Movies – Spectre Collie

Groundhog D-Day (an Edge of Tomorrow appreciation post)

Catching up on my backlog with the excellent 2014 movie about fighting aliens and time loops. Spoilers.

Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman and starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, got virtually unanimous praise when it came out, and I immediately put it on my list of movies to watch. That was in 2014 — eleven years ago — which might give an idea how my movie backlog is going.

As it turns out, the virtually unanimous praise was absolutely correct. It’s a great sci-fi action movie, made all the more remarkable when you think of how badly it could’ve gone without the right people making it.

Edge of Tomorrow has all the ingredients of a shamelessly corny, inexcusably derivative, hour and a half of people winking at the camera and dispensing the cheesiest dialogue before heading dutifully into the next completely predictable action movie cliche. But it knows exactly what to do with those ingredients, cleverly combining and remixing everything to keep it feeling fresh, and letting all of the cliched action movie scenes work exactly like they were intended to before they became cliches.

It’s also excellent to see Cruise playing so hard against type for so long at the beginning of the movie. Or rather, playing what he realizes is his public persona, instead of the role he almost always plays in action blockbusters. His character is so smarmy, and he leans into it. You can immediately tell that this guy has gotten where he is by being good-looking and charming, and the script really drives home that he’s all about appearances with no substance. And then it conveniently has him do something awful, so you feel justified in hating him. And you can really savor seeing the shit getting kicked out of him for the next fifteen or twenty minutes.

Of course, any sense of that is more or less undone by the rest of the movie, which has him saving the entire world, but a) of course it does, and b) it gives him a real redemption arc, as opposed to being a super-hero whose obstacles are all external.

They knew that the comparisons to Aliens were going to be obvious, so it was clever to cast Bill Paxton as the master sergeant over a private who’s arrogant and scared shitless. In fact, the familiarity of the whole squad doesn’t seem like a lack of imagination so much as setting us up with the same feeling as our protagonist, that we’ve seen this all before, many times.

I liked that it neither tried to hide all of its various influences, or try to make excuses for them by calling them out. Yeah, it’s like Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers. We know. That’s the premise. It’s so obvious that we don’t even need to mention it.

It feels like there’s a whole sub-genre of time-loop movies at this point, and it’s a sign of how smart the filmmakers are, and how much they seem to trust the basic intelligence of the audience, that the edits are made at all the right places. You see just enough of the repeated material to be able to follow what’s going on, but rarely so much that it’s tedious. The main exception is during the training sequences, but that’s also deliberately repetitious to drive home that he’s spent a lot of time in training. Later in the movie, they do a lot of clever things with dramatic irony, where we only learn along with the other characters that the protagonist has been through this scene already.

My favorite of the time jumps, by the way, is when Cage/Cruise skillfully escapes from the squad by rolling underneath a passing truck… and then is immediately run over. A lot of the first act of the movie seems to be having a lot of fun with the idea of “Ethan Hunt would never!”

Edge of Tomorrow does a great job of establishing its rules, playing within them, and then violating them to introduce the next obstacle. My main criticism is that I wish they’d done a little bit more, even though I can’t imagine exactly what. It was a little disappointing that the movie had been so cleverly remixing and rejuvenating action movie cliches, and then just ended by blowing up the Super Boss Alien. I’d been hoping for one more twist on the whole thing, or one bit of clever manipulation of the rules — instead of just repeating things over and over until they got them right — like Rita/Blunt deliberately getting re-dosed with alpha blood, or learning that there never was an “omega,” or something.

Then again, watching Ballerina and John Wick recently has taught me that sometimes less is more. Adding more “depth” or complications to an action movie can just slow it down, or undermine everything that makes it work. Edge of Tomorrow feels like a movie that uses familiar action movie cliches not because it couldn’t think of any better ideas, but because there’s a good reason those moments are so familiar. They’re satisfying.

Best Movies of 2025 (So Far)

A probably-too-early post during what has been a surprisingly good year for movies

A few years ago, I was surprised to realize that I’d watched enough movies to be able to compile a short list of favorites. I’d already gotten out of the habit of going to the theaters even before the pandemic hit, and there’s seemed like less and less incentive to put up with the hassle (or pay for an AMC subscription) for what seemed to be pretty mediocre output.

It might be just because I’ve been forcing myself to get out of the house more in 2025, but it seems like this has been an unusually good year for movies overall. I’ve already got a list of favorites longer than the past several years, and it’s still just the beginning of June. I have seen a couple of duds that were so unremarkable I didn’t even have anything interesting to say about them, but it probably says something that even the movie I disliked the most (so far) wasn’t so bad that it was boring.

So I’m going to jump the gun and point out my favorites. Maybe it’ll be interesting to see how many of these are still my favorites at the end of the year?

One Thing I Really Like About Ballerina

Ballerina managed to combine everything I’d expected from John Wick with everything that pleasantly surprised me about John Wick. Spoilers after a warning.

One thing I really like about Ballerina is the scene in which our protagonist Eve finds an arms dealer to equip her with all the various weaponry she’ll need to continue her quest of ultimate vengeance. To explain why I like that scene so much would require me to spoil it, so I’ll save it for later.

Based on the trailers, I’d expected this just to be Ms John Wick. At this point, I’ve still only seen the first movie, so I wasn’t sure exactly what that would entail, but regardless, I was all for it. One of the most beautiful women in the world as a super assassin going to exotic locations, shooting, stabbing, judo- and flame-throwing a bunch of bad¹ guys? What’s not to like?

And I’m delighted to report that the movie does indeed kick so much ass. It manages to include everything I’d expected from the first John Wick movie after hearing about them for so many years: shamelessly gratuitous hyper-violence, ridiculous world-building about clans of assassins who live by a strict code of honor, and beautiful cinematography surrounding its lengthy bouts of ass-kicking. Including, yes, a set piece inside an absurd purple-lit nightclub, this one full of walls and tables made of ice.

It also manages to include a good bit of what pleasantly surprised me with the first movie: a sense of restraint and economical storytelling. I don’t want to overstate that and give the wrong impression, since Ballerina is a lot more excessive than John Wick, and everything that that movie either implied or showed in flashback is explicitly shown here in a long origin sequence starting with Eve as a child and continuing through her training. But there’s still a sense that the movie knows exactly what it is and what’s important to this story, and it knows exactly how to make a simple story engaging enough that you’re not distracted by how simple it is.

Even more importantly, it wastes as little time as possible getting its story obligations out of the way and advancing to the next action set piece. There’s a great command of timing and pacing; the beginning does seem to drag on a bit, but you soon realize that it’s been putting all of the pieces into place, so that the entire last half of the movie can be practically uninterrupted action.

And a side effect of that command of timing is that the movie is surprisingly funny. There are no comic relief characters, and everyone plays it completely straight-faced throughout, but the action is choreographed so that scenes will have laugh-out-loud moments interspersed with all of the hyper-violence.² It is unapologetically a “He done blowed up real good!” movie that remains aware of the point where all of the action just becomes silly, and it lets the audience enjoy the silliness for a beat before quickly reining things back.

I don’t know whether the rest of the franchise is as much bombastic fun as Ballerina is, but now I’m actually looking forward to diving back in and finding out for myself. Getting into specifics about my favorite scenes will require spoiling things. This is such a simple movie that there’s really not much to spoil, but I’d hate to ruin what made the scenes work so well for me.

The Locked Door of Chuck

Reconsidering my simpler interpretation of The Life of Chuck. Lots of spoilers.

When I saw The Life of Chuck, I thought that its strength came from its execution, not its ambiguity. Its big ideas aren’t completely original, self-consciously so: it explicitly references ideas from Carl Sagan and Walt Whitman, and has characters deliver lengthy monologues explaining what they mean. I thought that it was a straightforward story, well told, with the fantastic elements and the story structure making its familiar ideas have more impact.

But not everything fits together perfectly neatly. I was having a conversation with my friend Rain where she pointed out how the story didn’t seem to fit the theme: if Chuck as a teenager had a vision of his death, reminding him that life is fleeting and wonderful and we should make the most of it, then why did he choose an occupation that he said bored him?

The middle act, which almost entirely consists of his spontaneously dancing with a stranger, has a definite sense of melancholy and regret to it. He can’t — or possibly chooses not to — explain why he did it. He has brief flashes of happy memories, which we see played out later, but also suggest that he’s all but forgotten them as an adult.

I’d thought that the predominant, overarching theme of the movie is that every one of us, even those of us whose lives seem mundane or unremarkable, contains an entire universe of lived experiences, connections with other human beings, and moments of joy. An excellent message, but it seems to be at odds with the image that we’re shown at the end: a young man ignoring his memento mori moment and instead living a life of quiet regret. The rest of the movie asserts that we shouldn’t be quick to sum up anyone’s life so simply — he’s not “just” an accountant — but the second act devotes so much time to the idea that these moments of expansive joy are rare and fleeting, and that he’s disappointed to be just an accountant.

The locked door to the cupola, which is ominously hinted near the beginning of the movie, and makes up the bulk of the last (first?) act, seems almost superfluous. Honestly, I’d thought it was simply King wanting to insert a supernatural element into the story as a vaguely horror-tinged reinforcement of the idea that “life is fleeting.” And it was a little bit of a shame, since I thought the idea was so much more beautifully and memorably expressed in the first (last?) act. That seemed to say everything it needs to, on a grand, cosmic scale: “even in the face of the end of everything, our connections to each other are most important.” Why follow up with so much story about the cupola, if the characters don’t learn anything from it?

It was starting to feel like one of those “lights out” puzzles, where flipping one switch on ends up flipping another two off. There are three mostly-related but distinct ideas in the story, and settling on any one dominant theme seems to invalidate the others.

But I think it’s interesting that the story¹ chose to explicitly highlight two themes that are kind of at odds with each other. Sagan’s idea of compressing cosmic time into a single calendar year not only illustrates the vast scale of the cosmos, but also emphasizes how ephemeral we are not just as individuals, but as an entire civilization. Whitman’s declaration that “I contain multitudes” suggests that our existences are vast; we contain entire universes and limitless potential.

So what if the story isn’t just illustrating those ideas, like I’d originally assumed, but is deliberately setting them against each other? Not just repeating the ideas, but putting them in conflict with each other, to ask the audience to reconsider what they really mean?

I suspect that I was too quick to assume that The Life of Chuck was essentially three separate stories, each with a theme that stood on its own:

Basically a modern, fantastic, and apocalyptic version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, showing characters making and re-establishing important connections with each other at the end of the world; i.e. even if our time with each other is limited, it’s the only thing that matters
A moment of uplifting joy and genuine connection with strangers; i.e. even the most seemingly mundane life can be filled with unexpected wonder
A Stephen King short story about a boy learning about love and loss and what makes him special, meeting the dozens of people who will continue to live on in his memory for the rest of his life, all with a supernatural horror element of a room that foretells death; i.e. life is short, so make the most of it

And I’d been too quick to assume that the choice to present the three parts out of order was a stylistic flourish, a wry acknowledgement that we know how the story’s going to end, because we all know how every story ultimately ends.

But what I hadn’t considered was the possibility that The Life of Chuck wasn’t a case of King taking a break from horror to tell a life-affirming story, but instead using horror to tell a life-affirming story. I think I’d gotten so distracted by the “life is beautiful” and “young boy coming of age” moments that I wasn’t thinking a lot about Chuck’s grandfather (Mark Hamill) and his role in the story.

We do see the locked door earlier, when Marty sees it but passes it by. This plants the image in the audience’s mind and suggests that it’s the big mystery that will unlock the “meaning” of the movie. If I remember correctly, he passes it by in favor of going out on foot to reconnect with his ex-wife Felicia.

Later, Chuck’s grandfather warns him not to go through the locked door, finally accidentally revealing one night what he saw in the cupola. This just makes Chuck even more curious, so he sneaks up one night to open the door while his grandfather is sleeping. He’s stopped by his grandfather, who has the vision himself, and warns Chuck that he just can’t open the door. It’s only years later, after his grandfather’s death, that Chuck enters the cupola and has the vision that ends the movie.

We also see throughout that Chuck’s grandfather is kind, loving, and takes care of his family, but he spends all of his time inside with his accounting books and his alcoholism. I’d taken this to be just a contrast against Chuck’s grandmother, who’s shown to have a more joyful life, teaching Chuck to love dancing. I thought it was a “two roads diverged in a wood” lesson for Chuck, which made it even stranger that he seemed to end up choosing his grandfather’s path.

It doesn’t feel like a horror story in the slightest, since everyone involved is safe, content, and loving, their lives filled with periods of extreme sadness, but ultimately able to rebound into happiness. They just happen to have this weird locked room in the house. (And we find out that the building was eventually torn down, seemingly with no supernatural Poltergeist-like consequences).

So it hadn’t fully occurred to me that going into the cupola leaves a person cursed. Not cursed to die, since it’s strongly implied that it only shows what’s already fated to happen, but cursed to know. It’s one thing to know that we’re going to die; it’s an entirely different thing to be certain of it, because we’ve seen it. They’re not even granted the knowledge of specifically when it’ll happen, but just the undeniable certainty of it.

The curse didn’t kill Chuck’s grandfather, and it didn’t really ruin his life, either. It just kind of numbed it. He wasn’t haunted enough to be driven mad by it, but he did seem to be entirely focused on practical concerns and on preparation for his own inevitable death. He says “the waiting is the hard part,” which is a line that Chuck repeats at the end, after he has his own vision. In the moment, it feels like an ominous underscore of the “memento mori” idea — we all know this is coming, so make the most of your life while you can.

But in the context of everything else, it feels entirely different. It suggests that from the moment they went into the cupola, their lives slightly shifted from living them into waiting for them to end. The end credits play over a peaceful, sunlit view of the empty cupola, which in the moment, after the first act of a coming-of-age story, suggested a bittersweet conclusion: “this is the final missing piece of the story of a good man with a life well lived.” But taken in context with everything else, there’s a more ominous undercurrent: “this was the moment when Chuck’s life changed from living it, to waiting for it to end.”

In effect, it’s not an expression of “memento mori” but a rejection of it. It says that if you spend your whole life thinking of its ending, it doesn’t spur you to live life to fullest. Instead, it causes you to think of it as a story with a finite conclusion. Where everything that happens is leading up to and informing that moment, and you can only make sense of the entire thing once it’s all over.

By starting the story with its ending — and not just the end of one life, but the end of an entire universe — The Life of Chuck is essentially saying, “Yeah, no shit this is all going to end. That’s not the important part.” It’s about living in the moment. Treasuring all the moments of connection we have with other people, not because they’re imparting valuable lessons that will be meaningful at some point in the future, but because they’re meaningful right now.

The signs saying “39 great years!” and “Thanks Chuck!” are a little more ominous in that context. I’d initially taken them as an uplifting send-off, to take the edge off of the existential horror: he’d led a good life, and he was appreciated by the people who loved him. Plus a reminder that there’s so much more going on with people than what we can see on the surface: just looking at a sweet retirement message for a seemingly average man gives no indication that he “contained multitudes.”

But reconsidering them after seeing the rest of the story, there’s a more sinister idea, which is that his life was largely defined by that simple summation at its ending. He was almost entirely absent from his own story, between the moment he saw his own death and the moment he died. All except for that one remarkable time that he chose to live in the moment, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.

1
As I said before, I haven’t read the original, so I don’t know what was changed for the movie, but a synopsis gave me the impression that they’re largely identical.

One Thing I Like About The Life of Chuck

Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of a Stephen King story is so sincere and heartfelt that it’s impossible not to like. Very mild spoilers, you can thank me later.

My favorite moments in The Life of Chuck are in the scene when the world ends, and I don’t consider that a spoiler. It’s simultaneously wonderfully fantastic, ominous, and so grounded, with near-flawless performances from Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The full weight of the entire story rests on that scene, and the movie nails it.

Which is a relief, since I think The Life of Chuck spends its entire running time walking a tightrope over a chasm of either apocalyptic nihilism or overly maudlin, Forrest Gump-style sentimentality. I thought there were several moments when it stumbled, threatening to go over the edge, but in the end, it made it. And delivered a tasteful and understated flourish.

For me, most of those stumbles were due to the narration. The movie was written, directed, and edited by Mike Flanagan, adapting a novella from Stephen King’s collection If It Bleeds. So periodically, we get extremely King-sounding descriptions delivered by Nick Offerman. (I haven’t read the book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if entire passages were lifted directly). The casting and the performance are as good as they can be, with Offerman reading everything with his very recognizable tone; I can easily imagine it’s the tone that King had in mind when he was writing it. It’s blunt and matter-of-fact, giving everything an edge that keeps it from becoming too maudlin, but is also just flippant enough to remind you that it’s not a horror story. This is one of the life-affirming ones.

So my issue with it isn’t the performance, but the choice to have it at all. I hate narration in adaptations of literary works, because it just feels like the filmmakers throwing up their hands and taking the easier way out. It feels clunky but acceptable when it’s just giving exposition like characters’ names and backgrounds. It veers into the annoying when it jumps in to describe exactly what a character is thinking or feeling in a particular moment, instead of trusting the performances to get the point across.

But even that is part of the one thing I like the most about The Life of Chuck — do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself — which is that I overwhelmingly got the sense that this was a very heartfelt, sincere, and personal project from Mike Flanagan. I know enough about him to know that he loves cinema and that he’s a big fan of Stephen King, so it’s very easy to imagine that he included passages of narration when he thought that the author had described the character or the moment perfectly.

One Thing I Like About The Phoenician Scheme

The latest Wes Anderson movie is funny in the ways I’d hoped for and funny in ways I didn’t expect

After Asteroid City, I was concerned that my time as a Wes Anderson Movie Enjoyer had come to an end. He’d gotten so enamored of his own affectations and mannerisms that everything became completely impenetrable, and I was left like one of his characters, staring blankly at everything and unable to feel anything.

So it’s a relief that I thought The Phoenician Scheme was actually pretty funny. It’s still in love with all of its own affectations and mannerisms — and rigid compositions, and flawless art direction, this time set in 1955 and delivering a mid-century modern take on an alternate-reality Europe and Mediterranean — and it’s still about the familiar themes of dysfunctional families, odd people unable or unwilling to connect with their own emotions, unexpressed grief, and flawed men trying to make sense of their own legacy. But it has a lot of fun with it.

As usual, it’s the side characters who are the most interesting, since the main characters are invariably forced to deliver perfect performances all delivered in a deadpan monotone. Here, the standouts are Jeffrey Wright (playing almost the exact opposite of his character in Asteroid City), and Michael Cera as a tutor turned administrative assistant with an absurd accent. I’m not the first person to say it, but it immediately feels as if Cera has been part of Wes Anderson’s ensemble all along, instead of this being his first time.

One thing I really liked happens in a scene in which Benicio del Toro’s character Zsa-zsa Korda is getting a blood transfusion from his business partner Marty. The two men are lying with another man sitting in between them, manually pumping the blood. Korda is being grilled by his daughter Liesl (played by Mia Threapleton) asking pointed questions about her mother.

The scene is shot like a fairly typical argument in a Wes Anderson movie, cutting back and forth between POV shots of Korda and Liesl as they give short bursts of dialogue. Korda says something offensive, and Liesl slaps him. But we see the slap from Korda’s POV, meaning that Liesl pulls her hand back, and the camera whips to the side to show Jeffrey Wright’s character looking alarmed. The argument continues a bit, and she slaps him again, and the camera once again whips around to show Marty.

The reason I like it so much is mostly because it surprised me. It took me a second to realize what exactly had happened, and it was only after the second slap that I put it all together. These movies are so rigid and so formalistic — and here, even the camera movement is a perfectly level 90-degree quick pan, instead of like reacting to an actual slap — that they’re so rarely surprising. Even when there is a dramatic jolt, like in the first few minutes of this one, both the characters and the camera tend to react completely dispassionately. I feel like I’ve seen a similar scene dozens of times in Anderson’s movies, where a character displays a sudden burst of emotion, and they’re all filmed the same way: the camera remains static, and all the characters immediately reset to default. It was a surprise to see the camera become more than just a silent observer, and to realize that we were actually seeing things from Korda’s perspective.

And it was a surprise to see a Wes Anderson movie having fun with the format. Or more accurately: all the movies I’ve seen have the feeling that the filmmakers are having a lot of fun, but this felt like an attempt to let the audience join in.

There’s another bit later on, where Korda is talking to Liesl about his possibly getting baptized as a Catholic. During the scene, his dialogue and his delivery both subtly change. His speaking throughout has been very tightly controlled and reserved, but here it gets slightly more naturalistic. Less regimented and like self-consciously written dialogue, more like the character is trying to say what he’s actually feeling in the moment.

It all feels a little bit like small cracks in the ice, like the movie is very cautiously considering the possibility of maybe slightly breaking through all of its layers of deliberate artifice. As if it’s trying to be playful in a way that engages with the audience, instead of playful in a way that’s presented to the audience, and we’re expected to politely clap and say, “yes, quite delightful, that. Good show.”

Before going to see the movie, I’d read several reviews that complained that the movie was too detached and impenetrable to be enjoyable. But I thought that’s just baseline levels of Wes Anderson Movie, where you’re occasionally not even sure if it’s trying to be classified as a comedy. I didn’t think The Phoenician Scheme was quite as funny as the movie itself seemed to think, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a Wes Anderson movie that could surprise me.

One Thing I Like About John Wick

John Wick manages to accomplish a lot with the mantra of “tell, don’t show”

After over a decade of cultural diffusion — marketing campaigns for four movies and now a spin-off, countless memes, the character’s appearance in video games — the act of actually watching any of the John Wick movies seemed like just a formality. I assumed that whatever magic was inside had dried up a long time ago, and I was impossibly late to the party.

But after watching the first movie, I suspect that it might’ve been excellent timing. This is a movie about a character whose reputation precedes him. So much of John Wick is devoted to scenes establishing what a fearsome bad-ass John Wick is, without actually showing him being a bad-ass. I’d imagined it would be an hour and a half of non-stop slow-motion gunfights in purple-lit nightclubs, but that doesn’t really make up the bulk of the running time. Instead, we get lots and lots of people telling us how scary he is.

This is delivered best by the bad guy Viggo, a mobster who talks about Wick as if he were a fairy tale. He’s not the boogeyman; he’s the guy they send to kill the boogeyman! Much of this is in Russian, with stylized subtitles filling much of the screen, certain words given particular emphasis.

They’re light on specifics. The only actual story I can recall is when Viggo says that Wick once killed two men with just a pencil. A pencil! I felt like I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by this detail, though: I’ve already seen The Dark Knight and don’t consider it that much of a stretch to imagine how a pencil could be used as a lethal weapon.

As it is, the first time we see Wick really show his stuff is when he kills a bunch of dudes (presumably; they’re in masks) trying to get into his house, in a vain attempt to stop his pending killing spree. We know that he kills twelve of them, but I’ve got to say it feels like pretty rote stuff. Certainly more home intruders than I would be able to kill, but not exactly an unprecedented number for an action movie.

But by that point, the movie has done a really good job of establishing its vibe. I was already familiar with a lot of the “Wick-iverse” from the aforementioned cultural diffusion, so I knew about the hotel that catered to assassins and had a strict code of no-killing-allowed. But I’d imagined that all of it would be bigger, or given out in small dollops of lore across at least the first two movies.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the restraint in John Wick. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward story, coasting mainly on vibes and mood. Apart from repeating what a bad-ass John Wick himself is, there’s very little exposition, and it’s all streamlined and economical. You know very quickly who each character it is, and which role they play in this story. The simplicity really does give it the weight of modern mythology: a bunch of archetypes playing their parts in a simple story about revenge.

And about this recurring idea of “honor among killers,” which is bullshit in the real world but makes perfect sense in an action movie that’s presented almost like a fable.

If anything, I wish they’d gone farther into making Wick a super-hero. Have him doing five-finger death punches and the like, without ever breaking a sweat. When commenting on one of his many wounds, he admits that he’s “rusty.” But it creates this weird dissonance where everyone talks about him as if he’s a super-human killing machine, but the movie also wants us to relate to him as a John McClane, seat-of-his-pants type. I think it would’ve been stronger if they hadn’t bothered to put any tension around his getting wounded or kidnapped, but instead made the stakes all about his allies being in jeopardy, or simply the chance that his target will get away.

I definitely wouldn’t add John Wick to my list of favorite action movies, but I was impressed by how confidently it seemed to know exactly what it wanted to do. And how it seemed to suggest a story, a history, and a world much bigger than anything they needed to actually show us.

Your Taste, Should You Choose to Accept It

Mission: Impossible, Letterboxd, and making peace with being basic

Apparently there’s a new Mission: Impossible movie out? Who knew? You’d think they’d have at least put up a poster or something.

I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world, but at least in Los Angeles, the advertising is inescapable. The other day I went to a mall that’s not even attached to a theater, and coming out into the atrium, I was confronted with a positively gigantic LED screen, 25 feet tall at least, showing Tom Cruise’s face squinting out over his domain. It was like being in a modern update of 1984 where a bunch of Hollywood producers had said, “Well of course our main objective is to stay true to Orwell’s original vision but also we think obviously, Big Brother should be more handsome.”

I had plans to see the new movie, but was feeling an odd combination of gastrointestinal distress and extreme lack of interest. It seemed more or less guaranteed to be an entertaining action movie with some stunts that take full advantage of the IMAX screen, but I’ve been unable to work up even the smallest bit of enthusiasm for it.

But heading into the weekend, I felt like I needed to do some prep work to get the full effect. I’ve still only ever seen the first three movies in the series, after all. (Or in other words, I stopped right before they started to get good, by most accounts). But then I saw a recap of the franchise that made me realize I actually had seen at least one of the other ones, but had forgotten everything about them. But then I realized that all the details have blurred together, and while I think I remember seeing a scene of Henry Cavill beating the hell out of somebody in a bathroom, it might’ve been The Man From UNCLE or Casino Royale or maybe it was when he was wailing on me, in one of those dreams I’m not supposed to mention in polite company?

Whatever the case, the Mission: Impossible movies just don’t resonate with me at all, and I’ve been talking a lot of shit about them on social media lately. So much so that I’ve been concerned it comes across as the type of person who is super-quick to volunteer that they have no interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Where I’m never quite sure how we’re supposed to react. Congratulations on your sophisticated and refined tastes, I guess?

So it’s important to be clear that whatever it is that makes Mission: Impossible movies pass through my like fiber, it’s solely a matter of preference, and no value judgment is expressed or implied. (Except for the second movie, which is just not good). I love a high-budget, well-made action movie, and I love a summer blockbuster that everybody can enjoy at the same time as a Big Event. I have less than no interest in letting my obnoxious, pretentious movie snob come back to life after I’ve done such a good job of silencing him over the past several years.

Which is something I’ve been very wary of, since I’ve gotten back into Letterboxd. I like their YouTube videos, I like the social media aspect of it, and I especially like the idea of having a movie-watching diary that doesn’t require me to devote a couple of hours to farting out a post on this blog. What I don’t like is that it keeps reminding me of everything I hated about film school and about online film and popular media commentary.

And I start to waste time thinking about stupid stuff I absolutely don’t need to think about, like whether this movie “deserves” three stars, or do I bump it down to two and a half? Do I need to add a review to clarify my rating, even if I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say? Would it be fun to write something nasty about a movie I strongly dislike, instead of just ignoring it?

It’s all in danger of becoming performative instead of participatory. Like not just wanting to engage in interesting conversation about a movie (whether positive or negative), but needing to have your tastes recognized and validated. Where it’s not a celebration, like it should be, but a challenge that you can and most likely will fail at.

For example: choosing the four favorite movies that will go at the top of your Letterboxd profile, which is part of the site’s branding, since they ask celebrities on red carpets to list their four favorites. Mine are shown at the top of this post — The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Miller’s Crossing, and Rear Window. I mean, obviously.

But I’m gradually getting the impression that the rules for choosing these are more complex than I ever imagined, and I’ve done it wrong. For instance: I’ve just outed myself as basic. You’re supposed to choose something under-appreciated, to demonstrate that you’ve got more eclectic tastes. Ideally, something that is obscure enough that few others will have chosen it, but popular enough to dispel any sense that you specifically chose the most obscure and pretentious movie that you could think of.

“What’s wrong with Empire or Raiders?!” I protest, making even clearer that I’m missing the point. It’s not that people dislike them; it’s that so many people like them that it says nothing to list them as your favorites. You want to pick something that says, “this choice tells you something specifically about me.”

But each of those movies does say something specifically about me, to the point that it almost feels like a victory. For one thing, my memory is absolutely terrible, but I still vividly remember seeing each one for the first time¹ and realizing I was seeing something that was unlike anything I’d seen before. For another, each one changed how I think about art and what I value in it. Two of them obviously played a big part in my moving to California. Rear Window was like a light bulb going off² and changed the way I interpret movies. And Miller’s Crossing carried itself like both an art film and a gangster action movie, suggesting the distinction wasn’t as rigid as I’d always assumed.

And for about as long as those have been my favorite movies, I’ve gone through cycles of being a pretentious snob, to rejecting pretentious snobbery and becoming an arrogant snob instead, to just being kind of a self-righteous contrarian, to trashing stuff if I thought it would be funny, to whatever phase I’m in now. And honestly, it just feels like a victory to realize I just can’t get that concerned about highbrow vs lowbrow, knowing that I’ve seen a lot more blockbusters that resonated with me than “art” films have.

It feels like a victory to grow up feeling like a nerd, seeing all my nerd favorites become enormously successful business to the point that you were a weirdo if you didn’t like them, and then seeing that whole fandom fracture again. It feels like a victory to know that I’ve grown out of my arrogant phase where I scoffed at Stephen Spielberg as being too “corny” or “maudlin.” And it feels like a victory to realize that absolutely none of this matters at all, but I can still find a way to try and turn it into an introspective metaphor for self-discovery and growth or whatever.

But the most valuable reminder, at least for me, is just to remember why we’re fans of stuff in the first place. Ostensibly it’s to celebrate the stuff we love, instead of knocking down the stuff we hate. To discover new details about our favorites, or to discover new favorites. And resist the urge to let out the inner arrogant film critic, and instead just choose to enjoy things and let other people enjoy things.

1
At Phipps Plaza for the Atlanta premiere, at Septum Cinemas in my hometown for a birthday party, at the Tate Center at University of Georgia, and in a cinema studies class at NYU
2
No pun intended; not a flash bulb

Two Great Tastes (One More Thing I Love About Final Destination: Bloodlines)

Bloodlines not only nails the Final Destination formula, but also manages to give it some weight. Lots of spoilers.

This post has lots of spoilers for both Final Destination: Bloodlines and the first Final Destination movie, as well as maybe The Monkey and The Cabin in the Woods.

When I was still coming off of my high of seeing Final Destination: Bloodlines, I said that not only did it nail the formula better than any other entry in the franchise, but it also managed to avoid being completely nihilistic, and even ended on a note that was almost uplifting. I didn’t want to overstate it, but was just marveling at how it managed to lean into the black comedy inherent in the premise, but without becoming so campy or silly as to turn into a horror movie parody.

But since watching the sixth movie (and scheduling another visit to see it in IMAX), I’ve been reading through my old posts about the series, and re-watching all of the recaps on the YouTube channel Dead Meat. That reminded me of the maudlin (and in my opinion, just awful) original ending of the first Final Destination, which had the characters breaking the cycle by having our hero sacrifice himself and help bring new life into the world.

You could conclude that that’s a lesson about focus testing and studio interference, or you could conclude, as I did, that the Final Destination movies need to stick to their formula and stop trying to introduce any kind of emotional heft into a series specifically about a cast full of people all dying in absurdly improbable ways.

But then I started thinking about another scene in Bloodlines, which built off an idea from Final Destination 2: you can “satisfy” death by dying and then somehow being resurrected.¹ The character of Erik plans to save his brother Bobby, who’s next in line, by aggravating his peanut allergy until he flatlines, and then having the hospital staff bring him back.

Erik starts to get him a bag of roasted peanuts, but Bobby says as long as they’re doing this, he wants to get a pack of peanut butter cups. (Which he’s presumably never tasted, of course).² And the moment I like so much, which seemed like nothing more than a good gag at first: Bobby takes a bite of it, and he says, “It’s so good.” The reason I like it is because he’s marked for death, but he has a small moment of choosing to enjoy something.

1
Which is an idea I’ve seen pop up in several other movies since then, as well.
2
And we’re given a clear shot of the warning label on the vending machine, right before they start trying to tip it over, because this movie understands exactly how the series is all about planting ideas in the audience’s mind.

One Thing I Love About Final Destination: Bloodlines

Most horror movies lose their spark when the characters start figuring out the rules. The 6th Final Destination movie makes it part of the fun.

The Final Destination series is a perfect example of why it’s usually a bad idea for me to review a movie right after I’ve seen it. Until I get the chance to ruminate on it for a while, I’m either too positive about it¹, or I’m too negative about it.

I absolutely love the gimmick behind the series, but I was way too dismissive of them initially, and I’ve tried to set the record straight in recent years. In fact, after being too dismissive, I got weirdly possessive of the franchise enough that I never saw the fourth one, for some dumb reason like thinking it was way too early to be doing a reboot.

But in my defense, it often seems like the filmmakers aren’t quite sure what they think of the franchise, either. They seem a little bit reluctant to fully embrace the idea that these are almost black comedies as much as they are horror/suspense movies. The third has long been my favorite, because it felt like they leaned into the fact that it’s all absurd, without ever devolving fully into camp.

I’ve heard that the fifth installment gets the tone right, but I’ll never see it because it has a set piece involving LASIK surgery, which is my biggest can’t-handle.²

So I completely loved Final Destination: Bloodlines, which might be the best realization of the franchise’s premise. It was so much fun. And the horror isn’t diminished by the sense of humor, since the most horrific scenes are also inherently the funniest. I was laughing out loud while I was cringing, covering my eyes, and trying to crawl into the theater seat. Not to mention frequently reflexively covering up the most sensitive parts of my body like a hot woman in a shower in a teen sex comedy.

Also, I’m grateful to this movie for putting a permanent end to the notion that I might someday want to get a septum ring.

The best example of how the movie hits exactly the right combination of suspense and comedy is the opening set piece, which perfectly sets the tone for everything that’s to follow. It’s a staple of the franchise to start the movie with an elaborate disaster, the scale of which has increased from movie to movie. This one — following a Laura Linney-esque protagonist on a momentous date to the top of a Space Needle-inspired building — is especially drawn out. Not even so much for the scenes of disaster, but for moment after moment after moment of perfectly-executed foreshadowing. In fact, this one goes so far that it’s fiveshadowing.

Lines like “I think I’ll live” and “I’ll hang onto you” and “for the rest of my life.” An over-stuffed elevator that doesn’t seem to be functioning. A snooty maitre’d who you’re just waiting to meet a grisly fate. A tower whose groaning superstructure you can hear from the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. An out-of-control flambé. A glass dance floor. A chandelier shedding crystals onto the glass. A band performing a raucous version of “Shout” and encouraging the dancers to stomp on the floor. As the tension builds, there’s a mind-blowingly great sequence of quick cuts showing threats around the restaurant, including a guest cracking the top of a creme brûlée, and a carver slicing up prime rib.

And a running story of just the shittiest kid, starting with him getting yelled at for pulling a penny out of a fountain.

This sequence, and the way it’s perfectly in sync with what the audience is thinking, and the way it sadistically stretches out the tension, are a perfect encapsulation of what makes the Final Destination series so brilliant. It’s not just a case of planning out an elaborate death sequence, and it’s not even just a case of hinting at all the ways a character might possibly die in this scene. It’s knowing exactly how long to hold a moment, exactly how to plant an image in the audience’s mind that will continue to linger for the next several minutes, and exactly how to strike the right balance between suspense, horror, and comedy.

And that sequence isn’t even my favorite thing about the movie, which is a spoiler. I will say that my only criticism of the movie is that so much of it is in the trailers and teasers, so if you’re lucky enough not to have watched them yet, avoid the promotional stuff until after you’ve seen the movie. There are still some great surprises, but it did lessen the tension when I’d already seen a couple of the best set pieces.

1
I actually said I really liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What’s up with that?!
2
Lots of horror posters seem to involve eye trauma over the past few years, and I wish they’d cut it out.

One Thing I Like About Asteroid City

Even though I don’t get Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, I can still tell that Tilda Swinton did

Several years ago, I went with my family on a rare trip for us all to see a movie together. I don’t remember what we went to see, probably whatever was the blockbuster out in December 2004 that seemed like it would appeal to everyone. What I do vividly remember is that when we got to the theater, my family surprised me by telling me that they’d gotten us all tickets for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, simply because I’d said I was looking forward to seeing it.

During the scene where the crew finds the jaguar shark, and Bill Murray delivers the line, “I wonder if it remembers me,” I burst into tears. Afterwards on the drive home, I said that I’d loved it. The rest of my family said some variation on “I’m glad you liked it. I didn’t get it.”

I mention that mostly to illustrate how awesome and generous and kind my family is. But also to say that I now understand exactly how they felt. I watched Asteroid City, and I had the clear impression that it was trying very hard to say something profound, and I just plain didn’t get it.

When I finished it last night, I was content to say that it was very pretty, and I appreciated that it went so hard on its 50s aesthetic, and it did actually make me laugh a few times. (The only one I remember is when the stop-motion alien realizes he’s being photographed, and he poses with the meteor). And I thought it was interesting to switch between the movie and the movie as a play about the development and production of the play that is the movie.

But when I woke up this morning, I was bizarrely, irrationally, irritated by it. What was the point of all that?!

I guess I can appreciate the notion of Wes Anderson attempting to take the twee artifice of his movies as far as it can possibly go. Asteroid City makes the deliberate, tightly-controlled artificiality not just a stylistic choice, but an idea. An insistence that the style of unnatural compositions; stilted delivery of overly-wordy, mannered dialogue; and scene structure that leaves the purpose of each scene enigmatic; is all just presentation, but it’s not the point. That all of it is artificial, down to its core, but the point isn’t to make people believe the artifice, but to understand and feel the universal ideas floating underneath in a way that’s emotional instead of intellectual.

So, for instance, you can be looking at too many recognizable actors crammed into a fake submarine looking at a clearly fake fish and still be suddenly moved to tears. I got the sense that the equivalent scene in Asteroid City was supposed to be the one in which Jason Schwartzman’s character steps out of both the movie and the play-that-is-the-movie, and he listens as Margot Robbie’s character describes her scene that was cut from the production. But if there was something there that was intended to hit me like an emotional ton of bricks, I deftly avoided it, somehow.

I saw a blurb from a review where the reviewer confidently and simply summed it up as being “about grief.” But that’s a topic that seems to run through all of Anderson’s movies; it’s kind of like patting yourself on the back for saying a Martin Scorsese movie is “about Italians.”

Maybe it’s an extension of the idea of mannerisms piled on mannerisms, to the point that we’re completely out of touch with how we feel and why we do things. Like the conversations with Scarlett Johansson’s character, where she reveals that she’s been acting so long that she’s aware of how she’s supposed to feel, and she can perform emotions, but doesn’t actually feel them. Or the repeated scenes where the moments of genuine emotional connection in Asteroid City are described instead of performed. Or for that matter, the whole format of plays within movies within plays. (Which they completely undermine by having Bryan Cranston appear in the color segments, just for what felt like a gag that didn’t land, which annoyed the hell out of me).

Anyway, the whole point of “One Thing I Like” was to keep myself from rambling on trying to interpret everything about a movie, so I’ll just name one thing I like: Tilda Swinton’s performance as Dr Hickenlooper. There wasn’t a bad performance in the movie; everybody was doing exactly what was required by the handbook of How To Act In A Wes Anderson Film. But Swinton somehow seemed to be so thoroughly present. (I thought the same about Cate Blanchett’s performance in The Life Aquatic).

Not really naturalistic — because a naturalistic performance in this kind of movie would feel tone-deaf — but simply like she actually existed in this universe, instead of being an actor playing a character who exists in this universe. I realize I’m not breaking new ground by pointing out that Tilda Swinton is an astonishingly good actor, but this relatively small part made me think that I would believe her in anything.

Oh, I also liked that in the scene where Jason Schwartzman’s character is auditioning for the part in front of the playwright (played by Edward Norton), we get increasingly clear shots of the homoerotic art hanging on the playwright’s walls. The focus is on the performance, while a painting of a bare ass is clearly visible in the background, in spotlight. It’s never addressed or explained. (But I would’ve greatly preferred it if it had been left completely unaddressed, and hadn’t ended with a kiss that makes it feel like a cheap gag).

Magic What We Do (Rewatching Sinners)

More thoughts about Sinners after a second viewing, including plenty of stuff I missed. Lots of spoilers.

There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube video titled something like “10 Things You Missed In <Latest Blockbuster Movie Release>!” Occasionally, it’ll be given the slightly more charitable title of things you might have missed, but the implication is always the same. I didn’t take two whole semesters of cinema studies classes in college just to have some YouTuber talking shit about my media literacy!

But then again, maybe I should chill out a little bit. Especially considering that I finally got to watch Sinners for a second time last night, and there were plenty of details that I’d missed the first time.

On the whole, I’m very glad I saw it again, because it reduced the scope of it in my mind a little bit. Not just because we didn’t see it in IMAX this time, but because I could stop thinking of it as this epic parable waiting for me to pick it apart and impose my own interpretation on it, until I eventually got a certificate from the filmmakers saying “Congratulations! You understood it!” Instead, I can just appreciate it as an outstanding movie.

Some of the stuff that I’d missed is so obvious, it’s a little bit embarrassing. But I have enough trouble understanding dialogue in movies anyway, and it’s made harder when the characters are speaking in heavy dialect. Here are a few of the things I noticed this time around.

The highlight of the movie is still the sequence where Sam performs “I Lied to You,” which turns into the montage of the power of music to span across time and across cultures. Even when I knew it was coming, it still made me involuntarily gasp and my eyes fill with tears. Still just a literally breathtaking combination of images and music and ideas.

But throughout the movie, music is used as a representation of magic. Earlier I picked out the scene in which Annie is preparing a mojo bag for Smoke, and the music (titled “Why You Here” on the soundtrack) that has been playing throughout the scene perfectly syncs up with her striking a match three times.

It suggests that the “background” music throughout the movie isn’t entirely non-diegetic. It represents the magic that surrounds these characters, and it goes into sync during the moments when the characters are able to tap into that magic. Or overwhelming emotion, which is depicted as the same thing.

When Delta Slim is telling the story of how his friend was lynched in a train station, he becomes so overwhelmed at the grief and injustice of it that he can’t do anything but start humming a blues riff and stomping his feet. It’s a powerful reminder to the audience that “the blues” isn’t just some abstract style of music, but an expression of insurmountable pain and grief.

And the earlier scene between Annie and Smoke is echoed near the end of the movie, after Smoke has sent Sam home and has taken out most of the klansmen who showed up to destroy the juke joint. He keeps having flashbacks to the previous night, and in particular to how he’s lost all of the most important people in his life, and there’s a sense that he’s feeling not just rage, but survivor’s guilt. As the music crescendos, he rips off the mojo bag from around his neck, and the music suddenly stops.

When we see Annie again, nursing their baby, the earlier theme is repeated, now called “Elijah.” He’s smoking a cigarette, she calls him by his real name, and in a wonderful moment I’d completely missed, she says, “You don’t want to get that Smoke on him.”