My 2024 Holiday Wish List

Okay, it's time to ignore politics for a bit and get into the state of Hollywood.  It's been an interesting year, and a lot of long-running concerns about the industry are coming into better focus.  The strikes are mostly over, but the labor issues are not.  Streaming is quickly becoming a worse deal now that it has more of a monopoly on our attention, and broadcast is continuing to limp along.  The box office is in recovery, but the movies coming out seem to be safer and blander than ever.  Looking back on last year's wishlist, things have gotten better and things have gotten worse.  

So this year for the holidays, I want…

For seasons of television to be longer.  There were too many seasons of ongoing shows this year that were eight episodes and barely progressed their stories.  It seems to be a cost-cutting measure, exacerbated by the strike, and it's driving viewers nuts.  Some of the bigger budget series like "House of the Dragon" and "Rings of Power" take multiple years to produce a season, and the momentum and interest just die if they don't deliver something more substantive to keep the anticipation going.  There are a lot of big titles on their way in 2025, including "Stranger Things," so this is definitely going to come up again.  

For the demonetization of the culture wars.  After the anti-woke mobs set their sights on titles as disparate as "True Detective: Night Country," "The Acolyte," and the upcoming "Snow White" live action movie this year, it's pretty clear that this is all an excuse for the online deplorables to harass women and minorities.  The primary targets are almost always women.  The primary tactic is endless online vitriol about what women are doing or saying or making.  A big contributing factor that has emerged this year is that anti-woke content gets lots of attention on platforms like Youtube, which means there's a significant monetary incentive to keep generating more ragebait.  Youtube and their ilk could fix this - if they wanted to.  Instead, I expect they'll wait until things get out of hand again.  And they will. 

     

For the superhero movie industrial complex to proceed with caution.  2025 is going to see James Gunn's rebooted DC cinematic universe release its first film with the new "Superman," and Marvel release at least three new MCU superhero titles.  If the past few years have shown us anything, it's that less is more when it comes to superhero media.  The flow of Sony Spider-verse movies seems to have finally dried up, but Marvel and DC seem determined to maximize their output.  If we're not careful, things could quickly go back up to pre-"Endgame" levels.  At least the releases of new MCU series on Disney+ are slowing down.  For now.

For the streaming services to get better about marketing.  I'm not sure how anyone is finding out about shows these days, but I know people are looking for more to watch.  I don't know if I've ever had more requests for recommendations than I have in the past year.  My own watchlist is a mile long, but nobody else researches this stuff the way I do.  I'll note that it has been a little easier to keep up with new shows this year thanks to some delays, but there's no shortage of good stuff to watch.  The problem is definitely awareness. 

For one of the Twitter alternatives to gain enough steam to become a real contender in the social media race, because original recipe Twitter is pretty much FUBAR at this point.  I'm rooting for Bluesky myself, though it's quiet enough over there at the moment that I'm actually enjoying the environment.  

For my kids to latch on to a new musical with a soundtrack that doesn't make me want to strangle myself.  I curse the day that "Wish" was unleashed on the unsuspecting public.     

And finally, for all the media coming next year to exceed my expectations, and the creators behind them to have every opportunity to do good work.

Happy Holidays

  

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"Kinds of Kindness" Kinda Rules

Good grief, I can't tell you how much I appreciated a little Lanthimos this year. In a torpid summer season full of franchise reruns, a nasty anthology film from a weird European director was exactly what I needed. It's taken me longer than I'd like to admit, but I've really grown fond of the absurdity of Yorgos Lanthimos's work. If you'd told me fifteen years ago that I'd actually enjoy watching his characters' deadpan line delivery, frequent acts of self-mutilation, and warped attitudes toward sex, I'd have thought you were crazy.


Yet here we are. "Kinds of Kindness" is a rare anthology film, featuring three stories all with the same cast playing different characters, with one exception. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone each play the lead of one story, and jointly share the narrative in the third. In the first story, Plemons plays a man whose life is totally controlled by his micromanaging boss, and attempts to resist. In the second, Plemons plays a cop whose wife, played by Stone, returns home after being lost at sea. Finally, Stone plays a cult member in the third story who is searching for someone who can resurrect the dead. Other members of the ensemble include Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, and Mamadou Athie, who play different roles in each story. There is one minor character in common, known only as R.M.F (Yorgos Stefanakos). He has no lines, but is a vital piece of each plot, and the stories are titled "The Death of R.M.F.," "R.M.F is Flying," and "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich."


All of the stories follow the style of Lanthimos's earlier absurdist films like "Dogtooth," "The Killing of Sacred Deer" and "The Lobster." Each explores personal relationships and human impulses through allegory, pushing the characters to wild extremes. I think that these shorter pieces, co-written with Efthimis Filippou, actually work a lot better than some of the full length feature films. The time limit forces the filmmakers to be more efficient in their storytelling, and the bizarre concepts don't have the time to grow stale. I also like the use of the same cast in each story. The characters are unconnected, but there are echoes of the same behaviors and characteristics from one performance to the next, especially because everyone's dialogue shares the same particular cadence and phrasing.


It's been a while since I've seen a film that so clearly invites interpretation. I don't want to say anything definite, except that the stories seem to be ordered by how straightforward they are. The one where Willem Dafoe is controlling Jesse Plemons' life has a pretty clear theme, and the simple premise is taken to its logical end. The next with Stone returning from the sea feels like the modern day adaptation of a folk tale, using dream logic and instances of surrealism. The final story is the most complicated, with some concepts like the cult taking longer to set up. I'm still working out my feelings towards it. Crucially, however, none of the stories feel unfinished or that they should be longer than they are.


I really enjoy all of the actors involved in "Kinds of Kindness," especially when they're able to find the notes of humor and whimsy in the madness of Lanthimos's cruel universes. Emma Stone has a celebratory dance in the last segment that is perfect in its strangeness and intensity. Jesse Plemons gradually unraveling in the first segment is a joy. Lanthimos sticks him in more and more uncomfortable parts of the frame until you can just feel him ready to explode and run amok. And after everyone's antics in "Poor Things," the one graphic sex scene in the film felt more like a punch line than anything disturbing.


The only element that feels very un-Lanthimos is the soundtrack, especially the opening with The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams." It's oddly on-the-nose, almost spoon feeding the audience the premise of the first story. Still, it made for an excellent trailer, so I'm not inclined to complain.


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My Top Ten Films of 1938

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog.  The  ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order.  

A Woman's Face - I saw George Cukor's 1941 remake of this film with Joan Crawford first, which is a perfectly fine movie, but far inferior to the Swedish original.  Ingrid Bergman's performance as the scarred leader of a blackmail ring is incredible, and her unlikely redemption is far more moving than the played up romantic relationship and courtroom theatrics of the Hollywood version.  Kudos should also go to director Gustaf Molander, especially for the influential post-surgery sequence.  

Port of Seven Seas - Not all remakes are created equal, however, and I find this greatly condensed version of Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy a delightful watch.  Written by Preston Sturges directed by James Whale, lensed by the great Karl Freund, and starring an excellent cast led by veteran character actor Frank Morgan, the film is a charmer through and through.  Fans of the original will likely cry foul at some of the changes to the plot and characters, but taken on its own, it works beautifully. 

A Slight Case of Murder - A comedy starring Edward G. Robinson as a Prohibition bootlegger trying to go straight, based on Damon Runyon's only play.  Robinson as this genial, rough-edged mobster trying to join polite society would be funny on his own, but give him a family with similar criminal instincts, a couple of dim-bulb goons, and four dead bodies to get rid of, and you've got a classic.  None of the gags or characters are particularly original, but the execution from everyone involved is perfect.   

Pygmalion - This is a direct adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play that the "My Fair Lady" musical was based on, with a screenplay by Shaw himself.  Much of the material in the later adaptations was created for this film, including the embassy ball sequence.  I can see why this was considered the definitive screen version of the story for so long.  Wendy Hiller's Eliza Doolittle is one for the ages - painfully genuine and easy to root for -  and Leslie Howard as Professor Higgins is no slouch either.   

Boys Town - Hollywood mythmaking may have never been better than this biopic of Father Flanagan, a Roman Catholic Priest who started a boys' orphanage in 1917.  The story and nearly all the characters are fictional, based very loosely on the real Flanagan and his organization.  However, you never saw a more inspirational, life affirming piece of cinema, with Spencer Tracy playing the embodiment of all of humanity's generosity and kindness, declaring for the ages that there's no such thing as a bad boy.  

Alexander Nevsky - Sergei Eisenstein's historical action film is easily the most exciting thing he ever made.  There are epic battle sequences, touches of manly humor, and hints of the fantastic as the film chronicles the exploits of a Russian hero out of legend.  It's the cinematography that's the main event here, creating these magnificent visual compositions and in camera effects that are stunning to this day.  Every subsequent screen battle owes something to Eisenstein's work here.

Bringing Up Baby - One of the best examples of the screwball comedy pits Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant against each other and a leopard named Baby.  This was a box office bomb upon release, but subsequently rediscovered by generations of comedy fans who couldn't resist the expertly engineered comedic chaos of miscommunications, mistaken identities, bad luck, and physical pratfalls galore.  By the time Hepburn and Grant are dangling on that dinosaur skeleton, I was in love with both of them. 

The Adventures of Robin Hood - Was there any leading man that had more charm than Errol Flynn?  And "Robin Hood" was Flynn at his peak, wooing Olivia de Haviland as Maid Marion, and Basil Rathbone as the villainous Guy of Gisbourne, all in glorious Technicolor.  The movie still holds up, thanks largely to its exciting stunts, including one of the best screen sword fights of all time.  Kudos should also go to the unusually high production values, helping to show off the newfangled color photography.   

You Can't Take it With You - A Frank Capra comedy that puts two of my favorite actors - James Stewart and Jean Arthur - into a very unlikely premise.  The son of a greedy factory owner falls for the daughter of a family of eccentrics, who also happen to be the lone holdouts preventing  a pivotal business deal from going through.  The farce commences, resulting in literal fireworks, but the core of the picture is the very Capraesque appeal to humanity and neighborliness over capitalism and greed.   

The Lady Vanishes - Finally, this is one of Alfred Hitchcock's last British films, the success of which spurred him to head for Hollywood.  "The Lady Vanishes" is one of the undisputed classics of the mystery genre, though it's also often also classified as a romantic comedy and a precursor to a lot of WWII spy thrillers.  Of the accomplished cast, May Whitty as the vanished Miss Froy made the biggest impression on me, a pleasant old woman who nobody should be surprised is keeping big secrets.    

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Time With "A Gentleman in Moscow"

I'm not surprised that "A Gentleman in Moscow" is based on a novel.  The eight episode Showtime series 

charts the fortunes of a group of characters in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.  Each episode opens with narration to help measure the passage of time, and bring the watcher up to speed on where we are in Russian history.

Ewan McGregor stars as Count Rostov, a genial aristocrat who is spared from the purge because his writing is believed to have helped the Revolution.  However, he is judged and sentenced to live the remainder of his life in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow.  Rostov becomes a permanent guest at the hotel, under the watchful eye of the menacing Soviet official, Glebnikov (Johnny Harris).  He meets an actress, Anna Urbanova (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who eventually becomes his lover and close confidante.   His old school friend Mishka (Fehinti Balogun), a Communist writer, also visits him often.  However, his most constant companion is Nina Kulikova (Alexa Goodall), the young daughter of a hotel employee who is curious about Rostov's life as an aristocrat.

I watched "A Gentleman in Moscow" specifically for Ewan MacGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and wasn't disappointed.  Both of them have very entertaining roles in the show, but they're in  a more sedate and old-fashioned sort of costume drama than I was expecting.  Count Rostov is a tragic figure, a man forced to stay on the sidelines of history, largely cut off from friends and family, while trying to reconcile with the ghosts of his past.  He makes a fulfilling life for himself in the Hotel Metropol, as he struggles to retain what little he can of his old life and worldview, but it's an existence that is constantly marked by tragedy.  It's all very melancholy and very Russian, though the finale gives Rostov a final shot at doing something meaningful, and wraps things up for all the characters in a satisfying way.

History lovers should be warned that the show isn't very interested in actual Russian or Soviet history, with elements of the story frequently taking on a fanciful, fairy tale quality, especially in the earliest episodes with young Nina.  The show also uses colorblind casting, so Fehinti Balogun from "I May Destroy You" can play Mishka, and Leah Harvey from "Foundation" can play Marina, one of the hotel employees who befriends Rostov.  The hotel itself is real, but was used as offices for the new Soviet bureaucracy for a good chunk of the time that "A Gentleman in Moscow" takes place.  The show turns it into a romantic sort of nexus for international travel, and there are secret rooms and hidden passages, of course.    

The series changes from episode to episode as each installment takes place further and further in time from the last, but not as much as I was expecting.  Some characters age significantly, while others barely seem to change, even after decades.  Even using the most generous reading that we're seeing things from Rostov's subjective viewpoint, a show that spans thirty years could stand to spend more effort showing the passage of time.  Instead, references to Russian history serve as our guideposts, and unfortunately I wasn't well versed enough in the subject for the mentions of Khruschev or Nazi mobilization to be of much help.    

However, the show is well written and charming enough for me to overlook a lot of its contrivances.  I like that it's slower paced and fairly low stakes, with Rostov rarely able to intercede in the events that he witnesses as much as he wants to.  I like that it spends a lot of time contemplating the loss of a bygone era, and seeing Rostov find a place for himself in the new order, even if it's a low status one.  And I'm glad that MacGregor got to play this role, and didn't bother about trying to do it with a Russian accent.  

Finally, the show has my favorite opening sequence of anything I've seen all year.  I'm a sucker for fancy animation, and the artful use of Soviet graphic design elements is just delightful.  It perfectly sets the tone for a show that is a little slower, a little more classical, and a little more of an old fashioned epic than you see much of nowadays.  And thank goodness for that.

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My Criterion 40

Criterion is releasing a forty movie set this year, to celebrate their 40th anniversary.  It's supposed to be a sampling of some of the collection's best, and a good starting point for those just getting into world cinema.  I consider it a point of pride that I've already seen all forty, but most of these aren't films that I'd choose to own.  So today, for fun, I thought I'd put together my own forty-film collection of Criterion titles.

This is entirely  a fantasy exercise, and I know there are licensing issues that would make the inclusion of some of these films in a real set impossible.  Many of the original releases are out of print.  I'm going to play fair and only include titles with spine numbers, leaving out titles from the Eclipse series and the titles that have shown up on the streaming service.  I'm also leaving out shorts collections, television shows, and the Beastie Boys video anthology.  Single films only are eligible, though some will be from sets where they've been grouped with other titles.

By my own estimates, I've watched roughly 70-75% of the entire collection, which I think is good enough to make some decently well-informed selections.  

And now with all caveats covered, let's get to the list, ordered by spine number:  

10. Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg)

13. Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)

30. M (Fritz Lang)

61. Life of Brian (Terry Jones)

62. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer)

93. Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger)

101. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)

111. Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati)

198. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (R.W. Fassbinder)

306. Le Samouraï (Jean Pierre Melville)

316. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)

420. Happiness (Agnes Varda)

459. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel)

484. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975 (Chantal Akerman)

501. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)

519. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami)

573. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray)

591. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)

666. The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo Del Toro)

680. City Lights (Charles Chaplin)

691. Thief (Michael Mann)

717. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy)

765. The Black Stallion (Carroll Ballard)

779. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

821. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)

843. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)

888. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)

918. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov)

937. Dragon Inn (King Hu)

950. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder)

1023. The Cremator (Juraj Herz)

1025. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

1064. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)

1094. Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles)

1153. Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra)

1154. Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons)

1157. Daisies (Vera Chytilova)

1158. Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

1191. The Trial (Orson Welles)

1215. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)

So, my initial shortlist was over a hundred titles long, even when I limited myself to one title per director.  A lot of these titles are ones I've written about for "Great Directors" or ones that I probably will write about in the future.  I briefly considered disqualifying every film I'd written about for this blog, but that was going too far.  I did, however, disqualify everything in the existing Criterion 40 set, which knocked out several  titles, including "All That Jazz," "Bicycle Thieves," "The Night of the Hunter," "Do the Right Thing," "Sullivan's Travels," and "3 Women."

Availability was a consideration.  I don't believe that Netflix films like "Power of the Dog" have any other home media releases, while they seem to reissue "The Princess Bride" every time it has an anniversary.  Quality of the release was a consideration - I've seen some awful prints of older films, especially the public domain ones like "The Trial."  Criterion's restoration work is central to its purpose and identity.

Diversity was a consideration.  I was glad to find so many titles from female directors like Lucretia Martel, Kasi Lemmons, and Mira Nair had found their way into the collection over the last few years.  A few directors probably would have had films on this list if more of their titles were available.  I hope there's more focus on South American films next, which I wasn't able to represent at all.  I know I don't have enough documentaries or silent films and not a single animated film, but forty titles isn't a whole lot to begin with.  

And here are a few too many honorable mentions that were the hardest ones to cut:

6. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Renoir)

26. The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie)

49. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini)

135. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock)

158. The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith)

160. À Nous la Liberté (Rene Clair)

168. Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker)

247. Slacker (Richard Linklater)

453. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)

522. Red Desert (Michealangelo Antonioni)

561. Kes (Ken Loach)

544. Head (Bob Rafelson)

570. Zazie Dans Le Metro (Louis Malle)

576. Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang Dong)

645. The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita)

852. Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene)

982. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell)

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"12 Monkeys," Year One

I know I've been spoiled by the streaming era, because all I could think while watching the first few episodes of Syfy's "12 Monkeys" was how out of date it felt.  I used to watch a ton of science-fiction shows just like this, about shadowy conspiracies and desperate heroes with the fate of the world in their hands.  The lead actors were always slightly too well groomed, and the production values were always a little rough, but the writing and characters could make up for that.  "12 Monkeys" actually looks great for a 2015 cable show, the actors are strong, and the time travel premise is handled very well.  It just suffers in comparison to all the great science-fiction media that's come since.  And, of course, it doesn't hold a candle to the 1995 "12 Monkeys" film it was based on.

If you don't remember the movie, Bruce Willis plays a man from the future who is sent back to the present day to stop a devastating plague.  It's one of the only Terry Gilliam films that made any money, and Brad Pitt scored an Oscar nomination for playing an unhinged mental patient.  The "12 Monkeys" series, created by Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett, uses most of the same concepts but very little of Gilliam's memorable filmmaking style and aesthetics.  The man from the future, James Cole (Aaron Stanford) is from 2043, and makes multiple trips to 2015 to stop the release of the virus.  He meets and falls in love with a virologist, Dr. Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull), and the two of them work together to stop the group responsible for the outbreak, the mysterious Army of the 12 Monkeys.

Having multiple episodes to fill instead of two hours, the premise is expanded significantly to make it open ended, certain time travel rules are tweaked, and there are many more characters and complications.  Railly has an on-again, off-again boyfriend who works in politics, Aaron Marker (Noah Bean), who quickly gets caught up in the conspiracy part of the show.  Jennifer Goines (Emily Hampshire), one of the suspected leaders of the 12 Monkeys, is a wild card element who keeps popping up in new contexts.  Mysterious 12 Monkeys agents (Alisen Down and Tom Noonan) keep showing up to thwart our heroes.  In the future, the time travel program is headed by the commanding Dr. Jones (Barbara Sukowa), and Cole has a best friend, José Ramse (Kirk Acevedo), who he's known since childhood. Their group is constantly at odds with a militarized faction of survivors called West VII, led by a nasty named Deacon (Todd Stashwick).

It is frustrating to watch Cole and Railly keep hitting dead ends episode after episode, destroying some project or killing some baddie, only for there to be another goalpost just a little further off.  Cole keeps almost dying, the machine keeps almost breaking, and the satisfying payoffs are few and far between.  However, the show does come up with some solid smaller-scale stories within this framework, and some of the individual episodes are excellent.  The development of secondary characters like Ramse and Dr. Jones is much more interesting than the slow-burn romance between Cole and Railly.  A high point of the season is an episode where Dr. Jones demonstrates that she's willing to sacrifice what little hope the 2043 survivors still have in their timeline in order to stop the plague in the past from happening.  Sukowa is easily giving the best performance in the show.

Stanford and Schull are perfectly fine as the leads, but they're very limited by their roles as genre television creatures, and not very interesting.  Emily Hampshire probably has the most thankless task of trying to live up to the gonzo Brad Pitt performance as Goines, and falls significantly short.  Her character definitely needs some retooling moving forward, because she's not fitting the more grounded tone of the series.  Again, I want to emphasize that "12 Monkeys" is one of the better cable genre shows that I've seen, and there were clearly many talented people involved.  However, if this were premiering now on one of the streamers, the seasons would be eight episodes instead of thirteen, the stories would be streamlined and much less repetitive, and the title graphics would look a whole lot better.   

I feel like I might enjoy the show for nostalgic vibes if I put off watching the rest of it for a few years.  After the first season, I don't feel very incentivized to tackle the other three.  I like and do recommend "12 Monkeys," but only if the viewer understands what they're getting into.

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Missmediajunkie v. "The People's Joker"

So, several critics I respect have been gushing about "The People's Joker."  It's an independent film that's been difficult to see because of legal issues around its use of DC intellectual property, including the Joker and other "Batman" universe characters. Directed, co-written, edited, and starring Vera Drew as "Joker the Harlequin," the movie is a parody of a showbiz biopic that uses the familiar superhero tropes and imagery to explore our protagonist's journey of self-discovery.  The project started out as a re-edit of Todd Haynes' "Joker" film, but has transmogrified into something quite different.  And frankly, I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

There have been several extremely low-budget films like "Molli and Max in the Future" and "Hundreds of Beavers" that have made good impressions this year, using the visual language of internet memes and viral videos to put their own spin on familiar genre stories.  The production of "The People's Joker" is even more rudimentary than these projects, using crowdfunded art and animation, haphazardly shot footage of the actors, and even a few shots of Robert Wuhl appearing via Cameo.  The result is barely watchable, a mixed media collage of garish Joker pastiches accompanying the sad tale of Vera, an overmedicated, deeply repressed trans-woman who moves to Gotham City to become a comedian.  Alas, the Kafkaesque entertainment industry is predatory and allows no real artistic expression, so Vera takes on the persona of Joker the Harlequin (a fusion of the Joker and Harley Quinn characters), gathers a few like-minded freaks, and embarks on a career in criminal "anti-comedy."

My biggest problem with "The People's Joker" is that Vera Drew isn't much of an actor or a comedian.  She made her name as a professional editor and has a long list of editing credits, including work on "Tim and Eric" and "Comedy Bang! Bang!"  I suspect this is why actors like Maria Bamford and Scott Aukerman drop in for brief appearances in the movie.  Several of the supporting players are professionals, but they can't make up for the fact that Drew is the lead, and she clearly has next to no experience as a performer.  So even though some of the writing is clever, and the depiction of the trans experience is heartfelt, it's conveyed so awkwardly that I found most of the movie incredibly difficult to watch.  I can respect the artistic impulse behind the film that spurred Drew and friends to create "The People's Joker" as a piece of transgressive art.  Sometimes you have to cheer on the efforts of artists who don't let their lack of talent and skill get in the way of their  impassioned self-expression.  However, that doesn't mean I enjoy sitting through the results.     

As a "Batman" fan, I'm also not impressed with the use of "Batman" IP to tell this story.  Most of the characters are very loose versions of "Batman" villains, including The Penguin (Nathan Fustyn), Ra's al Ghul (David Liebe Hart), and Vera's eventual paramour Mr. J (Kane Distler), who is based on the Jared Leto Joker from "Suicide Squad."  I understand using the persona of the Joker, who has become symbolic of anarchy and the dispossessed over the years.  However, the rest of the analogy is a mess, with characters assigned to various roles seemingly at random.  The big villain of the piece isn't Batman, a closeted fascist numbskull in this universe, but Lorne Michaels (Bamford), who controls and sets the rules for acceptable comedy in Gotham.  Drew spends a lot of the movie throwing barbs at the entertainment establishment, including "Upright Citizens Brigade" and "Saturday Night Live."  I found most of this material unpleasantly indulgent, and it takes up way too much time.  

I think I would have responded better to "The People's Joker" if it had been a more straightforward trans allegory, and had been less squeamish about actually using all the Batman IP for this purpose.  I'm sure that staying on the right side of DC and Warner Bros. was a major consideration - the film opens with an impressively wordy disclaimer - but it would have helped a lot thematically if the Batman characters were able to actually resemble the original IP more closely.  Mr. J is the only one who actually looks like who they're parodying, while everyone else is a mishmash of bad wigs and worse makeup.  I can appreciate  camp, but it's no excuse for this level of ineptitude.  I'm sure the aesthetics are mostly deliberate, and I find them off-putting in the extreme.  It also didn't help that I watched "I Saw the TV Glow" recently, which does trans narrative via pop culture remix so much better.

As far as I can tell, the only thing setting "The People's Joker" apart from other amateur Batman fan films is that Vera Drew managed to sell this as a genuine, personal transgender narrative.  I'm willing to go with that up to a point, but even the fan films these days have production values better than this, and transgender narratives aren't exactly rare birds anymore.  "The People's Joker" also managed to hit a lot of my pet peeves - anti-Hollywood screeds, crummy meme art, and Vera Drew fumbling her way through too many lines.  Good grief, it was tough getting through this movie.     

 

If this inspires more people to make their own amateur films in the same vein, great.  More trans filmmakers and representation are always good to see.  However, I have no goddamned idea what the appeal of this movie is to anyone outside of Vera Drew's immediate circle.  It didn't work for me on any level, and none of the praise I've seen seems applicable to the movie I saw.  I really wish I could have figured out a way to connect to this one, but it's just not happening.  I just didn't get the joke. 

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Puttin' on "The Penguin"

Spoilers ahead.

I seriously wonder if I'm one of the only people who wasn't into "The Penguin" and actually didn't mind that "Joker: Folie à Deux" was a depressing anti-musical.  Then again, the recent "Joker" movie was over after 138 minutes while "The Penguin" is a prestige crime series that runs for eight hour-long episodes.  They're not really comparable and have little in common, except that they're both new takes on very old "Batman" villains, and were both released roughly at the same time.  

The Penguin, aka Oswald Cobblepot, has been reimagined as Oz Cobb, a Gotham mob boss who appeared in Matt Reeves' "The Batman" back in 2022.  Played by Colin Farrell under layers of prosthetics and makeup, he's a monstrous, ugly man who displays enough signs of humanity that we can be temporarily convinced to root for him instead of his enemies.  Functioning as a quasi-sequel to "The Batman," "The Penguin" charts Oz's rise to power in Gotham after the death of his former boss, Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong, replacing John Tuturro).  Standing in his way are Falcone's children, Alberto (Michael Zegen) and Sofia (Cristin Milioti), rival crime boss Sal Maroni (Clancy Brown) and his wife Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo), and plenty of others trying to fill the void left by Falcone.  Oz's only allies are his illness-addled, disapproving mother, Frances (Deirdre O'Connell), and a stuttering street kid he's taken under his wing, Vic Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz).      

The approach that showrunner Lauren LeFranc has taken here is to essentially make the Penguin into Tony Soprano with a disfigured mug and more cartoonish accent.  He's a blustering, buffoonish villain who can be incredibly genial, but is utterly immoral and unscrupulous.   Time and time again people trust him when they should know better, sometimes thinking they can control or manipulate him.  I can find no fault with Farrell's performance except that I don't find the character to be at all sympathetic or entertaining.  Keep in mind, however, that I watched all of "The Sopranos" feeling pretty much the same way about Tony Soprano.  I was only ever on his side because I cared about the people who were on his side.  And in Oz's case it's far more obvious that he's going to turn on everyone in the end.  

Fortunately, "The Penguin" features other figures of interest.  Chief among these is Sofia Falcone, with whom Oz has a long history.  His initial job in the Falcone organization was as her driver, and his actions contributed to her ending up in Arkham Asylum for an extended period of time.  When Sofia re-emerges as a candidate to take over from Carmine, deeply damaged and full of rage, Oz is squarely in her crosshairs.  The episode that goes into her history is the high point of the series, and an excellent showcase for Cristin Milioti.  Kudos should also be extended to Deirdre O'Connell and Rhenzy Feliz, who acquit themselves well in the episodes featuring their characters' POVs.

The performances were enough to get me through the entire series, but I knew from fairly early on that the show wasn't working for me.  Its comic book approach to organized crime dealings just never sat right with me throughout.  The characters were too broadly drawn, and their clashes too outlandish, even if the creators had taken pains to stay gritty and grounded.  I could tolerate these kinds of two-dimensional underworld figures in other circumstances, usually with the promise of a goofy action scene right around the corner, but in a show with more dramatic aspirations, I couldn't bring myself to take any of it seriously.  

Frankly, the Penguin was never a character that held any interest for me - he simply boils down to a very unpleasant, brutish career criminal.  This version of him tries to add some depth and some tragedy, which is admirable, but it's nothing that changes his fundamental nature or his function as a baddie.  I was never curious about his origins or how his mind worked, the way I was with the Joker or the Riddler.  In fact, I'd much rather see Sofia Falcone return as a villain in this universe than the Penguin.

The series is well made, and I don't begrudge the fans who enjoy it.  However, this corner of Gotham is not one I'm likely to revisit any time soon.  

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"Deadpool & Wolverine" (With Spoilers)

This is your final spoiler warning.  Ready?

Okay, so we've been inundated with nostalgia-mining multiverse movies for a couple of years now, including "Flash" and "Spider-man: No Way Home."  The reason one worked and the other didn't was because Marvel is really the only studio with the deep well of IP, the resources, and most importantly the clout to actually make these kinds of movies work.  Henry Cavill and Chris Evans will say yes to them.  They have the deep pockets and knowhow to make ridiculous things look kinda plausible.  They will commit to an iffy idea so hard that it seems like a stroke of genius by the time they're through.

And in "Deadpool & Wolverine," the one thing that absolutely works is paying homage to Fox's (and New Line's) Marvel films, without which the MCU may not have been possible.  Kevin Feige said yes, because that's where Kevin Feige got his start in superhero movies.  So did Ryan Reynolds, not in "Wolverine Origins," but in the third "Blade" movie where he played a scruffy vampire hunter named Hannibal King.  An unbelievable amount of resources have been spent on a movie with jokes so obscure that only a handful of people on the planet will get them.  Tons of younger viewers must have been scratching their heads when not-Captain America suddenly burst into flames, and Channing Tatum showed up as Gambit.  And it works because the whole point is giving a little love and attention to versions of the Marvel superheroes that have been forgotten - Blade, Elektra, the 2005 Fantastic Four lineup, and alumni from a lot of bad "Wolverine" movies - before Marvel Studios goes off and reboots everything.  It's not a full-scale tribute to all of these movies, or else we would've seen far more X-men participation, but to the real cast-offs and afterthoughts.  And there's something sweet about that.  

The rest of the movie is very serviceable, and very slickly produced.  Director Shawn Levy knows how to do funny spectacle, and there's plenty.  Aside from the R-rated content, this feels like a typical MCU film, just sort of glibly bouncing from one fight scene and bit of nonsense exposition to the next.  The story doesn't add up at all, but it's only here for joke scaffolding anyway, so why complain?  I think it's important to point out how little of the MCU actually gets used here, despite Deadpool fanboying the Avengers.  We see none of the marquee characters for more than a few seconds, though concepts from the "Loki" television series enable most of the multiverse-hopping.  This is in line with how "Deadpool" movies are supposed to function, however, operating on the extreme margins with tertiary characters like Happy Hogan and Wunmi Mosaku's Hunter B-15.  I expect more of the same from any forthcoming sequels.  

Jackman and Reynolds are great at the Odd Couple bickering, which turns into some very entertaining carnage, and I wish that they could've gotten the character arcs a little better sorted out.  I was mixed on the prior "Deadpool" films - the first one worked for me and the second one didn't - but there was very, very little that gave me any emotional stakes in what Wade was doing this time out, and some of the running jokes like Peter and Dogpool had me checking the clock.  Conversely, I liked the "worst" Wolverine, and I thought that nearly everything about the character worked - Jackman's performance, the costume (and the cowl reveal!), and the slow recovery from self-loathing and trauma.  I disagree that having Laura and Logan sharing a serious scene undermined the end of "Logan," since this clearly wasn't her Logan.  

  

I thought the movie had surprisingly strong villains.  Paradox is too good of a slimeball not to come back again at some point, right?  Matthew MacFadyen is such an entertaining weasel.  And then there's Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova, who is genuinely one of my favorite MCU villains.  She's so viscerally creepy and unsettling, and the depiction of her telepathy as feeling around in people's heads is prime nightmare fuel.  Her execution of Johnny Storm was wisely played for laughs as much as possible, but is still one of the most horrifying things we've ever seen in a superhero film.  If Cassandra is really dead, I hope Emma Corrin ends up back in the MCU in some way in the future.

I've never seen a film with so much fanservice jammed in, and was happy to enjoy multiple Wolverines and Deadpools, the right costumes, the wrong costumes, and nostalgic needle drops at every turn.  Whoever put together that credits montage and set it to the Green Day song that played at every late 90s graduation deserves a medal.  Finally, of all the alumni, I think I was happiest to see Wesley Snipes as Blade again, looking actually happy to be in the movie.  I'm glad that Channing Tatum got his chance to play Gambit, even if it was a very exaggerated version for comedic purposes.  Frankly, he looked totally ridiculous and I kind of love him for it.  

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"Deadpool & Wolverine" (Without Spoilers)

I'm not really sure how to review "Deadpool & Wolverine," because this movie is doing a lot, and is going to be different things to different audiences.  This definitely needs to be split into non-spoiler and spoiler posts, and this one will be the non-spoiler review.  Let's set the stage first.

Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is taking a break from being the superhero Deadpool, after he was rejected by the Avengers and broke up with his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin).  Attempts to live a normal life, however, are unfulfilling.  One day he's arrested by the Time Variance Authority, in charge of multiversal matters, where a guy named Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) tells Wade his whole timeline is going to be destroyed because the "anchor being" for his timeline has died - one Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).  Wade is spurred to go universe hopping to find another Wolverine - any Wolverine - to save his timeline and everyone in it from doom.

It is equally important to know that Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019, gaining control over all the Marvel characters that Fox had the rights to, including "The X-men" and "Fantastic Four."  Disney plans to make their own versions in the future.  A few characters like the fourth wall breaking Deadpool will carry over, but for the most part Disney has consigned the Fox-created Marvel movies to obscurity, and "Deadpool & Wolverine" turns out to be a weirdly earnest exploration into what that might look like for the unwanted characters involved, using all the MCU multiversal nonsense set up over the past few years by the "Loki" series and the last "Doctor Strange" movie.  Viewers can expect cameos galore, pulling from a bunch of late 90s and 2000s era Fox superhero films, Deadpool's anarchic commentary offering very little help for the uninformed, and obscure in-jokes every few seconds.  

So,"Deadpool & Wolverine" is pretty good as a curtain call for the Fox superhero movies (with a nostalgic elder Millennial soundtrack to boot), but that's not going to be enough to satisfy general audiences.  It's been far too long since most of those movies came out, and most viewers simply will not care.  Fortunately, "Deadpool & Wolverine" is also trying to be several others movies, and we may as well just review all of them separately:

Does this movie work as a buddy film?  Reasonably well, when the film decides it wants to be a buddy film, which is not often enough.  Hugh Jackman is a better straight man than Josh Brolin, and Jackman and Ryan Reynolds have pretty good chemistry.  You absolutely buy that these two would work well together after being at each other's throats for a while, and that hanging around with Deadpool would get Wolverine to finally lose it and bring some real satisfying R-rated comic book violence to the screen.

Does this movie work as a comedy?  Sometimes.  The problem is that some of the callbacks are so obscure, a high percentage of them just aren't going to hit.  Still, Ryan Reynolds' motormouth routine is as filthy and vulgar and oddly charming as always, and by now audiences know whether the Deadpool schtick is for them or not.  I do appreciate that there's room for other characters in the film to be funny, and that there's some good, old-fashioned slapstick, very stupid puns, and decent character humor amidst all the references, so at least there's variety.  

Does this movie work as an MCU movie?  Well, it certainly operates by the formula for one.  The Marvel money is put to good use, making the action sequences look cool and paying for stuff the other "Deadpool" movies couldn't afford.  I like that the requisite British villains, including one performed by a creepy Emma Corrin, are all played straight.  They help us to take at least a little of the plot more seriously, even though the attempts to inject some emotional stakes all feel pretty awkward.  There's really not much of a story here, except some leftovers from "Loki" and a second act stolen from "Furiosa," but I'm not watching MCU movies for the plot.  

Does this movie work as a Wolverine movie?  I'd say that "Deadpool & Wolverine" actually works very well as a Wolverine movie.  They avoid stepping on the toes of "Logan," lean into the fan wish-fulfillment, and it really is good to see Hugh Jackman back onscreen playing any version of Wolverine again.  I'm not saying I want this to be a regular occurrence, but there aren't many characters as iconic as Wolverine where nobody's really played around with their screen image very much.  Boy do the filmmakers make up for that here.  

Finally, does this movie work as a "Deadpool" movie?  Yes.  It feels a little wrong that a "Deadpool" movie is this expensive, but the fourth wall breaking has never been more extreme, Deadpool has never felt more zany and comics-accurate, and getting some closure on the Fox superhero universe feels like Deadpool's meta powers being used for good for once.

I'll get into many more of the spoilery details next time.  

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"Thelma" and "Treasure"

June Squibb is an unlikely candidate for an action star.  The veteran actress is well into her 90s, and has just played her first screen lead, as the title character of "Thelma."  Written and directed by Josh Margolin, "Thelma" is about a grandmother who is bilked out of ten grand by a phone scammer pretending to be her twenty-something grandson Josh (Fred Hechinger), and decides to get her money back herself.  This involves fooling her overprotective daughter (Parker Posey) and son-in-law (Clark Gregg), and enlisting the help of her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree), who has moved into a retirement community.

The marketing has been selling "Thelma" as a spoof of action films like "Mission: Impossible," which it is to an extent.  There's a tour of several common action movie tropes, including a game of chicken with mobility scooters, car chases, some gunplay, and even a shot of our heroes walking away from an explosion. However, for the most part "Thelma" is an extremely gentle, light-hearted comedy that is much more concerned with the reality of getting old.  Thelma is strong-minded and still fiercely independent, but she can no longer drive, struggles with anything involving a computer, and has outlived her husband and most of her friends.  Her rebellious streak is a lot of fun, but her loved ones rightly point out that Thelma has reached a point where she has to accept more help, as hard as it is.  I wasn't remotely surprised to discover that both "Thelma" the movie and Thelma the character are largely based on Margolin's grandmother and her experiences. 

The performances make the movie, and Squibb is a charmer.  She and Richard Roundtree handily carry the bulk of the screen time, and have a great rapport with each other.  They know how to get laughs, but more importantly nail the pathos inherent in seeking out one last adventure together.  I'm also happy to see more good work out of Fred Hechinger, who gets a solid subplot about Josh being stuck in a rut after a breakup, and trying to figure out what to do with his life.  The writing is well-observed, the comedy makes great use of the element of surprise, and "Thelma" is altogether more than what I was expecting.        

Now on to "Treasure," based on the work of journalist Lily Brett, and directed by Julia von Heinz.  This is a smaller Holocaust-themed film that I'm worried is going to fall through the cracks, despite a pair of excellent performances and very touching subject matter.  Lena Dunham plays Ruth, a New York based journalist who has come to Poland in the early 1980s to search for her family's roots.  Her jovial, but very evasive father Edek (Stephen Fry) has come with her.  He speaks Polish and she does not.  He's able to arrange a driver, Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski), make friends with just about everyone he meets, and find a way to enjoy himself just about anywhere.  Ruth, who has put a lot of effort into planning the trip, doesn't appreciate that her father keeps bulldozing her itinerary and seems to want to stymie her efforts.  

I was immediately interested in "Treasure" when I saw that Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham had been cast as a father and daughter trying to navigate a road trip and some touchy emotional territory together.  These two pair very well onscreen, with Fry being the big personality he's so good at being, while Dunham is much more restrained and buttoned-up as the adult daughter with a lot of insecurities.  As someone who has been on a few trips in foreign countries with lovingly critical parents, I related to Ruth a lot.  I came into "Treasure" not sure of how much Holocaust material was actually going to be in the film, so I was perfectly happy to watch two hours of Edek and Ruth just trying to bond and navigate 1980s Poland together.  This is the kind of awkward, but heartwarming situational comedy that appeals to me.   

When the film does start digging into Edek's traumatic past and all the resulting fallout, I was even more appreciative that the film had spent so much time letting us get to know Edek and Ruth first.  The parts of the film focusing on past history easily could have been overwhelming, but here they're presented in the context of an ordinary family's history.  And it feels so much more personal and grounded in reality than many similar films.  The scope is small, but the relationships ping as genuine.  And the wins feel monumental.

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The Video Essay Recs 2024

This year's batch of video essay recs includes several videos that can be treated as resources for further media enjoyment.  You'll see several returning creators, but also some newcomers in the mix.  Not all of these videos were posted in the last year, but considering Youtube's algorithm nonsense, I think I can be forgiven for taking a little longer than I should have to watch some of these.  

Quality Culture: Rush Hour - An Unexpected Image of Black and Asian Solidarity - Let's start with a retrospective on "Rush Hour" viewed through the lens of Black and Asian race relations.  I'm not the biggest fan of Jackie Chan these days, but I think we can all be forgiven for a little nostalgia in light of recent events.

The Movie Rabbit Hole: "No CGI" is Really Just Invisible CGI - A four part series on Hollywood's efforts to downplay the use of CGI in marketing - to the extent that they're actually using CGI to hide the use of CGI in behind-the-scenes footage of movies like "Barbie" and "Top Gun: Maverick."  Learn to spot little tells like bluescreens that have been digitally turned gray, and compositing mistakes.  Best of all, this video appears to have had some real impact in filmmaking circles, spurring discussions about marketing narratives and the use of CGI and VFX.

Moon Channel: Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War - I'm not very active in the gaming space, but this two-parter on the staggering level of misogyny in the Korean gacha game fandom is a must-watch.  Moon Channel is run by a lawyer and avid gamer, who does a deep dive into the social and cultural forces driving this mindset.  If you thought Gamergate was bad, what some of these Korean gamers have done in response to the slightest perception that their favorite gacha games might contain feminist messaging, is much, much worse.  I choose to take this as a cautionary tale, especially in light of some of the tantrums I saw in Western media fandoms this year.

Accented Cinema: The Cinematic Themes and Visuals of Ancient China - I watched a lot of period Chinese films this year, and I was so glad to find that Accented Cinema had put together this handy, multi-part guide to all the different eras of Chinese history, and all the different visual and thematic signifiers that go with them.  Whether it's Mongol fashions in the Yuan Dynasty or low necklines in the Tang Dynasty, you can tell a lot about a piece of Chinese media just by looking at how characters are dressed.  This also functions as a nice summary of the Chinese historical eras for those of us who didn't pay enough attention in school.

Li Speaks: A Comprehensive Categorization of Reddit Ragebait - I don't read the supermarket tabloids or the gossip blogs, but I am guilty of reading some of the advice and story subs on Reddit.  A lot of the stories are fake, but there are so many that it can be difficult to remember this when a new variation pops up.  So kudos to Li for taking on the monumental task of categorizing all the different kinds of ragebait on Reddit, from stories about bridezillas, to stories about evil mothers-in-law, to stories about terrible roommates.  It turns out there is an art to constructing fake drama, and this stuff is everywhere.  

Just an Observation: Why Ripley Felt Different - Here's a nice, straightforward breakdown of the recent "Ripley" miniseries from Netflix, and some of the choices that director Steve Zallian and cinematographer Robert Elswit made to help tell a familiar story.  I always appreciate a breakdown video that can help to articulate what made a piece of media so special.  

Be Kind Rewind: Miss Piggy, Camp, and the Death of the Movie Star and Patrick Willems: The Rise and Fall of Muppet Cinema - I'm a long time Muppet fan, so the recent Patrick Willems and Be Kind Rewind videos on Muppet media were inevitably going to make an appearance here.  Willems treats the Muppet movies as their own genre, while Be Kind Rewind examines how Miss Piggy functions as a throwback to and gentle parody of old school Hollywood leading ladies.    

 And finally, if you haven't seen them already, these are the two videos that got the most amount of attention this year in the media circles I'm in.  One is about calling out Youtube plagiarists, and the other is about a defunct "Star Wars" hotel.  They are both multiple hours long and absolutely fascinating.

Hbomberguy: Plagiarism and You(tube) 

Jenny Nicholson: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel 

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