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[charliejrogers]

TENET (2020) - Review & Analysis

It’s hard to write about this movie without spoilers… so… fair warning… spoilers ahead. Though they don’t start til like halfway through the review.

One of my friends recently asked, “So how was TENET.” My answer: “When I read about the plot after I watched it, my mind was blown.” Therein lies the problem. This is a classic, “It’s better the second time” kind of movie, something Christopher Nolan isn’t a stranger to (I lovingly saw Inception twice in theaters and The Dark Knight a whopping three times in theaters… and both countless times since). The difference is, both of those movies were great the first time around too. They just got even better with subsequent viewings.

My personal problem too is that with rare exception (and especially as I’ve gotten older), I don’t like watching movies more than once. While there’s too much out there that I know I’ll never see, I still want to do my best and see as much as I can. Therefore, I don’t put too much credence into “It’s better the second time.” If it’s not good the first time around, I don’t care if might be better the second time.

TENET continues Christopher Nolan’s fascination with toying with time. It’s a theme and gimmick that’s been a staple since his ground-breaking major debut with 2001’s Memento, but featured heavily in both 2014’s black-hole-time-warping space opera Interstellar and 2017’s timeline jumping war epic Dunkirk. In some ways, this is Nolan’s most straightforward manipulation of time, it’s just time travel. Here, the central conceit of TENET is that scientists at some point in the distant future have figured out a way to get objects (and people) to travel backwards in time, and to do so in real time. In other words, whereas in Back to the Future, Marty and Doc flash back from 1985 to 1955 in a millisecond, in the world of TENET that time-travelling would occur only after Marty and Doc wandered about Earth for the equivalent of 30 years’ time. And, importantly, during those thirty years, Marty and Doc would exist in the same plane and realm as all other “forward-time” people. They can even interact with the world like anyone else… just the interaction would be… interesting to say the least. The backwards-time person would appear to be moving in reverse from the perspective of the forwards-time person, and vice versa.

This idea leads to the most interesting part of the movie: the visuals and effects. Characters in the movie hold guns that don’t shoot out bullets so much as just absorb bullets from environments which travel with the same momentum as if they had been shot out of a gun. Bombs that blow up a building in the world of the forwards-in-time people, are experienced as fallen buildings that spontaneously reassemble from the perspective of the backwards-in-time people. The result is a movie in which the director clearly relished the opportunity to create little clever puzzle boxes of scenes. I’m sure there are countless of YouTube videos that will happily show you why this movie is a masterpiece, and I agree from a design and plotting perspective, it was satisfying to watch many of the same sequences (a car chase, a vault heist) from two perspectives (one forward-in-time and one backward-in-time) and to notice all the little details about how actions in one timeline ultimately affected the other.

That said, my head legitimately hurt as I watched this movie. As Clémence Poésy puts it in perhaps the movie’s most famous line, “Don’t try to understand it; just feel it.” I wish I could. The temptation to try to wrap your mind around what is happening on screen is too large.

Perhaps what most threw me off (and both impressed and annoyed me) is how it deals with the central paradox of time travel. Namely, what happens when you change the past… and can you even do that? To put it briefly, it tackles this subject head-on without trying to cut corners or introduce alternate universes.  Other films, like Avengers: Endgame address this issue by just explaining that each time characters go back in time and mess with the past, they are creating an alternate and parallel universe. This makes sense to me… as much as time travel can make sense that is. But the parallel universe solution means that truly whatever happened happened. The Avengers can go back in time and stop Thanos, but there will always exist a timeline where he wins.

This movie doesn’t subscribe to the parallel universe theory. It outright rejects my linear understanding of time and seems to subscribe to the same circular notion of time that was (not introduced but) made popular by the 2016 film Arrival. In this view of time travel, someone can go back in time and influence the exact same reality the live in. AND furthermore, the fact that one has traveled back in time makes it so that it has always been like this. In other words, traveling back in time erases any previous universe where one hadn’t traveled back in time. I think of it this way. Imagine someone poisons my Mom’s box of Cheerios. She dies. I manage to go back in time and throw away her poisoned Cheerios before she could eat them. In the Avengers view of things, my mom would still be dead in the original timeline, but I created a new parallel universe where she’s now alive, having never been able to encounter the poisoned Cheerios. In the TENET view of the world, by travelling back in time to throw away the Cheerios, I effectively undo the fact that my Mom was ever in danger. Though I as a time-traveller may remember my harrowing Cheerios journey, she has no memory of the experience since I went back and prevented that reality from ever happening. What this does mean though is that as soon as I time-travel far back enough to get rid of the Cheerios, there are now two of me in the world. There is one who time-travelled and one who is unaware that his Mom was ever in danger. Time-traveller-me now cannot simply return to his home and normal life… as the other-me is living his life unaware that time travel was ever necessary (creating a Prestige-like scenario where maybe the time-traveller is better off just offing themselves, and honestly I wouldn’t have minded Nolan retreading themes from that superb movie).

It’s that last part about the time traveller being unable to return to his old life that marks the biggest difference from time travel in the vein of Back to the Future. In the Back to the Future model, after throwing away my Mom’s poisoned Cheerios, I can zap back to the moment in time I initially decided to time travel, and insert myself back in the correct time (technically there could still be two of me... but we’ll ignore that for now). However, in the TENET model, you cannot “zap” back to the future. The only to go back to the point when you first went backwards is just to live that amount of time. That’s why two of the same person will have to essentially co-exist. And since the movie stipulates that two of the same person cannot come into contact, the time-traveller is likely to live a life of exile.

It’s the sort of head-scratcher that makes sense on paper (and hopefully I clarified something for someone), but when watching this stuff play out on screen it made for a very unsatisfying movie. WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! We as the viewer are used to seeing things as they unfold in real time. What this movie doesn’t allow us to see are the countless times various characters fail to do something and going back to undo their mistakes. Instead, we are experiencing the new reality created by past timetravellers, unaware (til the end of the movie) that they were previously realities that were erased (or prevented from coming into existence). We learn at the end of the movie that our Protagonist (John David Washington who’s cleverly named just The Protagonist… ugh) is actually the founder of the elite, global para-military force called TENET which is designed to thwart efforts by the future to erase the past. Setting aside how illogical the future’s plan is (something which the movie acknowledges… which doesn’t necessarily help matters), the reveal that The Protagonist is the original founder of TENET means that there’s a whole lot more to the plot we don’t see in the movie. The original Protagonist clearly had a long life with life events that were very different from what we see in this movie. Namely and most importantly, he at one time lived in a world without TENET. Presumably, the initial Protagonist discovers the future’s scheme and fails to stop it. In order to undo his failure he goes back in time to form TENET. In doing so, he completely erases the TENET-less reality he had actually experienced. And interestingly, the Protagonist involves his younger self in his plan for the eventual of TENET. So as I said, the Protagonist we follow in this movie is NOT the original Protagonist, but instead one who lives a reality that was manufactured by an older version himself.

What I think is crucial, (and maybe I’m dead wrong here, who knows?) but at the end of the movie when it is revealed that the Protagonistis the founder of TENET, it is implied that our Protagonist (the one we follow in the movie) will go on to do the same acts as his prior self (namely, as an old man, he will travel back in time and found TENET again). But I don’t think this is true, and it’s here I think the movie approaches time travel in a unique way. A figure has already founded TENET, so there’s no need to do that again. What’s happened, happened. In essence, the Protagonist we see at the end of the movie is free to do whatever he wants. What’s happened has already happened and the TENET-founding Protagonist has already done his thing.

What I like about that is that it avoids the weird, paradox circular shit that infects time travel fiction. Take the third Harry Potter, for example. Harry is about to get destroyed by Dementors until a Patronus spell is fired. As we discover later in the movie, it was actually Harry who cast that spell. But how is that possible? If a future Harry is the only way to save Harry… then how does he get saved the first time? Maybe there’s an alternate reality we don’t see where Ron saves Harry last second and Ron dies so Harry goes back in time to prevent that reality from happening and we just never see that. Regardless, it’s a large plot hole that is unexplainable. What I give credit to Nolan and co. for is crafting an incredibly complex time travel tale that avoids any obvious plot holes and time paradoxes. We are left with a fairly intelligent piece of science fiction. Also it doesn’t chalk it all up to, “aliens think and speak in circles so time is circular”… you know that bullshit that Arrival pulled.

That’s more than I intended to write about the plot. The point is, as I said at the beginning, reading about and discussing the plot is superbly interesting and hats off to Nolan and crew for putting it together.

Watching the plot is a different story. Nolan is needlessly confusing in this picture. The fact that reading about the story offers a great deal of clarity should be a red flag. Not that every movie needs to or should be clearly understandable immediately… but it shouldn’t be so confusing that your head hurts.

I think the most disappointing thing is that I would be willing to set aside the confusing story for the pleasure of some well-choreographed, mind-bending action sequences. While the previously mentioned car chase is one such sequence, the grand finale invasion/battle was (for me) incredibly hard to follow. Shot to show two simultaneous operations, one team moving forward, one moving backward, I had no fucking clue what was happening.

And then once we start to actually think about the characters and humans who make up this story… it’s clear more work went into designing the action/set pieces than in developing the characters. I hated… HATED John David Washington’s performance as the Protagonist. He was written to sound like a quick-quipped, witty, charming Bond-like hero, and this just isn’t the movie for that. Though a former CIA agent, he’s not in a spy-thriller. And when the dialogue isn’t a showcase to show off how witty our hero is, it is just an excuse to explain boatloads and boatloads of exposition. I’ve become a real stickler as of late for how films do this. Classically, films use a newbie character as a stand-in for the audience as an excuse for other characters to explain the particulars of the world to them. It’s a little trite, but it’s perfectly functional. What isn’t functional is what this movie does. Half of the dialogue is the The Protagonist meeting someone and them asking him a question like, “What do you know about this Russian base?” and the Protagonist responding, “That Russian base? Well it’s… blah blah blah” and proceeds to talk for a minute answering the person’s question exactly. They reply, “Correct.” And the movie proceeds. It just doesn’t do much to make me care about any characters.

And then, yes, we have to talk about it, the way Nolan’s film deals with its lone female character, Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). She’s the wife of the film’s villain, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Brannagh, doing his best impression of a Eastern European maniac since the last time he did this for 2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit… which admittedly he does a good job of). The men in this film just don’t give a shit about this woman. But that would be OK if the movie was honest about this, or in particular made the Protagonist feel guilty about how he uses Kat, discards her, and gets her unnecessarily involved in her husband’s affairs. If you can’t tell, I hated the Protagonist, which is never a good sign when watching a movie. I didn’t much like Washington in BlacKkKlansmen either, so maybe he’s just not my guy. In both movies, he seems to have a confident swagger about him that doesn’t match the characters he plays.

Robert Pattinson is in this movie too. He’s good. I don’t know. Nothing special here from him. He doesn’t detract from anything, but he’s not a great addition. Same goes for the performance from Debicki. Branagh as the villain is good. He’s a good actor even if his beard/facial hair just looked off the whole time. Maybe a larger make-up budget would have helped? At least he was an interesting character, even if deeply flawed and the movie goes a bit too far to make him sympathetic.

So it’s not the complete mess that some people say it is online, and while I understand and appreciate and really like the complexity of the plot and time travel mechanics on paper… they are certainly not a joy to watch. If you do watching, then be prepared to do boatloads of mental gymnastics or just resign one’s self to not understanding what’s happening. While I’m happy to hand-waive some shady plot points or time paradoxes from a movie, when the whole movie is a time paradox, that becomes hard to do. Alas, this is still the best Nolan film for me since Inception, but still a far cry from the highs of his 2000s run of The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception. If some of the character moments were better developed, this would have been a better film. Instead, really, don’t try to understand and just be awash in this time-loopy, messy, but clever film.

**/ (Two and a half out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - Review & Analysis

Here’s a non-controversial statement: 2017’s Wonder Woman is a legitimately great film (if you discount the last act’s boring battle). A fun, yet emotional anti-war tale with a great period aesthetic. What elevated it from greatness was its starkly bleak reveal that Ares does not start man’s wars, but he merely gives humans ideas for how to instigate them. Ultimately, it is Man who holds responsibility for our own destruction, and despite this Wonder Woman still chooses to help us poor creatures. Cool themes, cool hero, cool movie.

Wonder Woman 1984 shares the main character from its 2017 forerunner, as well as its dedication to recreating a particular period aesthetic (here the 1980s), but the brilliant writing from the first film is gone. The main themes are essentially… “be careful what you wish for” and “winners never cheat; cheaters never win.” Not the most grand and interesting follow-up to the prior film’s genuine insight into human nature.

But that’s OK. I’m really not sure why this movie is getting so much flak online. If DC’s recent prior history with filmmaking should have taught us anything, it’s that 2017’s Wonder Woman was a fluke. Remember that this is the same studio that brought us the outstanding climax to Batman vs. Superman where one grown man learns that another grown man’s mother is also named Martha. Oh, and did we all just forget that Justice League is one of the worst movies we have all collectively ever seen?

So let’s not be too hard on WW84 for not meeting the quality of 2017’s Wonder Woman. Few comic book movies can. In the more fair comparison to other movies in the DCEU, it sits below Shazam! and Aquaman, and just a smidge below Birds of Prey, but certainly above Suicide Squad, and then literally leaps and bounds over every other movie they’ve made.

Let’s start with the good. Honestly, despite my gripes about the themes of the movie not being very profound, I found the story to be interesting. The movie centers around Diana Prince (Gal Gadot in her role as an archaeologist for the Smithsonian and not as Wonder Woman) stumbling upon an ancient stone whose inscription invites people who hold the stone to make a wish. No one takes it really seriously at first, so two people make wishes without thinking they could come true. The first person is Diana herself who wishes to bring her boyfriend (whom she only knew for about a week, mind you) from the dead. As a reminder from the first film, her boyfriend Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) had died nearly 70 years prior to the start of this film in a dramatic, sacrificial, world-saving act. Apparently, Diana hasn’t moved on at all from the 1910s and still considers her short-time lover to be her forever lover. She’s not really a human and did not grow up a human, so I think we can forgive her for not moving on… but it is weird to imagine that Diana somehow works at the Smithsonian (without going to college? Or did she?) without developing any friends or interest in life. Wouldn’t she have moved on... like a little bit?

Anyways, she wants her boyfriend back, and that’s wish #1. Wish #2 comes from new character Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig… who I am shocked to find is 47 years old! She looks fantastic and far younger in this film). Were Barbara a man, the way she is treated by her colleagues would put them in the stereotypical role of a future school shooter. Barbara is a brilliant gemologist for the Smithsonian, but goes completely unrecognized for her brilliance. She is shy and unconfident, and subsequently people frequently forget that they have even met her. Add on to that the fact that she has to work in the same office as Wonder Woman, and her loneliness and subjective feelings of unattractiveness increase as male employees drool over Diana while they ignore and mock Barbara. Therefore, we would forgive her for having a chip on her shoulder. Yet, for all this, Wiig avoids playing her as an angry, emo goth. Barbara kinda has this air about her of “Well, this is just how life is, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.” Given the character’s lack of self-confidence and lack of social grace, it at times seemed like Wiig was just reprising her old SNL character, Penelope, the socially awkward one-upper. But that’s not fair to her character. Wiig portrays Barbara with an earnest goodness to her. She’s one of those people who when allowed to talk one-on-one proves to be more eloquent and interesting than you could have imagine. Far from being angrily envious of Diana’s confidence and beauty, she’s more sadly jealous. Naturally, then, she wishes on the stone to be more like Diana… unaware that this wish might have some unintended benefits.

But then, there’s a third key character to the film (and a third wishmaker), the main villain Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal). I cannot tell you if this was a good character or not… and I cannot tell you whether the imperfections of the character are more due to the film’s writing or Pascal’s performance. Lord is another loser, and like Barbara, his “loser” status is the result of being a victim of America’s prejudicial attitudes. But whereas Barbara fell victim to sexism, Lord falls victim to racism. Hispanic in origin, Lord grew up in America with an abusive father at home and racist classmates at school. Beaten down from an early age, all he wants in life is to make a name for himself, to prove he’s not a loser. In a clever twist, Lord (the person who originally ordered the wish stone to come to America before it was confiscated by the FBI and sent to the Smithsonian for analysis) does not simply use the stone to wish for riches and power… he wishes to BECOME the stone. That way, he can get nearly infinite wishes so long as he can con the people around him to wish things for him.

The scenes of Max Lord as a flawed human who just wants to not be a loser show Pascal giving a great performance as a human being at the ends of desperation. The scenes of Max Lord the supervillain are… not good. In a long string of over-the-top, eccentric, hyperconfident supervillains in countless superhero movies, Pascal’s Lord is just not interesting. In fact, he is literally a weak character. He cannot fight for himself as his body is crumbling (a side effect of wishing to become a stone). Furthermore, his initially grounded motivations to finally be respected and successful seem to be just utterly lost by the end of the film when he just wishes for world chaos… only then to turn around and declare undying love for his son. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Failure to understand a character’s motivations casts a shadow over Barbara’s character arc as well. It is explained that the wish stone takes something in return for granting someone their wish. So as payment for bringing Steve Trevor back to life, Diana loses some of her strength. Still… this strains to fully explain why Barbara, after gaining Wonder Woman-like strength, turns into a walking humanoid cheetah (complete with bad CGI like she walked straight out of the cast of 2019’s Cats.) Like I get that she lost some of her humanity and morality in exchange for strength… but Cheetah girl seems like a little much. And though initially it is fun to see Wiig get to play Barbara as a confident and sexy woman who fights back against the patriarchy, the movie (I think) unfairly pushes her into the villain role. In my opinion, she should be treated as a tragic character, something akin to a Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, as her villainous tendencies are not really her fault. She literally had the part of her that cares about other humans taken away from her when she naively and innocently wished to be like Diana. Instead, the movie has Diana lecture her that she shouldn’t be so evil. She literally can’t, lady! Stop being so hard on her! In any case, it seems like a failed opportunity to generate sympathy for a genuinely likable character who tragically becomes a villain not through her own accord.

That failure to create genuine emotions extends to Diana’s story as well. As soon as Steve is resurrected, you know by the movie’s end he will be dead again. There’s no other way this movie ends. Yet, the fact that Diana is so stubborn in refusing to give up Steve makes it hard to sympathize with her. She is simply being selfish, making her eventual decision to say goodbye to Steve feel more like her finally doing the right (and obvious) thing, and not some heartbreaking decision. Also the fact that seemingly Diana hasn’t even tried to move on in the last seventy years doesn’t help matters for me: it more just feels like a lazy way to write in Chris Pine’s popular character into the second movie. The move certainly weakens the idea of Diana as a strong, independent woman by making her emotionally stunted and crippled for the last 70 years. It would have been a much more satisfying (and daring) choice if Diana had moved on from Steve emotionally and had to deal with the guilt of having brought him back by accident, particularly if he didn’t want to go back to being dead. Instead... Steve knows he has to go back and Diana feels no guilt keeping him around. It’s weak character writing.

These poor choices I contrast with two of my favorite TV shows that demonstrate perfectly how former lovers who miraculously reunite eventually have to say goodbye for good: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jane the Virgin. For risk of spoilers to those still watching Jane, I’ll stick to the Buffy example. There’s an episode of Buffy (though technically an episode of the spin-off show Angel) where Buffy and her vampire lover Angel are fresh off their recent and tumultuous break-up, but through some dark magic that neither seeks out, they are given the opportunity to live a life where Angel isn’t actually a vampire and their love can be fully expressed. Yet, in the end, Angel opts to give up his life as a human and return to being a vampire. The choice is so moving precisely because (due to circumstances I cannot begin to explain) in choosing to give up his life with Buffy, he saves her life as well. Whereas in this movie, Diana choosing to let Steve go is really just her choosing to undo her choice to essentially cheat death. Angel, however, is actively choosing to give up a life of happiness he never wished for but was just given on a silver platter, and will now live in a world where his lover will never know his selfless act and will go on hating him. It’s heartbreaking in a way Wonder Woman dreams it could be.

And not to get too Buffy-heavy… but that show also deals with the emotional consequences of being ripped out of the afterlife much better than this movie. Steve just kinda unrealistically adapts to being alive again in all of five minutes. If, perhaps, from the start he questioned why he was there and hinted to Diana that something was wrong, the emotional aspect of this story, the doomed nature, the feeling of “this is the last chance we’ll have together” could have made this a stronger movie. I wanted to find myself crying when Diana finally says bye to Steve, and I was no where close to that. Gal Gadot shares at least part of the blame. She’s a pretty wooden actress. It’s something I noticed in 2017’s Wonder Woman, but in that movie she was supposed to be a fish out of water so her stilted presence seemed appropriate. Here, where she’s supposedly become an assimilated American for 70 years… it is just bad acting.

Anyways, another aspect of this film that was lacking were the visuals. The bad CGI of Barbara as Cheetah is just scratching the surface here. The opening flashback to Diana as a girl performing in the Amazonian Olympics just… looks fake. I don’t know. The reliance on CGI over practical effects is clear and distracting. It’s only worse in the subsequent scene where Wonder Woman stops a theft from occurring in a mall. The effects are just bad. Like passable for a film in the 1990s or early 2000s. But for a 2020 blockbuster, it’s noticeably bad. And already the scene where Wonder Woman is running towards the camera with a weird green screen behind her seems to have become a meme given just how weird it looks.

And yet, for all the negatives I’ve listed, this is a decent action flick. There’s even some nice set pieces like the one in the White House. As little as I liked Max Lord as a supervillain, I found figuring out the other half of each of his various Monkey Paw wishes (i.e. the downside of each wish) to be clever. unfortunately, each of the main three characters fails to have a story line that takes full advantage of their emotional potential, or they are just poorly acted. With few exceptions, the film eschews “fun” in favor of “seriousness.” Really the only exception is, as in the first film, the chemistry between Pine and Gadot. Their chemistry makes for some of the movie’s best moments, like when Wonder Woman makes the plane they’re flying in invisible and the pair flies over fireworks on the fourth of July. But that sense of whimsy in their scenes is largely absent from the rest of the film. This is particularly true of the action sequences, especially those at the climax. The seriousness makes them rather boring. Really, I’m comparing these action scenes with the last half hour or so of Birds of Prey which really set the bar for superhero movie fight choreography. So in the end, it’s overall an OK movie. It certainly isn’t as bad as others make it out to be, but I cannot believe I’m saying this… in 2020 if you’re in the mood for a fun superhero movie, you’re better off with the Suicide Squad sequel than the Wonder Woman sequel.

**/ (Two and a half stars out of 4)

[charliejrogers]

Soul (2020) - Review & Analysis

See? 2020 wasn’t so bad. We got TWO Taylor Swift albums AND two Pixar movies! I joke. 2020 still sucked. Still, it is pretty notable to be getting two Pixar films in the same year. Last time that happened was in 2015 when we got Inside Out (what I thought was a masterpiece) and The Good Dinosaur (and I will die on the hill that more than a visual stunner it was a good movie too!) This year we’ve already had what I consider the functional equivalent of The Good Dinosaur in Onward, a very good, but ultimately light adventure tale of brotherhood. That means my expectations for this film Soul, from Inside Out’s director Pete Docter (also the director of Monsters Inc. and Up) were unfairly high. This was to be the year’s Pixar masterpiece.

It certainly tries to be. It’ a heavier film than Onward, deciding to tackle more existential questions like... “is there a point to life?” and “how do we avoid living a meaningless life?” You know… the stuff you usually see in kids’ movies. And while I am a big proponent of Pixar and recognize it is unfair to call their movies “kids’ movies,” the magic of their films usually derives from their ability to appeal to adults and kids alike. Though I love Inside Out dearly, I know it wasn’t a huge hit with kids, so it will never remembered as fondly as say Wall-E, Finding Nemo, or the seminal Toy Story . I say this because… I’m not even sure who this film is meant for? I really cannot imagine a child enjoying this film, but I’m also not a child so I won’t hold that against the film.

As an adult, however, I only moderately enjoyed the film. What it definitely has going for it is the beauty of the animation. I think The Good Dinosaur was probably still prettier, but that’s only because nature is prettier than city streets. This movie is drop dead gorgeous with environments sometimes indistinguishable from photographs.

Furthermore, the world of this movie is really, really interesting and creative in a way only Pixar could make. Well… sort of. A lot of the film is just our world, New York City to be precise. The movie tells the story of struggling, middle-aged jazz pianist Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) whose day job as a junior high band teacher pays the bills but doesn’t feed his soul. He’s only there at the behest of his mother (Phylicia Rashad). If not for her, Joe would be out there every day auditioning for gigs, trying to make it big and (likely) starving from want of work (though certainly not for want of talent). She’s more elated when Joe gets news he’s being made a full-time faculty member than when he gets a chance at a once-in-a-lifetime gig

But as fate would have it, that gig was what he’d been waiting for his whole life, his chance at the big time, the chance to play alongside a modern day legend, jazz sax player Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). He’s so excited when he gets the gig he can’t keep his eyes on traffic and inadvertently keeps getting himself into danger. Eventually, in his distraction, he actually falls down an open manhole. And he dies.

Yes. You read that correctly. Joe dies like 10 minutes into the movie. It’s really rather jarring tonally, and I feel like his death isn’t made dramatic at all. Something more impactful would make his inevitable resurrection all the more special. This is a studio that made me cry three times in 10 minutes when I first watched Up… they could have done something more here. Instead, the death just happens and we clip along to the next scene. This slightly rushed pacing continues throughout the film and is ultimately my biggest complaint with the movie. For something that tackles very big and heavy themes, it never really gives them time to breathe.

Anyway, the film then starts part 2 of 4. With Joe dead, we now see his soul alone in a vast black nothingness, standing on a bridge towards a bright light (what is referred to as the great beyond). Joe isn’t ready to die – he was just about to have his big break! So he manages to escape from the bridge to the Great Beyond into the world of the Great Before. It’s here that Pixar’s creativity gets to shine the most. The Great Before is the land in which personalities are born. Big Picasso-esque extradimensional figures (all inexplicably named Jerry and all with New Zealand accents) serve as guardians of the little, uniformly blue souls as they go through the “You Seminar” where they engage in various activities in order to become who they will eventually become. The Jerries usher the souls into various pavilions (including selflessness and insecurity as well as self-absorption!) in order to create all of our unique personalities. Apparently, the film sides hard on the nature side of the nature vs. nurture debate.

But the most important part of the seminar is pairing these newly developing souls with a recently deceased soul as a mentor. Together the two are supposed to work together until they find the developing soul’s “spark.” Once a soul gets their spark, they are ready to head to Earth and start life. Some people get their spark, i.e. their inspiration to live, from hearing about their mentor’s great life achievements in “the Hall of You” (mentors runs the gamut from Archimedes to Mother Teresa). Other souls get their spark from time spent in “the Hall of Everything,” where souls can try out various Earth hobbies and find what they will eventually love most in life (whether that’s painting, acting, or in Joe’s case jazz piano).

It’s a clever conceit, and I very much enjoyed my time spent in the colorful world of the Great Before. The movie gains its primary plot here when Joe (who isn’t supposed to be a mentor and should just be on his way to the Great Beyond) gets confused with a recently-deceased, world-renowned child psychologist and accordingly is assigned to be the mentor for a particularly difficult-to-inspire soul, referred to only by the number 22 (Tina Fey). Mentors have tried and failed to give 22 their spark for thousands of year. Ultimately, 22 just doesn’t get the hoopla about Earth and rather just enjoys the routine of their “non-life” in the Great Before. However, they and Joe make a deal. Since whenever a soul gets their spark, they get an Earth pass, if 22 gets their spark, they agree to give their pass to Joe, allowing him to return to his life and allowing themself to stay in the Great Before forever.

That plan doesn’t work. Instead the pair find some “shamans” in a desert within the Great Before who try to perform a resurrection ritual for Joe. This was probably the most creative aspect of this film’s plot. Shamans, mystics, or just serious meditators on Earth can actually have their souls transcend into the spiritual realm, allowing them to interacts with the other spirits who are permanently in the spiritual realm, like Joe and 22. I make special notice to include “serious meditators” because the main mystic/shaman is Moonwind (Graham Norton) who finds zen and therefore access to the spiritual realm by being a sign twirler on a street corner in NYC. But what I love about this aspect of the movie is its explanation that not just serious meditators can transcend to this realm, but actually any human can. Any time anyone gets “in the zone,” like when they get lost in playing music or basketball (or in my case doing physics problems), their soul can transcend up to the spiritual realm. The shamans are only in that they are aware of and can interact with that new reality; the rest of us are not.

However, in a fun, if a little too on-the-nose aside, the main job of the shamans is to return lost souls to Earth. Lost souls aren’t dead, they just belong to people who have become so addicted to something (e.g. greed) that they become soulless while living. The lone example the movie gives is of a hedge fund manager whose soul they manage to return and who subsequently quits his job. I’m sure there are nice hedge fund managers out there… so this joke fell flat for me even if I found the concept intriguing.

So the shamans perform their resurrection ritual. It goes predictably poorly as we’re only maybe 35 minutes into the movie and it can’t end yet. So we enter part 3 of the film where, because of the botched ritual, Joe’s soul inadvertently gets put into a cat and 22’s soul into Joe’s body. The rest of part 3 sees Joe and 22 try to put things back together. All the while, 22 by being in Joe’s body gets to finally experience real life on Earth (including their first experience of the human senses including tasting pizza). They find that they like Earth a whole heck of a lot, finding greatest pleasure in the smallest of things: a leaf falling from a tree, conversation among friends, a child’s hand being held. Plus, by being a naïve soul trapped in an old soul’s body, 22’s interactions with Joe’s family and friends (while Joe looks on in cat form) grants Joe an almost It’s A Wonderful Life type experience. 22 says and does things with Joe’s voice and body that he might never dream of saying, but the result of 22′s fresh take on life is the creation of new and genuine connections with those around him in ways he never had previously.

Of course, it’s not a kid’s movie without some sort of villain. While on Earth, Joe and 22 are being hunted by Terry, another extradimensional figure who serves as the Great Beyond’s accountant. Terry’s not so much a villain as he is a semi-comical plot device. While I appreciate that this movie eschews a true “villain,” I feel like Terry did little to add to this movie’s already very lacking sense of dramatic tension. I would have been perfectly content if they just added more horror and dread to Joe’s sense of loss of life.

Eventually, Terry manages to track down the pair and bring them back to the Great Before where, to everyone’s surprise, 22 somewhere along the way found her spark and now has a genuine Earth pass! She’s ready to live... and for once she’s excited to. That is, until Joe insists that 22 doesn’t deserve the Earth pass (i.e. to live) since they only gained a spark by being him and being in his body. In other words, 22 just got to copy Joe’s spark. So he takes 22′s Earth pass and rejoins life. He even realizes his dream and plays an absolutely outstanding show with Dorothea Williams!

And then feels empty. Earlier in the film, back in the Great Before, Joe got to see his “Hall of You,” that exhibit of his life, and he looking at his life so far decided that if he really stopped living that his life would be meaningless. He worked so hard for one thing for so long (to become a career pianist) and he never got it. Well, flash forward to the end of the movie, having now finally reached his dream, and Joe realizes it didn’t give him the payoff he thought it would. His life still feels empty. I appreciated the film’s quoting David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is water” speech even if it felt a bit hackneyed, and ultimately it serves as the movie’s message. Life isn’t about the big moments; it’s about what’s all around us. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” John Lennon once sange. Life is the stuff that made 22 so happy… the stuff that gave 22 her spark. She didn’t find a purpose or meaning when she was down on Earth that gave her a spark, she found a joy in falling leaves and conversations.

So with that realization, Joe returns to the Great Before, finds 22 and gives them their Earth pass back. Joe had in effect robbed 22 of the ability to live, and in the end undoes his harmful. But with only one Earth pass between the two of them, if 22 is to live, Joe must prepare for the Great Beyond. Now if you’re expecting to cry somewhere in this last part of the film… think again. As I said earlier, the film kinda clips along through these various story beats, not giving them time to be fully explored to the satisfaction of an adult thinker. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I didn’t feel much of a connection to either Joe or 22. so despite big moments of sacrifice and love, no tears came to my eyes. It’s not that either is unlikeable, but neither is particularly charming.

Some of it, I think, lies with some less than stellar voice acting on the part of Jamie Foxx. I don’t know. Some of his parts just felt phoned in? Tina Fey is adequate as 22, but not a stand-out. And I’m willing to concede too that the movie, the first in Pixar’s canon to focus on a Black character, may not have been made with me a white guy in his 20s as the target audience. Still, I’m not sure that race is particularly relevant to my dissatisfaction. I more think the film’s philosophy is a little jumbled, or maybe I just disagree with it. It seems to tells us that there’s no meaning to life and that the important part of life is enjoying the small things… but that’s a little naïve to say the least. Yes, trees are beautiful and music sounds good, but the movie shies away from the fact that life sucks for so many people. Like so many people. I’m sure poor and beaten down people will not feel comforted if you tell them that living is worth it because falling leaves are pretty.

But at the same time, I don’t want the movie to have argued that every person is “meant” to do something. In fact I think that idea is bullshit, and I like that the film denies this degree of determinism. If you can’t tell, I’m more on the nurture side of nature vs. nurture. But still by creating this world where souls are fully formed individuals prior to incarnation and to deprive them of a purpose feels… well soulless. Though, potentially bleaker, it feels more honest to just say we’re born as a blank slate, in a world devoid of meaning than to say that we are born fully formed into a world devoid of meaning. I would argue the later (and what the film argues) to reflect a darker, crueller world. Especially after watching a show like The Good Place which managed to so creatively and adeptly develop an entire moral philosophy that was relatively easy to understand and was largely agreeable... this feels lacking.

So yeah… I just couldn’t connect philosophically with this world, the film tackles bigger themes than its kid-friendly world seems fully capable of tackling, and despite beautiful visuals, it lags in the sound department, making it hard to really relate to these characters. I know it will find an audience because it’s a superbly made film set in a creative world with a unique premise, but that audience just isn’t me.

**3/4 (Two and three fourths out of four)

[charliejrogers]

Miracle on 34th Street (1947) - Review & Analysis

What a weird, wonderful movie. Miracle on 34th Street is quite possibly the oddest Christmas movie I’ve ever seen. In part this is due to the fact that some stuff just doesn’t age well. How many old, strange men are you willing to let your seven-year-old daughter hang out alone with, Ms. Doris Walker?! But also it’s weird because because despite its typical Christmas-movie themes of faith/belief, true love, family, etc… it’s a wholly unique film that doubles as a legal drama!

This was my first viewing of the perennial classic, a film which started as a story by Valentine Davies and was adapted for the screen and then subsequently directed by George Seaton. Though baptized a Roman Catholic, Seaton himself grew up in a Jewish neighborhood of Detroit. He even had a bar mitzvah. I wonder how much of Seaton’s upbringing affected the final product we see. The central theme of holding faith in something that doesn’t make sense to those around you probably resonated strongly for the director who as a kid who became interested in a religion that was foreign to both of his Swedish immigrant parents.

From a direction standpoint, it’s fairly by the books and of its time, with a few notable exceptions, one being the opening credits sequence which shows a lone man walking slowly about the NYC streets from behind. He’s dressed in all black and we have no idea who he could be. He could literally be anyone in the world. Then all of a sudden, like magic, his face is revealed: the man we’re following is Santa Claus! Or, at least it looks a whole lot like him. What is Santa Claus doing in New York? Is this even Santa Claus?

These are questions that end up being central to the movie and just straight up never get answered. I loved that writing choice. The writing is the first of the film’s three big stars. This film won the Oscar for both best story and best adapted screenplay and it deserves every ounce of those awards. The story is so sublimely clever. Put shortly, the movie is about a man who claims to be Santa Claus and due to his uncanny resemblance to the jolly holiday figure, his natural aptitude for talking to children, and his almost savant-like knowledge of toy stores in Manhattan, he gets hired to be the mall Santa for Macy’s flagship Manhattan store. However, not everyone is as convinced that he is the real Kris Kringle. Certainly the Macy’s company psychologist does not. An uptight and unpleasant man, he (like others) thinks Kringle is utterly delusional but (unlike others) he also thinks these delusions presage future violence whenever inevitably others may challenge Kringle on this delusion. The psychologist thus schemes to get Mr. Kringle committed to *cue thunderclaps* Bellevue!

What ensues is a legal battle. I can’t imagine any other Christmas movie whose climax ends in a courtroom but it’s an incredibly satisfying thing to watch. We have the idealistic lawyer, Mr. Fred Gailey, who believes that Kringle, while clearly delusional, poses no actual threat to the community and actually does the community a great service in spreading kindness. Nevertheless, has to prove that Mr. Kringle is legally THE Mr. Kringle lest Kringle spend the rest of his life in the looney bin. Note… I have a very healthy and “modern” view of mental health, and would never use the term “looney bin” to describe today’s mental health hospital… but I use the term here because the images we get in the film of Bellevue’s inpatient psych ward are of sedated men in all-white clothing… in other words the movie certainly thinks of being in a psych ward as a looney bin, which adds a bit of dramatic tension to the story.

There’s certainly some not-so-subtle condemnation of psychology going on this movie (at least of the kind practiced by the Macy’s psychologist, Mr. Sawyer (a snivelling Porter Hall)). This was coming at a time when increasingly science was taking the place of religion, so it makes sense that psychology would be an enemy in a movie about faith and clinging to things that don’t make sense. The trial over the existence of Santa Claus almost serves as an inverse Scopes Monkey trial; Kringle even ironically compares his lawyer to Clarence Darrow, the lawyer on behalf of science.

What this movie nails so absolutely perfectly is that honestly… I don’t know if Kringle really isn’t Santa Claus. I’m not claiming that Santa exists in the real world, but in the world of this film, it’s really not obvious whether the film leans one way or another. That’s an ambiguity that tends to make art shine when it’s present. We see through Gailey’ legal maneuvering that the legal defense for Santa Claus’ existence is tenuous at best. At one point he calls the prosecutor’s child to the witness stand to argue that Santa Claus must be real since that is what his Dad (the prosecutor) has always told him. Therefore it seems like the film’s psychological explanations are probably the most likely. Yet at the same time… when a little Dutch girl comes to see Santa at Macy’s because she can “just tell” he’s the real Santa… why else would Kringle know Dutch songs about Santa off the top of his head? Why does an old man who lives in an old folk’s home on Long Island know so much about Manhattan’s toy stores?

And then there’s the more practical questions about Santa lore. Why is Santa in New York? He says he was born in the North Pole… so why did he leave? If he’s real, then why does he need to direct parents on where to buy the best toys? Is it merely that the world has outgrown him?

There’s also a whole economic piece of the script that I won’t even fully touch on. But basically Kringle in attempt to do right by parents, doesn’t merely recommend toys from the Macy’s toy department, but lets them know about better deals on toys that are located in stores elsewhere in Manhattan, including those that are rivals of Macy’s! This policy is such a hit with customers, it ushers in a revolution in department store policy, with department stores across the nation vying to extend more goodwill to customers. As I said, there’s something in there about the power of the free market and how capitalism doesn’t have to be evil... but I’ll leave it there and return to the central questions of the film. Like... does Santa Claus exist?

I don’t know! But the film raises really interesting questions and just leaves them there for us to sit with. Everything that the film tells us points us to the common sense conclusion that this man is NOT the genuine Jolly fellow… yet we want to believe there’s something more and that’s what makes this film so special. We literally as the audience go through the same mental charades as the characters in the film.

Thus far, I’ve attributed this brilliance to the plot, but there’s another absolutely vital element: the performance by Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. This guy deserves every ounce of his Oscar for his performance. There’s not a second that he’s on screen that he doesn’t ooze charisma and charm. This whole movie would fall apart were it not for him, good plotting be damned, since we need to believe, even for mere fits and flitters, that this man is Santa Claus.

Never is he more convincing than when he interacts with children. There’s the absolutely magical scene with the little Dutch girl I mentioned above, but it’s when Kringle chats with little Susan Walker (played to heart-melting perfection by nine-year-old actor Natalie Wood whose got a stink face that never ceased to make me chuckle) that this movie achieves greatness. Though the trial scenes put the theme of faith vs. psychology at the forefront, the real heart of this movie is the conflict of faith vs. practicality. Little Susan is raised by her mother (and her Black nanny/house-caretaker who gets depressingly little credit… or screentime), and her mother Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) is a thoroughly practical women. She’s a high-up exec at Macy’s, and seemingly one of the only women to be in such a position. As such, she’s a unique character for her time. Rigidly pragmatic, she eschews any and all attempts at fun and imagination for her daughter (as well as for herself). We get the sense that a different film, a different story, might dive deep into Walker’s struggles as a single mother in the 1940’s trying to be taken seriously in the business world. In a sense, she’s a forerunner to Faye Dunaway’s character in Network. She was clearly hurt by romance in the past (she and her husband divorced, which I imagine was rather scandalous at the time), and this fear of getting hurt by romance is what compels her to teach her daughter to avoid the stuff completely.

Clearly, there’s some cool gendered stuff going on here. Imagination, romance, faith: these are all things that are stereotypically more female-coded, while business, pragmatism are more male-coded. You inherit your father’s name but your mother’s religion as the old tradition went. And in our society at least, the latter (pragmatism/business) is supposed to make you successful and get you places… the former (faith/romance) does not. Yet in this movie, we have idealism and romance of our male lawyer Fred Gailey (John Payne) and the pragmatism of our female businesswoman Doris Walker. It’s a fun play on typical gender norms, but more interesting is to see how this duality plays out in the development of little Susan under the dual influences of her mother and the combination of Misters Gailey & Kringle.

Natalie Wood goes down in the pantheon of all-time great child actors, up there with the kid from Kramer vs. Kramer. She’s precocious but not in a way that’s off-putting. The way she evaluates the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in such a matter-of-fact way is hilarious, and as I mentioned the stink eye she gives Kringle when he tries to tell her that he’s Santa is nothing short of perfect. Over the course of the film, we see her more harsh nature melt away and she becomes a kid. It’s a beautiful reminder of that childhood only comes once in a lifetime. If this movie shows us nothing, it’s how hard it is to maintain a sense of levity once one becomes an adult. We have to start worrying about what our bosses might think, what the press/public might think, what voters(!) might think. Never again will it be fully OK to have your heads in the clouds and believe in nonsense, so why take that away from children.

As much as this is a perfect film, I could have done without the romance plot. Mostly because it seems unnecessary. Doris seems to change in her attitudes towards Kringle and towards raising her daughter that constitute enough character growth thata having her all of a sudden fall head over heels for Gailey just seems forced. For that matter… Gailey’s a weird dude. This movie romanticizes a weird, creepy type of romance where Gailey spends time with a small girl just to get time with that girl’s mother. Walker and Gailey are such opposites and share no on-screen chemistry, that I just didn’t buy the plot.

But that’s OK. It’s a small blemish on an otherwise wonderful film. It hits different emotions than, say, It’s A Wonderful Life, but it’s magical all that same, and one that I can actually imagine children wanting to watch. It’s unceasingly clever plot, matched by a once-in-a-lifetime performance by Edmund Gween as Kris Kringle and a great child actor performance from Wood make this a must-see movie for any holiday movie fan.

***/ (Three and a half out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

Paddington (2014)

Sometimes you watch a movie and want to be challenged. You want your head to explode. You want to get lost in a world of plot twists and double-crosses. Other times you don’t. TV more often than movies fills the role of comfort food for people looking for passive media, but let’s all take a moment to recognize the power of a good comfort movie. Sometimes your comfort movie is that dumb rom-com you’ve seen 1000 times, other times a mindless action movie of good vs. evil. Many comic book movies certainly can fall into this camp, but really any series like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings can become comfort food whenever those fans begin to think of the characters more like old friends than avatars on a screen. And never is that more true than when a childhood friends makes their way onto the big screen.

I don’t believe I have ever read (or has someone read to me) a Paddington book. In fact, after writing that sentence I had to Google whether Paddington was a series or a single book. I’m not from the U.K. so please excuse my ignorance. It’s not that people in America don’t know Paddington he’s just not as popular here as he is across the pond. Therefore when this hit theater six years ago and I heard critics rave about it, I didn’t get it. Christ, it was even nominated for the best British film at the BAFTAs in 2015. There was Paddington, a family movie about a walking, talking bear, right next a serious drama about Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and the very adult ScarJo sci-fi film Under the Skin. Plus, think also I was at an age where I was “too cool” for kid’s stuff. I was in college, so why watch a movie that could make you happy when you could watch something that could project to others how smart you thought you were. All of this is to say that, I went into this movie without the advantage of nostalgia, something I suspected might have been boosting audiences’ and critics’ scores.

Paddington from director Paul King tells the story of one unnamed Peruvian bear who is among the last of his kind. What makes this particular species of bear so special is their uniquely high intelligence. The film starts with a black-and-white film reel documenting the journeys of the explorer who was the first among men to stumble upon this particular subset of bear, sometimes back in the early 1900s. The explorer first instinct is to hunt and kill the bear to bring back to a British museum, but he is eventually won over by the sheer intelligence of the bears. They are already master builders and have developed unique, modern-looking housing structures when the explorer first finds them, but quickly he discovers they can understand English,  can even reproduce it to some extent, and are adept at new technologies. The explorer leaves them with a phonograph and a record of him talking about how to be a proper gentleperson in London.

Fast forward some hundred years, and the original two bears the explorer essentially perfected their understanding of English based off the explorer’s record. They also know quite a bit about early 20th-century etiquette and about a hundred different ways to tell fellow Londoners that it is raining outside. And though now aged and frail, they have passed much of this knowledge onto their young nephew whose character can be summed up by the following four traits: 1) undying love for his aunt and uncle who raise him 2) utmost and strict adherence to etiquette 3) deep desire to belong to a home 4) obsession with marmelaide.

All four of those things turn out to be of vital importance when disaster strikes his home in Peru and he is forced by his aunt to seek a new home in the only other place they know: London! With only his uncle’s hat and a marmelaide sandwich on his head, the bear stows away on a freighter to London. He heads to the nearest train station as he has heard stories about how during WWI, orphaned children would show up to train stations wearing certain necklaces to signify their need for a home. The bear does just that, but the world of 1914 is very much different from the world of 2014. People don’t so much as look at the bear. If they do, they assume he’s a poor beggar, vendor of cheap goods, or just a plain con-artist. They’re too busy rushing this way and that. “In the age of technology, Britain has lost its way” the film seems to suggest. Or, more cynically, it seems to make a comment (albeit) on xenophobia and Britain’s lack of openness to immigrants, especially prominent given the distinctly colonial feel of the explorer’s documentary and his attitudes towards these “primitive” creatures.

Except, of course, this is a light-hearted family film. A fantasy film at that. For example, no one is freaked the fuck out like they would in real life by a talking bear roaming around a major metropolitan area, in some cases doing serios damage (albeit accidentally) to various property throughout town. E.T. this is not, so there’s no plotline of the government trying to snatch him up for research purposes, nor does this apparently talk place in our reality where the bear would become an instant viral internet star.

Instead, as a family film, the movie mostly focuses on the idea of “family.” The bear is eventually approached by Mary Brown (Sally Hawkins), the matriarch of the Brown family who are a well-off family who live in a cozy townhouse in a quaint London neighborhood. Mary is more empathetic to the bear’s plight than her ill-tempered husband Henry (Hugh Bonneville) who is a risk analyst who sees the bear for what he is: a risk! Still, he begrudgingly agrees to let the bear, who names himself Paddington, stay with them for one night, but then he’s off to the orphanage  institution for young souls whose parents have sadly passed on.

Mr. Brown’s not wrong about Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) too. Despite his undeniably genuine nature and complete absence of my ill-will, he’s a natural klutz. His childlike innocence and curiosity finds him tinkering with things that just ought not to be tinkered leading to a movie defined by its many great misadventurous set pieces, such as when Paddington accidentally floods the Brown’s bathroom to when a pickpocket accidentally drops a wallet that he stole and Paddington begins chasing him around London in grand fashion, not understanding why the thief doesn’t want his wallet back.

More than anything, though, Mr. Brown’s hostility towards Paddington stems more from his concern for his children, specifically that his son Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) will end up being hurt either as a direct result of Paddington’s activities or will simply try more daring things inspired by Paddington’s free-wheeling and wild spirit.

What I love about the character of Mr. Brown, who truly seems to be the secondary character after the titular bear, is the way he is a true character and not a one-dimensional rule-follower. The way the film (comically) demonstrates that Henry Brown was not always Mr. Brown, but was a motorcycle-riding Wildman who was suddenly and permanently changed by fatherhood makes him an incredibly relatable character, and grounds this silly cartoon in something of a reality.

Less can be said about Mary Brown. Sally Hawkins does a wonderful job portraying her seemingly boundless kindness and love, but ultimately there’s not more to her character than just being nice and kind. Her only story arc revolves her relationship with the Browns’ daughter Judy (Madeleine Harris) who is a stereotypically moody teen who doesn’t want to introduce her boyfriend to her Mom because, as Paddington puts it, “she suffers from a terrible disease called embarrassment.”

But no one’s watching this movie to watch the Browns or learn about their characters. It’s nice that Mr.’s character is so well-established as it makes his little sacrifices and gestures to try to help Paddington so satisfying. One second he was pushing to get Paddington out of his home, the next he’s in a dress breaking into an archives to learn more about the explorer who originally visited Paddington’s aunt and uncle one hundred years prior.

This little detour to the archives relates to one of the two other sub-plots to the film. The first is how Paddington’s quest to find a new home (since Mr. Brown refuses to let him stay with his family forever) leads him to want to find the explorer (or at least the explorer’s family) since he figures they of all people would love to take in as family a bear whom their father had so loved. The second subplot (and the more hackneyed and boring plot) deals with Nicole Kidman’s Millicent, a deranged, taxidermist employee of London’s Natural History who has a nasty side hobby and collecting (and stuffing) rare animals. She hears rumors of a talking bear, she starts to hunt him. Kidman actually does a very good job leading a cartoonish seriousness to the role, but just the whole subplot feels very perfunctory, like the studio was afraid no one would want to watch a movie that didn’t have a clear bad guy. Add in a sub-plot to this sub-plot where the Browns’ sad-sack neighbor Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi) teams up with Millicent in the hopes of being her lover, and you got my least favorite part of this movie.

Taking away the villain plot would deny the Browns the opportunity to rescue their little friend from the jaws of danger, and prevent me from seeing that tear-jerking display of love with which the film ends, so I suppose it’s worth it. With snow falling around them and love in the air, Paddington with its focus on the importance of family, is almost a Christmas movie, or at the least is a perfect movie for the holiday season.

It’s also funny for all ages. I can imagine sitting in a theater with children and hearing the little cackles of children as Paddington fights a shower head using a toilet seat lid as shield and toilet brush as sword. The film does not go for easy jokes. Its physical comedy is often elaborate, and there are plenty of jokes meant for the adults in the room that aren’t necessarily sexual in nature. For example, the Browns’ daughter is learning Chinese “for business,” which means she’s learning phrases such as “How do I get to the business center?” and “I’m being investigated for tax fraud.” But more than anything, it’s a distinctly British film in its humor, favoring throw-away lines and sight-gags over fart jokes. One of my favorites in the idea that Millicent’s office is full of taxidermied heads of exotic animals, and when she walks into her workshop on the other side of the wall, we see all the rear-ends of these same animals. Another pitch perfect moment is when a downtrodden Paddington finds himself at Buckingham Palace and having revealed the sandwich he keeps under his hat for emergencies, we find out what things the Queen’s Guard keeps under their Bearskins. It’s silly and ridiculous in a way perfect for a kid’s film.

I also love how the film gives us a view of the world through Paddington’s eyes, and I give much credit to the film’s director Paul King for translating for us through film Paddington’s essential innocence. Twice, once towards the beginning, and once at the end, the film presents us with a toy-house that is an exact replica of the Brown’s home and we can actually see the Browns walking about and interacting in this odd meta-moment as Paddington narrates their goings on and provides his interpretation of what is happening. It lends an air of frivolity to our lives. Yes, the world is sad an hard, but for those innocents, the children, it’s a world of wonder and curiosity, a dollhouse in which anything is possible.

In the end, this movie is damn near perfect comfort food. It’s family focus creates a heart-warming tale that helps tries to inspire us that, despite our splintered isolated world, the world can be a place of love and welcoming. I wish the villain weren’t such a drag, but I am happy to report that despite not having any contact with Mr. Paddington in my life previously, I fell in love with his character almost instantly and am very happy to count him among my cinematic friends and follow him on any of his next adventures.

*** 1/4 (Three and one fourth stars out of four)

[charliejrogers]

This poem will end the way it began

This poem will end the way it began.

Like a palindrome Except not at all. So don't expect anything so clever. But of course, it's clear the poet certainly thinks they are being clever.

Still, this poem will end the way it began. So why even read until the end? "Because the journey may prove meaningful." What journey? You're reading a fucking poem. Some people wouldn't even say this is a poem. It doesn't rhyme. Other poets might try to make a rhyme at this point. Just to be clever. Don't expect anything so clever. But of course, it's clear the poet certainly thinks they are being clever.

But seriously, the poem will end the way it began. Stories are either lines or circles, But this poem isn't advocating for one or the other. It's barely a poem and certainly not a story. It's just ending the way it started,  So don't expect anything so clever. But of course, it's clear the poet certainly thinks they are being clever.

This poem will end the way it began. Each stanza has ended the same way too. It wasn't planned that way. The poet just wrote the first line and went from there. Why I am writing in the third person? The "poet" is I. That's not a poetic way of saying that sentence; It's just grammatically correct. Still, you might suspect that this whole thing was planned out. I'll be incapable of convincing you otherwise. I agree it feels manufactured, But I assure you there's no deeper meaning, So don't expect anything so clever. Just words on a screen. I ended this stanza differently. How "clever."

This poem will end the way it began. But I'm debating whether or not I will stick to my promise. It would certainly make meaningless a lot of what I wrote if the central premise of the poem turned out to be False. Or would it actually become "greater." Would this poem become "challenging"? "Subversive"? It already reads like a goth kid's wet dream, Why not go for the full beans, End it differently than it began? I'm scared too. I meant to write "to,” But I suppose "too" works there too. Ok, I suppose that little word play was clever, But I promised nothing too clever So am I now justified if I choose to end things differently? I'll enter the canon of unreliable narrators. And if I do end how it began, The fact that I broke my promise to not be clever by showing overt cleverness, Well, it will just make this a bad poem, Which of course many will already say this is, If many even read this far, If anyone even reads it at all. If someone just reads the first line and nothing else The poem will be true For them. For you? Who fucking knows where this is going? This stanza is significantly longer than the other ones. There's no significance to that, Except for the fact that I'm having trouble figuring out How to end things. Well now that makes it seem like I'm writing an allegory about death. I'm not. I just don't like when lines go on too long. But now you think it's about death. Fuck. I started this poem because I felt like being clever, And I think I succeeded at the start. But now I'm thoroughly out of ideas And have no way to satisfactorily end this poem. To end with the first line seems cliché To end with something else would also be cliché. I wish I could print this on circular paper. It would be a real "fuck you!" to structure Because then poem would never end. I'm sure you didn't need me to mansplain that to you. But now I've typed it and it's not going away.

Whatever. I'm bored of writing this. I thought I'd feel more triumphant at the end. There's no glory in being clever for clever's sake. So, I give up and won't try anything more clever for the end. After all I said from the beginning there wouldn't be anything so clever, So I'm sorry about that "to" and "too" wordplay part. Anyways, here's the ending, as promised:

This poem will end the way it began.

[charliejrogers]

Klaus (2019) Review & Analysis

I remember recently discussing with my fiancée how, though there have undoubtedly been a number of Christmas movies released in the last twenty years, none have really risen to the level of a “classic” – something you would want to watch every year as part of a tradition. It’s true I have not seen it, but still something tells me that 2008’s Reese Witherspoon vehicle Four Christmases is not on anyone’s annual watchlist… nor 2017’s Mel Gibson-infested Daddy’s Home 2. We concluded that the last “classic” was 2003’s Elf. And, while Christmas movies don’t have to mention Jesus or religion obviously, please don’t try to tell me that Frozen is a Christmas movie… it’s not! In some ways, given how secular things are, I began to wonder if there even was a market for holiday family fun movies, but of course, I’m an idiot because you can just make a whole movie about Santa Claus. Move over, Jesus, we gotta talk about the reason for the season!

Klaus released last holiday season on Netflix and at least in Chicago I saw billboards for it everywhere. Netflix went all in on promoting this as the next big Christmas movie and had some moderate success; they even grabbed an Oscar nom for best animated picture. Unlike most animated films these days, Klaus was made by neither DreamWorks nor Disney, and it shows. It lacks the refined polish of a Disney/Pixar feature, but also has a heart unlike a DreamWorks picture. The animation style can be best described as a hybrid of 2D and 3D (yet not quite 2.5D). At times the character models look like classic hand-drawn 2D models set within a mostly computer-generated 3D environment. But at other times, they look more 3D. It’s confusing to describe, and inconsistent to watch. It often felt like I was watching a compromise between a studio that wanted a distinct animation style but didn’t have the budget to fully realize it. Still, more often the not it’s a pretty movie.

More than the raw visuals, the movie has a fantastic sense of atmosphere… perhaps even too much at the beginning. Klaus is, in one sense, the story about how a lonely woodsman becomes the legendary Santa Claus, but for such a jolly premise, much of the film is shrouded in shadows and dominated by an oppressive, cold, snowy bleakness. In retrospect, this makes sense as the true triumph of Santa and “Christmas spirit” can only be best appreciated when it brings light to the darkest of places and times. Still, upon first viewing, I was quite surprised and shocked by the dark atmosphere and downright violent imagery on display at the beginning of the film, so much so that I was wondering if this really was a Christmas movie!

The darkness stems from the fact that our woodsman Klaus lives deep within the forest on a far north island, far far from the closest village which is a town called Smeerensberg and is famous for its never ending feuding and wickedness. It’s a genuine Nineveh of the North so it seems. The town’s feud centers around two rivalling clans (the film’s equivalent of the Hatfields & McCoys) and every villager belongs to one clan or the other. The two families’ feuds go back longer than anyone can remember (cave paintings exist that depict their feud), implying an original sin of sorts with the town being more born from hatred than spawning it. Hatred is so foundational that it infects every part of society. Unwilling to allow children to interact with the rival clans in classrooms, children just don’t go to school. Instead, they roam the streets playing pranks on old people and stabbing snowmen with carrots.

For the most part, Klaus lives his life separate from and unbothered by these unruly residents of Smeerensberg. What breaks his solitude is the arrival of a new post officer to Smeerensberg. More than a trivial side character, this post officer, Jesper Johansson, is surprisingly the main character of this movie all about the origins of Santa Claus.

Much like the residents of Smeerensberg, we the audience come to the film with a primary misunderstanding, much of what makes Santa famous today (the home invasion via chimney, the responding to letters, the reindeer-pulled sleigh) were the creative inventions of a spoiler-brat-turned-postman. So despite this movie being about the origins of Santa Claus, being a Christmas movie, you should have guessed that this will be some variant on Dickens’ classic tale. Jesper isn’t a classic Scrooge in that he doesn’t abhor Christmas, but he is self-absorbed, materialistic, and all-around not a great guy. He’s the spoiled son of a successful postal worker who controls a postal empire that looks more like an army. (The true fantasy of this movie has nothing do with sleigh bells and stocking stuffers… it’s the idea that the post office is a well-organized, well-respected, successful enterprise.) Anyways, recognizing his own son’s worthlessness, Jesper’s father decides to whip him into shape, ship him off to the God-forsaken land of Smeerensberg with an ultimatum: Jesper must process 6,000 letters from the town of Smeerensberg in a year or else be cut off from his father’s wealth. The problem? With how ugly the feud is in Smeerensberg, no one needs to write a letter to express their feelings when a cold snowball to the face (or worse) will get the point across quite clearly.

So now with the spoiled postal heir longing for silk sheets as he tries to survive out in the cold boonies, the movie gets a hint of the Emperor’s New Groove flavor… sans llama. It is only by sheer “chance” (we’ll get to that) that when Jesper visits the woodsman in a last ditch effort to find one person on the island who wants to send a letter, a piece of paper falls out of Jesper’s bag as he flees in horror of the woodsman (we’ll get to that).  This piece of paper contains a drawing that a little boy made of himself locked in a high tower looking sad. In a very humorous scene, we had seen Jesper accidentally stumble across this drawing and then unsuccessfully try to scam the boy into giving him money so that Jesper could “mail” it back to him, rather than just give it back. Regardless, recognizing the little boy’s suffering, the woodsman decides to do something about it and enlists Jesper’s help. Luckily for the children of Smeerensberg, the woodsman has a barn full of toys. Yes, “a barn full of toys” is as creepy as that sounds and the films uses that creepiness to full effect when Jesper first meets the woodsman. The large, imposing, hooded, axe-bearing woodsman is far from the jolly fellow we know he is destined to become. He’s downright scary and given how violent the town of Smeerensberg is (Jesper almost dies when he first arrives because he’s tricked into ringing the war bell which sends the whole town into violent frenzy), we and Jesper are not wrong to assume the woodsman holds only ill-intentions. Essentially, the first meeting with the woodsman is supposed to be something akin to the reveal of the Beast in 1991’s Beauty & the Beast, a film so scary it sent my then two-year-old sister running out of theater in tears. Ultimately, I can’t speak for the mind of a child, but the tension for me here is certainly lessened by the fact that… well… we know the woodsman is Santa Claus. So even though Jesper is scared shitless and flees after meeting the woodsman, we know that there will be more to their story.

Still, even if not necessarily scary, the film does successfully shroud the woodsman in mystery, and his backstory is slowly and beautifully revealed throughout the film. I won’t spoil it here, but the script does a fantastic job of contextualizing the woodman’s stoic and aloof nature and explaining why that barn is so full of toys. The explanations come naturally and speak to a real human pain that I was not expecting from this film. In terms of emotion, the woodsman’s backstory almost reaches the opening montage to Up. ALMOST, I said, so put down the pitchforks!

So Jesper and the woodsman team up to deliver a present to that first child from the drawing. Or more accurately, the woodsman throws Jesper down a chimney to deliver a present while the woodsman looks on. The ensuing scene when the boy opens his present brought tears to my eyes. The woodsman (and we with him) watching the pure joy of a child receiving a present is truly nostalgic in its most literal sense. It hurts to see such joy, remembering that at one time you too could feel such joy from a hunk of plastic, and knowing you will never feel that way again. It’s a joy that few films outside of A Christmas Story with its the red rider BB gun really nail. Anyways, the little boy sees the woodsman through the window and finds his original drawing of himself locked in the tower which the woodsman leaves behind by accident. He surmises that the postman had devliered his drawing to the woodsman, and the woodsman responded with a present.

After that… well the rumor spreads wildly of the mysterious woodsman who comes down chimneys at night to give presents to children in response to letters. Now, the once dormant post office becomes a bustling hub of activity as children from all over flock to send letters to this Mr. Klaus. Kids even beg to go to school so that they can learn to write in order to get presents (much to the dismay of the disilliusioned teacher who long ago gave up on her dreams of teaching in a town where no child goes to school and had turned to being a fishmonger in order to pay the bills and one day afford to leave the town for good).

Gradually the children, who seemingly had no toys prior to Klaus and Jesper’s escapades, now joyously play together, regardless of which clan they belong to. Initially this upsets their parents greatly, but in the end it’s hard to really hate the parents of your children’s friends. The film promotes an age-appropriate and inspiring, if fanciful and naïve, notion that all the world’s problems would be solved if we all thought like children. As by spreading joy throughout the town, Jesper and Klaus inadvertently make the town a better place to live. It’s the theme of the film (not that they’re subtle about it): one act of good-will always begets another (or something like that). Still, all this doesn’t please the village elders, who abhor the change from the town’s hateful origins. They will ultimately serve as villains trying to put an end to all this gift-giving business.

Of course, there’s another villain of sorts, as well. Despite all the good he’s doing, Jesper is ultimately still motivated mostly by the notion of getting back to his old cushioned life. He is essentially using Klaus and preying on his kindness in order to launch himself back to a life of selfishness. It’s here the story feels most Dickensian, particularly in a scene where the school teacher (now love interest) acts functionally the same to the ghost of Christmas present and takes Jesper to the city center to see for himself the love and joy that he has helped bring to the world. But, still his desires to go home are strong, and, of course, he keeps them a secret. So between Jesper’s inner conflict about where he belongs in life and the external conflict of the community trying to fight back against a change in its culture, the film naturally comes to climax when the two conflicts meet and Jesper must confront both challenges at once.

What I’ve realized in writing this review … is that I am very impressed by the plot’s complexity and depth. The film weaves together at least three solid story arcs (Jesper’s coming-of-age/Scrooge-like-change-of-heart, Smeerenberg’s bubbling kindness revolution, and the woodsman’s aged hero who finds redemption and purpose after so many years alone). That all three feel fully supported and without any bloat is a testament to its absolutely solid writing, and for a kid’s film no less! Furthermore, the “origin” story genre can sometimes fall flat as it can just feel like the writers are writing more Wikipedia entries, explaining how every little aspect came to be more than just telling a good story. I call it the Han Solo trap. As for Klaus, the little tidbits about why Klaus uses reindeer and not horses, who the “elves” who work his workshop are, always clever and grow organically from the plot.

Plus, despite my opening doubts regarding whether the dark tone really fit a “Christmas” movie, the film very capably captures the joys of the Christmas season. Like Christians think about Jesus, Klaus/Jesper bring a world of light into a world of darkness. The film teaches about the importance of creating a loving community, of being selfless, and most importantly of respecting the spiritual aspect of the season. Even if this is a decidedly capitalistic/entrepreneurial movie, the film is not without a spiritual side. The previously mentioned “chance” of the woodsman seeing that initial drawing of the boy locked in the tower is no chance at all. Instead, throughout the film we see that the woodsman is “haunted” in a sense by a ghostly wind that points him in the path of righteousness. The film has its own explanation for what the force behind the wind is, but it is not too far of a stretch to point out the similarities between the wind and the Christian idea of the guiding Holy Spirit. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the woodsman represents God the Father and Jesper God the Son, (or is Klaus more the Christ figure?) because I think this movie is decidedly not Christian, but more I just want to highlight that I enjoyed that the film allowed for the presence of spirituality, which moves this film from the realm of secular kindness to one that recognizes the power and presence of some spiritual goodness, aligning with how many think of the “Christmas spirit.”

Now, let’s be clear, this is a fun, family classic, but it’s not a perfect film. In fact, I downright disliked the first twenty to thirty minutes, for the aforementioned tonal reasons, but also because I really disliked Jason Schwartzmann’s voice acting in the lead role of Jesper. My dislike lessened with the introduction of the woodsman, but it never went away fully. I can’t help but think this movie would be better with a different actor voicing Jesper. Everyone else does an adequate job with the voice work. J.K. Simmons as Klaus takes on an almost Batman-like stoic gruffness, and Rashida Jones as the teacher and love interest is just fine. And, again, I never really fell in love with the art style and it sometimes distracted me, and I found the soundtrack, particularly the main song to be rather lame and too much “of its time” than the typically timeless, more Broadway productions that Disney/Pixar put out. Still, director Sergio Pablos has done something I did not think possible. He and his team created a *new* Christmas classic, one that I’m sure will be played on an annual basis in many households across the world.

***1/4 (Three and a fourth stars out of four)

[charliejrogers]

Blow the Man Down

Though I don’t do them often, I’m a big fan of movie double-headers. None more satisfying than a summer afternoon in 2018 when I walked out a theater’s showing of BlackKklansmen and then directly into the adjacent theater for Blindspotting (I paid for both tickets, I swear!). And it’s even better when the two films have some sort of thematic link like BlackKklansmen and Blindspotting… 2018’s Green Book and Overlord made for a much less satisfying pairing. This is al la lead-in to say that Blow the Man Down was actually part one of a female-dominated double-header alongside Yes, God, Yes which I previously reviewed. Both the products of women writer/directors (here the dual-team of Bridget Savage Cole & Danielle Krudy) with women being the primary characters… but that’s about where the similarities end.

The best way I can describe Blow the Man Down is that it has a bit of Fargo’s small-town crime vibe to it, but without as much dark humor. Set in fictional coastal seaport of Easter Cove, Maine in what looks like early winter/late fall, the film has a bleak, cloudy look to it, in a way really only New England can, not unlike 2017’s Manchester by the Sea. From the start, things are ominous. The film opens with what is essentially a Greek chorus of fisherman singing/chanting old Irish dirges, specifically the dirge “Blow the Man Down.” While I’ll be honest and say I didn’t listen carefully to the words of the song, it didn’t really feel like the slow chanting in low voices of gruff men would be telling the most upbeat of stories.

We then cut to a funeral reception for a woman who in dying is leaving behind her now-orphaned two daughters. The elder and more responsible of the two, Priscilla Connolly (Sophie Lowe), spends her time working the small seafood store her mother used to own. Though not explored deeply, we get a sense of opportunity lost in Priscilla. She never got to leave town fully, needing instead to take care of her ailing mother and keep up business at the shop. In some senses she knows she is trapped in this small town with no other options or money to make a new path. She’s not even sure there’s enough money left to hold onto their mother’s home.

On the other hand is Mary Beth Connolly (Morgan Saylor), who is more reckless than Priscilla, or more accurately she is less mature. After her mother’s funeral Mary Beth jumps into a car and heads to a local bar where, despite the fact that she may or may not be of the legal drinking age, is clearly welcomed as a regular. Mary Beth dreams of getting out of the small coastal town, and has her eyes set on college as soon as she can get out.

The funeral reception is largely uneventful, but throughout much of it, the soundtrack plays loud dissonant music not so much fitting for a funeral reception but for horror film. We the audience are left confused. Combined with the opening dirge, the soundtrack seems to be preparing us for the type of movie that, as of yet, we are not seeing.

That changes when Mary Beth meets a slimy stranger at the bar, an short-lived tryst that ends with the stranger chopped up, put in a cooler, and set to sea. Much to our surprise, the blood lies not just on Mary Beth’s hands, but on Priscilla’s as well. There’s a great “quote” of Lady Macbeth as Priscilla tries furiously to scrub every last spot of blood out of her hands.

It’s only when the sun rises the morning after the Connollys late-night escapades that the film really seems to begin. Where I was expecting this to be a movie about the Connolly’s dealing with their guilt, by and large we don’t get a sense that they feel all too guilty – more shocked. So while there is a subplot about a young, handsome policeman who is ironically on the lookout for the exact person he seems to have the hots for, I at least didn’t sense any tension in this regard. The real conflict involves looking at the other residents of the not-so-sleepy Easter Cove, or more specifically at the women of Easter Cove.

Gradually throughout the film we get the sense that there’s this group of older women (including one played by June Squibb!!) who acts as pseudo-protectors of the town. They, like all proverbial old fish-wives, know just about everything that goes on in town. So when the police begin their investigations into the death of a local prostitute, these women guardians know who’s to blame far before the police. The one to blame is Enid, a one-time friend of the old-lady club and now sole-operator of the only brothel in town, who seems to have been most close with the Connolly’s mother. Now with Mrs. Connolly gone, the old lady club engages in an all-out war with Enid. As the prostitute’s killing is intimately related to the man whom the Connolly’s have disposed, the old lady club is another group hot on the sisters’ heels in discovering the truth.

As I said, the story of the Connolly’s sort of takes a backseat as the film progresses and begins to focus more on the Old Lady Club and Enid, and I wish the movie hadn’t taken this turn. I would have loved to sit more with the Connollys and their guilt, with that all-too-human instinct to pile lies upon lies that make a genuine misunderstanding into a clusterfuck. Basically I wanted to see a re-do of season 2 of Fargo. Instead, we see the sisters, in very crude terms, have to choose to either join the dark side or join the light side… in the end they join the gray side which I suppose is more artistic, realistic, and satisfying.

Still despite the dark plot, the inter-weaving story threads, the wonderful cinematography, recurring chorus of fishermen singers etc., I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t really invested in the story. I don’t know, other than the initial encounter between Mary Beth and the slimy man, I never felt like the characters were really ever in danger. There was very little tension throughout the movie. It doesn’t help that I didn’t think that neither Sophie Lowe as Priscilla nor Morgan Saylor as Mary Beth give a particularly strong performances, though Saylor does a better job, but that may be she just has more to do. So it’s a solid plot with an interesting ending twist, it still feels like this could have been a better movie than it ended up being. If I’m sounding harsher than I should it’s because I wanted this to be a fantastic movie, but I will still happily settle for the good movie I got.

*** (Three out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

Yes, God, Yes

Full disclosure: I not only attended a Catholic high school, but I specifically attended a Kairos retreat, the exact retreat which the characters from 2020’s Yes, God, Yes attend. In the film, they call it “Kirkos,” but everything about “Kirkos” is the same as my (and seemingly every) Kairos. So let me clear up a few things for those of you who saw this film and thought, “This shit at this movie retreat can’t be what they do in real life.” Yes, Kairos leaders really do collect your phone and watch upon arrival to the retreat center since you are now on “God’s time ”(kairos comes from the Greek word καιρός which literally means “God’s time”). Yes, you are forced into small groups with your other classmates and feel this weird pressure to have a sad life story to share. Yes, small group leaders start to play music while they tell their own story AND pass out the lyrics as if these song lyrics are real deep poetry. One of my retreat leaders, for example, handed out sheets of the lyrics to Florence + The Machine’s “Shake it Off.” Now, I LIKE Florence + The Machine, but even still the lyrics to that song are nothing special. And, most of all, yes, those who come back from Kairos do tend to act a little cultish. At our school it was referred to as having a “Kai high,” a feeling in time when everyone just wants to be friends yet those people only exclusively hang out with one another.

In defense of Kairos retreats, at their very best, they offer adolescents at a critical time in their development the opportunity to reflect on their lives thus far, evaluate if they are living out the values their parents and community have instilled in them, and give them a safe space to work through conflicts, apologize, and try to be better people. At their worst, it’s a self-congratulatory experience where people act morally superior to others without really doing anything substantial… or even worse it’s a period of time where adolescents might unearth and talk about really hard topics like suicide, depression, etc. for the first time… and yet are given no real guidance on how to handle those emotions outside of this four day experience!

All this said, this is not a review of Kairos retreat. It is, indeed, a film review. I just wanted to make clear my biases etc. before talking about it since the retreat does more than provide the setting for the majority of Yes, God, Yes: the retreat’s four-day thematic structure doubles as the film’s plot structure. Just as in real life, our protagonist does a lot of questioning about her life and her faith during her first day, does some “crying” during the second as people, “accepting/trusting” the third, and then “living out” the lessons she learned on the fourth day and beyond! The difference is that in real life, teens are supposed to do these things in regard to their faith... or protagonist across those four days has a genuine sexual awakening.

In fact it’s exactly the desire to suppress her sexuality that prompts our protagonist to go on the retreat in the first place. Because our protagonist, Alice (played by Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer), has just discovered something about herself that is hard to put out of her mind: she likes sex! Or, more specifically, likes masturbating. Alice is, from what we can tell in the prologue, a pretty by-the-books Catholic teen. She follows the rules, goes to Church with her Dad every Sunday, and os pretty sexually naïve… sheltered as we used to describe kids. Someone starts a rumor that Alice “tossed” a boy’s “salad” at a party and the rumor spreads like wildfire. Even the teachers know about it, and she loses her status as a gift bearer for the school’s weekly Mass. Of course, Alice doesn’t even know what “tossing salad” means (nor truthfully did I… but the movie seems to anticipate this by providing a definition to the audience at the very beginning of the film.)

All Alice knows is that she likes arm hair… like LIKES arm hair, something she discovers when she’s on an AOL chat room and someone sends her porn. That’s right, this is a film set in the early ‘00s, so if you hold any nostalgia for that time, get ready to have your fill from the era’s cheesy pop ballads to giant brick phones, to the fact that America (while starting to be so) wasn’t so health conscious that’s it not crazy to believe a teenage girl would just come home from school and snack on frosting and a giant bowl of Cheetoh’s Puffs. The nostalgia is not quite as in your face as in Captain Marvel, but it’s certainly more of a focus than it was in Lady Bird.

Yeah, you knew the comparison was coming. Let’s just be clear, this is by no means trying to be the next Lady Bird. This movie knows it’s pretty frivolous to begin with. Still, it’s hard to avoid comparison with the last big movie about a Catholic girl coming of age in the early 2000s. What I learned in watching this movie compared to Lady Bird or even Boyhood is that merely recreating aspects of my former life does not a good movie make. While I loved the fact that part of watching Lady Bird was getting to see someone shine a light on how ridiculous high school theater could be, that was never the point of the movie. Here, meanwhile, a significant purpose of the film is to highlight the fact that, yes, Kairos retreats are weird and the Church sucks. While I found myself nodding my head in agreement with what I was seeing on screen… it wasn’t exactly enjoyment as much as thinking, “yup, this is what a Kairos retreat is.” Furthermore, I feel like there are aspects of Kairos that would be great for skewering and I love the parts they absolutely nail: the cultish nature of the retreat and the pressure to frame your life in a sad way… but they ultimately take a route of criticism that is too easy and frankly is not a focus of most Kairos retreats… the focus on shaming one’s sexuality and the innate hypocrisy that behavior inevitably reveals.

If there’s a villain in this film, it’s probably the retreat leader and school priest Fr. Murphy (Timothy Simons), who gives in to rumors of Alice’s sexual impropriety as much as any schoolyard bully. No one in this whole film, from Fr. Murphy, to the head of Alice’s bunkhouse, to her small group leader, to even her best friend, takes Alice’s spiritual journey seriously, as they all assume Alice is not taking the retreat seriously as she seems to be avoiding talking about her recent, rumorous activity. Of course, there’s a bit of #MeToo hypocrisy here in that the male with whom Alice is said to have been engaged with enjoys none of the backlash that she has been dealing with. And to that degree it’s a satisfying movie in that Alice gets to dish out a little #MeToo revenge.

Still, even with all things conspiring against her, Alice retains her good spirit throughout the film… as well as her determination to further explore her sexuality. On the one hand, it’s a little unrealistic the risks she takes in trying to learn more about her body, but on the other hand teenagers and young adults are friggin’ weird when it comes to figuring out themselves. Ultimately she is emboldened in this take once she finds out that all those people who are out to get her to confess her “sins” are sinners in much the same way.

Probably the best scene comes at the end of Alice’s third day of the retreat when she runs away from the retreat center and walks into a lesbian bar where she hears the story of someone who used to be Catholic and is now not. More important than anything she could learn at the retreat, this Iowa girl learns that some normal people… just don’t have a religion. For some people this world, its pleasures, its pains, is more than enough. Alice doesn’t become a full-blown hedonist after this, but she is opened up to realize there’s more to life than Catholic guilt.

Perhaps to make this good message ring out, the film as a whole, despite some absurdist elements, feels like it’s meant to be a somewhat accurate reflection of reality. I wish the writer/director, Karen Maine had tried for a slightly more absurdist approach or taken out the absurdity altogether. She already makes the Catholic high school authority more caricature than character, and the plot at timesis almost silly. Therefore, the tone of the movie just sorta feels off throughout. Just about the only thing keeping this movie grounded is a great performance by Dyer who portrays a genuine sexual awakening very faithfully, capturing the mix of confusion, guilt, and excitement all at once. Even when Alice does something downright stupid, Dyer’s performance engenders our trust from the start, and we are always on her side. I wish I could have liked this movie more as it really does accurately portray some aspects of a Kairos retreat and is about as close as I think I’ll get to having it portrayed in a major film, but ultimately by not treating the Church authority with the same amount of nuance paid to Dyer’s Alice and her sexual awakening, the film ends up being an enjoyable, if one-noted, experience. Come to make fun of Catholics, stay for Dyer’s performance.

 **7/8 (Two and seven-eighths out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

Emma. (2020) - Review

I’m an embarrassingly not well-read man. Of the great Jane Austen, I’ve read about a hundred pages of Pride & Prejudice… and that’s it. It’s not that I don’t like Austen’s writing. In fact, I just about loved every second of that particular books, and as for literature more generally, recently when for school I had to read Shakespeare’s King Lear I remarked to my fiancée (quite genuinely), “This Shakespeare is really good!” But rather it’s just so hard so me to commit myself to hours and hours of reading which can take up so much mental energy when I can passively sit and absorb a complete story in two hours.

This prologue to my review of 2020’s Emma., starring the new it-girl of the year, Anya Taylor-Joy (of recent Queen’s Gambit fame) serves more than mere self-deprecation about how I’m a simpleton. Indeed, it also points out that opposed to many who will watch this movie having pored over Austen’s words time and time again and will see it as little more than an adaptation, I arrive to the film a blank slate. I’m excited to take in a new tale without any preconceived notions, much in the same way I viewed and was able to be wowed by last year’s superb Little Women whose story I also was not at all familiar with.

The marketing for this movie made me expect a Baz Luhrmann-esque take on Victorian England, or at the very least something that would try to appeal to the edgier feminist crowd like the fans of Birds of Prey. Harley Quinn fan are in for a little bit of a bait-and-switch: this is a fairly traditional period piece romance tale. That is, at least in terms of the plotting: visually its bright, vivid, high-contrast color scheme gives the tales of aristocratic England a fairytale sensibility. The whites are particularly blindingly white as to suggest the “fairy tale” world we see is almost cold and off-putting. The fairy tale aesthetic also makes plain the artificial nature of the fact that this is a film and not a documentary. In other words, the film looks more like it belongs to the world of Wes Anderson than being related at all to the realistic and harsh color palette of Gerwig’s Little Women. It’s an odd choice thematically, even if the visuals are striking and engaging throughout, the story of Emma. is fairly down-to-earth. The best I can make of it is that the artificial aesthetic seeks to match the protagonist’s penchant for manipulating the loves live of all those who live in her little English hamlet – though I get that’s a stretch. Ultimately, as I said, it doesn’t detract from the movie, but it does suggest a more whimsical, fantastical tale than the one we end up getting.

That is not to say this is a movie devoid of whimsy. In fact, the first half-hour or so of the movie is really quite funny. Bill Nighy, hot off his turn in Detective Pikachu!, is a bona fide scene-stealer here as Emma’s loving but neurotic father, Mr. Woodhouse. Put him in a room with his two incompetent male attendants and I will be laughing. Similarly opening scenes where the annoyingly oblivious Ms. Bates is unable to take the hint that no one enjoys her stories help to build up the world of Emma. and cement the titular character’s role within it as a stable, self-confident force who commands respect.

She’s also pretty vain. Something that she knows deep down, but also can’t forget because her longtime friend, Mr. Knightley can’t stop reminding her that she’s vain as if he were that one slave to the Roman emperor whose job is just to whisper in the emperor’s ear that he’s a mere mortal. Emma considers herself a one-of-a-kind matchmaker and derives great pleasure from it. It’s a seemingly innocent sounding hobby until one realizes that people have hearts and feelings and aren’t just pawns in a game of chess. Mr. Knightley is the only one to really call her out on her near-sociopathic hobby, especially as the two compete to match Miss Phillips, the meek new-comer to their high-society circle, with one of two different potential suitors. Emma hopes to link Miss Phillips with the town’s priest who is undoubtedly out of her league socially which is all that matters to Emma, while Phillips’ heart lies more with Knightley’s champion, the simple farmer, Mr. Martin. The argument that develops between Emma and Knightley about who is more in the wrong trying to win Miss Phillips’ heart for their particular suitor is the highlight of the film’s plot. Thematically I could tell it was this aspect of Emma’s character that made her a literary legend. Like main proto-feminist characters, she can take advantage of the trappings of the patriarchal, marriage-obsessed society to elevate her own station and try to help other women achieve that same station.

It should be noted that this self-described “highlight” comes about… a third of the way of the film. It’s not that the following two-thirds are bad, but they don’t reach the originality of the unapologetic feminism of the first third. Emma despite her insistence on not being at all interested in marriage, is, of course, madly in love with one particular fellow: Mr. Churchill, (though, truthfully, she’s never met him). And as the film progresses, we see her fall in and out of love with this outsider as well with her childhood friend, Mr. Knightley. Though truthfully, no one in the audience is fooled by whom Emma eventually ends up with. Churchill, for all his good breeding and accomplishment, is a little too aristocratic. He’s insensitive, a bit of a fop, and seems to bristle at the idea of working; Knightley on the other hand is much more industrious, more ruggedly handsome, and clearly has a good moral compass.

And so, for all its feminist trappings and declarations against love and marriage, it’s a story of love. That doesn’t necessarily have to weaken its claims to be feminist but putting Emma. up against Gerwig’s Little Women and we are left with a less mature, a less of-its-times tale. Yes, Knightley and Emma make a good couple, but we don’t get a sense of that this will help Emma live any more of a fulfilled life in the way we get that sense for Jo. She’s still doomed, I suspect, to be bored and be defined by little more than her husband.

It’s not fair to criticize one work for not being another work, and to be clear I don’t think I mean to do that. Plus, I want to be clear that in criticizing this movie I am not criticizing the novel. I have never read the novel, but I am positive there are aspects to Emma’s character as well as to the characterizations of some of the side characters that allow them to be richer and fuller than there is space to allow for in a two-hour movie. Mr. Churchill and Jane Fairfax who serve as foils for Mr. Knightley and Emma, respectively, seem to be particularly weak characters in the film who undoubtedly get more fleshed out elsewhere. And truthfully, I would have loved to have spent more time in this world. As I said, it’s very fun to look at, and the acting is downright wonderful from Taylor-Joy and Johnny Flynn in the lead roles, so a little more time spent building up some of the more peripheral characters like Mr. Martin, Fairfax, and the Westons would have probably allowed for more opportunity for Emma to show off how truly unique she was in terms of her independence.

Alas what we are left with in the 2020 Emma. is a very fun and well told story. It won’t blow anyone’s socks off, but serving as photographer Autumn de Wilde’s directorial debut, it certainly is pretty, well-acted, and in terms of introducing a classic story to a new, modern audience… she made an Emma fan out of me.

*** (Three out of four star)

[charliejrogers]

Under the Skin (2014) - Review

For a lot of science fiction movies, I find myself enjoying the ideas of the film more than I think I actually enjoyed the film. It’s what I’ll refer to as the Annihilation-syndrome, named after the 2018 movie that I found to be an absolute bore while also being an exceedingly intellectually stimulating discussion about the nature of cancer, mutation, and biology in general. The film I am reviewing now, 2014’s Under the Skin, honestly is nowhere near as unenjoyable as Annihilation, but I mention the film because I think much of this review will focus on the really interesting ideas this movie brought up which might make you think I thought this is a masterpiece. It’s not. It’s good, very good even, but not as good as its theme and ideas.

A lot of my restrained enthusiasm has to do with the fact that the film is purposefully cryptic and full of esoteric imagery. While there are spoken parts, I don’t think much would be lost if we couldn’t hear what was being said. That is to say, the dialogue doesn’t do much to make sense of what we are seeing displayed on screen.In fact, there are large sections of characters interacting without any dialogue, yet everything is understood.

To its credit, what we are seeing is largely very beautiful from a cinematography point of view. Much of the film takes place in the city of Edinbugh, Scotland and it captures well the urban grit of the city and how our protganoist fits well within that urban environment. The way the red lights of Edinburgh’s traffic lighst cast a foreboding, menacing band over the protagonist’s eyes as she drives about town on the hunt for men to ensnare in her trap shows that this dangerous character is right at home in the anonymity of the city.

The protagonist is played by Scarlett Johansson, who spends most of the film alternating between being the pinnacle of seduction in the eyes of the heterosexual male gaze and being a lifeless void. That’s because Johansson plays an alien (I think) or at the very least a humanoid being who seems to have the sole purpose of finding lonely men, taking them back to her lair, and trapping them in a sunken-place-like void where ultimately everything but their skin is extracted from them. I’ll henceforth refer to this character simply as “the humanoid” with she/her pronouns for clarity. We never learn the humanoid’s motivations, but we know that she’s not acting alone. She’s supported in her ventures by a (presumably) humanoid motorcycle gang who also double as agents who will clean up her messes.

At the beginning of the film, the humanoid appears to have no free will or consciousness. When she comes across her first dead body, she is more interested with the ant crawling along the body than the woman who used to inhabit that body. She simply steals that woman’s clothes, and begins acting out what seems like a pre-designed course for finding and trapping men. As soon as she has completed an interaction with a human, all of the emotion drains straight out of her face. Johansson’s face takes on a scary lifelessness on par with Billy Skarsgård’s Pennywise the clown from the It movies. There’s a scene where the humanoid, in the process of attracting a new victim, stumbles across an infant that has been abandoned at the beach and is screaming out. Perhaps the director is toying with audiences’ biases that the humanoid, appearing as she does as a human woman, will “naturally” want to reach out and save this baby. That she doesn’t seems to signal to the highest degree that this “woman” is no woman at all, but a cold, merciless something else.

Yet, somehow, by the end of this movie, I found all my sympathies lying entirely with this decidedly inhuman killing machine who makes her living preying on people just like me. This is because something happens that changes the humanoid about midway through the movie. Up to that point, it would be easy to classify the film as a feminist revenge fantasy, where men’s penchant for objectifying women and their aggressive desire to “conquer” women is met with a dish that is served so very coldly. It’s oddly satisfying to watch men who will blindly get into a car with a complete stranger and follow her into a creepy house just because they want to fuck her, end up being exposed as little more than skin around a bag of meat.

But then the humanoid comes across a man whose face deviates greatly from the norm due to some unnamed medical condition. It very much resembles the face of the protagonist from The Elephant Man. He is out an a walk at night to the grocery store. The humanoid doesn’t see him like the rest of the world does. She doesn’t understand how insensitive her genuine question about why he shops at night might be to him. In a darkly ironic sense, she’s the first person in his life to truly see him as a man and not a hideous monster. He has none of the arrogant sexual bravado like the humanoid’s prior victims. He’s sexually innocent, a virgin. When she offers to take him back to her place, he doesn’t take pride in any successful conquest. We see that he’s pinching himself just to prove that he’s not dreaming. It’s a heartbreaking sequence. Whereas we may have been on board, at least symbolically, with the humanoid’s cool takedown of the patriarchy, this particular abduction flips the script. Our sympathies lie more with the man than the “woman.”

Why he doesn’t succumb to the same fate as the other men is not clear. Notably, he’s the first we’ve seen that isn’t fully erect despite the humanoid ardent attempts at seduction. Secondly, he’s like the first to take some stock of the fact that he’s been lured into some black void from another dimension. He obviously finds Johansson attractive, but it’s almost like he is more amazed by what is happening, his penis “disarmed” so to speak, compared to those who came before him who were “armed” to conquer. And in lacking their sexual aggression, he was deemed to have a “lighter”, purer heart, preventing him from sinking into the deep of her trap.

This seems to change the humanoid. It’s as if she questions her whole purpose in life up to that point. Maybe all those men who had come before were as gentle as sweet as this one. Or maybe she yearns to be more than a monster.

Previously we had seen the humanoid stare at women from her car in much the same she looked at men, yet we never see her take women as a victim. It’s more like she was curious by these creatures, like she didn’t know they would be there. She shows the same curiosity towards her own body. She stares at it, hugs her curves. Just after her encounter with the man with the dysmorphic face, she looks long at her face in the mirror and then at a fly stuck to a window. It’s as if she’s looking at how she looks to others (humanoid) compared to what she really is (more like a bug, an alien). As the film goes on, it’s almost as if she’s trying to convince herself the skin is not a farce, that it’s really her, that she’s real, and that there’s nothing else under the skin. There’s an ironic beauty in the dysmorphic man wanting to be seen for what’s on the inside where she wants to be seen for her outside.

We subsequently see the humanoid undergo something of a coming-of-age as she flees into the more rural surroundings of the bogs of Scotland, presumably to avoid her motorcycle-driving allies who don’t want her to veer off course. The camera work in this part of the film highlights her as a stranger in this strange land, with her hot pink sweater standing in stark contrast to the drab Scottish milieu. And truly from the rocky/pebbly beach below the impossibly high bluffs at the ocean to the Mars-like desert shrubbery of the bogs, Scotland has never made Earth look so alien. Yet it’s in this foreign land, far from the trappings of the dirty city that the humanoid experiences the pleasure of being a human, or more specifically being a woman. For a few days she is even one man’s princess, and I think it confuses her so much that she enjoys it.

The genius of this film is the way it makes you forget that the humanoid isn’t actually human. In the latter half of the movie we celebrate her cautious steps towards humanity. There is a love scene that is among the most intimate I’ve seen filmed. Yet, we also fear for her and feel sorry for her when her fantasy comes crashing down and it is revealed to her and to us that her initial approach to men proves was much more appropriate.

This is a slow film that rewards patience, but ultimately it doesn’t do much to excite. There are abstract sequences of light and color accompanied by discordant sounds of chanting that seem straight out of the Jupiter sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. These do little more than confuse, and sometimes bore. And even if the lack of excitement is deliberate (perhaps intended to deconstruct female seduction) that doesn’t make it anymore enjoyable. Still, it is a beautifully shot picture that provides a stunning condemnation of our male dominated society. It would manage to make even the most bitter-hearted viewer feel sympathy for a humanoid who just a half-hour ago was on a cold-blooded murder streak. Still, even if it doesn’t introduce any hard-hitting questions about humanity like the best sci-fi, in the end it revels in a different dominant theme of sci-fi: no matter the monster man meets, man is always the ultimate monster.

 *** (Three out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

The Trip to Greece (2020) - Review

The Trip films are an odd bunch. Director Michael Winterbottom has been filming the travels of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan while they play caricatures of themselves for ten years now over the last four films. In fact, the films aren’t even the original product of their work. Winterbottom first edits and releases the footage as a television series for the BBC that is usually about double the final length of the eventual feature film. I’m not sure if there’s any way for a Yankee like myself to lay my eyes on the full, 3-hour television versions, but I’m also unsure whether the extra footage would add or detract from my enjoyment of the film. Largely, it would depend on whether that extra footage was more of the The Trip’s comedy portions or drama portions. Generally, the former far outstrips the latter.

This is all to say, I find this series the most enjoyable when it doesn’t try to be too overly ambitious in trying to be dramatic art. Most people are like myself: they are turning on this movie because they want to see two very skilled comedians riff on one another. In particular they want to see them show off their incredible skills for impersonation. The Trip to Greece has no clear stand-out scenes of impersonations like the previous films. The first film will be immortal for the two comedians’ dueling Michael Caine impressions, and in some ways each of the subsequent films has always seen the pair struggling to recreate the freshness and originality of the first film’s easy back-and-forth energy. The second movie expanded on the viral nature of the first film by revisiting Michael Caine with the added joy of ripping on Tom Hardy’s non-understandable Bane. Plus, that film saw pitch-perfect, darkly comedic performance of Brydon’s famous “man-in-a-box” voice at the ruins of Pomepii, making it seem like there was someone still trapped inside the site’s molten figures. Then, for me, while the third film is the weakest of the bunch, Coogan’s Bowie and Brydon’s Jagger impressions single handedly made it worthwhile. This film’s coup de grace comes in a superb scene where the pair recreates the dentistry torture scene from the Dustin Hoffman & Lawrence Olivier movie Marathon Man. There’s also an impressive feat of ventriloquism where Coogan speaks while also making his mouth look like they are saying different words, as if someone is dubbing a voice over him.

Luckily, these movies don’t rely exclusively on only scenes of impersonation. The conversation between the two talented actors is entertaining on its own, with one always racing to beat the other to punch line. The winner is always us, the audience, and that remains true in this film.

But as I mentioned, the comedy is only about half the equation for each of the film. All of them have a sadness that runs just below their surface. Generally, it revolves around a failed or, in some cases failing, marriage of one of the actors. Or perhaps the two actors start to discuss and struggle with the fact that they are aging and feel that their lives lack meaning. A not-so-subtle loneliness lives at the fringes of the films, particularly when it focuses on Coogan’s character. At its best, the dramatic aspects of the films are thought-provoking and act as sobering subtle criticisms of the seemingly hedonistic, vain lives of actors and those in show business. At its worst, like in The Trip to Italy or The Trip to Spain it’s a self-indulgent mess that we put up with just so we can get more of the impersonations and snarky banter. The first film probably balanced the drama the best by leaning harder into the comedy throughout, with the dramatic undertones only becoming prevalent at the end – a beautifully impactful end to an otherwise frivolous film.

This movie leans much more into the drama than the first film, but unlike the prior two installments the drama is still well-balanced by the comedy. I think that this is largely due to the fact that the actors decide to slide back into their respective roles from the first film. This means that Coogan plays the role of the self-important, womanizing, superior actor, while Brydon is the more light-hearted, good-natured, merry-prankster, unlike in The Trip to Italy where their personalities seemed reversed. And, importantly, this film gives equal screen time to both actors instead of The Trip to Spain where the dramatic bits were skewed towards Coogan.

But above all else, I think the film feels so balanced because it takes such great advantage of its setting to enhance the drama rather than just serve as a pretty backdrop for silly conversations. The script uses the Grecian landscapes to hearken back to the ancient Greeks, with particular emphasis on this land being the birthplace of drama and comedy. Unlike today where “dramedies” dominate much of the premium TV landscape, for the Greeks these were two completely separate styles of theater. Dramas were largely devoid of comedy, and vice versa. The Trip to Greece take advantage of this separation and allows each of its character to embody a different stereotype. The self-important Coogan, of course, embodies the drama. He scoffs at Brydon’s lack of knowledge of Classical philosophy and seems more impatient than ever with Brydon’s imitations. He particularly bristles when Brydon claims that Coogan’s recent BAFTA-winning dramatic performance as a real-life comedian/entertainer in Stan & Ollie was nothing more than an imitation.  Brydon, the light entertainer, is like a court jester, always smiling, the embodiment of comedy.

But what I like even more than how this comedy/tragedy separate thematically resonates with the actors’ temperments is how the movie uses this same duality and  applies it to the overarching “plot,” if it’s appropriate to even call it that. The whole idea behind this particular trip is that Coogan and Brydon are going to follow the course of Odysseus’s eponymous Odyssey. In fact, the first words we hear from the movie, with the screen is still dark, is Brydon reciting the first words of the Iliad. The first image we see is the pair looking over the ruins of ancient Troy. What’s so wonderful is that the actual Odyssey is not a piece of theater. It’s an epic poem with as many pieces of light-hearted adventure and romance as there are set pieces of grief, destruction and other heavy drama. As such, the film allows Coogan and Brydon to experience their own, separate aspects of Odysseus’ original journey. By the end of the film, both do reach their respective homes, but in a way that matches the vibe of type of theater they embody.

Like any good Shakespearean comedy, Brydon’s journey ends with a marriage of sorts. Ever the light-hearted romantic, he asks that his wife fly out to meet him in Greece. Now, far from his home in England, Brydon has found his home in his wife, his Penelope. With the domineering Coogan out of the picture, Brydon becomes king of his castle, i.e. now HE drives the car.

Meanwhile, Coogan is haunted throughout the film by the possibility that his ailing father will die. His eventual death is all but confirmed by a dream Coogan has midway through the film which essentially recreates Aeneas’ famous flight from Troy while carrying his son and aging father. As those who know the Aeneid know, only one of those three will survive to make it to their new home. His dramatic story arc concludes with the emotional reunion all the way back in England between himself and his son, recalling Odysseus’ eventual reunion with his own son Telemachus.

It’s a beautiful way to end the film. It gives consistency and weight to the fairly rigid juxtaposition of to the two character’s personalities in the film, and it does so in a way that almost seems fated in a way that recalls Greek tragedy. This thematic consistency is overall satisfying without being distracting in the way the dramatic portions detracted from the second and third films. Ultimately, it serves to complement the comedy you show up to enjoy. While it will always be tough to top the first film’s originality and surprisingly poignant end, this is by far the most artistic film in the series, and the arguably the best since the series began. Here’s to more and more trips to come!

*** (Three out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

First Cow (2020)

It’s impossible for me to write about First Cow without thinking that this movie is some sort of sublime cross-over between Joaquin Phoenix’s worst nightmare and joyous fantasy. Running at odds with his oddly emotional anti-milk Oscars acceptance speech back in February 2020, First Cow is a love letter to the power of milk in the realm of baking. The sweet, sweet udder juice provides the very backbone of a community’s happiness and two men’s livelihoods. But, where Phoenix’s nightmare turns to fantasy, the universe gets justice. No milk theft shall ever go unpunished! Move over, Herman’s Hermits; it’s not just “No Milk Today,” it’s no milk ever!

My kidding aside, I was pleasantly surprised by First Cow, though truthfully I’m not sure exactly what I expected besides knowing it was a movie set in nineteenth-century America. Acknowledging my own biases and knowing ahead of time that the director was a woman, I was surprised by how decidedly male this film was. There are really only three female characters of note throughout the whole film, and none of them have prominent speaking roles… in fact the only one who does speak English merely serves as a translator for men.

I wonder in what way the director, Kelly Reichardt, sees herself as fulfilling that role in making this film. That is, in choosing to deliberately make a movie about the nineteenth-century fur trappers in the harsh, male-dominated world of Oregon Territories, Reichardt wanted to highlight an aspect of the dominant “alpha” male society that is most certainly experienced by males but is rarely commented on, largely because it is considered female. I’m talking, of course, about love. I doubt there are viewers of this film who would disagree with my assessment that the two male protagonists shared a love for one another, but I’m sure many would categorize that love as merely representative of “deep friendship” or “platonic” (in the layman’s sense) at the most. While I’m not going to sit here and necessarily argue that the two characters shared an erotic love and I do not think that is the intent, I really do believe characterizing their relationship as merely “two great friends” would be received by the pair as a great insult. The two share the type of relationship seen among men that is rarely seen in the media save for war movies where “brotherhood” is a dominant theme. Outside of war, it’s a relationship that is largely reminiscent of the beautiful love seen between Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck and “Ratso” Rizzo. It’s the sort of sacrificial love that dominates the thoughts of Christian scholars. Still, it can be easily misinterpreted as erotic love. What I think Reichardt does beautifully is develop the love between the two carefully so you see it organically develop such that by the time we get to the final scene, we are unsurprised by one of the two character’s sacrificial acts of love.

The key scene, as I mentioned, comes at the end, but it’s noteworthy to mention that the pair’s ultimate fate is made plainly clear in the first few minutes of the movie. The movie starts (almost paradoxically) with an epilogue of sorts. We’re in the modern day, and a woman is exploring the forests of Oregon when her dog stumbles upon some bones that (with a little more digging) reveals two skeletons lying next to one another, like two lovers lying in bed. The best reason I can think of as to why Reichardt includes this epilogue before the rest of the film is because as soon as we the audience realize that two males are the most dominant couple in the film, we more readily anticipate and are more open to seeing love develop before our eyes.

So accordingly, after this brief pre-movie epilogue, the film jumps backwards in time to the nineteenth-century where we meet Otis “Cookie” Figowitz (John Magaro), the cook for a trapping company who is runs a little out-of-step with the rest of his crew. It is embodied in a visual motif that is repeated often throughout the film. We will have a shot of either of the two main characters, Cookie or his eventual companion King Lu (Orion Lee), doing something quiet in the foreground while characters perform some other more exciting activity in the background which in any other movie would take center stage due to the inherent spectacle. But it’s clear that Cookie is a more sensitive soul, he enjoys his time in the woods collecting mushrooms, and he does not have any interest in violence whatsoever. But that does not mean he isn’t without courage.

Early in the film, he comes across King Lu, a Chinese immigrant who is on the run after killing someone to avenge the killing of one of his good friends. Notably, when they first meet, King Lu is completely alone, hungry, and naked. While it isn’t addressed specifically, it is implicit in King’s and Cookie’s first meeting (and during other character’s subsequent interactions with King later in the film) but racially hostile undertones almost threaten to undermine King’s and Cookie’s initial friendship. Yet, like the story of the Good Samaritan, Cookie puts away his initial feelings of racial bias, and goes out of his way to clothe King with a blanket before allowing him to speak any further. Cookie grants King with a great deal of dignity, and goes one step further, offering to smuggle him among the various bags and supplies on his travels, knowing full well that if the rest of his crew find out that Cookie was hiding a “Chinaman murderer,” that he’d be in deep shit.

Cookie and King separate after this initial meeting, but upon reuniting later in the film, they never separate from one another until the very end. In what is the most puzzling choice in the film to me is Cookie’s initial decision to join King for a drink at King’s home. The two reunite in a trapping fort bar after a fight breaks out and the two are the only customers not drawn outside to enjoy the spectacle (the outsider/outcast motif returns). However, just before the start of the fight, one of the primary instigators of that fight requests for Cookie to watch over his infant whom he had brought to the bar. Therefore, when King asks Cookie to join in at his home, he is also asking him to abandon this helpless infant. The image of the baby swaddled in a basket recalls the previous imagery of King swaddled in the bags and supplies within which Cookie was smuggling him. And ultimately Cookie does abandon the baby for King, and in joining King for a drink at his home, never actually leaves. The two begin living together. So I’m not sure of the significance of the baby. Is it that Cookie had the choice between two “new lives,” one a literal new life of someone else and the other, in King, a chance at a new life for himself? Or is it simply just to serve as foreshadowing that in following King, Cookie is opening himself up to a life of indulgence where the concerns of others are less important than his own happiness?

As for the latter question and the plotline that develops around it, it really serves as a bitter critique of American capitalism and the American dream. While we love to tout the “by the bootstraps” myth, this movie serves as a simple morality play about how no matter what, pursuing the American dream means ripping somebody off for your own benefit. In this instance, it means Cookie and King nightly sneaking onto the property of the leader of the trapping fort and stealing milk from the only cow in the area in order to essentially have a monopoly on baked goods and make a pretty penny. Now, we can sit and debate about the morality of “owning” a cow, and whether Cookie and King are even doing anything immoral since it is preposterous to own an animal! Or I’m sure there are those (Joaquin Phoenix) who think Cookie and King are just as immoral for taking ANY milk from a cow as the man who owns the cow in the first place. This is not the time to discuss animal rights. But it is notable what the cow, too, has had to suffer in order allow for Cookie and Lee’s successes. She was initially transported to the trapping fort along with a mate and her calf, but both died en route. She spends her time tied to a tree and by the film’s end locked up within a small cage.

In sum, the love that Cookie so beautifully shared with King at film’s beginning does not seem so equally shared by the pair in regards to their relationship with others. And in their pursuit to become successful capitalists in a system rigged against them, they ultimately hurt some of those around them, most notably titular cow with whom Cookie has almost romantic relationship with, which in some ways makes his treating her as little more than a literal cash cow so egregious, even if he cares deeply for her.

Hence the morality play. I don’t have to spell it out for you what might happen if two people repeatedly rob the same person in the same way again and again and again. But even if we as the audience agree that the cards are stacked against Cookie and King from the start in their attempt to become independent, to achieve the American dream, the film never pretends that they are acting as virtuous agents. In the end, though, they get their redemption even as they receive punishment. King is given a chance to abandon Cookie outright who in an attempt to flee their pursuers has become badly injured. King realizes he can just take his riches and run. But he doesn’t. He decides to lie next to his dearly beloved companion. While he could not have predicted what would be the fatal consequences of this decision, he knows that sticking with Cookie in his current state will only cause him trouble. But that’s where the beautiful sacrificial love that defines this pair comes in. Whereas many will view this film and remember it as a cautionary tale about the American dream, I will forever remember the realistic love of brothers shared between these two wayward men.

***(1/4) (Three and one fourth stars out of four)

[charliejrogers]

Extra Ordinary (2020), definitely not ordinary, but not extraordinary

What’s your favorite Monty Python sketch? Is it the “Argument Clinic”? “The Spanish Inquisition”? “Fish Slapping”? These are all good… but it’s a trick question. The “Maths” episode of the short-lived but long-remembered series Look Around You is the ultimate example of British humor that Monty Python & co. so perfectly embodied. Look Around You presented each episode in the same style, feeling, and with the and production values of a cheap edutainment video from the 1980s/1990s, and they did it so faithfully that they were able to match an incredible deadpan delivery with even the most ridiculous shit (like suggesting that every pencil case should include a pencils, a pair of compasses, and a nebulous substance that could improve cognition when chewed – but could also confer “diarrhoea” -- referred to only as “Garry gum”).

I bring up my love for Look Around You because the very opening of the 2020 Irish comedy-horror-romance, Extra Ordinary, seems poised to breathe new life into edutainment / public access TV parody. The film starts with clips from a fictional television show called The Talents, a show shining a light on paranormal activity present in our world. It’s hosted by Vincent Dooley (Risteard Cooper) who is occasionally helped by his young daughter Rose. The clips from the show, peppered throughout various parts of the film, are, for me, the film’s highlights. They are simply the best outlets for the film’s brand of humor. The show-within-the-film allows the writers to be downright silly while still keeping a straight face. During these times, like when a clip from the show introduces “gloating” (or “goat floating”), the sheer ridiculousness of the show makes it clear that the movie’s in on the joke too.

The first fifteen or so minutes of the movie’s main plot do a great job of maintaining this tone. Once we exit the show clips and enter the present day, we see Rose, now an adult (Maeve Higgins), driving about town waving to spooky abandoned toasters. Rose is no longer the little girl from the show-within-the-movie. Instead, she’s now a grown, single woman haunted by a dark past which is only hinted at but we know involves “dadslaughtering,” as she puts it. She runs her own driving school, but everyone in her small Irish town still knows her as the ghost lady and therefore her voicemail is full of people leaving messages requesting her paranormal talents.

One such person requesting her services is our perfectly named male protagonist Martin Martin (Barry Ward). A milquetoast man, we meet him shaving in his bathroom when suddenly the words “You must pay” appear on his mirror. Slightly spooked, he closes the other half of his bathroom mirror to reveal the other half of the mirror-message, “your car tax!” This bathos continues the film’s self-aware, ironic tone. This is a man so thoroughly used to the abuse and nagging of his wife that now he doesn’t bat an eye when he gets the same treatment from her now, even though she’s a ghost. Martin’s daughter is less warm to her mother’s continued haunting presence. The story gets rolling when Martin’s teenage daughter gives her father an ultimatum: either he call the local ghostbuster to exorcise her mother from their home or she’s going to leave home for good. Reluctant to let go of his wife and but more reluctant to lose his daughter, Martin calls up with Rose Dooley to appease his daughter but has no intention of moving forward with the exorcism. He will simply pretend to need a driving lesson and then tell his daughter later that Rose refused to help.

The scene that follows is slightly unexpected: it’s a genuine rom-com meet-cute, as Martin is predictably awkward and not prone to being a good liar (since of course he already knows how to drive). But given the rest of the film’s tone it won’t surprise you that the chemistry that builds between the two protagonists is awkward, lurching, and not at all easy-going, but always a joy to watch. Eventually the two team up to do some ghostbusting which is the other highlight of the film. Every ghostbusting always involves Martin channeling a a ghost’s spirit, Rose talking with that spirit (through Martin) in order to resolve their issues, and then it ends with Martin puking up that ghost’s ectoplasm, something which is always grossly satisfying to watch. If this was the whole movie, just watching these two characters fall in love and do some ghostbusting, I would have been much more favorable to it.

Why I am ultimately slightly unfavorable towards it is due to the film’s third star and villain: Christian Winters, a talentless one-hit wonder from decades ago who is trying to use dark magic to stage his comeback. Martin’s daughter gets tangled up in Winters’ nefarious plan which is ultimately what forces Rose and Martin to team up to ghostbust in the first place. It’s not the plot here that I take issue with. It’s the character of Christian Winters, or (though it pains me to say) the performance of the character by Will Forte that marred this otherwise charming film. Forte is one of my favorite comic actors whose turn as a serious actor in 2013’s Nebraska will make him immortal in my eyes. But here in Extra Ordinary? He’s overplayed, hammy, and just doesn’t fit the tone. He feels like an SNL character transplanted into Monty Python skit. He lacks the subtlety and awareness that he’s in on the joke like the rest of the cast. Winters just sorta is a joke. His girlfriend is even worse. Whereas our protagonists are loveable, believable characters, she’s a nightmare of a self-absorbed woman. I guess whereas the rest of the movie has heart, the entire Christian Winters subplot does not.

And this sucks. Because I loved much of the rest of this movie. The romance between Martin and Rose is sweet and you really feel like you’re rooting for them. But Winters brings the wrong vibe to this otherwise charming film, and you can’t help but feel that were it not for the producers feeling like they needed a well-known actor in the role of Winters in order for the movie to sell, this movie would have been better served by a more low-key and unknown Irish actor like the film’s two leads. But what remains when you subtract out the Winters character is a charming movie with a unique tone that remains one of the sweetest and funniest rom-coms I’ve seen in recent memory.

**/ (Two and a half out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

The Green Room

The indie horror flick The Green Room is a very solid addition to the horror / survival-horror genre of film. It’s a quick, 90-minute romp that sees its protagonists of young indie hardcore-punk rockers try to outwit and outlast a cult of skinheads somewhere in the remote Pacific Northwest. The movie is always just shy of engaging in politics, which is probably for the best as it would have bogged down the real reason people sign up to see horror films: to get scared and to be grossed out. Still, the film does leave the viewer with a lot of questions as to what the fuck this cult of skinheads actually believes, why they are so well-organized, why does Patrick Stewart run the cult, and why is the cult headquartered at a club that houses shitty hardcore punk music concerts. Often when a film leaves viewers with many unanswered questions, it’s touted as a challenging, artful, even provocative film. Here it just feels like lazy worldbuilding.

But, as I’ve hinted at, as a horror film, the purpose of this movie is to provoke intense emotion/fear, not necessarily be the brainiest movie you’ll see this year. To that degree The Green Room, I’d say, is a moderate success. To some degree, the success of horror films has much to do with the psychology of “this could happen to me!” It’s why home invasion films are so spooky! Here, though, I don’t plan on joining a hardcore-punk band, and certainly have no intention of playing concerts for a bunch of skinheads in the middle of the woods. So the central psychology of easily relatable horror is missing. (In fairness to the movie, the band members are desperate for money and wouldn’t choose to play for this crowd otherwise). But once we put that aside and let ourselves be taken in by the film, what we have is the story of four young twenty-somethings locked in a room where a murder just took place, knowing full well that those who committed the murder have no intention of leaving any witnesses. What proceeds from there are various attempts by the band members to escape their make-shift prison, and the subsequent attempts by the well-organized near-militia that runs the place to kill them.

As I said, this is a gruesome film. While guns are here, I think more people die by dog or knife. The movie toes the line with the gore, showing you just enough to make you squirm without ever feeling like a gore-porn flick. Probably the best part of the movie comes towards the end when the surviving bandmates hatch an elaborate plan to entrap some of the unassuming cultists, but all in all the movie is at its most fun (and at its best) when the band mates leave the safety of the titular “green room” and try to make a run for it. My adrenaline would start rushing since the movie makes it very clear that not everyone will make it out alive, so you never quite know who of the bunch will kick the bucket on each attempted escape.

Our protagonists are likeable enough. The prologue establishes them as full-of-themselves punk rockers. The don’t do social media because they find it fake. They are the real deal, unwilling to “sell out,” even when that means they subside on near-starvation-sized meals and siphon gas to get to gigs. Even if we as the audience don’t see the value of their dedication to “pure punk,” we can appreciate that they are no hypocrites. They live what they preach and as a result are generally a likeable, lively, and rambunctious group. Plus, the film establishes them early on as being firmly anti-Nazi, which always helps when the only other people in the film are firmly pro-Nazi. Still, there’s no strong, distinguishing personalities among the four other than Pat (Anton Yelchin) who’s a little more quiet than the others (essentially the “quiet one” of any great band) and Sam (Alia Shawkat), the lone female of the group. Also, due to circumstances I won’t explain due to spoilers, the band is aided by a pro-Nazi-sympathizer, Amber, whose character confused me but is played by an actress whose name is fun to say: Imogen Poots.

But that’s ok. Much like a Final Destination film, we only need to care enough about these people such that we are perversely interested to know what gruesome fate awaits them or we cheer them on hoping that they come out on top! And we do care about them… if for no other reason than they are up against Nazis… and despite what our president may say… there are no good people on that side.

What elevates this movie from being completely frivolous with a few great bits is the bizarre casting of Patrick Stewart (yes, THAT Patrick Stewart) as the leader of the evil Nazi cult. I say “bizarre” not in the sense of “poor,” but in the sense of… “how the fuck did they get Patrick Stewart to do this movie?!” He’s great in the role, lending an air of scary legitimacy to the wacko world of this Nazi cult much in the same way he does to the X-Men.

But that’s really all I got to say about this one. It won’t blow your socks off by any means, but it’s short, it’s gory, it’s fun on a Saturday night, and it’s cool to see talent on the caliber of Patrick Stewart displayed so prominently in a movie that has no aspiration or need to meet it.

*** (Three out of four stars)

[charliejrogers]

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

In 2006, Borat was one of those great cultural touchstones that transcended the big screen. There was no aspect of pop culture after its release that wasn’t in some way affected. It perfectly coincided with the rising popularity of YouTube, such that those who hadn’t seen it (or couldn’t because they were too young to get into the rated R movie) could at least see many of its famous clips.  Everyone knew Borat in 2006. Everyone. You couldn’t go two fucking steps without someone going “very nice!” or “my wife!” It was such a wonderfully smart movie. It combined the best aspects of a Jackass movie, i.e. the trolling of innocent and unsuspecting bystanders, with a noble cause, to expose to the world the ignorant side of America. It was a novel and insightful look at our country.

In 2020… there is no insight in telling us that much of the country is ignorant of the truth, racist, or sexist. As Borat himself points out in this film, in the years between when he filmed the first movie (2005) and the new movie 2019-2020, America has become transfixed by their new “magical abacuses”, i.e. cellphones. Phones, the internet, social media, all of them expose us everyday to how the other half lives in their little social bubbles. We don’t have to wonder “do people really think this?” Just type whatever terrible or stupid theory you can think of into Google, and you’re guaranteed to find at least one person who endorses whatever heinous thing you just wrote. Again, this is portrayed within the film when Borat, confronted by the fact that maybe some of his core beliefs are lies, finds websites that say that (much to his anti-Semitic disappointment) the Holocaust was not real. So, one is left wondering… what can Borat bring to the table in 2020 that is fresh?

Unfortunately, the answer is… not a whole lot. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm feels mostly like a retread of 2006 with the only additions aiming more for “shock factor” than real comedy aimed to grab headlines (which it succeeded in doing). This is not to say this is not a funny movie. It is. The film’s opening where Borat describes the typical (fictionalized) Kazakh’s view of American politics is hysterical. In sum, America went to shit with the election of Obama, paving the way for other Africans to take power of the West (cue the photo of Justin Trudeau in Black face). Now with Trump in power, Borat is sent on a mission to curry Trump’s favor so that Kazakhstan and its leader will be viewed with the same favor that Trump has bestowed upon other “tough guys and tough guy countries” like Russia/Putin, the Philippines/Duerte, North Korea/Kim Jong Un, Brazil/Bolsonaro, etc. The gift is supposed to be an overly sexually aggressive chimp for Vice Pussy Hound (i.e. Vice President) Pence. However, Borat’s daughter Tutar sneaks into the crate with the chimp, and after a chain of events Borat has no choice but to gift his daughter over to Pence, and eventually Rudy Giuliani, instead.

It’s a simple enough plot but I think the movie gets a little too caught up in it. No one is asking for a plot line for this movie. If this were just a string of sketches with a vague whiff of a plot to transition between the sketches no one would fault it. In fact, that sounds like the first Borat. We are just here for the sketches. Yet the movie is looking to do a little bit more than the first movie. It’s not content to just say, “Hey, look at yourself, America! You’re fucked up! Let’s all laugh at you.” This movie has specific targets that dominate its focus: Trump and Trumpland.

This is, I think, an unfortunate choice not because I don’t approve of bashing Trump and Trumpland, but because whereas the first movie felt like comedy was king with the sociopolitical insights as a dominant undercurrent, here the story and the humiliation of Trump and his base is the end goal. This still makes for funny scenes, but when I think back to the first Borat (and as I re-watched clips of the first movie after finishing this movie), some of the greatest parts of Borat had nothing to do with politics or sensitive subjects. Much of the humor was just based around the ballsiness of Sacha Baron Cohen. This is a guy who when invited into a person’s home for dinner makes openly sexually complimentary remarks about two of the female guests, but explicitly states that the host’s wife is ugly. Never mind the fact that at that same dinner party, Borat hand-delivers his shit in a bag to a guest, claiming to not know how Western toilets work. It’s hilarious, it’s daring, and has nothing to do with politics.

In essence, the first Borat was such a success because Cohen played the character with such a believable naivete and loose grasp of English idioms, that he was a factory of malapropisms, a genius of comedic-timing, and a troll that could annoy the ever-living daylights out of anyone. There are as many scenes of him trolling nice, innocent people (like the driving instructor, the man who teaches him jokes, the group of feminists, or really any time he goes on the news) as there are scenes of him trolling people so that Cohen can make a political point or social observation (like the singing the wrong national anthem at the rodeo or his innate criticism of a Pentecostal Chruch’s weirdness). And in the end, the “point” of that plot at least had nothing to do with politics. You can watch this movie, get your laughs, remark at America’s racism, and still get your laughs.

Here, there really isn’t any scene I can think of that wasn’t done to make some sort of observation or political point. The closest I can think of are the bits towards the beginning before the plot kicks into high gear. There’s a recurring bit I love of him communication with the Premier of Kazakhstan via fax machine at a local UPS Store. The genius isn’t contained in the sentence I just wrote, but that he requires the aging worker of the UPS Store to hand-write all of his faxes for him and read any and all replies. Similarly, there’s a quick bit of genius at the beginning where Borat goes to a cellphone store and cannot understand FaceTime at all. He assumes the person on the phone must be the brother of the phone store worker he sees in front of him; they cannot be the same. Similarly he somehow enlists the help of a delivery person to re-seal the crate in which his daughter came to America in.

But otherwise, the jokes are there either to say, “Woah! Aren’t these Americans terrible?!” (whether he’s talking about QAnon’s theorists, anti-abortionists, or anti-maskers). Or there’s gross out humor, mostly about vaginas and periods, (or moon blood, as Borat calls it). As I said, these aren’t all unfunny. Probably my favorite sequence in the film sees Borat and his daughter at a pregnancy crisis center because Tutar has accidentally swallowed a little baby doll that was on top of a cupcake her father had “given” to her as a “treat” that was just supposed to be “their little secret” because women in Kazakhstan aren’t supposed to have sweets. So she ate the cupcake behind a dumpster. I’ll let you guess what happens when you enter a Christian pregnancy crisis center asking for them to take out the dumpster baby your Dad wasn’t supposed to be giving you… but it’s hilarious to see the worker sorta squirm his away around addressing the reality of incest.

But mostly, I felt kinda fatigued knowing that Cohen and co. were mostly trying to show me the “underside” of QAnon and anti-maskers… but as I said, in 2020, I am unfortunately well aware of both these groups, their psychologies, and their world. So merely highlighting that these ideas exist and that the people who endorse these ideas don’t really have a lot of great ideas otherwise, isn’t that novel as it might have been back in 2006.

Probably the more “interesting” side of the film is it’s focus on feminism. The film uses Tutar (played perfectly by previously unknown Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova and deserves all the praise she gets) to really expose how America, despite being a “feminist” nation, still shares many aspects with the fictionalized version of Kazakhastan where women are considered equivalent to livestock. The movie hopes to shed light on the far reaching effects of the patriarchy. The movie ends at the top of the pyramid with politicians who feel like it is their right to use their power to sleep with whomever they want (Trump’s obviously the true target of this criticism and I will say, the final Giuliani scene feels a little bit like entrapment… that said, I think it’s fair to say not every man would be so willing to fall into that trap). But leading up to that we see aspects of America designed to fit perfectly with the patriarchy’s demands. We hear from a shallow, vapid Instagram influencer that to get by women need to be docile and pretty, and we see a frankly horrifying discussion from a plastic surgeon talking about all the things wrong with Tutar that he would fix with surgery so that men would want her… despite the fact that she’s a beautiful woman and has nothing wrong with her! We live in a society that recognizes the horror of a patriarchical society, but still so clearly buys into it.

But in the end… you’re not watching Borat Subsequent Moviefilm to get an education on feminism and the problems with the patriarchy. That should be the extra cherry on top of a main course of hearty laughter. In focuses on the politics, Cohen and co. find plenty of laughs and memorable moments, but fail (perhaps inevitably) to recreate the signature naivete and bumbling oafishness of his titular interviewer, in the process losing some of the film’s humor and paradoxically its ability to leave a lasting message.

**/ (Two and a half stars out of four)

[charliejrogers]

Poltergeist (1982) (Or, an epileptic’s worst nightmare)

Wow. “What a picture!” to quote Al Pacino’s character from Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. I went into this movie with very low expectations and said to my roommate seconds before we pressed play, “All I know is that this movie has something about ghosts, TV’s, and a little girl who says ‘They’re heeeeeere!’” And if that too is all you know about 1982’s Poltergeist, stop reading and go see this movie for yourself. This movie presents a visual spectacle from 38(!) years ago that can genuinely hold its own with the slickest CGI-fests of the 2010s (and certainly better than the average CGI flick of the mid-00’s.)

Yes, there is a plot to Poltergeist, and I’ll try my best to efficiently condense the complex plot in a succinct sentence: a family’s house is haunted. Yup. That about does it. Let this not be a critique of the film. The plot here merely needs to justify the existence of the film’s visual effects and serve as a link from one show-stopping scene to the next.

If I haven’t made it quite clear yet, this is a visually stunning film, but not necessarily from a cinematography point of view. That said, this movie could be used as a text book for how to make spooky establishing shots (the key? place a spooky object at a slightly askew angle very prominently in the foreground). No, it’s visually stunning from the standpoint of set design and practical effects.

This is really a movie that has three primary sequences and then some interstitial fluff. The first sequence of note is the ghosts’ initial assault of the family’s house including the (legitimately terrifying) abduction of the family’s youngest daughter, Carol Ann, into the paranormal recesses of her closet and the almost-abduction of their son Robbie by being swallowed by a tree. The second major sequence involves the family’s grand and “scientific” attempt to get Carol Anne back from the malevolent spirits, and the third great sequence is the film’s coffins-springing-out-of-graves grand finale as the spirits exact their final revenge on suburbia! Truly, during each of these sequences my heart was racing and my mouth was agape. It says something that even though I knew this movie was rated PG and therefore that it was unlikely that any character would die, the movie created enough suspense that I never safely assumed everyone would be OK.

But can I talk more about the set design for a second? Prior to this movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and its final mine-cart battle was, in my view, the gold standard for achievement in set design. This movie really gives Indy a run for his money, despite the film taking place almost entirely within a cookie-cutter home that’s part of a large, sprawling, and bland housing development that scars the otherwise beautiful California landscape around it. Despite some curious architectural choices within the house (that staircase!), we see that there is literally special about this home. The patriarch of our film, Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) is the best salesman the housing development company has, and we see him sell houses that look exactly identical to his own. Yet, for all its ordinariness, there are so many tricks hidden behind the set’s walls that are revealed slowly throughout the film (and then very quickly at the end!). Everything from the ominous tree outside the children’s bedroom window to the unfinished pool to a closet door and to, yes, even those stairs(!) gets completely transformed before our very eyes from ordinary, safe, and boring to being part of the other world’s attack on our own! All of this comes to a head in the fantastic, jaw-dropping conclusion where skeletons and coffins pop out of the ground as if they were buried with springs (and the fact that in developing the set they probably buried with springs really makes me smile that the cast and crew were walking all over this set with booby-trapped coffins below their feet at least some of the time).

While it was a decision that was probably made due to the technical limitations of the time, I love that the coffins and skeletons are lifeless entities and not zombies. There is something infinitely more creepy about invisible forces acting as a puppet master over lifeless bones than the cheesy/overplayed model of the living dead. Furthermore, zombies are boring, unexciting villains… they walk slowly and stupidly hunt for brains. Clearly the force behind this film’s haunting is smart. It likes toying with the family. As we are told in the film, it knows what the family is afraid and uses it.

But more than just the set design, the practical effects in this film are wonderful in a way that’s no longer possible. I’m still scratching my head at how they filmed that scene where in seemingly one continuous shot, the film’s matriarch (Diane played by JoBeth Williams) pushes in all the chairs at the kitchen table, bends down to get something out of a cabin, and upon standing back up she (and we with her) see all of the chairs now stacked precariously on top of the table. The sequence takes five, six seconds, and is filmed to look like ONE SHOT! How did they do that?! Similarly, even just the scenes where chairs slide across the floor are magical in a way that is no longer possible in today’s era where I would know some computer was responsible for any on-screen trickery.

That the movie is such a successful spectacle no doubt is due to the influence of one Mr. Stephen Spielberg. He doesn’t direct this movie (Tobe Hooper does), but Spielberg wrote and produced it, so unfortunately for Mr. Hooper, Spielberg is primed to get most of the credit, as this film fits so perfectly in the Spielberg directorial canon. The movie came out a month before E.T. and certainly feels like a wonderful companion piece. It truly is a “kid’s horror movie” in the best sense of the phrase. The scenes where the family’s young boy, Robbie, is alone in his room dealing with his irrational fears are among the movie’s best. He sees faces in the tree outside his room, he throws a sweatshirt over his creepy clown figure, and investigates the darkness underneath his bed. All this is filmed with enough tension to perfectly capture and remind audiences how it felt to be afraid as a child.

The other hallmark of a classic Spielberg film? It doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is refreshing compared to if this movie were made today (and judging from the artwork from the 2015 remake I seem to be correct in my assumptions). In today’s age of developing deep “lores” and cinematic universes, the film isn’t too interested in fleshing out its paranormal theory. There’s a nice little piece of the film where one expert in ghosts explains her theories about the afterlife and what happens to the soul, but it mostly stays at a superficial level. We don’t know why there’s a particularly angry spirit haunting this house, and frankly it doesn’t matter!

Additionally, despite the serious and deadly circumstances the family faces, there’s a good deal of whimsy to this film. Just take the film’s ending. After the Freelings make a daring and heroic escape from their haunted home just before it is completely swallowed up into a blackhole, the movie ends with them checking into their room at a Holiday Inn for the night. As the camera zooms out on the closed motel room door and the credits roll, the film’s theme song plays. It’s a song that has an unironic, easy lightness to it that fits more in a Christmas movie than a Halloween movie. To me, it symbolizes that despite the destruction of the house, the spirits that inhabited it finally have reached their peace. It makes you wonder who were are supposed to be rooting for in this film… the Freelings or the ghosts? More on that in a second.

But no better example of the film’s whimsy exists than when the family enlists the help of local parapsychological experts (i.e., ghostbusters.) It is clear to me that the film Ghostbusters wouldn’t exist but for this movie. Anyways, the ghostbusters at one point brag about their credentials and knowledge of the paranormal, explaining that they once saw a toy car move across a room over the course of hours all by itself. Mr. Freeling (at this point with perpetual bags under his eyes from constant stress about his daughter residing in the spiritual world) grunts politely but with lack of interest. For in the next second he opens the door to the paranormal hub of his home where all the furniture is floating and spinning around by itself. The ghostbusters just about shit themselves.

If there’s some political commentary in this movie it’s very surface level and doesn’t distract from the spectacle. I was dreading this being a plot revolving around building the housing development on “sacred Indian burial grounds” and therefore the Native spirits were exacting their revenge. The movie actually addresses this head-on saying explicitly that the housing development was not built upon such land. It’s not that white people don’t deserve cosmic revenge for the way we (I’m white) as a people destroyed multiple civilizations… but that’s just such a tired, lazy, and slightly offensive trope. Instead, we find out that the original land developers built on top of a regular cemetery, moved the headstones, but never the bodies. Thus, the disturbed spirits and the subsequent haunting.

Still, even with this paranormal explanation, the movie is not-so-subtly critical of suburbia and suburbanites even if it’s critiques aren’t clear or fully fleshed out. As I noted above, towards the beginning of the film, the camera pans slowly across what is a beautiful California hilly landscape only to reveal a seemingly endless expanse of identical homes as part of this housing development. There’s an implicit sense at the very start that these people and their cookie-cutter existence and petty problems (like getting into a war with neighbors over the faulty TV signal), don’t belong here in this beautiful land… something made rather explicit by the film’s end when the ghosts fight back and finally get their peace.

As for more unclear symbolism, there’s got to be some meaning to the ironic fact that Mr. and Mrs. Freeling are both open-minded pot-smokers and Ronald Reagan-voting YUPPIE’s, but I never quite figured it out. Ultimately though, the specifics of Diane’s and Steve’s characters are not that important. They’re just supposed to be stand-ins for everypeople and they serve those roles very well. They are very, very likable as a couple with a strong, supportive, and obviously sexual relationship. And it’s clear they love their children very much. When told that Steve had to yell at Carol Anne sternly in order to save her life from ghosts, Steve hesitates because it is not within him to be harsh with his child. And as for Diane Freeling, she is the model of the perfect mother. She is devoted, loving, tender, but above all unafraid to risk her life to save her babies. It is clear the writers of Strangers Things had her in mind when they created the character of Mrs. Byers.

In every review I write, I get surprised by how much I end up writing. This is objectively a silly, inconsequential movie about a family whose house is haunted. It has no grand themes or ideas, the performances are all perfectly adequate, and some of the dialogue is downright silly. So how is there so much to say? It’s the way the director Tobe Hooper so perfectly recreates feelings of childlike fear and the way Spielberg and co. worked so hard to create such a grand spectacle that is better than some of the biggest budget movies of more recent yearsmakes this a true joy to watch. This movie knows exactly what it wants to be, sets out to do it, and comes away having it a big time home-run. And in its embrace of whimsy comes out on top over so many other movies it inspired who took Poltergeist‘s cutes on big set pieces, but forgot about its heart.

****(Four out of four stars)