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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collecting Criterion – My Own Private Idaho (1991)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning – Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 8.5/10

Off the Page – Mildred Pierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thunderbolts* – Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 8/10

TCM Classic Film Festival 2025 – Film Exhibition Report

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

THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 2025

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

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

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

FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2025

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

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

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

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2025

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY, APRIL 27, 2025

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

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

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

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

The Movies of Summer 2025

The year has already been a roller coaster ride, and not just at the box office.  Focusing in on the state of movies for now, the last few months have been defined as being alarmingly weak at the box office, save for one unlikely savior.  The month of March was particularly marked with some alarming box office results.  In a month that has usually seen a strong performer or two taking advantage of those Spring Break crowds, this year’s March for the first time since Covid had failed to deliver a film that made over $100 million domestic.  This same time last year, we had two films reach that mark with Dune: Part Two (2024) and Godzilla vs. Kong: The New Empire (2024).  But this year, we had two of the costliest flops to to hit the screens in quite a while.  Warner Brothers’ ambitious sci-fi epic from auteur director Bong Joon-ho, Mickey 17 (2025) fizzled out pretty quickly beyond it’s opening weekend, and failed to recoup even a quarter of it’s original $100 million+ budget.  Then there was Disney’s Snow White (2025) which is going to be an even bigger financial loser for it’s studio, as Disney may finally be seeing it’s audience lose interest in their live action remake phase. Couple this with an under-performance from Marvel, with their recent film Captain America: Brave New World (2025) only barely reaching break even and a slew of other box office non-starters, 2025 is definitely starting off on the wrong footing.  But then came one of the most unexpected turnarounds in recent memory.  After three months of box office woes, suddenly theaters have been coming alive again with the surprising success of The Minecraft Movie (2025).  How the film is able to generate the box office it had had even with mostly negative reviews is certainly a mystery.  Some of it may be a Rocky Horror like phenomenon with audiences attending the films just for the trashiness of it all and to have the experience of seeing the movie with a rowdy crowd.  Whether people actually like it or not (and I certainly don’t) the good thing is that Minecraft is helping the movie theater industry weather what has been otherwise a bad start to the year.

Now of course it is time to look to the future and see what will be the movie that we’ll all be talking about in the Summer months ahead.  While the Spring has been a tough time at the box office so far, there are a lot of positive signs on the horizon that this Summer will fare a lot better.  Like in the years past, I will be going through this Summer’s most interesting coming attractions, and tell you which ones are the must sees, the ones that have me worried, and the ones that I think should be skipped.  Keep in mind, these previews are based on my own thoughts about the effectiveness of the marketing as well as the buzz that each one is generating before their respective releases.  My predictions don’t always pan out, and sometimes I may miss the mark and either overestimate or underestimate a movie.  The only thing I wish to make happen with these previews is to draw attention to the movies that are on the horizon in the hope that it helps all of you be informed about what to expect at the movies this upcoming season.  So, with all that said, let’s take a look at the Movies of Summer 2025

MUST SEES:

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS (JULY 25)

It’s a given every summer that when Marvel has a new movie coming out, people are going to want to pay attention.  After taking most of last year off with only one single theatrical release, Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), Marvel is back to it’s more ambitious release schedule of multiple films per year.  They had a hard time with Captain America: Brave New World this February, but that was a film long plagued by production problems.  This film and the other Summer release which I’ll spotlight later have not had as difficult a development and are actually arriving with a lot of positive buzz.  Of the remaining Marvel movies, it’s this one that looks to be something really interesting.  Marvel has attempted to bring comic books “first family” to the big screen twice before, and it hasn’t worked out yet.  2015’s Fant4stic was an especially miserable failure.  This time around, it does look like Marvel is making an effort to get this one right and do justice to the iconic characters of the Fantastic Four.  It’s interesting that they are starting their new version of the Fantastic Four in a different universe than the regular MCU.  While it’s an interesting call story wise, it does offer the creative team to make some bold choices in the world building.  The retro-futuristic world that they live in is visually very stunning; mixing high sci-fi with mid-century design.  Another positive sign is the comic book accurate look of Ben Grimm, aka The Thing.  Before, he was either an actor buried under a ton of prosthetic make-up, or in Fant4stic’s case, a terribly animated CGI monstrosity.  Here, his appearance is very close to how he looks in the comic books, while at the same time allowing for expressive features that help bring his personality out much better.  It helps that Emmy winning character actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach is also doing a great job of embodying the character.  Indeed, all of the Four members look right for the part, including Joseph Quinn as the Human Torch, Vanessa Kirby as The Invisible Woman, and Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic.  The fact that they’ll also be dealing with a galactic threat the size of the celestial earth-devouring Galactus should also make this quite the spectacle.  It took a while for Marvel Studios to finally get the rights back to bring the Fantastic Four into the MCU.  Let’s hope the third time is the charm for these four.

SUPERMAN (JULY 11)

While Marvel is preparing it’s summer roll out of highly anticipated titles, it’s rival studio DC is about to begin a new era.  Under the supervision of director James Gunn, we are about to see a relaunch of the DC Universe, and who better to get things started than the man of steel himself, Superman.  The Snyderverse Superman, played by Henry Cavill, always felt like he got the short end in the DCEU, as director Zack Snyder seemed much more interested in the Batman side of DC’s catalog.  For this new version, James Gunn himself is taking on the responsibility of launching Superman’s new era, and that seems to be especially a good sign for the future of the character.  One of the best things about James Gunn as a filmmaker is that he puts a lot of value in comic book tropes, and in particular, he embraces the sillier side that helps to make them so much fun.  He displayed that perfectly with his Guardian of the Galaxy trilogy at Marvel, and managed to carry that over to DC with his excellent The Suicide Squad (2021) and Peacemaker series.  What seems to be especially exciting about his new take on Superman is that he’s not wasting any time in building the world around him.  No more rehashing Superman’s already well tread back story.  For this movie, the DC Universe is already fully formed, and we are just jumping right in.  It’s probably smart, because the problem with the Snyderverse was that they were attempting to build everything up from scratch while at the same time speed running through all of the key story-lines, preventing anything from actually coalescing into a complete whole.  Here Superman (played by newcomer David Corenswet) shares this world with a lot more super heroes, including a Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, and a few other in what looks like to be a big screen adaptation of the All-Star Superman comics.  Oh, and Krypto the super dog is also making his live action debut as well.  In contrast with the Snyderverse, the main goal of Gunn’s take on Superman is to return to the sense of fun that we had with the old Richard Donner/ Christopher Reeve classic, which is probably why there are hints of John Williams’ iconic score in the trailer.  Here’s hoping that James Gunn puts the DCU on a strong footing and brings about a bright new future with one of the greatest super heroes of all time.

THUNDERBOLTS* (MAY 2)

While James Gunn is getting his universe up and running over at DC, Marvel is preparing to introduce it’s own take on the Suicide Squad.  When the Avengers are unavailable, who does humanity turn to is the question being posed by this movie.  The answer is a grouping of misfits and outcasts with something to prove.  The team assembled for this version of the Thunderbolts are some of the characters that we’ve been introduced to along the way in the post Endgame MCU, many of whom have done something wrong in the past.  The team consists of former black widow Yelena (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), phase shifting criminal Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), assassin Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and disgraced Captain America turned U.S. Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell), all under the supervision of CIA chief Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).  The idea of assembling these tarnished figures together and hoping they have it within them to save the world is an appealing one to base a movie around, and certainly new ground for Marvel to cover in their movies.  I’m interested in seeing how these more hard edged characters work off each other, and the chance at redemption could lead to some very interesting character building.  We’ve gotten to meet these characters in various other films; now we’ll see how they function when they are in the spotlight.  I am especially excited to see David Harbour’s Red Guardian here, since he’s been one of the best new characters that Marvel has introduced in the last couple years, and he and Florence Pugh’s Yelena were easily the best parts of what was an otherwise forgettable Black Widow (2021) movie.  Bringing in Marvel veteran Sebastian Stan as his popular character the Winter Soldier should also offer up some fun character interactivity too.  But it will also be interesting to see how they fare against an enemy as powerful as Sentry (Lewis Pullman) in this story.  And what is the mystery behind the asterix in the title that they’ve been teasing about in the marketing.  These may not be A-list Marvel characters, but as we’ve seen with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, the B and C list characters can make a movie a lot of fun when they have their own opportunity to shine.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING (MAY 23)

In 1996, the first Mission: Impossible movie premiered with it’s star Tom Cruise in top action hero form.   Nearly 30 years and eight movies later, Tom Cruise is still delivering heart pounding action on a grand scale with this long running series.  But, with this new film, there seems to be a drive to the end of the road.  This was originally supposed to be Part II to the previous film, Dead Reckoning Part I (2023), but the filmmakers decided this movie should stand on it’s own, because it may not be the end of the franchise completely, but it’s quite possible that this will be the end for the character of Ethan Hunt.  There’s a finality that’s being presented in this trailer, showcasing all of the events that have led up to now, showing that it’s all been leading to this.  It’s understandable that Tom Cruise may want to step back from doing these movies now considering that he’s well into his sixties and probably can’t pull off the same amazing stunts anymore, though let’s face it, he’s lasted far longer than most in this business.  The only question is, how big of a bang does he want to go out on.  The previous movies had Cruise climbing the outside of the world’s tallest building, hang onto the side of a real plane in the air, piloting a helicopter solo, and in the last film riding off of a cliff on a motorcycle.  Every Mission: Impossible movie has had at least one stand out scene with Tom Cruise really putting himself into the action rather than using a stunt double.  We see some hints of what we might get in this movie, but how well will they stand against all the rest.  You would think that Tom Cruise wants to save the best for last.  Regardless, these movies are always a ton of fun to watch and here’s hoping that this movie at least measures up to all of the movies that have come before it.  The cast that he’s assembled through all the previous movies are all here, plus a few new faces.  I’m especially happy to see Ving Rhames still there because apart from Cruise, he’s the only actor to have appeared in all eight movies.  Whether this is the end, or the beginning of a new era, it will be a hard act to follow for Tom Cruise.  The Mission: Impossible franchise has been his own personal baby for decades and ever the showman, he’ll definitely want us to say goodbye in a grand finale.

ELIO (JUNE 20)

You can always rely on Pixar Animation to deliver some good-nature fun in the middle of the Summer season.  This film was originally supposed to come out last Summer, but was pushed back due to the post-Strike reshuffling of the schedule.  The delay may have worked out in it’s favor, because a year ago, the Pixar brand was not exactly on the strongest footing.  Lightyear (2002) under-performed in theaters, and Elemental (2023) started off poorly before managing to recoup thanks to word of mouth.  Releasing Elio right after this, an original story without a whole lot of per-existing interest from audiences at a time when the Pixar brand couldn’t help to lift it up, would have been a disaster for the already beleaguered studio.  Thankfully, the highly anticipated sequel Inside Out 2 (2024) took its Summer slot instead and gave Pixar a much needed win at the box office.  With a worldwide gross of over $1.5 billion, Inside Out shattered records and re-affirmed that Pixar indeed could still deliver at the box office.  This more positive environment should help Elio out.  It almost certainly won’t perform as huge as Inside Out 2, but it should have a pretty healthy run that will be on par with most of Pixar’s best movies.  It all depends on how well audiences respond to the story.  What they seem to be going for with this new film is a coming of age story with a child who can’t seem to make friends on Earth, so he instead tries to find his place off planet.  The character of Elio himself looks like he’s going to be a lot of fun to watch, especially when he begins to interact with all of the various alien species.  Pixar seems to perform at it’s best when it deals with the emotions of growing up and discovering one’s place in the world.  This is trope that has proved to work well for them in the past with movies like Coco (2017), Luca (2021) and Turning Red (2022).  We’ll see if Elio is able to live up to the other films.  It definitely looks like it’s going to be a visual feast as well, but of course that’s to be expected from Pixar.  It also marks the first solo directorial effort from Coco co-director Adrian Molina, so we know that it’s going to come from a filmmaker capable of making a movie that balances genuine emotion with a lot of fun mixed in.  Let’s hope that this renewed strength in the Pixar brand keeps going with this film and beyond.

MOVIES THAT HAVE ME WORRIED:

LILO & STITCH (MAY 23)

If there is one thing that seems to not be as safe a bet at the box office as it used to, it’s live action remakes of classic animated films.  Disney, which has been leading the charge with these types of movies, enjoyed some major box office success in the past decade remaking all of the major films in their animated canon.  Some like Beauty and the Beast (2017) and The Lion King (2019) even made the studio well over a billion dollars each.  But that box office domination seems to have lessened over time.  The Little Mermaid (2023) performed well domestically, but struggled internationally.  The Lion King prequel Mufasa (2024) also struggled to perform as well as it’s predecessor.  But what has especially thrown cold water on the remake craze at Disney is the disastrous performance of Snow White (2025), which has fallen rapidly off of the box office charts and will likely lose Disney money in the long run.  So, we may be seeing this very divisive trend possibly coming to an end.  Although, that does depend on the remaining remakes that are still in the pipeline.  This summer we are getting a remake of Disney’s late Renaissance era classic Lilo & Stitch (2002), which definitely has a lot to prove in the wake of Snow White.  The one thing that is in this film’s favor is that it makes a lot more sense remaking this film in live action compared to Snow White.  The original Lilo was one of Disney’s more earthbound films, even with all of the sci-fi elements, so it doesn’t take a whole lot to breath it into life in live action.  You don’t need to make lavish sets and costumes; all this movie needs to do is film on location in Hawaii and try to match the vibe of the original film as best it can.  And it does feel like the movie is managing to find that balance.  The CGI Stitch “live action” model does look very adorable, and original film director Chris Sanders returns to do the voice.  Even more importantly, the film seems like it found the right child actor to play Lilo with newcomer Maia Kaeloha.  The one thing that this movie needs to prove more than anything, and some that most of these remakes fail to accomplish, is justify it’s existence.  It has to stand up on it’s own in contrast with the original, and hopefully it can do that and be just as charming as well.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (JUNE 13)

Speaking of live action remakes of animated classics, Dreamworks is getting in on the action now.  Considering that Dreamworks hasn’t been around as long as Disney and hasn’t built up the same amount of classic films over that same time, it’s easy to see why they haven’t been jumping on the bandwagon themselves.  But that ends this Summer as they release their first live action remake through their parent studio Universal.  The original How to Train Your Dragon (2010) is undeniably one of the best films that Dreamworks Animation has ever made; probably the best.  And compared with most of the other Dreamworks movies, this one makes a whole lot more sense than others.  You don’t see a lot of sense trying to do Shrek (2001) in live action.  Dragon was a film that did strive for a bit of grittiness and life like texture to it’s story and world.  More than anything, translating the world of the original movie into live action, with it’s very Viking like aesthetic, seems very natural and the remake definitely feels like it’s doing a very one to one translation.  The film even has one of the original voice actors returning, with Gerard Butler reprising his role as King Stoick.  There’s just one thing that might end up hurting the film in the end, which are the dragons themselves.  The problem is that they still look too cartoonish, and it kind of breaks the life like aesthetic that this film is going for.  Toothless, the main dragon in this film, just looks like the same exact model as the character in the original film, just with a different skin texture.  It might have helped to have changed up the look of the character just a bit more.  Honestly, Disney seems to have matched that better in their Lilo & Stitch remake, as their Stitch does look like he fits better in live action.  Maybe the dragon’s animation might work better in the context of the film, but again, it has to justify it’s existence in contrast with the original.  The original film had an epic quality that is hard to replicate, and if they are just doing the same movie over again, it may not work out well because audiences already fell in love with the original.  We’ll have to see if this Dragon can indeed soar on it’s own.

28 YEARS LATER (JUNE 20)

For the most part, there are a lot of exciting things about this movie.  It reunites the original creative team behind the original, Danny Boyle directing from a script by Alex Garland.  It also puts together an impressive cast, with Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes.  Plus it delivered one of the best movie trailers in recent memory, with a chilling montage of post-apocalyptic carnage underscored by a disturbing 1915 recording of a recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s powerful anti-war poem “Boots.”  The one thing that may unfortunately work against the film is that the trailer may have been too good.  I don’t know if the movie itself is going to display the same kind of artistic intensity that this trailer has.  Kudos to the marketing team that put this one out, because it’s almost a two minute long art piece within itself.  The re-team of Boyle and Garland, who last worked together on the original 28 Days Later (2002) over twenty years, should still make this movie a well crafted horror action film.  But I feel like the trailer may be misleading us into believing that this movie is going to be something that it isn’t.  I imagine that the real film is going to be more of a slow burn leading to some big set pieces.  The trailer seems to be preparing us for a much more intense experience.  We may still get that, but it’s going to feel very different than what the trailer showed.  Also, I’m pretty sure that Kipling poem appears nowhere in the final film; it’s just something that the marketing department thought would be cool to use in the trailer.  We’ll see how well this performs once it’s in theaters.  It’s a mid Summer horror film, which often has seen a lot of success in past years.  My hope is that the movie does live up to the promise of it’s intense marketing campaign.  It’s hard to get audiences excited in another zombie movie, which is itself a pretty over-saturated and diluted genre.  Perhaps that’s why the trailer had to go as hard as it does; to get us re-interested in this kind of movie again.

THE NAKED GUN (AUGUST 1)

Making this movie would easily be dismissed as sacrilege in most circumstances.  The original Abrahams and Zucker classic is one of the funniest comedies ever made and one of the iconic roles that turned Leslie Nielsen into an unlikely comedy legend.  But, over time both the Naked Gun franchise and the spoof comedy genre died off, so it’s unusual that a studio would want to pick it up again.  The one trying to make an attempt this time is producer Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy and Ted fame.  He clearly has a soft spot for Naked Gun and it’s clearly seen in his style of comedy.  So, it makes sense for him to be the new shepherd for this series.  And to take over the role of Frank Drebin from Leslie Nielsen, it makes sense to go with someone of the same ilk like Liam Neeson.  Neeson already has been within Seth MacFarlane’s circle with cameos in movies like A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) and Ted 2 (2015).  The only question is, can this movie still be funny?  The spoof genre died out for a reason, because the movies just kept getting less and less funny.  It’s hard to tell how well this movie will pull it off, but the trailer certainly shows that it will be trying for a goofy tone.  It might work out well, given Liam Neeson’s participation here, but it also might be a horrible mess too.  I’ll give the movie this, that O.J. Simpson joke in the trailer is legit very funny.  At least the movie is actually acknowledging the elephant in the room there.  Seth MacFarlane’s team probably understands that there is a lot to prove here, and they clearly have a reverence for the original and will try to do it justice here.  It certainly won’t be anywhere near as inspired as the original film, but if it can still make most of us laugh, than that’s a plus.  The worst thing they could do is make a Naked Gun movie without a single joke that works, and at least from the trailer we see that at least one joke does land.  I worry that we’ll get the former, but I do hope that we’ll at least get something fun and enjoyable

MOVIES TO SKIP:

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH (JULY 2)

Fool me once is how the phrase goes.  Jurassic Park was a one of a kind masterpiece that still holds up over 30 years later.  Since then, the franchise has failed time and again to recapture the magic of that original.  Even Spielberg could do it with The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), which is easily his worst film.  Jurassic World (2015) came closest to getting there with a fresh new take on the concept, showing us the park in a fully open to the public capacity, but the two sequels that have come after have squandered any of that good will by getting progressively dumber with each outing.  It seems that Universal Pictures is looking to soft re-boot the franchise again by starting fresh with a new cast.  Gone are the stars of the last three movies, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, and instead we get Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali.  While the cast may be new, the same old action scenes look to be more of the familiar.  The premise of scientists and explorers putting themselves in harms way for the sake of studying these dinosaurs seems to be overplayed at this point.  What happened to the more intriguing concept of dinosaurs being let loose into our world that was established a few movies ago.  That seems to have gone nowhere and based on this movie, which chooses to show dinosaurs yet again confined to a remote island, the past continuity of the franchise really doesn’t seem to matter at all.  This movie is just more cash grabbing by the studio, wringing out every cent they can get from a franchise that has been fruitful for them in the past, but is continually running out of ideas.  For this franchise to survive beyond this, it’s better if the studio looks beyond formula and stop just trying to make the same movie over and over again.

FREAKIER FRIDAY (AUGUST 8)

I understand why Disney would be choosing to make this sequel now.  Lindsay Lohan seems to have gotten her life back together after a few years of scandal and hard living and is seeing a career rebound thanks to her well received holiday movies on Netflix.  And Jamie Lee Curtis is riding high after her Oscar win for the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022).  And they both genuinely want to work together again on something.  Unfortunately, like many other sequels made decades after the fact, this movie is just merely doing the same plot over again, only they are including a new generation.  Chalk this movie up to being not a film for me.  I didn’t much care for the original either, nor the even more original film from the 70’s starring a young Jodie Foster that it was a remake of.  The only thing this movie may have going for it is the report between Lohan and Curtis.  They clearly are invested in doing this film.  But, the era in which this kind of movie could work seems like it has passed.  Another body swap comedy is a hard sell, even to a new generation.  I think it would have served better for Curtis and Lohan to re-team in a movie that was more original.  Fans of the original film may like this one, but as we’ve seen with recent Disney live action legacy sequels like Hocus Pocus 2 (2022) and Disenchanted (2022), it’s hard to pick things back up after a twenty year gap.  Not only have you aged up, but so has your audience, and the newer generation may not hold it in the same regard.  We’ll see if this sequel manages to keep things freaky all these years later.

SMURFS (JULY 18)

And here we have a movie that already just spells disaster.  When the trailer puts it in your face that “Rihanna is Smurfette,” you know that there is nothing else noteworthy to sell about this movie.  It’s not even the first time that there has been an attempt to jumpstart a Smurfs film franchise.  There was the live action adaptation from the early 2010’s and then the all animated one from 2017.  Is there anything they are doing differently for this new one.  Doesn’t look like it.  All that they seem to have done is add a different, Spider-verse style filter on the CGI Smurf models to make them look more hand drawn, and that seems to be it.  Otherwise it’s all the lame jokes that we’ve seen before.  Remember how they would replace a curse word with the word “smurf” to make it feel more edgy while still keeping it G-rated.  That’s pretty much what they are doing again.  Hopefully this movie ends up like the ones before and just fades into obscurity, but then again that may just lead to more re-boots again in the future.

So, there you have my outlook on the upcoming Summer movie season.  This will be an interesting Summer to observe at the movies, because it will be the first true season that’s unaffected by the strikes of 2023.  All of the re-shuffling of the schedule in the wake of the labor walk-outs has resolved, mostly in the last calendar year, so this will be the first Summer in a while that feels like it used to. Or at least that’s the hope.  The thing that still lingers over the industry is the uncertainty in the economy due to the tariffs and trade war going on.  One of Hollywood’s big worries is that the lucrative Chinese market may get cut off, which has been essential towards helping the studios recoup financially with their massive, some would say over-budgeted tentpoles.  China has been moving away from Hollywood in recent years and favoring more of their own domestic cinema instead, but if the trade war makes them even less inclined to play American made films in their country, that could have a devastating effect on the movie business here.  We’ll have to see how things turn out.  Can domestic box office be enough in an economy that is becoming less stable?  It does give Hollywood some hope that Minecraft is performing as well as it is right now, and we’ll see if that translates over the course of the rest of the summer.  There will be the usual standards like Marvel, Pixar and DC, but there are a bunch more films out there that I didn’t mention that could also be big surprises.  It’s going to be an interesting couple of months, and the hope is that outside influences won’t spoil too much of the fun we’ll have at the movies.  I certainly am going to try to have as much fun as I can, and I’ll continue to share my thoughts on these movies in the meantime.  So, have a great Summer season at the movies and let cinema be the thing that helps to lift your spirit through troubled times.

Evolution of Character – The Joker

Comic books, especially in recent years, have been fertile ground for movie adaptations.  But what is especially interesting about the way that Hollywood brings the characters from comic books to life is the quick turnaround that happens between the different eras.  Because of the potential cash infusion that these kinds of films can make, the studios don’t like having these characters sitting on a shelf for too long.  That’s why when one comic book franchise runs out of steam, the the studio will immediately move to reboot it from scratch with a new team and actors in place.  That’s why in just a short amount of years we’ve seen so many different iterations of the same super heroes.  Now it’s not all uniform with every comic book character.  In the last 25 years, we’ve only had the same actor playing the role of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in the same time frame that we’ve had three different Spider-Men.  And in the era of the MCU, a different tactic has happened where characters end up retiring and passing the mantle of that character over to someone new, much like how it works in the comics.  But, for the most part, it’s been very common to see entirely new versions of these comic book characters hit the big screen very quickly after the last ones have run their course.  And perhaps no other comic book character has seen the most different movie variations over the course of his history than the caped crusader himself, Batman.  The last twenty years alone we’ve seen about four different versions of Batman hit the big screen, with another one coming up soon in the new James Gunn DC Universe being launched.  But, as wildly different as all of the Batman adaptations have been on the big screen, it’s his greatest nemesis that has seen an even more dramatic evolution.  The Joker, a super villain introduced in 1940 in Batman #1, has become not just one of cinema’s most iconic bad boys, but a role that is coveted by some of the world’s greatest actors, who in a few cases have even been rewarded for bringing this agent of chaos to life.  On the page, the Joker has always been a standout villain, being the twisted reflection of everything that Batman is and stands for.  But on the big screen, he’s evolved into something even more; a larger than life manifestation of our nightmares.  From his humble beginnings to the award winning cinema icon he is today, let’s take a look at the most iconic versions of the Joker ever put on screen

CESAR ROMERO from BATMAN THE MOVIE (1966)

The Batman TV series was very much a product of it’s time, but even still it has earned it’s own place in the overall Batman fandom.  The series starring Adam West as the iconic crime-fighter is a far cry from the darker and moodier version of the character that we would get in the decades after.  But, there is a lot of joy in watching the show in all of it’s colorful, psychedelic kitsch.  Even with all that, it’s still Batman’s story and when Batman’s on screen his rogues’ gallery is sure to follow.  Of course, one of the characters that had to make it into the show somehow was his greatest foe, the Joker, and he’s here played by veteran actor Cesar Romero.  Ironically, it’s the Joker that translated into the campy style of the show better than all the rest of the characters given that the “clown prince of crime” already had a larger than life flamboyance to him.  Romero definitely plays up the clownish side of the character very well, and in particular he may have been he most instrumental in defining the Joker laugh.  His multi-part cackle is simultaneously silly and also unsettling, and it’s a laugh that in many ways has been the blueprint for defining all of the Jokers that have come after.  This 1966 film adaptation was released into theater in between the first and second season of the wildly successful show.  The film pretty much is an extension of the show, using all the same sets and costumes, but expands on the scope of the adventure.  Ceasr Romero’s Joker returns, but is also joined by Burgess Meredith’s Penquin, Frank Gorshin’s Riddler, and Lee Merriweather’s Catwoman in a supervillain team-up.  Even though Joker is always defined in the comics as Batman’s most dangerous foe, in this movie he’s more or less just along for the ride, with the Penquin acting more as the ringleader.  But that’s not to say that he’s wasted in the movie either, as Romero’s Joker still looks like he’s enjoying the fun of being bad.  One interesting side note about Romero’s version of the Joker is that Cesar refused to shave off his mustache throughout the entire run of the show, including this movie.  The way that the filmmakers got around this was to paint over the mustache to make it blend in with the rest of his clown make-up, only it’s still very noticeable, especially in HD.  It’s definitely another weird quirk of the show, but at the same time, it also fits within Cesar Romero’s gonzo take on the character and makes just that much more loonier on both the big and small screen.

JACK NICHOLSON from BATMAN (1989)

Heading in the exact opposite direction of Cesar Romero’s campy Joker, we get this absolutely terrifying rendition from Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s darker re-imagining of Batman.  Nicholson had been playing roles for a long time that allowed him to be a bit of jokester, but his performance here is far more Jack Torrence than Randall McMurphy.  His origin for the Joker follows closely with the comic books, with him being scared after falling into a vat of chemicals after a row with Batman, a plot point taken directly from Alan Moore’s beloved The Killing Joke story line.  But what we get once he transforms fully into The Joker is purely of the imagination of Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson.  The permanent smile on his face, created with very effective prosthetic make-up, is definitely unsettling to look at, and it just make the moments when Joker starts breaking out into laughter all the more terrifying.  And Jack Nicholson chews into every scene as this character with great delight.  Nicholson had long been a fan of the Batman comics, and his involvement in the project was very instrumental in getting it greenlit at Warner Brothers, who were initially hesitant to bring Batman to the big screen.  To show his faith in the comic characters and Tim Burton’s vision, Nicholson even accepted a back ended deal that would help to save on his salary during production with the hope that it would pay out in the box office receipts, which of course it did and Jack got handsomely rewarded.  There seems to be a bit of the Cesar Romero silliness in Jack’s interpretation of the character, particularly in the moments when he starts dancing, but Jack also knows when to bring the menace out as well.  One of the most effectively terrifying moments is when he delivers the line “Wait until they get a load of me.”  The combination of a scowl with that sinister smile, all in the glow of moonlight is a very nightmarish image.  And Nicholson’s Joker laugh, while not entirely different from his own, is also effectively creepy.  For a whole generation of kids, of which I was one, this was our introduction to the Joker; a character that both scared us silly, but also left us captivated.  Michael Keaton’s incredible turn as Batman was likewise also iconic, but Jack’s version of the Joker is perhaps the thing that most made Tim Burton’s vision as successful as it was.  With him, we were certainly dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight.

MARK HAMILL from BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM (1993)

It’s strange to think that one of the greatest versions of the Joker was played by Luke Skywalker.  It just goes to show how versatile a performer someone like Mark Hamill can be.  After the massive success of Tim Burton’s Batman films, Warner Brothers TV Animation was tasked with creating a Saturday morning cartoon series in the same style and tone of the movies.  The team of Creative Director Bruce Timm and Writer Paul Dini went above and beyond just Saturday morning cartoons and made what many consider to be not just one of the greatest animated series of all time, but also one of the best adaptation of Batman in general as well.  The success of the show was so massive that Warner Brothers commissioned the same team to make a feature film for theaters to tie in with the show.  Mask of the Phantasm features many of the same great traits as the show (it’s style and mature storytelling) but one thing that it certainly couldn’t leave out was the presence of the Joker himself.  He’s not the central villain of the movie’s plot (that being the titular Phantasm) but he’s there to make trouble nonetheless and be a thorn in the Batman’s side.  Mark Hamill came to the role unexpectedly as a last minute replacement when the original actor (Tim Curry) dropped out.  Hamill immediately clicked in the character and has played him off and on for decades after in various formats, including this film.  While Bruce Timm’s design of the character is remarkable enough, it’s Hamill’s vocal performance that truly sells the character.  He’s often described his Joker voice as being a mix of The Invisible Man and the Blue Meanie from Yellow Submarine (1968).  His voice is both effectively cartoonish in the right way but underlined with an unsettling bit of shrillness too.  And of course the enormous cackle of a laugh he gives is chilling, and in my opinion never topped.  To be honest, whenever I read a Batman comic, it’s Mark Hamill’s voice I hear as the Joker, which is a testament to how well he has ingrained his version into our memories.  Hamill has put his time as Joker to rest in tribute to the memory of the late great Kevin Conroy who voiced Batman alongside Mark Hamill’s Joker for all these years.  In Hamill’s own words, “Without Batman, crime has no punchline.”

HEATH LEDGER from THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

Perhaps the most iconic and most celebrated version of the Joker we have ever seen on the big screen.  And the most remarkable thing about it is that no one outside of the film’s production ever thought it would work.  When it was announced that Heath Ledger would be taking on the role of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s widely anticipated Batman sequel, it turned quite a few heads.  Up to that point, Ledger was most known for his Oscar nominated role as a deeply closeted gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain (2005).  No one other than Christopher Nolan could see him embodying the role and it was leading a lot of fans to worry that he was being miscast.  And then, the first teaser for the film was released.  Played exclusively in IMAX theaters, audiences were treated to the introduction bank heist scene played in full as a teaser, and it gave us our first look at what Ledger would look like as the character.  And after that, no one was doubting the casting choice any more.  Ledger looked and sounded unrecognizable as the Joker, and his horrific looking scarred face with smeared on clown make-up made him look far more disturbing than any Joker we had ever scene up to this point.  Further marketing really put the spotlight on Ledger’s Joker and anticipation for the movie really began to pick up.  Unfortunately, Heath would not live to see the laurels given to his groundbreaking performance.  He sadly died from an accidental overdose mere months before the movie released into theaters.  As tragic as his untimely death was, we thankfully were blessed to have had one final masterful and complete performance with him in this film.  And his Joker is iconic in every conceivable way.  He’s terrifying, but also manages to deliver a genuine laugh throughout the movie.  The best thing about his character here is also the fact that he’s left as a bit of an enigma; a man with no past or an identity, except to only be the ying to Batman’s yang  And as over the top as he’s going with the character, it still fits within Nolan’s more grounded vision of the Batman mythos.  There are numerous moments where his brilliant performance shines, but perhaps the most memorable is the interrogation scene where he’s confronted by Christian Bale’s Batman in a literally explosive battle of wills.  Ledger’s performance proved to be strong enough to earn him a posthumous Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor, and his Joker remains a high water mark to this day.  We all doubted him, but in the end he proved us all wrong.

JARED LETO from SUICIDE SQUAD (2016)

Now, to go from the greatest cinematic Joker to easily the worst.  It was hard to find a way to bring the character of the Joker back to the big screen after Heath Ledger’s iconic performance.  But with the beginning of the now defunct DCEU (also known as the Snyderverse) which gave us yet another version of Batman, played by Ben Affleck, it was only a matter of time before we would get a new Joker.  But instead of introducing the Joker in a standard Batman story-line, the DCEU instead had him make his first appearance as a side character in this Suicide Squad adaptation.  Now, why here?  It’s because one of the Suicide Sqaud members is Harley Quinn, Joker’s frequent accomplice and girlfriend; a character who by the way made her debut in the animated series which featured Mark Hamill’s Joker.  Margot Robbie did a fine job bringing Harley to life on the big screen, but the same can’t be said about Jared Leto’s Joker.  Leto made some weird choices with the character.  Instead of playing up the flamboyance of previous versions of the character, Leto’s Joker is just a demented lunatic who barely talks above a whisper most of the time.  I get that this Suicide Squad’s idea of the Joker was supposed to have him be more punk rap gangster than the carnival-esque clown he was before.  But it just feels weird and try hard.  It just makes the Joker feel less intimidating when we see him covered in tattoos and wearing a grill on his teeth.  Even his Joker laugh feels weak, like he’s struggling to get it out and it just comes through as a whimper.  Since Cesar Romero, every actor playing the Joker has put gusto into their laugh; even Heath Ledger with his more sinister version, which oddly feels like it was inspired a bit by Romero’s original multi-part laugh.  The one saving grace about this version of the Joker is that he’s barely in the film at all.  He’s only there to give Harley Quinn motivation in the plot, and let’s face it, she is far more the star of the show here.  Jared Leto would briefly turn up again as the Joker in the infamous Snyder Cut of Justice League, added as part of the re-shoots to bring more definition to Zack Snyder’s original vision.  While he’s not as garish looking playing the part in that scene, he’s also just as equally worthless to the plot as well, and given that the DCEU died a quick death thereafter, it’s probably for the best that we’ll never see this version of the character ever again.

ZACH GALIFIANAKIS from THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE (2017)

The surprise success of The Lego Movie (2014) was largely due to it’s groundbreaking animation, what a lot of fans also loved about the movie was the cheeky and imaginative use of all the different IP’s that the Lego brand has been able to cobble together.  The mix and match of characters from across pop culture in Lego form offered plenty of entertainment, but one of the big standouts in the movie was Lego Batman.  The hilarious take on the character proved to be so popular that it convinced Lego and Warner Brothers to green-light a spin off film just centered on the Lego Batman character.  And naturally, if there is going to be a Lego Batman movie, there would have to be a Lego Joker there too.  Lego Joker gets to make his screen debut in this movie, and he manages to be a surprisingly effective antagonist for this story.  The brilliant part of how they portray the Batman/Joker dynamic in this story is by making them like a toxic romantic couple, with each one only finding gratification through the friction of their rivalry.  Zach Galifinakis plays the character closer to his own stand-up comic persona, which helps to differentiate him from other versions of the character, and his performance balances off of Will Arnett’s eccentric and caricatured Batman quite well.  The visual of Lego Joker is also very cool to look at, with the animators accentuating his Joker grin with razor sharp, shark-like teeth.  The plot involves Joker getting back at Batman, out of a need for attention, by unleashing all of the worst villains out of the Phantom Zone, which is another way that this Lego franchise is able to throw in a bunch of other characters from different IP’s; or at least from all the ones that Warner Brothers had the licenses to.  But even in a movie that includes the likes of Voldemort, Sauron, and Godzilla, it’s the Joker that still stands out as the most memorable villain in the movie, and that mainly is because the movie manages to still bring all the best qualities of the character.  He is definitively an agent of chaos and this includes bringing about a chaotic show of force with every embodiment of evil together, all simply because he didn’t feel adequately in opposition with Batman.  He’s also just a fun take on the character that feels right at home in brick built world.

JOAQUIN PHOENIX from JOKER (2019) and JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX (2024)

If there was ever a portrayal of the Joker that comes closest to matching the visceral, terrifying version that Heath Ledger brought to the screen, it’s this version portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix.  The first Joker movie was controversial for many reasons, mainly with it’s attempt to humanize such fundamentally diabolical character.  Too many people misinterpreted the movie as a validation for the persona of the Joker, that it was giving sympathy towards the toxic, incel type of masculinity that the Joker often represents, rather than see what the movie was really about which was a critique about how social and economic disparity are often to blame for creating monsters like the Joker.  But, what most people who either love or hate the movie will still agree on is that Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is undeniably great.  In telling the backstory about how one man became the Joker (a first on the big screen), Joaquin perfectly embodies this broken down man who descends further and further down the rabbit hole of his own demented mind; externalizing all of his anxiety and mistrust of the world into this Joker persona, which unfortunately boils over into murderous rage.  The unsettling message of the movie is that monsters like the Joker start to infect societies of people desperate to find larger than life symbols that will help to galvanize their own darker tendencies.  Unfortunately there is real world evidence of the Joker being a potent symbol for violent people, as the shooting in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado tragically showed us.  There’s nuance to the portrayal of Joker in the movie that gets lost in all the controversy around this film, and that’s largely thanks to Phoenix’s fearlessness in the role.  For his efforts, Phoenix won an Oscar for Best Actor, making him the second performer to earn an Academy Award for playing this character after Ledger.  Unfortunately, the awards success and stellar box office convinced Warner Brothers to green-light an unnecessary sequel.  It worked so much better for the story of Arthur Fleck becoming the Joker to be just a one off, but director Todd Phillips still moved forward anyway, and the sequel Joker: Folie a Deux became one of the more baffling misfires of a sequel we’ve seen in recent memory.  Sadly the movie undoes all of the effective character building that was done in the original film, and even leaves us with an unsatisfying rug pull in the end, showing that this Joker was not in fact the same Joker that would one day face off with Batman.  And it’s pointlessly made into a musical too.  Phoenix’s performance is still the most worthwhile aspect of both movies, but certainly used much better in the first film.

It is fascinating to see a character like the Joker go from comic book heavy to a movie role capable of winning it’s actor an Academy Award.  And not just one, but twice.  That’s the incredible effect that this character has had in our pop culture.  That iconic mix of white skin, green hair and a purple suit has made the Joker stand out, especially in contrast with the Dark Knight himself.  Whether he’s played more light-heartedly by the likes of Cesar Romero or with terrifying intensity by Heath Ledger, he’s a character that demands our attention.  And each generation seems to find new ways to bring this character to life and keep him relevant to the times.  For me, I grew up with the mix of fear and funny found in Jack Nicholson’s iconic performance.  And like I stated before, Mark Hamill’s vocal performance as the Joker has become the voice that I hear whenever I read a Batman comic.  There really has only been one Joker performance that has fallen flat for me, which is Jared Leto’s weird take on the character.  Leto’s a talented actor, but his performance just feels at odds with what the character has always represented, and worst of all, his performance is neither scary or funny.  Thankfully, Joaquin Phoenix managed to find that right mix, while at the same time creating a fascinating portrait of a man unraveling due to his demented belief that the world has been unfair to him.  Looking at every version of the character, the one that certainly transcends them all is Heath Ledger’s portrayal in The Dark Knight.  His performance in that movie not only stands as perhaps the best ever given in a comic book movie, but one of the best ever in cinematic history.  In that performance, you do see the “agent of chaos” unleashed, and it’s one of the most profound portraits of evil ever put into a film.  Where Joker goes from here will be interesting to see.  There was a tease for the character in Matt Reeve’s The Batman (2022), played by Barry Keoghan behind a cell door.  Whether anyone can reach the heights that Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix reached remains to be seen, but the opportunity has certainly become something that great actors now actively pursue.  The one thing we know for sure is that when there is still a Batman in the world, there will likewise always be a Joker not far behind, hanging around like the bad joke that he is.

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