I didn't think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.

Brief Encounter — 3.5/5

I think for me, there's a thought that if this were Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, I would probably be taken by it more; the natural charm, two people bigger than whatever current relationship they're in who find each other, but bound all the same by a pre-existing contract with a lesser being who isn't bad, simply nice enough. But I think the beauty of this movie is how normal Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are. "Do you realize, Sir, that if Celia Johnson could contemplate being unfaithful to her husband, my wife could contemplate being unfaithful to me?" is the truth of it. I appreciate from there the leanness of the movie; a grand romance told in 86 minutes and just a few weeks of knowing each other. There's an undeniable beauty here and I, like Alec, fall in love with Laura with her big eyes and pursed lips. Middle-class as they are, they both, bathed in the light of love, become more attractive as the film goes on. Though I think then, my ultimate disconnect is that I don't fall in love with Alec. He seems too forceful, too sure, the romance seeming less like an accident, a giant hole that they just happened to step into. She fell; he leaped. 

Things that are true

do not have to continue being true.

It may be that home has no room for you.

Caught Stealing — 2/5

I'm looking to figure out where Aronofsky is in this, and I simply could not tell you. Put any number of generic directors at the front of this and I'd believe more easily it came from them. What's up with all these famous intellectual directors out here making Steven Soderbergh jaunts? Are they trying to prove they can have fun? Fucking stop it, you're not fun, it's not what you do. This movie, at its best, is trying to be some take on 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels,' fun smaller characters caught up in a bigger world, but neither side of the equation is all that interesting. I didn't know this going in but I should have been made wary by this movie being based on "the first in the [person] series of novels." When has that ever worked out? Movies keep trying to make these 70s-adjacent character-centric novels into bigger things, and Jack Ryan's been the closest to success, and even his movies are all pretty blah. What is it that keeps those novels from working at movies? Austin Butler is certainly fine here, but his Hank Thompson is not some Fletch-level of character where you can see where people might want to follow him further. The casting here is left and right; Regina King is woefully miscast, Zoe Kravitz continues to play herself, the Facebook version of cool, and I'm surprised that the generic AI-generated phone voice we heard throughout the movie belonged to Laura Dern, and then Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Matt Smith all think they're in 'Snatch,' which, good on them for thinking they're in a better movie. They're broad sketches of characters in a movie that's focused on little details that don't matter. What's it matter that Hank don't drive, that he has an alcohol problem, that he likes the Giants? Ah, so the finale is in a Mets stadium? Oh, no, they're just passing through? Nvm. It's just notes on a character, fleshed out but with no blood pumping through their veins.

You're stuck on a certain story.

Couples Therapy S4 — 5/5

Re-reading my review of the last season, I feel like I've probably said all I need to say about this show. Each episode is a universe and it always takes me way too long to finish each season because each episode is both very heavy, and very filling. If any new realizations this season, maybe the ways in which Orna is increasingly challenged by people she does not know and whose lives she cannot know, and so the tools she has to help may not be the right tools for them.

There's only one plot: nothing is as it seems.

The Lowdown — 3/5

As much as I wanted this to be a pseudo-sequel to 'Reservation Dogs', it's really more an Ethan Hawke piece than Sterlin Harjo's. The edges of this world retain a faint outline of the exceptional casting and chemistry of that earlier show, but as the show reaches its conclusion, it's clear that those edges never really mattered; hamstrung by being a show rather than a movie, needing to fill out whole episodes with new characters and side-steps. At its core, it's a mystery, and only a mildly compelling one. In the conclusion, Hawke's character lays it all out in a long monologue, which is helpful, because the show didn't really help piece it together. It's a bunch of snacks calling itself a meal. But anyway, lately I am interested in figuring out the core of actors and directors—definitions—and this show helps me piece together Ethan Hawke: he's a dirtbag boyfriend! He cares more about being right than being good. "I'm just being honest" as a 5'10" male, unafraid to hurt your feelings because he's being pure to himself, self-righteous in pursuit of a greater ideal which will lose him friends and leave him lonely but at least he's able to sleep at night (alone in his bed). Too handsome to be incel, but an early precursor to the podcast males who have opinions. Draw a straight line from him here to him in 'Reality Bites.' Though the last two or three episodes of this series really did not work for me, the last 10 minutes provoked an emotional response as he, a "truthstorian," has to swallow the truth (the right, honest thing) in trade for doing something good, and you can see how much it sticks in his throat. It is a version of growth, but growth which at first hurts, bones pushing upwards, skin stretching to hold it; it feels tumorous. Is it growth if it destroys what made you interesting? Is it worth being right if you only end up hurting people? So feels like a good ending for the particular character that he embodies. 

I am a much better human being than you.

Eddington — 3/5

Ah, we are in the age of the apolitical political thrillers. "Both sides are a little stupid," says our centrist artist leaders, Ari Aster, Emerald Fennell, Paul Thomas Anderson. They're not wrong, they're just not helpful. I think this movie is both better and worse than 'One Battle After Another.' Better in that it's a more compelling build-up of interconnected parts, worse in that I can't really rationalize what it's building up to. Easily the best "Covid-era" movie made thus far (that I've seen), a clear signpost that "post-Covid" is our new "post-9/11" traumatic time-based movie marker. One united us against a theoretical and fictional common enemy to turn our hate towards, while this one just shows us how much we hate each other. And no matter what you do, it's wrong. I don't know what to do with that. Again, it's not helpful. 

If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

Frankenstein (Del Toro) — 2/5

I had given up on Del Toro, mostly because I only like one of his movies, despite the critical acclaim he gets for more than just that one of his movies. But my wife wanted to watch it, and who am I to deny the love of my life, my sweetie, my darling, my friend. Watching it, at least, helps me to define some things I don't like about his style. It's obvious that he's an aesthetically-driven director, but I don't like his aesthetic. I find that his choice of colors are at odds with the movies he's making. I think his movies want to feel like films, but everything looks so digital. Despite everything he does having this aura of horror, everything looks so pristine, so calculated. That thing behind the curtain has been carefully placed. Every scene is a painting, but lacks the loose expressionism of painting, and of dread. His overuse of blue and green tones creates not this aura of strangeness, but of fakeness. It's taking those hues of colored versions of those early Whaley monster movies, multiplied by the neon spray of Spencer Gifts darklight posters. It has a Pottery Barn-level of patina to make it look old, even though new, but just makes it look stuck in the late 90s. Is Guillermo even seen as a horror director? Is that just my perception of other people's perception of him? I'd classify him more as a maker of gothic melodramas. Base level romances or father-son catastrophes, but with a weird monster-who-isn't-a-monster. It's the aesthetic appearances of horror in name only. Man's the real horror, yeah, sure, okay. Anyway, this movie: Jacob Elordi's Frankenstein is compelling until he tells his own story and has this weird awkward way-too-heartfelt smile. Oscar Isaac as father turns from joy to contemptuousness too quickly, and the eventual forgiveness comes too easily. I think there's probably an interesting story about how fathers have no patience for their children, how they can create them but can only mold them so far. But that exists only on the edge of this movie. These Netflix movies just give big names a lot of money, when what they really need to give them is an editor for their ideas. I feel like the Netflix experience is on the other side of history to the studio system. It's an argument against free reign.

Good ideas change the world.

Great ideas create new ones.

Yippee!

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace — 1.5/5 (rewatch)

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones — 2/5 (rewatch)

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith — 2.5/5 (rewatch)

I haven't seen these movies since they came out and, in the 25 year gap, they have passed into the realm of watchability. What felt stupid 25 years ago is still very, very stupid, but there is now a quaintness to it. Everything feels like a Dreamcast cutscene. It feels like watching a movie from the '40s, in the '90s. Not necessarily good to engage on its own merits, but in order to see how things were. And what becomes fun in these movies is that you can visibly see the new world they're creating getting increasingly better. These movies were released across a 6-year span and, by the end, they looked more and more like the world we now know. In Episode 1, Star Wars traded its pure cinematic quality for brightly lit, flat environments for which to paint a background in the computer. When an actual set appears, it feels like a godsend. But as the movies progress, you can see them figuring out what works and what doesn't, how to hide effects in darkness, how to return a bit of cinema realness to the fake reality they'd constructed. So, too, the characters. As Red Letter Media asks — "who is the main character in The Phantom Menace?" It's no one!! It's just a bunch of people running around until someone gets chopped in half. But the movies becoming better hinge on Hayden Christensen — not on being a good actor, but on being an actual character. You can see everything that girls loved about Twilight in this movie full of attractive young people who can not recognize the very obvious red flags in front of them. He's moody, he's angry, and he's lost, and you can see an iconic character being constructed. And, in my prediction about 'Andor' making these movies better in retrospect, I can see that there's the possibility of a good politically-oriented movie in here! It'd make a good TV show!!! But as a movie, it's just so poorly fucking told. Which brings me to my overarching theory of George Lucas (work in progress): here is a man who lacks patience for progress. He just wants to go fast, zoom zoom, scene transition swipes being an artistic choice less because of the artistry and more because they let us get from somewhere to somewhere faster. Doesn't want to wait for an edit, so invents digital editing. Doesn't want to wait for sets, so popularizes computer graphics. Doesn't want to direct actors, just say the lines. No time for characterization, that takes too long. No time for rewrites, we've got a movie to make. It's a mentality that leads to bad movies but, also, based on everything that came afterwards, you can't deny that these three movies didn't change the world just as much as the previous three did. 

If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

Smoke Signals — 3/5

Everything I love about 'Reservation Dogs' is here, but just the beginnings of it. A fairly standard story, but the Natives at the center and behind the camera manage to elevate it by virtue of simply making it different, because they are different. Every old story can be new if you tell it new, with a different people. And then the worst haircut reveal moment in all of cinema. 

And God knows I've had some rough fuckin' years.

Peacemaker S2 — 2.5/5

Apparently I have only had a better habit of writing consistent reviews for just the past couple of years, because it looks like I did not review season 1. Here goes: it was fun. 

Season 2 is also fun, but lesser. Both seasons are kind of the best and worst of James Gunn — a certain casual lack of effort (or is it effortlessness?) to the set-up, lazy crude jokes, weaponizing needle drops to effectively and immediately communicate 'we're having fun', and surprising emotional depths plumbed from stupid, stupid characters. (Writing that out, I think he's the closest filmmaker equivalent we have to Garth Ennis, the comics writer.) This season's successes ride on John Cena managing to carry emotion surprisingly well, contrasting the buffoon we've mostly known so far. But also this season seemed like it would rather focus on Harcourt, who's whole thing is being emotionally unavailable, so, y'know, not necessarily the best person to place our emotional goodwill. So it just becomes light fun with the occasional touching on something interesting, laddering up to a final episode that does not at all put all the pieces together. I'm halfway through a rewatch of GotG v3 and I think it's obvious that Gunn has a soft spot for the side characters, but then gets sidetracked by the side characters to the side characters. 

I just want to know that it's really happening.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind — 4/5 (rewatch)

I have a lot to say about this movie.

This movie is a horror film.
I think something lost in our view of Spielberg is that those early movies of his really leaned heavily into horror. It's easy to think of that with 'Jaws', because it's commonly put in that category, but also — 'Jaws' never really feels like a horror movie as we've grown to know the genre. It feels like a character set piece with some jump scares and gore. It's scary if you think about it rather than being scary in the moment. And 'scary if you think about it' is something that runs through 'Duel,' 'Close Encounters,' and even 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' which I will call the last movie of the first act of his career. We commonly associate Spielberg with a sense of childlike wonder, more akin to 'E.T.,' or the any number of movies he produced in the '80s. We think of him more as the parody of him, like how we associate De Niro with the caricature of his 'Taxi Driver' role. And there is wonder present in these early movies as well, but also equally present is the other side of wonder — fear. 'What's behind that door?' is both an exciting, and dangerous question to ask. Wonder and fear play off of each other, a thin line separating them. The other side of that door might be your parent there to greet you, or an emptiness where a parent used to be. A child asks 'what if aliens exist,' and the adult version says 'it would freak us the fuck out.' There are scary ideas in this movie. But we don't necessarily see it because Spielberg, I think, doesn't have the language for horror. Had he grown up on 'Halloween', he may have made the musical cues more frightening (the dun dun DUN of Jaws is meant to be scary, but you also can't really take it seriously). Had he the camera knowledge of, say, the version of him that made 'War of the Worlds,' he might have been more hectic with his camera. But I'm glad he has neither at this stage in his career, more molded off John Ford, because what he has instead is unmatched and undefinable. When Billy goes running off into the night... it's odd, but it's not presented as scary. But it is scary... if you put yourself into his mother's shoes. This movie is about people who have an incredibly frightening experience, and people who don't believe them, and wouldn't that freak you the fuck out if that happened to you or happened to someone near you? To either have that happen and not be believed, or to see someone you know change and not be able to follow them through that door? These early Spielberg movies were grasping at this notion of 'wow, what a fun idea' mixed equally with 'opening this ancient relic will melt your face off btw.' Step through this door and you will be changed, but you really need to ask yourself — do you want that? But instead of presenting it as horror, it's presented as natural moments within a suburban life. The terror of everyday life. 

This movie is about coming to terms with something you don't understand.
At the ending of this movie, humans repeat a five-note phrase over and over again in an attempt to be understood, while a giant alien machine responds with increasing complexity. It is like a child saying 'Da-da!' over and over again, pleading to communicate, and a parent responding in full whole sentences that the baby cannot even begin to grasp. And so, to the repeated parent metaphors I'm putting in here — I hated 'The Fabelman's' when I watched it, but I think it's worth a rewatch with this movie in mind; at the very least, having watched that movie helps me enjoy this one more. This is very much Spielberg trying to figure out why his mom left. When I first (and last) watched this movie 20-some years ago, I could not grasp how someone with a family could just so easily leave their wife and children. And now, older, I am aware that this happens all the time, every day, all around us. And I think what I also understand after having a few mind-altering experiences of my own is that the curse of knowledge isn't just that you are changed, but that others are not changed. You enter these experiences, through these doorways of perception, and you will know more than you did before and you will be changed forevermore and no one anymore will understand what the fuck you are saying. Which is, again, scary. But I think through this movie he's starting to understand how someone could just leave. Because they have no choice! They are different now. Call it a mid-life crisis. Call it an alien abduction. They are no longer the person you knew, and they must go now be that new thing. 

All-in-all, I'm glad I gave it another shot after all these years as I walk away thinking I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it. This movie means something. It's important.  

Look but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow.

The Devil's Advocate — 3.5/5

Long been on my list as something that I'm not sure was highly received, but felt like an entertaining, enduring movie and man, Pacino is having fun, isn't he? He is both terror and cartoon, a Looney Tunes-sized supervillain. Keanu is pretty bad in here, thinking that he can pull off a Southern accent, but also Pacino pronounced 'cyber' as 'kyber' so I don't think anyone behind the camera was actually paying attention to the words coming out of people's mouths. Which creates a good and useful looseness! This could have been more serious, more horror, more good, but it instead is fun; infinitely rewatchable, both lesser-than and better-than, a devil's trade.

Semen demon.

One Battle After Another — 3/5

Expectations hurt this one. Not because I expect a lot from PTA, I think he has extreme highs and then a bunch of movies that absolutely do not connect with me despite being celebrated by others. So yeah, the expectations that others create for him make me less interested in jumping into a similar situation of being befuddled by the larger Criterion-American populace. And so—I enjoyed the act of watching this movie, and for two hours kept asking myself — "Is it great yet? Is it great yet?" At the very end, it started approaching something I could rationalize as great? Maybe? I'd have to watch it again to confirm, and to the movie's credit, its form makes it something easy to rewatch. It feels like PTA's 'everything connects in some tenuous way' by way of Soderbergh's light '70s action chase adventures by way of Quentin Tarantino's gritty caricaturizations. So maybe not as fun as those two on their own, but also a bit more than those two on their own. And in the center, some really fun characters!! One of Leo's best roles, Benicio's very best role, Teyana Taylor has an iconic look, and Sean Penn rides a sort of perfect line between serious actor and comedic role. I think, in general, intellectual directors have trouble with humor, and this is probably a better example of them pulling it off, short of, you know, making me laugh. It has a tone! That great undefinable thing that all good movies somehow achieve. And so, to the ending — if I were to try to draw a larger meaning from the movie, and I do have to try, it's that we are all of us going to be failed revolutionaries in whatever respects, flawed as we are with our original and unoriginal sins, but the only hope we have in creating a better world is creating children that are better than us. And part of the way we make them better is that we raise them well, but also that we fail them. They will mirror us, we will see them reflected in us, even in inverse. 

Dunno, I might be forcing it? 

Admit nothing, deny everything.

The Apprentice — 3.5/5

More than a good movie, a useful movie. Part of me wants to feel sympathy for these people because, uh, I'm a good person (?), but if I can push past that, it's a useful tool for seeing how monsters create monsters. The bad news is that they'll exceed their creators. The good news is that they will also destroy them. 

Also, the aesthetics of this movie are great, combo-ing archival NYC footage with the film, creating a verisimilitude. It feels vintage, authentic.