Freud's Last Session (2023)

Director: Matthew Brown

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Liv Lisa Fries, Jodi Balfour

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I barely managed to catch the last screening here in town.

Did I Like It: There’s a challenge at the core of the movie, and at the risk of oversimplifying, it might be boiled down to this: Is the entirety of human experience governed by God or by sex?

What if you’re of the opinion—and maybe in fact live in a time that has nearly uniformly decided—that both conclusions are a little bit preposterous?

The pitch of letting these two titans of a differing worldview then falls flat, but what I was ultimately struck by how much I found Lewis (Goode) to be a likable chap, not unlike the Jesuits that people The Exorcist (1973)*. Religious, sure, but still existing in the world, acknowledging that doing so is to accept that doubt may be the thing which binds the universe together. In short, he’s someone you could still have a conversation with, and he might even have an ability to read the room and know when someone isn’t in the market for proselytism. In even shorter, he is not of the tedious, glassy-eyed variety.

I’ve got a couple more reasons to do it, but I’ve actually started to read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe after resolutely spending the better part of forty years avoiding it. It’s… fine.

And the more I think about the movie, it’s probably… fine, too. One would imagine that we would have largely moved on from the slavish adaptation of plays for the screen after we figured out how to move the camera around when its tied to sound equipment. Everything about this movie reeks of transcription over adaptation, working more as a conversation than a dramatized or visually interesting story.

Maybe I need to really break down and watch Shadowlands (1993). Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

*It’s entirely possible I am working overly hard to misunderstand the point of that novel, that movie, and for that matter, everything about C.S. Lewis.

Chasing Liberty (2004)

Director: Andy Cadiff

Cast: Mandy Moore, Matthew Goode, Jeremy Piven, Mark Harmon

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I did watch First Daughter (2004) all the way through, for obvious reasons. I feel like that should count for something.

Did I Like It: Sometimes your wife has a bad day, and you say, “We can watch whatever you want.”

And she picks this.

And you already agreed to it.

So we watched it.

And there’s nothing terribly wrong with it. 

The locations are nice and varied. The extended sequences in Prague use several of the same locations from Mission: Impossible (1996), one of my favorites. The scenes in Venice bring to mind films like Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), and I’m more than a little embarrassed that was the only film shot in Venice which I could reach for in this moment... Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)! There, I found another one.

Mandy Moore is likable, and that will paper over a lot of blandness in a romantic comedy, and there is more than enough to go around here. I was starting to call out plot points for the film long before they came to pass. 

The film is a McDonald’s cheeseburger. It has no inherent value on its own. It is an imminently predictable experience. But in the end, it’s fine. Damning with faint praise? Sure. But I could damn it with other things, so maybe the film should take the win.

But let’s get to my real criticism: Mark Harmon plays the fatherly President, and that’s fine. I probably prefer him as a Secret Service agent, but that’s what happens when you steep yourself in The West Wing. First Daughter, on the other hand, has Michael Keaton as the President, so frequent visitors to the site will know which film I give the win.

...yes, the reason, I watched First Daughter was because Keaton was the President. Obvious reasons.

Watchmen (2009)

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, and Malin Åkerman

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah. I mean, I’ve read the comic book, so there’s not a lot that doesn’t cover both spheres of that particular venn diagram.

Did I Like It: Well… It’s not my least favorite Zack Snyder movie. It may even be my favorite Snyder film. But I’m quickly realizing that this doesn’t answer the question. 

Here are some things I really like about Watchmen:

• I’m eternally a sucker for alternate histories set in the 1980s. Ultimately, this is going to be granddaddy of that very niche genre.

• I’m eternally a sucker for characters who can’t/won’t see time in a linear fashion. Billy Pilgrim, The Doctor, Doc Brown, Doctor Manhattan. They are all my kind of folks.

• The Owlship is a neat vehicle unlike anything seen before or since in comicdom.

• It’s always worth engaging in a story with no easy answers. Morally reprehensible characters have a point. Likable people make awful choices.

• The costume choices made in the film subtly hints at the costume design of the Batman films in the 1990s. The armor Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) even has nipples.

Look at that, I eventually got to something I like about the film. There isn’t much there, sadly.

While reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen comic, I was struck by how good the work is. How comprehensive. How fully-realized. How dense, but in a good way. 

And I remembered how much I didn’t think the movie lived up to that promise. However, now that the film has no sense of anticipation hover around it, it must have improved with age, no?

Sadly, no is right. I went for the Ultimate Cut in this viewing, rationalizing that perhaps with more of Moore and Gibbons’ work injected into the proceedings, things will have improved even more still. Not so, as Snyder’s insistence on transcription is only offset by some his truly baffling choices when he takes a swing at adaptation. Snyder probably shouldn’t shoulder all of the blame for the misfire, as Moore really intended for the work to be unadaptable and appears to have largely succeeded. It is entirely possible that there isn’t a cinematic version of this story that works. The forthcoming HBO series may or may not prove me wrong on that one

Also, I have a confession: I have never quite understood why Tales of The Black Freighter is such an essential part of the story in any format, beyond driving home the fact that in a world where superheroes were real, people would search for escapism in some other kind of story. Sure, there are some parallel qualities to the two stories, but beyond that it just added some depth to frames including Bernard (Jesse Reid). Now with all of the side story cut into the film, everything is just a longer and feels that way, with two feature-length movies fighting for screen time. Even the comic realized a little bit of Black Freighter goes a long way.

I’ve never seen a filmmaker who so wildly veers between tone deaf musical choices, and cues that are way too on the nose. In one of his better sequences—incidentally, the one where there is the most adaptation over transcription—over the montage opening credits, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” pins the tail right on the donkey. On the other end of things, Wagner blaring over the conclusion of the Vietnam War makes me feel like I’ve seen this movie before, because I have. The less said about Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” over the Owlship sex scene, the better off we all are*. I’m not sure why “99 Luftballoons” or “The Sound of Silence” are in this movie, other than they are both catchy and at least one of them would have gotten some serious FM play in 1985.

The cast is all over the place, sadly. Haley does yeoman’s work holding the movie together as what turns out to be the protagonist. Jeffery Dean Morgan—a good actor—is so earnest in every scene he inhabits that the earlier moral ghoulishness never comes across. Billy Crudup is supposed to be sleepwalking through the film, but I can’t quite figure out why everyone else decided to do the same thing.

Snyder may be a good director, but until he makes a film that isn’t irritating at its core, I’m not sure anyone is going to believe it.

*Okay, you want to talk about it? I challenge you to find a more awkward, uncomfortable sex scene in a movie. I don’t want to sound like a prude, but I just got embarrassed with its wanton earnestness. The comic book didn’t have that, I assure you.