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No choices.

People, this is not how toilet training works.

There was such an opportunity here to make this one about parenting two kids and how it can change the dynamic but instead it’s about…basically nothing. Doubling the number of children doesn’t seem to change their parenting style or approach at all. None of the conflicts come from having a new baby. They ignore the kids for most of the film. 

Also, the Tri-Star fanfare when Julie takes her first steps is RIDICULOUS.

Man, they are totally not wearing their seatbelts on this roadtrip. But they live in volatile times and are separately trying to pretend they don’t notice. What’s a little recklessness?

Everyone has things they keep to themselves; bravado as a response to stress. Our characters just want to be young and horny…until they can’t be anymore.

 Using Zappa’s Watermelon in Easter Hay over the end credits is so smart. It’s a song from a concept album where music has been banned and this song is only imagined in the main character’s head; a watermelon in Easter hay is something being somewhere it doesn’t belong but still being somehow beautiful. Alfonso really knew what he had here.

Love that Mendo gets use his own accent. There’s actually nothing as terrifying as well-deployed strine.

Jyn’s character arc is the same as Han Solo’s (aloof outsider turned true believer) but that development happens off screen. Nothing she witnesses really makes her go ‘oh I must the Rebellion for realsies now’. (I think that’s what her meeting with Saw is meant to be but it doesn’t land.)

It is funny how in Andor almost no-one in the Rebellion we see references the Force whereas here suddenly all the Rebels are saying ‘May the Force be with you’ the whole time.

Really gets at how much people constantly tell pregnant women and mothers what they should or should not be doing. Everyone has an opinion.

Travolta has always been charming but contested against the absolute scumbags the rest of the men in this movie are, he is the most charming MF on the planet.
 
(Wild at how much the technology and processes around pregnancy and motherhood have changed. Almost everything about it is would now be considered bad practice. So much unintentional child endangerment, along with the intentional.)

Keaton, guyliner pioneer.

The rate of jokes isn’t quite at the level of ZAZ so it’s at times very funny but there’s also a lot of dead air. Doesn’t help that there’s also no clear narrative thrust until his brother becomes a prosecutor, which isn’t until more than halfway in (and then apparently we’re supposed to know that the mob isn’t aware they’re brothers, which I don’t being set up at all).

It does do something great that not many of these kinds of movies do, which is when a joke you think is just a joke becomes a plot point later on, like the shelf paper and the cigarette case with chewing gum.

I hadn’t ed a lot about this film but what always stuck with me was the use of Tonight You Belong to Me over the credits. Genius. If you’d told me that song was the inspiration for this story, I’d believe it.

The plot is fairly light on so Nicole Kidman’s performance has to work. And boy does it. She makes you believe she believes this kid is her husband. Incredible.

Funny that they all seem to take Sean at his word rather than as a severely mentally disturbed kid whose parents need to be more involved. They indulge him, question him, spend time with him. Like they’re already treating him like an adult, like he IS Sean. Because they’re intrigued, sure, but they’re also all grieving.

(Did this miss a trick by not having Sean just appear at the table when they turn the lights back on after Lauren Bacall’s blows out the candles on her birthday cake? Instead we just get their faces as they see Sean out of shot. I guess that’s why Johnathan Glazer is Jonathan Glazer and I’m not.)

Love that in the 70s someone could be threatening to kill hostages over the train radio and the dispatcher hearing this is just like, ‘Keep dreamin’ maniac.’ 

Rollicking fun but most of the characters, except Matthau I guess, are so dumb (all part of the satire I assume). What kind of cops are these, just waiting for the hostage takers to tell them what to do? Useless mayor, useless institutions. No wonder the bad guys almost get away with it. Up against a buncha idiots.

(Only complaint is that none of the hostages are really characters or make an impact, so when it’s revealed who the undercover cop is, it’s very underwhelming. Shouldn’t that have been the story of the train, the hostages knowing one of them is a cop and in-fighting? Anyway, so much fun.)

He’s playing for his life at the end. He assumes he’s about to die but at least he can play Chopin.

The Warsaw ghetto part of the film is a sheer horrific dirge. Gets the nightmare absurdity of the situation and situates you right inside it. The lady looking for her husband in the ghetto. Fighting over spilled soup. The lady who smothered her infant.

It becomes a horrific but constant dirge. So ironically, the shock eventually wears off. The second half is not quite as harrowing and we’re thankful for it even as Wladek becomes more ive, even as we can tell he’s less ashamed than exhausted by the mechanics of survival – hiding in a fireplace, having no food for weeks, becoming sick, hiding in bombed out buildings.

All survival stories are propaganda because most people didn’t survive, and Polanski is trying to get they across. Szpilman didn’t do or not do anything in particular, it was mostly luck. That’s the point. 

(Formally straight. Compositions don’t call attention to themselves. Lots of dips to black. Nothing elegant. I guess that’s the point. Strange that we break the formal construct of only seeing what Szpilman experiences 10 minutes from the end and for no explicit ultimate gain.)

There’s a moment where Hedwig’s mother ponders whether someone she used to clean for was in the camp, suggesting a class element rarely seen or downplayed in Holocaust movies. The Nazis weren’t the elites they imagined themself to be; they were thugs, of course, but they were also strivers, petit bourgeois.

(It’s interesting how many Holocaust films take it as a given that everyone knows parts or all of the story. You’re meant to recognise the smoke stack in the background and be chilled, and you are, but it makes me wonder how this film plays for younger generations. What film could stand on its on and the introduction and exploration? This is not going to be that film.)

Very fun but (and I get that this is the point) it’s so much like an actual Star Trek movie/episode that I feel like I’m not in on the joke.

The most perceptive thing is that every character is kinda mean and/or dumb. Which is perfect because that’s exactly what teenagers are!

(Also, Linda’s totally lying about having a boyfriend, right?)

Gravestones used as cobblestones.

I just can’t handle this anymore. I’ve seen this movie many times but now, as a father, or even just as a grown up person, it hits too hard.

Filmmaking is obviously stellar, somehow being masterful without calling attention to itself in the usual Spielberg way. The contrast of the list making at the start at the train station to the final titular list. Paperwork and bureaucracy being shown both as the instruments of evil and ultimately as the saviour. ‘Paperwork’ is often the reason Nazis give in the film for not wanting to do what Schindler asks, and he is able to convince so many of them by bribing just enough to overcome the hassle of the paper (‘an inconvenience to the list’).

There’s also at times an argument in this that capitalism is superior to war and fascism because at least if you can make money off someone their right to live can justified. Even as the Holocaust used the mechanisms of capitalism to its advantage. 

Like the division of labour in a factory, in this movie Spielberg shows how the Holocaust partly worked through people not quite knowing how their individual task fits into part of an even greater evil whole, despite how evil each task was by itself. (‘How could it possibly be worse?’)

Feels like what it’s metatextually about: what an HDHD (or 80HD) kid comes up with when he tells you a story. In fact, I’m half surprised they don’t include the books’ frame device of this being ‘written by’ two 10 year olds and that’s why everything is so wild and silly. Kinetic fun.

Ah, so good! 

Both the template for and also the inversion of so many romantic comedy tropes. You think you know what will happen and you’re kinda right in ultimate outcome but never exactly right in mechanic. Very refreshing.

Interesting comparison to One, Two, Three 25 years later (with the Wilder connection). The Soviet satire stuff there is probably harder hitting but it’s all such a farce you don’t care about the characters. Ninotchka is so much more deeply felt and balances that tone so delicately. Helps to have Garbo of course.

You can tell Hammond was a man because he thought he had to create a theme park with 15 species of dinosaur to get people interested when he would only have needed one dinosaur as a proof of concept. If you think about it, Jurassic Park as an attraction is completely unnecessary. 

It is actually so funny that they don’t really see any dinosaurs of the actual tour. It’s just like a real zoo – you barely see anything because the animals just chilling in their habitats. It takes them going off the path to have their encounters. (Just like what Hammond and his scientists do, straying from the path of ethics yada yada.)

Perfectly paced. Takes its time setting everything up so as soon as the electricity goes off the whole thing can just take off. Every scene is memorable, even the shoe leather stuff. And something I noticed on this watch is how much visual shorthand is used in the action sequences, allowing Spielberg to make leaps of logic that through shot selection and editing you never really notice. Efficient and effective.

Only Hammond and Grant get proper arcs but they pay off so well. Grant at the end in the helicopter with the kids asleep on him and looking out the window at birds, his outlook on his personal and professional life changed forever. Perfect.

I love the idea of the existential crisis of a Neverland without Peter Pan, dramatised specifically in Captain Hook’s suicidal ideation but also in the aimlessness of the Lost Boys and the sense that there’s no adventure or fun left because Peter left to grow up. The message is: it’s fun being a child but everyone does have to grow up because ‘to live would be an awfully big adventure’. 

So, it doesn’t quite get to that level of resonance but a least half of this works. Everything before we get to Neverland (and some of the stuff there) is great. It’s really the pirate baseball sequence where the wheels come off. 

As soon as the actual Peter Pan stuff starts happening it falls apart. It loses focus from being about a father trying to save his kids to…being about this other character named Peter Pan. All the fatherhood stuff never connects with the Peter Pan stuff because the throughline isn’t clear. What from Peter Banning’s life have we seen that sets up that this could be the grown up Peter Pan? What in Williams’ performance as Pan shows that he’s the same father from the first two acts of the film?

BUT the filmmaking just is still so good, whatever the issues with the story, the pacing, the length. The shadows, the compositions, the transitions. As always, we take Spielberg for granted.

(The workaholic dad stuff hits differently hard now. Especially how his having a mobile phone and being available for calls even during time off is just what working life IS now.)

The way the men look at Hideko reading to them and imposing on her all these deviances that are not in her but in fact are being thrust upon her by another man is pertinent to all discussions around performance, be it acting, social media, pornography. 

The pulpy double crosses in the luscious period setting make this such a fun, rewarding watch. Every time there’s a twist or reveal, it totally works. 

So clever how it uses the filmmaking against you, to show you things you’ve already seen in a new way. (Obviously that’s not a new thing but the way it does it with, for example, coverage, feels fresh. Like the first time around our version of the story had been redacted.) 

The tone threatens to go off the rails (and almost does in the torture sequence of the third act) but Park’s mastery keeps everything just where it needs to be.

On this rewatch, it occurred to me that it’s a happy ending because that’s where the film ends. You can easily imagine there being another rug pull, just around the corner, out of our view.

There’s a tremendous sadness watching these Welles films that were taken away from him, imagining what they are supposed to be. Very strange for something to be suffused with genius but also built on shifting sands.  

This again is one with enormous potential but stymied by the double helix of amateur actors and ADR (seemingly necessitated by using those foreign or inexperienced actors) and feeling the need to dub over them. 

Stunning visually. Still unmatched in composition, use of shadows, close ups with impact. It’s even actually very dramatically satisfying by the end and whenever Welles himself is on screen he’s mesmerizing. But it’s just not a finished film and that’s the great tragedy of Welles’ career. 

*Confidential Report verison

Why is THIS the Snow White movie?

Like, if you feel uncomfortable making a movie about vanity and jealousy of younger people’s beauty, maybe don’t make a Snow White movie.
The throughline of the story is so downplayed that it seems like Gal Gadot’s evil queen is more concerned that Snow White is plotting against her kingdom than jealousy and the hubris that goes with it. They define and redefine what ‘fair’ means multiple times so that it’s not clear what the Queen’s deal even is. 

You can update fairy tales without stripping them of what makes them enduring and powerful. Zegler is winning but boo to everything else.

Ha, never noticed that Elsa deliberately gave Donovan the wrong cup at the end. 

The mission is harder to follow in this one. Possibly because it makes less sense and deliberately doesn’t dwell on details. (At least in the previous two it was clear why everything was happening – not just why but WHERE.)

The writing’s just not as sharp as Raiders or even Temple of Doom. (It’s only just occurred to me that no two Indy films are written by the same person.) But despite the messy middle, the final act is incredible and ends with one of the most satisfying endings ever.

Also, Jump scare Alexei Sayle as a Turkish sultan. 

[OK but this film has one of the weirdest cuts in a Spielberg movie that I only point out because of how out character for him it seems: towards the end when Donovan shoots Jones Sr, the camera does this spin motion to land on Connery’s face as Indy grabs him. But halfway through it cuts to the same motion but the close up is on Indy, and then cuts back to (what I imagine is) the original shot. It obviously wasn’t planned this way and it basically becomes a jump cut. Can’t think of another Spielberg shot or cut that disorienting that’s not on purpose.]

‘It’s not anti-American, it’s anti-Yankee!’

Imagine you’re making a film about the division of Berlin and all the madcap adventures that could happen with that setup, then the Berlin Wall goes up while you’re shooting, making your premise obsolete. Fascinating.

Obviously based on a play but Wilder leans into that with a presentational style that gets to show off his facility for blocking and widescreen composition. 

Stellar performance by Cagney. 30 Rock density of jokes per minute. Hard to imagine a quicker comedy.

Actual LOL when the secretary’s dancing shakes the walls so much that Khrushchev’s picture falls out of the frame to reveal Stalin’s underneath.

Extra extra-judicial.

Perkins is constantly dwarfed in the frame by the scenery or by other people or just by empty space. A man in search of justice in an absurd system is a lone, tiny voice. Trying to maintain dignity in the face of massive institutions and their complexity is pointless.

I don’t know if it’s a critique or a compliment to the film that its subtext is collapsed into the text such that there…almost isn’t a text? If you haven’t clicked what’s ‘really’ going on, it must be utterly bewildering. 

The plot is in very broad, non-specific strokes, with monotone performances meant to put us at a distance and placeholder dialogue and place names (really the high school is called Void High? And the Nickeloden-type tv channel is called The Young Adult Network? And the video arcade is called Fun Center?).

(Cards on the table, I prefer my subtext to at least complement a coherent story with a satisfying throughline whether you’re part of the ‘in the know’ group or not.)

Unfortuantely, you can easily see how a conservative reading of this movie would say it’s about escaping into a dream world that doesn’t exist, a shared delusion. There’s no joy in either world, wherever you go. That’s ultimately nihilistic. Maybe that’s just because we never see what happens to ‘Maddy’

Certainty becomes uncertainty. Institutions are not equipped to deal with an evil it has never encountered because they’ve been allowed to become corrupted and weak. Every one thinks they have one simple trick to find the answer, whether it’s looking in someone’s eye or documents or physical battery or mysticism.

We all deal with the frustration of not knowing in our own way and while some ways are less harmful than others, none are proof.
In the end even the righteous become corrupted.

Plus, jump kicks.

Spielberg really wanted to make Stalag 17 but since that had already been made he made this instead.

A master technician working with subpar material.
Spielberg’s trying to squeeze emotions out of the setting but it just doesn’t work because the story and the characters aren’t compelling. (Bold to assume the audience would care more about a spoilt white rich kid over the actual Chinese people under attack/occupation.)

So when in the last 40 minutes or so all these major things seem to be happening, it feels like nothing’s really been set up. It’s trying to pay off beats it never set up emotionally or even narratively.

And look, I do appreciate the lack of voice over narration but honestly I could not tell what was happening on a larger scale a lot of the time because Jim is not a character with any interiority and seems to think and act in bizarre ways, not in the sense of a compelling character but as one barely written. 

It is interesting to see a few of these beats get reworked to much greater and appropriate effect in Schindler’s List.

You never see lovesick cops anymore. 

Cop in the first story gives himself a month to let go of his ex; Faye in the second story gives herself a year to be ready, perhaps, to gift a real boarding . 

I like the idea that Faye altering Cop 663’s home little by little is her way of inuring him to her. Like a romantic inoculation. Leaving pieces of herself for him to wonder about but never really know. Before he knows it, he’s been living with her presence, even as she’s too timid to show up for a date. Like a ghost, just as he becomes aware of her, she vanishes. She shies away because doesn’t want to be seen, only felt.

Towards the beginning of the film, Celie cleans a dirty wall to reveal a flower on the wallpaper. Without meaning to, this seems like Spielberg’s whole approach: look, it’s OK because underneath it’s beautiful.

The tone is all over the place, even within a scene. When Sofia is telling Celie that she had to fight her whole life and refuses to be beaten by men, one of the most affecting serious moments, it’s intercut with Harpo pretending that his beaten up face was from being kicked by a mule, which is played for laughs. 

All the little bits of business – Mister struggling to cook in the kitchen and asking Celie what to wear, Harpo falling through the roof – are at odds with the tone of the piece, such that Spielberg is setting you up for one emotion only to pull the rug out from under you a moment later. He’s such a good craftsman at building these pieces but he hadn’t yet realised how to use restraint in presenting them.

The scene where Sofia punches the mayor, a huge and tragic turning point in her arc, is (at first) played very lightly and even ends of a semi-comedic beat as she calls for the police to help her but instead she’s struck down by them. This stuff happens all over the film. 

Every piece of serious violence is either shied away from (often literally with the camera moving away) or undercut with some misplaced levity.
Spielberg had not yet learned to be still and sit in the moment, however uncomfortable it is.

And yet, so much of it is so touching and well done. Any scene between Celie and Shug, especially when they read the letter together, is incredibly powerful. When Celie finally stands up to Mister at the dinner table. Nettie’s return. 
A three and a half star movie made me cry.

It’s a strange thing, trying to explain music and it’s probably not fair to want a film to try but although this is very well done and totally entertaining to watch, I just wish there had been some more insight into HOW his music works. 

I know, it’s not fair to ask a movie to do something it’s not trying to do (it’s not a video essay after all) but although we see and hear a lot of music in here, we aren’t any closer to any insight about what makes John Williams’ music special.

Try to tell us WHY the Home Alone score sounds like Christmas (is he using voicings common in Christmas carols?), show us HOW playing two leitmotifs against each other create tension and develop character. It’s a cop out to just call it ‘magic’.

One day they’ll make a music documentary like that. Not today though. This is fine.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking at until you realise whose perspective you’re seeing it from.

The commitment to the formalism is astounding. And when the movie chooses to break with it for certain sequences, you’re left wondering why and interrogating it. WHY are we suddenly seeing the back of someone's head instead of what they can see? What does it mean? Because it does mean something.

The magic trick of seeing our protagonist for the first time because now we’ve entered someone else’s point of view. It accomplishes something usually only novels can do.
 
The key scenes that justify the POV premise is when we’re experiencing what it’s like to be hunted, chased and beaten, when we also have experienced what it’s like for this person to just be sitting in school or reading a book like anyone else. 

Chilling. Brilliant. America as a Potemkin village.

Because the characters aren’t moving physically across the world like in Raiders, Spielberg chooses to make sure every sequence and set piece is based around movement and momentum – Indy swinging on ropes or his whip; the ceiling crushing downwards on Indy and Short Round; the Thuggee sacrifice as a cage plunged down into lava; the rolling rock crushers, vertical water carriers and, of course, the rollercoaster carts of the cave sequences, the list goes on.
So there’s de facto narrative momentum created by physical staging of movement in the frame. 

Anyway, still too ethnographically iffy and narratively inert to be the best Indy but some of the staging is among the best of Spielberg’s already high bar.

in the early 2000s, there’d be 700 movies like this every year? They were all solidly 3.5/5 star films but easy to watch. Boy we didn’t know how good we had it.

Culkin’s character is very well observed, that type of guy who is charming and friendly but subtly manipulative to everyone around him. Still feels…weirdly lightweight (not derogatory).

Thoughtful. Light. Three and three quarter stars.

Imagine the founder of The Substance going on Shark Tank:

‘So you’re telling me your primary marketing channel is random creepy guys whispering to vulnerable people in a doctor’s office, then you call a number to get an address, then we send you a key to a dingy garage where you have to pick up the product yourself – no delivery of the actual product – and then there are just a few cards with vague instructions. Oh and then the customer inject the substance into themselves – you can’t make this into a pill? – so customers need to have a pretty thorough knowledge of minor surgical procedures. With no legal disclaimers either, mind you. And when you need a refill, those don’t get delivered either, you have to trek out to that garage again and pick it up yourself? And you want 100 million dollars for a 40% stake. For those reasons, I’m out.’

Anyway, shot and performed like an episode of Tales from the Crypt (complimentary) but way too long (derogatory). For something so heavy handed it ironically doesn’t have a clear view of what it’s supposed to be satirizing. It’s such a cartoon world that no actual power dynamics come into play, not really; no larger structure of oppression beyond internalised hatred. Like if it’s satirical target is anyone, it’s Elizabeth for wanting to be younger. The way it’s presented, it’s all self-inflicted, which is where the Tales from the Crypt stuff continues; it’s always hubris that does you in. (Vanity, no matter the reason, is still vanity.)

Still lots of fun with great practical effects. I appreciate how gonzo the ending is, not chickening out and following its one idea to its logical conclusion.

This was never my film. I always was somehow creeped out by it as a kid. Something to do with the household (definitely being very uncomfortable with ‘penis breath’). I think I recognised or sensed that this was not a happy family, even though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time. Which with hindsight makes it so uplifting and magical that this is the family ET comes to.

But it’s not a happy film; there’s so few actual fun hijinks ET gets to have with the family before he’s sick and getting captured by G-men. It’s not as whimsical as I always think it’s going be. All that stuff in the quarantine area is so upsetting and I think it was so distressing to me as a kid that the tension is only barely relieved by the happy/sad ending.

Anyway, it’s pretty wild they used to get kids to dissect frogs at school.

An anti-procedural. There’s no procedure with Chance, it’s all vibes – and they’re all bad vibes. 
Like Heat, it gets at something about the type of people who become cops vs criminals and how similar they are. Petersen is basically a thug with a badge.

By the end, the deaths of bad men set one woman free, escaping in his own car, while the other woman finds herself in a new cage under the control of another corrupt man.

The imagery in this thing. Dafoe kneeling beside a fireplace naked throwing money into the fire. The sex scene between Peterson and Feuer. The intense but clear editing during the against-traffic car chase. 

Also, can’t get over that they chose to set this in the final week of December and January but there’s nothing festive (even the lower third date stamps that come up every so often specifically skip over Christmas). In this LA, nobody’s happy, even when they could have every reason to be.

As a kid I didn’t necessarily know which of these came first, so even though Indy gets such a great character introduction, it also plays as though we the audience should just be happy to see our favourite returning character Indiana Jones. 

Perfect use of a ‘something is accomplished BUT THEN something sets them back’ screenplay structure all the way to the final scene. (It’s kind of why there’s that ‘Indy doesn’t affect the plot’ trope because it’s such a one step forward, two steps back structure.) 

I like how it’s clear that Indy isn’t actually a superhero, he’s just a dude usually in over his head (‘it’s not the years, it’s the mileage’). Like he really is just that nerdy professor. 

The map room scene where where the sun shines through the Staff of Ra on the place where the ark is sets up the supernatural element of the actual ark in a pretty subtle way. In the sequels people must have expected some supernatural stuff but it’s so lightly deployed here (and kinda thematic too) that it’s unexpected but still makes sense when people start melting.

‘At twenty-one or twenty-two, so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible. Which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can't tell twenty about this. Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty.’

Georgie is the kind of person who writes ‘born in the wrong era’ under Bob Dylan videos on YouTube. 

He doesn’t like that the wind is changing, the earth shifting under his feet and he’s so mad about missing the good old days. As we all are.
He’s quite literally a horse drawn carriage in the age of automobiles. The new technologies always seem like an imposition until they’re just the Way Things Are.  

Even in this famously compromised version, Welles was absolutely cooking: the lighting, those shadows, the staircase scenes with Georgie and Aunt Fanny and their constantly shifting power differentials, the blocking, the dialogue, the elegiac but sardonic tone. Cinema! 🍿

There’s a Leonard Cohen lyric: ‘Took my diamond to the pawn shop/but that don’t make it junk.’

Constantly calls attention to the construction of itself with the editing, the mismatched voice over, the reenactments, the reuse of footage etc – but that doesn’t make it a fake. 

Does it matter if art is real? What is real anyway, duuude? If a fake has an effect on you, is it not art? (And what does this mean now with AI?) 

The fake biographer says a forger cannot be a true artist because he has no unique personal perspective or expression. I think that’s about right. But fiction is different than fake, than just a copy. (So where does skill and technique come into it?)

Orson Welles, possibly the most interesting person to ever live.

(It’s funny how people get irate at the final third because that’s the part that’s made up. The whole thing is made up, maaaan. Welles is a filmmaker, this is a film, we cannot help but only represent a copy of a person when we cut footage together. There’s no trick to it, it’s just a simple trick.)

Today I watched a French film about a novelist accused of murdering their spouse after a suspicious fall where secrets about their relationship are exposed. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THE STAIRCASE. And boom goes the dynamite.

Anyway…central performance is magnetic but the whole thing is too visually dull and compositionally ambivalent for my taste. (A lot of aimless, dated looking handheld stuff that I guess is still popular in Europe. So many trial scenes and the blocking never makes the layout of the courtroom clear until the very end when we see that wide shot from the gallery.) 
Less plotty than I might have preferred. Was expecting maybe a twist like Witness for the Prosecution or something that makes you see the kid differently, like Power of the Dog but no, it’s a French melodrama. 

There is a thread in here I like about not being able to speak the language you’re most comfortable in, not being able to express yourself in the way you want etc but it doesn’t seem to tie into the actual narrative, except in an abstract way. (Maybe it does and I’m dumb. Is it saying something about how we judge people who prefer to speak another language? Maybe but that’s not in the text. We don’t see her being judged by the community for being German for example.)

It’s notable that the final sequence pays off the scientists’ story (all the navy people coming back) and Jillian’s story (Barry returning) but nothing pays off for Roy. His story is incomplete because…there was never a challenge for him to overcome. (It’s not because he had to see it for himself – he’d already seen flying saucers way earlier in the movie; it’s an obsession for a repeat experience, not of knowledge.) In fact, everything he should be overcoming he’s abandoned. He doesn’t realise he needs to go back to his family. There’s nothing for him on Earth and it’s all his fault. Maybe that’s the point. 

(That final sequence is astounding but the film overall didn’t improve for me on rewatch. It’s still too long and the film doesn’t seem to know Roy is a deadbeat.)

Fritz can only see the world through wrestling. It’s how he processes his sadness*. And it’s infected his family, whether the curse is real or not. Fritz’s iron claw move itself pushes someone down from the top of their head, causing pain via pressure. THAT’s the curse.

The haunted look all of the boys have 
even at the start acts as foreshadowing. Characters speak their feelings openly without necessarily sounding like they’re going THROUGH those feelings. The dialogue is very declamatory. ‘When you did this, it made me angry.’ It shouldn’t work (and might be the result of an unpolished screenplay) but it does.

It’s actually a creative challenge to depict each tragedy differently, and parse out the information with tact but also so they have impact. (Revealing Kerry’s injury is done in a simple but highly effective way.)

Small, important scene: Maura Tierney telling Lily James that she can’t wear the black dress she’s laid out because everyone will recognise it from the other funeral(s). (es the Bechdel test too.)

Weird thing: Only two pieces of voice over, both the same (or very similar), at the start and end. Weird formal break from the rest of the film though, especially since all the information we get in those V/Os occur in dialogue too. 

*It’s not, I don’t think, primarily about toxic masculinity; that’s an easy read and a lot of initial reviews here seem to declare it without really making the case for it. If you actually engage with the text, it’s more than that. They’re being blinded by the aesthetic, by the subject of wrestling. Masculinity might be the prism through which Fritz interprets parenting and his own lost dreams but it’s not the engine of it.

Truly, what can you say?

Interesting to think when this was made, the war hadn’t ended. That’s why it’s a relatively small scale story, a little victory with a big melancholy.

First 6 minutes a little rough with exposition and clumsy crossfades, the main giveaway that this was a troubled production and things were not planned out. But once we get to Rick’s, it just cooks. The filmmaking improves, things feel more purposeful. Shadows and blocking. Dialogue and FACES. 

Forgot that in the flashbacks both Ilsa and Sam call him Richard, explaining why she wasn’t sure it was him when they first get to Rick’s Cafe and then when she comes to him to beg for the letters of the transit late in the film she calls him Richard again.

Toto jumps out of Oz’s hot air balloon basket at the end because he hates being in baskets. 🧺 Pretty smart. 

(My children found it magical. Shit still works.)

Notice how many shots have the horizon at the top or bottom. 

What can you say? This isn’t even in my top Spielberg films and yet...

Economy of storytelling. (Brody’s sheriff car perfectly framed by the open gate is how you first find out his role in the town.) Using every inch of the frame to tell the story. Entering scenes late and getting out early. No waste. Cutting on action (e.g. when we the see the barrel being pulled off the boat across two shots). 

What’s interesting is there’s no real subtext of hubris, of humans getting, ahem, out of their depth and being punished for it. It’s triumph that we can defeat the shark because that’s the good and right thing, even though it comes at a cost. We as people can and should impose our will on nature. Is that conservative? Or is it just humanist?

Did Spielberg…invent the Coen Brothers? 

About the triumph of the underclass. Tricky balance of laughing at but not looking down on the less fortunate because their aims are noble.

Second Spielberg movie in a row that feature a vehicle physically pushing another one. Was this a real thing?! Weren’t people concerned about scratching their cars?

Sam Neill is dressed almost exactly like his Jurassic Park character throughout this.

Very silly (like, too silly for this to have an a child’s death be the reason they’re on a boat). Underwritten (nobody has motivations for their actions; feels like we’re missing a sequence that explains Billy Zane’s whole deal). Feels like it’s building up to a twist that never comes. (The dead kid stuff never comes back in any way, and isn’t even in the source novel.) Some great aerial and nautical photography though and the way Billy Zane is taken out is ridiculous but fun.

I regret to say this doesn’t quite have the juice. It’s hard to follow up the air-light first two films and everyone tries I guess but it all seems tired; there’s a lethargy to the whole thing.

Not terrible by any means but there’s not a lot of the surprise and delight of the first two; where it should be light, it drudges. It forgets to be a comedy at times, instead choosing to fill in backstory we don’t need. Just give us more hard stares and silly jokes! 

(The worldbuilding borders on the supernatural in this one, almost breaking the premise of the whole series by forcing something whimsical like a bear from Peru living in London to have a concrete backstory and history. To what end, I’m not even sure. Feels a bit like they shot the first draft. Paddington doesn’t really even have an arc and they basically invent this idea of him needing to find his real home at the end when that was not really set up at all.)

Think about how irritated people must have been when they had to stop just to get a glass of water. No wonder there’s so much road rage – everyone was dehydrated!

Imagine this being your first film. So much action, actual cars driving on actual roads. You can always tell where the two vehicles are in relation to each other. Already such an innate understanding of where to put the camera and how it should move.

It does hit the same beat over and over again, so tension builds and falls but doesn’t really gather momentum through the middle section (ittedly this probably plays better in the original TV cut; all the added scenes pad it out and hit the emasculation thematic point really hard, something I don’t think Spielberg particularly cares about).

Watching this in the cinema at the time, I thought that the Scouring of the Shire was going to be included and that Gandalf’s ‘Saruman has no power anymore’ was a setup. The one real flaw of the film is that without that chapter, Saruman is adrift in the story.

And for a while I thought it needed to be in the film, multiple endings be damned (when you set up lots of plot and character arcs, you have to close them off one at a time; multiple endings are not a problem). Mainly because I liked the subtext in the book that war touches every corner of the world and you can never really go home again, because it isn’t there.

But in the fullness of time I think Jackson captured that idea just with Frodo’s arc and how he doesn’t fit in the Shire anymore. Anyway, still incredible. 

Stray thoughts: 

- Sheer force of will keeps this thing moving but some plot points are definitely papered over in the theatrical cut (e.g. doesn’t explain where/what Osgiliath is in relation to Gondor and Mordor, unless you from the map in the previous movie).
 
- Related: Just the balls to not put any supers/lower thirds explaining where everything is. Jackson knows it matters less that you understand the geography as long as you get the emotional beats the characters (and character sets) are going through. 

- Denethor is just ‘wrong kid died’ for half his arc. Love the little detail of Dentheor sitting on a smaller throne below the true King’s throne at Minas Tirith.

- Small thing but Sam only calls him Gollum, while Froso always says Sméagol. (Funny writing these notes in Apple Notes, a lot of the Middle Earth names autocorrect to have the right accents/diacritics; nerds!)

 -Subtle (or not) but when Eowyn is defending Merry from Eomer’s teasing, she is really defending herself and anyone the men of Rohan would dismiss. 

- Theoden’s men watching Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas ride away into the path of the dead, thinking they’re abandoning him: ‘Shit blokes’. 

 - ‘Release the hostages’ and it’s their decapitated heads getting catapulted into Minas Tirith. Forgot that bit.

- Keeping this many story plates spinning and have them all climax at the appropriate times is such a feat of filmmaking, whatever the squabbles one might have with individual choices. Like, having Aragorn arriving with the army of the dead hitting at the same time as Eowyn is fighting the Witch-King is just chef’s kiss. Love the effect of his disintegration too.

- Again on multiple endings, this just used to be called falling action. 

- ‘So es Denethor, son of Echthelion.’ Brutal. 

 - When Gandalf describes what happens after death to Pippin, I believe Ian McKellan has seen the afterlife. You’re telling me he didn’t get an Oscar nomination and *checks notes* THOSE other guys did? 

- Related: How did Viggo’s ‘it is not this day’ speech not get him an acting nomination? Far out. Or Astin’s ‘Do you the shire?’ 11 Oscars and still got robbed. (All acting categories that year were weak – crazy that these didn’t get nods.)

- Henchman orcs getting dispatched so easily by Sam, you love to see it.

- Black Metal fans watching playing bingo watching this: Gorgoroth, Shagrat, Isengard…do they ever say ‘Burzum’ out loud?

- Far out, I forgot about the Eagles. Deux ex machina be damned, it’s so cool. Besides, it’s set up two movies earlier that eagles can save people when they saved Gandalf from Isengard.

- Wild to learn that the cave troll Aragorn is fighting while the ring gets destroyed was originally shot to be physical representation of Sauron as he appears in the prologue. I wonder what the body language would have been when the ring finally sinks into the lava.

Amazing how well this works in the theatrical cut considering how (from memory) it’s the most compromised from the extended edition.
It’s the one where I couldn’t necessarily connect all the dots and you just have to go with some things by the power of will and the filmmaking. (E.g. sorry, why were the Rohirrim off away from Rohan so that Gandalf had to fetch them to get them to Helm’s Deep?). Stray thoughts:

- Incredible that this series just kept introducing iconic characters with each installment: Gollum, Theoden, Wormtongue, Eomer, Eowyn, Faramir – and we get new leitmotifs! The Rohan theme is haunting. We barely miss the Fellowship theme (by my count we only hear a hint of it once, when Aragorn tosses Gimli funnily enough).

- Gollum haunts the first film but when you see him in this one it’s beyond belief how much they nail it. Just imagine if Gollum didn’t work. Or if Serkis’ voice wasn’t right. But it just works.
-One of Saruman’s most insidious things is he turns men against other men with lies (‘the horse men stole your lands, burn their villages.’)

- It’s become a cliche to say but there’s so much production value from just actually filming in real locations. 

- I love how they really play the whole ‘white wizard’ thing as the big twist it should be, even completely playing unfair by having Christopher Lee’s voice mixed in with McKellan’s when he meets the remainder of the Fellowship. 

- There’s just no irony. Jackson’s painting with big brush strokes but completely emotionally and dramatically real.

- As big as Jackson can go, it shows such restraint and smarts to play the Sméagol/Gollum split personality scene in traditional over the shoulder setups, so you instantly get that it’s the two sides talking rather than anything more complicated like showing two of them in the frame and then one disappearing or something more literal. And it’s so inherently filmic. Perfect adaptation.

-“Po-tae-toes,” gets its own close up. 
- It only just clicked for me that there’s an implication, in the films at least, that the Elves are leaving Middle Earth partly because of the dark forces gathering. 

- One cool Easter egg from the book is how Legolas is able to seemingly jump backwards onto Gimli’s horse as if weightless. It’s never explained in the film but elves essentially don’t have mass or something.

-It sucks that we lose so much of the Faramir story in the theatrical cut but his introduction and the reveal of ‘he was my brother’ plays so well that I can’t help think it was always going to be edited this way (unless I’m mising where most of his stuff is in the Extended Editions). 

- The Uruk-Hai being more disciplined than regular orcs really works for the Helm’s Deep battle because you get to do all those classical armies standing off against each other things that Fellowship didn’t really have because they were mainly fighting marauding hordes of orcs. 

- All those little beats and insert shots like the man turning to reveal an eyeless socket or the Uruk-Hai breathing steam out of its mouth – this is how you build an all-time battle sequence.

- So much juice in just seeing kings like Theoden and Aragorn fighting on the front lines. 

- , all those terrain aerial shots are helicopter shots. No drones at all.

My ranking of the films of David Lynch.

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Blue Velvet
3. Lost Highway
4. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
5. Twin Peaks: The Return
6. Eraserhead
7. The Elephant Man
8. The Straight Story
9. Wild at Heart
10. Inland Empire

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My ranking of the films of David Fincher.

1. Zodiac
2. The Social Network
3. Gone Girl
4. Se7en
5. Fight Club
6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
7. The Killer
8. Panic Room
9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
10. Mank

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.