A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Director: Marielle Heller 

Cast: Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Chris Cooper

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: But the fact that I haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not going to reach for every ounce of familiar comfort that it can get its hands on.

I’m legitimately torn about the casting of Tom Hanks. He looks nothing like the real Mr. Rogers, and in fact can’t realistically look like anyone other than beloved movie star Tom Hanks*. Then again, there would be no other credible star of a major film who would look like Rogers. Then again, again, if they were wanting anyone with enough positivity to have any hope of channeling Rogers’ essence, I can’t think of anyone better suited.

And the fact that I spent so much time while watching the film running through that line of thinking may indicate an issue with the film. It’s a pretty fascinating portrait of Rogers, wrapped in an otherwise unremarkable family drama. I got a much better tap into the man Rogers was, and felt more viscerally the kind of things Rogers would want us to feel through last year’s comprehensive documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

With one notable exception. At various points of the film, streaks of possible anger or at the very least less-than-total-perfection lying within Rogers are hinted at. It’s not meant to bring his stature down (there’s even a moment where the long-held urban legend maintaining that Rogers was either a Navy SEAL or sharpshooter), but to actually give the rest of us mere mortals a chance at reaching for his nigh-saintly nature. Even Rogers maintains that he feels angry at times, before delineating what he does to work through those feelings.

In the film’s final scene, Rogers watches the last take of the day on his TV show, and the production wraps. Everyone else in the studio leaves, and Rogers goes to the piano to tinkle the keys. He then pounds the low notes as the film ends, just as he told Lloyd Vogel (Rhys) he does when his temper gets the best of him. It’s a poignant movie to wrap things up, and man, do I wish I could have seen Rogers himself done the same thing.

*I suppose Polar Express (2004) is a fair exception, but even Woody the Cowboy Doll sort of looks like Hanks.

Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Director: George Lucas

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd

Have I Seen It Before?: I mean, c’mon. I was alive in May of 1999. How would’ve I managed to avoid it?

Did I like it?: When confronted with that question, all I can do is sigh.

As time has gone on, the prequels—and especially this film—have enjoyed a modicum of critical re-evaluation.

That kinder eye is, unfortunately, completely unearned. 

I could go through all of the things wrong with the movie. Every performance outside of Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor is leaden to the point of legally being classified as a sedative by the FDA. One might want to write off the performers as unequal to the task, although it feels like punching down to continue to dump on Jake Lloyd, to say nothing of the fact that the rest of the cast have done extraordinary work outside of the saga.

Time has somehow been less kind to the film. Expectation may have eroded away, but there is a reality that Lucas didn’t bargain for that cannot be overcome. If Lucas had known how then state-of-the-art CGI would fair over time, he may have waited even longer before embarking on the production of the prequels. Each CGI creation is fairly impressive in and of itself but loses any credibility as part of a real movie when it has to interact with real actors. It’s why Andy and the rest of the humans in the Toy Story films weren’t played by real humans. It wouldn’t have worked.

I could also drag the plotline for being unfocused at best, and willfully uninteresting at worst. However, try tearing away the C-SPAN in space and the half-baked children’s story about a vacant-eyed boy meeting a racist’s idea of a salamander. The Kurosawa for the 21st century, Space Samurai epic is a pretty watchable movie. Too bad that only accounts for—at best a third of the film. Sometime in the last year, I saw a section of the film with all color removed, and played with the Japanese dub. Someone really should put the whole film through that process. I’d watch it. I suppose it really wouldn’t take that much work to do that, but who really wants to spend any more time thinking about Episode I than they really have to?

There is one thing you can’t take away from this film. For better or worse, it is a George Lucas film. Completely unmoored from the restrictions of budget, the need to collaborate, or the question of success, he was allowed to make a film uniquely his own. Not since Welles was given carte blanche over RKO has someone singularly willed a major motion picture into existence. Take that, those that question the auteur theory!

The Monster Squad (1987)

Director: Fred Dekker

Cast: André Gower, Robby Kiger, Duncan Regehr, Stephen Macht

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. Where have I been hiding this whole time?

Did I like it?: Maybe not as much as I hoped I would, but it’s still packed with plenty of charm.

The film is surprising in a few ways starting out. First, who knew the guy who directed RoboCop 3 (1993) was capable of making anything even remotely watchable. The second is that while this film shamelessly trucks in the same milieu as The Goonies (1985), but manages to have characters who actually want something and something resembling a story.

One might blanche a little bit at the sour nature of the kids who we are supposed to root for, but as we are theoretically closer to the end of the era of South Park, if these children aren’t the sweet kids hoisted on us by Spielberg, that’s all right. Plenty of other 80s films don’t reach for any sort of enlightenment with their characters. Come to think of it, if the kids were a little nicer to each other, they would feel less real. I don’t remember other kids being nice when I was younger.

I know it’s going to sound like I’m the guy who walks out of Hamilton saying that it was pretty good, except for all the rapping, but maybe the kids were the weakest part? I would have loved a movie that featured the classic Universal monster lineup* making their way through the world of the 1980s. Who really cares about Colin Clive or Edward Van Sloan during the classic movies? Why make the film focus on them?

*For that matter, had the film been produced by Univerasal, we might have gotten the monsters in their more ubiquitous form, instead of something vaguely akin to those images.  

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong

Have I Seen it Before: It’d be weird if I hadn’t by now, right?

Did I Like It: It’d be weird if I didn’t right?

The big (and likely unfair) question one must confront when critiquing this movie is how it ranks against its predecessor, The Terminator (1984). Many say that this is the superior film, putting it in that rare pantheon of sequels that out-perform the original film, The Godfather, Part II (1974), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and another entry in the Cameron pantheon, Aliens (1986).

I’m not sure this one qualifies.

Don’t get me wrong, the tools Cameron brings to bear here (now with a full budget) cements his status as one of the greatest technical filmmakers. The then-embryonic use of CGI is perfectly applied, used to bring the T-1000 character to life at a time when it really couldn’t do anything other than give us strange metallic polygons. But at the same time, the use of puppetry, miniatures, and even rear-screen projection is used with just the right amount of restraint that it makes it all the more irritating when other filmmakers over the last twenty-five years have decided that even lesser quality CGI is all they needed to sell the reality of their films. Honestly, no one uses rear-screen projection anymore, even Cameron. It’s a real shame.

And yet, the restrictions make for a more interesting film. The restraint that Cameron uses here is all the more present in the initial film. There a fewer moments in the original film where I am thinking about the technology at play. I am more thoroughly immersed in the story there. Maybe the romance between Sarah (Hamilton) and Kyle Reese in the original film is a stronger engine for a story than the Shane built out of chrome on display here. No wonder Cameron got out of the cyborg game after this one, and with each new entry in the series why we wonder why they keep going.

Saved! (2004)

Director: Brian Dannelly

Cast: Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit

Have I Seen it Before: Several times. It’s one of my wife’s favorite movies, so it ends up being a movie I see roughly once a year.

Did I Like It: It’s charms cannot be denied. It could have been like any other number of teen comedies, especially of the era, but it manages to transcend.

Most teen movies are going to have the same general structure. Characters fall in and out of love. Misunderstandings abound. It all ends in a prom or other dance. To my mind, only John Hughes could eschew this format, and he only did so some of the time, and only when he tightened the focus of his adolescent epics to the timespan of one day. Even that most perfect of all movies, Back to the Future (1985) can’t quite pull out of that particular orbit.

So it is, too, with Saved. Many movies in the genre are content to hit those same beats and offer nothing new. They are quickly forgotten. What separates those special stories—like Saved!—that live within the trappings of a genre and manage to transcend things. For one thing, it’s the setting. While some version of Christianity is probably still prevalent in America, most can’t say they went to a private Christian academy for their High School.

Even I can’t say that, and I tragically got all of my education in the state of Oklahoma. Even if the setting is alien and interesting, the characters are familiar, or at the very least feel real. The writing is certainly critical to this quality, the performances cannot be ignored. Mandy Moore—long before she established her acting bonafides in NBC’s This Is Us—paints a villain that is both blindingly frustrating and totally human in her hostility. Mary-Louise Parker normally plays knowing and shrewd characters, but here plays largely oblivious but ultimately decent with the same level of believability. The relationship between Macaulay Culkin and Eva Amurri—despite coming from what on paper appears to be supporting characters—is the emotional heart of the film, as they are the true strangers in this strange land, but still manage to cut through any artifice they might have needed to survive only to believably wear their pathos on their sleeves. Other movies would be content to have cookie cutter characters lurching to something akin to life by actors either too bored or too unwilling to bring anything interesting to the proceedings.

That may be the secret to any film that exceeds expectations. Just tell a story using a familiar structure, in a completely unusual setting, with interesting characters. It must also be perfectly cast.

That easy, right?

The Aviator (2004)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, Alan Alda

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, but it’s becoming abundantly clear that I may only remember about 10% of movies I saw in the mid-aughts. In some cases, that’s great. In other cases, I wished I only remembered about 10% of everything that happened in the mid-aughts.

Did I Like It: Yes. Way better than the 10% I remembered watching.

On first blush it doesn’t feel like DiCaprio is the right casting for Howard Hughes. He’s too boyish, even now in his middle age. Thus, the film wisely only hints at the broken man the tycoon would eventually become. It also doesn’t opt for a happy, if truncated ending, a la Ed Wood (1994) that leaves their doomed protagonist on top. Hughes is a doomed man here, and that would have to be the essential quality in bringing the character to the screen, something that Warren Beatty never quite captured in his long gestating picture about Hughes, Rules Don’t Apply (2016).

Thus, as the brash young man who needed the last two film cameras in all of Hollywood, DiCaprio is perfectly selected. With the possible exception of Cate Blanchett ably impersonating Katharine Hepburn, the other performances tend to blend into the background. This might read as criticism, especially given the high number of stars that round out the cast, but the electric quality of DiCaprio’s Hughes makes his inevitable fall that much more tragic.

Stylistically, it is an odd film for Scorsese. He embraces the computer tools of the era to display Hughes’ daring flights. It puts the camera where it might otherwise not want to go, but it also ages the proceedings in a way I can’t imagine Scorsese wanted when he set out to make the film. All too often DiCaprio looks like an actor sitting on a soundstage, rather than someone flying a plane only he believes will reach the air.

Bad Boys II (2003)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Martin Lawrence (absolutely mystified that he kept top billing going into the sequel; will this keep up with Bad Boys For Life? [2020]?), Will Smith, Gabrielle Union, Jordi Mollà

Have I Seen It Before?: I have a vague memory of watching the first fifteen minutes of it on DVD at some point, but being bored by it. Is that even possible?

Did I like it?: A little less than the original Bad Boys (1995), and I’m left a little uncertain as to how to quantify that difference. Michael Bay is in fine form, eschewing the complete void of human interest that has become his later career. He really should just make clones of Lethal Weapon (1987) and leave the robots to… Well, no one, now that I think about it. 

Smith and Lawrence continue to effortlessly offer the one non-negotiable element for buddy cop movies: chemistry. Each are plenty charming on their own (although one may have more of a continuous record at the box office) but together their so imminently watchable that it isn’t a completely ridiculous notion that the two will come back together for a third film next year.

The movie is shamelessly what it is, for better or worse. So why doesn’t this one work as well as the previous film? Am I just wrong? A possibility. The film reached several worst-of lists in the year of its release. However, it does have a cultural reach that eclipses the original, although that may be more related to its being lionized in Hot Fuzz (2007).

It’s more difficult to quantify something so subjective at first blush, but if I had to pick one element that sinks or swims plenty of movies. The score here is produced by a different composer, and I really prefer the score in the first movie. It might be reductive to be down on a movie for one single element, but just try to watch films like Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), or better yet, Halloween (1978) without the music. Both films become equally unwatchable, which is simply unfathomable given how both of those movies turned out. Music counts, folks.

The King of Comedy (1983)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard, Diahnne Abbott

Have I Seen It Before?: Yes, but so much of it had disappeared from my memory, like some kind of dream that didn’t mean all that much. If you had asked me what I remembered from the film when Joker (2019) quite aptly put it back in our collective consciousness, I would have only been able to reach for long sequences of Robert De Niro waiting in Jerry Lewis’ reception area.

Did I like it?: I’m thrilled to report that my failure to remember much of the movie owes more to my fleshy, insignificant brain than to any problem with the film itself.

It’s hard to deny this film’s influence on Joker. I mean, look at that poster. The structure is almost totally aped from it. The thing that the new film changes is how it ends. In films today (and TV shows, now that I’m thinking about shows like Breaking Bad, and to a much lesser extent Dexter), people who do bad things need to suffer some kind of comeuppance, even if their descent into depravity is the closest these characters come to self actualization.

Here, Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) is just as ruthless as Walter White, just as mentally unmoored as Arthur Fleck, and just as oblivious to the world as Dexter Morgan. And yet, as this film ends, Pupkin is on top. He goes to prison for a flash, but the world loves him. It turns out he’s far funnier than we were led to believe. The world was actually keeping him down, as it turns out.

How the hell am I supposed to feel at the end of the film?

After John Hinckley cited Taxi Driver (1976) as the muse for his violence, it’s sort of a marvel that Scorsese would continue to tell stories about disaffected madmen in the few years immediately after the Reagan assassination attempt. It wasn’t like Salinger started writing the ongoing adventures of Holden Caulfield (or anything) after Catcher in the Rye.

Bad Boys (1995)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Martin Lawrence, Will Smith (last time he gets second billing, me thinks), Téa Leoni, Joe Pantoliano

Have I Seen it Before: I was a child of the 1990s and had cable, so I saw some version of this movie, to be sure.

Did I Like It: What’s not to like? How hard is it to make a buddy cop movie work?

That question may be unfair. The entire genre is dependent on chemistry between the two leads. If it works, you’ve got the next Lethal Weapon (1987). If you get it wrong, suddenly you’re saddled with another Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)*. In what must be unnerving for those who make movie in the genre, that chemistry is largely ephemeral, and can be waylaid by any number of factors and good casting alone may not be enough to save matters.

Luckily, the chemistry between Lawrence and Smith is nearly perfect in its calibration. When the two are sharing a frame and just talking, the film’s charms are undeniable. One can’t be certain if they’re improvising during these sequences, but it feels breezy in a way that seldom can be achieved outside of improvisation. They’re easily funny, which is starkly obvious when it appears that either of the stars deliver one-liners supplied by one of the four credited screenwriters.

This movie even comes from a time before Michael Bay went into autopilot mode while mashing action figures together, and while his style may be a bit too arch for some, it does feel at home in the Miami sun amid endless explosions.

*I’ll be willing to admit that one had some other problems, not the least of which appear to be that the entire rationale for its existence appears to be as a prank Arnold Schwarzenegger played on Stallone. Look it up!

Doctor Sleep (2019)

Director: Mike Flanagan

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyleigh Curran, Cliff Curtis

Have I Seen it Before: Aside from wondering how much play they’re going to get out of the (computer generated?) recreated sets of The Shining (1980), but it certainly seems like Warner Bros. is going to get they’re money’s worth out of the effort.

Did I Like It: Sure.

I can’t help but think back to 2010: The Year We Made Contact (1984). Is there a need to make a sequel to a Kubrick film? Almost entirely not, and yet the foundation that Kubrick leaves us with is enough to make a pretty watchable movie.

And while Flanagan’s film has its flaws (it drags in the middle, and leaves perhaps one too many plot holes that aren’t helped by acknowledging that they exist), there’s more than enough to like. 

Do we give this film credit when a lot of what works about the movie is directly from the original? Yes, because for the most part elements from the first film are taken with some degree of restraint, and almost always in service of the story. I probably could have gone without the use of either the main title from the original film or “Midnight, The Stars, and You” in the opening and the closing of the film, as that moves the proceedings a little disappointingly into the territory of fan film, but it can be forgiven. The fan service could have been a lot worse.

Like with that earlier unnecessary but ultimately likable Kubrick sequel, the performances elevate. McGregor extends the sad, unformed wonder of Danny from the original to an adult with sadness metastasized. His arc toward hope (even if it means his physical doom) fuels the movie. Ferguson dances between the hypnotic and threatening qualities that the story demands with enough versatility that for much of the run time I didn’t recognize her as an actress I had seen in films before. Curran could have easily veered into too-precocious for her own good, but manages to be believable in a role that other films (including the original) would have relegated to a mystified mute. Carl Lumbly is so good as Hallorann that there were several moments I wondered if they had used some manner of computer trickery to bring Scatman Crothers back from the dead.

Will Doctor Sleep equal its predecessor? I can’t imagine it will, but it did manage to be watchable and not embarrass itself. That’s all I needed it to be.

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

Director:  David Wain

Cast: Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. That’s the secret anxiety of these reviews: Learning just how profoundly behind I am on the great stuff. As the streaming singularity looms, it’s becoming clear that I could strap myself to a TV and never catch up

Did I like it?: Truly, madly, deeply, but it took a moment.

For the first several minutes of the movie I became very concerned that the film might be too earnest for its own good, but I think the genius is that it lulls us in with a sense that it might be trying to be a normal film, but secretly is nuts under the surface. 

One might even come to think that the tone is uneven. It is populated with performers who are more well-known from cerebral comedic material, passes itself off as a convincing replica of 80s films that had aged incredibly poorly, but it is actually an exercise in cascading non sequitur.

I can see why some people disliked the movie. I can even see why some people bordered on active hostility. It’s pointedly, blissfully aloof. I’ve been accused of the same more than once in my life, so the film becomes less a movie that I take in and try to detach myself from the experience to unpack what works and what doesn’t work. It’s more like meeting a friend for the first time who is—as unlikely as that seems to be at times—on my save wavelength.

So strange that I took so completely to something that I had missed for so long. I might delve deeper into the film but thank the Gods of streaming that Netflix decided to give us not one, but two seasons of additional stuff to watch. 

Is that how you’re supposed to feel about a movie after its over? I guess it is now.

Gangs of New York (2002)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. I’ve been kind of on a Scorsese jag lately. Thanks, Joker (2019), I guess.

Did I like it?: Yes, but to qualify that statement I will say I watched during spare moments on my phone. Thus, I’m almost entirely sure that I did not watch the film in the way Scorsese intended to take it in, nor can I weigh in as to whether or not the movie is too long.

I’m a bit awestruck that this film ever got released. It is the meeting point of three of the most wildly controlling forces in American cinema, director Scorsese, star Day-Lewis, and producer Harvey Weinstein*. That it was only delayed for a year is something of a small miracle. That most—not all, mind you—of those delays owed to 9/11 is utterly flabbergasting, especially when one considers that there’s only a single shot that could be thematically related to the incident.

Does the end product end up compromised? No, not for the most part. Day-Lewis chews through every scene he has, and as I imagine with every film in which he has appeared, he is allowed to do whatever the hell he wants. The tone of the movie around him, however warbles between the kind of deliberate crime drama Scorsese has made his life’s work, and the kind of four-quadrant easily digestible pablum dressed up in the disguise of prestige drama that was Weinstein’s second favorite hobby. It’s designed so meticulously constructed toward the goal of evoking the history it fictionalizes that one can’t help but admire and often awe at the craft on display. And yet, the music feels so all over the place in a desperate attempt to nab one more nomination for best song for Miramax’s campaign money.

Legend has it that a work print/director’s cut exists and that it allegedly feels more focused. Scorsese insists that the final cut is his director’s cut. This may be one of the only times in his output that I wish for the former, but begrudgingly accept the latter.

*Naturally, Weinstein has plenty of problems other than being a control freak, but I can’t be the first one to tell you that, right?

Mr. Arkadin AKA Confidential Report (1955)

Note: For the purpose of this review I watched the so-called “comprehensive” edition released in 2006.

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles, Robert Arden, Paola Mori, Akim Tamiroff

Have I Seen it Before: Never. That’s embarrassing enough and puts my reputation as the world’s only semi-pro Orson Welles historian, but I did manage to read the novel before getting around to the Criterion Edition DVD. God bless, Criterion, giving a fella something to read packaged with the DVD.

Did I Like It: Sure. What’s not to like?

This feels like a transition film for Welles. Gone are they heady days of playing with the biggest train set imaginable, as Welles once referred to working within the high-budget studio system. He would still go on to make Touch of Evil (1958) a few years after Arkadin, but the days of wine and roses are gone. He’s beginning to embrace the grittier, pseudo-documentary aesthetic that would come to dominate his final films like F For Fake (1973) and The Other side of the Wind (2018). And yet, there are long stretches where it feel like Welles is reaching for and more than often actually attaining the visual polish of the days when he was still a wunderkind.

Now, I understand that this is a prime example of one of Welles’ films that was so severely compromised that it could only be salvaged now by a bit of luck and the hard work of cineastes, but even so there’s something sort of tragic about the sound design of films of the era. Dialogue in motion pictures was barely twenty years old at the time, and the syncing of ADR is never quite right. That technology would still take a number of years, and even today can be a little wobbly without the use of computers.

As he continued to lose the resources of the major studios, he compensates by becoming more experimental. The camera flows through scenes like a swinging pendulum, which would have been unimaginable during his time on Citizen Kane (1941) or The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and really unimaginable for any film at all.

And so I’m left with the same rolling wonder that I’m left with after most of the man’s movies.

What would the movie had been like if he had gotten all of the resources he needed?

Terminator Dark Fate (2019)

Director: Tim Miller

Cast: Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, no. For the most part. Who would have thought that any Terminator movie could reach for anything fresh? 

Did I Like It: Yes… But a qualified yes.

It’s probably unreasonable to ever thing that we’re going to get a Terminator film that is somehow better that the first two films directed by James Cameron. Several have now tried, and they’ve had varying degrees of ultimately disappointing success. Cameron is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Even his arguable failures like The Abyss (1988) never fall short of ambitious.

He’s now back in the business—if even in an ancillary fashion—and the results are remarkable. The film has a lively energy that none of the non-Cameron films could even hope for, and this is coming from someone who actually kind of sort of liked Terminator Genysis (2015), despite it being a huge convoluted mess of time travel with a crappy title. The clutter of previous entries has been swept away, and the action re-focused on the central element of the first and greatest movies, Sarah Conner as played by Linda Hamilton.

Now that doesn’t make it entirely fresh, as a rash of legacy sequels—most notably last year’s Halloween—have trucked in similar territory. This film isn’t quite as crowd pleasing as that other film, but one has to admire this for indulging only in the bare minimum of fan service (especially for the sixth film in a series). The only time nostalgia takes over is in the films opening minutes for a scene that takes place shortly after Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). The technology on display to make Hamilton, Schwarzenegger and even Edward Furlong appear as if no time has passed since that peak of the series is staggering. Thirteen years ago we were subjected to the twitchy CGI horrors that were Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in the opening scenes of X-Men: The Last Stand, and four years since Schwarzenegger himself awkwardly appeared as his younger self in the aforementioned Genysis, but it truly seems like the technology has reached its maturity here. How long before we are treated to entire films using the same tools?

How long before this series clears the decks again and just gives us a an entire movie with those stars as they appeared in the 90s.

I suppose Dark Fate’s box office will dictate what that strange techno future will look like. 

Come to think of it, Dark Fate is kind of a dumb title that doesn’t really have much to do with the film that surrounds it. At least Genysis was the name of something in that movie…

Oh, well, start the clocks for the next entry Terminator: Woo-hoo b-words coming sometime in the next few years.

The Sting (1973)

Director: George Roy Hill

Cast: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, Charles Durning

Have I Seen It Before?: I have the vaguest of memories of trying to watch it once on cable, but edited to within an inch of it’s life, the movie dragged on for far longer than its just-over two run time. Definitely felt like I was missing something at the time. It completely mystifies me as to why that was a mystery back then.

Did I like it?: Yeah, I think so.

I kept hesitating to watch this movie because it’s been lionized for its byzantine plot. By the time my DVD returned to its menu, I was struck with the need to ask “Is that it?”

I expected the need to pay attention to every second of the film to even be able to follow it. Instead, I think I may have become the quintessential bad audience member at a magic show. I’m not blinking, and thus I see the slight of hand as it plays out.

So, I suppose it’s on me that this film just didn’t work for me. And that’s the unfortunate thing that can happen when people don’t watch the classics as quickly as they possibly can. They end up seeing all of the stuff that was inspired by the ur-example. The magic of the original is diminished, or in some cases, completely gone.

So, I come here not to damn The Sting, but to damn us for not getting on the ball and watching the greats. Learn from my mistake. Make better choices. If you’ve got a choice between watching Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and this, watch this first. If you have a choice between watching Joker (2019) and Taxi Driver (1976). If you have the choice between watching Notorious (1946) and Mission: Impossible II (2000), for the love of God and everything that is Holy, watch Notorious.

Let’s make better choices all around, people.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybil Shepard, Albert Brooks

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. They’re coming to take my official film snob membership card as I type this.

Did I like it?: It’s an experience, but I’d have to be a certain kind of person (read: Hinckley) to say I really enjoyed it.

The movie is such an insistent attempt to make a film that eschews the usual trappings of Hollywood entertainment, but Bernard Hermann’s score (his last, he passed away before the wide release of the film) bubbles through the movie. If you were only listening to the proceedings instead of watching, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a romantic comedy in the early goings. Between that and the whole cowboy motif and homages to The Searchers (1956) it’s hard not to see this movie as the story of a man—and perhaps a culture at large—warped by exposure to cowboy stories that never fully came to grips with the violence that surrounds them.

And then there’s that ending. 

I’m so constantly annoyed by the rash of youtube videos “explaining” the ending of like, every film released. They’re boring bordering on odious. I don’t need an explanation of Joker (2019). It’s pretty straight ahead, if wobbly. For that matter, why would anyone need the ending of a movie like Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) explained. Most—if not all—current movies are as straight ahead in their proceedings as your basic fairy tale.

But I digress. I’ll be damned if at the end of this movie I didn’t want to rush to the internet and have the true nature of our final moments with Bickle spoon-fed to me. Thankfully—blissfully, even—there is no concrete answer. Both Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader acknowledge the interpretation that after Bickle guns down the gangsters, synapses fire in his mind for the last time and he imagines a world where he ended up a hero, but maintain that their intension was to display the irony of a monster like their main character slipping into a hero’s role purely by luck, with the knowledge that he will be nowhere near that lucky the next time. I like that version of the ending better; it inflames the imagination.

Between Two Ferns The Movie (2019)

Director: Scott Aukerman

Cast: Zach Galifanakis, Lauren Lapkus, Ryan Gaul, Jiavani Linayao

Have I Seen It Before?: No. Yes, I know I’m behind.

Did I like it?: Uhh… Yeah, I think so?

It never seemed like the crown jewel of the internet video empire Funny or Die would have been able to lend itself at all to a feature, but then again people probably said the same thing about Wayne’s World (1992) back in the day, so what do we know?

Now, I don’t think this film is quite the revelation of the best translations from sketch to feature that are out there. It’s perhaps trying a little too much to be a riff on Waiting for Guffman (1997) with an absurdist streak to be as surprisingly unhinged as the original videos were, but it is amiable enough.

Naturally, things work the best when Galifanakis (Galifanakis*) is interviewing celebrities during segments for the (now fictional) show. An extended sequence at the cable-access station where the show is produced fitfully introduces other characters that will join Galifanakis on his quest. It might have been better to see more of these people, but my dismissal as too much like either Wayne’s World or Waiting for Guffman would have been only more acute.

The movie doesn’t end so much as the run time elapses, and that may be its fatal flaw. More tension as Galifanakis tried to fight his instincts while interviewing Gal Gadot (Gal Gadot**) would have been more satisfying. Instead, Galifanakis perfunctorily turns back to his old show, and the fact that the film doesn’t really have an ending is played off as something that might be a joke, except it’s the least funny part of the film. The sour taste is somewhat ameliorated by the outtakes of the film, which are more amusing than anything else in the last few minutes of the film proper.

*That’s a little annoying that I have to type that twice to be correctly writing about film, but then again, I would imagine that both Galifanakis the man and Galafanakis the character are probably fine with that.

**Sigh.

Jurassic Park (1993)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough

Have I Seen It Before?: I mean, I’m a child of the 90s and I like movies. How would I have gotten through my life without this movie?

Did I like it?: It’s only gotten better over the years.

I came to a revelation during my recent review for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). With this film, Spielberg exorcised most of the populist impulses that had made his career. Sure, you have this film’s sequel, The Lost World (1997), and the aforementioned fourth Indiana Jones film, but those both seemed like chores Spielberg relented to, rather than films he was that interested in making. Double that sentiment for Ready Player One (2018). Perhaps he was indulging a return to form with the animated The BFG (2016), but I’ll let you know when I get around to seeing it.

But what a valedictory run this is. Every element works and became the standard for blockbuster movies to the present. The special effects have mostly not aged in over 25 years. I say that, but what I mean is that the physical effects (mostly by Stan Winston) still look like real things, which will keep this film working decades from now. The leading-edge computer images fare a little less well. Large tableaus of dinosaurs interacting with (read: eating) each other work pretty well, but any time ILM uses their tools to venture into the undiscovered country of the close-up, or if their sprites and polygons deign to interact with humans, the seams begin to show. It’s hard to be too critical of either Spielberg or the movie for this, as they were trying things that had never been tried before. However, with the knowledge that George Lucas saw this film and decided his own technology had finally elevated to the point where he could go back and make his long-gestating Star Wars prequels, well… the judgment of movie history might have

My wife points to this as John Williams best score, and I’m at a loss to argue the point. I’m also at a loss to come up with a theme that Williams has written since that was as memorable as the march he concocted with this movie. Everybody behind the scenes was going for broke here, it seems.

And yet the thing I am most tickled by during this, quite possibly my 100th viewing of the film—are the non-tech questions. The movie may be peak-Jeff Goldblum, and even when his character, Ian Malcolm, is vacillating quickly between smarm and snark, one can’t help but be amused by him. The movie might have worked had it just been him, and if Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) had gone for that, it might have been a lot more satisfying.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen

Have I Seen It Before?: I was there on that delightful spring day in 2008, wearing a leather jacket and fedora. I’m not sure how I feel about that admission, but I am reasonably certain that it is my fondest wish that I never do anything like that ever again.

Did I like it?: It seems like a superfluous question, but let’s get into it, shall we?

As with any film George Lucas became involved with after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), there is a profound antipathy that courses through the populace.

And yet, when it comes to this movie, I really want to like it. I do. I’m pretty sure I do. I’m not one of the people who were completely turned off by the notion of Dr. Jones (Ford) running from Soviets before running afoul of a flying saucer. I’m more certain than I have of anything else in the history of film that if the fourth film tried to bend over backwards to give us even more Nazis, then the complaints about this film would have been even more caustic. I do wish that Spielberg and company (well, let’s face it, mainly Lucas) had gone for broke and had that familiar fedora’d silhouette look out into space. If they truly wanted to take a deep dive into 50s Sci-Fi movies, there was plenty of territory left unexplored.

That all being said, the story is actually kind of engaging. The cat and mouse game between Indy and the communists is more than enough to keep things lively, and fans of the series should be mostly on board with the movie.

Then why doesn’t the movie work?

I think there is some mix of two motivations behind the film’s listless quality: boredom and spite.

Each of the essential triumvirate (Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford) of the Indiana Jones series must have endured endless questions over the preceding twenty years about when Indiana might go on the hunt again. I can imagine that the questions got irritating. This movie certainly stopped most of us from asking about a fifth film. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished.

Lucas has long since seemed bored with the idea of popular filmmaking by the time this film came out, and that apathy was confirmed when—at the earliest opportunity—he sold the entire shop at the first opportunity to allegedly make small experimental films he doesn’t plan on showing to anyone.

Ford engaged in acting by way of sleepwalking for every film after Air Force One (1997) and before Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). Some might argue in good faith about that range, but few would argue that this fourth entry that previously so catered to ever strength he had as a movie star, is now the nadir of Ford wandering aimless in and out of various films.

Spielberg, too, seems as if he had expended any and all excitement for the big entertainments that made him his bones were exhausted by Jurassic Park (1993). To make an action movie now must feel like a chore on par with The Lost World: Jurassica Park (1997). There are plenty of more serious films that he seems far more interested in making.

And right there, while Lucas bears the brunt of the blame for the resulting movie, there really should be plenty of blame to spread around. Sure, the film has the anti-septic, CGI-heavy feeling of the Star Wars prequels, which feels even more off when Indiana Jones was always the far more analog cousin of that galaxy far, far away. But Spielberg and Ford could have still zeroed in on something special, if that was what interested them.

Maybe they still will.

Joker (2019)

Director: Todd Phillips

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy

Have I Seen It Before?: That’s the real question, isn’t it?

Did I like it?: Wow, just the one-two punch with the really tough questions, huh?

I had a temptation to write two separate reviews for this movie, one unrelentingly positive, the other abjectly negative. The film had spawned so many hot takes even before its wide release that adding anything to the discourse started to feel like a mix of disingenuous and redundant.

There is a fundamental flaw in the idea of trying to explain the Joker. Part of his disturbing appeal lies in the fact that he eschews origin. The comics are steadfastly bumfuzzled as to where The Joker even has a name. Alan Moore’s superlative The Killing Joke even casts a vote for the notion that The Joker himself can’t even remember how he became like this (a notion hinted at by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight [2008]). Trying to explain who he is by giving him a name and a series of events to go wrong to push him into murderous clowning takes away from the essential spark of the character.

Before you start, yes, I know Batman (1989) tried to give similar dimension to the character by way of Jack Nicholson, but I’m allowed to love a movie despite its flaws. I’m allowed to live with some contradictions.

There is no way this film would work even fitfully if it weren’t for Suicide Squad (2016) and Jared Leto. Much as it pains me to give credit to Leto for anything outside of Dallas Buyers Squad (2013), but that ill-considered adventure effectively nullified the question of should anyone play this character after Heath Ledger’s mesmerizing turn. So, thanks, Jared. As it stands Phoenix gives a performance to rival—although I think I will land on not-quite surpass—Ledger’s. He certainly has committed to the part (far more than others associated with the movie committed to their roles, but I’m getting ahead of myself), and the anguish he contorts his face into during his flare ups of pathological laughter add a dimension to the character at a time when one would have been forgiven for assuming that there was nothing left to mine in the Clown Prince of Crime.

The sequence where Arthur/Joker (Phoenix) finally arrives on the panel of Murray Franklin’s (De Niro) talk show is about as good as any handful of minutes of Jokerdom from Cesar Romero to the present. The tension is palpable. The movie itself wants to telegraph the punch that Arthur will kill himself live on TV, Budd Dwyer-style. Anyone who’s read The Dark Knight Returns had to have been like me, and wondering how he was going to kill everyone in that television studio. When he puts a slug in De Niro’s face and chest, it’s genuinely surprising.

I wish I could say as much for the rest of the film. The clown’s uprising spreads throughout Gotham on that same evening, culminating in—you guessed it—the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. If I have to see that woman drop her pearls on a wet alleyway one more time, I think I may lose my mind. Including the TV series Gotham this is the sixth—count it, sixth—time I’ve had to watch that same exact scene, and there really aren’t a lot of ways to stage those events.

It’s the first crumbling piece in the façade that is the entire movie. Phoenix may be doing great work, but every other ounce of the movie and every word out of director Todd Phillips’ mouth has been a real bummer. Yes, it’s sort of new to bring the early-Scorsese sensibility to the superhero film, but it is still not far removed from films that have already been made. Phillips is—to borrow a phrase from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)—imitating the sounds, but not the language of those films. He’s even gone record to insist that the film should not be taken seriously, because he wasn’t trying to say anything with it. Such a cop-out feebly tries to absolve him from any negative impact on society, but it also nullifies the entire movie.

It’s lazy, and it’s dumb. While there are parts of the film that work despite itself, it can never truly achieve escape velocity from that unfortunate reality.

Now, this is all to say that I saw a story (it was admittedly click-bait-y) that hinted that after this film’s somewhat surprising box office success, Warner Bros. may be wanting to further branch out into weird one-off films, including an adaptation of Batman Beyond with Michael Keaton as Old Man Wayne. If that comes to pass, everything is forgiven, Todd. You gave me what I always wanted, despite yourself. Kind of like Jared Leto.