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.

Hundreds of Beavers (4/5)

Hundred of Beavers was written by Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (you don’t know them) sometime around 2018. It was shot over the winter of 2019-2020 in Wisconsin with a crew of six. Mike Cheslik directed and Ryland Tews starred. The movie was edited by Mike Cheslik for two years using mainly Adobe After Effects ($22.99/month subscription). The total budget was $150,000. The movie premiered at the Fantastic Fest in 2022, which is a film festival in Austin, TX, that is not SXSW. From there, it hopped from film festival to film festival in 2023. It was released on streaming in April 2024. A select few theaters in NYC showed it for a couple of weeks.

The above storyline you should find intriguing. Because a film made by nobody and coming from nowhere usually doesn’t eventually get to a wide distribution. What usually happens if the movie is bad or even mediocre is that it dies a quiet death before anyone who doesn’t regularly attend film festivals even hears of it. But here “Hundreds of Beavers” is, and it is possible that you can see it. You probably should, simply because it exists and there is nothing else much like it.

Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick comedy about an apple cider brewer named Jean Kayak that loses his apple groves and applejack liquor business in a catastrophic instance of beaver sabotage. He wakes up in the middle of a snowy winter with nothing and spends the first third of the movie just trying to survive in the wilderness. The movie is in black and white (not deliberate, just cheaper to edit and create special effects) and lacks dialogue (deliberate for purposes of humor). Jean Kayak’s attempts to feed himself resemble the plot of an extended Wile E. Coyote cartoon. He concocts elaborate plans and traps to snare his dinner, rabbits and beavers, which routinely veer off into bizarre and humorous outcomes. The movie employs human actors for all parts, even the rabbits and beavers are played by humans in rabbits and beavers costumes. But beyond that, it is hard to tell what in-frame is real and what is an aftereffect. For practical purposes, the movie may be categorized better as animated.

The second third of the movie plays like a video game in which Jean Kayak reinvents himself as a fur trapper and starts concocting elaborate schemes to kill beavers and sell their pelts to the local merchant in exchange for increasingly valuable prizes (the most valuable of which being the hand of his daughter in marriage, worth "hundreds of beavers"). This part of the movie gets a little tedious, not necessarily because any one part of it is not funny, but because there are too many separate parts. After all, the perfect length of a Looney Tunes cartoon is about five minutes long. This movie is 108 minutes. You can only take so much of this type of fast-paced humor before being gassed. I'm not sure what part should have been cut, but its about 18 minutes too long.

But in the third third, well, that is where the movie truly gets special. For the beavers aren’t just ordinary beavers. They have been chewing through the forest in order to gather enough logs to build something extraordinary on the lake. Indeed, what exactly they are building argues that Jean Kayak’s increasingly systematic harvesting of their pelts amounts to something close to a murderous rampage, if not an outright genocide. When Jean Kayak is Beaver captured, he is even given a Beaver trial and provided a Beaver lawyer. This Beaver society has the rule of law.

There are some truly ingenious scenarios and setups in this movie. The opening song is a lot of fun. The hunting party and the wolves that follow it provide amusing horror/suspense. The merchant’s daughter is a good pole dancer. And I happen to think that men in big beaver costumes are inherently funny, especially so when they are fighting. I eagerly anticipate what Cheslik and Tews could do with a budget. Someone should give them a bunch of money so we can all find out.

I think this movie would make a great double feature with Avatar. Avatar is one of the most expensive movies ever, made by as high-profile of creators as you can get, and has such a self-serious pro-nature bent that it is technically anti-human. Whereas Hundreds of Beavers couldn’t be cheaper, is made by nobodies and is unapologetically, perhaps even unethically, pro-human. The latter would be a great antidote to the former.

Road House (2024) (3/5 Stars)

They have remade "Road House" the 1989 classic action-comedy starring Patrick Swayze. This gives me another excuse to talk about Roger Ebert, whose review of the same I am incorporating entirely at the bottom of this review. I have read at least a thousand of Roger's reviews. His review of Road House is arguably his best one. I share this review more than I share any other of Roger's reviews. On the "Road House" DVD, one of the audio commentaries is done by superfan Kevin Smith (Clerks) who takes the time to bring up and read the entirety of Roger's review during the movie. In the history of DVD audio commentaries (as far as I know) it has only happened once that a movie review is recited for the record, and that was Roger's review of Road House.

It is notable that Roger didn't think the movie was good, but this only proves one of his better philosophies: that it isn't the reviewer’s job to get it right, that is to correctly judge whether a movie is "good" or "bad". (thumbs notwithstanding, Roger would always direct his audience to his writing column for his full opinion. He reviewed far more movies in writing than on his TV show.) No, the job of a reviewer is to describe the movie accurately. This is the only way a reviewer can be helpful because different people want to and like to see different types of movies. Now, with that idea in mind, I suggest you peruse Roger's review. By the end of it, I guarantee that you will have a pretty good idea as to whether or not you are the type of person who would want to see Road House (1989).

The remake of “Road House” has a decent enough pedigree on paper. Doug Liman (Swingers, Edge of Tomorrow) is directing. Jake Gyllenhaal has replaced Patrick Swayze as Dalton. Billy Magnussen is the lead bad guy and Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter, is a crazy henchman. But producing a remake, particularly a remake of an already perfect movie like Road House (1989), is tricky. After all, if the original movie is great, why remake it? Why not just watch the original. Case in point: West Side Story (1961) and West Side Story (2021).

A remake only makes sense when the original movie is good with room to improve, is hampered by a lack of budget/outdated technology, or has a cultural barrier like a foreign language. Great remakes include Scarface (1933) and Scarface (1983), Ocean’s Eleven (1960) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001), and Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Minus One (2023). Scarface is a good example of an update in time and place, taking a 1920s Italian immigrant smuggling booze in NYC and replacing it with a 1980s Mariel Boatlift immigrant smuggling cocaine in Miami. Ocean’s Eleven is a good example of taking an ordinary heist plot and adding on lots of intricacies and smooth editing. Godzilla Minus One is arguably the best remake I have seen, introducing a superior drama as well as 21st century special effects to a B-movie that utilized men in godzilla suits.

What I am saying is that doing the same thing in a remake doesn’t make sense. Something should change. The tricky part is deciding what should change when so much of the original movie worked. And Road House (2024) is a lesson in changing the wrong things.

The update in time and place is neutral. The original Road House took place in 1989 in Missouri. The new Road House takes place now in Florida. Whatever.

However, the biggest and most inexplicable change is the backstory of the main character, Dalton. In the original movie, Dalton is the world’s best bouncer. He gets head hunted by a corporate man who owns a bar that he wants to remodel and expand. Dalton doesn’t drink or smoke, starts his mornings with some half-naked Tai Chi (or something), and tells his subordinate bouncers to be nice to rowdy customers. In the remake, Dalton does not have this back story. In fact, he isn’t a professional bouncer at all. Instead, he is a UFC fighter that got blackballed from the sport because he killed an opponent in the ring with an illegal hit. The owner of the new Road House (Jessica Williams) hires Dalton not because she wants him to stop fights, but because she wants Dalton to win them.

The bad guys have changed too. In the original, the big bad guy, Brad Wesley, was a hedonist who threw extravagant Playboy style parties in his mansion (Seemingly financed all by shaking down local businesses, which as Roger Ebert accurately pointed out, seemed to be limited to three locations). Here the bad guys are young angry men on yachts engaged in the well-worn subplot of a real estate developer trying to force out the one last remaining business on the block so they can get on with their planned super-development. There also seems to be a drugs subplot, which would be in the running with the former for the most well-worn subplot in the history of movie subplots. The bad guys have a lot less fun than Brad Wesley did in the first movie. They have no women. There is no nudity.

That the bad guys are a lot less fun and that Dalton is unprofessional removes one of the elements that made the original Road House unique. How to put this? You see, Dalton (1989) works in a corporate capacity. His stated purpose is to help the owner’s business by calming down the joint so that patrons can feel safer and spend more money. Dalton is polite until he cannot be polite. He has a degree in philosophy. He’s monogamous. In other words, Dalton is a square and the original Road House (1989) is a conservative movie. Now, I say that even though the original movie is wall-to-wall sex and violence. But this is one of the things that movies can do. They can reinforce ideals in the good guys while simultaneously allowing a vicarious experience of the opposite through the bad guys. Road House (1989) allows the squares to have it both ways. The new Road House (2024) removes this guilty pleasure.

Instead, Dalton (2024) is but a reincarnation of John Wick and an endless multitude of other older violent vigilantes, a man who nominally wants to be peaceful but becomes super dangerous if angered enough. I don’t understand why that would be the change to be made in this remake. Road House (2024) has ditched the one thing that made the original unique and, in turn, has transformed this intellectual property into something you’ve already seen a bunch of times.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor. He has done fine work in a multitude of movies (Zodiac, Prisoners, Okja). Having said that, I don’t really buy him as an action star. Even with all the muscles. He does his best work as Emo (Donnie Darko, The Good Girl, Nocturnal Animals). I find it hard to believe that he could beat Conor McGregor in a fist-fight. Weird thing is, I don’t think he is necessarily miscast as Dalton, but I mean the 1989 Dalton that only drinks coffee and tries really hard to be polite. He is miscast as this Dalton, which tries to be the poor man's version of Liam Neeson and/or Keanu Reeves.

Also, where are all the fat men getting into fistfights like the original movie? And the good music? Or the G-String contest? Could we get at least one ridiculously large explosion of a barn? How about a shot of Jake Gyllenhaal’s ass (McGregor’s ass does not count)? You couldn’t fit the line “Pain Don’t Hurt” anywhere? And, and, and….

-----------------

Roger Ebert, May 19 1989

The guiding spirit of "Road House" can be glimpsed in one particular scene, which is set in the trophy room of an evil sadist who holds a helpless town in his iron grasp. His hunting trophies include not only the usual deer and elk and antelopes, but also orangutans, llamas and a matched set of tropical monkeys. This guy went hunting in the zoo.

We are expected to believe that the sadist financed these hunting expeditions by shaking down the businesmen in a town that, on the visible evidence, contains a bar, a general store, a Ford dealership and two residences. "Road House" is the kind of movie that leaves reality so far behind that you have to accept it on its own terms.

Was it intended as a parody? I have no idea, but I laughed more during this movie than during any of the so-called comedies I saw during the same week. Consider, for example, the movie's hero, a barroom bouncer named Dalton and played by Patrick Swayze (last seen in "Dirty Dancing"). Here is a man known as the best bouncer in the business - and the business must pay well, since he owns a Mercedes convertible. But he is not simply your average tough guy. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University and is capable of deep insights into his trade, such as, "In a fight, nobody wins." Dalton is summoned to a small Missouri town where the Double Deuce, the local nightclub, is terrorized nightly by the local goons and louts. His assignment: Bring peace to the bar so the owner can remodel and expand. His enemies: the hired guns of Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), the extortionist with the exotic trophy room. (Everyone in this movie has names out of a Western - not only Dalton and Brad Wesley, but also such characters as Wade Garrett, Doc, Emmet, and Cody. Doc is a girl, but never mind.) Dalton wades into the fray on opening night and finds himself in the middle of a fight in which the furnishings of the Double Deuce are reduced to matchsticks. Wounded by a knife cut, he goes to the hospital, where the gash is sewn closed by Doc (Kelly Lynch), a beautiful blond who is impressed by Dalton's doctorate in philosophy and his ability to withstand pain.

In no time at all, Dalton and Doc are making love on the porch roof outside Dalton's rented room - a roof that can clearly be seen by the evil Wesley, who once entertained hopes of becoming Doc's lover.

(These two houses, on either side of a river, seem to be the only homes in town, and most of what goes on in each house seems to be staged for the benefit of the other.) Dalton sees he needs help to clean up the bar. So he calls in his best friend, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), who is the second-best barroom bouncer in the world. (Note to cable TV operators: The world finals of bouncing might pull in decent ratings.) This upsets Wesley no end, since his income depends on maintaining an iron rule of terror over the local townspeople.

"Road House" is said to be based on an actual case in Missouri where the local bad guy, universally hated by everyone in town, was murdered in broad daylight - and no one in town seems to have seen a thing. If that is the genesis for the story, everything else in it seems to have come from a cheerful willingness to go over the top in every way possible.

This is the first movie in a long time to use the line, "Prepare to die!" And how long has it been since the same movie contained a) a dash into an exploding building to save an occupant; b) a rock 'n' roll band protected by a Plexiglas shield; c) goons who line up for instructions and call the bad guy "boss"; d) a lecture on the fine points of bouncing; e) a sexy woman doctor who goes all the way on the first date, and f) random quotations from the great Western philosophers? This movie is so top-heavy with plot, it can even afford to ignore some obvious possibilities. For example, Swayze's rented room is on a ranching spread across the river from Gazzara, and Gazzara is so busy with his other villainous duties that he doesn't have time for the standard subplot in which he wants to run the rancher off the land so he can build a subdivision. Of course, in a town with two residences, there may not be much pent-up housing demand.

"Road House" exists right on the edge between the "good-bad movie" and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer. This is not a good movie.

But viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Not Boring)

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a 1965 by Russ Meyer, an auteur that produced, directed, and sometimes wrote low budget B-movies that prominently and constantly featured women with large breasts.

I am writing a movie review about it for a couple reasons. The first is that I saw it last week in a movie theater, Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, NYC, to be exact. The original rule of this blog was that I would write a review for every new release movie I saw in a movie theater. There were some exceptions to that rule over the the years, but given that I watch less and less new releases in theaters (my son, my work, the fact that there isn’t a movie theater in my neighborhood), I may as well expand the rule to every movie I see in a theater, regardless of whether it is a new release. I would like to write at least two reviews a month, and at least 20 movie reviews a year, and writing a review about every theatrical experience will help narrow what movies I write about. After all, I’m not really seeing less movies. Also the movie reviews will be fairer. For instance, I was considering writing a review for Dune: Part Two, but would that be truly fair since I saw the movie at home instead of where I should have seen it, on the big screen (I was about to write that the visual aspect of it was not as impressive the second time around, but is that because it wasn’t or because I saw on a television set?). This review will also give me the chance to write about the theatrical experience, and perhaps, the future of it. Stay tuned for that after the movie.

What can we say about this movie? It takes place somewhere in the Southern Californian desert where our three large breasted heroines (villains?) spend their time drag racing convertibles. There is Varla (Tura Satana) who has black hair, a violent nature and a short temper, Billie (Lorie Williams) a blonde, playful and sexually reckless, and Rosie (Haji) who is Italian much in the same way that Chico Marx is Italian. That is, she speaks in an Italian accent and that’s it. On the other hand, her lack of a personality defaults her as the relatively sane one.

The first half of the movie concerns this trio’s terrorizing of a young couple. It starts out friendly, and I’m still not quite sure what happened, but ends in a murder of the guy and the kidnapping of the girl. Then as the trio are filling their gas tanks, the station attendant tips them off on an old man living in a nearby ranch that might be hoarding a large amount of money. He lives with his two sons, one of which reminded me of Dr. Frankenfurter’s creation in Rocky Horror Picture Show, i.e. he’s hot and very stupid. The old man is, like immediately, revealed to be sexually degenerate, and somehow this movie turns from a story about the trio kidnapping the girl to maybe saving her from this guy.

In between all of this nonsense are fast cars, fast women, a few murders, two sex scenes that both start and end inexplicably, one fried chicken lunch, and several lame but not annoying attempts at humor. I enjoyed it. As Roger Ebert (movie critic, and former screenwriter for Russ Meyer) wisely put it: a B-movie can’t be good in the classic sense, but they can achieve a certain level of distinction by not being boring. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Is the perfect example that statement. You can say a lot about what it is or isn’t, and the arguments will continue for as long as the movie is still watched, but something we can all agree is that it is not boring.

At the showing, the movie was (briefly) introduced by a film historian who informed me that the movie was a favorite amongst homosexuals and that Russ Meyer was an honorary member of the gay community. (This movie was part of a film series at Nitehawk titled Be Gay, Do Crime!). That is sort of news to me. Like, I was aware that gay film directors like breasts (see Almodovar and Penelope Cruz), so it was not hard for me to realize the connection with Russ Meyer when it was pointed out. But I think the connection is even simpler than that. The women in this movie don’t really act like women. (Of course, neither do the men act like men. The story isn’t written well enough). They do however, act and look like drag queens. Drag queens are the combination of the worst stereotypes of both men and women, the aggression and entitlement of the man, the vanity and vapidity of the woman. And although we can argue about whether being so extra is socially acceptable, I think we can all agree that drag queens are not boring. I like them well enough at a distance, like on a movie screen.

I am happy to report that Nitehawk Cinema showed Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! In its main theater for a 9:30 p.m. showing on a Monday night and that the performance was sold out. Importantly, because the movie is not a new release, Nitehawk will be able to keep most, if not near all of the take from the tickets receipts. On top of that haul, Nitehawk sells good food and alcohol, which probably bring in more money than the tickets.

I believe Nitehawk is the future of movie theaters. Not as many people see new releases in theaters nowadays because of their ability to see movies on streaming services or on demand at home on big high definition television set for less money and less travel. But the experience of watching a movie that cannot be paused in a dark room on a giant screen with a group of people (all of which intensifies reactions and minimizes distractions) is still the best way to watch a movie. Add catered food and mixed cocktails and you've got a high value experience. With the advent of social media, it is now easier for movie theaters to advertise for special events like the showing of old movies. And since tickets can be purchased online several weeks, sometimes months, in advance, the theater will have a pretty good idea of whether the night will be well attended and adapt accordingly. I expect Nitehawk could have even switched the theaters from the large room to the small room depending on demand if it was so required.

Another good development that I have heard of but not yet experienced has taken place. Movie studios are now able to own movie theaters. (The news is that Sony has purchased Alamo Drafthouse). This vertical integration was long barred because of monopoly restrictions, but (I am assuming) the splintering of American culture and diversification of ways to experience content has rendered those monopoly concerns moot. In the best case scenario, what this should do is allow more opportunity for smaller films to be seen in movie theaters. As it is, since movie theaters have to give a substantial amount of their take to the studios for new releases, movie theaters have an incentive to show only big blockbuster films that they know will sell a lot of high-price tickets. If the theaters don’t have to share the take (because the studio owns the theater) and they can serve food and alcohol (all you have to do is remove zoning laws) then the price of the movie ticket could conceivably remain low enough for people to be willing to watch a smaller movie in the theater. We will cross our fingers and see.

Godzilla Minus One (5/5 Stars)

“I have a question. Does this plan of yours mean certain death?”

“Of course it doesn’t.”

“Okay, well, those odds are better than the war.”

So goes a conversation in Godzilla Minus One in which a naval commander attempts to persuade a room of Japanese men to volunteer for a mission to fight back against Godzilla, a monster mutated to gigantic proportions by radioactive discharge of H-Bombs tests in the Pacific Ocean in post-war Japan. It is an extraordinary scene given the historical context. The first notable detail is that the commander is requesting cooperation, not demanding compliance. Japan, and particularly imperial Japan, before and during the war, was extremely hierarchical. Not only did figures of authority demand complete obedience (infamously to the point of death), but the subjects usually obeyed without compunction. The second notable detail is that enough men actually agree to the mission, after, importantly, others do not without shame or consequence. This is right after defeat in World War II, a conflict whose damage to Japan and its people was exacerbated by the imperial leadership’s willingness to sacrifice its soldiers/pilots in suicide attacks and its people in bombing raids far beyond the point of any realistic hope of victory (and, of course, the American’s stunning capacity for ruthlessness in carrying out the same). These men aren’t agreeing to this dangerous mission simply because the authorities are expecting them to. They accept it on their own terms and, specifically, they aren’t willing to risk their lives for nothing. They insist on a plan that makes sense and has a chance to succeed. In one movie scene, you can feel Japanese culture feeling around for the middle ground between gung-ho aggression and total pacifism.

In the annals of human history, there are not many parallels to a society being so thoroughly laid low as Japan was in World War II. What exactly happened has rarely been directly addressed in the history of cinema, American or Japanese. One of the best war movies ever made, Grave of the Fireflies, showed a fire bombing raid, a mother covered head to toe in bandages dying from burns, a sister slowly starving to death. Thankfully, it was animated. The subject matter was so intense that it would have been very hard to watch if the medium itself wasn’t one removed from reality. Godzilla has always been a giant metaphor for nuclear war of course, but here he becomes more than that, a giant metaphor for war itself. How the characters react to Godzilla reveals their feelings toward war, the present one with Godzilla, yes, but also the one that has just devastated the country. In East Asian fashion, the people still pull their punches when it comes to criticizing their leaders, but the metaphor presents the opportunity to indirectly express these feelings, and the writing by Takashi Yamasaki (also the director) is exemplary in this regard. The main dramatic through is the character of Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot that either smartly and/or disgracefully did not complete a suicide mission during WWII, and how he seeks to redeem himself against Godzilla.

After seeing this movie (and being floored by how good it was), I looked up the original movies from 1954. An apt comparison of Godzilla Minus One is the first Daniel Craig era reboot of the James Bond franchise Casino Royale. A similar idea behind both being: what if we took this very popular pulp entertainment and rebooted it as a well-made and produced, dramatically competent, movie. Well, here it is. According to Wikipedia there are 38 other Godzilla movies. I’ve only seen five of them (1954, 1998, 2014, 2021, and 2024) but I would be very surprised if Godzilla Minus One isn’t the best one. This isn’t just a great monster movie. It’s one of the best movies of the year.

Godzilla himself is a fearsome monster. He has come a long way from a man in a suit knocking over skyscraper models. There is the iconic scene of crowds of people running away from him as he stomps through Tokyo. Godzilla’s heat ray is a straight up atomic blast that prompts an extraordinary scene of not just physical destruction but emotional devastation. The movie won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects and, somehow, this is a low-budget movie. Or at least relatively low, like 30 million dollars. I frankly don’t understand how that is possible, except to say that everyone else in the industry has much they can learn from it.

Unfrosted (3/5 Stars)

 

There is a scene in Unfrosted, a movie that parodies the making of the original Pop-Tarts, in which the product is tested in the labs over there at Kellog’s. The brains behind the operation, Bob Cabana (played by Jerry Seinfeld) and Donna Stankowski (played by Melissa McCarthy) are stationed behind sandbags, plate glass and barb wire while Steve Schwinn (played by Jack McBryer) dressed as an astronaut tests out the products ability to interact with an ordinary kitchen toaster. This takes place on Earth, but Steve Schwinn moves in slow motion as if miming the low gravity of the moon. Then Bob Cabana looks over at Donna Stankowski and mugs, “Isn’t this a bit much?”

Take a moment to consider the context. Kellog’s didn’t test the first pop-tart this way. Indeed, Kellog’s didn’t even make up this story as part of an advertising campaign for the Pop-Tart. So it doesn’t make sense for the joke to be on a self-serious and unaware Kellog’s. Actually, the reason why the making of the Pop-Tart is being treated as if it is a NASA mission is because of Jerry Seinfeld. It is Jerry Seinfeld that really likes Pop-Tarts. It is Jerry Seinfeld that co-wrote this movie, directed it, and cast himself as the lead. So when Jerry Seinfeld remarks, “Isn’t this a bit much?” there is only one person who can be the object of that joke, himself. But the character Bob Cabana doesn’t seem to understand this, and really, the movie doesn’t understand it either, which is the main reason why the majority of it fails comedically.

Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that making a sitcom episode is like running with an egg. A movie is a compartmentalized and cooperative process and a joke is a fragile thing. For the joke to survive from inspiration to showtime, it needs to successfully survive writing, production, editing etc. Sometimes you can pinpoint, where exactly in the process the joke fails. Unfrosted is an example of a movie failing at the starting gun. The idea is wrong. The movie doesn’t know where the joke is.

If Unfrosted was going to work, then Jerry Seinfeld and his obsession with highly processed breakfast options needed to be the object of satire. To do this, he should have cast himself as the CEO of Kellog’s and he should have played the part straight with no winking. Then Jim Gaffigan should have been the long-suffering and weirdly obsequious Bob Cabana. Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan should have switched parts.

Then when the CEO of Kellog’s, Jerry Seinfeld, insists that competitors are to be spied upon, that a head scientist from NASA is to be poached, and that a coterie of crazy persons are hired to perform research (don’t change any of this, definitely keep Bobby Moynihan as Chef Boy Ardee), this will be funny because Jerry Seinfeld really is crazy about Pop-Tarts and everyone in Hollywood would gladly do anything he wanted. Just take a look at the cast herein, if you don’t believe me on that note. Jerry Seinfeld has such tremendous good will stored up from his TV show, which itself made so much money, that a rolled up red carpet follows him around on the off-chance he might want to do something, anything, other than stand-up comedy. (I heard he once remarked off the cuff something about bees being interesting. A year later, you had The Bee Movie.) That reality can be funny, particularly in the context of an unimportant breakfast option, but this movie doesn’t see that potential. It is frustrating to see so much not quite work and so much left on the table.

Here is an example of something left on the table. Melissa McCarthy, a NASA food scientist, is poached by Jerry Seinfeld. He argues to her that Pop-Tarts are an exciting innovative frontier in food and that it is a waste of her time to be working on the moon because that is never going to happen. Walk on the moon, Jerry scoffs, come on. Okay, that is funny enough. But where is the scene where NASA actually does put men on the moon and Melissa gets angry at Kellog’s because she missed it to work on Pop-Tarts. (This would be the dramatic end of Act II, a development that threatens to pull the team apart for good). And now imagine Melissa getting mad at Jim Gaffigan instead of Jerry Seinfeld because I switched the characters. Same goes for the Pablo Escobar and the Milk Thugs scenes. I mean, Jim Gaffigan can actually act ashamed/scared. Or to put it another way, Jim Gaffigan can actually act.

And wouldn’t it be funnier if Jon Hamm and Jon Slattery had a good idea for the marketing of Pop-Tarts, which Jerry Seinfeld rejects because he wants the moon. (That’s a MadMen reference). And wouldn’t it be funnier if, but I should stop here, I don’t want to be too obvious about wanting to work with Jerry Seinfeld.