"Interview With the Vampire," Year Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

This season of "Interview WIth the Vampire" is based on the second half of the Anne Rice novel of the same name.  After the death of Lestat, Louis and Claudia go to Europe, and meet a new group of vampire characters, including the ancient writer Armand (Assad Zaman) and thespian Santiago (Ben Daniels) at Paris's Théâtre des Vampires.  These events are not as exciting as the first season, because the thrill of discovery has been tempered considerably, and Lestat doesn't get nearly as much screen time (he's still hanging around in Louis's head as a projection of his guilt), but this is an excellent adaptation of the source material - and a big improvement from the Neil Jordan film. 

The story has been expanded to fill eight hour-long episodes, so we get to see Louis and Claudia adjusting to life in Paris, their relationships with various members of the Paris coven, and quite a bit more character development for everyone involved, especially Claudia.  She's played by Delainey Hayles this season,  who does an admirable job as a more mature, more thoughtful Claudia, whose yearning for connection with other vampires leads her to some very dark places.  I don't quite buy Hayles as a teenager, but Claudia's frustration and longing are portrayed beautifully.  Also, a brief notice at the beginning of the first episode of the season, announcing the actor substitution, is the best handling of this kind of situation I've ever seen.  We also learn more about Armand much more quickly, and the vampire fledgling Madeleine (Roxane Duran) actually has a personality and some agency in her relationship with Claudia.  

Additional material is also created for the characters in the framing story.  Daniel continues his interview, but is contacted by an outside party who offers information about his first encounter with Louis in the 70s.  This leads to my favorite episode of the entire season, a flashback to young Daniel (Luke Brandon Field) in the immediate aftermath of the original interview that questions Louis' trustworthiness as a narrator, and Louis' whole relationship with Armand.  Louis and Armand's relationship suffers a bit from not being as fun to watch as Louis and Lestat's relationship, but the characters are so fascinating that I was very invested in the twists and turns of the pairing pretty much immediately.  The ending of this season also plays out a little differently from either the book or the film versions, creating a much less gloomy and much more satisfying conclusion for the hopeless romantics like me.  It's a little indulgent, and I don't know if Anne Rice would approve, but for this adaptation it feels well earned.

The production values continue to be excellent. I adore the show's version of the Théâtre des Vampires, and their macabre productions.  Having the actors share the stage with projected film clips is a fun conceit, and Ben Daniels has such a wonderful presence as the Théâtre's stylish leading man and master of ceremonies.  The violence and gore don't feel quite up to the same level of intensity as the first season, probably because there is less intimate partner violence.  However, there are some pretty spectacular fights and showpieces this year, including a harrowing show trial.  I continue to enjoy all the historical revisionism and allusions to other artists.  A fun addition is Louis deciding to take up photography as a hobby in Paris, and becoming frustrated that he turns out to be a pretty mediocre one.  Jacob Anderson continues to be the show's best performer, and his final line in the last episode sent a wonderful chill up my spine.      

With "Interview" nicely wrapped up, and a third season announced, I look forward to more Lestat-centric stories moving forward.  However, I never liked any of the subsequent books in this series nearly as much as I liked "Interview," and the show's creators will have their work cut out for them, trying to match the quality of these first two seasons.  But then again, if anyone should try, it's this team.  And I wish them the best of luck.     

"Challengers" is a Champ

I wasn't looking forward to "Challengers."  I've watched a few tennis matches over the years, but I've never been a fan of the sport, and thought that Luca Guadagnino had his work cut out for him trying to make the game compelling onscreen.  I can't think of the last great tennis movie, and I suspect that there may not be one.  However, I'm happy to report that I underestimated Guadagnino, because the movie is great.  "Challengers" is not only the best tennis movie I've ever seen, it's in the running for the best sports film I've ever seen.

It helps that "Challengers" is simultaneously a movie about tennis and a movie about an intense love triangle.  We first see Art (Mike Faist) and his wife Tashi (Zendaya) in 2019.  He's a decorated professional tennis star, she's his coach, and together they're rich, successful, and seemingly a perfect couple.  However, Art has hit a slump in his latest attempt at a Grand Slam.  Tashi puts him in a smaller tournament to get some confidence back, and Art unexpectedly finds himself playing against his old doubles partner Patrick (Josh O'Connor).  We learn that Art and Patrick first met Tashi when they were all up-and-coming teenage tennis players in 2006, and both young men were rivals for her affections.  

The reunion stirs up a lot of old feelings and a lot of unresolved tensions.  As the three characters reconnect and reevaluate what they want, flashbacks fill in what happened to them in the past.  Tashi emerges as the lynchpin character, who manipulates the other two in order to get what she wants.  She chose Art over Patrick in the past, but Patrick's the one who understands her better - especially her obsession with tennis and winning.  She faces the same decision again in the present day, as everything comes down to Patrick and Art playing an epic tennis match in the film's final act.  I'm thrilled that "Challengers" is an adult romance that actually feels like an adult romance in a way that no movie has in far too long.  The relationship dynamics are complex, rich, and endlessly entertaining to watch.  The maneuverings of the three players are messy and difficult, and all of them transgress at one point or another.     

I can't express enough appreciation for Luca Guadagnino making sexy movies for audiences that seem to be so oddly resistant to them.  He's made a ridiculously hot feature about a contentious menage-a-trois, and gets away with it because we don't actually see any sex.  There's brief non-sexual nudity and a few scenes of foreplay, but all the real physicality is reserved for the tennis scenes (which deliver everything you'd want from sex scenes anyway).  The score by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor is mostly techno and electronica dance beats, injecting energy and intrigue into the quieter moments where it looks like nothing is happening, but of course everything is happening.  

The performances of the three leads are all very strong, but I think Josh O'Connor comes off the best.  Patrick is in a much rougher place than the others when we first meet him, and O'Connor makes a meal out of being a walking disaster.  Mike Faist as Art is less showy, but no less complicated, and has no trouble going toe to toe with O'Connor in every scene.  I'm hopeful that the success of "Challengers" will raise the profiles of both actors.  As for Zendaya, she's always been a little difficult for me to buy playing grown women, but she's completely convincing as the ex-prodigy who never lost her need to win at all costs.  She was fine in "Dune 2" earlier this year, but in "Challengers" she's the main event.

And then there's the tennis, which does everything right technically, and looks great to the untrained eye, but the final match is on another level.  Guadagnino holds back on cinematic tricks until this scene, where suddenly there's slow motion, overhead shots, shots designed to look like the POV of the ball, incredible sweaty close-ups, all lovingly edited.  And it all worked exactly as intended and had me on the edge of my seat.  I never thought that I'd say this, but I'm ready for more tennis films, especially if Luca Guadagnino is involved.

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"Halt and Catch Fire," Year One

I didn't realize how much I missed "Mad Men" until I saw "Halt and Catch Fire," created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, try to do its own version in the 1980s tech industry.  After years of hearing the critical praises, I'd like to say that I finally made the time to watch this series for its prestige TV bona fides.  However, the truth is that I sought out the show specifically for Mackenzie Davis and Lee Pace, who play one of the couples "Halt and Catch Fire" is built around.  Davis is a brilliant young coder named Cameron Howe, and Pace is the corporate shark, Joe McMillan, who recruits her to work on the new personal computer project he's putting together at the fictional Cardiff Electric.  Joe has also hired Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) to put together the hardware.  Gordon and his wife Donna (Kerry Bishé) are both engineers, with a marriage already under strain from Gordon's prior ambitions.  

For the computer literate, watching an alternate history of the early days of computing, where the Cardiff team comes up with so many innovations, and problem solves their way out of so many crises, should provide plenty of nerdy, nostalgic joy.  For the technologically clueless like me, "Halt and Catch Fire" is still a great watch for the endless drama of a bunch of volatile, mismatched personalities constantly at each other's throats in the pursuit of creating something great.  The corporate antics are often very similar to "Mad Men," with Joe as the ruthless salesman who can talk his way out of anything, Cameron as the rising ingénue, and the Clarks trying to balance home and work lives.  The ensemble is much smaller, the writing more plot-driven, and the characters more broadly drawn.  Soap opera style dramatic twists come fast and furious in the second half of the season.  However, I like that the storytelling is very balanced, with none of the four lead characters really dominating the narrative.  Donna might have been the nagging wife archetype on another show, but here there's so much time spent on her perspective, and Kerry Bishé's performance is so strong, Donna easily won me over.

There's a sense that "Halt and Catch Fire" is still finding its feet, and the show's sterling reputation is definitely a factor in why I'm giving this first season more slack.  Characters that are underwritten now are on track to improve as the show goes on.  The relationship dynamics are going to change as we move on to different projects and different stages of everyone's lives.  The performances are all very strong, and the four leads all have interesting arcs set up for them that I'm looking forward to seeing play out.  Cameron is probably the weakest link at this point, never showing much beyond her rebel exterior, but Mackenzie Davis is so striking onscreen that I'm invested in her story anyway.  And I love that the writers tipped their hand in the last episode to suggest that she's based on the woman from Apple's famous "1984" Superbowl ad.   

  

I wish the rest of the cast was a little better filled out.  The only major supporting character sticking around for the long term is John Bosworth (Toby Huss), Joe's boss at Cardiff, who simply is not given enough to do and didn't leave much of an impression on me.  Probably the weakest episode is the ham-handed, one-episode appearance of Joe's ex - who happens to be  the only African-American character of any importance in the entire season - to throw another temporary wrench in the works.  

Right now, my favorite aspect of the show is the music, composed by Paul Haslinger, formerly of Tangerine Dream.  The period-appropriate electronica tracks are absolutely perfect.  I think I could watch another three seasons of "Halt and Catch" fire just for the end credits music.  

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My Favorite George Stevens Film

George Stevens is the last of the "Five Came Back" WWII directors who I haven't written a "Great Directors" entry for yet.  I was on the fence for a long time about whether he should have an entry or not.  Despite winning the Academy's Thalberg Award, two Oscars, and a ton of other accolades, I never liked any of his films much.  His socially conscious epics like "Giant" and "Shane" bored me.  They looked great, but the stories were ponderous and self-important.  It was only when I started digging into films from the 1930s and 1940s that I found Stevens' pre-War output of comedies, musicals, and lighthearted adventure films.  It turns out that Stevens started out as a cinematographer and gag man for the Laurel and Hardy films.  And it was his early career efforts that won me over.

"Penny Serenade" is an oddball film no matter how you look at it.  Telling the story of a tumultuous marriage, most of the time it's a domestic comedy, but the second half grows more and more melodramatic, finally ending in tragedy with a little last-second uplift.  Episodes from the couple's life are told in flashback from a point in time when the two are about to separate.  There are several terrible plot twists that only work because the actors are good enough to pull it off, and because Stevens keeps the proceedings moving along swiftly.  And even so, I don't know if I would have liked "Penny Serenade" as much if I weren't lucky enough to have seen it at the right time in my life, when I was primed to be the most sympathetic to its main characters.    

Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a young couple who decide to adopt a child after suffering a miscarriage.  Over the years, we watch them struggle through the adoption process, common parenting woes, and unexpected tragedy.  The film is absolutely manipulative, getting all the mileage it can out of the cute baby, but also very charming.  I knew it had me when we came to the scene where a family friend  - an ink-stained printing worker named Applejack - has to patiently demonstrate to the clueless new parents how to bathe and diaper a baby.  And I realized I was completely head over heels when Cary Grant had his big speech to a judge in the third act, pleading that love should matter more than a family's temporary money problems.  The Academy took notice too, giving Grant his first Best Actor nomination.

The narrative skips backwards and forwards in time, taking us from the couple's first meeting through the present day.  The use of music is key, tying the flashbacks to a record collection, where each transition to a different period is paired with a new song.  The visual storytelling is wonderful, dispensing with dialogue when fortune cookies, a montage of nurseries, or newspaper headlines will do.  Upon a recent rewatch, I was surprised at how long it took to set up the characters and their relationship, and I'd forgotten some of the early scenes, like the entire period the couple spent living in Japan.  No one even brings up adoption until halfway through the movie, but once the baby shows up it feels like everything snaps into focus.  It's amazing how little comic scenes of walking up a squeaky staircase, or fumbling an uncooperative alarm clock feel so much more impactful than the literal earthquake that happens in the first act.    

One thing that's confounded me about "Penny Serenade" is that the most dire and upsetting tragic turn in the story isn't depicted at all, despite being critical to the plot.  We only learn about it through a letter read by one of the supporting characters some time later.  Was this kind of tragedy  considered  too much for 1940s audiences to take?  I don't know if the filmmakers made the right choice, but at least the execution is tactful and sensitive, focusing on the terrible impact of the family's loss instead, and making more of a point of their resiliency.  The balance was the important part - if "Penny Serenade" had been all melodrama, without the romance or the comedy, I doubt I'd have responded to it nearly so well.  

George Stevens famously stopped making comedies after returning from WWII, focusing instead on humanist dramas and prestige pictures.  I consider it a terrible loss.  He was certainly no stranger to melodrama before the war, but he was also one of the romantic comedy greats, and never got enough credit for it.    

What I've Seen - George Stevens

Alice Adams (1935)

Swing Time (1936)

Vivacious Lady (1938)

Gunga Din (1939)

Penny Serenade (1941)

Woman of the Year (1942)

The Talk of the Town (1942)

The More the Merrier (1943)

I Remember Mama (1948)

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Shane (1953)

Giant (1956)

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)

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"Hit Man" Makes His Case

This was supposed to be the summer of Glen Powell, and his most notable play for the A-list is the film he stars in and co-wrote with Richard Linklater, "Hit Man."  It's loosely based on the life of Gary Johnson, an unassuming college professor who was secretly helping out law enforcement by playing a fake hit man in undercover operations.  Powell gets to dress up in fun disguises and put on different personas.  He transforms from a nerdy academic to a confident stud over the course of the story, helped out by his romance with a desperate woman, Madison, played by Adria Arjona.  He's in practically every scene, and uses the time to make the case that he's ready to be America's new favorite leading man.  

And Powell mostly won me over, though with a few misgivings.  Similarly, "Hit Man" won me over, though the too-tidy resolution left me a little shell-shocked.   I give Linklater and Powell all due credit for setting up a fun, watchable romance, and the two leads certainly have chemistry.   "Hit Man" mostly follows the usual template of a caper movie, playing with mistaken identity and secret relationship tropes in a very lighthearted way.  However, when it comes to the film shifting gears to something more serious in the last act, I didn't quite buy the big twists.  Some of this is due to the performances - Adria Arjona is fine up to the point where she has to be potentially threatening, which doesn't really work.  Powell's better about getting Gary's thought processes across, except in that crucial final moment, where we find out if the hit man is really just a part he's playing.  I'm not sure if the resulting tonal clashes were deliberate or if I'm overthinking things.  

Spoilers ahead in this paragraph.  Gary and Madison getting a picture perfect happy ending in spite of doing some awful things is meant to be dissonant to an extent, but probably not to the extent that I found it.  On the one hand the story is a fictionalized account of a real person's life, and we know that the final act was completely made up to inject some sensationalism.  The credits even point this out!  On the other hand, this feels like a very odd way for Linkater to be doing any kind of self-reflective commentary on the artifice required for happy endings in this kind of crime-based rom-com.  There are definitely better ways to get this idea across, and I wonder if "Hit Man" would have been better as a Steven Soderbergh project instead of a Richard Linklater one.  Or did I just not get the joke about Gary embracing a role that we know from the outset is a fantasy?  

In any case, "Hit Man" is a solid piece of filmmaking.  It's very low budget and lacks a lot of the niceties you'd expect from studio productions, but I hardly noticed their absence.  Because Gary is a fake hit man, violence is only alluded to and mostly happens offscreen.  However, Linklater is good at keeping the momentum going and the tension high.  The high point of the film is a fantastic scene involving Powell, Arjona, and the iPhone Notes app, as they try to keep their stories straight during a staged confrontation.  The timing is perfect, the camerawork and editing are on point, and the actors seem to be having a blast.    

Linklater films are dependably well populated with interesting character actors, and the MVP of the cast is definitely Austin Amelio.  He plays Jasper, a scummy cop who becomes the chief antagonist, but the performance is so entertaining that I was internally cheering whenever he showed up.  Retta and Sanjay Rao play Gary's snarky handlers while he's working undercover.  They often feel like they stepped out of a network sitcom, but I suspect they're closer to what real cops are like than most of the ones we see onscreen.   

I admit that I got overhyped for "Hit Man," one of the few bright spots in a fairly lackluster summer.  And I probably got overhyped for Glen Powell too, who is doing a perfectly good job of being a leading man here, while making progress toward being a movie star.  I don't think he's quite there yet, but he's definitely gaining speed.  

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They Broke Google (A Rant)

2024 seems to be the year when everyone figured out that the Internet is terrible now.  The big tech companies have all stopped innovating now that the investment money has dried up, and are now busy trying to suck every last cent of profit that they can from their users.  Now that Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and all the rest have gotten everyone dependent on their ubiquitous services, they don't have to care about the customer experience anymore.  Elon Musk can let Twitter turn to absolute garbage, and people are still using it because they have to - the livelihoods of many creators hinge on it.  Youtube is waging war against ad-blockers instead of trying to make their site more usable without them.  Amazon has inserted so many ads into Prime, it feels downright hostile.

But the worst - and perhaps the most emblematic example of this attitude - is the once vaunted Google internet search engine.  Advertisements, SEO optimization, and the prioritization of product searches have made searching far more difficult than it used to be.  More obscure sources have been buried or deindexed, frustrating research efforts.  Recent "algorithm updates" to address spam and AI-generated content don't appear to have helped much.  And this isn't a new phenomenon, with complaints about the erosion of search quality going back several years.  It just took a while for everyone to notice, the same way it took a while to realize that Amazon largely turned into a dropshipping business for low quality Chinese knockoffs, and Craigslist turned into scam central.    

In short, capitalism has caught up.  The free trial has finished and now we have to pay the subscription fees, or deal with a worse and worse online experience.  Paywalls limit access to real journalism while misinformation runs rampant.  There aren't real kid-friendly online spaces anymore, because moderation costs too much, so you have to be a helicopter parent or keep your kid off the internet until they're in high school.  Everybody wants you to download an app.  Everybody wants permission to access your data and feed it to an AI.  The algorithm determines everything you see, and gaming the algorithm is now a necessary skill set to actually get anything done or find sources that aren't awful.  The worst scams and abuses aren't being cracked down on because legislators still don't understand how anything works on the internet, despite most of us now spending way too much time online. 

I find myself nervously eyeing the parts of the internet that are still in relatively good shape.  Social media site Reddit recently had an IPO, and can't seem to keep futzing with its algorithms, but its user base remains as ornery as ever.  Programming site Stack Overflow is in the middle of a war with its users over a partnership deal with OpenAI.  The New York Times published a concerning article on the future of Wikipedia last year, Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth, which is doing nothing for my peace of mind.  I tried using Microsoft's Bing search engine for a while, but their Copilot AI assistant (based on OpenAI again) was so intrusive that I eventually quit.  

Now in the far distant past, when an online service started behaving badly, the users would jump ship for a competitor.  My early internet history led me through tons of defunct online communities like Usenet, Livejournal, MySpace, Vine, and Digg.  I've been feeling for a while that it's time to start searching for greener pastures, so I've been quietly spending more time on Bluesky and Metafilter, and developing other fallback options in case things start to fall apart.  However, not everybody knows how to do this, especially the younger folks.  Some services like Youtube and Google Search are so entrenched and so dominant, you have users who would be unable to function online without them.   

Then again, users have a history of adapting quickly in a pinch.  Remember when Zoom exploded during COVID lockdown, when it turned out other options like Skype and Google Meet just weren't going to cut it?  Or before that, remember how fast Blackberry went down when the Iphone made its debut?  If someone figures out a search algorithm that can reliably outperform Google Search, it'll catch on quickly.  You can kill TikTok - and hopefully they will, because the app is straight trash - but an alternative is probably just around the corner.  Let's just hope that Elon Musk doesn't end up running it.    

Anyway, it's probably a good thing that the honeymoon phase of the Internet's takeover of the planet is done.  Now we can get started on finally fixing it.

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"The Idea of You" and "Hundreds of Beavers"

Well, this is the weirdest pairing I've done in a while, but I don't want to wait any longer to put down some thoughts on these two movies.

I've tried to write more about romantic comedies, because the genre needs all the attention it can get these days.  After a pretty dry spring, the only major romantic comedy of any real note from the last few months is Amazon Prime exclusive "The Idea of You."  It's a fun bit of wish fulfillment for women in their forties, and as the intended target audience, if I don't talk about this movie, who will?  At first glance, it seems pretty disposable - Anne Hathaway stars as Solène, a divorced mother of a teenager, Izzy (Ella Rubin), who has a chance meeting with a 24 year-old pop star, Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), and decides to pursue a relationship with him, despite knowing better.   

Co-written and directed by Michael Showalter, everything about this movie is unlikely from the start.  Solène runs an art gallery in the Los Angeles area, her ex-husband Daniel (Reid Scott) is a workaholic who can afford tickets to Coachella for his daughter and her friends, and Annie Mumolo is popping by Solène's house every so often for convenient girl talk.  Then there's Hayes, the remarkable un-bro-ey pop star who falls so head over heels in love with Solène at first sight that he's dedicating songs to her and buying up every piece at her gallery.  And isn't it convenient that Izzy (clearly played by an actress in her 20s) is going to be away at camp all summer, so Solène can jet-set around Europe with Hayes on the European leg of his boy band's current tour?

However, I like the Showalter and his co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt use the opportunity to dig into the hypocrisy around "cougar" relationships, and events unfold pretty realistically once the public finds out.  This is not "Notting Hill," and the media attention quickly proves to be too much for Solène and Izzy to handle.  And there's something very admirable about the movie choosing to face that reality instead of perpetuating the fantasy, and choosing a rather quaint, old-fashioned ending.  "The Idea of You" is still fluff, but it's not overly mindless fluff, which is always a nice surprise.  Anne Hathaway hasn't made something this light and Nora Ephron-esque in a while, and frankly that's a shame.  She's still terribly charming and watchable doing this kind of material, and the movie goes down pretty easy, even if I wasn't much of a fan of the poppy musical interludes.  Galitzine's fine, but boy bands were never my thing.  

On to "Hundreds of Beavers," which is quickly becoming the cult film of the year.  Directed by Mike Cheslik, starring Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, and written by them both, this is a low budget labor of love, with some truly demented intentions.  "Hundreds of Beavers" feels like some nostalgic Wisconsinite filmmakers decided to recreate some of the violent cartoons of their youth, but nobody could draw, so they decided to just put people in ludicrous mascot costumes to play the animals, use video game assets for anything they couldn't build themselves, and have a live action guy as the main character, running amok.

So, this is the tale of 19th century fur trapper Jean Kayak (Tews), who traverses a snowy forest in search of bunnies, beavers, raccoons, and other animals to annihilate.  It takes a while for Jean Kayak to build up his skills and his inventory from zero, trading furs to the Merchant (Doug Mancheski) for tools and weapons.  He also flirts with the Merchant's daughter (Olivia Graves) and works toward the seemingly impossible goal of trapping hundreds of beavers to buy her a diamond engagement ring.  "Hundreds of Beavers" is in black and white, there is no audible dialogue, and all the visual effects shots were created with Adobe After Effects.  It plays a bit like an old Buster Keaton short, except that it's an hour and 48 minutes long, and the visual language is a lot more cartoonish and surreal.  For instance, every time Jean succeeds in killing one of the animals, its eyes are X'd out with big black crosses.     

It takes a long time for "Hundreds of Beavers" to establish how the universe works, show the mechanics of how all the animals and weaponry function, and set up the stakes and goals for our hero - maybe too long.  The film's major flaw is its pacing.  There's a point where we get a video game map mechanic showing all the different locations where Jean travels, and we just watch him make his rounds, gathering supplies and checking traps, incrementally building up to the big, wild finale where everything snowballs into chaos.  Small gags are repeated over and over with new variations, and tend to get funnier each time, but there's a significant chunk of the movie that just feels like a slog.  It didn't help that for a good amount of "Hundreds of Beavers," the gags and slapstick didn't strike me as particularly funny.   

However, the movie is absolutely fascinating for what it manages to accomplish on such limited resources, and its particular blend of influences, from old cartoon tropes to giant monster battles in the finale.  It reminds me a lot of "Molli and Max in the Future," but even more of a shoestring production, relying on a lot of passion and ingenuity.  Comedies are very hit or miss for me, and I know that "Hundreds of Beavers" has won over a lot of fervent fans.  And for their sakes, I'm thrilled this movie exists.

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