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 — 3.5/5

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.

Memento amorous.

28 Years Later — 2/5

Uhhh just a mish-mash of tones and art directions, which makes it for an at-times compelling and often confusing watch. Is this a serious tale on serious earth, an oddball horror film, some story about... archers(?), or a Power Rangers film? All to say, I didn't really like this movie, but I'm also curious to watch the next.

And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.

Unforgiven (rewatch) — 4/5

Wow!! What a difficult movie!!! Just an incredible thickness to the proceedings. The thing that sticks with me within that is this: what is the cost of justice? And does that cost justify it? There are two characters here who are maybe outright a bad guy — the man who cuts up the woman and the bar proprietor — but the rest of them are, in any other movie, a potential protagonist: the formerly bad man looking to take care of his family by picking up his gun to kill a newly minted bad man, the man who still thinks he may have some badness in him, the man who wants to have a badass in him, the man who claims to be badder than he is, the bad guy turned law enforcer, the deputies bad at their job, and the women who do bad things but want to be treated as though they're worth more than a horse. Pick your poison but be sure — it is poison. So was it best just to leave things alone? A functioning civilization will have law in the center and flaws at the edges, and it's those frayed threads that unravel the whole affair. Those women deserved justice. And all would have been settled if they got it when the payment came due. But in the absence of it, an interest is created on the payment due that takes it beyond justice into another realm. I struggle with an idealism to be right and correct in all things (lest cancer form), and what feels to me a truth that mistakes will continue to be made, on and on, here to eternity. A bad carpenter will not make a good house, and we, all of us, hardly know what we're doing. Lately, I am stuck on this notion that society is a thing that is always constantly only ever so barely hanging on. 

The other thematic element at play here is the stories we tell ourselves and others. Bill Munny is chasing a truth, exaggerated, and all those potential protagonists are telling themselves stories about what they are, were, and could have been. A lot of stories, all bending the corner towards 'lie,' but the only real undisputed truth in them is that in the end, a lot of people die. 

This movie is about the edges of morality, and how they form a very sharp corner. 

As a child, I yearned for the mines.

A Minecraft Movie — 1.5/5

Watched it for work. The kids are really making this into something larger than it is, and that's great for them. Really. But also another sign for me that I'm getting old and I, like the generations before me, will cease to understand the world that passes by my window. Good luck out there.