Inside Out 2 (2024)

Director: Kelsey Mann

Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I felt like I saw the trailer last summer about 150 times, but have yet to get around to it until now.

Did I Like It: There’s a certain amount of inevitability about the movie. The original Inside Out (2015) was such a uniquely clever idea, and all came to the ominous conclusion that puberty was rapidly coming down the pike for Riley (Tallman, replacing Kaitlyn Dias). The audience starts to write the sequel in their own head. There’s not much here that isn’t covered by those passing thoughts as we were leaving the theater after the first film.

New emotions are an interesting layer, to be sure. I may just have a problem believing that any child of the twenty-first century only starts to experience Anxiety (Hawke), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in the summer before they go to High School, but maybe I’m in the minority there.

The thing I’m most delighted by is the eventual fate of the aforementioned Anxiety. A simpler film would be content to make Anxiety into a villain that must be vanquished for all time. I know plenty of people who treat their own anxiety like that, and it more often than not renders them into something between a sociopath and a mere bore. Here, Anxiety is relegated to another part of the tableau. Anxiety can run away with the whole show and is inherently explosive and unpredictable, but then again so are any number of fuels we might use. Anxiety doesn’t have to bring down the entire operation. It doesn’t have to lead to a never ending chorus of “I’m not good enough.” It can—when properly harnessed—lead one to try to do better.

Wildcat (2023)

Director: Ethan Hawke

Cast: Maya Hawke, Rafael Casal, Philip Ettinger, Cooper Hoffman

Have I Seen It Before: Funny story, that. I keep teetering on the edge of writing it all down here but let’s leave it at this: If you see me out in the world, ask me about the time Ethan Hawke specifically and directly wasted 105 minutes of my time.

But no, I’ve never seen the film before today.

Did I Like It: Any kind of artists probably spends a large part of their existence hoping that no one will see the seams in their work. That’s infinitely complicated by the fact that those seams are likely the only thing the artist can see anymore.

I think Ethan Hawke would admit, if pressed, that he didn’t on the page have much of a movie here. That’s not fair. Every moment in the movie is telling me that; we didn’t have to press him at all. There is no narrative in the life of O’Connor (Hawke), and the rest of the movie is filled in with imaginative vignettes depicting O’Connor’s work with the cast re-packaged as the characters.

There are moments, though to really recommend it. I viscerally feel one of the opening scenes where O’Connor bristles at her disinterested editor contorting himself to similarly warp Wise Blood into a more conventional package by outlining the thing before it is done. Several other moments rang true, which is impressive enough when I often have trouble relating to the—one doesn’t want to say “excessively” but the gentler correct word escapes me—religious. Several of the vignettes of O’Connor’s world are evocative and would make astonishingly good short subjects, but they aren’t. Admittedly, the film accomplishes that goal that I often look for in biopics like this: It made me want to seek out the author’s work. Unfortunately, here, it is only because I feel like I got short shrift in the process.

It is all as if the elder Hawke might have really wanted to make a documentary about O’Connor with those fictional interludes spliced throughout, and just… didn’t. An admirable disappointment, but still a disappointment.