MOVIE REVIEWS: "I'M STILL HERE (Salles)", "INSIDE OUT 2", "KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON", "DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE", "HARD TRUTHS", "THE PIANO LESSON", "SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY", "WILL & HARPER" and "ASTEROID CITY"!

(Sigh)

My movie reviews keep taking longer and longer to get out. Part of it is that I'm just working on a lot more recently. I've written a couple shorts recently, and I even directed a short TikTok video-thing? 

I didn't want to, but I might as well promote it, but I wrote and directed a short Carl's Jr. thing. Apparently it's their anniversary and my friend wanted to enter their TikTok contest celebrating it. We didn't win anything, but if you're interested, here's the link: 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/caL8_tbwBxY

I'm not sure how I ended up directing it, but I hope I did okay there. When I shared it on Facebook, I wrote a cryptic post insinuating that I was parodying something with it, and left the hashtag: #ELKMBCCRRMMCMMM as a hint, just to see how many people would even get it. I think one or two people might've figured it out, but here, what's I was parodying: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h17XM_KoXcM

Yeah, for those who don't know, this is an infamous scene from "All My Children" where Erica Kane, for reasons that are we too complicated and elaborate to explain, she is out in the wilderness and runs into a bear and begins yelling at the bear like it should be something she should be able to control. How or why I had this weird inspiration in my head, is-, (Sigh) yeah, the inner workings of exactly how my mind works are sometimes too bizarre to explain, this is the kind of thing that happens when you know way too much and have distressing, fascinatingly good recall; you make ridiculously obscure 40-year-old television references that only you and like five other people are ever gonna understand. (Oh, and that hashtag, is Erica Kane's full initials. Erica Louise Kane-Martin-Brent-Cudahy-Chandler-Roy-Roy-Montgomery-Montgomery-Marick-Marick-Montgomery [I know some people argue that some of these marriages don't count for various reasons, Cudahy's was annulled, Roy's marriages were invalid-, well the first one way,- whatever, correct me in the comment sections if you want. I swear I'll read them.)

I also got this added to my IMDB page:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt45294320/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_accord_2_cdt_t_1

A short film I wrote that, actually did pretty well, won a couple local awards. We'll see what happens, link for that's here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp6pN2Rq6Gk

Plus, I've been busy with other aspects of life between all these projects. (Shrugs) I don't know, I don't try to think or look too far into the future right now, I'm just happy to be getting whatever I can get at the moment and it's nice actually getting some projects finished and done. Hopefully, there'll be more later. 

Anyway, enough humblebrag promotion, let's get to the movie reviews! 

I'M STILL HERE (2024) Director: Walter Salles 

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

There's always something about a filmmaker, who suddenly, returns home, to make a movie, isn't there? For me, it seems like a lot of a filmmaker's best films come after they left their home country and tried to work in Hollywood, or elsewhere, sometimes successfully, but then they find their way back to their home country and suddenly they make something special. And it's particularly interesting here, 'cause we have a filmmaker who hasn't made much at all recently. Walter Salles makes any list of the greatest filmmakers from Brazil. He's not always the first name, but it'll come up, even though he hasn't made much in the last decade or so; his last feature, outside of a documentary on, the great Chinese director Jia Zhangke of all people-, um-, actually scratch that; that makes sense, they're pretty similar filmmakers, but besides that, and a few scattered shorts, the last film, film, he made was 2012's "On the Road". Yeah, that one; remember that strange but mostly forgettable adaptation of Jack Kerouac's novel? That also,-, strangely makes some sense. Well, trying to adapt Kerouac to film has never actually made sense; it's better to read Kerouac than to actually watch it, but Salles's films, up 'til then, if ask me what his specialty or genre is,- it would've been the road movie. 

His biggest films that hit America were "Central Station", a wonderful tale about a mismatched older woman and a young orphaned boy who have to travel all through the country of Brazil to find the boy's never-before-seen father, and "The Motorcycle Diaries" based on the diaries of Che Guevara and Alberto Granado as they traveled through South America in their early twenties. Both are very good films, and also, they seemed to be the films of his that are the most personal to him. He's made other films in the U.S. and elsewhere, and he's got a lot of odd muses; I remember watching his film "Behind the Sun" in one of my film classes, and that's an odd one where he adapted a romanian novel about two families that have fought a multi-generational war with each other, and resets it in turn-of-the-century Brazil, and even that one I think of as having some road trip elements to it. Still, he hadn't made that much since, certainly little to capture the world's attention, but suddenly, he burst back on the scene with "I'm Still Here", which became the first film from Brazil to finally win the Oscar for Best International Feature, something was way overdue. (Especially if you know the history of how they've treated other Brazilian films in the category before.... IYKYK) And in a way, it feels fitting not only 'cause Salles seems like the heart of modern Brazilian cinema to me, even if he's made more films outside the country than inside it, but also because, for somebody who hasn't made much in awhile, in order for him to come back this big, it had to be something very personal to him and to his country, and oh boy, did we get one here. 

"I'm Still Here", tells the story of Eunice Paiva (Oscar-nominee Fernanda Torres), the wife/widow of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello). Rubens Paiva, was one day, taken by authorities from his home, and never came back. He was a former Congressmen, and one that was in exile after the U.S.-backed Brazilian military overthrew President Joao Goulart which led to a military dictatorship that lasted 'til the mid-'80s, and he's not the only one who was an enemy of the state that was taken in and suddenly never returned. He was in contact with other expatriates and contacting with them, but he wasn't involved in any activities, but that didn't matter to the government. He was arrested, and then Eunice and their daughter Elaine (Luisa Kosovski) were also taken in by the police. The daughter was released soon after, but Eunice remained for twelve days, where she was tortured and inquired about activities and peoples that she knew little about. Eventually, she's let go, and the news reported that Paiva had fled the country, but nobody believes them. 

It's hard to describe this movie in just, the actual facts-, a different movie and a different filmmaker might've been more focused on trying to figure out what happened, make the movie more investigatory, and there are some elements like that, for instance, one of Eunice's child's teachers, Martha (Carla Ribas) is also taken in and questioned, but doesn't reveal her story and what she knows until after the dictatorship is overthrown, perhaps for good reason. They can't go to the local press, so Eunice is going through lawyers and international press to make public the situations here, but that's-, that's the details of what's going on, but what the movie is really about is the struggles of a family having to go through all this and what that means. The Paiva's were well-off but Rebens was the one with the jobs and careers, and suddenly Eunice has to take care of several children of various ages, all the while being watched by the state, while having to grieve her husband's lost and probable murder, and somehow keep the family together, and surviving, and figure out how to suddenly do all of that as a single parent of five children. 

Salles actually was close to Eunice and the Paiva family, which explains why he was talked out of semi-retirement for the project, and to create his first feature film in his home country since 2008's "Linha de Passe". The film was based on a book by novelist Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Eunice's son who's played by Gilherma Silveira as a kid and Antonio Saboia as an adult, and the entire movie shows the transformation of the family over the years. His memoir actually begins with Eunice suffering from Alzheimer's near the end, who's played by Fernanda Montenegro, Torres's mother, and the Oscar-nominated star of Salles's "Central Station", not only making Torres and Montenegro the first two Brazilian actresses nominated for Best Actress Oscars, but only the second mother and daughter to be nominated in the same category, after Judy Garland and Liza Minelli and the first time it's happened while both were nominated for films made by the same director. The real journey of the movie isn't so much Eunice's fight for the truth, it's how the family changed and evolved over those years because their father was taken. Beginning in small ways from their oldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) coming home from London, to them having to let go of Zeze (Pri Helena) their family's beloved maid, to moving to Sao Paolo and eventually Eunice going back to school eventually becoming one of the world's foremost lawyers and advocates for the rights of indiginous peoples, but that's what happens, the movie isn't what these characters do, it's how they do it, and it's those smaller moments that surround the greater injustice. 

The moment of the movie for me is during an interview for a local newspaper that's doing on a story on Paiva, and their insistance on a somber family portrait, and instead, Eunice, and everyone else, asks why they can't smile, and eventually they all do. Why should we just be sad and angry, and honestly, I get it. If anything, the Paiva's smiling like a happy family in their photos, probably was the biggest F-U they could give the dictatorship for their actions; you took away our father, husband, patriarch, but you didn't take away our spirit; we're still a lovin family and will remain so for years to come. It's not gonna be any of the details of the atrocities the regime committed, and they committed a bunch, trust me, but how they didn't let it break them. Salles's last road movie is a journey through the horrors and struggles of life through a recent horrific past in his native Brazil, and yet, we are still indeed here. 

INSIDE OUT 2 (2024) Director: Kelsey Mann

⭐⭐⭐

I posted my Canon of Film on "Inside Out" before I watched "Inside Out 2". Part of it was that, I had started writing that one a little while ago. I forgot I hard started writing it; in fact I had it on my list to actually write one on "Inside Out" and was planning to do it soon enough anyway, only to find that I had already started it, apparently awhile ago. (Shrugs) It must've really been on mind..., no pun intended. 

That's not to say that I expected bad things from "Inside Out 2", I certainly didn't think that; Pixar isn't perfect of course, but I certainly wasn't afraid that would happen, but I think it's that there's something so utterly perfect and essential about that film, that's so essential and universal that I was a little afraid that a sequel, even a good sequel could diminish it a bit. It's happened before, many times,- I mean, look at the "Shrek" franchise, but even Disney/Pixar,- there's a few sequels you can look at and point to there, I personally think "Incredibles 2" is good example; it's not that it's a bad movie, but it's definitely not a great one. It's not nearly as memorable or interesting as the first,- it doesn't take away from the first one, in fact, that film kinda goes out of it's way to kinda correct a lot of the issues that might not have aged that well in the original,- I won't say it was "woke", that's not the right word, at all, let's say it's more of an afterword or an epilogue to the original film than a true sequel. It doesn't make the original worst, but like most postfaces, it's not always essential that you read them to consider yourself finished with the book. I guess that's my real concern, I'm not sure I wanted a sequel to "Inside Out", but I certainly didn't want an epilogue to it. 

Or, maybe that was just the Anxiety (Maya Hawke) in me talking. So, Riley (Kensington Tallman) is older now, and about to enter high school. In the meantime, she's made friends at her new school, Grace and Bree (Grace Lu and Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and all three are star players on the local junior high hockey team, and they all get invited to the weekend camp for the Fire Hawks, the main high school team that Riley wants to attend. She's thirteen now, however, and suddenly, the crew in her head, are awoken by the control panel's giant puberty light suddenly going off, and the construction crew bursts in to do some sudden renovations while Riley's sleeping. This alarms Joy (Amy Poehler) and baffles and concerns all the other emotions, and suddenly when she awakens, Riley's acting in ways that they're unable to fully handle, luckily new emotions have come in, led by Anxiety. 

This is the kind of thing that was somewhat obvious to begin with, sure, but essentially this makes sense from the beginning. 

Originally, Pete Doctor and the Pixar crew, when conceiving this film, they originally had ideas for dozens of emotions, not just Joy, Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira), but decided to limit it to five, partially because of just how complex it would be to even feature every emotion, but also just to simplify the story in general. And it does make sense, the older you get the more complex emotions in terms of their kind and range one tends to have, although I certainly knew people who definitely had Anxiety controlling much of their mind, way before puberty. (Anxiety's pretty quiet now, but yeah, he definitely started, eh, early elementary school for me. Definitely at the latest, first or second grade for me, whenever I really started fearing getting a bad grade or missing an assignment, or whenever I started having panic attacks? First grade, yeah.) Strangely, I don't recall having Anxiety, over trying to befriend or impress somebody the way Riley does with Valentina (Lilimar), the team's star Senior player. I definitely remember the other emotions like Embarrasment (Paul Walter Hauser) and I guess I had some Envy (Ayo Edibiri) and I definitely had Ennui. (Adele Exarchapoulos, who is definitely the best cast person for that role they could've picked, [granted, it was the nineties, ennui was pretty in, but yeah, it's an underrated and useful emotion.]) And personally I'm kinda glad because Anxiety seems to be very controlling, and she decides to take over Riley for the weekend, and send the other emotions into a vault along with some of Riley's darkests secrets, and eventually they find Riley's true self from the back of the mind where Riley's most troubling thoughts lie, and get back to the Hub before Anxiety completely rewires Riley's belief system. 

I definitely hate anxiety, and definitely feel Riley's pain towards the end of the film, but yeah, as much as this film is still pretty good, it's definitely not as powerful as the original. This is a good story, I guess but I feel like it's not fully enriched in this film; now if we had an "Inside Out" TV spinoff on Riley-, I mean, that'd be hard, but I think this could be more interesting. Hell, that's a decent idea to continually adding new emotions one at a time as opposed to a bunch of new ones right here, kinda like, the seriously underrated "The United States of Tara" added a new alter periodically through the series the more we found out how troubled her character was. (I probably shouldn't be comparing a teenage girl to a character with Disassociative Personalities Disorder, especially considering how exceptionally rare that condition actually is and how much of the mystique of that syndrome came from flawed pop psychology books that turned out to be completely made up to begin with....- ["Sybil" was a lie, look it up.] but yeah, this story, it feels more like a couple episode arc in a series more than a movie.) 

Anxiety is just not a fun emotion to have around, and it's a devastating one to control you. I guess we all learn that, but it's certainly not as powerful or important a message to a young person learning that it's okay and important to be sad sometimes. Anxiety is a teenager emotion so it does fit, my anxiety was never trying to impress anybody but yeah, one year in a badly-run magnet program where keeping my grades up cost my a bottle of Excedrin/week headache, yeah, Anxiety definitely caused that, ugh! Yeah, Anxiety should just stay in it's comfy chair in the back. 

"Inside Out 2" doesn't diminish the original masterfulness, but this still feels like a good story that didn't need to be a movie. I mean, it's not like Disney sequels didn't have a couple of those as well, so I certainly don't think that Pixar was immune from that syndrome, hell, they've made far worst already, (Like, c'mon, did "Monsters University" really need to exist?) Thankfully "Inside Out 2" is still better than most of those. But it is weird how the first movie taught us how important and essential an emotion can be while this one's story is how horrific and awful it can be having a different emotion be in control of you. I'm not saying it's a wrong message, I totally get where it's coming from, but eh, that is a bit of a tonal whiplast if you think about it long enough. Maybe if I didn't love the original so much, I'd appreciate this one more but that comparison does hurt it. 

Also, all this focus on hockey, and being an ethnomusicologist even though they don't even know what that is yet, when you're supposed to be teaching her to be an astronaut Joy, you promised, remember!  

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023) Director: Martin Scorsese

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

  

I knew there was another reason why I've always been a little bit troubled by the rise of the so-called "True Crime" docu-narratives in-, well, basically all forms of media right now; essentially that kind of storytelling, was invented and made popular, by the FBI. Seriously, J. Edgar Hoover, was a propogandist among everything else, and he used all the media, movies, eventually television, and even the radio, with some of the earliest and biggest radio plays to talk of tales about how great the FBI was, by them, getting to the bottom of several of America's biggest crimes. It's not that these weren't stories worth telling or shouldn't be told; in many cases these are stories that absolutely should be told, but they were told from the perspective of the heroic law enforcement officers, and frankly that's- well, very few crimes begins with the police-, they're just the ones piecing it together, they're rarely the "Heroes", at least not the heroes that they often claim that they are. There usually isn't heroes in these stories, most crimes are bad guys and victims.

 

If anybody realizes that more than Martin Scorsese, as a storyteller, I'm not sure who that would be, but I'd be willing to bet whoever that is, was a victim. For all the talk about Scorsese as a great director, which he is, one of the interesting things about him is how genuinely difficult it is to pin him down, as a storyteller. He himself famously brought this up during some of the Oscar promotion he did for "The Departed", the only film of his to ever win Best Picture, in that, that film was the first time he ever made a movie, with a plot. Hmmm, that's probably not completely accurate, even at the time, but he definitely has never cared about shaping his films into a more traditional Hollywood-style three act structure narrative; hell some of his most famous films are infamous for outright destroying some of the more conventional screenwriting rules. (There's a reason Robert McKee teaches "Casablanca" and not "Goodfellas") Yet, why does he tell his stories this way? He can tell a more traditional and cohesive narrative, but he's not interested in that. He's always been way more interested in creating a world his characters live in, and also, trying to figure out exactly, who's telling their story, and perhaps more importantly, from who's perspective the story is being told. 

"Killers of the Flower Moon", is not a new story, it's actually quite an infamous one. That doesn't mean I had heard about it beforehand; I hadn't. Basically, at around the turn of the 19th Century, oil was found on Osage land in Oklahoma. This made the tribe, at the time, quite rich; per capita, the Osage were the richest peoples in America. Well, on paper, they were, 'cause people originally thought that, they needed some white man banker to be in charge of their money, fearing that they wouldn't know what to do with it or how to spend it,- but if you know where the story goes from here, than you know that that's arguably the least of the problems for the Osage. After oil was founded, others began to move into their world from the outside, most notably, William Hale (Oscar-nominee Robert De Niro). He's taken to help the Osage build up their area and city, and is a local sheriff among other high-profile roles in their culture, community and influence. In essence, he's the local mob boss, and he runs the area like a mob boss would run their area, except, he's doing a lot of this in order to, well, steal the money from the Osage, in due time. 

His nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes into town to help be with his Uncle after the war, and he seemingly drifts into his Uncle's long, elaborate scheme of marrying into the Osage people, and then, slowly, yet periodically, kill off all the Osage, making the Hales and the Burkhart able to inherit their mineral rights and money for themselves. It's unclear if that's always the intention with Ernest; he seems to actually be in love with Mollie (Oscar-nominee Lily Gladstone), they have a brief but lovely romance that leads to marriage and kids, but it becomes clearer and clearer that William's praise of the Osage peoples and encouragement of connecting with them, isn't just meer suggestion, or even matchmaking. One-by-one, Mollie's family and relatives are killed. Some are outright murdered with little-to-no investigation, others die from illnesses that seem to be so common among the Osage it's almost like those old, and real stories of how, the Native Americans, when meeting the original colonizers from Europe would get sick and die from blankets, or just from naturally non-immunity from the diseases they brought with them across the ocean, although, even back in the '20s, I knew diabetes wasn't gonna knock out somebody so much the way the "insulin" seems to knock out Mollie, the one Osage who genuinely seems to be fighting and screaming for outside help. She hired a Private Investigator, (Gary Basaraba) at one point, but he's soon taken out by Hale and his gang. 

Eventually, Mollie goes to Washington and begs the President to do something, and for those who don't know, this story is infamous in the lore of the birth of the FBI, represented here mainly by Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemens) who, along with his crew, eventually come in and investigate and-, well, they get to the bottom of what's been going on, but it's hard to say that they, somehow stopped it or anything, although that's what old J. Edgar would have you believe. 

I'm leaving out a lot here, including a lot of great and memorable performances by people like Cara Jade Myers as Mollie's trainwreck sister Anna, or Scott Shepherd as Ernest's brother Byron who's also caught up in Hale's enterprise. Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow make some glorified cameos as lawyers eventually as well. Yet, the story itself is practically nauseating in it's grotesqueness when the fact get said out loud, but in terms of the film, despite it's epic length, the movie earns that 3+ hour time length by drifting us into the clashing worlds of the film. The very slow reveal of what's going on under the surface creates such a nervous tension that fulfills not just the story, but the entire world. A beautiful reminder that the stories of true crimes and atrocities don't really occur in a easily digestible-for-all-time-zones vacuums, even if they can be told in a three hour movie, or a half-hour podcast. (Especially when it's not the Osage people telling the tale.) 

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE (2024) Director: Shawn Levy

⭐⭐

Oh-kay, I have to begin with one single declaration, we have to fucking stop using NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye", for any reason whatsoever. In fact, you really shouldn't be using any NSYNC song for any reason;- yeah, I wasn't a Backstreet Boys fan either, but this has never been a contest BSB were miles better than NSYNC on their best day, but any use of that horrible song in particular, after the way it was used in "Red Rocket" is-, well for one thing, it's just gonna remind that that's a better movie and the only good use for that song's existence, but also it's just cheap and uninteresting to use it, especially for an opening fight scene where the steel bones of a wolverine are used as weapons. 

Also, I feel like I have to catch up on my Linkara to watch this movie, and I have not been keeping up with my Marvel,- well, anything. So, I went and checked my original review of "Deadpool", which, I liked a lot, but was also just in general, hugely confused by, 'cause I knew nothing about "Deadpool". Anyway, one of the first things I mentioned was a joke about how Deadpool was technically in the X-Men universe, and how combining them and the Marvel universe wouldn't make any sense, which, it doesn't, but that's besides the point. I misspoke though, because Deadpool wasn't in the X-Men universe, he was in, an X-Men universe....

(Sigh) 

Oh-kay, forgive me, if I get this wrong, 'cause it's all stupid, and I don't care, but this movie begins, in Earth-616, which-, I think in the Marvel comics world is the nickname given to the main timeline-, or, as it's called here, the "Sacred Timeline", of everything that is proper canon in the universe, as oppose to-, um, all the others branches and bunches of other things that are not canon. 

(Sigh) 

Fifteen minutes in and this film is reminding me of every reason I'm not into comic books. 

Anyway, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), we learn is not in this timeline, but he's in something called the Earth-10005 timeline. In this timeline, which I think is the original X-Men timeline, he's called into action by Mr. Paradox (Matthew McFayden), who runs the TVA; they're the keepers of the timelines, and his timeline is about to die 'cause Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) died in his last film, "Logan", which was the only "X-Men",- well, basically anything, that I actually really liked, so he's determine to find a new Wolverine to replace that Wolverine so that his timeline can keep going and not fall into "The Void". 

The Void, is basically, this empty Mad Max-inspired place where all movie franchises that die out, their characters eventually end up. So, I'm gonna call this place, "Tattertown", and hope you all get the obscure Ralph Bakshi reference. Anyway, the ruler in Tattertown is Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) who is Charles Xavier's sister, which-, I-eh, maybe that was the thing before-, I don't remember. She's the evil one who basically is allowed to run roughshot over The Void in a deal with Mr. Paradox, who's been secretly creating a time ripper machine which is there to end these superhero timelines sooner rather than having them continue going-on after their main character dies off and decay into The Void. 

Personally, I'm on Time Ripper's side, but sure, he's evil and eventually Deadpool finds a Wolverine, from a universe where he was a huge failure to and for the X-Men, and apparently in this one he wears that stupid yellow outfit which I always did think was a good idea to get rid of when the live-action X-Men came around. (I was hoping that in his universe Storm just said, "I'm mother nature bitches!" and just kicked everyone's ass, but- I don't know, even when I like the X-Men, they fundamentally confuse me as a concept. Except for "Logan" again-, where somebody actually had the same genetic mutation as another X-Men for once. Oh yeah, Laura, (Dafne Keen) is here in The Void-, along with other characters from other franchises over the years. Some I liked,- for instance Jennifer Garner's "Elektra" shows up, which- I never got around to her film, but I stand this, "Daredevil" is still one of the better superhero movies and shouldn't get shit on nearly as much as it does and she is one of the big reasons for that. (She should be a bigger star in general actually, both Elektra and Jennifer Garner.) I won't list too many others, some of them are so obscure even if I did spoil them I'm not sure anybody would know who the hell they are; even some of the characters in the film barely know who they are. 

The "Deadpool" franchise has already always been ridiculously self-referential, it goes beyond-, I mean, if the MCU is an oroboros, "Deadpool and Wolverine" is the film where the tail has shoved itself up the snake's sphincter and gone through it's digestive system and all the way up through the mouth, where the tail begins to eat the snake's head from the inside out. I mean, Deadpool even lets Wolverine know that, "Hey, sorry that you're joining at a bit of a low point," and yes, this is a low point. And nothing in the film is objectively terrible in of itself but there's such a general pointlessness to it.

It's weird how the quantum physics theory of their being infinite number of universes can be done so well in so many kinds of literature, yet most of the time it's usually done really badly, even by people who should know better. Like, "Star Trek" uses it's badly, most of the time, but the best use of it in a literary context might've been that episode of "The Next Generation", "Parallels", where Worf keeps going through multiple versions of himself in different universes, which is still brilliant. It's way better there than it's ever done in these comic book superhero stories, and the reason is because they actually treat it, you know, scientifically. Like, they go into the thought processes of what it means and how you may be different if one decision or one alteration caused so many differences in your universe and what you might encounter if for instance, there's some kind of portal created through science technobabble or magic crystals or whatever and you end up in an entirely different alternative univese version of you, and what that means, but whenever it's in these superhero films, it's always about, how to get all these characters from all these different worlds and universes together, in order to,- I don't know save the world, or stand there and be cool, or see how every single Deadpool variant really likes Peter (Rob Delaney). It's just a Get Out-of-Jail Free card for poor creativity and storytelling, this is why I couldn't stand that "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" film, it reminds me that I think Spider-Man was never a good story to begin with and now you're all just trying desperately to come up with several other variants until you stumble across one that's good, instead of just giving up entirely and coming up with something better that's not Spider-Man. 

Or, any of these superheroes.- Look, I don't mind that somebody's taking all these shots at the MCU and the idea of a 20th Century Fox logo covered in dirt like it's a relic from "Planet of the Apes" that's a funny idea, but it's not really all that funny, when the people making the joke are indeed, the ones who came up with all this to begin with. This is the kind of satire that should be made from the outside looking in, and yeah, Deadpool even existing in cinematic form in the Marvel Universe, being able to find streaming on Disney+ of all streaming services, like I get that he's the accidental superhero in the Marvel's roster of superheroes but it still isn't as sharp as it could be because the jokes are coming from inside the Mouse's house, and also, it's not as fresh and unique as when the first "Deadpool" did come out. 

Look, I didn't want a "Deadpool & Wolverine" film, I'm not particularly angry that we got one, I'm not even that upset at how it came out, but I can't imagine how it's worth anybody's time. Even if you were able to keep up with every joke and reference and bizarre randomness at the choice of pop songs on the soundtrack, and appreciated the raunchiness of the whole thing, I can't imagine this is a film that even the hardcore MCU people are going to care about. 

Also, while it did have a funny post-credits scene that-, almost convinced me not to knock a half-star off of my rating for having one, (Almost, and yes, I'm still doing that, #StopPostCreditScenes!) the movie also had a bizarre, kinda sincere mid-credit montage, of like, the behind-the-scenes of like, Marvel, everything over the last few decades that,- honestly I'm not sure what to make of. It kinda defeated the movie's thesis that the timelines were worth saving and not sending them into the void, while also, kinda acknowledging that this is sort of a final post-script reflective farewell afterword? Is this whole thing dying or not? I mean, I know it's not dying-dying, unfortunately, but was that the joke that it was, a reminiscence on the end of a film franchise in a movie that's about saving a film franchise?! or wasn't it-, 

(Sigh)  

I give up. I don't even know what to make of that.   

HARD TRUTH (2024) Director: Mike Leigh

⭐⭐⭐1/2

You know, there's this idea, of a Mike Leigh film. If you know his work, than you know what I'm talking about. To a degree you can kinda fill in some of the details, usually a kitchen sink family-type film, or at the very least, a modern slice-of-life character piece where there's one character in particular who's got this overabundant personality trait, one that, no matter what that trait is, it's omnipresentness seems to completely overwhelm the movie and to some degree effect the other characters, and this occurs where's a particular triggering event or reveal or whatever that moment would be where we'd traditionally consider a revelation or a plot comes into focus. It doesn't always happen, but what's more important, that there's a character who's personality is driving everything else around them.

Sometimes, it's an extreme optimistm, sometimes it's this annoying cloyingness, sometimes it's flirtatious clinginess, in "Hard Truths"'s case, in short-tempered, anxiety-ridden anger. In some ways Marianne Jean-Baptiste's performance feels like the epitome of what we would consider the most prototypical Mike Leigh main character, ever. (Hard to call most of these characters protagonists, but they're almost definitely the main characters-, well, maybe not Lesley Manville's in "Another Year", but usually it's the most pronounced character in his ensemble pieces at the very least) Which is weird to say, 'cause, on paper, that's- that's not entirely true.

We think it is because of how he makes movies; Leigh's process is infamous for beginning with the actors and then taking and recording months of improvisation seesions with the actors in order to flesh out the characters and then he forms a screenplay out of the improvs, so it seems like the hyperrealistic kitchen sink dramas are the most natural for him, and they do seem to be the go-to genre for him most of the time, but still, that's very deceptive. In fact, his filmography overall is way more interesting and elaborate. For instance, he's got quite a few period pieces, and not just the severely underrated "Vera Drake", about a 1950s-era abortionist; my favorite of his films might be "Topsy-Turvy", which is a comedy about Gilbert & Sullivan as they produced their play "The Mikado". His last film, "Peterloo" which I haven't gotten around to watching yet, is a military film about a massacre at an infamous early 19th democracy rally. "Mr. Turner" was a biopic about painter J.M.W. Turner. His interests are way more eclectic than I think we tend to realize. But, if I think of Mike Leigh, I'm not thinking about any of those films, as great as they are; I'm thinking about "Secrets and Lies", or "Happy-Go-Lucky", or even one of his more overlooked films "All or Nothing", these melodramas about the personal struggles of these- I mean, they're usually lower class, but they're mostly just common, everyday people, or at least that's what they think they are, and through a peek from Leigh's lens, we slowly really how extra-ordinary their lives and experiences genuinely are, in their ordinariness.

"Hard Truths" though, this one's a little harder to push through than others and mainly that's because Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) is just one of those truly disturbing and unlikable characters. She wakes up, angry, pissed off and is constantly berating anyone and everyone around her, like their mere presence is an absolute disturbance to her day. She's berate her son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for nearly every action he partakes in, and wonders why he's so lazy and overweight that he doesn't go out and get a job, but when he can't even put a dish in the sink without getting yelled at, you get his quiet solemness. As well as his father, Curtley (David Webber) who works as a quiet plumber but doesn't say or do much when he gets home. When Pansy freaks out at him because she decided not to make dinner, he and Moses quietly get some fried chicken and then Pansy complains about how they wouldn't be able to get along without her. 

You've all probably run into an erratic and unhinged personality like this somewhere before, and you're hoping there's some kind of answer for all of this. It's not that their isn't, it's just that, there isn't a single easy answer. Pansy's sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is a successful hairdresser with two grown daughters, who seem to be well-enough adjusted even as they go through their own work and life struggles. The movie hinges around Mother's Day, where Chantelle's trying to get Pansy to go to their mother's grave, as Mother's Day is the fifth anniversary of her passing. Pansy has some unkempt feeling about her mother, but she's also feeling like the family just doesn't love her. She's also aware that, she's not exactly been lovable though. And she herself knows that she's been more of a caretaker than a wife or a mother, and her family can feel that pain too. 

"Hard Truths" isn't one of Mike Leigh's very best films, but it's again one of his more brutally realistic ones. Marianne Jean-Baptiste famously worked with Leigh on arguably his most successful film, the brilliant "Secrets and Lies" where she plays an adult black woman who finds out that her birthmother was a waify white lady, who didn't know that the child she gave up for adoption years earlier was black. That's a great performance, and earned her an Oscar nomination, but this is a tour de force performance, and if you didn't know Jean-Baptiste's other acclaimed works over the years, you might not think that she's acting here. Everyone else is great, but I'm not gonna recall their work in this film later. Jean-Baptiste's role is tough to watch but gets more and more complex the more you think about the ramifications of it. Sometimes you run into someone like that, you wait 'til they leave the room and wonder, "How the hell they got that way," but this movie also asks how did their family or anybody else put up with them," and sometimes that answer is more strained that we want to admit ourselves. "Hard Truths" indeed. 

THE PIANO LESSON (2024) Director: Malcolm Washington

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

Denzel Washington's undertaking of adapting all of August Wilson's plays to the big screen is a fascinating and admiral endeavor, and has so far produced some great films. It's also become now, a family undertaking, as Denzel is merely a producer on this film, "The Piano Lesson", but his son Malcolm Washington has taken over directing for this, his first feature, and his son John David Washington, play Boy Willie, the scheming southerner who's coming up to Doaker and Berneice's (Samuel L. Jackson and Danielle Deadwyler) Pittsburgh home, under the guise of selling watermelons, that he's brought up from down south, selling them literally out of the back of a pickup, but also, to take the family's piano, and sell it in order to gain some farmland of his own. If possible, from old the Sutter estate, the latest patriarch, he claims was taken by the Ghost of the Yellow Dog. Also, Denzel's daughter Olivia, Malcolm's twin, and Denzel's wife Pauletta, are also in small roles.

(Shrugs) 

I don't know what to make of this becoming their family business, but I've certainly seen and heard about far worst such businesses. And it's not like we don't need these films. 

August Wilson is simply put, one of the greatest playwrights in American history, but he is possibly the biggest and most important African-American playwright ever, but none of his films ever got made into features in his lifetime. He was in talks early on to have "Fences" made, but he objected because he insisted on an American-American director, not because he didn't think a white person couldn't direct him technically, but he felt culturally, his plays needed somebody from that background to do it well. I can understand that; it was around the time that Milos Forman originally got the ball rolling on producing the biopic that would become Spike Lee's "Malcolm X", before Spike Lee convinced him that it should be an African-America, more specifically, Lee himself, directing it. "Fences" of course, would eventually be directed by Denzel as the start of this journey to record what's colloquilly been called "The Pittsburg Ten", but "The Piano Lesson", has one slight asterisk to this, 'cause, it actually was adapted before on film,- but it was adapted into a TV movie, not a theatrical film.

You can find that version pretty easily too btw, it's currently streaming on Tubi for free, and streaming on Hallmark, believe it or not, because it was a Hallmark movie, back when they didn't make a hundred of those a year and they'd be a little more selective of what they'd put their brand label on; it wasn't all just crappy Christmas movies in order to sell more christmas cards. (Do they still do Christmas cards, come to think of it?) It's pretty good, it starred Alfre Woodard, and about half the cast of "Roc". I started watching this as I wrote this, because as I watched this theatrical adaptation, it did feel like I had heard this story somewhere before and I think it might've been from this TV movie back in the day. Or, I might've just read it at some point in some English class; "The Piano Lesson" along with "Fences" earned Wilson a Pulitzer Prize among many other accomplishments, so you can make an argument that it's the most famous of his plays, and this does feel like something that might've been an assignment from an English textbook at some point. I imagine it might be the most theatrical one too, 'cause I'm not surprised finding out that this was the technically the first one to get a film adaptation of any kind. 

August worked in a few different genres, and "The Piano Lesson", is a ghost story. And a haunting one at that. Obviously, the piano is a McGuffin, but this isn't any piano. It's a piano that's got the carvings of the family members on it, family members that go back to the slave days, when the family was owned by the Sutters themselves, and that's only part of the story of the piano; I don't want to spoil the entire tale about it once the entire significance of it gets fully explained, basically Boy Willie, believes he has a right to it, and Berniece is being stubborn for not allowing him to take it, especially since she's not using it to make any money on his own. She's not even teaching young Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), Doaker and Berneice's daughter, although she plays a little and Boy Willie even shows her some boogie woogie fingerings at one point. Apparently, Boy Willie can play but isn't interested in it anymore, and now that James Sutter (Jay Peterson) fell down a well, something that apparently the Ghost of the Yellow Dog does a lot, he's offered to buy the estate a deal on a parchment of the farmland, first dibs if he can come up with the money in time, or else, they're gonna sell the whole thing publicly.

What happens though, is that, with Boy Willie's arrival, Sutter's ghost begins haunting the family. Mainly Berneice and then Maretha, and they can't quite figure if it's because of Boy Willie, of if it's because Sutter's haunting them themselves, of if it's that he still believes the piano is his. It's honestly amazing how many of these plays, especially these family plays deals with this kind of economic conflict;-, well, amazing's not the right word, but it does come up way too often in my view, but then again, I usually like most of those plays, including this one. This one, does have a different twist to it though, with it being a haunting, and essentially climaticing with a local pastor Avery (Corey Hawkins) performing, essentially an exorcism on the house. 

Usually with play adaptations, I tend to look at the film and try to consider, more-or-less how the film captures the experience of having seen the actual play on stage, which is something that I think freaks people out a bit. Most people want to know how well the film expanded on the play, but ehhh-, I question that critical approach a lot, and frankly, August Wilson's material really will forever be most effective on the stage, that doesn't mean you can't create a cinematic experience that gets us the feeling of the stage, and "The Piano Lesson" is like the perfect example of this, 'cause being a ghost story, means you have to really believe there's something truly scary and haunting going on when you're staring at the actors on the stage right in front of you. (I also think about how, in a bunch of theater's storage units, there's a giant piano that's got some carvings on it, that they only bring out just for this play; probably standing up right next to three or four dozen extra glass unicorns.) This movie with the combination of the spiritual and supernatural clashing head-first with all the other conflicts, I can easily imagine a really spellbounding stage production of "The Piano Lesson" being truly special. Obviously this film expands a bit, like a few sequence in a jazz club where Boy Willie's soft-spoken friend Lyman (Ray Fisher) has trouble getting with any of the girls that seem to flock to the flamboyant Boy Willie, and it helps exacerbate the movie's most tender moment between Lyman and Berneice. Danielle Deadwyler got a lot of awards attention for her performance most of all, and deservedly so, but this film has a lot of great performance, and I feel like I wish I could've seen this live. Like any version of "MacBeth" we happen to come across, we wonder what decision the play would take, about whether or not we actually see the ghost, for instance. 

Well, this is a film adaptation first and foremost, but I like that I cared enough to think about those things a lot. "The Piano Lesson" is the August Wilson play I'd most want to see live, at least of the three they've adapted so far, and that's a compliment to how good the adaptation is. I like the choices they did make, and I'm looking forward the next one. I hope it doesn't keep taking another four year to pump these out though, even though, sometimes I do need the time to rest between them to recover. August Wilson's legacy is in safe hands. Thank God, the Washingtons take after Berneice way more than they do Boy Willie. 

SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY (2024) Directors: Ian Bonhote & Peter Ettedgui

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

You know, all these superhero movies out there now, and all the other IP characters that have overtaken Hollywood, if there's ever a superhero actor who I'm still genuinely stunned to ever see in a non-superhero role, it's Christopher Reeve. Even to this day, and I'll be honest, I actually don't think much of "Superman" as a film-, I actually think the only really great superman film was "Superman II", which he is of course great in as well, but when I happen to run into Christopher Reeve in something else, it takes a minute to think of him as somebody, other than Superman. This isn't even unusual for people playing Superman, George Reeves, the original television superman, infamously struggled with typecasting all the way until his tragic suicide, but it's still seems different with Christopher Reeve-, it always seemed strange to ever see him outside of that role. I remember watching "The Remains of the Day"; he's only in that movie for, maybe not even ten minutes of screentime, but it's like he was almost cast because he was as big of a fish out of water as you could possibly find, playing an American in a very British film about a butler and a maid, and who's more of a fish out of water in a Merchant-Ivory film than friggin' Superman! The other film I remember him in was "Noises Off", the Peter Bogdanovich adaptation of the most well-beloved play about the behind-the-scenes of a play; he's actually really good and really funny in it, and he had to do a lot of physical humor in it too, but that's one of those plays that's better on stage than on screen, even with that film's all-star cast. It's got a little bit of a cult following, I guess it's worth the watch though, especially to see him in it.

I also saw that TV movie remake of "Rear Window" that he was in, and he won a SAG award for it, but-eh, of course that was a role he did, after the accident. 

(Wipes tears from eye)

Sorry, I think I was partially putting this movie off knowing how sad it would be. And we needed this movie, ever since he passed, I think Christopher Reeve's legacy has kinda been forgotten a bit over the years. Not just the fact, that, yes, he is the best and most iconic Superman, and he probably will always be, but after the horse riding accident that left him paralyzed, he became one of the biggest advocates for disabilities and spinal cord research, and his foundation still survives to this day, and a lot of the amazing techniques that are actually available now to get people to walk again, were some that might've first been attempted on Reeve, or were developed because of the exposure and funding that Reeve helped provide. What I hadn't realized was how major a political activist he was even before the accident, and frankly a lot of his personal histories and background has been quietly underreported, so that alone makes a wonderful documentary like "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story" absolutely essential. 

For instance, his father was Franklin Reeve, a famous poet and academic and he came from a very complex broken home, with divorce and several marriages from both sides, and Franklin was one of those most obnoxious and esoteric of artists, who- yes could back it up 'cause the guy had like, dozens of rare skills that no normal human would have, but he definitely didn't think comic book characters were a high enough art for his son to be doing. Reeve himself, was a Juliard trained actor, a major high school athlete at several sports, but he a theater kid at heart who played a few instruments as well, and good lord, he had that kind of a perfectly chiseled face that it clearly seems like he was carved like Greek marble. The movie even used that statuesque image of Reeve, as a cutaway shot showing a stylized effects of what it was like to be paralyzed after being Superman. He also was a pilot who flew solo across the Atlantic a few times. Honestly, looking at his life and all his accomplishments,- I mean, perhaps the reason we don't think about him much anymore is because of how pitiful his life makes most of ours look. Even spending the last nine years of his life parallyzed, I'm still taken aback thinking, how the hell did he do as much as he did?!

I didn't understand a lot of this as a kid. I knew Christopher Reeve was Superman, but I hadn't seen the movies and only vaguely recognized his picture, but I remember when he showed up at the Oscars, a mere ten months after the paralyzation how everybody stood up and everybody in my family watching with me, was kinda in shock. It dawned on me watching "Super/Man...", that I'm sure there had been a few famous people even in Hollywood who, maybe not as severe ailments, but somebody must've had personal physical struggles or even disabilities, but few of them were ever public about it, and most I'm certain probably just left the industry and public life altogether. I looked it up and honestly, I couldn't even find that. Everybody I can think of who had some kind of disability after they became famous, and still tried to remain in the industry, they all did it after Christopher Reeve did. Especially back then, I don't think people get it,- nowadays, you see a ramp next to stairs, and you think, "Why are they bothering still putting stairs there?", like, the ADA, the Americans for Disabilities Act, was in 1990! It was that recent; it was Bush Sr., and it was a long fight to get that, and no, they were still trying to get a lot of those rights at the time, and Reeve was somebody who ended up fighting for them, and pushed a lot through. He was already very politically active to begin with, but- like, the last thing I remember about Christopher Reeve was him being mentioned at the 2004 Presidential debate by John Kerry, as being somebody he was working with to fight for better conditions as well as guiding money to help advance spinal injury treatments. 

John Kerry's one of the talking heads here, as well as most of his kids, and his ex-wife. Dana Reeve died shortly after Christopher's passing from lung cancer, and the kids, some of whom had spent most of their lives with their father in a wheelchair, took over Christopher and Dana's foundation and that's still running strong today. Reeve had a lot of friends in Hollywood and Washington. Robin Williams was actually his roommate at Julliard, and I knew they were close but I didn't realize how close he was, and he close Robin and his then-wife Marsha was to them up until Christopher died. Glenn Close, who was close to both of them hypothesized how big a hole Chris's passing left Robin, who after Reeve's passing, began struggling with his old addiction demons, and later had struggles at home, and eventually with his mind. (I'm not personally as sold on that, especially if you've checked Robin's autopsy report, but I imagine it's, in an oddy way, a fairly comforting thought for those close to them.) It definitely represent a giant whole missing for everyone around Reeve. 

If there's anything missing from "Super/Man..." it's probably that we still didn't get enough of Christopher Reeve in his life, therefore making the film feel slightly unfulfilled, but that's a minor issue. "Super/Man..." is an important document of a man who's legacy is so much more than being the chiseled image of human perfection that Neitzsche would describe as "Superman". The film was directed by the team of Ian Banhote and Peter Ettedgui, two of the best documentarians, especially among autobiographical documentary filmmakers around. They're film "McQueen" about the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen made my Ten Best List a few years ago; they also more recently made the Netflix documentary, "Rising Phoenix" about the history of the Paralympics Games. I haven't seen that one yet, but these guys are unusually good at getting to the essence of their subjects, and from everything I ever heard about Christopher Reeve, and I never heard a bad word about him from anybody, they achieved his essence really well. I am certain he would appreciate this beautiful monument to him. 

WILL & HARPER (2024) Director: Josh Greenbaum

⭐⭐⭐

There's a lot of aspects of the trans experience that I must confess aludes me. There's many of the obvious aspects of course that I will never fully be able to comprehend even if I am able to empathize, but there's definitely one detail that, always kinda fascinates me, and that's, the name. Despite everything else, this is by far the strongest barrier for me to fully understand, and while I don't think I'm alone in that, I do think I'm in the minority, 'cause especially working in a creative field, it's startling to me just how often I run into people, not even in the industry but for whatever reasons, they go by different names than the one's they're given. Perhaps I live in a neighborhood right now where a lot of people just go by quite a few different names as well, especially the females, I see around town, but it does feel like it's becoming more and more common for people to go by different names than when they were born. Makes me consider how I've felt about my name over the years, which has not always been easy. My last name got made fun of quite relentlessly through much of my schooling; and since I had a more common first name, it often became the name I was most commonly called, even by close friends of mine. Sometimes I embraced it; I even remembered a prolongued period of time where I didn't even put my first name on papers I signed. Other times I have fought against it, asking to say that I prefer David,- sometimes being very pedantic and saying that I don't like being called, Dave. My mother not only was single, but she gave me her last name, and when she did marry, kept her given name, and perhaps that's apart or my virilence towards it, believing that my name is unique and important enough to keep. Yet, it was not a name that I chose and there were times that I did not like having it, but I never thought about actively changing it for any reason, I think it is something that comes up way more often than is ever discussed when growing up. My mother is a product of a time when it became out of fashion for new wives to have their name changed for instance, but now it seems much more common for those, when of the legal age to do so, to be able to simply fill out a few court documents and indeed, change their name to whatever they feel more suits or fits them, and while that does coincide with the more common prominence of trans people in society, and the uptake in transphobia and hate crimes towards them, this sense of striving for finding one's natural self, has lead to more consideration of what exactly one wants to be called. 

Will Ferrell's real name, is John, for instance. John William Ferrell, apparently at home, he was always called Will and that name stuck through adulthood and natural his successful acting career. That's not terribly unusual, in fact it's sometimes shocking to look up an actor or performer of any kind it seems and find out that they're actually going by their real name. That's understandable and simple enough, a lot of people I knew preferred to go by their middle name. His friend Harper Steele, that's a different story. Harper was Andrew Steele, a successful writer and producer, famously the head writer for "Saturday Night Live" during much of the '90s when Will Ferrell became a star on the show, and the two have remained close friends ever since, both of them often working on each other's projects over-the-years, and they decide to go on a road trip together, about a year after Andrew announced that he was transitioning to a woman and had decided on the name, Harper, obviously after Harper Lee, the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird", which is interesting 'cause, that is also, not her real name. She was born Nelle Harper Lee, and like Will, went by her middle name for publication, but she went by Nelle personally. 

I don't know why people's names fascinate so much about the trans experience, part of it is that I'm still not 100% sure I fully get it. I still struggle with, say Elliot Page's old travel show "Gaycation with Ellen Page", since she transitioned and that whole show was about her being gay, which, since he's trans, and dates women now,- I struggle with that one; it almost feels to me like, Elliot and Ellen are two different personas entirely, but if I go look that show up on Vice's network, they've changed it to "Gaycation with Elliot Page", even if the credits still say Ellen. I also don't really call Eddie Izzard, one of my personal favorite stand-up comics, "Suzy", although he says he prefers to be called that since he transitioned but he also says he's not disturbed if people call him Eddie, and she usually still performs as Eddie Izzard, or Suzy Eddie Izzard-, and he's also not particularly caring about which pronouns he uses. Compared to realizing you've been the wrong gender all this time and then going through the process of changing one's gender, changing/altering one's name is a predominantly trivial matter, but it still feels like a complicated one. 

Anyway, it's one of many subjects that Will & Harper talk about on this road trip of there's from New York to California. The idea is that, Harper would travel the country regularly as Andrew and would go to a lot of places that, might not be particularly welcoming towards somebody who's transitioned. Basketball games for instance, or just regular truckstop bars in flyover country states. He grew up in Iowa, so it's not new to her technically, but it's new since he became a her. And for Will, it's also his way of essentially, understanding his friend more. Sometimes the attempts backfire; famously they go to one of those restaurants where they try to eat a giant steak in a quick enough time period to get it for free, and Will, for some reason decided to go there in his Sherlock Holmes character from "Watson & Holmes" which-, I guess nobody told him that that was his worst film yet. Anyway, the photos of the event hit Twitter and once they stopped noticing his publicity stunt, they recognized Harper and the keyboard transphobes went at them. He makes it up to her by going in disguise to a restaurant at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas later on. 

They end the trip by visiting a secluded house that Harper had bought in California years ago which was her getaway house, where she had ideally planned to one day leave her life and live there where she could secretly dress up in women's clothing and live as she really wanted. That place was vandalized badly at some point, and the remnants of it make it seem like such a shallow pursuit, but in the moments of fear for Harper, I get it. When you think you won't be accepted, you look for some place where you will, even if that place is alone. 

"Will & Harper" was directed by their friend Josh Greenbaum; he's directed some television and films, often with some of Will's SNL-Alum compatriots before, I liked the overlooked Kristen Wiig/Annie Mumalo vehicle, "Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar" he directed for instance. The film itself isn't necessarily special more than it's just these two friends who happen to be big in the entertainment world going on a road trip, but you know how those films are, if it's interesting people, than you're gonna mostly enjoy the road trip with them. I guess it's a little more interesting than that vanity project description; apparently they even said that after they finished filming they weren't entirely sure they actually made a movie, but it was a nice trip anyway, and honestly, that's enough. 

ASTEROID CITY (2023) Director: Wes Anderson

⭐⭐

For some reason, after watching "Asteroid City", I decided to jump to Rogerebert.com for the first time in a while and read Glenn Kenny's review of the movie on there; I'm not entirely sure, although I suspect it had something to do with the other Wes Anderson film that I'm not particularly fond of, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", which Ebert explained as, quote, "the damnedest film. I cannot recommend it, but I wouldn't for one second discourage you from seeing it." I'm kinda on the same wavelength on Roger for that one, although I ultimately thought it was one of Anderson's more pointless meanderings. Kenny actually praised "Asteroid City" quite a bit, and he notedly brought up Jason Schwartzman's breakout character in Anderson's "Rushmore", which is a movie I like, but is also the film that-, at least before "The Grand Budapest Hotel" was the most beloved critically of all of Anderson's films, and-eh, honestly I've never fully understood that one. 

It's got the whimsy but I never really felt "Rushmore" had any real emotional punch to it, which is fine. Wes Anderson's movies are so distinctly his, stylized and center-framed to the nth degree that I can understand how some people can be completely turned off by them, but at the same time, when he's on, he's on. And to me, his first great film wasn't "Rushmore" but "The Royal Tenenbaums". Part of what I loved about that film, is the framing devide he uses, as the opening of that film begins with, a library book being perchased called "The Royal Tenenbaums" and then, as we continue with the movie, we get interstitials of the chapter openings. It's a surreal family epic with a narrator, presumably because the book is in third person, and also probably is a bit of an obnoxious and possibly bad novel to read and is filled with eccentric characters who've all lived lives that seem way too extraordinary to ever be real, it's like a fictionalized account of a downfall of some kind of Kennedy or Rockefeller-esque family; it turns a lot of the parts in the movie that would've been questionable and unrealistic if the movie were just, a regular movie, into strengths. 

He's done this a lot, in fact, I'm quite convinced that literature is the hidden core to the center of Wes Anderson's motifs. I think he's best when his focus is on the tone and stories of classic children's literature, "Moonrise Kingdom" for instance, I think his very best film, not only feels like a novel that's somewhere between "The Boxcar Children" and "Island of the Two Dolphins", but it also kinda feels like how I, as a kid would imagine the book would play out in my head, as I was reading it. He's also adapted some Roald Dahl novels, and stretched into surreal animation when the typical live-action devices he has for his movies aren't enough. 

He's also inspired by other forms of literature though, but sometimes when he is, he ends up with more of an erratic and surreal mess than a completed film. "The Life Aquatic..." feels way more like a bunch of parts than it ever does a complete whole, Roger Ebert was right about that one. I kinda feel similarly about his previous film, "The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun", which used the conceit of a strange newspaper magazine's, final issue as a framing device for a few different short stories that he's telling. That one I didn't like much either, but I found that one kinda clever, even if this was the kind of off-brand Parade magazine that would only ever exist in a world created by Wes Anderson. "Asteroid City", though, is the first time where I think this playful inspiration is just absolutely getting in the way. 

"Asteroid City" uses the framing device of a 1950s documentary TV special, with a Rod Serling-like narrator, who's only credited as "Host" (Bryan Cranston) to tell the story of a play, called "Asteroid City" which is apparently the most famous play by famed tragic playwrite Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) about a small desert town, named "Asteroid City" that is the meeting point of a lot of unique people on one particular day in the post WWII America, around the time of many famous UFO sightings in the American deserts, so think Roswell, except this place has a tourist trap in the form of a giant hole cause by an asteroid that hit the area millenias ago. It also has an unfinished onramp to a never-built freeway.

Anyway, the play stars Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzmann) who's playing Jones and the character in the play, Augie Steenbeck a war photographer who's going to "Asteroid City" where his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) is taking part in a major science competition held there. He's also there with his daughters, where he reveals that their mother has died and that their grandfather Stanley (Tom Hanks) is on their way to pick them up after their car breaks down. There's also Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), well, the actress is named Mercedes Ford, who's playing Midge, but in the play, Midge is a major Hollywood star who's daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) who's also in the competition...- and-

Okay,- you know what, I can't explain the rest of this film. I tried, I've spent like three days trying to go over everything, and I can't. That's the problem with this movie,- I tend to like Wes Anderson's elaborate whimsical approach to characters, especially with his love of literature, but there's a line, and were in a play, that's apart of a documentary about the play, that's about the author of the play, and how all these characters and parts and sets come together- I could spend like six paragraphs trying to connect all the dots of all these characters, and not even mention the fact that in the middle of the movie, Jeff Goldblum plays an alien!

That's how batshit, this movie is, like, that phrase, "Jeff Goldblum plays an alien", can begin with the word, "Meanwhile". This movie has an all-star cast, almost of the actors are playing multiple roles as themselves and stars-, and I don't know. This is why I brought up how I like the ideas of playing with the conflated storytelling mediums in "The Royal Tenenbaums" before, because everything that works there, it does not work here. Like, all Wes Anderson films, parts of this work,- like what would happen if suddenly an alien came down and just randomly grabbed a rock and was photographed and saw by a bunch of people forcing a quarantine in the middle of a weird desert place,-, like, that's actually a cool premise for a play, even toying about the idea that this is a play were watching being adapted, but when you keep adding these extra layers, that the play is in the documentary of the play, but there's also act breaks, and while it's a play and clearly we're on a set,- ugh, and there's still so much other stuff, like how the Hotel Manager (Steve Carell) shows off the plots of land that can be bought at the local motel's quarter machine. Or Maya Hawke's character as a science teacher trying to teach science to a group of Stargazers who were also there for the science thing, only to be stranded 'cause of the alien... It's all too much. 

He's done stuff like this before,-  "The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun", his last filn, I didn't really like it but even that one, it's clear were getting visualizations of magazine article that would've been in an issue of the titular paper, so even as it's a bunch of short stories and asides, it makes sense why it's like that. This movie has way too many extra layers about it, and because of that, any power that the stories within the stories of the film it might've had is just lost. Maybe you can argue that's the combinations of genres is the point,- I mean, I just watched "Killers of the Flower Moon" and that movie made a major point about how the interpretation of the story and how it was told, and had been told through sketchy biases and mediums had diluted the importance of the tale, but in this case, we're not even talking about a real play or playwright; this is all in Wes Anderson's head, and somebody needed to tell him to let a few things go. Personally, I would've just let this story be the play that it is, maybe make it clearly a teleplay like something Paddy Chayefsky would've done in the '50s or something, and then, begin the movie like this, staged teleplay and then have the more fanciful parts come from the movie....- there was a way to do this, granted, it would've been done in a more conventional manner and tone than I think Wes has any interest in ever doing, but like, this is the first of his in a while, maybe since "The Darjeeling Limited" where I just had a hard time even caring about what was going on by the end. This might be his worst film; I know some people are gonna live and die on it, and Roger Ebert is right, when he's off, he's still making the damnedest film where I wouldn't stop others from watching this film, but man, if there's a movie where the parts are better than the, well, literal giant hole in the middle of town, it's "Asteroid City".