Re-View: The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)

“If, having reached the age of forty, you still find yourself despised by others, you will remain despised to the end of your days.”

Confucius, The Analects, Book 17 Verse 26

To be a virgin at a later age confers a certain stigma on a man. I can think of no apt metaphor then the stock market. If you consider a person like you would a share of stock in a company, your view of the value of such a person is not only based on what features that are generally important, the fundamentals, but also the company’s reputation with the public. So a blue-chip stock, though perhaps overvalued in terms of fundamentals, is a safe bet if only because other people already find it valuable. Whereas a penny stock, though perhaps underrated based on fundamentals, is to be avoided because everyone else is avoiding it. And if people follow the herd when they buy/sell stock, you can bet that they do it even more so when picking romantic partners. After all, who you are romantically attached with confers a certain status. A male virgin, let’s be honest, is clearly not valued by the general populace, and although he may be underrated in terms of fundamentals (maybe, or maybe not. Maybe there is a good reason why he is avoided), what does it say about the purchaser to be rooting around in the bargain bin in the first place. I mean, right? You know?

You will see this play out in the most innocuous of ways in all sorts of movies. For instance, in The Notebook, during that time period when Ryan Gosling is estranged from Rachel McAdams, the movie takes pains to make clear that he is still having sex with other women. It is important to show that he is capable of finding women that will have sex with him. This is important to his appeal.

(The above analysis applies more to men than women. A woman that remains a virgin promises exclusivity, which is a prize to the preternaturally jealous male mind.)

This sense of stigma is what Writer/Director Judd Apatow sought to explore in his first feature The 40-Year-Old Virgin. According to the audio commentary, it is based in part of Judd’s own experience of a multi-year self-imposition of virginity after multiple poor sexual performances on his part. That sense of shame forms the underlying base of an emotionally honest but also crude and very funny movie. Steve Carell, in his first starring performance as a male romantic lead (at the age of 43), is Andy, the titular virgin. In a sneakily great performance, he at once combines the self-conscious terror of his shame with the frustration of not having any idea what to do about it. Invited to a poker night with his fellow employees at a local electronics retailer, he tries to bluff his way through an exchange of dirty stories but gives up the game when he describes a woman’s breast as akin to a bag of sand. On the spot, his fellow employees (played by Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, and Romany Malco) decide it is their mission to get Andy laid. Andy has the look of a deer in the headlights, scared witless but unable to avoid the primal forces of nature about to engulf him.

What follows is a trial-and-error journey through several layers of bad advice. It is taken as a given between the employees that the first time will be full of bad sex, so Andy shouldn’t waste it on someone he cares about. Romany Malco suggests he picks up a drunk woman. Although this could conceivably work, it doesn’t consider Andy’s generally upstanding character. After all, if he was the type of person who would or could screw a woman under the influence, he wouldn’t still be a virgin. Seth Rogen also gives bad advice, until you consider its logical corollary, which is ultimately helpful. “Most men don’t understand how to talk to women,” he observes. He advises Andy to, “just ask questions.” This works because what a man has to do when he only asks question, is to listen to what the woman is saying. Actual good advice is given by Paul Rudd who merely confirms that sex with someone you love is a great thing that is worth the effort. Of course, the problem with Paul Rudd’s example is that the woman he is in love with doesn’t reciprocate his feelings.

Ultimately, Andy succeeds with Trish (played by Catherine Keener, aged 46 in 2005), a woman with her own stigma. Trish is a grandmother. That is, she had a child when she was about 20 years old who just had a child at the time of the movie. This is a stigma for women (not men) because of the previously mentioned prize of exclusivity. Regardless of stigma though, solely based on the fundamentals, both Andy and Trish are catches. They are gainfully employed, in great shape, and are generally good people. As a bonus, they do not have current substance abuse problems. It really shouldn’t be so hard for people like this to find each other. But then again, this was 2005, right about the time families and friends stopped being matchmakers but before online dating. It is not like you are about to meet either Andy or Trish in a bar.

[Spoiler Alert: Andy and Trish totally do it. In what is the most old-fashioned and charming detail about this frequently crude movie, there isn’t any sex that is premarital.]

Looking back after twenty years, this movie is notable in just the sheer amount of supporting actors/actresses that someday would become movie stars. Catherine Keener was already established, but this is Steve Carell first starring role. Seth Rogen, still in his early twenties but looking as old as anyone else, and Paul Rudd would start headlining their own string of movies within a few years later. Then there are single scenes of Kevin Hart trying to buy a stereo, Jonah Hill trying to buy shoes, and Mindy Kaling at a speed-dating event. Kat Dennings and Elizabeth Banks (in a thankless role) are here in supporting roles as well. Good ensemble movies have a way of boosting the careers of everyone involved in them.

This was the directorial debut of Judd Apatow and it came in the early part of a string of produced/directed movies that would establish him as the most reliable force of comedy between 2004 and 2011. He went on to direct Knocked Up and Funny People in that time, produced Will Ferrell’s Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers, early Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Jonah Hill movies like Pineapple Express and Superbad, and finally, the great Bridesmaids in 2011.

One of the hallmarks of these movies is the room given to the actors for improvisation. This was part of an early 2000s trend (see also Christopher Guest and Curb Your Enthusiasm) that set up a scene on the page but gave actors the ability to just spit out lines on the spot. The B-Roll from these takes would become special features in the DVD or the basis of an unrated director’s cut that was always inferior to the movie originally seen in the theater. (What movie wouldn’t be worse if you added 10 minutes of jokes not good enough to be in the original cut), Some actors are much better at this than others. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, when an actor is trying to improvise comedy, they just say the most obscene thing that comes to mind. There is an Indian character named Mooj in this movie (played by Gerry Bednob) that can’t seem to do anything but spout foul language and tell people to fuck goats. Much better is the improvisational master class given by Jane Lynch as Andy’s boss. She keeps her lines understated and tells stories, like the one about being seduced as a girl by her household’s Guatemalan gardener. After 20 years, Jane Lynch is much funnier that Gerry Bednob in this movie.

Also, a few more items that we may notice while looking back:

1. You can’t call and just hang up anymore. We have universal Caller I.D. 

2. That “We Sell Your Stuff on Ebay” store, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

3. Andy’s advice not to buy a new VHS machine is spot on. 

4. Finally, and I suspect this has always been true: Sex, it is a great thing. And Love, arguably the best.

My original review may be found here: https://maxsminimoviemagazine.blogspot.com/2010/10/40-year-old-virgin-092105.html

One Battle After Another (4/5 Stars)

For the first fifteen minutes of this movie, I wasn’t sure what year this movie was taking place in. The setting seemed vaguely contemporaneous, but the characters and their actions seem to exist in the 1960s-1970s. We are introduced to a domestic terrorist outfit called the French 75. Leonardo DiCaprio plays their bomb expert. The main baddie is Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. They stick up banks and declare that the money is being used to fund black liberation and civil revolution. What they lack in a coherent plan is made up for with narcissistic delusions of grandeur.

It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes of screen time before reality sets in. The United States Government, led by Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (played by Sean Penn), arrests if not assassinates most of them. As Perfidia is being wheeled away in shackles, the arresting officers take out their smart phones and take selfies with her. And that is how I finally understood that this was taking place post-2007. Which is ridiculous when you think about it. Because no matter how crazy you believe our politics presently is, it still isn’t as crazy as it was in the 1960s-1970s when you had real domestic terrorists bandying about the country planting bombs (Weather Underground), engaging in shooting matches with the local police (Black Panthers), and sticking up banks (Patty Heart’s Symbionese Liberation Army).

The details of terrorism morph over time. Like criminals in general, terrorists live on the cutting edge of technology and infrastructure. In the mid-20th Century, the new interstate highway system and the arrival of civilian air travel allowed criminals to complete their activities and escape with unprecedented speed and distance from traditional authorities. The government took some time to catch up, but they did, which is why we no longer have such a scourge of serial killers and international terrorists. The new frontier today is in cyberspace, but “One Battle After Another” is stuck in the past. I am informed that Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson adapted this screenplay from a 1990 book by Thomas Pynchon titled “Vineland”. That would make sense, because the conceit of the movie would play much better if the prologue had taken place in the 1970s and the rest of the movie took place at the turn of the nineties.

Still here we are. Countering the 1970s vibe of leftist extremists, we are introduced to a very Reaganesque vibe of right-wing conspirators. They call themselves the Knights of St. Nicholas, gather in expensive tunnels beneath a California suburb, and seem to concern themselves solely with fighting the equally fictitious French 75. Col. Steven J. Lockjaw is presented with an opportunity to join this fabled league of white supremacists but encounters a difficult problem with a background check. You see, Col. Lockjaw had an affair with Perfidia Beverly Hills and the child she bore around the time of her arrest, could either be his or Leonardo DiCaprio’s. If it is his, he will have to dispose of this child. If not, well, its not that big of a deal, but I think the plan is to kill her anyway.

As is usual in the USA, the idiocy of delusional left-wing extremists fuels the excesses of the more formidable and much better funded right-wing kind. If the French 75 create an annoyance akin to a housefly, the Knights of St. Nicholas provoke a solution akin to swatting the same with a baseball bat. Col. Steven J. Lockjaw creates a false emergency to utilize his military force to infiltrate a small town in Northern California to search for his potential daughter, now about sixteen years old, named Willa (played here by Chase Infiniti). Colonel Lockjaw uses the army – not a SWAT Team, not a cadre of FBI agents – to search for a private citizen. He interrupts the prom of a local high school with a squadron of soldiers armed with assault rifles. Then he detains and interrogates the children to find Willa. (A very good performance is given by James Ratterman as the main army interrogator. He has very good screen presence and I was not surprised to learn that he is not an actor. He is an actual retired army interrogator.)

This is an extraordinary crime and fuels a chase around Northern California in which the French 75 abduct Willa to save her from Lockjaw, who relentlessly chases after her, all the while Leo DiCaprio tries to find his daughter and save her from everybody else. Meanwhile, the false emergency concerns an underground trafficking pipeline of illegal immigrants from Mexico. This pipeline is conducted by Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (played by Benicio Del Toro) who moonlights as a karate instructor while upstairs/downstairs of his dojo illegal immigrants sleep on mats. With all the crazy Americans on both extreme sides of the political spectrum around, Benecio Del Toro has done well to immerse himself in the calming stoicism of eastern philosophy. I am reminded of the hustler in Sean Baker’s “Prince of Broadway” whose illicit store on Canal Street is raided by the authorities and who, in the next scene, tells an employee to stick around because he will have something else going on in a few weeks. He just takes it in stride. I can only imagine what real illegal immigrants think of our cultural conflagrations. I presume it is not so different. After all, for every day they get to work and earn money in this country, they are playing with house money.

All these characters are well drawn, and the movie moves along at a fair clip. Del Toro and Sean Penn put in good work. Sean Penn is the type of movie star who seems to lose and gain inches of height between roles. Here he is at his shortest. Leonardo DiCaprio, more than anything, is a very good tastemaker and producer. He lends his star quality, no better or worse in this movie than in others, to get the movie made, which are always interesting stories told by very good filmmakers. He seems to be going through the list of all the best directors of his generation and will at the end have worked with most of them. I hear he will be working with Damien Chazelle next on an Evel Knievel biopic. I bet that one will be good too.

What can we say about Paul Thomas Anderson? He is one of the best moviemakers around and has quietly over a few decades has produced a kaleidoscopic portrait of California at varying times and places. (The sole exception is Phantom Thread which could exist just to confirm that P.T. could locate his movies anywhere if only he felt like it). It would have been a bit more interesting if he hadn’t changed the temporal setting of the book or at least updated the crimes and criminal outfits to fit the 21st century. For instance, there is a lot of crime being enabled by the dark web and Bitcoin. Wouldn’t it have been better if this movie was about that sort of criminal network. But maybe we don’t quite understand how that works yet. There isn’t that clarity that comes only with hindsight.

 

 

KPOP Demon Hunters (5/5 Stars)

In a blitz of exposition during the first 5-10 minutes of this animated movie you will learn: A K-Pop Girl’s Band Trio named Huntr/x also doubles as secret superheroes that defend the Korean peninsula from underworld demons that suck the souls of its human inhabitants. Huntr/x protects Korea by physically fighting these demons with gleaming blades but also by their golden voices, that when amplified by the adoration of their fans, provides a protective golden aura that saps the strength of the head demon. The moment is nigh when through the power and popularity of an impending hit single “Golden” they will defeat the head demon once and for all.

The Trio is composed of Zooey (voice acted by Ji-Young Yoo, talking, and Rae Ami, singing/rapping), the cute one, Mira (May Hong, talking, Audrey Nuna singing), the emo one, and Rumi (Arden Cho), talking, Ejae singing), the leader. Each is gorgeous in their own way, have the best fashion and live in a skyscraper in Seoul that reminds one of the Stark Tower in Manhattan from the Marvel Universe. At the same time, they like Ramen, crash relaxing on the couch, and adoring their fans.

In a last desperate gambit, the head demon heeds the advice of a cursed man who sold his soul for a golden voice and material comfort over 400 years ago. He points out that the fans are the source of Huntr/x power, so the best way to sap their strength is to form a competing KPOP group. Enter the Saja Boys, a quintet of gorgeous boys, ready to do dance-battle for the hearts and souls of the Koreans.

KPOP Demon Hunters is a prime example of what contrived absurdities a story can get away with when the movie is composed of wall-to-wall great music. Now, I am not a fan of KPOP or much of a fan of pop music in general. But great music, well, you know it when you hear it, and this soundtrack is replete with good to great songs. And I believe that the songs in this movie were made expressly for this movie, which explains why the lyrics all directly relate to the plot. This makes them all eligible for the Best Original Song Oscar. (That category only made sense pre-1970s when original musicals were a popular genre). That category is so weak and the music in this movie so good, it is entirely possible that KPOP Demon Hunters sweeps the nominations to the exclusion of every other movie this year. If I had to choose five songs from this movie, they would be “Takedown”, “How It’s Done”, “Soda Pop”, “Golden”, and “Your Idol.” The winner would be “Golden” which should take over “Let it Go” from Frozen for the most popular karaoke song for a new generation (if it hasn’t already done so). Several times during this movie, I wished that it was live-action so I could watch live performances of these songs. You can do a lot with animation that you can’t do live, but nothing beats watching a real human deliver a musical performance. (Maybe someone like Edgar Wright can remake this movie.) I would watch next year's Oscars just to see these songs performed live.

KPOP Demon Hunters and its songs are in English, with the odd Korean sentence or phrase mingled in here or there. I was surprised when I looked it up on IMDB to find that this was not a Korean movie. All the directors, writers, and voice actors are American and Canadian. They are all Korean of course, but they live over here and are citizens of our country. South Korean culture is a prime example of just how stupid any argument against cultural appropriation is in practice. Because South Korea got to industrialized culture so late (post-1987 when it became a full democracy), almost everything it does has a pre-existing Western inspiration related to it. But it is also very much its own thing and in turn has influenced culture elsewhere. KPOP is such a good example of this normal creative cross-breeding that it is impossible to tell where the creativity begins and ends along racial/class lines. Looking at it one may come away with the common sense conclusion that cultural creativity requires many sources of inspiration and that cultural appropriation is not a crime but a landmark of civilization. You know which culture has remained entirely authentic over the years: North Korea.

Because of when KPOP came into being, its shape and content was noticeably different from the American music industry. The most important distinction is that KPOP came into being post-MTV and music videos. So, the appeal of KPOP has never been solely auditory the way it was in the American experience for its first fifty years (1930-1980). Each song had a music video and, in all practical terms, there wasn’t really a difference between the music video and the song.

The American music industry for its first fifty years didn’t have a mass-produced visual aspect to it. You heard the songs on the radio or on an album. The audience became fans based on what they heard and generally before they saw the band live. For this reason, The Beatles felt no need to get a better looking drummer. It was a great time to be a normal looking musician. As Jack Black said in “School of Rock”, “you could be the ugliest sad sack on the planet, but if you’re in a rocking band, you’re the cat’s pajamas, man.”

MTV and KPOP changed that. If you aren’t gorgeous, you can’t be on stage, sorry. And It also puts more of an onus on dancing, something you can’t really do with a musical instrument. So now we have Boy Bands and Girl Bands, the deliberate product of corporations manufacturing that Beatles appeal, but this time with gorgeous people who can dance. Musicians are still employed in pop music I’ve heard, but they are somewhere in the background, in the orchestra pit, or in the studio writing and recording the songs. Clearly the quality of new music reflects these new priorities. Really, it is a surprise to me whenever I come across something like KPOP Demon Hunters that has an album full of really good songs. I wonder if it has anything to do with its animated style: the creatives have essentially ditched the performers and put out a KPOP product without a KPOP band.

American music fits its culture, or rather counterculture, of a diverse individualistic society. Rocking out is about freedom and sticking it to the man. Jim Morrison of The Doors was on stage for himself, usually stoned, and damn the fans (“You’re all slaves!”). KPOP fits the culture of East Asia which is homogenous and conformist. Huntr/x and Saja Boys appeal to their fans with respectability (a competitive polite-off between the bands raises the biggest laugh of the movie) and they seem to care far more about their fans than any American rock band would dare admit to. The authenticity and sincerity of KPOP or just pop music in general is debatable. It is quite frankly a corporate product meant to appeal to your vanity amongst other base instincts. The appeal of it though is made apparent by KPOP Demon Hunters. The movie is a manufactured fantasy that moves your body and makes you feel good about yourself. Is that a noble purpose? Well, maybe. Would people pay for it? That, now, is beyond debate.

20 Years of Movie Reviews

On September 21, 2005, I attempted to post a comment on Rotten Tomatoes for a movie called “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”. I didn’t know what I was doing and ended up accidentally creating an account that included a blog. Since I was seeing several movies a month in theaters and was reading Roger Ebert religiously, I started to write movie reviews. In or around October 2010, I forgot the password for my RottenTomatoes account and couldn’t retrieve it because I no longer had access to my college email. So I copied the posts and moved to Blogger, which as of this writing, is still a thing that exists. About that time, I wrote the blurb “A Guide to this Blog” which is now dated and preserved right below. In the spirit of preserving a record of thought, this Guide Update will not fully replace it.

I am writing this in September 2025. So twenty years have passed since I started writing movie reviews. I think it is appropriate at this time to reflect on what that means and what, if anything, has been learned from the experience. And really, more than that, something else needs to be addressed here: the fact that very very few people read this blog. It has never had more than ten followers and I think those people stopped actually following it a long long time ago.

What is the utility of writing about movies? When I think of this question, I go back to the first couple chapters of Fever Pitch, a novel by Nick Horby. That book was about a football obsessive (European football, Arsenal respectively) who was trying to justify the depths of his fandom. One of the things he pointed out was that knowledge about the most recent football scores was a social boon. He reported that upon commencing any new social situation (school, job, anything really), all he had to do was study the morning sports page and he would have something he could talk about with the most random of strangers (as long as they were men of course). A similar insight was proffered in the Billy Crystal movie City Slickers. A trio of men are queried by a woman as to what utility there is to knowing sports trivia. In response, the movie utilized its special ability to throw off a joke before delving into deeper, more emotional territory. The joke I will not give away, but after it is told, one of the men describes his strained relationship with his father and how when he was growing up they got into a lot of arguments and had trouble seeing eye-to-eye on many issues. But, he notes, we could always talk about baseball.

But what about movies? Unlike sports, it is impossible to talk about movies (or art in general) on a purely trivial basis the way one can and does discuss sports. When you form an opinion about a movie, you necessarily infer something about your tastes and personality. Importantly, you are not talking about yourself, but you are there, somewhere, in a way that you aren’t in a conversation about sports. The more pronounced and articulate your opinion is, the more of yourself is revealed. The very act of laughing at a joke reveals that you already knew the truth of it (that is, the part you “get” without it explicitly being stated). Indeed, what makes a movie review something different from a movie’s IMDB page is the movie reviewer, who as Roger Ebert succinctly put it, is telling a story about a person who watched a movie.

It is perhaps easier to describe the social abuses of watching an above average amount of movies then the social utility of the same. I think this is ably demonstrated in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris whereupon the main character (Owen Wilson) knows as much about the 1920’s Lost Generation in Paris as the antagonist (Michael Sheen), but only the latter uses that information in social situations, and they do so to demonstrate superiority, as if the act of acquiring knowledge (or credentials) made a person more intelligent. There is a rank snobbery amongst movie reviewers that dismays those of us that want other people to actually experience good movies. I have seen almost half of the 1001 Movies You Need to See Before You Die and can report that a lot of the earlier movies are relatively bad. This should be expected if one considers that nobody really knew what they were doing in the first thirty years of movie history. It is kind of amazing when you see a movie that actually works from this time period (I recommend Buster Keaton, Alfred Hitchcock, Citizen Kane). With this common sense approach, beware of any movie reviewer that argues the best movies ever made are in black and white. They probably make their declaration with ulterior motives. They either presume that you will never watch the movies they are talking about, or if you do, you’ll just assume you are too stupid to appreciate these old movies. Or, and this is a distinct possibility too, they just have poor taste. I mean, there are people, tenured professors especially, who swear by Soviet cinema. And you can take my word for it, everything the communists have ever produced is mindless trash. The Man with a Movie Camera from 1929 is not the 9th Best Movie Ever Made (as reported by Sight and Sound's famous best movie poll). You don’t need to see it at all and certainly not before watching a thousand other better movies. Watch Baraka instead if you want to look at compelling things without the distraction of narrative.

Given that a knowledge of movies is routinely weaponized by insufferable snobs against the general public, what again is the utility of having a deep knowledge of movies. After all, if you paraded it, you may be mistaken for (and just might be) an insufferable snob. The same problem occurs to the person who reads an above-average number of books. Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not sure that a deep knowledge of movies/books/albums has a social utility. Watching old movies, reading books, writing movie reviews: these are all solitary activities. You do them alone. Frankly, I got into watching a lot of movies because I didn’t have many friends and lived in a socially isolated place. The more extensive my social life becomes, the less movies I see each year.

I am reminded of Roger Ebert’s promise in his foreward to his Great Movies book, “The way to know more about anything, is to deepen your experience of it. I have no way of proving it, but I would bet you a shiny new dime that it is impossible to experience the films in this book without becoming a more interesting person - to yourself anyway.” Looking back, I think that last caveat “to yourself anyway” is important. Because regardless of whether the outside world gives you credit for it, experiencing great art indeed changes one’s inner life. I recall reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and feeling like my brain was expanding. I have spent a lifetime trying to get other people to read that book and have yet to be able to have an extended conversation with anyone else who has read it. Even so, I state now emphatically, that reading it was not a waste of my time.

There is a further utility in not just watching movies, but writing about them. This insight I first read in the autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams. The author noted that as he started his career as a professional writer, he noticed a difference in how he experienced those subjects he knew that he was going to write about. I can confirm this. When watching a movie that I know I will write a movie review about, I know that I am more focused on what is happening on the screen. And with the more movie reviews I have written, the more I actively think about what I am watching. Watching movies/television is a passive experience. Writing about them is an active experience, and that activity bleeds into the passive act of watching.

This is true for regular life. The writer, confronted with a life experience that he knows he will write about, must actively think about how it should be expressed into words on a page. Again, the social utility of this is still unknown to me. I can report though that this hobby of writing about movies has helped me as an attorney. The practice of studying narrative on the screen and writing about it in a blog, if not directly applicable, hones similar skills that a litigator uses to convince his audience: judge, jury, adversary, client. The format and professionalism of a lawyers’ work and attire are like the lighting, audio, and production design of a movie. You don’t really notice them unless they are not performed competently. And when you do notice them, you can’t think of anything else (i.e. the story and/or the legal argument). I’ve listened to countless audio commentaries and these are instructive because what is usually talked about is not the high-falutin theoretical philosophies of movie critics. Mostly the commentators talk about showing up and doing a job. It is illuminating to hear “great directors” talk as if they were just normal people who try hard and care.

For this reason alone, even if no-one ever reads another blog post, I presently plan to write this movie review blog indefinitely. I may have not made a cent off this publication, but I most certainly have become a better writer through the practice of it and especially during those years I was not gainfully employed 2011-2015 in substantive lawyer work. That in turn has made me a lot of money as an attorney. Money is important to happiness and is most rewarding when you earn it. Indeed, I cannot imagine the attainment of my main sources of happiness: my marriage, my growing family, or my residence in New York City without the help of money and the ability to make more of it. I make a point of this because it is said so little it may no longer count as common sense. Tell it to all the young people you know. They will thank you for the wisdom later.

Interestingly, the only thing that would probably stop me from continuing this blog is the event of its unlikely success. That is, for some reason, it became popular. I shudder to think of hordes of random people leaving their mental droppings in the comments section. Indeed if I ever became famous for any reason, there is potential for someone to mine these pages for the purpose of publicly shaming me. There is twenty years of material here (and I can think of several specific examples) so it is inevitable that there's something for people to dislike. It is the continuing policy of this blog to not take anything down, since the most interesting thing about it is the progression of thought over time. But this policy kind of depends on the convenience of no one actually taking the time to read the thing. I don’t owe you people shit. If this ever comes back to bite me, I will take it off the internet. I will continue writing, it just won’t be public.

But to end on a realistic note, such scenarios and defensive declarations are an act of vanity, the same arrogance told of in my 2010 Guide to a Blog. I enjoy writing them and that is why they are here, but at the same time, I hold the following truth as a token of well-earned wisdom: That people are generally concerned with themselves and that their thoughts towards others and yourself are fleeting. Once you no longer see the world as a conspiracy of mean girls, you have indeed graduated from high school. Even great movies, if no one remembers them, have little cultural impact. This becomes obvious whenever a movie critic suggests a movie's worth is determined by its influence, i.e. the credit it deserves for doing something for the first time. Most likely, that movie critic simply has not seen all the older movies that did that "first thing" first. And so it goes. All things must pass.

Happy Gilmore 2 (3/5 Stars)

For those of us with memories of the 1980s and 1990s before streaming and really before the advent of Netflix DVDs, one’s experience of movies was influenced by what was a relatively limited supply. You either saw a movie in the theater, when it was on television cut up and divided by advertisements, or by renting/buying VHS. You generally bought less VHS movies then you rented, so you probably had a fairly limited number of movies that you could watch at will. As a result, those movies in your possession, well, you watched them alot. We watched Jurassic Park so much that my little brother (toddler age) would go around the house pretending he was a dinosaur. Happy Gilmore was another one of those movies that we had on VHS. I watched that movie many times, which clued me in on a lot of the call-backs in the sequel.

I like the sequel well enough and want to state that upfront because given how the rest of this review will go, I don’t want the reader to get the sense that I didn’t like the movie. The fact is, I like Adam Sandler and have no qualms with his type of comedy. I have no problem admitting that. The problem I have with him is that, well, the opportunity to turn in a superior product is there provided he just puts a little more effort into it. Everyone once in a while he does, and you get a glimpse of what he can do. But too often he doesn’t, and you leave a little disappointed and wonder what it would take to make him care enough to suffer just a little (just a little!) for his art.

Happy Gilmore, being a movie made before Sandler was an established star, does not have some of his trademark fat and happy bullshit. There isn’t an over-reliance on cameos by celebrities, mainly because celebrities wouldn’t have been drawn to the production of a relatively unknown comedian. There isn’t an overreliance on weirdos that Sandler, well ensconced in normality, merely chuckles and rolls his eyes at. In Happy Gilmore, Sandler is the odd man out, an unaccomplished hockey player who spills his rage onto polite golf courses. And Happy Gilmore has a particularly good antagonist, Shooter McGavin, (played by Christopher McDonald at his 1990s peak) who inhabits not only the smug country club class that looks down on the blue collar Gilmore, but also inhabits the critic that looks down on Sandler’s type of comedy. There is a sense of entitlement to McGavin that is earned. He has paid his dues, worked really hard, and is at the top of his game. He wants and (probably deserves) that gold jacket. And then Happy Gilmore comes over with a scientifically bullshit long drive. No doubt there were established comedians who looked upon Sandler’s comedy and his inexplicable success in the same way. Here was a guy who would go on the SNL Weekend Update Desk with characters such as Opera-Man (a Man who Sang Opera) and a guy with last-minute Halloween Costume Ideas (i.e. Sandler gives a big grin, calls himself Smiley-Man, and asks for candy) and somehow got consistent laughs. And then he became a big movie star. It feels unfair and McGavin, in one way or another, represents all of us who don’t find this sort of thing funny.

The sequel’s plot is derivative of the first. It should be mentioned that it feels that way on purpose in order to capitalize on nostalgia, not simply out of a lack of creativity. Gilmore kills his wife with an errant golf drive (a similar joke occurs in the first movie when Gilmore kills with his father with a slap-shot at a hockey game) and Gilmore gives up golf and starts drinking. Along the way he loses all his money because someone he beats up sues him for assault and battery (why didn’t anybody else think of that?), so now he needs money to support his daughter’s higher education bill. Hung over and desperate, he turns back to golf.

In the first movie, he was trying to buy back his grandmother’s house from foreclosure, which is a relatively good reason to raise money. Here, his daughter (Sandler’s actual daughter in a cameo) is a talented ballerina whose teacher recommends sending her to Paris Ballet College which costs $75,000 in tuition a year. That is a relatively stupid reason to raise money. With $300,000, you don’t need to go to a fancy school to establish your career. Just start your own company and fund your own shows. (Adam Sandler and Tim Herlihy, writers of the original are back as the writers of the sequel, except now thirty years of making Sandler comedies, I bet they are much richer than they were. That might explain this out-of-touch premise). What is better is Sandler’s four idiot sons who take after their dad. They are much funnier and are gainfully employed with careers that didn’t drive their parents into six figures of higher education debt.

After many decently funny montages in which Happy Gilmore realizes his lost golf game (getting sober helps), he attends a gold jacket dinner which epitomizes one of the problems with sequels to successful comedies in general. This dinner is attended by many many actual golf legends who sit there content to get credit for being themselves. Comedy is better told from the outside and though the makers of the sequel may pat themselves on the back for having the type of pull that gets Jack Nicklaus' onscreen participation, it doesn’t make the movie any funnier.

The golf world has a problem which has provoked this dinner of gold jackets. There is a new startup league called Maxi-Golf which promises to make golf more exciting. This gives the movie the convenience of defending traditional golf (now that Sandler is a secure incumbent) while also making the climax of the movie far more cinematic than traditional golf (i.e. the competition takes place in the new and exciting golf tournament space). One of the new Maxi-golfers carries around a working chainsaw as part of his persona. The only thing missing is Norm Macdonald as a commentator musing that it is Ridiculous.

Cameos are one thing. The movie includes such non-Hollywood types as Travis Kelce (football player) and a host of musicians in small roles (Bad Bunny, Post Malone, and Eminem). These are generally neutral developments though I did like Eminem’s short bit a decent amount. What is actively detrimental to the movie is the re-telling of jokes from the original movie. This clearly is purposeful, the movie wants you to remember the old movie for nostalgia purposes, but it is antithetical to comedy, which abhors the telling of the same joke twice.

The frustrating thing is that the movie doesn’t really have to rely on these nostalgia traps. It has enough new things to explore, and with a little more effort could have explored them more. Here are two story ideas that would have helped the movie: 1) It is revealed that Shooter McGavin has spent the last 30 years in a mental institution because he couldn’t get over the events of the first movie. Why? Wouldn’t it be funnier if Shooter McGavin had spent the last 30 years trying but continually failing to win a gold jacket for various reasons? 2) It is revealed that the Maxi-Golf people are enhancing their golfers via experimental surgery which enables longer drives. Why not reveal that Happy Gilmore suffered a hockey injury way back in the day that had the same effect? That would go a long way in justifying his unscientific golf drive. And it would bring up a conflict about what truly counts as performance enhancement that is natural as opposed to deliberate.

The movie is good enough to the point where I can see these improvements as possibilities of where it could have gone had it put in the effort. But the movie is just content enough to be mediocre, to get all of Adam Sandler’s friends onscreen and paid, and to have several obvious product placements before Sandler moves onto the next film. You could say this about Adam Sandler’s career in general. Every five or six years, he shows us how good he can be, which is why the vast majority of his work product, which revels in mediocrity, is such a continual disappointment. If only this movie could have positioned Shooter McGavin in such a way that the main conflict was a comment on Sandler's career, just like it was in the original movie. If only.

Eddington (4/5 Stars)

There is an old story, I believe I heard it first in the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately sense the danger and jump out to escape. If you put a frog into a pot of tepid water, and slowly bring up the temperature, the frog will sink into a languid stupor and unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

In preparation for this review, I looked up that story on Wikipedia to see if it was true or not. I thought it may be a good metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. But apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, it isn’t true. In fact, it could not be further from the truth. Instead, Wikipedia cites more modern day scientists who argue that a frog placed in tepid water that is gradually heated will notice the increase in temperature and almost certainly try to escape, whereas a frog that is placed in boiling water will very likely die immediately before it can escape.

Somehow, the fact that this widely known metaphor is completely wrong makes it an even better metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. I mean, I saw it first in An Inconvenient Truth wherein Al Gore used it to shame people’s supposed ignorance of the science behind global warming. You think Al Gore would have fact checked that part. And if Wikipedia is wrong and you can boil a frog by slow and steady manipulation, that too would be a good metaphor for Eddington, which is about the small rural town of Eddington, New Mexico where everybody and nobody seems to know what is going on and is very angry about it.

There is a general lag in what goes on in the world and what shows up in movies. Unlike television shows or other media that have production timelines which allow it to be topical, it takes a relatively long time for a movie to be greenlit, produced, edited, and then released. I believe Eddington would be the first movie that takes place in the time of COVID-19 (Spring and Summer 2020) and is specifically about what was happening during that time. And boy does this movie have everything, and how. Mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, bitcoin, false flag conspiracies, pedophilia conspiracies, Antifa, etc., all of which is experienced within the context of forced social isolation. Never have I seen a movie with so much social media doomscrolling.

Because of certain coincidences, COVID-19 had less of a dramatic impact on my life than the rest of the country. I had not taken a vacation in a long time and both deserved and could afford an elongated one. I had just married my wife and was literally in the honeymoon phase of the same. We did not yet have any kids that could be kept home from school. Heck, I never even worked from home. All the other companies in our shared office space evacuated, so my law firm just spaced itself out and I biked to work instead of taking the subway. I dipped into my savings, finished my last screenplay, read War and Peace, and played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons on Zoom.

Still, I had the vague sense that although the restrictions that were put into place in New York City made sense in New York City (after all, in March 2020, NYC experienced a very real surge in hospitalizations, the numbers of which inferred that hundreds of thousands of cases were going unreported), I did wonder whether it made sense to replicate those restrictions in the rest of the country. After all, why would you impose the same Spring 2020 lockdown in relatively dense New York City, which had experienced hundreds of thousands of cases, in relatively spaced-out Houston, Texas which maybe had hundreds of cases, if that.

Eddington takes place in a small town of the same name in New Mexico. In May 2020, the mayor (played by Pedro Pascal) has decided to lockdown the city, mandate masks and six feet of separation. There is not a single COVID-19 case in the entire county. This seems crazier to some people than others. The sheriff Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix) suffers from asthma and cannot breath in a mask. He openly wonders why he is being directed to wear one while he is alone in his car. There are some attempts at reasonable discussions, but these attempts are thwarted by actors on both sides recording everything on their smartphones. The practical effect of parties filming an argument/negotiation is that it removes the possibility of an engaged discussion. After all, the speaker is not interested in whether the other participant is listening. Instead, they are making a speech to their social media followers. The problem is one more removed than people not listening to each other. In effect, no one is even talking in the first place as the arguments are ranted into the social media ether. It is like the environment of Cable News has descended upon and engulfed the interactions of regular people. After a disappointing exchange with the mayor, Joe Cross decides to throw his hat in the ring for the upcoming mayoral election. He announces his candidacy on Instagram.

Then George Floyd was murdered and the idiocy of COVID-19 was amplified by galling hypocrisy. I certainly remember being informed many times about that notorious 1918 Parade in Philadelphia that kept on being cited as a prime example for why everyone should stay inside and avoid outside crowds in a pandemic. That analogy was completely forgotten in a space of day when it suddenly became okay to have large outside demonstrations. It was a huge gamble in public safety that browbeaten and timid health officials had no balls to criticize. But then we learned that it wasn’t actually a big deal. Large outside gatherings did not lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases. That was reality. So why then were the public officials who okayed the demonstrations still shaming people into staying inside and wearing masks. The lockdowns and school closings just went on forever.

Eddington is notable in that Ari Aster doesn’t appear to be putting too much of the blame on either side of the political polarization. Indeed, it does not appear that Ari Aster is interested in the politics of the period. What interests him about the COVID-19 pandemic is what interests him as a director of great horror movies (Heriditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid). There is an extreme of human emotions in his films that reminds one of Scorsese and a gleefulness in purposefully triggering such emotions that reminds one of Hitchcock. Ari Aster has taken the trauma of the pandemic and has exploited it into yet another emotionally manipulative (i.e. frightening) movie. That bastard, he is arguably the best director to come onto the scene in the past 10 years.

The location of the movie is important. And to someone like me who believes that the nationalization of politics is an exceptionally bad thing, Eddington is instructive to that end. Eddington, the place, does not have a COVID-19 problem and yet the streets are locked down and masks are mandated because of what is happening in New York City. Eddington, the place, does not have a police brutality problem and yet street protests erupt which naturally morph into rioting because of what is happening in Minnesota. The citizens of Eddington have gathered on the streets to yell at each other over issues that do not affect or concern their community. What a nightmare.

About halfway through the movie, Joe Cross is visited at his home by some kind of nutty preacher (played by Austin Butler) who tells him of a story about being an orphan, getting kidnapped by a society of super-rich weirdos in Northern California (sounds like the Bohemian Grove), and being hunted down in the woods as part of some rich super-rich weirdo game. Joe’s wife (played by Amy Adams) brought this guy home for dinner and takes him seriously. You want Joe to explain to the guy that he is nuts, but how is that possible when the world is so crazy. I was thinking about that frog that gets slowly boiled to death without realizing it. Extremism on one side breeds extremism on the other. When neither side has a stable ground to make a sound argument from, it is impossible to defend reason. And no, simply arguing that you support science or scientific authorities is not a replacement for actually understanding the scientific basis of something.

I am 38 turning 39, and I look back on my youth and thank my lucky stars that there was no social media. There are next to no pictures of me in grade school and high school and those that exist cannot be found online. Facebook came to my college in my Freshman year, but more importantly, the Facebook wall wasn’t implemented until,, I think, after I graduated. That Facebook wall, it is an evil thing. It makes it seem like every last thing you have ever posted has the thought and attention paid to it as if you decided to publish it in an established newspaper. It doesn’t even allow you to slur your words so that everyone knows you were drunk when you posted. This is an important thing in real life interactions that is sorely missing in online communications.

Eddington has several teenage characters and I shudder to think that there was in actuality a generation of kids that lived through COVID-19 that went through a very important stage in their social development almost entirely online (or in gatherings on the remote edge of town where they illegally gathered to drink sad beers). At one point, one sorry boy (who reminds me of J.D. Vance for some reason) tries to explain to his parents what the goals of Anti-Racism are and why they are important. This releases the largest laugh of the movie when, after a comic pause, his father erupts: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white!” If you know a kid that went through that phase, try not to hold them to it or remind them of that period of time. They were just trying to fit in.

In Ari Aster’s last movie, Beau is Afraid, I wondered what the movie would be like if Ari Aster had tried to land the plane and not pulled up at the last second for his ending. I think it is fair to say that in Eddington, he does not pull up and that the landing is not successful. This movie crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. Playing it safe may have just resulted in Joe Cross being hospitalized and dying of COVID-19. Instead, Antifa gets involved and the streets of the town experience a hail of machine gun fire.

There is something else not really mentioned here. The movie begins and ends with a conspiracy that is just hinted at. It includes a tech giant that wants to build a large data center right outside of town, which may or may not guzzle up the town’s limited supply of water and energy. This is a local issue that actually affects the residents of Eddington. And yet, there isn’t much controversy about it as the citizens' attention spans are being focused on national problems elsewhere. Indeed, and I am just theorizing here, Mayor Garcia may have locked down the town when he did because he wanted to avoid a civic discussion that would inhibit his ability to push through the development. Is that what the community leaders were discussing in Mayor Garcia’s empty bar that one night when this whole thing started?

Friendship (3/5 Stars)

Sometimes, as the iron is hot, it is best to strike it, whether you are ready or not, lest the opportunity pass you by. Tim Robinson is on the upswing. His sketch comedy show “I Think You Should Leave” is one of the best shows of the last five years. Given his success, now is the time for him to move onto bigger things, like a full scale movie. And given that he specializes in portraying a type of socially catastrophic middle aged man, someone had the bright idea to conceive of a movie in which he strikes up a friendship with the “I Love You, Man” middle aged man himself, Paul Rudd, whose comedic reputation is of the exact opposite nature. At the very least it should make for a great marketing campaign.

There is so much potential here that I kind of wish that someone had done just another rewrite of the script before they had jumped into it. This movie should be very good. Instead it is mediocre and the laughs are sparse. There are plenty of good moments, but too many of them are throwaway. The main problem is that an integral part of the storyline doesn’t quite make sense and so the movie is never truly grounded in reality. If the story does not have a base level of reality, it is hard to build jokes on top of it.

For those unacquainted with “I Think You Should Leave”, it may as well be the present vanguard of comedy. There is something special and new about what is going on in that show. If I were to pick one particular sketch to illustrate what is ground-breaking about it would be the “Haunted House Tour” in which the Tim Robinson character, after being informed that this was the “adult” tour that takes place after 10pm, decides to ask a bunch vulgar questions because, and this is important, he thinks that cursing is the socially acceptable thing to do in an “adult” tour. It is hard to describe and I think you should just watch it. But the main development comedically is the context. As a millennial, I grew up in a place and time where vulgarity was met with shock, and that shock value was funny. For the longest time, comedians seemed to be on an unending and ever more predictable quest to top themselves in vulgarity, a comedic strategy which sometime between There’s Something About Mary and Stepbrothers experienced diminishing returns. In the “Haunted House Tour” sketch, the vulgar questions aren’t met with shock. No-one is scandalized. It just feels weird and inappropriate. After all, it is 2022 and all the adults have seen StepBrothers, which came out in 2008. The incredible thing about the Tim Robinson character is that he wants to be socially acceptable, he is just utterly clueless as to how to do it and is making and committing to blindingly wrong choices to that end. In the “Haunted House Tour” the character is so well developed, and so well acted, that I experienced not only hilarity but a dramatic catharsis.

It is a very good idea to take this Tim Robinson character and insert him into a movie wherein Paul Rudd, that very cool and easy going guy, moves in across the street, and the chrance develops for them to develop a friendship, that is before Paul Rudd realizes just how strange and off putting the Tim Robinson character is. This is basically the plot of “Friendship”. It is a little like “The Cable Guy” but told from the point of view of Jim Carrey.

The main problem here is that the Tim Robinson character (named Craig Waterman) is inexplicably married to a successful business woman played by the beautiful Kate Mara. They have been married for so long that they have a teenage son. Craig Waterman also has a good, if not reputable, job as an advertising executive for addictive phone applications. Make no mistake, this is the Tim Robinson character, who is prone to giant social gaffes and inexplicable moments of wrath. So, what is he doing gainfully employed and happily married for more than a decade? That doesn’t really make sense. And you can’t blame his behavior on the added presence of Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd is playing the stereotypical Paul Rudd character. He’s just a cool guy. It’s not like he is driving Craig Waterman crazy.

What would make more sense is if Craig Waterman had an obscure dirty job and lived at home with his mother, and maybe one or both of them were hoarders. (That’s the backstory of the “Haunted House Tour” after all). I think this would make Craig Waterman more endearing, and Paul Rudd’s cute circle of friends more snobbish/elistish when they (understandably) reject him.

Still, besides the missed opportunity, there are several good moments in this movie. One of my favorites included the quick scene with an obscure actor named Connor O’Malley along with his character’s viewpoint about the forever war in Afghanistan. I also really like the toad-acid trip scene in which Craig Waterman orders a sandwich. Man, I just wished the move was better because the concept is such a good idea. And these opportunities, they don’t come around all that often.

Sinners (4/5 Stars)

We have been waiting for this movie for ten years. In 2013, Writer/Director Ryan Coogler entered the scene with the impressive Fruitvale Station. We were all happy to see him hired by the biggest of studios (and definitely get paid) to make some wide release blockbusters like Creed (2015) and then Black Panther (2018). But unlike other auteurs that get scooped up into the money-making apparatus of reboots, remakes, and superhero franchises (Chistopher Nolan comes to mind), he either did not have the opportunity or chose not to take a step back and make some smaller movies in between his large ones. Ryan Coogler has not made a truly personal movie since 2013 until now. Sinners is undeniably Ryan Coogler’s movie. He built up a lot of good will (and box office) over the past decade, and here he is spending it.

Not that Sinners is a small movie. Yes, it takes place over the course of one day and one night in 1930s Clarkson, Mississippi, but it comes with all the technology and scope of a Marvel movie. Besides the obvious example of Oppenheimer, there has not been a more appropriate movie for an IMAX screen in the past several years than Sinners. I saw this movie in a regular movie theater and was consistently reminded by Coogler’s framing that I was seeing only a part of what he wanted to show me. My time to see it in IMAX has passed, but if it ever was released again in an IMAX theater, I would try to see it again.

The story as it is involves two identical twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who have been gone from town for a while. First then fought in World War I and then they ran booze in Chicago for Al Capone. Despite the segregated reality of Mississippi, they have decided to open a bar/nightclub in their home town and spend the first half of the movie impressing the natives with their big city style and money and recruiting the best band they can for opening night. This involves rounding up an old bluesman like Delta Slim (played by Delroy Lindo) but more importantly an up-and-comer Sammie Moore (played by Miles Caton) whose voice is reminiscent of James Earl Jones.

The auditory aspects of Sinners are as impressive as its visual aspects.. Sinners has enough music in it to be classed as a musical, and Ryan Coogler shows his knowledge and very good taste in old school blues and old tyme folk music, which fill up the movie wall to wall. Sometimes it is hard to tell what makes good sound mixing or sound editing, but I would be very surprised if this movie was not going to show up next awards season nominated and perhaps winning those awards. (I do not believe there will be a nomination for Best Song because I think all of these songs are pre-existing, however, my category for Best Use of a Song will very likely include at least two entries from this movie).

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of Sinners, but I sit here and wonder whether I really understood the overall theme and plot of this movie. The main storyline I have already described is clear enough. But halfway through the movie, vampires show up and they surround the nightclub with the aim (I think) of turning the talented Sammie Moore into one of them. Clarkson, Mississippi is known as the place where blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical success. That might be relevant. I’m not sure. Sammie Moore seems to be plenty talented already. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what the sins are that the film title Sinners appears to be referring to. Is it just basic drinking, carrying on, and fornicating? Because I don’t think the characters were doing anything heavier than that besides killing vampires.

Nor does the vampires’ desire to obtain Sammie Moore seem to be a not-so-veiled metaphor for the white man’s mission to steal the essence of their (supposedly) more artistic/creative black brethren (see Jordan Peele’s Get Out). After all, the vampires have their own music, and Ryan Coogler made sure to incorporate some very good samples of it. The vampire’s cover of Rocky Road to Dublin is awesome. Indeed, when attempting to be invited into the nightclub (basic vampire rules do apply here), the vampire's claim that they are not prejudiced and that to join them would be an opportunity to join an equal fraternity of undead. Whether it is better to be an undying and powerful vampire or to be a black person in the segregated South is an argument that gives the characters (and us) pause.

The movie devolves into bloody fist fights before the last remaining characters make it to the morning. Overall, the mission to open this nightclub is a dramatic failure even if the Klan get dealt a major blow near the end of the film, almost as an afterthought.

One more thing can be said about the performance of Michael B. Jordan. I’ve seen actors playing against themselves as identical twins, and this is not the best version of that. But more distracting is the fact that Michael B. Jordan is still built like Apollo Creed and Killmonger. Is it appropriate for a normal human in 1930s Mississippi to look like they’ve been into competitive body-building? It is even more distracting given that Michael B. Jordan was a respected actor (see The Wire, Fruitvale Station) before he became a human action figure, as opposed to, say, Arnold Schwarzenneger who doesn't really have the range to be anything but Arnold Schwarzenneger. Nicholas Cage did this for a few years (1996-1998) but then became normal again. If Ryan Coogler can escape the constraints of franchise movies, then I think it is time to release Michael B. Jordan as well.