All posts by James Humphreys

A Bigger Boat – Steven Spielberg’s Jaws at 50 and the Rise of the Blockbuster

You’ll never go in the water again!  That was the tagline of the monumental blockbuster film Jaws (1975) when it first premiered, and was there ever a tagline that hit it’s mark exactly as it did.  Hollywood was no stranger to creature features.  The whole B-Movie Sci-Fi craze of the 1950’s and 60’s was littered with movies about mankind battling the forces of nature as they run amuck.  But, Jaws was very different from those classics of the past.  It was grounded and devoid of campy cheapness.  It was a film that managed to transcend the the creature feature genre and grab a hold of it’s audience in a way that the industry likely did not expect.  It was a movie that made it’s premise feel real, and for a time, it did in fact make people afraid to go into the water.  Jaws was adapted from a novel of the same name by Peter Benchley, who had a part in adapting his own book into the screenplay alongside screenwriter Carl Gottlieb.  While the story had some of the same tropes as many other creature feature stories, Benchley’s novel rooted it’s premise in a far more grounded story about the people charged with saving their town from a rabid great white shark.  It’s a simple story, but enriched with not just the man vs. nature aspect but also with the friction that occurs between the people involved as they embark on their quest.  It’s just as much a character study as it is a story about hunting a shark.  While the movie had a lot of potential to be a fun action adventure, it would achieve a much greater status in the annals of movie history by falling into the right hands at the right time.  Jaws status as a classic is inexorably tied to the personal growth of the filmmaker who made it; Steven Spielberg.  Jaws was the movie that propelled him to the next level as a filmmaker and he wouldn’t be the icon that he is today 50 years later had it not been for the trials the he was put through in the making of this movie.

Steven Spielberg was an ambitious go-getter right from the start of his career in Hollywood.  Legend has it he snuck off of the famous Universal Studios tour when he was a teenager and wandered around on his own.  He was spared from disciplinary action after a film librarian at the studio was impressed by his ambition and he was granted a three day pass to revisit.  That three day pass expanded into a full time gig as Spielberg became a regular assistant on the studio lot.  He used his odd jobs to help finance a short film called Amblin (1968), which got him noticed by a Universal executive named Sid Sheinberg, who signed the then 20 year old filmmaker to a 7 year contract.  Spielberg would direct several episodes of TV series made on the Universal lot, and he won high marks for his professionalism and ability to run productions on time and on budget.  Spielberg eventually got his chance to direct feature films for Universal, which included the critically acclaimed films Duel (1971) and The Sugarland Express (1974).  But while these movies were well regarded, Spielberg hadn’t had that big break out hit that would turn him into a household name and give him the creative freedom to do what he wanted as a filmmaker.  Thankfully, he still had the favor of Sheinberg, who by 1971 had elevated to the position of President at Universal Studios.  And it was not long after that the novel Jaws was optioned by the studio.  Based on Spielberg’s success with the movie Duel, which featured a story about a man being hunted by giant freight truck, Sheinberg believed that Steven had what it took to make this story about a killer shark work on the big screen.  Spielberg was more than happy to take up the challenge, but given what happened over the next couple years, Spielberg may have had some second thoughts about the assignment.

The making of Jaws was to put it lightly a bit of a “shit show.”  As skilled as Spielberg was up to this point, he had yet to make a movie as complicated as this one.  For one thing, half of the film was going to be set out in open water.  While you could do some of that on a studio controlled flood tank, of which Universal actually has one of the largest in the world, Spielberg believed that you needed the authenticity of being stranded out in the middle of open sea to really convey the terror of the shark’s presence.  So, the production set up shop in Martha’s Vineyard, with the small island community playing the part of the fictional Amity Island from the novel.  The sleepy, tightly knit community provided a good setting for the production of this movie, but it also was a crucial lifeline for the film once it moved into it’s oceanic phase.  In order to make it look like they were out in open water, they had to film several miles out in order to make the island disappear over the horizon.  But Martha’s Vineyard also had the benefit of having shallow waters all around it in a twelve mile radius, with the bottom being only 30 feet below the surface, making salvaging much easier if something went wrong.  And that it did.  Not only were they confined to filming on boats for most of the film shoot, but they were also dealing with three mechanical sharks that would be playing the monster.  Two of the sharks were open on opposite sides in order to create greater mechanical movement depending on the shot and the angle they were capturing it from, while the third was fully skinned and meant to bob up and down in the water, mainly for the shots showing it swimming.  But these sharks would prove to be a nightmare to maintain.  Filming out in the open sea meant that the salt water would constantly wreck havoc on the mechanical instruments puppeteering the sharks, and the sharks would constantly experience multiple issues that delayed shooting for extensive lengths of time.  Salvaging the sharks from the sea floor was also a common occurrence.  The shark problems being a constant nuisance throughout the film shoot caused Spielberg to jokingly name the sharks Bruce, which was the name of his lawyer.

Given all the production woes, Spielberg was constantly worried that he might have the project taken away from him.  He had gone from delivering on time and on budget to massively going over schedule by weeks.  But, it was through these trials that Spielberg really found himself as a filmmaker, developing skills that would carry him through the rest of his career.  While the sharks were giving him trouble, Spielberg used this opportunity to become a problem solver.  He would fill the down time between shooting with the sharks by working on shots that would build the atmosphere of the movie.  His team devised a scene that was not in the original script where Richard Dreyfuss’ character Hopper conducts an underwater investigation of a boat that was potentially attacked by the shark.  The scene is famous for a jump scare as a severed head pops out of one of the holes in the haul of the boat.  So while the scene doesn’t show the shark itself, you still get a sense of the terrifying power it holds after seeing what ends up to it’s victims.  And through all of this, Spielberg learned that it actually worked to the movie’s benefit to show as little of the shark as possible, which helped to make the shots later in the film when he does appear have a lot more impact.  They would only be able to get a handful of shots of the sharks actually working, but they would not be wasted, and thanks to the expertly handled building of dread throughout the film, Spielberg achieved his goal in making the shark absolutely terrifying.  It’s all a trick of signaling the presence of the shark without actually seeing him.  There are several underwater shots that signify the shark’s point of view as we see him swim up towards his victims who are bobbing around on the surface.  Then the movie cuts to the actors as they react to the shark capturing them in it’s razor sharp bite.   Couple this with John Williams’ iconic pulse-pounding musical score that signals the dreaded presence of the shark, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for making us forget that this is just some mechanical shark.  In the end he becomes almost as terrifying as the real thing, and we only ever get 4 total minutes of screen time with him.

But it’s not just the shark that makes Jaws an iconic movie.  Steven Spielberg also lucked out in getting the right actors for the part.  An interesting side note about the director’s history with the source novel is that when Spielberg first read it, he found himself rooting for the shark because he found the human characters so unlikable.  One of the great things about this movie adaptation is that Spielberg managed to make the human characters relatable and worth following to the end of the story.  And it mattered to have the right actors in the rolls too.  Roy Scheider was already a well respected up to this point in his career, having already garnered accolades for his work in the Oscar-winning The French Connection (1971).  He would provide the perfect everyman element to the character of Sheriff Brody.  Rising star Richard Dreyfuss would also bring a wonderful kinetic energy to the film as the cocky, self-made shark expert Hooper.  The working experience between Spielberg and Dreyfuss must’ve really been fruitful as Spielberg would cast him as the lead in his next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  But perhaps the most memorable character to come out of the film was the mysterious Captain Quint, played by an absolutely magnetic Robert Shaw.  Quint enters the film with one of the most memorable introductions in movie history, scrapping his nails across a chalk board in order to get the townsfolk’s attention at a community meeting, and with his salty Irish brogue he delivers a character that’s as tough and mean as the shark he hunts.  With echoes of Moby Dick’s Ahab, Quint becomes just as much of a wild card in the story as the shark, and his dynamic in contrast with the two more pragmatic heroes helps to give the movie personalities that are indeed capable of being interesting, independent of the shark.  One of the greatest additions to the film’s story is the scene where the three men have a bonding moment in between shark attacks and share their own stories to each other.  Here, Quint tells the other two about his time on the ill-fated U.S.S Indianapolis; a ship famous for sinking in shark infested waters after delivering the atomic bomb to the navy posted in the Pacific.  The monologue Quint delivers, which was written by an uncredited John Milius, is chillingly told by Robert Shaw, creating one of the movie’s most iconic moments.  Through that and many more moments like it, Spielberg managed to make this more than just a creature feature, but a truly human story about survival in the face of overwhelming terror.

In the end, the movie went overschedule by a staggering 100 days.  Spielberg was worried that this would be the movie to end him, just as he was finally starting to get a foothold as a filmmaker.  No studio would ever hire a director who ended up going three times over schedule like that.  While he still had the favor of Sid Sheinberg at Universal, that might’ve ended as well if the movie failed to recoup it’s costs, which also went massively over budget.  This was going to be the final film on his contract anyways, and there would be no need to renew if they couldn’t trust him anymore.  So, with a lot weighing on his shoulders, Spielberg would assemble his film together in the editing room, hoping that all that hard work translated into a coherent film.  The movie was orignally slated for a Holiday 1974 release, but because of the delays that the film shoot suffered, Universal had to push the release to Summer of 1975.  This was seen as a bad omen for the movie.  Back in those days, summer was seen as a dumping ground for the movie studios as films that were always considered valuable were released towards the end of the year, hoping to garner awards attention.  Summer movies were the throwaway genre flicks that the studios didn’t see much value in since they never grossed as much as the prestige films.  But, things would be different for Jaws.  The delay almost became a blessing in disguise because it not only gave Spielberg the right amount of time to assemble a stronger movie out of his edit, but by the time the film was released, it would be playing in a less crowded field at the box office with no relative competition.  The film opened on June 20, 1975 in one of the widest releases seen up to that point.  Initially wide releases were reserved for maximum saturation for films that studios had no faith behind, but for Jaws, a movie that received instant critical acclaim and wide audience interest, it would be a foundational shake-up for the industry as a whole.  Jaws became a monumental success at the box office, shattering every record in the books, including becoming the first film ever to cross the $200 million mark in it’s original release.  Jaws not only was a success story, it also fundamentally changed Hollywood forever.

If there was anything that has come to define Jaws in the annals of movie history, it’s that it started what would later become known as the era of the Blockbuster.  While Jaws wasn’t the movie that helped to coin the term blockbuster, as previous films like The Sound of Music (1965) and The Exorcist (1973) also were given the label, it was nevertheless seen as the movie that would usher in a new era where movies like it would be the driving force in the commerce of Hollywood.  After the fall of the old studio system and the rise of New Hollywood, the driving force in Hollywood through much of the 60’s and 70’s was auteur driven films from the newest crop of maverick filmmakers like William Friedkin, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese.  Spielberg came up through this generation, but he was also set apart from it given his studio connections.  With the success of Jaws, the studios began to fall out of favor with the auteur driven cinema of New Hollywood, which was already starting to see declining returns due to out of control productions like Sorcerer (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Heaven’s Gate (1980).  Now they wanted to have the next Jaws.  There were plenty of cheap copycat movies that tried to capitalize on Jaws success, like Orca (1977) and Piranha (1978), but it wasn’t another Jaws clone that would continue the Blockbuster era into the next decade.  Spielberg’s friend and colleague George Lucas would follow Jaws’ example by releasing his new space opera adventure film Star Wars (1977) in the summer season, and in the end, he too would see a phenomenal success during it’s release, even surpassing the record setting grosses of Jaws.  In the years that followed, the Summer season was no longer viewed as Hollywood’s dumping ground, but would instead be where Hollywood would premiere their biggest tentpoles, capitalizing on audiences off all ages that were out of school and looking to cool off from the summer heat.  And both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg would continue to feed the studios’ appetite for new blockbusters, delivering more in the coming decades with big franchise like Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park.  But all of this change was the result of the turning point that Jaws marked with it’s massive success in the face of all the factors that worked against it.

Steven Spielberg may have been the man who sparked the beginning of a new era in Hollywood, where the Blockbuster would come to dominate, but Jaws was also the movie that forged him into the kind of filmmaker that would continue to survive and grow in the changing Hollywood landscape as well.  The challenging and mostly frustrating production of the movie would be his trial by fire as a filmmaker, and out of it he developed problem solving skills that have made him the most consistent and reliable filmmaker in the business.  Spielberg became the great instinctual storyteller that he is today thanks to the creativity he had to rely upon in order to make Jaws come together.  And even after 50 years, Jaws still is the thrill ride that brings you to the edge of your seat and hasn’t lost any of it’s, shall we say, “bite” over the years.  It’s gone on to have this legendary aura around it, becoming one of the most oft-quoted movies in Hollywood history, especially with Roy Scheider’s now iconic ad-libbed line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”  You can still see regular screenings of this film in cinemas all over the world, including a recent one at the TCM Classic Film Festival in April where it played with a pristine 35mm print at the Egyptian.  It also has managed to become a mainstay at the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, where the Studio Tour has a brief encounter with Bruce the Shark as a part of it’s showcase.  But that’s not the only lasting legacy of Jaws at Universal.  While Spielberg has gone on to make movies at every single studio in Hollywood, he still considers Universal his home base, and when he set up his own production company Amblin Entertainment, he chose to set it up on the Universal lot, next to the bungalows that he once worked out of as a page boy and assistant all those years ago.  You can still see Amblin’s offices just off the main route of the Studio Tour to this day.  Jaws made the Spielberg that we know today, and though it may have been a nightmare at the time, there’s no doubt that Spielberg is proud of what he accomplished with the film.  Those grueling 150 days of shooting set the stage for the next 50 years of Spielberg’s life and he’s still not done yet.  We may have been afraid to go back into the water that fateful summer, but we’ve always returned back to this movie again and again, and that will continue for the next 50 years as well.

Elio – Review

It’s becoming more and more difficult for an original idea to break through in the increasingly competitive world of animation.  Once a rarity, sequels have become the driving force of animation studios, with more and more of the top brands relying on established franchises in order to keep the lights on.  But at the same time, none of these franchises would exist had one original film managed to connect with audiences.  So, there has to exist a balance between studios investing in their future by coming up with the next big idea for a movie, while at the same time still continuing to milk their franchises for what their worth.  Sadly, the balance is becoming more heavily favored in the sequel department, and that’s partly because those are the films that generate the strongest results at the box office.  But the flooding of the marketplace with established franchises has made it difficult for something original to stand out, and the number of them that do is becoming far smaller each year.  This is even true with what is regarded as the best animation studio of them all; Pixar Animation.  All of their highest grossing films are sequels, including Inside Out (2024), Incredibles 2 (2018), Finding Dory (2016) and Toy Story 4 (2019), and there more on the horizon, including another Toy Story.  But, they are a studio that still tries to put out something original into theaters, not just in order to plan for the future, but to also allow themselves a chance to be experimental as well.  They have a lot more leeway than other animation studios in this regard, mainly due to the strength of their brand name which is a selling point in itself.  But, circumstances in recent years have made even this selling point difficult for them.  After Toy Story 4 hit theaters and generated a handsome total at the box office, Pixar had an upcoming slate that was going to be primarily originals; a bode of confidence in their ability to deliver on the strength of their brand alone.  But, unfortunately the Coivd-19 pandemic ruined their plans.  Onward (2020) only got two weeks into it’s run before movie theaters everywhere closed and Pixar would not have anything seen on the big screen for another 2 years.

In that meantime, three films of theirs were dropped onto streaming; Soul (2020), Luca (2021), Turning Red (2022).  And when it finally came time to return to the big screen, Pixar unfortunately were re-entering the race with a bum horse called Lightyear (2022).  Essentially, all of the brand value that they had in the previous decade was undercut by their parent company’s decision to have them drive up their streaming service’s membership instead.  And this was despite the positive critical response that these movies received; Soul even went on to win a couple of Oscars.  These movies were finding an audience thankfully, but their absence from the movie theaters was affecting the brand’s selling power as well.  People were just not being drawn to theaters anymore because they had to see the new Pixar movie.  This was evident by the weak opening weekend numbers of Pixar’s next film, Elemental (2023).  The movie thankfully managed to stay afloat thanks to strong word of mouth, but even still it was far from Pixar’s peak performance.  But then came a sequel to the studio’s rescue; Inside Out 2.  People figured that the sequel to the award winning 2015 original would do much better at the box office, but I’m sure few imagined just how well it would do.  The movie became Pixar’s biggest moneymaker ever both at the domestic and worldwide box office.  It’s unfortunate that it had to be a franchise film that turned around Pixar’s fortunes, but at the same time Inside Out 2 was still made with the high quality animation and storytelling that has become a bedrock of the studio.  With a big win in their column now, Pixar is hoping that it will have strong downhill effects for their follow-ups.  Originally, their newest film, Elio (2025) was supposed to precede Inside Out 2, but considering that it’s production was delayed a bit by the strikes in 2023, it was decided to push the film a full year and let Inside Out 2 carry the slack for the year.  It may have worked to Elio’s benefit because now they can ride the crest of the wave of it’s predecessor’s huge win.  The only question is, is Elio another positive step in the right direction for Pixar, or is it another flop waiting to happen that can’t carry the weight of Pixar’s valuable brand.

Elio is another in a long line of coming-of-age stories that have been central to Pixar’s body of work.  A young little boy named Elio (Yonas Kibreab) has recently lost his parents in an accident and now has to live under the care of his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldana), an Air Force major responsible for running a program that tracks space debris.  While spending time with her on the base, Elio wanders into an exhibit that details the history of the Voyager 1 spacecraft and how it has explored deep into outer space, sending a message from Earth to distant worlds within the cosmos.  Blown away by all this, he wishes to explore the cosmos himself.  A couple years later, he has devised a plan to get himself abducted by aliens.  His obsession has left him isolated from his community, and estranged from his stressed out aunt.  Things come to a head when Elio ends up using the satellites on the base to send out a message to outer space in the hopes that someone will hear him.  This incident leads Olga to put Elio in a youth camp where he’ll be trained to be more disciplined.  But, while trying to stay out of the wrath of bullies at the camp, Elio ends up finding out that his message was received.  An alien spacecraft arrives and beams him light years away to another world.  He soon finds himself at a space station that operates like a intergalactic United Nations, and they are seeking new worlds to join their ranks, including Earth.  With the help of a super computer named Ooooo (Shirley Henderson), he’s given a universal translator that helps him communicate with all of the Alien ambassadors present there, including Ambassador Questa (Jameela Jamil), Ambassador Tegmen (Matthias Schweighofer) and Ambassador Helix (Brandon Moon).  There’s only one problem, they are all under the impression that Elio is the leader of Earth.  Complicating things even more, a war lord Emperor named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) is also threatening the council of the Communiverse if they don’t honor his membership.  In order to fit in and continue his charade, Elio volunteers to speak with Lord Grigon on his dreadnought ship, but he soon learns he’s out of his league and becomes imprisoned.  On the ship, Elio meets Grigon’s young son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), who may be his ticket out of trouble.  Is Elio able to fit in with this weird and often dangerous alien world, or will he learn that he needs to make things right on Earth first.

Elio is the first directorial effort of Pixar veteran after Adrian Molina after his co-directing work with Lee Unkrich on Coco (2017).  It’s easy to see that coming-of-age stories are something that he’s drawn to as a storyteller as there are quite a few parallels between the two movies.  Both involve an adolescent boy with big dreams getting a chance to visit a fantastical world where he’s able to live out his fantasy; but along the way they realize that their dreams also clash with reality and it makes them confront something about themselves that challenges their viewpoints.  All of this isn’t to say that Elio is directly copying Coco beat for beat; it just shows that Molina seems to work comfortably with this kind of narrative.  And indeed he does make Elio’s story a wonderful and engaging one.  Elio will indeed be a crowd pleasing movie for many people.  It’s funny, colorful, and even has a good heart that hits some powerful emotional beats.  I’d say the one thing that works against the film is that it isn’t terribly original either.  It does cook with all of the Pixar movie ingredients that we all like and uses them well, but it all comes together in a meal that feels perhaps a tad bit familiar.  Elio isn’t quite as groundbreaking in it’s concept, as demonstrated with it’s similarities to Coco, and visually it is borrowing a lot of inspiration from a lot of things that we’ve already seen done in other Pixar Animation movies.  Is it just me, or does some of the designs of the Communiverse station feel like they were pulled out of the world of Inside Out.  With all that said, everything is still done well in the movie.  It may be formulaic, but the movie doesn’t suffer too much from that.  I for one was still finding myself entertained throughout.  But you can definitely tell when the movie was falling back on already tread ground when it was struggling to find it’s way.  Oddly enough, it’s the Earthbound stuff that was where the movie was finding it’s most inspired moments.  I especially loved the way they dealt with what Aunt Olga was going through while Elio was off on his adventure.

The movie’s greatest asset overall is the character of Elio.  He’s certainly not the first young protagonist in a Pixar movie, and he’s actually part of a recent trend of the studio focusing on adolescent stories.  Elio comes to us after the likes of Miguel from Coco, Luca from Luca and Meilin from Turning Red, but he’s still able to stand out amidst all of them.  The thing that makes the character of Elio so enjoyable to watch in the film is that the filmmakers aren’t afraid to make him a bit of a problem child.  There are a lot of similarities between him and Lilo from Lilo & Stitch (2002), and that’s not a bad comparison at all.  Elio is essentially a nice kid, but he also has a bad temper and is a bit of a habitual liar as well.  The movie also makes a strong point that this obsession he has had with exploring the universe has made him withdrawn and alone, which is an interesting character flaw to give to a young character like him.  Elio’s journey is much more than getting the chance to explore the universe; it’s also about coming to understand that having a myopic obsession becomes a roadblock to your maturity as a person.  The movie thankfully never shames Elio for being a bit of a weirdo.  But it does confront Elio with the fact that he does need to grow up in order to be a better person.  When he is taken to the Communiverse, he realizes very quickly that his dreams have done little to prepare him for real world situations.  It does the coming-of-age trope very well in this regard, and the many layers of Elio’s character help to make the story resonate.  I have a feeling that many kids are going to find the character relatable, and the message that Pixar is sending with the movie is one that is worthwhile for young viewers.  It’s okay to dream and be a free spirit, but also have a sense of your responsibilities to those you love and the world you live in.  All the while, Pixar does a great job giving Elio a winning personality that makes him feel both animated but also real at the same time.  I especially like the fact that he not only has come up with his own language (which is a very kid thing to do) but he also figured out the correct grammar in that language as well.  His voice, provided by a talented young actor named Yonas Kibreab, also brings a lot of warmth and humor to the role.  You know when Pixar is working well with it’s storytelling when they can make yet another child protagonist in their long line of movies still feel wholly unique and different.

The remainder of the cast are more of a mixed bag.  The one drawback of having such a strong main character in the movie is that his development kind of takes away from all of the other secondary characters in the story.  Elio’s Aunt Olga perhaps suffers the most in available screen-time, because for the sake of building up the middle act of the movie, her character needs to be sidelined.  That being said, she does come across as a fully rounded character herself.  It’s helpful that she’s voice by newly minted Oscar winner Zoe Saldana, whose adding yet another prime role in her body of work for Disney, following appearances in the Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar franchises.  Her vocal performance hits the right marks with showing Olga’s frustrations with all of Elio’s bad behavior as well as her desire to do right in raising him up in the absence of his parents.  The alien characters also are a mixed bag, as many of them don’t really stand out given the short amount of run time we spend with them.  One of the stand outs is Brad Garrett as Lord Grigon.  Garrett is a veteran of many different Pixar films, including playing Bloat in Finding Nemo (2003) and Gusteau in Ratatouille (2007), and he brings his comically bassy voice to yet another memorable character in one of their films.  I like the fact that his vocal performance is able to find range between menacing and comical without making the shifts feel out of character.  It’s a character that could’ve easily turned one note, and thankfully Brad Garrett is a veteran of the medium to where he can make the character a lot more multi-faceted.  Newcomer Remy Edgerly is also a standout with his hilariously upbeat performance as Grigon’s young son Glordon.  The contrast between Glordon’s more monstrous appearance (kind of like a mini version of the sand worms from Dune) and his hyperactive childish personality is especially fun to watch, and the movie gets a lot of humorous mileage out of the character.  Edgerly also has strong chemistry with Elio’s voice actor Yonas, and the interaction between the two is a definite highlight of the movie.  And in the Pixar tradition, the strength of the cast is not in the names on the marquee but rather by how well the actor fit their role.  Zoe Saldana is perhaps the biggest name in this cast, and she’s not even the main character.  Everyone is perfectly suited for their roles in the film, and it makes for another great Pixar cast of characters.

The film also has a strong visual sense too, even though a lot of it does feel derivative.  Pixar has never faltered when it comes to their visuals, even on some of their lesser films, and Elio continues their winning streak in this department.  I especially like the contrast that the movie delivers with the Earthbound moment and the celestial ones.  The Earth scenes feel natural with a muted color palette.  Then once the aliens come to “abduct” Elio, the palette begins to pop.  It’s a lot like the shift found in The Wizard of Oz (1939), though no sepia was used this time.  While the visual motif of the Communiverse feels perhaps a bit too close to the organic looking fantasy-scape of Inside Out, it still had a lot of beauty to it as well.  It’s also cool to see the work put into making all of the aliens unique in their designs. There aren’t a lot of repeating alien types in those scenes, which tells you that Pixar allowed their artists to go wild with their imaginations, and most of it does make it on the screen.  The movie definitely gives the story a very adventurous feel, surprising us at every corner with all the stuff we are about to see.  And while there is a lot of familiarity to a lot of the sci-fi tropes in this movie, many of them are fun send-ups of those cliches as well.  What they do with cloning in this movie is especially imaginative, and it leads to some of the best laughs in the movie.  In many ways, I feel like this movie pays homage to a lot of kid-centric sci-fi movies of the 80’s and 90’s, like Flight of the Navigator (1986) and Explorers (1985) and helps to modernize those kinds of imaginative adventures for young audiences living today.  At the same time, it does have the same heart-string pulling moments that have become a hallmark of Pixar.  While the movie didn’t leave me misty eyed like the ending of Coco, the film does hit some emotional moments that I’m sure will warm the hearts of audiences both young and old.  Also, I especially dug the music in this movie, provided by Rob Simonsen.  It’s got a techno futuristic beat to it, but also it also hits those emotional moments very well, reminding me a lot of the Oscar winning work of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the Soul soundtrack.  Overall, another extremely well crafted film from Pixar Animation.

It’s too early to tell just yet how Elio will be received.  It will not be anywhere near the record-breaking box office of Inside Out 2, and early indicators suggest it may actually struggle out of the gate.  The hope is that Inside Out 2’s success may have rebuilt the brand prestige to Pixar, but that will only be determined by Elio’s ability to stand on it’s own as a follow-up.  There’s no doubt that Pixar still has the creative drive to deliver a worthwhile original film, but it’s going to be hard to convince audiences of that in this current animation market.  Even now, the box office is dominated by not one but two live action remakes of classic animated movies; Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon.  One positive that may work in Elio’s favor is that Pixar films are known to leg out well past their opening weekend.  This was true with Elemental, which overcame a weak opening weekend to turn into a modest success at the box office.  And all of those films that opened on streaming instead of in theaters have since gone on to become some of Pixar’s most popular recent films.  Hopefully audiences will discover Elio over the course of the summer and if they don’t come in droves on opening weekend, hopefully word of mouth will keep it around for a long while.  As far as Pixar movies go, I think it stands very well in contrast with some of their best work.  I wouldn’t say it’s one of their all time greats (which is becoming an increasingly high bar to clear), but it’s definitely in the upper half of their filmography.  The only thing that holds it back from a more perfect score is that a lot of it is formulaic and falls back on the familiar too many times.  But, everything is still done extremely well, so there isn’t too much to complain about.  It’s got one of their best main characters ever and has a story that still has a lot of charm, humor and warmth to it.  And it should be said that we need to root for more movies like it, especially in an animation industry that is increasingly reliant on franchise appeal.  There needs to be more fresh ideas in the animation market, and these new ideas need to be nurtured through audience interest.  That’s how we can get a vibrant and bustling animation market back to not feeling like it’s not a cash grab anymore.  Definitely see Elio if you can in a theater and keep looking up at those stars.

Rating: 8.5/10

Cowboys in Love – Brokeback Mountain at 20 and the Impact it Has Had on Queer Rights in America

It is really quite interesting looking at a movie like Brokeback Mountain (2005) in the context of the 20 years since it’s release in theaters.  For a lot of things, it was a pivotal film for many different things.  It solidified director Ang Lee as one of the industry’s greatest filmmakers, earning him his first Oscar for directing, a landmark as the first Asian filmmaker to win that prestigious honor.  It was also a crucial film in the budding acting careers of Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams.  It was also a major touchstone in the all too brief body of work for actor Heath Ledger who sadly would be lost to us in a short couple of years after his appearance in this film.  But, above all else, Brokeback Mountain stood as a monumental step forward for queer themed movies in Hollywood.  In the 20 years since this movie came out, there have been many social progressions in queer representation in cinema, with the presence of queer characters and storylines no longer being niche, but rather a natural part of the fabric of the culture.  But, 20 years ago, things were quite different, and Brokeback Mountain stood out much more as a provocative statement in it’s time.  Over the years, we’ve seen attitudes change, and it puts Brokeback into a different frame now in retrospect.  Does it still resonate with a culture that has seen so much change in 20 years, or is it becoming more of a relic of it’s time.  There are many ways to dissect Brokeback Mountain as a work of cinema, but it’s place in queer cinema is where it has stood out the most.  It certainly wasn’t the first movie centered on queer themes to be made, nor even the first mainstream film to center on queer characters.  But it perhaps was the most profound statement made in it’s time about how Hollywood as a whole wanted to deal with queer rights in society which was to be fully supportive of it.  And that was crucial as the fight for queer rights in America were reaching a breaking point.

One of the  most provocative things about Brokeback Mountain was that it was telling an overtly queer story in a genre that typically was associated with hyper masculinity; the Western.  The movie was adapted from a short story written by American author Annie Proulx.  It covers the story of two cowboys named Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist who are hired to herd sheep in a grazing range near the titular Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.  Out in the middle of nowhere with only each other for company the two form an attachment which eventually turns into sexual desire.  After the weeks long assignment ends, the two men go their separate ways.  They both find new lives and jobs, get married and have children.  But, there’s always that nagging draw in the back of their minds about the time they spent alone at Brokeback Mountain.  They eventually reunite, and sneak away on camping trips which cover for their romantic flings.  Over time, this secretive arrangement they’ve made for themselves takes it’s toll on their relationship as well as on their marriages.  They know that if their secret gets out, it’s more than just public shame for them; in certain parts of the country it also means death.  For the sake of their sanity and what’s left of their relationships with their broken families, they part ways for good.  Years later, Ennis learns that Jack did in fact run afoul of the wrong kinds of people who looked down on their love, and it leaves an empty place in his heart now with no one else to share his secret love with.  Annie Proulx wrote her story as a reflection of what she observed in rural North America.  She would spot lonely men in country bars who often appear to be looking at the other men, but had to put on a rugged exterior in order to throw off suspicion.  She didn’t know for sure what these men were hiding, but it gave her the inspiration for writing about cowboys who had to hide their secret homosexual desires behind the aesthetic of a rugged outdoorsman, as she stated herself in an interview, “I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.”

Her short story was acclaimed when it was first published and immediately garnered the attention of screenwriter Diana Ossana.  Ossana sought Annie Proulx’s approval to adapt the story into a feature script, which Proulx agreed to despite reservations about whether it could be done.  While Ossana was an accomplished writer in her own right, she also had a writing partner on this screenplay that would be crucial for the adaptation; acclaimed writer Larry McMurtry.  McMurtry was very much the godfather of modern Westerns with an impressive body of work that included dozens of novels and short stories.  He’s perhaps best know for his Lonesome Dove series, which was turned into an acclaimed TV mini-series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.  Movies that were based on his novels have also become classics, including neo-Westerns like Hud (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1971).  McMurtry and Ossana had collaborated on a few novels before and they had a great rapport together.  Larry loved the story that Ossana brought to him with Brokeback Mountain, and he had the Western bona fides to give it that genuine rugged American cowboy flavor.  They completed their screenplay almost a year after the original publication of the story in 1998, but the film would languish in development for a couple years.  Hollywood was still hesitant to invest in a provocative and unapologetic story about gay love, especially as the conservative Bush administration was coming into power.  New Queer Cinema icon Gus Van Sant expressed interest in the script for a while, with the intent of casting Matt Damon and Joaquin Phoenix in the roles of Ennis and Jack.  That eventually fell through as Gus became more intent on filming his Harvey Milk biopic project instead.  Eventually, producer James Schamus at Focus Features decided to take a chance on the film, and he handed it over to his long time collaborator Ang Lee.  Lee was an interesting choice to tackle this project, as he was very versatile filmmaker.  In between this and his Oscar nominated martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Lee was just coming off his failed attempt at a Marvel super hero movie, Hulk (2002), proving that he was open to making any kind of movie regardless of genre.  It wasn’t Lee’s first attempt at a queer themed storyline, which was 1993’s The Wedding Banquet, but it would be his first attempt at a Western.  Still, Brokeback Mountain had extraordinary luck in not only having a team of prestige writers and filmmakers in their corner, but with Focus Features involved they were getting the backing of a major studio as well.

Brokeback Mountain was released at a very crucial time in American society.  We were entering a hotly contested debate over the matrimonial rights for gay and lesbian couples in the United States.  In 2004, Massachusetts became the first US state to recognize same-sex marriage as a legal right for it’s citizens.  This set off a firestorm from the religious right, saying that it was an affront to “traditional marriage,” and they began to push back on this groundbreaking advancement in gay rights.  Unfortunately for many in the queer community, the anti-gay right wing had the political muscle to get push back.  Republican president George W. Bush and his administration used this as a wedge issue in their re-election campaign and were pushing for more bans on same-sex marriage across the country.  Sadly, the majority of states did ratify these bans into law, including deep blue California with their controversial Proposition 8.  There was even a move to write a ban of same-sex marriage into the Constitution with a “traditional marriage amendment.”  This was the flashpoint that Brokeback Mountain was brought into; a moment where the debate over same-sex marriage was the primary focus of the American “culture wars.”  In a way, this was both a blessing and a curse for the movie.  One, it was a prestige film that was going to garner more attention because the subject it was tackling was very much a focal point of the cultural conversation at the time.  But, it was also going to become the poster child for this same era of conflict, and become the target of the same backlash that the queer community was facing during this time.  The movie would be the talk of the town, but also the focal point of a debate that it may not have been built for.  Regardless, the movie premiered to critical acclaim when it first released in the Fall of 2005, and it was for the longest time seen as the clear front runner in the Oscar race for that year.  It’s eventual loss to Crash (2005) of course would set off another firestorm of it’s own.

The Oscar controversy aside, Brokeback Mountain would have a more lasting effect on the industry that did lead to profound change not just in Hollywood, but in the culture as a whole.  With a solid box office and substantial collection of awards to it’s credit, Hollywood was finally seeing that queer themed films were actually quite valuable and worth investing in.  This was helpful for Gus Van Sant’s previously mentioned Milk (2008), which became an Awards season success just a few short years later.  But it wasn’t just with prestige films that we were seeing this change happen.  The stigma of queer representation in movies became less and less of an obstacle and more of a feature of the industry.  Gay characters were popping up more and more on the silver screen and on television, and not just as a stereotype there to be made fun of.  The same evolution was also happening across the country, with a backlash starting to grow against the backlash to queer rights.  The incoming Obama administration took a much different approach towards the LGBTQ population.  While initially playing things down the middle, then Vice President Joe Biden stirred the conversation again by rightly pointing out how absurd these same-sex marriage bans were.  Eventually the administration embraced the idea of decriminalizing same-sex marriage, and California’s Prop 8 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, thereby nullifying all bans on the books and making it legal in all 50 states.  How much Brokeback Mountain had a hand in this change is uncertain, but the movie certainly put focus on the conversation that was desperately needed, and perhaps helped to strengthen the resolve of Hollywood to no longer ignore this very vital community in the culture at large.

It is a much different world now than it was back when Brokeback Mountain was first released into theaters.  Attitudes towards same-sex relationships have certainly changed.  The stigma around same-sex marriage is almost completely gone, with now a vast majority of Americans having a positive opinion about it, with only the most rabid religious fundamentalists having any issue with it today.  Even still, there is still a lot of people out there trying to silence and erase queer voices in media.  The Trump administration in particular has courted many people intent on rolling back queer rights into his government, while also hypocritically proclaiming himself to be an ally for the queer community.  The times have changed, but a movie like Brokeback Mountain faces a challenge in trying to remain a relevant factor in this conversation.  Does it hold up in these changing times.  One thing that has negatively effected it’s place in queer cinema is surprisingly the way it deals with the relationship between it’s two characters.  One of the ways that Hollywood has dealt with garnering sympathy for the rights of queer people in society is to turn their stories into tragedies.  It does play into the underdog aspect of wringing sympathy from the viewer towards the plight of this persecuted community, but it does also send the wrong message to people who are still struggling with their identity.  This is what a lot of people today identify as the “kill you gays” trope, where a gay character is often doomed in the narrative as motivation for the plot.  Queer people don’t deny that the hardships of their struggle for rights need to be documented, but they also believe that these stories should also be balanced with stories of affirmation and triumph as well.  The fact that Brokeback Mountain ends on such a downer may be crucial for it’s own story, but what kind of message does it send to a young viewer still struggling to come out to see that queer relationships often end in heartbreak or tragedy.  It’s perhaps why much more queer themed movies today try to show more triumphant stories about love and adversity than the tragedies that often flavored their presence on the big screen before.  It also helps that many more of these movies are coming from a more insider perspective, made by queer filmmakers for the purpose of being inspirational.  Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurty and Ang Lee are all well-meaning in telling this story, but they are also coming at it from an outsider perspective, which comes across as being more about pity than anything else.  It’s a good thing that we are moving beyond movies like Brokeback Mountain and presenting queer characters and storylines that don’t have to be marked by tragedy in order to be successful.

It works much better to look at Brokeback Mountain on it’s own merits as a story about love blossoming in the unlikeliest of places.  Ang Lee’s involvement serves well here, because he is never once trying to thrust the message of the movie to the forefront.  He presents the film as an unexepected love story framed within the aesthetic of the American West, and how that contrast plays out.  There’s no cinematic flourish to the love-making scenes in the movie; they play out in a very realistic way, with both men not really knowing exactly what to do in the situation.  There’s a naturalistic flow to Ang Lee’s direction, with him playing the scenes out as honest to life as possible.  It’s not a titilating movie or a preachy one either.  He’s concerned first and foremost with the lives of these characters, and how the forces of society are weighing down on them.  It helps that his actors approached the material with the same kind seriousness.  The film’s most standout performance, however, belongs to Heath Ledger.  Ledger, who had been a rising star in Hollywood for some time, was finally given the oppurtnity to play a role with great emotional depth, allowing us all to see what he really was capable of as an actor.  And we saw the making of a superstar with this performance.  Ledger’s performance as Ennis del Mar is a total transformation, showing emotional depth and command over a character that is truly impressive.  You also don’t even feel like he’s acting, as he just embodies this character wholly.  It’s through his performance that we especially feel the schism between the way a man like him presents himself publicly, with a stoic cowboy exterior, and how he feels internally with his desire to embrace the man he loves.  Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is a bit showier and doesn’t quite stand up as well as Ledger’s, but the chemistry between the actors still works.  The real surprise though is Michelle Williams as Ennis’ lovelorn wife Alma.  The actress, who up to that time was most well known for the primetime soap Dawson’s Creek,  was finally given the chance to act in a film where she could really show her dramatic chops, and she has since become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated and awarded actresses.  Sadly, Heath Ledger was unable to see the legacy of his performance play out after his untimely death in 2008.  But there was one positive outcome of his work in this movie that still literally lives on to this day.  Both Ledger and Williams fell in love during the making of this movie, and they had a daughter together named Matilda who was born in 2005, right when the movie was hitting theaters.  Now 19 years old, Matilda is carrying on the torch of her late father and keeping his memory alive.

It’s undeniable that Brokeback Mountain is a pivotal film in the history of queer cinema, but it’s also a good thing that Hollywood has also moved past it.  As queer themes have become more mainstream in movies not just on the outskirts of Hollywood, but by the actual studio system itself, the more provocative films of the past now look like time capsules of a different time period, when things were not so great.  But, that also doesn’t mean that these films should be forgotten either.  We need to still see where we once were to know how far we have come.  Brokeback Mountain was made to make a statement at a crucial time when it almost looked like we were about to enshrine discriminations against same-sex relationships into the Constitution itself.  With gay marriage now not just the law of the land, but also embraced by the vast majority of Americans, the statement made by movies like Brokeback now seem quaint and irrelevant.  But, complacency often leads us to forgetting the importance of our hard fought for rights and it can lead to an erosion of those rights over time if we are not careful.  That’s why movies like Brokeback Mountain are still important, because it reminds us of the struggle and what it took to get where we are as a community.  When it first came out, Brokeback Mountain was undeniably provocative and stirred a conversation worth having.  As a young twentysomething closeted gay man when this movie first came out, I too struggled with how to respond to it.  I shamefully tried to dismiss it too, running away from my own feelings because the movie was very much showing me the struggle that came with being queer in America.  But over time, I saw why the struggle was necessary and I was able to accept who I am without fear, and in turn, I accept the movie much more now as a cinematic milestone.  I acknowledge that I am a better man today, and while I still have some reservations about the movie (particularly with it’s tragic gay tropes), I do now wish to celebrate it for what it did for queer representation in cinema.  Back then, some of us wished we could quit Brokeback Mountain, but now with the world once again challenging our rights in the queer community, we need this movie and the many more films of the Queer Cinema movement to inspire us to fight for a better future again.

Collecting Criterion – My Own Private Idaho (1991)

The road to get us to the point where mainstream acceptance of same-sex relationships took many different paths, one of which was the art of cinema.  It can definitely be said that the struggle is still not over and is in fact getting bad once again for the LGBTQ community, but there is solace in knowing that we as a society have persevered through this before and will do so again.  It helps to look back and see how the Gay Rights Movement managed to evolve over the years by looking at the films that defined it.  In the span of a lifetime, queer themes in movies went from being nearly hushed into oblivion to being accepted as mainstream by the whole of Hollywood.  One of the big turning point moments came in the 1980’s, a time when the queer community faced some of their biggest challenges.  It was the era of the AIDS epidemic that ravaged it’s way through the LGBTQ community, and with it came fierce backlash from the Reagan Era rise of the Religious Right.  And yet with all that hardship in their way, brave voices rose up and demanded to be heard.  In the face of unimaginable bigotry, including at the highest levels of government, queer activists made their voices heard and through significant and bold actions that demanded the attention of the general public, they managed to win support to tackle the scourge of AIDS and gain a sense of dignity that they had long been denied.  While the mainstream of Hollywood largely steered clear of queer issues out of fear of backlash themselves, there were filmmakers in the independent space that were eager to put queer stories on the big screen.  And in turn, queer themed movies would help to revolutionize the indie film market in kind.  This rise of new independent movies that addressed and spotlighted the LGBTQ community in the late 1980’s and early 90’s became known as the New Queer Cinema movement, or the Queer New Wave according to some.  Much like the other avant garde art cinema movements of the past, Queer Cinema intended to present a new vision of queer representation on film.  It would be a movement that would encompass many different genres of cinema, but would be geared primarily towards challenging the accepted heteronormality of classic Hollywood and pushing cinema into addressing sexuality and gender in a more head on way.

The Criterion Collection has included a number of movies that helped shape the New Queer Cinema movement.  One of the most noteworthy is the groundbreaking documentary, Paris is Burning (1990, Spine #1018). which examined New York City’s drag-ball scene.  This documentary, shot mostly in the midst of the 80’s, was a dramatic window into a vibrant Gay and Trans cultural movement which ultimately found it’s way into the mainstream, influencing mega stars like Madonna by inventing the concept of Voguing, and also the idea of ‘throwing shade” at someone.  Other noteworthy New Queer Cinema movies that made it into the collection also includes Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996, #1184) and Gregg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up (1993, #1233).  But not all movies that are classified as part of the New Queer Cinema movement are made by filmmakers that have exclusively made queer themes a major part of their filmmaking style.  One such filmmaker is Gus Van Sant.  The Portland, Oregon based filmmaker has been an icon of the independent film community, but his film output is not primarily within the Queer Cinema scene.  Today he is probably most well known for his Oscar nominated work on Good Will Hunting (1997), which is very much not a queer themed movie; at least not textually.  But he has addressed queer issues in his movies, owning to the fact that he is an out and proud gay man himself.  And some of his earliest movies were indeed integral to the formation of the New Queer Cinema movement.  Sant’s debut feature, Mala Noche (1985, #407) has been added to the Criterion Collection, but it was with his thrid feature film that he made a significant jump in his esteem as a filmmaker, and helped to shed a spotlight on the New Queer Cinema in a big way, giving it the mainstream recognition that got Hollywood to finally notice that this was more than just a niche, underground movement.  That film, My Own Private Idaho (1991, #277) not only was a monumental step forward for queer representation on the big screen, but it would go on to be a highly influential film over the years that followed in how it depicted queer relationships in cinema.

My Own Private Idaho is a uniquely told story, combining many different inspirations into one.  It’s both a neorealist look at the life of street hustlers living on the fringes of society as well as an avant garde visual poem, and even an adaptation of Shakespeare at times.  The film revolves around a street hustler named Mike Waters (River Pheonix) who tries hard to get by selling himself for sexual favors with often lonely older clients, but unfortunately his episodes of narcolepsy has made this difficult for him as well.  Living off the streets is made better thanks to the support of his community of fellow hustlers, including Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), his best friend.  Scott is different from the other hustlers because he is there by choice rather than circumstance.  He has a lifeline in the fact that he is the son of the mayor of Portland, and is entitled to inherit a fortune once he turns 21.  But, he has rejected his father’s high society life in favor of a life living day by day on the streets.  They make their home squatting in an abandoned apartment complex in Downtown Portland, which is lorded over by an older hustler named Bob Pigeon (William Richert), or Fat Bob as they affectionately call him.  After the police raid the apartment complex, the community of hustlers scatters and has no place to stay other than on the streets.  In this aftermath, Mike resolves to return to his hometown in Idaho in search of his long lost mother, and Scott agrees to help him in this new adventure.  On the journey there, they run into a German businessman named Hans (Udo Kier), who is far more frank and honest about his homosexuality than these two American boys are.  It leads Mike to confess that he has stronger feelings towards Scott than just being a friend, but Scott rebukes him, saying “I only sleep with men for the money.”  They end up learning that Mike’s Mom left Idaho many years ago to go to Italy, which then takes the duo all the way to Rome.  Unfortunately, their search is fruitless there as well, and Scott ends up abandoning Mike after falling for a local Italian girl.  Quite some time later, Mike has returned to the streets in Portland, and he sees Scott again, this time living the high life after inheriting his money.  When the street hustler gain loses their mentor Bob suddenly, they hold a funeral for him defiantly in the same cemetery that Scott is burying his own father in.  And by looking across at each other, the two former friends clearly see what divides them as they know what they now consider home.

The movie is certainly one that will leave many divided.  It’s loose narrative is one that is definitely built more around vibes than anything else, and it may be alienating to those who want a clearer throughline of a story.  But with My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant is wrapping his arms around a lot with this movie, and there is a lot of poignancy there.  One of the best ways to view the film is seeing it through the eyes of it’s protagonist, Mike Waters, and the unique way he experiences reality due to his narcolepsy.  There are gaps in time that affect the way he sees the world, and that’s why there are dramatic jumps made throughout the narrative.  Van Sant does a lot of experimental storytelling here, with the film jumping from sometimes almost documentary like style, such as the parts where the street hustlers are telling their life stories in an almost interview like way, to flights of fantasy like the image of a barn being dropped from the heavens onto an empty road.  But perhaps the most jarring addition to the film’s structure are the few moments when it is literally turning into a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One.  The intention is clearly to equate Scott Favor’s character with that of Prince Hal from the play, and how he would ascend to the Throne of England to become Henry V.  The character of “Fat Bob” Pigeon is also a clear parallel with Falstaff, and the movie not only makes these equations obvious to the viewer, the film even takes lines directly from the plays themselves.  Originally, My Own Private Idaho started out as a modern day set adaptation of Shakespeare, but as the script evolved, the straight adaptation was parred down.  This might have been because Van Sant became more interested in exploring Mike’s story-line, which makes the Shakespearean elements even more interesting.  Where Henry V’s rejection of his past Bohemian ways is seen as a noble inevitability, here Scott’s actions are seen as more of a betrayal.  Through Mike’s point of view, Scott choosing to accept his affluence is denial of who he really is; a sign of him running back into the closet as it were.  This parallel’s Mike’s own awakening towards accepting his own feelings, which is portrayed in a more positive light.  Through this, Gus Van Sant is showing a more frank exploration of affection between two males that wouldn’t have been allowed in Hollywood before, and is defiantly stating that it’s better to embrace who you are rather than shield yourself in a “normal life.”

The greatest strength that this movie has are the performances of the two leads.  You’ve got to remember that this was the early 90’s, when homosexuality was still seen as a taboo in most of the culture.  If there was a portrayal of a queer character on screen, it was either as a target of ridicule or an individual doomed to tragedy.  But, one of the big things that remained a roadblock to getting more queer voices represented on the screen was the stigma that still remained around portraying a queer character.  Many still believed that it would hurt one’s career to take on a role as a queer character, because people thought it would stick to them and lead to a loss in their celebrity status.  Performers who actually were LGBTQ also had to live in the closet in order to have a career in show business as well.  It was only through some much needed, groundbreaking films like this one that the stigma was finally broken down in the late 90’s and into the new millennium, to the point now where an actor coming out of the closet is no longer tabloid material but rather just an accepted norm.  Both Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix deserve a lot of credit for legitimizing movie roles like these.  River Phoenix was one of the most celebrated young actors of his era, already an Oscar nominated actor before turning 20, and he was well on his way to superstardom.  Keanu was very much heading in that direction as well, having gained a fandom through Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989).  Upon reading the script, Keanu said yes to the role right away, un-phased by the queer themes of Van Sant’s script.  Initially, River’s agent tried to prevent him from seeing the script, but Van Sant sneakily got around this by letting Keanu personally deliver the script to River’s home.  Of course, River said yes as well, and Gus Van Sant luckily got his two most sought after actors to bring his characters to life.  And both River and Keanu perfectly show how ridiculous that long held stigma against queer roles in movies was.  Here were two heterosexual, cisgender actors who not only brought honesty and compassion into their roles as these queer characters, but it also showed that it wouldn’t negatively affect their careers either.  Sadly, River Phoenix would not live long after to see the effect that his performance had, but the fact that Keanu’s career is still going strong to this day is proof that this movie was nothing but a net positive for him as an actor.

My Own Private Idaho was a big step up for Gus Van Sant when it came to his visuals.  Here he got to shoot it beautiful 35mm film stock, which was a far cry from the 16mm black and white graininess of Mala Noche.  And Idaho is a very color saturated film, showing off a vibrancy that was a trademark of his early work.  Idaho still hasn’t received a 4K UHD release from Criterion yet, but for the blu-ray edition it was given a new 4K transfer that was approved by Van Sant and his director of photography, Eric Alan Edwards.  The new transfer was made from a digital scan of the original camera negative straight from the Warner Brothers Archive.  Considering that this is a film barely over 30 years old, it was fairly in good condition already, but this new transfer makes it look absolutely immaculate.  Apart from some of the style choices of the early 90’s, you would swear that this was a movie made within the last couple years as it has held up very well visually.  Some of the artsier moments in the movie shine the most in this restoration, including the faux freeze frame shots that Van Sant uses for the sex scenes.  What also stands out are the outdoor vistas.  The opening shot of River Phoenix standing alone on a country road in Idaho, which was actually shot out in Eastern Oregon as Mount Hood is clearly visible in the scene, particularly shines with all the natural beauty in fine detail.  The Criterion disc also feautures two optional DTS certified master soundtracks.  One is a re-creation of the original film’s 2.0 surround sound track, while the other is a re-mixed 5.1 alternative.  The film is not quite a bombastic aural experience for the most part, with most scenes playing pretty quiet, so either track is fine for your viewing experience.  You might get more of an oomph from the 5.1 option with regards to the movie’s many needle drops, and also from the cityscape ambiances of Portland and Rome in the movie.  Overall, Criterion has done a fantastic job presenting this film in a way that does justice to the filmmaker’s intention and how it was meant to be seen in it’s original release.

The bonus feautures are bountiful as well, per usual for Criterion.  Most of the bonuses are carried over from the orginal 2005 DVD release of the film from Criterion, and thankfully they are deserving of re-releasing them in this blu-ray upgrade.  There’s no audio commentary track, but Gus Van Sant does get to speak about the film in a special audio only interview with fellow New Queer Cinema pioneer, filmmaker Todd Haynes.  Their conversation is illustrated with various images of the movie and it’s making related to the topics discussed.  Through this, Van Sant gives some interesting insight into his experience with the movie and how it stands as a landmark in Queer filmmaking.  A more substantial featurette is a Criterion made documentary called The Making of My Own Private Idaho, which features interviews from cast and crew including Van Sant and Keanu Reeves.  One other interesting featurette is an interview wit film scholar Paul Arthur where he discusses the adaptation of Shakespeare in the film, as well as the influence of Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1966), which covered the same plays referenced in Idaho, and which Van Sant cited as a direct influence.  There’s also an interesting featurette which has a conversation between producer Laurie Parker and Rain Pheonix, sister of River Phoenix.  This was an especially insightful piece because it sheds more light on the importance of River’s contribution to the movie and the tragedy of his all too short life.  There’s anoter featurette that features a conversation between writer J.T. LeRoy and filmmaker Jonathan Caouette about the film’s legacy.  Lastly, a set of deleted scenes and a theatrical trailer round out the remainder of the extras.  It’s a great assembly of features that both shed a lot of light on what went into the making of the film, as well as putting into perspective it’s importance as a part of the New Queer Cinema movement.

One of the most poignant things learned about the movie was a subtle addition that River Phoenix himself insisted be part of the film.  The campfire scene where Mike professes his love to Scott was a moment that was very much shaped by the manner in which River chose to portray the character.  As Gus Van Sant was crafting his screenplay, he made the film as more of an exploration of the hardships that the street hustler life put upon the characters.  But, perhaps not by his own intention, the movie was more or less making these characters victims of their own homosexuality; something that harkened back to how the subject would have been addressed in old Hollywood.  But, in that campfire scene, you see a characters, as Van Sant describes it “being gay in an all natural environment, with no money changing hands.”  It’s one of the first true coming out scenes where accepting one’s own same-sex attraction is a moment of affirmation, and presented as a true breakthrough for the character.  Phoenix, unbeknownst to to Van Sant, had rewritten much of the dialogue for this scene himself and Van Sant is grateful for the devotion that his actor brought to making Mike Waters more than just another queer tragedy, but rather a soulful reminder why characters like him matter.  It’s that honest take on queer identity that has helped to make My Own Private Idaho an iconic film in the New Queer Cinema, and it’s influence can still be felt as queer films have become more mainstream.  Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Moonlight (2016) travelled on the road paved for them by My Own Private Idaho and the many other unsung movies of the New Queer Cinema movement.  Criterion has done a wonderful job preserving this film, and they are continuing the expand their library to include many more queer themed movies that come from this pivotal cinematic movement, and even those that paved the way for it as well.  Lifting up queer voices is as crucial now as it has been before, and movies like My Own Private Idaho are poignant reminders of the road that has been traveled before, and the path ahead that we must walk to keep their influence and inspiration burning bright.

criterion.com/films/249-my-own-private-idaho

Imitating Art – Artificial Intelligence in Cinema and the Possible Risks of It’s Future

Hollywood, like the rest of society, is prone to major moments of upheaval whenever major breakthroughs are made in technology.  Just look at the history of cinema and how it responded to new things like synchronized sound, television, and the internet over the last century.  Some corners of the film industry manage to find their footing by embracing new technology, but there are others who are not so lucky.  The advent of sound put a lot of actors out of work because they didn’t have the right voice for cinema and their style of performance that was geared towards acting through silence was seen as old fashioned.  Computer Animation in the digital age also shook up the world of visual effects, where craftsmen and women who developed elaborate practical effects that were shot live on set were suddenly replaced with blue screens that would later be filled in with CGI by technicians working at a computer stand months later.  Not to say that these new technologies were all a bad thing.  New tools allowed cinema to grow and evolve, which was in the long run a positive for the industry.  But, disruptions aren’t accomplished without a cost to the old ways of doing things, which in of themselves were also instrumental to helping to build the artform.  Sound helped the movies talk, but we also lost the bold experimental storytelling of the silent era movies.  Computer animation brought some amazing visuals to the big screen that couldn’t have been done with just practical effects, but it also has led to a lot more movies feeling artificial compared to the tactile physical effects that were hand crafted.  And the biggest cost of all, big disruptions also put a lot of people out of work; many of whom who were specialized in some fields that sadly phased out.  It’s unfortunate, but that’s the cycle that Hollywood has gone through in it’s entire history.  And there are more disruptions to come in the future.

The one that is especially worrying the industry right now is the beginnings of what is being called an AI Revolution.  Many start-up companies, and also ones with ties to already established tech giants like Google and Meta, are making significant advancements in the development of Artificial Intelligence.  This is far more than the Siri and Alexa assistants on our smart home devices.  The newer AI programs are starting to perform more complex functions including autogenerating text responses to any prompt you give it.  ChatGPT has become a widely used app that people now use for content creation, which can be anything from a text response to a full length speech.  These text prompts are now finding their way into many different written documentation, including term papers, website pages, and most worrying to professionals in the film industry, screenplays.  At the moment, the technology isn’t perfect and some of the robotic sounding phrasing of ChatGPT’s text prompts betrays it’s artificiality.  But, like most artificial intelligence, it learns as it develops, and the imperfections are getting harder to detect.  The presence of an AI that can produce long form amounts of text is one thing, but what is especially worrying is the advancements made in visual AI technology.  Now a text prompt can generate a visual image and more recently, we’ve also seen it create moving images.  There’s talk that this will be the technology that will ultimately destroy Hollywood and the film industry as we know it, and the sad reality is that there is a possibility that it could, depending on how it is used.  It should be noted that AI isn’t advanced enough yet to replace the actual art of physically making a movie, but it’s also a technology that’s still in it’s infancy and growing up very fast.

For those wondering why Hollywood was brought to a standstill 2 years ago with the dual strikes of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, this was a big reason why.  The guilds of Hollywood were seeing what Silicon Valley was doing with their big push into AI, and they wanted to establish some guardrails before it put a lot of current and future careers in jeopardy.  Thankfully, the studios and the guilds agreed to new standards when it came to due compensation if someone’s likeness or written work was used in any AI programming, but development into AI technology within the industry was still allowed to continue.  It’s not just the main guilds that are getting affected by this new tech, but every other below the line profession as well.  If you could just make a movie in a computer that looks about as real as anything that was shot on a set, well that risks the jobs of camera operators, lighting technicians, set builders, make-up and hair dressers, truck drivers and caterers, all whose livelihoods are dependent on there being a steady stream of new films and shows being made.  But, the big movie studios would also like to cut their costs, and making movies and shows with fewer people involved is something that sounds appealing to them.  The rise of streaming saw a giant ramp up in production across the industry, but it also blew massive holes into the budgets of the companies that own the platforms as they were all in an arms race to have the most “content” available for their customer base to watch.  The promise of AI being a cheap alternative is something that would appeal to lot of studio execs who have had to write a lot more paychecks over the last decade.

There’s one big issue with trying to use AI as a replacement for physical filmmaking, beyond the obvious one that AI made films still look fake.  Artificial Intelligence, in order to function, must assemble data from the internet in order to create the desired product of it’s prompt’s request.  It’s the one thing that AI still is incapable of accomplishing which is an original idea.  It can imitate, but it can’t create something whole cloth that is new.  So, when we see something that resembles a movie that was developed using AI, there’s a noticeable lack of visual ingenuity.  The image we see is a cobbled together amalgamation of many other things.  There was a demo released on the internet a couple months back of a cinematic car chase that was entirely made using AI.  Some AI enthusiasts said that this was the death of Hollywood, but closer inspection of the visuals in the clip showed how visually inconsistent the actual clip was.  The driver behind the wheel changed appearance multiple times and even the model of the car differed in various shots.  And the streets that it was driving through also had various weird things going on in the background.  The technology may advance to a point where these inconsistencies may be smoothed out, but it doesn’t address the big problem all together.  There’s a general lack of authenticity to the visuals that AI creates.  To make a story that connects with an audience, it takes a human touch to know things like the Mise en Scene of the shot they are constructing and how to edit the shots together for emotional impact.  AI only follows what it’s instructed to do, which doesn’t follow an emotional current.  That’s why it’s visual language is random.  Also, by combining data off of the internet, AI also runs the risk of cannibalizing data that was created by other AI programs, and that often leads to corrupted results that can sometimes appear nightmarish.

The big question is, will audiences care if they are fed more content that is AI generated.  We are seeing a test run of this phenomenon play out currently in our media landscape.  Social media has been flooded with a ton of AI generated images.  Many of them are absurdly artificial and can be easily identified, but the worrying ones are the ones that are trickier to spot.  The especially worrying aspect of AI is how it’s seeping into the world of politics.  Many bad faith actors are using AI for propaganda purposes, creating false images that can feed into misinformation campaigns.  A lot of altered images are easy to swat down now, but as technology improves, it will be more difficult and we will find ourselves living more in a post-truth world.  It becomes even scarier when moving images come into play.  Are people more discernable when it comes to noticing things that aren’t real in visual media?  There’s this thing in computer animation known as the “uncanny valley” where the animation that’s created in a computer attempts to feel as lifelike as possible but reaches a state where the likeness becomes off-putting and repulsed by the viewer.  This was a big reason why motion-capture animation never was able to take off; at least as a replacement for standard computer animation.  The brief period where Hollywood tried to make motion capture a thing, which was spear-headed by filmmaker Robert Zemekis with films like The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007) is not looked back upon with favorability and thankfully died off pretty quick.  But, motion capture does survive in a way as a tool to mix realistic digital characters with live action ones; such as those in the Avatar movies.  AI’s future could run a similar course where audiences reject it as a full replacement for the art of cinema and instead sees it used as a tool in the arsenal of digital artists in the future of visual effects.  The future either way is still uncertain, but for everyone’s sake, it’s better if AI on it’s own is not a catch all fix for all of Hollywood’s problems.

The thing with AI technology is that it’s only bad when used in a bad way.  There are ways that Hollywood could implement AI technology in a beneficial way.  Streamlining the visual effects process is one example where it’s benefits can be useful.  One of the big problems facing the film industry today is the overworked and underpaid labor in visual effects.  So many digital artists are forced into this “crunch” culture of digital rendering, meaning that many of them are working round the clock in order to deliver their rendered shots on time under sometimes unrealistic deadlines.  Many digital artists find it difficult to work under these conditions and it’s only gotten worse in the rise of streaming.  Over time, it’s led not just to a downgrade in quality visual effects for many projects, but a workforce that often has succumbed to bad health due to the long hours as well as a more toxic work environment.  Some AI programs that can carry some of the workload in limited areas could indeed help many of these digital artists meet their deadlines without there being a dip in quality as well as giving them a better work experience as a whole.  There are a lot of applications where it does seem like a little AI assistance could be beneficial, but because people in the industry are wary of what the introduction of these tools may end up replacing, it’s difficult to be nuanced about the good aspects of AI.  We saw one controversy erupt last year when it was revealed that AI was used by the film The Brutalist (2024) in it’s production.  The Brutalist, which was a mostly hand-crafted low budget film, used AI for one specific reason, which makes sense when you learn more about it.  The film’s editor, David Jancso, wanted to have the lead actors sound more authentically Hungarian like their characters should.  Jancso, who is Hungarian himself, used an AI program named Respeecher, which allows someone to mask their own voice with another one entirely.  This is a program that has been used before by Lucasfilm to replicate James Earl Jones’ voice for new lines for Darth Vader, and in The Brutalist’s case, Jancso used his own correct annunciation of Hungarian vowels to fix the line readings of Adrain Brody and Felicity Jones in the movie.  Their performances are still authentically their own, but Respeecher allowed their Hungarian to sound closer to what it should be.  Still, this stirred a bit of controversy and it’s a small possibility that it might have cost the film the Best Picture award at the Oscars.

It is healthy for the Hollywood community to be skeptical.  This is something that if put into the wrong hands could end up ruining cinema as we know it.  The big concern is that the studios are going to do whatever they can to make more money, and the belief is that investing more into AI would be worth it in the long run if it meant that they would have a tighter control over how much money they’ll be spending.  But there are a massive amounts of unseen costs that could lead to more trouble down the road.  To replace the amount of production that is involved in making a full length movie, it would take a massive amount of data processing, which means using a significant amount of server space in data centers across the world.  Using data centers is not cheap, and it also uses up a lot of energy to run them, which could also lead to significant environmental impacts as well.  And all this for something that is not going to be new and original, but rather a faint reproduction of many other things that we’ve already seen.  It all depends then on if the audience is eager to buy the product they are serving up.  It’s hard to say what that result may be.  We are already in a moment of cultural stagnation where the majority of new movies out there are either sequels or remakes.  Hell, we just witnessed A Minecraft Movie gross nearly a billion dollars at the global box office, which kind of tells you that we may be already primed to accept AI slop at our local movie theaters.  But, there are signs that people have more discerning tastes than that.  Take a look at the rise and fall of other tech advancements in the last couple years.  The NFT market thankfully died a quick death after people realized that owning digital art was fairly pointless and also a scam, and people are also opening up their eyes to the fraudulent nature of crytocurrency as well.  We’ll have to see if people call the bluff of those pushing AI generated media on us as well.  What may ultimately decide things one way or another is how many creative people may end up using the technology.

Strangely enough, we have been programmed to distrust AI over the years by Hollywood itself.  From HAL 9000, to Skynet, to Ultron, Hollywood has made AI feel like a very sinister force that often intends to eliminate humanity altogether.  And it’s understandable to be fearful of the technology.  The biggest threat that it currently possess is the possibility that it may replace us in the workplace, and in many professions it already has.  The sad thing is, we are largely responsible for all of the threats that AI poses for our future because we are addicted to convenience.  We like using self-checkouts at the grocery store and using Google to help us with our research instead of going out to the library.  Streaming has also caused us to move away from attending the movie theater, and pretty soon it will try to replace the very act of movie-making itself.  But, it’s something that we can still have the power to push back on if we still value movies as they are.  There are thankfully many filmmakers out there who are still making movies that are as practically constructed as they can be and are still able to find their audience.  The recent success of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), a fully original film made by real artists and utilizing actual, physical film stock in it’s making and presentation is a good sign that audiences are still hungry for true cinematic experiences.  Even with a million detailed prompts AI could never make something as new and original as Sinners because it took a lifetime of human experience to craft that kind of story and make it connect with audiences.  There’s hope that this will convince the studios that they need to still invest in original films made by actual people.  The AI encroachment will always be there as the technology continues to be refined.  But like how music lovers rediscovered the beauty of vinyl in recent years and the steadily increasing loyal fan base of physical media shoppers out there, there will always be an appetite for something that’s real and that’s what will ultimately be what drives the future of cinema.  AI at best is a tool that can help the business improve beyond it’s shortcomings, but it can’t motivate change in the same way that a new voice and original idea can.

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning – Review

It’s very difficult for any franchise to maintain stamina to last more than a decade, let alone several.  Even rarer is a franchise that has managed to get even better as it goes along, and rarest of all, do so with it’s main attraction still capable of delivering in every outing.  One such franchise that has continued to age like wine over the course of nearly 30 years is the Mission: Impossible series.  Based on the TV series that ran from 1966-73 made it’s jump to the big screen in 1996, though less so as a direct translation and more as a starring vehicle for an A-list star, in this case Tom Cruise.  What helped to set Mission: Impossible the movie apart was the way that Mr. Cruise threw so much of himself into the action scenes in the movie.  The series would come to be defined as a whole by it’s groundbreaking use of stunts, many of which involving Cruise himself.  And with each new film, it became a game of upping the ante with what they could do.  Each new Mission: Impossible had at least one standout stunt sequence that for a lot of people would be like nothing they’ve ever seen before.  And for an adrenaline junky like Tom Cruise, each of these movies allowed him more opportunities to do what no other actor or stunt man for that matter had ever attempted on screen before.  This includes scaling the outside of the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol (2011); hanging onto the side of a real airplane as it takes off in Rogue Nation (2015); or piloting a helicopter solo through a narrow canyon in Fallout (2018).  Because of all of these iconic action scenes, this has become the identity of the franchise, leaving the original series as a distant memory; save for the memorable theme song that still is a big part of the franchise.  But one has to wonder, after 30 years of raising the bar with each film can Tom Cruise and company still deliver on that same level?  Or is the series inevitably going to hit it’s breaking point, especially with Cruise now reaching his sixties.

There seems to be a feeling that Tom Cruise is starting to prepare to say goodbye to what has been his signature franchise.  And to bring the series to a close, he’s delivering not one but two films.  The plan was to make a grand two part finale, with each film released a year apart.  The problem is that a lot didn’t go according to plan during the making of the film, which also extended into the release as well.  The pandemic shut down filming on the first part of the series for several months.  Cruise tried his best to get production up and running again, including adopting strict Covid guidance measures on his film set.  But even while the production was on hold, he was still making sure his crew was being taken care of, which included paying them all through the delays.  While this was a noble gesture on his part, it also ballooned the budget significantly.  The first part also had to sit on the shelf until 2023, so that it wouldn’t conflict with Tom Cruise’s other big blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  But once it did make it to theaters, it unfortunately suffered a case of awful timing.  It’s late July release just so happened to fall mere days after the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and it got completely drowned out by the dual blockbusters of Barbie (2023) and Oppenheimer (2023).  Not only that, but it also released just as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes were starting, meaning that the actors could not go out to help promote the film as well.  As a result, Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part One (2023) became a very expensive underperformer at the box office and a significant money loser for parent studio Paramount.  Considering that there still was one more movie left to go for this franchise, the studio was at a crossroads about how to do after this disappointment.  It was decided to put some more distance between Part One and Two, with the latter being pushed back another year.  Also, the studio also decided to drop the Part Two moniker on the title.  The second movie would now be called Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and would get a prime Memorial Day release, which is also when Top Gun: Maverick hit theaters.  Despite all of the changes and production turmoil, there is still a lot of excitement surrounding what may be the final film in this franchise.  The only question is, does this Mission end with a bang or does it self-destruct.

The film opens a few years after the events of Dead Reckoning.  A rogue AI program named “The Entity” has been infiltrating vast stretches of the world wide web, with many government agencies worried that they are next.  But, there is hope that someone may one day gain access to the source code of The Entity and contain it’s power for good.  The source code however was last traced to a Russian submarine named the Sebastopol, which sank over a decade ago.  The only key known to unlock the source code’s location was retrieved by IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team.  Their goal is to find the location of the submarine and use a poison pill algorithm on a hard drive to neutralize The Entity before it reaches the world’s nuclear arsenals.  But, Hunt’s team faces a major hurdle when a past foe, Gabriel (Esai Morales) manages to steal the poison pill drive from them.  Now Hunt and his fellow agents must track down Gabriel while also searching for the Sebastopol’s whereabouts, and to complicate matters even more, the governments of the United States and Russia are also pursuing their own ends to stop The Entity, with a nuclear option on the table.  Ethan is granted a 72 hour window by President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) to find the submarine and neutralize the Entity.  But it calls for his accomplices, tech wizards Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), master pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), and former ally of Gabriel named Paris (Pom Klementieff) to be at the right place at the right time, putting all of their lives on the line.  Meanwhile, they are also facing interference from other government agents like Secretary Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and Captain Briggs (Shea Whigham) who are more skeptical of Ethan’s tactics.  With time running short and facing mounting pressure from all sides, including the wrath of an all seeing AI presence, will Ethan Hunt manage to save the world from the brink of destruction once again?  Or is it one mission too much to handle for even him?

When you go into a Mission: Impossible movie, you more or less know what you are getting yourself into.  This is a franchise that has prided itself on pushing the envelope to the extreme.  But after 30 years, does this franchise still have the ability to deliver something that we haven’t seen done on film anymore?  I was starting to doubt this myself after watching the last film.  While I still though Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning was a really good movie overall, I was a tad bit underwhelmed as well.  There was a lot of hype surrounding the signature stunt of the film, which involved Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off of a cliff, with a camera following tightly behind him to get that money shot looking straight down into the abyss below.  It’s a cool stunt, but I felt that it was a bit over-hyped because seen in context with the rest of the film, it just doesn’t come off as particularly harrowing.  The more impressive scene came later, with an extended train crash segment, but by that point, I felt that the movie was fairly lacking in overall tension.  Which made me worry about how they were going to follow this up in Part Two.  Has the franchise truly run out of steam?  Well, I am happy to report that it in fact has not.  The Final Reckoning is a major step up from Part One of this franchise finale.  While Dead Reckoning felt unengaging, I can definitely say that Final Reckoning put me on the edge of my seat multiple times throughout the lengthy run time of the movie.  It’s still not perfect, and it does fall a bit short of the franchise at it’s best, but it’s still among my favorite films in this long franchise.  the movie’s most glaring problem is that it takes it’s time in the first act to get things going, with some rather clunky exposition to get us up to speed.  But once it hits the halfway mark when Ethan sets off on his mission, the movie grabs a hold of us and takes us for a ride.  The last hour and a half of this nearly three hour movie is Mission: Impossible at it’s very best, and of course, one of the big reasons for that are the signature action sequences.

This movie has two of what I think are not just among the best action sequences in this franchise, but perhaps among the best ever done in all of cinema.  One is an extended sequence where Ethan Hunt reaches the Sebastopol submarine that lies deep on the ocean floor.  The way they filmed this sequence is just extraordinary.  It uses just the right amount of CGI effects mixed in with some impressive in camera work on a real flooded set.  There’s something that they do with the water level in this sequence that is really impressive when you see it in the movie.  It’s not a difficult technique to do, but when executed as well as it is in this movie, it becomes a really great visual that immerses you into the scene perfectly.  I also have to commend the sound design from this scene as well.  If you watch this movie in a theater with a high quality sound system, you are going to inundated with all of the metallic roaring of the submarine wreckage as it grinds down on the ocean floor and all of it’s weaponry starts banging around in it’s hull.  And it’s a sequence that Tom Cruise largely has to carry on his own, mostly without dialogue.  This was a definitely highlight of the movie for me, but it’s not the only one that stands out in the film.  The one that you see plastered all over the advertising of the movie, involving the duo biplanes is also a worthy action sequence living up to the high bar of this franchise.  I for one would love to learn just how much of this sequence involved Tom Cruise really hanging off of the wing of one of these planes in mid-air.  There are a couple shots that are undeniably the real deal, of course with the necessary safety harnesses either hidden or digitally erased.  Even still, the fact that Tom Cruise would endure high speed winds, excessive g-forces, and any other dangerous possibilities involved with flying a plane just to get those in camera shots is beyond belief.  I cannot think of any other actor who pushes his own body to the limit like he does, all for the sake of making this stuff look as real as possible.

Though the series has run for a total of 8 films, the last half has only had one directorial vision behind it.  Cruise has found a trusted creative partner with Writer/Director Christopher McQuarrie.  McQuarrie has been the one whose guided the franchise through it’s latter stage, which has been driving the franchise more towards spectacle than style.  It’s not a bad thing for this franchise to lose some directorial panache along the way.  While the franchise did attract some big name filmmakers like Brian DePalma and John Woo initially, their directorial styles didn’t quite standout as well as they should.  If anything, the directors in this franchise have had less input on the visuals overall, with Tom Cruise as the star and producer being the chief creative force overall.  Eventually, he decided he would rather have a director that more or less comfortable conforming to his vision rather than their own.  And McQuarrie is a competent enough filmmaker that he actually fits well as the steward of this franchise.  For this film, I actually feel like he proved to be a bit more than just competent.  There are some striking visuals in this movie, including a truly breathtaking one where Ethan Hunt comes into contact with the polar ice cap, and it shows a great deal of confidence McQuarrie has now behind the camera.  It was shots like that that I felt were missing from the last film, which was a fairly basic looking film for this franchise, though not as bad as my least favorite film in the series, Mission: Impossible III (2006).  McQuarrie’s only misstep with this movie is a bit of the writing.  The film, like I mentioned before, does have a difficult time getting started, and it does feel like McQuarrie was perhaps a little overwhelmed by the task he had to perform, which was to not just follow-up the story from the last film, but to wrap everything up from the franchise as a whole.  There’s a fair amount of the movie throwing quick edit montages at you just to refresh your memory of all the key moments from all the previous seven films in the series so that you don’t get lost in the plot.  It’s clunky, but thankfully it doesn’t last far into the film.  Like I said before, once the movie enters it’s second half, that’s where the film gets really good.

The movie also thankfully still devotes enough time to it’s cast as well.  Sure Tom Cruise is the main draw, but there’s a generous amount of time devoted to getting us to like all of the other team members there to help him.  I especially like that Ving Rhames still makes an appearance here.  Apart from Cruise, he’s the only other actor to appear in all 8 movies.  And you can tell that Cruise was more than happy to have him back every single time.  It’s a 30 year friendship that very much translates into the film.  Simon Pegg is also a lot of fun to watch here, bringing a nice bit of levity to the film through his great comedic instincts.  Hayley Atwell, who joined the cast in the last film, also gets more to do, and she brings a nice bit of innocent curiosity to the film, especially when she’s confronted with the sometimes absurd plans that Ethan’s team asks her to participate in.  I also enjoy seeing the who’s who of character actors that Tom Cruise brings in to play all of the government brass that either are on his side or think he’s completely crazy.  There’s also a surprise addition to the cast that harkens back all the way to the franchise’s origins that I thought was fun to see appear here.  The one part of the cast that unfortunately came across as the weak spot in this movie was Esai Morales and the villain Gabriel.  The actor is fine, but the character is just too dull and uninteresting to work as a formidable villain.  Even the movie seems to forget about him, as he disappears for I’d say a good hour of the film’s run time.  To be honest, The Entity works much better as a villainous presence in the film.  It has this “eye of Sauron” like mystique to it, and you can definitely feel it’s influence over everything in the plot, even if it’s not physically shown on screen.  A lot of the tension in the movie comes from the fact that they only have the tiniest of windows available to them to contain this thing, which makes it a foe worth fearing, especially when it has the power to destroy the world.  But, of course the main attraction remains Cruise himself, and he does not disappoint.  I still love the fact that he’s not afraid to show Ethan Hunt’s more vulnerable side.  Hunt doesn’t always do everything smoothly, and he often comes away bruised and bloodied.  The franchise could’ve easily turned Ethan Hunt into an invincible super hero, and instead the movie thankfully shows that he’s a man who gets the job done, even if mistakes and injuries happen along the way.  It also gives the character a much needed humorous side when things don’t always go to plan, which Cruise plays perfectly with his hilarious dumbfounded look in certain scenes.

So, is this truly the end of the road for the franchise?  I don’t think that Mission: Impossible the brand will ever be laid to rest, because it’s just too valuable to Paramount, especially with it’s future merger partner Skydance being the production outfit behind the franchise.  But, Tom Cruise as it’s poster boy star may be nearing it’s end.  Cruise has pushed his body for a long time and has proven to be remarkably in peak physical form even into his sixties.  But, Father Time catches up to us all, and it’s going to get to a point soon where Tom Cruise will be too old to do these kind of death-defying stunts anymore.  Even still, there’s enough left open even at the end of this movie to signal more adventures down the road.  It’s just too early to tell if Tom Cruise is truly done with Ethan Hunt right now.  If he is, then he should feel pretty proud of himself because he closes out his time in this franchise with a banger.  I would say that this is probably my third favorite film in the series, behind only Ghost Protocol and Fallout.  The former was the most well-paced and visually inventive of the series, while the latter had the best stunts and the best villain of the series, with Henry Cavill’s memorable baddie.  For The Final Reckoning, I would say that it falls just shy of the others because of it’s clunky opening, but it features two of the best action sequences of the series as a whole.  That submarine sequence alone is a true work of cinematic art.  At 170 minutes in length, it is definitely the longest film in the series, but you won’t be bored by any of it.  It does exactly what the best action film should do, which is to grab a hold of you and put you on the edge of your seat.  One thing that I would like to see Cruise do though after making a film like this is perhaps return to more dramatic work.  I know he feels at home in action movies, but he’s also a three time Oscar-nominated actor as well, and I would like to see him return to that too.  Maybe that might be in the cards for him, as Final Reckoning feels like a bit of a parting gift to a franchise.  We’ll see if that is the case or not, but if this is the end for Cruise’s time as Ethan Hunt, than it’s a finale worth feeling proud about.  Overall, this is undoubtedly a mission very much worth choosing to accept.

Rating: 8.5/10

Off the Page – Mildred Pierce

The 1930’s and 40’s was a time of turbulent upheaval for society; something that even today we still feel the ripples of.  The 1930’s were defined by the economic collapse of the Great Depression, which ushered in an era of the New Deal reforms that reshaped America’s domestic policy.  And if that was not enough for one generation to go through, the Depression was followed up with World War II, the bloodiest conflict of the 20th Century.  This was an era that offered up so many stories of survival in the face of adversity and there were plenty of writers who managed to capture that era with a genuine emotional connection to the times.  One such author was American crime novelist James M. Cain.  Cain, a former journalist, was known for creating hard-boiled stories of dark corners of the American experience.  His novels were often first person confessionals of his characters admitting their crimes to the reader and giving out all the details about how they were done.  His stories often involved murder, love affairs, and deception as part of their plots, which made many of his earliest works particularly intriguing to readers looking for something salacious to read in the turbulent Depression years.  The hard-edged stories that he wrote particularly caught the eye of Hollywood.  Many of his early novels, like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity would not only receive high profile movie adaptations, but Cain’s work would also be instrumental in developing a brand new film genre that would come to define the era, known as Film Noir.  And while many of his stories fit well into the genre of Film Noir, not every story that he wrote necessarily centered around crime either.  In perhaps his most well known novel, the 1941 best-seller Mildred Pierce, his story there would actually center around social and economical disparity resulting from the Great Depression.  In a rather ahead of it’s time sort of way, Cain actually shun a spotlight on the struggles of women in the workplace and created a surprisingly potent feminist figure in his titular protagonist; a woman who manages to overcome the obstacles put upon women seeking success in American society.

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to see the potential in Cain’s story, and Warner Brothers immediately snatched up the rights to the novel, intending for it to be one of their next prestige films.  Micheal Curtiz, fresh off of his Oscar winning success directing Casablanca (1943) would prove to be an ideal choice in bringing this film to the big screen.  He was a multifaceted filmmaker who could work in any kind of genre, including crime thrillers like Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.  But what mattered even more was who would be playing Mildred.  This was a role that was surprisingly not sought after by most actresses at the time, because many stars were afraid of taking on a motherly role because that was a sign of an actress getting older, which would have aged them out of other coveted roles.  Michael Curtiz’s preferred choice for the role, Barbara Stanwyck declined for this very reason, as did Bette Davis, which is ironic given who they did eventually cast.  Thankfully for Warner Brothers, there was one movie star that not only was unafraid of taking on the role of a mother in her film, but was also actively campaigning herself for the part as well.  Joan Crawford was very different from a lot of other leading ladies of her time.  She often shunned glamour roles, even though she was stunningly beautiful enough to pull them off, because she was more interested in taking more risk taking parts that were often grittier and truer to the American experience, especially during the depression.  Mildred Pierce was a role that seemed almost tailor made for her.  She was drawn to working class heroines, and she had the acting chops to pull it off, while at the same time having the matinee idol visage to still shine on the big screen.  And this would be a role that she would make all hers.  The film would win Joan the only Academy Award of her career, and it’s still the role that most people associate her with.  It can definitely be said that Curtiz and Crawford delivered a cinematic classic with Mildred Pierce (1945), but it is interesting comparing it to the book as well, because there are some striking differences.  Some of them were done out of necessity, due to the code censorship of the day, but it does make watching the movie a slightly different experience than reading the novel.  And in a surprising twist, some of the changes made may have inadvertently contributed to the birth of the film language of Film Noir as a result.

“I felt as though I’d been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life, except for the few hours it took to get married.”

One thing that becomes pretty clear between reading the book and watching the movie is that their depictions of Mildred vary in subtle ways.  The book treats Mildred as a more grounded depiction of a women driven to survive in any way she can.  She’s not glamourous or stunning; she’s an average woman both physically and mentally.  And that’s what made her a relatable heroine.  Many readers recognized her, or perhaps found themselves feeling seen as her.  This was a woman who had to sacrifice a lot to maintain everything that she could of the life she had before things went haywire.  She was the embodiment of the average American who had to scrape by in the midst of the Depression and also had to step up when the War left the nation with even less stability.  Her adversity through it all is what made her such a potent symbol of the time.  She goes from housewife, to waitress, to restauranteur, to a corporate head in a very short span, which before the Depression years would have been seen as unusual for a woman.  But this was also the Rosie the Riveter era, when women were called upon to enter the workforce in a way that they hadn’t before because so many men were overseas fighting in the War.  It was a time when women were finally showing their worth as equals in the workforce, and Mildred Pierce was that type of upwardly mobile heroine that this time period valued.  It’s probably what drew Joan Crawford to the role, because she wanted to represent that kind of figure of feminine exceptionalism.  And for the most part she does do justice to the character of Mildred.  She shows off how intelligent Mildred is at running a business and finding new ways to succeed that some of her male counterparts would never have figured out.  The one big difference in her performance is that her Mildred is a bit more melodramatic, which is probably a result of the acting style of the time.  Crawford was definitely more subtle in her acting than most, but there is a soap opera like quality to her performance her as well.

“I think I’m really seeing you for the first time in my life.  And you’re cheap and horrible.”

One thing that the movie does perfectly translate over from the book is the theme about the corrupting influence of wealth.  In particular, both the movie and the book are sharply critical of elitist attitudes in society.  Living through a Depression would have soured many people’s attitudes towards those who flaunted their wealth, especially if they were people who never earned their money through hard work.  This attitude is personified through two different characters in the story; Mildred’s deceptive second husband Monty, and her snobbish oldest child Veda.  Veda in particular is one of the most loathsome characters ever created in both literature and on the silver screen; a spoiled brat who will do anything to maintain an affluent lifestyle, even at the cost of shaming her own mother.  She makes for a shocking villainess in this story given the lengths she goes to.  In the movie, she was played by a remarkable young actress named Ann Blyth, who as of this writing is still with us today at the ripe old age of 97.  Blyth does an amazing job of personifying this cold, ruthless schemer who will never accept anything less than what she feels like she’s owed; which is mostly unreasonable.  She is the biggest test ever of a mother’s unconditional love and the tragedy of Mildred’s story is that she puts the love of her children before everything else.  In the movie, you see Mildred have more of a spine when standing up to her daughter, including one of cinema’s most epic slaps to the face after Veda shames her for working as a waitress.  Mildred’s confrontation with her daughter builds more gradually in the novel, with Mildred putting up with a lot before things hit their boiling point, which results in a very shocking moment in the book.  For a lot of people who read the book and watched the movie in it’s era, Veda was the personification of the very class of people who made the Depression as trying as it was; unchecked greed mixed with a stubbornness to refuse to change for the sake of others.  

The characters of Mildred and Veda very much translated in tact from the book to the screen, but a lot of other characters saw more dramatic changes in the adaptation.  Mildred’s first husband Bert is a bit different in the movie, especially in the opening.  You see him as a bit more of a negative influence in her life as he becomes more frustrated that Mildred is pulling her wait more than he is.  Bert (played by Bruce Bennett) is definitely a symbol of the displaced man who ended up loosing his social balance through the Depression.  Without work, a lot of men couldn’t support their families, and that led to a lot of broken marriages as families split so that there would be one less mouth to feed in the household.  But, like Bert in the book, the portrayal of the character softens as he recognizes Mildred’s value as a successful businesswoman.  Though they do go through with the divorce, it is revealed that Bert is the better man in her life as the scheming Monty shows his true colors through the latter half of the story.  It’s interesting that the movie chooses to put Bert in a more antagonistic role early on than how he’s portrayed in the book, which is far more positive.  It’s perhaps the movie’s way of motivating Mildred to push herself harder to prove everyone else is wrong about her.  Another interesting change from the book is the absence of Mildred’s neighbor and closest friend, Lucy Gessler.  In the book, Lucy is a feisty and loyal confidant for Mildred who helps to push her in the right direction; appealing to all of her better instincts.  The movie instead gives a lot of Lucy’s characteristics to another character from the book, Ida Corwin, who starts off as Mildred’s supervisor at a restaurant and then later becomes her business partner.  Ida in the movie is played by a scene stealing Eve Arden who gets all the best one-liners in the movie.  It seems like the filmmakers wanted to streamline the story by combining the two characters into one, but it was probably also done as a means of giving Mildred more agency in the earliest part of the story.  If she only acted upon pursuing a career in the restaurant industry after a friends suggestion, then it minimizes the self actualization and deep rooted intelligence of Mildred herself.

“Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea.  They eat their young.”

Where the book and the novel divert the most though is the framing of the entire story itself.  Oddly enough, of all of James M. Cain’s earliest novels, Mildred Pierce was the only one that was not framed as a first person testimonial.  And yet, that’s the way that the movie chooses to frame it’s story, having Mildred herself recount all the events that led up to this particular night as she’s being interrogated by the police.  Which is the other big change from the novel; there’s a murder in the movie.  The murder is literally what opens the movie, with Monty (played by Zachary Scott) falling dead from a gunshot, his last words being Mildred’s name.  We don’t see who fired the shot, but the very next moment in the movie shows Mildred walking onto a pier, contemplating throwing herself in and committing suicide, which is certainly a suspicious thing to do right after we’ve seen her husband be murdered.  All of this, however is an invention purely for the movie itself.  The whodunit aspect of the movie in a way was done as a response of skirting around the aspects of the book that couldn’t be adapted because of the Production Code in place at the time.  In the book, there is a much different and more shocking conclusion to the story.  Mildred has given up so much of her hard earned wealth to help give Veda and her new husband Monty the lavish lifestyle that they clearly cherish more than anything.  But, it puts Mildred in a needlessly precarious position with her business expenses being unable to pay for all of this luxury living.  And then she is dealt the harshest blow of all when she finds Monty in bed with Veda (who by the way is still underage).  Monty desperate to plead his case, but Veda just arrogantly flaunts the scandalous situation even more in front of Mildred, and this becomes the final straw.  Mildred violently attacks Veda and strangles her, causing her to lose her beautiful singing voice.  There’s no murder, but what was left of Mildred’s idealized life with Veda and Monty is forever broken.  What’s more, it also proves to be another scam on Veda’s part, as pretending to lose her voice merely lets her out of a contract that kept her in California.  She leaves Mildred broken even further by this deception and in a way still gets what she desired by the end.  The book’s finale has Mildred consoled by Bert in her grief, and ultimately Mildred celebrates by proclaiming “The hell with her” before the two decide to drink their sorrows away.

This bittersweet ending that comes after the villain leaves without ever facing their comeuppance would not have flown with the censors in Hollywood at the time.  The bad guys always had to pay the price in the end no matter what, so that’s why the murder plot was set up in the film.  The set up is the same; Mildred doesn’t find Monty and Veda in bed together, but she does see them in a compromising intimate situation, which still gets the betrayal across in the story.  Where things divert is that Monty second guesses his relationship with Veda after Mildred has found them out, and Veda can’t accept that, so she shoots Monty dead for betraying her.  Mildred returns after hearing the gunshots, prepares to turn her daughter in to the cops because of how hurt she is by their affair behind her back, but Veda once again plays upon Mildred’s motherly love and Mildred, in another moment of weakness, tries to take the blame for her daughter’s crime.  Only, it doesn’t work out and Veda is still arrested.  Mildred is finally free of her, but the movie leaves Mildred still heartbroken, which is different from the more optimistic finale in the book.  The themes of the book still work within this new finale, but it also undermines Mildred’s growth as well.  You just want her to finally assert herself as a mother finally after Veda clearly crossed the line, and yet she still puts her above herself.  If there was ever a warranted place for Mildred to actually be justified in abandoning her child, this would’ve been it.  But, that’s what the filmmakers had to deal with if they were going to make this story work under the Code restrictions.  And in some ways it was a blessing in disguise.  There’s nothing noirish about the original book, but the murder plot in this movie helped to make it work within the Noir style.  Curtiz and his team made great use of dramatic lighting and shadows in this film to give the story a darker tone.  The ending in particular, with Mildred finding Monty and Veda making out in the beach house is one of the most quintessential Noir moments ever pt on film.  While most of the rest of the movie is a compelling drama about endurance and adversity in the face of ongoing struggles, the noir scenes that frame it are just as potent as any detective story made around the same time that were more distinctly noirish.  In fact, you can see the influence of Mildred Pierce in many other Noir films that came after; the pier scene being an often imitated moment in other films.  

“Mildred…We weren’t expecting you.  Obviously.”

One thing that this movie for sure did was to give Joan Crawford the iconic role that would define her career.  There’s questions about whether she was as good of a mother in real life as she was playing Mildred Pierce, as Mommie Dearest (1980) famously speculated on.  But there is no doubt that she crafted a potent portrayal of motherhood that in many ways was both inspiring and also frustrating.  The book gives a much more satisfying catharsis for Mildred, as she finally learns to let go and just accept that she is better off without toxic people like Veda and Monty in her life.  The movie sadly still confines Mildred into a sense of guilt by the end that she honestly doesn’t deserve.  But overall, the book and the movie are undeniable classics that still hold up very well 80 years later.  The movie stands as one of the classics of old Hollywood, with incredible craft behind the camera as well as in front by it’s incredible cast of actors.  One can’t help but think of Joan Crawford in that iconic fur coat standing on the pier in the dead of night as a quintessential Hollywood moment in cinema.  And the fireworks between her and young Ann Blyth are some incredibly intense scenes as well that further define this as a great film.  The book on the other hand goes far deeper into the character’s psyches and also takes more risks in telling it’s story.  Many years later, director Todd Haynes made his own adaptation of the novel in a 2011 mini-series for HBO, starring Kate Winslet as Mildred and Evan Rachel Wood as Veda.  In that series, Haynes stuck much closer to the book and was able to delve more into the darker themes of the story, given the extra creative freedom he had with no more Production Code to get in the way.  The mini-series is pretty good in it’s own right, but the 1945 film feels even grander because of it’s iconic old Hollywood status as well and also because it was more of a snapshot of that time period.  Mildred Pierce spoke to a world that was just coming out of 15 of the worst years this country has ever faced with the Depression and the War.  Those who participated in the movie lived through all that, and that made their portrayals in the film all the more personal.  As we are going through our own time of uncertainty right now, I wonder how audiences today would respond to a story like Mildred Pierce.  In many ways, I think a character like her would still feel familiar to a lot of people and that’s what helps to make her portrayals on the page and on the big screen feel so timeless.  

“You look down on me, because I work for a living.  Don’t you.”

The Power of the Goof – How A Goofy Movie Became a Surprise Cult Hit Over 30 Years

The Disney Renaissance ushered in a Golden Age for the art of animation.  After many decades of being a niche market for little kids, animated movies were suddenly becoming big blockbusters once again; films that all ages were enjoying equally.  But it wasn’t just on the big screen that Disney Animation was succeeding.  Their TV animation department was also blossoming alongside the Renaissance films of the late 80’s and early 90’s.  Disney had developed a number of hugely successful Saturday morning cartoon shows that also became highly influential.  They often featured already established Disney characters, such as Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Tail Spin, which starred Baloo from The Jungle Book (1967).  They were also developing hit shows with original characters too, like Darkwing Duck and Gargoyles.  One show in particular, the Scrooge McDuck centered Duck Tales became such a huge hit that it even spawned it’s own theatrical film.  Duck Tales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) was certainly more ambitious than the average episode of the show, but it was also limited by a slightly larger than TV sized budget that the studio allocated for it.  Needless to say, the Duck Tales movie didn’t light up the box office the same way that the TV series had on the airwaves.  But, the attempt to make it work did garner the attention of the new regime that was in charge at Disney during the 1980’s.  In particular, Animation head executive Jeffrey Katzenberg believed that the popularity of the shows made for strong contenders of a new plan he had for his animation feature department.  As the studio was buzzing with the development of their A-list projects like Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992), Katzenberg was looking for a way to put more films in development that were smaller in scale but still retained that high quality Disney style to them, essentially creating a B-move department.  There were plenty of good shows to choose from to jumpstart this new project pipeline at Disney, but which one would be the movie to get the first green light.

The block of Disney cartoon series became so popular that even the programming block it spawned was given it’s own name: The Disney Afternoon.  The Disney Afternoon block of shows would switch once a new program was launched each year, keeping the line-up fresh over many years.  The first new show to jump into the line-up was very unlike the others.  After giving the spotlight to many secondary characters from the Disney stable, or entirely new ones as well, it was decided to give one of the Fab Five Disney characters their own show.  And who better to headline a new series than Goofy himself.  The character, who first launched in 1932 with the name Dippy Dawg, had been a popular mainstay in Disney’s many theatrical shorts over the years.  And Goofy was also a character who could be re-molded for any time period as well, which has helped him to stay relevant all these years while still maintaining his core characteristics.  His new show would be called Goof Troop, which followed the everyday adventures of Goofy and his son Max, as well as their neighbors, the Pete family.  Goof Troop was very different from all the other Disney Afternoon shows, which were often more action adventure based.  Goof Troop by contrast was much more grounded, choosing instead to be a domestic, situational comedy.  It was a show about the quirks of suburban life, with Goofy often getting himself and others into some very silly situations.  And it was a huge hit for the Disney Afternoon.  While people enjoyed all of Goofy’s trademark goofiness, it was also the relatable day to day issues that the characters dealt with that helped to make it a favorite with audiences.  And what’s more, it was a premise that could easily translate into a theatrical story as well.  And that’s what the newly formed B-team at Disney thought as well.  It all depended on if Jeffrey Katzenberg thought the same way they did, so a story team was assembled to pitch the idea of a Goof Troop movie.

Some of the earliest people involved on the project included producer Brian Pimental and story writer Jymn Magon.  Magon had worked as a writer for Disney Television for some time, including on Goof Troop, so he was an ideal choice to put together the first draft of what would be the script for the movie.  Eventually, the team had the script storyboarded out and was ready to present to Katzenberg.  However, it didn’t take very long for Katzenberg to see the problems with the story right away.  The initial story was too close the original show, and Katzenberg thought it lacked heart.  It was just a 80 minute collection of shenanigans with Goofy, and Jeffrey wanted something deeper that he believed would connect more with an audience.  So, despite feeling dejected, the Goofy movie team went back and streamlined their script even more.  Eventually, most of the side characters from the animated series would be excised from the story, including Pete’s wife Peg and his daughter Pistol.  In the end, much of the Goof Troop elements would be left out and this new movie would become more of it’s own entity, with only the characters of Goofy, Max, Pete and his son P.J. being the connecting threads.  And even they would be different to their TV counterparts.  The character who went through the most significant change was Max.  Max has more or less been around since the 1950’s in Disney cartoons, where he was known as Junior in his earliest appearances.  He was renamed Max for the series Goof Troop, was was given a very contemporary, 90’s style personality.  But for the movie, he would be changed even further.  The movie aged Max up to his teenage year, made him less self confident and more at odds with his father.  And it was in exploring this aspect of Max beginning to mature and growing in more contrast with his father that the filmmakers found the heart of the film they were looking for.

What was important in getting this story to work was having a vision that could make the more dramatic themes feel natural, which was not easy for a film that starred a character like Goofy.  A rising star in Disney’s animation department, Kevin Lima, was tapped to direct the film.  This wouldn’t just be his first time directing a feature; it would be his first time directing anything ever.  To make it even more daunting, he would have to supervise production across three different studios in three different continents.  The Burbank studio would be the main base of operations, but most of the animation would be done off-site at Disney’s international animation studios in France and Australia.  While this would’ve normally been a recipe for disaster for a first time director, Kevin Lima proved that he could indeed pull a project like this together.  One thing that helped to make him an ideal choice in guiding this project was the fact that he had a personal connection to the story.  As revealed in the recent Disney+ documentary about the making of the film, Lima had an estranged relationship with his own father, who abandoned him and his family when he was still young.  Taking on this story about a father and son reconnecting through a road trip experience was therapeutic in a way for him, and it motivated him towards getting that sense of bonding across in the story.  He also had the benefit of a team of animators who wanted to show that they were more than just the B-team at Disney.  While it didn’t have the same budget as say Aladdin, the Goofy Movie would still have some of the best rising talents at the studio eager to show off what they could do.  The French studio in fact had a team of twin artists named Paul and Gaetan Brizzi who would later go on to create some of the studio’s most artistically daring sequences in the years ahead.  With a story that had emotional resonance in place and the full blessing of Jeffrey Katzenberg, A Goofy Movie was finally set into motion.  But it’s success wasn’t always a guarantee.

Unlike all of the other animated features made by Disney at the time, A Goofy Movie was not a fantasy or a grand adventure.  It was a road trip movie.  The story involves Goofy wanting to take his son Max on a fishing trip in the hopes that it will mend their strained relationship.  Meanwhile, Max has become increasingly resentful of the traits he’s gotten from his father, fearing that he’s going to grow up to be just like him, so he’s been trying to reinvent himself in the pursuit of impressing a girl that he a crush on at school; Roxanne.  The majority of the movie has the two of them at odds over how they should deal with their relationship; Max wants to break free and Goofy wants to stay connected.  Eventually things come to a head when Max deceives his father, having them steer away from Goofy’s plan to go fishing and instead pointing them in the direction of a concert for Max’s favorite singer that he lied to Roxanne about knowing personally in a desperate ploy to impress her.  But, through the friction, Goofy and Max come to a realization that they can’t stop either from being who they are. Goofy realizes that Max has his own path in life to follow, and Max realizes that his father is always there for him and that being his son is not a curse like he believed it was.  Kevin Lima pointed out one scene in particular where we see this dynamic really coalesce in the story, and that in what he calls the “Hi Dad” soup sequence.  In that scene, where the two are forced to take refuge in their car after an encounter with Bigfoot, they start to break down their defenses and find common ground for the first time.  It’s a scene that you rarely see in any animated feature, let alone one from Disney.  It’s just a parent and their child reflecting on their relationship and getting to the root of why they’ve grown apart.  The fact that they managed to make a scene like this work with a character as inherently cartoonish and silly as Goofy is really a testament to how well the filmmakers handled tone and character in their film.  It’s not too serious, or too silly; it’s just like a conversation you would see in real life, and that was kind of revolutionary in animation.  There’s no wishing on a star to solve these characters problems; this was as true to life as any Disney Animated movie ever got in terms of their storytelling.

One of the major contributors to making A Goofy Movie work as well as it does was the voice cast assembled.  Strangely enough, this is also where things could’ve gone disastrously wrong as well.  Jeffrey Katzenberg had seen what putting Robin Williams in the role of the Genie in Aladdin did for that film’s record-breaking box office, and he believed that the best way to sell a animated film was to put a celebrity name behind it; something that he would pursue more when he left to start Dreamworks Animation years later.  Kevin Lima revealed in recent years that there was a possibility for a while that Goofy was going to be given a celebrity voice.  In particular, he had Steve Martin in mind.  This distressed Goofy’s official voice at the time; veteran vocal artist Bill Farmer.  Farmer had been voicing Goofy since 1987, including in every episode of Goof Troop.  He was hoping to also carry that over into A Goofy Movie, but this plan to change Goofy’s voice left him shocked, making him wonder why someone didn’t want Goofy to sound like Goofy.  A test sample was made, with Bill voicing Goofy in his normal voice to show Katzenberg how it would actually sound in practice, and thankfully Jeffrey saw the error in his plan and allowed Bill Farmer to continue playing the character the right way.  And Farmer’s performance is really extraordinary  in the movie, with him finding nuance in Goofy’s voice that no one had even heard before, allowing him to excel in the film’s more dramatic moments.  His performance also works perfectly against the vocal performance of Jason Marsden as Max.  Marsden was a budding teen actor at the time and Max would be his second major voice role after Binx the Cat in Disney’s Hocus Pocus (1993).  What’s great about his performance is that it feels so natural against the shiny personality of Goofy.  He doesn’t take the teenage angst too far, nor does he try too hard to sound like a cartoon character’s son.  He plays the part naturally, and it makes Max a fully rounded and relatable person.  You really get the sense that you would’ve known someone like Max in school or were him yourself.  In addition to the leads, voice acting veterans Jim Cummings and Rob Paulsen carried over their roles as Pete and P.J. from Goof Troop without missing a beat, and were joined by an impressive collection of character actors like Wallace Shawn, Kellie Martin, Jenna von Oy, and an uncredited Pauley Shore in the cast.

However, there was a speedbump in the film’s road to the big screen.  Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had been the film’s biggest ally at the studio, abruptly left Disney after a succession dispute with CEO Michael Eisner.  Apart from Katzenberg, there was no one else at the Disney Studios that was enthusiastic about having a B-picture production line, so little effort was put into marketing the movie.  The film was too far along to cancel, so Disney ended up treating it as an obligation rather than a movie to be treasured as a well as any of their others.  The film was quietly dumped into theaters in April of 2025 to little fanfare, and this resulted in low box office results.  Critics were also split, because they weren’t sure what to make of it because A Goofy Movie didn’t fit the typical Disney Animation mold.  At least their Spring 1995 release helped them to escape the long shadow of the previous year’s hit, The Lion King (1994), which would have buried the film even more.  But, even with it’s lackluster launch, this was not the end of the movie’s story, but rather it’s beginning.  The movie slowly developed a following during it’s home video release.  People gravitated to the more grounded, realistic story at it’s center, especially in the way it tackled the issues of family and fatherhood.  The fanbase for this movie grew steadily over the years, and in some surprising demographics as well.  One of the biggest areas of support for this film was found in the African-American community.  You’ve got to remember that this was long before The Princess and the Frog (2019) and Disney still had not featured any significant character of color in their movies up until the 90’s.  Despite all of the characters having a Goofy like appearance, black audiences still saw themselves identified in this film, particularly with the pop singer character in the movie named Powerline, who was primarily based off of singer Bobby Brown, with a little Michael Jackson and Prince thrown in.  This was also the first Disney film to ever feature hip hop in it’s soundtrack, which probably also contributed to it’s popularity in the black community.  The soundtrack overall is another factor in the movie’s success over the years.  It’s a musical, but not in the standard Disney fairy tale style.  Each song is unique, mixing rock, country, hip hop, and pop all into one.  The finale song, I 2 I, sung by Powerline (who was voiced by recording artist Tevin Campbell) in particular has become one of Disney’s biggest hits over the years, receiving it’s own fair share of remixes and covers in the YouTube era.  What is especially great about the re-discovery of this film is that it has shown Disney that not every animated classic needs to be based on a legendary story.  Sometimes, a simple father and son road trip is enough to yield a great universal experience for everyone.

Over 30 years the movie has grown in esteem in Disney history; greatly over-coming it’s B-movie status.  It’s especially funny seeing how much Disney’s own social media machine is spotlighting this film’s anniversary this year, and not even mentioning once the anniversary of their “A-list” movie from the same year; Pocahontas (1995).  It shows that even the B-team could create something that could lay claim to being a masterpiece.  And indeed, over time the B-team got to be rewarded for their efforts.  Kevin Lima got to move on to directing an “A-List” feature as co-director of Tarzan (1999), and afterwards he even found success as a live action filmmaker, getting the chance to direct the film Enchanted (2007), starring Amy Adams.  Though their Paris based studio was closed shortly after the making of A Goofy Movie, the Brizzi Brothers would get to direct some of the most beautiful moments in future Disney features, including the “Hellfire” sequence in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and the “Firebird Suite” segment of Fantasia 2000 (2000).  Bill Farmer continues to voice Goofy exclusively to this day and has been honored as a Disney Legend for his efforts over his 37 years in the gig.  Jason Marsden also continues to voice Max occasionally, and has been an in demand voice actor all of these years as well.  One of the pleasing things about this anniversary in particular is that it’s showing just how big this movie has gotten.  Disney was especially taken by surprise 10 years ago when they held a 20th anniversary panel at the D23 Expo in 2015.  Demand was so high that they had to turn away hundreds of people at the door after the room had reached capacity, and the audience that did make it was electric.  After attending last year’s D23, I can tell you that the fanbase has grown even stronger since then.  Powerline was an especially popular cos-play at D23, even rivaling people in Jedi or Mickey Mouse dress-ups.  It makes sense because all the children who grew up over these 30 years with the movie are now having children of their own, and they are probably re-watching the film with them in a new perspective.  Those who originally identified with Max are now finding more in common with Goofy.  And one of the greatest legacies that this movie has had is that it’s helped people from multiple generations, fathers and sons, learn to communicate with one another.  It’s more than just a goof, it’s a movie that brings people together and that’s why it holds such a special place in Disney history.  And that is definitely something worthy to “hyuck” about.

Thunderbolts* – Review

Things haven’t exactly gone according to plan for Marvel since the astronomical success of their last few Avengers films.  When Avengers: Endgame (2019) broke every conceivable box office record in it’s opening that summer, it seemed like everything Marvel touched turned to gold.  But not to rest on those laurels, Marvel definitely had their plans for the future.  They had a plan for the next 3 phases of their cinematic universe, which was about to be turbo charged by the upcoming launch of the Disney+ streaming service, which was also going to be an additional platform for their storytelling going into the future.  The first three phases, which centered around the collection of the Infinity Stones and the diabolical plans of the mad Titan Thanos who wanted to use them, would be given the designation of the Infinity Saga, whereas what was coming next would be called the Multiverse Saga.  Given that designation, you can imagine what the focuses of phases 4, 5, and 6 would be.  This was going to be an ambitious new chapter for the MCU and there was a lot of excitement to be had in the Marvel fandom.  Or, at least that was the plan.  The onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic put a massive roadblock in front of Marvel’s plans.  Their entire 2020 slate had to be pushed back a year, and the release order of all their projects had to be reshuffled.  The beginning of Phase 4 was no longer going to be on the big screen, but instead streaming on Disney+, with the mini-series Wandavision leading the charge.  Eventually as the pandemic receded, Marvel was able to get their projects out on time, but there was some trouble brewing as well.  The disruption of the pandemic and the inner turmoil at the Disney corporate offices under the short lived tenure of failed CEO Bob Chapek caused Marvel to lose a bit of their creative luster.  People were noticing that Marvel had lost some of their edge during this time, and it lead to speculation that maybe the golden era of Marvel was indeed over.

Now, some of the complaints that all of Marvel’s output was falling short were a bit overstretched.  I for one still stand by my positive reviews of Eternals (2021) and The Marvels (2023).  But it is undeniable that they have struggled to find their footing in a post-Endgame and post-pandemic world.  Some might say it was Marvel over-stretching itself by putting half of their output on streaming, which left some of the fan-base who don’t subscribe to Disney+ out in the cold when it comes to the interconnected story-lines.  They still have solid successes for sure, like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 (2023) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), but they are also being offset with hugely disappointing films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) and the recent Captain America: Brave New World (2025).  After the departure of Bob Chapek from Disney, returning CEO Bob Iger took a big look at all the future Marvel projects in development and decided that Marvel needed a major re-calibration.  It was practically a necessity after the Jonathan Majors scandal forced Marvel to abandon their plans for the Multiverse Saga centering around his supervillain character Kang the Conqueror.  Their initial Kang plans for the upcoming Avengers films were suddenly shelved in favor of focusing on another iconic Marvel villain, Doctor Doom, with Robert Downey Jr. returning to Marvel to play the part.  And that shift in plans seemed to ripple across all the other Marvel projects.  All the Marvel shows and films were basically put back into the oven to cook a bit more in order to bring the studio back to it’s storytelling roots.  You can definitely see a shift from project to project.  Captain America: Brave New World seemed to be too far gone in production to be saved with rewrites and re-shoots, but the Daredevil: Born Again series on Disney+ managed to salvage itself and win positive reviews.  The remainder of Marvel’s 2025 slate also seems to have benefited from the re-calibration as they are making it to the finish line without costly rewrites and re-shoots generating negative buzz around them.  The only question is, are they able to prove that Marvel has their mojo back.  That is what we hope to see with the next big new Marvel blockbuster coming out this week; Thunderbolts*.

The story of Thunderbolts* finds controversial CIA director Valentina Allegra De Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) facing impeachment charges by the House of Representatives.  She is called to Capitol Hill to be grilled by a number of Representatives, including newly elected congressman James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the former Avenger and Winter Soldier.  Hoping to skirt repercussions for her more dubious decisions as director, she calls in some of her team of assassins and spies to conduct one final mission. These include former Widow Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), who is seeking a way out of her line of work; U.S. Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell), the disgraced ex-Captain America replacement; Ava Starr, aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a phase shifting powered thief and assassin; and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), a powerful assassin with mimic capabilities.  They are all called to infiltrate a secretive underground facility belonging to Valentina’s shadowy O.X.E. Group, which had been using the base for top secret experimentations.  The group of killers quickly put it together that they were sent there to assassinate one another as part of Valentina’s plan to wipe her slate clean of all incriminating evidence, including them.  But they find someone else in the bunker with them, a dazed and disoriented man who calls himself Bob (Lewis Pullman).  They all manage to fight their way out of the bunker, but soon learn that Bob is more than what he seems.  It turns out he’s the sole survivor of a human experiment project for something called the Sentry Project.  Things go awry during their escape, and the team of misfit mercenaries end up wandering through the desert, hoping to evade Valentina’s forces.  Along the way, they are picked up by Yelena’s adoptive father, Alexi Shostakov. the former Red Guardian (David Harbour), who has been eager to get back into the hero business.  They are also intercepted along the road by Bucky Barnes, who is tired of sitting through congressional meetings and is ready to take matters into his own hands.  Meanwhile, upon learning that the Sentry program yielded a successful specimen, Valentina has aims of using Bob to her own ends.  However, something much darker lies underneath the new power base that is a part of Bob now.  Can the rag tag band of anti-heroes, who have jokingly taken on the name Thunderbolts, end up defying their own shortcomings to become true heroes and stop Valentina from making the wrong move with her plans for Bob?

Thunderbolts* comes out at an interesting time for Marvel.  While the studio has made major moves behind the scenes to help salvage their Cinematic Universe, it’s uncertain just yet if that change will prove fruitful.  Deadpool & Wolverine was a massive success, but that sort of stood on it’s own, being less of an entry for the character into the MCU and more of a continuation of his own franchise.  It didn’t help that this year started off with Captain America: Brave New World, which was a victim of Marvel’s uncertain direction which resulted in underwhelming box office.  Thunderbolts* has a lot to prove to both long time fans of the MCU, as well as casual viewers; can Marvel recapture their glory.  The best thing I can say about Thunderbolts* is that it doesn’t have any of the problems that plagued Brave New World.  It’s a movie with a clear idea of what it wants to be, and it doesn’t clutter the story with a whole lot of connected universe nonesense.  That ultimately was Brave New World’s downfall; that it didn’t know what it wanted to be.  And the fact that it required a whole lot of Marvel lore homework to understand left the audience at arms length from the emotional core.  Thunderbolts* on the other hand doesn’t require you to have seen every Marvel property that ever was.  It certainly helps, considering that all of the characters (except Bob) have appeared in past Marvel movies and shows, but the movie doesn’t assume that everyone is up to speed.  Instead, it expertly places all the characters within the situation and allows us to understand these characters through the dilemma.  And that’s where the movie draws it’s biggest strength, seeing how these characters interact off of each other.  For the most part, Thunderbolts* represents a fine return to form for Marvel storytelling, where they manage to stick to telling one story at a time and not feel like a middle chapter in an ongoing story.  The MCU at it’s best allowed for each of their movies to have an identity all on their own, so that any casual viewer could have an easy entryway into the story of the movie they would be watching.  Post-Endgame, there seemed to be less concern about letting a movie stand on it’s own and more about setting up for the future.  Quantumania was the worst offender of this, and ironically it’s job was setting up a future that we’ll likely never see now.  Sure there are still Easter eggs in Thunderbolts*, but they take a back seat to having us be involved in the story at hand.

But, even as Thunderbolts* does get a lot of things right, I wouldn’t say it reaches the astronomical heights of the MCU at it’s best.  It’s biggest obstacle would be the sense of familiarity.  It doesn’t change the game in the same way that Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) or Black Panther (2018) did, showing us something new in the super hero genre.  Thunderbolts* is just a very well executed but otherwise conventional Marvel film.  Perhaps what all the excitement about this film stems from is that people have been craving this kind of Marvel movie for a long time.  The action scenes and banter between the characters are all a lot of fun, but I also wasn’t feeling like the movie wowed me in anyway.  The heights of the MCU where you felt like you were on the edge of your seat waiting to see what would happen next isn’t quite there in this film.  But, what is there still left a smile on my face.  I liked how the movie molds these characters over the course of the film, going from jaded individualists to a group of friends who have each other’s back by the end.  It could be easy to say that this is Marvel’s answer to The Suicide Squad from DC, but that’s not exactly what this movie is going for either.  There’s growth in these characters that gets surprisingly deep; showing that there is a lot of trauma in each of their pasts, and that each one of them has the capability of being better.  I loved the concept of facing the dark side of your persona and learning to live with it as a part of you while also rising above it being a crucial part of the plot.  The climax of the movie literally has all of the characters facing down their demons and finding strength together.  That’s the heart of this film, and the movie succeeds the most in delivering that message.  The banter with all of the characters is also a lot of fun.  Given that these characters are a dark shadow of the Avengers team themselves, it’s fun to see their bonding come through with a bit more friction in the beginning.  And they get a little more cutting in their insults than any of the Avengers would have done; except maybe Iron Man.

The best asset this movie has is undoubtedly it’s cast.  Everyone here has been making the rounds within the post-Endgame MCU, but in this film we finally get to see the actors really get to the core of who these characters are.  Both Florence Pugh and David Harbour were easily the highlights of the otherwise sub-par Black Widow (2021) movie in which they were introduced.  Thankfully neither misses a beat here.  Harbour’s Alexi naturally gets most of the big laughs in the movie, and I absolutely love the energy he brings to this role, keeping it silly while avoiding becoming too cartoonish.  Pugh’s Yelena sort of acts as the main character of the movie and she delivers a fantastic performance here.  We really get to see her emote in this performance, as Yelena goes through some very rough emotional hurdles in this movie, but the movie still manages to keep that fun sarcastic side to her intact.  Wyatt Russell and Hannah John-Kamen also get to flesh out their characters a lot more, showing their growth from disgraced misfits to heroes with a purpose.  Sebastian Stan, the most veteran member of this cast in the MCU, dating back over a decade down to Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), delivers the standard bad ass elements of his character that you’d hope to see here, but he also manages to work a bit of a fun side in there too.  It is funny to see him outside of his element trying to be a congressman and how it clearly is stiffing to him.  It’s great to see that Stan has not grown out of the character just yet because he is still a lot of fun to watch as the Winter Soldier.  We also get to see Julia Louis-Dreyfus finally get to let loose in a more villainous role.  She’s been making some trouble in the MCU through appearances in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Disney+ series and in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), but here we finally get a sense of just how cutthroat and morally scrupulous Valentina can be.  But perhaps the actor who has the most heavy lifting to do in this movie is Lewis Pullman as Bob.  He is definitely the films most interesting character, and it’s a testament to Pullman’s performance that you don’t quite know what turn his character will take.  At times he’ll be charmingly goofy, but then in an instant he’ll be forebodingly creepy.  It’s a balancing act that he manages to pull off well and it makes his character’s journey all the more fascinating.

Of course, when we go to Marvel movies, we expect there to be some spectacle, and Thunderbolts* does deliver on that.  One particular standout is a vehicular chase scene in the middle of the film.  A scene like that one does show one of the movie’s strengths, which is that it’s far less reliant on CGI visual effects than most of the other recent Marvel films.  The action scenes are well choreographed and very grounded in reality, which makes sense given that most of the Thunderbolts are physical fighters rather than super powered beings.  The only down point with regards to the fight scenes are those moments when it does start to rely on CGI.  The digital effects in this movie, to be honest, are not very good, and in one scene in particular near the end it is so blatantly obvious that the characters are being replaced with CGI doubles because they start to look like video game characters.  Thankfully, it’s just one scene where that stands out like a sore thumb.  There is, however, one digital effect in the movie that does look quite good.  Towards the end of the climax, one of the villains goes through a transformation and it is a very chilling and effective digital effect.  What that character is also able to do is pretty creepy and gets one of the most shocking reveals in the film as well.  In this instance, it’s the part of the movie that does feel like something we’ve never seen from Marvel before and that helps to make the final act of the movie work as well as it does.  The movie has a very imaginative finale, and it’s good to see Marvel actually take some chances with this one.  And like the best Marvel films, it’s a climax that actually feels like it has some weight to it; that you really don’t know where it’s actually going to end up.  The film for the most part delivers on what we expect from the MCU, but it is a positive sign that Marvel’s getting back to delivering substance along with the spectacle.

Overall, I don’t feel like Marvel hit a home run with this movie, but it certainly is a solid double and maybe even a triple thanks to that strong finale.  I thought all of the performances really helped to make this a fun time at the movies, with Florence Pugh and Lewis Pullman being particular stand outs.  Also, it’s finally getting Marvel back to the point where they can make any one of their movies stand on their own when viewed apart.  This movie didn’t feel like an obligation, but rather chance to explore a bit more of the this cinematic universe we love.  Sure, anyone who has kept up will get all the clues about what is to come next, including with the obligatory post credits scene, which this one actually delivered with a good tease.  It’s in stark contrast with something like Captain America: Brave New World, which felt like it was telling five different stories in one.  Thunderbolts* knows that we just came to see a group of misfit characters from Marvel’s B-list interact with each other and found a way to have fun with that.  I even love the fact that the name Thunderbolts* itself is it’s own inside joke.  Not to spoil too much, but I will say that we do get an answer for what the asterix in the title actually means and it’s actually a pretty good reveal.  The origin of the Thunderbolts name is also a pretty cute reveal.  I saw this film as a slightly better than average film in the pack.  I would actually rank it with the two misunderstood movies that I seemed to like when no one else did (Eternals and The Marvels).  It is a vast improvement over Brave New World and most of the other middle of the road MCU films made in this Multiverse Saga.  It is still no Avengers level success, but at the same time, it shouldn’t have to be.  The best thing it does is show that Marvel can indeed still make a thoroughly enjoyable movie that doesn’t have to be just another cog in the machine.  Hopefully the solid results from this means good things for Marvel’s future, especially with The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) around the corner.  Given the underdog status of the characters that make up the Thunderbolts team, it’s fitting that their own movie managed to prove a lot of people wrong and ended up rising to the challenge.

Rating: 8/10

TCM Classic Film Festival 2025 – Film Exhibition Report

Another year has passed and the TCM Classic Film Festival is back.  I’ve been covering this festival now for every year that it has been held since I started this blog, except for the the two years during Covid that that the festival wasn’t held of course.  Why do I keep coming back each year?  There’s just something about watching classic films in the setting of the heart of Hollywood that becomes this irresistible draw that I always look forward to each year.  A lot of the movies that they show are films that I have seen before (in some cases many times), but for a lot of them, I am seeing them again for the first time on a big screen.  And even better, there are quite a few movies that play at this festival that I’m coming to with fresh eyes.  Seeing movies on the big screen is always my preferred way of seeing a movie for the first time, and what the TCM Film Festival gives me is the chance to see these movies in the world’s most famous theaters.  The roster of screens has changed over the years for this Festival.  The primary location is of course the famed Chinese Theater, but they also utilize the equally beloved Egyptian Theater down the street, as well as the Chinese Multiplex in the Ovation Hollywood mall complex.  And for special screenings, they also utilize other screens in the area.  During the renovation of the Egyptian that spilled across the pandemic years, the American Legion Hollywood Post theater was used as a venue for the festival, and for Disney related screenings, the El Capitan Theater also becomes part of the Festival.  Sadly, the Cinerama Dome still remains shuttered due to the bankruptcy of it’s past owner.  Hopefully it too will one day become part of the festival again.  This year’s festival carries over the same venues from last year, and this year the theme is centered around “Fantastic Worlds on Film;” putting an emphasis on classic sci-fi and fantasy films being screened at the festival.  This is certainly evident by the choice of the opening night screening, The Empire Strikes Back (1980).  Of course, I am going to try to see as many movies as I can over this four day fest,  and give you my impressions of all the sights and sounds that I experience.  So, here is my day to day account of the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival.

THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 2025

Heading straight to Hollywood Boulevard from my day job, I immediately got myself into line for the first show of the day available for standby viewers.  I of course am unable to attend the opening night show, as it is exclusive to only the highest of pass holder branches.  The opening night shows are always a big deal at these, given the full red carpet treatment and everything.  I’m fine with not being able to get into these, because there are plenty of other things to do for those with lower tier passes and standby guests.  I do try to get a glimpse of the red carpet though, and just like in past years, it looks like a big deal.  Half of the busy Hollywood Boulevard is taken up by the typical infrastructure needed for big premieres; the red carpet plus areas for the press pools, lighting for the VIP’s to shine while their pictures are taken, plus a small bleacher stand for those lucky few fans who got to become spectators for the red carpet arrivals.  As mentioned, the opening night show is devoted to the beloved Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, which is celebrating it’s 45th anniversary this year.  The opening night screenings always bring out a big guest for the occasion, and for this screening of Empire, who better to have than the creator of Star Wars himself, writer/director/producer George Lucas.  Lucas of course didn’t direct or script Empire; that was done by Irvin Kershner and Lawrence Kasdan respectively.  But of course this was still his world that he created and he did write the story for all of the original Star Wars films, so he makes for a very worthy guest for this screening.  I would indeed like to have been in the room to see George Lucas, but the high tier passes are out of my price range, so it’s the regular screenings for me.  To start this Festival, I headed to the Chinese multiplex to see one of their 7:00pm shows, the first ones for this venue at the Festival.  And it’s fitting that the movie I selected is one that I have yet to see, the Kathrine Hepburn/ Elizabeth Taylor film Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).

The Chinese Multiplex has been a bit of a second base of operations for this Festival, especially in recent years.  While the Roosevelt Hotel still is the primary gathering spot with  Club TCM and the Info Desk located there, the lobby of the Multiplex has recently become the home of a lounge space for guests of all kinds as well as the official Boutique Gift Shop for the festival.  In many ways, this is a much better gathering space for the cross section of attendees, because it’s where both pass-holders and non-passholders mingle.  At the multiplex, there are three screens in use, and my first film was in the second largest of these, Auditorium 6.  The screening kicked off with a quick greeting from TCM personality Jacqueline Stewart who then introduced the special guest for the pre-show Q&A.  The special guest was filmmaker and writer Nick Davis, who has a special familial connection to the film Suddenly, Last Summer.  His great uncle was the director of the film Joseph L. Mankiewicz, which would also make him cousin of TCM master of ceremonies Ben Mankiewicz.  Nick is also a recent author of a biography about both Joseph and his brother Herman, another legendary writer (Citizen Kane), which Jacqueline was eager to promote.  During their discussion, Nick mentioned many interesting tidbits about the movie, including the fact that working with Elizabeth Taylor on this film helped Joseph to eventually getting the job as director on Cleopatra (1963), which of course turned into a messy situation for Mankiewicz later on.  He also detailed how much of a difficult situation it was working on this movie with two actresses known to be difficult to work with.  But, he also spotlighted how effective the film is visually, which is something that Mankiewicz was not quite known for, having more of a reputation as a dialogue driven director.  The pre-show talk was brief and we were presented with the film itself.  I certainly came to this movie more for Kathrine Hepburn than anything else, and she was certainly the highlight to be sure.  The film overall was perhaps too melodramatic for my tastes, but the performances definitely are worth watching it for.  I especially like the way Ms. Hepburn enters the movie, descending on an elevator like a Queen on her throne.  After the film concluded, I had a very short window to get to my next film, which I worried would be the hardest to get into.

My next film was in the smallest venue of the festival; the 200 seat Auditorium 4.  I’ve only ever gotten into this screening room twice before in the over ten festivals I’ve attended.  But, luck was on my side again.  The theater was down to pretty much the front two rows, but I got in.  The special thing about Auditorium 4 is that it’s one of the few venues to screen movies with film prints.  For this one, we were seeing a beautiful 35mm print of the David Lean film Blithe Spirit (1945), donated to the festival from the British Film Institute.  Before the show, we got another Q&A from TCM host Alicia Malone and special guest, actress Christine Ebersole.  Christine famously got to perform in a Broadway revival of the original Noel Coward play, where she got to perform alongside screen and stage legend Angela Lansbury.  Ebersole gave us some interesting insight into how she approached her role on the stage version and how it differed from the movie we were about to see.  She noted how in the stage version that she didn’t have to wear green make-up like actress Kay Hammond does in the movie.  It was an interesting talk with Christine Ebersole, a veteran of stage and screen herself now.  The movie started and it was great watching another movie at this festival on celluloid, especially an early technicolor one like Blithe Spirit, which put a lot of emphasis on it’s color palette.  This film print dates back to 2008, so it’s fairly in pretty good shape, free of scratches and wear.  It was my first time seeing this film and it was an interesting watch.  The movie is old fashioned, but in that charming old cinema way.  It was especially jarring to see a very young Rex Harrison in the film, given that I’m more used to his mid-life work in movies like My Fair Lady (1964) and Doctor Doolittle (1967).  The movie of course takes advantage of it’s translation from stage to screen and features some fun supernatural slapstick. With two movies down, my first night was a success.  I got into the two screenings that I wanted and was able to get a pretty good vibe of the start of this festival.  Night number two however might be a bit more competitive.

FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2025

Given my day job work schedule, and the fact that I had my eye on attending a midnight showing on this night, I had to miss a whole bunch of films that were scheduled on this second day of the Festival.  So, I didn’t arrive at the Festival until around 7:30 at night.  What I planned on seeing was my first show at the Chinese Theater for the festival, which was a 30th Anniversary screening of The American President (1995), starring Michael Douglas and Annette Benning.  I managed to get in line fairly early, but it didn’t much matter since every Standby guest was let in.  For this screening, the film was preceded with a Q&A with the film’s writer and director, Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner, interviewed by Ben Mankiewicz.  Naturally, Reiner did most of the talking, and he gave some pretty interesting insight about the making of the movie.  The film was originally developed with Warren Beatty in mind for the President, but once his real life wife Annette was cast in the film, Beatty ended up backing out so that the film wouldn’t be reflective too much of their real life relationship, which opened the door for Douglas to come in.  Aaron Sorkin also revealed a lot about his process of writing the screenplay.  The most amazing fact that he revealed was that his original draft of the climatic presidential speech at the end of the film was a staggering 15 pages long.  They also talked about how this film in particular would be the genesis for Aaron Sorkin’s popular television series The West Wing, which starred Martin Sheen as the President, who coincidently is also in The American President  as the Chief of Staff.  As Reiner said, Sheen got a promotion after appearing in this movie.  This is a film that I had seen before, but never on the big screen, so it was a treat seeing it with an audience.  I’m also happy that I got to see it with Reiner and Sorkin there to talk about it.  It helped to make up for the fact that one of the movies that I had to miss out on was another Reiner film, Misery (1990), which Rob was also there to introduce alongside the movie’s Oscar-winning star, Kathy Bates.  It’s one of the hard choices one has to make when choosing which movies to see.  I planned it out this way because I wanted to have the ability to see the midnight show.

Typically the TCM Film Festival midnight showings are not extremely hard to get into.  I had absolutely no trouble getting into the Friday night ones in the last two Festivals.  This year however was going to be different.  The 2025 Festival’s Friday night midnight show was going to be a 50th Anniversary screening of the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a film synonymous with midnight showings.  This would be it’s own big draw, and I feel like a lot of outsider, non-passholder patrons would have been jumping at the oppurtunity to see just this film.  This of course jeopardizes my strategy of using the standby queues for each movie.  So, right as The American President’s credits began rolling, I bolted for the exit in the hopes that I would get to the standby queue in time before it would fill up.  When i got there, the line had filled somewhat, but not overwhelmingly so.  There was a very outside chance I would get in.  Though I was resigned to the idea that the movie might sell out (it’s happened to me before) I was hopeful.  I honestly would’ve felt worse for the people lined up in front of me who had dressed up for the screening if they couldn’t get in.  This wasn’t just going to be just any other screening; TCM really wanted to recreate the whole Rocky Horror midnight experience, so audience participation was strongly encouraged, including character dress-ups.  The only thing that wouldn’t be allowed were outside props, but each person at the door would be given a gift bag with pre-apporved props for the show.  Thankfully, the movie ended up getting a late start because of the bag checking at the door, which allowed for more time to check seat availability.  Remarkably, they managed to get every person from standby in.  When I entered the theater, the choices were pretty limited to just the front rows, but this in turn would actually be a blessing in disguise.  Just so you know, I had seen the movie before, but never on the big screen and especially not at one of these famous midnight shows.  I learned from my fellow audiences members that this made me a “Virgin,” which meant that I had to participate in some pre-movie initiation.  Nothing scary mind you; I just had to stand up and be seen and do some harmless public humiliation.  But, even though I had some idea what I was in for, a lot of what followed was certainly beyond what I could’ve expected.

First off, since this was still a TCM Film Festival Screening, the movie was still preceded by a Q&A.  Alicia Malone, who actually showed up in costume herself (dressed as the Susan Sarandon character Janet Weiss), did a sit down interview with one of the film’s original stars, Barry Bostwick.  Bostwick shared a few stories about working on the film and also what he thought about the incredible legacy that the film has had.  You can definitely get a sense that he’s been to more than one of these rowdy midnight shows before, and he was very happy to be in front of this particularly rowdy crowd.  After the interview, the emcee of this showing, President of the Rocky Horror Picture Show Fan Club Larry Viezel, went through all the ground rules before we started.  He hilariously noted that this Auditorium #1 of the Chinese Multiplex was much classier place than normal for this kind of show, so he advised that we stay rowdy but also be respectful.  The fact that lighters were banned is noteworthy.  This is also where the Virgin initiation also took place, which was all in good fun.  But the best part of the show was that we would be getting a live performance from a shadow cast.  The troupe of actors, known as the Happy to be Here Shadow Cast, would re-enact every scene from the movie right in front of the screen.  This was, to be honest, one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had at any TCM Film Festival.  The movie, with the context of all the audience participation, just become so much more entertaining.  Normally I would hate it if I heard someone talking throughout the movie, but here it just seemed like a natural part of the show.  Two girls sitting behind me in particular seemed to know all of the call backs, and they were shouting them out with gusto throughout.  We also all got to dance the “Time Warp” together and use our props when cued to do so.  Because of my “Virgin” status, I missed all the prop cues, but I didn’t feel like it mattered.  For me, just observing the mayhem around me was my form of entertainment.  And the shadow cast was amazing.  It very much was like watching a play and a movie at the same time; truly a new experience for me.  I’m so happy that I didn’t miss out on this and that TCM had the bravery to put it on in the first place.  I don’t know any other time I might have sought this kind of experience out, but now I’m glad that this show has, to a certain extant, taken my “virginity” away.

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2025

Now for the first full day of my Festival experience.  I definitely needed the morning to recover from the night before; Rocky Horror didn’t end until 2:30am.  After some much needed sleep, I returned to the Festival and headed immediately to my first stop of the day, the legendary Egyptian Theater.  The Egyptian made it’s triumphant return to the Festival last year after being closed for both Covid and a multi-year restoration.  The reason why the Egyptian’s return is so special is because it is the only venue in Hollywood equipped to run nitrate film prints.  These extremely volatile and flammable prints are rarely screened for the public, so the fact that the Festival goes out of it’s way to show film as much in their original formats, including on nitrates, is always a major plus of the event.  For this morning, they were going to screen the Joan Crawford Oscar-winning noir classic Mildred Pierce (1945), with a nitrate print donated from the British Film Institute.  The film was introduced to us by the duo of Ben Mankiewicz and comedian Mario Cantone.  Mario is a major fan of classic Hollywood, and in particular he has a deep love of the work of Joan Crawford and her on-screen and off-screen rival Bette Davis.  One of the treats from Mr. Cantone’s introduction was that he was able to whip out his hilarious elderly Bette Davis impression; an impression that cracks me up every time I hear it.  The nitrate print that was used dates back to the film’s original 1945 release, and for an 80 year old print, it was in remarkable condition.  The film was hardly scratched, which was very different from the nitrate print I saw last year for Annie Get Your Gun (1950) which looked particularly beat up.  This print only had a few jumps around the reel changes but other than that it ran through the projector with almost perfect clarity.  Kudos to the BFI for taking such good care of this particular nitrate print, and to the Egyptian projector staff for treating it with the best possible care.  With that, I was able to scratch the Egyptian theater off of my to do list, which off almost all the venues has become increasingly hard to get into, even with a 500 seat capacity.  My next stop was a different story.

My second film of the day was taking place at the enormous Chinese Theater, where Back to the Future was going to be playing in celebration of it’s 40th Anniversary.  This wasn’t an extremely hard show to get into, given the size of the venue, and also it was a mid-day show.  But, the theater still filled up fairly well, and it was nice to see this classic get a robust showing at this festival.  The special thing about this screening was that it was the premiere of the IMAX version of the film, which was made possible due to the film’s recent 4K restoration.  This IMAX presentation was actually meant to premiere five years ago at the 2020 TCM Film Fest, but obviously that got cancelled due to Covid.  It’s good that we finally now have the opportunity to see this version of the movie, and it also allowed us to see the Chinese Theater in it’s full IMAX mode.  Normally the screen is masked to allow for screenings of regular film presentations, but for this IMAX show, the full screen was exposed, and it’s true size is pretty overwhelming.  I’ve been told that this is the largest screen in North America, and that may very well be true.  Before the start of the film, we got a special pre-show Q&A with some of the crew of the film; notably co-writer and producer Bob Gale, cinematographer Dean Cundey and Michael J. Fox’s stunt double Charlie Croughwell.  They shared some fun little stories about the making of the movie, including Croughwell talking about how he pulled off some of those great skateboarding stunts in the film.  This of course is a movie that I have seen many times over, but it was great revisiting it again in IMAX.  Watching it on that Chinese Theater screen really made it feel like I was being enveloped by the film itself.  Seeing it with an audience also made the showing special, as this is undeniably a crowd-pleaser after all these years.  So, with that movie checked off the list, I didn’t have to go far for my next one since my third film of the day would also be at the Chinese.

This next screening, however, was going to be a first not just for me but for everyone attending the Festival.  This year, TCM was putting on a special celebration of the long lost film format known as Vistavision, which was developed by Paramount Pictures back in the 1950’s as a response to Cinemascope.  Vistavision was a unique format that ran horizontally through a projector rather than vertically, and it’s image size was 8 perforations wide rather than the standard 4.  This made Vistavision a great format for large scale imagery, and it was notably used to shoot films like The Searchers (1956) and Vertigo (1958).  However, the enormous cost at the time to shoot and exhibit films in the format caused it to fall out of style and eventually it became extinct as the technology advanced past it.  Vistavision only recently made it back into the spotlight because it was used in the recent Oscar-winning film The Brutalist (2024), and currently it is being used by filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro for their upcoming new films.  While filmmakers are getting back into the habit of using Vistavision cameras for their projects, most places can’t actually play Vistavision prints anymore, because there are few projectors left that can actually display films with 8 perf frames.  But, TCM managed to find a way to do it.  They worked with the Boston Film Center to re-construct a projector rig capable of 8 perforation playback and combined it with the Chinese Theater’s already existing 70mm IMAX capabilities.  Because of all this, we could actually see a true Vistavision presentation; something that hasn’t actually happened since the heyday of the format back in the late 50’s and early 60’s.  For this Festival, we would be given the opportunity to see two Vistavision films screened in their original format; 1955’s We’re No Angels and 1957’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  I chose to go to the first showing, which was a fun little comedy starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray.  The show was preceded with a discussion about the Vistavision format by Paramount Pictures archivist and author Charlotte Baker, who delivered a more in depth lecture about the format exclusively for passholders in the Club TCM room that same day.  The movie itself was in very good shape and it was great to actually see how this old, long unused format actually looks in it’s original format.  My hope is that this becomes a more regular thing done at the festival, and not just with Vistavision but with so many of the other experimental formats of the era.

To close out my lengthy Day 3 at the Festival, I went to the Chinese Multiplex to catch a screening of a classic Marx Brothers comedy, Animal Crackers (1930).  For a late night show, this was much easier to get into than my midnight show from the night before. Even still, the audience for this 9:15pm showtime was fairly good.  I feel like the best way to appreciate a Marx Brothers comedy is with an audience, so I was happy to see the theater fairly full.  For this screening, the show started with a pre-screening Q&A.  The special guests were writer and performer Andy Marx, who also happens to be Graucho Marx’s grandson.  He was accompanied by superfans of the film, the screenwriting duo of Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt).  They talked about different interesting stories surrounding the Marx Brothers and in particular their relationship to this film.  Because of copyright issues, Animal Crackers actually went unseen by the public for decades after it’s original release.  It was only in recent years that the full, un-edited version of the film was found in the British Film Institute and given the restoration to restore it back to how it was originally seen back in 1930.  Scott Alexander also shared a funny story about how he got to see Graucho Marx when he was still a child and desperate for an autograph.  The movie itself looks remarkable for a 90 year old film.  It’s amazing that just a few short years after the invention of “talking pictures” that we were getting a film such as this with Graucho spitting out rapid fire one liners that still are funny all these years later.  It’s kind of miraculous that the original cut managed to survive and end up getting restored to the pristine way that it looks now.  With that, my third night came to a close, and it was time to get some sleep and prepare for what would be an eventful final day.

SUNDAY, APRIL 27, 2025

As opposed to my Saturday plans, I was up at dawn to attend the first round of screenings on this day.  I made my way to the Chinese Theater, which typically is easy to get into on an early morning screening.  While passing by, I was seeing that normally busy Hollywood Boulevard was closed, getting red for the red carpet premiere of Marvel’s Thunderbolts*.  One thing that I typically like to do at each Festival is to watch a big Hollywood musical in the Chinese Theater.  There’s just something about seeing a musical, which are almost always extravagant spectacles, in a legendary movie palace like the Chinese that evokes old school Hollywood to me.  In past years, I’ve seen everything from The King and I (1956), to Hello, Dolly (1969) to Bye, Bye Birdie (1963) to The Music Man (1962) in that theater during these Festivals.  The enormity of the Chinese’s screen also helps to make these movies feel even more larger than life.  For this Festival, my musical experience would be Oklahoma (1955), screened here for it’s 70th anniversary.  Naturally the film looks stunning on the giant screen at the Chinese.  We were presented with the Todd A-O version of the film, which apparently was filmed simultaneously with a Cinemascope version of the movie.  The Todd A-O version was made for Cinerama style exhibition with the Roadshow format; and it even played at a slightly higher frame rate than normal.  While the two versions were all shot the same, there are different takes for each one, so it can be said that there are two similar but slightly different cuts of this movie.  The Chinese Theater even drew the curtains (which are also epic in scale) to simulate the Roadshow experience even more.  After the movie, we were treated to a post-show Q&A with the son of the film’s female lead Shirley Jones, Shaun Cassidy.  He talked about this being his mother’s film debut and the impact it had on her career thereafter.  He also shared that her background as a stage performer also helped to prepare her for the double take shooting process that they need to do both versions of the movie.  While Oklahoma is not my favorite movie musical, I did enjoy seeing this grand, old school Hollywood musical in the kind of presentation and setting that does it the justice it deserves.

My next round of the Festival would take me to the Chinese Multiplex where I would be seeing the one film on my schedule this final day that was new for me.  The movie was Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961).  This movie is noteworthy for being Warren Beatty’s screen debut, and it’s easy to see why he became an instant movie star.  For this presentation, we were getting a premiere look at the film’s recent new restoration, as well as a special Q&A with the daughter of the film’s other star Natalie Wood, Natasha Gregson Wagner.  Natasha also brought he own 13 year old daughter to the show, because she was getting to see her grandmother in this movie for the first time, which must have been it’s own surreal experience given that Natalie Wood was still a teenager herself when she made this movie.  The discussion mostly covered what it was like for Natasha growing up as the daughter of a movie star and she also shared stories about meeting the film’s director Elia Kazan.  As for the film itself, the restoration looks quite good for a movie from the early 60’s.  It gives the film a nice polish with fairly strong color grading.  For a first time viewing, i found the film interesting, but otherwise not among the best of Elia Kazan’s career.  After the movie, I stayed at the Chinese Multiplex for what would be my 3rd film of the day.  It was another film that I had seen before, but never on a big screen, and there was a reason I wanted to see this one.  With the passing of legendary filmmaker David Lynch this year, I wanted to see at least one of his movies at this festival, and there were two to choose from.  The first, Wild at Heart (1990) was offered as a midnight showing on Saturday, but since I already selected Rocky Horror as my midnight show for this year, I opted for the second one which was Blue Velvet (1986).  Unfortunately, this was the one thing that ended up not going according to schedule for this entire festival.  While I did still get into the movie, the special guest that was supposed to appear before the show, the film’s star Kyle MacLachlan, had to drop out last minute.  It was disappointing, and the only hiccup to my overall perfect Festival line-up, but at least I was able to experience this classic film on the big screen for the first time, and get to experience a Lynchian film the way it’s supposed to be seen, with an audience just as disturbed as myself.  A fine way to remember a true original who sadly left us this year.

With all that, there was only one movie left to go, and this was the ever crucial closing night film of the Festival.  They always select a special one to show in the Chinese Theater for the finale, and it’s thankfully one that’s open to all audiences, passholders and standby alike.  I was hopeful that I had enough time to get there early enough to get an early spot in the standby line.  There have been years before where the closing night show was going to sell out, and there was good reason to think that this one would too.  The final movie was going to be the Michael Mann film Heat (1995), celebrating it’s 30th anniversary.  Michael Mann himself would be there for a pre-show discussion, but he was also bringing along a friend; someone who initially wasn’t planned for the festival but later came aboard as a last minute addition.  One of the film’s stars, Al Pacino himself, was coming to the closing night show, which turned this screening of Heat from a interesting choice to an absolute must see.  I was worried that as word got out more that Al Pacino was going to be there at the Festival that it might cause a sellout for the show before Standby was even allowed to come in.  It’s happened to me before.  Thankfully, there were just enough empty seats left for us in the standby line.  We were pretty much limited to only single seats scattered throughout as well as either the far back or the front row.  I managed to find a single seat about halfway up, which still got me close enough to get a good look at Al Pacino.  Both him and Michael Mann came to the stage with a thunderous standing ovation from the near sell out crowd in the Chinese Theater.  They were then interviewed by Ben Mankiewicz who led them in a discussion about the making of the film.  They talked about what it was like making the famous shootout in downtown Los Angeles, as well as the iconic coffee bar scene between Pacino and Robert De Niro.  They also talked about the late Val Kilmer and what it was like working with him on the film.  To close out, Pacino also shared a hilarious story about an interview during the press junket for the film where he was lost being asked questions from a over enthusiastic French reporter. The film of course held up after 30 years, and it was great finally getting to see the movie on the big screen for the first time.  But what this also did was complete one of the most successful TCM Film Festivals I have ever had.  I left the Chinese into the nighttime atmosphere of Hollywood Boulevard, taking in the aura of another complete and satisfying Film Festival.

Over the four days that I spent going to the TCM Film Festival I did not once miss out on anything that I had pre-selected beforehand.  This was a huge improvement over last year when I had two instances of movies selling out before I was allowed to enter from standby.  I got to go to a film in every venue this year, including the elusive Auditorium 4 where available seats are rare even for passholders.  I got a nitrate screening in as well at the Egyptian, which is also a sometimes difficult show to get into.  And of course I also got into the closing night show, where I saw a true legend on stage with Al Pacino.  But even compared with other years where I successfully got into all the movies I wanted to see this one felt even more special.  One of the things that truly made this one of my best Festivals ever, if not the best, was the inclusion of that Rocky Horror experience.  I am so happy that TCM and the Chinese multiplex allowed this show to be put on for us attendees.  There was some risk involved, given the reputation for the Rocky Horror midnight shows to get a little rowdy, but the way they pulled it off even with all the compromises still gave me a memory that I will always cherish from this Festival.  I’ve been to three midnight screenings now at the TCM Film Festival and this was by far the best one.  It makes me wonder if they’ll ever do a screening of The Room (2003) at the Festival.  Doubt it, but who knows?  Another highlight was seeing a movie screened in Vistavision, which is something that I could have only experienced here at this Festival.  I hope that they continue this in the years ahead with more Vistavision prints from the Paramount archive.  And of the movies I was watching for the first time this year, there is always that one movie that becomes a true discovery for me that I didn’t know I would like that much before, but after seeing I now feel like I found a new classic.  The Vistavision screening of We’re No Angels was that movie for me this year; a film I had never heard of before, but now I’m happy to have learned of it’s existence and would gladly watch it again in the future.  It’s all of these great experiences that keep me coming back each year, and this year’s festival not only met my expectations, it shattered them.  This was an all time great Festival experience and I hope that 2026 will be just as eventful and memorable.  Thank you again TCM and see you again next year at the movies.