that I never actually sat down and watched Paris, Texas. I'll get around to it. I've seen a lot. I haven't seen everything. We need to be gracious to the blog writer sometimes. I don't know how this worked out to be the follow-up to The Zone of Interest. Both, if you completely ignored context, are movies that almost remove themselves from traditional narrative structures. Now, that is a wild simplification. I'm even slightly aghast at myself for comparing these two movies. The Zone of Interest may lack a structural narrative, but that's because it is a commentary on the normality of ignoring horrors. Perfect Days lacks a narrative because it is a celebration of the small, analog parts of life. Somehow, this becomes the worst and best double feature ever. Now, I went off on Zone of Interest. I appreciated it intellectually. I even would go as far as to applaud it as a powerful avante-garde work. But honestly, I didn't really like it all that much. While I probably won't be recommending Perfect Days to people, I actually kind of enjoyed it. Now, Zone of Interest's biggest flaw (which I acknowledged was on me) was that it didn't keep up the level of intensity for me and I left the film a little bored. I got a little bored with Perfect Days, leading to me almost nodding off in the final ten minutes of the film. I kept slapping myself awake. I saw it all, but there was a struggle. Part of the problem is that, like its title suggests, the whole thing is about maintaining almost a sense of serenity or zen. Hirayama has problems, but nothing that normally would necessitate a movie to run a discourse over the topics covered. The thing that really separates these two movies is that The Zone of Interest is almost not about characters. Perfect Days is all about character, especially if you are invested in the character himself. Hirayama is a bit of an enigma. An aging man in the middle of a city, Hirayama embraces his solitude. Hirayama --potentially an avatar for Wim Wenders...if I knew more about him --embraces the analog joys in life. His books are used. He listens to cassettes. He takes care of saplings. He rides a bike to watch baseball games at restaurants. He lives almost a monastic lifestyle. Yet, he seems so happy. I can't help but think that Hirayama is the intentional deconstruction of the archetype. I need to watch this movie again, but I'm pulled to movies like Umberto D. and Bubba Ho-Tep. (Okay, those two movies don't normally get lumped together.) These are both movies about the dangers and fears of aging. Especially with Umberto D., the protagonist views the city as something isolating. The ways of his youth have disappeared and there's something completely terrifying of dying alone surrounded by people. Hirayama almost willfully ignores these fears. Maybe not absolutely. The movie ends with a bittersweet takeaway, potentially meant to act as a mirror for the viewer. I'm talking about the final shot of Hirayama smiling broadly at his music in his van, but also transitioning into a state of almost tears. But that's not the majority of the movie. Instead, Hirayama takes what traditionally is considered a disgusting job --cleaning toilets --and turns it into something to take pride in. It's not like the movie is unaware of the stigma of such a job. Takashi (who can best be described as "a lot") points out the futility of such a job. But he finds value in it. There's almost a parable nature to the movie. I can't help but view the movie as meditation. It is so quiet and so peaceful. Hirayama goes to work, gets the same can of coffee everyday, and enjoys the same pleasures every day. There are small blips that remind us that every day, as similar as it was to the previous day, has a sense of variety to it. But Hirayama makes his very simple life look pleasing. Because he has divorced himself from traditional capitalist values. His apartment is spartan. He has organized his cassettes into a really sexy looking shelf, displaying his collection. While he reads a lot of challenging books (I find Faulkner to be mostly inaccessible), he only has a solitary bookshelf. His plants aren't purchases. He finds them during lunch hours. He seems to eat the same egg-salad (we assumed) sandwiches across from the same awkward girl every day. But he seems so happy. A kid finds his mom. He smiles. He finds out that his deadbeat partner is a Down syndrome boy's favorite person. He smiles. He watches baseball and he enjoys the fact that people have strong opinions over a game. He smiles. The perfect days aren't perfect days by most people's perspectives. They are days full of burdens and toils. But to remind us that no one has a perfect life, Hirayama has conflicts. Takashi (again, a lot) is just this force of chaos. He shows up for work when he wants. He wants rides. He wants to sell Hirayama's tapes. He needs money. Hirayama clearly looks down on him. (I have to infer because Hirayama almost takes a vow of silence in this movie, further pushing the narrative that he lives a monastic lifestyle). But he's not a character who naturally wallows. I wallow. I think the world is a terrible place all of the time. But it's also because I'm one of those people who continually complicates his own life. It sounds like I'm dramatic. I'd like to think that I'm not. But I also know that there are so many things that seem like I need to do them when, in reality, I could just simplify my life. Hirayama chooses the things in his life that are valuable and almost intentionally purges everything else. He likes people. It's not like he's a hermit. It's just that he invests everything into the things he values. As depressing as it is for me, one of the things that guarantees him a sense of peace is that isolation. For a while, I wondered if he was asexual. That would explain a lot. But there is this implication that he's in love with Mama from the restaurant. Those near-tears at the end, I think those tears are about her. From Hirayama's perspective, happiness comes from controlling the self. It's choosing the things that are important. But there is an element of sacrifice to that lifestyle. He values his books and his tapes so much that it almost seems like a relationship is incongruous to the lifestyle he has fostered. It's sad, but it's not that he's necessarily just lonely. When he meets Mama's ex, there's the fear that things will change. The level of relationship that he has with Mama seems to be their exchanges at the restaurant. She makes him feel special. He's the most polite, so she likes him. The notion that someone else is more important than he isn't a slight against him. It's more about change. I kind of hate that I liked this movie so much. It's sp lovely. There's something so seductive about simplifying a lifestyle to just gain a sense of accomplishment or joy behind it. It is a boring movie. I can't deny that. Not a lot happens in the film. But it is also a pretty and serent film. PG-13 and I kind of get why. Despite being about genocide and real world horror, the entire conceit is that you see none of it. You hear it. Especially if you have the subtitles on, you can pick up on things that are atrocities. But you don't see almost anything. At one point, the kommendant has sex with one of the prisoners, but it is off-camera and implied more than anything else.
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Glazer Thank goodness I looked up that this was the Under the Skin guy, because that completely scans for the entire movie. The thing is, I have to take avante-garde on a case-by-case basis. That seems like a really obvious thing to say. I mean, I take every other film on a case-by-case basis. Why wouldn't I do the same thing with the avante-garde? Part of that is that it is almost a bit of blasphemy to slander, libel, or even criticize something that is considered artistic. In some cases, I get it. After all, me criticizing something that is artistic may be simply because I'm a big dumb-dumb. I know that's not the case with Zone of Interest. I completely get Zone of Interest. I just find myself...fatigued at times? The issue that I have is that I really like the concept behind the film. For those not in the know, The Zone of Interest is almost lacking a story intentionally. It is about the life of the kommendant of a concentration camp. Like a rectory borders a chruch, the home of this kommendant is directly adjacent to the concentration camp that he runs. It is a film about juxtaposition and what is not seen. We live in a world where we have viewed the Holocaust narrative so many times that we are almost dulled to the pain of these people. One of the sequences in Zone of Interest is actually the cleaning of the Auschwitz museum and the atrocities that happened there. The cleaners, all doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, are cleaning things and displays that remind us that an unfathomable amount of people died and they are unemotional because this is their daily lives. The purpose of The Zone of Interest is to show us the the things we never see. In the case of this specific story, we see what it was like to be German during this time. It is a story of a willful ignorance to the crimes that humanity perpetrates on a daily basis for the sake of comfort and self-righteousness. The Zone of Interest isn't bad. It's delivering exactly what it promised. I'd even go as far as to say it delivers a little more. We get some visual choices that make us question what it must be like to be part of the few who empathize with those behind the walls. Those parts are actually my favorite parts of the movie. Now, when I was in college, I remember having to argue that role of the director was to serve the plot. I argued against someone who was adamant that character preceeded plot every time. Over time, I tended to lean to my friend's perspective. Character was fundamental to storytelling. Lots of stories without plot completely work. In the case of The Zone of Interest, I'm not quite sure that we get either. We get hints of character. Hedwig gets a lot of attention in this story and I know her needs. She wants to create the nicest home for her family. She wants success so that she is respected. But Hedwig, despite being the most defined character in the film, is almost an NPC in this story. The story never follows Hedwig's goals. We don't know much about her character except for the fact that she stands still as a character. The Hedwig from the beginning of the movie is the same as the Hedwig from the end of the movie. Now, because this is an avante-garde story that is not about plot or character, we're allowed to forgive that she doesn't go through a major change. After all, lots of film movements aren't about learning something from the events of the piece. Considering that this is a movie set during World War II in German, it would actually be a little bit inapprorpiate for Hedwig to come to some grand realization about the role that the Nazis had over the Jewish people. We have a little bit of that from Hedwig's other, but it really isn't about the Germans' changes. If anything, Hedwig's mother is more put-off by the execution of the Jewish people, not morally righteous about the whole thing. If anything, this is a movie about mood and tone. Like with Under the Skin, Glazer absolutely crushes with that. He gives this sense of ominousness to the whole film. When the ashes start seeping into the river and there's this backwards "We have to save the children" moment, it's incredibly upsetting. But it isn't necessarily about story. I'm really bummed to say that, effective as the film is about bringing about an emotional response, I found myself constantly staring at my watch. I had gleaned what I could from it. The one thing I didn't want was to grow bored with it and I'm ashamed to say...I did. I should have been riveted with something like this. It's beautifully made. But I don't know if it is an-hour-and-forty-five minutes beautifully made. Maybe that's the last criticism that the movie has for me. As much as I care about the events, I clearly don't have the fortitude to keep hearing about it. It sounds like this is a criticism of the film, but it is more about me and people like me. We can get insensed for only so long before we're bored enough to move onto the next tragedy. It's sick and I get it. I started off the movie straight up mad at the extended moment of silence and the film ends the same way. It's a test. I don't love to be tested, but it was a test that I failed. My blessed life couldn't handle a little bit of discomfort and that's how I reacted. It's a well-made test, but I still needed something to latch onto besides the subconscious idea of sadness. Also, Cinefix? Hot take making this the best movie of 2023. Rated R for just about everything. It's extremely sexually explicit, but I could argue that it was probably less explicit than people made it out to be. (I'll talk about that later.) There is nudity, drug use, violence, gore, suicide, murder, and lots of sexual acts. I know. I just said it wasn't that much. Again, I'll talk about that. Just know that it isn't necessarily for the faint of heart. R.
DIRECTOR: Emerald Fennell Okay, you guys made me think that I was going to watch Salo again or something. (Now you know not only that I watched Salo at one point, but that I was willing to do so again because people kept on asking me about this movie.) I don't get a lot of requests for movies. But oh-my-goodness, people kept asking me about Saltburn. I didn't want to dismiss it. I know that people have strong opinions on the movie. I'll tell you what. It's pretty good. Now, I know that I'm blaspheming on some level here. I bet that if I walked into the video store back in the day, I'd probably get ripped apart for liking Saltburn. I don't quite know why I would get ripped apart. I just get the vibe that it is gauche and basic to like this movie. Objectively, it's a gorgeously shot film with solid acting and an interesting story. Is it perfect? I don't know. I don't think so. There's a part that I'm going to discuss, but part of that I'm still unpacking. Hopefully, I can process a lot of that as I write, so maybe we'll determine whether one of my complaints is valid or if it is just a scene that doesn't belong in the movie. I don't know everything. I just pretend that I do. First of all, let's talk about graphic content. It is graphic. I won't deny that it is graphic. I actually hate that I'm not more scandalized by this. Honestly, it isn't an attempt to be a flex or anything. I've now seen so many horrorshows out there that I kind of hate that I'm desensitized to a lot of stuff. But everyone looks at you when you say that you've seen Saltburn like you are some kind of deviant. This is a movie about people being cruel, often sexually cruel, to one another. And you absolutely should be scandalized by the things that happen in this movie. But that feeling comes with a mixture of investment, empathy, and imagination. If you are invested in the story and see these as real people doing these real things, it comes across as brutal. I get that. But these shots are gross only if you think that the actors are really doing those things. I'm going to use the code that everyone else is doing to describe "the scene." I'm talking about "the bathtub scene." I was ready for a lot worse than that. You know that's just water, right? It's just water. I know that is being incredibly dismissive. After all, The Thing special effects still scare me and I'm aware that those are just gross looking puppets. But my brain instantly distanced itself from what people thought was going on and I was able to power through a lot of those scenes without cringing too much. Here's the big victory that Saltburn won that should be noted. I'm not a big fan of The Talented Mr. Ripley model of story. Fundamentally, Saltburn is just a more sexually explicit Talented Mr. Ripley. (Also, the other Ripley movies, including the one that is coming out soon.) My buddy in high school was obsessed with that movie and it didn't do much for me. Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley also opened the door for similar films. The film I'm kind of talking about is the creepy outsider lusting not only after a person, but after a person's entire lifestyle. Through emotional manipulation and cruelty, this person weaves themselves into someone else's lives,coveting that life until it is theirs. The thing that the Ripley movies always did, though, was to leave their protagonist (in the sense that we're following this character's goals, not in a heroic sense) a blank slate. We know so little about Ripley. Often, we have to identify with the object of their desire and Ripley becomes this menacing figure. But with Saltburn, Oliver is with us the most in the story. We don't know most things about Oliver until the end. (I want to discuss that a bit.) Oliver is our protagonist. We see him in his ups and downs. Through the course of the story, it almost feels like there are two Olivers. It feels like the real Oliver is the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses character. He does anything for love and attention because he's been starved for that. Man, that character is relatable as heck. He knows he's out of Felix's league and he's constantly paddling to keep up. But that's why Oliver's other personality is so horrifying. He shows up first with Venetia in the garden and it is so polarizing compared to the first guy. We have to wonder which character is the real Oliver and which one is the mask. As the story progresses, ultimately solidifying this with a retelling of the story in the final act, we find out that the mastermind latter character is the real Oliver and that the sympathetic nerd is something completely fictional. Ripley doesn't really give you a ton by design. I like knowing the complete psychopathy of Oliver though. But I did say that one scene frustrated me. The bathtub scene is such a memorable scene because of the disgusting sensory experience that it elicits. The bathtub scene exists because the movie outright lies to us at the beginning. I don't like that. I had a discussion and it was posited that the movie never really lied to us, but I don't know if that works either. I'm being too cryptic. I apologize. Keep the bathtub scene in the back of your mind for this part. The movie bookends with a parallel scene. The opening of the film is Ollie confessing a deep intense love for Felix. He says something along the lines of "I am not in love with him. I love him." The phrase "I love him" repeats, mirroring Oliver's obsession with Felix. The film ends with Oliver, grown up and standing over Elsbeth's comatose body starting with "I love him" and it devolves into "I never loved him." Eventually, he chants how much he always hated all of them, implying that Oliver was always playing the long game, bilking the Catton family out of their undeserved estate. Now, here's my problem. The bathtub scene was something done alone. What graphic thing that Oliver does over the grave kind of works, despite being alone because I can see that all of the evil that Oliver does to the Catton family as a form of sexual assault. I get that. But the bathtub scene almost doesn't work with that. Oliver told us that he loved Felix, so the bathtub scene works. But if he never loved Felix, if all of that was an act to assert dominance, I don't think he would do the bathtub scene. Now, if I'm really getting into the nuance of the scene, it could have been an opening salvo as his power starts to emerge. But it seemed that the bathtub scene happens because of his own arousal to the spying that he just perpetrated. I don't know. I'm a little worried that the bathtub scene was only left in the movie both as a misdirect (which would make it unearned) and for shock value. After all, I kept on hearing about the bathtub scene. It just seemed to make less sense knowing what I know about the ending of the film. But the movie just mostly works. Every casting choice is perfect. Golly, I don't know how I got a movie that was so demented that somehow triggered my sympathy and my disdain at the same time. Like, Oliver is absolutely evil. But his target constantly does things that makes Oliver look human by comparison. Felix doesn't know that Oliver is a sociopath. Felix is treating Oliver like a pet. The constant reminder of a previous guest that Felix treated like a pet and then disposed of makes this entire scenario a story of comeuppence. Absolutely Oliver is a monster. But no one knew that Oliver was a monster, so the events that unfolded present like a very specific horror story. Honestly, it's why horror movies tend to make victims bad people. They break a rule; Jason gets them. In this case, we've changed the rules of what makes a victim, but there is no final girl. We almost celebrate Jason as victor and it's really messed up. But that's why we break formula sometimes. R, almost exclusively for language. Not only that, but the language in this movie is almost used ironically. Because Monk has to put on this character, he uses curse words to hide behind the fact that he knows almost nothing of this lifestyle. The movie does have violence, as Monk imagines someone being shot to death. There is some drug use in the movie, coupled with discussions of sexuality. R.
DIRECTOR: Cord Jefferson "You know, this movie is making fun of you." I know, my wife. I know. That's the thing about liberals. They tend to be able to laugh at themselves pretty well. At least I do. The topic of race, as grounded as it is in the past with bigotry springing up to the present, is a deep and many-faceted discussion. When I used to teach Things Fall Apart, we would study the TED talk "The Dangers of a Single Story." There were two main ideas: people of a culture should have the definitive voice in that culture and that a culture cannot be defined by a single voice. Ultimately, American Fiction is the natural progression of this idea. As much as we want Black voices to speak out about injustice and oppression, Black voices cannot be only about injustice and oppression. I mean, some of you have to be scoffing at the obvious right now. I think you kind of are supposed to. By the way, I wasn't prepped for two great surprise movies in the Best Picture categories. The two movies that I probably enjoyed most out of the Best Picture category are American Fiction and The Holdovers. Maybe I'm just in the mood for a tightly knit dramedy. I knew the conceit of American Fiction before watching it. I mean, the trailers were everywhere. Just by watching YouTube every so often, you'd catch one of these trailers. I liked the idea, but I thought of the concept as limted. But American Fiction is the right level of smart in all the ways that count. I kind of pigeonholed American Fiction into a subcategory of film: the deceit film. I don't think that's an actual term, so let me spell out what I mean by "deceit film". Using dramatic irony to tell a story, the film revolves around a lie. In this case, we have the lie that spirals out of control, leading the protagonist to gain fame and notoriety, ultimately having to deal with the downfall and exposure of the deceit. The funny thing is...there really isn't any exposure. God bless this movie for messing with me. I thought I had the whole thing written out in my head. Monk, as far as he pushes the lie, never really gets caught doing it. I mean, we know that he shares the reality of the novel with Wiley, who will be making the story of his deceit into a movie. But we don't actually deal with any of the consequences of Monk's lies. Monk actually seems pretty happy towards the end of the movie, not because his conscience is cleared about the lies. The movie steers away from the guilt of lying to the point of Monk making peace with his choices to write a parody book to begin with. Monk is the kind of character I want to write, by the way. I sympathize with Monk. He's a great anchor for this movie (and points to Jeffrey Wright for being just a top notch actor, which I hope to address more in this blog). Monk is a character who is a little bit caustic, but that comes out of being frustrated, not being a bad person. He's passionate about quality writing and the world isn't allowing him to express quality writing because we live in airport bookstore world. (OH! To be a published author whose books crush at an airport! His lamentations are my dreams!) Now, that's even an oversimplification of the character. See, Monk could come across as completely unlikable. But Monk, for all of his self-involvement, is actually quite vulnerable as a character. He made a choice to leave his family. It's one of his defining moments. He wanted to become a writer, so he left behind all of those things that distracted him from becoming the best writer he could be. On one end, it could be seen as selfish. On the other, it could be seen as practical. But when Monk is back to being entrenched with the people in his life, he instantly steps up to the plate. His sister's death redefined him as a person. As such, he cares for his mother when his brother Cliff holds resentment towards her. (Note: I don't know if it shocks you that Sterling K. Brown is also amazing.) But he snaps at people. Again, I love me a complex character. And people are always diagnosing him. I see this guy with a lot on his plate being awful to people that he cares for. I get it. I hope that Monk is not me in that regard, but it's incredibly sympathetic, even if you want to scream at him a bit. It's a film about being a writer and I can't deny that. But it is also a story about family and wanting to take care of yourself. Monk has a million reasons to lie about the book he wrote. American Fiction creates a compelling case for immorality. He technically doesn't do anything illegal, as far as I understand. Perhaps there's an element of fraud, creating the characters of Stagg to inspire readers to purchase a convict's book. But really, it's just all in bad form the behavior he's illiciting. But Monk is his own worst critic. He's the reigning defender of good writing, of academic writing. His character faces the greatest rebuke of his actions: he has contributed to the filth of society. Maybe that's what makes the conversation with Sintara so fascinating. Throughout the movie, Monk goes from loathing Sintara to seemingly admiring her. She shares his concerns about the role of Black fiction, especially that which is written to absolve white guilt. They are the only two who think that the book is trash. But Monk is a character who cannot let things go. After all, it is the content of Sintara's novel that he's parodying to begin with. He loathes the notion of her novel, with misspellings and the archetypal Black characters running throughout. But Sintara creates something almost undigestable with her argument. She both absolutely agrees with Monk about the role of Black voices in fiction while being abhorred at how simplistic Monk's views on Black fiction are. Monk wrote his book as a parody. He was angry and venting. I mean, he clearly took a long time to get that out of his system. I wrote the first draft of my book in two months, fast by anyone's standards. Two months to vent is a long time, especially as a joke. (Question: he still gave his agent a copy of the book that he didn't want to sell?) Both Monk and Sintara have points during that argument. If the point of writing is to find the authentic voice, Sintara's book would have a certain degree of blasphemy. She's more authentic than Monk is. I mean, she is putting her own face and history out there, unlike Monk who creates Stagg to cover his own shame. But she is writing someone else's story without injecting any of the self into the story. But she's also saying that we should be lifting authentic stories of adversity up. She says that people like her characters exist. She comes from a place of thorough research, not just gut instincts, borrowing from pop culture to giggle at lesser writing. It's all so complicated and I love that it doesn't have a right answer. As much as that argument doesn't have an answer, I end up mostly on Sintara's side in that fight. There's just so much to unpack. I also can't help but love that this is an English teacher's movie. Golly, talking about books and what makes books work. Part of me is on the outside, looking in. It's a world that I desperately want to be involved in. I said that I wanted to talk about Jeffrey Wright in this movie before I close up. Jeffrey Wright might be one of the most adept and powerful actors we have in a generation. There are so many great actors out there, including Sterling K. Brown, whom I mentioned earlier. Not to diminsh from Brown's role in this, but Brown plays variations of a type. He does this very well. He's often confrontational and charismatic. But Wright is all over the place with his choices of roles. He does genre as well as subdued incredibly well. You really can put that guy in everything and he absolutely crushes it. This felt like he was rounding out the Bingo card with great and varied performances. He just nails every scene and I'm continually impressed. American Fiction works on all levels. I wouldn't hate to see this do well at the Academy Awards. Rated R, mainly because the film is determining whether or not someone's death was a murder or a suicide. Both topics bring their own traumatizing elements. Spriraling out of this, because this is the story of a trial, much of the film tries to bring out the defendant's illicit behavior. This means that sex and drugs are discussed, if not seen. We also see the corpse, which is gory. R.
DIRECTOR: Justine Triet Like, it's really good. I can't deny that this is a really good movie. But is it Best Picture good? I mean, we are starting to run into this every year. Now, I will say, I've been looking for an argument that Greta Gerwig should have been up for Best Director for Barbie. Then everyone said, "Who are you going to pull off?" And my takeaway? Justine Triet. Yeah, it sucks that I'm pulling another director off of the Best Director page. But also, Anatomy of a Fall is a decent courtroom drama that doesn't really break new ground. It's weird, because I'm going to be writing this blog with the knowledge that Anatomy of a Fall doesn't really do anything wrong. It just doesn't do anything better than other movies have done. If I had to be gracious and say that it did one thing better than anything else is to remind me that I should not get arrested in France. Geez, one of my bigger running gags in the movie was just shouting "Objection" and then a thing that I heard from American courtroom dramas. First of all, let's go with the dumbest stuff right now. It seemed like one of the major points of the movie was that the judge absolutely seemed to hate Sandra, right? Like, I kept waiting for that to be a plot point and that someone was going to bring it up. But do you know what actually happened with that? Nothing. No one was going to say a darned thing about how the judge really seemed to have it out for the defense, even though it seemed like the defense was just doing its job, you know, defending the client? Again, I know little-to-nothing about the French legal system. I just know that I shouldn't get arrested there because they'll treat you terribly. One of the reviews of Anatomy of a Fall called the film a prestige film that was turned into an airport read. I kind of agree with that. Maybe it colored me too much before sitting down to write this. Again, I gave this movie the least chance for success out of any Best Pictures out there. Someone mentioned to me that Anatomy of a Fall was just alright and I think that was the vibe I went into it with. It is dramatic as heck. Golly, the pacing and the storytelling is pretty darned good. In terms of understanding that this is one of those stories where we'll never really know the truth about whether Samuel jumped or was murdered, it doesn't quite leave the end one-sided. I mean, we never see the event in real time. Because this is a story more about the trial and the fallout of the trial, it does highlight the limited nature of a trial. Anatomy reminds us that it isn't necessarily an exporing of the objective truth. It is a reminder that the justice system is really more about who can argue better. That was the weirdest thing. As much as the story was about presenting evidence, which it only did occasionally, almost everyone who went up on that stand presented potential theories and you had to pick the best one of the group. I suppose a good ambiguous story gives you a lot of evidence and you have to go back and forth whether or not the defense did it or not. I don't know. Anatomy of a Fall made the justice system such an environment of bullying that I instantly stuck with Sandra from moment one. Heck, she could have even done it and I still wanted to defend her the entire time. Naturally, I want to compare the movie to Doubt, a film that never really tells us what happened. But with Doubt, you are left with the horror of two very different, equally bad scenarios. With Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra, despite potentially having murdered her husband, comes across with so much sympathy even if she did it that it doesn't create the same result that Doubt injected into its movie. I'm never going to advocate murder. It's my thing. But let's say that Sandra did murder her husband. It seems like he was borderline emotionally abusive and cruel to her. She would have to abandon her son. That's all terrible. But the best case scenario, a murderer would be in prison. I suppose that's the majority of crime dramas. But the alternative, which is the way that I viewed the movie, is way more tragic. First of all, I consider nothing more tragic than an innocent person going to jail. The corrections system is a system of punishment, not rehabilitation. But this would be a woman who lost her husband to suicide. A child would lose both parents in the wake of an unfathomable tragedy. But the bigger thing that the movie kind of touches on, but doesn't really hit very hard is the fact that Sandra's career is over. She has one of those careers that rests on the goodwill and support of a community of readers. People judge her art based on her morality. Remember, I'm the one who had lots of questions about the appearances of Amber Heard in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. I'm part of those masses who has a hard time divorcing the art from the artist. But the prosecutor in the story brings in Sandra's novels as evidence towards her character. If Sandra is a modest public figure, it would be hard to separate her art from her reality. But when the prosecutor brings in her novels as forms of evidence towards her mental health and her disposition, that inexorably makes the work the same as the artist. The only benefit that would come out of a trial like this is the macabre out there, who would read her work as a means to glean insight into a killer. It's upsetting. What Anatomy of a Fall absolutely crushes is the effect that it has upon Sandra's son. The very nature of being put on trial is a stigmatizing event. Those people around Sandra are fallout when it comes to trying to defend her. Remind me to be a little critical when it comes to how Daniel processes this. I'm going to be a bit of a bully, but I just can't come to terms with what this character does. Anyway, I almost care more about Daniel than I do about Sandra. I feel for Sandra. Absolutely. The performance that Sandra Huller gives Sandra the character is what cements the work. But Sandra is intentionally reserved as a character. She's holding it all in only to let go at times in the movie. She's willing to have everything out there about her relationship with Samuel, partially to stay out of jail, but also because it seems that she's very open with her life as an author. If she pulls from her real life, the notion of hiding things just because some things may be considered icky is beyond her. But she also doesn't go out of her way to tell her ten-year-old about her sexual proclivities. When he's exposed to all that, it's a bit much. That's the stuff I watch this movie for. I'm more interested in what happens to Daniel, in light of all of the trauma that he already went through. Okay, let's bully Daniel a bit. The experiment with the dog? That seems a bit much. I don't know. I'm going through anecdotal evidence for things. But it seems like a kid wouldn't poison his dog, especially given his visceral reaction to that dog's near death experience, for the sake of proving something that ultimately didn't have a lot of say in court. Maybe the bigger problem I have is the sequence of events with Daniel. A key idea to the story is that Daniel doesn't know if his mom is innocent or guilty. Marge, who clearly doesn't understand the crux of her job of keeping Daniel neutral, tells him that he just has to go with his gut and follow it hard. I don't get that logic. I don't see how poisoning the dog stems from these conversations. It seems like, if the dog didn't vomit, it wouldn't really change the narrative of Mom's guilt. Sure, it gives Mom a little bit more leeway when it came to collecting evidence. But I don't know if it helped her as much as he thought it would. I hate to be crapping on this movie because I enjoyed it. But I do agree with the New York Times. It has elements of a prestige movie, but it seems kind of forgettable in the long run. It's got that crime drama thriller thing going on, but without the gravitas to make me remember the movie in five years. PG-13 mostly for superhero violence. Since Aquaman and its surrounding characters have gone for amore optimistic tone, these movies are pretty watchable for kids of all ages. I guess that would be mostly true if it wasn't for the real casual use of the s-bomb. I mean, boy-oh-boy, that's the go-to curse word for superhero movies, isn't it? Also, if you don't care for Amber Heard, she's also all over this movie. I'll address that in a minute.
DIRECTOR: James Wan I can tell you right now. More than anything else right now, I don't want to be writing about Aquaman 2. I'm going through some self-loathing nonsense. I already wrote about a movie today. I want to shut down and play some Alan Wake 2, but I also know that --if I've done my job right --I'll have a plate of movies to write about on Monday coupled with a lot of grading to get through before the end of the quarter next Thursday. So here's to me powering through some writing that doesn't sound appealing to me at all. Here's something that will make this blog completely unrelatable. I'm the one dude who absolutely loathed the first Aquaman movie. With that perspective, you have to understand that I think that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is a big improvement. Now, is it a good movie? I won't go that far. It's still a rough film from my perspective, but I don't see the hate that it got from viewers. It's my last time to talk about the DCeU while the DCeU is still going, but it might come from the fallout of "What an odd farewell story". I get that. I get that some people really invested in the whole concept of a cohesive DCeU. I know that the Snyderverse fandom --potentially the most toxic fandom out there right now --really needed this whole thing to come together. I know that post-Snyder, there was this feeling of betrayal towards anything either DC or Marvel related. It was Snyder's vision or bust. Then there were the people who just wanted these DCeU movies to keep going. I was in the camp of what's happening right now. I wanted to let it die and to come back with a clean slate under a focused banner. For those people who said Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was bad because it's a weird foot to end up on, I kind of get that and even support that. It's a bummer when something you love dies an unceremonious death. For me, what made Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom completely watchable --if not great --was that it was a way more focused story that the first one. The first Aquaman was trying to do the entire mythology and canon of Aquaman in one movie. It didn't understand that there was a large gulf between complicated and complex. Golly, they touched on everything in that movie and all of it felt --pun intended --watered down. This is a straightforward movie. Occasionally, the way-too-many writers of this film through in a couple of light curveballs in an attempt to complicate the movie. Honestly, some of Lost Kingdom felt like it was trying to pad out a two-hour runtime. I also know that this movie got really butchered in some edits and reshoots. A lot of that comes down to the reviews and response to The Flash, which I honestly believe gets more hate than it deserves. Okay, Ezra Miller is a hard sell, but the rest of that movie is mostly fine. But Lost Kingdom, like The Marvels, is a simple story. I'll take a simple story done well over a complicated story that sacrifices gorgeous story for fan-service. But the problem is that Lost Kingdom, as simple of a story as it is, doesn't really do that one story well. It's not bad. I don't think it is a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination. Like I said, it kept my attention for the entire runtime. But there are so many moments that just feel like set-pieces and skewed logic. In terms of set-pieces, it's really weird how Orm's prison works. Orm is kept prisoner in the desert. I love that. Very smart. The guy is powered by water, so keep him water-starved. But his prison in the desert is right by the ocean. It's almost like we desperately didn't want to answer how to get an emaciated Orm from his prison back to full power, coupled with the broey moment when Orm hulks out and takes out all of his captives. But the biggest problem is that this movie is about reconciling Arthur and Orm. That's a cool concept and I absolutely love it. Too bad no one had a nuanced reason for putting Orm in this movie. Arthur's big problem is that he has to do something off-the-books. As King of Atlantis, he would not be sanctioned to investigate this problem that they are having. The Atlanteans are hesitant to have any kind of relationship with the surface world and this is a problem that needs cooperation with the surface world. Now, that seems like a problem that Aquaman would have to deal with. But his first and only suggestion to solving this problem is busting Orm out of prison. See, that doesn't scan at all. I get it. We need Orm out of prison so the brothers can be brothers again. I love the goal. It's just just the "how" doesn't make a lick of sense. I don't know why they need Orm for this problem. They are looking for Black Manta. Why would Orm know where he is? I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here. What ultimately happens in the movie is that Orm uses his knowledge of the seedier parts of the ocean to make a connection to get information about the location of Black Manta. But there are lots of people in Atlantis. Heck, Mera seems pretty knowledgable about these things. Where's her input? On top of that, Arthur Curry is really tied to the greater DCeU. From what I understand, Michael Keaton's Batman was supposed to be in this movie at one point. Again, the failure of The Flash movie may have had the studio scrambling. I can see a studio making knee-jerk edits to a movie to make everything that failed in a movie dowmn to a mathematical formula. It's what bad studios do. But there were so many other ways for Arthur to get the information or help that he needed and none of them made sense that you would bring in the old bad guy. (It's not shocking that it happens in a James Wan movie. That's what happens in every Fast and the Furious movie.) This whole tirade about how to get Orm into the movie is indicative of every other sequence in the movie. It's not that I hate Orm. (I mean, I don't love Orm, but I like the idea of this being a story about family and forgiveness.) There are so many scenes that are just meant to look pretty. At one point, on the island where Black Manta is, there is a jungle filled with giant creatures that are trying to kill them. Was it necessary that this island had giant creatures? Not really. These giant creatures never really came back into play outside of the fact that it created a fun and visual action sequence. Ultimately, this movie felt like scenes were only there to keep people chowing down on popcorn. You could set these characters anywhere and give them things to punch and it would be the same movie. Honestly, right now, I could put these characters in New Zealand fighting biker gangs and the movie would fundamentally have the same flow. Everything is only remotely related to the main plot of stopping Black Manta from freeing this monster who was pretty easy to take down. Yes, I kinda / sorta liked the whole global warming message. If you make an Aquaman movie without talking about how humans are ravaging the planet, you kind of missed the point of Aquaman. But like with the first one, there's nothing in the movie that was built on nuance. Instead, we're constantly fed action sequences to keep our attention. There are some lovely parts, to be sure. But just the constant conflict was hurting the more vulnerable, character building moments. Were they successful at bringing Orm and Arthur together? Sure. But could it have meant something more? Probably. Can I have a hot take? I love Jason Momoa. I'm almost tempted to say that we should give him any role he wants. But the hot take is that...maybe he's not the best Aquaman? I really want to like him in this role. I've been saying that DC needed to have the same fun that the Marvel movies have. Here's my own hypocrisy at work. If you were a hardcore fan of Iron Man before Iron Man came out, you might have been angry. Robert Downey, Jr. injected some perfect humor into that character. (See, how I wrote "perfect"? That's not fair or equal measured.) I know that Aquaman is not a great IP, but neither was Iron Man. It's just that it felt like Robert Downey, Jr. took the template of Tony Stark and made him snarky. In the comics, Aquaman is intense. He's way too intense. His personality is a big ol' grumpus. Namor and he have too much in common. While I love the idea of Aquaman being this giant of a man who can rock people when they go toe-to-toe (giving him some validity as a superhero), Jason Momoa might be having...too much fun? This is coming from a guy who crapped on the DC movies for being too serious. It's just that I think we need to pick our movies that are serious and which ones are fun. Superman, Flash, Guy Gardener, Shazam, those are fun time movies covered with the jokey-jokes. Batman, Aquaman, Swamp Thing? Those guys can get darker. Okay, let's talk Amber Heard. What am I supposed to think about Amber Heard right now? (What? I'm being honest. Apparently the wind has changed.) Last time I checked, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp were both terrible toxic people and that we were going to be done with them. Has there been an update? Amber Heard was all over this movie. Okay, here's me sounding that I want someone to stay cancelled and I'm not sure what I'm really saying. There are times when the actor overshadows their characters though. I had a hard time coming around to Mission: Impossible III because Tom Cruise was jumping on couches at the time. The same thing kind of happened with Amber Heard. I kept thinking that her scenes were done and then there was more Amber Heard. Mera wasn't a huge character in this movie, but they just kept bringing it back. Part of it came from the fact that Arthur's a dad in this one. But the one thing that really didn't get sold is the role of fatherhood. Parts of the movie were all about being a dad in the lightest way possible. But that story kept disappearing when it was convenient. The final beef I have with the movie was something that impressed me in the early DCeU. When Atlanteans were underwater, they looked rad. Their hair floated and it was super cool. Their hair still floats, but was I the only one who got the vibes that people's faces were just filtered onto their heads? It looked so weird at the time. I don't know. It's a fine movie. It's not great. I'm not going to miss the DCeU, but I didn't hate this movie outright. PG-13 and a lot of it comes from the first act. It's not like there isn't mature content in the later parts of the movie. But the first third has the absolute torture and forced prostitution of Fantine. Without going too much into it, there's also a very gruesome suicide at one point in the story. Violence and death pervades this story. It just has a lot, but it rarely feels manipulative. PG-13.
DIRECTOR: Tom Hooper I know that REAL Les Mis fans don't care for the movie. Maybe that's not absolute. Maybe it's just anecdotal. But it feels like the real Les Mis musicals find this to be some kind of abomination. Me? I love it. Like, I really love it. In fact, I kind of secretly love it more than the play...of which I've only seen once. Listen, I get that the voice of Javert is way more impressively operatic than Russell Crowe. And yeah, if there's a weaker casting...it might be Russell Crowe. But also, like, he's fine? Like, he's not terrible at what he does in this movie. Yeah, it's one of those things of comparison. I was also positive that I've written about this before. I've seen it so many times in the past ten years that it is unfathomable that I haven't written about it up until now. I tried linking the Les Mis blog to a reference I made in a previous entry and I was flabbergasted that I haven't done anything with this movie up to this point. So just be aware, I don't know where I'm going to take this. I teach The Count of Monte Cristo. No, I'm not going to show my class that movie. That movie is genuinely a perversion of the original book. (See my hypocrisy? I like the movie of Les Mis while the musical nerds love the play, but I won't play the movie of The Count of Monte Cristo.) I do so because, not only tonally and temporally are there a lot of connections between the two novels, but thematically and narratively as well. We do a compare and contrast thing with Les Mis and The Count of Monte Cristo. If I had infinite time, space, and patience, I would teach Victor Hugo's novel. But also, if you thought that The Count of Monte Cristo was a tank of a novel, Les Miserables puts it to shame. The thing about Les Miserables is that it might be one of those really rare perfect stories. Ironically, I didn't really care for it when I first saw it. I was late to come to the game and my wife's family was obsessed with this play. Me with my heavy weight of skepticism when it comes to obsession took a while to glom onto the story. They probably think it is a bit of blasphemy that I like Tom Hooper's version so much. I have a degree in theatre. I just proved that I do by spelling "theatre" with the "-re" ending. It's not that I don't love theatre. I really do. Ask my wife. My 40th birthday gift was seeing four plays in three days. I love them. But I also think that some stories actually lend themselves quite well to being filmed. I know that Tom Hooper is living under the cloud of Cats right now and that it is going to take a while to backpedal from that. If you want my opinions on Cats, I don't have one. I actively disliked Cats when it wasn't an abomination of a movie. They come out into the audience and no thank you. But Tom Hooper grasped the grandeur of the stage show and translated that as best as he could. So, I wrote this whole thing about how The Phantom of the Opera is kind of a travesty. I always considered that musical so spectacle heavy that it undermined an intimate story that could be happening. Les Miserables has its fair share of spectacle. It's why a lot of local theatre companies can't pull it off because it is a technical nightmare. Hooper refuses to let his version of the production to simply be a spectacle drive though. I mean, it is a spectacle. Golly, some of those shots. Jean Valjean tearing up his papers? But Les Miserables lends an emotional weight to a spectacle filled story. As much as some people remember the flag-and-the-ship or the barricade, that's all very nice. But this is one of those musicals where so much character is being revealed through song. Again, I read the Victor Hugo novel. It's a tank. It's not better than the novel (although it could be argued that I never want to read it again while I will watch Les Miserables annually without frustration). It's just that the use of song to explain the characters' inner monologues works better here than I've ever seen in musicals. The crazy part about Les Miserables is the French-to-English translation. I think I mentioned in Casablanca and The Grand Illusion that I get weirdly patriotic over the French National Anthem. Les Miserables hits a lot of the same beats for me. I am a big fan of protest rights and Les Miserables hits that need to be heard message pretty hard. The funny thing is, as emotional as I get over the barricade sequences, it might be some of my least favorite parts of the story. I'm a guy who adores Jean Valjean. I'm not the only guy out there who is mesmorized by this story either. Heck Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did their own homage to this story as well. One of the major reasons that I show this while reading The Count of Monte Cristo is that, despite both protagonists sharing similar origins, Jean Valjean goes left while Edmond Dantes goes right. Both men are able to redefine themselves in the face of grave injustice. But while Edmond Dantes finds value in the abject humilation of his antagonists, Jean Valjean uses his newfound wealth and anonymity to become the best man. Often, I'll lament that the world is a terrible place. I could quote Gandalf right now, but that would mean me Googling it and who has time for that in Late Stage Capitalism. What Les Miserables gets right is that it doesn't deny that that the world is a terrible place (hence, the name "The Miserable"). But instead of simply embracing the misery of existence and writing it off as an ending in itself, like The Bicycle Thieves, it stresses that mankind needs to be aggressively selfless in the face of evil. If we had to be critical of Jean Valjean, symbolized by lifting the flag and the cart on his back, he puts too much on his own shoulders. Fantine has every right to yell at Valjean because she's been through Hell. From her perspective, Valjean is culpable for her and Cosette's dilemma. He's not solely responsible, but his act of noninterference ultimately led her into the position she was in. But given the power of dramatic irony, we know that it wasn't so much that Valjean wrote off Fantine, but was almost unaware of this story as he was embroiled in his Javert drama. Yet, he still takes care of this girl. And the insane part is that he's trying to care for his pursuer for the entire length of the movie. Javert, who probably comes across as lawful evil a bit throughout, is so blinded by his own past and his own anecdotal experiences with criminals that he can't see the greater good and convoluted morality of his own actions. But Valjean keeps presenting him with reasonable requests. When he sacrifices his own freedom for the man misidentified as Jean Valjean, Javert comes full bore onto him. Valjean asks for three days to put right Cosette's home life. Now, we can demonize Javert here. Realistically, Javert has heard similar things before. But this continues throughout. Every time that Javert confronts him, Valjean offers a reasonable solution. He even offers to give himself up if he can just BLANK. In his own way, he's caring for Javert there. He knows that his own defiance of the law is an abhorrance to Javert and he wants to heal this man. Those final confrontations, he offers where he can be found. If Valjean knew that Javert was going to commit suicide, I wonder what his response would be. It's not that Valjean wouldn't turn himself in given the confrontations. It's just that there was always something incredibly pressing that required Valjean's temporary freedom. Like It's a Wonderful Life, we realize the value of one person to society. Unlike George Bailey who has a hard time seeing the forest for the trees, Valjean is only too aware of his responsibility for others. When the man accused of being Valjean is on trial, the true Valjean's concerns are for all of his workers who need employment. Never is it really for his own freedom beyond that initial choice to fake the death of Jean Valjean. It's this noble action. I need that stuff. I need the knowledge that our choices mean something. The world will be terrible and there will be a mass of people out there who are only looking out for themselves. But I do love that we have a character like Jean Valjean who is continually punished for his good deeds and his response time-and-time-again is only to escalate this notion of self-sacrifice. It's a beautiful story. Through and through. Each character has something they fundamentally believe in and they they explore it deeply. Even the Thenardiers, in their own way, break free of their caricatures at times and show their true evil beyond the jest. It's all great. I love complex characters and the world that keeps them all woven together. Les Miserables is just a marvel of a story and Tom Hooper crushes it. I know it was up for Best Picture, but I think some of the love for this movie has faded since its release. Yet, my students always seem to really dig it. |
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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