Emilia Perez (2/5 Stars)

I’ll give “Emilia Perez” this, it is consistent and it is original. That is, it has a vision and follows it without distraction or compromise. It is a great example of Roger Ebert’s insight about the worst movies being made by some of the best talents. His point was that those who lack skill generally make mediocre movies that inspire neither admiration nor hatred. Those movies are simply boring. It takes great talent to make a great movie. But it also usually takes great talent to make a truly awful movie. Only the best of us have the ability to take a bad idea and unapologetically and unwaveringly run it into the ground. “Emilia Perez” is one such movie.

A movie can be good in two ways. It can be technically proficient, the set can be correctly lit, the sound can be correctly mixed, the makeup can be correctly applied etc. It can also be personally enjoyable: that is, the subject matter can appeal to the personal preferences of the audience. (I never saw last Christmas’s viral hit “Hot Frosty” but I bet the people who watched it were probably pleased with the product without it needing to be all that technically good.) A movie can also be bad in two ways. It can be incompetently made. But a movie can also be technically proficient, but offensive on a personal level. These categories overlap obviously. Most mediocre ones are technically deficient but personally appealing. The last category, technically proficient and bad, is the most rare. Since movies are such a collaborative medium, and are made for people, it is rare that a team of talented people, working well together, make a truly offensive movie.

To illustrate what makes a movie “bad” in the second sense, take the character of Rita Mora Castro, a lawyer played by Zoe Saldana. We are introduced to her as she is preparing the defense of a client that the movie strongly implies murdered his wife by throwing her out of a window. Zoe Saldana does a song and dance (this movie is a musical) in which she uses her legal acumen to thrwart the meanings of words like “love”, “justice”, and “freedom” in favor of someone she knows is guilty. At the same time, she complains and pities herself that her legal talents are not appreciated by her superiors. At no point in this song does Ms. Castro express sympathy for the murder victim.

Movies and television shows are replete with characters of dubious moral nature. But just because a movie is about a bad person, does not mean that the writers/directors/producers of this movie are justifying that character’s behavior. Some of the best cinema about bad people, think Walter White of “Breaking Bad” or Tony Soprano of “The Sopranos”, are made by creators with well honed moral compasses who know exactly why and how bad their characters choices are. That well honed morality lends greatly to the dramatic arc of the story line. The problem with “Emilia Perez” is that it supports its sleazebag attorney. She could be a good person, but she isn’t because she wants money and power. The movie is fine with that and even goes so far as to give her a song and dance at a later time in which she accuses everyone else of being worse. The argument essentially is that her character’s lack of candor and dubious morality is justified because people don’t deserve her integrity. That is offensive. As a lawyer myself, that is specifically offensive to me. Her position and education demand that she hold herself to a higher moral standard, which, at a minimum, means she doesn’t make bullshit excuses like not being able to start her own law firm (where presumably she would be able to practice law without moral compromise) because, and I quote her, she’s black.

Ms. Castro’s efforts in support of the rich and powerful are not ignored though. She is approached by the boss of a drug cartel who wants her to help him fake his own death so that he may engage in a voluminous amount of cosmetic surgery to the end of transforming himself into a woman. The plan, carried out to song and dance, is successful. He fakes his death, abandons his wife and children in the process (he did not bother to seek their counsel about it), and resurfaces from the bandages with, among other things, new skin, new breasts, a new vagina, and a reduction in his adam’s apple. Importantly, he pays for all of this by embezzling money from his drug cartel. Like a lot of money. So although he starts a new life, shorn from the responsibility of running a large organization, he still has all the money and lives his new life as a new woman in luxury in a big house with maids and newly hired goons. Imagine the CEO of the company you're working at doing something like this. Imagine your spouse doing something like this. Imagine your father doing something like this. Imagine a movie not giving a shit about your feelings and instead insisting that you should feel a great joy in this person’s journey of self-actualization.

And it gets worse. This man refers to this decision as if a woman, someone named Emilia Perez, is telling him to do it. And this is another striking example of this movie being tone deaf and in dramatically poor taste. After the transformation, Emilia Perez, feeling sorry for all the mothers of Mexico whose children have been disappeared in the drug wars, starts a non-governmental organization that denounces the cartels that are conducting this orgy of violence, and the corrupt government that allows it. This NGO aids in the retrieval of bodies from mass graves so that these poor mothers can adequately mourn. (This Emilia Perez is quite adept at doing  this because she intuitively knows where the bodies are buried.) The character, and the movie, are under the impression that engaging in a sex-change operation absolves all sins and makes the character a truly different person. Emilia Perez feels no need to turn herself into the police or give back the money she has gained via the blood of innocents. She didn’t commit those crimes. The man did.

There is an old joke about the rich man and his toupee. This egocentric guy, growing old and growing bald, decides to invigorate his looks with some youth by wearing a hair piece. It looks ridiculous and everyone can tell it is fake. But no one says it to his face because he is rich. So he just goes around looking ridiculous ensconced in a delusion that only the wealthy can afford. This is the same with all transgender people who choose to engage in cosmetic surgery. We simply do not have the technology to affect what they desire and, most of the time, they end up in the uncanny valley, approaching something to what they intend to be but obviously, and unsettlingly, not what they intend to be. So, even with all this surgery, which I believe the actor Karla Sofia Gascon actually received (for personal reasons, not for the movie), there is an unspoken dirty little secret that hangs over the movie. Karla Sofia Gascon looks ridiculous and fake. This is clearly a man we are looking at. It says a lot about this movie that it chooses to engage in this pandering sensibility so much so that even in front of all the television cameras that Emilia Perez preens for, not a single person in Mexico recognizes the drug lord. Even her wife (played by Selena Gomez) and children don’t recognize him. Emilia Perez pretends to be a long lost and very rich aunt of the deceased drug boss and no one suspects a thing. It says alot about the Academy that they have decided to sustain this pandering delusion by nominating Karla Sofia Gascon in the category of Best Actress. SHE’S A MAN!

“Emilia Perez” has an ending reminiscent of the one in “The Room”, in which writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau, after dragging us through an awful awful movie, at least unwittingly granted the audience the concession of watching the hated main character commit suicide. “Emilia Perez” provides this same type of relief when we are treated to a large fireball that kills enough people to spare us a sequel. The movie believes the characters are martyrs and that this should be very sad (there is funeral parade in which the poor peasants of Mexico appear to be canonizing the memory of Emilia Perez), but we know they more or less got what they deserved and the scene works as a cleansing purge that washes away much of the repugnant build-up of toxicity and entitlement that came before it. Can this movie become a cult classic at midnight screenings with running commentaries by derisive drag queens? I don’t know, I think it might be too technically proficient of a movie, but maybe. As for the music, well there wasn’t any particular song or melody that stood out as good or distinctly memorable. The dancing was fine I guess. Whether or not the lyrics were eloquent (or even rhymed) is beyond me because I do not speak Spanish.

And now we have to address the elephant in the room here, which is that “Emilia Perez” has been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, the most of any other movie this year. It could very well be named Best Picture. Although there is a perverse part of me that likes the idea of a movie as original and daring as “Emilia Perez” winning the top prize, I can’t help but imagining that such an honor bestowed would come off with the general populace like the movie itself, tone deaf and in dramatically poor taste. It would be a few notches worse than giving Will Smith a standing ovation after he slapped Chris Rock in the face. I suppose it is hard for certain insular groups to consider the feelings of other people. The Academy is no exception (weird though, since the point of art is to do just that). For political reasons, “Emilia Perez” should be nowhere near the Best Picture race. Maybe their high-priced attorneys can explain this to them in such a way that it doesn’t unduly hurt their feelings. If the Academy wants to be daring, it can bestow the prize on “Anora”, a movie that presents with clear eyes how the delusional entitlement of very rich people affects the rest of us. Or the Academy can be safe and honor whatever this year’s version of “Green Book” (“Wicked”, anyone?’). Almost everything we do is political and certainly at this level with so many millions of people watching. We just experienced a political election in which a manifestly defective nominee just won the popular vote. One can sit back like Ms. Castro and complain about other people, or one can take stock in this simple reality: that the American people looked at Donald Trump and then the alternative and then, after ruminating about the choice for many many months, decided that the alternative was worse. The way to get back is to get better.

Gladiator II (2/5 Stars)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.”
Errol Morris

Edward Gibbon’s landmark The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1789) is distinct from most history texts in its general direction. Most histories start at the infancy of a civilization and follow it through to its maturity. The Decline and Fall starts at the maturity of the Roman civilization and follows it aaaaallllll the way down. The best and most famous of its historical characters are all at the beginning and as the story continues they get worse and more obscure. There are many reasons why the Roman Empire declined and Gibbon’s book has several thousand pages of them, but I will very briefly outline the very basic problem that occurred after the death of Marcus Aurelius (circa 186 A.D.) and continued for the next 100 years until the advent of the reign of Diocletian (circa 284 A.D.). The authority of the emperor rested on the army, and, more specifically, the Praetorian Guard which was that part of the army that was stationed in Rome. Starting with the reign of Commodus and moving forward, many emperors were killed via the honorable usurpation of a crazy tyrant or the dishonorable assassination of a competent prince, but no matter how the transfer of power occurred, the first thing that the new emperor would do would be to pay off the Praetorian guard with a donative, basically a bribe for the army’s loyalty. This first act of business was so ingrained and predictable that it created a moral hazard. After all, the more the army assassinated emperors, the more they benefited financially. For those 100 years, there were an estimated 30-35 emperors/usurpers, only one of which, Septimus Severus, died of natural causes. The rest were murdered.

[Gibbon tells of an extraordinary interregnum after the murder of the Emperor Aurelian (circa 275 A.D.) wherein the army asked the Senate to recommend a successor and the Senate, in turn, asked the army to recommend a successor, and this back and forth went on for eight whole months while the throne remained entirely vacant. Nobody wanted the death sentence.]

Surely, in this context, there is a prurient, exploitative, and lurid story to be told in blockbuster cinematic form. There isn’t really a moral to be found in the circuitous killing of so many princes over such a long period of time, which itself presaged only a further and total decline in the empire, but at least the story would have no lack of sensational violence. It may come as a surprise then that Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, a story that takes place circa 211-218 during the reigns of Geta, Caracalla, and Macrinus does not use any of it. The most this movie takes from history is the names of those three emperors, but the real crimes of these men are not explored and their interactions with each other, though dramatic and fatal in real life, are not shown and indeed cannot be said to even inspire the plot of the film. It is just generally bewildering to me that the writers could have such a mountain of material to work from and disregard all of it in favor of a storyline that, essentially, could only appeal to an audience entirely ignorant of the historical context in which the movie supposedly takes place.

Modern dramatists come across a very basic problem with interpreting material that either originates or takes place in the past. Shakespeare is a good example. There is always this temptation to update the language and locate the action in venues that are more easily identifiable. The problem is that the best thing about Shakespeare is the language, not the plot, and if you are updating the language, you lose what brought you to the material in the first place. The fact is that the past is old and hard to understand. To truly appreciate it, the audience needs to go to the past, not the other way around. The best Shakespeare performances are those that strip out all distractions from the words themselves and focus almost entirely on helping the audience understand what is being said.

Gladiator II could have been a much better movie with this approach. As it is, the plot concerns Lucius, the son of Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe’s character in the original) becoming a gladiator about twenty years after the events of the first film. He is a jaded malcontent that speaks derisively of the Roman Empire and yearns for his grandfather Marcus Aurelius's “Dream of Rome” in which power is returned to the Senate and the empire is once more based on freedom. There is a subplot in which a returning army is going to overthrow the corrupt duo of emperors Geta and Caracalla and enthrone the daughter of Marcus Aurelius (Connie Nielson, still alive from the original, where apparently she totally got it on with Russell Crowe and bore his son. I think we all missed that part) as the rightful heir to Marcus Aurelius with the presumed plan of returning the empire back to the old days of the Republic.

That bullshit plot is historically absurd. The Roman Senate was not a model of republican virtue and indeed had very little semblance with our modern institutions. The Romans did not believe in freedom and certainly no emperors, generals, senators, or sons and daughters of any of them would have paid lip service to a plan to expand "freedom" by granting more power to the Senate. Nor does this confused conspiracy have even internal logic. One cannot support freedom and republican virtues through the assumed authority of hereditary power. And there is no reason to believe that the daughter of Marcus Aurelius has more right to rule than the duo of emperors who are also the sons of emperors. Besides, I very much recall that in the original movie (and also in real life), Marcus Aurelius’ main mistake was giving over the empire to his worthless son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) instead of adopting a competent successor like Maximus. But here we are to assume that Lucius has some legitimate claim to the throne based on who his father and grandfather is. The movie ends with an incredible confrontation and denouement that suggests the “Dream of Rome” has a plausible chance of becoming a reality, perhaps as soon as the next movie. Of course, in reality, the Roman Empire declined and fell. Indeed the very next emperor after Macrinus, Elagabulus, was a teenage orgy enthusiast. He does not make an appearance here and is sorely missed.

There are good elements to the movie. I for one have no problem with the absurd spectacle of an armored Rhinoceros or a naval battle replete with sharks within the Coliseum. Those were fun. Also fun was Denzel Washington’s machiavellian portrayal of Macrinus. While all the other characters are enunciating their lines in “swords-and-sandals” fashion, he just chews through his dialogue as if this was the sequel to Training Day. He didn’t get the memo on how to act in the ancient past. Also, with one exception, this is a good example of color blind casting. Given that race didn’t matter in the Roman Empire (citizenship certainly mattered, but that wasn’t based on race), it doesn’t affect the inherent drama of any particular scene by having a black man play a character that historically wasn’t black. And since Denzel Washingon is one of our best actors, why not hire him to play what, in this historical context, should be a race neutral role. The only exception to this is the plot point, found in this movie but not in history, that Macrinus was once a slave, which for no apparent reason, makes Denzel Washington’s blackness seem relevant when it isn’t.

I’m not sure what the point is in morphing the distant past to pander to modern sensibilities. Most movies take place in the present and already do that. One of the best things about a movie that takes place in the past is that it can provide the modern audience a new experience, a story about humans that have an entirely different worldview. A very good example of this is the recent TV series Shogun, which is a fictional account of feudal Japan that takes pains in helping the audience understand what characters living in early 1600s Japan thought, felt, and were motivated by. I don’t think any of us would condone ritualistic suicide the way that feudal Japan did, but with a well produced story, the audience can understand why the characters do it and how it affects the plot. 

You don’t have to agree with characters in order to find them interesting. To only value the past to the extent that it justifies our actions in the present is a narcissistic, narrow, and numbingly tedious way to interpret historical events. After all, if there is no difference between then and now, then there is also no novelty in setting a story in Ancient Rome. And if all one considers important about the the past is that which comments on the present, then history does repeat itself, but only because one is too vain to consider those elements that are different. This is why movies made by Communists are so stupid and boring. Ridley Scott is usually better than this. 

All of Us Strangers (5/5 Stars)

Adam (played by Andrew Scott), a writer, sits alone in his apartment not writing. His building was recently built and so is almost uninhabited. One night the fire alarm goes off, Adam evacuates, and finds that he is the only person to do so. As he looks up at his building, he sees an apartment with a light on, the only apartment in the building with a light on, and a man looking down at him. They notice each other. Back in his apartment he hears a knock on his door. It is the man he had a moment with earlier (Paul Mescal). He introduces himself as Harry and offers his friendship in this lonely building, maybe more than that. Adam considers it but declines.

He thinks twice of it in the coming days and when he notices Harry again in the building lobby he strikes up another conversation. They start an intimate relationship. Around the same time, Adam visits his old neighborhood and indeed, the house he grew up in. He finds, without explanation, the ghosts of his deceased parents, frozen in age right before they died in a car crash when he was about nine years old.

What follows is a series of extraordinary conversations between Adam and his Mom (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell). They are curious as to how his life turned out and how he is doing. Adam comes out as gay to his mother who is mainly worried, in a 1980s way, that such an identity would lead to stigma and illness. Adam explains that things are different nowadays. Then he has a conversation with his father who with bemusement explains that he already knew he was gay. That conversation turns when Adam questions his Dad as to why he didn’t comfort him when he was being teased at school because of it. After considering the matter in full, perhaps for the first time, his Dad apologizes in a moment of sublime warmth.

Adam’s interactions with his parents are not confrontational and his parents aren’t defensive. Instead, Adam is curious about why his parents did or did not do things and the explanations given, generally, are that his parents are human beings that sometimes make mistakes. Maybe if they lived long enough, they could have gotten it right eventually, but they died when Adam was still young. His parents are happy that Adam has found in his new relationship with Harry. The plot turns in a way that I won’t reveal when Adam attempts to introduce them to each other.

“All of Us Strangers” was adapted by writer/director Andrew Haigh (Lean on Pete) from a Japanese novel entitled Strangers by Taichi Yamada. Without reading the novel, you can feel the Nippon seeping through the screen. It makes a lot of sense that the original story is about a man in Tokyo feeling lonely. Meeting ghosts as a matter of course without the obligatory “this can’t be real” scene is very Japanese. But reading the synopsis of the novel’s plot one gets an idea of how great an adaptation this could be. (I won’t know for certain until I read the book, which is now on my list. Ask me in a couple of years about it.) Apparently the homosexual identity of Adam and the very personal conversations about sexuality with his 1980s parents were all superimposed by Andrew Haigh on a Japanese novel about ghosts.

Sometimes when the emotions of a story are so raw, it helps to have a creative barrier to better aid the audience to digest the story. Japanese movies in particular can be so intense that sometimes I feel the subtitles help the experience. After all, when you don’t understand the language, you kind of assume that the acting is perfect and don’t find it distracting. (It is hard to imagine Grave of the Fireflies, a movie about fire bombings and starvation, being endurable without the helpful emotional salves of a foreign language and anime.) It is then commendable that All of Us Strangers, a live action movie in English, hits all of its notes with appropriate delicacy. In particular, the performance of Andrew Scott is meticulous in its execution. This movie excels in the Japanese art of small things.

There is one very special moment in this movie that is a lock of my annual award of Best Use of a Song. One of the ghost encounters has Adam travel back in time to the night of his parents’ death as they set up a Christmas tree in the warmth of the family home. Playing on the radio is “Always On My Mind” by The Pet Shop Boys. This song, like the movie, is an exceptional cover that transforms a heavy handed lyrical ballad sung by the likes of Elvis Presley into a normal brit pop tune with 1980s synthesizers and beats that only upon further introspection reveals tender and moving lyrics. Movies, music, poetry, I mean art in general has a utility in our lives that this scene is a shining example of. For most of us, it is hard to articulate exactly how we feel, either by lack of talent or by lack of nerve and probably both. But sometimes you can just point to a song, a dialogue, a phrase, a picture and say this, this is how I feel. All of Us Strangers is one of the best movies of the year.

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.