The things that are that are not.

The Secret Agent — 4/5

According to the internet, the Brazilians have a culture of not wanting to bring up the past. This was helpful to fully understand the movie! But also, to the movie's credit, it created in me that curiosity to seek out more information. At its core, it's a serious movie, but completely surrounded by these curious and compelling choices. It's not a mystery movie, but it arouses mystery in me. It makes me want to learn more! Why is there a severed leg murdering people?? What is happening in the north vs the south of Brazil?? So, on a surface level, I was able to enjoy the movie despite not fully getting it, but learning what the culture is about helped me understand what the movie is about. At the end, when Wagner Moura appears in his second role, both clearly his father's child and totally removed from his father, there is this sense of hope that quickly becomes muddled. I didn't understand it while watching it, but later, upon learning, did it register. There is a hope that the past leaves a legacy: a son takes on his father, a nation is better for what came before... and the disappointment of that being both true and not true. The American axiom of "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" kind of flipped on its head, with the opposite also being true — we can't hold all of history in our head, it gets scattered, becomes unfinished fragments, barely remembered thoughts, we can't recollect how all the pieces came together, and so we are destined to do it all over again. 

When I pray no one answers. I only pretend he does. Then I do whatever I think god probably would've suggested. Usually, it's obvious.

The Phoenician Scheme — 1.5/5

Wes Anderson is just making French comic books at this point. Fantagraphics-ass shit. I don't think this movie means anything, and I'm not really a particular fan of how he handles humor. It's too staged. Humor, for me, needs a feeling of unpredictability, and he's far too controlled for that. 

Do people enjoy your company?

Minx S1 — 3/5

A worthy successor to 'Glow,' in that it's a clothing-caricatured depiction of a time and place where I want everyone's furniture and outfits, there's lighthearted humor with mostly good-meaning people, a wily but goodhearted businessman, a disrespected industry, a feminist who's expanding her ideals to others while loosening her own hard-line views, and the occasional titty. Shit, writing it out, it is just 'Glow,' isn't it? It's fun, a perfectly light watch, though at times the priggish nature of the leading lady tends to amount to 'watch 18 minutes of her being wrong before realizing there are other perspectives.' 

Where the fishes are frightening.

Shrinking S3 — 3/5

I think the show has returned to its beginning-of-season-1 lulls, namely in that the comedy either just stopped working, or that the show has forgotten it's a comedy? There were a lot of things that felt like jokes that I did not laugh at. Fortunately, the emotion works! I do like these characters, and their fumbles along the way to growth. Everyone would be better if everyone just said their problems aloud, and then friends neighbors co-workers all collectively helped them overcome it!! It's the 'Ted Lasso' idealism that everyone grew to hate and both marks and stains Bill Lawrence's work. But I think the longer his shows go, the more an irony appears: despite doing the work to overcome your problems, there continue to be new problems. Which, yes, I know, is life and sitcoms, but it feels like the idealistic POV of the show suggests that we may Some Day attain The End of Problems, but as the end of Ted Lasso, Scrubs, and this season show, it usually means that when you're in a good place, you just up and fucking leave. What's the use of building a community if everyone acts like it's optional????? The unintended thesis of Bill Lawrence's work is that it teaches us that moving forward means leaving people behind. Which, I think, is sort of a summation of the American mindset: this battle and balance between needing others and needing to be okay on your own. 

Howzat?

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — 2.5/5

"I didn't really like this movie, but I'm also curious to watch the next," I said about the previous one. I think the appeal was essentially "what a weird corner they've painted themselves into, I wonder how they'll paint themselves out." And that is indeed the appeal. When it's at its weirdest—like when Ralph Fiennes is doing his best satan karaoke—it is something wonderful. "The end of the world isn't sad or depressing, it's just fucking weird" is a Mad Max-esque sentiment that I can absolutely buy into. It's unfortunately too little of that. It feels like it's trying to be a TV show, as a movie series, characters coming in and out and intersecting at just the right time, but ultimately saying nothing beyond continuing to move the plot forward. Unfortunately, by the end, there's no one really worth following, all of the interesting characters are now gone. 

It's true,

through you.

— Kim Gordon, NOT TODAY 

Are you sure?

It Was Just An Accident — 3.5/5

Feels like a one-room play, except there's a car! So they keep driving to new locations!! I liked this and let me see if I can figure out why I didn't love it: At the end, Eghbal sits tied to a tree, legitimizing himself via his belief system. If he is right, justice is served. If he is wrong, God will give them justice in the afterlife. In his mind, both paths are essentially equal. And this, after an hour and a half of questioning whether they have the right person, and whether it's worth hurting that person in vengeance, stands the ideological divide that paints one as winner and the other as destined to look over their shoulder. They are a believer. They have justified themselves through religious doctrine. And so I think this divide is the most interesting aspect of the movie, but I don't think this is the thing the movie is questioning. I think the movie just sort of upholds the liberal agenda of being morally pure in the singular, constantly questioning whether it is right to take righteous action if it hurts your soul, while leaving the collective without someone willing to sacrifice their soul for the greater good. We can't keep saying we're better than them while accepting that we'll never be better off than them. As I get older, and move ever closer to excusing violence, I no longer think it's good enough to ask these kinds of questions—we have an answer, repeated 1000x throughout history: no revolution occurs without violence.

When they do, we smile.

Mo S2 — 3.5/5

I like the show, as I am a sucker for very normalized looks at cultures that are not my own. As with season 1, sometimes fun, sometimes sad, and overall a casual look at the violence that otherwise regular people have to navigate in order to achieve some level of normalcy. Always a gun to their head, always a wall to be thrown up against.

Sham and hokum.

Wicked: For Good — 1/5

Awful. What is this dark, hopeless shit? Why is Glinda-With-The-Big-Lips a bad guy? Why does Anorexaba become a bad guy? Why does her sister seem genuinely evil? Why are love interests turned into dark, tormented, vengeful versions of the Scarecrow and Tin Man? Seeing this nightmare play out, you see even more clearly the cash intentions of splitting this into two movies: you retain the first as a light, fluffy, fun reimagining, built for infinite rewatches, and you get to toss its foul ending into a dungeon of unwatchability that need never be mentioned again, while also generating +$500M of additional revenue shat out behind the wagon trail of its lead-in. It is awful. It is the apotheosis of the fan fiction need to connect everything, a corporate slop bowl where nothing can be new, only a combination of previously existing ingredients, rearranged. It cannot be redeemed, so it is separated. It becomes not satire, not parody, but a worse thing—a piece of work that makes the fucking 'Wizard of Oz,' an eternal classic, actively worse. It does not build on top, it builds a tunnel underneath from which sinkholes can collapse whole worlds. This movie is genocidal.

Do two overlapping shadows become darker?

Perfect Days — 4/5

I think not only is life fragile, as stories like to remind us, but also our view on life is fragile. We create routines, our perfect days, and once something disrupts that, the control you've inserted onto your life in terms of personal narratives is set on fire. O, your life might be better. O, your life might be worse. To the left and right of you, as inconsistencies set in, is a more perfect day, or a lesser one. Over here is judgement; over there is connection. (Both carry potential to be the same thing.) Do you choose a consistent life, or a more curious one? They both carry light and shadow, and we get to choose how much of each we want in our life, but we don't get to choose either's absence. I see myself in Hirayama's chosen life; beautiful, until it's skewed by those forces beyond our control, and from there, we must find our way back to center, and whatever new routine is waiting on the other side.

Strange trails, hidden paths.

Train Dreams — 3/5

Joel Edgerton stars as A Decent, Hard-Working Man Whose Love Was Pure And Whose Life Was Marked By Loss. It aims to be be Pretty™, and achieves it, sure, even if the result is just one large dead girlfriend montage. But as a resonant, emotional movie, it fails on its two recurring themes. "Does this act of innocent ignorance curse my life?" haunts him until it disappears totally. "Does this man's life in totality have meaning?" is only really brought up by the narrator, who gives the movie a feeling that it wants to be more whimsical than it is. Where it succeeds, though, is operating at that place between "this is the old world" and "this is the new world." Old tools, hard times become new tools, easier times, in a blink. You could have told me this movie was based in the 1850s until suddenly we're in the 1920s. It's that feeling of "gradually, and then suddenly." You're in a forest, and then the forest is gone, and you were too busy chopping down all the trees to notice. And in the way the movie moves you through that forest, you can understand how people get lost in the world. Take your eyes off of it for a second, and it's gone.

The places I would be

if I wasn’t me.

— I Wanna Feel Pretty by Greg Mendez 

What is given may be taken away at any time.

Hamnet — 3/5

Shit, guys, I went a full fucking year of questioning this movie's title without anyone telling me that Hamnet's the name of the fucking kid. I guess I should have watched the trailer? And now I know, and a weight has been removed from my shoulders. Life blooms. 

The last 45 minutes is a good movie. The power of narrative to process powerful emotions? Putting ourselves into our art as a way to let go? A good story as pathway to immortality? Bro, sign me up, let's fucking go. And then the first hour and 15 minutes is a love story between a manic playwright dream boy and a... (re-reads notes)... a witch? Okay, she's a witch. It's a weird fucking love story, bros. Willy Shakespeare doesn't come across as tortured so much as flighty, a flirt, a flake, until the end when he's, uh, placed his emotions into this play. Had this been 'a story of a man who can't express himself except in his art,' I'd be like "good on you." But no, this is a story about the wife who's left behind, who barely knows what's inside her husband other than that he accepts her, who was strong until love's attachment weakened her, and then he gets forgiven because he's placed all the things he could not give her into a powerful work. The movie feels like a forgiveness of a wayward partner because they are an artist, which I can buy, except the portrayal of him for much of the runtime is kind of just "shitty guy."

And now we're off on another journey.

Man on the Run — 2.5/5

Given a fairly new interest in Paul McCartney [cough cough, looks at Alex], I watched this. It feels like the attempt of this movie is to reframe Paul McCartney as not the soft boi that he very much superficially appears to be. Behind those puppy dog eyes: He disappeared! He disagreed! He dissolved the legal entity known as The Beatles! If that was the movie's attempt, I guess it successfully does that. So while this movie feels like a movie licensed and approved by the official estate of Paul McCartney, a chance to raise the idea of Wings in anyone who might view them disparagingly, I'm also not really sure I understand why he'd like to come across as very talented, and also a bit cold and oblivious. I think the movie, in its way, showcases very clearly what he was and wasn't without the three other people whose names will always be connected with him: very talented, preternaturally so when given the right box.

And gatekeepers, and norms.

Bugonia — 3.5/5

Do I like this? I think it's interesting. I think for 4/5s of its running time, it accurately captures the faith of knowing without not quite knowing; trying to hold on tight to a barely graspable idea. I think the ending is much bolder and less ambiguous than most people might have gone for; I think others would have chosen an easier way out. I think it proves that Yorgos Lanthimos is always a compelling director worthy of being watched. But also I'm not sure what to think. It reminds me of when I watched 'Poor Things,' where there was this feeling that there should be something bigger here, a larger analysis to be gleaned, a thing to take out of the theater into conversations. But it all felt like it was right there on the page? They both are movies that makes not obvious choices while also feeling obvious. 

Also the alien spaceship was shaped like a jellyfish and I saw a jellyfish, bro, it was in my dream, bro, we saw the same thing, bro, the collective consciousness, bro.