Who's been messing up everything?

Agatha All Along — 1.5/5

It started off with what seemed like a playful idea—as WandaVision explored old sitcom aesthetic, this show might explore genre television. But that didn't happen! And whatever did happen was fucking dumb. Agatha's inconsistency can be mistaken for intentional (chaos being) but I think it's just an excuse. Aubrey Plaza's Rio is fun until it stopped making sense. This set of people set together never settle into place. There was one episode which was genuinely good? People seem to like the other episodes as well? The fuck is wrong with you all? I throw my hands up. I don't think it's worth trying to understand the divide. It's just people making up their own mythos to fill in the gaping holes. Which I guess is how mythology works in the first place? New song's good, though.

If we want people to reveal themselves,

we have to be willing to forgive them for who they are.

There are a lot of things more dangerous than a wounded animal. A healthy animal, for starters.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold — 4/5 (rewatch)

I fucking love this movie. Isabel Merced comes across as so genuinely sincere throughout the entire movie. The movie is in many ways a giant wink, playing with whatever Dora is known for in ways I'd have no real clue about, but she never once blinks, and the movie works around her as everyone plays the audience surrogate and squints their eyes at her to wonder if she's real. She is! And they couple her with some 'Easy A'-sized parents!! I fucking love great movie parents. It's my Superman syndrome. "Kindly couple," not "last son of Krypton," being the true origin of Superman's beatitude. And so, too, Dora's.

I couldn't wait 'til I got home, to pass the time in my room alone.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin — 3/5

Tearjerker (derogatory). Why is it derogatory??? I don't know, man. This thing made me cry and then that crying made me feel like it wasn't deserving. What was missing? Shit, I dunno. It reminds me of my own time growing up online, and the people there who helped me grow beyond what I thought I was capable of. But I don't know why that would disconnect me from the story. It's sad that his body fell apart? It's great that he was able to find a world where that didn't matter? I suppose I was waiting for those two worlds to come together. But, you know—death.

This is church.

Somebody Somewhere S1 — 4/5

The series comes out with a banger of a first episode, and then somewhat struggles to maintain that high. But within that struggle, it remains incredibly watchable due to the incredible pair at the center. Bridget Everett sometimes strains within either who her character is, or the ability to bring it to life, but there's something about her worth paying attention to as the series' highs rest on her shoulders. Meanwhile, Jeff Hiller is a star, fully formed. He could easily have been a Jack McBrayer caricature (non-derogatory), but he feels like a true-to-life weirdo, happiness and sadness (or happiness through sadness) encompassing his being. They're at the center, and that center is shaped with an incredible sense of joy. The joy of friendship, of people who enjoy being around each other, and are enhanced by being around each other and are blessed to have found each other. That joy then spreading around to others who they invite into their congregation. The last episode manages to return to the high of that first episode and cements what I believe the show to be about—"This is church." A place for the unwashed masses to gather, without judgement. Finding a place within the no-place of existence, if just for an hour here or there. A place to worship each other. It's church, it's a bar, it's a park, it's your best friend's apartment on Friday nights.

Hillbillies with a Youtube channel.

Twisters — 3/5

Man, first 15m is banger. People who get along, getting sucked up into a twister. And THEN, the next hour or so is a banger. People who don't get along, trying to get their ass sucked into a ternader. Daisy Edgar-Jones vacillates easily from happy girl to sad girl to sassy girl, and they all seem to form a 3-dimensional view of the character—and she's got genuine chemistry with Glen Powell. Glen Powell—I get him! His whole meta-narrative is tied up in "this guy wants to be a movie star" and the characters he plays best fit within that meta-narrative, if you were to define "movie star" as "fully-formed persona." Clark Gable is who he is. Cary Grant is who he is. Glen Powell is who he is. Less concerned with growth, and more about grown into who they want to be, and are comfortable with the cracks that show. The sexlessness of Tom Cruise tied up in the Yankee-acceptable redneck cowboy persona of Burt Reynolds (though less likely to verbally or physically abuse his partners). More in the realm of pop-country. He works best in this, and Everybody Wants Some! and Top Gun: Maverick for all those reasons, and worse off in movies like Hit Man, which is him trying to be a fucking actor. Complexity doesn't suit him. And, unfortunately for him, that desire for complexity starts to seep into the movie. As soon as he shows up at Daisy's hotel door, the movie turns sour, trying to form a Jacob-Edward-Bella three-way race for affection, trying to create sexual tension out of thin air, making enemies out of the wrong people. It gets all turned around and can't straighten itself out again. Sucks, cuz it's a banger of an action movie up until then.

Forever

came too soon.

Sorry. He's a degenerate, you know.

Hooper - 3.5/5

To the point of 'newness,' and the failure of 'The Fall Guy' to become something bigger than it was, 'Hooper' illustrates something that movie didn't have: a culture of stunt-people. A world inside our own that we had not known before. Though TFG existed within that society, it built its world on a mystery-to-be-solved and a romance-to-be-resolved, while Hooper is down in the mud with the people. It builds a world of not necessarily Southern people, but a Southern mentality which was embodied in Burt Reynolds. Get in trouble, have fun, hurt yourself, help your friends. They're assholes to everyone outside their ring, and to everyone inside their corner; the only difference that they've become your asshole, and you've earned your place beside them. It's a world, I think, that hasn't existed for thirty-some years, since Burt Reynolds fell off the scene. The moonshiners, the honky-tonkers, the people on the sidelines, no greater purpose to their lives than just having a beer and a laugh. The movie upends this towards the end, trying to build to drama, but it wasn't built to handle it well. At least it knows it? The wink at the end says it all: "You had fun, didn't you?" I did. As it is, it's movie-as-window into another world, one I'd happily visit again.

I'll write you a letter tomorrow. Tonight, I can't hold a pen.

Can't Hardly Wait — 4/5 (rewatch)

At this point, feels like I'm just rewatching these things to create better context for why I love 'Not Another Teen Movie.' And I think it comes down to NATM not making fun of bad things, but making fun of good things—just the sillier parts of them. 'Can't Hardly Wait' is a banger, the last of a breed of movies about last nights matched with good music and distinct characters wholly identifiable from a yearbook photo alone. (And I think it's got a film-making trick that NATM caught onto which is to bridge transition scenes with off-screen chatter, creating energy where there isn't, which is a trick I think other movies could lean on.) But the cardinal sin lying in the center of it, which NATM pokes at with a knife, is its sincerity. Which it wears well! Ethan Embry embodies a type of guy, in love with the high school beauty, despite the awful things they did to her hair. But the sincerity is something to point at and say "that's stupid" (because it's sincere). I think when people say "they don't make movies like this anymore," I think they are referring to the fact that a movie can be both fun and sincere. CHW came out in 1998 and NATM came out in 2001 and somewhere around here, sincere became the most awful thing you could be. That cynical sentiment was bubbling up in the '90s and so it feels like it's associated with that decade, but actually may have only been cemented until the Y2Ks. The '80s had it in spades, the '90s had their fair share, but the teen comedy boom rusted over during the 2000s and 2010s, yeah? Something was missing in the water. Things like 'Easy A' came along and proved that they could still exist but they felt more like a fluke rather than a sign that the dam was leaking, preparing to burst back open. Ugh anyway, what's my point? I don't have one. This review really went off the fucking rails. "Artists who are hurting, who take knife to skin: it is okay to bleed sincerity onto the screen. It will ruin you. It will make you immortal."

What a stressful day you've had.

Trap — 1/5

Trash. I was prepared to come out of this with a "wow, M. Night has really made a niche for himself these past many years" and then this movie slapped those feelings out of my head. This feels like a first-time director who has no sense of pacing, acting, or how a camera should move. Awful dialogue, delivered awfully. I'll never under-estimate him again? I'm also not confident I'll never give his next movies a shot either. Maybe that's his appeal: you have absolutely no idea what movie you might be walking into. That's the trap!!!

If love doesn't last,

then what's the point of lying?

If love lasts forever,

then what's the point of dying?

Every artist prays, when they step upon the stage,

that God will come when called.

You didn't know, but you were both born as musical genuises.

The Legend of the Stardust Brothers — 2.5/5

It's a music video movie, a loose plot laid across a collection of songs, all used as an excuse for fun visuals. There are many fun visuals! And the songs, collectively, are fun, that same pop world of Richard O'Brien's 'Shock Treatment'—both thin and big. It doesn't ever become anything substantial, and that's fine; it's a movie that can be easily divided into snippets you enjoy on YouTube, which is essentially what I did.

Pop quiz, asshole.

Speed — 4/5

I've grown to believe that when a movie hits, it's less because of the specific ins-and-outs of 'hey, it's a solid movie' and more that it feels like something new. I love 'The Fall Guy' but I'd now argue that it's relative failure belongs to it being just a solid movie. It was charming, and fun, in ways I'd seen before, but rearranged. That's not enough. But I can clearly see in my mind movie audiences looking at "Speed" and seeing something they haven't quite seen before, and I can see movie executives looking at it and saying "I see a new template." And I am not knowledgeable enough nor do I have a good enough memory to say if this template really existed before then—arguably in bits and pieces in other movies, and I'm sure in cult movies, but perhaps never put in front of the world as a big action film with bona fide movie stars in the blockbuster era. I think some of those people watching the movie, scrambling for exactly what it is that is new about this, might look at it and say the template is "entire movie built around silly action set-piece," and therefore you got movies in its wake built around silly action set-pieces... but that's just the executional details. That's just the excuse for enabling the big shift as I see it which is momentum. It's a chase movie without the chase. It's a countdown movie. You're just constantly moving, the big enemy a giant ticking clock on the wall. Keep moving, moving, no time to settle down, and the movie nips and tucks character development within the 'ramp up excitement every ten minutes' template. And for that in order to work, you need control of the fundamentals. For these movies to be what they are, they can't just be a new template—they have to have an ounce of that traditional mode of movie-making: actors with chemistry. Sandra Bullock is great in this!! She, too, feels like something new, and I need to watch a few more of her early movies to figure out exactly what that is. She seems proto-manic pixie dream girl, minus the indie twee (so just "college girl with equal mixture spark and anxiety" is the best I've got so far). Keanu, as he does, carries a movie with full belief in confronting a confusing situation. The movie's only fault really is not really knowing how to end. I wonder if it could have just ended with Keanu and Sandra escaping the bus. The movie feels the need to keep pushing bigger and bigger instead of accepting it's already big. But fuck it, the subway's got some iconic moments, so whatever, I'll get over it. But overall—this felt like something new, and still feels like something that I haven't quite seen replicated to the same degree. I think a movie's success can be half defined by how many pale imitators are birthed in its wake who are both worse than it and more successful than it, and you can see a direct line between this movie and every single thing that Michael Bay has done. Though he only understood the template without ever once getting the fundamentals right.