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The Passion of the Christ (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released February 25, 2004:
The Passion of the Christ is a retelling of the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ’s life (perhaps you’ve heard of him?). In these final hours we witness his betrayal at the hands of Judas, his trial by Jewish leaders, his sentencing by Pontius Pilate, his subsequent whippings and torture and finally his crucifixion. Throughout the film Jesus is tempted by Satan, who is pictured as a pasty figure in a black hood (kind of resembling Jeremy Irons from The Time Machine if anyone can remember). The Passion spares no expense to stage the most authentic portrayal of what Jesus of Nazareth endured in his final 12 hours of life.
For all the hullabaloo about being the most controversial film in years (and forgive me for even using the term “hullabaloo”), I can’t help but feel a smidgen of disappointment about the final product. The Passion is aptly passionate and full of striking images, beautiful photography and production values, and stirring performances all set to a rousing score. But what makes The Passion disappointing to me is the characters. You see, Mel Gibson’s epic does not devote any time to fleshing out the central characters. They are merely ciphers and the audience is expected to plug their feelings and opinions into these walking, bleeding symbols to give them life. Now, you could argue this is what religion is all about, but as far as a movie’s story goes it is weak. The Passion turns into a well-meaning and slick spectacle where character is not an issue. And as a spectacle The Passion is first-rate; the production is amazing and the violence is graphic and gasp-inducing. Do I think the majority of people will leave the theater moved and satisfied? Yes I do. But I can’t stop this nagging concern that The Passion was devoid of character and tried covering it up with enough violence to possibly twist its message into a Sunday school snuff film.
For my money, the best Biblical film is Martin Scorsese’s 1987 The Last Temptation of Christ (also a film mired in controversy). Last Temptation, unlike Gibson’s spectacle, was all about Jesus as a character and not simply as a physical martyr. Scorsese’s film dealt with a Christ consumed by doubt and fear and the frailties of being human. But the best part is the final 20 minutes when Jesus is tempted, by Satan, to step down from the cross and live out a normal life. Jesus walks away from the cross, marries Mary Magdalene, fathers children (this is where the controversy stemmed from but they were married) and dies at an old age. Jesus is then confronted by his aging apostles who chastise him for not living up to what he was supposed to do to save mankind. Jesus wakes up from the illusion and fulfills his mission and dies on the cross. Now, with the story of Last Temptation an audience has a greater appreciation for the sacrifice of Jesus because they witness his fears and they witness the normal life he forgoes to die for man’s sins. There is a sense of gravity about what Jesus is sacrificing.
With The Passion Gibson figures if he can build a sense of grand sacrifice by gruesomely portraying the tortures Jesus endured. Even if it is Jesus, and this may sound blasphemous, torturing a character to create sympathy and likeability is the weakest writing trick you can do. Yes Jesus suffered a lot, yes we should all be horrified and grateful, and yes people will likely be moved at the unrelenting violence he endured, but in regards to telling a story, I cannot feel as much for characters whose only characterization is their suffering. Sure, The Passion flashes back to some happier moments of Jesus’ life, which I like to call the Jesus Greatest Hits collection, but the movie does not show us who Jesus was, what he felt (beyond agonizing pain) or the turmoil he went through in finally deciding to give up his own life for people that despised him. The Passion is not about character but about spectacle.
So let’s talk about the violence now, shall we? Gibson’s camera lovingly lingers on the gut-churning, harrowing, merciless level of violence. But this is his only message. It’s like Gibson is standing behind the camera and saying to the audience, “You see what Jesus suffered? Do you feel bad now? FLAY HIM MORE! How about now?” What was only three sentences of description in the Gospels takes up ten minutes of flogging screen time. Mad Mel has the urge to scourge. After an insane amount of time spent watching Jesus get flayed and beaten the violence starts to not just kill whatever spiritual message Gibson may have had in mind, but the violence becomes the message. The Passion does give an audience a fair understanding of the physical torture Jesus was subjected to, but the movie does not display Christ as fully human, enjoying life and love, or fully divine. The only thing The Passion shows us about Jesus is that the son of God sure knew how to take a whuppin’. For Gibson, the violence is the message and the point is to witness what Jesus endured. Some would call that sadistic.
The actors all do a fine job and it’s impressive that everyones’ lines is in two dead languages (Latin and Aramaic, though for the life of me I can’t tell them apart). But the acting is limited because of the nature of the film. Had there been more moments of character the acting would come across better. As it stands, the acting in The Passion is relegated to looks of anguish or looks of horror, interspersed with weeping. Monica Bellucci (The Matrix sequels) really has nothing to do as Mary Magdalene but run around in the background a lot. Jim Caviezel (Frequency, Angel Eyes) gives everything he has in the mighty big shoes he tries to fill. It’s too bad that his Jesus spends most of the screen time being beaten, which kind of hampers his acting range.
Now let’s address the anti-Semitic concerns. The Passion does portray a handful of Jewish religious leaders as instigators for Jesus’ eventual crucifixion, but there are also Jewish leaders who denounce their actions and just as many people bemoaning the torture of Jesus as there are calling for it. Who really comes off looking bad are the Romans. Excluding the efforts to make Pilate look apprehensive, the Roman soldiers are always seen kicking, punching, whipping, spitting on Jesus and laughing manically with their yellow teeth.
And like I said before, most people will be extremely satisfied with the film because it’s hard to find a person who doesn’t have an opinion on Jesus. Gibson is counting on audiences to walk in and fill in the holes of the character so that The Passion is more affecting. Gibson’s film is worthy spectacle, and despite the vacuum of character I did get choked up four separate times, mostly involving Jesus and his mother. The Passion is a well-made and well-intentioned film that will hit the right notes for many. I just wish there were more to it than spectacle. I really do.
Nate’s Grade: C
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
In 2004, Mel Gibson made an R-rated foreign film that was two hours of savage brutality against Jesus, and it wound up being one of the biggest box-office hits of the decade and forged a trail for other Hollywood execs to chase after a “faith-based audience.” It could be said that this grisly movie gave the people what they wanted, and apparently what they wanted was to watch their messiah suffer physical feats that should have killed any mortal five times over. Twenty years later, The Passion of the Christ is still a curiosity, a movie with so much technical quality and devotion to a specific purpose, but that purpose is so narrow: make people feel bad. If you were being charitable, you could argue that the sacrifice of Jesus is felt stronger when every whipping, beating, scourging, and blood-letting is endured from the audience. Except I don’t believe this, because that assumes that more time spent on visual carnage equals more appreciation earned, as if our empathy has an equation. The emphasis on the death of Jesus feels like a telling insight into certain elements within mainstream American religious culture, where the focus is on violence and loss and less so the resurrection of Jesus, wherein the man conquers death and preaches forgiveness of sin for all mankind. It’s the preoccupation with grievance and brutish power over the helping of others different and less fortunate from ourselves. I’m not going to say the hard-core fans of The Passion of the Christ are valuing the wrong spiritual ideals, but it was this Jesus guy who did say everyone should love thy neighbor as thyself.
This is going to be a rarity for my twenty-year re-review series, but I agree almost one hundred percent with everything I wrote in 2004. I can’t really improve upon that analysis and my explanation for the faults of the movie and its spiritual shortcomings. Some of these lines are still terrific: “…Twist its message into a Sunday school snuff film,” “The only thing The Passion shows us about the Son of God is that he sure knew how to take a whippin’,” and, “Mad Mel has the urge to scourge.” More time is spent obsessing over the blood of Jesus than any of his words. I’m still debating the exact legacy of this movie besides as a harbinger of a wider Christian marketplace as well as Jim Caviezel’s own god complex. Gibson only directed two other movies after, 2006’s Apocalypto and 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge. His personal failings also became hard for many to ignore after his anti-semetic drunken ramblings and allegations of abuse, relegating him chiefly to direct-to-streaming (13 films from 2020-2023). In many ways, The Passion of the Christ represents Gibson at his height of powers within Hollywood, and it was accomplished outside the studio system who thought he was crazy, though he proved them right for different reasons.
Some strange Passion facts lost to history. 1) This movie actually killed a viewer. During the crucifixion scene, a man suffered a fatal heart attack and later died. Sure, the man’s genetics and life-style choices are more likely at fault here, but had this man not seen Gibson’s movie he might have survived or at least been in a better capacity to deal with his eventual heart attack symptoms. 2) Gibson attempted to re-edit the movie for a PG-13 theatrical re-release in 2005, trimming five minutes of some of the more gruesome violence, yet the MPAA still said the movie was keeping its R-rating. 3) During filming, Caviezel was literally struck by lightning. 4) A sequel has been in development for almost twenty years, confirmed by Gibson’s Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace in 2016. In 2023, Gibson revealed he has multiple versions of the sequel script in the works, including one that visits hell. Caveizel has predicted the possible sequel would be the “biggest film in history,” but this is the same guy who declared Donald Trump as the modern-day Noah, so maybe let’s not regard this guy too credibly with his opinions.
The challenge with any on-screen depiction of Jesus is fleshing him out as man and god. Only focusing on one obscures the complexity of characterization, denying filmgoers a more engaging examination of the key figure of Christianity. I’d still advise everyone to watch Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ for all the important elements that The Passion of the Christ lacks. This is a movie designed only for brutal spectacle and nothing more, and it’s just as tedious and empty now as it was twenty years ago. Apparently, Scorsese feels like he still has more to say on the subject and is planning another Jesus movie based on a 2016 book by Shūsaku Endō, the same author of the source material for Silence. While I would maintain that Scorsese has already made the greatest movie about Jesus, as well as the greatest movie about the exploration and challenge of reckoning with faith (2016’s Silence), who am I to deny one of our living legends another bite from the apple? It’ll certainly be more spiritually meaningful than watching an execution of Jesus for two miserable hours designed as enlightenment.
Re-Review Grade: C-
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It Lives Inside (2023)
It’s a horror movie as examination on assimilation from an Indian-American standpoint and giving a different culture its own big screen boogeyman. It Lives Inside is about Samidha, a teenage Indian-American girl trying to fit in her suburban high school, which often involves her downplaying or abandoning her cultural roots and practices. She’s all but abandoned her childhood friend Tamira as an impediment to her social acceptance by the cool Caucasian kids. She then feels even more guilt when her friend goes missing and might be possessed by a demon of Hindu lore that feeds off negative energy (no wonder it’s targeting high school girls). This is the latest movie that uses the vehicle of horror to examine more personal themes, bringing a specific culture into the forefront and allowing wider audiences to learn from the horrors of trying to fit in when you feel different and ashamed for being different. As Samidha searches for her missing friend, she’s also forced to seek out help from her disapproving and more conservative mother, a woman steeped in her heritage. Where the movie left me wanting was in the exploration of its specific mythology as well as the development of the divide between mother and first-generation daughter. That’s the core of what can make this movie special, and yet what we get are more scenes of jump scare PG-13 terror and canoodling. It’s not a terribly scary movie, though the eventual creature design has some nicely unsettling angles. There’s one moment of hair floating that really unnerved me, but most of the movie falls on generic atmosphere effects. There are so many sequences of one high school English teacher working alone in the school (where is anyone else? Does this woman do nothing else?) and running through corridors as lights flicker and sinister sounds linger. By the end, It Lives Inside is an acceptable horror movie that would have benefited from spending more of its time on the perosnal elements that would have made it stand out rather than fit in with the horror crowd.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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The Iron Claw (2023)
The true story of a wrestling family that was beset by so much tragedy it might as well be a lost Shakespearean drama. The Iron Claw follows the Von Erich brothers, lead by oldest brother Kevin (Zac Efron). They’re all competing for their father’s approval, the same man who gives them updated son rankings at the breakfast table. Kevin and his three brothers (Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Stanley Simons) are living out their old man’s dream of being a professional wrestler of significant renown, and the appeal of the brothers is as a fighting family of wrestlers rather than as single entities. In essence, they don’t seem to matter unless as a collective. This leads to plenty of misguided attempts to curry favor with their toxic parent and a pile-up of tragedies that would be absurd if it wasn’t actually true. The issue for me was that I didn’t see the other brothers as fully dimensional characters, and side stories like Kevin’s romantic escapades felt lacking as illumination. It felt for much of its running time like a good movie but one going about its business with a little too much expediency. I was interested but felt like the brothers were more reflections on Kevin than their own separate characters. However, the film’s last twenty minutes are by far the best part and finally find a way to elevate the drama as well as better personalize it through Kevin’s grief and survivor’s guilt. “It’s okay dad, we’ll be your brothers,” spoken with the innocent yearning of a child, pretty much broke me and caused me to sob. If you’re a fan of 1980s professional wrestling, or meaty dramas about the suffering of strong men from strong men, I’m here to assure you that it’s okay to cry here. The Iron Claw is a fine drama that comes together by its end for an off-the-ropes wallop, and the lingering sadness is one that will be hard to shake for hours.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Dream Scenario (2023)
Imagine being the most famous person in the world for doing absolutely nothing, where every person can see you every night, each of them feeling like they own a little piece of you. Now imagine that person being a balding, middle-aged father and professor of evolutionary biology, a man so dull that nobody would likely remember him except that he keeps popping up in everyone’s dreams on a nightly basis. The man in question is Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), a man so boring that his literal dream is to publish a book on the evolutionary biology of ants. Dream Scenario begins as a sci-fi curiosity and then becomes an intriguing expose on sudden fame as well as the most cogent argument yet on the hazards of a “cancel culture” that too many comedians cling to as an excuse for not being funny. I kept thinking back more and more on the movie, rolling over sequences and choices, as it refused to leave my waking thoughts.
There’s an obvious and easy parallel between what Paul is experiencing and general celebrity, where members of the public have an individual relationship to a person but divorced from the reality of who that person may or may not be, as well as one-sided. These are strangers to Paul but so many feel like they know him, like a neighbor, or a lover, or a threat to someone’s mental stability. It’s an ongoing struggle of rationalizing different perceptions of a person, where so many project what they want onto this smiling bald man who has become a national figure of fascination. Given the premise, I completely understand. I can only fleetingly remember my own dreams maybe once every two weeks, but if a real person, who I’ve never met, continued to make strange cameo appearances, I would definitely investigate further. That’s a genuine mystery that could break through even our jaded media culture. The big question would be why is this happening but the more interesting question is why this guy? What makes him special? I was always engaged with the movie and impressed by the turns the screenplay made, providing insightful glimpses into human nature that felt relatable as well as realistic in response to this phenomenon. Of course there are certain people that view him as some angel, whereas others a devil needing to be stopped, and some an unknown being they’ve projected sexual feelings onto. There’s a very funny and also deeply uncomfortable sequence where a young woman tries to recreate her erotic dream with the real Paul, and of course the real Paul fails to measure up to the fantasy mystique. I was also intrigued by the question of why Paul does not appear in his wife’s dreams. The screenplay by director Kristoffer Borgli is consistently well-developed and full of changes and challenges that had me glued, though I should warn you, dear reader, that you will never be given a concrete reason why the dreams began.
The first half of the movie is Paul’s ascension, enjoying his notoriety and the new access he has to getting published and achieving his dreams that felt stalled for too long. It’s the positivity of the fame and untapped desire of the general public, with the assorted weirdo from time to time. Then there is a significant turn, and the movie gives a clear theory as to why, and the dreams all of a sudden now become nightmares. Instead of Paul just being in the background of everyone’s dreams, acting as an observer rarely doing much of anything, now he’s become a malevolent force, a stalker, a killer, or worse. Now the general public fears this man and fears going to sleep with the certainty that Paul will be waiting for them to perform any manner of terrors. Paul is placed on sabbatical after his very presence on campus drives students away into hyperventilating. Paul is genuinely pained by this but also painfully annoyed, as he argues he cannot be responsible for the dreams of others and what happens inside every individual subconscious. He hasn’t really done anything in physical reality, and yet he’s kicked out of restaurants, shunned by his colleagues, and his endorsement deals are drying up with the exception of the alt-right.
The premise also allows for plenty of beguiling and funny and creative imagery. Since we’re dealing with a wealth of dreams, this allows the filmmakers a near limitless opportunity to hit whatever themes or oddities they desire under the pretense of retelling a dream. We get the mundane, we get the horrifying, which plays out with some effective jump scares, and we get plenty of surreal moments. This artistic choice allows for an ending that feels ambiguously bittersweet but also tragically fitting and satisfying. It felt exactly how it should have been. It reminded me of Being John Malkovich, and truthfully this movie feels like a lost Charlie Kaufman story. The consumerism satire is also right on target, from Paul’s initial agency meeting trying to get him to endorse Sprite in the dreams of millions, to the application of harnessing people’s dreams to sell products or further one’s social media branding. It feels topical while also a sadly logical extension.
For me, this is the most interesting satirical broadside yet exploring the concept of “cancel culture,” a term often so overblown to the point of being a nonsensical catch-all for consequences. Paul’s sense of grievance is real, but the movie doesn’t present him as a martyr and instead chooses to use this transition, from curiosity to pariah and national nightmare, to better satirize people’s attempts to manipulate their own flailing narratives (see: ukulele apology videos, self-imposed exile for “listening,” late-night Ambien usage, etc.). After Paul has a nightmare of his own, starring himself, he records a manic tear-filled self-pittying apology to appeal to his detractors saying he now too has those “lived experiences” with transparent insincerity, and of course it doesn’t appeal to anyone and he’s even more ridiculed and despised. I enjoy that the movie doesn’t want to dwell in the tragedy or general unfairness of this turn of events with Paul becoming the world’s most hated man. Paul also refuses to accommodate or acknowledge other people’s discomfort, overriding security concerns and repeatedly placing his family and children in uncomfortable if not humiliating positions because dear old dad just refuses to accept mollifying his behavior for their social benefit. Paul was riding high on the ego trips of the unexpected attention and adoration, and occasional starry-eyed groupie, and he’s fighting to regain that same level of credibility and status before he retreats back to being a punchline, an asterisk in history, a trivia answer on a game card.
Dream Scenario tackles the rise-and-fall of overnight celebrity and sudden fame and adds an intriguing sci-fi spin as well as some arty yet accessible meditation and fun satirical social commentary. It asks us to contemplate the nature of our dreams and how we might behave under this extraordinary scenario, whether as one of the people befuddled by the dreams or the even larger befuddlement of the person appearing in all those millions of dreams. It asks us to reconsider perception, as well as how well others may know us, as well as what we look for with our own dreams. When Paul’s wife (Julianne Nicholson) admits her own fantasy and it involves him wearing an old 80s costume that she found to be surprisingly sexy, he’s a little let down that this is all she has for her dreams, and that to me seems like a fine central theme to ground this movie. It’s easy to go crazy with limitless possibilities, but we often return to what matters most, and that’s often idiosyncratic, personal, and perhaps underwhelming to an outsider who lacks the context and, sorry, lived experiences. Our dreams can help define us but not necessarily as extravagant escapism. It can also be the ordinary, the unusual, the moments and people we just want to revisit a little longer. Now imagine this hijacked, weaponized, and then hacked into ad space, and you have Dream Scenario, a peculiar yet arresting little movie that has lots of intriguing ideas to share.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Bottoms (2023)
I really wanted to like Bottoms, a sex comedy told from the perspective of a marginalized group literally learning how to defend themselves and develop a sisterhood of support and violence. It’s a high school comedy with two very winning leads, Rachel Sennot (also co-writer) and Ayo Edebiri, and it’s from the same director as Sennot’s breakout 2020 indie, Shiva Baby. It’s just that the comedy is working so hard, the energy level is cranked up so high, but the results tipped more into the realm of obnoxious characters overselling lackluster material. The two main characters create a school fight club under the guise of teaching their fellow female students how to defend themselves, though the real reason is to impress and then sleep with the hot cheerleaders that they’re crushing over. This also leads to them soaking up all the physical tumbles and sweaty wrestling contact with their crushes. The sleaze of the premise feels a little too easily excused in a misplaced “girls can do it too” sentiment. The explosions of real violence, including actual literal bloody deaths, doesn’t feel properly integrated into the tone of this heightened universe. There’s so much aggressive exaggeration that it’s hard to find a baseline here. It almost feels one or two jokes away from a spoof movie. There are no straight characters (not hetero-normative) characters to better play off the stilted silliness. I just don’t think the jokes and callbacks are there. The banter is occasionally amusing but it tapers off too often like an improv jag slowly running out of steam. It’s not a good sign during the end credit blooper reels when the outtakes prove that only one or two actors may actually be skilled at improv, one of them perplexingly retired NFL athlete Marshawn Lynch who is actually quite funny as a laid back teacher learning about feminism. The ensemble is filled with good actors having real fun playing such arch spins on high school movie stereotypes, and I applaud reclaiming the high school sex comedy from a modern lesbian perspective, but unfortunately Bottoms didn’t work up that many genuine laughs from me.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Aporia (2023)
In writer/director Jared Moshe’s low-budget indie film Aporia, the Trolley Debate, killing one person in order to spare the lives of, presumably, more people or a greater number of people, gets its own movie in a thoughtful and provocative little indie. The thorny ethical questions are given their rightful due, and this is where Aporia really shines for me, as a small-scale sci-fi story with Big Ideas bursting forth and the understanding to give them adequate space for satisfying contemplation. It bowled me over.
Sophie (Judy Greer) is still very much not over the death of her husband, Malcolm (Ed Gathegi). He was killed by a drunk driver months ago and that driver also seems to have escaped justice. Sophie is left alone to raise their pre-teen daughter Riley. That’s where Jabir (Payman Maadi) comes in. He was a friend of Malcolm and reveals they had been working on a prototype for a time machine in secret. The machine has its own limits. It sends a photon particle back in time, which will kill any living creature that it materializes inside. All you need are the time, place, and coordinates and you could kill anyone. The further in time you need to go the more power the machine will have to draw. Sophie is beside herself but taken over with the excitement of possibly bringing her husband back to life. All it takes is murder.
What the characters have created is essentially a magic gun that can shoot into the past, which means the only use for this time travel device is to take life. They will only ever be murderers if they decide to use it, and so it becomes a question over under what circumstances would it be permissible to utilize this weapon. The first victim is obvious, the man responsible for the death of Sophie’s husband, and like magic he returns good as new without any memory of ever having been gone. It’s an important rule introduced that only the people in the room with the machine will still have memories of the previous timelines before the space-time revisions. This is a good move for an obvious dramatic one, so that the characters will be able to be impacted by the changes because they can recall a life without them, but it also sneakily supplies another complication. Each one of them has the potential to use the machine alone and thus never having the others realize what they had done. It’s one more tricky ethical question, asking whether you would betray the trust of someone close to you if you could get away with it. Naturally, the characters debate the merits of when to use the machine and when not to, with each new use further complicating matters because the next change can always destabilize the state of things, and then it’s a chain of changes to try and find the right order, and that leaves a trail of bodies littering the past.
It wouldn’t be a compelling time travel narrative without the ole’ favorite of unintended consequences. By removing the drunk driver before he could ever fatefully get behind the wheel, Sophie has brought back her husband and felt like the cost was negligible, as that driver in present-day is an abusive husband who gets drunk and yells at his family while he escapes justice for manslaughter. However, once you start pulling at the knots of the human timeline, some interesting and unexpected results can happen. That same man has been removed but his family isn’t necessarily better off. Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), the widowed wife, is struggling to make ends meet as a single mom with a daughter (Veda Cienfuegos) suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS). They are deep in medical debt. It seems that the least this man did was help provide a financial cushion. Without his presence, they’ve had to go it alone and they’re broke and likely unable to continue paying the costly medical treatment for this adolescent girl. Because of Sophie’s desire to bring back her husband, she has doomed this innocent victim. Sophie’s guilt causes her to seek out the family, check up on them, and upon the discovery of their hardships, befriend mother and daughter and find a way to make things right as the unknowing perpetrator of their dilemma. From there it becomes a game of thinking how she can erase their misfortune while keeping her own husband.
I will discuss one significant turn because I think it’s an evocative example of the thought-provoking nature of the screenplay, but I will warn you there will be significant spoilers. If you wish to remain pure, dear reader, then skip to the next paragraph. The team comes up with a new name to eliminate to solve the fortunes for Kara and her daughter, a man who swindled her, a Ponzi scam artist who left her penniless and forced to close her bakery. Seems open and shut with an obvious bad person, thus an easy solution. But you should recognize there are no easy solutions in stories untangling timeline interference. All of a sudden, Sophie and Malcolm come home to discover that they have a completely different child. Their teen daughter is now a teenage boy with a different personality and different interests. How? How could eliminating one bad man in a completely different state change the course of history enough that their child has been affected? They debate the possibilities, perhaps something as small as a different sperm winning out or conceiving her on a different day or month, but the results are irrefutable. While their child is alive in this timeline, in a very real sense they have both now lost their daughter. The person they raised together, loved, and helped shape has been eliminated and the grief is palatable. This new child is a stranger, but they too are strangers to this child. They are absent formative memories and do not have the shared connections and history to draw upon. When Sophie tries to comfort this new Riley, she doesn’t know what may work because she doesn’t know anything about this child. I don’t think the filmmakers are making negative commentary on adoption, which is essentially what this scenario mirrors, but the grief goes two ways. They mourn the child blinked from existence, and this child also had his parents blinked from existence and replaced with lookalikes, they just don’t understand it yet. It’s this escalation that personalizes the unintended harm of what they’re doing and sets the stage for the final decision.
The ending is going to divide people but it felt note-perfect for me. It ends on an emotional high of coming to terms with their culpability but also on accepting uncertainty. We end on an ambiguous note, absent a resolution about the final extension of the final decision. I think it works very well not just in trying to have it multiple ways but because after being in the know, it puts the characters, and vicariously the viewer, in a state of vulnerability and the acceptance of staying there. It’s an uplifting conclusion thematically because it’s about accepting loss but also accepting our limitations. The final conversations are inadequate because how can you summarize a life with another person, whether a lover or a friend or a spouse, into just a handful of clumsy words. Our vocabulary does us a disservice when it comes to expressing the glorious debt we feel having had these people in our lives. That is why the movie ends on an emotional high for me and really comes together, personalizing the ethical conundrums.
Greer (Halloween Kills) has had a long career as a supporting actress, usually the funny but supportive best friend to the lead, and as an outstanding voice actress (Archer, Let’s Go Luna), but rarely does she get a meaty dramatic lead role. She’s terrific here and serves as our dramatic anchor through the turbulent changes and moral soul-searching. She is our reflection, and Greer’s emotional journey is well encapsulated in a performance that doesn’t go big into histrionics but is more carefully grounded and natural. I don’t think the movie would work as well, at least on an emotional level, without her.
Is Aporia a perfect film? Well, very few are, and the movie could have even more development, leaving possibilities behind given its tantalizing premise. I’m glad the movie didn’t go overboard into some slapdash thriller territory and instead grounded its science fiction timeline wonkiness into engaging human drama about loss, sacrifice, and acceptance. As my pal Eric Muller said, Aporia likely works better as a screenplay than a finished film, though this discounts the heavy-hearted contributions of Greer. I’m glad this movie emphasized its ideas and provided the time to really dwell in them, even if the movie is only about 90 minutes altogether. Aporia is a deeply engaging movie that worked on all levels for me, enriching emotions and satisfying intellect, and is definitely worth the discovery.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Love Again (2023)/ Rye Lane (2023)
Romantic comedies used to be a powerhouse of Hollywood and now it feels like they’ve all disappeared from your local multiplex. Rom-coms gave us industry stars, careers, and household names, the likes of modern rom-com royalty including Nora Ephron, Cameron Crowe, Nancy Myers, and Richard Curtis, and two of which have screenwriting Oscars. It’s a subgenre that is quite often dismissed, usually by condescending men, let’s be honest, as empty-headed maudlin wish-fulfillment. It’s no coincidence that rom-coms are looked at as more of a female-driven genre aimed at a more female-centric audience, so the contemptuous pile-ons from men can often seem like insights into masculine social allowances for empathy. I’ve long been a fan of romantic comedies, even written a few, because they’re just so damn likable. It’s a foundational principle of the genre, to get you to like the characters, their interactions, their courtships. The movie is romancing its audience at the same time the characters are romancing one another, and who doesn’t like to be swooned? Two 2023 rom-coms, Love Again and Rye Lane, showcase directly how appealing and heartwarming and swoon-worthy that excellent rom-coms can prove, and how middling when its genre is taken for granted.
With Love Again, we follow Mira (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) who is mourning the loss of her deceased boyfriend. She continues to send texts to his old phone number explaining the depth of her grief and confused feelings trying to get her life back on track. It just so happens that her dead boyfriend’s old number has been given to the work phone for Rob (Sam Heughan), a journalist who is getting over his own recent heartbreak. He takes a curiosity to this stranger sending him such heartfelt texts, and after meeting her from afar, decides to try to get to know her better, resulting in the two of them romancing but with the Big Awful Dreadful Secret always waiting to be discovered for the unfortunate Act Two break.
I don’t understand Love Again, like at all. I understand what happened on screen in a literal sense but the reasoning behind it, the storytelling choices, are so bizarre and foreign to me that it feels like a group of aliens who only learned human behavior through the worst direct-to-streaming rom-coms tried their hand at recreating human interactions and falling in love. The very premise seems almost like an afterthought, so why even go through the trouble of this labored conceit? The fact that Rob has been receiving this sad woman’s grief texts could present a real ethical conundrum, beyond the fact that he knows her private thoughts and feelings and he doesn’t even know who she is. The natural angle would be for him to take it upon herself to do small things to make her feel better, maybe from the outside perspective of a secret admirer, a position he never intends to go beyond. The issue becomes when he starts to transition to romance, because now he has a head start that she didn’t even realize was happening. Also, he could make use of the information that she’s been unknowingly feeding him, about favorite foods or interests, to better sweep her off her feet, but that also places us in an ethically dubious scenario of emotional manipulation, akin to what Bill Murray tries to get away with the loops of Groundhog Day. It’s a borderline stalker situation that can easily go too far. The fact that Love Again doesn’t even cover these most obvious plot scenarios makes the entire premise feel perfunctory; it could have been anything that accidentally drew Rob to Mira because it’s so unimaginative and, simply, bad at its own inept storytelling. It’s so baffling and feels like it was made with contempt for its audience, believing that they would accept anything as long as the genre parts were covered, so Love Again’s story is the barest of pained efforts.
Love Again is bad in ways that are despairing while also being mind-numbing. You get a sense early on how little feel for the material the filmmakers have, at how poorly the scenes are at disguising their creaky plot mechanics from the viewer. It’s the kind of movie where a kindly bartender introduces himself and seconds later is all, “I sure feel bad about your dead boyfriend.” It’s that kind of movie, the kind with supportive friends and work colleagues who are only there to provide words of encouragement or set the scene in the most transparent and lazy way, “You know you haven’t been the same since…” to better tee up the audience as far as what is important. All movies do this but the exposition needs to be masked with character details or comedic exploits, and the better to visualize a person’s life.
This is also the kind of comedy where the jokes amount to the first idea of every scene, where there is never a subversion or even an escalation or a comedic situation. In this world, Nick Jonas makes a cameo as a bad date who is vainly obsessed with bodybuilding and that is the only joke you’ll get with that appearance to the end. It’s the kind of movie where Mira’s “quirk” is asking dates would you rather scenarios that aren’t even raunchy or extreme or even that telling of her own personality. Her other personality trait is that she likes, get this, putting her French fries on her cheeseburger (what a crazy bohemian!). It’s the kind of movie that has Mira as a children’s book author and doesn’t even bother to provide a scene of her demonstrating her storytelling prowess and insight for creating metaphorical-heavy stories to impart important lessons for children. This technique could have been a greater insight into her emotional state without having to rely upon the character just spouting out her feelings. Even worse, the movie doesn’t use her texts to her beloved as a means of getting to know her better. It’s the very premise of this movie, supposedly. These details meant to give the movie its definition, what separates it from the rom-com pack, but what it produces feels so insufficient and haphazard that you wonder if this was a failed genre MadLibs.
It’s also bad that Chopra Jonas (The Citadel) and Heughan (Outlander) have a remarkable lack of chemistry. They’re both good-looking human beings who have previously shown to be quite capable and appealing actors. I do not blame them for the lack of feeling in this movie. They could only do so much with the poorly written characters and the clunky dialogue. Watching them attempt to flirt with this material is like watching two cats try and recreate the H.M.S. Titanic. It’s just not going to work well.
Here’s another example of how poor the filmmakers have developed the elements of their tale. Rob is still mending his broken heart from a fiance that left him a week before their wedding. He is a cynic, although like everything else in this movie, if you push too hard it’s only there as a shallow fixture for story. But if you’re going to make him the cynic, make him believe that love is impossible, it’s a chemical condition of the brain, some delusion, and that this drives his contempt for having to interview Celine Dion, a pop star best known for her soaring ballads about love and sunken ships and hearts going on. He thinks her songs are cheesy and silly, and over the course of the movie, of course he becomes a believer (at least this the movie understands the arc to follow). Again, the most obvious route would be to make him a music critic, someone who decries silly love songs and thinks of them as a destructive drug for the masses. This would make more sense why he’s so irritated at having to cover Dion, and why he would be covering Dion, and it would also make more sense then for his reconsideration. The movie, instead, makes Rob a big fan of… basketball. He loves to watch basketball. Why is this man covering Celine Dion then? If he was going to cover basketball, why not bring his passion for it more into focus, at least as something he can learn from and share with Mira? They share a quick game where she basically says, “I like this game too,” and that’s the rest of this completely underdeveloped characteristic that doesn’t tie back in thematically at all. Again, if you’re going to make this much of Dion’s multiple appearances, including devoting your end credits to having your cast and crew enthusiastically lip sync to her songs, then at least tie her better to your plot.
Ms. Dion doesn’t need me to defend her. She’s a grown woman and can make her own decisions, and I’m sure she was handsomely paid for her contributions in Love Again whose soundtrack features five new songs and six of her past tunes (why not go the jukebox musical route at that volume?), but I need to further explain the awfulness of Love Again’s choices. Late into the movie, Dion discusses her own personal loss, mourning her husband of twenty-plus years who died in 2016. The fact that this real woman is mining her own real tragedy to provide the emotional boost to our bad protagonist in a bad rom-com just feels morally queasy to me. It just feels wrong, especially in the name of such an undeserving character in an undeserving movie for her to have to rehash her own personal grief.
On the other end of the quality spectrum is Rye Lane, a smaller British indie that follows Dom (David Johnsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) through a crazy day and night together across the bounds of South London. She discovers him crying in a toilet stall, a meet-cute so intentionally un-cute. They’re both nursing mixed feelings and unchecked anger over being dumped by their respective exes. Dom discovered his girlfriend cheating on him with his best mate and now he’s scheduled to meet with them both to better clear the air. Yas finally stood up to her neglectful and self-centered sculptor boyfriend but she wants to recollect her favorite record in his flat before she can bid goodbye to him forever. Together, they will help each other through their respective relationship detritus and plot their next steps forward.
What an immensely charming movie Rye Lane is and it’s one that reminds you about the innate pleasure of the rom-com genre when paired with characters we want to get to know better. Thank goodness the screenwriters keenly understand how to develop our protagonists but also make them imminently winning. By establishing both Dom and Yas as reeling from recent breakups, and from such awful people, it makes us want to root for them to regain their sense of composure, dignity, and personal joy. We want them to show up these people who have made them feel so low, and it just so happens that one another will serve as the ultimate and unexpected wingman. I loved it when Yas buddied up next to Dom and pretended to be his very doting and very sexual new paramour as well as press Dom’s former flame on her own cheating ways, shifting the power dynamic. It supercharges the growing friendship between the two of them as well as reconfirm their need to find a partner who can and will go out of their way for them. Watching each of them encourage and aid the other during a time of need and insecurity serves as a reliable provider of satisfaction and a clear path for us to also fall in love with these unique people.
The writing is so quick-witted and charming that simply listening to these revealing and often hilarious conversations is a pleasure. I’m reminded of Richard Linklater’s famously talkative Before trilogy, another all-in-one-day whirlwind romance of two characters exploring a locale while also exploring one another under a limited period of time. It’s a natural structure because it provides a looming urgency but the drama also unfolds more or less in real time with the characters learning about one another at the same pace that the viewer is, and so our emotions feel better attuned as the characters change their perceptions of one another. This is the joy of rom-coms, finding characters you simply want to spend time with because they’re so charming, interesting, and deserving of finding happiness of their own making. Dom and Yas are wonderful characters separately but the right combination together. He’s more nerdy and awkward and she pushes him to be more assertive and confident. She’s less sure of her worth and sets herself up for sabotage in landing a job she might love, and he refuses to let her let herself down. It’s genuinely amusing and heartwarming to watch these two help one another in their time of need.
Rye Lane is also peppered with playful and, at times, chaotic visuals to goose up the talky proceedings. Debut director Raine Allen-Miller will often use quick inserts and playful visual framing to add more pizazz to the presentation, like when Yas and Dom present their recollection of events like narrators to a stage play of their own lives. It’s lively and fun but occasionally the visual inserts and sound design, or perhaps the score itself, felt like added distractions to the appealing core elements of the movie. It was the only annoyance I felt in such an otherwise funny and charming movie boasting such winning performances. It felt a little unnecessary at times and seemed like the filmmakers had doubts that the material and the performances themselves were enough to sell the entertainment of the movie.
Romantic comedies remind me of the old saying, “it’s not the singer, it’s the song.” They’re like many other sub-genres of movies and storytelling itself, complete with expectations and formulas and rules and recognizable parts and pieces that add up to, hopefully, entertainment. In this regard, movies are like a meal, and two people can follow the same recipe with the same ingredients and concoct two totally different final creations. Fans of rom-coms are like fans of any other genre, looking for good storytellers to value their time and give them an escape. It’s not just that the familiar elements are included, it’s what is done with them, the care and affection from the storytellers, chiefly creating characters that you can fall in love with and root for their own happiness and fortuitous fortunes.
Love Again is based on the 2016 German film Text For You, itself based on a 2009 German novel (I watched the trailer on YouTube, and it’s weird having actors refer to text messages as “SMS-es”). It’s a reminder of how soulless the worst of these lazy rom-coms can feel when producers look to check boxes to fulfill some list of genre requirements that they think will satisfy the lowest expectations of a gullible fan base they can exploit. Rye Lane is the latest example of the real pleasures of a finely developed rom-com that understands the essential appeal of what makes these movies more than “chick flicks.” Skip Love Again and its ilk and instead feel the pitter-patter of your heart renewed with Rye Lane.
Nate’s Grades:
Love Again: D+
Rye Lane: A-
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Lady Ballers (2023)
Conservative commentator Ben “Debate me!” Shapiro is not the first name you would think of with comedy, at least not intentional humor. His outlet The Daily Wire has begun producing and releasing its own movies, starring the likes of Gina Carano and and Some White Lady as Snow White in their Snow White movie that exists solely because Disney had the temerity to hire a diverse woman to play a fairy tale character. I reviewed 2022’s Shut In, the Daily Wire’s low-budget-friendly contained thriller, and was surprised that much of it worked as a straightforward drama. It’s not enough to get me to watch their school shooting thriller, Run Hide Fight. Next up is one of the worst movies of 2023, Lady Ballers, a sports comedy built upon the idiotic premise that a washed-up high school basketball coach (writer/director Jeremy Boreing) can gather his former male athletes and compete on a newly accepted stage. They will disguise themselves, wearing dresses and wigs though not bothering to shave their beards, and call themselves trans women and waltz to money and glory.
The central joke of Lady Ballers is a mean-spirited perspective deeming trans rights to be little more than a calculated media sideshow of accruing social woke points. To say this movie is transphobic goes without saying and from people who don’t deserve any misspent assumptions of good faith about “starting a dialogue.” In this world, trans people are a confused liberal scam, something that can be solved by kicking a guy who says he thinks he’s a girl in the balls and telling him to get over it. The movie feels like a proverbial kick to the balls for all genders.
Just think about the nature of comedy being one of subversion, of zigging rather than zagging, and the failings of Lady Ballers become even more magnified and odious. The most obvious joke would be these out-of-shape former athletes thinking they could simply throw on dresses and trounce the competition only to find that these women aren’t just good, they’re far better. This would force the characters to reassess their wrong-headed beliefs and learn lessons about being humble, empathetic, and open-minded. But naturally that’s not the worldview that Lady Ballers and The Daily Wire want to reinforce (it’s sad that “empathy” is not a universal goal) because their audience isn’t coming to this movie with a desire to rethink transphobia or gender-based assumptions and general sexism levied against female athletes. They’re coming to have their “anti-woke” feelings coddled and sexist notions soothingly reconfirmed (“Turns out white male of non-exotic sexuality is the only group not being cast by Hollywood these days” – you sure about that?). Because of this starting point, the attempts at comedy don’t really work because it’s forgoing subversion and surprises of the status quo, and continuously punching down, making fun of even recognizing the humanity of trans people or that they simply even exist.
For the reported defenders of women’s sports, the entire premise of Lady Ballers is deeply sexist. The film posits that any man, no matter how out of shape, could competitively destroy a woman in sports. It’s a laughably misguided assertion, bringing to mind a 2019 survey that found 1-in-8 men thought they could win a point in tennis against Serena Williams. The idea that anyone with little experience could contend or even dominate against a female professional athlete who has devoted her life to improving her physical prowess is built on pure misogyny, the notion that men have to be superior to women no matter the context. “Soon all the best women will be men,” says the conniving and morally bankrupt journalist. The filmmakers, and numerous politicians who have become obsessed with policing the genitals of student athletes, style themselves as the defenders of women when they couldn’t care less about women’s sports, and Lady Ballers even makes this very observation as a bad joke, giving the phony advocacy game away. One character responds to the question of what makes a woman a woman with, “They’re just like men, only better. Just shave your legs, tell each other how brave you are for things that require absolutely no physical courage, and don’t be afraid to cry at work.” There’s a montage of the guys attempting all these other sports and instantly dominating all women. Are you sure you don’t actually really despise women, Lady Ballers? That’s what it looks like here. The film’s entire premise is built upon the dumb concept of male superiority regardless of circumstance. You can’t fashion yourself the protector of women while also thinking they must be inherently inferior.
There are so many scattered conservative straw man send-ups that Lady Ballers becomes an unintentionally fascinating profile of what agitates conservative media at the moment, or at least what agitates their easily agitated audience that they’re catering to, whether or not they genuinely believe in the horrors of what they’re stoking and selling. There are jokes about touchy-feely out-of-touch liberals just wanting to resolve matters with hugs. There are jokes about journalists being wholly untrustworthy and callously taking advantage of multiple abortions. There are jokes about evil school teachers indoctrinating students. There are jokes about black teens being untrustworthy criminals who will steal from you. There are jokes about space lasers followed by jokes about Jewish military. There are jokes about considering the MRNA vaccine as part of one’s regular diet, which doesn’t remotely make sense. There are several conservative cameos like Ted Cruz, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and even Shapiro himself that will go over most viewer’s heads, as will references to things like Dylan Mulvaney and Riley Gaines, the woman who tragically finished in fifth place in a swim meet instead of fourth because of a trans athlete. Late in the film, the coach comes to see women as being better caregivers and communicators, and while we’re meant to celebrate his widening perspective, it’s still a window into where the conservative audience easily stoked for this movie thinks that the real important values of women lie, namely putting up with men and making them better people.
And yet, despite myself, I could at least recognize a few passing jokes that kind of work on their own, if you can remove the morally repugnant context of the movie’s aims. Early in the movie, as we’re establishing the teammates as high school athletes, two players are fighting and one responds curtly with, “Your mom’s a catch!” to which the other player adds, “She’s your mom too!” In the same scene, the players plead for the coach to inspire them, and he shrugs and says, “I already threw three chairs on the sidelines, pal, I don’t know what else you want from me.” I think I actually chuckled at that line. The ongoing character definition of two players being twins from sharing fathers who shared the same mother at the same time is at least something outlandishly memorable at the expense of its dumb characters rather than a group of people. One character’s psychotic obsession against badgers based upon his high school mascot has some potential and makes for some weird asides that, at least, don’t make fun of trans people. I even kind of like the simplistic sports chant “winners are just losers who win” as a reflexive joke. When the evil yet sexually voracious journalist lady, who has been engaging in an affair with our coach, slaps him hard, she adds the helpful aside, “These are not sexy slaps.” The concluding game involves inviting little girls to take the place of our scheming men, and it’s played as a heartwarming act of valuing sportsmanship, and then the newscasters reveal the little girls lost by 400 points, not because they’re girls but because it was children versus grown adults. It’s as if someone who at least had a passing understanding of some comedy punched up some of these lines and situations, which makes the rest of Lady Ballers that much more embarrassing.
However, is finding tiny slivers of comedic merit a critical fool’s errand considering the despicable worldview and disingenuous intent of Lady Ballers? I’m reminded of all the film historians and academics that praised the technical merits and storytelling methods of Leni Riefenstahl’s anti-semitic “documentary” Triumph of the Will or D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Maybe you can objectively analyze Griffith’s use of zooms and cross-cutting and modern storytelling techniques in his 1915 silent era blockbuster, or you could examine the deplorable racism and the fact that the movie served as a rebirth for the KKK’s membership and a new era in segregationist terrorism. It all depends on the individual viewer and their tolerance for overlooking offense, but it’s hard for me to venerate well-designed or executed pieces of a diseased whole. This is not to say Lady Ballers is on the same filmmaking wavelength as Griffith or Riefenstahl; it’s a dumb sports comedy that wishes it was a second-rate Zucker-Abrahams movie. The bar is considerably low, infinitesimally low for this movie considering its target audience and targets, and yet this movie trips over even the mildest of expectations. Lady Ballers only confirms that a comedy made by people who don’t understand comedy can only ever be limited in its funny, especially when its built upon a premise radiating seething ignorance.
Nate’s Grade: D
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Alternate Opinion: Lady Ballers Guest Essay
My friend and writing partner Ben Bailey asked me to host an extensive essay he was compelled to write after watching Ben Shapiro’s deeply disingenuous and presumably laugh-free sports comedy, Lady Ballers, a movie built upon not just transphobia but also misogyny. I plan on watching this movie as well because of course it will be one of the worst movies of the year and thus I’ll need to analyze these things for you to spare you, dear reader. In the mean time, enjoy Ben’s monumental take-down on the movie, its terms and goals, and the disingenuous nature of the toxic conservative media ecosystem.
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“Trigger Warning: A Woke Soy Cuck is About to Talk About Lady Ballers“
By Ben Bailey
So, Lady Ballers is a thing. If you haven’t heard of it, or of Ben Shapiro’s right wing Daily Wire production company, I envy your life and your ability to avoid psychic pain. For the rest of you, maybe you’ve seen the trailer or some reaction videos on YouTube, and then you likely did what most rational people would do and casually dismissed it as something you will never have any reason to watch. At least I assume most people will never watch Lady Ballers because most people don’t have a subscription to Daily Wire+ or the wherewithal to actively seek it out through other quasi-legal means, but I watched it, and if only to justify the effort of doing so, I decided to commandeer my good friend’s blog for a bit to talk about it. You should know that I insisted he watch it, because even though I cited him as a friend just now, I secretly hate him and only want bad things for him.
Lady Ballers is the story of the whitest basketball team you’ve ever seen in your life deciding to take advantage of our modern “woke obsession” with regarding trans people as human beings with basic dignity by pretending to identify as women so that they can compete in women’s sports, where they will obviously dominate due to their manly testosterone being the natural kryptonite to weak lady estrogen. If you are as exhausted reading that synopsis as I became writing it, rest assured that the rest of this isn’t actually going to be much of a traditional review of the film on its cinematic merits, because that would be completely pointless. If you’ve seen the trailer and know anything about the people who made it, you already know it’s bad. It’s not funny, its amateurish and just generally poorly made, because it was made by unfunny amateurs who don’t know how to make anything good. I will touch on quality issues here and there, but mostly I want to focus on what the film represents in the larger cultural and political context in which it is being presented. What is the point of Lady Ballers, and what does its form and function say about the bigots behind it and the zeitgeist they so desperately wish to influence?
I also want to stress at the outset that the level of critical analysis I am about to apply to Lady Ballers should not be seen as any attempt to elevate it to the level of art worth engaging with or expanding any intellectual strain to deconstruct. Just by talking about this movie, or even calling this loose assortment of tired hate-filled nonsense a movie, might leave the erroneous impression that Lady Ballers is, in any way, inherently interesting. It is not. It is in fact, beyond the novelty of its miserably cynical polemic, a very boring thing that I would defy most people not already tuned into its disgusting message to even sit through (and frankly I bet most of its target audience would find it difficult as well).
Let’s start with Ben Shapiro, the public face of the Daily Wire brand, who appears briefly in a cameo as a referee at one of the games to deliver a line that unintentionally reveals more about him and this movie than anything else in it, flatly stating that he’s just getting paid to be here and doesn’t actually care about anything going on. Ben Shapiro is a grifter, and almost certainly a bad person who probably believes a lot of terrible things about people, but I say probably because you can never be sure with someone like Ben if he actually believes anything he says or is just saying what he needs to say to appeal to an audience of people as bad as he is presenting himself to be. The science is not yet in on whether he is biologically a piece of shit, but he clearly identifies as one, and just as he seems to regard trans identification according to his film, he’s only doing it for the clout and the money. Whether or not Shapiro actually believes any of his own hate-filled rhetoric is immaterial to his main goal, which is raking in money from the suckers in his audience who very much do believe it, and the reason we know this for sure, is because he just made a movie called Lady Ballers.
You see, in a recent interview about the movie on his website, Shapiro revealed that the original intention for Lady Ballers was not creating a kind of dumb, raunchy, shocking for its own sake comedy that he would almost certainly hate if he hadn’t made it himself, but rather, a hard-hitting documentary focusing on his favorite fake culture war controversy. The plan was to have cis-gendered men actually pretend to identify as women in order to infiltrate women’s sports for real and prove that all the so-called trans-women currently doing it were just liars like them trying to get a hairy leg up on the competition. The problem apparently became immediately obvious when they found that the standards for applying to women’s sports as trans-women were much higher than any of their stooges were willing to meet, as they weren’t ready to undergo the hormone treatments, surgeries, and other little details required to prove that they weren’t just a bunch of assholes trying to co-opt something they don’t care about in order to score political points with MAGA douchebags. You get it, right? It’s the one legitimately fascinating thing about Lady Ballers, that its very existence in its current form invalidates its entire thematic premise. They had to make a fictional “comedy” version of the story they wanted to tell because it was impossible to present the thing they claim to believe is actually true in any way that could qualify as a documentary even by their incredibly low standards. As Shapiro is fond of saying, facts don’t care about feelings, and in this case, that appears to be true.
But of course, that didn’t stop them, so they went ahead and made Lady Ballers, and I could go on for quite a while listing off all the transphobia and misogyny and racism awash in it, as well as all the stuff that wasn’t deliberately objectionable but still offensively unfunny, but again, what would be the point? More interesting to me is what this movie says about the people who made it and the audience it is targeting and what the perceived existence and marketability of that audience says about us as a country and a species. I always felt that the rise of Donald Trump was less about him than it was about us, that whether he won or lost, or wins again or loses again in 2024, it would be a test of our own moral character for us to pass or fail. Do we accept that this is who we are, or do we actually try to live up to what we all want to believe are our better selves? The vitriol intrinsic to Lady Ballers and the Daily Wire and this whole movement of stoking anti-trans hatred to rile up bigots, ultimately in the hope of pushing them to the polls to support a fascist overthrow of our democracy, just seems to me to be another facet of that test, and how close we are to passing or failing it is the only question worth thinking about.
For a movie supposedly about the topic of trans-people in sports, it is a bit surprising that this movie doesn’t actually feature any depictions of real trans-people in it. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting any portrayal to be positive, but I at least expected there to be a trans-character, if only to take the role of a villain or antagonist representing the thing the movie is railing against. We have the aforementioned cis-men pretending to be trans but otherwise no one who genuinely considers themselves to be trans. Even if you dismiss the authenticity of trans identification and say they just wrongly believe something about their gender, you’d think they would show someone like that in their own movie, right? There’s a brief bit at the end where a character suggests they might be, but only as a quick throwaway ball-kicking joke. If trans people are the bad guys in real life, why are they not the bad guys in this movie that wants you to come away thinking that they are so bad?
More to the point, why are there no trans conservatives in the movie? I know there aren’t that many, but off the top of my head I can think of at least two public examples. Maybe Caitlin Jenner was too big a get for this and just saying that the vaunted star of Can’t Stop The Music, Jack and Jill, and literally no other movies is too good for this is saying something, but what about Blair White? Pretty sure she’s been on the Daily Wire a couple of times, but apparently, they couldn’t get her to show up to provide any kind of cover for the transphobic message. That’s literally what she does for a living, being the trans person willing to sell out her own people for conservative clout, and either they didn’t want her in this for some reason, or even she turned them down. Blair White agreed to appear in a Tom MacDonald music video but turned down Lady Ballers?
That can’t be it. It’s not possible that they even asked them, or ever considered including any trans-people, even as imaginary straw-women to make fun of them, because that would require acknowledging that they are actual people who exist. As the film’s mid-credit stinger suggests, depicting one of the main characters attending Jordan Peterson’s reparative therapy to cure their trans-delusions, for this movie and the ideology behind it to make any sense, trans-people can’t exist, and anyone claiming to be trans is either mentally ill or pulling the same scam as the film’s protagonists. If Jenner had shown up, sure she may have parroted the talking points about keeping sports segregated by the gender binary, but she would have presumably done so with the confidence of a person who clearly believes that they have the right to exist as they are without being accused of being crazy or a liar, which would go against the movie’s larger message that trans-people aren’t just illegitimate as players in sport but illegitimate as people in general. The people behind Lady Ballers are grifters who don’t believe anything, so naturally they assume that everyone else is too, and that includes trans-people, who don’t actually believe what they say about themselves, and are merely grifting a gullible public, just like the Daily Wire is doing.
Designed to work in tandem with freak-outs about Drag Queen Story Hours grooming your kids and doctors prescribing hormone blockers to babies without their consent, the faux controversy about trans-people in sports has always been a thinly-veiled cover for the larger goal of trans erasure, a way to launder openly genocidal rhetoric designed to inspire the very kind of deadly violence against trans-people we’ve seen increase in the last few years as if it were just some completely legitimate concern for the integrity of women’s sports. But Lady Ballers is so blunt and bad at its own messaging that it fails to hide what it needs to hide, giving away the game, no pun intended. Obviously, these people don’t genuinely care about women’s sports; a major running gag in the movie is about how literally no one cares about women’s sports, and the central premise of the movie assumes that any man, regardless of skill, is inherently physically superior to every woman and could beat any women at any sport at any time purely by virtue of being a man.
And I know that sounds like a joke, to the point where you might question my criticizing it in the context of a movie at least intended to be a comedy, but that’s not a joke in this movie. You as the audience are not meant to take the idea that any man is better than all women at all sports as an exaggerated, farcical concept. That is the actual thing you are meant to unironically accept so that the other jokes in the movie work, the underlying rational assumption upon which the other jokes are made relatable. You aren’t meant to laugh at the idea that these men are trouncing these women at the sports the women trained for and the men didn’t, you are meant to laugh at the absurdity that any woman would ever think they could try to go up against any man. A few years ago, there was a poll that found that 1-in-8 men genuinely believed that they could beat Serena Williams in tennis, and this movie was written for them.
If you know who this person is in the picture, I’m sorry.
The virulent misogyny dripping from every corner of Lady Ballers would seem to preclude any genuine regard for the integrity of women’s sports or women in general. The most prominent female character in the film is a conniving reporter colluding with the team’s head coach to cynically milk the “stunning and brave” human interest story for viewers, who casually references her regular abortions as the annoying minor consequence of aggressive promiscuity, you know, the way all women who get abortions do? At one point, one of our “heroes” stares off into the middle distance while spitting out a creepy incel screed sarcastically defining women as just like men but better because they shave their legs, brag about bravery for things that aren’t brave, and aren’t afraid to cry at work, and the next shot is the reporter shrugging and nodding in agreement, as if it was the truest thing ever said and, despite her prior demonstration of assertive hostile feminism, she has absolutely no way to refute it.
Again, you might be saying, these are just jokes. Bad taste jokes, maybe even jokes based on faulty premises that could only be enjoyed by the terrible people who accept those premises, sure, but still, only jokes. But that’s the weird thing about a movie like Lady Ballers that is more preoccupied with its political and cultural message than its service as a functional comedy. The message is not in the service of the comedy, the comedy, such as it is, is in the service of the message. Comedy is about subverting expectations, while cultural polemics are about reaffirming expectations. For instance, if you start your movie with a bunch of characters assuming that simply being men would allow them to dominate women’s sports, one would think the next scene would be them realizing that this was not the case, in a montage of them getting taken down a peg for their sexist hubris. Or you might have an actual trans character presented as a contrast for the absurdity of their fake trans grift. But this movie can’t do any of those things, because to subvert the expectations of its audience of bigoted right-wing morons would defeat the whole point, which is to validate their bigotry and to keep the cash flow coming. The needs of a comedy and the needs of whatever this movie is are diametrically opposed to one another.
Fairly early on in Lady Ballers, before the film’s gender-bending twist, the head coach delivers one of his famously rousing motivational speeches to his team, getting them to chant a motto that will return in the third act: “Winners are just losers who win.” Credit where its due, unlike most of what passes for comedy in the movie, this line at least structurally conforms to be a recognizable joke. It’s not particularly funny or clever, just a superficial rhetorical absurdity, but it also serves as another one of those accidental confessions on the part of the producers. Because if you think about it, losers who win basically describes the Rightwing Influencer Pipeline to which the Daily Wire crew belong.
Also, Ted Cruz cameo.
To the extent that they have won anything, or rather succeeded financially as a grift or culturally as propaganda for a noxious worldview, it has always been with the distinct stench of loser-dom. C.H.U.D.s like Matt Walsh or Michael Knowles speak with all the confidence of people with an actual point, but there’s always this underlying sense that beyond the choir to which they are preaching, the cringe and bluster are obvious to anyone else. When Ben Shapiro tries to own Cardi B and Megan The Stallion’s W.A.P. by questioning whether the titular wetness is a disturbing medical condition, unintentionally revealing to the world that he’s apparently never made his own wife sexually aroused, the self-own, while hilarious, is not even a little surprising. In short, contrary to the utter gob-smacking dearth of actual jokes in their movie, these guys are themselves complete jokes.
And the more important point is that the joke isn’t landing anymore, if it ever did. One need only look to the spectacular failure of Moms For Liberty, a group that tried to ride the wave of transphobia to take local school board elections by storm, only to lose almost every seat they ran for in 2023. If there is any saving grace to Lady Ballers, it is that it decidedly does not feel like the work of people who are or even think they are winning anything. This doesn’t feel like a triumphant victory lap of the Anti-Trans Right, but rather the sad last desperate gasp of a dying movement that was never even a real movement to begin with, the fizzled fart of stale air escaping a punctured basketball, or if you prefer, a balloon used to approximate a fake boob by someone who’s never done drag and didn’t bother to research anything about how to do it right. And that’s good. Not the lack of research but the larger failure of the mission that this movie represents. You still shouldn’t watch it because it sucks.
The thing I’ve always found interesting about Shapiro is that in spite of his horrible takes on everything, he strikes me as someone at least smart and self-aware enough to feel some measure of secret disdain for how his career is dependent upon debasing himself to the kinds of people who boycott M&Ms because the green one isn’t sexy enough anymore. If you didn’t know, he got into the right-wing commentary business after a failed attempt at making it as a screenwriter, and it would seem that the Daily Wire getting into its own film production is at least on some level a way for him to live out the dreams that were robbed of him by his crippling lack of creative talent. I like to think that knowing Lady Ballers is the closest he’s come to the achievement of his lifelong aspirations, and that the actual career he did build for himself is an active impediment to those aspirations trapping him in a cage of his own bullshit from which he can never escape to a land where he is regarded as a legitimate creative person, is the funniest joke of all.
(Addendum: I didn’t have any other place for this, but I did feel I would be disingenuous if I did not mention the one actual good idea in the movie. At one point, the head coach goes to a Hooter’s-esque sports bar but one staffed entirely by men in drag. Of course, in the context of the film this is yet another joke about how men dressed as women are silly and should be dehumanized and presumably executed by the state in the next Trump administration, but out of that context, it’s just a solid concept for a restaurant and I would patronize the hell out of a place like that. Not sure if anyone has ever tried something like it in real life, but if not, they should.)
[Editor’s Note: At the film’s premier, one of the actors was arrested by the FBI and charged with four crimes relating to the January 6 insurrection because of course.]
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Beau is Afraid (2023)
Beau is Afraid is a ramshackle mess of a movie, and that is both the highest compliment and an indictment on its tremendous excess and lack of focus. It’s Ari Aster’s big swing after his modest successes in elevated horror (Hereditary, Midsommar), so the indie maven studio A24 gave him a thirty-million budget and three hours and full artistic reign to do whatever he wanted, and love it or hate it, one has to objectively admit, Aster really went for something all right. I’m still deliberating where that final something falls on the artistic merit equation. There’s undeniable ambition and artistry here, but there’s also so many ideas and moments and bloat, it genuinely reminded me of 2007’s Southland Tales (did your stomach just drop, dear reader?). It’s because both movies are stuffed to the brim with their director’s assorted odd ideas and concepts, as if either man was afraid they were never going to make another movie again and had to awkwardly squeeze in everything they ever wanted into one overburdened project (in Richard Kelly’s case his suspicion might have been correct, as he did only direct one more feature -so far). While I certainly enjoyed -if that is the right word- Aster’s movie more, Beau is Afraid is not an easy movie to love, or enjoy, or even simply sit through, and not just because of its bloated time.
If I had to boil down this sprawling movie into one easy-to-digest concept, it’s about Jewish guilt. If you’re not a fan of feeling uncomfortable or anxious from the intensity of a movie, I would skip this one entirely. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) might as well be a stand-in for the biblical figure of Job for all the cruel punishments and indignities he endures. Just when you think, “Well, it can’t get any worse,” Aster rolls up his sleeves and rises to the challenge and makes things even worse for his pathetic put-upon plebeian. This is a movie of escalating discomfort, chiefly meant to convey the constant state of anxiety that is Beau’s daily existence, and for the first hour or so, Aster works marvelously at making you squirm. It’s a movie less meant to reflect our objective reality and more a projection of one man’s anxious feelings and paranoia, the unsettling urge that everyone secretly hates you and something bad is always ready to lethally strike.
Beau is Afraid is an absurdist comedy of heightened almost screwball proportions, with Beau becoming increasingly frazzled and muttering “Oh no” hundreds of times as fate has it out for him. Small worries become all-consuming, like the simple task of trying to get water to swallow his new prescription medication, and how this eventually spirals to the ransacking of his apartment building, which is also all Beau’s fault, inadvertently, though that won’t mitigate the guilt. There are numerous fears and worries amplified to breaking points, inviting morbid chuckles and nervous titters. Beau sits in his bathtub to stare at an unknown man squeezed against the walls of his ceiling and about to slip and fall. Why is this man there? Why does Beau not immediately leap out of the tub? Why do both men remain fixed in their positions until the inevitable? It’s because it’s a ridiculous paranoid fear manifested into a ridiculous scenario made even more ridiculous. It’s the same with ignoring his mother’s calls only to have a stranger answer her phone to inform Beau that she has been killed and happens to be without a head now. It’s a realistic fear, avoiding phone calls and the draining emotional energy required to answer, and following it up with a consequence of darkly absurdist proportions to make him feel even worse. The movie leaps from one squirm-inducing, grueling sequence to the next, testing your limits and patience. There’s a post-coital revelation debunking, and then confirming, an outlandish worry that made me laugh out loud with tremendous auditory force. What else could I do? It certainly feels like Aster is inviting the audience to laugh at Beau’s pain and tragedy because what other human response can there be but to laugh in the face of unrelenting torment?
Where the movie loses momentum is about halfway through, after Aster has established the drive of the movie, Beau’s attempts to get to his mother’s funeral so they can finally bury her. Every hour he is delayed, Beau is reminded that his mother’s body is rapidly decaying and only furthering her “humiliation” at the hands of Beau’s inaction. The second part of the movie involves Beau recovering from injuries in an upper class family’s home, the same family (Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan) that accidentally ran him over and is now kind of holding him hostage against his weakened will. We have an urgent goal, we have obstacles keeping him from that goal, and this is where the movie continues to work, as each new attempt to escape only confirms how much stranger and dangerous this family unit is. This dynamic plays into the established heightened fears and absurdist complications. It’s keeping him from his goal. But when he does eventually free himself from this hostage scenario, he literally wanders into the woods and discovers a troupe of thespians that refer to themselves as the Orphans of the Forest, and then a theatrical production may or may not present the rest of Beau’s natural life. This was where the movie’s momentum, which had steadily been ratcheting up along with the dark comedy, began to flag, and when I started to worry, then suspect, then confirm my sinking feeling that this all isn’t going to add up to something more cohesive and thought-provoking. It’s really more a movie of sustained memorable moments and unpredictable, tone-shattering twists and turns. Beau is Afraid is unpredictable, and that both works as an asset and eventually as a handicap. That’s because every scene is hammering the same overall thematic point just with a different stylistic arrangement of fears and anxiety. Following this redundant framework, a 130-minute version of this movie world would feasibly have the same thematic impact as the 180-minute version, merely eliminating some of the many detours.
Another nagging aspect of the movie that failed to add up to much more for me was how little Beau seems to matter in his own story. He’s more intended to be the universe’s lone fall guy rather than a person, a victim whose chief characterization is his ongoing victimization. He suffers and that is his identity. Considering the movie is more a loose fable, this can work since Beau is essentially a stand-in for all of humanity, but there are more personal aspects of him worth exploring in finer detail. The toxic relationship with his mother is worthy of further examination, especially the decades of emotional manipulation to ensure Beau would never replace her with another woman. I wish Aster had devoted more of his 180-minute run time to exploring Beau as a person rather than pitting him against a proverbial assembly line of pies to the face. Phoenix (Joker) has so little to do here except stare wide-eyed, helpless, and mumble as the world constantly befuddles and antagonizes him. It’s a performance purely of pained reaction.
Can I recommend Beau is Afraid? For most viewers, probably not. It’s too long, too sporadic, and doesn’t come to anything cohesive or cumulative or even meaningful beyond a mean-spirited sense of pessimism directed at our titular human punching bag. It’s wildly ambitious and off-putting and bloated and outlandish and the kind of big artistic swing that artists usually only get so rarely in their careers. And yet I have to admire the sheer gusto of Aster making a movie this strange and alienating, a movie that’s constantly altering its very landscape of possibilities, usually to the detriment of Beau’s physical and mental well-being. It is an exhausting experience, so that when the end finally arrives, we, much like Beau, are simply ready to accept the finality we’ve been waiting for after so much abuse. There are moments throughout these ungainly 180 minutes that are sheer brilliance, and sequences that are sheer torture, some of which are on purpose. There’s also just way too much of everything, and without variance or finer exploration of its themes and specific characterization, it becomes a cosmic game of whack-a-mole where you might be the one actually getting hit over the head, and after so long I can’t blame anyone for not enjoying the prolonged experience.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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