Soul

Tina Fey and Jamie Foxx in Soul

Pixar has produced so many phenomenal films, it's hard to say if there even is a best one. But you know, if there was, it just might be Soul. The storytelling is so economical, so effortless, so richly textured. Even characters we only see for a scene or two feel gorgeously real. There are great moments of physical comedy. There's a rendering of the late afternoon sunlight in New York City so majestic and serene that it'll make you want to fucking cry. This movie made me feel all of the feels. If they have movies a hundred years from now, people will still be watching this one.

I mean, I'm as surprised as any of you are to realize that my old movie review blog even exists. I haven't looked at it, or really thought about it, since 2017, which was... let me check. Yeah, roughly nine hundred billion years ago. We'd never seen members of Congress openly flirt with sedition and nobody knew what TikTok was. I'm honestly not even sure I knew the word "pandemic." We were all so young then.

Soul was so good that I that it made me think "damn, I need to need to write something about this movie so my friends know how good it is." The thought dropped like an anchor down some deep hole in my memory and came back up with this blog stuck to it.

I actually don't want to tell you much more about Soul except that I think you should watch it. Oh, and also that one of its many delights is that it contains scenes wherein a man in a hospital gown walks down a public sidewalk in New York City, carrying a cat, and he's clearly having a back and forth conversation with the cat, and none of the New Yorkers around him pay the slightest bit of attention. And they do the scene in such a way that you notice this, and think, "yeah, that's about right."

Logan

I decided to add a picture of a real wolverine to the top of the review as a joke, as if I had mistaken the character for the animal. Then I did a Google image search on "wolverine" and found almost nothing but pictures of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Seriously, I needed to scroll down a really long way to find this picture of the actual animal.

I walked out of Logan confused about its pacing. It bothered me and I didn't know why. Some parts seemed really draggy and I didn't understand what they were doing in the film. The plot did not unfold in the rhythms I had expected it to. Then I came home and saw another reviewer describe it as a Western. And as I look back now, with the understanding that it was paced like a Western, man, Logan was a fucking symphony.

I'm still not sure that I liked it. It was a great movie; I'm just not sure that I liked it. There was a lot of sadness and pain in this movie, and it all happened to characters I've become very fond of. These beloved characters were so sad for so long that by the end of the movie, I was sad too. A bad movie can't make you feel like that, but also, I had not been expecting to feel so sad tonight and the sadness put a little bit of a kink in my evening.

Here's a quick plot summary: in the near and dystopic future, Professor X is hiding in a derelict water tower in Mexico, suffering from super-mutant-dementia. Logan struggles to obtain adequate medication for the Professor, failing often. Logan is also quite ill and aging visibly, and his alcoholism has really spiraled out of control. Then plot things happen, forcing Logan and the Prof to throw their lot in with a little girl who is kind of like a Wolverinelet, driving her north across the US toward the promised safety of Canada. They are hotly pursued by the evil corporation that made her into a Wolverinelet.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2

Here are three reasonably good-looking young people and a bird that is on fire for some reason.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

In these opening lines from the Prologue to Act I of Henry V, Shakespeare establishes what academics would later describe as a "topos of inexpressibility." The high and kingly matters of war and politics are so consequential, so deeply and intensely real, that it is beyond the ability of a playwright and a handful of actors to reproduce them; the players can only point to grander things than themselves and hope the audience will forgive them.

A moment ago, as I sat in front of my computer preparing to review the fourth and final film of the Hunger Games tetralogy, I was reminded of Shakespeare and his topos of inexpressibility because reader, I cannot fucking express to you how bad this movie was.

I feel so empty inside.

That was such a bad movie.

I mean, it was SUCH a bad movie.

Near the end, while yet one more excruciating, plodding scene offered us more flabby expository dialogue regarding the fates of characters we last cared about no later than 2013, I turned to John and whispered, "oh god, how much more of this must we endure?" and he was nice enough to say "ssshh," because the man who had been snoring behind us for the last 45 minutes* seemed to have woken up, and it was possible that he was once again attempting, against all reason, to enjoy the steaming shit-heap of a movie that was The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2.

Crimson Peak

Funerals rarely look as funereal as they look in Crimson Peak. These are outfits that practically scream: we are going to take a dead person and bury them right in the fucking GROUND.

I would like Guillermo del Toro to design my mausoleum, please.

Man, Crimson Peak is a great looking movie. It's lean on plot, and full of characters you've seen before doing things you've seen before, many many times before, but you can't throw a rock in that movie without hitting some lovely melodramatic Gothic architectural doodad or other, and the characters constantly walk around swathed in yards and yards of dramatically swishing diaphanous translucent fabric that swishes around them, being super dramatic and translucent and diaphanous.

There is a funeral near the beginning of the movie with a black coffin processing toward a huge, elaborately carved stone monument, with men in top hats and women all in black with black netting over their faces, and del Toro loves showing us that funeral so much that not too long afterwards he needs to show us ANOTHER funeral, only this time it has to be raining so everybody can be holding black umbrellas that go with their black top hats and dresses and face-netting.

To demonstrate how simple the plot is, here is a fairly complete summary of it in only seventy-six words: a girl falls in love with a mysterious man from far away. They marry and she returns with him to his home, only to find that the home is full of secrets. For a long time, she wonders what the secrets are, and then she finds out what they are, and they are kind of fucked up. After that, some perilous things happen, but she will probably make it through the peril and be fine afterwards.

But for heaven's sake, most of the movie is set in a mansion where there's a hole in the roof that constantly has leaves or snow falling langorously through it and landing in an elegant, melancholy pile on the floor, and where blood-red glop oozes up between the floorboards and leaks down the walls and although the movie makes some bullshit excuse about how the house is built on top of a clay mine and the clay is very red, Guillermo del Toro just wants to make the house look like it's bleeding. And you might well ask, given that the house is in a barren clay field with hardly any trees, and of the few trees there are, none come even close to being as tall as the house, well then those leaves that are falling so evenly and majestically through the roof of that red-glop-bleeding house, where the hell are they coming from? FROM THE FEVERED, BAROQUE IMAGINATION OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO, THAT'S WHERE.

American Ultra

Jesse Eisenberg spends much of American Ultra absolutely looking like shit on toast, and he really makes it work.

Movies with stoner protagonists risk devolving into a series of cliches. You know. Smoking marijuana makes you hungry, it makes you laugh at things that aren't really funny, and it interferes with your short-term memory in ways that make you comically bad at performing simple tasks. Amirite?

American Ultra is none of that. It's original, ecomomical, and visually and formally beautiful. It isn't really a stoner movie for stoners. It's surprisingly dark and smart, and it doesn't suggest that being a stoner is a lot of fun. From the beginning of the movie, Jesse Eisenberg* appears to be trying to self-medicate, and it doesn't seem to be working very well.

And then, as you will know if you saw any of the previews, Jesse Eisenberg turns out to be a trained and conditioned secret agent so secret that he didn't realize he was one, and then a lot of people try to kill him and his girlfriend Kristen Stewart a lot, I mean, seriously, a LOT, and I won't tell you exactly how it ends, but it becomes clear enough early on that this is not the kind of movie where the good guys die, or even lose, at the end.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Tom Hardy takes over the title role in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Unlike his predecessor in the part, Hardy has probably never addressed a female police officer as "sugar tits."

Perhaps you didn't realize that you needed to see Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron spend 120 minutes driving a giant war-semi covered in pointy things across a blasted and poisonous hellscape with literally one tree in it while they're being hotly pursued by a sort of mobile homicidal Burning Man Cirque du Soleil show on wheels, but trust me, holy crap you need to see that immediately and when you do you will not be able to believe your eyes.

A lesser movie would have just shown us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur. Mad Max: Fury Road gives us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur that pulls out of the gearshift and reveals itself to be the handle of a stiletto.* I really respect that kind of attention to detail.

If most action movies are advertising, then this one is poetry. Oh, Reader, this one is savage, glorious, blood-spattered poetry, full of explosions and piercing war cries and unlikely objects flying through the air in every direction. That's right, Reader. Shit in this movie gets so real that I can only convey the intensity of my excitement by addressing you directly. As soon as we got home, my boyfriend John plopped down on the couch in front of his Xbox, and, with glazed eyes and a dreamy tone in his voice, simply said: "I need to shoot things."

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

Who the hell is that woman on the right? I think maybe her name is Johanna or something. It basically doesn't matter.

I've been getting over a cold lately, and shortly after John and I sat down at the Regal Morgantown Stadium 12 to watch the latest installment of the Hunger Games tetralogy, I covered my mouth with my arm to cough, but ended up accidentally hawking up a giant, moist loogie right onto the arm of my sweatshirt. Have you ever done that in public by accident? It suddenly feels like everybody is watching and judging you, even though in reality it's likely that nobody noticed. I took off my sweatshirt and put it under my seat with the fabric of the arm folded so no errant blobs of loogie would escape during the film.

And if that anecdote seems wandering and pointless to you, wait until you see the first 35 minutes of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.

If you do go to see it, persevere through the awkward intro, for beyond it you will encounter several nuggets of young-adult movie goodness unfortunately suspended in a larger, amorphous plot-slurry during which our heroine Katniss Everdeen sometimes cannot play her critical propaganda role in a civil war because she is very busy trying to decide which of two boys she likes more. One of them is a vampire and one of them is a werewolf.