PG-13 for language, a funny scene with mild gore effects, and implications of potential sexuality without actually doing anything all that scandalous. Probably the gore scene is the one that might push this movie into PG-13. Yeah, I guess the language is pretty constant throughout, but it all feels mild. Oh, there's also a murder (again, a ghost is part of the title) and a bunch of attempted murder. Still, it feels pretty tame. PG-13 makes sense, but you could probably watch this with a younger audience.
DIRECTOR: Christopher Landon See? I told you I would watch this one! It just took me a minute to get to it. Okay, I watched this at the request of one of my former students. We're having an alumni get together to watch Psycho and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, assuming that I can stay awake that long. (Realistically, I can only handle one movie because I'm an old man with a family. Anyway, We Have a Ghost is definitely one of the movies of all time. Let me back up. I was warned that this movie wasn't amazing. There was complete disclosure that this student just really enjoyed this movie, despite the fact that it wasn't necessarily anything special. I, for some reason, really hoped that I would be moved by something with that description. After all, I'm the guy who rallied behind Flamin' Hot this year because it was a movie that caught me off guard. We Have a Ghost didn't do much for me. While I kind of enjoyed it for the first half of the movie, I was almost a little annoyed by the movie at the end. It's not like the movie really creates any cinematic crimes, per se. It's just that it's a movie that keeps escalating instead of turning inwards. That's not a problem because it's not like the movie does what it does by accident. Christopher Landon is starting to earn a little bit of a reputation behind his specific subgenre of horror movies. (It's really weird to call We Have a Ghost a horror movie, by the way. This is closer to Casper the Friendly Ghost than it is to Poltergeist.) While it seems like Landon does like horror and scares, he's far more interested in turning a genre on its ear a bit. He likes to laugh at tried-and-true formulae and I kind of appreciate him for it. But We Have a Ghost really gets its premise out of the way fast and never really looks back. Fundamentally, this takes the notion that it is absurd that people find ghosts scary. Don't get me wrong. Often, I find a good ghost story or a haunting story the most frightening of the stories, despite the fact that I don't believe in ghosts even a little bit. But Landon's kind of right. If we tend to follow lore and other ghost stories as canon, most ghosts are victims of horrible circumstance. Why would they be scary? Everything about the ghost narrative says that ghosts, when they complete their unfinished business, can move onto another plane of existence. Ideally, this would be some kind of afterlife. Cool. But ghosts in all of these stories are killers. What kind of closure are they looking for? In the case of Ernest / Randy (whom I will be referring to as Ernest because he's called that for the majority of the movie), he's just a dude who got the short end of the stick and never got to see his daughter again. That's technically the stuff of ghost stories. It's just that a guy who got killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time shouldn't be scary. He should just be...a dude. The odd thing was that, as much as the movie wanted me to bond with Ernest, I didn't. I don't know why. Maybe because I found Kevin far more interesting. I can't explain it. There's a movie about a guy being murdered and the fame that comes with being a ghost and I was interested in the kid who had no friends. (AM I THE KID WHO HAS NO FRIENDS?) Part of it comes from the idea that Ernest can't talk and can't remember anything, so Kevin becomes a far better avatar for the audience. Now, there's something I'm going to explore here that is both a compliment and a complaint, so bear with me. Kevin's story is interesting. Kevin has a lot of baggage with his character. He's a kid who absolutely adores his father and can't stand him. Kevin starts the film with a chip on his shoulder. I think we've all been programmed to love Anthony Mackie. There's a reason that he's the current Captain America. He's just likable. (Although I'm going to be really bummed when everyone says that he's not their Cap, mirroring the racism that the comic book predictred a decade ago.) But then we find out that Anthony Mackie as Dad is a bad man. The problem is...we are often told that he's a bad man and he's not often shown as a bad man. This B-plot is handled quite poorly. The movie is really afraid for us to hate Dad in this movie. We see him do awful things, but he does them in a charming way. Mackie does a really good job of having his character believe that he's doing the right thing, despite the fact that he's hurting everyone around him. Part of that comes down to how the rest of the family reacts to Dad's choices to exploit Ernest for personal gain. Kevin's the only one who is really mad about it. Mom is slightly annoyed at times, but can't deny the financial gains that have been coming to the family. So when the government (this movie really escalates, guys) decides to capture Ernest, Dad feels bad but no one really hates him by this point. It's just because Anthony Mackie is so darned charming.The movie just has a bit too much wholesomeness. It wants to give us conflict between father and son, but not so much that we can't forgive Dad by the end. What? You want me to argue that this movie is too wholesome? The movie's climax involves the real Ernest, who killed Ghost Ernest years ago, confront Kevin and his family. It seems like Real Ernest got away with it (You know what I mean, Vern?) That guy takes Kevin hostage with a gun to his head. (My moment of applause showing that the true threat to humanity is an old white man with a gun. We may continue.) Kevin elbows him, gets away. Dad tackles Real Ernest. But somehow, old White guy beats up (let me check) Anthony Mackie and leaves him incapacitated. Kevin gets away, but older brother Fulton also gets taken down by this septegenarian. A reminder: Ernest is holding a gun that he intended to use to kill this family because he thought that they knew his secret and that he might go to prison. Fulton is left unshot, as is Dad. What kind of killer is this? He keeps beating the people he's trying to kill and not killing them. I'm not saying that the Presley family should be killed. I want them to live. Again, I'm preaching the fact that Kevin is a likable character. But it's weird that he's not shooting all of them considering that he's holding a gun and they can't fight back. Do you know why? This movie is too wholesome. But the movie isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's just...silly. Ghost Ernest, for a guy who can't talk, is charismatic. The fact that America falls in love with Ernest is a little funny and also understandable. While the movie doesn't have a political message (shy of a BLM poster out of focus in one shot), it does kind of take down American obsession with social media. Sometimes, people are all about Ernest. Sometimes, they're really scared by him. The silliness, as fun as the movie is, does hold the movie back. I wanted to love Tig Notaro's character. The whole government thing is an ingredient too far. We just finished season three of The Bear and that entire ingredient needs to go. Simplify. There's too much stuff on that plate. Ultimately, the government stuff didn't go anywhere. There's an implication that Real Ernest had a tentative relationship with the government, but that didn't make a ton of sense and seemed odd that they kept nodding the eagle connection. (My takeaway was that Real Ernest didn't actually have anything to do with the government and that he just used the bust of an eagle to clobber Ghost Ernest over the head.) The movie kind of added the whole government plot to give the movie an action sequence and a car chase. Also, what was Kevin being arrested for? It seemed weird that Ernest getting next to a girl was enough for a warrant. The whole government thing? Remove this from the movie. Anyway, it's fine. I'm on a long string of "It's fine" movies. When you watch a lot of movies and you basically like everything, there's a lot of movies that you write "It's fine" about. I wanted to love it more, but there's just a lot of things that are done for silliness reasons. I'm probably going to watch a Bergman movie next, so we'll see how much I needed just a little silliness in my life.
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PG. If you are looking for one thing that will be an interesting discussion to have with your kid, it's going to be explaining puberty. Guys, we should be talking about puberty anyway, but Inside Out 2 might be the movie (or, may I suggest, Turning Red?) that forces that conversation to the forefront. But if this is a parent's guide to whether a movie is right for a family member, just remember that Pixar is really good at making us scared about the everyday coupled with making us cry a lot. There's stuff in the movie that is just scary, even though it might be hard to define why. PG.
DIRECTOR: Kelsey Mann Guys, you need to stop hyping me up for movies. I get such unreasonable expectations for movies that no movie can possibly live up to the expectations that I have for the film. Honestly, if the first movie didn't exist, this might be one of my favorite Pixar movies. But because the first one exists and I think that this one isn't as original as the first film, I honestly only have "meh" reviews for it. I acknowledge the following: "Just because a movie isn't as good as its predecessor, doesn't make it bad." So if you find me griping, just know that I liked it. Part of it is that I wanted this to be an unabashed exploration of puberty. I'm going to say, the first movie really teased that these were Riley's first steps into puberty. The movie ends with a "Puberty" button on the console. The trailers for Inside Out 2 show the Puberty button going off and Riley's brain getting wrecked. But really, that was all a device to get Anxiety to become the antagonist of the piece. I don't mind a movie that explores Anxiety as a concept. Heck, having Riley being a representative of teenage girls dealing with anxiety is also kind of brilliant. But I was promised this big, complex look at what it meant to be a teenage girl and I feel like we only got one facet. Don't get me wrong. It's a huge facet. It's a facet for every person. Note that I'm already backpedaling, thinking that my life will be ruined if I don't handle this with kid gloves. But this is a movie about anxiety and that's fine. I just found the movie to be hyperfocused instead of tackling all of the things going on. My frustration is that there is a pantheon of other emotions that have been introduced in the movie and they are wildly underrepresented. (I suppose the same could be said about the other emotions from the first film. Joy and Sadness are the MVPs. The other emotions are often used for comic effect.) But with the OG emotions from the first film, these characters are well-developed and stay true to their purposes within the film. With these new characters, particularly Envy, they often seem like minions as opposed to fully realized characters. Anxiety is the big bad. She's a dominant force. I'm very cool with that. But when you have that strong of a character, they can't just talk to themselves the entire time. So Envy, who is supposed to be the avatar of jealousy and greed, just echoes Anxiety. Envy isn't copying people. It's wanting what they have. And the thing is, we're huge The Bear fans. Ayo Edebiri is one of the best actresses out there. I wanted her to have this nuance and character and she's just this sounding board for Maya Hawke's Anxiety. That's not fair. But the bigger problem (again, I liked the movie) is that this very much feels like a sequel. Often, the task of a sequel is to bring people back into this world again. But the movie just can't be a carbon copy of the first film. It's this tightrope walk where you have to bring back the nostalgia of the first film (hey, there's Nostalgia!) and offer something new. I don't know how much new was brought into this film. The first film had Joy and Sadness booted out of the control room and having traverse the facets of Riley so that she could experience those emotions again. Because this is the sequel, they needed to up the same concept, so all of the emotions from the first film must now traverse Riley's personality to ensure that she can feel those emotions. There's some problems with that. The first movie established that emotions are complex. Often, we can have happy / sad memories at the same time. When someone is dealing with anxiety, they're often dealing with other emotions as well. If anything, we feel them more intensely. (Hence the console being hyper-sensitive to touch.) But if Anxiety locks up Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger, is Riley no longer feeling those things? While Anxiety can feel like a color of Fear (and that is discussed), Riley often finds herself angry at other characters. For the sake of sequelizing a concept, the story makes...less sense? This feels like I'm being incredibly picky, but the first movie does such a good job of explaining the complexities of the pre-teen mind that moments like this takes me out of the film. It was so well figured out in the first movie and this feels like we have to shut down part of what made the first one so well made to make this movie work. Now to undo everything I said. Inside Out 2 is actually a pretty great film. From a completely visceral place, Inside Out 2 mostly works. The jokes are great. I'm genuinely invested in Riley's journey at hockey camp. I kind of love that we don't have the insane stakes of the first film. The first film threatened to make Riley a homeless preteen. This movie makes us believe that not making the hockey team might be the worst thing that can happen to a person. Really, it imbues what is just a moment in time with such gravitas that we care for this character in the same way that the emotions really care for Riley. And I kind of love that the Inside Out movies are better advocates for mental health and care than anything else that I've seen. Anxiety is this compelling bad guy. Again, the best villains are ones that think that they're the heroes of the film. Inside Out 2 colors Joy as a flawed protagonist again. Let's talk about that for a second. Many sequels retcon the first movie and have the protagonist forget all of the lessons from the first film. Immediately in this film, Joy has grown as a character. Joy and Sadness are the best of friends. She's not blind to the fact that Sadness is kind of a mess. But Joy is working to better herself. But she's making all new mistakes. Do you understand how much of a pleasure it is to see a movie where the protagonist makes all new, yet logical, mistakes? Also, the hero's journey to defeat the villain is what illuminates the mistakes that the hero has been making. The best part? While Anxiety's issues mirror Joy's, it isn't a one-to-one thing. Instead, we see the maturity that Joy has experienced allows her to approach the issue from a different perspective. That's pretty cool. I wish this was a slam dunk. It's not fair that I have to come to a movie demanding a slam dunk. Instead, we get a very good sequel that runs into some sequel problems. I don't know why people are losing their minds over this one. My guess is that it handles the concept of anxiety extremely well, but doesn't really touch on the nuance of everything else introduced. Still, it's worth a watch. If I've done anything, I hope I've tempered expectations so you can just watch a very good movie instead of expecting a life-changing experience. PG, despite some crazy language and continued potty humor. Also, this is about violence that ends up killing people in mildly bloody ways. When you have to write about the offensiveness of a movie, everything kind of takes a different context. If I watched this as a kid, it probably wouldn't have raised any red flags, despite the fact that the protagonist is a really creepy dude when it comes to kissing women. There are a ton of consent issues that probably weren't addressed that often in 1978, so keep that in mind.
DIRECTOR: Wei Lo It's funny how these things work out. I plan to not watch that much stuff so I don't have to write too often and then I basically stack a bunch of movies in the same day. It's not like I was planning on doing that. I have this pretty intense regimen when it comes to watching movies while on the treadmill, so that seems out of my control.. (Spoiler: It's not.) Then we took our kids to see Inside Out 2, because of course we're going to see Inside Out 2. Then my wife says that we should show the older kids Labyrinth and, yeah, we absolutely needed to do that. (Although, she's watching it to make fun of it and I'm in the camp of "Let's enjoy this unironically." I'm always going to lose that battle.) Anyway, there's a lot going on in my life when it comes to this blog and I guess I'm going to write every minute of my vacation and never get around to playing video games ever again. You know what? I started Spiritual Kung Fu and I thought, "Now here's a serious movie." Just cinematography wise, it looks way more professional than Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, which is insane because it came out the same year as Half a Loaf of Kung Fu. And in the first ten minutes or so, I got the vibe that this was going to be a serious action comedy. (Serious action comedy is hard to define. It looked like it was going to go legit.) Then Jackie Chan starts peeing on ghosts and farting on people, with the response being "It stinks" and then I was completely lost. Is it a better movie than Half a Loaf of Kung Fu? I suppose so. I don't know. There's a plot that I can kind of follow. It seems a lot more focused. The twist at the end kind of got me. Okay, it only got me because I was not expecting there to even be a twist. Some of you are probably saying, "Duh, that's what a twist is." No, a twist is often a curveball solving a problem. See, I wasn't invested enough to even know that there was something I was trying to deduct... ...despite the movie constantly telling me that there was a traitor inside of Shaolin Temple. See, part of that's on me, but the other half of the problem comes from the tone of the film. There are movies where we're trying to piece together a mystery before it is revealed to us. But tonally, Spiritual Kung Fu is doing some stuff that is more in line with a screwball comedy than it is with a murder mystery, which I just realized this kung fu movie technically is. Part of my brain was often frustrated with the idea that there was something to unpack in this movie because I was focused on the wrong thing altogether. Despite the fact that there was a mystery of who was murdering the Shaolin monks, I was focused more on the most bananas motivations that I've ever gotten out of characters. See, the movie is called Spiritual Kung Fu because there are a bunch of ghosts (who it took me a while to confirm were ghosts. I thought that they were aliens based on that comet that hit the temple) who are trying to teach Jackie Chan's Li-Yiang this secret fighting style that is the only fighting style that can defeat another stolen fighting style. The bigger issue is that the movie doesn't really establish that ghosts exist in the universe. Maybe that is a cultural thing, but the movie starts off a lot more like a traditional kung fu movie. There's a problem that is somehow linked to kung fu and it takes a lot more kung fu to solve that problem. Out of nowhere, a comet hits the temple, revealing an ancient manuscript that will give Li-Yiang the ability to beat this other fighter. The weird part, beyond a comet coming out of nowhere, is that the manuscript is haunted / invested by wacky ghosts. Okay, the movie takes a hard right at this moment. But the movie is called Spiritual Kung Fu. I should have been ready for ghost kung fu masters who have wacky hijinks, right? Yeah, the reaction that people have to these ghosts make not a lick of sense. The movie, as convoluted and soap-opera-y as the beginning is, at least stays consistent with reactions. When the ghosts show up, character development and choices go right out the window. The initial monks who discover the ghosts are rightfully scared. I appreciate that. Then Li-Yiang goes to investigate the ghosts because he's a skeptic. The ghosts mess with him...and he's remarkably cool that his entire belief system should have been rocked to the core. No change in him. He sees ghosts. They mess with him. He's fine with that. Meanwhile, the ghosts move downstairs and mess with the monks down there. This is where the movie just makes no sense. For some reason, in some shots, the monks are terrified of the ghosts. In some shots, they're just wacky. One of the elders uses manuscripts to see the ghosts and the lower members think that it's funny to steal these manuscripts and see the ghosts? I don't know what the motivation behind these choices are. They were scared of the ghosts moments ago. When the elder uses the manuscripts to see them, it seems proactive towards getting rid of the ghosts. Instead, we start getting bits. I hate bits in Jackie Chan movies. They're there to buff up a thin script and I don't get these sequences. They're just too wacky for my taste. Anyway, Li-Yiang, immediately after fighting off ghosts and confronting them, sees the elder fighting the ghosts and thinks that he is drunk. It's like the filmmakers were just stuffing jokes into every moment, even if the jokes contradicted each other. But the rest of the movie, shy of the kissing fight sequence, is fine. I wrote about this earlier. It's a scene where Li-Yiang, who has never seen a woman, demands a kiss from the first one he meets. She fights him off. He escalates with his kung fu. Even worse, he has the ghosts teach him about better kung fu so he can claim that kiss from this girl, who is definitely not into it and he beats the crap out o her. Not a great scene. But if you can ignore this very uncomfortable bit that keeps going on for way too long, the action comedy afterwards is pretty watchable. Again, I waxed poetic about how Jackie Chan has a lot in common with Gene Kelly when it comes to choreography. There are some insane sequences in here and a lot of them. Honestly, and this is me really whining, some of the scenes are so impressive...but they go on too long. I hated that I was growing disinterested at certain points because I was overwhelmed with long and laboriously choreographed fight sequences. My biggest complaint, though, was the fact that the two plots were a bit disjointed. I was really happy when the ghosts got in on the final fight. It kind of cemented the two disparate plots into a loose singular plot. See, the ghosts stuff and the hunt for the Seven Deadly Fists didn't make a ton of sense. I didn't understand why Li-Yiang, who found this long lost manuscript, didn't share it with everyone considering the seriousness of the predicament that they were in. But he didn't. If the ghosts didn't show up to fight the bad guy, who was kind of amazing at fighting and was a way bigger threat than the guy who we thought was the Big Bad, then the movie just wouldn't have made any sense whatsoever. But still, there is a lot of movie where the ghosts don't even play a part in the story and it's just about kung fu. It's a lot of odd choices. Maybe my disappointment in this film comes from the idea that it looks so much better than Half a Loaf. I was earnestly invested in the movie early on and then it just spiraled into some very odd decisions. It's still pretty fun, but there are just so many weird choices made for this movie. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
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