Across the River and Into the Trees (2024) Review

the story: An old soldier tries to find a reason to live.

the rating: ****

the review: I've become somewhat of a Hemingway nut, in the past decade, stemming, ironically or not, from a depiction of Hemingway himself, in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and have been steadily plugging away at his fiction (and some of his nonfiction, including, of course, A Moveable Feast), and he's become very easily one of my favorite writers as a result.  Across the River and Into the Trees, though, first came to my attention as a home video release (since its theatrical run was negligible), as it's not considered one of Heminway's essential works, and as such hadn't previously showed up on my radar.

So I collected the movie and ordered a copy of the book, and watched the movie and then read the book, and having read the book, rewatched the movie.  As these things tend to go, for those who aren't slavishly devoted to the narrative that "the book is better," I drew more from the movie the second time around, as a result.  

The movie changes things somewhat considerably, but it's the same story, all the same, and anyway, it's really a very fine excuse to spend some time with Liev Schreiber.

Schreiber has been one of my favorite actors since I first saw him, either in Scream or RKO 281, in which he plays Orson Welles as he constructs Citizen Kane, although it was probably another TV movie, one I'm fairly certain I'm in exclusive circles for remembering, much less very fondly, at all, called Since You've Been Gone, just an absolutely great, classic voice, and the knowledge of how to use it.  He's otherwise had a fairly obscure career, most notable as the second actor to play Sabretooth, in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  

In some alternate version of history Schreiber is an acknowledged classic Hollywood lead actor with a rich catalog everyone knows.  

In this one?  You could do far worse than to appreciate him in Across the River and Into the Trees.  Which, by the way, is popularly considered one of Hemingway's worst efforts, but I enjoyed it as much as I have any Heminway, and as I've said, the film version is worth watching on its own merits, chief among them being perhaps the long-awaited true spotlight for Liev Schreiber.

They say Bogart wasn't really Bogart until he hit middle age, when he at last became a valuable commodity.  I don't see that being Schreiber's fate.  Today's Hollywood is far too finical for such things.  But that he found such a role, in such a film, is worth celebrating all the same.  The whole performance seems natural, a culmination of everything he's done so well before, everything he was always meant to be, but never quite found in other movies.  

I'm the kind of film fan who can appreciate a movie even if all that's worth recommending is the lead actor.  I can accept a good performance for its own regard.  Fortunately, the movie around Schreiber knows what it's doing, too, and although it's not Hemingway's version, it feels like classic Hollywood in ways that haven't been seen in probably half a century, an international setting (Venice) that's allowed to settle into the backdrop, as Schreiber embarks on his last fateful excursion, with a young lady who finds herself caught up in it, despite every reason not to be.  

Josh Hutcherson, playing a very different role than in a much wider release in 2024, The Beekeeper, is probably the chief beneficiary of the alterations Peter Flannery made to the story, in an expanded, wiser supporting turn than Hemingway envisioned.

Rebel Moon - Parts 1 & 2, A Child of Fire and The Scargiver (2023-2024) Review

the story: A farming village on a remote moon finds itself the target of the nightmarish Imperium military.

the rating; ****

the review: Usually a review, even here, covers one movie at a time, and I could certainly split my thoughts between A Child of Fire and The Scargiver individually, but Rebel Moon hit that sweet spot the internet loves so much, something it was supposed to like but ended up hating, so I'm going to simplify things and write about both films under a single umbrella.  Longish review short: Rebel Moon is better than you heard.

Actually, so the story goes, it began life as a project Zack Snyder pitched in the Disney Star Wars era, and anyone who watches or knows anything about Rebel Moon will find this very easy to believe.  Much of the general framework of the two films is Star Wars iconography, down to the stand-in lightsabers a few of the characters use.  

The very funny thing about all this, the reaction to Rebel Moon is that it addresses basically all the criticisms the internet has posed about Star Wars over the years.  It also handily combines the original, prequel, and sequel trilogies, nine films into two.

Star Wars fans worry that the original trilogy will lose its appeal to later audiences, who are growing up with films that look far more advanced than even the pioneering work done in 1977, 1980 and 1983, with or without the visual updates George Lucas has toiled away at for some thirty years.  The prequels are generally derided for trying to appeal to younger audiences a bit too much, with elements that are hard to take seriously and thus difficult to separate from the rest of the material.  The sequels generally find their criticism in either being too slavish to the original films or not coherent enough in what they were trying to do.

Rebel Moon was constructed in much the fashion of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, in that the two films Snyder produced were part and parcel of the same production schedule, and there was never any doubt that they were both going to be released, especially since, unlike the later Horizon saga, they had a guaranteed, streaming, agreement.  The results are much more like Jackson's work than Lucas and his successors, in that they deal with the material in a sober fashion first and foremost, plunging into a fictional landscape and taking it at face value, and assuming audiences don't need to be guided along in accepting it.  

This is to say, the story was in place, it didn't have silly elements (unless you choose to view them as such, as many internet responses have), and it looks completely modern, with a budget that subsequently needed good reviews and wide audience acceptance in order for there to be more entries, neither of which Rebel Moon enjoyed, and so the future is doubtful.

It's been described, other than the obvious Star Wars parallels, as another version of Seven Samurai, and that seems to have been enough.  But gathering a group of warriors is one of the oldest tropes in fictional.  Even in 1954, when Akira Kurosawa's film was released, Tolkien was in fact releasing his Lord of the Rings, which itself is a sequel to his own Hobbit, where another band of warriors gather, and that is to say nothing of Robin Hood's Merry Men, or King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, the Greeks united in The Iliad, or Jason's Argonauts, which still includes the most famous member of any such band, Heracles, otherwise known as Hercules, spoken of even within The Iliad itself as the greatest generation of warriors...

So the pedigree is certainly there.  Even if you leave Rebel Moon at Seven Samurai itself, is that really such a bad thing?  Star Wars owes a debt, after all, to The Hidden Fortress, another samurai epic (Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, acknowledges the debt he owed to the same genre in his entry).  By the second film, Scargiver, each of the warriors assembled is given an origin, after their spectacular calling cards in Child of Fire as they join the quest, which occasions one of the best, understated moments of the films as at least one character allows another origin to go unremarked, which makes up the bulk of the backstory most important to Rebel Moon...

Because it's Zack Snyder it's lush visuals all around.  No one does it as well as Snyder.  It's not even close.  He's been doing it since 300 and there's no one who even tries, and for years the excuse was, he stole his ideas from the comics he adapted, but Sucker Punch is full of the same verve (and is itself far better than suggested, and an obvious predecessor to Rebel Moon).

To cobble the story, Snyder in fact combines elements from all of the Star Wars trilogies.  He splits Han Solo into a number of different characters, including the one played by Charlie Hunnam in Child of Fire.  The lead character, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is as much the Rey of the sequels as she is Luke in the originals, or Anakin, or perhaps more accurately Padme (or both) in the prequels.  That's what's so fascinating.  The Imperium is the First Order from the opening of The Force Awakens, the bloody conqueror without mercy barging wherever it wants with guns blazing, much as audiences adored the vision of Darth Vader in Rogue One.  The farmers of Veldt are a version of the Lars moisture farm that can be understood, and faced with a problem that is far more urgent than foot soldiers looking for lost droids.  I'm not criticizing Star Wars.  Rebel Moon has more in common, in the final analysis, with Braveheart than Luke Skywalker.  

It's got Djimon Hounsou, carefully drawing on his appearance in Gladiator, as one of the warriors Kora assembles.  There's Anthony Hopkins voicing the robot that explains in simple terms why in this story they're treated like scum (we're left to assume, in Star Wars, that there are latent fears of the droid armies that once ran roughshod over countless worlds).  His is the role of narrator.  In most of his appearances he's silent. It's artful in ways that are usually reserved to Pixar.  Ray Fisher, one of Snyder's Justice League actors, is unrecognizable and yet charismatic in an otherwise thankless role, meant to motivate more than fill the screen.  Ed Skrein is the villain who looks like a Nazi but wears a suit, the real suggestion, perhaps, that in our current times the villains wear ties while the rest of us just try to get on with our lives.  Corey Stoll appears in Child of Fire as village leader, and if you didn't know it was him you probably wouldn't guess, but as with every time I see him it's easy to appreciate his presence.

Boutella has been a genre queen, somewhat quietly, for much of the past decade, although never appearing in something that has been an unqualified success, or a success at all, really, from Star Trek Beyond to The Mummy to Atomic Blonde.  I caught her in a small production called Settlers, a few years back, and I adored that film, and anyone who enjoys Rebel Moon, or even if you can't, would still be recommended to check it out.  Rebel Moon is filled with accents, which is something I personally enjoy.  She's understated and expected to sell her action role in much the fashion that has failed to connect with just about every other available example (she resembles very much Alicia Vikander's Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, or the lead in Terminator: Dark Fate, the latest cinematic attempt to revitalize that franchise).  That alone was always going to be enough to sink Rebel Moon's popular prospects.  

All the hate is from people who were going to hate the results anyway.  Snyder's Man of Steel and then Batman v Superman were incredibly unpopular online, and then the long campaign for Justice League: The Snyder Cut, which ended up producing actual results, left his reputation in tatters, which he unwisely attempted to capitalize on with director's cuts of both Rebel Moon entries.  I haven't seen those.  In this era such cuts have begun to take on the reputation of being inherently better than the original, studio, theatrical versions since they "fill out the story," although I've seen every version of Alexander, and that's my favorite movie, and there's no cut that's significantly better.  They're just different cuts.  There's a very old school of this sort of thing at this point, from the different versions of Brazil to Blade Runner, and I also have ones for Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, and a great many of his fans still lament the loss of the original Magnificent Ambersons to the cutting room floor...

The filmwork, the storytelling, the acting, it's all there.  Later audiences will surely have a version of Star Wars, at the very least, where if they don't want to watch nine movies can settle for two.  It's also its own thing.  All of these stories are.  By the time you realize how much Kora's life was manipulated, you can't help but be swept up in the tragedy of it, and the prospect of redemption, which is left dangling at the end of Scargiver.  Do we need to see that?  Will we ever?

I don't think that matters.  I think these movies sell themselves.  Ignore what you've heard.  These are well worth watching.

A Complete Unknown (2024) Review

rating: *****

the story: A young Bob Dylan navigates his early career while remaining stubbornly true to himself.

the review: While I was waiting for Conclave to make sense, I kept wondering what was going to pop out unequivocally to me as the best movie of 2024, and then I saw A Complete Unknown, and it was no longer in doubt.  I was going to see it anyway; catching up with Bob Dylan has been a hobby of mine for more than a decade.  I had figured out that I loved the guy's music, and I understood his role in pop music history, but it wasn't until A Complete Unknown that I got to see a version of how it played out at the time.

Biopics are a staple of American film, and musical biopics especially, these days, since it's easy to assume that the music itself will sell the movie if nothing else, just waiting for something familiar to start playing.  But the problem with biopics is that they happen to follow a basic template, and any real understanding of the artist or band in question can be lost in the details.  For instance, the other day I watched I Saw the Light, about Hank Williams, and not only is Williams lost in the movie, but even his songs are badly layered in it, so that there's no sense at all about why you should care about any of it, or what Williams meant.  

A Complete Unknown certainly has no such problems.  We catch up with Boby Dylan as he treks over to meet with his hero Woody Guthrie, who's stuck in a hospital trying to rehabilitate, while Pete Seeger basically acts as his ambassador to the world, and in turn, Bob's.  We know his goals, his talent, and his future without even reaching his best-known material, right from the start. 

The movie itself is sort of like the real world illustration of Yesterday's conclusions of what it'd be like if everyone forgot about the Beatles except one guy, who proceeds to present all their songs as if they were his own, so that he amazes everyone with his ability to generate great material.  A Complete Unknown leans on the great material available and sometimes makes it look too easy, until Bob starts running into problems because as it turns out, success or not, he still just want to be Bob, and isn't too keen to fulfil someone else's vision of him, whether it's Joan Baez or a record label or the Newport Folk Festival.

In this era of blockbuster film movie stars have struggled to stay in the picture, and certainly new ones have found it equally difficult to be noticed, but Timothee Chalamet is one of the few to have figured it out, and his Bob Dylan is a truly uncanny accomplishment, both in the music and in general.  Roger Ebert's review of Walk the Line suggested he found Joaquin Phoenix indistinguishable from Johnny Cash, and that's a considerable exaggeration, but in Chalamet's case it isn't.  Possibly this is because Bob Dylan famously isn't much of a singer (the one glaring omission of the movie is failing to acknowledge this reputation).  It really doesn't matter.  This is the central miracle that makes all others possible.

Walk the Line's Johnny Cash is here, as portrayed by Boyd Holbrook in hopefully what's finally his breakthrough role, a true creation is a career that's been floating just under wide recognition for years, including a standout performance in Logan, which like Walk the Line and A Complete Unknown, is directed by James Mangold, who between all those Wolverine movies, these biopics, and other material like Ford v Ferrari, has comfortably settled into one of my favorite and most reliable directors.

Edward Norton, once one of those late Hollywood leading actors but since settled into picking his spots in art films, inhabits Pete Seeger just as if, like everyone else Norton plays, is as comfortable being Edward Norton as it is watching him.  At this point he's the closest we've really gotten to another Jimmy Stewart.  Elle Fanning, Dan Fogler...But the biggest surprise is Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, a true discovery.  Joan Baez fans might quibble, but if A Complete Unknown has to crib from Walk the Line, then Barbaro fills out the June Carter role better than Reese Witherspoon, so effortlessly naturally it's a shock that she isn't already a star.

The film is otherwise Bob being Bob.  I have footage of the Newport Folk Festival where Bob plugs in, so the trash being tossed at him visibly didn't really happen, but the effect is there, and it's Bob dealing with the consequences of being Bob, the way his relationships faulter, the way he can't understand what's so wrong about working on new material while crashing in someone's home instead of, y'know, paying attention to them...It's always the music.  He may be uninterested in detailing his past, but for Bob Dylan, the future is ever full of the music that fills him.

Anyway, for my money, totally fascinating, engrossing stuff.  These are maverick times.  And as always Bob's the bard leading the way.

Conclave (2024) Review

 rating: *****

the story: A new pope is elected amidst desperate maneuvering between cardinals.

the review: It was only a couple days ago that I finally figured out the ending, and as such unlocked the whole movie, and now I'm quite happy to report my love for Conclave.

As a Catholic, it's always nice to see, in recent decades, any film that breaks through the mainstream tackling Catholic matters.  Conclave was a modest success in theaters, but more importantly critics actually liked it, and have been including it among the best movies of 2024.  I suspect for a lot of them understanding the movie takes a backseat to the spectacle, up to and including that ending, and for many Catholics the ending only fuels a controversy.  Catholics will assume Conclave makes a mockery of the faith, and critics will assume it's all good fun and high theater.  It's a bit deeper than that.

It helps to hang all this on the sturdy shoulders of Ralph Fiennes, playing the cardinal tasked with running the election process, and therefore finding himself in the middle of seemingly endless intrigue, from John Lithgow's cardinal who ends up positively Machiavellian to Stanley Tucci's cardinal, who sees himself as the vanguard against backward traditionalism.  The fourth name actor in the ensemble is Isabella Rossellini as the nun tasked with keeping the proceedings running on a practical level, but who also finds herself unable to ignore the drama unfolding around her.

My original reaction to Conclave was that it was a wonderful reflection of the post-John Paul II papacy, the inability to escape his considerable shadow.  On that score it still works nicely.  Mostly, though, the whole thing is a metaphor about the massive tangle of politics our age seems thoroughly incapable of escaping, and the ending a direct reflection of its consequences.  

To be more specific, the ending, in which the newly elected pope stands revealed as having by far the biggest scandal just waiting to be exposed and yet having seemed like the best possible candidate after everyone else was eliminated from contention...In the rush to disqualify each other, the cardinals didn't stop to consider what they were losing in the process, and what they get as a result.

I can't think of a much more relevant story for these times.

Gladiator II (2024) Review

 the story: Nearly twenty years after Maximus took on Commodus with the fate of the Roman Empire at stake, his story unexpectedly concludes.

rating: ****

review: As someone who's enjoyed Ridley Scott's stream of historical epics since Gladiator, I figured I was in a good position to understand his vision for its much anticipated and also much delayed sequel.  From Kingdom of Heaven to Robin Hood to Exodus: Gods and Kings to The Last Duel to Napoleon, I found his meditations on the complexities of leadership brilliant.  Gladiator II, I determined, was much the same.

It's not at the same level as Gladiator or Last Duel, but it's not trying to be.  Its sole mission is to finish the original narrative.  Since Russell Crowe's Maximus dies at the end of Gladiator, how exactly a sequel was supposed to happen was always going to be a challenge.  The speculation always drifted in the direction of revisiting Maximus in the afterlife, which for those keeping score who still haven't seen Gladiator II, does not happen.  Rather, the plot follows two key players from the first film as they manage lives caught up in the further turmoils of empire.

Now, Ridley Scott was never playing strictly from the historical record.  He plays fast and loose with facts, as he did the first time around.  Faster and looser, actually.  But his point isn't really fact, but rather searching for heroes.  We don't live in an era chalk full of heroes.  Or rather, we don't spend a lot of time worrying about them.  We actually go out of our way to poke holes in the halos of past heroes, which reckless abandon.  It seems relevant, in such times, to find heroes in a more creative fashion.  Actually, when you stop to wonder why all the heroes are fictional superheroes these days, it begins to make a lot more sense.  Ridley Scott found himself with a Roman superhero the first time around.  Then he simply revisited as closely as he could.

You want spoilers?  The little boy from Gladiator grew up, and through circumstances found himself repeating much of Maximus's arc.  This isn't mindless duplication.  That boy turns out to be Maximus's own child, the product of an affair with the sister of Commodus, once again played by Connie Nielsen.  If you want the compelling reason to have a movie called Gladiator II once again hinge the plot on someone being a gladiator and trying to save the empire, it's really in the dramatic potential fully realized by how Nielsen's Lucilla reacts to the agonies that follow.

Actually, the title gladiator isn't even the one who most closely follows Maximus's arc, but rather the character played by Pedro Pascal, the latest actor beloved in TV roles but constantly struggling for respect in the movies (see: James Gandolfini, Bryan Cranston), who once again acquits himself well, in case you really doubt it.  The title gladiator is played by Paul Mescal, who in his breakthrough role was never going to challenge Russell Crowe, and again, didn't need to.  The draw here is the legacy, and the outcome. Derek Jacobi is the other returning actor from the first film, though he's mostly here as a link and a demonstration of the weakness of the senate, and old man on the sidelines trying desperately to make a difference, but it's just out of his grasp.

The true calling card of the movie is Denzel Washington.  This deep into the review, and it's only here I even mention him, because it really shouldn't be necessary.  Washington's presence is the true distinguishing feature of Gladiator II, its biggest claim to be more than just a sequel to Gladiator.  It's by definition at least as much a Denzel Washington picture just by his presence.  He's showy, but not in a Training Day way.  He's not always dialed in, and he doesn't need to be.  When he has something to do, you know it, and when he's trying to hide, you know it, and that's a new kind of role for Washington, and nothing that was part of Gladiator, and everything you need to know about Gladiator II and its vision of politics pivots around that description.  

It's great filmmaking by extension.  It's utterly gratuitous in its depiction of politics, the cheat code Maximus used in the first film removed, and all the dangers reinstalled.  There are consequential deaths.  There are rewarding deaths.  They're all shocking, effective moments, some of the most deft ever depicted in film, and for that, Gladiator II earns more than it needs to, since without a Russell Crowe to root for, you wonder why you should care, and that's the reception the movie's gotten, and again, again, this is beside the point.

The point is, the story is finally finished.  Good truly prevails, even though we know the empire's rot into oblivion soldiers on anyway.  In the story of Gladiator, Marcus Aerelius had a dream that seemed unattainable, and certainly so when the hero he hoped would help him gain it is dead at the end.  At the end of Gladiator II, the hero is still standing, and so, too, is the dream.  It pivots the narrative to definitive hope.  And that's the point.

These are the times we live in.  We need heroes, even fictional ones.  It doesn't hurt to have them grounded in some grand past in the real world, even if their stories are fictional.  This is a perfect coda, and perfect storytelling, even if it isn't perfect filmmaking.

Theater visits so far 2024...

 Since I've done such a horrible job of blogging here at Film Fan this year, let's have a look at what I've seen in theaters so far this year, possibly because I wanna spend some time talking about one movie in particular...

Argylle I found entertaining in its several layers, reminiscent of Lost City but certainly its own distinct flavor.  Sam Rockwell I'd basically follow anywhere and is alone worth the price of admission.  Funny, too, since there's a book based on it, since like Lost City it follows an author thrust into an adventure straight out of her books.  By the third act it makes more sense but rests on a less convincing lead performance than its predecessor.

American Fiction was something I needed to catch up on from last year, and I'm glad I did (the author of the book it's based on, Percivall Everett, has been getting better notices on his newest book, James, but as far as I can tell, not a large amount of additional sales), although it seems a little more focused on elites having elites problems than a real connection to the black experience it's technically about.  But I'd follow Jeffrey Wright anywhere, and am glad he got a spotlight like this.

The Beekeeper was instantly my favorite Jason Statham movie ever, and I realize I'm fairly late to the party, but interestingly, for me, it was a marked counterpoint to the elitism I found troubling in American Fiction, in that Statham's rampage is against the unchecked nature it currently enjoys.

Dune: Part Two I've certainly already written about, here, and how it's a technical achievement I find difficult to engage with emotionally, which is odd, since I had a very different reaction to Arrival, where both states existed so exquisitely well together.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is, like Beekeeper, a violent delight, featuring a pitch perfect ensemble cast, and has been since release one of my leading contenders for best of the year.

Sasquatch Sunset falls short of its intended mark, spending too much time in silent wonder at its strange world only for a last minute reveal at a deeper layer.  Even if we never see humanity, it would've been worth seeing more of what these creatures are living in the margins of in order to appreciate some actual context.  Instead it's just a curiosity.

Civil War is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.  Most of the film is fascinating, a glimpse at journalism in its rawest form.  Then it has to go ahead and let everyone, including the journalists, just watch as a president is assassinated.  It's a terrible, off-note ending that all but spoils the preceding pleasures.

Horizon: An American Saga, since I grew up on Westerns, was very much another welcome homecoming, a splendid tapestry that looks past pretty much the remaining romanticism still lingering in the genre.  But the release schedule was far too optimistic, and if anything scared more viewers away than the typically long running time of the modern historical blockbuster (which, while pursuing what streaming services can't, has yet to produce a winner at the box office).

Daddio is one of my favorite random discoveries, an intimate conversation between strangers exploring relationships and modern life.  Dakota Johnson I'm happy to enjoy in something other than the sitcom I first saw her in, and Sean Penn, it's the first time in a long time I've just gotten to enjoy one of his performances after years of burying his talent behind Hollywood hype (which I trace back to Mystic River), which drive even him away for years.

The Bikeriders is another leading contender for best of the year, easily.  Just perfect, a throwback to a bygone era, much like everything else I've loved this year, which is clearly the running theme of an industry trying desperately to justify itself while also looking for things that aren't packed with CGI.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is another steady entry in the franchise, practically a sequel to the last one.  It's just wild that Will Smith actually survived that Oscars slap.

Deadpool & Wolverine, since I was always more interested in Wolverine than Deadpool, was a wild ride of a return engagement, for both, the first time Ryan Reynolds had an actual story to tell and somehow the juiciest turn Hugh Jackman has gotten, in a role that has been determined to pump in melodrama from the very start.

Trap is another classic work of M. Night Shyamalan filmmaking.

Borderlands, of which I am the only one who actually enjoyed it.  Too many times fans of things have absolutely no perspective.  Nobody outside of them holds the games to be a sacred cow.  If the movie fails, no one is going to rush to revive popular interest.  The thing will die on the vine.  And once again, this is what happened.  If you liked the recent Jumanji movies, there's no discernable reason you wouldn't like this, too.  If you liked the recent Dungeon & Dragons movie, this is right up your alley.  

Conclave is hugely compelling for a Catholic, great drama ending on a curious note that kind of fiddles with its conclusions, wondering if the Church is somehow ready for a woman (in effect) in the papacy.  I don't really see how that was necessary, but I'm not going to quibble.  On the whole, another of the shining notes of the year.

Venom: The Last Dance kind of forgets that this is the final film in a trilogy for most of its runtime, finding a villain from the comics to close out the story but then getting lost in trying to explain how, since by the end we're left with the villain still out there, no other film forthcoming (and highly unlikely to be revisited), and only the sad goodbye between Eddie Brock and the symbiote.  But spending most of it just watching Eddie trying to survive despite nothing sticking to put him at risk, just kind of stumbling along, with a random off-the-maps family continually intersecting in his efforts.

We Live In Time is a fine little relationship drama.  Still kind of shocked it happened at all, much less in regular theaters (recently the domain of streaming services, such as A Marriage Story).

Joker: Folie a Deux has gotten so much exposure, and not a bit of it good, of course it's the one I was talking about at the start of this.  I have no idea what happened here, who mailed everyone excrement to provoke such a reaction.  This is exactly the second part of what happened in the first film.  Exactly.  Same flights of fancy, just with added song, since for the first and only time in his life, Arthur Fleck has an actual dance partner.  What some people seem to have considered, this isn't a movie about the Joker, but a Joker.  We've reached a point where The Dark Knight is far enough in the past that people are forgetting what exactly made Heath Ledger's Joker so great, that this second of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies is beginning to be lumped anonymously as just one of the three that resulted.  And so of course we're now at the point where another Joker is just another Joker.  Critics of the first one really just wanted to dismiss it as Taxi Driver cosplay, just as many viewers of Joker really just saw it as Ledger cosplay.  They just couldn't distinguish or analyze the first one for its own achievements.  It's no surprise, then, that neither has made heads or tails of the follow-up.  If you're looking for a classic predecessor to this one, that would be One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, mixed up with, I don't know, A Star is Born.  But ultimately this one can't help but fail to connect with audiences since it's another, along with most of Sony's Spider-Man villain movies (including, of course, the Venom movies, of which this last one was easiest to lump in).  Most critics don't understand superhero movies, and most fans don't understand supervillain movies.  This Joker was never really a hero (despite the first movie's ending), and he was never really a villain.  He was always a victim.  Just try finding sympathy for those, unless they're faceless.

A little about Dune: Part Two

I’m not calling this a review, since I don’t want to get a lot into the film itself, but this is more to say I can’t understand how everyone is so effusive about it. I’m going to call it the Excalibur effect. Excalibur was the 1981 grandiose take on King Arthur. Clearly a result of studios trying to figure out why Star Wars was such a hit, where a lot of other films chased, desperately and without any of the technical finesse or storytelling flare, what George Lucas did, in the genre he did it, Excalibur went in another direction, far into literary history, for another saga involving grand destinies, the sad stories of fathers and sons, and, well, swordplay. And it did it straight, no studio meddling to broaden the audience (which usually means adding in some comedic elements), full fantasy, and it’s been a cult classic ever since.

The Excalibur effect is perhaps better known, today, through Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, filled with the same purposeful earnestness (with some comedic elements), but otherwise embraced with extravagant praise, from the start, by critics and viewers, to a greater extent than Excalibur itself, thanks to its unusual, to this day, strategy of releasing three films in three years, and telling fans they were all shot simultaneously, the MCU before the MCU of getting ahead of the curve and getting to ride it the whole way.

I don’t think any of these movies, with the exception of Fellowship of the Ring, deserves the amount of praise they get. I find them to be highly indulgent, from the entirety Excalibur to how Gollum is depicted in the second and third Rings. When you go grand you have to earn it with truly great filmmaking.

Denis Villeneuve is a great filmmaker, but he’s driving himself to distraction with how long he stays on Arrakis. Here I’m specifically addressing the length of these films. If he were packing them with the kind of gripping drama or subtle intrigue of his best films, that would be one thing. But Dune: Part Two is packed mostly with dithering. Pretty dithering, but mostly an internal battle Paul Atreides fights over a destiny we’re supposed to question. It’s the whole point. But instead we’re led to hero-worship him, like everyone else. 

So it’s a movie no one else could have made. I get that. No one else has. But sometimes no one should. Maybe it’s because I’m impatient for Villeneuve to work on some of his own material. People say they love this now, but will they follow him the way they have Christopher Nolan? Nolan had his Batman films, but he always balanced them with other work. I get that Villeneuve was probably happy he got to make a second one at all, and he was rewarded for it. There’s more praise and attention this time than with the first one. 

I just wish he could have made his point better, I guess, and not worried so much that it looked good regardless. Sometimes that’s not actually the only thing you need to worry about. Some people just can’t tell the difference. It’s the Excalibur effect. But it’s the substance that really counts. Extremely competent filmmaking still needs excellent storytelling.