All posts by James Humphreys

Off the Page – Winnie the Pooh

One of the strongest contributions that merry old England has contributed to world literature are the books that have been written specifically for younger readers.  Popularized specifically in the turn of the 20th Century, children’s literature began to blossom and leave it’s mark on the publishing world, and many of the most well known authors were coming from the English literary community.  What really distinguished English children’s literature were the memorable characters that came from these imaginative stories.  Whether it be the maniacal Mr. Toad from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, or the boy who never grew up in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or the practically perfect nanny in P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, these were characters that lept off the page and captured the imagination of children not just in their native England, but all around the world as well.  But the most popular of these characters may have come from the unlikeliest of authors.  That character of course would be the little stuffed bear known as Winnie the Pooh.  Pooh Bear is a character known the whole world over, rivaling even Mickey Mouse in overall awareness across cultures.  But what is it about the character of Winnie the Pooh that has managed to transcend multiple generations and cultural barriers.  In essence, there is a simplicity to the world of Winnie the Pooh that connects with our imagination at a very young age.  As children, we see our own little worlds as being much grander than they really are, and out of that we develop an imagination where that small little world is the place for a great adventure of our making and the toys we play with are our companions.  That’s at the core of the Winnie the Pooh stories, and it’s also where their creation began.  Winnie the Pooh was born out of a real place and the imagination of a real child, which itself evolved into an interesting story on it’s own.

Alan Alexander (A.A.) Milne was a mildly successful playwright in England during the earlier part of the 20th Century.  He served his country in World War I, and the experience left severe mental scars.  His writing post-War became more harsh and bleak as he was passionate to express his anti-War feelings to the world.  The toll of the war led him to retreat from the social life of London, and he spent much of the 20’s at a country estate near Ashdown Forest in East Essex.  Most of these exile years were spent in the company of his young son, Christopher Robin Milne.  Hoping to start fresh with his child that he neglected because of his seclusion due to triggering war flashbacks, the peaceful countryside allowed Milne to settle down and give more attention to his son.  He observed how Christopher Robin would create his own adventures in the woods outside their home, and always with a stuffed bear at his side named Growler.  This inspiring scene would spark the creativity in Milne’s mind once again and he began to write about Christopher Robin’s adventures in the 100 Acre Wood that was Ashdown Forest.  And though Christopher Robin was indeed a part of his stories, the name of the bear needed to be more distinct than Growler.  At the time, the London Zoo had just welcomed a Canadian bear cub with the name Winnipeg, or Winnie for short.  And though the Milne had changed the name of his stuffed bear, Christopher Robin contributed the addition of Pooh to the name, as it was what he called a swan that lived in the nearby pond on the property.  Christopher’s names for all of his other stuffed toys also made it into the story, including the tiny little Piglet, a tiger named Tigger, and a donkey named Eeyore.  Over the course of two years, A.A. Milne wrote over two dozen Winnie the Pooh stories, and they were published collectively in two volumes, the titular Winnie the Pooh (1926) and The House on Pooh Corner (1928) soon after.

“Pooh, for a bear of very little brain, you sure are a smart one.”

The two Winnie the Pooh books were enormous hits all over England and they managed to make a huge impression across the pond as well in North America.  The impact of that success unfortunately was not all that good for Milne and his family.  One of the things that really captured the imagination of young readers were the many illustrations that were included in the books, taken from pencil sketches by Milne’s longtime collaborator and friend E.H. Shepard.  Shepard’s depiction of Winnie the Pooh and his critter friends would become iconic and influential for years beyond, but when it came to drawing Christopher Robin himself, Shepard and Milne made the mistake of basing his likeness on the real Christopher.  As a result, the very young boy became a bit of a celebrity, with many people clamoring to meet the real Christopher Robin.  Christopher would go on a whirlwind tour helping to promote the book, with A.A. Milne unable to stop the frenzy surrounding his son.  There was even a reckless marketing ploy where Christopher participated in a photo shoot with the bear Winnipeg at the London Zoo.  That’s right, a barely 8 year old child was made to stand next to a live bear that could’ve easily attacked him without warning.  Thankfully nothing happened, but it is shocking to think how poorly Christopher was treated during these promotional days.  Naturally it led to some resentment in Christopher’s later years, as he grew to hate the bear that made him famous and thus denied him a simple childhood.  A.A. Milne also resented the success of his Winnie the Pooh books because they overshadowed his other work and weren’t reflective of his true passions.  Winnie the Pooh would be a sore spot in the Milne family for many years, as Christopher became more estranged from his father, whom he blamed for exploiting him.  Towards the end of his life, A.A. Milne chose to distance himself from his most popular creation, refusing to have it dramatized in any form, both on screen and on the stage during his lifetime.  Eventually he and Christopher did reconcile in later years, but they together chose to disown the cuddly little bear.

“The only reason for being a bee is to make honey.  And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”

After A.A. Milne’s death in 1956, the rights to his Winnie the Pooh stories were passed on to his publisher’s widow, as Christopher Robin Milne had no interest in claiming the character for himself.  A couple years later, the widow of the publisher would put up the rights for a film version for the first time ever.  There of course was one filmmaker who had his eyes set on the Winnie the Pooh stories for a long time and jumped immediately at the opportunity.  That person of course was Walt Disney.  Disney gained the exclusive rights to the Winnie the Pooh stories in 1961, and he was intent on putting his own spin on the world renowned stories.  But, instead of crafting a full length feature based on the books, Walt opted to make short subject adaptations of select chapters of the Winnie the Pooh books.  Given that the Winnie the Pooh books are just a collection of self contained short stories, it made more sense to have a series of shorts made rather than a singular film with a feature length narrative.  And so, Walt Disney and his animators would begin their work on Winnie the Pooh with an adaptation of the first two chapters of the original 1926 book; one with a story of Pooh using a balloon to fly up into a tree in order to reach the honey found in a bee hive and other involving Pooh getting stuck in the entrance hole of the bunny hollow of his friend Rabbit.  This first short would be called Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), which sadly would end up being the last animated project that Walt Disney would see to completion.  After his death in 1966, Walt’s animation team began work on the second featurette, entitled Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968), which among other things introduced the character of Tigger into the series.  Blustery Day would prove to be even more popular than the first short, and it ended up winning an Oscar as well for Animated Short.  A few years later, the third short Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974) was released.  The three shorts were then combined into a package feature film called The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) with new animated interstitials and a finale added.  This package feature is how most people are able to view the original run of Disney’s take on Winnie the Pooh, but it’s not the last we would ever see of the little bear.  Indeed, Winnie the Pooh would be around for quite a while, appearing in Saturday morning cartoons, holiday specials, and he would even get another animated feature film from Disney in 2011, simply titled Winnie the Pooh.  Not to mention, he would become a gold mine in merchandising for Disney, making billions of dollars for the company.  Remarkably, what A.A. Milne chose to cast aside, Disney would embrace and make their own, and it would be one of the most lucrative acquisitions they have ever made.

Though for fans of the original books, it’s that Disneyfication of the character that has become controversial over the years.  Many people in the UK are especially resentful of how Americanized the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh is.  The Disney shorts very much lack the English identity that is so crucially part of Milne’s writing.  A.A. Milne was a poet first and foremost, and his Winnie the Pooh stories were full of the kind of flourish that he excelled at as a writer.  Some of the moral lessons learned by Pooh and Christopher Robin show how Milne himself was trying to process his own outlook on life, with Pooh acting as both a companion to Christopher as well a bit of a therapist.  Much of that  flourish is minimized in Disney’s versions, as Winnie the Pooh and his friends speak more or less like other American cartoon characters of the time.  Even though the characters themselves may be missing some of that distinct Milne dialogue in favor of a more straightforward American style sense of humor, Walt Disney and his team still found a clever way to work some of Milne’s style of prose through the inclusion of a narrator.  Voiced in the original run of shorts by English actor Sabastian Cabot, the narrator plays an important function within the adaptation.  He not only brings Milne’s own voice into the film, but he even interacts with the characters as well.  One of the more inspired choices of the Disney adaptation is to have the characters actually interacting within the pages of the book itself, including treating the text as actual physical objects.  They’ll even address the narrator directly, aware of his existence.  It’s an interesting aspect that Disney added  and it helps to both pay homage to the original text while at the same time allowing for creative flourish on the part of the animation itself.

“Heffalumps and Woozels are very confusal.  A Heffalump or Woozel’s very sly.  If honey’s what you covet, you’ll find that they love it.  Before your eyes you’ll see them multiply.”

Even with the changes Disney made, the shorts still maintains a reverence for the source material.  It is clear that the Shepard illustrations were key inspirations for the visual style of the 100 Acre Wood.  Disney Animation was going through a transitional period in the mid to late 60’s, as they embraced a newer, sketchy style look thanks to a Xerox process that translated pencil drawings directly onto animation cels.  It worked well on some projects, like the more modern day 101 Dalmatians (1961), but looked a little too course on films that should have had a softer, classical look like The Aristocats (1970).  For Winnie the Pooh, the Xerox process was a perfect match, because of it’s similarity to the Shepard illustrations.  The backgrounds in particular really feel like they were pulled right off the page, and given the short’s gimmick with the living manuscript that the characters interact with, it’s clear that Disney really wanted to capture that simple beauty found in the original texts.  The character designs take heavy inspiration from the Shepard drawings too, though with noticeable differences to help make them easier to animate.  Disney’s Winnie the Pooh is a bit more rotund than his book counterpart, though Disney still keeps the shape of his bear head very similar to how it is in the book.  Piglet is almost a direct translation, while other characters are embellished a bit more.  Tigger is especially more dynamic in the Disney version, being both animalistic, but also capable of human like behavior.  Disney’s choices in voices also go a long way towards making the characters come alive.  Veteran actor Sterling Holloway, a favorite of Walt’s, was brought on to give Winnie the Pooh his voice, and it’s a perfect match.  While literary purists may bemoan Holloway’s American accent on this very British bear, there’s no denying the soft tone on his voice is delightful to listen to and feel natural for a stuffed bear named Winnie.  Ventriloquist and comedian Paul Winchell delivers a rousing performance as Tigger, especially in developing the distinctive laugh of the character with his “hoo hoo hoo hooo.”  Character actor John Fiedler brought his distinct high pitched voice to the part of Piglet, and he would continue to voice the character for another 40 years up until his passing in 2005.  One key change that the Milne family probably would’ve approved of are the changes to Christopher Robin.  In addition to also giving the character an American accent (provided by a number of young actors), they also changed the look of the character to help distance him more for the real Christopher Robin.  His function in the story is also less direct, with him passively being a part of stories that Winnie the Pooh is more independently motivated in.

“Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in the enchanted place on top of the forest, a little bear will always be waiting.”

Though Disney made several changes to the characters, they still remarkably remain faithful to the stories themselves.  All of the shorts that made up The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh were adapted from Milne’s own stories.  The stories themselves get mashed together to create bigger narratives, but each one translates original ideas from Milne’s own imagination.  Disney clearly knew that many in the audience would’ve been familiar with these stories, especially the iconic Honey Tree and Flood stories.  Where Disney saw their chance to bring their own flourish was in expanding upon concepts that are limited when described on the page.  One of the biggest moments that Disney contributed to Winnie the Pooh is found midway through the Blustery Day short.  In it, Winnie the Pooh learns about the concept of Heffalumps and Woozels from Tigger, fearing that they will steal his honey.  This leads to a nightmare sequence when Disney creates some truly surrealistic imagery.  I would make a guess that this was the segment that helped the short win an Oscar because it is a one of the most tripiest moments found in any Disney movie.  The “Pink Elephants” sequence from Dumbo (1941) seems to have been an inspiration, with Winnie the Pooh finding himself caught up in a weird place surrounded by Heffalumps and Woozels that shapeshift into anything.  It’s definitely the thing that deviates the most from Milne’s original vision, which is far more grounded in a magical reality.  Apart from that detour, which makes sense in the scheme of the story as part of Winnie the Pooh’s nightmare, the stories play out just as Milne wrote them.  The stakes never grow too dire; the only real conflict overall in the arc of these stories is the contention between Rabbit and Tigger, which the characters are too good natured to ever take too seriously.  Disney showed with the Heffalump sequence that they were capable of deviating far from Milne’s vision, but they wisely kept Winnie the Pooh characteristically simple and direct in line with how the books told their stories.

As Winnie the Pooh inches closer to his Centennial anniversary, it is remarkable to see how his influence has not waned but instead grown stronger.  After the character entered the public domain a couple years ago, it didn’t take long for opportunistic filmmakers to exploit that freedom and use the iconography of Winnie the Pooh as the basis for a horror movie.  Thankfully, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) came and went and was widely panned by everyone, so it’s existence shouldn’t cast a bad rep on the character going forward.  What has been one of the stranger legacies of the character, however, has been his influence on global politics.  At some point, many people pointed out the visual similarities between the Disney design of the character and Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jingping.  President Xi has been aware of this, as the comparison to Winnie the Pooh is often used as a way of mocking the controversial leader, so what has come as a result has been a crackdown on all Winnie the Pooh related imagery all across China.  The only exceptions allowed are select pieces of merchandise, as well as costumed appearances at Shanghai Disneyland.  Other than that, no one in China is allowed to distribute anything not approved by the Chinese government with Winnie the Pooh on it.  Now Winnie the Pooh has been turned as a symbol of rebellion in China, which I don’t know how an anti-Fascist pacifist like A.A. Milne would feel in response.  As of now, the Disney version of the character remains the face of the character that most of us know today, and Disney is not likely to be slowing down with their presentations of the character.  He is now as big of a driver of the Disney brand as Mickey himself, with Pooh being especially popular with the youngest part of Disney’s audience.  Has it taken away from some of the appeal of the character that Milne first imagined.  The original shorts did an admirable job of staying true to their literary source, but in the years since, with Disney going way beyond the books with countless spin offs on television and home video, it can be argued that Disney has been a little overkill with their hold on the property.  Still, Winnie the Pooh remains more or less the same honey loving bear we all love, and like his original literary companion Christopher Robin, he has been a guiding role model for kindness in much of our childhood memories.  If Winnie the Pooh’s legacy in the end is to encourage a lot more kindness in the world, than perhaps A.A. Milne was able to fulfill his intent for seeking a more peaceful world after all.

“The most wonderful thing about Tiggers is that I’m the only one.”

The 2024 Oscars – Picks and Thoughts

The time has come again to hand out the gold in the heart of Hollywood as we arrive at the industry’s biggest night.  Though we are well into the new year now, the Academy Awards do feel like the final curtain to the year prior when it comes to the movies.  It’s the Awards ceremony that definitively gives us the snapshot of where the film industry is at the current moment, and this year’s Oscars certainly marks the end of one of the most tumultuous in cinema history.  What defined the year of 2023 more than anything else was the months long Writers’ and Actors’ strike, and while it did result in much needed beneficial gains for the creative community, it also shook up the release calendar on the back end of the year, when Hollywood puts out it’s Oscar contenders.  There were many films garnering for attention that still got released during the strike, but without the benefit of having the cast out in the circuit promoting them a lot of those potential contenders ended up getting no attention at all and were mostly forgotten by year’s end.  Some distributors even decided to give up and pushed their movies to the following year.  Who knows how different this year’s award season would’ve been had the strikes not happen.  While that may be a question to speculate in the years ahead, this year’s Oscars definitely reflects the affect of 2023’s other major event which was the “Barbenheimer” effect at the box office.  Not only did the two high grossing saviors of last summer dominate the box office, but both Barbie and Oppenheimer ended up with a healthy amount of awards recognition too from the Academy, with one in a pretty good position to take Best Picture.  It’s fitting that the Academy recognized the importance of what “Barbenheimer” did for the industry.  The Academy has been seen as very out of touch with the average audience for a long time, and that has been reflected in the dismal ratings for the ceremony on television in recent years.  Hopefully they learned this year that a movie being a blockbuster doesn’t always mean it’s unworthy of an Oscar, and the hope is that this year the Oscars ceremony will also get that “Barbenheimer” bump.

What follows are my in-depth breakdowns of all the top categories, as well as my quick list of all the others.  For these top ones, I will provide my commentary and reveal not just who I think will win, but also who I would like to see win, which sometimes diverges.  My track record is not 100%, but I do observe the trends and momentum leading up to Oscars night, so I try to make the best educated guess I can on these picks.  I even go out of my way to see as many of the nominated films as possible, including the short subjects.  So, with all that said, here are my picks for the 2024 Academy Awards.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Nominees: Cord Jefferson, American Fiction; Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach, Barbie; Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer; Tony McNamara, Poor Things; Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest

Perhaps the most stacked category of the night.  Any one of these nominees would be the hands down favorite in any other year, and the fact that they all have to compete against one another is unfortunate.  In one case, the Oscars made a misstep, putting the screenplay for Barbie in the Adapted category, when it is far from an adaptation.  The explanation was that Barbie is a pre-established IP before the movie, but anyone who has seen the film knows that it’s story was purely from the imagination of Greta Gerwig, as well as her co-writer and real life partner Noah Baumbach.  This is also one of the many categories pitting the two “Barbenheimer” films against each other.  While Oppenheimer‘s script is an excellent one, with Christopher Nolan adapting a 700 page biography into a compelling and intense three hour film, it’s also clear that the film’s better strength is in it’s direction, so this is a case where Barbie actually has the edge.  But, it’s looking like that it too will come up empty handed.  A lot of the momentum in this category seems to be shifting in Cord Jefferson’s direction.  Jefferson’s cinematic debut is winning raves across the board, and in particular for it’s witty and satirical screenplay, poking fun at the way race is addressed in the publishing world.  His screenplay is sharp tongued, but also has a great deal of subtlety in it’s character building moments.  While it likely will be the winner, I do find myself more drawn to the more risk taking scripts.  Tony McNamara’s Poor Things script has some of the most hilarious “WTF” lines of the year, and it does a great job of mixing the absurd with the profound.  Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is also a brilliant example of writing through subtext, as he perfectly captures the banality of the evil found in the casual conversations from the Nazis he observes in the film; finding the power in the things not said.  But honestly out of the bunch, I found Greta and Noah’s examination of the dynamics of femininity and masculinity through the famous toy brand to be the most impressive writing achievement in this field of nominees.  Who knew that Barbie would end up being the best statement film of the year?

Who Will Win: Cord Jefferson, American Fiction

Who Should Win: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Barbie

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Nominees:  Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, Anatomy of a Fall; Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer, Maestro; Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, May December; Celine Song, Past Lives; David Hemingson, The Holdovers

Here we have a category with far more clear favorites.  While Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik’s May December may have gotten a lot of buzz going into awards season, the fact that this is the sole nomination that the film received pretty much tells you that it’s not favored to win.  Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer’s Maestro is a charming love letter to a legendary artist, but it’s also fairly formulaic as far as biopic screenplays go, which hurts it’s chances as well.  With those two flashy Netflix movies out of the way, the remaining nominees are representative of the strong year in independent cinema we had in 2023.  Celine Song’s understated Past Lives was a critical darling that stuck with critics and Academy voters all year.  But it’s modest showing in the other categories shows that a nomination is about as far as the movie is likely to go in this category.  For right now, the momentum seems to be behind the Palme d’Or winner from Cannes, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall.  Triet’s crime drama showing the process of a murder trial unfolding from investigation to ultimately the verdict is a captivating watch, and the screenplay is very precise in the way it uses language as a part of the mystery.  It certainly is the movie that makes you think the most while watching it, and it’s satisfying that Justine Triet doesn’t give you an easy answer as to what actually happened either.  As good as Anatomy of a Fall’s script is, my favorite in this category has to be the script for the movie that I named as my favorite for the year.  David Hemingson’s screenplay for The Holdovers is this beautiful throwback to the subdued character driven comedies of the 1970’s, fitting perfectly with the visual aesthetic that director Alexander Payne gave the movie.  It is the perfect blend of drama and humor with just the right amount of edge to keep it from growing schmaltzy.  And he should get the award for some of the best written insults of the year, which Paul Giamatti delivers to perfection.  While it’s chances are fading, I would like to see The Holdovers make an upset win here.

Who Will Win: Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, Anatomy of a Fall

Who Should Win:  David Hemingson, The Holdovers

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Nominees:  Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things; Robert DeNiro, Killers of the Flower Moon; Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer; Ryan Gosling, Barbie; Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction

For all the comic book movie nerds out there, it is funny to see this as a competition between Iron Man and the Hulk, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Mark Ruffalo both nominated here.  While Ruffalo’s performance as a petty womanizer in Poor Things was certainly a delight and deserving of awards recognition, it seems he is likely to see his fellow Marvel alum take home the gold this year.  Robert Downey, Jr. has had one of the best redemption arcs of anyone in movie history, coming from a near career destroying set of scandals and drug addiction to eventually headlining in the biggest movie franchise ever.  Winning an Oscar would be yet another distinction to help cement Downey’s remarkable career resurrection.  Playing former Atomic policy chief and later adversary of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lewis Strauss, Downey’s performance is big and memorable, and it demonstrates all the best qualities we’ve seen out of him as an actor.  This is his third nomination, and all signs show that he is likely to win.  But, as much as I loved Robert Downey’s performance in Oppenheimer, the performance that impressed me the most in this category was Ryan Gosling as Ken.  Comedy roles are often overlooked by the Academy, especially with the broad, cartoonish type of comedy that we see in Barbie, so it’s a real testament to Gosling’s comedic chops that he managed to get nominated for his performance.  It is far and away one of the funniest performances we’ve seen in years, with Ryan Gosling commanding every moment and being absolutely perfect in the role of the insecure Ken doll that messes up the harmony of Barbieland in the film.  His “I’m Just Ken” musical performance may in fact be my single favorite scene in any movie of last year.  As hard as it is to be nominated for a comedic performance, it’s even harder to actually win.  Still, I think that Gosling is the closest competition that Downey has in this category; a true “Barbenheimer” showdown.  But, like what is expected for this upcoming Oscar night, Oppenheimer has the edge in this category.  And it will be a deserved win for Robert Downey, Jr. whose career turnaround really is a remarkable story in itself.

Who Will Win:  Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer

Who Should Win:  Ryan Gosling, Barbie

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Nominees:  America Ferrera, Barbie; Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers; Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple; Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer; Jodie Foster, Nyad

Here we have the most locked down Award of the night.  From the beginning of the Awards season to now, Da’Vine Joy Randolph has dominated this category, winning pretty much everything.  Her role as the warm-hearted boys academy cafeteria cook Mary Lamb in The Holdovers has been celebrated across the board and it’s the kind of nuanced performance that really grabs the attention of Academy voters.  I couldn’t agree more.  The moment you first see her character in The Holdovers, you instantly want to know more about her, and Ms. Randolph delivers a tour de force performance that perfectly aligns with the overall tone of the film.  I’m happy she’s getting all of this due recognition as it means that The Holdovers is guaranteed at least one Oscar this year.  I don’t see any of the others in this category denying her the Award.  The only one who might have the most outside chances of an upset might be America Ferrera for Barbie, who was the surprise nominee this year.  There’s an outside chance that her surprise nomination could lead to an outside win, but it seems unlikely.  I think one of the reasons that America got the nomination was because of that viral moment in Barbie where she gives the big speech about the pressures of being a woman today that pretty much spelled out the main thesis of the film.  It’s a deserving nomination to be sure, as are the other nominees.  Danielle Brooks was a bright spot in an otherwise unnecessary remake of The Color Purple.  Emily Blunt stole the show in her brief scenes as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, leading to a first ever nomination.  And Jodie Foster was an expected stand out in the inspirational Nyad.  But Da’Vine Joy Randolph clearly stood out the most this year, with a performance that is equal measures devastating and inspiring, while also filled with charming humor.  You can count on her making the Awards season sweep, with an almost sure thing Oscar becoming the jewel in her crown.

Who Will Win:  Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Who Should Win:  Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

BEST ACTOR

Nominees:  Bradley Cooper, Maestro; Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer; Colman Domingo, Rustin; Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction; Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers

This is a tough category for me, because it involves pitting my two favorite movies of the year against each other.  Two favorites have emerged in this category since the nominations were read, and in the last couple weeks, the race has actually flipped a bit in favor of one over the other.  Initially, Paul Giamatti looked to be the favorite, with his win at the Golden Globes (and his subsequent after party trip to In-and-Out Burger that went viral).  But, in the last few weeks, Cillian Murphy has been racking up wins at the BAFTAs and the SAG Awards.  As of right now, it looks like Murphy is benefitting from the overall momentum behind Oppenheimer going into the Oscars, and he seems to be pulling away right now.  I do indeed like Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer.  It would be fitting that Murphy earns his Oscar for a Christopher Nolan film, as the two have been frequent collaborators on multiple movies.  And given how so much of the film’s success is dependent on his performance, given that he’s in nearly every scene of the three hour epic, the fact that the movie was the box office hit that became shows just how well his performance hit it’s mark.  It certainly wouldn’t upset me if Cillian Murphy wins the Award.  But, my favorite performance here comes from my favorite movie of the year.  Paul Giamatti’s career has been made up of a remarkable string of memorable, quirky characters, and sadly this is only the second nomination he has ever gotten (and first for a Lead role).  Winning here would really be a great acknowledgement for a career of outstanding character roles, but it’s also just a recognition for a phenomenal performance that achieves the right balance between hilarious and heartbreaking.  And man does he put some punch into those intellectual sounding insults.  At this point, I feel that some of that goodwill within Hollywood that Paul Giamatti has built up over the years could lift him to the top, but right now Oppenheimer is looking to have a big night and that will likely be the tide that lifts Cillian Murphy over the edge as well.

Who Will Win:  Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer

Who Should Win:  Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers

BEST ACTRESS

Nominees:  Annette Bening, Nyad; Carey Mulligan, Maestro;  Emma Stone, Poor Things; Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon;  Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall

Again, this is a category where it looks like two favorites have emerged.  And this one is a bit more competitive than Best Actor going into the home stretch.  Overall this is a strong category with deserving nominations for all.  A special shout out to German actress Sandra Huller, who is nominated here for Anatomy of a Fall, but also delivered another standout performance in the Best Picture nominee The Zone of Interest; a breakout year for her for sure.  Right now, this is a race between Lily Gladstone and Emma Stone, and it’s hard to say who has the edge.  Both won the Golden Globes in their respective Drama and Musical/Comedy categories, but since then Lily has picked up the SAG award and Emma has picked up the BAFTA.  If I were to put my pulse on the race right now, I would say this is going to go to Lily Gladstone.  Hollywood loves to make history at the Oscars ceremony, and a win for Lily would give them that moment as she would be the first Indigenous actor to ever win an Oscar.  It would be a deserving honor too, as she was definitely the standout in Martin Scorsese’s expansive Western epic, outshining even big heavyweights like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro in the film.  But, as much as I liked Lily Gladstone’s performance and would cheer a historic win for her on Oscar night, I do feel the best performance this last year belonged to Emma Stone in Poor Things.  Her performance in this oddball re-imagining of Frankenstein is a performance unlike anything I have seen before, and it really takes a committed and fearless actress to convincingly put it off.  Emma Stone, reuniting with director Yorgos Lanthimos after making The Favourite together, makes the character of Bella Baxter one of the most unique big screen protagonists I seen in a long while, and where she takes this character in the film is a wild journey.  And yet, she manages to nail even the more dramatic parts as well alongside the goofy moments.  It’s my favorite performance across all categories at this year’s Oscars, so I definitely am rooting for Emma Stone to prevail.  But, a win for Lily Gladstone wouldn’t upset me either, and it would be a long overdue Award for the Native Indigenous community who have long deserved recognition for their contributions to cinema.  Her win will also likely be the sole Award for Killers of the Flower Moon at this year’s Oscars, so it’s hard to completely count out the Scorsese effect as well.

Who Will Win:  Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon

Who Should Win:  Emma Stone, Poor Things

BEST DIRECTOR

Nominees:  Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer;  Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest;  Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall;  Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon;  Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things

This is another one of the easy to call categories.  That not to say that the other nominees here are slouches.  It’s remarkable that Martin Scorsese is still being recognized in this category this late into his career, showing that he hasn’t lost his magic touch at all, having now been nominated in 6 different decades.  Yorgos Lanthimos made perhaps his biggest leap yet as a visual storyteller with his dreamlike aesthetic placed upon the world of Poor Things.  And Jonathan Glazer delivered one of the most chilling Holocaust films ever with a movie that remarkably shows very little carnage but conveys the horrors instead brilliantly through atmosphere and sound.  Justine Triet delivers a brilliant dissection of the French legal system in action through Anatomy of a Fall, though I feel her nomination should have been filled by Greta Gerwig for Barbie.  But, it’s been clear to anyone going into this Awards season that this is going to be Christopher Nolan’s year.  The Holdovers topped my list this year because I thought it was the best written movie of the year, but Oppenheimer was my number two and it was undeniably the best directed movie of the year.  Nolan has always been pushing the boundaries of the cinematic artform, creating these monumental films that are more than just a movie; they are events.  A huge proponent of IMAX photography, he made Oppenheimer as must see film in theaters, and that helped to contribute to it’s nearly $1 billion box office.  There has been a groundswell for years for the Academy to honor Christopher Nolan for the advancements in cinema that he has made.  The reason we have 10 nominees for Best Picture is because the Academy overlooked Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), so that’s a profound legacy he has left right there on it’s own.  Thankfully, Oppenheimer is one of those undeniable achievements that no one can argue isn’t deserving of the Oscar for Directing.  It may have taken a while, but Christopher Nolan should finally get that long overdue recognition from the Academy.

Who Will Win:  Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Who Should Win:  Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

BEST PICTURE

Nominees: American Fiction; Anatomy of a Fall; Barbie; Killers of the Flower Moon; Maestro; Oppenheimer; Past Lives; Poor Things; The Holdovers; The Zone of Interest

Thankfully this was another year where I managed to see all 10 nominees in a theater; even the one made for Netflix (Maestro).  And I was happy to see that 6 out of the 10 were movies that appeared on my own Top 10.  In fact, 4 of my top 5 are present in this category, and each makes a good case for being Best Picture.  However, from the looks of it, Oppenheimer is coming into the Oscars as a heavy favorite.  It has swept through all the Guild awards (except the strike delayed WGA) which is a tell tale sign of a big night at the Oscars.  It just remains to be seen how big of a night.  It might be a big winner like last year’s Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), or it could be a case where the Academy likes to spread things around.  Are there any movies that could challenge Oppenheimer for the night’s top prize.  With the second most nominations, it would seem that Poor Things could be in the best position.  There’s also Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon to contend with as well as Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, both of which tackle issues that appeal very much to the tastes of the Academy.  The other half of “Barbenheimer” could even arguably muster a surprise win as Barbie was the undisputed box office champ of last year, and is credited for saving the theater industry during the contentious strike period.  Right now, Oppenheimer feels unstoppable with all the bellwether awards in it’s pocket, but at the same time I don’t feel it’s locked down as much as Everything Everywhere All at Once had a year ago.  Weirder things have happened before at the Oscars.  I of course would love to see The Holdovers come out on top, but it’s Best Picture chances faded pretty early, and it’s got a better chance anyway in the acting categories.  In the end, I feel that Hollywood is keen on honoring the phenomenon that was “Barbenheimer” in some way, and Oppenheimer is the movie that best represents what the Academy is looking for.  It’s the kind of movie that the Academy used to love in the 90’s, that being the “prestige blockbuster;” a lavish prestige film that manages to have crossover with audiences and become a huge moneymaker as well as an Awards contender (Forrest Gump, Titanic, Gladiator).  Oppenheimer hopefully re-sparks that trend as the business really has missed that kind of movie for a long time.  Oppenheimer should be the big winner of the night; the only question is how big?

What Will Win: Oppenheimer

What Should Win:  The Holdovers

And here we have my quick rundown of all the remaining categories with my picks to win in each:

Best Cinematography: Oppenheimer; Best Film Editing: Oppenheimer; Best Production Design: Poor Things; Best Costume Design: Barbie; Best Sound: The Zone of Interest; Best Make-up and Hairstyling: Poor Things; Best Original Score: Oppenheimer; Best Original Song: “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie; Best Visual Effects: Godzilla Minus One; Best Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol; Best Documentary Short: The Last Repair Shop; Best Animated Feature: The Boy and the Heron; Best Animated Short: Ninety-Five Senses; Best Live Action Short: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar; Best International Feature: The Zone of Interest

There are a number of things that I hope we’ll see happen at this year’s Oscars.  One, I hope there is acknowledgement of the hard fought for changes that the strikes brought to the creative community this last year.  It seems unlikely, given that the guild members would like to move on and the studio heads would like to forget.  But this was a monumental thing that happened in 2023, so so mention of the progress made in the industry would be ideal.  The Academy also needs to understand that the ceremony is about the people and the movies that they make.  Don’t try to turn the Oscars into it’s own spectacle.  The Oscar winners will provide that for the ceremony itself.  The Academy has been tinkering with the format too many times in recent years, and every new gimmick they try just does not work; especially the one where they cut out and pre-taped the “lesser” categories before the start for the show.  What people want to see are the movies and celebrities they care about getting the highest recognition from the industry and that’s all the Oscars need.  I’m seeing a trend in recent Awards shows like the Golden Globes and the SAG Awards where they’ve trimmed the fat and just presented the Awards without needless sketches and montages to pad out the run time.  Last years Oscars was another example of a well paced awards that felt trimmed down without having to cut out any of the categories from the broadcast, and sure enough that was reflected in the ratings.  It should also help that two of the nominees this year were the highest grossing movies of the year.  “Barbenheimer” saved the box office last year, so let’s see if it can do the same to the Oscars as well.  I’m hopeful for a more positive direction with the Academy Awards, where prestige and blockbuster don’t have to be relegated to separate camps.  Last year revealed a significant change in what audiences want to see and it’s reflected in the nominees this year.  It looks like the theatrical comeback is becoming more and more cemented as a reality in Hollywood, as streaming was far less represented at the Oscars this year.  So, while it appears that Oppenheimer is the movie to beat at this year’s awards, there still could be plenty of surprises, and it should make for an all around exciting Awards presentation this year.  Here’s hoping for a great show at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Dune: Part Two – Review

It has not been an easy road to the big screen for Dune.  The beloved sci-fi epic novel from author Frank Herbert was once thought to be un-filmable.  Within it’s nearly 700 pages of text is a densely plotted narrative filled with political intrigue and deep philosophical questions.  Oh, and there’s giant sand worms too.  Many filmmakers flirted with adapting the text for the big screen.  Avant Garde Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky famously made a valiant attempt in the 1970’s to get Frank Herbert’s vision to become a reality, but sadly it never got past the development stage.  It’s considered by many to be one of the greatest films that never got made, and the details of it are spotlighted in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013).  In 1984, the task would be given to rising star filmmaker David Lynch, who brought his own bizarre directing style to the project.  While he was able to complete the film, it would end up being a compromised project, condensing the vast expanse of Herbert’s novel into a compact 2 hour and 17 minute run time, making it a somewhat messy adaptation.  Audiences were generally unimpressed and the film performed poorly at the box office, though over time it would gain a cult following.  David Lynch himself swore off ever attempting another big budget project like Dune ever again, instead focusing his energy on smaller, more auteur driven projects in the decades after, and he has largely disowned the movie as well, even taking his name off of extended cuts.  It would take another four decades for Hollywood to seriously take another shot at adapting Herbert’s monumental epic, with many more filmmakers flirting with the prospect before ultimately passing it by.

Enter Denis Villeneuve, a French Canadian filmmaker that had put together an impressive resume in the 2010’s.  After a string of critically acclaimed thrillers such as Enemy (2013), Prisoners (2014), and Sicario (2015), Denis made an even bigger impression moving into science fiction.  His film Arrival (2016) earned him his first recognition from the Academy Awards with nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, and that in turn led to a high profile gig of creating the long awaited sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017), his highest budgeted film to date.  While Blade Runner 2049 was not a box office success, it still won a lot of acclaim for Denis for his remarkable handling of the film’s epic scale.  But all of these films seemed like warm-ups for what had always been Denis’ dream project; Dune.  With his proposal winning over the rights holders at Legendary Pictures, Denis was set to get his wish granted with a grand scale adaptation of this iconic novel for the big screen.  To do justice to Herbert’s narrative, Denis Villeneuve determined that the story would need to be split into two films.  However, to convince the financers of the project, Warner Brothers, that this was the right course of action, he would have to make Parts One and Two separately, with approval for the latter contingent on the success of the former.  It was a gamble, but it guaranteed at least one film for Villeneuve.  Unfortunately, the ability to turn Part One into a success hit a major roadblock with the Covid-19 pandemic.  Originally slated for an October 2020 premiere, the film ended up being delayed a full year.  And then, when it did finally make it to theaters, the effects of the pandemic were still in play with audiences not fully back.  Plus, Warner Brothers foolishly decided to release their entire 2021 slate day and date on streaming in addition to theaters, cutting back any potential box office profits.  This boded poorly for Dune: Part One, and yet, the film managed to find it’s audience, managing to be one of the few WB projects that year to cross the $100 million mark and it picked up a total of 6 Oscars for it’s technical achievements, and even earned a Best Picture nom.  Needless to say, despite the odds, Warner Brothers was convinced to fulfill their promise and allowed Denis Villeneuve to complete his epic adaptation.  The question is, though, did Denis Villeneuve stick the landing with Dune: Part Two.

The movie picks up right where the previous film ended.   In the distant future year of 10191, on the desert planet Arrakis, the high House of Atreides has been destroyed after a bloody coup perpetrated by the rival House Harkonnen, with the knowing consent of the Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken).  Although the Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) and his brutal nephew Rabban (Dave Bautista) believe that they have wiped out the entire Atreides household, far out in the desert plains of Arrakis, two survivors remain.  The son of slain Duke Leto, Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) both survived their assassination attempts and are exiled far from home.  To survive in the harsh, worm infested desert, Paul and Jessica have formed an alliance with the native Fremen people who seek refuge in underground settlements.   Their leader, Stilgar (Javier Bardem) believes that Paul is a prophesized spiritual savior that could unite the Fremen people and help them reclaim their home world from the Imperium once and for all.  Stilagar’s daughter Chani (Zendaya) is far more skeptical of the prophesy, but over time she warms up to Paul’s presence within their tribe and over time, a budding romance emerges.  Paul and the Fremen engage in guerilla warfare against the spice trade that the Harkonnens run on Arrakis, weakening the Baron’s status amongst the high households.  The Baron seeks help from the Emperor and his daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), both of whom suggest that the Baron elevates his youngest nephew to commander of the Harkonnen forces.  That nephew is the psychotic warrior Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who has no qualms about achieving success by any means necessary; even in harming the most innocent.  With a new threat coming to Arrakis, Paul Atreides must decide if he should embrace his position as the prophesized savior, the Kwisatz Haderach, in order to unite all the Fremen tribes, or abandon it and disappear out of fear of the thing that he may turn into if he fully accepts his destiny, igniting a much bloodier holy war across the known universe.

When Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One (2021) first premiered, it was heralded by long time fans of the books and causal viewers alike.  Dune has often been described as the Lord of the Rings or science fiction, and that distinction carries over with it’s cinematic adaptation as well.  Just as with Peter Jackson’s beloved adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein’s epic fantasy trilogy, many believe Villeneuve’s Dune to be the definitive adaptation of the novel for the big screen.  But getting to this point almost didn’t happen because of some short sighted moves on Warner Brothers part.  Unlike The Lord of the Rings which had the luxury of filming all the films in one single multi-year shoot, the completion of Dune was split up and could have ended abruptly had things not gone well.  The ill-fated “Project Popcorn” initiative of 2021 also gave ill tidings for the completion of Villenueve’s vision.  It could have been very possible that we would have only had the first half of the book on screen and nothing more; which would have been double insulting given that Dune: Part One ends so abruptly.  Thankfully, despite the hurdles, the movie was a success and Dune: Part Two is here, giving us the full breadth of Frank Herbert’s original novel.  And thankfully, despite all the drama and the long wait, Denis has managed to stick the landing.  There is no drop in quality at all between Parts One and Two, and it really does feel like the continuation of the first film.  Of course one big difference is that Warner Brothers feels less cautious this time around and has gone full force giving their full confidence to Denis.  Part One in many ways was Denis setting the pieces on the board, and Part Two is where the game really begins.  Everything is bigger, grander, and the stakes are even higher.  It definitely feels that this is the dream part of the project that Denis Villeneuve was always itching to get to, and thankfully the stars aligned to make it happen, even amidst the wort resistance.

There are a lot of things to be impressed with in Dune: Part Two and it does feel like the mightier film in the series.  But, I wouldn’t say that it does everything better than Part One.  The one thing that is a nitpick for me with the movie is that I think the pacing is not as strong, or should I say consistent as it was with Part OnePart One was a masterfully paced film that never let off the gas from beginning to end.  While the pacing is still overall good in Part Two, I do feel there are some hiccups along the way that stall an otherwise spectacular experience.  And it’s not just scenes that pad out the run time; there are moments as well that I feel don’t fully take advantage of some of the big moments in the movie.  The ending in particular seems a bit rushed, as big moments toward the finale don’t quite carry the weight they should.  The film already has a epic sized 166 minute run time (which alongside Part One‘s run time takes the full experience to 5 hours of storytelling) but I feel it could have made the experience even stronger if it let the finale breath a bit more to let the pivotal moments feel even grander.  It’s a rare instance where I’d say an already long movie should have been just a little longer; possibly even rounding out to the full 3 hours.  Even still, all of the classic moments from the book are here, and they are still impactful.  Where the movie actually feels well paced though are in some of the moments that Frank Herbert more often glosses over.  The development of Paul Atreides earning his place within the Fremen society is given more development here than any past adaptation, as is his romance with Chani, which becomes a crucial backbone for the movie overall.   One other thing that the movie sadly lacks apart from Part One is the novelty.  Dune: Part One was such a revelation when it first premiered; a welcome return of a prestige blockbuster in a time when popcorn entertainment in the form of comic book movies still dominated the landscape.  Dune: Part Two doesn’t really stand out as much; it’s just the same movie, but more.  I feel like the two movies are intended to be viewed as a whole, but it unfortunately takes away from the individual merit of the movie itself.  Again these are nitpicks for what otherwise is an impressively mounted film on any other measure.

One of the things that Denis Villeneuve really ups the ante with in this film is the scale of the action scenes.  Part One had some impressive action moments, but most of the best action scenes were contained on a intimate one to one scale.  Here, Villeneuve takes things to a more biblical level, with armies numbering in the thousands clashing on vast battlefields.  This is a movie that definitely demands to be seen on the largest screens possible, which thankfully now in a post-pandemic environment are more widely accessible than they were back when Part One was in theaters.  I caught this movie in 70mm IMAX, and let me tell you that is the ideal way to watch the movie.  Villeneuve took the cue from fellow grand epic director, Christopher Nolan, and specifically shot most of the movie with IMAX cameras with this presentation being the intended showcase.  There are some moments in this movie that will take your breath away with how immersive they are.  Arrakis is it’s own character in the movie, and Villeneuve really showcases the beauty of the familiar yet alien landscape that the planet has.  Even the surreal sunsets with the two moons of Arrakis eclipsing the sun create a kind of eerie crescent unlike anything we’ve seen before.  And then of course, there are the worms.  The colossal titans of the desert are a marvel meant to be appreciated on a vast movie screen, and the visual effects team did a remarkable job making them feel as grandiose as possible.  The scene where Paul Atreides takes his first solo ride aboard the back of a worm is a particular highlight of the movie, with all departments of cinematography, sound, computer animation, and practical effects all working together to create a truly epic moment on screen.  Also, the legendary Hans Zimmer delivers yet another heart-pounding musical score that certainly was rattling the rib cages of everyone in my theater with that mighty IMAX speaker system.

Giving the movie another air of high quality is the incredibly strong all star cast.  Part One had a very impressive cast to begin with, and Part Two managed to maintain all of the holdovers from that cast without losing any of the performance in between films.  Everyone whose character made it out of Part One alive picks right up where they left off and continues to deliver pitch perfect performances in Part Two.  Timothee Chalamet continues to impress in the role of Paul Atreides, a character that was always going to be a challenge to get right especially in this second half of the book, and he rises to the challenge with some impressively commanding moments.  The Fremen characters that only come into the story late in Part One are thankfully expanded upon here, and the actors do a masterful job with their roles.  Javier Bardem’s Stilgar is one of the few characters allowed to be a little more loose and comical compared to the stoic others in the movie, and Bardem gets some well earned laughs in the movie without it feeling out of place.  Zendaya, whose Chani barely factored in the first movie, is the biggest standout in Part Two, as you see her character go through some substantial growth in the story.  Zendaya really captures the passionate fervor that drives Chani as a character, and given all the craziness that goes on, she really helps to ground the movie with her cynical eye towards the myths and lies that have shaped the world around her.  Of the brand new characters, the real stand out is Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha.  It’s hard to imagine that this is the same actor who played Elvis Presley in the Baz Luhrrman directed biopic just a couple year ago.  He is transformed in this role, and he leaves an eerie impression.  His coliseum fight on the Harkonnen home world may be one of the best villain introductions I’ve seen in a long while.  And while they don’t have a whole lot of screen time, the characters of Princess Irulan and Emperor Shaddam IV do make the most of their presence and that’s largely due to the talents of their actors.  Florence Pugh carries a captivating sense of intelligence in her performance.  And of course Christopher Walken’s casting as the Emperor brings a great deal of gravitas to the minor role and it’s a real coup on the part of the movie to get an actor as legendary as him to be a part of this.

I don’t know what Warner Brothers was thinking by not planning ahead and having both parts of Dune filmed simultaneously.  It was probably an economic choice, but if it didn’t work out, you would have left a beloved story cut unceremoniously short with a nagging open-ended finale that connects to nothing.  Thankfully, Dune: Part Two has become a reality and the full story of Frank Herbert’s original novel can now be appreciated cinematically for all time as a complete whole.  Of course, this isn’t quite the end just yet.  Dune was only the first of many books that Frank Herbert wrote about the desert planet Arrakis and the legacy of Paul Atreides.  Denis Villeneuve has already said that he intends to return to adapt the second book in the series, Dune Messiah, which has a far better chance of getting green lit with the expected huge box office that Dune: Part Two is expected to generate.  In the end, it all worked out for Denis Villenueve, and he may have made it possible for their to be an epic movie franchise that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.  As a movie on it’s own, Dune: Part Two is an impressively mounted movie, though I think it works best as a companion to the first film and vice versa.  Denis Villenueve intended for the two parts of Dune to be a complete whole rather than two individual films with their own unique identities.  While I do appreciate the incredible achievement that this movie is, I do wish it had resonated just a bit more as it’s own film.  It might also be possible that I may warm up to the movie more with repeat viewings, and that I just need to give the film time to fully marinate in my mind.  It happened with Oppenheimer (2023) last year, where it took me two more viewings to fully appreciate that film as a genuine masterpiece.  I feel like Dune: Part Two will stick with me in the same way.  It is an overwhelming experience the first time, and that can be a good thing.  I was sitting pretty close to the colossal IMAX screen at my theater (one of the largest in America) so some distance may help me in the future.  For now, I highly recommend seeing this on the big screen and ideally in IMAX if available in your area.  Few movies are made with this kind of spectacle in mind, and like great epics of the past like The Lord of the Rings, Denis Villenueve has taken a beloved work of literature and brought out it’s full potential as big screen spectacle.  Capturing every detail, from the tiniest grains of spice to the enormity of the mighty sand worms, this movie does Frank Herbert’s vision proud.

Rating: 8.5/10

Evolution of Character – Pinocchio

Few characters seem so perfectly suited for the medium of cinema than Pinocchio, the little wooden puppet who wanted to become a real boy.  First created by Italian writer Carlo Collodi, the story of Pinocchio was intended to be a morality tale meant to teach young children to be better behaved.  Pinocchio’s journey is defined by his experiences encountering the dangerous world outside his home and gaining the insight into what is right and wrong, often through some personal trauma.  For example, whenever he tells a lie, his nose will grow, making the lie plain as the nose on his face.  To a child reading this story, something as disturbing as that will certainly make you think twice about lying too much.  In addition to that, Pinocchio is also confronted with disturbing realities such as human trafficking and torture during his journey to return back to the comfort of home and family.  And central to getting Pinocchio on the right track in life is his warm hearted, woodcarver father Geppetto, as well as a cricket companion who quite literally is the embodiment of his conscience.  One thing that has made Pinocchio a tad bit difficult to bring to the silver screen is surprisingly not the magical element that brought the little puppet to life but rather the dark nature of Collodi’s original story.  Pinocchio’s story is a harsh one, and it puts the lovable puppet boy in harms way to the point of sometimes nightmarish scenarios, from the exploitation put upon him by abusive scam artists to being eaten by a ferocious sea monster.  But, he nonetheless he has had a profound presence on the big screen and what follows are some of the most noteworthy in his long cinematic history.

POLIDOR from THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO (1911)

It’s not at all surprising that one of the earliest cinematic works from the nation of Italy would be an adaptation of one of their most imaginative literary works.  This version of Pinocchio’s story is pretty sparse given the limitations of filmmaking at the time, basically just touching upon the basics of the story.  Even still, there are some imaginative elements put into the filming of this movie, with a lot of the magical elements feeling very much borrowed from a theatrical adaptation of the story.  One thing that this movie surprisingly would influence on future adaptations is having the world of Pinocchio being inhabited with human and animal hybrid characters, albeit played by actors in shabby looking masks.  With regards to Pinocchio himself, French born performer Polidor does a decent job of bringing Pinocchio to life.  Sure, you’ve got to get around the image of a grown man portraying what is supposed to be a child, but Polidor (tapping into his vaudevillian background) does carry the energy to make the character entertaining enough.  Of course, given the limitations of the medium at the time, this movie can’t quite get across the magic element of Pinocchio being a wooden puppet brought to life, or more specifically, getting across that he is actually made of wood.  That of course is something that future adaptations would find a way to achieve.  It should also be noted that this was once considered a lost film until it was miraculously rediscovered in a Milan vault in 1994, which has helped to keep this century old first appearance of the character preserved for audiences today.

DICKIE JONES from WALT DISNEY’S PINOCCHIO (1940)

When you mention the name of Pinocchio to anyone, this is likely the version that will first come to mind.  After changing the world of cinema forever with his first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), it was a bit surprising that Walt Disney chose Pinocchio as his follow-up.  American audiences were not as familiar with the Italian morality tale as they were with the Grimm’s brothers morality tales that Disney had used for many of their film adaptations.  But in the hands of the artists at the Disney Studios, that would certainly change.  Disney’s Pinocchio is absolutely one of the finest animated films that has ever been made, and the story of the little wooden boy is just a natural fit for the animated medium.  For one thing, they can actually have Pinocchio act like an actual marionette puppet without strings.  And while the animation can make Pinocchio feel truly made out of wood, what makes the character endearing is the voice that he is given.  Walt Disney wisely cast a real young actor to play the role, that being a then 10 year old Dickie Jones.  Dickie just has the perfect innocent inflection on all of his lines, at times being humorously naïve while at the same time giving the conviction of humanity in his performance when the movie calls for it.  Disney certainly didn’t create the character, but they certainly made him their own and their version of Pinocchio remains the gold standard to this day.  The same goes for the story that they tell, which does depart greatly from Collodi’s original text, but is still surprisingly dark and mature for a Disney movie.  Even after over 80 years, Disney’s Pinocchio is unmatched in artistry and storytelling, bringing out the full potential of the magic within Collodi’s story, wishing upon a star and making dreams truly come true.

SCOTT GRIMES from PINOCCHIO AND THE EMPORER OF THE NIGHT (1987)

Given just how iconic Disney’s Pinocchio is as a character, it might surprise you that he’s not the only animated version of the character to make it to the big screen.  Thanks to Pinocchio entering the public domain in the 1980’s, more animation studios were freed up to make their own Pinocchio films without running into Disney’s hold onto the cinematic rights that they held for decades.  One of the first to jump on that was Saturday morning cartoon giant Filmation (the people behind He-Man, for example) who surprisingly took a surprisingly different route in their adaptation of Pinocchio’s story.  Instead of doing a straight translation of the original story, they opted instead to do a sequel.  This of course is meant to be sequel to Collodi’s original and not Disney’s, and that becomes very apparent when watching the film.  The animation is certainly a step down from the Disney standard, though it is more polished compared to Filmation’s TV library.  In addition, this movie goes into some very weird territory, typical of what we were seeing in 80’s era animation.  In this story, Pinocchio is reverted back to his puppet state after living as a human by a dark magician who is intent on bringing the living puppet to his master, The Emperor of the Night, as a sacrifice for more power.  The movie can sometimes descend into nightmare fuel, especially with the Emperor himself (voiced by James Earl Jones of all people) who is a monstrous presence.  Pinocchio himself is given voice by a young Scott Grimes in his first of what would be many voice acting roles (Family Guy, American Dad), and he works well enough for what this kind of movie needs.  It’s an interesting 80’s animation oddity, but definitely a far cry from a true adaptation of the story of Pinocchio.

JONATHAN TAYLOR THOMAS from THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO (1996)

Leaving animation for a bit, there have been plenty of live action attempts to bring the imaginative story of Pinocchio to life.  In this version, the Jim Henson Creature Shop made an attempt to create a version of Pinocchio that maintained the full visual look of a real wooden puppet, but with the articulated movements that made it come to life in a convincing way that the Henson puppet manufacturers were renowned for.  Indeed, I do give the movie quite a bit of credit for using a practical effect puppet for this version of Pinocchio, and the puppet himself is pretty state of the art for it’s time, which apparently took the Henson shop 9 months to perfect.  The problem, however, with this version of Pinocchio comes from his unfortunately miscast voice.  Jonathan Taylor Thomas was the “It” young actor of the moment in the mid-90’s, coming off the success of his role on the TV series Home Improvement, and providing the voice of Simba in The Lion King (1994).  His casting as Pinocchio here was much less about him being right for the part and more with him being a big name that the film could capitalize on in the marketing.  His vocal performance clashes greatly with the rest of the actors in the film, most of them being Euro-centric: apart from Martin Landau as Geppetto doing the best he can at an Italian accent.  Thomas’ Pinocchio sounds too modern and Americanized by comparison, and it just doesn’t fit the rest of the movie, which is a shame given the craftsmanship put into the puppet model itself.  The movie also streamlines the story of Pinocchio in a way that removes all of the sense of peril and danger that was essential to growing Pinocchio as a character.  Instead, the movie more or less is just there to be a showcase for the production design with the barest of bones when it comes to the plot.  The craftsmanship is certainly first class, but it ultimately it rings hollow when it comes to making the story of Pinocchio feel alive.

ROBERTO BENIGNI from PINOCCHIO (2002)

One of the most misguided movie projects in history sadly involves this classic story as well.  I don’t know what Italian comedian and filmmaker Roberto Benigni was thinking taking on the role of the wooden puppet who wanted to be a real boy.  Benigni of course is a filmmaker drawn to the farcical side of things, but this kind of adaptation was certainly ill conceived, especially given where Benigni was in his career.  This was his cinematic follow-up to the Oscar Winning Life is Beautiful  (1998), which netted him an award for Best Actor amongst other things.  Perhaps it was a misunderstanding on Hollywood’s part to think that Benigni was a different kind of filmmaker after making his Holocaust comedy (?), so Pinocchio was certainly not the right kind of movie for him to fall back on.  Mainly Roberto Benigni is just doing his usual schtick of loud, boisterous slapstick comedy with only the faintest of connections to the story of Pinocchio.  It sadly does not work on all accounts.  Benigni’s version of Pinocchio lacks any sincerity, and it’s the minimalist of attempts to convince the audience that he is a wooden puppet come to life.  Mainly what we get is Benigni dressing up in a puppet costume that seems more circus clown than anything else, and the only instances we get of any connection to the original story are pathetic special effects to make it look like his nose is growing longer.  This apparently was an artistically unsatisfying project for Benigni as well.  He only directed one more feature after this one, 2005’s The Tiger and the Snow, and then he went quiet for over a decade afterwards, both in front and behind the camera.  That’s a pretty bad sign when a filmmaker’s reputation is ruined to a point where they disappear thanks to just one movie, and sadly it had to be one involving an iconic character like Pinocchio.

FREDERICO IELAPI from PINOCCHIO (2020)

Thankfully, there is a happy ending to Roberto Benigni’s connection with the character of Pinocchio.  After spending many years out of the spotlight, Benigni would return to the classic story, only this time playing the part of Geppetto instead of Pinocchio himself.  The part of Geppetto it turns out is a much better fit for the actor, who manages to give a nice, tender and surprisingly subtle for him performance as the pure hearted woodcarver.  Here he acts opposite young Italian actor Frederico Ielapi as the little wooden boy, who manages to balance well off the seasoned comedian.  The movie features some well done make up effects to give little Frederico wooden like features, and the film earned an Oscar nomination as a result.  While not exactly a perfect adaptation of the source material, this film nevertheless feels truer to the spirit of Collodi’s writing.  It certainly is the best attempt made by the nation that brought Pinocchio to the world in the first place.  One of the best aspects of the movie is that it doesn’t shy away from some of the darker aspects of the story, but also at the same time, it doesn’t get too heavy into the moralizing either.  You can tell that this was an attempt to treat Collodi’s story with reverence, something that many other adaptations have failed to achieve in the past.  Sadly, the movie didn’t get much of a life theatrically, as it premiered in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. But, for those who manage to discover it, they’ll find a beautifully crafted film that thankfully helps to wash away the stench of it’s star’s previously failed attempt at portraying the little wooden boy.

GREGORY MANN from GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO (2022)

We’ve seen so far Pinocchio brought to life on screen through live action and animation, with make-up effects and even with an actual puppet.  Most recently however, we can now add stop motion to the techniques used to give life to this lovable wooden boy.  2022 proved to be a surprisingly robust year for Pinocchio on the big screen, as we got a total of three new films that year featuring the character.  One was a cheaply made CGI animated film with D-List celebrity voice talent headlined by Pauley Shore as a very whiny Pinocchio.  The second was another Disney live action remake, this one directed by Robert Zemekis and starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto.  Of course, the third version, this stop motion animated feature, was the vastly superior version of the story from that year, and in all honesty, it’s probably the best adaptation of Pinocchio since the Walt Disney version.  From the visionary mind of Guillermo Del Toro, we have this beautifully constructed film that seems to be the best of both world when it comes to adaptations of Pinocchio’s story.  It has the same imaginative magical spirit of Disney’s version, but maintains the darker tone of Collodi’s original text.  In some ways, it takes the story into even darker territory by setting the film in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy pre-WWII.  When it comes to the character, the movie actually feels the truest to the original concept of the character that we’ve ever seen.  Voiced wonderfully by young English actor Gregory Mann, Pinocchio here acts as a benign blank stale of a child who grows his conscience through the perils he faces and the friends he makes along the way.  The characterization works remarkably well here, as in typical Del Toro fashion, the physical model of Pinocchio can start off as off-putting in it’s odd design but over time becomes endearing.  Guillermo Del Toro crafts a beautiful world to set his adaptation and alongside his co-director, the late Mark Gustafson, they won a well deserved Academy Award for Animated Feature.  It may not surpass the sublime magic of Disney’s original, but it is certainly a close second and the best version of Pinocchio that we have seen in quite a long while.

There are many rights and wrongs when it comes to bringing Pinocchio to life in cinema.  Some of the best attempts we’ve seen involve a great deal of imagination to bring the character to life.  His very being itself requires some advanced cinematic tricks to make him be believable as a character.  A puppet made of wood and suspended with strings is not supposed to walk and talk like a human unsupported.  Doing this in live action is especially tricky, which is why the best versions of Pinocchio exist in animation.  Disney’s version of Pinocchio is undeniably the best version of the character, because the animated medium offers limitless possibility in bringing a magical oddity like him to life.  One scene in particular, where Pinocchio turns his body around in place while keeping his head stationary is a trick with the character that can only be possible through the hand drawn art of animation.  Guillermo Del Toro’s stop motion version likewise does a masterful job of bringing the wooden puppet to full life, and at the same time also still leaning further into the jagged wooden physicality that a puppet like Pinocchio would have had.  There have been valiant attempts to do Pinocchio justice in live action as well.  The Jim Henson Creature workshop version in the 1996 film was a valiant attempt at using a practical effect, and the make-up effects in the 2020 version do a commendable job too.  The less said about Roberto Benigni’s version the better, and I’m sure he’s glad people are becoming more familiar with the newer and vastly superior version of the story he’s in.  Pinocchio is a tricky character to get right, but in the end, what matters is that the story manages to find a way to be true to the heart of what Carlo Collodi intended for the character.  The story is about innocence, and how easily it can be corrupted in a harsh world.  The best versions of Pinocchio’s story are the ones that don’t shy away from the dark elements in his journey, but at the end of the day, Pinocchio has to come out the better for it.  The key to becoming a real boy is to be brave, truthful, and un-selfish, and that is at the heart of Pinocchio’s story, and that’s a lesson that any child will certainly carry with them into childhood.  That’s why the best version of this story, like the Disney one and hopefully Del Toro’s too in the future, remain strong across the generations, because it is the kind of story that brings out the most in the imagination of a young child.  Pinocchio keeps us all wishing upon that star and giving us hope that we all let our conscience be our guiding light.

Madame Web – Review

The once resilient comic book movie genre that dominated the box office in the 2010’s has had a rough time of it lately.  It’s no longer just the reliable moneymaker that it once was, and it’s a problem that is growing increasingly problematic across the whole industry.  It’s even affected the undisputed champ of the genre, Marvel Studios, who suffered their own worst year in a long while in 2023.  The problem is not so much the characters or the stories that are being told on screen, but the fact that the productions of these movies have become so over bloated and the market has been over-saturated to the point where box office revenue can no longer cover the costs of making the movies.  There are still some bright spots, as movies like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) still managed to check off a box office victory, but overall audiences have made it clear that they are growing tired with a genre that looks to be well past it’s peak. The studios seem to be getting the message at the moment, as both Marvel and DC have pulled back on their production slate in order to reassess their upcoming futures.  Marvel Studios only has one theatrical release in the whole of 2024, with Deadpool & Wolverine coming in the Summer, while DC is working on a full reboot of their Cinematic Universe starting in 2025.  And it’s probably a good thing for both them and the audiences that we’ll have a bit of breathing room that will help us to fall in love with the genre once again.  It’s too bad that Sony Pictures and their licensed Spider-Man Universe didn’t get that same memo.  If there was any hope for a comic book lite year at the movies, it’s been dashed with Sony’s onslaught of new films that are already built on a flimsy foundation of what Sony considers to be a cinematic universe.

Since the turn of the millennium, Sony has retained the cinematic rights to the character Spider-Man and his affiliated cast of friends and rogues; a result of Marvel’s then plan to spread their characters around to all interested parties around Hollywood.  As Marvel began to reconsolidate it’s cinematic rights into a singular studio, with the help of parent company Disney, Spider-Man remained the sole holdout purely because Sony continued to have box office success with every film.  They believed that if they continued to release a new Spider-Man affiliated movie every year, their rights to the character would remain intact and they could sustain a franchise on it’s own without having to relinquish it back to Marvel.  The plan, however, hit some speedbumps as The Amazing Spider-Man reboot of the franchise didn’t have the strongest legs.  In order to keep the rights in house, the set up a special deal with Disney where the Spider-Man character could participate in the mega-successful MCU while Sony would continue to produce the standalone Spider-Man films in conjunction.  Marvel was thrilled that they could have a say in the cinematic representation of their A-list hero again, and Sony could now benefit from the exposure that could spill over into their own movies.  While this arrangement was happening, Sony also looked for other ways to maintain their hold onto the Spider-Man rights, and they believed the best way to do that was to build up a cinematic universe of their own; not just centered on Spider-Man, but all the characters in his orbit too.  Soon, famous spider-foe Venom received his own solo film, which itself turned into a surprise success, thanks to the star power of Tom Hardy in the role.  After this, movies based on other Spider-Man linked characters emerged, including a movie for Dr. Michael Morbius and Kraven the Hunter.  This hope for a Spider-Verse seemed short lived however, as the Morbius (2022) movie opened to dismal box office and terrible critical reviews.  Right now, despite early success with Venom, the Sony Spider-Verse is looking very much like the poster child for everything that’s wrong with the super hero genre right now, and things don’t any brighter as Sony is premiering a film this week centered around one of the truly most obscure characters in the Spider-Man storyline; the mysterious Madame Web.

The movie follows the story of New York City based EMT Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson).  She spends most of her day saving as many lives as she can alongside her fellow ambulance driver and friend Ben Parker (Adam Scott).  On a routine assignment helping out victims of a factory explosion, she starts to have peculiar visions; almost like time slipping backwards and forwards without warning.  She soon learns that some of her visions end up coming true, which becomes an alarming revelation for her.  As she heads home from a psychiatric exam, she has her most troubling vision yet.  She witnesses three girls aboard her commuter train getting assaulted by a mysterious man.  As she regains her composure, she alerts the three girls and guides them away from the man who is pursuing them.  After a chase through the city, Cassandra manages to find a hiding place, and she tries desperately to explain the very peculiar situation to the three frightened teens.  She quickly learns that each of the girls have actually interacted with her in the past couple of days, right before the visions manifested.  Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney) was the step-daughter of a victim that Cassandra helped deliver to the hospital.  Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) was nearly run into by Cassandra’s ambulance on the same run. And Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) lives in the same building as Cassandra.  All of them are somehow linked together by what seems like chance, but Cassandra believes there might be more answers elsewhere.  She decides to consult the journal written by her mother, the one thing she has from her as her mom died during child birth, leaving her an orphan.  In her journal, Cassandra finds a photograph of the man that was trying to hunt after her and the girls earlier; a rich tycoon named Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who was after a source of power that comes from a certain Spider species deep in the Amazon jungle.  It turns out that Ezekiel and Cassandra’s powers of foresight are linked, as Ezekiel has had visions of his own of his life ending at the hands of the three teenage girls, who themselves will be bestowed with powers in the future.  Does Cassandra manage to gain control of her special ability and help save the future heroes, or will Ezekiel manage to undo his own fate by destroying the lives of these girls in a time when they still have no idea what is happening?

My own experience with the Sony Spider-Verse has been fairly mixed.  Excusing the animated Spider-Verse movies, which are definitely separate from the live action productions (and might I add also much better movies), the overall value of Sony’s films is a far cry from what’s been put out by Marvel Studios itself.  I for one didn’t mind the first Venom (2018), which while not a great movie was nevertheless helped greatly by a winning performance by Tom Hardy as the titular anti-hero.  Morbius was very much a mess of a movie, though I didn’t have the same hatred for it as most other people do.  It was bad, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve seen much worse movies and Morbius was just boring for the most part, with Matt Smith’s vampy villainous turn being the one bright spot.  Now we have Madame Web, which seems even more superfluous than a Morbius film, and the timing for it couldn’t be worse as it seems the super hero fanbase is drying up.  It is possible that a movie like Madame Web could overcome these roadblocks to stand on it’s own as an engaging action thriller.  Unfortunately, this movie has ended up being exactly what we expected it to be, and honestly even worse than that.  This movie is the worst Sony Spider-Verse film thus far, and it’s not even close.  Morbius had some redeemable moments by being entertainingly bad at times.  Madame Web is a movie devoid of any entertainment value.  It isn’t even the fun kind of bad.  This was without a doubt one of the most difficult sit throughs of a movie that I have had in a long time; almost reaching Dear Evan Hansen (2021) levels of discomfort.  At a time where the super hero genre desperately needs to win back goodwill with it’s audience, this movie is unfortunately going to remind everyone of all the bad things about the genre, because this movie is full of every single one.

I honestly don’t know where the genesis of all the problems with this movie lie.  The script is certainly one of the worst factors.  Remarkably, Sony decided to go with the same team of writers that had written Morbius, showing that that they learned nothing from that experience.  Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are also the scribes responsible for such cinematic gems like Dracula Untold (2014), The Last Witch Hunter (2015), and Gods of Egypt (2016), which makes you wonder how some writers somehow manage to fail upward in the movie business.  Madame Web may be their worst script left, because the whole thing reads like a first draft from someone who just completed a Screenwriting 101 course.  The movie has the clunkiest expositional dialogue I have ever seen.  Nobody speaks like a human being, they are just information dumps simply there to move the story forward.  There’s absolutely no interesting scenes of character development.  Every motivation is forced and the situations are contrived.  The main character herself, Cassandra Webb, suffers the most from this.  We don’t get any insight into her character, such as quirks or desires.  She’s just a passive pivot point for all the events of the movie to center around.  If the powers that be at Sony thought she was deserving of her own film, than make her a interesting enough to make us care.  The same can be said for all the other characters as well.  Ezekiel Sims is likewise also hollow as a character.  We only get the most miniscule of reasons as to why he’s a villain.  He’s sole purpose here is to look menacing in a Spider-Man like suit, and he fails pretty hard at even that.

The performances are also likewise pretty subpar.  I don’t know what kind of direction Dakota Johnson got (if any), but her performance as Cassandra Webb is like watching a mannequin emote.  There is nothing there but barely above a whisper line deliveries and the occasional eye roll.   Dakota Johnson may get a bad rap based on her past work in the Fifty Shades of Gray franchise, but she is capable of strong performance, as seen in movies like Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) and The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019).  She may have had the capability of crafting a more interesting performance here, but the lack of direction just leaves her lost.  That’s true of pretty much all of the leads in this film.  The three teenagers lack chemistry with each other, which makes their interactions more grating than endearing.  They feel even more awkward interacting with Dakota Johnson’s Cassandra, who’s supposed to be the guiding mentor to all of them, but in the end just feels like another moody teenager.  Tahar Rahim doesn’t help matters much more with his performances as Ezekiel Sims.  His one-note, understated performance is the blandest possible route to take with a character that’s supposed to be a terror.  Honestly, his performance is better when you can’t see his face once it’s behind a mask.  It doesn’t improve his performance much, but it’s better than the dead eye dour expression that makes up the rest of his performance.  Honestly, the only salvageable performances in the movie are from the film’s smallest parts; that of Adam Scott as Ben Parker and Emma Roberts as Mary Parker, the future mother of Spider-Man (the movie takes place 20 years in the past by the way).  They don’t add much to the overall movie, but these characters at least offer their actors a little bit of personality to hold onto, and Scott and Roberts are at least trying.  That’s the big takeaway from the performances in this movie, a very big lack of trying.  These actors are certainly capable of emoting, but whether it’s the lack of direction or the actors just not invested in the whole production itself, what we are left with is a movie lacking in any personality whatsoever.

Is there anything about the film that is worthwhile.  The only good things I can say is that the movie does do some interesting things with the time slipping that Cassandra experiences.  I did find the editing of these scenes effective, as it does a fair job of disorienting you while also making it clear how these visions appear from Cassandra’s point of view.  It doesn’t do the time travel thing as well as similar sequences found in Groundhog’s Day (1993) or Edge of Tomorrow (2014), but it works just enough to give the otherwise stale action sequences a little bit more flavor.  It seems like the editors were the only ones making this movie that actually did their jobs right.  Otherwise, visually, this movie is another mess that ruins the experience.  Some have rightly pointed out that this movie feels like a throw back to the mid-2000’s era of super hero movies, with it’s washed out color scheme and bland camera work.  While there were definitely some super hero movies of that era that had that kind of look, which thankfully went out of style once the bright and colorful MCU emerged, the 2000’s still had plenty of visually impressive movies in the genre too; especially the Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man trilogy.  Madame Web definitely feels like it’s a movie stuck in the past, and not in a good way.  It’s only compounded more when the very generic looking visual effect appear in the climatic final act.  The movie for the most part doesn’t so much feel like a super hero movie from 20 years ago, but rather an action film from 20 years ago; the kind of filmmaking that was coming out of the school of Jerry Bruckheimer.  For Marvel’s sake, at least no one will mistake this kind of movie for one of their own; as they’ve been pretty good at keeping their own house style consistent and appealing.  There’s nothing really offensively bad about the way that the movie looks; it’s just that Madame Web’s visual style is as devoid of character as everything else in the movie, again pointing to the whole pointless nature of it’s existence.

In many ways, this movie honestly puts the problems with Marvel and DC’s recent films in a more favorable light.  As much as films like The Marvels (2023) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) have struggled at the box office, those movies at least tried to do something to be entertaining.  I for one actually quite enjoyed The Marvels and a recent re-watch has confirmed my positive view.  All of the complaints that other critics have levied at The Marvels I feel are more pronounced in the nothing burger that is Madame Web.  It is by far the lowest effort super hero film I have experienced in a long time; maybe even ever.  It’s astounding to see so little passion put into this kind of movie.  It’s like even the actors and the filmmakers knew just how pointless this whole thing was from the get go, and they just gave up caring.  There was no love put into this movie.  The only reason it exists is so that Sony can extend it’s cinematic rights to the Spider-Man corner of the Marvel library.  Madame Web was perhaps a stretch too far, as no one outside of the most knowledgeable comic book reader even knows of the character’s existence.  And I’m sure even that kind of devoted fan will be angered by the butchering of Madame Web as a character in this movie.  It’s likely that Sony’s going to learn a lesson from this experience, as the film is very clearly going to bomb, even harder than Morbius did.  It’s hard to say if there was any valuable reason why this movie should exist at all.  If someone put their heart into it and had a worthwhile story to tell, then it’s certainly possible.  But, Madame Web is far from that movie and another example of Sony missing the mark when it comes to building a cinematic universe in the vein of the MCU.  I don’t know if I would say it’s the worst comic book movie ever made, since we do live in a world where Fant4stic (2015) still exists, but it certainly feels like the most pointless super hero movie ever made.  And in the end, the Sony Spider-Verse has found itself caught in a web of destruction that I don’t see them ever finding a way of escaping; except solely through animation.

Rating: 3/10

He Rode a Blazing Saddle – 50 Years of Mel Brook’s Comedy Classic and Why It’s Good That You Can’t Make it Today

Mel Brooks, undoubtedly one of the most influential comedic voices of his generation and of all time, has left behind an incredible legacy over his near century long life and even at the ripe old age of 97 (as of writing) he’s still capable of making us all laugh.  Under the mentorship of Sid Caesar, Mel found his way through Hollywood as a successful joke writer before eventually deciding to expand into film.  His debut, The Producers (1968) was a smash hit, and earned the multi-talented comedian his one and only Oscar for Original Screenplay.  What particularly made The Producers stand out was that it bravely tackled a taboo subject, namely the horrific legacy of Adolf Hitler in a post-WWII world.  After the horrors of the Holocaust came to light at the end of the war, many people believed that it was in bad taste to make any jokes about the atrocities committed during the war, including any mention of Hitler himself.  Mel Brooks felt differently, seeing ridicule as the best answer against evil in the world.  He believed that by mocking Hitler and the Nazi regime through his comedy, he was robbing them of their power to inspire others that want to emulate them.  Mel knew very well that Fascism and xenophobia didn’t go away with the defeat of the Nazi regime during the war, and that the specter of Hitler still haunted humanity for many years afterwards.  That’s why his ability to mercilessly mock the imagery of Hitler and the Third Reich in The Producers was such a profound breath of fresh air when it premiered.  But Mel would continue to look to other targets for ridicule in many of his future films, including a place that rang a little too close to home in Hollywood.

The year 1974 was the zenith of Mel Brooks’ career as a filmmaker.  In that year, he released not one but two comedy masterpieces, both of which remain just as potent and hilarious as they were when they first released.  In the Fall of 1974, Mel produced and directed the classic horror spoof Young Frankenstein (1974), which was a farcical delight that at the same time was also reverential to the movies it was spoofing.  While most of the movie still holds up as a comedy, it’s also clear that Mel’s working in more of his comedy comfort zone with Frankenstein.  The other film, released in the early part of 1974, was a much more risky project for Mel, and one that fifty years later remains the most controversial film of his career.  But surprisingly enough, Blazing Saddles  (1974) didn’t start out as a Mel Brooks project, but was instead the brainchild of writer Andrew Bergman.  Bergman’s premise of a sleepy Western town that’s forced to change once they receive a new sheriff who’s Black instantly appealed to Mel Brooks, who saw the comedy potential in the material.  He worked with Bergman to flesh out the comedy even more, insisting to Bergman to write without being “polite.”  And touching up the comedy even further, Mel enlisted the help of one of the hottest stand up comedians of that time, the legendary Richard Pryor, who was also instrumental in shaping the racial commentary of the film.  But even with all of the comedy legends working together on this movie, the film was certainly going to be a hard sell.  Because of the no holds barred nature of the racial comedy, with shall we say very liberal use of a certain racial slur, the script was certainly going to face some roadblocks on the way to getting made.  Eventually it found a home at Warner Brothers, and Mel was granted access to one of the most legendary Western movie backlots in Hollywood to bring to life his silly little film.  In the shadow of Western sets that the likes of John Wayne, Errol Flynn, and Randolph Scott all shot their movies on, Mel Brooks would stage iconic comedic moments like a horse getting punched out by football star Alex Karras, the stunned silent arrival of Sheriff Bart to town, and the climatic brawl that spans the entire studio lot.

What makes the comedy so special in Blazing Saddles is the complete and full sincerity of the cast.  Each and every performer fully embodies the absurdist reality of this farcical spin that Mel Brooks has put on the Western genre.  The most instrumental casting of course is that of Sheriff Bart himself.  Though there was speculation that Richard Pryor himself would step into the role having contributed to the screenplay, Mel was insistent on getting an actor without a comedy background to play the part, as Bart needed to be a grounded character compared to the caricatures of the  rest of the cast.  He found his Sheriff Bart in Broadway actor Cleavon Little, who perfectly slipped into the role.  The crucial part of the character of Sheriff Bart is his confidence; he has to be the smartest person in amongst of whole slew of buffoons, and Cleavon plays that aspect to perfection.  His escape from a tense situation at his arrival is brilliantly realized as he uses the townspeople’s blind bigotry against them, leading to a satisfactory punchline where he says to himself, “Baby, you are so talented, and they are so… dumb.”  It’s a great summation of his character and Little’s subtle performance aids in making Sheriff Bart work as the heart of the movie.  He’s also perfectly matched with Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid.  Wilder, who previously work with Mel on The Producers, was not the original choice for the part, as veteran actor Gig Young had originally been cast.  However, Young’s drinking problem made him a liability on set, so Mel had to make the choice to let him go and re-cast the part.  It took a while for Mel to find the right actor to play the Waco Kid; he even attempted to enlist John Wayne himself at one point, who graciously declined due to the more objectionable aspects of the script.  Gene Wilder was reluctant to take the part, think that the part was too restricting for him as a performer, as he referred more bombastic comedy roles.  Eventually Wilder relented on the condition that Mel chose Gene’s script as his next project and that’s what led to the making of Young Frankenstein.  Despite Wilder’s misgivings, he was perfect for the part and some of the movie’s biggest laughs come directly from him.  Rounding out the cast, there are tons of comedy legends including Harvey Korman as the villainous Hedley Lamarr, Madeline Kahn as the vivacious Lilly Von Shtupp (who received an Oscar nomination for her role), Slim Pickens as the dim witted cowboy Taggart, and Mel Brooks himself playing the distracted Governor LePetomane.

Initially, Warner Brothers executives were hesitant in releasing the movie, as the subject matter and unvarnished language made this a very taboo project.  Upon the first screening, the executives were stunned silent by the uncomfortably frank way that Mel Brooks addressed racial issues within the film.  It was thought that the movie would either get shelved or dumped quietly into theaters in order to bury it as the studio had little faith in it’s success.  In the time in which this movie was made, racial tensions in America were still fairly raw.  The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s had been a tough fought battle for equality and it eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which broke down the Jim Crow segregationist policies of the South.  But even a decade later, racial tensions endured, especially as they were inflamed again by political opportunists like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.  There were certainly more opportunities growing for black  voices in entertainment at the time, as subgenres like Blaxploitation began to emerge, but Hollywood itself was slow to progress with the times.  What was particularly pointed in the subtext of Mel’s film was how the Western genre was itself complicit in creating this myth about America’s past; specifically putting an almost exclusively white face on it.  There were numerous stories of the old west that centered around African American cowboys and lawmen, but none of them were being told.  Sure, Mel Brook’s was approaching this subject in a humorous way, but the critique of Hollywood’s lack of diversity was certainly there as well.  Warner Brothers knew very well that this was going to be a controversial movie no matter what.  What ultimately led to the film making it to theaters was an internal screening with Warner Brothers staff, much of whom were better representative of what the typical movie going audience would be like, and they were hooting and hollering with laughter the whole way through.  Thus, Mel Brooks got his film out into theaters and of course it would go on to become an instant classic.

Looking back on the movie as it now approaches it’s 50 year mark, it is remarkable how well the film holds up.  A lot of the comedy, particularly the more slapstick gags still feel timeless.  A group of cowboys eating beans and blowing gas around a campfire definitely feels evergreen, especially with the hilariously over the top sound effects used.  But, the time that has passed with regard to the racial subjects in the movie put the movie in a different light today than it did then.  Race relations are somewhat different today than they were 50 years ago, though there is still a lot about the movie that feels sadly relevant as well.  Black representation on film has improved over time, both in front and behind the camera.  There are still some lagging factors when it comes to equality though.  Just because milestones like electing the first Black president have happened in the recent years doesn’t mean that racial tensions are gone forever.  Some would say that they are getting fired up again.  This is one aspect where Blazing Saddles is especially relevant to this day.  In the film, Hedley Lamarr appoints Bart the sheriff of Rock Ridge knowing full well that the bigoted townspeople would rather abandon the town rather than accept him as their new protector, and that will help him gain control of the land for his own aspirations.  A disingenuous politician stirring up racial tensions for his own gain feels all too familiar in today’s political climate.  There certainly are aspects of Mel Brook’s comedy that have not aged as well either.  Mel certainly is an equal opportunity offender in his many comedies, but there are times when some of the racial jokes fall into the point of gratuitousness.  Also if there was something that I think he would rethink in the film, it would be the depiction of the musical performers in the “French Mistake” number as reductive gay stereotypes.  It’s all still in good fun, and it’s clear that Mel’s intent is to poke holes in the absurdity of racial bigotry and not to indulge in the ugliness of it.  However, over time, some people have lost that context when it comes to celebrating the comedy of Blazing Saddles over the years.

One of the things that has been said a lot about Blazing Saddles is that it’s a movie that could never be made today.  There’s a lot of truth to that, as the making of the movie was very much a response to the racial politics of the time in which it was made.  But, for some, they use Blazing Saddles as an example of how Hollywood has lost it’s way.  There are many critics online who point to this film to say that movies have gotten too “politically correct” or Hollywood has gotten too “woke.”  It’s interesting that they would single out Blazing Saddles of all movies as being the film that represents a time in Hollywood that wasn’t “woke” as it’s a movie that honestly is one of the most socially conscious films ever made by a major studio.  It was “woke” before that ever became a term.  Mel Brooks is and has always been an outspoken defender of civil rights movements in America.  Even in his late 90’s, he still speaks his mind on these issues.  One of the last social media posts made by his late friend and fellow comedy legend Carl Reiner before his death in 2020 was pictures of Carl and Mel at the latter’s then 94th birthday party, with both of them proudly wearing shirts that said “Black Lives Matter.”  Being called “woke” would be a compliment to Mel and not an insult.  But, for some reason, the anti-woke crowd wants to claim Blazing Saddles as a movie that speaks for them.  You have to wonder, what is it exactly about the movie that they like?  It certainly can’t be the criticism of naked racism, as Mel Brooks is clearly making fun of the complicit nature of white bigotry that pervades the Western genre.  I shudder to think that the only reason some people like this movie is because of it’s un-censored use of a certain word.

Here’s the thing about the way the movie uses racial slurs in the film.  Never in the whole movie is a racial slur meant to be a punchline for laughter.  Sure there are situations in which the n-word is skirted around in a hilarious way, like the old prospector character Gabby Johnson getting drowned out by a church bell right as he says the word or when Governor LePetomane asks Hedly Lamarr, “What are you nuts?  Can’t you see that that man is a Ni?”  But when the actual word is spoken, it’s not taken as a joke, but is instead intend to be a shocking jolt.  It also is important to note that the word is said by some of the dumbest and most ignorant characters in the movie.  They are the subjects of ridicule in the movie first and foremost, and that’s the intent of the story Mel is trying to tell.  Stories of the American West have long glamorized the image of white Americans taming the old west, while whitewashing all of the racial injustices that happened along the way.  Primarily it was the slaughtering of Native American tribes that got left out of the myths of the Old West, as indigenous people were reduced to savage obstacles in the way of progress, but also at the same time settlers of other races, including Blacks and Asians, were also left out of the Western myths too.  Blazing Saddles breaks down that myth by making it clear to the people of Rock Ridge that bigotry is their own worst enemy and that using a slur is just a sign of their own stupidity and blindness.  If there are people out there who find the n-word usage to be the one funny thing from this movie, and that it’s the thing that they lament as not being able to be done today, well, they are telling a lot about themselves then; and also making Mel Brooks’ point for him.  As the Waco Kid succinctly says in the movie, “These are people of the land.  The common clay of the new West.  You know… morons.”

That’s why it’s a good thing that a movie like Blazing Saddles couldn’t and shouldn’t be made today.  Blazing Saddles is a comedy that needed to exist in it’s own specific time; a time where naked bigorty needed to be called out and that Hollywood had to be confronted over it’s own shameful history in perpetuating the stereotypes that fan the flames of racism.  It’s a movie that should stand on it’s own and speak across generations.  The reason why a movie like it shouldn’t be made today is because I don’t think anyone would be able to offer the same thing that Mel Brook’s added that made the difference; a feeling of hope.  Today, comedies are far more cynical and geared toward the irreverent, because the belief is that positivity is a gateway to sappiness.  What is important in Blazing Saddles is that in defiance of all the bigotry he faces, Sheriff Bart fulfills his duty as a protector of his town and ends up saving the day in the end.  Even more than that, he does so by using his intelligence to win the day, not just outsmarting his enemies but also winning them over to his side.  The movie is hopeful about overcoming prejudice, even though it’s still aware about the long arduous road that is, with Sheriff Bart at one point saying, “Someday, they’ll even address me in broad daylight” when talking about the townsfolk he just saved.  There are many people who have tried to emulate what Mel Brooks has done with movies like Blazing Saddles, but few capture the same amount of wit and intelligence that his movies contain.  There is a very nuanced and pointed commentary about race in America amidst all of the fart sounds and sex jokes.  That’s what makes Blazing Saddles such a special comedy; it truly hits so many levels when it comes to comedy, with a sharp satirical edge and a fair amount of broad slapstick for good measure.  And it never fails to make us laugh, even after 50 years.

Argylle – Review

Matthew Vaughn’s career has been a turbulent one as a filmmaker.  He first made a name for himself as a producer, specifically as the one who guided the early films of Guy Ritchie.  After the success of Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), Vaughn believed that it was time for his own foray into directing.  Staying within the comfort zone that he was familiar with through his collaboration with Guy Ritchie, he debuted as a director with his own take on the British gangster film genre; 2004’s Layer Cake.  Starring a pre-007 Daniel Craig, Layer Cake was generally well received by audiences and critics.  And while many would have thought Matthew Vaughn would’ve followed Guy Ritchie’s continued success within this gangster film genre, Vaughn surprisingly went in a much different direction and spread his wings out into the realm of fantasy filmmaking.  His follow-up would be the fantasy adventure Stardust (2007), which while being a big departure from Layer Cake it still showed Vaughn’s talent for mixing action and comedy together, something that he would continue to expand upon in his later films.  Those skills would especially propel him to further success as he extended into the comic book genre.  His next film, the hyper-violent super hero send-up Kick Ass (2010) would be the purest expression of Matthew Vaughn’s cinematic style yet.  The cartoonish excess of his action scenes would become the staple of his directorial style, and it would be the thing that guided his career as a director through the next decade.  Almost a year after making Kick Ass, he was called upon by Marvel and 20th Century Fox to help revive the ailing X-Men franchise, and he managed to succeed there as well, giving that franchise the reboot it desperately needed with X-Men: First Class (2011).  But where Matthew Vaughn would take his talents next would be a turning point for him as a filmmaker.  He would soon launch a franchise that both gave him the best showcase for his talents yet but also would end up holding him back and begin a decline in what had been a momentous career up to that point.

Working again with source material from comic book writer Mark Millar (Kick Ass), Matthew Vaughn set out to bring the comic series Kingsman to the silver screen.  Kingsman: The Secret Society (2015) was all of Vaughn’s best cinematic tricks put together in one fun romp of a movie.  The mix of cartoonish action and excessive violence mixed in with a cultured English aesthetic was a winning formula, and the film became Matthew Vaughn’s biggest success to date.  The church massacre scene in particular, where Colin Firth’s secret agent character takes out an entire congregation of crazed zealots in a brilliantly choreographed oner is seen by many to be one of the greatest action scenes ever filmed.  The success of this film led Vaughn to undertake a first in his booming career as a director; he was going to direct a sequel.  Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) was quickly churned out in two years, and anticipation was high given the beloved status of the original.  Sadly, lightning didn’t strike twice as the reception of The Golden Circle was not as warm, making this the first misfire of Vaughn’s career.  What had been his strong suit up to this point was now starting to become his weakness; namely the irreverent comedic tone of his action scenes.  When Elton John, in an extended cameo, is doing obvious wirework fight scenes in the movie, the humorous tone begins to fall apart.  Add to this a lot of plot contrivances and a bloated 2 1/2 hour run time, and many Kingsman fans came away disappointed.  You would think after this disappointment that Matthew Vaughn would want to move on, but shockingly he remained committed to this franchise.  He chose to next direct a prequel to the Kingman franchise by showing the origins of the organization in the awkwardly titled The King’s Man (2021).  The film suffered from the affects of the Covid-19 pandemic, delaying it over a year, and while it was more consistent in tone than it’s predecessor, the film still failed to generate renewed interest in the waning franchise.  Cut to now and Matthew Vaughn is still finding himself in the espionage genre, but he’s hoping to begin again with a new potential franchise launch with the film Argylle (2024).

Argylle follows the life of a lonely espionage novelist named Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose Agent Argylle books are international best-sellers.  Though she is immensely popular for her writing, she chooses to live a solitary life in her secluded Rocky Mountain getaway with her beloved feline companion Alfie.  Occasionally she’ll receive feedback on her books from her mother Ruth (Catherine O’Hara), who tries to needle her into being more outgoing.  While she writes her newest novel, she vividly pictures in her mind how it will look, with Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) being a dashing super spy who is assisted by his tech wiz Keira (Ariana DeBose) and his musclebound back-up man Wyatt (John Cena).  When she hits her writers block moment, Elly decides to travel cross country to visit her mother and father in Chicago.  While taking the train, she ends up sitting across the aisle from a stranger who just so happens to be reading her book.  He introduces himself as Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell) and bluntly tells her that he’s in the business of espionage, which she dismisses as a joke.  However, the two are approached by another fan seeking an autograph who suddenly tries to attack Elly.  The attack is thwarted by Aidan, who disposes with a dozen or so would-be assassins, and the two manage to escape by parachuting off of the moving train, along with Elly’s cat Alfie in a carrying pack.  Once safe, Aidan confides that Elly’s Argylle novels have predicted real events in the past, and a shadow organization is trying to get to her because they believe her oracle like senses will lead them to a black book of secret files.  The leader of the shadow organization named Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston) is hell bent on getting to Elly before Aidan can bring her to his own director, also named Alfie (Samuel L. Jackson).  Elly embarks on a harrowing mystery that turns up many surprises along the way, all of which makes her realize that Argylle is more than just a character she made up for her book.

It is certainly nice to see Matthew Vaughn pull away from the Kingman funk that he has fallen into over the last few years, but it leaves us with the question as to whether he has something new to offer as a director.  Sadly, Argylle is not the revitalizing tonic that he needed as a filmmaker.  Even worse, this movie is actually the worst film he has made so far.  While the Kingman films became a little scattershot over time, they still displayed a strong sense of style that at least kept them watchable.  Argylle on the other hand doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be.  This movie is one of the most unfocused films I have seen in a long time, as it tries to be so many things all at once.  It wants to be a comedy, but it tries way too hard to be shocking with it’s twists and turns; it wants to be cartoonishly violent, but seems to be undermined by it’s PG-13 rating; and it wants to be grandiose and operatic in it’s scale, but just looks artificial most of the time.  I think that the problems with this movie stem mostly from the screenplay itself, written by Jason Fuchs, whose credits to date include Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) and notorious box office bomb Pan (2015).  Fuch’s script tries way too hard to be a Romancing the Stone (1983) style action romantic comedy, with plot twists that think they are clever but are telegraphed way too clumsily that you can see them coming a mile away.  While Vaughn’s flashy style can overcome shortcomings in the script, it sadly becomes it’s own problem simultaneously as the excesses become more obnoxious than engaging and the film brings out Vaughn’s worst tendencies as a filmmaker.  Every problem that started with his sequels in the Kingsman franchise are amplified here.  As well choreographed as the action scenes are, they just don’t land as well when you don’t care about much else from the movie.

That’s not to say that the movie gets everything wrong.  While the movie is a failure in most places, one thing they do get right is the chemistry between the two leads.  What helps to keep this movie from becoming a total disaster is the performances of Sam Rockwell and Bryce Dallas Howard as Aidan and Elly.  They are not awards worthy performances, but they do help to ground the movie and give it a bit of redeeming power; particularly with Rockwell.  Sam’s performance as Aidan is the clearest high point of the whole movie, as he seems to be the only actor that understands the assignment.  He’s charming, funny, and surprisingly adept in the action sequences which he gets quite a few moments with before he’s replaced with the stunt double.  You can definitely see a Bruce Willis in his prime quality with Sam Rockwell’s work here, as he perfectly balances the humor with the sincerity of his duty as a figure within an action movie scenario.  Bryce Dallas Howard does the best she can with a character whose whole story gets more and more convoluted as the movie goes, and it’s in the moments she shares with Sam Rockwell on screen where her performance shines the most.  Honestly, it’s in the brief moments where the two characters are aloud to actually connect on a human level that the movie actually finds it’s brief footing.  I wish the movie was more about them working off each other and solving the mystery together rather than series of plot detours and action set pieces that it ends up devolving into.  The ingredients are certainly all there, but Vaughn just refuses to pick a lane and decides to go for the loudest and most insane trek possible.  And it ruins what otherwise would’ve been a fun romp of a spy action comedy.

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag.  The imaginings of the Agent Argylle books give very little for the actors to do, but that seems to be the point as the characters are meant to be archetypes.  Still when you have a trio as talented as Henry Cavill, John Cena, and Ariana DeBose together on screen, you’d like to see them emote just a little bit.  Cavill’s part in the movie is especially confusing, as Matthew Vaughn doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do with the Agent Argylle character.  He flashes in and out of Elly’s imagination throughout the movie, as if Vaughn wanted to keep Cavill in as much of the movie as he could beyond just a cameo.  But for someone who is supposed to be the movie’s namesake, Argylle is such a throwaway character and Cavill’s whole participation just comes down to looking literally like an action figure.  I feel bad for Henry Cavill as he is very much a talented actor, but he sadly gets dumped into these failed action franchises that end up wasting his talents.  There’s a bit more gained from the inclusion of veterans like Bryan Cranston and Catherine O’Hara.  O’Hara especially gets to shine here, taking her comedic chops and working them surprisingly well into a more action packed movie.  Cranston has a nice menacing presence, though his villainous character is sadly underdeveloped and is fairly bland overall.  Strangely enough, it’s really just the cat that comes across as the most sympathetic screen presence, and half of the time he’s a visual effect, given the dangerous situations that they put him through.  Overall, the movie has an enviable all-star cast that it ultimately just ends up wasting.  It’s not surprising that the movie was bankrolled by a mega-corporation like Apple, as they clearly had the money to cast big names in all the parts.  But none of that promise with this kind of cast translates as they are all just lost in the shuffle of Vaughn’s excessive direction and the unfocused story that values shocking twists over actual character development.

Another big problem is the visual degradation of Matthew Vaughn’s style that this movie seems to demonstrate.  Vaughn, for most of the early part of his career, was able to balance his excesses as a visual story-teller with a clear sense of vision that was cohesive.  But through the Kingsman sequels and Argylle, the style is clearly overwhelming the substance.  One of the big issues is that he seems to be relying too heavily on CGI to get the style he wants for his action scenes.  The reason why movies like Kick Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Society worked is because they had a lot of thought put into the fight choreography first and foremost, and then later used visual effects to accentuate.  This was definitely evident in the church fight from Kingsman, which had the visceral mayhem of a handheld shot, but was aided by CGI to help add the blood and cover up the edits in the quick pans.  This is also why The King’s Man worked better than The Golden Circle, because there were more scenes involving real stunts than visual effects.  Sadly, it’s all too obvious that most of Argylle’s big stunts were constructed using computers.  There’s two visually operatic action sequences late in the movie that might have worked better had they not felt so artificial.  It’s where Vaughn’s instincts are working against him, as his need to go big are robbing the movie of it’s impact.  It’s the unfortunate desire on his part to go further than he had in the Kingman movies, but using a shortcut to get there.  He went from cartoonishly violent to just a cartoon by the end of this movie.  It’s also laughable that this is supposed to be a globetrotting movie, but it’s obvious they never left their London area soundstages as most of the movie is reliant on greenscreen for all the locales.  It’s a sad result for a film director like Matthew Vaughn who for the longest time was one of the most inventive and exciting filmmakers of the moment.

Argylle is sadly another step down for Matthew Vaughn as a filmmaker.  It’s like everything from Kingsman: The Secret Society on has been one big audition reel for a James Bond movie, but it just keeps getting sloppier the longer it goes on.  While James Bond has it’s own excesses, it does know how to play by it’s own rules and also it’s a franchise that knows when to revitalize itself with fresh blood.  Matthew Vaughn for some reason seems to be chasing his own bad instincts and letting them undermine the work that he does.  He has a creative eye for action, but he seems to be losing the confidence to make that work in a realistic way.  Argylle shows a director at odds with himself, unable to reign in a big project with the same kind of focus that he used to.  Perhaps he needs to step away from the spy stuff for a while and find a different kind of movie to make that his talents would be best suited for.  It was certainly interesting when he stepped into the fantasy genre with Stardust; I wonder if he still has that kind of movie in him.  He’s also been pretty vocal about what he’d do with a property like Star Wars as of late.  Perhaps he should get a shot at a sci-fi film like that.  He basically just needs to have a reinvention of some kind, because his creative juices are just not flowing anymore as a spy film director; or even as a comedy director.  As someone who was very much on board with his first five films, I found Argylle to be yet another crushing let down for a director that needs to do better.  In the end, all the flashy style and many twists and turns do nothing to resurrect a bare bones effort and it just ends up being a bore by the finale.  It’s a waste of top tier talent and will likely not be the franchise starter that it’s aiming to be.  The best it could do is to wake up Matthew Vaughn from his career stagnation and help him see the shortfalls that he’s been mired in for far too long.  Hopefully then, we can get back to the fun, inventive action packed material that we got excited for in Matthew Vaughn’s earlier work and hopefully forget Argylle as a footnote in the grand scheme of his cinematic body of work.

Rating: 5/10

The Beauty is Gone – How American Beauty Went From Oscar Champ to Forgotten in 25 Years

There’s one thing that is interesting about the growing list of Oscar winners over it’s 96 year history.  That thing is how each year’s selection of winner becomes a bit of a time capsule of their era in film.  Of course there are some winners that do remain timeless and feel just as fresh and entertaining today as they were when they first premiered in theaters, such as Casablanca (1943), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), or both The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974).  But then there are some winners that don’t quite translate as well over the years as the tastes of movie audiences change.  For some of them, historical context is necessary towards understanding why this particular film rose to the top of the Oscar field.  Some are just due to studio politics, such as the dated and cliché The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) beating out the timeless High Noon (1952).  But other times a winner is just the product of it’s era and just doesn’t translate well over time.  It doesn’t always mean that the movie is bad, but it is clear that some movies age poorly.  By all accounts How Green Was My Valley (1941) is a charming little family drama, but the only thing we seem to know about it today is that it’s the movie that beat Citizen Kane (1941) for Best Picture.  For their time, honoring these kinds of movies would’ve made sense, because they reflected the mood of Academy voter, who have more than not favored the more uplifting film.  But, there are times when you see the Academy choose a winner that feels like a breakthrough film at the time which unfortunately over the years begins to look more and more like an out of touch exercise with hindsight.  And I don’t think that I have ever seen a Best Picture winner fall of the pedestal harder than the 1999 champion American Beauty.   25 years ago, American Beauty looked like it was going to be the herald for a new era in cinema.  Nowadays, it comes across as naïve and pandering, and even more surprisingly, almost completely forgotten.

I remember the way that Hollywood fawned over this film when it first came out.  This was going to be the movie that shaped a new era in Hollywood with it’s tackling of then taboo subjects of suburban malaise, teenage sexuality, and homophobia.  It also had a high pedigree of talent behind it.  With the backing of Hollywood rising star Dreamworks and it’s trio of super producers Katzenberg, Geffen and Spielberg, this movie was design from the get go to dazzle the Academy.  West End stage director Sam Mendes was called upon to make his big screen debut after dazzling the theater world with his acclaimed re-imagining of Cabaret for both London and Broadway.  Veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) was hired to shoot the picture and Thomas Newman was given the duties of scoring the film, and in each case they were breaking the mold of a Hollywood prestige picture.  Then there was the cast, which included established stars like Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning as well as young newcomers like Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, and Mena Suvari.  And it was all centered around a screenplay from longtime sitcom writer Alan Ball that Spielberg was said to have fallen in love with immediately.  Overall, this was a movie that came together with all the right ingredients at the right time, which is the case with most movies that end up collecting multiple awards.  But for it’s time, this movie was believed to be something else entirely.  Understanding the context of it’s release, American Beauty was coming out at the tail end of the 1990’s, which at that time had seen high budget period dramas dominate at the Oscars, including Braveheart (1995), The English Patient (1996), and Titanic (1997).  The year prior, the very safe pick of Shakespeare in Love (1998) had upset Saving Private Ryan (1998), so the Academy was beginning to be criticized for being out of touch, which may have been what prompted the turn that benefitted American Beauty in the eyes of Academy voters.  And boy did it, as it not only took home Best Picture, but it was one Best Actress award short of completing the Oscar Hat Trick, which is winning the top five awards (Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Director, Picture), a feat only three films have ever achieved (1934’s It Happened One Night, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs).

So what was it about the film that cast this spell on the Academy.  The movie looks at the lives of two suburban families going through various crises.  The Burnhams are a nuclear American family on the verge of implosion after years of sexual frustration on the part of the depressed patriarch Lester (Kevin Spacey).  Living next door are the Fitts family, which is lorded over by a disciplinarian and homophobic father named Frank (Chris Cooper) who clashes constantly with his artistically inclined son Ricky (Wes Bentley).  Both in many ways represented the ideals of the nuclear American family that so many in conservative media like to push forward, and this movie takes a sledgehammer to that image and exposes all the cracks underneath.  Lester is depressed by his lack of urgency over his life, and then is “awoken” after being aroused by his daughter’s “sexy” best friend.  From that moment, he disrupts all of the routines that have governed his life and begins to do things his way, much to the chagrin of his career driven wife (Annette Benning), whose got her own subversive issues going on.  And of course the kids are going through their own hormonal awakening throughout the movie.  And then there is the Colonel, whose external homophobia we learn is a mask for his own self-hatred.  It’s in general a critique of the societal masks that we impose on ourselves to function in a modern society, and the movie examines if those masks themselves are part of the problem we face everyday.  After a long line of safe, studio driven fare, I can see how the Academy believed that American Beauty was this subversive gem that would start a new era of filmmaking in Hollywood.  In some ways it kind of did, but not in a way that would put American Beauty as the touchstone film that they thought it would be.  In general, 1999 was a year full of movies that would shake up Hollywood, and some have held up much better over time than American Beauty did like Fight Club (1999), The Matrix (1999), Magnolia (1999) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).  Those films continue to inspire filmmakers to this day, but I can’t think of any other movie that strived to be the next American Beauty.

So, why is it that 25 years later American Beauty has fallen off people’s radar despite being such a big winner at the Oscars.  It’s been out of print as a physical media release for nearly a decade now, and you’d have to dig pretty deep to find it on streaming (currently it’s on Paramount+ along with most Dreamworks catalog titles).  I think the primary reason that people no longer talk about this movie these days is pretty obvious, so I’ll just get to the elephant in the room.  The depiction of Lester Burnham in the movie seems to diminish the pedophiliac nature of his character.  He is the main protagonist of the story (the whole thing is framed through his post-death narration) so we are observing the movie through his perspective.  And Lester’s main motivation is that he wants to have sex with an underage girl.  25 years later this element of the character cannot in any way be justified.  Now truth be told, he doesn’t go through with it, but the movie does comes as close to the edge as it can with the subject matter and at the same time, this sexual drive is seen as a positive thing for his character development because it’s what pulls Lester out of his mid-life funk and let’s him feel alive again.  The implications of that are just icky in today’s culture, especially in a #MeToo world.  But if it was just the character development in the movie, maybe you could just dismiss it as out of touch for it’s time.  Unfortunately, we have learned of Kevin Spacey’s real life sex crimes, and it make the character of Lester Burnham almost unbearable to watch now.  Unlike Lester, we know Spacey actually went through with his molestation of underage victims, by his own admission.  It’s a disgraceful revelation that in many ways has clouded the reputation of American Beauty more than anything else.  With things hitting pretty close to real life, I wonder if Alan Ball has any regrets in letting his main character be let off the hook for almost committing statutory rape.  I get that exposing the cracks underneath polite American society was the aim, but some things need to be called out as unacceptable and this movie just seemed to forget that.

Before the exposure of Kevin Spacey as a perverted monster, American Beauty faced another backlash over the years since it’s release, and that was the perception that it was a pretentious movie.  American Beauty rides that fine line between the naturalistic and heightened sense of reality.  While the movie is grounded in a contemporary (for it’s time) American setting, the film also takes several turns into flights of fantasy, mainly as a way of looking into the minds of the characters.  We especially see this with the moments that Lester lusts after the character Angela (Mena Suvari), with deep red roses being a heavy metaphoric presence.  Sure, those moments are beautifully shot by the late Conrad Hall, but in the end they are more style over substance given how heavy handed these moments are.  Still, those are the moments that helped to sell the movie and remain the most memorable to this day, so that’s a credit to the craft of the movie.  Where most of the pretention lies is with the dialogue found in Alan Ball’s script.  Originally, American Beauty was originally conceived as a stage play, and that helps to make the heightened dialogue feel more within context.  The characters in this movie do not talk like real human beings, but more like they are characters within a play whom the actors must imbue with heightened emotions.  For the most part, the lines that are supposed to be profound just become annoyingly cloy.  This is especially true with the character of Ricky, whose artistic sensibilities come across as particularly hollow.  The notorious trash bag scene over time has become the poster child moment of this movie’s pretentious reputation.  What was supposed to sound deep and poetic in it’s day now in today’s eyes just looks like a privileged white boy’s low effort attempt at filmmaking.  There are stronger moments in the movie that do still work, like the escalating tension of the dinner scene where Lester throws the plate of asparagus at the wall, but for the most part you can tell a lot of this script would’ve hit a bit harder if performed on a stage, instead of being awkwardly translated for the screen.

There is one thing about the movie that I do think has subtly worked it’s way through the culture at large since it’s premiere.  The character of Lester Burnham in many ways started the trend of “difficult men” on both the small and little screen in the 20 years since it’s release.  This is particularly the case on television, where you see characters like Tony Soprano and Walter White emerge in pop culture in the 2000’s and beyond.  While Lester Burnham was not the first of these kinds of characters (a main protagonist that is interesting to dissect while at the same time hard to sympathize), he certainly helped to popularize the type.  As problematic as Lester is, his character evolution is in itself an interesting catalyst in examining the subversive fractures of American society, particularly when it comes to masculinity.  You see many more characters of this kind post-American Beauty than before, which in the 80’s and 90’s leading up to it kind of presented a more idealized portrayal of the modern American male.  Lester Burnham was a deeply flawed individual, but that ascension of his own worst instincts bubbling to the surface made him a far more interesting character as a result, and it changed the perception of what constituted a portrayal of masculinity in movies thereafter.  But, at the same time, the movie does have it’s own dated portrayals of masculine/feminine dynamic that haven’t aged very well either.  What is surprising is that Alan Ball, who is a queer writer himself, seems to perpetuate the antiquated idea of deep in the closet resentment being the driving force behind homophobia.  We learn that Colonel Fitts’ virulent homophobia is it’s own mask for his own closeted feelings, but this feels like a story element that minimalizes the horrific nature of violence towards the gay community.  Yes, there are cases where homophobes have been exposed as having secret gay affairs, but for the most part violence committed against the gay community has just been the result of pure bigotry.  To pin internalized homophobia around Colonel Fitts’ motivations is a very reductive approach to a very serious problem that still affects the queer community in American society today.  I feel that with hindsight, this is a part of Alan Ball’s script that likely would be much more nuanced today.

The movie primarily has the problem of just being too tied in with it’s era.  It is a very Clinton-era movie, made back in a time when the worst that this country was going through was the scandalous thought of an American president being unfaithful to his wife.  In some ways, I kind of see what may have inspired this movie to begin with.  American Beauty definitely feels like a cry out into the dark abyss of modern American malaise.  It was a post-Cold War world where we as a society were growing comfortable with the idea of being the world’s sole super power.  American Beauty was very much a wake up call to remind us Americans that society is not as candy colored as it seems.  America is a complex society of many divisions, and trying to mask over that with an unrealistic picture of polite, suburban values is doing more harm than good.  Now, the delivery of that message in American Beauty is undermined by it’s own pretentions, but the underlying idea behind it is still sound.  One thing that I think unravels the movie as a whole from achieving it’s goal is the way that it handles the ending.  Spoiler Warning, but the movie closes with the murder of Lester Burnham.  The death has been telegraphed throughout the movie, as Lester is speaking in narration beyond the grave (an inspiration from the classic Sunset Boulevard).  What I think would have made the movie much more of a masterpiece is if it left the identity of the murderer ambiguous.  We see fully who pulled the trigger on Lester (Colonel Fitts) and it kind of robs the movie of it’s most profound moment.  There are several culprits who may have wanted Lester dead by the end, and the mystery it left behind would’ve been a great thing to leave the audience with.  This moment would’ve felt even more poignant years after, because in the context of the movie, Lester’s murder is the catalyst for destroying any remaining perception of the perfect American idealized world left in the lives of these characters.  Honestly, there’s a story to be told about what happened to all these characters afterward, because just like the families in the movie, America itself was on the verge of it’s own traumatic upheaval.  American Beauty was the first Best Picture winner of the new millennium, and in the 25 years since America has seen the 9/11 attacks, decades of war, economic upheaval, a rise in Fascism, and a crippling pandemic.  American Beauty warns us of how we grow too complacent sometimes, and the years since have only reinforced how much we take for granted with our own comfort.

American Beauty unfortunately is undermined with it’s own dated sense of values from the time it was first written and filmed.  The world has changed considerably in the last 25 years, and a pretentious examination of suburban malaise just doesn’t have the sting that it used to.  The fall from grace that Kevin Spacey has gone through hasn’t helped either.  Still, there are many things about American Beauty that still hold up very well.  One is Annette Benning’s incredible performance as Carolyn Burnham.  Her career obsessed matriarch driven to the extreme to uphold her place in society is still a potent character portrayal.  The scene where she has an emotional breakdown after having a terrible Open House showing for her clients, with the backlighting of the closed blinds perfectly captured by Conrad Hall’s camera, is a definite highlight of the movie.  And unlike Spacey, her career is still in top form as Ms. Benning has just been nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars again for the movie Nyad (2023); he fifth overall.  Sam Mendes, who is only one of three directors to ever win for a debut film, has only gotten better in the last 25 years as a filmmaker.  His follow-up to American Beauty was in my opinion his masterpiece with the amazing Road to Perdition (2002), and he’s made many other astonishing films such as Skyfall (2012) and 1917 (2019) since then.  Conrad Hall would sadly deliver his swan song with Road to Perdition as he passed away before it’s release, and he won a posthumous Oscar for his work.  Both that and American Beauty represented a fantastic late career resurgence for one of the master cameramen of Hollywood.  And Alan Ball’s sensationalized style of writing would find a better place back on television with hit shows like Six Feet Under and True Blood.  For the movie American Beauty, it remains a film today that’s both infuriating for it’s pretentiousness but admirable for it’s artistry.  Given the crazy quarter century that’s we’ve been through, I honestly think it would be interested to revisit this kind of story.  Perhaps Alan Ball and Sam Mendes should consider a stage version like it was originally was supposed to be, but with a more contemporary context, especially when addressing Lester Burnham’s problematic underage lust.  It is fascinating how in 25 years, this movie went from the peak of Hollywood glory to a cinematic footnote.  It’s both deserving of scorn, but also much more interesting than that.  At the very least, it’s worthy of a re-watch.  Times change, but cinema is forever, and this may be a plastic bag caught in the wind of a movie, but that in a way is it’s own beautiful little time capsule.

Focus on a Franchise – DC Extended Universe (DCEU): Part One

Roll back the clock to the mid 2000’s and the cinematic landscape was very different for movies based on comic books.  DC was still trying to find it’s footing again after the disastrous implosion of their Batman franchise with Batman & Robin (1997) while at the same time Marvel had their many characters scattered around Hollywood at multiple studios.  Then in 2005, Christopher Nolan launched onto the scene with his grounded re-imagining of the Batman character with Batman Begins.  The movie was both a financial success as well as a critical darling, which made Hollywood realize that comic book movies could be so much more than just standard popcorn entertainment.  Which then led to the year 2008, which was a touchstone year for the genre as a whole because it not only saw the premiere of Nolan’s monumental second film in what would be his Dark Knight trilogy, the iconic The Dark Knight, but it was also the year that Marvel premiered Iron Man, the first film in the ambitiously planned Marvel Cinematic Universe.  While Christopher Nolan’s trilogy was winning praise from audiences and critics alike, Marvel was also gaining attention for their attempt at a connected universe through multiple franchises centered around their different characters, and with the acquisition of Marvel by Disney, the comic book giant now had a home base to put that plan together without too much intereference.  This plan culminated in the team up film called The Avengers (2012), which broke multiple box office records, including those set by The Dark Knight.  Hollywood had now seen the concept of a cinematic universe work on a massive scale and many of the studios were eager to repeat the magic that Marvel had managed to conjure up.  It would seem that DC would be in the best position to match what Marvel had achieved, given that they had their own stable of iconic super heroes and were also riding on the high of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy at the time.

But, as many would find out, it was almost impossible to repeat the same formula as effectively as Marvel had been doing.  Even as many of the studios were trying to form their own cinematic universes, Marvel continued to build with every new phase.  Universal failed in spectacular fashion with their “Dark Universe” based on their stable of movie monsters.  Sony, clinging heavily to their rights to the Spider-Man franchise, have put out numerous failed projects centered around as many superfluous characters in the Spider-Man orbit as they can, with only the Venom films being mildly successful.  But no other studio tried harder to compete with the likes of Marvel than their rival DC.  Under the corporate umbrella of Warner Brothers, the DC Comics Studio was given a significant spotlight in the wake of the success of the MCU.  The pressure was on to have the DC characters to have a cinematic universe of their own that would be on par with Marvel.  But the question remained, who would be the one to lead the charge.  At Marvel, the reigns of the cinematic universe were not held by one film director, but rather by the head of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige, who delineated with his inner circle what stories would be told and how all those story thread would be woven into a larger story.  Who would be DC’s Feige then?  After completing his trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Christopher Nolan was ready to move on and work on other projects he was interested in like Interstellar (2014) and Dunkirk (2017).  DC and Warner Brothers instead turned to another one of their rising star filmmakers to help set the tone for their planned universe.  That filmmaker was Zack Snyder, who just a few years prior made a statement for himself with faithful adaptations of graphic novels such as 300 (2007) and Watchmen (2009).  With Marvel leaning more into the colorful and comedic, it was decided that DC would lean more into the dark and dramatic in order to differentiate their universe, which Snyder was a good match for.  And so, the beginning of the DC Extended Universe was set.  But, as we would see, Cinematic Universes don’t always go as planned.

MAN OF STEEL (2013)

Directed by Zack Snyder

There are many factors that went into making the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) the runaway hit that it was, but one of the undeniable factors of it’s success would be the solid foundation it was built upon with the success of it’s first film, Iron Man.  Had that movie not worked, it would have poured water on the whole plan moving forward.  So, a lot was resting on the results the movie that would launch the DC Extended Universe (DCEU).  It’s only logical that the starting point for this multi-year, multi-film plan would have to involve the most iconic super hero in the entire DC stable; Superman.  Superman of course already had a strong cinematic background before, with the classic Richard Donner directed/ Christopher Reeve starring 1978 original being seen as the film that launched this genre in the first place.  But, after the disaster that was Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), the “man of steel” had been on a lengthy hiatus on the big screen.  The well-intentioned but ultimately dull Superman Returns (2006) likewise cast doubts on Superman’s box office viability.  But, his story does offer a great starting point to launch a cinematic universe, given that Superman is the world’s most recognizable super hero.  What DC wanted to do this time was to ground Superman in the same way that Christopher Nolan had with Batman.  Zack Snyder could certainly bring that grittier style that was needed, but is that a good fit for the character of Superman?  There are a lot of questionable choices made in Man of Steel, chief among them would be what was seen as gratuitous violence that felt out of character for Superman.  The film was controversial for it’s time given that the resulting fight between Superman and the villainous General Zod leaves the city of Metropolis in a smoky ruin, with uncomfortable echoes of the devastation of 9/11.  Also, Superman ends up stopping Zod by killing him, which according to comic book lore is very much the antithesis of Superman’s pure hearted character.  To many people, Snyder’s approach to the character seemed to more self-serving of the director’s style and less in line with who Superman should be.  But, the movie still managed to succeed at the box office, no doubt riding the crest of the wave made by the success of The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises a year prior.  The movie also won praise for it’s casting of Henry Cavill as Superman, who most considered to be a strong choice, along with the casting of Michael Shannon as Zod.  But, the true test of the longevity of the DCEU would depend on what Snyder would do next as a follow-up.

BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (2016)

Directed by Zack Snyder

Despite there being mixed opinions about the Man of Steel’s treatment of the Superman mythos, people were still thrilled to find out that the next film in the DCEU would see Superman going head to head with the Dark Knight himself in his next film.  Not only that, but this would be the clearest indication yet that were on our way to seeing the first true assembling of the Justice League on the big screen.  Plus, we would be getting our first post-Dark Knight version of the Batman, which it turns out would be heavily influenced by the famous Frank Miller run of the character in the comic books.  There were a lot of naysayers at the time when it was announced that Ben Affleck would be playing the caped crusader, but as it turns out, it would be the best choice Zack Snyder made for the whole movie.  While Snyder had the ingredients to make one of the most iconic comic book movies of all time, he sadly didn’t have a compelling story to center his movie on.  The key problem with BvS is that the whole plot to get his super heroes to fight one another is convoluted and non-sensical.  All of the story problems that plagued Man of Steel are amplified here, and the biggest problem of them all is the horrible mismanagement of the character Lex Luthor.  Luthor is one of DC’s most iconic villains, and most well known as Superman’s arch-nemesis.  Here he is played by Jesse Eisenberg who from the get go you can tell was horribly miscast.  His personality type is not at all like the cool, calculating super genius of the comic books, and it almost seems like Eisenberg’s direction with the character was to make him closer to the Joker with his out of place manic outbursts.  You can also see the flaw in DC being too heavy-handed with their expanded universe plans, as too much of the movie feels like a set up for future movies, especially in a painfully mediocre sequence where we see our first glimpses of Ezra Miller’s Flash, Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, and Jason Mamoa’s Aquaman.  At least Wonder Woman does get something to do in this movie, as the heroine (played by Gal Gadot) joins the other two heroes in the final battle; and I won’t lie, the money shot of DC’s holy trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman all standing together on the battlefield is pretty incedible.  Sadly, all the other potential is wasted as Snyder’s style over substance tendencies undermine any connection we have with the characters.  That’s why there was significant doubt about the future of the DCEU moving forward after this, as the movie was critically panned across the board.  It also didn’t help that Marvel released Captain America: Civil War (2016) a few short months after, showing the same concept of super heroes battling each other, but done much better.

SUICIDE SQUAD (2016)

Directed by David Ayer

If the heroes weren’t going to save the DCEU from floundering, than how about the villains.  Before the Justice League assembled on the big screen, we were presented with this team up of villains from across the whole DC rogues gallery.   The concept of the Suicide Squad from the comics is that when the government deems a situation too dangerous to risk the lives of their strongest heroes, they send in a team of criminals who lives they don’t mind sacrificing for the sake of the greater good.  It’s a fun concept that offers DC a chance to make use of the deeper bench of their collection of characters, many of whom would be making their big screen debuts.  This also being the first film in the DCEU not helmed by Zack Snyder also offered people the chance to see what a different directorial vision would look like in this cinematic universe.  David Ayer, who previously won acclaim for the films End of Watch (2012) and Fury (2014) seemed like a good choice, as his style matched the grittier tone that DC wanted to continue, but was different enough from Zack Snyder to show more diversity of vision within the cinematic universe.  Again, like the movies that came before, DC had done a good job with their casting.  Will Smith gave a devilishly charismatic portrayal to the sharp-shotting Deadshot.  Margot Robbie seemed to have been born to play Harley Quinn.  And perhaps the most outstanding casting choice of them all, and the sole actress from this era to outlive the DCEU in this role, Viola Davis as the ruthless Amanda Waller, the squad’s agency handler.  But, not everything seemed to work out as planned; the common refrain of the DCEU thus far.  While the movie does work better than the Zack Snyder films in general, it also is frustratingly all over the place in tone.  Apparently during post-production, David Ayer had the film taken away from him and re-edited by the studio to give it a more comedic tone.  This was due in part because of the competition with Marvel, which had achieved enormous success with the mix of humor and action in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).  It’s sadly ironic that years later, DC would tap James Gunn himself to direct the Suicide Squad sequel instead of David Ayer, who to this day insists on having his original cut see the light of day.  This was yet another example of DC’s inability to adequately build a cinematic universe, mainly due to them continually playing catch-up to Marvel.

WONDER WOMAN (2017)

Directed by Patty Jenkins

Three movies in, and the DCEU’s future was on shaky ground.  Their movies were performing well at the box office, but critically they were far behind where Marvel was.  And there seemed to be a lot of doubt whether their next film could pull them out of the slump, given that it centered on a heroine that up to now had never carried a film on her own before.  Wonder Woman carried a lot of uncertainties, given that no super hero movie before had centered on a female super hero, nor had been directed by a woman.  And Patty Jenkins, the director, had never attempted a film on this scale before, with her only film prior being the small independent flick Monster (2003).  And yet, with all of those factors weighing against it, Wonder Woman defied all expectations and became a critical and commercial success.  Many people point to this as the film that saved the DCEU (at least for a while) and it’s clear to see why.  For one thing, it is the first DCEU with a consistent tone and a cohesive story.  Set during WWI, it finds the Amazonian princess Diana brought into the human world in a quest to stop all wars by defeating the God of War, Ares.  Accompanied by her human guide Steve Trevor (a perfectly cast Chris Pine) we see Diana grow into the hero that we know as Wonder Woman, which Gal Gadot brings so much charm into, and that proves to be the key to the film’s success.  For the first time in the DCEU, we finally see a hero take action and use their powers in an unselfish way.  Patty Jenkins apparently fought to keep the No Man’s Land sequence in the film against the wishes of DC and Warner Brothers, and it’s wonderful that she did, because that’s the part of the movie where we see the super hero become who she was destined to be.  That’s what the DCEU had been missing before; the reminder that these heroes are larger than life and worth being inspired by.  It also helps that Patty Jenkins seems to have that reverence for the character as well, in a way that never feels artificial and surface level like it does with Zack Snyder.  And it also not only marks the first time that DC not only matched Marvel in their quality, but in some ways even surpasses them.  It would be two more years before Marvel had it’s own female led super hero movie with Captain Marvel (2019), so DC can proudly claim that they were the first to reach that benchmark.  Thankfully, it was also a benchmark that finally was worthy of the character and fulfilled the long awaited promise of seeing Wonder Woman brought to cinematic life.

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017)

Directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon

But, just as quickly as Wonder Woman was able to put the DCEU on the right track, the Justice League pretty much immediately derailed it once again.  This film is notoriously known as one of the most troubled productions in movie history, and all of that misfortune is clear to see in the theatrical cut that we saw in the Fall of 2017.  Still reeling from the inability to compete with Marvel year after year, Justice League went through numerous rewrites and reshoots throughout it’s production, with DC constantly second-guessing itself.  Originally planned as a two part event, DC decided to take the full four hours of content that Zack Snyder had assembled in his cut, and demanded it be whittled down into a theater friendly two hour cut.  Unfortunately, a family tragedy prevented Snyder from being available to restructure the film according to those new demands in order to meet the deadline, so it was decided to give the film over to someone else.  That someone would be Joss Whedon, the man who delivered a monster hit for Marvel with The Avengers.  If he could assemble the Avengers successfully on screen, surely he’d do the same with the Justice League, right?  It turns out Whedon’s magic touch couldn’t save the sinking ship of the Justice League; if anything he made things worse.  Costly re-shoots didn’t give any added coherence to the story, but instead only added awkwardly shoe-horned jokes into the mix.  And in the years since, stories have come out about how bad of an experience the re-shoots were for the actors involved.  Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot pointed out the abusive and belittling behavior Whedon directed toward them on set, with Fisher pointing out how his Cyborg character (who was the main focus of Snyder’s cut) seemed to be diminished in the story completely in what seemed like retaliation from Whedon.  Joss Whedon’s reputation has never recovered from this disastrous production, and DC and Warner Brother’s bad decisions on this film would have a ripple effect across the remainder of the DCEU, particularly with fans.  I didn’t even get to the other problems with the movie, from Henry Cavill’s awful CGI upper lip to the bad animation of the villainous Steppenwolf.  Snyder still received sole directorial credit, but it’s unfair to call this his movie as it is more DC’s and Joss Whedon’s mess.  Of course, Zack Snyder would have his final word in the end, but that will have to wait for Part Two.

AQUAMAN (2018)

Directed by James Wan

If you were to make a guess as to which DC super hero would emerge as the box office champion in the DCEU from the outset, I don’t think anyone would’ve picked Aquaman.  But that’s exactly what happened.  Aquaman was the only DCEU film to ever cross the billion dollar mark at the worldwide box office, which was a welcome result for DC and Warner Brothers after they saw Justice League flame out the year before.  One thing that probably helped Aquaman get to a billion dollars was because it came out in the year that you could say was the peak of the super hero genre; 2018.  This was the same year that saw the record breaking success of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War from Marvel.  But it wasn’t just Marvel Studios making a killing.  Sony was also making a killing with their Spider-Man villain spin-off Venom, starring Tom Hardy, as well as their critically acclaimed animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.  It was just the best time possible to have a super hero movie in theaters, and Aquaman was in the right place at the right time.  It also helped that Jason Mamoa was a genuine magnetic star who was more than capable of carrying a movie like this on his huge shoulders.  The film was definitely a big departure for director James Wan, who was better known up to this point for his work in horror, being the architect of the Saw and Conjuring franchises.  In my own personal opinion, I felt that Wan’s vision was a little scattershot in bringing the world of Aquaman to life, as the story feels overstuffed with too many elements.  It’s like Wan thought he was only ever going to get one shot at making an Aquaman movie, so he was determined to put it all into this movie.  There’s one too many villains in this film, with Aquaman battling both of his comic book nemeses, Oceanmaster and Black Manta.  The finale is also a CGI overload that is often hard to follow.  But, I know my opinions are in the minority as audiences still ate this movie up, and helped to elevate Aquaman into the upper tier of cinematic super heroes.  It also helped to secure the survival of the DCEU for a bit longer, especially in the wake of Marvel hitting it’s own mighty crescendo.

SHAZAM (2019)

Directed by David F. Sandberg

If I were to select a film out of the DCEU that would be my own personal favorite, it would be Shazam.  I think that this is the movie where DC finally hit the right note with their cinematic universe.  The movie was grounded yet still magical, funny without feeling forced, and more than anything represented what a DC film could be without living in the shadow of the Marvel.  This was what the DCEU should have been from the beginning.  It doesn’t hit you over the head with the heavy metaphors and symbolism of Zack Snyder’s films, nor has the awkwardly laid in humor of what Joss Whedon brought to Justice League.  It’s just a charming story told with enough visual imagination to make it feel like a true comic book come to life. The character of Shazam was always going to be a tricky one to pull off, so it mattered a lot in how they would cast the character, in both forms.  Teenage actor Asher Angel brings enough likable charm to the role of Billy Batson, and even manages to do well in the dramatic moments as he frantically tries to discover who he is after being orphaned as a child.  When he transforms into the super being Shazam, Zachary Levi takes over and does a magnificent job of portraying a teenager in a grown man’s body, with often hilarious results.  Helping to bridge the performance between the two actors in the role is the perfect chemistry both have with the character Freddy Freeman (played with perfect comedic chops by Jack Dylan Grazer).  What especially helps this movie to soar unlike so many of the other DCEU films is that it doesn’t feel as labored as the others.  This movie seemed to be detached just a bit more from the DCEU master plan, so it was able to stand out more and be it’s own thing, which helps the movie as a whole to feel more like a complete vision rather than just a cog in the machine.  This is what also helped Wonder Woman to stand out too, with the greater vision of the cinematic universe not getting in the way of telling a stand alone story.  The fact that they could do this with a character as obscure in the DC pantheon as Shazam just goes to show that when done correctly, any super hero can work on the big screen.  You just need to combine comic book action with a compelling story, especially one that’s an inspiring coming of age narrative like in this film.  At this point in time, it also looked like DC was set to compete with Marvel on relatively strong common ground in terms of tone and story.  But, the turn of the decade would bring it’s own challenges.

BIRDS OF PREY AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN (2020)

Directed by Cathy Yan

The mouthful that is this movie’s title gives you a bit of an indication of the whirlwind of mayhem that this movie ultimately ended up being.  It follows up the events of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, but also goes out of it’s way to indicate that this is very much not a sequel.  The movie was mainly produced to be a showcase for Margot Robbie in the role that turned her into a star.  Most people just refer to this as the Harley Quinn movie, and that’s an apt description.  She is undeniably the centerpiece of the movie, with the titular super girl team being the background players.  Margot Robbie makes the most of this film, as she is a hilarious delight playing Harley Quinn in all of her madcap madness.  Of all of the DCEU films, this is the one that is undeniably a comedy first and foremost; with the Deadpool films being the closest spiritual inspirations to this movie in the genre.  Unfortunately, this tone made the movie receive a mixed reception from fans who were not fully on board with this kind of cartoonish shift in tone for the DCEU.  It was also the first DCEU film released theatrically with an R-Rating, which also was a major shift in strategy for DC.  If you take it on it’s own outside of it’s place in the DCEU, this movie is a fun subversion of the super hero genre, with Margot Robbie’s game comedic chops delivering a lot of laughs along the way.  But, this was at a point when the DC fandom itself was greatly fractured, with the “Release the Snyder Cut” movement hitting it’s highest point and Zack Snyder stans angrily rejecting the sillier tone that this movie was starting to put forward.  Sadly, a lot of factors worked against Birds of Prey’s favor, especially the looming disaster that was the Covid-19 pandemic that ultimately cut it’s time at the box office short.  Of all the official DCEU films, this is the one that most people forget about, and it’s too bad because on it’s own it’s a funny little film with a hilarious performance by Margot Robbie as Harley.  I would like to think that the confidence she built as a comedic performer in this film and the Suicide Squad movies would eventually help her deliver the iconic work she did in Barbie (2023) a few short but arduous years later.

At this point, we break this overview of the DCEU into separate halves.  These first few years show DC struggling to find their way into getting a cinematic universe to gel together on the big screen with a lot of bad choices in the beginning leading to some gradual successes.  The second half of this retrospective, which I will get to later this year, will show how the DCEU inevitably came apart in a post-pandemic world, leading to what now will be a complete overhaul and reboot.  You may wonder why I didn’t include the Oscar-winning Joker (2019) starring Joaquin Phoenix in my retrospective.  This is because DC themselves have classified that particular film as an “else-worlds” story disconnected from their cinematic universe storyline; so it doesn’t count as an official DCEU film.  The same will still apply to the Matt Reeves directed The Batman (2022), which opened alongside the second half of movies in the DCEU slate.  What is definitely clear from the overview of movies in this article is that DC was consistently running from behind in the race against Marvel, and they never quite caught up to their rival.  Though there were certainly bright spots with Wonder WomanAquaman, and Shazam, the fact that the build-up and failed execution of a Justice League movie clouded so much of their reputation just showed that the DCEU was always doomed to fail.  More than anything, it was  the mess that was the Justice League movie that dragged everything down with it.  But it can also be said that the lackluster results of Man of Steel may have caused the ripple effects of failure from the very outset.  The Hall of Justice could never stand on a faulty foundation.  Even with all that, the DCEU still gave us some individually strong movies that are still worthwhile to watch on their own.  This, as I’ll point out in Part Two, is even true of some of the movies in the back half of the DCEU, even if they failed to deliver at the box office.  I will always be entertained by the charming innocence of Shazam, and the inspiring heroism displayed in Wonder Woman.  The latter’s No Man’s Land sequence I would argue stands up as one of the greatest scenes ever in a super hero movie, right alongside iconic moments like the train fight in Spider-Man 2 (2004) or the Airport fight scene from Marvel’s Civil War.  The story of the DCEU still has more stories to tell, but from these first eight films, the definite impression left behind is one of valiant efforts made to work with a flawed plan that was never going to pan out like it was intended to.

Making Movies Fresh – Modern Film Discourse and the Flaw With Rotten Tomatoes

Looking at the state of film criticism in our social media driven world, I feel like there has developed a disconnect over what people actually think a film critique really is.  In the last few years, film discourse has very much opened up to allow more voices into the conversation, with social media amplifying opinions across the spectrum.  This democratization of film criticism, which has allowed fans and casual viewers to have a voice that reflects back towards Hollywood, has certainly helped to change things for the good in the industry.  Instead of having the trades and large media conglomerates dominate the discourse around film, groups that otherwise never had a voice before with regards to media are able to deliver their own takes about Hollywood that break through the wall of insider talk.  Minority groups can voice their criticism about representation in various forms of media, and their critiques can now lead to a new re-examination on Hollywood’s part in order to rectify that disparity.  But, there is a downside to the increased input of the casual film criticism out there in the media, and it has had it’s own negative effect on not just the media, but the culture as well.   Part of the problem is that we’ve reduced film criticism down to a mathematical formula, which itself is a reductive action done to what should be a personal experience.  And it’s a problem that Hollywood has only themselves to blame, because they have put too much stock into scoring their outputs in a way that is more friendly to their data driven work flow.  While it may help to cover their bottom line by getting quantifiable numbers to base their actions on, it also belittles the art of filmmaking itself as everything becomes standardized.

Of course, the current media trend that I am talking about is a thing called Critic’s scores.  These are accumulated numbers based on published film reviews that are put together to create an average percentage that quantifies a movie’s overall score.  There are numerous sites that offer this kind of ranking, but the most well known of these is a site called Rottentomatoes.com.  Rottentomatoes.com was started in 1998 by a group of undergraduates from the University of California, Berkeley.  The site was simply a statistics site that used movie reviews as the catalyst.  Interest in the site grew over time, and they eventually were bought by larger media conglomerates; first IGN in 2004, then to Flixster in 2010, and then finally by movie ticket retailer Fandango in 2016, who have been running it ever since.  Rotten Tomatoes gained their notoriety through their distinguishable ratings system, which much like a school grading system offered up a pass or fail metric to base a movie’s reception on; only by their branding based on tomatoes, movies either fell into fresh or rotten categories.  Anything above 60%, and the movie would be fresh.  Anything below that, and it would be rotten.  A few years in, once Rotten Tomatoes gained more notoriety, they began to give movies a certified fresh ranking, meaning that the movie statistically could never fall out of fresh territory based on the ratio of the number of reviews and their aggregate score.  With certification like this, Rotten Tomatoes scores became marks of quality for films, and film companies began to use their Tomatoes score as part of their marketing.  If Rotten Tomatoes deems it fresh, then you will hear of it.  Other sites like IMDb and Metacritic also have developed their own ratings systems that in some way or another grab the attention of movie executives.

While seeing how well a movie performs on Rotten Tomatoes can be informative, the statistical aspect of their ratings system can also be misleading.  Film criticisms are often multifaceted and nuanced, and it can’t just be summed up in binary fresh or rotten ranking.  Sometimes, critics find themselves in the middle, neither loving nor hating a movie, but find the good and the bad in movies that are often hard to fully sum up.  Sometimes, critics even change their mind about a film after a sitting on it for a while, giving it a re-consideration after a second or third viewing.  But that kind of nuance is just not acceptable in a business that requires immediate feedback.  While Hollywood is able to get a quantifiable score out of places like Rotten Tomatoes, they are also getting a snapshot of that movie’s response.  And sometimes, that can actually have a negative effect on itself.  Something of that order happened happened to Disney with two of their films this last summer.  Disney decided to gamble big on the releases of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) and Pixar’s Elemental (2023) by having them premiere at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.  The reception from the festival was tepid to say the least, and it resulted in both of the films sitting with Rotten scores on RT.com for almost a month before their wide releases based on the few, high brow reviewers who saw it at Cannes.  This had a negative effect on both film’s box office, as they performed well below their expected openings.  But, over time, Dial of Destiny and Elemental did pull themselves out of the Rotten territory and ultimately ended up fresh at 70% and 76% respectively, with Elemental even earning a very late Certified badge.  The movies’ overall response in the end turned positive, but the damage had already been done by those low numbers and both movies struggled at the box office.

We are at a point where audiences are very well aware of the Fresh vs. Rotten metric, and it’s affecting their choices in what movies they go out to see.  This is largely due to the fact that movie tickets today are quite expensive and the customer is very discerning about what they want to spend their money on.  The Rotten Tomatoes score has become a powerful metric within the film business because it’s an easy to understand rating that all audience can look towards.  Much like all consumer ratings out there, people just want to look at the score and determine if it’s worth it to them to invest in it.  This is nothing new for film criticism.  For most people, when they look at a movie review, they don’t want to waste time reading through the critic’s every well thought out analysis; they just want to see the score.  That score of course varies from critic to critic.  Critics either use a letter grade, or a star rating, or in my case on this blog a number grade.  Some critics even just uses a simple binary rating system in the positive or negative.  It’s all based on how the critic wishes to quantify their overall response in a simple way to sum it up for the reader.  This of course is what fuels the scores of sites like Rotten Tomatoes, which takes those scores and creates an aggregate number.  But there is a flaw in the way this score is put together.  Quantifying a review in many ways is subjective.  There are plenty of film critics out there who don’t even give a score.  How does Rotten Tomatoes take their critiques into account.  At this point, we see where the binary system becomes a bit flawed, as a review that sounds negative in certain areas and positive in others without giving out a score messes with the algorithm of the site’s metric.  As a result, a guess is made as to where the movie falls, and that can have an effect on the overall score of a movie.  This of course becomes even more of an issue because these are numbers that matter a lot right now to Hollywood and has an influence on how they market a film as well as how what they greenlight in the first place.

Published film critics’ scores being aggregated into a number is one thing that becomes a problem when that number doesn’t reflect nuance.  It’s also another thing when there is also a user rating in play.  Rotten Tomatoes and other sites do offer a secondary number based on input from their own users, which on it’s own is a worthwhile service that allows the casual user to have a say as well.  The unfortunate thing about user ratings is how open they sometimes are, which can sometimes lead to abuses of the ranking system.  There is this practice that has arisen on places like Rotten Tomatoes called “review bombing,” which is where a coordinated effort is made to load a bunch of negative reviews all at once onto a websites user rating in order to purposely drive the overall score down.  Most often, this is done with the purpose of damaging the public perception of a movie, which the organized group can point to as proof of their own slanted opinion.  You definitely see the effect of this with movies that have very polarized critics’ and users’ scores on Rotten Tomatoes, such as Captain Marvel (2019), Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and The Little Mermaid (2023).  What makes review-bombing a suspicious activity is that it usually happens before a movie comes out, as most of the user reviews seem to have been purposely negative without even having the context of seeing the movie.  As observed, the most often reason for these review bombs happen is because a group is attacking a film for it’s content rather than artistic merit, such as if it is focuses on a marginalized group or contains a message that they object to.  The intent of the review bombing is to get Hollywood’s attention and make them believe that these often small minority opinions are much bigger than they really are and try to force the industry to conform to their own narrow-minded worldview.  It may be dishonest, but it has had an effect before.  I would argue that Lucasfilm took the review bombing of The Last Jedi too seriously and it caused them to do too much over-correction which resulted in the mess that was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).  Rotten Tomatoes even recognized the damaging effects of these trolling review bombs and they changed their metric to only reflect certified user reviews.  Sadly, we are in a place where valid criticism and baseless trolling get mixed together, and it unfortunately becomes even harder to allow genuine non-professional voices into the mix without having to gatekeep free speech.

So, how do we look at fair film criticism in this kind of environment where opinions are too often hard to take seriously.  I try to look at what I value in film criticism.  When I was developing into a burgeoning cinephile in my formative years, I took the opinions of film critics seriously.  My childhood overlapped with the rise of film criticism as entertainment, as part of my weekly routine was to watch Siskel & Ebert’s syndicated review show on TV.  Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert may have unfortunately also contributed to the reductive binary rating metric that place like Rotten Tomatoes emulate; famously popularizing the thumbs up or thumbs down rating on their show.  Truth be told, that’s what made their show a draw for me as a young film lover, as I eagerly wanted to see which way the thumbs would fall for each movie on their show.  But having gone back to look at some of their old reviews on YouTube, another thing occurred to me about what they brought to their show; something that I probably didn’t rightfully appreciate as a teenager.  Their reviews were simply not just about the binary thumbs rating; it was about how they expressed their thoughts about the movie.  That was the key to their success as film critics.  They could articulate why a movie was good or bad.  That’s the art of criticism that you just can’t put into a numeric score.  Film criticism is about engaging with a work of art, and stating what effect it had on you.  That’s what makes being a film critic worthwhile; it’s a art form within itself inspired by the response that we have to any type of media.  Some can deliver a succinct opinion within a strongly worded paragraph while others can spin a thesis’ worth of thoughts across multiple pages, and any one of these criticisms can be just as valid whether positive or negative because it is genuinely coming from an honest place.  It’s that kind of personal touch that in more and more ways is getting buried down in the discourse of film criticism as movie ratings are becoming more of an impersonal metric.

As it has become increasingly clear over time, the perceptions of Hollywood’s highs and lows are becoming increasingly manipulated into becoming part of larger narratives about culture and the arts.  People want to draw their own conclusions about Hollywood and they use simplified metrics like those found on review sites like Rotten Tomatoes to define their narrative.  People attacking Hollywood for going “woke” for instance cite user ratings from Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb as proof of Hollywood being out of touch with the audience, though as I stated before those ratings can be heavily manipulated.  At the same time, certified ratings can also be skewed in favor of a positive response for a movie.  Sony Pictures got caught red handed with having a fake film reviewer submit positive reviews of their movies, and this may have juiced the numbers for some of their films on these ratings sites.  As we’ve seen, systems that can be easily manipulated should not have this kind of influence over an industry, and yet they are increasingly getting the notice of Hollywood who desperately want to use that Fresh rating in their marketing.  Those abusing the privilege of contributing to a film’s overall ranking are doing so with the intent of manipulating Hollywood, and that could lead to some dangerous consequences, like the silencing of disenfranchised groups who don’t have the same obsessive drive as internet trolls to hijack the narrative.  In the end, though site like Rotten Tomatoes have an immediate impact on a movie, it at the same time is not a long term one.  You’d be surprised how many movies receive a Rotten rating on RT.com and then years later develop into cult classics.  I can think of a dozen movies even in the last year which I think were rated too low or too high for my opinion.  A movie I liked, Shazam: Fury of the Gods (2023), received a rotten 53% from critics, which shows that I fell outside the majority consensus on that movie.  But at the same time, it doesn’t motivate me to change my opinion either.  Those critics ratings on Rotten Tomatoes or any other site are not a monolith, and if you disagree with the overall ratings, that’s fine.  Movies are a subjective art and we should all like what we like and not feel pressured to accept the “narrative.”

And while I do point out a lot of the flaws of the Rotten Tomato critical metric, there are some positive things that the site has done for movies in general that are worth celebrating.  The site does spotlight movies that otherwise would’ve gone unseen and it does function as a genuine entertainment new site, though one that is imbedded with the industry itself.  The same goes for IMDb, which is an invaluable resource for film information of all kinds.  People just need to look beyond the surface level of those Fresh or Rotten ratings and they’ll see the added worth of the sites they visit.  That’s something that is true about all film criticism in general.  Don’t just skip ahead to the final rating; read through and engage with the opinion that the film critic presented to you.  You may not agree with it, nor should you be obligated to, but taking into consideration the arguments made by a critic will allow you the view to have more nuanced reactions of your own.  When visiting Rotten Tomatoes, look through the blurbs of each critics reviews; you’ll find that sometimes there’s a caveat to a positive review or a silver lining to a negative one.  Maybe use those blurbs to seek a link to the original review itself if you are compelled to read more.  Some movies generate some very clear cut, one-sided opinions, but you’ll find a lot of other movies that often leave people conflicted.  One thing that I do like about the Certified Fresh label given to movies on Rotten Tomatoes is that they are often almost always won by small movies that normally would go unseen by mass audiences.  If the Rotten Tomatoes metric carries that much weight in the industry, it’s best that movies that should be spotlighted are the ones that receive the best responses with critics, and they are able to float to the top thanks to Rotten Tomatoes Certified label.  That’s ultimately what we want as film critics, to help get something that meant a lot to us seen that otherwise would be ignored.  We use our voices to articulate the love we have for film, and some of us do so in writing.  That’s why I created this blog site.  You may not agree with every opinion I have to say here, but I tell you that every word I write is my own and I am happy that it inspires any engagement from any of you, even if it’s in conflict with my opinion.  While Rotten Tomatoes and other sites like it are valuable as an aggregate collector of film critiques, just know that movies are more than just Fresh or Rotten; they are experiences that defy being just a number.