Movie Reviews - 2025 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS 

My wife loved the set direction and costume design, and I liked the Creature’s story, which we get in the last hour of this 2.5-hour movie, but I was bored for most of it. 

Writer-director Guillermo del Toro has said the problem with his Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) isn’t that he’s a mad scientist, it’s that he’s a bad parent. And yes, that’s the problem with his Victor Frankenstein. It’s an obvious and unsubtle problem. Dude creates life out of dead matter, and almost immediately he puts it in chains in the basement; he gets furious when it can’t annunciate anything more than “Victor”; he calls it “It.”

Apparently del Toro also thought of Victor as a rock star, and you definitely get that vibe. At one point, strutting down the muddy 19th-century street, I flashed on Sly Stone (or Walt Frazier), and was amused for a moment, but that’s nothing to hang a hat on—even a Sly Stone one. The rock star thing has also been done. People think this guy from the past is X, but he’s really a rock star! Where was it again? Oh, right, “Gothic,” the 1986 Ken Russell movie about the debauched weekend in Villa Diodati in Switzerland when Mary Shelley, with husband Percy and Lord Byron, came up with the idea for “Frankenstein.” Russell, too, thought of the poets as rock stars—Byron has to run from screaming fans, etc.—and it totally made sense. When I took a Byron class at the University of Minnesota, I remember a hipster student saying that Byron was the world’s first rock star.

(BTW: Oscar Isaac would make a great Lord Byron if anyone wants to make that movie.)

Byron as rock star, yes. Dr. Frankenstein as rock star, why? What does it add?

I haven’t even gotten to the comic book aspect of it all. The early color schemes (mother red, father black, son white) reminded me of what Warren Beatty did with “Dick Tracy” in 1990: every character a color, straight from the comic books. It was original when Beatty did it, done to death since. Speaking to done to death, how about superpowers? This Frankenstein Creature (Jacob Elordi) isn’t just strong, he’s superstrong. He tears wolves in half, pushes free ships trapped in the Arctic ice. Dr. Frankenstein did more than give him life, he made it so he couldn’t die. His body heals rapidly from mortal wounds. Think Wolverine without the snikt.

Father to the man
The movie opens in the North Atlantic in the 1850s, with a Shackleton-like attempt to conquer the Pole or something. The point is they’re stuck in the ice, and there’s bickering since the Danish captain (Lars Mikkelsen) wants the adventure to continue; but then in the distance, an explosion. Quick excursion, they find Dr. Frankenstein replete with artificial leg. But they’re followed by a growling, howling creature in rags, who tosses sailors around like rag dolls, killing a half dozen, while demanding “VICTOR!” Bullets don’t kill him, they merely pause him, so the Captain, no dummy, trains his weapon on the ice, cracks it, and the Creature goes under. And then, in the captain’s quarters, everyone settles in as Victor tells his story in the most elongated way possible. 

“Wait, didn’t you tell us the Creature who killed six of my men can’t die, hates you, and will soon be back to kill more?” 

“Yes, but please hear about my childhood first.”

As a young man, Victor (Christian Convery) is pushed mercilessly by a surgeon-father who doesn’t love him and doted on by a mother who does—a mother who wears all red. Not a good sign. Yep, she dies in childbirth, for which Victor blames his father, the attending physician, but holds no grudge against the offspring, William. But then family fortunes diminish, father dies, children are sent to separate countries.

Cut to the rock star performing at one of those 19th-century surgical amphitheaters at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He says he’ll supercharge dead matter into life and does exactly that—a head and torso on a table gasp back into existence. In a way, del Toro masterminded the scene too well, because it’s too horrifying for the tepid reaction it engenders from the elders. There’s indignation, and consternation, and God is invoked, but there should be absolute amazement that a man has done this, along with a violent condemnation that he did in fact do this. He should be chased through the streets, like a rock star, but with anger rather than love/sex on the mind of the mob. “Oh my god, that’s amazing! Don’t ever fucking do that again!”

He does find a fan, Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a Cherman who is uncle to brother William’s fiancée, and who is intrigued by Victor’s work enough to bankroll it. They find a castle for the experiments, etc., and it’s appropriately cool—in these scenes, Victor comes off less rock star than film director—but since it’s Christoph Waltz we’re immediately thinking, “OK, what are his ulterior motives?” Ready? He’s dying of syphilis and wants Victor to find a cure. Kidding! Apparently reanimating dead matter is child’s play next to curing syphilis. No, he wants Victor to put his brain in whatever he reanimates. Victor balks. The diseased brain will tarnish his product. It's like he’s the artist, the filmmaker, and Harlander is a producer with “notes.” 

Oh right, during all this, William (Felix Kamerer) and his fiancée Elizabeth (Mia Goth) arrive, and Victor develops a new obsession: Elizabeth. del Toro cast Goth as the mother, too, so there’s an Oedipal thing going on. Meh. One, Goth does nothing for me, and I found her character annoying, so I didn’t feel any of the obsession. Two, it was one obsession too far. Keep the man, and the story, on track, Guillermo. Three, isn’t it the same obsession? Wasn’t he interested in reanimating life because he never got over his mother’s death? Well, here she is! He doesn’t have to do that now. Done and done. Instead, the obsessions coincide and keep bumping into each other. They jostle for space in the story.

But it’s “Frankenstein,” so eventually he has to create the creature. The experiment seems a failure until the next morning when Victor wakes with the creature at the foot of the bed. He’s done it! Plus it’s superstrong and heals super fast! And it can talk! At least it can say a word, his name, Victor. He should be amazed at what he’s done but only sees the errors, and chains it in the basement. William and Elizabeth arrive, see the handiwork, and she and the Creature bond. Sparking Victor’s jealousy? Or is he simply an artist who wants to crumple up that version and start over? After staring the fire, he has second thoughts, tries to save his creation, but is blasted outside by an explosion, losing his leg. The creature escapes.

This is still a tale told on a ship in the Arctic, remember, and at this point there is turmoil outside, and the captain opens his door to find the Creature standing there. Now he tells his tale, or at least everything after the explosion. In the woods, hunters shoot him, he finds refuge in a stable and does behind-the-scenes good deeds for the people there. They call him “The Spirit of the Forest.” He bonds with the blind grandpa (David Bradley, Walder Frey of “Game of Thrones”), and we get echoes of the great James Whale Frankenstein movies. But wolves arrive, CGI wolves, and there goes gramps.

Eventually the Creature realizes he can’t die, that he’s doomed to an eternity of loneliness, and he returns to confront Victor on the night William and Elizabeth are to marry. What the Creature wants? His own bride. Or he wants a companion. Victor assumes he means a mate (so heteronormative!) and refuses. He fears the race they might procreate. There’s anger, Elizabeth gets in the way, is shot by Victor. William arrives and is thrown aside by the Creature. Before he dies, he tells Victor that he is the true monster. In case that hasn’t been underlined enough. 

The rest is a comically quick chase to the Arctic—a pursuit-to-the-ends-of-the-earth feel. I think Victor is planning to destroy the Creature with dynamite (which doesn’t exist yet), but the Creature confronts him, lights the dynamite, blam, doesn’t die. That’s the explosion that alerts the Danes. Stories done, creature and creator, son and father, reconcile before the latter’s death. The Creature is allowed to leave. He faces the morning sun.

Life, give this story … life
Does the movie leave us at its most intriguing point? Like: What now? Isn’t that the question? What do you do with this unique eternal life? Maybe it ends there because there’s no answer. Or there’s a million answers.

Victor was never interesting because he was all over the place: dressed like a rock star, acted like an artist, ignored the science. He created a thing that couldn’t die, that could heal itself quickly, and he never tried to recreate that experiment? Or to see if the experiment could work with living tissue? Say his own? Could he regenerate a leg, for example? He made the greatest discovery in human history and did nothing with it.

The Creature meanwhile, is like Goth Frankenstein: tall and lanky, long stringy hair, hoodie, with a stitched-together face that looks like face tats. It’s a bit too hipster for me. That said, Elordi imbues him with humanity.

That said, I wish we wouldn’t keep making this movie. Feels like dead tissue. And no one’s animating it in a way that feels meaningful.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I didn’t believe it enough.

Yes, I believed everyone in his entourage would drop everything to follow the sad whims of movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney), since they’re in his employ, and moths to flames and all that; but I didn’t get why, within days, they would each abandon him. Everything else was the same and he hadn’t acted awful in the interim. Hadn’t he even caught a purse snatcher? Kinda? But they all fall away because that’s the movie’s trajectory, things falling away, until our guy winds up alone in the woods, the European woods, the dark fairytale forests of our childhood imaginations, even if all that falling away doesn’t make much sense.

Back in college, I thought up a short story along those exact lines: a group of friends heading out for the night, to a party they can't find, and one by one falling away until it was just our protagonist, alone, with nowhere to go. I didn’t write it.

Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” is a work-life balance movie, but for the title character it’s never in balance. He loves work and is bad at relationships. People around him are either looming up and talking incessantly, or they’re pulling away, bitter. Maybe that’s the nature of that biz. Everyone wants a piece of you until they don’t get it.

Nothing’s in balance with Jay’s two daughters. While Jessica (Riley Keogh), the special-needs teacher, feels abandoned from way back when, Daisy (Grace Edwards), the recent high-school grad, feels smothered in the right now. That’s the sad whim—pursuing Daisy onto a train in France. It’s like he’s making up Jessica’s deficit with Daisy’s abundance. Bad idea. I also found both daughters annoying, particularly the younger and more privileged. Her first line to her father is “I’m smarter than you,” and I wanted him to say something like, “You know who wouldn’t say that? Someone smarter than me”—the way that Clooney once said “You’re about 100 miles from smart” in another, better movie. But this movie isn’t that smart.

Clooney and I are almost the same age—he was born a week after my older brother, in May 1961—and a man sifting through the regrets of his life, well, that’s my wheelhouse. I’m your target audience. But the movie keeps falling short. It keeps delivering scenes I don’t buy or don’t care about.

I’m beginning to think Noah Baumbach and I will never make it as a couple.

Can we go again?
It’s not a bad open, the final days of a movie shoot, with the protagonist, Jay Kelly, wounded in the shadow of a NYC bridge, saying, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to leave the party.” The actor is the opposite. They yell cut and print but he says to the director, “Can we go again? I’d like another one.” Apparently Kelly is famous/infamous for not being able to leave productions. Maybe he doesn’t want to return to his life.

Then we return to his life—the “I’m smarter than you” scene as he skims his backyard pool—after which he learns that Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), the director who gave him his first big break, has died, and Kelly flashes back on the last time they met. Schneider is old, down on his luck, and wants Kelly to lend his name to a new production but Kelly won’t. He won’t help a friend to whom he owes everything, and that friend is now dead. And now it’s the funeral. I expected comeuppance, but no, he’s greeted well by family. He’s welcomed.

The comeuppance comes a scene later. In the parking lot, he runs into an old roommate, Timothy (Billy Crudup), and the two go to a bar, and what starts out as pleasant but unequal reminiscing—since Jay is where he is, and Timothy isn’t—quickly turns to animosity. Timothy has resentments. Any story about the story of Jay Kelly includes the scene where he accompanies a friend to an audition for a Peter Schneider film and he winds up with the part—and the career! How about that? Well, Timothy is the friend and he’s got 40 years worth of animosity to vent. He feels that Jay Kelly stole his career, and his girl, and the moment Timothy decides to go for it, to punch Jay in the face, the look in his eyes is truly scary. Kudos, Mr. Crudup.

It's after this incident that Jay Kelly tells his entourage they’re going to Europe to follow Daisy and maybe pick up that award in Tuscany his manager, Ron Sukenik (Adam Sandler), wants him to get.

The entourage includes Ron, as well as publicist Liz (Laura Dern), and it’s revealed the two nearly had a thing together. These days he’s always on the phone with wife and kids, everyone Southern California-spoiled, but he nearly had the other. The true thing? Or just another thing? Who knows?

What kept them apart is the need to be there for Jay, and that’s not a bad exploration, but it feels like it would be exploration in a movie called “Ron Sukenik”—or maybe in a movie called “Jay Kelly” if the main character was Ron Sukenik. That’s not this. But they keep having to go to Jay, to prop him up, because there’s a sense he can’t handle the world. Even the trip to the bar with Timothy. Should we let him go? Does he know how to pay for things? Ron keeps calling him “puppy” because that’s what he is.

I just kept waiting for something like wisdom. It was a bad idea to follow Daisy, but I like the reaction when he shows up in her train car: she’s annoyed, betrayed, while the French dude/wannabe filmmaker she’s snogging is agog. Because it’s Jay Kelly. That’s everyone. They’re all agog, and he’s there, and it’s not much. Is that the point? “What do you say to people who say you only play yourself?” says a snooty girl on the train. “You know how difficult it is to be yourself? You try it.” That was someone else’s line, decades earlier, but Jay repeats it here. Same way he took Timothy’s improvisation and made it his own in front of Peter Schneider. All the best lines are somebody else’s; he just reads them.

I like the train bathroom where he keeps repeating his name, along with the names of other great Hollywood actors. I wanted it to lead somewhere.

And why that name, by the way? That plainness. JK? His rival gets Alcock. You don’t need to be Freud for that one. I was hoping Alcock would be a Brad Pitt cameo but Patrick Wilson is fine in the role.

The Crest
You know when the movie became magical? At the end, in Tuscany, in that old operatic theater layered like a wedding cake, when they show scenes from Jay Kelly’s movies. Because they’re actually scenes from George Clooney’s movies: “Thin Red Line,” “Up in the Air,” et al. It’s the magic of movies. Maybe that’s part of it. Jay Kelly is a pain but look at the magic he makes.

I’m glad Patricia and I went to see it at an actual movie theater, the Crest in Shoreline, the last of the Landmark chain in town. All the jobs are one now—you buy the ticket from the guy who sells you your popcorn, who tears the ticket, etc.—but it’s hanging on. The theater smells old, the audience was older, and a moth, an actual moth, kept flitting in front of the screen during the show, but it’s hanging on. Not a wedding-cake theater but still there. 

It's been a while since I’d seen a George Clooney movie. He’s such an omnipresent cultural figure that it’s easy to look track sometimes, but I think the last time I saw him on the screen was “Hail, Caesar!” in 2016. Another role where he plays an actor. Back then he was making everything everywhere all at once—“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Syrianna,” “Michael Clayton,” “Burn After Reading,” “Up in the Air,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Descendants,” “Gravity,” boom boom boom—plus his own directing efforts, all during a 10-year run. And then, poof, not. Where did he go? Where did I go? Can’t believe we didn’t stay in touch. We should work harder at staying in touch. We're not getting any younger. 

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of the ending, either.

A corporate CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), is kidnapped by two exurb nutjobs and chained to a basement cot because the leader of the two, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), thinks she’s an alien intent on destroying Earth. Her head is shaved so she can’t communicate with the mother ship, her body covered with antihistamine cream for same, and at one point she’s given electro-shock treatments. You wonder how far Teddy will go to prove she’s an alien before he realizes he's wrong.

Turns out he’s not wrong.

We get those vibes throughout but I assumed it was just cultural commentary. I.e., These CEOs with their airless offices and airless terminology (“unpack,” “let’s dialogue”) are like aliens, and certainly of a different species than workaday Teddy, who bikes to his job at a “Fulfillment Center”—another awful corporate term—of Auxolith, Fuller’s corporation, where he slaps addresses on boxes. Plus it’s Emma Stone, with her thin body and big E.T. eyes. Oh, and near the end, after Teddy kneecaps her, she uses her one good leg to crawl, like an injured crab, alien-like, to lift the keys from the now-dead No. 2 man Don (Aidan Delbis). So we get the alien vibe throughout. 

But I assumed she wasn’t an alien because “Bugonia” is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, and it was a serious film tackling the serious issues of the day—like the near-kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020 by right-wing nutjobs. Overall, too many CEOs are making too much money by creating way too many awful jobs like Teddy’s; and too many people like Teddy are alone with their thoughts and the internet. That’s a lot of life these days. It’s relevant.

And then it becomes absurd. Teddy is right—right down to using hair to communicate with the mother ship. Even Earth in those final shots is flat. I guess we should’ve listened to those guys, too.

I felt oddly rooked. I spent 90 minutes worrying over a person I didn’t need to worry over. I expended emotional capital, a precious commodity these days, on nothing.

Yorgos’ larf
I should mention that my nephew Ryan doesn’t quite align with this interpretation. He thinks the ending is ambiguous. I guess you could interpret it as less sci-fi than fantasy—as in Teddy’s fantasy. As in maybe it’s Teddy’s final thoughts before he blows himself up? Which is why he’s right about everything.

Wish I could see more of a reason to believe that. Right now it just feels like a larf, Yorgos’ larf, a giggle thrown at those sad serious people like me trying to think things through.

The early stuff is haves/have-nots. Michelle Fuller has. She rises early in her modern glass mansion, does her exercise/kickboxing, drives to work and breezes into her glass office and does whatever work she does. Her one human moment is driving and singing along to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe.”

Compared to most of the world, Teddy and Don are haves, too; just not compared with Michelle Fuller. Plus what they have they squander. It’s a nice house but falling apart around them. Teddy isn’t lazy—he bikes everywhere, he works, he raises bees, he raises Don—he’s just unfocused, or focused on the wrong things. There’s too much buzzing in his brain.

How crazy is Teddy? That’s our question throughout. Jesse Plemons has made a career out of playing people who seem quietly reasonable about their own horrifically unreasonable viewpoints—all the while seeming slightly off. You just don’t know how off until the reveal. Here there are several—moments when his temper flares and he resorts to violence, or worse, in the electro-shock scene, when everyone is begging him to stop, Michelle, Don, us, and you see him concentrating to ignore that noise and focus on the signal, his signal, the great work he’s doing for humanity.

But Teddy’s true reveal is at the 11th hour. By this point, things have gotten messy. The electro-shock data shows that Michelle is not just an alien but alien royalty, a queen bee, as it were, and entitled to some respect, or something, involving dinner. That ends badly, too. She provokes violence from Teddy, and might’ve been choked to death but for the timely arrival of the cops. Well, one cop, Casey (Stavros Halkias), whom we’d seen stopping and talking with Teddy earlier. He’s actually working the case of the missing CEO, just not well. Mostly he seems intent on trying to reconnect with Teddy and to apologize for molesting him when he was his babysitter years earlier. Yeah. Not sure why Yorgos has to throw that in, too. Worse, Casey's apology doesn't feel deep or thought-through; it just sits there. Is the point that everyone’s distracted? The cop by the past, Teddy by the present? Everyone has shit in their basement.

As Teddy is showing Casey the bee colonies, Michelle, hidden in the basement, is convincing Don she’ll take him to the other planet, Andromeda, and as he acquiesces he shoots himself in the head. That finally alerts the cop that something's amiss, but Teddy bashes his head in with a shovel, then confronts Michelle in the basement.

The oddity here and the rest of the way out is how amenable Teddy suddenly becomes. He was a stubborn shit for most of the film but suddenly every suggestion Michelle makes he follows. Owning up to her alienness, she tells him the antifreeze in the back of her car isn’t antifreeze but a cure for his mother lying in a coma because of an Auxolith product. He believes her. Still blood-splattered, he takes the jug to the assisted living facility, encounters no one, subs it out for her IV drip, and kills her. Now he’s pedaling back with tears in his eyes and rage in his heart.

In the interim, Michelle did the crab thing, got the keys, set herself free. At first she’s crawling up the stairs, but then returns to the basement. Was the upper door locked? That’s what I assumed. I assumed she returned to look for a new exit. But maybe that was never the point. Maybe the point was to find what she finds: Teddy’s secret room, with his computer, his newspaper clippings tacked to the wall, and mason jars full of the body parts of other people he’s killed. She wasn’t his first abductee. There were many, many others. That’s the true reveal. He’s Ed Gein for the sci-fi set.

And somehow, despite killing his own mother on Michelle’s false intel, he remains suggestible. When he returns, she has the upper hand. She demands to know how many of his experiments were Andromedans, he says two, then she peppers him with the true sad history of humanity. How we’re just an alien experiment, a mea culpa for killing off the dinosaurs; but we’re forever haunted, forever problematic, forever in trouble. But she can cure us. She has to return to her corporate office to teleport to the mothership, but then she can cure us. And he can join her.

And he believes her.

Ryan’s theory
Question: in the teleportation closet in her office, wearing that suicide vest, does he blow himself up on purpose, by accident, or is it the Andromedans somehow? Or doesn’t it matter?

The hokiness of that teleportation closet, along with the hokiness of the Andromedan race—reminding me of 1970s-era “Dr. Who”—gives further credence to Ryan’s theory. Maybe Teddy watched those shows growing up. That’s why he imagines the Andromedans that way. Besides, if you take it all at face value, that it all happened the way we’re seeing it, why would the Alien Queen kill off the human race now? We, through Teddy, have finally evolved enough to figure it all out! We’re worthy. Nope. Pop. Gone.

I liked the final images of all the dead around the world as Marlene Dietrich’s version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” plays on the soundtrack. But it would’ve felt more poignant if I hadn’t already soured on the film.

Would love to hear other thoughts. I feel like I'm looking for an interpretation of the ending that makes the movie more meaningful, and I'm not finding it at all.

I did walk away wishing to see a movie, or maybe an “Office”-like TV series, called “Fulfillment Center,” about the unfulfilled people working there filling orders for other unfulfilled people trying to fill the holes in their own souls with its various products. A comedy, I imagine.

WARNING: SPOILERS

For a month now, friends and family have been virtually tapping me on the shoulder to ask if I’d seen “One Battle After Another” yet. Everyone urged me to go. K. thought it was great, A. said he enjoyed it, R. said it was the best movie he’d seen in years.

Last weekend, Patricia and I finally saw it at SIFF Downtown. And almost from the get-go I was disappointed.

The movie feels both hugely relevant and comically beside-the-point. We get a fictional continuation of our past amid what feels like our very real, authoritarian present and future. Politically, it damns both sides but does it in a way that feels like each’s attack on the other. Left-wing revolutionaries whining about their personal space? That’s an “SNL” skit. And when was the last time left-wing guerillas blew shit up—The Weather Underground?

That was actually the problem I had from the get-go. We watch as left-wing revolutionaries, self-dubbed French 75, and led by the dynamic and hypersexual Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), liberate prison camps and take on the man, and I’m like: It’s as if the Weather Underground kept going. I didn’t know the title actually comes from the Weather Underground. One of its many manifestoes:

“From here on out, it’s one battle after another—with white youth joining in the fight and taking the necessary risks. Pig Amerika beware. There's an army growing in your guts and it's going to bring you down.”

In real life, of course, when the risks came down, white youth got good jobs, voted for Reagan, moved to the suburbs.

The criticisms I have of the movie, by the way, are couched with trepidation. Whenever I see a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, I’m both impressed and vaguely disappointed, and when I write about it I tend to lead with the disappointment but by the end I want to see the film again. Particularly the So Cal/Thomas Pynchon-inspired stuff: “The Master,” “Inherent Vice.” I want to rewatch “Inherent Vice” now. I barely remember anything about it, but back in the day I wrote the following, which jumps out at me after seeing “One Battle”:

There’s a sense here, and throughout the movie, that this is where we went wrong. During this pivotal moment, the left got stoned while the right got busy.

This dynamic, from the review, also feels relevant to “One Battle”:

They’re led by Lt. Det. Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin, in a standout performance), a crew-cutted chest-thumper, who earned his nickname by beating up suspects, and who has a comic oral fixation with black phallic symbols—mostly chocolate-covered bananas.

Or are such fixations just relevant to PTA? Maybe he's working through some shit. Well, who isn’t?

The Ethan dilemma
Have any black critics weighed in with concerns about the sexualization of black women? It’s not just Perfidia; there’s Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle), who struts along a bank table, mid-robbery, toting a machine gun and wearing the shortest of miniskirts with legs that go on forever. Meanwhile, Perfidia isn’t just the lover of the droopy explosives expert Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), first seen in hoodie pulling a wagon like he’s some bizarro continuation of Elliott from “E.T.”; no, she also takes it to the enemy, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). At first it seems she’s humiliating him? Forcing him to get a hard-on at gunpoint and parading him around? But he digs it, and she digs it, and they wind up lovers; and when she’s caught, she gives up the whole lot of them, all of French 75, while also giving up her daughter and fleeing to Mexico. She’s a dirty rat, to coin a phrase. I guess the clue was in the name.

Then we fast-forward 15 years to a time when the faux Weather Underground is even further underground, irrelevant except in their own minds. It’s the right-wing authoritarian forces who have a strut in their step. Or a stomp.

Lockjaw, no worse for wear, is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret org of wealthy white supremacists; but as they consider his membership, they ask if he’s ever been involved in an interracial relationship. He denies it, of course, in a way that feels just slight off (Penn: chef’s kiss); then he uses his full power and authority to track down and remove evidence of past infidelities.

The true irrelevance of French 75 is that, with the will, which Lockjaw now has, they can be found in a moment; that they weren’t for 15 years indicates how much they didn’t matter. But it’s a horror show that Lockjaw, a mere colonel, can set all of this in motion: high schools are rousted, streets burned, lives lost and upended, all in a search for Perfidia’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), a high school student raised by the perpetually stoned Bob.

Got to give it to Penn: Even within the confines of his caricature, a limping, rigid man who often seems more G.I. Joe doll than human being, we still wonder what he’ll do if/when he finds her. It’s an Ethan Edwards moment, isn’t it? Hadn’t thought of that until now. He could pick her up and say, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” But that’s a heroic move and he’s not the hero here.

Who is the hero here? Not Bob. He’s a bathrobed stumblebum, unable to remember his side’s passwords and passcodes as he tries to check in and get safe. He’s Jeff Lebowski caught in the crossfire.

Willa? She’s smart, tough, knows her stuff, can deal with both generations. She’s also hostage for half the film.

I’d go with Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s martial arts instructor. He’s another guy we’re wondering over as Bob shows up at his door, pursued and desperate, but every step of the way Sergio is calm, purposeful and helpful. He keeps his head while the town is engulfed. He’s also, it turns out, his people’s Harriet Tubman. While tempests rage on either side, right wing pursuing left, he’s the still middle getting things done and keeping the underground railroad moving. After he’s saved Bob’s ass yet again, he’s pulled over by the cops, arms raised, bemused, doing a little dance as part of his sobriety test, admitting, with a twinkle, to having had a few beers. It’s such a great moment, it makes the return to the main storyline a disappointment. It’s the last we see him.

The stupidity and the tyranny
Afterwards I asked Patricia who scared her most, and she said the old guy with the Christmas club: one-time “Emergency!” co-star Kevin Tighe. “For me,” I said, “it was the guy who was questioning the high school kids. He seemed real.”

And he is. Per IMDb:

Lockjaw's second-in-command and chief interrogator, Danvers, is played by a non-professional actor: James 'Jim' Raterman, a security consultant and former HSI Special Agent.

Expect to see him in other shit.

During the high school interrogations, a trans friend gives up Willa’s phone, and she’s tracked and found in a nunnery, where Lockjaw hauls her into the chapel to perform a DNA test. Yep, she’s his. He’s no Ethan, of course; there’s no going home for the two of them. But he can’t bring himself to kill her, so he contacts the Native American bounty hunter, Avanti Q (Eric Schweig), who’d set the search in motion. Avanti won’t do it, either—he’s a tracker, not a killer—but takes double the money to deliver her to a right-wing militia. Except the men there hardly acknowledge Avanti’s existence except to call him “Wagon Burner”; and his mind is changed about the whole dirty enterprise. After the gunfight, only Willa lives.

Oh right. The Christmas org has done its own research on Lockjaw, doesn’t like what it’s found, and brings in the completely nondescript Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker), who talks banana pancakes with a Mrs. before being told by the higher-ups to terminate the colonel’s command. He shows up on a lonely desert road and shoots Lockjaw in the face.

Is he also pursuing Willa? Or does she simply feel pursued? Either way we get that great roller-coast shot of Southwestern hills and dales, onto which Willa leaves a gift: Avanti’s car in a blind spot for Tim to crash into. When he doesn’t know the passcode response, she kills him. She nearly does the same with Bob, since he obviously doesn’t know the response, either. But he gets her to stand down and they embrace.

I would’ve ended there. I didn’t need a bloody-faced and disfigured Lockjaw walking back to civilization and into the arms of the Christmas club, who welcome him only to gas him to death in his office. (I do like how plain the office is—the office for which Lockjaw risked everything.) Then we get Bob and Willa in the aftermath. She’s off to a protest in Oakland, he’s trying to figure out smartphones. But isn’t he still a wanted criminal? So isn’t the smartphone dangerous? Or does he no longer feel pursued with Lockjaw dead?

I’ve often complained that PTA’s movies aren’t focused enough, and this one finally is … and I liked it less. So I guess that was never the problem. Plus I’ve reached the end of this review and—save for Benicio—I’m not gungho to revisit “One Battle.” Sorry.

But I am gungho to rewatch PTA. His movies often feature conflicts between two men: a stern one tending toward tyranny and a lost one tending toward chaos.

• Daniel Plainview vs. Paul Sunday
• Lancaster Dodd vs. Freddie Quell
• Bigfoot vs. Doc Sportello
• Col. Steven J. Lockjaw vs. Bob

In most, the two men share the screen. Not here. I think it’s just the one scene? In the supermarket? Question: In the other movies, is there a middle-ground figure, the space occupied by St. Carlos? Or did Benicio carve that out for himself?

I’ll give “One Battle” this: It tackles the horror and absurdity of the world today—no mean feat. It's also comforting to know that, amid the stupidity and the tyranny, there may be a calm man somewhere, doing a bemused jig in the police lights, getting shit done.

FURTHER READING:

• My nephew Ryan's review on Letterboxd.

DiCaprio as Bob: lost, tending toward chaos.

An obstinate curmudgeon, surrounded by an amateurish crew...

WARNING: SPOILERS

Does Wes Anderson ever think, “Alright, enough of this crap, let’s do something REAL, baby!!” I imagine not because we keep getting Wes Anderson movies. I’m just curious what it’s like to live in that two-dimensional headspace. I imagine it would be fun, playing with cinematic dioramas all the time, but maybe that’s wrong. Maybe he feels trapped? I do know he’s the most unique filmmaker I’ve ever seen. No one is like him and he’s always like himself.

Here’s what I wrote in 2007 about the essential Wes Anderson storyline:

An obstinate curmudgeon, surrounded by an amateurish crew, is down on his luck. After a flurry of petty machinations, he loses his place, his woman, his reason for being. But along the way, and without a clear demarcation point, he achieves a kind of wisdom, a kind of acceptance. By giving up the notion of who he imagines himself to be, he is allowed to be that very thing. And only then is happiness achieved.

You could divide these protagonists into seekers (Max Fischer, Mr. Fox, Sam) and redeemers (Royal Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou, Augie Steenbeck). Basically: Are they moving into the world to mold it in their own creative fashion? Or are they returning from the world to repair what’s been broken?

His latest protagonist, Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benecio del Toro), is both. The thrust of the story is Korda as molder/creator, but the heart of the story remains a redemption song.

Blood on the wall
The opening is kind of a shock, to be honest. It’s still that super-symmetrical Wes Anderson two-dimensionality—Korda and an assistant on a private plane, on opposite sides, Kora left foreground, the other back right—but with the plane feeling flimsy, like a theater prop. And then a thump. And a look around. And in a flash the right side of the plane blows out and the other dude, buckled in, is literally cut in half, blood splattered on the wall.

Then a plane crash in a corn field and the world mourns the rich, nefarious industrialist Korda. We lose our protagonist before we begin. 

Reports of his death are, of course, greatly exaggerated. 

In that 2007 article, I said Anderson’s characters tended to be “easily bruised” and “too delicate for the world,” but Korda’s the opposite. He keeps surviving assassination attempts while glimpsing the black-and-white afterlife; and because of both, but particularly the latter, he attempts to reconcile with his long-lost daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, excellent), a pipe-smoking, cynical, Catholic novice, whom he sent away at age 5, and who believes Korda may have murdered her mother. He denies these rumors vociferously; but since he is who he is, do we believe him? Does she?

A sour note, for me, was sounded early, when descriptions of Korda forever escaping legal repercussions for unethical business practices reminded me of You Know Who. It made me wonder if Anderson had chosen the wrong character at the wrong time. I still wonder that.

The maguffin that drives the film is … a dam in the desert? Is that right? And machinations by governments/entities drive up the price of a key component, making the enterprise unprofitable. So Korda, surrounded by his amateurish crew, both Liesl and tutor/assistant Bjorn (Michael Cera, fucking brilliant), fly to various points to shore up his international financial backers and get them to increase their share. These backers include west-coast Americans Leland and Reagan (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), east-coast American Marty (Jeffrey Wright), and Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), a French nightclub gangster.

Family has fingers in it, too. Zsa Zsa even proposes to Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson) to keep the project afloat; and though she accepts, she’s cutthroat in business and refuses to increase her share. The big reveal is Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Zsa Zsa’s estranged half-brother, who may or may not be the biological father of Liesl, and may or may not be the true murderer of Liesl’s mother. However, he is the man who keeps trying to assassinate Zsa Zsa, and the two men face off in a fight that feels like a live-action version of the animalistic fights from “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Along the way, it’s revealed that Bjorn is less shy, Norwegian entomologist in love with Liesl than a superspy for Zsa Zsa’s enemies … in love with Liesl. It’s why he goes over to Zsa Zsa’s side. In the end, Zsa Zsa uses his own money to complete the project, bankrupting himself, and he and Liesl, who is bounced from the nunnery, run a small bistro together with Bjorn, who proposes to Liesl, who accepts. Everyone is saved.

So it’s typical Wes Anderson that doesn’t resonate like the best Wes Anderson (“Rushmore,” “Tenenbaums,” “Mr. Fox,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” “Grand Budapest”).

Que Cera, Cera
What to make of the title? Phoenicia was an ancient land of city-states in the Middle East—modern Lebanon, basically. The title also leans toward “Phoenix,” rising from the dead, something Korda does at the outset and throughout the film. And along the way, he achieves a kind of wisdom, a kind of acceptance.

He's Anderson’s biggest rascal since Royal Tenenbaum but do we like him? Sure. Just not like we liked Royal, a man who was truly down on his luck and back on his heels. Korda acts that way throughout the film but isn’t he still one of the richest men in the world? Who was going to use slave labor? There’s nothing like the “Me and Julio” scene: “I’m talking about taking it out and chopping it up,” Royal says, and then does exactly that with his grandkids.

So was “The Phoenician Scheme” a way of Anderson challenging himself? I.e., can I make a ruthless, amoral industrialist a character worth redeeming? Or was he hoping to remind the ruthless and amoral among us (including You Know Who) that they will die soon and it's not too late to redeem yourself?

I do know this: The biggest laughs I got came from Michael Cera. He should be in every Wes Anderson movie going forward.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Confession: I was never a big Led Zeppelin fan. I was in the demographic, certainly—straight white male born in 1963—but they were never my thing. I was the quiet rules-follower who listened to the Pauls: Simon and McCartney.

It was my older brother, Chris, who rocked out to Zeppelin. He taught himself guitar and sang along with Robert Plant (and The Who, and Sabbath) on our father’s stereo. He wrote their logo (and the logos of the Who, the Stones and Sabbath) on his school folder, most likely sitting in the back row of a classroom at Washburn High School wearing bell-bottom jeans, tight t-shirt, and long hair. He wrote their lyrics in his school notebook.

In 2017, four years sober, he included three of their songs (“We’re Gonna Groove,” “Rock and Roll,” “Trampled Under Foot”) on a compilation CD he made for me. A Zeppelin lyric now adorns his memorial bench along Minnehaha Creek after he was killed at a busstop in Edina, Minnesota in November 2023.

OK, count it in
The point is, he was the fan, not me. But it took one chord, the opening to “Good Times, Bad Times,” which plays at the outset of the documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” for me to go, “Oh right, they were good.” And it took Jimmy Page playing his guitar with a violin bow for me to go, “Oh right, they were boring, too.”

Watching the doc, I kept watching the clock (see: rules-follower, above), thinking, “Speed it up, guys, we haven’t even gotten to 'Stairway' yet.“ Guess what? We don’t! “Stairway to Heaven,” often cited as the greatest song of the rock era, isn’t mentioned. Neither is “Led Zeppelin IV,” one of the biggest-selling albums of all time—37 million copies worldwide. Instead, they end it with “Zeppelin II.” “Becoming” is true to its title. It’s the “Batman Begins” of music documentaries—all origin issue. It’s British lads growing up in the wake and rubble of World War II, with extended rations and drabness, and … wait, what’s that noise coming from across the Atlantic? Wow, listen to that. What they were to my brother, American rock ‘n’ roll was to them. 

Another confession: I didn’t really know them individually before this. I’d heard of Jimmy Page, of course, who is name-checked in Paul McCartney’s “Venus and Mars”:

What’s that man moving ’cross the stage
It looks a lot like the one used by Jimmy Page

But for years I got Robert Plant and Robert Palmer mixed up. I know! And John Paul Jones? Wasn’t he in like Paul Revere and the Raiders? I just didn’t know. But this doc and Song 180 of Andrew Hickey’s podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs,” about Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” have finally helped me sort things out a little. Half a century late.

Zeppelin was the anti-Beatles in this way: The Beatles met as teens and played together for years until they became professionals, whereas these guys were mostly professionals before they ever played a note together. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones were among the best session musicians in Britain in the mid-60s. Page played on everything—from “Goldfinger” and “Downtown,” to early Rod Stewart and David Bowie, to “Can’t Explain” by The Who and “Heart of Stone” by the Stones. Meanwhile, Jones came from a show-biz family—his parents had been in vaudeville—and he could arrange music along with play bass, and did both at a furious pace.

The other two, singer Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham, were relative babies, two years younger than Jones, who was two years younger than Page. They were Midlands boys, on the outskirts, when a post-Yardbirds Page decided to put together his own supergroup. I’m intrigued that he was first thinking Terry Reid (“Stay with Me, Baby”) for lead singer. I could see that. He wanted that power. But there were producer clashes between Peter Grant (Zeppelin’s guy) and Mickie Most (not), and Reid went with Most, but he did suggest a replacement, a guy he’d heard in a Midlands band called Obs-Tweedle. Then Plant suggested drummer John Bonham, though Bonham’s wife didn’t want hubbie anywhere near Plant, whom she considered bad news. Meanwhile, Jones’ wife read about Page’s supergroup and insisted he call. 

Their first rehearsal was in a rented basement room in London. Page asked Jones if he knew “Train Kept-a-Rollin’.” Told it was a 12-bar and it’s got a riff, da da da, he said “OK, count it in.”

“And that was it,” Jones says. “The room just exploded.”

“When it finally came to a halt,” Page says, “I’m absolutely convinced that everyone knew that that was a life-changing experience.”

All three surviving members of the band are talking heads here—I believe the only talking heads here. I love Jones; he’s got a calm, matter-of-fact vibe that reminds me of Levon Helm. Page never loses his smile. Both men have aged well. Some have criticized the doc by not putting the band members into the same room with each other, and sure, maybe, but through audio tape director Bernard MacMahon does put them into the same room with Bonham, who died in 1980 of alcohol poisoning. We see them listening to Bonham talk about the band. I’ve seen this more and more in documentaries—having talking heads listen to or watch footage from decades past and gauging their reactions—and it’s usually worth it. Here, too, though there’s no real drama. Bonham just says nice things.

Indeed, I don’t think I’ve seen a music doc where every member of the band has such obvious respect for every other member of the band. There are no past grievances, no gripes, just one hat-tip after another. It’s charming.

So charming it kind of gives the wrong impression. They rehearsed for a month in Pangborne, then played on Danish TV as part of leftover Yardbirds contractual obligations, immediately sounding great, immediately sounding like them; then they toured America, where they broke. At one point, we hear Plant on Wolfman Jack’s radio show taking calls from listeners: 

Female fan: Hi. Guess what? I think you’re a fox!
Plant (genuinely curious): What does that mean?
Female fan: It means you’re a very good-looking man.
Wolfman Jack: Far out!
Female fan: I really dug the concert. I just really think you’re a fox and just keep doing what you’re doing.
Plant: That’s very nice of you. We will.

This is so ’70s—from Wolfman’s “Far out!” to the female fan’s use of “fox.” Meanwhile Plant comes off like a schoolboy.

“They're so polite,” I said to Patricia, who saw them at the Green Lake Pavillion in Seattle just before they broke big. ”I always thought they were the bad boys of rock."

“No, they were the bad boys of rock,” Patricia responded.

So is that why they end with “Led Zeppelin II”? So they don’t have to go into the endless tours and drugs and sex and debauchery? So they don’t interview Cameron Crowe as a talking head about interviewing them for Rolling Stone in 1975, which became the basis of his film “Almost Famous”? So they don’t get into why John Bonham died?

A many-venued concert film
That first life-changing rehearsal is less than 40 minutes into the doc with nearly 90 to go, so what’s the drama if they all got along? It’s in the rise, and in the battle with critics. They immediately thought they were great, didn’t get why others didn’t see it, took umbrage. 

As for what fills the space? Music. We get entire songs, often with long solos. The doc almost becomes a many-venued concert film. Put it this way: as much time is spent in recounting how the group got together as in playing “How Many More Times” on Danish TV. To be honest, I would’ve liked more on the becoming. There’s a passing reference to The Who’s Keith Moon suggesting the name for the band but not how or why—though that’s in the “500 Songs” podcast. Per Andrew Hickey, an earlier British supergroup was put together as a one-off, someone suggested making it permanent, and Moon responded, “That’ll go down like a lead zeppelin.”

We get crystal-clear footage of them and their influences—from Lonnie Donegan to Little Richard—and I was impressed by how purposeful Page was in creating album rock for FM radio stations in the U.S., to the point where he sabotaged the singles potential of certain songs. “Having seen a situation where singles broke the spirit of a band,” he says, “I didn’t want it to break the spirit of this band.” He saw the future and produced it. And, on a different scale, Zeppelin wound up dominating the ’70s the way the Beatles had the ’60s, and then (like the Beatles) disbanded as a new decade broke. They decided not to go on without Bonham—a true group to the end. 

It’s an odd doc: a polite film about the bad boys of rock that ignores their greatest hits. It’s still good. I wish Chris were around to see it. I would've loved to talk to him about it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I’m not a horror fan but for some reason I was intrigued enough to see this one in the theater. I think it was the kids running out of their homes in the middle of the night with their arms at an angle—4 and 8 o’clock, basically. That time is both magic hour and scary hour, and the way they’re running makes it seem like magic hour. It’s like they’re playing a game.

They’re not playing a game.

You could say “Weapons” is the “Rashomon” of horror movies. We keep getting different perspectives of the same event even as the story moves along: Justine (Julia Garner) takes us so far, Archer (Josh Brolin) goes back to fill in detail, and then forward to progress the story, same with Paul the cop (Alden Ehrenreich), and on and on until the final perspective: little Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Because beginning with Alex would’ve been a giveaway.

You could also say it begins with the most innocent, Justine, in order to keep the mystery shrouded—even though Justine isn't innocent. No one is.

Kind of an asshole
I'm not implying a conspiracy. It’s just that everyone has their faults, and sadnesses, and ways of getting through life, and few seem focused enough on the tragedy in Maybrook, Penn.

One night, 17 of the 18 kids in Justine’s elementary school classroom leave their homes at 2:17 AM and disappear. Home alarms timestamp everything, along with video doorbells that give us grainy footage. A child’s narration deals with all of this in the first minute or two of the film. That disappointed me. Felt like it sped through why I came.

What we get is aftermath. Seventeen kids are missing, the cops are flummoxed, so who do parents blame? The cops? The remaining kid? Wait, what about … the teacher? Yeah! Just what she was teaching those kids all this time! So that’s what happens. A town meeting is called at the school, she’s asked to talk, she does so poorly and is shouted down. They all but chase her from the place. At home her doorbell is rung and someone paints WITCH in bright red paint on the side of her car.

Initially, we’re sympathetic. But bit by bit we realize, “Oh, she’s kind of an asshole.” She goes to the liquor store, which we get, but two bottles of vodka, girl? And then she’s trying to pick up an old flame, Paul the cop, at the local dive bar? And she won’t leave little Alex alone? She stalks him the way others stalk her. She keeps behaving badly. To be honest, it relieves some of the pressure inherent in a horror film. We worry less about her because we care less about her.

Then abruptly we get a shift in point-of-view, to Archer, a local businessman/construction guy, whose son Matthew (Luke Speakman) is one of the 17. Archer is angry, devastated, sleeping in his child’s bed, having nightmares (some of the scariest parts of the film), and screwing up at work. He’s also stalking Justine. He’s the one with the red paint. And he’s doing his own investigation. At first this comes off like the MAGA doofus “doing his own research,” but Archer isn’t wrong. Through the doorbell cam footage, he plots the trajectories of Matthew and another child to the point where they converge. He figures they’re running to something. But before he gets more details, he spots Justine at a gas station and confronts her. They’re so busy arguing they don’t see the school principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong), running at them with arms at 4 and 8 o’clock.

That’s a lot of the movie. Everyone is so concerned with their own shit they don’t see the shit going down. I was reminded of 9/11: this government agency with this bit of knowledge they didn’t share with that government agency with that bit of knowledge. 

We first see Alex’s home when Justine follows him there, and all of its windows are boarded up with newspaper. Feels like she should’ve gone to the cops with that info. She doesn’t. As for those cops? Besides banging Justine and lying abysmally about it to his wife, Paul is concerned with his own shit. Namely, he busts the local junkie kid, James (Austin Abrams), whom we’d seen panhandling by the liquor store, gets stuck by a needle in the kid’s pants, and decks him—all in view of the police cam video. So, to save his own ass, he lets the kid go but tells him to get out of Dodge. Which means, when the junkie kid goes to the Alex home to rob it, and discovers all of those missing kids standing in the basement like zombies, and tries to collect on the $50k reward, Paul the cop chases him away.

Turns out the answer to the mystery is what’s painted on Justine’s car—it’s just not Justine. It’s Alex’s aunt, a supercreepy woman named Gladys (Amy Madigan, fucking amazing), who comes to visit, creeps everyone out, and then turns Alex’s parents into zombies and forces Alex to do her bidding or she’ll make his parents hurt each other, kill each other, eat each other. So poor Alex has to go along. When Gladys discovers the parents aren’t aiding in her recovery enough, she gets him to bring home personal items from his classmates. That’s why they all vanish at 2:17 AM.

A thing or two about witchcraft
There’s a surprising amount of comedy in this horror movie, particularly between Paul the cop and James the junkie, but it also has its blind spots. I mean, Gladys ain’t that smart. Every kid in Alex’s class disappears except Alex? She makes her captive helper an immediate suspect. I also don’t get why, at the hospital after the Marcus attack, Justine and Archer DIY it rather than go to the cops with what they know. Or why, after following Gladys’ instructions explicitly for months, Alex literally crosses a line that Gladys has drawn that sends his zombie parents attacking him. 

The good news is Alex has learned a thing or two about witchcraft, and turns his zombie classmates against ol’ Gladys, and after a too-long chase through the neighborhood they literally tear her apart. That was satisfying. But the ending wasn’t. Most of the kids don’t wake up. Most remain catatonic. It’s not that I want a happier ending, just a more resonant one.

Is the title wrong? I keep forgetting it. But not sure what I’d call it. “2:17”? “Runaways”? 

Still enjoyed it. Still looking forward to more from writer-director Zach Cregger.

Ne Zha: Bart Simpson as ancient Chinese warrior

WARNING: SPOILERS

So this is what the fuss is all about.

For the uninitiated, “Ne Zha 2,” the animated sequel to China’s megahit “Ne Zha” (2019), is the highest-grossing movie of 2025, and no one’s close. As of this writing, per Box Office Mojo, it’s grossed $1.9 billion while the runner-up, “Lilo & Stitch,” is about half that at $1 billion.

Does that mean the world is finally coming to see Chinese cinema? Not quite. It earned $1.86 billion of that $1.9 in China, while much of the rest was probably Chinese living abroad. The new poster for the A24 English-language rerelease calls the movie a GLOBAL PHENOMENON but it’s still a distinctly Chinese phenomenon.

I think there’s a reason for that. While the animation is amazing, and it’s a fun lead character, foreigners can get a little lost in the story. The movie is based on a 16th-century novel, which was based (I guess?) on folk legends, which was based on who knows what. Two hours is a short span to come up-to-speed on 5,000 years of Chinese culture.

Seriously, I’d love to talk to someone who grew up in China and see if they understand any of this.

The thing with two souls
Here are the basics.

A chaos pearl is birthed that the gods can’t control so they split it in two, spirit pearl and demon orb (think: yin-yang), and while the former is reincarnated as the handsome Ao Bing, the demon orb becomes the third son of Li Jing of Chentang Pass—a little gremlin named Ne Zha. He’s a misunderstood, often picked-upon demon who is blamed for things that aren’t his fault; but fate brings him and Ao Bing together, then they unite to take down the forces trying to destroy them. In doing so, they lose their bodies but their spirits survive. That’s the first movie.

This one begins with a scheme to reunite their spirits with a corporeal form. And it works! But then Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the East Sea, believing his son Ao Bing dead, sends the tall, dark, Disneyesque villain Shen Gongbao to lead an attack on Chentang Pass; and in saving the village in the ensuing battle, Ao Bing uses his powers too quickly. Now, not only will his new body die but his spirit will as well. That’s why Ne Zha invites him to share his body. And it works! Temporarily. They’re told it’s only good for seven days. Worse, the Sacred Lotus that allowed their bodies to be recreated has withered and died. Can anything resurrect the Sacred Lotus to resurrect Ao Bing? Yes! If Ne Zha can pass the three tests to become an immortal, set by Wuliang, the benevolent Buddha-like leader of the heavenly Chan sect, he’ll be rewarded with a potion that will do just that.

With me so far?

Ne Zha is counseled throughout by Master Taiyi Zhenren (Sammo Hung by way of Richard Kind), who realizes that if Ne Zha uses his fire powers before the heavenly sect, they’ll know he’s a demon and the experiment will end. For some reason, Ao Bing’s water powers aren’t suspect (water good, fire bad?), so the idea is to let Ao Bing control the body. Great in theory but Ne Zha isn’t used to not controlling his own body and keeps getting in the way. Solution? Sleeping pills. When he’s out, Ao Bing takes over. For some reason, his face changes, too, becoming more like Ao Bing’s bland handsome face. 

Meanwhile, there’s trouble in Chentang Pass. Ne Zha’s parents, Li Jing and Lady Yin, negotiate with the villainous Shen Gongbao to bring in medical supplies for the wounded from the opening battle, and he finally relents. Also his younger brother, Shen Xiaobao, who morphs into a leopard cub, shows up. Their father, Shen Zhengdao, turns out to be the second of Ne Zha’s tests, which Ne Zhe passes even as Zhengdao loses his hand. He’s then violently captured by the Chan sect’s military forces, while Xiaobao, witnessing, is shot and killed. Not cool.

Ne Zha passes the third test on his own—no help from Ao Bing—after he becomes enraged upon learning that Chentang Pass has been incinerated by Shen and Ao. (Ne Zha is constantly cautioned about not losing his temper, but whenever he does he wins: here and later in the cauldron.)

I’ll cut to the chase. Ao Bing gets his body back, Ne Zha joins Wuliang and the heavenly Chan sect in its attack on Ao Guang and his underwater minions, but, alley oop, Ao is innocent. It was the other underwater dragons who were in league with the Buddha-like Wuliang and the heavenly Chan sect—who, let’s face it, seemed problematic throughout—and whose evil plan is to turn everyone into pills or something. Basically they’re killing people to speed up a process to do whatever the elixir thing does. This happens to Ne Zha’s mom (voiced by Michelle Yeoh in the English-language version) right in front of Ne Zha, and in losing his temper he transforms into a bland handsome (but fiery) teen, and, as such, he and Ao Bing lead the troops that rout the bad guys. Or they scatter them but the worst survive. For the sequel.

Look what they did to my boy
“Ne Zha 2” is as scatological as “1”: Boogers are talked up, pee is drunk, and rancid food is eaten, regurgitated, and that regurgitation is almost eaten again. Ech. That said, some bits are funny and travel well. I laughed out loud a few times.

I’d rather have seen it in the original Mandarin but it wasn’t available for the A24 rerelease. First time I’ve seen a dubbed Chinese movie at Pacific Place. Also the first time half the audience was non-Chinese. Usually it’s just me. So at least a slightly bigger fraction of the world is coming to see Chinese cinema. 

One concern, if you’re writer-director Yang Yu: You have this incredibly lucrative IP, the little gremlin boy, Bart Simpson as ancient Chinese secret, and now he’s not that. Now he's a bland handsome teen. So is there any way to include the gremliny Ne Zha into the sequel? And if not, will people shell out $2 billion kuai for an anime hero?

Look what they did to my boy

WARNING: SPOILERS

I thought its trailer the funniest I’d seen in a while but missed the opening earlier this month. Then Joe Posnanski recommended it on his blog, and my brother-in-law and nephews saw it and liked it. (Yes, even Jordan.) Only one in 20 jokes land, Posnanski says, but when you’ve got 400 jokes that’s a lot of laughs.

And getting Liam Neeson to reprise Leslie Nielsen’s great comic turn as Lt. Frank Drebin (Jr. this time)? And created by the Lonely Island guys? With an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes? Who doesn’t need a laugh as the world caves in?

My favorite moments are the spoofs of the action genre: The hero and villain finally squaring off mano a mano and instead of lasting several impossibly bloody and bruising minutes it’s just one punch to the solar plexus before the villain, Richard Cane (Danny Huston), an Elon Musk stand-in, crumples to the ground. “Haven’t you ever been in a fight before?” Drebin asks with genuine curiosity. 

Love that. But I do wish the film were funnier.

50 yards
The movie’s main recurring bit—the cups of coffee handed to Frank and partner Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) as they move through their day—didn’t do much for me, but then I haven’t watched TV police procedurals in like 30 years. Overall, the movie’s a bit scatological. There’s police cam footage of Frank crapping his pants, and … nah. Though I did like, in a cringey way, Frank’s voiceover upon meeting Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson): “She had a bottom that would make any toilet beg for the brown.”

The movie does the cop-movie tropes well. Frank foils a bank robbery (the brunt of the trailer) but gets in Dutch with the tough black police captain (female this time: CCH Pounder), who chews him out and reassigns him. That case, an apparent suicide, is, of course, alley oop, linked back to the bank robbery. The love interest, Beth, is the sister of the apparent suicide, and everything leads to Cane, a techie/electric-car maker, who has hatched a plot to destroy much of humanity on New Year’s Eve.

It's a distinctly right-wing/libertarian plot. Cane feels there are too many mediocrities in high places, so he plans to keep the best and brightest in a bunker while a signal sent via cellphone reduces everyone else to their most animalistic self. Everyone will fight in a literal survival of the fittest, and the survivors will join him and his crew. Except he and his aren’t exactly the best and brightest. They’re actually the problem. Their getaway is on souped-up motorcycles: You all know how to ride, right? Let’s go! Cue chaos and crashes. They don’t know how to ride. Just as he doesn’t know how to fight.

Many of the jokes are of the “Airplane” variety. (“May I ask why?” “Sure, go ahead.”) Some mock movie conventions, as when Drebin picks out an alias for Beth from objects in the room: “Uh, this is … Cherry … Roosevelt …  Fat Bozo Chowing Down on Spaghetti.”

But probably the best joke, certainly the most pointed, is this one:

Bartender: You don't remember me, do you?
Drebin: Should I?
Bartender: My brother. You shot him in the name of justice.
Drebin: That can literally be thousands of people.
Bartender: You shot him in the back as he ran away.
Drebin: Hundreds.
Bartender: Unarmed.
Drebin: At least fifty.
Bartender: He was white.
Drebin: So you’re Tommy Roiland's brother.

Liam Neeson isn’t quite Leslie Nielsen but he’s not bad. That’s true for everyone in this. Hauser isn’t quite George Kennedy, Huston isn’t quite Ricardo Montalban, but both are OK. Pam Anderson is surprisingly funny. The scene where she skats with a jazz band made me laugh. On the plus side no one’s O.J. Simpson. Yet. Loved the “Weird Al” bit. I guess he was in the first, too.

No joke lands like in the first movie when Nielsen butchers a baseball-game National Anthem as opera singer Enrico Pallazzo, but that’s a high bar. That’s about the highest bar. I may never have laughed so hard in my life—literally falling down on one knee on the sticky theater floor in Edina, Minn., gasping for breath.

Naked this, that gun
I’m curious if I was put off by the usual problem—people. I saw it at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle, and there were four guys—Lonely Island acolytes, I’m guessing—who kept laughing hard at jokes I didn’t think funny at all. It got to the point where I wondered if they were movie-studio plants to get the rest of us laughing. Had the opposite effect on me.

Do we even think about the joke of the title anymore? It’s an absurdist take on all those pulp fiction-y, Mickey Spillane-y novels of the 1940s and ’50s, which are all about “Naked” this or that “Gun.” So put them together even though they don’t make sense together. But now they do. Now it’s IP.

Earlier I said this was by the Lonely Island guys but I guess it’s just Akiva Schaffer (“Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping”). He directed and wrote the screenplay with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. The latter two did 50 episodes of “How I Met Your Mother,” which my nephews swear by, and the Robert Downey Jr. “Dolittle,” which gets a different kind of swearing.

Again, there’s not much to say. The point of the movie is to make you laugh, and if you did, yay, and I did. I just wish I’d laughed more.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Didn’t quite work, did it?

“The Fantastic Four” is one of the greatest successes in comic book history, the thing that jumpstarted the Mighty Marvel Age of Comics, but it’s never transferred well to the screen. It’s partly the visuals—only the Human Torch’s power is cool cinematically—but mostly it’s the wrong people owning the rights. They did it cheaply (Bernd Eichinger, via Roger Corman), or stupidly (Fox). To be honest, I thought the most-maligned take, Josh Trank’s 2015 version, was the smartest, since it was about the horror of transformation. You think you’re you and now your body is on fire or elastic. Just writing that makes me realize the conversation the FF didn’t have nearly enough: why the others could return to their original form but Ben Grimm couldn’t. And sure, that’s the point of the Thing, his tragedy, but what if he could look like Ben and then will himself into the Thing in times of trouble? Johnny Storm goes “Flame on!” and he’s the Human Torch; Ben goes “It’s clobbering time!” and he’s the Thing. “You’re just not trying hard enough,” Johnny tells the Thing. “Just focus.”

Wait. What if it took more effort for Johnny and the others to return to human form? I like that idea. “It wants me to be on fire all the time,” Johnny says. “It’s work not to burn everything.”

“First Steps” goes light and light-comedic, antiseptic and at a remove. I admire the attempt but I kept waiting to be engaged. OK, now it’ll get going… OK, now it’ll get interesting…

It felt like I was watching the movie from a distance. Like the distance between us and Earth-828.

The needs of the one
Yeah, it’s not our Earth.

It’s also retro-1960s. Not hippy 1960s, either, but fun, frothy, JFK-era 1960s. No assassinations or Vietnam War, no women’s lib or Civil Rights Movement. No need. Haven’t black people always had equal rights? Just look at Lynn Nichols (Sarah Niles). She’s got an important job … for someone. Look at Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby). She’s not only the Invisible Woman but the world’s greatest diplomat. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) is not only Mr. Fantastic, a superhero, and not only the world’s greatest scientific mind, but also its Bill Nye, the Science Guy. He’s got a TV show, “Fantastic Science,” in which he explains how cool science can be.

Seriously, guys, spread it around. Let some other people do some shit.

It’s still fun for a time. We get the classic Baxter Building, the light-blue unis, the flying Fantasti-Car (intro’ed in FF #3! – Erudite Erik). On “The Ted Gilbert Show,” we get a quick-cut of their origin along with some early adventures, including battling the Mole Man. There’s an homage to the cover of FF #1—the monster coming out of the ground. I kept smiling at this stuff. Plus the title fonts of the show are like the title fonts of the early FFs.

At the same time, nothing really sticks. Sue gets pregnant, Reeds worries over what comic rays might do to a baby, Johnny and Ben (Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach) banter in their manner. And we wait for something interesting to happen.

And then it does! The Silver Surfer arrives—and this time she’s a chick! Specifically: Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner), the longtime love of Norrin Radd, the original Silver Surfer. Why the gender switch? Who knows? But I like her use of “herald” as a verb: “I herald your beginning, I herald your end, I herald … Galactus.” The Surfer has always been known as “The herald of Galactus” and this just underlines that. She says it in Times Square, in front of the FF, and there’s a moment when the Thing’s eyes seem to focus, to clarify, and I was like “Ooh, there’s our guy. OK, let’s see this.”

Nope. The FF decide to meet the moment by flying into space to meet Galactus, but space travel is just clunky. Plus you’re meeting him on his terms. And preggers Sue is going along? Good god.

But that’s the point. In space, or on a planet he’s currently digesting, Galactus is drawn to what’s in Sue’s belly. He sees the future Franklin as a potential replacement for him, which is what he wants. You get the feeling that even Galactus isn’t in control of Galactus, that it’s this ancient and awful curse, and he would rather just not exist. But first he needs a replacement. That’s Franklin. So he gives the FF a choice—a Sophie’s Choice: Give up the baby and he’ll spare the Earth.

Ick. It’s doubly icky because logic points to doing it: Either everyone dies, including Franklin, or everyone lives, including Franklin, who just gets raised by Galactus to be a world eater. It’s the “Star Trek II” equation, the needs of the many, except Spock sacrificed himself while Franklin obviously has no agency. As they returned to Earth, after a fairly clean zero-gravity birth, my main thought was, “Well, just don’t tell anyone about the deal you rejected.” So what’s the first thing Reed does? Cue forehead slap. His plan to defeat Galactus is another forehead slap: teleport the Earth billions of light years away. Right, what could go wrong?

Meanwhile, Johnny translates the Silver Surfer’s language (!!!) and discovers her origin: how she offered herself as G’s herald to save her own planet. In this manner, he chips away at her armor. He reminds her of who she is.

If you’re wondering what Ben Grimm is doing all this time, join the party, pal. The movie completely underuses him. He cooks, he lifts cars for Yancy Street kiddies, he has a thing for a nice Jewish girl (Natasha Lyonne), he grows a beard. That moment when his eyes focus/clarify? That’s as cool as he gets. Even in the final battle, as Sue uses her force field to push Galactus back toward the teleportation device to send him (rather than Earth) billions of light years away, Ben merely topples the building that Galactus is leaning against. That’s how he helps. He's the helper. And when they need someone to sacrifice themselves to give Galactus that final push? Not Ben. It’s Johnny who volunteers, but he’s shunted aside by the Silver Surfer, who was only reminded of her humanity because Johnny figured out her entire language and culture. No wonder Andy Warhol painted him.

Are we safe?
The casting is good. I love Pascal, but then everyone does. During the press conference when he’s asked “Are we safe?” and he responds, “I don’t know,” the line-reading is so perfect—measured but worried but honest—it momentarily buoyed my hopes. (That Q&A can be a meme for the last 10+ years.)

Quinn is fine as Johnny, the most fun of the four, and maybe Moss-Bachrach is good as the Thing, but how do you tell? Maybe I could do it. Hate to say it, but Kirby is miscast. I wanted Mama Bear and wasn’t feeling enough maternal from her. Even as Sue lay dying from the effort of single-handedly defeating Galactus, and the camera lingered, I was like “Oh right, we’re supposed to care.” Plus it was obvious Franklin would save her. The unsacrificed son resurrects the sacrificial mother. None of it resonates.

Not sure who to blame for the movie’s sense of remove. Matt Shakman has directed a lot of good stuff, but mostly on TV (“WandaVision”). Four guys wrote it, only two of whom have extensive credits, and only one of whom, Eric Pearson, wrote stuff for movies that weren’t bad: “Thor: Ragnarok,” “Black Widow,” “Thunderbolts*”. But also “Godzilla vs. Kong.” 

Anyway, they did it. The stars of THE WORLD’S GREAT COMIC MAGAZINE! have finally entered the MCU. Here’s hoping they take it someplace interesting.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I went because my wife wanted to go. This was us Saturday morning.

She: You want to see “F1” today?
Me: Not particularly. You?
She: I don’t know, looks fun!

This was us after we sat through the 2½ hour movie + half-hour of ads/trailers beforehand at Regal Meridian in downtown Seattle.

She: That was way worse than I thought it’d be.
Me: It’s about what I thought it’d be.

The half-hour beforehand, I should underline, included commercials that went 12 minutes past the slated start time. That should be illegal. And the dumbest commercials you’ve ever had to sit through. And we had to sit through them. We were trapped. That was the feeling: trapped.

Doesn’t exactly put you in the mood to watch a 150-minute movie.

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Watching, I began to wonder if “F1: The Movie” wasn’t originally supposed to star Tom Cruise. Its director, Joseph Kosinski, had directed Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the movie was about car racing—like an update of “Days of Thunder”—and the main character is a bratty American who once wanted to be the best, things fell apart, and now, at an advanced age, he’s getting another shot at being the best. Classic Cruise storyline. 

But no, it was Pitt’s from the get-go. He’s a race-car fan, too. Like McQueen, Newman, all those fuckers. I don't get the appeal, particularly as a spectator sport, but that’s a lot of cool to argue against.

As the movie opens, Sonny Hayes (Pitt) helps win a race at Daytona, turns down the trophy from the team lead (Shea Whigham), then drives west looking to join a race in Baja. Instead, old friend and former rival Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem in a thankless role), somehow waylays him in a laundromat in the middle of nowhere and asks him to race for his Formula 1 team in Europe. Investors will sell the team, APX, currently in last place, unless it can win a Grand Prix race that year. He needs him.

Sonny is sympathetic, amused, but keeps turning him down. Afterwards, he has this conversation with the waitress. 

Sonny: A friend comes to you with a 100%, positively too-good-to-be-true offer. What do you do?
Waitress: How much are we talking?
Sonny: It's not about the money.
Waitress: What’s it about then?

That causes Sonny to think, huh, and the next thing we know he’s in Europe.

We never do find out what it’s about then (though we can surmise), and, worse, we never see Shea Whigham again. He’s half the reason I went. He’s my spirit actor: the sour look he gives the world is how I feel 90% of the time these days.

APX already has its apex racer, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who is …  yeah, I never really got his vibe. Initially he just seemed undistinguished and undriven; then they make him the shallow kid interested in publicity. Mostly he’s just young, handsome and dull, who takes potshots at Sonny’s age.

We get reductive snapshots of Apex team members. There’s the blonde girl who, whoops, leaves a drill in the path of the car during a tire change, causing a blowout, but somehow she keeps her job; we’re supposed root for her. There’s the grizzled old European guy who runs things—except does he? Not with Sonny around. There’s the Irish girl, Kate (Kerry Condon), who studies wind effects, and who has new theories on the doohickeys and yadda yaddas for the car but never implements them until Sonny starts pushing. She’s the love interest.

Joshua, dubbed J.P. by Sonny, is media-savvy but without charisma, while Sonny is hugely charismatic but wants nothing to do with the media. By and by, we learn his past. I like this back-and-forth at a press conference. This is from memory, so forgive the errors:

You were highly touted and then you crashed.
Yeah.
And you quit racing for 10 years.
Yeah.
And became a gambling addict and got divorced.
Yeah.
Any regrets?
Yeah.

That’s good.

You know what I thought the movie would help explain? What Formula One racing is. Like the rules that Sonny keeps breaking. But the movie doesn’t help much with that. Somehow it’s a team thing, but with two rather than four like the Tour de France. In the first race, Sonny doesn’t let Joshua pass him and the lesson is you gotta take it, buddy. In another race, Sonny keeps creating minor havoc, causing the track to slow for the clean-up crew and allowing Josh to finish in the top 10. He’s a team guy after all! With Kate’s car improvements, Josh is in second place in another race and goes for broke on a rain-slickened road. He crashes. Sonny is blamed though it wasn’t his fault. But in Josh’s absence, Sonny keeps moving up in different Grand Prix races in different cities. It’s basically a who’s who of where I never want to go.

Ex.: Las Vegas. There, Kate finally gets Joshua and Sonny to settle differences over poker, with the winner apex for APX. During, both men realize they lost fathers at the same age. And in the end, Josh wins the poker match. Sonny folds without turning over his cards. Get it? He secretly won, but wants the kid to gain confidence or something. And it leads to the inevitable night of nookie with Kate.

But then a clash with the Powers That Be over Kate’s redesigns, and in Vegas Sonny “drives angry” and crashes. Ruben removes him from the team for his own safety, but then the smarmy board guy (Tobias Menzies) indicates that when the team is sold he wants Sonny back as “team principal,” since he’s so punk rock and everything, and, oops, yeah, smarmy board guy is the one who traduced the team to the Powers That Be. Sonny betrays him back. Though he’s got double vision, he shows up in Abu Dhabi to race the final race. Both of our cars are near the lead, and then all is lost, and then it isn’t. And then Sonny sacrifices so J.P. can be the leader, but then J.P. sacrifices so Sonny can win, and he takes it home as if in a dream, an 11th hour conceit, so Ruben gets to keep the team.

The epilogue is like Daytona redux: Sonny leaves early and continues on the path he was on before Ruben so rudely interrupted, heading to Baja. His back is torn to shreds so he’s going to ride dune buggies off sand dunes. Makes as much sense as anything else in this thing.

The need for something
Along with having Formula 1 racing explained to me, I’d hoped to get a sense of what it takes to be a world champion racecar driver. Barring that, I’d hoped to at least feel the speed. None of it.

Pitt is good. He does his Pitt thing. He’s becoming more interesting as he ages, very Robert Redford, no bullshit, but it still wasn’t worth it. I left the theater annoyed. The movie was bad enough, but those ads? Regal Cinemas kind of broke me. Stop, please. Don’t make me get out my Shea Whigham face.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Imagine DC Comics had the creativity and will in the goofy, moribund 1950s to create epic, two-issue storylines in, say, Action Comics, that cross-pollinated lesser-known superheroes with Superman. Imagine, too, that the cross-pollination was with the future, so we get social media, FOX News-style propaganda, racial and gender progress. Now imagine one of these epic, two-issue storylines involves the machinations of Lex Luthor to: 1) foment a war between two countries, 2) create his own country in its aftermath (Luthorville uber alles), and 3) destroy Superman (natch).

Now imagine you only ever owned the second of that two-issue arc. It was dog-eared, and you read it over and over again, and sure, it summed up that first issue on the first page, but you only ever got to read the second part.

And then somebody made a movie about the second part.

That’s James Gunn’s “Superman.”

From Jesus to Wilt Chamberlain
First, the balls on this guy. Everyone in the world is trying to be cool, and Gunn is like, “Nah, let’s be goofy.” While other directors look toward the moody, rain-drenched and problematic Frank Miller types, he’s like, “Nah, Mort Weisinger and Otto Binder are more my cup of tea.” He ignores Supes’ origin story completely, begins this particular tale in medias res, puts our hero back on his heels for most of the two hours (Superman!), lets the minor-est of characters steal the show, and—most startling—makes Superman’s parents villains.

No, not Jonathan and Martha Kent.

We should acknowledge that for all the tragedy of his origin story, Kal-El/Clark was pretty lucky to have four good parents. Most of us would settle for one. Gunn cuts his luck in half.  And it makes sense! That’s the thing. You’re sending your son, the sole survivor of your race, to a planet populated by the likes of us, wouldn’t you want him to pass on those Kryptonian genes as much as possible? That’s their counsel. Take many mates, son. Procreate. If the metaphor of Marlon Brando’s Jor-El was Jesus (“They only lack the light to show them the way”), the metaphor of Bradley Cooper’s Jor-El is Genghis Khan. Or Wilt Chamberlain.

So yes, I admire the ballsy work James Gunn has done with “Superman.” Here’s my quibble. In doubling down on Superman’s goodness, his innocent nature, does he make him frustrating? And does this upend the movie’s main message about goodness?

A few months ago, a clip from the movie was released of Superman landing like a missile in the Arctic, battered and bloody, and whistling for his dog, Krypto, who shows up only to jump all over his aching master. I loved it but I worried: Should Gunn/Warner Bros. be showing us this scene from the middle of the movie? Isn’t that giving away too much? Turns out, it’s the first scene. And we don’t get flashbacks.

Instead, we get a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet list of factoids, all divisible by three:

• 300 years ago, metahumans arrived on Earth
• 30 years ago, Superman arrived on Earth
• 3 years ago, he revealed himself to the world
• 3 weeks ago, he stopped a war between Jarhanpur and Boravia

Etcetera.

Does everyone call it a war? It’s really an invasion. Boravia, with high-tech weapons from LutherCorp., and under the comic dictatorship of Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Buric, the comic Russian oligarch in “Triangle of Sadness”), invades Jarhanpur, and Superman (David Corenswet) puts a stop to it. We get details later during a Q&A with girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), who, yes, already knows his secret identity. Did Superman consult the U.S. president first? Did he talk with Ghurkos? Under whose authority did he stop it? Turns out, no, he didn’t take to the prez, but yes, he did have a talk with Ghurkos. He flew him to the desert and stuck him onto a cactus and told him to never do that again. As for whose authority? “People would’ve died!” he says.

So how did Superman get battered and bloody? That was him losing a fight with the Hammer of Boravia. Except he’s not Boravian, and he’s teamed with the shape-shifting Engineer (Maria Gabriela de Faria), and both are acting under the command of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). In fact, the Hammer is Ultraman, and Ultraman is actually (we find out at the 11th hour) a clone of Superman. Kryptonians shed DNA like the rest of us, Luthor scooped up some and created this. Then he treats it like a real-life videogame avatar, shouting codes for punches and count-maneuvers from a command center of tech geeks at LuthorCorp.: A1! F7! J10! It sinks Superman’s battleship.

But Krypto drags the battered, bloody Supes “home,” i.e., to the Fortress of Solitude, which rises out of the Arctic whenever Supes appear, and which is run by robots, particularly “4” (Alan Tudyk), a Jarvis/C3PO-like officiant. There, Supes is repaired while being soothed by an oft-watched message from his Kryptonian parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan), only half of which is playable. The rest is garbled. It takes the Engineer to ungarble it after Luther invades the Fortress. Then they use that ungarbled message—Jor-El and Lara telling their son to create a super-harem and rule the world—mix in some FOX-News style propaganda and legit-media ineptitude, and turn the world against Superman.

How smart is Corenswet’s Superman? Not very. It takes him too long to figure out, “Wait, if they’re using my Kryptonian parents’ message … [pause] … [pause] … they must’ve broken into the Fortress of Solitude!” Right, and where’s Krypto? Gone. Which is when Supes smashes into LuthorCorp., crushes the bones of both of Luthor’s hands, lifts him up by his scrawny neck and semi-torches his balls with his heat vision. Kidding. That’s what I would’ve done, while slowly enunciating. “You-do-not-take-people’s-pets.” Supes just crashes into LuthorCorp. and sweeps aside Luthor’s desk. As for the super-annoying tech geeks, who reminded me of the “OMG, the quarterback is toast!” computer geek of “Die Hard”? I wanted those guys hurt, too.

But they aren’t hurt. Nobody is. Instead, Supes surrenders to the authorities, which is less the U.S. military than a public-private partnership with LuthorCorp. It’s paramilitary, and it includes otherworldly “pocket dimensions” where Luthor has imprisoned both his enemies (ex.: a blogger who wrote bad things about him) and those who might be useful to him in the future. It’s slightly reminiscent of the animal experimentation cages in Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” Among the useful is Metamorpho, the Element Man (Anthony Carrigan of HBO’s “Barry”), whose body can be transformed into any element. Kryptonite, for example. That’s what happens here. While Krypto runs himself to death chasing phantom squirrels, Superman is slowly poisoned to death by Metamorpho, who is forced to comply because his baby son is being held at gunpoint by a Luthor minion across the way. Eventually, though, Metamorpho figures the most powerful being who ever lived might be a better partner than Lex, and he turns off the kryptonite and turns on a yellow-sun surrogate.

Oh right, before all this, we’re introduced to a nascent organization of metahumans operating out of the Hall of Justice, who call themselves The Justice Somethingorothers! Yeah, they haven’t figured it out yet. Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) wants it to be the Justice Gang but that’s vetoed by Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). It’s the latter who winds up stealing the show. I don’t even get Mr. Terrific’s powers, but his personality is vaguely Vulcan, super smart, and super impatient. It's fun, and Gathegi nails him. His assault on the paramilitary org—after Lois beseeches the Justice Somethingorothers to help Supes—with “5 Years Time” by Noah and the Whale playing on the soundtrack, is when we get the biggest whiff of Gunn’s “Guardians” movies. Fun fun fun.

That’s two-thirds of the movie. The final third requires a pep talk from Pa Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince) about how Clark/Supes is still who he is, the sum of his beliefs and choices, regardless of his Kryptonian parents; then it’s back in the game. As Supes battles the Engineer and Ultraman, and Green Lantern and Hawkgirl stop yet another Boravian invasion (a kid from Jarhanpur hoists a tattered Superman flag), and Mr. Terrific attempts to counteract Luthor’s unstable pocket dimension from tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe—starting with Metropolis—while all of that is going on, we watch our Daily Planet team blow the lid off Luthor’s scams. Better, it’s with evidence provided by Luthor’s moll, Eve Teschmacher (Sara Samaio), who, this time around, is a selfie-loving influencer with a thing for Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo of “Licorice Pizza”). I know. Somewhere Marc McClure goes, “Wait, what?”

And when all is settled, Superman relaxes once again in the Fortress of Solitude and soothes himself with a video of his parents. The human ones.

Nicely done. So why did I feel frustrated?

50 years time
First, a confession. Ever since about 2004, I’ve sometimes seen political dimensions in movies that don’t have them. This might be more of that. Here it is anyway:

Superman is the Democratic party.

I know! I’m sorry. I didn’t want to go there. But the frustration I felt with this Superman reminded me of the frustration I feel with the Democratic Party on a daily basis:

1. He’s too nice
2. He doesn’t understand the depth of the power and machinations and evil against him
3. When the opposition besmirches him, he just sits there, as if truth will out

Gunn’s overall message is that not only will truth out, but goodness will out. When Superman finally collars Luthor, he gives a speech about how he, Superman, screws up all the time, he makes mistakes, and that’s when he’s most human. Nice message. Except throughout the film, the population in Metropolis was so willing to believe Luthor’s propaganda that they didn’t seem worth saving to me. Even when the Daily Planet correction is issued, and everyone turns on a dime back in Supes’ favor, it reminded me how susceptible we all are. It made me wonder if Jor-El and Lara didn’t have the right idea all along.

A tyrannical Superman (for an issue) has a long history in the comic books.

This is the fourth cinematic Superman incarnation I’ve seen, all on opening weekend, going back nearly a half-century:

• “Superman: The Movie” (1978): I was 15 and I saw it with my movie-critic Dad at (I believe) the Southtown Theater in South Minneapolis—probably for a Wednesday or Thursday night special screening before its Friday opening. Packed house. Fun.
• “Superman Returns” (2006): I took my superhero-loving colleague Ross to a special late-morning screening at a downtown Minneapolis theater, one of those Block “E” things on Hennepin Ave. I was 43 and, in my spare time, writing film pieces for MSNBC. Out of my research, I wrote “Sex and the Superman” for MSNBC and “Truth, Justice and (Fill in the Blank)” for The New York Times. Packed house.
• “Man of Steel” (2013): First showing opening day, Friday, June 14, at the Cinerama in downtown Seattle, and then I wrote a review for this blog. Packed house. I was 50. I’d posted so much about Supes and his history in the preceding months that friends suggested I write a book. I should have.

Superman may live but none of the above theaters do. Isn’t that sad? The Southtown was razed in the mid-90s, the Block “E” theaters were shuttered in 2012, and while the Cinerama is still in downtown Seattle, thank god, it’s now run by SIFF, thank god, the Seattle International Film Festival. This week, though, it’s not showing James Gunn’s “Superman” so I saw it elsewhere.

• “Superman” (2025): I’d planned on going to one of the downtown theaters late Friday, but I was sick; so I waited a few days and saw the first showing Sunday afternoon at Pacific Science Center’s IMAX Theater. Packed house. Families. Fathers and daughters. It’s the latest I’ve seen a new Superman movie—two days after it opened!—but then I’m 62 and slowing down.

James Gunn’s “Superman” is more than a movie, of course; it’s the first salvo in his attempt to reboot the entire DC Universe so that it’s consistent, monumental and (above all) fun. Not a bad stab. It’s certainly a reminder that Gunn doesn’t need the big guns (Superman, Batman) to make his universe work. Indeed, he seems to do better with the characters no one’s ever heard of.

Final thought. The tagline? “Look up”? I get it now. And James, I wish I could.

Walters between two horrors: “He had fascinating friends.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” doesn’t tell us everything. It’s insular. It’s written and directed by a woman (Jackie Jesko), most of the talking heads are female TV journalists (Oprah, Katie, et al.), and most of what they say is supportive. She’s their shining star and they buff her up. It doesn’t help that it was produced by ABC News Studio, the network/news division where she worked for decades. It could’ve used, as we say in the biz, fresh eyes.

Example: The doc talks up early criticism of how Walters blended celebrity and hard-news interviews. We get her in voiceover—reading from her autobiography, I assume, since she died in December 2022:

I was criticized for doing specials that had people in the news along with celebrities: You can’t do both. Well, you can, and I did. And today we see it all the time.

As your parents will tell you, “We see it all the time” isn’t exactly a justification, particularly since that was the very fear behind the criticism. That those realms would blur and it would become the norm, and we wouldn't be able to distinguish between the two. That we would become a less-serious country.

Others in the doc come to her defense but it’s not much of a defense: 

Cynthia McFadden: This was very controversial to put hard-news interviews next to celebrity interviews. And there were many who felt she was just lowering standards.

Bob Iger: She had a vision back then that celebrities are news. She was criticized in that regard because she actually believed it—and I think she turned out to be right, that they were newsmakers.

Sure, but what news? Relationships? Gossip? What Angelina Jolie does won’t affect my taxes or healthcare coverage for my father.

Tellingly, as McFadden says “hard-news interviews” above, we get a shot of Pres. Reagan, and for “celebrity interviews” it’s movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Shortly thereafter, of course, Schwarzenegger would become hard news himself when he was elected governor of California, just as Reagan had once been celebrity news as a B-movie actor for Warner Bros. in the 1940s. The lines were already beginning to blur when Walters arrived but she helped erase them.

Here’s what the doc doesn’t begin to ask: Did lowering those journalistic standards to the point where celebrities and U.S. Senators were interchangeable personalities on the idiot box, did that help create an environment where, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say a two-bit huckster TV host and raging misogynist and racist could get himself elected president of the United States and then systematically curtail minority rights, women’s right, and the rule of law?

That was the fear. The fear is what we’re living through.

Not recorded here
If you’d asked me beforehand what stands out about Barbara Walters I would’ve said Gilda Radner’s “Baba Wawa,” the infamous “If you were a tree” question to Katherine Hepburn, and how the “Barbara Walters Special” aired every year after the Oscars. We get 10 seconds of Gilda and none of the rest. I mean, yes, the specials, but no mention of that prestigious timeslot. And no tree question.

I could’ve used more on her early steps in journalism before the “Today” show. We get the childhood—her father ran a NYC nightclub, he went broke, she had to become breadwinner—but this is mostly used in a pop-psychology way to explain her behavior. It’s why she was so driven (breadwinner), why she liked scoundrels (her father was one), why she had a longtime friendship/relationship with Roy Cohn (he helped her father with a tax issue).

The Cohn revelation was a shocker to me, particularly because, per Walters, it went beyond friendship. Peter Gathers, who edited her autobiography, says, “They talked about getting married. I have no idea how serious it was, but I would say to her: But he’s gay.” Her response? Not recorded here. Instead, another BW voiceover:

Roy was very well-known and had a great deal of power. He would take me to the Stork Club, to some of the great restaurants, he had fascinating friends.

Where do you fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? That’s Roy Cohn in “Angels in America." That’s what he cared about, and that’s what she cared about.

Which is why Walters had such a problem when Diane Sawyer showed up all tall and blonde on ABC in the 1990s. She was “a goddess,” per Walters, and Walters was frosty with her. As for what Sawyer thought? Not recorded here. Instead, the doc talks up how Walters opened doors for women everywhere even though she herself admits that wasn’t the goal.

We get her daughter, adopted. We get the example she set for the likes of Oprah and Katie Couric, even as each took the opposite lesson from her: Oprah saw her fumbling motherhood because she was married to work, and decided she herself couldn’t do both and never had kids. Couric thought Walters seemed lonely and became determined to have a family.

We get the exclusives: the first joint Sadat-Begin interview (landed, I assume, because Begin had the hots for her); the first Menendez brothers; the first Monica Lewinsky. That’s our trajectory: from stories that matter to tabloid crap. We’re less serious every day.

And the rest
You know who’s really good in this? Bette Midler. She’s also one of the most articulate about why Walters was good at what she did. Walters made the interviewee comfortable, and familiar, and then suddenly, bam, the tough, rude question. To Harvey Fierstein: What’s it like to be a homosexual? To Muhammad Ali: Are you faithful to your wife? To Midler: Do you do drugs? Do you think you’re good looking? Do you think you’re sexy? The doc also gives us Midler today looking at her responses from back then. Nice touch. I would’ve liked more of that.

The mid-1980s interview with Clint Eastwood is charming, too, particularly the way he flirts with her. She was good at these. She was good with the rich and famous and powerful. I don’t know if she did the rest of us any good.

In my defense, it did premiere at Cannes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

On the last day of my vacation in France, as a way to avoid the afternoon heat and as a kind of experiment, I did something tres gauche: I went to see “Mission: Impossible ­– The Final Reckoning” at the Grand Rex on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris. 

It was a kind of experiment because the film wasn’t VO (version originale) but VF (version francais). It was dubbed. I was curious:

• Did the French voice actor sound anything like Tom Cruise?
• How much would I understand with my shitty French?
• Would I be able to follow the plot anyway?

Well…

• All the voice actors sounded plain, regressed to the mean. Maybe that’s the nature of that biz.
• My shitty French didn’t help.
• I still understood most of the movie.

It’s an action movie, after all, not complicated, and I know the tropes. I’ve been watching these things about as long as Tom Cruise has been alive.

La cle, boss, la cle
He’s showing his age a little, isn’t he? He’s in fantastic shape—entire scenes are him in his skivvies, Joel Goodsen + 40 years—but in some scenes his face is oddly puffy. I assume because of the stunt work he insists on doing? You know that footage of pilots and astronauts with contorted faces from G-Forces? I think it’s hangover from that. Cruise has been hanging off too many planes during his career. He does it again here—twice. He plunges into Arctic waters—twice. He runs superfast and super-upright to try to save a friend’s life before a bomb goes off. Once.

Here’s what the plot of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” seemed like in French with my shitty French.

Ethan Hunt is in possession of the key from the last movie. He and the girl, Grace (Hayley Atwell), are kidnapped from a swanky opera by the villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), and Hunt is tortured, Grace is threatened, but they break free. Hunt is with his IM team when he enters a pod that shows him a vision of the end of the world—nuclear destruction. So now we know what he needs to do: prevent that. But first his computer guy, Luther (Ving Rhames), is trapped with a bomb and Ethan races across empty London streets to set him free. He doesn’t. He and Luther talk through the plastic partition, like Kirk and Spock in “Star Trek II,” with Luther most likely saying some version of the needs of the many outweighing him, even though he weighs a lot. Boom.

Now we’re in the North Atlantic. Ethan jumps into frigid waters, is about to die of hypothermia, but he’s saved by doubtful U.S. military scuba forces, one of whom winds up being a traitor.

Meanwhile, his IM team visits a scientist and his Inuit wife on an Arctic island, but uh oh, other forces are there, too. Russians? Gabriel’s? There are discussions and standoffs and gun battles.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States (Angela Bassett), keeps debating with her advisers, including Gen. Nick Offerman, about what to do about the impending nuclear apocalypse.

Hunt is doing more than debating. He scuba-dives into a sunken Russian nuclear sub—didn’t we see it sink in the beginning of the first movie?—and that’s the point of the key, you use it there for something, which Hunt does; but he also lets in a lot of water, so on the ocean floor the sub keeps turning and groaning and turning, and it’s about to fall into a deep chasm. Ethan works frantically to escape, but the only way he can do it is to strip to his skivvies and swim through icy waters to the surface. He swims and swims, and slows, and stops. And dies. And that’s it for that.

Kidding. He passes out, and when he wakes up he’s being warmed by Grace and reunited with his team. Somehow.

Then it’s to an underground facility in South Africa, where there are discussions and standoffs and gun battles between Gabriel, IM Forces, and U.S. intelligence repped by that jerk Kittridge (Henry Czermy). Beloved IM dude Benji (Simon Pegg) gets plugged, Gabriel runs away with the doohickey that matters, and Ethan runs after him.

Now we intercut between:

• The IM girls, including Pom Klementieff’s Paris, trying to defuse a bomb with the help of a wounded Benji.
• The U.S. president still arguing with advisers, and being threatened, and Gen. Nick Offerman getting his Sgt. Al Powell “Die Hard” moment—the sudden savior.
• Ethan pursuing Gabriel, who escapes via biplane.

Actually two biplanes. Gabriel pilots the first, his lieutenant(?) the second, which is the one Ethan latches onto. He pulls himself up, decks the pilot, takes control of the plane, and goes after Gabriel. No, Gabriel sees him first, and decides to have fun, like Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. But then Ethan climbs onto Gabriel’s plane and gets the doohickey from around his neck. And as Gabriel gets swept into a propeller (I think), Ethan parachutes out while plugging that doohickey into another doohickey, and that’s the thing that saves the day at the last second. Whew.

Back in London, the surviving IM members, including Benji, look at each other and nod about saving the world, and then go their separate ways.

Not sure if it made more sense in English.

The pill with the poison is in the podkova going nova
In English I’d have the names and reasons for things. The standoff with the scientist on the island, for example? That’s about getting the Russian sub’s coordinates, which are relayed to Ethan so he can retrieve something called the Podkova, which is the thing you need to defeat the Entity.

Right, the Entity. That’s what’s missing from the above. It’s the movie’s main villain—artificial intelligence. Maybe that’s the takeaway from this French-language experiment: AI makes a lousy villain. Because where is it? Here, there and everywhere. But not on the screen.

It’s the Entity that’s going to launch everyone’s nukes, and Ethan needs to jump through all these hoops to make sure it doesn’t happen. But—I’m curious—does Gabriel want the world to end? He certainly keeps getting in the way of trying to save it. So maybe he’s part of the “undercover doomsday cult” Wiki mentions that I don’t remember seeing either. By the way, I totally dig this line from Wiki on the film’s climax: “Ethan finds a second parachute and plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova in midair…” That’s a master class in maguffins. Or pornography.

“Final” is the eighth (and supposedly final) of the Cruise “M:I” movies, which seem to have run their course. They're certainly not increasing their take:

* As of June 27-29 weekend

To its credit, it embraces its past. The island scientist (Rolf Saxon), for example, is the CIA analyst Ethan fooled with the zipline-above-the-floor stunt in the first film, while that jerk Kittridge was also a jerk in that first film. Pres. Erika Sloane? Back in 2018, as CIA head, she foisted the traitorous, mustachioed Henry Cavill on IMF. Now she’s the black female president because in real life we can’t have such nice things. Oh, and Shea Whigham and his great skeptical expression turns up as the son of Jim Phelps, the star of the TV series (Peter Graves), and the great betrayer from the first film (Jon Voight). He and Ethan shake hands in the end. Bygones, bro.

After beginning the series with auteurs (Brian De Palma, John Woo, etc.), the last four movies have all been directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the guy who wrote “The Usual Suspects” but now seems in the Tom Cruise business. The last thing he worked on that wasn’t a Cruise movie was in 2013. Since then, it’s the likes of “Jack Reacher,” “The Mummy,” “Top Gun,” “M:I.” They might want to start seeing other people.

Tom Cruise? He was the great brat of the Brat Pack, our forever cocksure cousin, playing guys determined to be the best at a thing—test pilot, bartender, race-car driver—despite the doubt and desperation in their eyes. But he never quite grew up, did he? Did he ever play a father? “War of the Worlds,” I guess. He’s still best-known as a son—“Risky Business,” “Magnolia”—but he’s 63 now and a little old to be hanging off airplanes. Not sure where he goes from here. In the poster for this one he seems oddly serene, the desperation gone from his eyes. Maybe that's a way forward.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a subgenre of horror about anxiety rather than fear? If so, “Friendship” is a master class. I think I watched more of it through splayed fingers than any horror movie I’ve ever seen. If I wasn’t at the theater I would’ve turned it off, and if I wasn’t at the theater with my wife I would’ve fled. It’s excruciating.

But is it any good?

I didn’t laugh much. The Subway Sandwich scene, yes, long and hard, and an early moment in a couples group therapy session, when cancer survivor Tami (Kate Mara) talks up her fear that the cancer will return, and her doofus husband, Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson of the Netflix series “I Think You Should Leave”), says to her, “That’s not gonna happen,” out of the side of his mouth, mock knowingly. It was a such a wrong comment, told so wrongly, I burst out laughing. 

But it points out what’s wrong with the movie. She’s such an adult and he’s such a doofus that you wonder “How are these two together?” And then they’re not.

Same with work. How does he have this job? How is this guy a manager? And then he’s not.

The story is how Craig’s need for friendship with his cool-guy neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd) ruins his life, but it was ruined anyway. Because he’s Tim Robinson.

Opposite of zeitgeist
Robinson is probably best-known for the sketch/meme “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!” in which his character, dressed as a hot dog, attempts to join a group figuring out who drove a hot-dog shaped car through the window of a high-end clothing store. I also like the “Brian’s Hat” sketch. Two execs are on trial for insider trading, and texts are shared in court detailing their guilt—except 80% of the texts are them ragging on the hat of a colleague. But even there … I laughed more at the concept than its execution. And I don’t know if it’s because the hat in question was just so stupid—a safari fedora, basically—or if Robinson’s comedy doesn’t work for me. If he pushes comedy to a place that doesn’t make me laugh and doesn’t feel relevant.

Example: I thought “Friendship” was going to be about the difficulty of middle-aged men finding friends in the 21st century—riffing off that John Mulaney bit. Nope. The movie came about because writer-director Andrew DeYoung felt rejected in a midlife male friendship, got angry about it, realized how pathetic that was, and figured it would make a good comedy. The tagline isn’t that men need friends but men shouldn’t have friends. The opposite of the zeitgeist.

Craig is a marketer at a tech company who somehow manages a team even though no one has respect for him. One day, helping load flowers into his wife’s hatchback (she runs an online floral shop or something), a package arrives for their new neighbor and she asks Craig to deliver it. He does. And is immediately smitten.

What I like about the cool-guy neighbor is he’s not really cool. And are they riffing off of Rudd’s “Anchorman” character? Same hair, same ’stache, same dated lingo (a cool car is “cherry” and cops are “pigs”). Brian Fantana was a field reporter while Austin is a local TV weatherman who wants the morning slot. He also fronts a sad weekend band, goes mushroom-hunting in scabby woods next to a freeway, and wears a toupee. He’s got arrested development, too, just not as skewed as Craig's.

Much of the movie is skewed. It’s all just slightly off. Mother and son kiss each other on the lips? Mom has an orgasm when she’s lost in the sewers? Craig only wears one brand of clothing, Ocean View Dining, which keep getting ruined. He’s forever dropping his smartphone into puddles, too.

Austin, after showing off his ancient fossils that don’t look ancient, and the sad mushroom-hunting, takes Craig on a midnight excursion through tunnels and into city hall—which, again, feels like high school hijinks. The friendship goes awry when Austin invites him to a regular meet and Craig feels odd man out. Everyone else knows the parameters, the rituals, the songs. Craig? He crashes into a sliding door. Then, in a basement sparring match(?), he keeps getting jabbed in the face and winds up sucker punching Austin in frustration. As a result, Austin becomes more distant, and Craig more desperate, until Austin just lays it out: I don’t think this friendship is working.

So Craig tries to recreate what he had with Austin—with himself as Austin. He brings his direct-reports to his basement to show off his version of the fossil—a tiny dagger—but no one’s impressed, jokes are made about size, he has a fit. He leads a very reluctant Tami on the tunnel adventure and winds up losing her; the cops have to be called in. In short order, he’s fired and Tami leaves him, and really all you think is: “About time.”

Then the Subway Sandwich scene. The kid at the smartphone shop promised him something stronger than drink, and one day Craig is so depressed he takes him up on it. Nothing glamorous: He lays down in a back stockroom and gets high by licking a toad. Except instead of some mind-bending experience, Craig finds himself at a Subway ordering a sandwich from a gray-haired Austin, who knowingly compliments all his choices. That’s it. When the kid asks him what far-out adventures he had, Craig furiously admits it was just ordering a sandwich at Subway.

Speed bumps
I also like the speed-bump bit. That’s long been Craig’s one contribution to society—he got the city to put speed bumps in their neighborhood because “this isn’t a freeway.” But at the end, when he tries to ram Austin’s new yellow Corvette, guess what prevents it? The speed bumps.

After Craig pulls a gun on Austin and his friends (yes), he’s arrested. Final scene: In the back of the patrol car, he looks over at Austin with need in his eyes, and Austin turns around in slow-mo and winks. And Craig smiles. Sure.

I wanted to like “Friendship” more. I want to like Tim Robinson more. But I don’t think this relationship is working.