All posts by James Humphreys

Superman (2025) – Review

It’s surprising that one of the characters that’s been the hardest for DC Comics to bring to the big screen is also their most iconic on the page.  Superman is undeniably one of the most well known comic book characters ever created, and probably the most famous one of all worldwide.  But, bringing him faithfully to the big screen has been somewhat of a challenge.  This is perhaps due to the fact that his first cinematic outing was just too hard of an act to follow.  Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) captured the character perfectly in a movie that honestly was the catalyst for the super hero boom that has happened in cinema over the last few decades.  While Donner’s direction was certainly a big part of making the film a success, the even bigger reason the movie worked as well as it did was because actor Christopher Reeve flawlessly embodied the character of Superman and made him a hero worth rooting for.  Reeve’s charm mixed in with his incredible physical presence really made us all believe that a man could fly.  And the part rightly came to define Reeve’s career, as well as his own life thereafter, especially after the tragic accident that left him paralyzed.  Over the years, DC and their parent company Warner Brothers came to realize that it was going to be very hard filling those bright red boots that Reeve wore on screen.  After the box office failure of the Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), it would be a whole 19 years before we would see Superman on the big screen again.  Unfortunately, Bryan Singer’s attempt at rebooting the franchise with Superman Returns (2006) was a pale imitation of Richard Donner’s original, despite a game performance from Brandon Routh taking over from Christopher Reeve.  While Superman was struggling to find his footing on film, his DC colleague Batman was taking charge at the box office thanks to Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Dark Knight trilogy.  In order to capitalize on Batman’s success, Warner Brothers decided to apply it’s more gritty style to adaptations of all their Super Heroes, starting with Superman himself.  The studio looked to filmmaker Zach Snyder to revamp their iconic hero into something as iconic as their Batman, but this unfortunately didn’t work out as well as they hoped.

While Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) did deliver some strong box office numbers, it was also sharply criticized for missing the point about the character.  In Man of Steel, Superman resorts to killing the villainous General Zod in order to save people who were in the supervillain’s line of fire.  This was antithetical to the many years of comic book lore that showed Superman as being pure of heart and never once resorting to murder, even in justifiable cases.  It was a case where Snyder was conforming the character to his own storytelling sensibilities, which fell into a gloomier and hard edged viewing of the world.  This kind of grit is fine for heroes like Batman, but just feels wrong for the character of Superman.  Unfortunately, DC and Warner Brothers meant for Man of Steel to be the launching off point for a cinematic universe akin to their rivals over at Marvel.  The fact that they started off with such a divisive film like Man of Steel as their foundation is a testament to why the DCEU (also known as the Snyderverse) ultimately failed.  And this was truly unfortunate given that they had cast an actor like Henry Cavill who if placed in a more faithful adaptation of Superman on the big screen could’ve been as great as Christopher Reeve.  But, with Snyder out at DC, it’s time to take another shot at bringing Superman to life on screen.  After his departure from Marvel, director James Gunn found a new and welcome home at DC, where he was granted the opportunity to do his take on The Suicide Squad (2021).  Though the movie’s box office was dampened due to the Covid pandemic, Gunn nevertheless received high marks for Suicide Squad, and DC was eager to work with him again.  He was granted a quick return to Marvel to close out his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy before moving on this his next assignment, which became more than just one movie.  DC and Warner Brothers wanted him to take over as the Creative Director of their entire Cinematic Universe, becoming essentially DC’s equivalent of Kevin Feige over at Marvel.  Gunn would be the one who would decide which projects would be getting made, and it’s only natural that he would choose Superman to be the one who would help launch this new, revamped Cinematic Universe.  And, in taking on the duties of writer and director, he would be putting it on himself to get this relaunch on the right footing.  The only question is, does Superman soar or is cinema his unfortunate kryptonite.

In an interesting creative choice, James Gunn is re-launching Superman on the big screen without going over his entire backstory again like his previous films had.  In this version, we meet Superman (David Corenswet) as he is three years into the gig.  Despite being the world’s strongest hero, he still is struggling to do the right thing by saving as many people as he can.  He soon learns that a lot of his well intention deeds also run contrary to the rule of law.  In particular, his intervention between two warring nations called Boravia and Jarhanpur has made him run afoul of the US State department.  In order to reign in Superman, the government has granted billionaire tycoon Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) the opportunity to use his resources to contain Superman and hold him in captivity.  Lex has long resented Superman and other meta-humans that have called Earth their home, and he uses all the tools he has to bring Superman down.  Meanwhile, the reporters at the Daily Planet, where Superman works under his alias Clark Kent, are attempting to break apart the conspiracy that Lex has concocted in order to sour public opinion against Superman and learn about the whereabouts of where he’s being held prisoner.  Clark Kent’s colleague, and girlfriend, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) even seeks help from a group of corporate sponsored Super Heroes who are under the working title of the “Justice Gang”  They include the Green Lantern Guy Gardener (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and the tech savvy Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi).  Another Daily Planet reporter, Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) has an insider source feeding him information on Lex Luthor’s duplicitous deeds.  Superman, over the course of these crucial days, must learn what is the most important part of being a super hero, which is to put the safety of others above his own self.  But he also must deal with the fact that someone like Lex Luthor will use his inate kindness against him, by forcing Superman to make unfair compromises that only end up serving Lex’s goals.  Can Superman still be the hero while being forced into the position where he has to make the toughest of choices in order to serve the greater good?

There’s a lot of pressure on James Gunn’s part to get this re-boot of Superman right.  Superman is a true icon, and the mishandling of the character over the last couple decades has in turn also doomed the larger plans for the cinematic universes that were to be built on his shoulders.  But, James Gunn has had a stellar track record at both Marvel and DC, and no one doubts that he can deliver a movie that both is revolutionary in it’s style while at the same time being faithful to the comics.  I’m happy to say that he does not disappoint with his version of Superman.  While it may not be my favorite film of his, I certainly do think he delivers a movie that does an honorable job of bringing Superman to life, while also still being entertaining in that very Gunn-esque way.  The movie has a fair share of laughs and bombastic action sequences, but at the same time it does what it needs to do to deliver us a compelling Superman story-line.  I would even say that this is the best we’ve seen of the “man of steel” since the Christopher Reeve days.  What Gunn really excels at here is a general sense of fun, which is what we also got from Richard Donner in his film.  But he isn’t just merely trying to ape what Donner did with his Superman, which was the fatal flaw of Bryan Singer’s version.  This is the same James Gunn sense of fun that we saw him use in both Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad.  It’s pleasing to see it apply so well to Superman and his narrative.  There’s not a cynical bone in this movie’s body.  When it wants to be profound, it earns it and when it wants to make a statement, it comes from a sincere place.  And for the most part, the humor lands.  The one flaw I would give this movie is that James Gunn seems to be wrapping his arms around a bit too much, to the point where I feel like some elements kind of lose impact as they get lost in the shuffle.  Some characters, especially Lois Lane, feel like their development was truncated a bit in order to fit more plot elements in.  For the most part, James Gunn manages to bring it all together in the end, but it’s a movie that does indeed throw a lot at you, and a few things do get forgotten in the process.  One thing that does help is that the movie hits the ground running right from the start, so that way we are not bogged down with too much exposition.  No origin story here, since it’s Superman and we should all know his beginnings by now.

And speaking of Superman, he is undoubtedly the movie’s greatest triumph.  A lot of the movie’s shortcomings are easily overlooked due to the fact that they managed to get the character right.  David Corenswet definitely fits the look of the character, with a wide build and tall frame.  But what he also does a great job with is making Superman relatable.  This movie gives a lot more time towards breaking down who Superman is as a person than perhaps any other version of the character we’ve seen.  The movie is far less about how Superman is going to save the day and more about what the day to day work of being a super hero does to him mentally.  This is a portrayal of the character that actually shows him to be vulnerable, showing that he is indeed more human than we think.  He’s put through a far more personal journey here, where the conflict revolves around whether he has a right to be the protector of this world despite not being from it originally.  James Gunn has stated in interviews that he views Superman’s story as an allegory for the immigrant experience.  For many immigrants, they have to work much harder in order to convince others that they should have a place in their new home.  Despite having grown up in Smallville America, Superman is still set apart due to his metahuman powers, and that sadly makes him a pariah to those who don’t like anyone different than them, including and especially Lex Luthor.  David Corenswet portrays this more vulnerable and relatable version of the character, being equal parts charming as well as physically imposing.  And he’s a perfect fit for what James Gunn wanted to explore with this character.  Christopher Reeve will still remain the gold standard of the character, much in the same way Sean Connery was for James Bond, but David’s portrayal perhaps comes the closest to reaching that high water mark.  Not that Henry Cavill and Brandon Routh were lightweights.  Those two were unfortunately the right guys at the wrong times, with movies failing to give them the opportunities to get the character right.

But it’s not just David Corenswet that delivers a great performance in this movie, as he is complimented by an excellent ensemble.  The biggest standout is Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor.  Luthor is a character that has long been neglected on the big screen.  You have to go all the way back to the Donner original with the late great Gene Hackman’s brilliant performance to find a worthy Luthor on the big screen.  Hoult’s portrayal here may be the best one we’ve seen yet.  He perfectly captures the pettiness of Luthor and makes him an absolute, irredeemable asshole in the movie.  It’s refreshing to see an unapologetic villain in one of these kinds of movies again, after there have been so many attempts at making sympathetic villains who unfortunately are never that interesting.  Hoult really does a great job of getting that smarmy bravado of an entitled brat that most mega billionaires usually end up being.  And kudos for actually shaving his head bald for this role too, because he does indeed look like the comic book character come to life.  There are a lot of other great performances here as well.  The “Justice Gang” are all fun personalities that add some flavor to the film.  Nathan Fillion (a James Gunn regular) gives a hilarious portrayal as a cocky, self-aggrandizing Green Lantern and Isabela Merced is also quite amusing in her Hawkgirl portrayal.  However, the standout is Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific.  The character is a fairly recent creation from DC and is not widely known to fans outside of the comic book world, but spotlighting obscure characters has been a specialty of James Gunn and he makes Mr. Terrific one of the film’s breakout characters.  Just like what he did with the Guardians characters, I’m sure Mr. Terrific will soon become a fan favorite for many people thanks to Mr. Gunn.  I also want to spotlight the brief appearances of Ma and Pa Kent (played by Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince respectively).  They are so adorably folksy in this film and really help to underline the heart of the movie, which is showing the simple beginnings that helped to shape Superman into who he is.

One of the biggest improvements Gunn has made to this adaptation of Superman is with the visuals.  One of the biggest complaints about the Snyderverse films was their washed out color palettes.  Instead of the vibrant colors that you would see on the comic book page, Zach Snyder just muted everything in metallic grays and blacks, which just did not fit with the character of Superman at all.  Superman as a character represents a beacon of hope, and beacons should shine brightly.  Thankfully, James Gunn has brought back rich and vibrant colors.  This is especially evident in the bright reds and deep blues of Superman’s outfit.  Also most of the movie takes place in broad daylight; another improvement over the perpetual twilight of Zach Snyder’s vision.  Like all of James Gunn’s other comic book adaptations, he wants to take what’s on the comic page and bring it to life.  And it’s the fearlessness of balancing the silly with the serious that has come to define his work.  I love that he embraces the weirder side of comic books, and he surprisingly manages to find appropriate places to make it work in Superman’s story.  One of the best visual gags in the movie is a tender scene between Clark and Lois taking place while the Justice Gang battles a monster outside in the background.  The juxtaposition is what James Gunn manages to perfectly handle in his films, and there are plenty of moments in the movie where there are extra details in the background that help to make the scenes a whole lot funnier.  Thankfully, Gunn isn’t too indulgent; he doesn’t resort to tons of Easter eggs that foreshadow future films in the franchise.  All of the surprises work in service towards the world-building and story being told.  But, there are some clever nods to Richard Donner’s Superman thrown in here and there, and the movie also incorporates some of John Williams iconic theme into it’s musical score.  There also seems to be some little jabs at the Snyderverse as well, especially in a scene where Superman goes out of his way to avoid creating city wide destruction.  Overall, it demonstrates the high quality attention to detail that James Gunn has developed as a filmmaker working in this medium of comic book films.

It’s an unenviable task that James Gunn has put himself in having to set this new era of DC comic book movies on the right footing.  He was to win over a lot of fans, many of whom are growing fatigued over the abundance of comic book media we have had over the last decade.  The unfortunate thing is that his re-boot is coming on the heels of the demise of the very divisive Snyderverse.  The die-hard Zach Snyder fans are already getting their knives out to tear this new movie apart.  And if this movie doesn’t perform well, it could halt James Gunn’s long term plans for DC as a result.  Thankfully, the forecasts are indicating that Superman is poised to have a strong opening weekend.  How it performs beyond that is anyone’s guess, but hopefully it does well enough to instill confidence at Warner Brothers to get the ball rolling on all the future plans for Gunn’s DC Universe.  I for one feel like this is a good place to start, as the movie is just a fun, adventurous ride that is worthy of the Superman name.  You need a strong foundation to build a multi-film franchise, much like what Iron Man (2008) did for Marvel, and what was missing from the Snyderverse from the get go.  It’s not perfect, but what it gets right it gets very right.  David Corenswet makes for a great “man of steel” and I can’t wait to see him play this character again, including in future films that will inevitably reintroduce us to the Justice League.  It gets me excited because if they can get Superman right, then the rest of DC’s greatest heroes will also get much improved adaptations as well.  One thing you can really tell from this movie is James Gunn’s love for this cinematic universe.  He’s not some cynical director for hire.  He loves these characters and he wants us to love them all too.  Sure, DC still has a lot of catching up to do to be where Marvel is, but with Gunn in charge things are lookin bright, especially if we see more results like this.  And that in turn will help Marvel too, because nothing works better to improve the quality of your product than having a strong competitor be your motivator.  James Gunn’s Superman is one of this summer’s most satisfying blockbuster experiences and a fun time at the movies that thankfully makes us believe that a man can fly again, and hopefully for a good long time after.

Rating: 8.5/10

What the Hell Was That? – Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

Independence Day (1996) was a fairly monumental film when it first came out.  It broke new ground in the field of visual effects and managed to supercharge the careers of the actors starring in it.  But, at the same time, no one would ever consider it a masterpiece by any means.  The film was co-written and directed by a frequent name that appears in this series of articles, Roland Emmerich, and though Emmerich has demonstrated himself to be a very flawed filmmaker over the years, Independence Day does present him at his best.  A lot of the flaws in storytelling that plague most of Emmerich’s movies are present in this (his most successful film) as well, but it’s balanced out with an overall general sense of fun and creativity that defined most of his earlier films.  Independence Day was Emmerich’s third studio made film, as well as his third collaboration with co-writer and producer Dean Devlin.  With the success of 1992’s Universal Soldier and 1994’s Stargate, the duo were quickly becoming the hottest team in Hollywood, and it helped them to get 20th Century Fox behind their ambitious alien invasion epic.  Independence Day captured the imagination of audiences with it’s foreboding atmosphere; creating a vision of interstellar invasion from hostile forces that dwarfed anything we had seen on the big screen before.  There’s nothing more provocative in selling a film called Independence Day than making the image of the White House being blown to bits by a 15 mile wide UFO it’s money shot.  But, apart from the imagery, the remainder of the film was, to put it lightly, unsubtle and prone to cliché.  But, audiences didn’t care because the movie still made it feel like you were going on a ride.  It was loud, jingoistic and manipulative, but also crowd-pleasing and in many cases very beautiful to look at.  It was the very definition of a popcorn movie and it indeed lived up to the hype by becoming at the time one of the highest grossing films of all time.  And like all smash box office hits, audiences were anxious to see more.  Surprisingly, Emmerich and Devlin didn’t immediately jump at the opportunity to create a sequel, only choosing to go further if they could find the right story.  Almost 20 years later, they finally did, but as we would learn, it may have been better to leave the story be.

In the 20 years after Independence Day released into theaters, Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich had much less success as filmmakers.  Somehow, Roland has been able to gain financing for all of his projects, but his box office success has fallen way short of his early days, and today his track record is marked more by box office bombs than hits.  You can also see him trying to recapture that Independence Day magic as most of his films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009) and Moonfall (2022) all basically feature the same plot; humanity saved by the end of the world by maverick hot shot fighters and enlightened nerds that no one listened to before.  The creative partnership between Devlin and Emmerich also came to an end, with them parting ways after making The Patriot (2000).  Even though the two were taking separate paths, they still held onto the idea of returning to the Independence Day universe.  But the further distance they put between it and a sequel, they more they would risk missing the moment when it would become a success.  Cinema changed very quickly in the years after Independence Day‘s release and so did the world for that matter.  The imagery of the film, which included notable landmarks like the White House and the Empire State building being blown up just weren’t going to work anymore in a world that witnessed the 9/11 attacks happen in real life.  If a sequel to Independence Day was to occur, it had to be very different in order to not be trauma inducing.  But, the team of Emmerich and Devlin also had to contend.  With an audience that had kind of moved away from science fiction films like Independence Day.  Blockbuster films in the new millennium were shifting from sci-fi to fantasy with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films leading the charge and then eventually super hero movies were all the rage in the following decade thanks to Marvel and DC.  Independence Day was becoming more and more a relic of it’s time, but with some still potent nostalgia flavored into it.  Eventually, Emmerich and Devlin settled on a story they wanted to tell, and it would involve not one but two sequels with a two part storyline.

Instead of picking up right where the first film left off, these new sequels would embrace the gap in time, and show how humanity responded to it’s near apocalyptic encounter with the alien invaders.  In one of the sequel’s better ideas, we see how humanity has deconstructed the alien technology from the downed wreckage of their ships, and have since used that tech to make advancements of their own.  It’s a logical narrative step that helps to differentiate the film from the original.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t do much else with that idea.  Yeah, the ships that the Earth’s military forces use are more sleek and high tech, but the film is also pretty inconsistent with it’s world-building, and it still shows a lot of low tech things like gas powered cars and present day warships still being used.  It’s basically the filmmakers deciding when to use high technology in the story when it’s there to look cool and forgetting pretty much anywhere else it might make sense to have it.   This element in particular is a big reason why the sequel falls apart.  Emmerich seems only interested in hitting all the familiar beats of the story, while ignoring the foundation which made them work in the first place.  The jump in time and the advancement of humanity in those years could have made for an interesting dynamic change in the story that could have made it a very different kind of movie that could stand independent of the original.  But, no, in order to get Fox behind this follow-up, he pretty much just made the original all over again, just with a bigger scale to it.  It otherwise undermines the idea of there being a more advanced society in this story when the aliens themselves have come with a bigger ship.  They don’t even change the way that the characters try to take out the aliens; they send a ship inside the mothership with the plan to blow it up again from the inside.  It makes you wonder why they advanced their technology at all when they just try to do the same thing again.

It’s pretty clear from the get go that Independence Day: Resurgence was a doomed project.  The studio immediately balked at the idea of shooting two sequels back to back and instead opted to make the one with a wait and see policy with regards to the third.  So, Resurgence was put into the production with the hope that Emmerich and Devlin could re-ignite the magic of the original film and hopefully turn this into a franchise that could go on for many years afterward.  But one big roadblock derailed this at the beginning.  If there was one movie star from the original film that could easily help lift this franchise, it was Will Smith.  Of all the actors from the first Independence Day, Smith had the best post-movie boost.  He became a big box office star thanks to other hit films like Men in Black (1997) Hitch (2005) and I Am Legend (2007).  And there was no doubt that his star power was greatly increased by his starring role in the original Independence Day.  So, having him on board for these sequels would easily give them a boost thanks to his devoted following of fans.  Unfortunately, Will Smith bowed out of returning to this franchise.  He cited that there would have been a scheduling conflict with this and his role in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (2016), which was shooting at the same time.  It’s probably true, but one can’t also help to think that Will Smith might have also seen the writing on the wall with the overall lack of interest there was for a movie like this.  His track record with sequels had also been pretty spotty, with the Men in Black films under-performing.  This wouldn’t have been a problem for Emmerich and Devlin had they had a plan B if one of their original actors didn’t return.  Unfortunately, their original script, the one that got the greenlight from Fox, centered around Smith’s character Capt. Hiller.  With that poor moment of hindsight becoming a problem, the two had to quickly rewrite their script in order to write Capt. Hiller out of the movie.  What we get is an unceremonious off screen death with the character of his son, played now as a grown up by actor Jesse T. Usher, taking up his place in the story.  Usher tries his best to fill that vacancy, but his character is also lacking in much of the charisma that helped to set Will Smith’s performance apart in the original.  So, like all doomed sequels, Independence Day: Resurgence was put into production in a frenzy that never quite coalesced together.

The movie still got many of it’s legacy actors to come back, but a lot of them had their characters unnecessarily altered in a bit of regression based on where we left them before.  Jeff Goldblum’s David Levinson fares the best as his character has risen to the level of head of the Earth’s Defense Force; an upgrade from his position as a satellite engineer who decodes the alien tech from the first film.  Robert Loggia (in his final film role) also makes a memorable return as General William Gray.  But, other legacy actors aren’t so lucky.  Judd Hirsch returns as David’s over-bearing father, and the movie weirdly turns him into more of a comic relief character that gets into shenanigans after surviving the destruction of the aliens with a family of orphaned kids.  Hirsch’s performance in the original was much more grounded while at the same time making him a funny personality and confidant to his son.  But here, he’s just a cartoon character and it’s a waste of a great talent like his.  Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore is also downgraded in this film, showing him mentally unstable in the 20 years after the last invasion.  It’s a far cry from the inspirational figure he posed in the original film, which showed him as a steadfast leader who rose to the challenge.  It is nice to see all of these actors back together again, but the movie seems to treat them disrespectfully.  Vivica A. Fox barely even gets a couple of lines in before her character is unceremoniously killed off.  And unfortunately, none of the new characters are interesting enough to carry the weight of the rest of the film.  Liam Hemsworth is a pale imitation of the swagger that Will Smith brought to the story and the aforementioned Jesse T. Usher is barely a character as well.  There was also a bit of controversy surrounding the recasting of Maika Monroe as President Whitmore’s daughter Patricia.  It was believed that Mae Whitman, who played the part in the original at age 8 and has had a successful acting career ever since, was passed over because she wasn’t deemed “conventionally pretty” enough for this film.  How much of that is true is unknown, but fans were a bit outraged.  Whitman herself has stayed above the controversy and has avoided commenting on it.  And of course, the movie makes a baffling decision to bring back Brent Spiner as Dr. Okun.  Yes, Star Trek alum Spiner is a beloved character actor, but his presence here makes no sense as his character was shown to be choked to death by one of the aliens in the original.  The sequel’s explanation: he was in a 20 year coma.  One of the many examples of lazy writing throughout.

One of the other things that doomed the project is that while it tries to advance the film with the standards of the time, it actually feels like a regression as well.  The original Independence Day was certainly a breakthrough for CGI digital effects, many of which still look fairly good nearly 30 years later.  But, it’s also important to remember that much of it worked because it was backed up with a lot of incredible practical effects too.  Those exploding buildings from the alien attacks were all done with scale models, helping to give the destruction a really tactile feel to them.  The puppeteering of the alien in the frightening autopsy scene also gives the movie an incredible looking creature that was handcrafted by some talented artisans.  When we think of visual effects from that era, it encompassed a lot more than just what was programmed into a computer.  Unfortunately, a lot of that practical movie magic has been usurped by CGI over the years, and Roland Emmerich unfortunately has been one of those filmmakers that has ditched practical effects more and more over time.  This is very evident in Resurgence as a everything from the alien mothership, to the city wide destruction, to the aliens themselves are now all done with CGI animation.  The thinking is that it should look better, but it doesn’t.  The tactileness is gone and replaced with a lot of vaguely discernable CGI mayhem.  Roland would probably argue that the movie is more impressive because CGI has allowed them to make everything bigger in scale.  But bigger isn’t always better.  The mothership in this film is as big as a moon, and is capable of generating it’s own gravity.  And yet, we don’t feel the same dread about it landing on Earth as we did with the smaller 15 mile wide ships.  That’s because the ship is honestly too big to convey, so all we get is a lot of the sky on fire as it lands.  It’s nowhere near as scary as those massive discs of metal piercing through the clouds and hovering menacingly over the city.  The same goes for the alien creatures as well, which were also given CGI makeovers.  In this film, we finally meet the alien Queen, who is massive in size, and she is nowhere near as menacing as the smaller ones we saw in the original.  Overall, Roland is trying to do everything he did before in the original with computer animation, and it makes his film feel less real and in addition the aliens much less scary.

With a lot of legacy sequels, the question inevitably comes up to this: Why?  Why make a sequel to this so many years later.  Most of the time, the answer simply is money.  Studios want to capitalize on established IP, and they’ll dig deep into their libraries in order to make something old new again.  But, most of the time, it doesn’t work.  Sure, there are examples of making legacy sequels that not only live up to the original, but also somehow manage to surpass it, like Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  But most of the time, the result is something like Independence Day: Resurgence, which just feels like an empty imitation of what once was.  And the original film was not exactly an all time classic either.  For a lot of audiences, Independence Day was a fun diversion that featured some at the time cutting edge visual effects and a few semi-inspirational moments that made them want to root for the heroes.  But, let’s not forget that the story and the characters were paper thin generic archetypes that were merely there to string together the action set pieces.  Independence Day is enjoyable as a visual effects spectacle, but over time it has also become something of a joke too with it’s many cliches.  For some, that’s part of the enjoyment as well because it gives the movie some campy value.  Essentially, Independence Day: Resurgence is what happens when you do the same movie, but take out all the things that made it fun in the first place, including the stuff that became fun ironically.  And the very insulting part is that the movie insists on us treating the film more respectfully than it deserves.  This is due to the fact that it’s trying to build lore that they hoped would help turn this into a franchise on the same level of say a Star Wars.  We weren’t interested in that back in the original and we are less so now.  The appeal of the alien invasion storyline from the original is that we know so little about who the aliens are and why they want our planet.  In Resurgence, we get introduced to a new concept of another alien race of non-organic beings that are also at war with the bad aliens, personified by a mysterious super intelligent orb called the Sphere.  At the end of the film, after the Queen alien is defeated, the movie arrogantly sets up the next chapter with the humans teaming up with the Sphere to take the fight to the aliens’ home world.  Yep, it’s another one of those franchise hopeful movies that ends on a cliffhanger that we’ll never see resolved.

It’s no surprise that Independence Day: Resurgence did not perform as well as it’s predecessor.  The movie flopped and was pretty much dismissed by both critics and audiences alike.  And in my personal opinion, it is one of the worst sequels in recent memory, ranking as the worst movie on my list from that year.  Sadly, there is an argument to be made that a sequel to this could have worked, but due to too much time passing and things not lining up the way they should’ve, we got this compromised movie that doesn’t do anything special and is entirely a waste of time and talent.  For the sake of the original film, the fact that this movie is so forgettable is a blessing, as it doesn’t take away from it’s entertainment value.  It seems like everyone has just agreed to ignore it.  Even Roland Emmerich considers making the movie a mistake, saying that they shouldn’t have moved forward after Will Smith passed on the project.  I mostly feel bad for the actors, a lot of whom just look lost in the movie.  What they did to Bill Pullman and Judd Hirsch’s characters feels especially insulting to the legacy of those characters, who while they weren’t exactly the deepest of characters in the original were still a bit more dignified than they are presented here.  Also, there’s a rather unnecessary bit of queer-baiting done in the movie as they reveal that Spiner’s Dr. Okun had a same-sex partner this whole time.  Emmerich himself made a big deal that he was writing a gay character into his movie, but while the intention is good thing, the execution is pathetic as we only learn about Dr. Okun’s relationship late in the movie, with it ultimately being meaningless in the long run.  If you can’t commit the whole way, then stop going partway and falsely claim that you are breaking barriers.  All that aside, it’s a pathetic and insulting attempt at building a franchise out of a just passable enough popcorn flick from the past.  It’s much better to just re-watch the original even with all of it’s flaws.  Indepndence Day: Resurgence is yet another in the long line of cinematic travesties brought to the big screen by Mr. Roland Emmerich, and unfortunately this was one that reflected back poorly on one of the few good movies that he had made in the past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elio – Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 8.5/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collecting Criterion – My Own Private Idaho (1991)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning – Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 8.5/10

Off the Page – Mildred Pierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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