North by Northwest (1959)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau

Have I Seen it Before: It’s one of those movies which, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, it feels like I haven’t seen it enough. 

Did I Like It: I usually try not to look at any other reviews of a movie before I write the review, but in this case I couldn’t help but notice the film’s Rotten Tomatoes rating of 99%.

Who could possibly bring themselves to give a negative review to North by Northwest? When I found out that the only dim view of the the film apparently comes from a contemporary review featured in The New Yorker, I seriously contemplated cancelling my subscription. The reviewer declared that with this film, Hitchcock had irretrievably descended into self-parody. One can’t help but wonder what he might have made of Psycho (1960). Bad takes can certainly have a shelf life...

How could anyone possibly not be head-over-heels in love with this movie? More moments from the aforementioned Psycho may have seeped into the collective cultural consciousness, but there’s a reason that every espionage thriller made after this film is helplessly trying to toil in its shadow. I’ve often said From Russia With Love (1963) is far away the best of the Bond movies (and that every Bond movie since is well-advised to reach for that standard), but even that peak of Bondanalia wants so desperately to be this movie, one can’t help but feel an inch of pity for it. Even a movie like Follow that Bird (1985) is built upon its back. Go watch it and tell me I’m wrong. My wife even thought I had been watching Batman (1966) from the other room, and honestly I can see the corollaries, and not just aurally. I could go on and on. 

Any film past its sixtieth birthday would be forgiven if parts were to have aged unfortunately, but no one seems to have given that permission to Hitchcock. Every second of tension locks into the viewer. Every joke in the film—and the film is deeply, deeply funny—still works and doesn’t sour after the wisecracks are now eligible to collect Social Security*.

It is a perfect Hollywood entertainment. As much as nearly every movie after it apes it in hopes of recapturing its magic, the movies were also originally created in hopes the form would be brought to full fruition with something like this.

*I don’t know how great I feel about that remark, but I digress... 

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. It was just one of those movies during a year where I was eyeball deep in the first season of The Fourth Wall. Never got back around to it, and when I found Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) kind of underwhelming, I didn’t get in much of a hurry.

But now, as there is a better than even chance that my first movie back in the theater will be Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), felt like I should at least try to get acclimated.

Did I Like It: Tragically, I’ve been down on fiction films as a general rule lately, so it felt as I started this one that I was going to continue my resolute ambivalence. But, ultimately, I found myself kind of enjoying the proceedings in a low-impact, lazy weekend afternoon sort of way. Everyone involved has done better work elsewhere, but that’s hardly a complaint. Many films can feature John Goodman, but not every film can be Matinee (1993).

The time the film is set in—the 1970s, just as the Vietnam War is ending and the Watergate scandal is heating up—give it an undercurrent of political commentary that consistently threatens to either weigh down the proceedings or become trite, and it is surely to the film’s credit that it never fully surrenders to the temptation. The film’s secret weapon, however is John C. Reilly. His performance as Hank Marlow gives the film a rationale for an enlightened sensibility, and provides its comic relief. One might think that the film is a bit too measured in the pleasures it offers, but it’s hard to knock a film that gets the mixture right. It may want to be a bit of Apocalypse Now (1979), but it knows that people are really here for the giant ape getting into fights.

I just hope the man lived to see 2016. Go Cubbies.

I don’t know if the latest entry in the Monsterverse canon will be my first trip back to the theater post-vaccination, but if I do, I’m reasonably sure I’m Team Kong all the way, if only because I enjoyed their most recent film far more than the other. That’s a reasonable basis to pick sides in a fight, right?

Chasing Liberty (2004)

Director: Andy Cadiff

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

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

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

And she picks this.

And you already agreed to it.

So we watched it.

And there’s nothing terribly wrong with it. 

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

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

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

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

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

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Dee Wallace, Henry Thomas, Peter Coyote, Drew Barrymore

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Find me the child of the 80s/90s who hasn’t seen the film, and I’ll show you a pod person. My wife, Lora, in fact, may have been so over-saturated by the film as an impressionable child, she finds the creature frightening and repellant now.

Did I Like It: Which is a real problem in our house, as for my money it is Spielberg’s best film. Yes, honey, even ahead of Jurassic Park (1993). It single-handedly set the standard and defined the aesthetic of cinematic spectacle not just for its generation, but quite possibly for all time. Hard not to be struck by just how much Super 8 (2011) slavishly toils in E.T.’s shadow. Gremlins (1984) shifts the setup from sweet and heartfelt to the chaotic and mischievious*. The less said about Mac and Me (1988), the better. Hell, even Transformers (2007) (but not any of the sequels, aside from Bumblebee (2018)) tries to harness the “boy and his dog alien pal” current that fueled the proceedings here.

And there’s a reason that it has inspired that level of imitation. One hesitates in using the term “purity” with a story featuring white people in the suburbs, but the simplicity and pure pathos that Spielberg brings to bear here hits like a ton of bricks every time. It works for anyone who has ever had a pet. It works It works as a child as a simple adventure story. It works for adults who feel they might have hit a wall and are disappointed that the world might not be as fantastic as it might have seemed when young.

It just works. 

My only qualm regarding the film is that, for the DVD I own, we are still subject to the 2002 special edition, complete with walkie-talkies in lieu of guns and other CGI effects that aren’t nearly as magical as the material from the original. I think Spielberg would agree with me there. Between this, shooting digitally, and some of the later Indiana Jones stuff, I think Spielberg spent most of the 2000s being bullied by George Lucas into things he wouldn’t have otherwise done, and has spent the last ten years trying to shed himself of those less-than-stellar decisions.

Trust your instincts, Steve. I’ll even buy the more recent Blu Ray releases of this film, so I never have to see another walkie-talkie as long as I live.

*While Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) remains one of the greatest films ever, but I digress...

Hemingway (2021)

Director: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick

Cast: Jeff Daniels, Patricia Clarkson, Mary-Louise Parker, Keri Russell

Have I Seen it Before: No, at the time of this writing, the film is brand new. Is this my first review of a movie released in 2021? Looking over the records, I did post a review of Zack Synder’s Justice League (2021), but as I had no capacity to review such a thing, Lora wrote that review.

Did I Like It: And that should be pretty telling. I’m not sure at what point the prospect of spending four hours with superheroes became a chore, and the opportunity of spending 6 hours with a man of letters who was gleefully awful even to those closest to him. I must have become so fussy.

I realize I have reviewed very few documentaries here on the site. I’ve been watching a lot of them, but as they are part of screening duties for a festival, reviews never find their way here. Gene Siskel said once—and my memory fails, he might have been quoting someone else—that he had long since come to prefer documentaries, as it would be time spent with a better class of people.

Documentaries—even flawed ones—will evade the essential phoniness which will weigh down even the greatest narrative films. And, thankfully, as this comes from Ken Burns, there is hardly a flaw to find. Is there a filmmaker who came onto the scene with Brooklyn Bridge (1982)* and became ubiquitous with the documentary form as of The Civil War (1990)**, and has maintained that level of craft throughout nearly forty years? If there is such a master, their name escapes me.

And yet, am I spending time with a better class of person? The reams of words written—and for that matter, the hours of footage displayed—about Hemingway’s failings are too numerous to have any hope to contribute anything new here. He was a brute, a drunk, and in the last years of his life a hateful paranoiac. You can’t dismiss any of that because he knew how to put together an English sentence. Can you contextualize the man’s flaws and still appreciate the work? 

There are three types of failed people where the question of whether the work still has value despite their less-desirable traits. 

There are those whose political beliefs become—or always were odious. Think someone like Frank Miller. Hemingway’s politics were incidental, but in action nearly always to the left, or at the very least anti-facist.

There are those whose behavior is so fundamentally wrong, that even the work becomes revolting in retrospect. Think Woody Allen. If any of his wives, or his children, or F. Scott Fitzgerald were still alive, I think they would have a legitimate beef. Otherwise, I am willing to label being an asshole in the abstract as a venal rather than mortal sin.

Then there are those who wished to be good, but due to being felled by alcoholism, multiple concussions, and the general makeup of human failures, never succeed in being the good men they would have wished. This is Hemingway. A failure. The film is an inspiration and a cautionary tale in equal measure.

*Which—if I’ve seen it—I have since tragically forgotten it. Must make a point to track it down. With my new account with PBS.org, maybe that will be within reach.

**Which I’m nearly always up for re-watching.

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999)

Director: Michael Vejar

Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Jerry Doyle, Jeff Conaway, Tracy Scoggins

Have I Seen it Before: I’ll do you one better, I even watched the few episodes of Crusade that aired before TNT made good on their Babylon 5 buyers remorse...

Although, to date, I’m pretty sure I never watched the ones that didn’t air. And that doesn’t begin to cover the fact that the epic story set up by this never gets resolved in any real way.

Did I Like It: And that may be the problem with the movie as I watch now. When it first aired, it was a thrilling new adventure that launched into what we could hope to be a new grand story that would capture our imaginations for another five years.

Only, it didn’t go anywhere. Kind of like The X-Files*.

Watching it now, the big-bold finish—with Earth being soaked in an alien disease with a hard timer of five years before every man, woman, and child on the planet would succumb—rings hollow. It’s understandable that there is no hint as to the resolution of this epic story in the latest story in the chronology, the series finale “Sleeping in Light”** didn’t refer back to it, but when Straczynski returned to the universe in Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2008), I don’t recall even a throwaway line to the effect of “Hey, they sure did cure that huge plague, didn’t they?”

Maybe I just like to see stories where large, overwhelming health crises are eventually resolved. That’s what twenty years will do to you.

Even with its inherent flaws, I can’t entirely dismiss it, even if I am still stuck with the inability to recommend the film, and would instead point readers to the series***. The special effects have been updated, slightly, and that’s a little bit of a memory. The new effect of the jump gate—completely unchanged for the entire five-year run of the series—is a revelation. Objectively, it too has not aged exceptionally well, but anything new in this arena from a Babylon 5 story is like a drink in the desert. The story contained herein—divorcing itself from any larger implications—is still a lively adventure story, though. And the fact that the adventure story can rise above its flaws at all certainly puts it above the other TV-films produced in the franchise.

*Yes, I said it. And, no, I’m not taking it back. 

**Filmed at the end of the fourth season in 1997, and not aired until 1998, several months before this movie.

***Tellingly, all of the series, but none of the movies (aside from Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)) are currently available to stream on HBOMax.

Independence Day (1996)

Director: Roland Emmerich

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. The summer of ‘96, this thing was bigger than Star Wars. At least, it felt like it was bigger than Star Wars, especially in an era before the special editions and the prequels. The family saw it during Independence Day weekend in Washington DC, which was probably the way to take in this movie intially. There were toys, there were tie-in novels, and there was the subsequent wearing out of a VHS copy.

Did I Like It: But then something happened. It was about a year after the film’s release, and I was at a Sci-Fi convention. They had a room devoted to endless screenings of various movies*. This movie was playing, I caught the tail end of it.

And I was bored beyond comprehension. I was thirteen. The film barely had a shelf-life of a year.

The jokes had burned out after the first viewing, the storyline collapses under even the slightest scrutiny of a thirteen-year-old, and the special effects would become passé very quickly after that. There simply isn’t that much movie there. Outside of a THX certified theater, the thrill disappears like vapor.

Seriously, this is a movie where scores of characters roll their eyes whenever Randy Quaid starts ranting about flying saucers, like visitors from another planet is the most patently ridiculous idea ever considered... While at the same time there are flying saucers everywhere. Did they hold any script meetings about this film? Or do people just have to react that way to Randy Quaid, regardless of the actual circumstances?

And still, I want to remember what enjoying the film was like. I suppose it’s a nice idea that the various nations of the world would get over their provincial differences and unite against a common enemy. Will Smith arrives fully-formed as a movie star for the masses here, having hinted at his charisma with Bad Boys (1995).

Also, the action figures came with computer games on floppy disks, which was pretty cool.

I’m trying, folks. I know the film is beloved by many, but it just ain’t me.

*Conventions don’t really do that any more, aside from anime. They should.

Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998)

Director: Janet Greek

Cast: Jerry Doyle, Tracy Scoggins, Jeff Conaway, Martin Sheen

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah...

Did I Like It: I’ve actually tried to watch it a couple of times since it aired over twenty years ago, and I’ve never been able to really get into it, and if it failed with Martin Sheen portraying one of its central characters, then it probably would have to be the weakest of the Babylon 5 TV Movies, right? 

I’ve written before that the strength of the series has always been its ambitious over-arching storyline, and the movies they produced towards the end of the series largely eschewed that framework, aside for perhaps Babylon 5: In The Beginning (1998). This is even more removed from the main storyline, taking place some time after the fifth season concluded, and has a tendency to get weighed down by the need that the first season—before the show really became something special—had of doing stand-alone stories. Thus, we are largely left with the special effects that have infamously not aged well, even with the series best episodes.

The series also had a certain smugness (often well-earned) that it was rising above the trappings of science fiction television at the time, only to have J. Michael Straczynski try to give us what basically amounted to a holodeck episode this time out.

And yet, I couldn’t help but kind of, sort of enjoy the film this time out. Martin Sheen is Martin Sheen, and that’s usually more than enough to allow me to paper over deep flaws (see either Spawn (1997) or the fifth season of The West Wing). The ideas in the film are enough to chew on and it actually improves one of the weaker episodes for the wobbly first season of the series.

Isn’t that enough? I’m inclined to say yes. I mean, how much can we expect from a made-for-cable sci-fi movie from the 1990s?

The Mummy (1999)

Director: Stephen Sommers

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo

Have I Seen it Before: 1999 was a strange time. All we wanted was a fourth Indiana Jones movie. Until that film finally came around to fulfill its inevitable level of disappointment, we’d take practically anything with archaeologists and deserts and long scenes where square-jawed heroes wield torches.

That’s where this movie comes in.

Did I Like It: Where Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) took the trappings of the B-movie and made them with the best possible tools—from special effects, to cinematography, to actors, stunt work, all the way to music—and redefined what a-list entertainment, this very-thin remake of the Boris Karloff classic is content to eschew those ambitions and do something most films couldn’t and wouldn’t dare:

It’s just a B movie. There are a few run-of-the-mill desert sequences that reach for epic, but much of this feels like it was shot in a studio, and not a terribly impressive one, at that. The CGI creatures only kind of worked over twenty years ago. And while Brendan Fraser is an amiable screen presence (who should have been afforded the opportunity to work more then and now), I think even he would agree with you that he doesn’t have the charisma of a Harrison Ford.

But, is there not some degree of delight in the fluff that comes with being a B-movie? What’s wrong with being a B-movie? Plenty of prestige entertainments are positively turgid, and I would certainly rather re-watch this movie than the vast majority of supposedly more considered festival screeners I have to watch.

At least it avoided that unbelievable awful b-team Nintendo-64 cartridge CGI that they broke out for The Rock in The Mummy Returns (2001).

Now that I’ve thought about it, that first thought I had about Raiders being the b-movie perfected, and this movie just being a modern B-movie may be a little unfair. The Mummy features a score by Jerry Goldsmith, and if it’s controversial to think that Goldsmith is just as good as John Williams, then I will happily be a lightning rod for that controversy.

True Lies (1994)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Eliza Dushku

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: It is a shame that James Cameron so rarely makes films now. Indeed, his only feature directorial effort in nearly twenty-five years* is Avatar (2009), and the only films he has on his schedule are sequels to that film. Had he kept his output at the pace it was in the 1990s, we’d have 5-10 new films from him to enjoy. 

And we might be less inclined to dwell on the ones that don’t work as well as the others. I remember enjoying this film a great deal in years past, but something about it doesn’t ring as sharply now.

The action is good, which isn’t surprising, as anything less from the team of Schwarzenegger and Cameron would have been a colossal blunder. Even then, it does feel like it is not all that surprising. The set pieces you see here would be stuff that had become old hat in the James Bond franchise by that time.

Maybe part of the problem is that Schwarzenegger isn’t quite the right casting for a suave mega-spy. He’s a better actor—or at least movie star—than most people give him credit for, and his roles after leaving the governor’s mansion have been by and large pretty good, but he is a howitzer, not a device for finesse.

I think the real problem, though is that the film is at its heart a romantic comedy, and Cameron excels at action and spectacle, and not so much the smaller human stories. He doesn’t fail at it, necessarily. He brought plenty of romance to Titanic (1997), obviously, but a light comedy may not be in his blood.

*His version of Spider-Man (2002) would have really been something, though. DiCaprio as the Wall-Crawler? Schwarzenegger as Doc Ock (had they ever gotten around to it)? But in that scenario, we all would have idly wondered what Sam Raimi’s version of the films would have been like.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Heather Lagenkamp, Robert Englund, Miko Hughes, John Saxon

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve probably seen this entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series more than any other.

Did I Like It: And that’s probably because ultimately, I’ve never never loved this series all that much. Even the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) always struck me as just a little too fashionable. Aside from a clever enough hook that might just barely burrow its way into your unconscious and bother you long after the credits rolled, it always seemed like just another 80s horror movie.

Here, though things are pretty thoroughly ahead of their time. Wes Craven’s meta instincts wouldn’t reach full acceptance for another two years with Scream (1996), but here it’s less of a joke.

In fact, it’s only intermittently interested in being a horror movie, mostly in the scenes leading up to the climax, and any moments where Langenkamp’s son (Hughes) is possessed of a mind to do Spooky Things. The rest of the film is more interested in the mythic, all the way to the point that when it does reach its climax, we have departed New Line’s effort to jump-start their moribund horror franchise, and is instead the most expensive R-rated Fairy Tale ever committed to film.

No wonder the co-creator of The Fourth Wall likes it so much.

It’s a bold move on Craven’s part and certainly worth a watch by anyone who might have an affinity for the genre, but might otherwise be turned off by the seventh movie in a series, which eschews the continuity of the previous entries in the series. I’m also happy to report it is only occasionally marred by some inherent design flaws. Scares are low, which could turn off some. Also, having non-performers like mega-producer Robert Shaye and Craven himself play themselves in key supporting roles illuminates why neither man had ever gravitated towards performance before. Even England and Langenkamp appear as if fitted not-quite-correctly for a suit of clothes when playing themselves. I can’t imagine an actor who made their bones in the occasionally absurd world of horror movies is very comfortable being themselves for long stretches of time, to say nothing of having to do so on camera.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

So, yes. It is time to review Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021). And honestly? I got nothing. I have very little to say about of the film which isn’t painfully obvious from just hearing about the trivia surrounding it. The film is four hours long (it’s too long). The film had additional reshoots three-plus years after release (several scenes are tacked on and don’t work). The studio allowed the filmmaker to do whatever he originally wanted with the material (it is, at times, pointedly personal, and collectively, a thorough mess). So, I’m going to have my lovely wife, Lora (@BringToABoyle) pinch-hit, because, friends... She had opinions about this one. Enjoy.

Title: Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ciarán Hinds

Have I Seen it Before: Technically no - seeing as how this week was the first time anyone could stream this version of the film. However, as we will come to learn in the course of this entry, I certainly feel like I’ve seen this before.

Did I Like It: Ultimately, there wasn’t much for me to like. At four hours long, there’s a TON of content here, but it never feels cohesive. It’s a story told in several parts, which might have worked better as a TV series, but does nothing in service to the overall plot other than provide way too much material to sift through. There are at least four different movies here: a coming together of great superheroes to save the planet movie, a fairly decent Cyborg (Ray Fisher) solo flick, a high fantasy epic where disparate groups of people come together to destroy the object the Big Bad seeks to find, and a heartfelt movie about family, loss, and moving on.

As the coming together of heroes to save the planet, Justice League really falters for me. There’s nothing here I haven’t already seen across several Marvel movies. And while the Big Bad of the MCU showed us a lot about why he was out to blink a bunch of people out of existence, Darkseid (Ray Porter) offers us no such thing. Any time he or Steppenwolf or Darkseid’s acolyte person (the internet says he is DeSaad (Peter Guinness), but I swear the movie never names him), were on screen together they only spoke in exposition. Get the mother boxes together...for reasons. An equation for anti-life (huh??) exists and it turns out it’s been on Earth for a long time...for reasons. I have no idea why any of these things is happening, nor do I really care to find out. 

The one thing this version improves over the theatrical version is in it’s service to Cyborg’s story. In fact, this could have a been a very solid solo film for him. It’s a thoughtful and interesting story of a father facing a tragedy and using his scientific knowledge to save his son’s life after losing his wife. In doing so, he turns his son into a cyborg with massive technological potential, but the son has to come to terms with what was forced upon him and how he will reconstruct his life. Not only is this a story about a dynamic and intellectual Black family, it’s also a story of disability and acceptance. I’ve seen many people on #DisabilityTwitter applaud Cyborg’s line in the film “I’m NOT broken!” as he finally starts to reconcile who he is and what his father gave him. 

Ultimately, yes, I’ve seen this film before. A. Lot. There’s a really long scene, which is basically just the ancient battle in The Lord of the Rings where the armies of the Elves, Dwarves, and Men (I mean, Amazons, Atlantians, and Men) all come together or destroy Sauron (Darkseid) and take away his ring of power (mother boxes, also there’s a ring, but not the one you’re thinking of) and formulate a plan to keep the source of power away from the evil until the evil possibly one day returns. I hope Peter Jackson got some royalties for this film. Also, Steven Spielberg called and would like his Jurassic Park (1993) rippling glass of water back. Not to knock the Cyborg story, but James Cameron deserves a nice fruit basket.

There’s also a family film in here somewhere about moving on from loss. I know Zack Snyder suffered a profound loss in his own family while working on the original film. Amy Adams is phenomenal in her portrayal of grief. Diane Lane is also an amazing actor. I would watch the hell out of their film about moving on from Clark’s death. Instead of really leaning into this and bringing in a more powerful emotional side to the film, instead we get...Martian Manhunter? Ugh. Don’t get me wrong. I love him in Supergirl. But why is he even here?

To paraphrase from a different DC movie: Why so...many endings? Seriously. More endings than The Return of the King (2003). And some of these endings aren’t even endings to things that happen in this film. Jared Leto reprises his role at the Joker in one such ending scene - which takes place in...an alternate timeline? The future? There’s no explanation for it, other than it is yet another Dream Of The Future(tm) for Batman (Affleck). Leto feels like he’s trying to channel too much of Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the character, and seems less interested in making it his own. Plus, he feels like the Joker for a different Batman film. Maybe something in the Schumacher oeuvre?

Some final random thoughts: Batman looks really silly fighting aliens. It just doesn’t fit for his character’s skill set. Alfred, in any iteration honestly, is great. Jeremy Irons is particularly fun here and brightens every scene he’s in. Finally, I dislike this version of The Flash. Ezra Miller is fine, and is doing his best with what he has here. But it doesn’t help that every scene in the film with The Flash being flashy is...SOOOO sloooow. Putting The Flash in all slow-mo just isn’t a choice I would have made. It also probably added fifteen minutes to a four-hour (!) runtime. Plus there are some implications that The Flash is going back and resetting time or something? It’s another thing in a long line of things in this film that is just never explained.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg

Have I Seen it Before: :gritting through my teeth: Yes.

Did I Like It: Let’s get right to it, shall we?

This is... Yes, I’m going to say it, a more wrong-headed film than Batman & Robin (1997). More stunted than Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987). To slightly break up the pattern I’m building, it is even more irritating than Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), which would make it the single most irritating film ever produced.

Now that I’ve cleared all of the Zack Snyder fans off the site*, let’s really talk about how the film goes wrong.

Martha. We’ve all talked about it. Or, more appropriately, we’ve talked at the issue. From before this film shot a single frame, the conceit has a flaw that was going to take some heavy lifting to surpass. The film was never going to be the battle royale between the Dark Knight (Affleck) and the Man of Steel (Cavill). They would initially disagree, and maybe scuffle just a tad, before realizing that they need to join forces in order to vanquish a larger, common foe.

This movie gets to that point, but hinges their eventual alliance on the fact that their mothers happen to have the same name. This would have been annoying storytelling in its own right, but the fact that the film almost, very nearly credibly sells Batman’s need to destroy Superman, all to have it not mean anything. Suddenly. Irrevocably. So much so that it fuels Batman’s megalomania well into the next movie.

Had Superman had a moment of humanistic purity that stopped their fight, or if Batman’s intellect had uncovered the realization that Lex Luthor (Eisenberg, more on him in a bit) had been playing them for fools the whole time, the third act really could come together.

This movie could never possibly recover from that moment.

Oh, but wait, there’s more. Is there a poorer casting choice in recent memory than Jesse Eisenberg trying to take his Mark Zuckerberg schtick to its absurdist conclusion and make something like a Lex Luthor out of it? He lacks the gravitas for the character. Bruce Willis could have played this character. The task may have been beneath the skills of Bryan Cranston. Even Kevin Spacey equated himself well enough, if nauseatingly in retrospect. I had a debate with somebody shortly after the release as to whether or not the miscasting of Eisenberg or the Martha blunder would be the film’s lasting legacy.

Why can’t it be both?

And there are other flaws as well that are more banal and less load-bearing. At three hours for the “ultimate” edition, it utterly fails to warrant its runtime. There are plenty of perfectly fine films that filled two VHS tapes back in the day, but also plenty of great films that didn’t need to be that long. Making a film long doesn’t guarantee an epic scope, or a story we can sink our teeth into. It guarantees nothing. Editors, please proceed with caution.

Also, I do have one big beef with the film which bears mentioning, speaking of the Ultimate Edition. In the lead up to this home video release, there was a bubbling sense that this extension would include Barbara Gordon/Oracle, and she would be played by Jena Malone. This would have been great casting, and widened the DC movies in a pretty great way. It didn’t happen, though. Malone played... I dunno, some IT person at The Daily Planet. Is it the film’s fault that it didn’t give me Oracle? No. Is it DC Films continued fault that they won’t give us Oracle, even in Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn) (2020)? Absolutely.

And yet, it’s not all bad, which makes it somehow more frustrating. 

Affleck is actually good as Batman. I’m reasonably sure I didn’t need a cinematic reboot of the character only four years after The Dark Knight Rises (2012), but he brings a certain quality to the character that was missing from Bale, or Kilmer, certainly Clooney, and dare I say, even Keaton. His interplay with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) is pristine. His unflinching eagerness for danger in the film’s opening minutes is about as Batman as a film performance could get. The sequence where he rescues Martha is pretty great. Sure, he’s a little eager to kill people standing in his way, but even Keaton wasn’t above some murder, so who am I to judge? I could have done with several more movies with him in the role, if only in the hopes that he could finally shed the title of Best Batman To Never Be In A Good Batman Movie. 

And now there’s nothing left to do but endure Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Speaking of things which have no right to be as long as they are... Let’s get this over with, I suppose.

*I would remind those of faithful still remaining that I kind of liked Man of Steel (2013).

Man of Steel (2013)

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: Honestly, kind of? I know that’s strange to hear from me, when I’ve been so blissfully, aggressively down on the follow-up, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)*, but there is something to this film that I find imminently watchable. 

The casting is top notch all around. I don’t think Russell Crowe has ever been a better action hero than his spin on Jor-El, and makes him seem like more of a man than the distant God-like figure filled in by Marlon Brando in years past. For that matter, between unseen corpses in The Big Chill (1983) and certain Princes of Thieves, Kevin Costner has been miscast more than a few times, but Pa Kent is not one of those. Also, Richard Schiff is in it. That’s very nearly worth a Michael Keaton or two in my book.

It’s true strength is this: eschewing the slavish devotion to the Christopher Reeve/Richard Donner films that perhaps weighed down Superman Returns (2006), this film surprisingly tries to turn the story of the last son of Krypton coming to Earth to live among humanity into an actual alien invasion story.

It’s such a simple and refreshing take on the mythos that I’m tempted to give the film a pass on any flaws that can’t be avoided. Anyone who lives in the midwest will probably find stumbling on a tornado as a pretty unlikely set of circumstances, to say nothing for the fact that having Pa Kent eat it in the middle of cyclone falls far short of the pathos-filled slow heart attack which took out Glenn Ford. The third act is notoriously wall-to-wall disaster porn, and the choice to have Superman (Cavill) kill Zod (Michael Shannon) in something approaching cold bold feels antithetical to the purity of the character. That’s because it is. But at least here, it stems from the rest of the film as presented, and it isn’t exactly like it’s a lazy coincidence that resolves all of the tension in the movie.

For that, we’d have to wait for the sequel.

*Even five years later, that title is an absolute chore to type.

Scream (1996)

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Skeet Ulrich

Have I Seen it Before: I mean, I was alive and in my adolescence for at least part of the 90s, so I don’t really see how I would get to this point without having seen it, but I digress.

Did I Like It: It’s hard to look at the film twenty-five years since without dwelling at least for a moment on just how much this film has wrought, and it for which it will receive no opportunity to do so. It injected new life into the horror genre, but that renaissance (including this film’s sequels) wore its welcome all too quickly. Thirteen Ghosts (2001), anyone? Dare I say, Halloween H20 (1998), a film that doubled back on the references in this film. Scientists hoped such a paradox/ouroboros would cause the rift this film created to collapse in on itself and set the timeline right.

What? Oh, also it provided the perfect model for the Harvey Weinstein money maker and allowed that guy to continue on unscrutinized for two decades. So, maybe this wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to the movies.

But I’ll be damned if much of the movie still works after all of this time, despite what I can’t help think is an overwhelming amount of tinkering on the part of the Weinsteins. The vagaries of 90s movies couldn’t snuff out Craven’s capabilities entirely. The references are one thing, and their appeal becomes thinner and thinner with each passing year, but it’s the final act of the film that I think keeps people coming back to the film after all this time. The tension, the shifting realization as to who the murder actually is, and that tape delay on the footage makes this the kind of film Hitchcock might have made during the era. The last reel of this film works so well, I very nearly forget that there is no way Halloween (1978) was playing the entire time during these killings without interruption until Matthew Lillard bites it.

Nearly.

From Russia With Love (1963)

Director: Terence Young

Cast: Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Amendáriz, Robert Shaw

Have I Seen it Before: Oh. Many, many times.

Did I Like It: For so many years, there wasn’t even much of a contest. Before some (underline, some) of the recent Daniel Craig entries, this was the best Bond movie ever made by several kilometers*. For my money, it still is the absolute gold standard of the franchise. 

And it can be hard to describe—to the uninitiated—why that is. There are few gadgets on display here. The iconic Aston Martin is still a film away. The main villain operates in the shadows, and the actual antagonists of the story are in roles that would normally be filled by henchmen as the franchise continued. To tell the truth, as a young lad I think this was very near the bottom of the list. Goldeneye (1995) was my jam. Boys do tend to have an affinity for whoever played Bond when they were about 10. We were all young fools, once.

It is the most faithful adaptation of one of Fleming’s original novels. That might account for some of it, but convincing oneself that the Fleming books are holy texts which should never have been deviated from is probably dangerous territory, and at minimum would preclude one from accepting Idris Elba as the next successor to the role, which he should 100% be. Don’t @ me.

Producer Albert Broccoli said that this is where the Bond formula was perfected, but I say that is bunk. If you want the formula perfected (before it was summarily regurgitated, you have to wait for Goldfinger (1964). This film’s true strength is that there was no formula yet. EON and Terence Young and the cast were content to make an actual movie the best way they knew how. By the time Thunderball (1965) came around, the whole affair had become a cottage industry.

With this movie, the chemistry between Connery and Bianchi (completely dubbed over, in the grand tradition of early Bond) is palpable. Those henchmen are both memorable villains without veering too much into cartoon territory. And Connery is never better in the role. He’s a man working the problems of his adventure out. There’s a mind at work, not a strange, inhuman superhero who is never in any danger.

If only the other Bond films could have pulled off that trick. At least Moonraker (1979) would have been a hell of a different picture.

*Felt weird to go with “miles” there, when we’re talking about 007.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, François Truffaut

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. It’s not been a staple of the Spielberg canon for me, and that might have something to do with, at it’s core, the film being about a father who will stop at nothing to not be a father anymore. I think Spielberg would probably agree with that assessment.

Did I Like It: I think I’m more up for the film now, and that may be tied to how it is now less about a man who can’t wait to be free of his kids and wife*, and more about a man in his thirties who maybe didn’t have things work out them. Something extraordinary happens, and it is all he can do to hold on to that sense of wonder.

Which, for some reason, I can relate to now. I won’t spend much time analyzing why, precisely. 

One could spend some time dwelling on the technical skill on display here, but how many ways can anyone say that Spielberg knows what he’s doing with a movie? Each frame is pristine, the editing is flawless, and by some miracle, the special effects still work over forty years later. Every Spielberg movie is a worthy cinematic experience**, and here in his prime Amblin phase, each entry into his filmography is an unparalleled celluloid confection.

In times past, I’ve talked about what separated Spielberg from his closest contemporary (as far as this era is concerned), George Lucas. Lucas made great movies generally when the sword of Damocles was swinging right above his head. By the time The Empire Strikes Back (1980) came out, Lucas didn’t have anything to worry about. Aside from a handful of films directed by Spielberg himself, he never quite got it right again. Spielberg on the other hand is the more natural director, and never stopped making worthy films. That being said, there is something special about Spielberg’s films that might very well have fallen apart at the seams, but still managed to miraculously came together. Jaws (1975), with its mercurial shark is that way. This film, with a studio nearly going bankrupt during production, a producer being fired, and by my count 6 separate directors of photography before we even start talking about a second unit, this film is another.

If, like me, this is not one of your favorite Spielberg films, it might be time to come home. It’s probably time for Roy Neary to come home, too.

Actually, it’s probably way too late for that.

*It is still about that, but stay with me, folks.

**Yes, even 1941 (1979).

Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Although for some reason this one is stuck in my memory less than Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003).

Did I Like It: And I wonder why that is. My immediate, instinctual answer is to say that as a college student when these were released, the first film somehow seeped into the consciousness of a certain kind of guy a bit more than this one.

Which is a shame, because (and forgive me if this next assertion dares to offend your delicate sensibilities) this is the better film. I might be inclined to think that my scant memory of the film made the surprises fresher and more pleasurable, but I think it’s more than that. The story here is tighter, the characters less broad, and the thrills are just as potent (which is only partially attributed to the reflexive cringing I experience after witnessing the repeated self-mangling of Uma Thurman’s hands.

Ultimately, I’m struggling to think of a film with a more potent (or even one to rival this film’s) feeling of catharsis in the aftermath of the climax. We feel the vindication of Kiddo (Thurman) so viscerally, we are very nearly relieved of Budd’s (Madsen) assertion at the top of the film—and I paraphrase—that she deserves to die just as much as the villains.

Here’s the conclusion I think I’m going to stick with. While the first film has plenty of thrills, and it could have suffered from being simply connective tissue in larger sagas like Back to the Future - Part II (1989)*, it is ultimately just a trailer for the far more satisfying conclusion contained herein.

* Which I still like, for the record, and about which I will not hear an unkind word.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Sonny Chiba

Have I Seen it Before: I wouldn’t say kung fu movies are a mainstay in my movie watching diet, so the prospect of this one didn’t insist on itself way-back-when. On spec, it was the film which inspired every brain-dead fool on my dorm floor to buy and display cheap samurai swords. Taken solely as the sum total of its parts the film should be irritating. And yet, I can’t recall a movie winning me over faster than when this one mentioned an old Klingon proverb in its opening seconds.

Did I Like It: That last remark I made really should say it all. Is there anyone who can bake together disparate parts that might not have been very good on their own—and certainly have no business going together—into a package so ceaselessly entertaining? The unflinching violence of the fights—which, surely, may not be to everyones taste—is one thing, but I’m really here for the little things. How can one not like a movie that injects a club owner who looks like Charlie Brown just for the joy of it?

And this isn’t even a complete movie, just the flashier parts Miramax would let Tarantino put forward, before the more introspective and emotional Kill Bill — Volume 2 (2004). It jumps around—hardly new for Tarantino—offers no real sense of catharsis at the end, and only holds itself together through the use of voice over narration. Honestly, if any other filmmaker had handled the same material or themes, the end result would have been the most irritating movie of all time.

Maybe I need to give all of these things another chance. I look at the Origin of O-Ren and wonder if I’ve been spending my whole life being wrong about Anime. For my money, that takeaway—the desire to steep oneself in the ingredients Tarantino has used—is the best possible feeling after one of his movies. That he has me even marginally interested in anime is a feat at which decades worth of friends have steadfastly failed.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. At various times in my life, I’ve been dragged to the theater to movies based on Tolkien’s work. I’m usually tired by the end of them, and I end up steadfastly refusing to see the rest of their respective trilogies. Before someone gets unduly bent out of shape, I’ll just say that I did not in any sense grow up with Tolkien’s work, so it didn’t mean much to have the works finally transferred to film. I’m also not a fan of high fantasy, so while the films could be the greatest ever produced, they just aren’t made for me.

Did I Like It: And so it is interesting that with this second trilogy that everyone kind of took my side in their reactions and collectively shrugged. Even my wife, who counts The Lord of the Rings trilogy as among her favorite films has yet to catch the final entry in this newer trilogy. The most obvious explanation for the film’s flaws is that it beggars all understanding that the shorter book is somehow forced to expand itself over an only slightly shorter trilogy than its progenitor. One can easily imagine that the studio was so desperate to recreate the success of the earlier films, even if the process of doing so simply didn’t make sense on its face.

The film is jammed with the same long-form clattering of incidents, trappings of sword and sorcery which launched more than a few D & D games*, and references that I’m certain mean a great deal to some, but next to nothing to me. Every other film in creation, I’m at liberty to be bored if the film stops for long sections of V.O. narration. With these films, I’m expected to ooh and ahh my way for three hours.

Which, I suppose, does make my feelings about these Hobbit films just as controversial as my views on Rings. I think there all of similar quality. Sacrilegious, I know.

But the problems become more fundamental—dare I say, philosophical—than that. I may be a Hobbit at heart. I want to stay in the Shire, and hear people sing songs, and eat dinner, and be left alone to write my books. My ideal version of this story would be obviously much, much shorter.

I get that I may be missing the point, but no level of elaboration, I think, is going to bring me around.

*Where my character would inevitably become inconsolably suicidal, so I could get home earlier.