F For Fake (1973)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving

Have I Seen it Before: A few times.

Did I Like It: And I like it more each and every time.

F For Fake is the final finished film released during the legendary director’s lifetime. And, yet, to call it a complete film is misleading. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster. Is it a straight-ahead documentary about infamous art forger de Hory? Yes. But, oddly enough, that film was actually shot by François Reichenbach*, with Welles hired to edit the finished product. This is a common theme for the later parts of his career. 

Not content to simply rest on that interesting subject, is this also an essay on Welles’ notions of  fakery in the larger sense? Also, yes. He saw the opportunity when de Hory’s biographer—Irving—became embroiled in an even larger fakery scandal involving a counterfeit ghost-written autobiography of Howard Hughes, and widened his lens. Throughly in the spirit of things, he concots a story about the mysterious Oja Kodar’s swindle of an irate Pablo Picasso that—spoilers—turns out to be a complete fabrication on the part of Welles himself. This might have been a more thorough surprise for this reviewer if I wasn’t pointedly aware that Kodar had been Welles’ traveling companion and mistress during the last years of his life. This is the trouble with having written two books and counting about Welles, so I’m imagining the reveal has a lost more mirth for the general audience both at large and at the time.

Is it also the closest thing we’re ever going to get to an auto-documentary? Still yes, Welles introspects just enough to analyze his own epic, Martian-related role in the annals of fakery. There’s just enough of the melancholy and futility Welles was famed to have in his last decades to feel honest, but not so much that it feels as if it is self-indulgent.

And that’s where the film’s genius fully gels. Yes, it is cobbled together from disparate parts, but that actually gives the proceedings a lively pace that other documentaries would have been unable to imagine. It’s almost like what I would imagine it to be like if you had a long conversation with Welles over a meal on a day when he was in a better than average mood. That’s a fascinating vibe for a disorganized film to capture. It may, in fact, be my favorite film Welles ever directed.

You read that right.

*For the record, a great super villain name if ever I’ve heard one.

The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996)

Director: Michael Epstein, Thomas Lennon

Cast: David McCullough, Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, Richard Ben Cramer

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, God Yes.

Did I Like It: Like is such a pedestrian term. There are few films—and certainly fewer documentaries—that so thoroughly injected itself into my DNA.

On its surface, The Battle Over Citizen Kane is an almost shallow examination about the beautiful, perfect wreck that was Orson Welles’ first feature motion picture Citizen Kane (1941). I’m one of the unusual people that might view this as a vice, but I can also sense that it is not an objective flaw, and certainly not a fatal one.

Really, the film was made at exactly the right time. Twenty years ago, plenty of people who worked with Orson were still alive and their memories incredibly sharp. It may have been one of the last opportunities to get first-person narratives of Welles during those early, heady years. All of the talking heads regarding Hearst are from historians or biographers, and while they have interesting insight, they are far less vibrant than the insights into Welles.

And then there’s that one shot at the very end of the film that—more than any other element in life—caused me to spend more time than I would have liked questioning a creative life. Orson puts it bluntly. Spending all of your time begging for the things you need to realize your vision was a terrible way to spend a life. He wished he could have done anything else.

As raw B-roll of an interview, the moment very well may have been an aside. It wouldn’t have been worthy of note other than a vague sense that Welles had a melancholy streak later in life. As the thesis of an entire film, it’s chilling. It is expert-level documentary filmmaking.

And yet, as I watch the documentary now, I’m struck by another talking head from the man himself. It appears to be from the same interview filmed just a few years before his death, and he seems amused by the scrambling train wreck that his life had become. That might be an important thing for me to remember, both as I keep telling my version of Orson’s story, and in my own life. It’s absolutely possible to be both amused and have regret fro the more seminal moments of ones life. There’s even an extra moment in that moment at the end where he says he can’t regret his regrets, because it was like staying married to a woman he might not have otherwise. He loved the movies, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t walk away from it. He wouldn’t.

Everyone wants you to think the story of Orson Welles is a tragedy. Sure, there is unrealized potential over the course of his life, but I’m not so sure he felt the whole thing was a tragedy. Not all of it.

Star Trek: Generations (1994)

Director: David Carson

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, William Shatner, Whoopi Goldberg

Have I Seen it Before: I saw it before I ever saw it. More on that in a minute.

Did I Like It: It’s exactly what we the fans probably wanted from a first Next Generation film, but it may be that we don’t really know what we want, as the film ultimately winds up a disappointment.

I feel this film far more than I think about it, and I think that’s the fundamental truth about it. 

It is the summer of 1994. Star Trek: The Next Generation has just gone off the air with an epic, perfectly-formed final episode that doesn’t really serve as a finale. All of the characters—in true TV fashion—haven’t changed. The TV audience—including 9-year-old me—are fine with that. We know that while this is the end of the weekly adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, and we wouldn’t have to wait long to see them again.

And so we come into the first Next Generation film with a list of things that the show had never quite addressed. Could the saucer section of the Enterprise act as an escape pod for the rest of the ship and—if need be—land safely on a planet? Who were the people that served aboard the presumably Excelsior-class Enterprise-B? What could possibly bring down the Enterprise-D? What happened to James T. Kirk (Shatner) after Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)? Was he still alive in the 24th century, the time of Picard (Stewart) and company*?

This film lives in a unique space in my brain. At a Star Trek Convention that summer, I managed to get a hold of the screenplay for the film for twenty dollars. It was such a wild boon, knowing what was going to happen in a movie months before its release. I was transfixed, and have been perhaps compulsively interested in screenwriting ever since**. I was struck by the interplay between Captain Kirk and Picard, two men who could understand something about each other that almost no one else could. I took the destruction of the Enterprise-D as a hit to the gut. That ship was the safest of safe places for seven years, and in this watching I was struck by the despair of the kids being evacuated during the destruction scene (even though that evacuation doesn’t really make any sense) still manages to hit me.

And with all of this fundamentally interesting stuff, the film just doesn’t work.

The time travel is all over the place, even more starkly noticeable as the film comes sandwiched between two of the better time travel stories the franchise has ever done, the aforementioned final episode “All Good Things…” and the next Next Generation film, Star Trek: First Contact (1996). 

The inclusion of not the whole original crew in the first reel, but instead just Scotty (James Doohan) and Chekov (Walter Koenig) feels off. The parts were clearly written for Bones and Spock, but instead the 90’s version of a control-F was done by way of a re-write. Why was Chekov so interested in taking over the medical care of the Lakul survivors? Why was he recruiting nurses out of the reporters? It boggles the mind why this scene didn’t get another pass, or there wasn’t a more concerted effort to make Nimoy, Kelley and the rest of the remaining crew more happy with the prospect of one last hurrah.

I can’t hate the film, but it is absolutely impossible to get over it’s more glaring flaws. Which, for an even-numbered film in the era when the even/odd dichotomy of Star Trek films still mattered, that’s not so bad.

Really? Had they not already made the episode in their third season, a re-worked version of “Yesterday’s Enterprise” might have been the perfect framework for a Kirk meets Picard story.

And it would have allowed the entire original crew to actually have things to do in the film, enough so that the actors might have been inspired to show up.

*Indeed, entire sections of the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual by Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda and the first edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia by Michael and Denise Okuda are devoted to some of these questions, to the point where I think those authors could have made a level-headed pitch at a story-by credit on this film. How do I know all of this? It was a weird childhood and there may have been some—properly researched, mind you—fan fiction written there in the 90s. Lay of me.

**It should bear mentioning that I also got a glimpse of the screenplay for Star Trek Nemesis (2002) months before that film was released via a leak on the internet and was filled with a melancholy that could only be countered by the hope that the film would improve in the directing or the editing. It wasn’t. It was somehow worse than the flimsy script. So, point for Generations on being an entertaining read, if an uneven final product.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener

Have I Seen it Before: I’m not entirely sure I’ve stopped watching it at this point. The film is so amorphous that I seriously wondered if Kaufman was still shooting the film, years after Hoffman died, and with a ten year head start, is still sending reels to upload to Netflix. 

Did I Like It: After saying something like that, I have to say no, right?

There are a lot of interesting visuals in this film, and they illicit a lot of feelings ranging from melancholy to deep melancholy. Some may say that Kaufman—a screenwriter making his first, and to date only directing attempt—is a gifted storyteller in need of a visual stylist like Spike Jonze to complete the package. This isn’t the problem here. He needed a tighter screenplay, which, honestly, he has provided other directors with far less effort.

That crack about melancholy above is maybe unfair, but only just so. There is much to identify in here. At it’s core, it deals with the blurring of lines between fiction and reality (I think) and that is a topic I have spent at least a little bit of time working out myself. The yearning for some kind of human contact beyond simply the romantic (again, I think) cuts deep with anyone on the north side of thirty and has spent a goodly chunk of their life in the same committed relationship.

Even the image of the schlubby Hoffman wandering through his life trying to write something real, while trying to find the right person to play himself (again, I can only guess) feels like I’m personally being called out, but that can’t be universal, right? It even took me most of the first forty-five minutes of the film to get over the fact that Hoffman and I essentially have the same haircut.

I just wish all of that could have fit into something I might understand as a story. I know Kaufman can create brilliantly structured stories, and that makes whatever I just saw all the more disappointing.

Always Be My Maybe (2019)

Director: Nahnatchka Khan

Cast: Ali Wong, Randall Park, James Saito, Keanu Reeves

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, but…

Did I Like It: Also yes.

Nora Ephron is dead, and thus, I’m reasonably sure that there isn’t going to be much new to discover within the genre of the romantic comedy. That being said, if the right alchemy of a charming cast and genuine laughs—as it does in this film—then my mind can actually forget for long stretches of time that this is fitting into a tried and true format. 

These characters are my age, dealing with variations on the same problems I deal with in my life, which is another interesting layer to the modern romantic comedy. Whereas before, the Toms Hanks and Megs Ryan of the world maintained a distant association with my parents generation, I find it much easier to identify with these characters. And yes, that is even with nearly every major character is of a different ethnic background than myself. White people would have a far easier and more enjoyable time of it if they just got over their anxiety about deeper representation in film.

There are moments where the traditional beat leak through. At about the half-way mark when Sasha (Wong) and Marcus (Park) are finally in the relationship they were always meant to be in, it’s clear that more peril awaits them, but up until that point I’m having so much fun with the Keanu Reeves sub-plot, I hadn’t given it all a second thought.

And Reeves is an unbelievably fresh breath of air in the movie. I quietly wonder how thick the boundary between fictional Keanu and real Keanu actually is. It’s easily the zaniest part of the film, and it only more makes me excited for the forthcoming Bill and Ted Face the Music, and that Reeves still has those comedic muscles that he is itching to flex.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Director: Jon Watts

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jon Favreau

Have I Seen it Before: No. Even that middle-credit scene was still a breath of fresh air.

Did I Like It: Yes.

I do wonder if some of this review is actually fueled by the theater-going experience. We tried the new Cinergy facility here in Tulsa. They’re Chuck-E-Cheese for grownups milieu might work for some people, and it is encouraging that they cannibalized the auditoriums of the late, great Village 8 for their screening purposes. However, their attempts to provide the same amenity-rich experience as the Warren falls flat with a limited menu and an awkward ordering process. Also, apparently they haven’t mastered the air conditioning of these facilities. To their credit, they were aware of the climate control issue and took it upon themselves to hand out gift cards like they were after dinner mints. If I had previously known I could make fifty bucks in fifteen minutes just by staring at Samuel L. Jackson while sweating most of my body mass away, I might have made different career choices. It was a perplexingly unique movie-going experience. They have pinball machines there, so I imagine I will be back if for that reason alone.

And the immediately difficult task ahead of me is to start comparing it to other films. Is it the greatest Spider-Man movie of all time? No. Is it even the greatest Spider-Man movie released in the last twelve months? No.

This movie is really running up against some rough competition coming so soon after the awe-inspiring, adrenaline-goosing Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse (2018). It even tries to dabble in some multi-verse shenanigans, but mostly as a fake out for the true plot in play*. I can’t even say that this is the greatest movie featuring the character as assayed by Tom Holland. Spider-Man Homecoming (2017) is jauntier. It’s blending of teen movie and big budget spectacle is more seamless. 

And, of course, Homecoming had Michael Keaton in it. There were reports that he would appear in this film as well. I’d like to say I don’t dock any points away from a movie for not featuring the once and future Batman, but I think that I even remotely like a film that could have featured Michael Keaton and opted not to is something of a testament to the film’s resiliency.

And that’s where it becomes clear that the comparison to other Spider-men is unfair. Should we be griping that this film isn’t quite as good as some of the greatest recent entries, or should we marvel (I see what I did there, and I’m not all that thrilled with it) that it is arguably true that the three greatest films (in no particular order) in the series are the most recent ones.

Because there is quite a lot to love here. Tom Holland is never not believable as a teen who’s in just a little bit over his head. Jake Gyllenhaal brings a manic charm to his role as Beck/Mysterio and so thoroughly plays on Peter’s unspoken need to fill the void in his life left by certain other characters, that you can’t help but hate him even more in the third act when his petulant villainy is brought to bear. On that note, it’s fairly effective as the more life-affirming wake for Tony Stark, where Avengers: Endgame (2019) felt like a gut-punch of a funeral. Zendaya accomplishes a startling task, keeping all of the brittle fun of her MJ, while still rising to the romantic comedy around her and showing vulnerability when the scenes demand. Jon Favreau shifts from the grumpy put-upon schlub of Homecoming to be the understanding grown up Peter eventually finds. Apparently the love of Marisa Tomei is the magical fuel of this series.

It’s a very sweet movie, and absolutely worth watching. I just hope they keep this up. And Gods of Asgard, please keep Venom (as played by anyone) as far away from this series as possible.

Huh.

I’m just now wondering how long Talos has been covering for Fury… Huh. That makes me re-think a lot of things.

*Or is it? Are we 100% that the J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons, you read that right) who runs the the Info Wars-esque dailybugle.net isn’t the same J. Jonah Jameson that gave Tobey Maguire such grief? Mysterio’s cover story of coming form an alternate universe is just a bit too specific to not have any truth to it. Wouldn’t Mysterio be far more interested in injecting just a little bit of truth into the large lie. Is anyone wondering how Jameson got an exclusive on Spider-Man’s identity? One wonders.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Director: Jonathan Frakes

Cast*: Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, James Cromwell**, Alfre Woodard

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, yes… I have the most vivd memory of coming out of the theater in November 1996 getting picked up by my parents. When they asked me how it was, I said, “The greatest two hours*** of my life.” They said, “You’re young yet.” Nearly twenty-five years later, I’m still not entirely sure what they were talking about.

Did I Like It: See the above comment.

At their core, the four films based on The Next Generation are a mixed bag. The producers behind the various television series of the era maybe never quite got out of their television mindset, so one could argue that we just got four feature-length new episodes featuring an A-plot for Picard (Stewart) and a B-plot for Data (Spiner). The rest of the cast—the main draw for that section of the audience that was likely to buy multiple tickets—got a few pieces of business here and there.

But in 1996—the thirtieth anniversary of the franchise—all of the cylinders were firing, and thus, we were treated to Picard and company’s undisputedly greatest film. Like The Wrath of Khan (1982) before it, First Contact wisely mines one of the better television entries and makes a more epic sequel, while at the same time not vapidly mimicking the structure of that earlier, GOAT movie, like they did in the near-unwatchable Nemesis (2002). There are also plenty of references to Moby Dick.

And still, my opinion of the film has morphed considerably over the years. As I have with most Trek films, I walked out of the theater thinking it was perfect. I’ve been wrong every time. For years afterward, I came to think Picard’s plot on the starship exacting his revenge on the Borg was the real story, while the prepping of the flight of the Phoenix down on Earth was filler. I now think of Picard’s Ahab-ing as mostly fine, if a little redundant of action star schtick which feels ill-fitting for Stewart. The real genius of the film is with Cochrane (Cromwell).

He’s a lout. A drinker. A low-level sex maniac. He has a passing interest in his work and legacy, but only in how much it will keep him in the company of his vices.

By most honest accounts, Gene Roddenberry—the creator of Star Trek—was the same way. Producer Rick Berman stated that the idea behind the film was to do something about the creation of Star Trek (i.e., the first meeting of Vulcan and Human, and the introduction of FTL flight).

He wasn’t kidding. This movie is about the genesis of the notion of Star Trek, and at the helm of this great idea is a creator history would lionize, but who was just as imperfect as the rest of us.

*It’s one of the near-fatal flaws of the Next Generation films that they never quite found enough for the rest of the cast—especially the funnier-than-she-gets-credit-for Gates McFadden—to do in their four entries into the canon.

**So I’m sitting at my computer, and for the life of me my mind is blanking on the actor who played the father of warp drive. It eventually came to me, but it has to be a testament to the actor that I don’t think of his name or any of the other numerous roles he’s played. He simply is Zefram Cochrane. Which is all the more impressive as legend has it the first choice for the role was none other than admitted Star Trek mega fan Tom Hanks, but he sadly had to back out as he was focused on directing That Thing You Do (1996). He would have been great, too, but here we are.

***The runtime is 111 minutes, but I’m sure the trailers were top-notch.

Men in Black International (2019)

Director: F. Gary Gray

Cast: Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Kumail Nanjiani, Liam Neeson

Have I Seen it Before: While a new release, everything about this movie has been seen before.

Did I Like It: Not really, no.

And that’s okay. The movie’s heart is in the right place. Moving away from an American-centric version of the franchise both adds some flavor to the movie (and, cynically, increases its odds at a higher international box office). Making our protagonists a woman of color is a great choice, and Tessa Thompson continues her streak of being great, even if this movie isn’t doing her any favors.

And the fact that the movie surrounding her isn’t very good is kind of comforting. For years, any movie that has dared for any degree of increased representation was required to be good, or it would have been used as evidence that representation itself is flawed. That this movie underwhelms is not being used as evidence that films should continue to be as white and male as they possible can be.

I just wish it was funnier, you know? Chris Hemsworth has proven in recent years (especially when paired with the perfect comic partner like Tessa Thompson) to be the goofball the world needs right now, but here he is straightjacketed into a role not far removed from a warmed-over Han Solo. The plot is predictable to the point of being paint-by-numbers, and that has been forgiven in plenty of films, as long as it had been funnier.

Then again, the original three Will Smith starring films are only intermittently funny, so I suppose this movie lives up to its heritage. Maybe it just needed to come from stronger stock.

But, honestly? The fact that you enter the London MiB field office through an antique typewriter shop nearly flipped my review to be positive. So, it’s not completely without charm.

Child's Play (2019)

Director: Lars Klevberg

Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Gabriel Bateman, Brian Tyree Henry, Mark Hamill

Have I Seen it Before: At the time of this writing, t’s a new release, so I think you know the answer to that one. Here’s the thing. I’m reasonably sure that I’ve seen the original Child’s Play (1988) at one point or another, but I can’t lay a claim to any particular memory of the film. Maybe I will have to try to watch or re-watch the original 

Did I Like It: I can’t think of much to say that won’t be damning with faint praise…

So let’s make with the damning, shall we?

There’s plenty of likable parts to this remake of Child’s Play*. At times, the film embraces its place in the universe and is content to be a gooey, unrelenting gore fest. Sadly, those moments don’t sustain and are few and far between. 

The film reaches for moments of what might be considered satire of modern life, but it would likely be too much to expect the film to really dig in for these moments when it is designed from top to bottom to be counter-programming to traditional summer fare.

Mark Hamill is a delight. He manages to completely eschew the role that made him a household name, Luke Skywalker. Anyone familiar with his career as a voice actor won’t be surprised by that assertion, but he also manages—aside from just a few menacing laughs—to eschew his iconic work as The Joker. We’re lucky to have Hamill, and we’re lucky he keeps picking weird things to do, even if the rest of the movie isn’t quite living up to him. This is the only uniformly great part of the film.

The rest never quite comes together. Aubrey Plaza looks bored. I mean, her whole thing is looking bored, but even here she seems bored with her boredom. The kids surrounding the film never seem to be really reacting to anything that is going on. They seem like the kids who didn’t quite get the roles of The Losers Club in IT: Chapter One (2017), which incidentally came from the same producing team.

All in all, it’s probably as good as the original Child’s Play. At least, I think it is.

*For that matter, is this the first series that has been rebooted while the original series/continuity is still a going concern? I suppose at this point you could make an argument for Ghostbusters, but when the 2016 film had come out, the idea of a traditional/legacy sequel to the original series wasn’t on the table. This is a truly strange case, with two different Chuckies competing for our dread.

Get Out (2017)

Director: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: Double yep.

I don’t know if it’s worth having a discussion of diversity in film in the context of a review, but if it ever would be, this would be the film in which to have that conversation. Some might complain about increases in representation. I do not understand these people, and find no other explanation for their attitudes than some degree of prejudice. Truly, a diversification of the types of stories we are exposed to only increases variety. How many more horror movies do we need to see with white guys at the center of the goings on? John Carpenter already mastered that. Let’s try something new.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest…

Peele brings every skill to bear that he harnessed in giving Key and Peele a cinematic literacy that one would not expect from a sketch comedy show. While the playing with tension and thriller tropes in this film put him in serious contention as the next Alfred Hitchcock, he now may be angling for being the second coming of Rod Serling, balancing on the line between those two lofty peaks is a worthy endeavor, and Peele is accomplishing the task with an astonishing level of skill. That he has this innate level of talent at the beginning of his feature career hints that we may have already been robbed of years of terrific films. Assuming that he continues to build on those skills in ways that I can’t at this point wrap my head around, promises that we will have a number of years of even greater films left to enjoy.

The more I gush or try to deeply think about this film, the more I start sounding like Dean Armitage (Whitford, channeling just enough of Josh Lyman to keep me eternally unsettled), so I almost wonder if I should keep this simple. This is brilliant, thoughtful, thrilling film executed with profound skill. If you’ve seen it before and loved it, it only gets better with repeat viewing. If you haven’t seen it, you should rectify your error. If you saw it, and weren’t on board with the film, you may need to re-think your life far more aggressively.

X-Men (2000)

Director: Bryan Singer*

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Anna Paquin

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, gosh. The memories. With driver’s license freshly in hand, this was the movie I first went to see under my own power. My, how far we’ve come. I am, of course, looking in your direction, Dark Phoenix (2019).

Did I Like It: There are, of course parts that don’t age so gracefully (see that footnote), but by and large the things that were done on purpose in this film work, while the things that are simply a reality of when and under what circumstances the film was made, not so much. But then again, I’m thinking that way back in the last year of the old millennium, the ratio of things that work to those that don’t probably stayed about the same. 

If Toad (Ray Park, living his best life in the late 90s/early aughts, to be sure) stole Cyclops’ (James Marsden) visor during the fight at the train station, why does he have it back as they head to Liberty Island? I mean, I guess, he has spares… But, still.

Now that the one true nitpick I have for the film is out of the way (excluding any toads struck by lightning), let’s get to the heart of the movie. And it is truly in the heart where this series is launched with the best of intentions. As an action movie, it is a product of it’s time, trying to echo some of the sensibilities of The Matrix (1999), but only managing to mimic, not capture the leather-clad wire-jumping spirit of that film. The plot is also insubstantial to the point of floating into the wind under the slightest scrutiny. It’s a 90s movie at the beginning of a decade that wanted something else. We’d have to wait for the sequel for the series to fully deliver on that promise, and another fifteen-or-so years for it to squander that promise and go out with a whimper.

And so the film is left with casting and the interplay between the characters. Here, it is successful. Patrick Stewart reaches his cinematic destiny, bringing all of his stern, yet patient leadership (and GOAT sitting in a chair skills) as Xavier. Ian McKellan might have seemed like an odd choice to play Magneto (in fact, the sort of Adonis-like Michael Fassbender seems more on-point), but he plays the man vacillating between compromise-averse crusader and egomaniacal tyrant with a deftness that any lesser actor may have whiffed. Anna Paquin… Well, there’s something about Anna Paquin’s Rogue that reminds me of thoughts I might have had as a younger man, that might be unseemly now, although they would have been age-appropriate at the time. Let’s just say that she inhabits the vulnerability of the role fully, and I really like scarves.

And then there’s Hugh Jackman, who arrived as if from nowhere in this film as a fully-formed movie star. He almost didn’t have the role, and it’s hard not to think of how bereft Dougray Scott must feel at having just missed out on what would be a 17-year franchise and a career as one of the most bankable movie stars of all time. It might be reductive to say Jackman glowers around the film like a young Clint Eastwood, but his magic is in the interaction with the other characters. His absolute infatuation with Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) feels real, his big-brother affection for Rogue is earned in every frame, and I absolutely believes that he just doesn’t care for James Marsden.

Is this a thin film in retrospect? Probably. But it delivered on the things that could work in an X-Men film, and left the stuff that didn’t have much of a hope of translating for later entries in the series.

*It’s just going to be ugly to have to watch his credit come up in films from here on in. It is of some small comfort that, in retrospect, some of his best films may have had less to do with his contribution than we might have been previously led to believe.

Dark Phoenix (2019)

Director: Simon Kinberg

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Sophie Turner

Have I Seen it Before: This is usually the part in these reviews where I make a joke about how a film is entirely too much like what came before it for me to label it a truly new experience. It will be incredibly difficult to not make a remark like that here.

Did I Like It: As much as I tried to avoid that above refrain, try as I might, I can’t say I’m 100 percent on board with this.

There should be a moratorium on adapting year-long epic comic book arcs into movies that can not (by studio mandate) run over 180 minutes of screen time. Superman movies have failed over a couple of formats to harness whatever was interesting about the death and rebirth of the Last Son of Krypton. Batman even managed to stumble a little bit trying to mash together Knightfall, No Man’s Land, and The Dark Knight Returns in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). And now the X-Men series have failed twice to capture the Dark Phoenix saga after two tries in less than fifteen years. These stories need longer to breath, which is why, ironically enough the most effective adaptation of the Phoenix saga actually occurs in the sixth season of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer.”

I’m not sure if Dark Phoenix fails as aggressively as X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), but it certainly trips up in new ways. The story is listless, being somewhat about an alien invasion story, and somewhat about the same set of characters we met in X-Men: First Class (2006). Matters are not helped by Hans Zimmer appearing to phone in his score, where 20th Century Fox (and now, presumably, Disney) fully owns the rousing John Ottman scores from the better films in this series.

There are some things to enjoy, here. McAvoy and Fassbender still prove equal to the task of filling the shoes of Stewart and McKellan. To be fair, that’s probably more praise for the team behind the sprightly X-Men: First Class (2011) than the work performed here. Some have indicated that Fassbender looks bored in the role, but I would counter that he’s doing the best he can with a script that doesn’t seem that interested in him anymore. How they got Fassbender (and for that matter, Lawrence) to extend their contracts into this movie is beyond me. Maybe the proceedings looked different before the film became engulfed in the flames of the dread reshoot entity.

Also, the opening moments are kind of sweet, with the X-Men being national heroes for the first time in their own film series. Gone are the days when they hide in the shadow. In fact, the President has a direct line to Xavier’s study. It put me—in the early goings—of thinking of how far this film series has come in nineteen years, now that it’s ending. Gone are the days where this series was trying to be a character drama that needed someone like Bryan Singer to make it at all comprehensible to film audiences, and now we’re fine flying into space and doing combat with cosmic forces. What a long, strange trip it has been.

If only it all came together a bit better. Ah, well. We’ll still have Logan (2017)*. Wait, is this the first X-Men movie to not feature Hugh Jackman at all? Weird. That may have been part of the problem.

*Which, by the way, this movie sort of absent-mindedly pisses all over the admittedly byzantine continuity set by the previous films. Logan can’t be the future of the original timeline established in the first three films in the series. That much is clear. As of the end of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), it would seem like Logan belongs in that new timeline, extended into X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and concluded here. But this film has Xavier retiring to play Chess with Magneto in France (for reasons, I guess) so I’m not sure how Xavier re-joins the school he built before the deterioration of his mind. And, I’m almost relieved to say, we will never have the opportunity to reconcile these multiple discontinuities. So, the lesson becomes that even when I try to dwell on the brighter moments of this series, this film only suffers all the more.

Ma (2019)

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans

Have I Seen it Before: Maybe I have, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t squirming in my seat the whole time.

Did I Like It: I like it the moments after I saw it. I might have really liked it had I possessed absolutely no concept of what the film would be about going in. It may split from my mind the more time passes.

That is to say that there is no problem with the suspense quotient of Ma. It’s forty miles of bad road, and the only qualm that I would have with the film is that it ends up in a fairly predictable place. It forges together elements from Psycho (1960), Carrie (1976), and Misery (1990), just to name a few, it all ends somewhere in the vicinity of the territory in which those movies did.

There was potential for this to go into some truly dark places, and some of those places might have made Sue Ann (Spencer) a more thoroughly sympathetic villain. The borderline-incestuous connections between the people in that small town could have taken some terrible turns, and everyone could have been a little bit damned at the end of the proceedings. Instead, the worst character are punished in appropriate, if morbid, ways.

That’s a minor complaint, though. A horror movie need not have sympathy for its villain to be successful within the context of its genre, and Ma succeeds in so many places where other genre pictures fail. The teenagers all believably behave and interact with one another. If I had a dime for every horror movie that missed the mark in that regard, I’d be richer than Jason Blum at this point. And, despite how the sum of the film’s parts might underwhelm, God help me if I didn’t squirm through every moment of the road to get there. That’s a testament to Octavia Spencer’s commitment to a role that other Oscar winners might have blanched at. One imagines that this film might not make the waves to typecast her, and if she keeps swinging for the fences like this, there may be some other little gold men in her future.

Step Brothers (2008)

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen

Have I Seen it Before: Yes

Did I Like It: Fuck it, yes I did. Don’t @ me.

People have been down on Will Ferrell forever. His humor is just yelling, they’d say. It’s just men acting like children with nothing more to show for itself, they’d groan. The only good movie Ferrell has ever made is Stranger Than Fiction (2006)*.

Well, they’re full of donkey shit.

Maybe this movie has me riled up 

There will come a time when I will somehow be compelled to watch Holmes & Watson (2018). It’s probably going to be when it shows up on some service I’ve already paid for. I also imagine that I’m going to hate it. That’s because the particular kind of party that Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly is over. But here, before McKay made the transition to semi-serious political satirist, the “let the camera run” semi-improv movie is still a delight. I’m laughing fairly regularly, and it isn’t like they are promising anything else.

Or, at least, it’s a delight for a little bit. This free association in this film isn’t really done anymore, and this might be the turning point of diminishing returns. Somewhere around the time Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (Reilly) decide their best friends that I’m not sure the film even attempts any kind of believability. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the film isn’t interested in believability in the early goings, but the strange affectations of the characters keep things going for the first act. It’s a ten-to-one SNL sketch extended to 98 minutes. Kind of like how I’ve tried to extend the word count of this review to a reasonable length.

Maybe I’m not the same arrested adolescent that really liked these movies. That’s a pretty big maybe.

*That one is mostly my wife. For the record, she is not full of any type of shit up to and including donkey.

Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme (2007)

Director: Patrick Archibald, Jay Oliva, Richard Sebast, Frank D. Paur

Cast: Bryce Johnson, Paul Nakauchi, Kevin Michael Richardson, Michael Yama

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Never really thought I would have the interest.

Did I Like It: I suddenly find myself scouring the earth for Doctor Strange material, so this is certainly satisfying the itch if for only a moment.

A funny thing happened during my most recent viewing of Doctor Strange (2016). I started really digging his vibe. Normally, I’m immune to the charms of stories about magic users, the occasional Harry Potter not withstanding. But there’s something about that Sorcerer Supreme that has lit the imagination of this magic-averse on fire.

Is it the psychedelic nature of Strange’s world? His easy desire to wield the tools of a trickster in service of the greater good? Partially, but I think it is far more as a result of his supremely (if you’ll forgive the unintentional pun) cerebral nature. 

His powers are not innate, nor are they as a result of some supernatural transformation. True, Iron Man and Batman owe a large amount of their power to their intellect, but Stark largely hides behind his improbable machines, and the Dark Knight has trained his body to perfection. Strange’s body has failed him, and literally all of his powers are learned. Maybe it is intellectual vanity on my part, but a superhero exclusively of the mind appeals to me.

But enough about that, how did this movie fair? In constructing Strange’s origins, this one falls a little short in relation to the live action movie. With a shorter run time, I would have wished the animated filmmakers got Strange to be far more strange far more quickly. It does effectively tap into the more mind-bending aspects of the source material, but it is well past the halfway point of the film before Strange dons his cloak of levitation. I’d like to see full-length movies where he is always his iconic image. Maybe I just need to be more patient for the forthcoming Doctor Strange 2.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)

Director: Mike Mitchell

Cast: Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Tiffany Haddish

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Somehow missed the movie while it was in theaters. 

Did I Like It: That above statement might dictate this one once again, but you know what? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this one is… sigh… awesome.

The first The Lego Movie (2014) was a revelation wrapped up in a movie that had no right to claim anything resembling a revelation. It’s ultimate twist that—like a Toy Story (1995) with a heaping portion of self-awareness—the proceedings are the playful mental wanderings of a boy (Jadon Sand) trying to just play with his father’s massive collection of Lego. It was a deceptively powerful meditation on creativity wrapped up in a movie wherein one of the characters is constantly asking after the location of his pants.

Where could a possible sequel even go from that high example? The first film sets up a new threat by allowing the boy’s sister (Brooklyn Prince) to also play with the massive piles of bricks, thus threatening to ruin all the boy’s master plans, starting the cycle all over again.

And this is where many may want to break ways with the new film. The revelation is gone, and each plot development is predictable first and enjoyable second. 

The question then becomes, is this a problem? Is it fair to compare the film to its progenitor? Is it fair to expect every film clearly made for children to re-wrinkle our adult brains? The answer to all three of those questions are probably no. 

To bypass the question of fairness, and address them in reverse order: It’s not fair to expect every movie made for children to really blow our collective hair back. There are plenty of great children’s films that possess only quality storytelling without any Charlie Kaufman-esque antics in place. 

While it may not be fair to compare this sequel to its predecessor, that comparison is hard to avoid, and through that prism the film suffers slightly. 

But here’s the takeaway: that isn’t a problem. The film is enjoyable, charming, and visually doesn’t let up. It may benefit from coming after the more aggressively disappointing Lego Batman Movie (2017). So what if it isn’t one of the greatest animated movies of all time? Thankfully there are plenty of perfectly fine films within the genre that aren’t as awesome as some of the others.

Brightburn (2019)

Director: David Yarovesky

Cast: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn, Matt Jones

Have I Seen it Before: At the time of this writing, this is a brand new release. That being said, I feel like I’ve seen most of this movie many, many times.

Did I Like It: The movie absolutely delivers on its premise. It doesn’t really reach for anything else, however.

The “what if Superman’s origin had gone a little bit differently” conceit has gotten a fair amount of play in the last twenty years. Red Son envisioned what would happen if, instead of the Kansas countryside, Kal-El of Krypton instead landed in the middle of the Soviet Union. True Brit likewise puts the seminal moment of Superman’s origin in the UK and gives him all the inferiority complex endemic to the British identity. Even I once dabbled in the notion, sending the Kryptonian escape pod in the middle of a rally for the Reagan/Bush re-elect, is adopted by the Gipper, and thus solidifies the Man of Steel’s fate as the protector of Truth, Justice, and the Republican way.

It was probably for the best that I never got terribly far on that idea.

So, we are dropped in with a similar mentality into this movie. Here, the environment in which gthe visitor from another world is largely the same. Kyle and Tori Breyer (Denman and Banks) have the same inherent wholesomeness of Ma and Pa Kent, while at the same time making sure everyone knows that their hipness is not to be questioned. Banks dresses in Ramones t-shirts and sings Bob Marley and the Wailers songs like they were lullabies*. 

They’re so boss.

And I think this is where I would have preferred for the film to reach a little bit more. If Brandon (Dunn) were dealing with an environment that either didn’t think he was special or was completely ill-equipped to deal with him at his best, the horror might have felt more tragic and less inevitable. I guess I just want to see the version of the story where Superman lands among people who are more emblematic of the worst the midwest has to offer.

Then he might have had some subversive reason to turn on humanity. As it stands, the film hums along on the promise of its premise, occasionally startling, and a few interesting moments of gore. It won’t be remembered much beyond this weekend, I think.

* Extreme digression alert, but I just now realized that the reason “Three Little Birds” gets so much play in I Am Legend (2007) is because it comes from the album Legend? Is it possible that film has layers? May need to re-watch it for this space.

The Green Hornet (2011)

Director: Michel Gondry

Cast: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz

Have I Seen it Before: I have a distinct memory of seeing the movie in theaters, but beyond noting that the only mildly interesting use of the 3D was during the end credits, I had next to no memory about the movie itself.

Did I Like It: That last thought ought to tell you something.

It’s odd, but at the same time intuitive in the way only film executives could come up with, that in the television landscape of the 1960s, Batman was played for laughs, while The Green Hornet was plated deathly serious. Fast forward 45 years are so and we are no deluged with deadly serious Bat-films, and so the makers of The Green Hornet decided to opt for counter-programming and re-introduce millionaire publisher Britt Reid to the populace by way of a Seth Rogen buddy comedy.

And that’s about all I—or from a quick Google search, most of the of the people associated with the making of the film—could say that’s interesting about it. Even if somehow Rogen and company worked under a studio that had any interest in making an R-rated comedy version of the film, but even then, Rogen would have been miscast. It feels almost as if the film were originally written for Rogen buddy James Franco to star as Reid, but he had enough sense to pass on anything more than a cameo.

Maybe a Hornet movie played for laughs was the wrong move to begin with. All I know is that I was maybe a third of the way through the film before I was wondering how I might find a way to watch the TV series. I’m pleased to report that they are all available on Youtube, in relatively okay quality bootleg versions. Go check them out. The first episode has the Hornet and Kato taking out a crook named Trump. It has real charm. A legitimate release of that would be something I’d be imminently interested in watching.

Black Panther (2018)

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira

Have I Seen it Before: Several times. Surprising given both the age of this film, and, for that matter, the age of this blog.

Did I Like It: If you don’t love this movie, you must have a reason. I’m beyond certain that reason is pretty dumb.

I could use this review to talk about everything everyone has already unpacked that makes this film great. The triumph of representation. The revolutionary depiction of people with agency with agency over their own lives who can still embrace their traditions and ancestors. The villain Erik Killmonger (Jordan) is lethal and ruthless, but kinda has a point (something some of the Marvel movies have struggled with).

I could talk about all of these things, but that would be falling short of the challenge Coogler has set for us by going three for three on making unlikely, astounding films that cannot be ignored. He has yet to fail to bring us something new, and I feel I must reach for something more.

Thus, I will dwell on the moment where the film threatens to collapse in on itself, but does not relent in being next level. I’m talking about the film’s first few minutes.

N’Jobu (Sterling K. Brown) tell his son, the future Killmonger about home. The movie opens with what amounts to a voice over narration. With characters—like Black Panther—that may have less cultural ubiquity, this may be a necessary evil. At the same time, it’s death on a cracker. Here, however, Coogler does what VO fails to do and embraces the visual medium he is beholden to. This sequence shows us so many things that N’Jobu doesn’t say about the world in which Black Panther exists. By the time the title of the film comes to find us, we are steeped in this world.

In lesser hands, this movie would have failed in the first few minutes. In Coogler’s hands, it never fails to compete for one of the Greatest Of All Time.

The point is this: Ryan Coogler is better than we deserve. If you’re not aware of this, you will be.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Mark Ruffalo

Have I Seen it Before: Absolutely.

Did I Like It: Man, there’s not really a weak entry in Marvel’s fabled phase three, is there?

There was a sense, immediately from the first scenes of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) that Chris Hemsworth is a movie star. That it took this long for Hollywood to get the fact that he’s a big goofball is a shame. We could have gotten a lot more movies like this. There’s bits of it in the original Thor (2011) has a little bit of this sensibility, but tragically Thor: The Dark World (2013) is content to be as dour as possible.

Such is not the case with this third—and let us not hope final—entry in the Thor series, the weight has been lifted and Hemsworth is allowed to be his most true screen persona. It’s a buddy comedy movie. Not only that, it is a triple-threat buddy comedy movie as Hemsworth easily pairs with no fewer than three straight people in the forms of Loki (Hiddleston), Hulk/Banner (Ruffalo), and Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson). In more than a few of those cases, Hemsworth is able to switch gears and be the straight man himself in those pair offs.

It’s also a wildly imaginative Space Opera that feels fresh even when my intellect tells me there was a studio note to make the latest Thor movie more like those Guardians of the Galaxy movies. It may also be the most incisive documentary about the true nature of Jeff Goldblum that we’re likely to get.

One might be willing to complain that this doesn’t feel like the third part of Thor’s story as presented in the previous films. His romance with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is offered no more than a quick line of dialogue about how they broke up, but when the movie is this good, I’m relatively certain we shouldn’t care.

Odin is dead. Long live Thor. At least, I hope. After everything he’s been through, he deserves more breaks like this. Long live the Marvel movies, if they keep being this lively.