Boys, where have you been?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem — 3.5/5

It's fun!! It played fast and loose with the turtles and how we know them, and so created something both familiar and new. It screams along, moving too fast to let you question the relatively small shifts in reality. Splinter's more a dad than a teacher. They're actual teenagers. Mutants everywhere! There's a casual cool, an immediate chemistry present within its parts. It rolls on vibes and a Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack. The core of the turtles is in that fucking theme song, and everything else is water. And now, to approach this children's movie through a critical lens: I couldn't help but to feel a tinge of disappointment throughout? And that disappointment isn't that it's bad, it's that it had all the ingredients to be better. Its emotional climaxes don't feel as emotionally climactic. It's got a clear 'about me' but also just... handles it with a hand-wave? Its casual cool borders on lazy. As it is, it's a perfect movie to watch in the background and get sucked in for bits and pieces at a time. And ultimately, that 'good enough' may very well be what makes it great. Infinitely rewatchable because it's got just enough to make you sit, but not enough to make you sit and think. We'll see? And, another note—Doritos, BTS, Attack on Titan. Those jokes on one hand made the movie accessible and easily relatable and, on the other, made it seem like a giant commercial. Which I know it is; the Ninja Turtle cinematic universe continues at Wal-Mart, in comics and cartoons and action figures and bedsheets. But the way it's handled, it feels harbinger to a new thing: advertising and movies collapsing into one. It's all just one cinematic universe called content. 

Had thirty years to figure it out

but picked the last 6 months.

— Brendan Joyce, Autobiography

Never to return to the shape they were.

Still – 4/5

Well-crafted! The footage from his career plays well with carefully crafted, vague recreations that bleed into each other, forming a connective tissue that allows the movie to use his works to tell his life story. And it does a great job of telling that story through the lens of a single idea (the inability to be still). It's really well done, and you feel his pain, and you feel his strength. You see him cohere into form and then you see him dissolve, becoming a puddle struggling to regain form. But there, in the reflection, still him. 

Electricity

that thinks it's human.

The fire next time.

Oppenheimer – 3/5

Real life has too many characters!! I wanted to see a people grapple with what they are making / what they have made, men playing god and realizing the almighty burden of holding the world in the palm of your hand. Instead, I get a series of people who give me a faint note of recognition, and then shuffle off to the side. A lot of background characters with no background to ground them, to add to the overall meaning. A race to be first will always beat a race to be right. And the movie is Nolan's typical racing — all propulsive momentum, a V2 rocket heading somewhere. But man, of all the targets to hit, why aim it at Strauss? The bitter social drama doesn't match up to the scientific drama, or the moral drama, or the political drama. Why are the women there, and what do they mean to him or the story? Who gives a shit about his renewed security clearance? It's distracting. It's real life, and I want cinema. And when Nolan hits on that point, as His works tend to do, the booming sound of the IMAX speakers and the visuals of rolling fire work together to create something beautiful, and frightening, and approaching numinous. I'd like to sit with that! But the movie moves too fast to let us sit with any thought too long. As is typical in Nolan's work, his worlds of gods have no room for men.

I'm trying to start from a place of positivity.

The Bear, Season 2 – 3.5/5

The Bear has, surprisingly, become a great companion piece to 'Ted Lasso'. Both being, in essence, what it means to be a manager. Building a vision, corraling collaborators; finding faith in work. And season 2 throughout threatens to wholesale become 'Ted Lasso'. Good people! Giving everyone a chance! Everyone has a place in our future, no one is expendable. 'Forks' is a masterclass episode that shows how every job is worthy of respect, that there is something beautiful and worthwhile in being in the service industry, as to love is to serve. (Shit, it gave me a renewed faith in my own job.) The high-tension anxiety of Season 1 largely dissipates in the slow build of building a new place for everyone to belong. But eventually, that workplace anxiety returns in a great final episode that shows the other side of that, and upends the 'Ted Lasso'-esque build—doing something well may well mean at the expense of all else. It may mean yelling and screaming and hurting the people you love (which is hurting yourself). Ted Lasso was a great man and manager without having to compromise himself, but even he ultimately wasn't up for the cost of greatness. So here is a far less perfect version of him on the other side, striving for something without the emotional skills to manage it. 

The stars at night are big and bright...

Pee Wee's Big Adventure – 3.5/5

It's weird, because I giggled a lot, but also I find it... exhausting? Part of it is Pee Wee who is both hilarious and kind of a difficult person—a child who I would hate to babysit?—and the other part I think is just a lack of momentum from a first-time director still finding his footing? I dunno. I love Pee Wee — or rather I love the idea of Pee Wee. He's funny just by looking at things in that way he can look at things, by how quickly he can turn things off and on. He doesn't have to be funny; he is funny. And I enjoy that he doesn't live in a cartoon as with his show; he stands out exactly as odd as he should, gleefully and willfully weird in a not-quite-as-weird world. His persona has a magical quality of fitting in anywhere, making everything he touches a little stranger rather than everything else making him feel more out of place. There's a contrast here that isn't in the show. But, on the other hand, the show was only 22 minutes, which might be just the right amount of him at any one go. Also, I'm being hypercritical of a thing that made me giggle a lot. Fuck the shit out of me.

To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn't just about horses, I lost interest.

Barbie - 3.5/5

This movie is difficult for me to place my finger on. It's wiggly. “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing,” as Greta Gerwig says, and I am stuck somewhere around there. Figuring out if she succeeded, I guess? It's a movie that's very aware that it's making A Barbie Movie. It's full of expectations and the feeling that, in order to exist in this world we live in, it must uphold those expectations while also subverting those expectations while also very obviously subverting those expectations. It must be light and pink and deep and red and bleeding from her vagina. It must be beautiful, and against beauty. It wants its cake, and to eat it, too—but to still stay skinny, duh. It has to make it okay for everyone to like Barbie. It must walk the center line. Listen, it's a hard task, and walking the middle aisle, hovering in the air between two powerful magnets pulling its arms in each direction. Its desire to live within contradictions break its easy painted-on smile. It has become sentient; aware. Though it's not so much self-aware as constantly aware of itself — much as women are constantly aware of being a woman!! In the end, it's a movie that befits the toy – designed to be analyzed, poked at, prodded; hair to be combed, body to be dressed, legs to be split, views to be contorted as the viewer sees fit to shape it through their own ideological lens. How much can it hold between its rigid plastic fingers? Must it carry the full weight of feminism and femininininity? As subjects and objects, all are inextricably linked to... not controversy, but opinions. It's a movie made to be discussed on the internet. It's an Instagram explainer of feminism, designed to be Instagram explainer-ed. It's a product about a product with us as the long-tail product. It's very possibly the most defining movie of our time. And any issues I have with it are not that it had something to say, but that the message wasn't perfect. I'll sum that criticism up as "female power fantasies are still fantasies of power," and go no further. ALSO BECAUSE I CAN'T HELP IT I'LL JUST SAY THAT SOMETIMES THE EDITING CHOICES FELT A LITTLE LESS IMPACTFUL THAN I THINK THEY COULD HAVE BEEN? But all that to say, the movie befits the toy. Barbie The Movie and Barbie the Character are magical mirrors for those who gaze into it, reflecting back themselves. 

Do you feel responsible?

Secret Invasion — 1/5

This is bad! I can't wait to see what happens next!!

Consciousness

causes collapse.

Same time, same channel.

Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia — 2/5

Half a documentary, only one real voice and one side that they keep returning to as they do a fairly horizontal, uninteresting recountment. Don't worry, friends, the office manager has something to say! And the app glitches?? Wow! And someone dies! And then there's this sudden emotional breakdown around that that the movie just kind of... fails to follow through with? There was your story, friends, and you let it go. As such, we're left with "HQ was big, and then it wasn't, and some behind-the-scenes drama acted in aid of both those things." Could have just as easily done a 20 minute read of that oral history on [online media outlet]. 

The key is to act like a happy family.

Succession Season 2 — 3.5/5

It's more of the same thing that you enjoy! Only this time, Tom is just the absolute best. What a tough role, and what an acting job to bring it to life! And what a cliffhanger! Yay! And yes, you do feel sympathy for these rich fucks who've been raised by this wicked man. Of course a monster will have raised monsters, too! And the little tiny steps away from that they roam are monumental in their proportionate size, and the way he corrals them back in, calling the cattle home, seemingly small in their evil. He only likes them when they're broken, with he as the glue holding the pieces together. But as the song goes — it's the ones who've cracked that the light shines through. 

With the rich and mighty, always a little patience.

Succession Season 1 — 3.5/5

It's this unusual mishmash of tones — obviously comedic slamming against definitely-not-comedic. It at times seems like it's aiming for that Armando Iannucci style of serious actors behaving very unseriously, but the weight of the actors stands too tall above the comedy. Sometimes. And then at other times, not. It's weird. But it works! It's a family that only knows how to show love by strategically hurting each other. It's lost jobs and deaths and a downwardly spiraling economy as the weapons and wasteful by-product of the petty problems of the rich and powerful. Kendall flip flops between good and bad, never knowing how to find the middle. Roman uses the exact same dialogue as his father, only without the power to make it meaningful. Shiv wants the power but doesn't have the balls to reach for it in case she fails. And Tom (who is great) is just her cuckold, too afraid of losing power to state his desires out loud. And Greg's just kind of a funny character skating on a proximity to power, a tool waiting to be used. At least so far. And despite them all being variations of giant shits, I am unfortunately invested in who comes out on top.