Anora (5/5 Stars)

If you haven’t heard of Writer/Director Sean Baker yet, then this is the perfect movie for an introduction. He has been making very good films for twenty years (Prince of Broadway, Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) but Anora is his best and may finally be his breakout. I say “may” not as some sort of hedge against the greatness of this movie, but only as to its subject matter, which does not correspond with the tastes of the general public. Anora is about an erotic dancer, Ani (played by Mikey Madison) that finds herself the object of desire of the son of a Russian oligarch. The first half of the movie is a whirlwind of irresponsible romance. The twenty-something heir, Ivan (played by Mark Eydelshteyn), finds her in a strip joint in Brighton Beach where they communicate in Russian. A week later, he pays her for sex that takes place in his parent’s mansion on the beach (the oligarchs are absent, likely in Russia). Shortly thereafter, he hires her for a week-long bender in Las Vegas, at the end of which he proposes to her and they get married in a Las Vegas marriage ceremony. In the second half of the movie his family’s hired hands energetically attempt to annul the marriage as soon as they are able.

Anora is the best movie about class since 2019’s Parasite, but unlike that movie, it doesn’t have anything to directly say about it. Instead, this is a Sean Baker movie. It exists not because Mr. Baker has something to say about rich people (like say, the TV show Succession) but because he finds Ani interesting and worthy of a story. Mr. Baker has made a career telling stories about people on the edge, and frequently in sexual trades, on their level and on their terms. His movies are ruthless in their realism but devoid of judgment. He shows a profound respect for his subjects, none more so than Ani who spends the running length of this movie being profoundly disrespected by everyone she interacts with. Mr. Baker respects Ani and people like her by depicting with clear eyes the bounds of their agency, or lack thereof, and the consequences of it. The movie ends with a gut-punch of emotion, a scene of catharsis so “earned” that it may as well set the standard for the same. Anora reminds one of 1990’s “Pretty Woman” only as far as subject matter and by contrast demonstrates what is fanciful and ultimately unsatisfying about it.

Anora is an energetic movie that takes place within a few weeks of confined time. It zips along through brief periods of elation and down-to-earth cynicism. It is funny, but not in a way that would denote it as a comedy. It is funny in the way that a Martin Scorsese movie is frequently funny (take Goodfellas or The Departed). That is, it knows its subject matter so well, and moves so efficiently, that the amount of material that the audience “gets” in every scene is inherently entertaining and frequently produces laughs of understanding. The movie, already at a rapid pace, gets kicked up a notch once the family gets wind of the marriage and a trio of men are sent to the mansion to put a stop to it.

The leader of these men, Toros, is played by Karren Karagulian, an actor you probably don’t know or recognize. I was watching the audio commentary of Sean Baker’s first movie Take Out, made for about $3,000 in 2004. In one scene he comments that the man on screen complaining about his delivery for about three lines was the most natural performer he had ever worked with and that he wanted him to be in every movie he made. Wait, what? That guy? It was Karren Karagulian, a very normal looking very Armenian middle-aged man. He is the antithesis of what a Hollywood actor looks like.

Sean Baker never reuses actors, except for Karren Karagulian. At the same time, Sean Baker never tells stories about people who look like Karren Karagulian. So Karren has always been an understated supporting actor in Mr. Baker’s movies or relegated to one or two scenes. Anora is really the first movie that allows him to perform some throw-down acting. Karren takes the opportunity and does not disappoint. The main reason the movie works so well in the second half is that the euphoria of the first half, in terms of energy, is replaced if not trumped by the manic panic of Toros in the second half, so that the frenetic pace never lets up. When the irresponsible heir escapes from his mansion without the newlywed Ani, Toros and his men take Ani on a 24 hour search for Ivan. When it appears that they have no leads as to where Ivan went, you would expect Toros to ease up and let everyone go home, but he never does. He takes out his phone in a diner and shows random people a picture of Ivan on the off chance that someone may have seen him.

Rounding out the trio of hired help is Igor played by Yuriy Borisov. He is wondering why he has been brought along since his job is to be the “muscle” (i.e. he beats people up when ordered to. In one scene, he shows proficiency with a baseball bat versus private property). It is explained to him that he is not to touch Ivan, and as for Ani maybe just to make sure she doesn’t run away. Igor is perhaps overqualified for this task. Like many people stuck in an awful bureaucracy, he does just enough to do his job with some base level of dignity. This movie, like Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, shows the poor fighting each other on behalf of rich people who stay above the fray. We get a glimpse of the patriarch oligarch in his private jet. His general lack of concern says quite a lot about why his son is such an entitled screw-up. This is perhaps the first rich character to be found in a Sean Baker movie. Mr. Baker seems to be content with showing just enough of him as necessary and moving on. The real romance here is one between Anora and Igor, but only to the extent of course that a sex worker and/or hired muscle can be allowed romance. Their respective employments are so emotionally exhausting, it is a wonder that they have any left over for their own personal use.

Perfect Days (4/5 Stars)

Hirayama is a janitor working for the city of Tokyo, Japan. He lives in a studio apartment and has a simple daily routine. He cleans the toilets of various public restrooms. He eats his lunch in the nearby park. He rides his bike. He patronizes a ramen stand in the nearby subway station and a small restaurant on a side street. He takes an interest in gardening, photography (in particular a kind of shimmer of light that results in the sun shining through the leaves of trees), 1960s-1970s musical artists like Patti Smith and Lou Reed (the latter’s song “Perfect Day” is sampled herein), and novels. Sometimes during this story, the semblance of a plot pokes through Hirayama’s routine in the guise of a niece who has run away from home or a co-worker that needs money for a date, but these are not too dramatic and their resolution is not too important.

This movie is enjoyable in the same way that a yule log burning in a fireplace at Christmas is enjoyable. I expect you can put it on in the background as one makes dinner, glance over a few times, and not miss anything. There will not be much to add here about the movie itself, which is stripped down and focused in a way like Hirayama’s life. The Director Wim Wenders has decided to portray this story bereft of concerns like excitement or ambition. There is no arc for the character since he is without want. He likes things the way they are and they stay that way. It is all very zen.

And wouldn’t it be nice if we all could slow down and live a life like Hirayama’s. Well, too bad. The rest of this review will be a discussion of why his lifestyle is actually illegal in most of the world. Yes, the remainder of this review will be a discussion on zoning and public policy. You could show “Perfect Days” on the first day of a class on city planning and spend the rest of the semester discussing it. It portrays those things that are actually important to the daily lives of normal people, not the megalomaniacs that too often seek to dictate by fiat the way the rest of us live.

Let’s take Hirayama’s job first. He is a janitor that cleans public restrooms. Normally, this would be a disgusting and dangerous task. In New York City, we don’t have public restrooms because our inhabitants can’t handle them. But this takes place in Tokyo, where apparently not only are the public restrooms devoid of drug addicts, graffiti, and litter, but are themselves works of public art. These are some nice restrooms Hirayama is cleaning the toilets in. We will discuss further why Tokyo does not appear to have the undesirable elements of urban life living in its public spaces, but for now will just notice that they are not there.

Let’s consider where Hirayama lives. He lives alone in a studio apartment. He can afford a studio apartment on a janitor’s salary. In NYC this is what would be called movie magic. But again, this takes place in Tokyo. The development of the Tokyo metropolis is an extraordinary case study in what occurs if a government simply allows people to use their land in the manner they see fit. In other words, Tokyo developed from the ground up without much city planning or zoning. How this occurred highlights its extreme improbability and why very few other places in the world are like it.

There are many reasons given for zoning laws, but the ones that actually make the most sense is incumbency bias. Zoning exists because vested interests want to protect their property values. Put another way, people who already have what they want bend the rules to keep what they have. So, let’s say if you wanted your children to go to the best schools and interact with other people who have just as much money, you could live in a community where all the residences have a minimum value of middle class or more. This strategy has the practical effect of keeping all of the poor people out of the neighborhood. Taking it one step further, since the neighborhood schools prioritize students that live nearby and are funded by neighborhood property taxes, you can effectively provide your children an edge in better schools and better social networks by living in a neighborhood that only middle class or rich people can afford. This, in a nutshell, is suburbia and most of America lives there.

Japan before World War II was a deeply unequal place. But, one of the effects of a devastating war is that it dramatically reduced inequality amongst the Japanese people. When the Americans burned Japan to the ground, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. Many poor people lost all they owned. Many rich people also lost all they owned, but since they started off with more, they lost more. So far, so normal. Wars and other dramatic events like famines and plagues decrease inequality. But what happened next really has no historical parallel. The United States deposed the imperial government of Japan in an unconditional surrender. This dramatically reduced political inequality to go with the dramatic reduction of economic inequality caused by the war itself. Then instead of looting, enslaving, and colonizing the country, it installed democracy and capitalism and left. So Japan in general, and Tokyo in particular is an extraordinary natural experiment: what occurs when vested interests are removed and replaced with an open society. Forty years later, Japan had the second largest economy in the world.

How does this affect our hero Hirayama? Well, since Tokyo was allowed to develop as much as the free market dictated, there isn’t this dramatic shortage of housing that exists everywhere else in the world. Tokyo is an ocean of development, as densely packed as the island of Manhattan as far as the eye can see. As a result, a janitor can afford a studio. Another important detail. Hirayama’s studio apartment doesn’t have a full bathroom. Hirayama patronizes a nearby public spa to bathe. In NYC and most of the United States, that is illegal. Every living space requires a bathroom, electricity and a kitchen. That is nice I’m sure, but it makes the apartment more expensive. And when the living space is too expensive for poor people to live in, they live in tents on the street without bathrooms, electricity, or kitchens. You thought you could get rid of poor people by removing cheap housing, but all you did was remove the cheap housing. The poor people persist in their existence.

(I recall reading about Ernest Hemingway living as an underemployed writer in Paris, France in the 1920s. How could he afford it? Well, for one thing, his apartment didn’t have running water. Would you trade running water to live as an underemployed writer in Paris in the 1920s? Or how about being able to live like Hirayama in Tokyo? To be poor and live alone in NYC is either impossible or requires a government handout, which is as bad as living with the government in your home. Something to contemplate about NYC is that all people here have the right to shelter. So there exists a shelter system that every single person living on the street could take advantage of. The homeless you see on the street choose to be there.)

Let’s consider where Hirayama spends his time. The ramen spot that he patronizes. The bookstore that he buys novels from. The record store that sells him his mix-tapes. The tiny bar that he drinks at. All of these places are run by middle-aged or older operators. What does that infer? It infers that the owners are working at their own shops. Tokyo allows these tiny stores to exist by allowing commercial spaces in places that are forbidden elsewhere. In Irvine, all shopping and residences are separated. And the only shopping you can do is confined to malls that, by design, have one owner. So, in effect, by developing the neighborhood in this way, it ensures that the physical marketplace is monopolized by one entity. This has the effect of dramatically raising the rents for stores in the mall. After all, you’ve unnaturally made commercial space scarce by rendering it illegal in all areas that are not within the mall. So only big companies can afford to rent space in the mall, which means that you can’t have these small independently owned stores that Hirayama patronizes in Tokyo. It’s nice to know the owners of an establishment. If it is a ramen spot, the owner remembers you and says hello. If it is a bookstore, the owner talks to you about books. If it is a bar, the bartender knows what you like to drink. And if you plan your town so that it is difficult for normal people to own the places that they work, you don’t have this type of interaction.

When he is not working, Hirayama rides his bicycle around Tokyo. The places that he patronizes are close enough in space where this is not inconvenient. When Hirayama comes to his destination, he does not lock up his bike. What? What alternate dimension is this where one does not take the basic precaution of locking up one’s bicycle? This is the one detail that I’m not sure is actually correct about “Perfect Days” depiction of Tokyo, but it does reflect a general truth about Japan. It is an abnormally safe place to live. In a country of 125 million, there were 912 recorded homicides in 2023. That is absurdly low. It is this sort of detail which allows Hirayama to live his type of life without the stress and anxiety that surrounds the poor in the rest of the world. At one point, he decides to relax by drinking beer under a bridge. It is a nice place to drink and there are no hostile people around. Would you drink beer under a bridge in your town?

One can point to stringent gun sales for low crime, which helps but isn’t the real reason why crime is so low. The real reason is that Japan is democratic, capitalist (i.e. has the rule of law), relatively old, and entirely composed of Japanese (like 99% of the people are natives). There isn’t anything special about the Japanese people. Take any other group of people and give them the same institutions and demography and that country too would be peaceful. What the low crime rate reflects is strong community ties. What enables strong community ties is a stable population and time. Japan has almost no immigration or foreign born population. Everyone is Japanese and their families have lived there forever. Over time, this fosters a very strong sense of community identity which is reflected in the fact that the public spaces (including the bathrooms) respect the people and the people respect the public spaces (including the bathrooms).

It is not that immigrants are inherently wild people. It is the fact that they are new, which in turn renders their portion of the population transient. Over time, community ties will form, but community ties are simply not there when the people show up. If you have a prolonged and large influx of people and/or large exodus of people, say like what happened in American cities in the 1970s and 1980s, communities that did have strong ties can break down and dissipate entirely, one side effect being an extraordinary rise in crime. There are benefits to diversity and immigration that are especially noticeable when one considers the example of Japan. Its aging population and workforce, its stagnating economy, its conformist and potentially oppressive culture would all be helped with more immigration. If it allowed more immigration, it would come with a crime wave. The question is at what point does the trade off stop being worth it. Immigration is not a question of yes or no, it is a question of how much.

There is much to learn about the good life by contemplating “Perfect Days”. In the context of city planning, one realizes that although Hirayama lives alone, his life is made possible by the people and community of Tokyo, who in their wisdom have decided to enact laws that are uncommon and to not enact other laws that are common. Now, I’m not saying we all have to live the zen life. All I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be illegal.

Megalopolis (1/5 Stars)

“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot - it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.”

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

The hook for seeing Megalopolis was too good for this reviewer to ignore, regardless of all the bad reviews and box office failure. I recall first hearing about this movie a few years ago. Francis Ford Coppola, maker of several of the best films ever (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now) had an idea for an epic movie. Something he had wanted to make for decades. He believed in it so much that he swore that he spend his family fortune on it if no studio would fund it. No studio funded it, and so I am told, Mr. Coppola funded it himself. At 85 and a self-made man, he is entitled to one last big roll of the dice. And….it looks like he just lost something like 100 million dollars of his own money.

The interesting thing is that this isn’t the first time that Coppola has blown his fortune on a movie. After the great success of The Godfather Part I and Part II and Apocalypse Now, Coppola self-funded the costly flop One From the Heart which put him in the middle class (until Godfather Part III in 1990). That movie is underrated. It had pretty innovative visuals and a Tom Waits soundtrack, but unfortunately paired it with a not-sexy plot of the tired love of a long married couple. In other words, the story was never going to make money regardless of how cool everything else was. But everything else is cool and the movie is worth the viewing for any Coppola fan seeking a deep cut after consuming the hits. Megalopolis on the other hand, well, I don’t know what this movie is supposed to be. It looks expensive and has several fine actors, but whatever original inspiration and/or message Coppola thought he was conveying has been hopefully lost amidst a plethora of mixed metaphors and stale images.

I quote the above passage of George Orwell as an aide in trying to articulate what is going wrong here. Take the main metaphor of Megalopolis. The city in which the characters inhabit looks like New York City but is called New Rome. The main characters are Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and an upstart city planner named Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver). Other characters include a wealthy magnate named Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) and a influential reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). The plot concerns the debaucherous decay of this empire of New Rome. At one point, the public is bribed with Bread and Circuses (this is a literal subtitle).

Any student of history can point to a glaring problem here. The characters Cesar, Cicero, and Crassus are from the fall of the Roman Republic (130 BC to 0 AD). The Roman Empire with its “bread and circuses” would fall hundreds of years later (200 AD to 476 AD). These are different things. For instance, the historical figure Julius Caesar was killed by a group of senators who considered him a tyrant and an enemy of the Republic. Wouldn’t then, the character whose namesake he shares be more appropriately an enemy of an institution that is a republic, not an empire? And Caesar was a popular leader not an elitist. Wouldn’t then his nemesis be one of the elites, not a vulgar rabble-rouser named Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBouf) whose followers conspicuously bear red base-ball caps. Does Coppola not expect us to notice that he is misusing his metaphors? Does Coppola, this man who spent 100 million dollars of his own money on this idea, not understand the historical difference between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire?

There is another reference here that seems heavily relied upon if not explicitly stated. The movie has heavy tones of Ayn Rand and objectivism. I don’t think it is a mistake that the main character is an architect (like the main character in The Fountainhead) and he is developing this new fantastic and futuristic building material (like the main character in Atlas Shrugged) that will solve all sorts of humanity’s problem if not for the silly little people who don’t understand genius when they see it. This architect is a very special person. Apparently he can stop time. Like, a building is falling down. He stops time, and while the building is stuck in free-fall and the world and everyone in it is frozen, he sort of nonchalantly looks around before resuming time again. It’s a cool trick, never explained and never used in such a way that would develop plot or character. There is no connection whatsoever between this objectivist architect, Megalon, or the time-stopping power with the historical Rome, either its republic or its empire. The little sense that the metaphors make on their own is doubly lost in their combination.

The material is called Megalon and the silly little people are afraid of it, though no reasons are given as to why. The architect is using this material to build a new city amongst the skyscrapers of Manhattan. This new city, in the humble opinion of this reviewer, is a god awful monstrosity that no one in their right mind would ever want to live in. Its best quality seems to be how it looks from a very very long distance. Imagine for a moment actually living in this place with a million other people. There are no discernable units, no bedrooms, no kitchens, and no bathrooms. Call me old-fashioned and reactionary but I think it highly important to be able to take a shit in private.

The movie provides a much better use for Megalon than as a building material. In one scene, a character gets shot, point blank, in the face. In the hospital, Megalon is used as a substitute for that part of his brain that exploded out of the back of his skull. This character makes a full recovery. The only thing more amazing than that turn of events is the fact that no-one else really appreciates its significance. Megalon apparently gives the gift of immortality and nobody cares.

This story ends with a big speech by our hero architect in which he exhorts the people of New Rome to, I don’t know, I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about. I looked online for the transcript of that speech so that I could reprint it here and analyze it as a prime example of the type of meaningless bullshit that pervades this movie. But I couldn’t find it at this time. I expect it will someday be easier to look up later and I’ll update this blog post when it is possible to do so.

Civil War (2/5 Stars)

The first election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a shock to the system of the liberal media establishment. I know, I know, that phrase “liberal media establishment” is hopelessly broad for this one person’s understanding. Yet, I believe I can adequately comment on my general knowledge of movies and my more limited knowledge of the television landscape. We colloquially refer to this particular part of the entertainment industry within the deceptively simplistic word of Hollywood, which, even though it is composed of many different private organizations, is nonetheless deserving of the stereotype of being decidedly left of center in its politics. We are comfortable making this observation not only based on political registration (the Republican in the Academy is a rare find) but upon practical realities: the geographic base of the movie/television industry is located in Los Angeles and New York City, two firmly left of center places. Since liberals vastly outnumber conservatives in these places, you can safely make the assumption that liberals vastly outnumber conservatives in the industry. Even Fox News, that lone voice of conservatism on the cable airwaves, has its studios located in Manhattan.

When an election result disturbs one’s sense of reality, it presents an opportunity to step out of one’s bubble and adapt. On the other hand, you could abandon yourself in the idea that the world is a chaotic mystery as presented here in Alex Garland’s Civil War, a movie about an American civil war with no deeper understanding of why such events might take place. The movie starts with the civil war already commenced. We are provided no reasons as to why it is here. We are told that one side of the civil war has the President in Washington D.C. and the other side is being led by the Western Forces of California and Texas. The combination of those two states should tell you right there the level of seriousness this movie pretends too. Given the movie’s plot and characters, it may as well be set on Mars.

Civil War isn’t the first political movie that aims to avoid politics and think itself clever for doing so. Watching this movie, I was reminded of the political comedies of Armando Ianucci, specifically The Thick of It, his send up of British politics, and Veep, his send up of American politics. The Thick of It concerned the operation of a fictional department within the British Parliament. The characters run amok doing various meaningless things that are mainly aimed at influencing their image in the press. In Veep, the vice president Selina Meyer is a politician of no particular political party and her team runs amok doing various meaningless things that are mainly aimed at influencing their image in the press. Neither group of characters had any real power. For comedy, this worked because if you omitted the outcomes of a political story, that is the laws that are created and their implementation on the populace, then what politicians do all day really is absurd.

But, again, The Thick of It and Veep are comedies. Civil War is supposed to be a drama. It is absurd, but has no jokes. The movie follows some journalists (played by Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura) as they travel from New York City to Washington D.C. with the aim of finding the President and interviewing him. The ease or difficulty of such a mission is arbitrary and rises and deflates with every other scene. The movie, although avoiding politics, nevertheless lets on clues as to its sympathies. One of the main locations is Charlottesville, the site of a 2017 white nationalist march that descended into violence. The casting of the President is Nick Offerman, best known as the conservative parks commissioner Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation. So without going anywhere near what can be described as details or reasons, we can be fairly confident who Alex Garland blames: the conservatives. Is this what Hollywood has to offer to the political discourse? A vague threat that if we aren't careful enough about who we vote (i.e. read Trump) the country might descend into a civil war?

The violence has no connection with modern warfare. The fights between soldiers occur at blindingly stupid close range. The tactics and ammunition seem to be chosen primarily for their cinematic advantages. There are no drones although I would think any serious war movie about now or the near future would understand their importance. Our heroes, one of which is a 12-year-old girl, photograph the scenes (again at blindingly stupid close range) and pretend that they are capturing drama.

There are scenes that destroy American monuments, the most prominent being a bombing of the Lincoln Memorial. If Alex Garland were American, I would accuse him of being unpatriotic. After all, how would this Englishman feel if a pretentious American movie destroyed Westminster Abbey for no particular reason (who knows, maybe he was inspired by V for Vendetta). His career appears to be in a downward spiral reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan. He had an excellent first feature (Ex Machina), followed that up with a good movie (Annihilation) before going on to make a movie that was bad (Men) and now another one that is even worse (Civil War). Like Mr. Shyamalan, this sort of thing happens when a talented but self-important filmmaker ignores all the outside voices telling him his work is going to shit. I would not be surprised if this is not bottom.

Inside Out 2 (4/5 Stars)

The original Inside Out, a brilliant Pixar product that explored the mental landscape of an eleven year old girl named Riley and populated it with a group of emotional characters including Joy, Fear, Disgust, Anger, and Sadness, ended with a promise for a sequel. On the control panel in Riley’s main consciousness was a big red light entitled “Puberty”. If Riley’s inner monologue had been the scene of drama/comedy before, wait until she became a teenager. It has been nine whole years since Riley was 11-years-old. But now that she is finally 13 and about to start high school, we have a sequel.

“Inside Out 2” stands as a prime example of the rewards and risks of sequels to beloved movies. It pales in comparison to the original, but how could it not when the original was a great film. It adds more facets to Riley’s mental landscape and more emotional characters, but in doing so crowds out the original plot devices and characters. It ventures into a territory, puberty, that is not for children before avoiding much of what makes being a teenager not for children. But even with all of these drawbacks, it is the highest grossing film of the year and biggest money maker in Pixar’s history (1.6 billion dollars by last count). So, how could Pixar not make this movie? How could Pixar not make a third?

“Inside Out 2” stands at a very efficient 96 minutes and contains almost as much, if not more, material as the original. But while “Inside Out” was a fully integrated, organized and intuitive tour of the mental landscape of a child, (even the throw-away jokes made sense in a vaguely scientific manner, for instance the earworm Triple Dent commercial that won’t be forgotten), the mental landscape of “Inside Out 2” is more of a haphazard and disjointed affair. Some ideas work better than others. The “Brainstorm”, a tornado replete with flying lightbulbs, is a clever representation of a real mental phenomenon. The “Sarchasm”, a valley in the mental landscape that opens up like an earthquake fissure when Riley utters a sarcastic remark, is just a pun.

And whereas the original’s core idea presented a fairly straightforward mental process, the formation and storage of memories and how emotions color them, here we have something more abstract and, probably, less scientifically accurate. The sequel deals mainly with Riley’s formation of beliefs about herself. This is presented by vertical strings that connect a pool in the subconscious with the conscious control panel. Each string presents an idea like “I’m a good person” or “I’m not good enough”, which, I believe, is meant to be a manifestation of Riley’s personality.

But is that a good example of what a personality is? I”m not so sure. And what is a personality anyway? One of the more important books I’ve ever read, “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book” posited that we don’t really have personalities, but we think that we should, and worrying about this absence or overcompensating for the same is the cause of much anxiety.

(Because I’ve mentioned it. One of the better thought experiments in Lost in the Cosmos directs the reader to consider why people can misread various astrology descriptions (Virgo for Pisces and so forth) and still be moved by its accuracy. The answer is that a person is so multi–faceted in terms of personality, that potentially any of the signs could apply on any given day. This is the counterintuitive reason as to why astrology is pointless. It’s not because it is inaccurate. It is because you are so complicated that the differences between the signs are nominal, and therefore meaningless.)

Speaking of Anxiety, this emotion shows up as the main antagonist. Other emotions that are introduced to the team are Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui. Missing once again is Desire. (Just add some Lust to Envy and you’ve got it, but then again, this is a children’s movie). Anxiety is mainly concerned with planning for the future, which has its benefits, but not when it bottles up the other emotions (literally) and performs a hostile takeover. The best thing about Inside Out 2 is its portrayal of an anxious sleepless night and a climatic panic attack.

Still, when compared with the average teenager’s puberty, Riley is doing just fine. The action takes place over one weekend at summer hockey camp where Riley worries mainly about whether or not she will make the high school team. One of the missed opportunities here has to do with Riley’s teenage counterparts. Like many movies about teenagers, the protagonist is given a complicated inner life while everyone else at school is portrayed as not-anxious automatons. Indeed, what is hardly ever explored in movies for teenagers, is probably the hardest thing about being a teenager, which is you inevitably spend your days in forced interactions with other teenagers. This truth is hard to grasp for minds just getting used to their own consciousness let alone trying to contemplate the mental inner-workings of those around them. It also fights against the movie industry’s happy willingness to placate the audience’s narcissism. It would be a rare movie indeed that had a character realize that everyone in high school wasn’t thinking about them, for good or ill, because they were all too busy dealing with their own shit. Inside Out 2 misses this valuable lesson because it doesn’t delve too deep into the murky waters of puberty in the first place. But hey, there is always the next sequel.

The Bikeriders (3/5 Stars)

“The Bikeriders” was adapted by writer/director Jeff Nicholas (Take Shelter, Loving) from a book of the same name by journalist Danny Lyon. This is not a book I’ve read or one which has piqued my interest from watching the movie. It would seem to me that as a journalist, he spent a lot of time interviewing the wrong people. This story is ostensibly about a motorcycle club named the Vandals from the Midwest, but his main interviewee is not a member of the club. Instead, she is the wife of one of the members and she admittedly doesn’t understand the appeal of the club or motorcycles in general and appears to be entirely ambivalent as to whether it exists at all. It doesn’t even seem to think her insights are really worth the recording and seems to be participating as a lark. Now, if you were interested in this material, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that she isn’t the best tour guide

Her name is Kathy (played by Jodie Comer) and the view of this motorcycle club is seen through her eyes mainly. Indeed, the movie’s narrative opens up not with the formation of the club, but her first random foray into it, going to bar the club frequents to meet up with a friend of hers. She immediately doesn’t like it since the place and all the people in it give off dangerous uncouth vibes. Still she sticks around after deciding to leave when she notices one club member that is much better looking then the others, Benny.

Benny has one and one only redeeming attribute: he looks like Austin Butler. Now, I’m not saying that Beeny is a bad person. No, I’m saying he is a boring person, but for the fact that he looks like Austin Butler. I don’t recall him doing a single interesting thing in this entire movie. We are told he is not good at riding motorcycles (he keeps crashing), doesn’t appear to have a job (do any of these guys have jobs?) and is not good for conversation. He mainly broods and like every other man in this movie binge drinks and chain smokes in every scene. Clearly, Kathy's attraction to him is built on lust. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t explore or even admit that this is what we are watching. When asked why she liked him, Kathy just says she doesn’t know, especially since Benny is kind of stupid and gets her into all kinds of trouble. Frankly, this woman isn’t a good tour guide for her own love life.

There might have been a character that would have made sense to build this story around, and that would be Johnny (played by Tom Hardy), the leader of the club. This may have answered, if there was such an answer, the big looming question: what is a motorcycle club, like what is it supposed to be doing with its time? Because it appears like they mainly ride their bikes, have picnics, and drink.. It is revealed that Johnny got the inspiration for the club from watching The Wild One, a motorcycle movie starring Marlon Brando. That character is described as a rebel. Someone asks him what he is rebelling against, and he replies “What do you got?”.

This nihilistic response can be an inspiring call to action for men who don’t really fit in anywhere else. But of course, you can’t just meet and do nothing all the time. If you can’t afford gas, you aren’t going anywhere. Like everything else in life, even don’t-give-a-shit rebels need money, and, if your organization has no purpose and is full of unemployable ne'er do wells who don’t want to work, well, is it any surprise your network is eventually taken over by a criminal element. The last half of the movie has a lot of former members complaining about how the organization went south.

I’m reminded of Banksy from Exit Through the Gift Shop commenting on how the anarchist rebellious movement of street art was capitalized upon by Thierry, a man devoid of any artistic instincts. “I don’t think Thierry played by the rules, in some ways, but then there aren’t supposed to be any rules. So I don’t know what the moral is.” 

But not only that, your wife is unimpressed.

Kinds of Kindness (3/5 Stars)

Director Darren Aronofosky once commented in an interview while on the press circuit for “Black Swan” that the type of acting Natalie Portman was doing in that movie was the kind of acting that actors like doing. (See it and you can see why he was being a little defensive.) Actors want to perform scenes of heightened. The movie crew's job is to facilitate the same. Scenes of heightened emotion may not be easy, but easy is not the point. Ambition requires that the task be hard. Christian Bale doesn’t need to transform his body to play any particular role. Makeup and fats suits do exist. Christian Bale wants to do it.

I can only imagine that this sort of ambition draws actors to the projects of Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Writer Efthimis Fillippou, a pair of auteurs that deal primarily with the bizarre recesses of human behavior. Emma Stone is a seasoned veteran now having starred in several movies. Willem Dafoe returns with her from the latest Lanthimos movie, Poor Things, which was about a recently deceased woman who has her brain removed and replaced with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist. Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Hong Chau are all rookies. Jesse Plemons, in particular, is an actor that specializes in being the square white guy in the room. He is flexing muscles here that he doesn’t usually get to flex. Like many Lanthimos projects, Kinds of Kindness is an exercise in stunt acting.

There is a fine line here when it comes to placing strange characters in bizarre situations and watching how they react. If the characters are too strange and the situations too bizarre, then the drama fails because there is no empathetic connection. There needs to be something that the audience can latch onto in order to feel what the characters are feeling.

“Kinds of Kindness” is a three-hour movie composed of three separate stories, one hour each. The actors are the same for all three movies, but they play different characters in each of them. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are the main characters. The titles of the stories refer to the only character that finds itself in all three movies, a man by the initials of R.M.F. And here you will have a good test of the movie reviewer. If the reviewer claims to understand why R.M.F. is important or what he can mean, then they might just be pretentious windbags. R.M.F., if he is anything, is an inside joke. The stories, for all intents and purposes, are in fact separate stories. They just employ the same actors.

The stories, like Lanthimos' career, are hit and miss. The first hews the closest to reality and thus works the best. The second works until its last fifteen minutes when it gets cold feet and breaks point of view. The third straight-up employs miracles, which have the strange effect of legitimizing what is otherwise utterly bizarre behavior. We will take them one at a time.

The first stars Jesse Plemons in an interesting turn. His character works for Willem Dafoe, but not in any worldly employment. Willem Dafoe orders him and Plemons complies in doing things so specific and disturbing that one would naturally suppose that Plemons is being blackmailed. But, apparently, Plemons isn't being blackmailed. Instead, he is just so needy and pathetic that he can't function without someone telling him what to do.  In fact, this neediness is so absolute that by the end of the story, you may start wondering whether it is Willem Dafoe that has the short end of the stick. And since the movie employs no magic, adheres to its internal logic, and is well acted by consummate professionals, it is inherently interesting to watch.

The second story is strong until it commits a perplexing error. It too stars Jesse Plemons as a police officer whose wife, Emma Stone, survived a plane crash and several weeks on a deserted island before being rescued and returned home. The thing is, for whatever reason, Jesse Plemons isn’t sure that the Emma Stone who returned is the same woman who left. He thinks that maybe she is an imposter, perhaps an alien. So, either he is insane or she is an imposter. Because this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, both could be a possibility and for most of this story, it is fun trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, about three quarters of the way through, the movie switches its point of view from Jesse Plemons to Emma Stone and gives away the game. Like a movie trick that is explained, it loses its luster. Its feels like Yorgos may have gotten cold feet.

The third story stars Emma Stone as a woman who has abandoned her family to work for a religious cult. The cult is obsessed with purity, but not in any scientific way. As an example, to cleanse their sinners, they subject to them to hours in a sauna. Then they lick their sweat to test, based on the taste I guess, whether the purification rite worked. The catch is that this cult is on the search for a great healer of a certain gender, height, and weight, who can cure people just by touching them. This person ends up existing. And if she exists, well maybe you can test whether someone is pure by licking their sweat. As far as I can tell, the cult's plan is to find, kidnap, and imprison this healer on a boat and then, (maybe), sell tickets to visiting sick people. This story does end in a rather satisfying way, whereupon Emma Stone does a cool dance and nothing that took place before matters. Then R.M.F eats a sandwich, which also doesn’t mean anything.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (3/5 Stars)

When telling a story, there are details that need to be explained and others that don’t, and yet others that seem like they should be explained, but actually, not really. And some things it is best to not provide an explanation for at all.

Perhaps the best non-explanation of a thing in the history of moviedom is Back to the Future’s treatment of time travel. Doc Brown points to what looks like (and is) three neon tubes and explains “this is what makes time travel possible, the flux capacitor”....aaand that’s it for the movie’s explanation of time travel. But my point is that this is the best way to explain time travel because time travel is impossible, so there is no point in spending an inordinate amount of time trying to justify it. We’re trying to watch a movie here. In this movie it’s possible because of the flux capacitor and we’re moving on.

The Mad Max series of movies (until this last one) are very good examples of movies not explaining things that are best not explained. We are told that the plot takes place in some future dystopian wasteland where nothing grows and the most prized resource in the world is gasoline. Gasoline is important because seemingly every technology but the internal combustion engine has vanished off the face of the earth giving armed stockcar and motorcycle gangs military superiority. And before you can really question how likely that scenario is, here are 90 minutes of awesome car chases.

A specific example of something not being explained in the last movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, was the missing arm of the female protagonist Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). She shows up as a highly capable warrior who can drive and shoot and fight and she doesn’t have her left arm. No explanation is given or attempted. What did the audience think of this? Well, if they were like me, they would have just assumed she was either born without it (this is a toxic wasteland) or she lost it doing something badass.

In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, we are treated to the explanation for how her arm was lost. And now that I have experienced both knowing and not knowing, I can tell you that I prefer not knowing how the arm was lost. In fact, consider this alternate take on the Furiosa movie. The movie starts with a two-armed child. She gets kidnapped by bikers and grows up at the Citadel. Later in the movie, as the character switches actresses from child to Anya Taylor-Joy (late 20s now), she is reintroduced without her arm, the idea being that she lost it somehow, and there is still no explanation given. Think about it, wouldn’t that be kind of awesome.

There is way too much explaining going on in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Just look at the run time, 2 hours 38 minutes. Max Mad: Road Warrior from 1982 was a brisk 96 minutes. Mad Max: Fury Road was the longest of the movies at 2 hours, but still its plot was deceptively simple. That movie starts with a car chase that goes one way and then they turn around and go back to where they started. It’s all over within a few days of movie time.

Here we have a plot heavy movie for the first time and much of it is not the kind of plot that we line up to see a Mad Max movie for, that is, it doesn’t involve car chases in the desert. Sorely missing is the exhilaration of Nicholas Hoult’s performance as the delirious and excitable War Boy Nux in the Fury Road movie (“What a Lovely Day!”). There is a notable big rig fight with a bad guy called the Octoboss, but that is too small a part in this movie, which is full of too many things that mean something. Since the world is impossible, it is best not to dwell too much on what makes it work. I’m not sure I need to understand the political machinations between the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gas Town.

Did Anya Taylor-Joy do a good job? That is hard to say. She certainly wasn’t memorable in the way that Charlize Theron was. Then again, she is not given much to work with. She has next to no lines, and didn’t do anything that would establish her as an action star. We have Chris Hemsworth chewing up the scenery, but there is either not enough of him, or just too much of other things.

I was very impressed by the look of Mad Max: Fury Road when I saw it all the way back in 2015. I had a similar experience watching Furiosa this year that I just had watching Dune 2. That is, I was less impressed by the visuals. I wonder whether it is because the world is not being introduced to me for the first time or because I saw the movie at home on a smaller screen. It is hard to say, though I do believe that the action in Furiosa is inferior to Fury Road. Something about it, well, I just know sometimes when I am watching a CGI car crash or a CGI blood spatter, and it isn't exciting. I wish the creators just figured out some way to do actions scenes without it. Ultimately, CGI is a crutch not a solution. Just watch Road Warrior. I am continually amazed by how well those 1982 action scenes work with no computers at all to rely on. They just have to do a little bit less in frame and employ a little more creativity.