"A Complete Unknown" is a Complete Unknown.

There is a scene about a third of the way through James Mangold's Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown" that exemplifies exactly the failure of the exercise. Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) Dylan's long time and long suffering (now ex) girlfriend stands in the wings of his concert watching as he and his other on again off again Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) share a seemingly intimate moment on the microphone. At first smiling, the more she seems to either note something still there, or maybe think back to the pain their original tryst caused her, the more she realizes she can't do this. Fanning is effective enough, and Chalamet and Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez ) have enough chemistry to make it believable, the problem is the film to that point had done nothing to build anything meaningful between any of these characters. A Complete Unknown thusly lives up to its title - almost everything in it other than the music functions and something unknowable. Without real intimacy, connection, heart, these relationships are mystifyingly anemic, and it upsets any connection to the audience.

Mangold's film would've been far more effective as a poetic abstraction of the spirit of Dylan. Connecting the epoch, the restless nature of an anxious country in the midst of a piping hot culture war that included the evolving direction of his music as well as the nations political jostling into something visceral and hymnal. Instead it opts for the feeling of a listicle article titled "20 times Bob Dylan was an asshole" wrapped around his greatest hits. The movie seems to want to speak through the music with the song choices many times connecting the theme of any particular junction of the movie to lyrics. This is flawed at best, ham fisted at worst as with its ending when Woody Guthrie's "Dusty old Dust" lyrics wail out "So long it's been good to know you” as Dylan says his final goodbye to Woody Guthrie. The idea in and of itself is sound, but the execution becomes an affect rather than an effect when you've done little to establish the relationship between Guthrie and Dylan over the film - repeating and frustrating theme in the movie. The people who are meant to supposedly shape Dylan's life, philosophy, and attitudes, rather by conflict, or connection, function like major guest stars on a sitcom meant to elicit applause after they announce their name in the "I Love Lucy" show. This includes major cultural/political events like the Cuban missile crisis,’and the civil rights movement, the latter of which appears as background mattes meant and cinematic memes for a completely different picture. What these events mean to Dylan, who these people are to Dylan, what their relationship was like, is barely intelligible, and carries no import other than to be sounding boards with which to reverberate just how cool Dylan was or how much of a prick he could be in any given moment. If the message is that Dylan didn't give a damn about any of these people or happenings it comes through loud and clear, but I believe the message is supposed to be that Dylan was brilliantly involved in his own myth making process, something that aided his music, but harmed anyone's ability to get to know him which shouldn't have had an effect on movie on our ability to get to know them.

Mangold's film is not a terrible movie, it's merely fine. I don't seek to exaggerate its weaknesses. As a movie that seeks to sing through the music there are quite a few occasions where it does so and soars on those wings. Dylan's music is of the sort that even to a layman like myself it provides both a symbolic and literal emotional ampage, an ethereal penetration that demands response from the soul. There is a quality of communion even within this deeply isolated persona. One feels this profoundly, especially in combination with Chalamet’s techniquely resonate performance. Timotheé Chalamet's work as Dylan, his ghostly physicality is one of the films strengths. He permeates the energy of an answered reply, and the film works best when he's singing and performing - his qualities, the boyish charm, the palpable angst, the sense of an ever present distance exactly the tools for the job here. It's a performance in compete tonal alignment with what the film wants to say thematically. The quality of his vocals is not just a good mimic, but seem to be in keeping with the spirit of Dylan. Moments where Dylan is visably distressed or agitated by some form of social anxiety or peer into his actual personhood are adeptly played by Chalamet’s gift for rigid, cold, detachment. If the cause, sensation, effect, on any of the things, people, that orbited around him would've been explored in any meaningful, interesting way, a better film would've extended our from it. Had it an ounce of the fantastic, or deviated in any way from the paint-by-numbers formula of the biopic in at least the way 2019’s “Rocketman” did it might have been far more inspiring, but this was a rote exercise in detangling the intricate curls of a man who was far more interesting than the film that encased him. A film that believes because it's titled in a way that calls forth the image it's fine that it actually be a question mark right to the very end.

From a Fan who wasn't a fan.

David Lynch is by all possible definitions and Icon of cinema. He has an argument for the most important director of his time (though these kinds of qualifiers and hierarchies I find unnecessary) “Twin Peaks”, “Inland Empire”, “Mulholland Drive”, “Blue Velvet”, “Eraserhead”, “The Straight Story”, “Lost Highway”, “Wild at Heart”, “The Elephant Man”, and “Dune”. That last one is so funny to me, both a man-made cosmic joke, and a measure of a man who was dedicated to his craft with an emphasis on the “his” part. Lynch was a singular artist, especially an American artist, whose impact on cinema as a whole cannot easily be quantified -if it all. But, if you were to want to look for the feeling of it, what that weight may tangibly feel like to your mind, you will hear it in the anecdotes of his devotees and maybe more importantly from people like me, who’s first introduction to Lynch was through that funny outlier called “Dune” and who never really loved his movies like that again. Someone who was always a bit befuddled by the messy abstract nature of storytelling. Who struggled to find not only meaning, but more importantly pleasure from watching his movies. I wasn't raised by cinephiles. I was never in the company of people who mentioned, watched, or talked about it's great contributors and/or it's ultimate meaning. I was made aware of their magic by way of videocassette, and cable, neither of which is the prescribed optimum for film going. We watched what most of the public watched. We went for the bright lights, and big stars. I was mainstream cinema to the bone, John Carpenter was as far outside as I went. I remember seeing Dune for the first time - it was definitely on TV because nobody but me was interested (when you have six other brothers and sisters you're gonna get out voted alot) and it was like Ridley Scott's “Legend”- something instantly appealing to me, despite one not being “Star Wars” and the other not being Conan (or later Willow) . Lynch’s Dune adaptation was frightening, it was ugly, and hideous, lavish, and gorgeous, silly, but powerful. When I was young the silly was the powerful, ( I don't know that that has changed) and the film was the beginning of a forty year awakening I had no idea was going on, because at the time I had no idea why I liked “Dune”. It was everything that most movies I loved on the subject wasn't. I barely understood it, it wasn't a movie star vehicle, it seemed (to a child) to not be very invested in the effects that drove these things, in short there was very little of the kind of candy I had come to know, but there was still candy there. The next film I saw of Lynch’s was “Eraserhead”, some 10 years later as a “much smarter” teen. Beyond confused, I felt betrayed, what happened to my guy? Dune was weird, but it was at least somewhat understandable, perceptible, likeable. It was aesthetically strange and sometimes hideous, but it was also beautiful and ostentatious. Eraserhead by comparison seemed like a student film, and “WHAT WAS THAT THING!” Not only had I never seen anything like Eraserhead, up to that point I had never seen such a vast difference between films in a filmmakers filmography. “Mulholland Drive” would be next, and this was by accident, because I had all but sworn Mr Lynch off, and after so many “WTF’s” so as to form a proverbial conga line, after the last scene, “Silencio”, after tiny people running out of paper bags, billowing smoke, stilted conversations, I was once again not only befuddled, but disoriented. I had no clue this was what film could do, was supposed to do. I felt I was taken out of one place and put into another, and that the shift of time and space had had an effect on my ability to tell up from down, right from left, good from bad. I was in a way frightened, and angry, and I swore him off altogether “for good”. What I didn't know then was that seeds had been sown within me. In a way not too dissimilar from the purpose of vaccines Lynch’s films were preparing me for an entirely new way of viewing cinema. Disorientation is often a consequence of intoxication, too much of a good thing can be a very real thing, or a very unreal thing. There was something that was pulling me towards watching Lynch films, despite my extreme aversion.

“Eraserhead” with its subconscious displays of sexual repugnancy was a reminder of my own normie dysfunctional relationship with sex, considering my upbringing. It was also beginning to sow the seeds of a question, of my aversion to its stiltedness, it's silences, and it's oppressive weirdness, and more completely to my aversions, to me as a spectator. I may have been utterly disgusted and bewildered by it, but I haven't seen it in 30 years and I still recall a great deal of it. Tangent; when I was young on one of our usual trips to Blockbuster video I ran into the unsightly sight of the box cover for “Hellraiser”, it was just a cover and yet I was deeply unsettled by it, by the aesthetics of Pinhead. There was something so viscerally off-putting about the sight of him holding that box, those graph-like crevices across his head each one of them containing a spike, the deprivation of any sense of life in his eyes, that off kilter smile that's not exactly a smile. It took me exactly 30 years to finally get around to watching that film as well, and when I did I wished I had seen it much earlier and then congratulated a younger me on being a good judge of character from a movie box, because I would not have been ready. Even as an adult, something about the concept of Pinhead only further agitated and unthawed that dormant sense of dread and terror. Sometimes all it takes is a look. From the beginning to the ending, “Mulholland Drive” was like the scaling of a rabbit hole. I felt consumed by it, I felt like I was being moved throughout its innards. The style of acting was off putting, the dialogue, the mystery of every beat and it's off beats eluded to a something unsafe, much like the darkened hallway of Bill Pullman's house (which may be his mind, our mind ?) in “Lost Highway”. These films promised something unknowable, something in the pitch of blackness. Even if they landed somewhere far safer (they really didn't) two to three hours of this for me on the regular was impossible, might as well take a claustrophobic person and tell them to hang in the back of a trunk for a couple hours for fun. Safer, kinder, films, not to be confused with safe and kind films (this is relative to Lynch) took the edge off by way of clear implication, linear movement, precise language. In those films being consumed feels good, you feel the divine in the pastoral sense. You can say “Someone is keeping watch over all this”. It is difficult to explain, but even in something like Fincher’s “Seven” there is always comfort somwhere in the viewing. This film has a shepherd, someone is at the helm and they are here. Lynch’s films felt like they were completely free to be anything and do anything to you, like they were protrusions from his bed as he slept, enveloped in his mind -you might feel, I might feel as if I have no ability to control when I want to leave. All this feels terribly exaggerative, and dramatic, I have a remote control. Nonetheless, it is I think an apt dramatic reprentation of the suggestive dreamlike state movies place us in, and that much more with someone whose visions were so distinctively dreamlike. It was Luis Buñuel who said that “among all means of human expression, its (films’) way of functioning is most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep”. When I think on my feelings on “Eraserhead” I think of a dog that jumped out of the screen barking viciously and left some of its spittle on my person as some harboring sense of existential worry was walking by - had nobody thought to put a leash on this thing? I don't mean to suggest that this is all Lynch's films were, I'm no expert here, I've only seen five of his movies. The ones I've seen were about everything anyone else's could be; love, desire, societal angst, femininity, masculinity, but all carried the additional weight of that very particular and vast divine in the same sense it is divine when you are swallowed by a black hole. Lynch wasn't the only American director of his time willing to plunge into that darkness, he wasn't the only one to make me feel strange, he was just the one to explore that level of depth, of its dimensions, and without a rope or tether. He understood the darkness somewhat like the Japanese understand demons. It wasn't something to be ran from, but boy did I run, like so many of his characters did from their own or …

By the time I had seen Pasiolini, Tarkovsky, Parajanov, and later Suzuki, Buñuel, and even Nicolas Winding Refn, I had no clue that my ability to accept, to love, or just respect these filmmakers or films was the result of the seed that watching Lynch had planted so many years ago. Much like in real life with a person you know intimately, or personally, the one who actually did the work doesn't reap the benefits. Sometimes it seems as though the body and mind keep the lesson, but the rebuke the teacher. Lynch's work had caused me to avert my eyes and then ask “why?”, which consequently opened them wider, but not to his films ..they remained closed to them. I would later see Lynch only in interviews, spring had come for Mr Lynch and as the ice slowly began to melt, I began to soften. The man was nothing like what his movies suggested to me, or rather what years of mediocre parodies of the “important filmmaker” in combination with some filmmakers being quite willing to embody this caricature - had told me about a person who makes these kinds of films. Lynch was extremely funny, very straight forward, not only in speech, but manner. When he spoke, he spoke clearly, and without the use of verbose, flowery language to explain his feelings or thoughts on film. He had style, but it was very simple. Casual, comfortable-looking and classic, the most dazzling portion being the size of some of the clothes, and of course his hair. He was what the kids today call a “yapper”, but he was an intent listener in all his interviews. Looking and waiting with eyes that seemed to draw the position of leaning forward in front of him. His story of meeting with George Lucas (who couldn't be more different if he came from Mars) is not only gracious and full of genuine admiration, but it's quite funny because he's so straight forward. The more interviews I would see the more I felt I was coming to the realization that I really loved this man, and more specifically I loved his dedication to being an artist without trying to be an artist, which is to say David Lynch was profoundly himself. “I do what I love and George does what he loves, the difference is what George loves makes billions of dollars.” -while good for a laugh isn't the backhand slight so many of his ilk and who love him are fond of tossing at a mainstream pop director like George Lucas, and it's a representation rather than a presentation of his very unique and undisturbed sense of self.

Most important to the change David Lynch wasn't anywhere near as disorientating and frightening as his films were to me. I no longer saw the provocatuer trying to snatch my soul, but an astute observer of the human condition. I would see these interviews intermittently and somewhere around the middle of that journey I somewhat relaxed in my disposition. Having relaxed, I began to feel “as wrong as I had been about the man, maybe I had been as wrong about his films?”. Maybe I somehow “felt” wrong. I decided finally to see “Blue Velvet” and found that feelings regardless of feelings don't change much. You cannot logic your way out of most of them, no more than turning on the light and explaining to a child that “nothing is there” solves the problem or their fear, or telling me that snakes are largely not a problem to humans makes me any less wary around them. No, not much had changed, but something big had changed. While this was still not a film I could love in that sense of adulation and compliment, it was a film I loved in the sense of pure attraction and feeling. I saw the humor in the arc and performance he wrote and conjured from Dennis Hopper. I connected with the intense feeling of dread as something repelling me, but also something that fascinated me. I (like so many others) was bewitched by thee Dean Stockwell scene; such a distinctive interruption, an emotional tangent, disruption to his own disruption, a love letter to the power of music. I got it, without “getting it”. I don't have poignant explanations and deconstructions for Lynch’s ouvre and career, but it left an indelible mark on me. Childlike an observation as it may have seemed to others, (and to myself) I realized that much like I don't have to understand his films or any film, I don't have to love a movie, or it's creator to be able to see this person has a power, a mastery, a sense of the divine in us and around us, and most especially in our foibles and our weaknesses, most especially in the dark. I began to interrogate myself as a spectator, to ask myself about my own intuitions, feelings, and aim for a better quality of distinction of thought. Respect is one thing, it's indifferent, ambivalent, distant, cool. I respect alot of peoples work, and in film this comes regularly for movies I can appreciate but not connect to, because the emotions they're aiming for are lost on me. That was never the case with Lynch, I always felt a resounding, loud, drum of emotion watching the films I did see. What Lynch has taught me over the years is that “liking” as it pertains to films and as a direct gateway to love is a bit overrated. That being repelled, confused, disoriented is as important a way to love of art as being attracted, understood, assured, or enlightened. I learned that being confused means to have to do work -work to discover whether or not that confusion is the result of ineptitude, or a lack of execution, or the intentional. Work to challenge your own feelings, sometimes to explore parts of yourself you're not ready to explore. That sometimes even when you think you've done the work you haven't. Maybe that was a undercurrent of the point in Eraserhead? I wouldn't know, I haven't seen it in thirty years. Maybe now is a good time to re-explore? Film school should've taught me this, but it's strict adherence to codes and the import of interpretation led me in the opposite direction. They worshipped Lynch there, but they also worshipped interpreting Lynch there. Wasn't much different to me than how you're taught to love God in most churches. You were supposed to love these images mostly because you're supposed to, and then because you can interpret them. Your love was then not really for the love of the movie, but love of your “exceptional” ability to read it. I did not, not in a way that instantaneously drove me to love. It was Lynch’s own voice neither self depreciating nor boastful, first outside of his films, then in, that gave me this. I may never want to hang out with Lynch films or revisit them consistently, but whenever I'm in their company, whenever I decide it's time to see a new one; like “Inland Empire” or “Lost Highway”, it's a reminder of the best qualities of art, of what we seek in art. I don't think many people will understand what I mean, take this as rubbish. Much film discourse either implicitly or explicitly implies a simple view of the love/hate dichotomy, Lynch set me down the path of not giving a f****. His films will never be my favorites and yet he is one of my favorite filmmakers. The abstract will never be as adored as the linear or decipherable to me on any regular basis, but it's ability to resonate with that part of us that may be afraid to speak, or be seen, that part buried underneath the idea of “self”, will always be far more revolutionary and disruptive. Lynch and his movies embodied a truth I strive for, one that may not exist as a possible goal, but acknowledges the striving as a truth in and of itself. In relation to myself they nudged me to interrogate myself, to ask for more, to dig deeper into processing my own thoughts and dreams. They are not the friends I hang out with everytime it would wear me out to do so, they are the friends I visit every once in long while and though they may not be your best or most beloved, their impact is revelatory each time. In the end you wave goodbye, promise it won't be so long, and then of course…it is.

Conclave: Big Whoop

I was rooting for this one pretty heavily after an alluring trailer and plenty of great reviews from people whose taste I enjoy. I mean a film about the political jostling and jousting in the midst of the secretive and mysterious institution that is the Vatican, cloaked in its opulence and surrounded by the power and absurdity of ritual and religion? -thats proverbial catnip for someone like me. But, alas that was not to be the case. From it's mechanistic, “sound the trumpets” opening - to its “did you get it?” ending, most of my issues with “Conclave” are the same I had with director Edward Bergers breakout remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, which could be summarized as a very acute case of "Beautiful Gowns, Beautiful Gowns". In both films there is/was an insidious stagey-ness to Bergers style, that made them confusingly sterile considering the drama and moral dilemmas on display. There are major tensions and philosophical contentions at play amongst some of the most petty, code driven, dastardly, hypocritical liars on the planet and there is no drama save for what lives in the language and what lives in the lines of these actors faces and under their tongues as they speak. How could there not be one moment where I registered any distinct emotion in a movie where “the pope is dead!” is just the beginning is a question Im still asking myself. There is a stark sense of the operatic, and the melodramatic in the films story of bitchy clergymen, in fresh fits, a mere gesture at the “Goodfellas” in smoking jackets film we could've had, but save for the acting and the words, the actual feeling of drama only comes in fits. For a movie that in actuality is frankly a bit funny, the framing and shots in this film are as quiet as a graveyard. “Tough crowd” is a line that could follow a number of sequences that failed to register what was so clearly on screen. There's one sequence during which one clergyman takes a sassy hit off his vape as another is being condemned and even then Berger seems disinterested in just how absurd a lot of this is. Even when a bomb outside explodes and sends a beam of light shining through the hole in the dome, it feels anti climactic, and very self involved, instead of something that acknowledges the grand nature of the farce and hypocrisy. It's also an angry film, but Berger hampers that too. The politics of “tolerance” are treated like precious gems newly discovered by a brilliant mind willing to sift through the veils of human ignorance when it mostly comes off as innert imagery driven by a baseline understanding of the obvious.

Ultimately Conclave hermetically seals itself in its own overwrought sense of self importance. A film far too aware of itself, far too obsessed with beauty in contrast to the petty ugliness that lives within these men (and by consequence this institution) as in and of itself profound. Symmetry and ornate aesthetics abound, but they keep us at a distance from the drama rather than connect us to it. When it reaches its conclusion and it's big reveal, it revels in its own sanctimony, proud of how little it challenged the audience, and how little it truly has to say about that reveal in everything leading up to it. Despite some of the best performances I've seen all year, a few eye opening shots, and a crackling script, I somehow came out of the movie with a sarcastic “big whoop”, and an eye-roll and a desire to watch “The Popes Exorcist”.

Audition: The Lady of Rage.

The very first scene is a moving one, a man watching his wife's final breaths before he sinks to the floor, his son walking in with a project just for his mother now faces the fact that she's gone. Too young to actually process it, the father grieves for two. The man, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is bathed in a warm, leathered, beige light, his arms outstretched to his wife for one more grasp at her life. She is still, she has nothing to say. Later in a dream she will only inform him of danger as a representation of his guilt, she is more a function of his voice than her own. She is dead, and she has no voice. For the audience It is the first time we see him and it is meant to endear us to him immediately, to connect us to him as a man worth empathizing with in the midst of grief, before it quite literally rips him apart; both figuratively and literally. This is one of the strongest aspects of Takashi Miike's “Audition”, it's spell, it's daring, it's willingness to make a pitiable and understandable man ultimately the villain of his own story. He is so understandable because he is the everyman. His misogyny is not the white hood version of patriarchal hegemony, nor cruelty, it's the Sears, softer side of the institution. It's benign, average, much like the rest of ours, and this in contrast to the visceral fury of Asami's (A devastatingly full Eihi Shiina) anger and the happiness she finds in it. This contrast, this disproportion, and the lack of judgement in it (intentional or not) is Miike’s greatest feat in the film, and maybe it's scariest idea.

The honeymoon phase with Aoyama doesn’t last long before Daisuke Tengan’s script is already picking at its creation. Time and time again throughout the movie we see the protagonist utter very casual bits of misogyny; acknowledgments of his ignorance about women even as he grieves the one he loves. He's fishing with his son and compares women to fish, later as he consumes that fish, his son informs him of the ability of certain fish to change their sex, and he states he “doesn't know much about ovaries” (something he shares with a great deal of real world men) the irony being that it's a major aspect to women's bodies, to his dearly departed wife, the same bodies that are often steeped in such supposed interest in, respect for, love for. Aoyama listens to, and affirms a nasty bit of misogyny from his friend Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) about a table of women minding their business. When that same friend asks him what he's looking for in a woman, “maturity” is seemingly the primary trait, yet when Yoshikawa sets up this elaborate rouse- the titular “Audition” (in and of itself a misogynistic plot) and states that he will make the age range 20 to 35 Aoyama doesn't question the earlier part of that group at all. The message present in the audition process isn't just in what the process itself is set upon, or the fact that it extends out from an imbalanced power dynamic that sets the women on the task of qualifying themselves to men who are aware that in most cases these women would not be in their league - but in the creation of the rules that govern it. Looking over the potential candidates Aoyama remarks that trying to choose is as hard as “choosing his first car” Yoshikawa replies “How can you compare the two?” It is unclear whether the offense is with comparing a woman to a car, or a car to a woman”. Aoyama sits comfortably at his desk and reads Asami’s profile and her innermost thoughts a a voiceover read those words out to us in Asami's voice “To live is to approach death gradually”. Aoyama connects with this on the basis of the loss of his wife, but what Asami is talking about has to do with the specificity of her own life and the inner lives of women at large. Upon finally meeting her face-to-face Aoyama takes some pleasure in patronizingly and condescendingly explaining Asami’s words to her. “In your essay you said giving up what was most important to you was in a sense similar to accepting death. I was most impressed, everyone has had similar experiences, you are bound to have to give up something precious in your life and there's nothing you can do but except that fact. That's life. I mean.. I was amazed that a girl as young as you understands that”. “I was amazed a ‘girl’ as young as you” and “Everyone has had similar experiences” is informative as to Aoyama's essential flaw. The former being condescending, the latter patronizing and assumptive. In a Harvard lecture on “The Architecture of Cooperation” Dr. Richard Sennet discussed this as a sympathetic expression of what he calls “The Majesterial self” which he also calls a benign mode of taking control. “When we express sympathy, ‘God I feel what's you're feeling’- it's as though we're saying ‘nothing is really foreign to me, any experience you have if I react to you I'm going to identify as though I understand it myself”. Asami’s story, her desire, asks of Aoyama something he is unable to give in his current state of self centered-ness. It asks of Aoyama to look at she and other women beyond what they do for him, how they make him feel, it eludes him for the same reasons he didn't know and doesn't want to know about women's ovaries, a lack of curiosity in any meaningful sense. The connection between Yoshikawa’s suggestion that the best women for him to target are women who in essence lack the ambition to want to be a star, and Aoyama’s attraction to Asami being her acceptance of not only physical death, but the metaphorical death of her career in ballet, as well as her lack of desire for extravagance is also directly related to that self centered nature. There is no specificity to his supposed love for Asami, the bodies are housed in a trope, and within this any woman could fit. After Aoyama begins to feel the hazy symptoms of the poisoned drink he has unwittingly taken, and before he falls, we are shown a sort of dream sequence, where Aoyama is about to receive filatio, and as he looks down he sees his secretary then become Asami, who then becomes his sons potential girlfriend, the suggestion is that to Aoyama these women are somehow interchangeable even as he vehemently denies it. The mask of respectabality fades, the fact that he isn't a man that literally burns his women, does not seprate him, as he occupies the same time and space in the dream as other vicious men from her life. As she beheads the teacher who abused her Asami says “I never felt unhappy really, because I never stopped being unhappy!”. Aoyama is watching and she seems aware of his presence, it could just as well be addressed to him as the teacher. The very next part of the sequence we see a woman holding a boy, who says “men need women to support them or they'll exhaust themselves”, we are then taken back to the scene when his friend suggests the audtion, then to Aoyama now sitting in the audition chair previously occupied by Asami “my son said I better marry again because I looked worn out”. We are back to the present Aoyama falls backward (this is literally his figurative fall) hitting the floor and sees Asami, it is the first time he is actually seeing her.

Miike and Tangens film moves its protagonist and antagonist in the same direction until they meet each other, and when they do it is neither as protagonist or antagonist but simply two very flawed people now finally connected in the truest sense that they ever could be. Aoyama and Asami start out sympathetic figures and become somewhat unsympathetic by the end. Asami's rage then is not evil, but human, and perversed as it may be..justice. It balances the scales between the shape of their lives. The “Heroine of Tomorrow” is the aspirational for Asami. It promises of something more fulfilling, of something as big as a movie star, something larger than life. It mentions nothing of relationships, and yet here she was auditioning. One gets the feeling that this is the beginning of all of her ill-fated relationships. A constant refrain of hope and disappointment. Asami’s, (by way of Eihi Shiina's intricately detailed performance) deliberate setting of the table, a fork in the road here, a spoonful of context there, a plating of the elements that fed Asami ‘s rage are meant to be in service of the main course that is Audition’s grotesque finale. The last 15 minutes or so of this film are not merely shock and awe, nor a twist, but a small performance piece both in the context of the film and outside to the spectator. It is a movie in and unto itself, that ends up connecting and informing the entire thesis of the film. Asami’s ascension into her largest self is less a revelation of her evil, than of her counterparts in the world. It is the revelation of her joy, which is the form the purity of her rage takes. Every prick of the acupuncture needle, every rip of the flesh, every vibration of Aoyama’s pain rushes through Shiina’s body like sugar, this is a delightful dish. This is her best work yet, a masterpiece of her commitment and she is having the time of her life. Every “Kiri Kiri” spoken by her is slapped across a canvas of expression that implies the exact opposite. It is not just her body that transforms (Shiina's movement in general is so much wider, so much grander and vivrant) but her spirit, her soul. This is who she is, this is what she wants, this is her “Incredible thing”. Miike's film has the good sense not to apologize for it.

Women's rage whether that is in the context of life in general, or in the context of the performer who is willing to have courage enough to bare their raw self to an audience in a way that may attract them just as well as it may repel them- doesn't have the built-in apologencia that men enjoy. Films dealing with it, that come anywhere near an endorsement have always stood out, but many times the men upon whom this fire is released are objectively hideous. Audition even moreso than Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” inflicts this upon a empathetic male subject. He is not heinous, he is not a rapist, or an abuser, he is a loving father, a grieving widower, he seems good at his job, but he is also a man. He has a fling with his co-worker while he was married, possibly while his wife was sick, he ghosts her without much thought as to how that might feel. He goes along with this audition idea enthusiastically for the most part, again without thought. He patronizes, condescends, he takes, lionizes women’s sacrifices even as he sacrifices nothing. He is neither the worst example nor the best, he is merely the average man. That he be the one to suffer so, is an integral part of her performance piece. A challenge to the expectation of suffering for women crystallized by doling out an analogous amount of suffering to the unwitting party. That for most of the movie Asami is playing a role and her finale is the courage to challenge her destiny, to challenge the role she has been given, is the fear factor. As with most stories in reality that involve murderous women, the underlying phobia is of women as more than what we can concieve. Though gruesome murder by men can be shocking due to the more sensational aspects of the “how”, it is largely expected or at least understood that this can happen. Violence is so directly associated with masculinity that there are whole rituals and rites of manhood around inflciting it, for women though it borders on unimaginable, to men especially. If the role of the performance artists or the actor in any stage setting is a search for the truth in human experience then Asami's reveal of something much closer to her true nature, something in defiance of the narrow confines of not only men's expectations, but her own. Something that it is also so monstrous to someone so sympathetic it eludes all conceived possibilities in the mind of the first time audience- is the act of courage. Wives, secretary’s, maids, even movie stars as women and girls, moving, living, existing, to indulge and confirm men's destiny, we see this repeatedly even as they appear normal in the film, just as we normalize everyday bits of misogyny in our own lives. “You call a lot of girls to the audition, reject them, then ring them up later to have sex with them you are all the same” “Audition” isn't just the in-context audition in the film, it's the auditions women endure in their lives to and for people about as curious or interested in them as an employer is in you. It's ending is then not one based in damnation or martyrdom, it is merely an off-beat affirmation of Asami's life and of her words. “You are paralysed, but your nerves are alive”, “When you are in pain you see your shape clearly”, and maybe most importantly “I truly have no one else you have others”, after all, it is because he had somebody that he survived, and as it happens that somebody is male. In a way Miike's film is an affirmation of the common sentiment amongst certain groups of women that if misandry were as real as some men like to insist, the results would be catastrophic for men, and the fallout would be much more than merely words. That Miike's film gives us an outlet to see the power, the beauty, the ferocity, and fervor of female rage without inhibiting or impeding it, without judging it, and without the aid of a cinematic sermon is what makes it so delicious. Here at the end Aoyoma is with yet another dead woman, on equal footing, (pun intended) eye to eye, suffering in exquisite pain, inhibited, barely able to speak, scarred. For a moment Asami tipped the scales, and more importantly she found her most courageous self and it was rage, it was power, and it was horror.

Rebel Ridge: Surviving is Necessary

One of my favorite quotes is one I feel has become more consistently relevant in these times as our quality of living continues to degrade in all sorts of ways. The quote comes from the great orator and scribe of our collective humanity Maya Angelou; “Surviving is necessary, thriving is elegant”. Inside those words lie a truth that is often hidden in a society where we are under the constant threat of poverty, of death, of ostracization. Hidden within the muscular, sometimes bone breaking thrills of Jeremy Saulnier’s latest thriller is this very thing. It is the source code to the existing obstacles for its protagonist -those both exterior and interior to his person. What Saulnier provides by the way of agonizing tensions between capitalism, white supremacy, and sexism- and then riveting sites of dialogue and action is an exciting (if not fully satisfactory) portrait of exactly the power of thriving over surviving. A movie about a stranger who comes into a random town running into the exact space of difference in between these two, a man who up until this point is a man surviving, but by the end a man thriving -by way of an insular and integrity filled justice.

As a person of color and especially as a person of color who might be a woman and/or black there is an inherent suggestion in our society that the status quo is irrefutable, that what is is what has been, and our best bet is to learn how to work within from within that framework. Our movies and television which feature a large amount of black people and POC as cops, as military, as some form of state sanctioned adjudicator around justice reinforce that, but contrary to popular belief going along is not getting along, and in a society this lopsided, this bent towards violence as a feature of its success not a bug - it's vital to understand that violence IS getting along. It is the universally understood language. Destruction in America is construction, and Saulnier's movie doesn't take long to ride us right into the wave of just how. When Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) arrives into town he is on his bike immersed in the blaring symphony of rage of Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” he is literally knocked out of his peace by an oppressive authority figure who sees it as a threat. In essence he is antagonized for merely existing by the folks that are meant to be justice. There is no making peace with anyone who sees your very existence as adversarial. This is something Terry is meant to eventually come to, by way of channeling his Rage and his focus. Rage and focus are separate but equal in Richmond's mind, but in Saulnier's film they are bonded equals. Terry’s separation of the two, using one to subdue the other, is a form of survival, of going along to get along, and from the moment he is attacked, he begins moving in various modes of evading and subduing his rage to maintain focus. Watching this alternating, incompatible, but justifiable swap is consistently part of the excitement and frustration of Rebel Ridge. Terry's rage is what allows him to connect to his sense of justice, to his own personal desire for something more than survival, to thriving, meanwhile his focus allows him to survive attack, but when used to maintain restraint it only further disintegrates his relationship with peace. Early on in his arrest he asks if he lets the officer look into the package the officer found in his backpack, will that expedite this process, and the officer says “The more cooperative you are, the better”, Richmond agrees, and it in fact does not get better. They legally, but immorally (a distinction that makes itself known throughout this film) confiscate the money they found, falsely charge him with drug trafficking, and and send him on his way much worse off than he was when he started. In essence, for his compliance he was rewarded with theft, and the destruction of his recently revealed plan to help his cousin get out of jail. Later when in the station to lodge a logical complaint, Terry in favor of getting along commits maybe his most outrageous bit of compliance by agreeing to let Don Johnson’s dollar tree cartel keep 26,000 of his hard earned money, and only give him back the portion most important to his cousins release (10,000 dollars ) which is of course as we eventually find out, turned down. Not only does Don Johnson’s Chief Sandy Burnne end up turning that down, but uses the information Terry willingly gave up about the restaurant he co-started to shut the restaurant down, under the principle that Terry's offer was itself a case of entitlement. The presentation of the competing interest of Terry's innate and socialized instincts for survival -versus a system which was born and raised in violence that only understands violence as an answer is the great dilemma of this movie. Saulnier’s action piece which of course is not intentionally about this particular subject so incisively depicts this tension that it ends up doing it better than many films that intended to.

Action films almost innately come with the expectation of violence, and as such they make a near perfect house for this particular story. When one of Chief Burnne’s cops asks Terry if he'd like to be tased the expectation is violence. When Don Johnson continues to probe and prick at Terry with sly remarks and statements about his cousin that are meant to be inflammatory the expectation is violence. Many have compared Saulnier's film to 1982’s genre classic “First Blood”, this is a more than fair comparison. Many have also called this a revenge thriller, that is a much less fair comparison or rather a much less accurate comparison. “Rebel Ridge” is no more a revenge thriller than its predecessor was, unless you indirectly connect both to revenge against the state there's not much being avenged in either. It is in fact more accurate to call these survival films, as we are witnessing survival tactics, whether that be in the more literal sense of how to physically survive in environments and conditions normally unsuitable for life, or in the spiritual sense of trying to maintain peace or sanity in environments and conditions normally unsuitable to either. Where they are certainly similar is in their integral understanding of the relationship between restraint and violence, not just in the film's protagonists, but also between the film's protagonist and their antagonist, so that both characters practice restraint and violence when necessary as an instinct for survival even while their restraint only seems to stoke the anger of their antagonists. In the first act of Rambo, after the initial confrontation, Stallone reminds Brian Dennehy’s Sheriff Teasle that he could have killed his man rather than just injured him, and that he could have indeed killed Teasle himself, rather than de-escalate it only serves to wrangle Teasle further. I already spoke to how Terry’s offer to Burnne only incensed him further. In both films the police as a function of the state are inherently violent almost innately so. They need no offense to create offense, they are offended perpetually by the existence of these non-assimilated identities. Be it John Rambo or Terry Richmond, these men are strangers, vagrants, unknown unknowns, and as such, a perceivable threat to their operations. The beginning of their interactions are intentionally agitative versions of “Give me a reason” -knocking Terry off of his bike, stopping John for walking on the street. Where they differ is in that very same identity, and out of it extends all of the integral differences between these two films. To state the obvious Rambo is white, and Terry Richmond is black, and it the differences are apparent immediately. While Rambo is bewildered at this response (“Why are you pushing me?”) Terry knows exactly what's going on, he doesn't know why he's being charged with, but he understands exactly why they're acting towards him the way they are and because of his knowledge of this, because his existence demands this knowledge for his survival, Terry Richmond is also much slower to move to violence than John Rambo. Rambo is in the somewhat privileged position to immediately react in kind to his instigators, the entire experience is new to him. It took his participation in an extremely unpopular war and vagrancy for him to run into a common circumstance of the existence of a Terry Richmond. The level of devastation he is allowed to enact is also vastly different from Terry Richmond, in part due to the fact that he is a white male and in part due to the protection of an intercedent, a high ranking government official in Richard Crenna's Col Sam Trautman. Richardson’s only allies lie in community, his intercedents in this film are an Asian man and his presumed son who run a Chinese food shop. While they are definitely of help to Terry's cause, their positioning in a xenophobic and spiteful country where one is still seen as the enemy is of such a precarious nature that they themselves become victimized from a distance. Once Terry arrives in town his only ally is a courthouse clerk herself in the precarious position of being nestled in the middle of this ring of corruption as well as being a woman, and eventually she too is victimized. As such this film cannot seriously label itself a revenge thriller nor in particular adhere to many of the narrative tropes of the action film. An action film can have its protagonist die, survival is not the main point of an action film, neither is justice, although of course they may very well have both. A revenge thriller can have its protagonist die, survival is not the main point of a revenge thriller neither is true justice, because justice is not synonymous with revenge. A survival film is dependent upon well…survival.

One of the films great joys reminds me of a joke made constantly in the black community that black people are always aware of the law. I don't believe this is intentional on Saulnier's part but it is nonetheless something that comes out of this film- that at almost every turn Terry makes sure that he is hyper aware of the law, the parts that he knows and the ones that he doesn't, and if he doesn't know, he seems very intent on making sure he does know it. It could be assumed that he doesn't hurt anyone because he is holding himself back, but I think it more likely that he isn't hurting anyone because it keeps him just inside of some well drawn lines that would lead to a lot more problems, namely his survival, his freedom, and his own personal peace. Frequently, Terry makes decisions that are based almost purely on his survival, one of which he admits in saying that the reason why he left town the first time and felt gratitude was the instinct for self-preservation in part owing to his training and in part (one could guess) to being a black man in America. Mr Liu is is a Chinese immigrant where he fought “for the other side” (in Im assuming either the Korean or Vietnam war) and affects a heavy accent in order to come off as more authentic to Americans who buy food from him. When broken down that accent is at its core another instinct for survival. Courthouse clerk Summer Mcbride makes many of her decisions especially her initial decisions like when and where to talk, and whether she talks at all, based upon her need for survival. Elliot the courthouse clerk,(Steven Zissis) “Serpico” (David Denman) Officer Sims, all of these characters are initially so concerned with their survival they’ve completely forgotten the elegance of living, of flourishing, of feeling good about oneself, and about what one does. Apathy in effect became a a given that rotted the town from the inside, and by consequence many of the lives therein. Terry's arrival is the instigating force in creating a fire that would spread to certain members and burn just hot enough to wake them up out of their slumber, rather than choke them in their sleep. The ending, the choices made, Terry’s exhale, they are all about survival and they are also about doing more than, being more than. What Saulnier's film then leaves us with is a connective thread that ties together and bonds together our ability thrive, to progress, to self-realize, to ultimately reach our highest goals- is directly tied to our ability and our willingness to rebel against apathy, against a reductive form of self preservation, and injustice, all of which are incompatible with the elegance and grace of thriving.

Godzilla Minus One's Most Impressive aspect.

I can remember like it was yesterday my first time experiencing a sense of philosophy emanating strongly from a film it wasn't any one film, but rather many that helped give rise to an awakening a sense of my political ideology, but one film that stood out for me in the sense of the nature of war and it's direct conflict of interest with our humanity was 1995’s “Crimson Tide”. I remember being puzzled them as to why this seems like it was being painted as a strong debate when it was pretty clear that one side was unconscionably reckless with human lives in a global scale in the balance. I remember being wowed by the line “In a nuclear world the true enemy is war itself”. The sense of power not stemming from the words in and of themselves and what they might suggest about the man who spoke them, but more-so how they triggered the other respondents including Gene Hackman’s Capt. Frank Ramsay in that scene. The way that the characters, (not necessarily the movie) framed Denzel's Commander Ron Hunter as somewhat cowardly in his apprehension to be involved in something that in and of itself should be regarded as a human evil. The movie paints what should be a pretty simple answer as a complex quandary; To wait to press “send” on nuclear Holocaust without clarity as to whether it's necessary, or not to. This would follow me into my experience watching 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, and the now infamous scene of private Upham’s act of cowardice. In a scene that would elicit a lot of palpable audience anger towards the character (which I initially felt as well) Commander Ron Hunter’s words “the true enemy was war itself” would reappear now calcified in the fires of my rage against private Upham's lack of action on screen. Those words now entrenched in my gut I saw the complexity around the repelling nature of cowardice in and of itself, and the repelling nature of putting people in these conditions that inevitably wreak havoc on a person's stress responses and in a more broad sense their humanity. Movies should not be relied upon for our politics seeing their position within our systems of oppression, but they can at times reinforce them, bond them, make them tighter. Whereas those movies were moments, and yet so memorable as concrete moments for my own personal political growth, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, a boisterous, operatic, blockbuster film that pretty much never stops from go, it sets the entire movie around the subject of cowardice as much as it does around the King of the Monsters himself. My extremely positive impression comes not a a reinforcement of my now pretty firm, but still evolving politics, but of my genuine glee that those thoughts would be so adeptly presented in a film and a boisterous, operatic emotionally dense blockbuster no less. The film opens with a kamikaze pilot named Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) landing his plane on a repair base. His arrival is immediately called into question because of the obvious; he is a kamikaze pilot, his one job is to die in service of this grand cause, and yet here he is back from the mission…alive. Ultimately a clear answer as to what has happened and why he's still here is evaded, which only makes the answer that much clearer. What becomes a question is not whether or not he evaded his “duty” but the ethics of that duty in the first place. That question is ultimately the thesis of the movie, centered around the idea of courage especially in lieu of actions by the state that could be called cowardice in and of itself. The arc of this movie is the arc of this man's courage, and where he finds it is I think an interesting treatise on where and when cowardice actually counts as cowardice.

In Rob reiner’s adaptation of Aaron Sorkin's play “A Few Good Men” it is pretty clear that the ultimate philosophical reveal of the film is that though Dawson and Downey acted on a supposedly “legal” order in the strict sense of the word, that they exhibited cowardice in their inability to take a moral stand against what they were asked to do. The film and play are meant to make clear the difference between legality and morality. In Godzilla Minus One, much of the same is present, except “A Few Good Men” is a courtroom drama where this kind of artistic discourse is fully expected, Godzilla: Minus One is a large scale monster movie. After his actions are clearly discovered one of the soldiers on base a skilled mechanic named Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) approaches Kōichi Shikishima with these words of understanding and compassion; "Why obey an order to die honorably when the outcome is already clear". That “outcome” is most immediately identified as the second world war itself and the fact that the war was a lost cause, but just a little digging would further reveal that even before the outcome was clear; the cause was a lost one, further still because imperialism is a lost cause. Once you arrive there, the notion of cowardice in this context is questionable. Even as we watch with anticipation of the moment he might one day redeem himself, we are treated to a stout redressing of the supposed hierarchy of the bloodthirsty needs of a state to increase its holdings in the world over the need for human bonds and life itself to be considered precious. The rest of the movie is not really about him making up for being a failed kamikaze pilot who rightfully sought to protect the sanctity of his life over the need to please his overseers, nor for being scared again when he knew that the outcome was sure, but to learn that when the conditions were right for him to be a hero, his heroism would arrive.

About a third of the way into the film a meeting is held between those who have decided to risk their lives in what is to be a final stand against Godzilla, the monster who represents the folly of American and Japanese imperialism, and eco-terrorism. Before he adjourns the meeting former naval engineer Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) tells the members of this rag tag strike team to go home and spend the remaining time with their families. A soldier responds “You mean be prepared”- the logical assumption being for death. Noda, full of regret that betrays a man who knows he's played a role in the loss of lives in this war, takes a beat before unconsciously shaking his head “no”, and replies solemnly; "Come to think of it, this country has treated life far too cheaply”. He then goes on to lay out the various ways in which they showed this disdain which runs the gamut from indirect (logistical callousness) to direct (Kamikaze Pilots) callousness for lives. He then (beginning to find passion in his voice) says “he would take pride in a citizen led effort that risks no lives at all”. The two most important words in that small speech are “country” and “citizen”, the context in which they are used and the difference in the attitudes associated with them, as well as the difference displayed in the mood of their orator. Each of these things are separate and distinctively different feelings which then forces the inherent understanding of the disassociation between citizen and country. The former is often victimized and exploited by the latter using the inherent desire of human beings to gather into social groups as a ploy to create a false sense of oneness that can be exploited in any number of ways, including engraving a sense of duty to what amount to the wills of a greedy few and not their individual or collective needs. The films defense of what is normally framed as cowardice magnifies the tension between the idea of country and it's connection to citizenry. In pointing out that this country was frivolous and apathetic towards life, Godzilla Minus One declares that this mostly citizen led effort will be about life and a fight for the future explicitly absolving Koichi and to some extent the audience for their empathy of the crime of cowardice. The realization being that to assert such a claim would be akin to victim blaming, taking us back to the first half of the Air technicians words “Why obey an order to "die honorably" when the outcome is clear”.

The theme that comes most clear in Godzilla minus one is the shame, doubt, and trauma, inflicted upon everyday average citizens indoctrinated by the powers that be of any nation state to take on the mindset of their conquerors. After that the redemption that extends out from freeing oneself from the shackles of incentivized homicide, and into a return to our actual social needs; one being the primacy of life itself, of which as Commander Hunter so articulated; war is the natural enemy of. It's a heavy concept fit snugly inside this stunning, roaring, spectacle of a movie and it's the true glory of this Godzilla film. A visual culmination years coming in my own cinematic journey towards the answer to a question began in the 90s with one submarine movie, all which arrived from the depths of either the sea or my mind.

I Like What Axel F is, I Mourn What it Could Be, and Maybe That it Shouldn't Be.

Beverly Hills Cop as a franchise is an interesting if not frustrating journey over the years, both as a production and as a viewing experience. The former because even the first one had an entire makeover before it made it to our screens, and the fourth spent a couple of decades in development hell. The latter precisely because it's so uneven as a franchise with both quality and tone, changing drastically from film to film even while the formula remains mostly the same. For two entries it somehow came together, for one it finally revealed the flaw in the undertaking of sequels in the first place, and for the latest I’d say the results are complicated. Unlike other major franchises the built-in plot line is one that makes repetition a quandary, because it's literally called Beverly Hills Cop it means either this Detroit cop has to keep coming back to Beverly Hills, or simply move to Beverly Hills..they chose the former. Something like “Aliens” lends itself to being set in different locations, different times, with whole entirely different cast of people if one should want. Indiana Jones can go on different adventures, Rambo can go on different missions, Rocky can have different fights, but Axel Foley coming back to (never mind having reasons) Beverly Hills to do work there while not working there is the definition of cinematically “stretching” milk with water, and yet here we are at the fourth iteration. This has always been the problem with Hollywood and more to the point capitalism, this unwillingness to let something that was profitable just live as it's most pure self because there's a shred of a possibility that money is being left in the table. The the obsessive and possessive desire to repeat what probably shouldn't be repeated because there's an opportunity for more money to be made is a prime example of Dr Ian Malcolm’s (Jurassic Park) proverb “You were so concerned with whether you could, you never stopped to think whether you should” and has taken the life and the love out of many a venture, many an idea, and in this case many a movie, and it's no different here.

Beverly Hills Cop: “Axel F” is a practice in cognitive dissonance of joy. It's fun, it's funny, it moves pretty well, the action is fine, the jokes are pretty good, there's some chemistry, and depending on your taste, you will find the acting anywhere from fair to very fair. The premise is the same, the result predictable; Axel needs a reason to come back and because it's a legacy sequel you can bet there is some kind of family involved. In this case there's a daughter that we had never seen before, by a mother we had never seen before and the movie proposes to deal with that by nudging in a not too shabby subplot about Axel being so in love with his job that he prioritized it over his daughter and then refuse to apologize for it. It's the kind of conflict that needs a lot more than it's being given here but it's in an applaudable effort to create something out of nothing -again “stretching the milk”. There are dirty cops, there's Kevin Bacon, we see most of the old players come back, it's not a bad time. I found it to be pleasantly better than I expected. “Better than expected” is fine, but it feels cheap and somewhat depressing to say that about a franchise that started on the notes this one did, and that relative quality is notable. Though it most certainly could’ve and should’ve been a theatrical release, there is something TV-like about this film, something in the cooking that makes it feel smaller, safer. I could mention the score, Lorne Balfe’s music has its moments of brilliance, but it's not ambitious enough nor anywhere near as creative as Harold Faltermeyer’s legendary score. I could definitely mention the script, which feels aggressively hollow, hackneyed, and predictable, and moves along like a sitcom. I could mention the direction which though far superior to the other aspects of production, doesn’t have the moxie or compositional detail of the Scott sequel which is this films most clear kinship of the series. The “why” of this particular blandness in the ultimate outcome, becomes a bit clearer in the ingredients of the credits. The original (Penned by Daniel Petrie Jr) was nominated for an Academy Award, the sequel was written by men (Larry Ferguson, Warren Skaaren) whose credits include “The Highlander”, “The Hunt for Red October”, “Alien 3”, “Beetlejuice”, and “Batman” combined. The first two were directed by gifted journeyman Martin Brest, and Tony thee Scott, director of “Top Gun”, “The Last Boy Scout”, “True Romance”, and “Crimson Tide” to name a few. “Axel F” is directed by a first timer whose previous credits are Apple Commercials, and written by the guy who brought you 2013’s “Gangster Squad” (a movie I almost forgot existed until I looked up writer Will Beal’s credits) and “Aquaman”. The other writers are a TV guy (Kevin Etten) and the writer/director or “That Awkward Moment” (Tom Gormican) another “Forget-Me-Please” legend. Factor in that somewhere back in time there was supposed to be a TV show involving a family angle (A son that time) and it helps map where the underwhelming bits might have come from. This kind of absurd drop in resume quality is is exactly my issue with the film and over that, capitalism because it shows not only are you committed to forcing something that ultimately may be best left alone in pursuit of something original, but that even when you're forcing it you're so disinterested in the actual product you don't even care to make sure that you put the best people around it even while knowing the history of the things that preceded it. Handing the reigns of a legacy franchise sequel over a TV writer, two poor movie writers, and a commercial director with no movie experience is telling and frustrating. It says to me you weren't aiming to make this a Blockbuster movie that would simply air on Netflix, but rather a high-end TV movie for Netflix, which is mostly what Netflix produces; “Bright” except not written by Max Landis, but kinda. When when the people behind “Top Gun” Maverick go into production and they enlist the likes of Peter Craig (“The Town”, “The Hunger Games”, “The Batman”) and the director of two of the most visually satisfying movies of their decade in “Oblivion” and “Tron Legacy”, it says to me “Oh they mean business”, and by comparison it makes the folks behind Axel F seem as if they barely tried. To be fair, movie making is always a crap shoot, and maybe over 20 years of trying to get this off the ground led to a willingness to compromise, but quality of the people you collaborate with and the people around you are indicative of not only a desire to want to make the best movie possible, but a belief in the product. So it then begs the question; “Why didn't the people behind this want to make the best movie possible?” . “Who doesn't believe in Beverly Hills Cop as an IP?”

Part and parcel to the frustration of watching something that is merely “fine”, put together by an assemblage of people who's resumes are merely “fine” when and maybe especially because the last was such a huge commercial and artistic failure, -is all the unanswered questions it calls forth. Most chief amongst them; is “fine” all we can hope for? This goes beyond even this franchise. When John Mctiernan leaves the “Die Hard” franchise for whatever reasons were behind that, why is no one looking for the best to replace him? Why weren’t John Woo, Tsui Hark, Martin Campbell, Paul Greengrass, or Michael Bay, given a ring? Why are Len Wiseman (fine) and John Moore (not good) taking up the work of a bona-fide action movie legend? In a world where 8 “Mission Impossible’s” in, they're still some of the best action films out there, I don't see the point of going into something with the ingredients to only make something acceptable rather than something that not just reminds people of the nostalgia they once experienced, but of the ingredients behind the quality they once experienced, the greatness they once experienced. Is Tom Cruise the only guy in Hollywood that knows action well enough to know how to follow great acts? I know the answers in a certain sense of what capitalism is bound to do, I just don't understand it on a kind of natural level. Where does pride in what you do not come into play? What you produce, putting your name on something. I'm not talking about Eddie Murphy who I think has made it pretty clear he’s sincerely trying, to some extent that's probably the main reason why this turned out any good in the first place. I'm talking about Netflix, I'm talking about Paramount, maybe even (dare I say it) Jerry Bruckheimer. I'm asking why is it that when Tom Cruise wants to make a legacy sequel it seems like a signal goes out for Hollywood’s best to get behind what is intended to be a global event, but when Eddie Murphy wants to make a legacy sequel of one of the most popular movies all time it seems like “The Replacements” from that one Keanu Reeves movie shows up? Though race may quickly come first to mind, considering the facts behind the aforementioned “Die Hard” series or the treatment of the remake of Mamoru Oshii’s sci-fi classic “Ghost in the Shell”, this is less an issue of racial disparity and more a disparity of higher ups who care about movies.

when there is sincere care and love brought on by some of the best doing today legacy sequels can rock

Back in 1998 Roland Emmerich riding high off the success of Independence Day would take a run at an American version of Ishiro Honda’s post nuclear eco-classic monster flick “Godzilla”. Culturally the movie was by and large a disappointment, the public felt it was forgettable and it showed itself in the drop off in the box office in only its second week, but it nonetheless was commercially successful and ended up making nearly three times it's budget back, and yet despite this the shutter doors were closed on any sequels for Godzilla. The market and the people recognized it wasn't a worthy pursuit. Funny enough, a revisit to Emmerich's Godzilla flusters one with a rush of nostalgia not simply for a time by-gone, but for a craft, for an attention to detail in storytelling that then was a bare minimum, and now barely exists. This is the struggle of not only watching the latest entry of what was a classic franchise but of watching movies in general today. The lack of care, the lack of intention, the the lazy acceptance of mediocrity, that has infected not only the upper echelons of Hollywood, but to some extent the audience which includes a certain amount of critics. When IP’s, sequels, and remakes initially started to noticeably dominate theater screens I kicked and screamed, but eventually their near ubiquitous proliferation led to a sort of mild acceptance and then eventually to a sort of celebration of the best of the worst, but at some point I've come full circle back to where I started. I no longer find myself in the mood to celebrate mediocrity disguised as invention or fun. If I watch either of the most recent Japanese Godzilla films (Shin Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One) and I see big, boisterous, emotional, fun as hell thrill rides, and then I watch “Godzilla vs King Kong” and it's just the same rock'em sock'em effects I got in those two and nothing else, why should I applaud the latter? When I played little league football I had one of those loud cranky old school Bear Bryant characters as a coach. Coach “Pete” was prone to vitriolic evil -John Wooden-like maxims like “Your saliva is 99% water drink that”, but from time to time his over simplifications and flat out lies hit. One such quote was “If you can touch it, you can catch it”. The words hang banner like over my feelings toward this current iteration of movie making. I would only slightly change the context to if you can touch greatness, than you can catch it. If you can get the monsters right and the joy of what we see in them, then you can get the characterization of the people affected by their actions right, you can get the rest of the storytelling right. a I'm not going to applaud you for cheating those aspects as if its either/or. Whether it was an Ed Wood picture or Berry Gordy's “The Last Dragon”, “Roadhouse” or any number of Golan-Globus productions, those films didn't end up becoming the cult classics they became because the directors were knowingly winking at the audience, or because they were aiming low. All of those people were sincerely trying to make the best picture possible and more important due to the insularly nature of the productions they were empowered by people who mostly wanted the same, and that heart and that desire along with other more indefinite factors regardless of skill, regardless of budget, ended up showing themselves in the final product. For those who have boots on the ground of an actual production it is not for me to say whether or not they actually are putting their heart and soul into these productions, that doesn't become clear till years later when somebody's brave enough to talk about what went on, but it is more than evident that the powers that be, that provide distribution, that green light, that hold final say over what talent they can afford to get, or want to go after, are definitely not invested in producing good art, and at this point they’re not even invested and producing great entertainment. They are not concerned with the legacy of films like “Beverly Hills Cop” beyond the extent to which that legacy makes the movie profitable. Whether its the fun but rather flat in comparison to their antecedent Bad Boys sequels, the crushing emptiness of the “Jurassic Worlds” or the sad afterlife of “Ghostbusters”, the continuing onslaught of reanimated skinless, corporatized nostalgia as content and time passable entertainment and it's disruptive effect on those of us who still wish to see those dearly departed bits of our past is frustrating to say the least, even when the final product is “pretty good” or “not too bad”. “Axel F” is just the latest example of Hollywood taking the safest road possible, the most risk adverse path to the creation of art and entertainment. For all intensive purposes the entry seems to be a success and the part of me that loved that series and what made its original entries such an important part of my '80s cinematic experience is happy for that, but the fact that that success only further incentivizes the disruptive nature of the philosophy of content over that of art and entertainment deeply saddens me.

Challengers Represents a Challenge for Zendaya.

“Challengers” the latest from autuer Luca Guadagnino is the tale of a couple Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) who then becomes a throuple when they meet the enigmatic and stunning Tashi (Zendaya) and the torrid stormy road they take to being able to fully become who they are, who they want to be. A movie so tethered to a foundational need, to desire, to sex, to hunger couldn't have been more bland and worse still, clumsy. Guadagnino’s latest is supposed to feel like a light hand under your shirt, in the small of your back, gliding upwards pressing on some muscles, sliding in others until it reaches the nape of your neck and pricks you deeply with a sharp fingernail. Instead Challengers "sex scenes" and it's ploys for lust and desire feel like someone making a bunch of racket as they try and sneak up behind you only to grab you by your neck and bang your head on the table. Every single moment felt forced, abrupt, there was no sense of timing, no sense of patience, and no true willingness to go “there”. Guadagnino likes to give us tantalization as pure presentation and it never works for me. He keeps his camera still and at a distance, it sits there like an observer who is outwardly about as moved by it as Spock. The camera is never there with its subjects in the ways Adrian Lyne voyeuristically enjoys Fatal Attraction, or the way Paul Verhoeven allows the camera to make it a throuple in “Basic Instinct”. In “Call Me By Your Name”, there is the infamous fruit scene, the camera nearly falls asleep as Chalamet commits to the act with all the passion of turning a doorknob..Where is the writhing, the self touching, why are his shorts still on? For an act so based in unbridled desire it feels like Ben Stein giving a class on lust. The director always seems trapped in a purgatory where longing and lust are in direct conflict. He never wants his subjects through the camera, he's rarely interested in their faces when they're burning for each other, just when they're attracted to each other. His choices are dull and it effects or maybe shows itself in his choice of actors who are the hinges upon which this doorway into desire hang. Zendaya in what many are calling a movie star showing is the prime manifestation of this conflation. Some have said this movie doesn’t work without her and they’re right…it doesn’t.

Zendaya is one of cinemas great movers, I believe that is what people most see when they talk about her movie star power. She is elegant but forceful, composed and lithe. It shows in the scene where Patrick first introduces her to us and Art, her body commits to every end position with force, but the getting there is smooth and wave like. Its much like the catwalk, the step into the ground is a earth, but the body before the step is water. Zendaya in so many ways resembles a cat, but she hasn't met a director yet who is interested in or wants to play with that energy and she's seems too interested in protecting herself to bring it out on her own. Sex and playing “sex” or “sexy” is about letting go. You have to be unafraid to let the camera as a disembodied partner see your primal self. Think about the way Jamie Lee Curtis performs this exact act in James Cameron’s “True Lies”. Playing a woman who has never done anything truly adventurous, who has always been prudent, a woman who wants more but has no idea how to get there -Curtis starts off stiff very aware of herself, and her watcher, but slowly, surely, she stops protecting herself and begins to lean into feeling her body, opening up the camera to her most sensual self, and by consequence we voyeuristically join, the man in front of her all but disappears. Zendaya’s Tashi is no Helen Tasker, but Zendaya herself reminds me of her in this small regard; she has made to date, prudent choices, smart choices, but she has not been adventurous in choosing her roles, and though this is her attempt, much like Helen Tasker in the beginning of her dance, she doesn't seem to really know how to get there. Zendaya has no moment in Challengers, where sensuality, sex, or unbridled emotion feel as if they have taken over her body even while she is in control. No encapsulation of Meg Ryan's orgasm scene in “When Harry met Sally”. In essence some true sense that while everyone is turned on, or appalled by her being seemingly lost in the throws of her own self passion, she was in full control and putting on a show the entire time.

I feel much of the same way about Zendaya as I do Michael B Jordan, two actors with untapped potential that remains corked under the fact that they never seem to let us into that hidden self, or to that creation of self that appears knowable, that calls us to peer inside them on camera. They have the looks, they have to a certain extent - the energy, but they seem to always be protecting themselves. Image production is of course a responsibility and an aspect of any acting career, but as with all things it's a spectrum that is in a different place for each actor it represents. Those actors we revere for their acting not for their image production is a result of their leaning being further on the spectrum towards the craft than it is towards the image, with Zendaya and Jordan, it's more image production than craft to an extreme. True vulnerability almost always seems to escape them, and any true sense that they are giving themselves over to us escapes us. Tashi may move as if she is always aware the camera is on her, but Zendaya should move as if the the camera is apart of her. Tashi may not be open to letting anyone in, but Zendaya should be sneaking us in through the back door. In one of her stronger scenes in the movie, Tashi and Patrick are involved in a conversation where her true desires have been have been exposed, it is in essence quite possibly the summation of Tashi as a character, and yet it's telling that outside of aesthetics nothing profound occurs in Zendaya's face and body. Whenever there comes a time for an interesting emotion of expression Zendaya performs the one that would get you the least points in “Family Fued, because it is the one that would come most readily to just about anyone. What Patrick is telling her is meant to cause a mixture of shock, hurt, attraction, and anger, because it is based in truth, (we know by what she does later) Zendaya only plays anger. One eye widens larger than the other, the rest of her face appears pained, constipated, as if Patrick is speaking is foreign language she struggles to understand. This is not bad if the only idea is that this idea is detestable to Tashi, and she wants Patrick to feel that way, but the audience should see what's going on underneath as well and the “underneath” is what Zendaya has trouble playing. Critic Angelica Jade Bastien was absolutely right when she connected Zendaya's acting with the Katherine Hepburn quote about Meryl Steep, you can most certainly “hear the wheels turning“, because Zendaya is thinking more than she's feeling . If you only pay attention to how she moves, how picturesque she is, you might be impressed but when you listen to how she cuts Patrick down, and you watch her face it's banal, far too straightforward there's no knife to it, it sounds mean, because the words are there, but she delivers them in exactly that energy with no interestimg curve. Often the most interesting and cutting words we've seen on screen have been delivered in the opposite energy, you don't get angry, you smile. You don't play emotive anger you calmly and cooly say “You're nothing to me but another dead vampire”, or you if actually pierced you allow a tiny face drop, near imperceptible, but a clear receipt. Zendaya'‘s face does not betray her, and Zendaya is not vulnerable enough to break through facade in the least, especially subtly. When she walks away it's a thing of beauty, if you're just watching the walk, but in her face, nothing. The anger she shows provides no interesting choice, merely furrowed eyebrows. The opening salvo between Michael Douglas's Dan Gallagher and Glenn Closes's Alex Forrest in “Fatal Attraction” is a Master class in the importance of A; a director knowing the value of direct close ups in titilation and anticipation, and B. two actors that understand the subtleties of facade and how and when it breaks. Gallagher wants to play the loyal husband merely here for an innocent drink, Alex sees through it and start sending arrows directly at him. Glenn Close’s poker Face and the subtle brakes in Douglas that ultimately lead to the sex scene are vital to what makes Fatal Attraction one of the sexiest movies of all time.

Zendaya does not appear to be a good poker player, Tashi needs to appear that way. The bedroom is one of the few places that Tashi can exert control and uninhibited desire, where her true face should come through crystal clear, not necessarily to the boys, but to the audience. Guadagnino could've helped her. A bedroom scene with Patrick is so stilted as to conjure no appetite whatsoever. He shoots it from medium wide, (why?) this is a form of intimacy, even if Tashi is a bit mathematic about sex we should see Patrick's desire for the fantasy in contrast to Tashi's desire for control and power. On the surface level Patrick and Tashi have this in common with Catherine Trammel and Nick Curran of “Basic Instinct” ; Patrick like Nick knows exactly who and what his “Catherine” is, he just doesn't care. He wants her badly enough not to. These are the moments for interesting choices in a scene, from all involved in that dirk room. See Eihi Shiina’s wildly over the top movements as she saws off Ryo Ishibashi’s foot in “Audition”. In that scene, mutilation is made decadent. This is Asami’s bedroom, and the mutilation is her sex, and the reckless abandon and joy she receives is thick in Shiina's movements and expressions. Director Takashi Miike's camera goes in close and personal, intimately because here is where Asami finally has control, here is where the facade breaks, where her true self is revealed and the coy child like fantasy is peeled away. In contrast Challengers will have no such moment with Tashi, nor with Zendaya. There's a scene where Tashi deeply hurt by something that has happened to her, you can't tell it's supposed to have hit her hard, she nearly drops under a tree and it all kind of comes crashing down. Again, there are no interesting choices. Zendaya isn’t patient enough, she isn't open enough. She sits there for a moment and nothing radiates, no rage, no sense she is truly trying to hold back against a rising tide in her body. Guadagnino goes in for a close up on her face and nothing really happens. These are the moments where actors are made. The emoting with Zendaya is never bad, it's just never great, or distinctive, or provocative. Tashi is an example of a number of women I've seen on screen the kind that are aware of this stipulations and gendered expectations the world places up on them and in this case most especially as a black woman or even more specifically a biracial black woman, and yet Zendaya seems as disinterested in this aspect as the movie is in it. There may be the tiniest of hints and illusions as to how her race plays into all this but there is definitely no sincere interest to explore this aspect of Tashi. Guadagnino and Zendaya could do to have taken a look at Viola Davis and Steven McQueen in Widows where despite the fact that Viola's character clearly moves in white circles her blackness within them plays a significant role in what we are seeing in the movie as well as what we see in Viola herself. Veronica Rawlings is overall quite a different woman from the much younger Tashi, but they do have in common the shared desire to keep it together. They are both manipulators and they both deeply understand the value society places on appearances, they have to. Yet Viola creates these profound moments of breakage, moments where the mask slips where she must find some place for this energy to go. Whether after being slapped by Elizabeth Debicki, or in her final scene. The most representative of what the vast difference is, is in the opening scene when she finds out that her husband is dead. The stare in the mirror that turns into a primal scream and then the immediate fixture, back to work, “I will not let this consume me” even as it is consuming her. I believe Tashi seen under the tree should have been that kind of moment, not the exact same moment but the same art in a sense that she needed to be somewhere where she could let it go for just a moment, pull it back together, and get back in the game. Zendaya doesn't omit, she clearly emotes, she just simply doesn't do anything interesting with it and maybe more importantly neither does Guadagnino. Challengers and its star ends up a missed opportunity for the kind of potential that exists for films to make a return to eroticism and for movie stars to make a return to form. There are suggestions, there are implications, and there are a few exciting moments where it feels like we are back, but for most and much of this movie it feels like wanting to play in the snow but only being able to watch it on the inside of a globe. There's something there, but I wasn't able to feel it and as such eventually I just put it back down.

Dune Part Two: Hollywood Doesn't Really Want Frank Herbert's "Dune"

What Hollywood wants from Frank Herbert's Sci-Fi epic “Dune” is a blockbuster film, this is its first and primary concern. This is not an insight, nor a damnation in and of itself, but it is a fundamental block in my ongoing issues with this franchise and the repeated tries at making a successful on screen adaptation. If the marriage was more successful, (and by successful I mean balanced) I would love Dune, but this Dune is a diluted, convoluted, distilled Dune, maintaining almost none of its capacity for thought provocation, and only a certain portion of its sense of wonder. Denis Villanueve is a director who deals in ambiguities and the incomplete. Frank Herbert's canonical Sci Fi text is as comprehensive a bit of storytelling-weaving as you can get in the genre. Well-beloved by many not just for it's exhaustive attention to detail in world building, but as a challenging narrative allegory of western power, ecological decimation, and imperialism, but is also as German historian Frank Jacob refers to it “Anti-Colonial Colonialism”. It stands against the idea in theory, but in practice it's still upholds it. The ongoing nature of this conflict of perception is representative of the cohabitative nature of the deconstruction and reconstruction of orientalist themes, symbology, and interpretation in the original text. The ongoing conflict between the original text and it's on-screen adaptations is a product of the cohabitative imbalance of capital and art in the industry, the latter of which is represented in the choice of director and holds an unsuitable amount of influence over the former in which both work to reduce a dense, rich text to pure artifice and almost no edifice.

In Denis Villanueve's two part adaptation of the first Dune, the book’s dense characterizations and cacophony of political machinations are reduced to broad strokes. There is no interest in building the interdependent and volatile nature of these relationships and the characters that represent them. The emperor’s integral role in what happened to the Atriedes being completely absent from the first film, is introduced in the second mostly through scenes that fly by and tell you absolutely the bare minimum about who the Emperor is as a character, much less that of the triumvirate of the noble houses, the navigator’s guild, and the emperor. Much of the political intrigue, tactics, and infighting which reinforces the prescience not only in events, but in incisive portraits of the psychological approach of colonial powers are also gone. Paul's doubts and unease about being a messiah are highlighted and over-represented, his foibles and ego silenced until he drinks “the water of life”, which then makes it seem the water of life caused it, rather than his own deficiencies. Villanueve’s own way into the book is a tell as to what he sees and values as the important thrust and even moreso, what he doesn't by way of silence. On the podcast “Q with Tom Power” Villanueve is asked what drew him to Dune in the first place, he answers; “There's something about the journey of the main character Paul Atreides, the feelings of isolation, the way he was struggling with the burden of his heritage, family heritage, genetic heritage, political heritage, climatic heritage, all this weight on his shoulders, then finally being able to find freedom through the contact with another culture.” Villanueve’s words are indicative and representative of Villanueve's focus on the hero's journey and since our “hero” is Paul, the Fremen are merely a device by which Paul is catapulted to self discovery. The hero’s journey aspect of Herbert’s book has always represented the source of Hollywood’s fervent attraction to this series, as it to them is what defines its potential as an intellectual property. The dollar signs in the eyes of industry executives easily push aside the fact that in some respects the source material is a rejection of that narrative, and the choosing of a director (a very skilled one) who shares the belief, means that by consequence of the machine through which it is produced, any chance for any meaty meaningful reconstruction or deconstruction of the original texts’ obvious themes is jettisoned, and that is a choice in every sense of the word. The spectacle which is what is wanted and desired by most of the execs, and most of the general public is not unimportant, (especially in a era so devoid of any true examples of it) but it is very much standing in the place of the politics and thematic breadth of Herbert's vision.

The spectacle of Villanueve's Dune is as oppressive as the book’s various houses and characters. Alot of thought was put into building this world and it's clear in the design; from costume, to set, to technology, and beyond. Harkonnens float like spacemen in an early Hanna Barbara cartoon above arid dunes and rock formations. A helicopter on fire freefalls in the background as we watch Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet race across the sand under the shade of the Harkonnen version of a John Deere for the desert. Sandworms slide through earth parallel to each other from a birds eye view. A harrowing supremely well choreographed fight occurs more than once, with a finale sure to be on the minds of everyone long after they have left the theater. All of these things are such forceful sights to behold, it's difficult to dismiss Dune part two’s success as spectacle. They take up so much air in the film you can almost forget to take a breath and remember that Dune is essentially a space epic with alot more than spectacle on its mind and far too politically intricate to be reproduced on screen by an entity so dedicated to the reproduction of the very things the book seeks to deconstruct. In essence how are you going to faithfully adapt such an anti-Star Wars book through the funnel of an enterprise that wants exactly Star Wars? The aspects of these films that most align themselves with the aspects most fetishized by both those in the industry and consumer at-large are in rare form. This version has alot more in common with those intitial Star Wars films than the difference in execution and skill might allow one to believe. The delayed introduction of the emperor, the reluctant hero with a family name that rings out, the focus on languages, creatures, clothing, weaponry, world building in essence, these are the parts of Dune that sell it. The parts that make it consumable to a vast mass. It has none of the weighted emotional heft of Spielberg's “Minority Report” or “AI” to deter some audiences. None of the narrative integrity to the challenging themes of its source material that “A Clockwork Orange” maintains to repel them. It does not carry the narrative foreboding present in George Lucas's prequels. Much like the initial Star Wars trilogy, characters having names and titles serve mostly utilitary and perfunctory functions to the script. The characterizations are airy, the politics are broad, there is little to detangle, little to sit with outside pageantry. The oatmeal density of the books themes and politics now water, Dune’s transformation to “popcorn movie” is now complete.

Frank Herbert had much more distinctive and specific desires for his book as it pertains to its themes and its political commentary. The parallels in the relationships between the noble houses, the emperor, and Arakkis (which even phonetically sounds like Iraq) are undeniable and as such unavoidable, thusly anyone who adapts the book must in essence agree with the intricacy, the specificity. You cannot deal in the abstract with a text like this. The source material, (which as it pertains to the fremen, also deals in forms of abstractness) lends itself to orientalism, if you then become even more abstract then what is left? The answer is movies that talk like the book about a man seeking to align himself with and become equal to a people no less than him, while asserting his superiority in nearly every image and piece of text. Movies that imply that merely feeling conflicted over your inarguable “superiority” is the same as deconstructing it. In his landmark book on the subject literary critic and academic Edward Said had this to say about “Orientalism”; “In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.” Knowing this, the question here is not whether or not Paul and the Atriedes are white saviors, (Though there could certainly be an argument they most certainly are as both the literature and screen do not truly deny that Paul is the messiah, but rather the efficacy of the role) the question is; “What are the Fremen?”

For all the time spent around the Fremen as a people, they are largely bystanders in a story that largely concerns them. They bookend the first film, appear in the second (as with most of the characters in this film) as a large collective meant to signify one character, and in no way are in charge of their own destiny. In text and then re-creation of the text, they are reduced to pawns. Their land is occupied, they cannot defeat their occupiers on their own and so the ways to defeat them are given to them by the foreigner - “You’ve been fighting the Harkkonens for decades, we’ve been fighting them for centuries” - their prowess as a fighting force is reduced to the swarm like behavior rather than the elite man to man skill that saw even small numbers of Fremen decimate large numbers of Harkonnen soldiers and the Sardaukar. Even their religion is given to them by way of the Bene Gesserit. Villanueve a man heavily drawn to the image seems completely disinterested in any image that shows the fremen people (his favorite in the book) as a mighty force independent of Paul. The interest is not in them as a people, but in the collection of symbols, signs, and cultural iconography that convey their “otherness”. The romance at the center of the movies suffers not only from the lack of any deep chemistry between Chalamet and Zendaya, but from the lack of any specificity around what exactly draws Chani to Paul despite her natural and very valid fears about him as an interloper. Gone is even the patience to suggest a slowburn as exemplified in something like “The Last Samurai”. Paul's whiteness is taken for granted as inherently attractive in and of itself. It is the draw, it is the pull, and as told on film it is irresistible no matter what place white men occupy and felt almost on sight. So, Said’s words remain; at what point in these films is Paul's relational superiority not clear? What are we to say about a narrative that continually highlights a groups mysticism and the abstract symbols of their culture apart from their humanity? One willing to turn “Jihad” into “holy war” as to not invite controversy, but unwilling to use one’s imagination as to how to present the MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) coded fremen in a complex relationship to a complex man? Why chance that potentially mine ridden path, when they can just have the horde remain mostly nameless and faceless save for those descriptors which most reliably tell us who they are stand-ins for? There is no need for a hypothetical about what would happen if MENA actors were placed in this precarious story of jihad, because there are MENA actors in this precarious story of jihad. Hamza Baissa as “Young fremen patrol”, Hassan Najib as “Young fremen patrol” and Omar Elbooz as “Young fremen patrol and on it goes. In the caves, on the worms, and any time we see the Fremen's collective ethnic makeup it is quite clear they're mostly MENA looking, they just don't need to speak or have much agency. What are we to make of a film that reduces Thufir Hawat - feared and revered master of assassins to glorified guide and head of security in one movie? His vital role to the goings on in the narrative cut completely? To the disappearance of Liet Kynes importance and her (gender reversed) relationship to Chani? To the reduction of Yuen's relationships? To the quick deaths of almost every person of color in the first and the reduction of Stilgar to a form of elevated comic relief in part two, almost pointless to the movie except as a pair of shoulders for Paul to sit on? The presence of the opposite or a challenge to any one, or two, or maybe three of these things would still make for a movie taking positive steps in the right direction, and none of them by themselves or in and of themselves harmful to the movie as an adaptation, it is the collection of them that does that.

Since Europeans, Western powers, America, and Hollywood center themselves as the cultural and political centers of the world so too do their literary and cinematic avatars, and as such it remains in Dune. You cannot free yourself from a narrative by adapting the narrative, no more than you can disband hegemonic structures and ideas from the “inside”. You are not subverting the trope of making the “other” a prop to show white superiority, by making them a prop to show the folly of white superiority. You cannot find yourself or seek the “true self” in another culture, (as Villanueve alluded to later in the same interview) this is nothing more than the guiding force behind the whitewashing of yoga or rastafarianism and many other appropriations, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” where the burden is his guilt over his capacity to consume. This is the flaw in any overall belief in the Hollywood structure to do something that would inflict even minor damage to its self perpetuated mythology. Dune is undeniably a story about a gigantic and enormous conspiracy to rob a people of a resource that rightfully belongs to them and the prophecy that uphold it's players criminal machinations. That POV is not the only read available, but it is amongst, if not its most apparent. That POV would mean trying to build a blockbuster around a hero that is in essence a villain, and the lack of investment in it forbids something as imaginative as allowing the events of Dune to fold out from a fremen perspective beyond a voiceover from Zendaya’s Chani. That POV would mean following through consistently on the implication made by Chani’s narration in the first, that the Atreides are just the fremen’s latest oppressors. Which would mean a blockbuster that played out superficially at least like “Killers of the Flower Moon”. For all the pomp and gravitas, this latest Dune has failed to acknowledge that aspect to even the degree a bare minimum would decree. It is not some understated study of the power and hegemony and in fact borders on a celebration of it, just ambiguous enough to not fall on that side. That alone would still not be enough for me to hold back my excitement for such detail to world building, had that world not been so aesthetically tied to this one, or so clearly the entire point, as film critic Richard Brody said about Villanueve’s vision in a recent tweet; “Nothing distinctive in his filming of gigantic sets, either—they themselves are the idea”. A decent emotional exploration in this movie mined for effect might've won me over to the film as well, but while certain images brought some sense of wonder there was nothing behind them to make them weighted. What's left is a movie that looks the part but doesn't feel it, a movie that feels like it sold out on the books most apparent themes, (nevermind imagining something beyond them) and couldn't even bother to replace them with something more revelatory or inspiring than ugly toys and sad faced boys.

Mr and Mrs Smith: “Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave”

Two thoughts reigned supreme as I watched Donald Glover's reimagining of the 2005 Pitt/ Jolie vehicle “Mr. and Mrs Smith.”; “Spy movies are very cool and Donald Glover is not’, and ‘there is a underlying contempt here for the things he's mimicking”. Ultimately I could end this entire thing with just that sentence. There are a lot of reasons why I didn't fall for this show, and why at a certain point it started to become a chore to watch it, but most of them could be housed under the statements above. What I found fascinating about the show was the contrast of what the interviews leading up to the launch wanted us to believe the show was going to do, and what the show actually did. The mission (at least by what has been said in interviews seemed to be to subvert the genre, push something deeper out of the marriage angle, and embrace something opposite of what the film possessed. But for all the conversation about how different this was going to be from the film, this was pretty much the same, just with people, places, tech, lighting, cinematography, vehicles, fashion etc that were less cool or interesting than both the original film and most of the movies/TV shows in the spy genre.

There had been a couple of quotes from Donald Glover that had made their way around Twitter prior to the show's debut. I found them somewhat annoying and misguided, but once I started watching I thought initially Mr. and Mrs. Smith had done a great job building a relationship between two people, with two people who had such glaringly astonishing chemistry. Erskine and Glover really do bounce off of each other magnificently. They have similar timing, similar forms of self-depreciation, and are a match aesthetically and spiritually, but they were right when they said in interviews that they are not Brad and Angelina and they “can't replicate that”. Episode five was the beginning of the scratch to an itch I had even while mostly enjoying the show up to that point. “Do You Want Kids” had all the ingredients for an unforgettable banger; Ron Perlman, a subject that is very much so worth deep conversation and commentary, a car and foot chase with hand to hand combat, expensive homes, and Lake Como, Italy. What came out was completely forgettable unless you count how forgettable it is as memorable. Perlman is a stand in for a “trial baby” in an episode about the couples different views on having kids. Unfortunately it's handled with all the subtlety of a mack truck in space, from the title to Perlman’s performance (which is very good, but also very obnoxiously on-the-nose ). It has nothing interesting to say about parenting or about the two potential parents, (outside of their differences of opinions on children) and nothing very interesting or memorable besides Perlman. Leaving the episode I thought “You had far more time to explore the issue of rearing children in this career field and you've come away with something not much deeper than what the original film had to say about it.” Worse still, the film made very clear that child rearing was something that they didn't necessarily need in their lives. In a country that has pushed child rearing on woman's bodies like crack cocaine, and is currently doing everything it can to force them into it as an inherent duty, which is more refreshing?

“I watched it and honestly, I was like, ‘I don’t understand it’ . I mean, I get why it’s iconic because of the people starring in it - it’s just two gorgeous people in this situation. But the story I didn’t quite understand. I called my brother and he was like, ‘This is just a great date movie. It’s boys vs. girls. What else do you want?”

— Donald Glover, Entertainment Weekly

“There's this huge space between us and it just keeps filling up with everything that we don't say to each other what is that called?” This is something Jolie's “Jane” says to their therapist less than a quarter of a way through the movie and it is reinforced by the imagery and conversations we see both before and after she says it. Near the end of the film that same therapist tells them that marriage is about battling through obstacles by battling together. Why reduce all of this to “two gorgeous people in this situation” and “boys vs girls”? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly Maya Erskine said “Angelina and Brad are untouchable in that you can't recreate that and Donald and I are just so different it felt exciting to play a couple that you might recognize as your friends or yourselves”. Tabling the fact that I don't agree with the idea that you can't recognize your friends or your selves in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie simply because they look good or are incredibly cool people - underneath these words is that ever present suggestion that by the mere fact of being beautiful, you lack profundity. That particular idea comes out clearly in the wash of this show. Later Erskine says; “No, I'm kidding I obviously couldn't be further from her. I tend to play characters that feel like the rejects of society, and my Jane felt like it was a reject version of Angelina, it wouldn't ever be her it couldn't be”. That sentence is representative, of a repeated theme in these interviews and by consequence the show that suggests that they are doing something that is not present in the previous adaptation or the actors in it, when in actuality it is very present in both. It makes a lot of what's said feel pretentious and guarded, which at times is what the show felt like too. The “I tend to play characters that feel like the rejects of society” implies a difference that doesn't exist. In actual fact that defines Jolie's career as well, in “Gia”, in “Hackers”, in “Girl Interrupted”, in “Gone in 60 seconds” and more. When you get wrong what it is that may need correcting, adding, or improvement in a project, then usually, you end up with something worse than.

If the goal was to dress this thing down, to make it something more akin to reality, (nothing in movies is ever a true reality) the pathway to that was made very clear in something like 2011’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. In Tomas Alfredson’s hazy adaptation of Le Carré’s story every single aspect feels like a repudiation of everything cool about spy movies. The clothes are lovingly austere, the locales poetically mundane, the photography is strikingly drab, each item so uncool that they reach out, wrap around and somehow end up right back at being cool. Mr. and Mrs. Smith would have been far more interesting if Glover would have accepted that and joined in with Sloane and the rest of the co-creators to try to create something that truly acknowledges and embraced that un-cool or embraced that he wants to be “it” and maybe more importantly why he wants be “it”. It's an inferiority complex that as a consequence creates a superiority complex. This finds its way into Mr. and Mrs. Smith by way of it's acceptance of the most banal ideas of beauty represented in its vehicles, in the clothing, and represented in the inflated sense of depth as it pertains to the shows discussions of relationship dynamics. Most of what this show aims to do relationship-wise as stated was already accomplished by FX’s brilliant “The Americans”, and done a thousand times better. John's insecurities around manhood and masculinity are interesting bullet points in the show, but never become a full treatise. The hunting, the therapy, the asthma. It shows them, it brings them up, it jots a note down, but it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of depth or complexity displayed in how The Americans drew and handled some of the very same issues around masculinity and having your better be your female partner in Matthew Rhys’s “Phil Jennings”. Its only slightly more complex than the original. Most of what Mr. and Mrs. Smith seeks to subvert as a show about spies, or as a show about relationships is either common, superficial, boring, or try hard, especially the action. What is left after both the cool and the un-cool fail is a show that wasted alot of its talent, it's locales, it's subjects, and is neither as deep as it thinks it is, or as cool as it thinks it is. Bland and tasteless, a box of grape nuts.

Mimicry is a superficial recreation of the most commonly recognized (and many times stereotypical) aspects of a person(s) or thing. It is an impoverished version of imitation mostly due to the fact that it is not knowledgeable of the subject and is sometimes willfully ignorant about it, because underneath it is a conflict between disdain and admiration for person (s) or a thing. Charlie Sheen's diatribe to Chris Tucker in “Money Talks” which includes the words “G posse on a fly tip” is a great example. It is impoverished because you can tell hes never been around black folk and even while admiring them on some level doesn't like them either. Donald Glover, Francesca Sloane, and the shows other authors suffer from a lack of reckoning with their conflicted feelings about cool and about beauty. Consequently that lack of a reckoning is what pulls the rug out from under their attempt for this deeper show they were clearly so intent on creating. You can't claim to distance yourself from something you're so obviously trying to recreate. If you're trying so hard to distance yourself from what they created, why are you dressing like them? Why are you so manicured? Why is everything around you so adherent to the most normalized ideas of beauty from cars to clothes to homes? Why not admit that you thought Brad Pitt looked awfully good in those form-fitted sweaters and shirts and that you tried to recreate that? Why not lend something to what you clearly liked other than backhanded compliments about their movie stardom? Why not go for the aesthetics and values in Apple TV’s Gary Oldman starrer “Slow Horses” and Season 1’s lack of alot of gun violence and action? Why have the far more unique idea of a wife who just refuses to have children and stands on that ground and all that could spring forth out of that, rather than copping out and having her admit she actually wants them while on truth serum? You went to the school dance and you don't fit in and so your knee-jerk reaction is to claim that the cool kids and the beautiful people are dumb and superficial, even while you came in your best tuxedo, asked your mom for those new Jordans, and tried to talk to the cheerleader. In that way the show doesn't really do what so many of the quotes from the interview claim it set out to do which is defy the status quo of this genre and of the people in these relationships, it merely gives the pretense of it. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not reimagining anything. It's not reinventing, nor challenging anything in the genre or from that film, it's just poorly mimicking both and passing itself off as more because they're not the “beautiful people” and that's pretty shallow.

Maestro: Men at a Distance

We open with the words of Leonard Bernstein; “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them and it's essential meaning is an tension between the contradictory answers”. They are meant to function as both as a guide into understanding Bernstein and to understanding Director Bradley Cooper’s intention for this film. I left it wondering if it had accomplished either. There is a desire to reckon with a man, a desire to reckon with the distance between us and him, and most importantly it's director and him, that unconsciously sits in the womb of the entire movie, but is never birthed, and thus I left the movie stunted. Disconnected from any deep feelings of emotion or intellectual revelation and/or connection. I was left at a distance from Cooper’s authenticity and consequently from his subjects.

The tensions between these distances are most certainly presented, or at least they are talked about or mentioned a lot. Between his work life and home life, his straight marriage to Felicia Montealegre, and his queer selfhood, between his authentic self and the performer. The latter is the aspect most presented within this movie. It's in his words to a reporter, his words to trusted friends, it's in his sometimes overhearing need to share, and his over bearing needs which can “swallow up” those around him as Felicia says in one climactic argument. He is in constant performance, whether in show, in love, or in conversation, and it is the friction between that performance and his actual self the movie tries to reckon with, but also seems afraid to come close to. The other aforementioned tensions are merely dressing to the dressing, and in concert with this very ostentatious cavalcade of technique and the artifice of craft and genius, it gives one the feeling that you visited a grand costume ball that had absolutely little to no meaning save to prove the ability of the person throwing it. For a movie about love, there is very little in it. There is loyalty, and lots of understanding, and respect, words thrown at you at 100 miles per hour, camera movements to astound you, close ups, and pulls, wide shots and all other manner of accoutrements that are meant to accentuate this supposed story of the tensions on creativity, brilliance, and selfhood, but not love. The problem is all of these apparatuses serve to distance you from the subject and the music rather than bring you closer into. Instead of hugging us, Maestro’s incessant plays for prestige shrug us off. One scene has Bernstein being sort of cautiously nudged by a man he has a deep respect for to hide his name, one feels like this may be an entry way to a story about the tension in the sometimes short, sometimes long distances between Bernstein's (and really any non-white protestant male) Jewish identity and his very American success, but before we can even acknowledge what we are watching, Mulligan's Felicia is whispering into his ear to be his authentic self and whisking him off into their love story presented with an over head bird-eye shot that whips us into an entirely different space both physically and mentally. It's not a bad choice, falling in love can feel alot like this, but love isolated in a vacuum is not a story, the story is in its relation to subjects, it's distance from them -to them, so we still need to see how it is found between these two subjects, but before we can appreciate their love story we are treated to a flamboyantly shot dance scene with no actual flamboyance most especially when Cooper enters the scene ( a dancer he is not). The point here being tensions are presented in the same way a child may reply “present” during roll call, but they are not reckoned with, consolidated, or interstitched in any meaningful way. This all happens as Bernstein's queer life is as quietly placed into storage in the movie as it is depicted it was in his life.

Bernstein's queer-ness feels like an unfortunate aside, like bait to get is into caring about his all encompassing precarious but sweet love for Felicia and not just because of how little screen time they're given, but because whenever his sexuality does show up it feels as if the investment is cheap and disinterested. Matt Bomer’s David Oppenheim is not a fully realized person at all, he is a series of reactions stacked on top of each other in an overcoat pretending to look like one. We see him and are made privy to stifled butt taps, stiff kisses, and looks that are meant to communicate the subtext of longing, and laughs, but there is nothing there, in commentary or chemistry. His other trysts and affairs are not given enough time or energy to create friction, they merely pass by without rubbing up against. When they are intimate it seems so contrived and forced , I half expected to see Cooper wipe the kisses off after. There is no sensuality there, no fire. To be fair, it is the same with he and Felicia's relationship, but it's just that much more noticable when the foundation is next to nothing. Save for the beginning, we only see his queer lovers to see how they draw Felicia's ire. They seem to exist in a very rigid “either/or” of friendly, or implied sexual nature (sex itself is off limits) but there is not a modicum of the depth and nuance afforded his straight relationship. How can we reckon with Bernstein's “authentic self” when such a massive part of it is so obviously treated with petit disdain?

Cooper's film is at its best when it is focused on the silences, the unsaid between the beloved couple. When the distance it maintains from each, actually serves it's emotional objectives, and when it focuses on Carey Mulligans outstanding performance. In an over the shoulder shot of Mulligan peering out from underneath her facade of shiny acceptance to reveal her natural jealousy over the moments Leonard shares with his paramour, you feel as if she is a thousand miles away. The deafening silence in a room after an argument as a balloon passed a window from the parade outside, betrays a dire loneliness in both of them. The distance between the camera and Leonard and Felecia as the camera sits well outside the fence of the pool area from which they try and talk about what is going on between them, and a close up of Mulligan in a monologue detailing her revelation that the woman she claimed to be was merely a conjured ideal to try and reconcile her love for the entirety of Bernstein with her organic sense of possession. These are scenes where I felt strongest that the movie was near accomplishing it's goal of reckoning with these tensions without answering them or preaching them to its audience. It was most distracted when it focused on its own obtrusive beauty and Coopers equally showy performance. Let me be clear, I did not like Cooper's performance. It is without a doubt the most distracting aspect of this film, and one of the worst in contention for an Oscar in recent history. Sure it is fervently ambitious, and there is detail, and I do see love there. Cooper's own tension as an artist I believe are a mirror image of sorts to the Bernstein he sees, and in moments Cooper's own vulnerabilities shine, but there are moments where that ambition and that desire overtake and choke out any ability to actually connect with Bernstein. It is an aggressively nasally performance, in which everything extends out from Bernstein's nose. A lot was made of that nose in particular, and while I don't agree with the takes that were presented to try and paint this as somewhat anti-Semitic, the focus is a poor choice to decide that this is where Bernstein vocally, in some ways spiritually speaks to us from. You have the prosthetic nature of the nose, but you also have the fact that Cooper is speaking through it to try and imitate Bernstein's vocal tenor. The experiment is a cinematic failure, it doesn't serve to bring intimacy between the audience and Leonard, but rather it distances us, constantly reminding us that this is Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein. We are supposed to say “My god he has really channeled this man” but best I can give is “Look how hard he is trying”. The gestures and the movements feel accurate enough, true enough, but everything coming from the inside reeks of effort that we should not be seeing, and in this veers it into the realm of Oscar bait. Once again this is also a place where the silences are the best. A scene where he has to put a pillow to his mouth to muffle his tear filled grief, a concert hall scene, (maybe the only) that in its movements , along with Cooper's show Bernstein's love and affinity for the music he was making even while Cooper himself is silent.

This is not a film that (as it states in the beginning) in any way sticks to one's bones to reckon with the tensions and agitations it is happy just to put on display. Its a movie that puts the clothing in the window to draw the eye, but the door to the store is locked. I came into the movie knowing very little about Bernstein and I came out of the movie still knowing very little about Bernstein. I came in very far removed from him, and left only a few steps closer, enough to we that he lived his wife deeply. If that was the movies one true goal it is fine enough of a goal, but those opening words in the quote do not speak to simply a complicated love story, but to something more, much more. A complicated man, a complicated genius, living in a complicated world in a complicated body. Cooper and co. seem to misunderstand and mistake the presentation of complexity as the expression of complexity. The complexity on display is banal, it's just presented with the sort of pomp that makes it seem like more. I wish more of the movie was like those scenes of silence. I wish the movie had the agitative daring of Mulligan’s compartmentalized performance. I wish Bernstein’s queer self was more welcome to the party, and I wish someone else was playing Bernstein instead of Cooper to allow Cooper to remain completely and totally married to the man, the subject, from the perspective he most seems comfortable with …a distance.

“All Truth is Crooked, Time istelf is a Circle”.

A room full of anxious unsure black men sit in a dark room with almost no identifiable tokens of place or time or identity even, save for their clothing which could still pass for a number of time periods. One by one they will renounce their own languages, and with them their very identity, - I immediately recall the words of Franz Fanon “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language”. After all of these black faces (and one seemingly white face, who is later revealed to be mixed race) another white man appears, he is shot profile, and he has on the garb of the church, he is the first identifier of the possibility of space (the church). His first words; “To live with Christ is to love God and man”. I ask myself what kind of love would ask of people to shed themselves of the things that make them who they are? The irony is intentional. Hondo like Fanon is acutely aware of what is being asked and what the consequences of the “asks” are. Hondo is also aware that to stamp a date, to make clear the space, place, time, is to create a distance and he is not interested in distance, nor time, to be clear he is not very much interested in the presentation of “factual”.

The film is a series of juxtapositions made stronger and more agitating by their inability to reach any compromise with truth, with morality, with time. As the film is semi-autobiographical this too is intentional as it connects the personal to the political. The personal being Hondo's experiences in a number of professions, and his experience with the country who overseered under the rouge of a sort of national adoption. The attitude, the documentation of colonization and imperialism and it's consequences, the agitation present in “Soleil O” reminded me of Costa-Gavras's “Z” (1969) and Ousmane Sembene’s “Ceddo” (1977). The period wherein these films take place, the lack of compromise in plot, craft, and commentary, the usage of technique and style to frustrate, stir, and indict audience and empire alike are all pervasively present, but maybe more than anything is the way in which these films play with time.

In Sembéne’s “Ceddo” a date is never said or mentioned, we have only a vague idea what period this takes place in, based off of costume and technology, but not much else. This is again intentional, as the lack of date implies the flux, or continuum of the behaviors and strategies on display. In Sembéne’s own words; “I can’t give a date. These events occurred in the 18th and 19th century and are still occurring”. In the epilogue of Gavras’s “Z” a reporter gives the news chronicling the events that happened beyond the reach of the film, when suddenly, he too disappears as we find out he was murdered from the voice of a woman. The time of his death is not acknowledged, the time that lives in between his absence is not acknowledged, because again time is not relevant to the actors nor the actions. In Hondo’s “Soleil O” we see a similar tactic to Sembéne's where a time is implied, but never stated and in Hondo's film we jump forward and back through time with no announcement or confirmation. One could be the other, the other the one. Uniforms change, clothing changes, but as with “Ceddo” ( which means the outsiders) the behaviors and strategies remain the same. “All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle”. The Nietzsche quote is not an argument as much as an invite to agitation and question. Time is meant to signal a great deal of things but in the historical context it is many times used to signal the beginning and ending of things. In that way time (a construct itself ) is a useful tool in the construction of propaganda and of a false sense of historicity that assumes that events of the past lived and died there, and the purveyors of it depend on that assumption. The radical nature of these films lie not only in the purity of the fire of their anger, or the straight forward force of their dedication to a deconstruction of truth - but in their resistance to the framework of time that allows the audience the peace of mind that comes with knowing this is not the here, the now, nor the present. Extending out beyond even the now of our own events (see Gaza, Congo, Tigray, Sudan, Haiti) to imply the future in the space of time between when these films were made, when the events occured, and now, which then leaves the audience with no safe place to go.

A Reckoning, but not thee Reckoning”

“It is a reckoning, but maybe not the reckoning I needed or wanted” were the words that came to me what would have been about midway through the movie and persisted until the very end. Sitting in the dark as I heard Lily Gladstone’s primal scream of bereavement and unrequited anger, I felt it beating through my chest and head like a drum. I do not think Scorsese or subsequently his film is afraid to go where he needs to go, say what needs to be said, show what may need to be shown. It's a film indicative of all of Scorcese's powers, and Thelma Schoonmaker’s too for that matter. The issue here is the issue that has ever been, which is that it is being told from the perspective of a white person. In the sense of who's directing it, in the sense of who's starring in it, and in the sense of whose perspective is most being represented. This conundrum haunts and elevates the movie simultaneously. It's inertia, it's profundity all live in the places where it is strong and where it is weak, and where the movie is strong and where the movie is weak lives in its perspectives.

The movie most closely takes on the appearance of a masterpiece (if not outright one) when you examine it from the angle that they (the white folks ) are the wolves. Scorcese’s film in its entirety gave me the feeling of watching one of those movies where they have the graphic for the way a virus begins to eat up cells over time, or even better a pandemic film where they have the electronic map show in elapsed time how rapidly a virus will spread. We start out with the near lack of existence of whites in Osage, and the markers of success and community amongst a native population made rich by the oil under their land, (even while we see in their appearance and spending the tokens and golems of white supremacy) and by the time we are near finished we see DiCaprio's Ernest Buckhart sitting in a room where he previously sat, which then was made up of mostly Osage people, now almost completely White. This imagery bookending either side of the film as well as a rather vast timeline of multiple murders and vicious animus through banal faces is jarring. The beginning of the mysterious rot (wasting disease AKA White People) and extraction of the Osage wealth is already in effect, by the time Burkhart arrives, but his presence will at the very least make it personal for Mollie (A phenomenal Lily Gladstone) an Osage woman whose life becomes a living hell upon meeting Ernest Burkhart. Even the title then, most especially in imagery begins to take shape. Through Ernest’s uncle William King Hale (Robert DeNiro) and his conglomerate of ne’er do wells, ambitious boot lickers, psychopaths, and morons, we see the killers, we see the physical terror, the existential terror, the ecological terror, both malevolent and benign. “Friends” are shot in the head from behind as they commiserate or watch over their baby, and white overseers watch over and control Osage money, Osage spending, even though it's Osage money! No police are ever brought in, we repeatedly hear how “no one cares” about the deaths of Indians” a double scoop of apathy and mockery. The murders are sanctioned both explicitly and implicitly, the apathy comes standard. We watch as white supremacy slowly waves it's collective shadowy hand over the lives of these people and their land darkening everything in their path with blood, greed, cruelty, and more blood. We see clearly how so many of the lies then, connect directly to the systems now, with the lies now transformed into law, tradition, and possession. The first half of Killers of the Flower Moon is the best half of this movie precisely because of the choice to go in from the perspective of the wolves, to let us see what the wolves see. Scorcese's willingness to dive into and portray the animus, the audacity of the mendacity, and frankly the stupidity on display is so sharp and fresh as to take you there in the flesh, and it is frightening especially because the movie isn't afraid to show sternly, truthfully, and without romance the depravity of it. In combination with the fact that even while it is still being told from the perspective of the wolves, it is more multidirectional than the second half of the film, this trapeze act of empathy, and truth, storytelling, and capital is absolutely stunning. It moves in waves from one perspective to another, balancing Osage and White narratives of the seemingly innocuous interactions that doom an entire people. The small things matter here, like the inherent commentary in the words voiced by a self aware, but also still white co conspirator when Leo tries to recruit him into service of a dastardly act “Why you always trying to get someone like me to do your work?”. It is the half of the film I most enjoyed and found to be the most brilliant. We see and hear a lot more from Mollie in the first half or so. Her joys, her reserve, her intelligence. We see the town, more specifically, the portrayal of what the town was before much white involvement, the integrity of it; to show mother's that have favorites, secrets that are kept by good women, alcoholic sisters who are short tempered, and depressed men, searching for reasons to live, even while they are rich, and now themselves a petit bourgeois class amongst their ethnicity is an important counter to victimized cinema that not only paints victimhood as an identity, (which is also caricaturization) but also reinforces the idea that victims have to be perfect, saintly. The portrayal of the decimation of an entire group of people so callous and disturbing it appears as nothing more than the rising of the sun, in juxtaposition with the banality of tactics used to murder, the slow drip of genocidal mania and the consistent re-creation of it with almost no residual effect on those who schemed and plotted it is all too close to home as we witness what is going on with Israel and the US backed decimation of Palestine and Palestinian peoples. Scorsese is as plain as we've ever seen him even while still he maintains his visual audacity. He's quieter here, more restrained. He rarely intervenes, interjects, or distracts us with the watermarks of his signature style, and the movie benefits from that. He's concerned here with letting us see with as few frills as possible, the plain wretchedness and decay inherent in the white supremacist enterprise, and juxtaposes that lovingly with the hearts, humor, pain, philosophy and spirituality of the Osage community. Never once condescending to them, most especially the women. The best representation of the latter, the one I believe is going to stick with me for quite some time; is the death of Mollie's mother (Tantoo Cardinal ) and the tangential pause that Scorsese takes to honor her meeting with the ancestors. The simplicity of it, the unceremonious nature of it, the lack of invasive ego in it. It represents in a microcosm so much of why Scorsese is so beloved in the film community, and the legitimacy of Scorcese's intent and ability in his work and especially in this film.

Its a third of the way through and I am reminded of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” the conclusion of which arrives at the same place as I did at the end of this film. I was left considering all the ways in which the hegemony of power in storytelling as it concerns the medium of film - prevents all but a very privileged few the right to speak to their own pain in the making of this colonial project turned empire. The obstructions present in the film, are present in the reality outside of it, and in the making of it. A white perspective is nonetheless a white perspective, and no matter the level of mastery on display, (and the level here is arguably as high as it could go considering) it is still what historian Michel -Rolph Trouillot calls a silence. A sort of confluence of variables that assist in the obstruction and impediment of the ownership of the narrative from the POV of anyone but those in power, which then leaves a silencing that passes down through history. The second half of this movie - where it begins to turn into more of a police procedural - is an example of this, as the combination of variables like profit needs, the star of the movie, running time, for example, shift the perspective almost completely to that of the white man and men around Mollie and her people, leaving their voices only to be heard in suffering. It is a scale size model of the original trauma and as such is evidence of the cracks, crevices, nooks, and crannies created by the lack of precision, the lack of understanding, inherent in a perspective outside the veil of something one can never fully be immersed in or touch. This is the portion of the movie where if anything it would have benefited strongly from a shift straight into Mollie's perspective. When I say Mollie's perspective I do not mean change the story much, nor that she should have had all the scenes that they gave to Leonardo DiCaprio, it means that all the events that we are seeing should be seen from a perspective that clearly is watching the precedings with an invisible eye from the marginalized position, imagine for example what Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” would look like if a sequel took place right from that ending, fulfilling the promise of its conciets by being written and directed by indigenous people. In Killers, it's hard enough to gauge what it was about Ernest that Mollie fell so in love with in the first place, but by the second or third the procedural aspect will eschew experience for process and beats familiar to true crime. How the Osage and more specifically Mollie feels in all this is a bit obscured. The portions that would feed much of what she can see, observe, and what she can feel, as we saw with Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's earlier release “Oppenheimer” are all but gone. We should still be able to watch all that's going on with DiCaprio, but with a lean toward viewing from her perspective, whether by voiceover, suggestive camera eye, or exposition and language. The Osage people’s decimation is Mollie's. She is a microcosm of their collective pain. Dealt one heavy blow after another, as the people with whom she shared close and intimate communal space with are murdered one by one. The first half (which in actuality might be more like three-quarters) was adept at this. We have voice-overs from Mollie’s perspective, we sometimes see through her eyes as she makes her way through crowds of white faces in the midst of contemptible peering. We get moments spent with her family laughing , gossiping, sharing. The third act appears and we can see the walls closing in on the Ernest and Hale and it is at this point that it becomes most clear in the movie that the fluctuating struggle in the relationship between the movies need for Leonardo DiCaprio and DeNiro to be the star and the importance of the story and it's subjects POV are at cross purposes. DiCaprio's character and his cohorts all but erased the agency and existence of a people who had already been beset by numerous tragedies in their upheaval from their original homes to this place -the need for the procedural aspect to follow the line of criminals to their rightful end overshadows the alternative need to hear from those most affected. I found myself asking what is she thinking, through all this? I realize she is getting sicker and sicker but a few scenes from the perspective of her in that bed, a few scenes about her grief, a few scenes about where and when she can find reprieve to go on, joy to stand, would've increased the power of everything else for me. I wrote “She has to know something is up, but she is also dead in the center of it unknowingly, it puts her in the eye of the storm, ignorant and yet at least unconsciously aware of what is happening and being created as around her” but I had to guess at all of it. I didn't want answers, I just wanted scenes where she was either directly or indirectly was prioritized, or that her perspective of these events was being represented to a degree that would then allow me to make my own conclusions about what is happening. Mollie keeps getting sicker, these strange men keep insisting on strange amendments to her treatment, her husband is growing further and further apart, her forest is becoming a pile of ash, and as her husband makes fun of her culture and her heritage to get her to take the poison that is killing her, she comforts him. It is sickening to watch, not much less to recall, and by the end I left wanting so much more from her, especially in lieu of the revelation of her husband's consistent role in all this. I love the idea of the movie taking place from the eyes of the wolves as it concerns the enterprise and the scourge, but when we got to Ernest and Mollie I wanted that perspective benched. Watching a movie about Tina Turner from Ike's perspective is not appealing to me. Returning to Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” another movie that contends with the massive weight of destruction at the behest of imperial and colonial forces as executed by a useful idiot - we see how all these events crashed and honed in on Oppenheimer, as it assails his role in it. As I wrote before in my piece on that film, there is a visceral anger directed at Robert, one that finds voice in the character of Emily Blunt. Here our anger finds no voice, and Mollie doesn't either. Can the Subaltern Speak? We should have been made to feel her world getting smaller as so many of these murders were of direct family members. Made to live in the amount of grief she had to be going through at that moment at that time, in the same way we are made to live in Oppenheimer’s persecution, shame and guilt, in Ernest’s shame and guilt? It is not that these things are completely erased or non-existent within the film it is that they are from the distanced, retracted, and reductive perspective of an outsider, which cannot be helped for the most part, and what parts can, are part of the inherent flaws of the ask.

In those movies about infections -and as a consequence zombies, - we are engaged in those films from the perspective of those who are besieged. The Mist, The Fog, the blood transfers, they corrode, corrupt, cause decay, destroy and we watch how those left behind cope. I don't see those stories as being much different from this. The effects of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, consumerism are much like what is depicted in those films. It is well documented many of them are commenting thematically on those very subjects. John Carpenter’s “The Fog” is pretty easily framed as one such commentary with its meditations on the costs of genocide, it's insistence on accountability and it's depiction of how the denizens and edifices benefitted both then and now from barbarity in a nearly all white town. It too is from the perspective of the wolves as they are being attacked by the avatars of their ancestral harm and their collective guilt. These stories and this story are similar in their tale of devastation. One day you're at home cuddling with your husband and the next your entire family is dead and so is the entire community from which you lived from which you had formed bonds and connected with folks and we see what the effect of that is on those who are left over, (That is the plot for Dawn of the Dead by the way) my point being, even though the subject matter is similar, these films center the besieged, not the horde, the besieged are understood to be universal, the “other” is the horde. What happens when you depict the horde and the horde is the storyteller? Are they the horde if they are the storytellers? Never mind that the size and proportion of white guilt is an obstruction to their ability to see fully the ways in which they have harmed irreparably the peace and agency of an entire ecosystem and people, there is also the natural obstructions created by history and the lack of on the part of those who have had history imposed upon them. If the idea is to see us, hear us, feel us, as every bit the equal of all peoples - to reiterate our position as both one and “other”, depicting truthfully the savagery of the those who labeled others “savages” is noble, and real, and so too is depicting the history of those who were silenced both before and after and in the between. Depicting the anger, the frustration, the intimate pleasures of our existence apart from the tragedy of our oppression. In that spirit the moral complexity of a man knowingly aiding a genocidal act cannot be so lopsidedly intertwined with the anxieties of the woman who lives with it, and whatever the reasons behind the decision it takes a distant, distant, distant second to my supreme interest in any aspect of what Mollie's inner life must’ve been at these points in her life, especially considering what Lily Gladstone is doing in this movie with her performance. It should not be left to the eyes of Lily Gladstone only, and in fits and starts to give us clues as to her interiority. Mollie is not yet bed ridden, she's not the ghost of herself she eventually becomes, but the sickness has clearly taken effect, and at this point in my mind, I asked “What are her dreams like now?” When she's alone with nothing but her grief, her thoughts, her racing mind, what does she see?…Is it just the owl when it comes for her life?”. “When it crosses her mind that her husband might be apart of this, what does that feel like for her?” “What is she wrestling with” What about her, what about her, what about her, go back to her”. One of the most vivid representations of this happened near the end of the movie when their child dies. We get a few seconds of Molly leaning over her child, but when Ernest finds out we linger, we sit with how deeply this hurts and affects him. It's a gut punch of a scene that DiCaprio acts without a single shred of ego or protection, and it lays bare the fallout of his avarice and deceptions, including ones of the self, but it was all about him, the only place with which Scorcese and DiCaprio could seemingly find success in putting this story together was in the relationship between Ernest and Mollie, so why does it feel like Ernest story, not theirs? Scorcese in a wonderful interview with critic luminary Richard Brody talks about the trouble he had getting into this story, and ultimately it is Leo who finds it in the relationship between Ernest and Mollie, yet that relationship isn't exactly detailed, nor followed intently. Now, the fact that “they were in Love” is something uttered by the descendants of Burkhart to Scorcese in the process of finding the story is instructional as it is, but there is also the fact that the core parts of strictly-on-paper story telling is mostly taking place without the aid of the Osage people of today and those facts obscure and hazy in the first three quarters of the film, become transparent in the final portion. Ernest’s righteousness at the end, his moral wrestling, and his supposed befuddlement and reckoning at the fact that he has played a knowingly active role in eviscerating his life, and the life of the woman whom he claimed to love being accepted as genuine seemingly without question is a perfect representation of why we talk so much about giving these kinds of opportunities to those who have a direct cultural understanding of them. The idea should not be that no one of any identity but the identity being represented should be able to tell these stories, but simply that these stories are BEST told when told by those who share the cultural markers and identity around it, and that the real story is in the spaces and areas in between and outside of rigid concepts like righteousness and morality (the latter of which I'm in no way accusing Scorcese of pandering to). That it's best when we speak, because when it's us we don't have to think about perspective we are it. You're asking people outside of those communities to do something that is foreign to them, especially if those people are part of the fabric of the group that maintains hegemony and power through it. Simply stating that fact should not be controversial, but I have a sense that it will become controversial once this movie starts making its rounds. Especially those for whom it's easy to kick the can down the road to some magical, but unspecified time in the future where we will be able to tell our own stories. It's not Scorsese's fault that white supremacy is so inextricable from our institutions that it makes telling stories about it from the POV of the oppressed feel near impossible, but it nonetheless comes with all the accoutrements that come with being considered in the fabric of whiteness. The fact that he is interested in this story, the fact that he dedicated what had to be considerable time and energy to get it out there, and to make sure that it was told in a way that maintains such overall integrity in its depiction of visceral cruelty in such veracious detail should be commended, and highly, but it should also be consistently and constantly tied to the “why” behind it. The idea that Hollywood thinks or will only allow him to be the one in the first place. If we do not (as a recent article explained by way of data and experience) accept that white leads are vital to a movie selling, then why accept that white directors or white writers are needed? Scorsese who has worked long enough as a white man, who is mastered as a craftsman and trusted as selling point is so as a result of opportunities he received(s) in part because he's an artistic genius and in part because he's white. Who can sell, what can sell, cannot be left to the collective racist feelings of Hollywood executives unchallenged, even when the chosen champion is arguably our greatest living director, and a champion of all perspectives of cinema from his own individual perspective. Hollywood executives insistence that these stories need a white lead, or white storyteller in order to bring people to the theaters is a re-creation of the racist principles that created the incident of the subject matter and the silence of that event that followed. By parroting the talking points of the white supremacist industry that upholds the idea that the story of the “othered” is not something people want to see, we uphold them ourselves, and that is not the job of the critic. As it pertains to Scorcese's “Killers of the flower Moon” we are left with the devastation, with the rot, the audacity, the cruelty, the intransigence of whiteness, white people, colonialism, capitalism, and westward expansion, told with the genius that only Scorcese can bring, the force multiplier in DiCaprio's depraved and pathetic interpretation, and Lily Gladstone’s once in a lifetime ode to the power of the eye. Once again from the perspective of the wolves. It is a reckoning indeed, but not the reckoning I was looking for or needed.

Film Diary: “Hard Times”, Comradery in Survival.

Almost everything is almost ugly, the clothes, the city, the cars, the people, even our protagonist. There's a poetry, a beauty, singing underneath them all though in their desire to be better than what society gives them as derelict people in the margins; poor, women, or criminal. Bronson is part homely, part silver fox, as as some say “All man”…The movie is too for that matter. Walter Hill has never had much time for women in his movies and I don't know that that's fine, but that's him and he doesn't shy away from it, or try to pretend he has much to offer in that realm, even though at times he really does. My point is “Hard Times” looks and feels exactly like that. The streets are worn, the buildings are ratty and tattered, most things are green or brown. The people are cheats, louses, addicts, fighters, and other forms of societies supposed ne’er do wells. A line that sticks is “Some people are born to fail and some have it thrust upon them”. The way it's put forth is as a statement of fact, but if we accept it as such, (at least for this movie) we might ask who in this movie was fated as such, and who has had it thrust upon them, but even more important, is to ask who the film empathizes with of the born to fail, and thrust upon. The answer provided in the narrative is very clearly both. You might say that James Coburn's glorified pimp “Speed” is the identifiable born to fail. You might say Strother Martin’s “Poe” is the one that had it thrust upon him, or you might say it's Bronson’s “Chaney. Doesn't matter, they all have both, and they are all deemed worthy of good fortune, good will, respect, and community. It's the foundation of this movies heart, for as ugly and mean and cold as this movie can be, on the surface it has a very strong vein of warmth underneath it in the form of male comraderie and brotherhood as all Hill films do. The films final act is the ultimate reveal. These three temporary fellow travelers one of whom almost discarded Chaney once he wouldn't save him from his predilection towards gambling, who would've pimped him into the ground unintentionally given his predilection and selfishness, end their dealings with a gift from Bronson. A generous bounty considering they deserved nothing, but in this movie deserves has nothing to do with it. The men who lose to Bronson don't lose to Bronson because they're bad guys, they lose because they're not fighting with what he's fighting with; a strong sense of self. They find their worth in the fighting, in the work, in the money, Bronson knows his exist well outside of it and he's willing to fight merely as an extension of it. One man named “Jim Henry” (Robert Tessier) is so much the case of a sense of worth trapped in your work, that he seems to become smaller after he loses to Bronson. The movie (again like all Hill’s movies) is not interested in morality in an unjust and many times unlawful world. Hill is a working class director and his characters are the underclasses. They are guided by individual codes and that they stay true to them is the mark of righteousness, not objective blind obedience to authority and those who would trample them. This movie is as underground as Denis Leary in Demolition Man. It feels subterranean and it deals with subterranean people. Those unseen, uncatered to, left to fend for themselves anyway they can. They all only want to survive and Hill finds - as any great storyteller - a profound nobility in the will to survive, and it shows whether it's Nolte's “Jack Kates” keeping Murphy's “Reggie Hammond's” stolen money from him despite knowing it's stolen in 48 hrs, or the mutual respect between “The Warriors” and “The Riffs” or in this case between Chaney and his temporary partners, Hill always seems to suggest that there is honor amongst thieves, because ultimately they're just trying to survive, and that is honorable.

OPPENHEIMER: A Divine Allegory on the Terrors of Neutrality.

There is a point in “Oppenheimer” Christopher Nolan’s treatise on not just the creator of the atom bomb but the confluence of events that led him to his fate as the “Father of the atom bomb”, where you realize Nolan is most definitely not doing a movie about white guilt, or a three hour bit of revisionist history with the hope that we all think kinder of the man. It comes about midway through the movie when one of the great loves of Oppenheimer’s life dies, and Oppenheimer (or “Oppy” as his friends call him) seeks solace to drown himself in guilt. His wife ( a rattlingly fantastic Emily Blunt) finds him off in the woods folded up like a baby in the cold ground of a the land he is in the midst of destroying and immediately runs over to grab him. What one would expect here, what usually follows- a pep talk from the wife who understands his genius, a loving confidence boost from the woman that acts as a kickstand in the mans moments of weakness - is not what's said, instead we get a viscerally livid Emily Blunt all but slapping him before she utters the magic words “You do not get to commit sin and make us feel sorry for you”. It is arguably the thesis of the film, and it was at this exact moment that what had only been hinted at, what felt like it could go either way, became definitive in a movie about a man that was anything but.

Nolan's film jumps from one location to another, from one room to another, from one conversation to another, sometimes in the same conversation. The imagery shifts perspective, shifts time, and is not as aesthetically pleasing as his previous works. Its rough work and craft, not rough as in rough draft, rough as in the sound and feel is abrasive and disruptive. The cuts and edits are part and parcel of the movies anxiety, its frustration. The sound on occasion impedes upon one's ability to hear what it is people are saying, furthering it's appeals to a sense of neglect. Nolan, who famously placed the quote “You should feel it rather than understand it” takes that maxim and uses it to it's most successful effect to date, because it not only lives in service of story but in service of perspective. This is not fully or only from Oppenheimer’s perspective , this is also for the benefit of ours. The imagery, the editing, the sound, the amount of characters in the movie all work in concert to provide this feeling of anxiety, of scattered-ness, inexactitude, and chaos, the fragments of which eventually become angrier and angrier until they explode. There is anger at the lack of concern for what seemed obvious, anger at the lack of focus and the clear blind spots that extend out from it. Anger at the glee of the American military industrial complex to dive in and take advantage of a power they had no business wielding with no conscious about the suffering it may inflict. Several times throughout this film I could feel that anger being transformed into those famous words that flung forth from Dr. Ian Malcolm’s mouth in “Jurassic Park”; “You were so concerned with whether you could, you never stopped to think whether you should”. Nolan, a director largely thought to be something akin to apolitical for the first time feels like somebody who is properly taking a stand on his subject matter, and that stand is one that is searingly frustrated with a man who wouldn't take one.

Nolan's depiction of Oppenheimer is as a man with a mind that could never seem to be in one place at one time, going from singular focus, (Preoccupation with getting the bomb done before the Nazis in order to stop them from possibly annihilating the world ) to one of almost no focus at all, (Most of what happens at Los Alamos) constantly adding more and more to his plate when focus was needed, or singularly focused on one task when he needed to be multi tasking. Several times we see or hear some version of the line “You're spreading yourself too thin”, and Murphy makes sure it shows in his body, in his speech, and in his movement. As the film goes on this turns into something more frightening, more terrifying, as we start to see Oppenheimer as a man who mistakes integrity for righteousness to a callous and cruel degree, and then to a destructive one. Moments when he should take a stand for one woman or the other in his life, he takes a stand for neither. Oppenheimer won't take his eye off the ball, except to save those who in the end wished him the worst. He'll fight for Teller (Benny Safdie) and stomp to get Bohr (Kenneth Branaugh) but can barely be bothered to do the least with the family he made, or the woman who asked only that when she need him every once in awhile, he be there. Moments where he should take a clear stand on his communist-ish principles he teeters back and forth between that and soft jingoism. On one occasion earlier in the movie his friend Isaac Isidor Rabbi (David Krumholtz) finds him in the office in Los Alamos and notices that he has on a military uniform. Isidor is quick to remind Oppenheimer that he is a scientist and that that is his community, so he should take the uniform off and be that, but this reminder only serves to reinforce the movies suggestion that Oppenheimer is a man who too many times can be moved from one position to the next, flopping around like some dead fish on searing ground hoping to be saved. He is a man apart, apart from social allegiances to his friends and lovers, apart from political allegiance to his country’s definitive social system (capitalism) and apart from his birthrights ethno-religion. When Einstein tells Oppenheimer “If your country doesn't love you, then you should tell them to go to hell”. Oppenheimer refuses, replying “I love my country”, but loving someone or something in no way means that you should tolerate such abuse as he has already received by the time this scene arrives, and as many true patriots like W.E.B. Dubois have remarked, loving your country is critically and sometimes harshly reprimanding it, it's just another example of Oppenheimer taking a principled stand when he should be taking an ethical one.

In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy he notes a specific kind of hell for those whom he was told “Were not rebels, nor faithful to their God”. He asks “What is it master that oppresses these souls compelling them to wail so loud” His guide answers: “I shall tell you in a few words. Those who are here can place no hope in death and their blind life is so abject that they are envious of every other fate. The world will let no fame of theirs endure, both justice and compassion must disdain them, let us not talk of them but look and pass”. “The world will let no fame of theirs endure, justice and compassion must disdain them”. This is Oppenheimer's hell, and in the end, Oppenheimer is a tragedy of the distracted man who in his obsessions and passions of principle, and inability to stand tall when it mattered most became egregiously short sighted, when he needed foresight. The “tragedy” not of the man himself - which might breed sympathy or martyrdom - but a tragedy of what extended out from that folly. What he created and the events that rumbled and shook his quiet confidence in who he was and in what he was doing to pieces, and from there the world that sprung up out of the ashes of it. Oppenheimer's neglect ended up causing two massacres if not a third, killing hundreds of thousands of people in one fell swoop, causing another mass of people to suffer with varying illnesses for generations. Through the rumbling stomping sounds of Ludwig Göransson’s score, the cold aesthetic grotesque beauty in Hoyte Van Hoytema’s photography, the imagined bodies he steps in, the kangaroo trial he endures, the non stop boiling vexation created by those who saw it coming a mile away, and the claustrophobic guilt of Oppenheimer once he finally came to see what was so obvious to those around him, there can be no other conclusion, but that this film is viscerally angry at Oppenheimer, while in recognition, that not only was he not alone, but was not fairly treated, even as he got what he karmically earned. In this sense “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” is not an opportunity to whip up a sense of mourning, nor a finger wag, but a stern clear eyed warning of the terrors of any form of neutrality when the time calls for a definitive stand… In essence, If you stand for nothing, you fall for anything, and anything in this case was a fall into the catastrophic devastation of man and world.

They Killed Tyrone : How it Happens is the Point.

There is a tendency today to watch movies through almost a purely political/moralistic lens. To judge a movie not based on its storytelling merits and attributes, but on the lessons it provides, the strength of them, and subsequently their morality, but messages are a consequence of stories, not the point of them. The power of stories is never primarily concerned with messaging, it's concerned with how they are transported. Newcomer Juel Taylor’s fun but poignant Sci Fi flick “They Cloned Tyrone” is such a story, and it's a great story. Two things define Taylors film; experience and perception. More specific to the movie, the Black experience in a racist patriarchal capitalist state and as a result of, our perception of ourselves and of our realities all of which have at the very least two ways of being seen, but this is not new to nay of us. The power is in the inventiveness, the creativity of the visuals, in the way we receive these messages, and that the audience is treated to this in the same way that the characters in the movie are, realizing our perception of things is off in real time along with the characters in the movie. Experiencing the terrors and the joys right along with them.

We are initially introduced to the small urban area of “Glen” and all its colorful denizens and various pit stops where these citizens engage in commerce or fellowship, legal and illegal activities, and work. It is presented as a reality, until it is not, but even as it's being presented as reality there are signs that something is off. Sometimes it's the silly titles to the names of businesses like the liquor store called “Got Dranks”. Sometimes it's in the performance of a character like John Boyega’s “Fontaine”, who carries in his performance a certain sadness that alludes to something not quite being right, something beyond what we are seeing. Sometimes it's in things exterior from the context of what's happening inside the film like the production design whether it be the cinematography which is eerie and all together real and unreal at the same time, or the clothing which is both lavish and gawdy. As we begin, Fontaine is looking for a drug dealer who appears to be selling on his turf. He pays a young boy to find this person, hunts him down and runs him over with his car. His various hustles for the day not finished, he then pays a sex worker to find a pimp named “Slick Charles” (A riotous Jamie Foxx) who owes him money, where we first meet Teyonah Parrish’s delightful “Yo-Yo” a sex worker with ambitions to be more, but his reality and ours is interrupted when he is suddenly shot by the very same drug dealer whom he had run over earlier that day. Things from here begin to take on double meaning and serve double purposes as well as perceptions.

The local liquor store is no longer just a pit stop for those who work (and those who don't) to commiserate and share the day's gossip, it is also one of a few strategically selected destinations where the cities inhabitants are being made compliant by way of imbibing (the liquor store), eating, (local fast food chicken chain) or congregating in worship (The church). The homeless man who sits out in front of the liquor store is not what he seems either. The semi slurred incoherent sentences that charismatically slide from off his tongue are revealed to be actual clues as to what's going on, as the movie insinuates, this is a Nancy Drew mystery by way of the hood. About a quarter of the way through the movie as Fontaine is starting to unravel the threads of this conspiracy, the old man gives them a clue as to where to go next. “The big man will point the way everytime" he says, referring to God, this too has double meaning; there is the spiritual sense wherein for those who believe in God recognize he acts as a compass many times providing answers that they need for a life that has been trouble some and burdensome and filled with terror since we arrived in this American experiment, but also it has a more literal connotation pertaining to a picture of Jesus inside the local church where his hand points directly to the secret entry way to the underground lab beneath their town. This is a consistent and constant theme within the film, whether it's in word like, “the trap” as an actual trap, or from one context to another like when Yo-Yo and Slick Charles make fun of Fontaine's predicament telling him he is both dead and not, here and not here.

The centerpiece of the film comes pretty much midway in the film when we are introduced to one of the major operatives behind this experiment, and the conspiracy that authorizes it, (which is also meant to be a stand-in for the American experience) recalling such films as “Undercover Brother”, “Get Out”, and “Black Dynamite”. In a wonderfully spirited performance, Kiefer Sutherland’s nameless character gives the characters a choice (which is really an ultimatum) die or run with the game, even as they know the score. When Sutherland is threatened by Yo-Yo he immediately shouts a word that instantly sends Fontaine into a trance where his body and mind now belong to Sutherland and he is force to act out anything that's Sutherland commands him to do. This is the most terrifying this movie gets. It is an evocation of the horror of possession, and invites parallels to Dracula, and zombification, in movies like “Sugar Hill” (1974) and in the case of possession “JD’s Revenge” (1976). It is through the visceral nature of watching Fontaine and Slick Charles eyes as they are commanded to either murder a friend or stand by and watch, each powerless to help his friend - that we the audience are transported to similar feelings and experiences of our own under the state. This is not real, and it is just distant enough and wild enough that it isn't traumatic or overbearing, but it simulates the experience well. Thing is though, they do have an actual choice and the recognition of this in the film begins the revolution. The pathos and poignancy of this film lies in this particular section when Fontaine grieving what he feels is a preordained life, resigns himself to his fate. Just after the big reveal of the entire operation Yo-Yo comes back to Fontaine’s place to galvanize him for a fight, but Fontaine wants no parts of it. Yo-Yo says “This sh** is bigger than you, it's bigger than me, it's your f***in home”. Fontaine's response is egregiously despondent, “Who gives a f***, this ain't no f***in community, it's just a bunch of broke-ass niggas with nowhere else to go”. Yo-Yo’s physical/hierarchal position vs her political position within this movie despite experiencing the exact same woes and some more-so than her male counterparts is a whole nother piece, but I digress. The key to this scene is that Fontaine's experience and his revelatory peek into his reality has in this moment dictated his perception of himself. His predicament is out of his control, so in his mind he might as well play it out and play it out he does, day in and day out. Again while the event /experience that causes this melancholia -as -living is outlandish, the actions themselves are the sad state of not only his reality but many of our own.

Fontaine wallows in his sadness, until he runs into the same child who at the beginning scouted out the drug dealer for him. Despite the fact that the child acts more grown than he is out of survival instinct, Fontaine sees in him innocence, and is reminded of his past and subsequently of a future. He is reminded that even with all that he knows and even with all that's going on, all the terror, all the violence, all the cruelty, that there are still joys to be found and that even though his humanity has literally been stolen from him, he is human nonetheless and that he deserves to live, not just survive. It is interesting then that the final boss of this particular film (it seems pretty clear they're setting up for the possibility of a sequel) is the original version of himself. It says that in order to move forward Fontaine is going to have to kill the version of himself that sees no hope, that is resigned to his fate and acts thusly. To expel the part of him that having experienced the pain, having experienced the trauma, having experienced the feeling of inevitable failure, had decided it's better to reign in hell than to serve in it and that “assimilation is better than annihilation”, rather than it's better to do away with hell all together.

Watching this film or any film to receive a poignant message is not wrong in and of itself, its simply misguided . Not only does it misunderstand where the power of stories resides, but its a reckless and immature understanding of the film industries position within the same capitalist/racist/patriarchal state, and the precarious position it places them in as moral vehicles. They Cloned Tyrone is not a great movie because it tells the right or wrong message, (it is of course arguable whether that message is terrible, banal, or great) it's a great movie because it invites us to consider our experience through a number of inventive, thoughtful, devices and images, through a contextual historical understanding of the genres it employs to do so, and through it's ability to make us laugh, cry, or become angry through it all, cloning just just Tyrone but the communal experience of living here in this country in this time, and more specifically in the various hoods of America.

“You People” is Made by and for the Wrong People.

I had been here before. I knew the road well. “Coming to America 2” as a viewing experience bordered on trauma. It was like someone bringing a loved one back to life just to get me to watch them wither and crumble away for two hours in front of my eyes. Pound for pound one of the absolute funniest movies of all time was drained of every bit of its essence, of its physicality, of its variety of personalities, and of its own personality. I had watched “Black-ish” and grown tired and weary of it because its commentary was flat when it wasn't shallow and most times it was both. I've never been a big fan of Jonah Hill's brand of comedy and interracial romance as portrayed in film and television today is the bane of my existence, and Barris is the King of that domain, so I really should have known not to believe that Eddie Murphy, nor Nia Long could save this movie from it's creator, because while his actors may have the range, Kenya Barris does not.

The plot of Barris’s latest “You People” is cut and dry. Jonah Hill's character Ezra is looking for love but can't seem to find it. Lauren London plays Amira, an up and coming costume designer whose most recent relationship was broken off because she felt as though her ex wasn't really seeing her and only said things that “he thought she wanted to hear”. Ezra's close black friend, (his ONLY black friend in the movie) makes the observation that she's “Never seen a man that desperate to be in a relationship, but what that could mean or say about Ezra is never addressed in his budding relationship with Amira. Neither is his relationship with Hip Hop housed within any sort of meaningful critique of the history of cultural appropriation within the culture. A white male with exactly one black friend, two well intentioned but still racist parents and a couple racist friends is never questioned within the context of the movie about his bonafides, or whether or not his own blindspots play a role in the couples future troubles. If “You People” had positioned itself as a light but raunchy romp that only seeks to have fun with the subject I would question why, but still deal with it on these terms, but if there is any doubt this movie wants to say something to you its finale -from London’s checking of Julia Louise Dreyfus, to Eddie Murphy’s mea culpa- cements that it is indeed. The fact that Ezra spends the entire movie repeating the exact same sin as Amira’s ex is also never brought into play, despite the fact that he takes it a step further by way of hyperbolic obvious lies because he doesn't just want to say he doesn't know about a subject or that he's never done or experienced it, many of which he does because he thinks its what they want to hear and wants to please both Amira and her father Akbar (Murphy). In this movie arcs become dead ends, commentary becomes a cul-de-sac. I don't think “You People” is aiming for Oscars so this is not about having them aim for a comedy the likes of “Doctor Strangelove”. I'm not even asking for Mel Brooks “Blazing Saddles” even though that movie too is hilarious and has some scathing commentary for white people. I'm asking for “Meet the Fockers”, or “Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins”. My biggest issue with “You People” is not just the fact that it's commentary is as basic and wrong headed as it can get, it is also that nothing he’s saying here is at all new or fresh, in fact its very very stale. It is that what could be an insightful, incisive, hilarious but honest look at what it means to date interracially in 2023 is ditched for a farce that illustrates the limitations of Barris’s mind and black representation. A farce in which its main joke is the 2023 equivalent of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney’s Ebony and Ivory lyric “We all know that people are the same wherever you go there is good and bad in ev'ryone”. Arguably worse still its just not executed well. The characters are not characters they're just props for the punchlines, it could be argued they are the punchlines. Jonah Hill and Lauren London aren't characters, their pawns in Barris’s Green Book version of romance. Eddie Murphy’s Akbar (despite a laudable effort from Murphy to create one) doesn't have characteristics he is a caricature, there is nothing really there outside of the fact that he is a member of the Nation of Islam and all the jokes extend forth from the fact that he is a member of the Nation of Islam. Nia Long’s character (in a completely thankless role) can only be described as “Wife of a member of the nation of Islam. Barris pits those extremely vague characterizations against the other in Duchovny’s and Dreyfus’s Jewish “White People” and we get some comedy fireworks, but a struck match of a romance and dumb racial commentary.

By comparison 2004's “Meet the Fockers” is a far superior example of how to employ this type of familial comedy in writing and how important drawing out believable people helps reinforce all the other aspects of the film. Bernie and Rozalin Cohen (Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand) are exaggerations of real people grounded in a specificity that contains all kinds of details. The fact that the Fockers referred to their home as “Focker Isle” on a sign posted outside their home is an example of one of those tiny but informative details. That Bernie erected a small shrine to all of his sons small victories is another. That shrine represents an important and very endearing detail of Bernie's form of love towards his son which is in direct contrast to the very rigid, literal, authoritative, pass/fail style of DeNiro's Jack Byrnes. The laugh that later comes from Jack Burns line “I've never seen such a celebration of mediocrity” comes from the specificity of Jack Burns worldview, and subsequently so too does any commentary that one might derive from this particular character. There's none of this kind of character building or world building in “You people”. Eddie Murphy’s Akbar Mohammed doesn't want his daughter with Ezra because he's not black, why does that matter to Akbar? ..the only thing I can derive from the movie is because Akbar is a member of NOI. All the real reasons black people have to be leery of interracial dating are left unexplored which ultimately leaves the viewer with only one real summation; that it is as hard for white people in black spaces as it is us in white spaces. Which may be the aspect of the film that grated on me the most because it's by and large not true. Black people do not make it anywhere near as tough for white people to be in our spaces as they do us, and that includes our familial settings. We are far more likely to to be incredibly gracious in front of white folks even if on the inside we have something more to say. That is in no way to suggest that we are docile or anything of the sort, but that is to say that the kind of situations that are created in “You People” where black people like Akbar are the instigators of issues with white folks is mostly a fantasy and one I don't see the point of engaging in even for comedy. This is one of the rare occasions I found myself asking that ever-present online question “Who is this for?”

Following the lead of a film that is so reductive in its wisdom about just about anything from character, to romance, to racial commentary I'd like to give some reductive wisdom of my own. If no one can imagine or even desire to see you're two leads fu****g in your romantic comedy it's already in trouble. Jonah Hill is to put it kindly nobody's romantic lead. It's not about aesthetics, it's about energy and he just doesn't have it. Jonah Hill is not a particularly introspective actor, I don't mean he's not an introspective person he's just not an introspective actor. There's very little he gives to us that comes from the inside. Like alot of funny people, his comedy acts as a buffer to letting you know anything real about him, unlike many of the people that came before him (like Eddie Murphy) Hill’s dramatic turns have been largely uneffecting, this effects the people that he plays, so most of the time when he's played great characters it's been the writing/direction that put him in the position to use the traits and skills that he does have in a way that works around the circuitry and blockages that he has in the way of giving any insight to what he's doing and why he's doing it (think what the Winter/ Scorsese combination does for him in WOWS). To fall in love with men on screen you have to give us the keys to who that person might be and you got to give us the keys a little bit to who you are, true TRUE vulnerability is key. Barris is not the kind of writer or director to illustrate what the actor cant see, and he also doesn't seem to understand romance or how it works at all, save through banter and hijinks. In the meet-cute of the movie Ezra meets Amira when he mistakenly believes she's an Uber driver. Magically through Kenya's writing it just happens to be that Ezra wasn't making an unconsciously biased decision based on expectations, but was himself the victim of an absolutely magical set of circumstances because there was a woman who looked exactly like her, who drove her exact car, who was due to pick him up at this exact time as she was parked out there to get directions. When the issue is seen for what it is and Ezra says that he can show Amira where she needs to go as a way to make up for this incident, Barris cuts the scene right there. Its a head scratching choice, because in actuality that would be the place to introduce us to the beginning inklings of what Amira may see in Ezra. Left as is are we to assume that an almost “racism” was so cute that she decided a date was next?… Because there was nothing there to suggest ANY connection and yet the very next scene she announces to her brother they’re meeting for lunch . When they meet there is again little in the way of any real connection between these two. A few words are exchanged and there’s a montage that shows their connection not any actual exchanges.

Everything that makes James L Brooks 1997 hit “As Good As it Gets” memorable “You make me want to be a better man” line so grand extends out from the very real work put into showing how these people connected in the first place, and that from building very real, three dimensional characters to fill out the world of the movie from Ivan Reitman’s charming doctor to Skeet Ulrich’s sketchy hustler. We collectively as an audience connect to Nicholson's statement because we've seen it throughout the movie. We've watched his evolution so it means something. We also know what it means to Helen in the context of how unpredictable it is to determine what might come out of this man's mouth and and how surprising it must have been to hear something this genuinely sweet and endearing even if in a certain context its a little bit problematic. To be fair, “You people” is not without its charms; the David Duchovny piano scene will fold anyone into hearty belly laughter. Lauren London's monologue to Julia Louise-Dreyfus is a potent commentary, (its also the only good one) Mike Epps and others are funny as hell in their cameo like roles, and Eddie Murphy, Nia Long, Julia Louise-Dreyfus, and David Duchovny are a delight the entire movie, but the movie-goer shouldn't be asked to survive by the breadcrumbs of talented actors trying to scratch together a meal on their skill and one good monologue alone. Worst of all it's quite jolting and telling to see a movie written and directed by a black man that feels so easily figures to be one written and directed by a white man. “The white boy who deeply understands black culture, but rejected by a form of reverse racism”, the “funny black gay friend”, the “good white people and the bad white people”, the “I don't see color I just see a human being” bow on top. It's 2023 we shouldn't be accepting these kinds of films from White creators and it doesn't make it any different for me that this one happens to be black with a white friend on tow. It's just further representation of the fact that all representation isn't good representation. Exemplified by the fact that Kenya Barris’s shows and films don't really get us, and mostly exist to give white people palatable content about black people for a profit.

The “Last of Us” is not the first good video game adaptation, it's just the first to believe in them.

I'm not interested in discussing the best video game adaptations over the years. It bores me and these things often turn into hyperbolic slugfests. As with many things video game adaptations have been more successful than some people give them and as bad as some others say. What I am interested in discussing is why with just one episode in I feel comfortable saying that HBO’s stab at video game adaptations “The Last of Us” is so obviously in love with the craft placed in the source material that it places the exact same amount into it's version. Relying on the power of the story not the property to propel istelf into greatness. There have most certainly been good video game adaptations. Mortal Kombat, (1995) Resident Evil and it's immediate sequel, Jolie's Tomb Raider films, and Silent Hill, are all examples of solid cinema, Street Fighter II: The Animated movie is a great adaptation, a bonafide classic that deserves it's laurels, but outside of that, all video game adaptations up until this point have approached these stories with either a philosophy or form of execution that is focused on celebrating the adaptation itself rather than the story.

The first cinematic adaptation of a video game was 1993's “Super Mario Bros”. It made sense for the first video game to have mega blockbuster success to be the first video game to be made into a blockbuster. The movie is truly it's own thing; a bizarro, surreal LSD-like trip into a grimey sewer textured world befitting a game where a plumber used pipes inter-dimensionally to save a princess from a prehistoric turtle. The problem was that Super Mario Bros the video game was not story driven it was an action-driven game. There just wasn't much there to make an entire movie out of, which in and of itself tells on the core motivation for making the movie. Street Fighter (the 1994 live action film) is a dumpster fire, from it's direction to its story, to its absymal casting, save for Raul Julia and JCVD. 95’s Mortal Kombat is a hoot, but it's one of the worst acted adaptations ever and especially so when it tried for heart. Everything about Mortal Kombat’s aesthetics and story suggested no one really cared about story they just wanted to give the fans what they want (Not the worst idea by the way, just not the best). By the time we got to the Jolie and Alicia Vikander led Tomb Raider's, video game storytelling had advanced by leaps and bounds, many of them borrowing from movies. The Tomb Raider films thusly got right Laura Croft's Indiana Jones-like ancestry, but the sentiment and pacing always betrayed it's intentions to add depth. Silent Hill definitely tried with an opening that sought to set up the tightness of it's characters, but the main three's relationship (Father, Mother, Daughter) feels sterile and clinical. It wasn't until it got to the relationship between the spectre and her original mother that a genuine flicker of emotion appeared to compliment and contrast it's savagely brilliant visuals.

“The Last of Us” doesnt seem concerned with selling us on the celebration of it's being a live action adaptation. It seems confident in the power of that story being expressed through a medium that allows it to do different things, and allow that to reinforce just how good this story was. You can start with its opening, which unlike Mortal Kombat doesn't begin with techno music screaming its name, while various popular phrases from the game are spoken out over the credits. Mortal Kombat wanted you to know that you are now sitting down and watching the “live-action” adaptation of your favorite video game…It shouldn't have needed to. The Last of Us instead opens with an unnervingly eerie setup about the apocalyptic possibilities of fungi, (which of course turns out to be true) which sets tone, mood, and the embers which will become the spreading flames of the story. Immediately after that it centers the bond between it's lead Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his daughter Sarah, (Nico Parker) and it's not that it centers the emotional bonds first that's necessarily new, it's how well it executes them that sets it's apart as a video game adaptation. There's a loving attention and care put into this world that exists before we even get to the “present” from within the story. My favorite example of this came about a quarter of the way into the episode when Sarah takes her father Joel's watch to go get fixed (this watch has some importance and bearing on the story going forward but we're not getting into that) in town. When the (extremely well casted) watch repairman announces the price to repair the watch she is taken aback. The watch repairman, says “Twenty” she says “Thats it?” He responds “Okay Thirty”. She says “Twenty’s good”. The repairman lets her know that he'll get on it right away but only a few minutes later his wife comes rushing in exclaiming that they must close the shop and he has to stop his work right now. She moves over to Sarah let her know that unfortunately he will not be able to finish, he exclaims immediately “I'm already finished”. On the surface this may not seem like much, but there are layers of storytelling happening in this very small scene. It serves as set up for an aspect of connection as it pertains to Joel's trauma, and for further foreshadowing the event. It makes a three dimensional character of the repairman by showing us his attitude in dedication to his job, his efficiency, his integrity ( he doesn't upsell her) and his relationship with his wife. It reinforces the dimensions of the town through that ever present sense of intimacy amongst inhabitants in stories with mythological small towns or suburbs like this. Through this one very small scene you're getting a sense of this town before the event, of the relationship between Joel and Sarah, and you're getting a build to the horror. That's the amount of detail and care they're putting into the story, that's the amount of trust they have in this story.

It didn't take long into the lifespan of video games before they started imitating movies, not only in the desire to want to use it as a form of storytelling, but in borrowing the traits of certain characters, themes, and genres. Video games got popular enough to have movies made of them, and they started making video games that act like movies, and now movies are adapting those games, and so the cycle evolves. There's really no need for either medium to condescend to the other, but there has subtly been a sense of that very thing in most adaptations until The Last of Us. These adaptations have largely not trusted, nor believed in the material enough to not do things like rushing to your premise, or to introducing your characters. To resist the impulse to place neon lights over every single easter egg and call back, and most importantly to find a way into the story that genuinely expands upon the lore and the tale in the ways that only film or TV as a long form medium offers beyond the limitations of what is inherent to gaming. By the time the Last of Us gets to its white-knuckle action sequence I was already beyond invested in a story I knew like the back of my hand. That's the power of this story. That's what sets it apart, not that it's the first good or great adaptation of a video game, but that it is the first one to in all ways possible show a deep respect for the power of video game storytelling. I'm reminded of a scene in Steven Soderberg's “Traffic”. Michael Douglas's new drug czar let's his cabinet know that when the cartel sends a message by hiring the best defense attorney in the land, he responds by hiring the best prosecutor. To quote Pedro Pascal in the Mandolorian; “This is the way”. The best should be given the best. Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, Silent Hill, Uncharted, etc, are some of the best of the best in the medium and when transferring them to another medium they don't deserve any less than that in direction, in casting, in writing, in detail, theme, love, and craft, and that's what I hope “The Last of Us” trends for, and gets trending in Hollywood.

“The Autopsy" Found Profoundness in Friendship and the Right Actors to Build it.

“Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.” - That's the way David Fincher's seminal detective vs serial killer showdown “Seven” ends. In its own way My favorite episode of Guillermo Del Toro's captivating horror anthology “Cabinet of Curiosities” will end that way too. The episode is titled “The Autopsy”. It is a masterpiece of television horror. A bit of noir, a bit of a procedural, a bit of a buddy movie, and surprisingly a great superhero movie about the “super” in us when we have something worth fighting for, that ultimately proves the elegant co-existing relationship between what is ugly and what is beautiful. A great deal of which is accomplished by way of craft in direction and Goyer's language, and to my focus here - the graceful, poetically large performances hiding in the well detailed husks of normality.

The dread in “The Autopsy” is existential. It's both very specific and nebulous as bodily invasion usually is. It is specific in its terror, the taking of our bodies without our consent (The very idea of being both intimate with something and also non intimate because the thing has no interest in the knowing of you) and unspecific in its horror, the varied, multi-layered and ultimately nonsensical fear of death. The balm for the tension caused by these two competing themes is very specific, it is the indomitable spirit of friendship, of connection, which in this story is one thing the enemy never counted on, never saw coming, and neither do we. It is at this intersection of fear and security our protagonist Dr. Carl Winters (F. Murray Abraham) arrives at one Sheriff Nate Cravens (Glynn Turman) to take up the sword and prepare for battle. Neither we nor the protagonists know what they are here for and this makes for another tension as the story unravels these two become aware of each other and so too do we. The specter of death around and on the shoulders of both protagonists and antagonists, and this friendship, refreshing in its organic purity- is what makes the episode, and what makes all of this abundantly clear is in the performances of F. Murray Abraham and Glynn Turman.

The noir element makes it so the story unravels backward and forwards in time. Detail upon minor detail is discovered and piled up one after another until they coalesce into a clear understanding of what exactly is happening, still the thing we are introduced to right after the inciting incident is two friends reconnecting after years. Why? Because the writer and director want us to feel the connection between these two. The villainy and the heroism, the horror and the pleasure, intertwined and separate. The complexity is the central force of the narrative, and more importantly what is behind it. It is tied to their friendship and not just the bond in and of itself but what kind of bond. It's one built on principles and honesty the unusual kind that allows for unusual honesty wherein one cannot take themselves too seriously, where to some it could be seen as ugly to say as much. “You're so thin I could use you as a whip”. Interesting on two levels; it's bluntness and its inherent bite and how Winters will come to be Craven's whip of sorts. Its also in the way Dr. Winters upon being asked what’s going on with him thinks on it only a moment before telling his friend he has stomach cancer, (that most insidious and cruel villain) and most endearingly, and maybe most important to the story the way Dr. Winters corrects Sheriff Craven when he insists he is “cursed by God”. Bathed in the warmest most relaxing light of the episode F Murray Abraham's Dr. Winters reminds Sheriff Craven directly that “he's just not that important, that's ego”. This (ego, arrogance) becomes a repeated theme. Turman relays a horrid story and ugly sentiments in glorious lighting, the mortifying and the beautiful always hand in hand, toe to toe in a dance. Murray's reaction is swift, Abraham says the words “thats ego” with a genial plainness tat belies his intention even before he continues with the rest, still, Glynn Turman is taken aback. Abraham says; “Who are you to claim special qualities of sin from the rest of us?” (Pouring himself a drink he had earlier scolded his friend about) “If you're cursed we're all cursed (beat) and I meant that in the nicest possible way”. As he says the last line Abraham gives Turman a cheery salutation with his drink. Turman holds a stern face a couple seconds, (his eyes already betraying the fact that he knows he has heard the truth ) but cracks before he can even give it any legitimacy and the laughter tumbles out of him already half into it's summersault. Its the kind of everyday poetry that escapes most storytellers, the kind that needs two actors with their skill and their sense of the grandiose and the simple to make it work. The details of what marks true friendship are often portrayed in wonderfully grand gestures to make them feel more powerful and robust to the audience, so that they resonate. Slow motion, a freeze frame of the moment, and close ups are all consistently used as signifiers of the moment. But Prior and Goyer trust the elegance of the moment (the ability to talk in this sort of straightforward fashion is a marker of deep friendship) and the grace of their actors to illuminate the poetry without pomp and it works

There is something to be said for the almost magical air of complex simplicity both Abraham and Turman bring to their characters. In both F Murray Abraham's Dr Winters and Glynn Turman's Sheriff Craven we find two actors who can cut through the fog of what classism has told us about the middle class, age, power, or nobility. A small town sherriff using words like “Maudlin” and “Posse Comitatus” doesn't feel right to common conceptions around the type of person holding these jobs. You need an actor like Turman who can bring a sense of grandeur to a school teacher who dies feeding a gremlin a candy bar to be able to pull off giving the common man an authentic sense of gravitas. Old men arent commonly heroes either. You need someone who inspires cunning and brilliance with an air of vulnerability like the man who once played to the hilt an insecure but talented hater in Amadeus in order to achieve a properly smooth subversion of the tropes and make a withered cancer ridden old man feel righteous as exactly the adversary this particular evil needed to he extinguished. There are all these tiny gears at play in their faces, hands, and bodies connecting you to both their seriousness and their playfulness. They're down home sensibilities, and manners, and their immense intelligence, and how that ultimately bonds them. A hand gesture, the jutting out of a lip, a lazy but deep sigh that lives only in expression. Each “tells” on just how important life is to them, how how precious their friendship is, and subsequently how precious humanity is to them. When Abraham shows concern for his friend he grips his cup tighter. Turman’s response to Abraham asking “if the situation is as bad as that” (in reference to his pouring a drink) is a sophisticated facial expression that more than anything undergirds the level of communication they’re on where most things don’t need be said. While Craven and Winters regard each other with deep affinity and professional courtesy, they care about people in general despite being in two professions not known for this type of care. In movies/TV and I would guess sometimes in real life the common refrain for people in these career fields (Coroner/Police) are things like “remain detached" “don't get too close to the case” “Don't get too close to the victim" “Don't make this personal”. The autopsy goes opposite not only in taking it and making the personal important, but making it central to what gives them an edge. Cravens speech about his own “uselessness” is a dead give away to just how much he wants to be of use, of service. Their powers are not only in the cliché powers of deduction but in attachment and explicit constant empathy. Sheriff Craven's complete bafflement at the heartless nature of the murders, comes not just from a clinical more sterile want of understanding what the hell is going on, or the obsessive desire to get his man, but from a deep respect for the sanctity of life, shown in how this thing tears at him. Every time someone disappears or is found dead Sheriff Craven reacts freshly as if it were brand new. Dr. Winters feels it too, even though his job requires a less emotional connection, there is still a very philosophical and poetic respect for life. He politely asks each body for forgiveness as he opens them up, a detail that shows and tells on the level of empathy the character has for humankind far better then any speech could. Abraham’s provides a majestic refined touch to the expression of these small pleas which directly addresses the discourse we have around how victims are treated in true crime as after thoughts. Here are two men deeply wounded by and not merely angry or enraged by the loss of life. That same empathy, combined with the fortitude of his friendship with Craven, supersedes the murders, the stomach cancer, and their egos. Dr. Winters who upon revealing the nature of his affliction and it's impending doom remarks “We're all headed to the same destination” maybe reserved and capitulating about his own death, but about his friends life or the treatment of others as insignificant, he is not for play. When the story finally arrives where it arrives it is that friendship with Craven, that kinship with humanity that motivates him to sacrifice the unthinkable, to keep going even as each pain is more excruciating than the last. Abraham's cavalier response to his impending doom - not just with the cancer - but in the face of the monster, as compared to his response once the monster tells him of its plans for his friend is discernably different. From that point on his resolve becomes more ..well resolute. This is so explicitly relayed and so beautifully understated it dulls even the sharpness of some gnarly mutilation and the tragedy of Winters sacrifice somehow ends up feeling…good.

The notions that those who hold power or authority or who are chosen by some version of divine right, blood, entity, or position in a hegemonic system, are the ones who need to save us is far too common of a narrative that doesn't really empower us. The power of “The Autopsy is then two fold; A. It lends power to the idea that heroism is in the hands of the common man as well. That we can all fight and win and scrap and thrive, even while being honest about the cost. B. It brings catharsis with that win. By the end of the episode, just when it seems death and gloom have won over we find our Daniel Webster has outsmarted the Devil and in that has won the day or at least a reprieve for humanity as represented in their friendship, a friendship illustrated by way of nuance and fine stitching. Craven’s power was in his reaction to being powerless, which shows his character. He willingly accepts help, growls, hurts, drinks, but he doesn't punish anyone else for his shortcomings. He doesn’t start lashing out on the town, throwing power around and arresting errant “punks". He mourns these losses and resigns himself to the idea that he may be up against something bigger than him while (without actually making a decision to do so explicitly) continuing to work the case. Winters sees this and offers his own life (which is a death sentence and a divine sacrifice) to stop this monsters task, but again mostly to save his friend who to him represents everything right with humanity. That's cathartic. In film and television catharsis, a release of tensions arriving from emotions held in suspension for any elongated amount of time can be powerful, maybe one of cinema’s most potent weapons as well, but its power is in having had tension in the first place, holding it for as long as possible for the third of your story. Too many times catharsis arrives with little stress. The characters don't feel genuinely threatened, the stakes don't feel genuinely impressed upon, death is never really on the table until the very very end, and no one is ever really truly dead until their contract is up and then there's just a new “Dread Pirate Roberts”. So Catharsis may come but it comes in a form that is dimmed. Something akin to a candle in the sun. When it's done right though, when the stakes are clear, concise, and impactful. When the tension has a vice grip on the audiences imagination, when death is absolute and then suddenly, out of the darkness, you show a hand reaching in to pull us up out of the abyss, well then that story, that catharsis it sticks, and that release is never really forgotten. To make the gist of that impact the sword of that death blow friendship? That may not be new, but it is refreshing and more to the point it’s not far from the truth. To have two actors with as much poise, elegance, passion, intelligence and charisma lends it even further weight. There is a desire that you have right from the gate because these are two actors you want to see win, then through the skills they embody the characters with it extends to the characters they create. Their on screen chemistry injects a richness to the authenticity of the love between these two that friends that says it more profoundly than had the words been actually uttered. The philosopher Epicurus said of friendship; '“The same conviction which inspires confidence that nothing we have to fear is eternal or even of long duration also enables us to see that even in our limited conditions of life nothing enhances our security so much as friendship”. “Nothing enhances our security so much as friendship” is a proper ending to a show where the darkness in every single way imaginable seems poised to win. It places the episode firmly in the same sphere that made “Seven” so appealing to me, which is that it isn't an argument for all of humanity as beautiful and worth saving in and of itself, it's an argument that those places where humanity as one of nature's best ongoing experiments does work, works so profoundly, so beautifully that it makes all the rest worth saving. And in these dark days a much needed balm if nothing else.

Hereditary:The Ghosts of the Living.

When I first saw Ari Asters debut I was blown away by its profound meditation of grief, but the horror aspect escaped me. The story was a bit too nebulous for me to fully grasp, the sign posts he gave with revelations as to what and who was doing what arrived at the door of my understanding with more mysteries. On that front it seemed to me a movie that existed almost totally beyond understanding to anyone but Aster, I couldn’t even see certain dots to connect them. This was more a function of the way I process information in film where to be honest though I don’t necessarily have to be spoon-fed and philosophically am adamantly against it, the more nebulous and impenetrable works of directors like Malick, Lynch, and even one of my faves Nicolas Winding-Refn fly right over my head like a Boeing jet. So I sought the knowledge of those who did seem to understand, and especially listened to Aster himself. It took until now for me to decide to actually revisit with my new understanding and I got to tell ya, this revisit of Hereditary was much like the experience of sitting on the quarter edge of a chair for hours. Always aware of the edge, never able to get comfortable, finding yourself day dreaming about that moment when maybe the person(s) occupying the chair will get up allowing you to finally sigh in relief. That moment never arrives in Hereditary, and the discomfort is mostly due to the unrepentant relatability to both the grief and the location of the terror in writer/director Ari Aster’s terrifying debut. Although his film resides in the supernatural, thats not where it buries its stakes, or builds its foundations. Ultimately Hereditary is what I would call a living ghost story. All its main characters are already figuratively dead. They walk around unable to communicate beyond longing looks and stares. They repeat and refrain incongruous sentences that speak to some greater meaning behind them, or scribble on notebook pages what they feel. And it’s not at all unlike many families in this new era of technological disassociation, distraction, and economic unsureity. This film is about the decomposition of the nuclear family, under duress from the constant assault from outside forces that we can't see and can barely detect including those from within our homes . The secrets, the lies, the disconnect, the patriarchy. And it’s not the only film exploring this.

The Conjuring, The Witch, Sinister, The Babadook, – all explored similar themes in albeit in their own unique ways- about the passing down of familial horrors and trauma, grief, panic, sin, murder, through a conductor of some sort, dolls, homes, farm animals, necklaces. There is always a passageway for evil in these films. Some door opened by curiosity, innocence/naivety, or vanity, in the case of Hereditary it’s avoidance as a coping mechanism. But, where those movies provide catharsis, closure (if only until the next movie) and safety from the damnation of these experiences and emotions, Aster’s provides no such release. In this way it shares cinematic bloodlines with films like Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”, Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession”, and Phillip Kaufman’s paranoid invasion fantasy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. All of these films in some way explored the corruption of bonds and bodies by insidious forces from within and without. For the Graham family and especially it’s central character Annie (Toni Collette in a raw, slowly unhinged, barn burner of a performance) it’s communication from within the very American tradition of tying sacrificial suffering to success. By the time we arrive at possibly the most traumatic event of the film – a scene that is grounded in familial terror rather than the supernatural, – we know there’s a history uncovered. The hardships of parenthood, marriage, the masked truth about many of our so called sacred bonds, blood thicker than water and the like, and the made up importance of a patriarchal male lineage. You not only have the implicit and explicit idea that this family struggles with secrets, (The eulogy Annie gives at her mother's funeral) or patriarchal attitudes as it concerns both lineage, and treatment ( The father son relationship, and the grandmother’s “wish”) but there is an unsaid economic concern, (the work place calls) and the desire to attain status and riches (Paimon and his gifts here can easily stand in for capitalism) we can feel the stressors, and we are faced with a grim reality; Hereditary is a dark fairy tale about deconstructing the fairy tales around family. It is as unrepentant about what it might conjure in us, as the forces who work from just outside the parameters of the story are about their roles in an entire family’s harm , and it is eerie, unnerving, upsetting, and difficult to watch for that reason

The spectres of this movie are alive, but they are not well and neither are we, much like the family in Hereditary we are all each one of us finding our own various ways into numbing, fighting, and defending ourselves to various attacks on various fronts many of whom live at the edge of shadows. Apparitions of our traumas haunting and moving us towards some inevitability of change whether it be evolutions or death. In an outstanding video essay for PBS, host Mike Rugnetta outlines what the popularity of any given movie monster tell us about the current epoch. Invaders from outer space and McCarthyism, nuclear Japan and Godzilla, serial killers and slasher films, and of course ..Zombies. in that context it's interesting to frame films like “The Babadook”, “Stoker”, the “Pet Semetery” remake, “Doctor Sleep”, and the “The Night House” not just as mediations of personal grief or a dubious desire to “elevate” horror, but rather an unconscious response to a collective expression of a society exhausted and crushed by the social and economic anxieties produced from dealing with a barrage of micro-aggresions and debilitating attacks from the most legitimized institutions. It could be said that alot of what we are experiencing right now is the death of our most beloved and commonly held beliefs about civilization and the various consequences and outbursts of grief that stem from the tensions at the source of one portion of the populus's need to move onto new realities and the others desire hold on to our most decrepit and hideous institutions and constructs even while they actively harm us.

In an age where we are confronting the generational effects of handed down racism, homophobia, and misogyny, while exploring the “chosen family” as an alternative to blood ties and the economic traumas that have produced a new kind of family dynamic, it’s not a stretch to see these films as conscious or unconscious expressions of societal tension and concern. Insurging evil as insurmountable because of it's resources and stealthiness is a difficult pill to swallow because of the necessity in our lives for hope, but on film it can serve the purpose of pointing out rots and virulences underneath the most beigm and accepted idealogies and conceptions. In fact I think Hereditary’s most impressive contribution besides being one of the most realistic portrayals of grief in very recent history is to criticize blind allegiance to those ties, and to alert us to the fact that what we don’t confront today and the yesterday we refuse to come to terms with will eventually meet us on its terms. Time and time again the family at the center of Hereditary have a chance to deal with and face the deep seated issues that plague and haunt them, and time and time again they bail out for safer ground. The central dinner scene that might have been cathartic, but stops short of any true healing, and is cut short by the ardent appeals to a return to comfortable avoidance. Having to face this tension ourselves second hand we relive our own first hand experiences. The supernatural element adding fantastical shock value to existential dread. A dread viscerally illuminated in the dastardly nature inherent in the scheme of it's Rosemary's Baby-like cult. In an interview at Tiff Ari Aster discussed his intention to make the movie or have the audience feel the terror and horror of a group who is not really in the movie but is smiling the entire time as they watch all these horrific events happen to its as he calls it “sacrificial lambs”. He succeeds mightily and that becomes even more evident in subsequent viewings where the surreptitious craft of the Paimon cult (Her mother and Ann Dowd's characters are particularly vicious in a revisit ) becomes clear as now knowing that all these events have been into action by her own mother and her compatriots. That she willingly sacrificed a husband, son, her granddaughter, grandson, and ultimately even her own daughter for Paimon’s “Rewards” is a vicious statement about our society in general. The final monologue by Ann Dowd's character nails it home. “We've corrected your first female body and give you now this healthy male host. We reject the trinity and pray devoutly to you, Great Paimon. Give us your knowledge of all secret things, bring us honor, wealth, and good familiars. Bind all men to our will as we have bound ourselves for now and ever to yours. Hail, Paimon!” The last word you hear is Hail which could easily stand in for Hell.

Hereditary through performance, written word, and tone created by an accompanying masterwork of sound design and eerie lighting portrays the absolute horror of exactly what happens when foreboding light shines into the darkness of the propeitors and landlords of our suffering and our own trauma and meets with our own inability to confront it, creating as unique a horror experience as I’ve seen on film, continuing yet another age of great horror filmmaking, by exploring the horror in everyday life.