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Dune: Part Two (2024)
I wasn’t fully taken with the first Dune movie when it arrived in 2021. It was visually sweeping, with dense world building and careful development of characters and themes, but then it just hit the pause button without any certainty there would be a conclusion. Thankfully, director Denis Villanueuve was able to complete his vision, and what a spectacular science fiction landscape this man has fashioned, visually resplendent but also with a story that deepens and improves on all the promise and setup from 2021. The triumphant of Paul (Timothee Chalamet) becoming a hero and avenging his father from their betrayers is tempered by the tragedy of Paul, becoming the false messiah that will bring about mass genocide. The movie doesn’t hold back in its criticisms of its hero while also providing complexity that makes us root for him but uneasily dread what might become. The narrative structure is easy to follow with Paul ingratiating himself with the native culture, rising to power and influence, and organizing a resistance against the well-funded imperial overlords of Arakis. This is the kind of sumptuous, big screen spectacle with intelligence that is so rare in the Hollywood system, and Villaneuve once again shows his ability to perform artful blockbusters that put him in a rarefied class with hew others. After the first Dune, I was hopeful but a little wary. After the second Dune, I feel like all of my concerns were wiped away.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Hellboy (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released April 2, 2004:
Guillermo del Toro loves things that go bump in the night. The Mexican born writer/director has shown prowess at slimy, spooky creatures with Cronos and 1997’s Mimic. He helmed the 2002 sequel to Blade, which had super vampires whose mouths would open up into four sections with rows of chattering teeth. The man sure loves his movie monsters. del Toro also loved Mike Mignola’s cult comic book Hellboy enough to turn down directing Harry Potter 3 and Blade 3 to ensure he could bring Hellboy to the big screen. Was it worth the sacrifice?
Let me just explain to you the villains of this movie as an example of how ridiculously stupid Hellboy is. The villains are … Nazis. Yes, the tried and true villains everyone can hate – Nazis. But these ain’t yo’ daddy’s Nazis; they’re immortal and led by zombie Rasputin (yes, the Rasputin). They all wish to puncture a hole into another dimension. What’s in this alternate dimension? Why nothing except for a giant floating spaceship that houses, I kid you not, the Seven Gods of Chaos, which all happen to be gigantic space squids. Why would anyone create a universe that has nothing but the imprisoned gods of evil? That seems awfully precarious. How exactly are giant squids going to take over the industrialized, nuclear-age world? Shoot ink at everyone? Sorry, space ink?
Let me not forget a Nazi assassin and his handy dandy arm-length blades. This assassin is also 100 years old and his body is filled entirely with sand. He winds himself up like a big clock. But if his body is filled completely with sand how can the clock gears work inside? You see what the normal audience member has to deal with? Plus these are just the villains, there’s a whole plot left to toil over as well.
The story revolves around a hulking, red demon named Hellboy (veteran character actor Ron Perlman). Hellboy escaped the space squid dimension in the 1940s when the Nazis unsuccessfully tried to open a dimensional hole large enough for your everyday on-the-go space squid. Now, Hellboy is an elite soldier for the government’s Bureau of Paranormal Research. He fights the creepy crawlies. He has to deal with a wide-eyed rookie, the watch of his “father” (John Hurt) and an attempt to rekindle a romance with a mentally troubled fire starter (Selma Blair). Oh yeah, and all the Nazi/Rasputin/space squid stuff mentioned before.
Perlman is really the only redeeming thing about this movie. The makeup is impressive, and he gives an enjoyably droll performance as a man who fights monsters with the same ho-hum-ness as a plumber reacts to clogged sinks. The rest of the acting runs the gamut of either being too serious (I’m looking at you Blair) or just too over-the-top silly (I’m looking at you, league of villains).
Hellboy is strung together with bizarre inanities, flat one-liners, heavy Catholic imagery, conflicting logic and contradictions, ridiculous villains, painful comic relief, half-baked romance and frustratingly ever-changing plot devices.
Watching Hellboy is like playing tag with a kid that keeps making up new rules as he goes (“You can’t tag me; I have an invisibility shield!”), and after a while you lose any interest. Late in the film, the Nazis will all of a sudden decide not to be immortal, and at a very inopportune time. Why? How? I don’t know. Hellboy also gets sudden new powers for some reason. Like he can bring people back to life by whispering otherworldly threats in their ears. For some reason nobody’s clothes burn when they’re set on fire.
Not only does Hellboy frustrate by changing the rules of its world arbitrarily, it will also frustrate out of sheer uninhibited stupidity. How come characters can’t hear or see a pendulum the size of the Chrysler building? How come during a vision of the apocalypse we see a newspaper that actually had the time and staff, during the Apocalypse, to print an issue that reads, “APOCALYPSE”? Why doesn’t Blair use her pyro superpowers immediately to vanquish all the H.P. Lovecraft creatures instead of letting Hellboy foolishly wrestle with them all? The gaping holes in Hellboy are large enough to squeeze a gigantic space squid through.
All this frustration and insanity might have been moot if the action sequences were somewhat thrilling. Sadly, they are not. del Toro’s action sequences seldom matter. There’s such little consequence of what’s going on that the action becomes stiff and lifeless. The first time we see Hellboy chase a creature through city streets it’s a fun experience, but soon the novelty wears off. The overuse of CGI wears down the audience, and after the third or fourth time we watch Hellboy battle the same monster, the audience is ready to go to sleep. There’s little entertainment in the film’s action sequences but just as much frustration and stupidity.
I have never watched a film that induced more eye rolls, shoulder shrugs, raised eyebrows, pained and confused glances and mutters of, “What the hell (boy)?” Comic book aficionados may enjoy the fruits of Hellboy but general audiences will simply shrug. I’m amazed that the majority of film critics seem to think positively about this movie. Maybe I’m the last sane person in an insane world but Hellboy is one of the worst films of the year and one of the craziest films you could ever hope to see in a lifetime.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
When I first saw 2004’s Hellboy, toward the tail end of my undergraduate years that April, I had no real familiarity with the character and went in with my pal, and fellow college newspaper entertainment critic Dan Hille. I went in a blank slate to the grumbling demonic lug created by Mike Mignola. To say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement in my original review. I had an extremely hard time gelling with the world and finding some firm internal logic, and my general astonishment colored every inch of that incredulous review from a snarky 22-year-old soon-to-be college grad. Twenty years later, we have a sequel, reboot, and a series of animated shorts and feature-length films, so the character is much better known today than back in 2004. I also think its occult-heavy, Lovecraftian world-building has also been further established through mainstream horror and science fiction projects. So, in 2024, I’m more familiar with the title character, the cultural connections and background, and especially Guilermo del Toro as a filmmaker, and I’m still left unmoved by this initial pitch to the character and his weird world.
It took del Toro and company years to get this movie made as the big studios lacked faith in the material, in Ron Perlamn as the lead, and in superhero and comic book properties period. This really was its own superhero story with outlandish villains, oversized heroes burdened with secrecy, shame, and guilt, and heavy themes reaching into religion and determinism. The concept of an underground agency of monsters to fight monsters is a good starting point for stories, and Perlman brings the right degree of curmudgeon charm to the outcast character who might become the ultimate hero of the world or its instrument of doom. The iconography of a demon trying to be a good guy provides a fun sense of irony, as well as a natural point of conflict as the wider world would have trouble seeing past the red skin, forked tail, and big curved horns. It makes me think of the gut-punch reveal from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End where the benevolent aliens look exactly like the common visualization of a hooved and horned demon. The starting point for Hellboy has potential. However, it’s the rest that ultimately lost me.
Secret agencies and hidden conspiracies working behind the scene need to, themselves, be interesting. Think of the Men in Black and their assortment of goodies and agents. With the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), I expect more from the supporting characters and what they can unlock about our understanding of the world and the unknown. There really are only two super-powered supporting players, with Doug Jones playing Abe Sapian, a variation on the Creature from the Black Lagoon gillman, and Selma Blair as a pyrokinetic woman who checks herself into mental asylums to protect others. Both of these characters have possibility and are fellow outcasts like Hellboy, but neither feels sufficiently fleshed out and incorporated into this story. Because of Abe’s scenic limitations of being in water, he serves as more of a taste of “the world world” and narrative device. He’s not even involved in the entire final act of labyrinth misadventures. With Blair’s unstable pyro, her character is relegated to a tormented love interest for Hellboy to save, get jealous, and also save again through even more ludicrous means. For a secret agency, it all feels a little too small.
The biggest side character is John Myers (Rupert Evans, The Man in the High Castle), invented for the movie to be the audience’s entry point into learning more of this strange land of strange creatures. He’s a total bore, and he also doesn’t factor much more into the story than being a living reaction shot. He has one significant moment in the climax, and that’s simply telling Hellboy to remember who he is, ultimately convincing the big man to turn back from his destiny of enabling the apocalypse. Why do we need this character? Can’t another super-powered creature serve this same purpose? Why not Blair’s love interest figure, which would then present more attention on beginning that romantic connection between her and Hellboy? There’s a reason in X-Men that we followed a mutant to learn about other mutants and not some boring human. John Myers isn’t even included in the 2008 sequel, The Golden Army, because by that point he had served his only purpose of introducing us to a new world and being a benign romantic foil.
In a story with literal living Nazis brought to life through the magic of anti-Semitic clockwork, I’m dumbfounded why so much of the movie is watching Hellboy fight these boring lizard creatures with tongue tentacles. I appreciate the emphasis on practical effects and the reality that it’s a bunch of stunt performers in monster suits rather than complete CGI. The movie is another love letter of del Toro’s to his influences. His affection for the monsters and outsiders is apparent in every movie going back to his first, 1993’s Cronos. It’s too bad then that the primary opponent are these rudimentary lizard monsters that feel like the kind of easily disposable pawns you would see heroes fighting in other superhero spectacle. They’re faceless, and the fact they can regenerate and duplicate upon death doesn’t make them more formidable, only makes them more depressing as they can’t be easily rid of. If you’re going to give me giant space squids in an alternate dimension, then give me the giant space squids. If you’re going to give me Nazi zombies led by Rasputin, then give me that crazy mess. Don’t confine these potentially interesting villains to the opening and closing only. I will also say the ending is still a rather sizable letdown as far as how formidable these evil space squid gods might prove in a world of explosive devices and a modern military with a practical blank check for its budget.
Fun fact, at the time of its release, some theaters were so worried about playing a movie with “hell” in the title during Easter weekend, and coming off the ongoing success of The Passion of the Christ that brought in more conservative ticket-buyers, they decided to re-title it “Helloboy” on their theater marquis. I find this absolutely hilarious.
Hellboy has some points of interest, as del Toro was still fine-tuning his brand of fantasy-horror into a more mass-appealing conduit. It’s got terrific makeup effects and some fun ideas, and it’s also certifiably insane. It threw me for a loop back in 2004, and I just couldn’t process this level of hyper absurd elements jumbled together, and it still makes for a bumpy viewing. I enjoyed the 2008 sequel much more, which took more of a dark fantasy bent, and I wonder if I was more accepting of that realm of material than I was for Lovecraftian sci-fi nonsense. del Toro has learned from the Hellboy experience, becoming something of a masterful chameleon. He delivered one of the best kaiju action movies of all time that made me feel like a giddy kid. He created a haunting fairy tale timed to the Spanish Civil War. He created a charming romantic fable where a woman falls in love with a fish and it won an Oscar for Best Picture and he won Best Director. He created one of the most visually impressive stop-motion animated movies of all time that can make me cry like a baby and deservedly won another Oscar. Next up, he’s got another stop-motion animated movie and another creature feature, a remake of Frankenstein. Through his versatility, creative consistency, and inherent ability to find human drama in the most peculiar places, I’ll see any movie that del Toro decides to devote his worthy attention towards. Hellboy though? I’ve seen it twice now, and I think I can leave it at that. I’ll upgrade my earlier ranking but not too higher, Hoo boy is that 2004 review a fun read.
Re-View Grade: C
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Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (2024)
Back in December, Zack Snyder offered his very Snyder-y holiday take on big-budget space operas with Rebel Moon, a project that began as his Star Wars pitch that was turned down. It was what you would expect from a Snyder movie: big, loud, silly yet played completely serious, and drained of all vibrant color. Rebel Moon Part One was on my worst of 2023 list and I felt was a waste of two hours. I was not looking forward to the concluding Part Two. I was worried it would be two more hours of the same, and now having seen Part Two, a.k.a. The Scargiver, the edgy nickname of our lead rebel Kora (Sofia Boutella) fighting the good fight against the Evil Empire, I can now say that the Rebel Moon duology is now a dreary waste of four of your waking hours.
Saying Scargiver might be minimally better than Child of Fire (did you remember that was the subtitle for Part One? Don’t lie to me, dear reader, you know you didn’t) is a nominal victory. There’s more action and a clearer sense of climax, with our underdogs planning their guerrilla war against the overpowering forces approaching (we’re basically watching the training of a Vietcong-like insurgency) and then pulling off their unexpected victory. The problem is that we’re still stuck with all the same characters from Part One, few of which will prove to be emotionally engaging or intriguing. We’ve assembled our fighting force thanks to the events of Part One, but far too many of them are interchangeable and punishingly free of personality besides the default character creation setting of “stoic badass.” There’s one lady who has laser swords so at least that sets her apart. When it comes to attitude, personality, perspective, and even skill level, these characters are awash, which makes the action falter when it comes to any sort of meaningful emotional involvement. The bare bones story is so plain with broadly drawn good versus evil characters from its obvious cultural influences. The fact that it’s derivative is not itself a major fault, it’s the fact that it does so little with these familiar pieces that the movie feels like it’s trying to skate by on your familiarity. After four hours, it’s clear to me that Snyder and his co-writers composed this not as a living, breathing universe with its own lore and history and intrigue, but as a story where he could have used the Star Wars universe to fill in the gaps.
Snyder can be a first-class visual stylist but his sense of fluid and engaging action stops at “cool images,” like living splash pages from comic books. Like Part One, there is no sense of weight to these action sequences. Things are just happening, and then in the next shot things are just happening. Occasionally there will be a sliver of relation, but whether it’s 60 minutes or 6 minutes, the effect is still the same. The action feels like it’s all happening in a vacuum, and the momentum we feel the upstarts are gaining is hampered. We went through the trouble of explaining their counter-offensives, so why does so much of it feel like it’s just watching a jumbled, ashen group of characters fire guns? This is best epitomized by Jimmy the robot (voiced by Anthony Hopkins) who has gone rogue from his programming and sits out much of the action for reasons entirely unknown. Then he arrives, takes down a few evil tanks, and I guess decides to sit back out. If this is our fighting force, what exactly has it amounted to? This makes the entire movie, and its predecessor, a frustrating viewing even for forgiving action fans. Things blow up good, and there are a few impressive visual orchestrations, but it’s so fleeting and slim.
Over the course of two two-hour movies, totaling four hours, with the promise (threat?) of more, it’s clear that what we really had here was perhaps one underdeveloped movie at best that has been unfortunately spread out over two (and counting) movies of time. Part One was entirely about assembling the team of rugged defenders, and this could have served as the first 45 minutes of the overall movie, with the events of Part Two filling in the rest. With Scargiver, the defenders don’t even start training the villagers until 40 minutes into the movie and the big battle doesn’t kick in until a full hour. Structurally, this doesn’t feel like we’re using our time wisely, and this is best evidenced by the fact that after AN ENTIRE MOVIE of character back-story, Snyder still stops the action to have his characters sit around and share their sad back-stories. Did these characters just not talk at all to each other after initially gathering person-by-person? Tarak (Staz Nair) still hasn’t put a shirt on. I felt like yelling at my TV as the character took turns, and another 15 minutes, for each member to share their tortured back-story again but with different visuals. I was almost worried that right before the battle another character would say, “Wait, before it all really goes down, I need to share, yet again, more of my back-story.” It’s not like these extra glimpses give us new understanding or even meaningfully differentiate their characters; they’re all just victims of an abusive space government that imposes its terrible will most forcefully.
There is one tragic back-story that does separate itself from the pack, notably because it literally separates itself from the pack and is told well before our group share. Kora explains her part in the assassination of the royal family, securing the military coup that left the Evil Empire extra evil, and I guess the guy named Balisarius as supreme leader (oh how this man must have been teased for his name as a schoolchild, which might be his own tragic back-story that we’ll get three helpings of with an eventual Part Three). This betrayal is personal and stands out, with Kora being the one to shoot the little princess, a girl who, in her dying breath, says she forgives Kora. That’s rough. This is actually a good sequence from a character standpoint as it establishes Kora’s accountability and guilt convincingly. However, Snyder makes some baffling creative choices that blunt the impact of this sequence. During the assassination, the musical score favors a string quartet, which is an emotionally plaintive choice. However, the music is actually diegetic to the scene, meaning it’s coming live from the room. There is literally a string quartet of musicians playing in the room while the royal family is betrayed and slaughtered. These guys are really dedicated to their art to keep playing throughout, and I assume they must also be part of the conspiracy or else big bad Balisarus (snicker) would kill them too. You might as well have them also start stabbing the royal family with their bows. It’s details like this that trip up Snyder, a man beholden to images and ideas but lacking the finesse to make them work.
An issue I had with this conflict was the disparity in scale between the forces, mainly my nagging question of why put together a ragtag group of space adventurers to defend this town if the Evil Empire could just nuke the planet from space? Well Snyder attempts to answer this early with Part Two, and the answer appears to be… grain. This community theorizes that the empire needs their grain yield so badly that they wouldn’t do anything to damage it, so their plan is to harvest all their wheat, turn it into grain, and then use the grain like human shields, hiding behind the valuable resource as cover and distributing it across the village. This is beyond silly. First, this isn’t like an entire planet harvesting grain, it’s one little village on the outskirts. It’s not like we’ve seen a giant warehouse that goes for miles and miles stockpiled with thousands if not millions of deposits of this food. Also, we’re talking grain here (stay tuned for my exclusive Rebel Moon-related podcast called “Talkin’ Grain”). It’s not like we’re talking about some super rare mineral or substance that is only found on this one planet, something linked toward like the power source for an ultimate weapon or space travel. We’re talking about grain here. Grain. You think this Evil Empire won’t nuke the planet because they’re worried they won’t get enough grain, the same crop that can be harvested on multitudes of other planets? How about they just kill everyone and then repopulate the planet with robots to harvest the precious grain? Or how about this simple village make some upgrades as we’re in a future world with space travel and artificial intelligence but people are still harvesting wheat by hand like they’re the Amish. Regardless, I hope you love slow-mo montages of grain harvesting because that’s what you’re getting for the first 40 minutes, as if Snyder is rubbing your face in his silly non-answer.
In the conclusion to Rebel Moon Part Two, once the dust has settled, and long since that grain has been harvested, the last five minutes sets up a would-be Part Three, informing us that an unresolved storyline is next up on the docket. The characters gang up for their next adventure, and you’re expected to be chomping at the bit for this continuation. I openly sighed. Every movie feels like a tease for the next adventure, and it seems to promise that this one will be the real one you’ve been waiting for, but it feels like franchise bait-and-switch. It’s more than incomplete or lazy storytelling, it’s a scheme to leverage interest in a world and series that deserves little. The universe of Rebel Moon is not interesting. The characters of Rebel Moon are not interesting. The visuals of Rebel Moon are fine, though some of the costume choices again can rip you right out of the reality of this universe (a guy fighting in blue jean overalls?!). In short, not enough has been established, developed, or even paid off to make Rebel Moon an interesting and satisfying movie, let alone two, let alone three, let alone however many Snyder wants to leech out of Netflix. I would say Part Two is better because at least it provides an ending but it doesn’t even do that, merely an intentional passing of the baton to the next movie, and round and round we go. Rebel Moon is a living poster stretched to its breaking point. Leave this shallow universe behind.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)
In 2021, the Monsterverse series, begat from 2014’s Godzilla franchise kickstart, finally matched up its two chief prizefighters by pitting King Kong against the mighty Godzilla. It was also by far the most successful movie in the fledgling kaiju franchise, and Warner Brothers was eager to keep the good times running. Now it’s three years later, but Kong is older and weary, living in the Hollow Earth realm below our feet but feeling very alone, the last of the giant apes. Suddenly, he discovers a new world beneath his feet, another level where there are other apes like him. However, they’re ruled in fear from the vicious Scar King, and so Kong needs to call upon his former rival and now tentative ally Godzilla for the ultimate homecoming smack-down.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire finds a comfortable resting place as solid disposable fun, a work that knows its real appeal and doesn’t get in the way of it, so why does this movie work for me whereas I had trouble really celebrating the 2021 predecessor? I think it comes down to streamlining and limiting the “dumb fun” to a more manageable quotient. There is still plenty of junk science and goofy moments that will likely inspire their share of guffaws, but I was more pleased this time than overwhelmed in 2021. I had plenty of friends that absolutely loved the 2021 showdown, and I’ll admit the big bouts of monster action were well developed and staged, but for me the dumb was more present than my “dumb fun” threshold could bear. Again, that’s not to say that this newest adventure doesn’t evoke similar eye-rolling. The very revelation of ANOTHER subterranean world and hidden civilization just under the feet of the other subterranean hidden world makes me wonder if every successive sequel will just keep digging downwards, discovering yet another undiscovered world, until they reach the molten core.
This movie is broken into three storylines and only one of them has the human characters; the core of the movie is Kong’s exploration of the new subterranean world and this is told wordlessly and effectively. The 2021 movie had to juggle multiple human enclaves all having their own adventures and discovering components of our story that would ultimately prove helpful. There was the Godzilla Team and the Kong Team, but did you know that the 2021 movie included all these human characters: our unexpected lead of the Monsterverse now in Hall, the returning new characters from 2021 by Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Kaylee Hottle, Alexander Skarsgard, Eiza Gonzalez, Julian Dennison, Demian Bichir, Lance Reddick, and the returning characters from 2019 by Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, and the son of Ken Wantanabe’s deceased scientist. Top it off with the starring title bout of Kong v Godzilla, and that’s a lot of speaking roles to have to juggle over two hours of monster mash. Having only one human group and only one new significant character (Dan Stevens as a hip veterinarian) helps keep things moving and puts more emphasis on the real big star, Mr. Kong.
Godzilla is sidelined for the second movie in a row to give way for Kong, and it’s the right call as the giant ape is more of a wounded warrior, and his loneliness and desire for community is an easier emotional state to convey than anything from the large enigmatic lizard. Godzilla spends almost the whole movie, leading up to the climax, on a mission where he’s powering up, like it’s a filler Dragon Ball Z episode. It does build a sense of anticipation for his eventual return in the big arena, but it’s clear that Godzilla’s name should be second in the title. He’s presented almost like an angry cat, settling into the Colosseum as an impromptu nap den. With Kong, the emotional arc of a lonely creature seeking kinship is universal and easy to understand even without words. He believes he’s the last of his kind and then to discover a community of those like him, and adjust as an outsider, and then upset the power structure of a bully wrecking havoc. There’s even a budding stepfather-like relationship with a little ape who begins as quite an annoying little stinker and then warms up to this better paternal figure. It’s a simple story of discovery and reunification, as well as overthrowing a corrupt leader, but it’s enough to get you emotionally invested in this giant CGI monster and his giant sense of encroaching ennui.
The biggest appeal of any monster movie is its destructive action, and Godzilla x Kong delivers in this regard while keeping things fluid and fun. Returning director Adam Wingard (You’re Next) makes sure the big brawls are easy to follow with minimal edits to better orient the viewer. The big hits feel like they matter, and the rules of the different fights and fighters and the varying geography matter. There’s a climactic fight in the Hollow Earth where gravity becomes a second thought, and it’s a tremendous visual spectacle as well as rousing sequence of excitement to watch these giants suddenly weightless and zooming through the air in combat. Wingard also knows when to give his characters their big hero moments, and the team-up between Kong and Godzilla has the same rousing satisfaction as you would wish for two titans of mayhem. I enjoyed the new orangutan villain, the Scar King, a fearsome beast that cannot match Kong for sheer brutal strength but makes up for it in speed and agility, and a whip-like weapon that controls a frost-breathing kaiju through fear and pain. It’s an interesting character at least in design and contrast from our hero kaiju, so it’s not just more of the same but with a horn or something. I have to think anyone coming for some top-tier monster wrestling will leave the movie happy.
As for the human drama, it’s mostly kept along the fringes and there to introduce necessary plot elements that a grunting ape couldn’t more adequately convey. Hall has to worry about possibly losing her adoptive mute daughter who is herself the last of an older civilization. It’s pretty simplistic but acceptable as a parallel about finding one’s place in the world from feeling alone.
Godzilla x Kong is silly and stupid and stupidly fun, appealing to any kaiju fan’s inner child, working that same primordial wonder of monsters and destructive spectacle. For my money, it’s a step above the 2021 initial brawl thanks to scaling down its many assorted plotlines dealing with too many forgettable human characters. The action is rip-roaring and proof that even more can be ceded to Kong and a lack of dialogue to tell this story in a meaningful manner. Wingard still has a natural feel for elevated B-movie material, and clearly this movie is going in a very different route than 2023’s now Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, a shockingly affecting post-war human drama that just so happened to have Godzilla in it. It’s a perfect blockbuster to chow down popcorn and hoot and holler along with our giant avatars of childhood glee.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
I held off watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for almost half a year as I feared that this even longer-in-the-tooth Doctor Henry “Indy” Jones (Harrison Ford) would make me reassess the 2008 Kingdom of the Crystal Skull more favorably. Having re-watched the original trilogy, I can say that Dial of Destiny has made me reassess the much-maligned 2008 sequel. It’s still not good, and has many wide misses, but it’s also a more interesting movie to watch even in its myriad ways of disappointment. Maybe that’s the Steven Spielberg difference, a filmmaker so talented that even his rare cinematic follies have their own dynamic appeal. Dial of Destiny is a nostalgia slog, including the opening action caper with a de-aged Indy set in 1944 battling Nazis, just like we like. The action sequences lack the whimsy and satisfying scope and scale of the past, but everything here just feels on autopilot, including a gruff Ford as an Indy well past his prime in a world that has only gotten more complex. He’s given two lackluster sidekicks, neither of which are well integrated, and an old former Nazi (Mads Milkkelsen) who literally wants to find the ancient time travel device to go back to WWII and give Hitler notes. It all feels so deflated and absent the spirit and fun of the original movies, and it’s disappointing in a manner that is more bland and predictable than crazy and outlandish (nuking the fridge, killer ants, Tarzan swings, etc.). There’s an interesting kernel of a concept here, an archeologist possibly finding a skeleton in an ancient excavation that belongs to himself, and an ending that could have been ballsy and poetically fitting for the adventurer to become literally part of history. Alas, the one really exciting aspect of Dial of Destiny wimps out, settling for an ending that feels like another weak feint to the franchise’s storied past. I was so thoroughly disengaged by this movie throughout its 154 minutes. It is bereft of lasting charm and imagination and fun. At this point, with an 81-year-old Ford, I think it’s time to leave the character in a museum.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released March 19, 2004:
No other movie this year captured the possibility of film like Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s enigmatic collaboration. Eternal Sunshine was a mind-bending philosophical excursion that also ended up being one of the most nakedly realistic romances of all time. Joel (Jim Carrey restrained) embarks on having his memories erased involving the painful breakup of Clementine (Kate Winslet, wonderful), an impulsive woman whose vibrant hair changes as much as her moods. As Joel revisits his memories, they fade and die. He starts to fall in love with her all over again and tries to have the process stop. This labyrinth of a movie gets so many details right, from the weird physics of dreams to the small, tender moments of love and relationships. I see something new and marvelous every time I watch Eternal Sunshine, and the fact that it’s caught on with audiences (it was nominated for Favorite Movie by the People’s friggin’ Choice Awards) reaffirms its insights into memory and love. I never would have thought we’d get the perfect romance for the new millennium from Kaufman. This is a beautiful, dizzingly complex, elegant romance caked in visual grandeur, and it will be just as special in 5 years as it will be in 50, that is if monkeys don’t evolve and take over by then (it will happen).
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned;”
-Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717)
“Go ahead and break my heart, that’s fine
So unkind
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Oh, love is blind
Why am I missin’ you tonight?
Was it all a lie?”
-Kelly Clarkson, Mine (2023)
This one was always going to be special. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not just one of my favorite movies, it’s one of those movies that occupies the place of Important Formative Art. It’s a movie that connected with me but it’s also one that profoundly affected me and changed me, that inspired me in my own creative ventures. With its elevated place in my memory, I’ll also admit that there was some mild trepidation about returning to it and having it not measure up to the impact it had all those twenty years ago. It’s impossible to recreate that first experience or to chase after it, but you hope that the art we consider great still has resonance over time. This happened before when I revisited 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, a movie that gobsmacked me in my youth, had such innate power and fascination, and had lessened over the decades. It was still good art but it wasn’t quite the same, and there’s a little tinge of disappointment that lingers.
When I saw the movie for the first time it was at a promotional screening. I was a senior in college and had dyed my hair bright red for the second time. After marveling over my first encounter with 1999’s Run Lola Run, I was determined to have hair like the titular Lola. My parents were hesitant and set parameters, like certain grade achievements, and I met them all. Afterwards they had nothing left to quibble so I dyed my hair red, as well as other colors, my sophomore year and then again my senior year. At the screening, a publicist for the studio asked if I wanted to compete for a prize. I demurred but then she came back and asked again, and sensing something to my advantage, I accepted. It turns out the pre-show contest was a Clementine (Kate Winslet) look alike contest and my only competition was a teen girl with one light swath of blue hair. The audience voted and I won in a landslide and was given a gift basket of official Eternal Sunshine merchandise that included the CD soundtrack and a bright orange hooded sweatshirt modeled after the one Clem wears in the movie. That sweatshirt quickly became one of my favorite items of clothing, something special that nobody else had from a movie I adored. I wore it everywhere and it became a comfort and a confidence builder. Back during my initial courtship with my wife, in the winter months of 2020, she held onto the orange hoodie as a memento to wear and think of me during our time apart. She said it even smelled like me, which was a comfort. It had meaning for us, and we cherished it. I had to marry her, of course, to ensure I’d eventually get the sweatshirt back in my possession (I kid).
The lessons of Eternal Sunshine run deep for me. On the surface it’s a breakup movie about an impulsive woman, Clem, deciding to erase her memories of her now ex-boyfriend Joel (Jim Carrey). Out of spite, he elects to have the same procedure, and from there we jump in and out of Joel’s head as a subconscious avatar experiences their relationship but in reverse. It’s the bad memories, the hurt and ache of a relationship nearing or past its end, but as each memory degrades and Joel goes further into the past, he discovers that there are actually plenty of enjoyable memories through those good times, the elation and discovery, the connections and development of love, that he doesn’t want to lose. He tries to fight against the procedure but it becomes a losing battle, and so he gets to ride shotgun in his cerebellum as this woman vanishes from his life. What began out of spite and heartache ends in mourning and self-reflection.
At its heart, the movie is asking us to reflect upon the importance of our personal experiences and how they shape us into the people that we are. This includes the ones that cause us pain and regret. The human experience is not one wholly given to happiness, unfortunately, but there are lessons to be had in the scars and pain of our individual pasts. I’m not saying that every point of discomfort or pain is worthwhile, as there are many victims who would say otherwise, but we are the sum total of our experiences, good and bad. With enough distance, wisdom can be gained, and perhaps those events that felt so raw and unending and terrible eventually put us on the path of becoming the person you are today. Now, of course, maybe you don’t like the person you are now, but that doesn’t mean you’re also a prisoner to your past and doomed to dwell in misery.
After my divorce from my previous wife in 2012, I wrote a sci-fi screenplay following some of the same themes from Eternal Sunshine. It was about two dueling time travelers trying to outsmart one another, one hired to ensure a romantic couple never got together and one hired to make sure that they had. The characters represented different viewpoints, one arguing that people are the total of their experiences and the other arguing people should be capable of choosing what experiences they want ultimately as formative. Naturally, through twists and turns, the one time traveler learns a lesson about “living in the now,” to stop literally living in the past and trying to correct other people’s perceived mistakes, and that our experiences, and our heartache, can be valuable in putting us into position to being the people we want or living the lives we seek. It shouldn’t be too hard to see that I was working through my own feelings with this creative venture. It got some attention within the industry and I dearly hope one day it can be made into a real movie. It’s one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written and I’m quite proud of it. It wouldn’t exist without Eternal Sunshine making its mark on me all those years ago.
It’s an amazing collaboration between director Michel Gondry and the brilliant mind of Charlie Kaufman. The whimsical, hardscrabble DIY-style of Gondry’s visuals masterfully keeps the viewer on our toes, as Joel’s memories begin vanishing and collapsing upon one another in visually inventive and memorable ways. There’s moments like Joel, after finding Clem once she’s erased her memory of him, and he storms off while row after row of lights shuts off, dooming this memory to the inky void. There’s one moment where he’s walking through a street and with every camera pan more details from the store exteriors vanish. A similar moment occurs through a store aisle where all the paperbacks become blank covers. It’s a consistent visual inventiveness to communicate the fraying memories and mind of Joel, which becomes its own playground that allows us to better understand him. The score by Jon Brion (Magnolia) is also a significant addition, constantly finding unique and chirpy sounds to provide a sense of earned melancholy. By experiencing their relationship backwards, it allows us to have a sense of discovery about the relationship. This is also aided by Kaufman’s sleight-of-hand structure, with the opening sequence misleadingly the beginning of their relationship when it’s actually their second first time meeting one another. The pointed details of relationships, both on the rise and decline, feel so achingly authentic, and the characters have more depth than they might appear on the surface. Joel is far more than a hopeless romantic. Clem is far more than some Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term coined for 2005’s Elizabethtown. She tells Joel that she’s not some concept, she’s not here to complete his life and add excitement; she’s just a messed up girl looking for her own peace of mind and she doesn’t promise to be the answer for any wounded romantic soul.
The very end is such a unique combination of feelings. After Mary (Kirsten Dunst) discovers that she’s previously had her memories of an affair with her boss erased, she takes it upon herself to mail every client their files so that they too know the truth. Joel and Clem must suffer listening to their recorded interviews where they are viciously attacking one another, like Clem declaring Joel to be insufferably boring who puts her on edge, and Joel accuses her of using sex to get people to like her. Both are hurt by the accusations, both shake them off as being inaccurate, and yet it really is them saying these things, recorded proof about the ruination of their relationship. Would getting together be doomed to eventually repeat these same complaints? Clem walks off and Joel chases after her and tells her not to go. Teary-eyed, she warns that she’ll grow bored of him and resentful because that’s what she does, and she’ll become insufferable to him. And then Joel says, “Okay,” an acceptance that perhaps they may repeat their previous doomed path, maybe it’s inevitable, but maybe it also isn’t, and it’s worth it to try all the same. Maybe we’re not destined to repeat our same mistakes. Then it ends on a shot of our couple frolicing in the snow, the descending white beginning to blot out the screen, serving as a blank slate. It’s simultaneously a hopeful and pessimistic ending, a beautifully nuanced conclusion to a movie exploring the human condition.
Winslet received an Oscar nomination for her sprightly performance, and deservedly so, but it’s Carrey that really surprises. He had already begun to stretch his dramatic acting muscles before in the 1998 masterpiece The Truman Show and the far-from-masterpiece 2001 film The Majestic. He’s so restrained in this movie, perfectly capturing the awkwardness and passive aggressive irritability of the character, a man who views his life as too ordinary to be worth sharing. Clem begs him to share himself since she’s an open book but he’s more mercurial. She wants to get to know him better but to Joel there’s a question of whether or not he has anything worthwhile getting to know. Carrey sheds all his natural charisma to really bring this character to life. It’s one of his best performances because he’s truly devoted to playing a character, not aggressively obnoxious Method devotion like in 1999’s Man on the Moon.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a messy, enlightening, profound, playful, poignant, and mesmerizing movie. A perfect collaboration between artists with unique creative perspectives. I see something new every time I watch it, and it’s already changed my life in different ways. I used to see myself as Joel when I was younger, but then I grew to see him as self-pitying and someone who too often sets himself up for failure by being too guarded and insular. It’s a reminder that our cherished relationships remain that way by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and open. We are all capable and deserving of love.
Re-View Grade: A
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Madame Web (2024)
What even is this movie and who is this for? I think the real answer is to help Sony’s bottom line, but that’s generally the real reason for most studio blockbusters, the opportunity for the parent company to make more money. Sony has the rights to Spider-Man and they’re not going to let those things lapse, and while Marvel is shepherding the Tom Holland-lead Spider-Man franchise, Sony is left to their own devices to build out the Spidey universe with lesser-known solo vehicles meant to launch an interconnected web of Spidey’s rogues gallery. It’s about growing more franchises, and it worked with 2018’s Venom, a favorite Spidey villain with a sizable fan base and benefiting from the goofiness of its execution with Tom Hardy and company. It didn’t work out for Morbius in 2022 because nobody cares about Morbius as a character, just like nobody cares about Kraven the Hunter as a character (coming August 2024!), and just like nobody cares about Madame Web, who wasn’t even a Spidey villain and instead an old blind lady that saw the future. The far majority of Spider-Man villains are only interesting as they relate to Spider-Man, so giving them solo vehicles absent Spider-Man is a game in delayed gratification. Madame Web is the latest in this misguided attempt to create an enriched outer circle of brand extension. It’s a promise of a continuity of superhero movies that will never come to pass. It’s a bland return to early 2000s superhero heroics with some substantial structural flaws to its own tangled web.
Cassandra “Cassie” Web (Dakota Johnson) is an EMT in New York City and frustrated by her humdrum life until after an accident she starts seeing the future. You see her mother was researching spiders in the Amazon before she died, and she was researching them with Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) who killed her because he needed a special spider with special properties. Her dying mother gave birth to Cassie thanks to some… mystical Amazonian spider-people? It’s rather confusing but so are Cassie’s visions. A trio of young students (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor) is in danger of being killed by a 30-years-older Ezekiel, so she takes it upon herself to save them, as they one day will become Spider-laden superheroes themselves. This Ezekiel, however, has super strength, agility, and the ability to walk on walls, so overcoming a Spider…man’s abilities might be too much for one EMT driver/psychic.
This movie is more Final Destination or That’s So Raven than a big superhero adventure, and that leads to lots of structural and narrative repetition. Cassie’s power involves her getting glimpses of the future, generally warnings of things to avoid or to intervene. It also makes for a very annoying structure because the movie never gives you clues about what is a vision and what is the real timeline of events. This leads to many repetitions of scenes and fake-outs, and after a while the story feels like it’s mostly jerking you around as well as treading in place. We don’t really know why these flashes happen and what larger meaning they may have. They just happen because the plot needs them to, and so they do. Early on, Cassie gets a vision of a bird flying into her window, and she chooses to open the window, signifying that she can avoid these fates. Why couldn’t Ezekiel Sims think likewise? He’s devoted his whole life to killing these mysterious girls because they’re destined to murder him, but if he’s known for years, why not strike when these girls were younger and more vulnerable, Skynet-style? Or maybe try just not being evil too? I guess that one was too difficult for him as he’s cryptically profited off his Amazon spider steal. More work needed to go into the story to make these characters important and for the fake-out scenes to feel more like horror double-takes. It just gets tiring, and you’ll likely start second-guessing anything of import is merely a vision about to rip away the consequences.
I think a big problem is our protagonist. She’s just so boring and we don’t really understand why she’s so compelled to save these three girls more than anyone else. Her entire back-story with her mother is merely the setup for how she might have super magic powers to kick in at a convenient yet unknown combination of elements and to provide motivation why she might want to kill Ezekiel. It’s all so rudimentary and mechanical, designed just to supply enough connective tissue of plot. As an EMT, finding out how to better save lives could be really useful, although I wish the movie had the gall to make her disdainful of her job beforehand and actively bad at saving lives so that way it would feel like the universe was interjecting and saying, “Here, be better.” You would think if she’s trying to prevent death, and especially the deaths of the people she knows, that it might kick in for her to warn a couple Spider-Man-related characters of note (more on this later). Instead, the Spidey girls have an extended moment learning CPR that feels forever and then tell Cassie, “Wow, you’re a really good teacher” after a rather unimpressive learning session with a motel room pillow. This character just isn’t that interesting even with her new psychic vision powers.
The Spidey girls are also rather uninteresting and given one note of characterization. One of them likes science. One of them has a skateboard and… attitude. One of them is Hispanic. I may have even confused about the characterization, that is how meaningless these characters are. They’re simply a glorified escort mission, a challenge for Cassie to simply keep alive. The scene where they stumble into a brightly lit diner in the middle of nowhere, after Cassie saved their lives and warned them to lay low for their own self-preservation, is immensely irritating. They take it upon themselves to stand on a table of letter jacket-wearing jocks and dance because that’s laying low. They’re annoying characters that never convince you why Cassie should go through such valiant efforts to keep alive. The flashes of them in Spider costumes are only brief glimpses of a possible future, one I can guarantee we’ll never see coming to fruition in this discarded universe.
The strained efforts to transform Madame Web into a disjointed Spider-Man prequel are distracting and generally annoying. It also reveals the doubts the studio had that anyone would be interested in a Madame Web story without additional connections to Peter Parker. Why do we need to have a pregnant Mary Parker (Emma Roberts) in this movie? Why does the climax also involve her giving birth? Are audiences going to wonder whether or not Peter Parker might be born? There’s also the prominent role of Uncle Ben Parker (Adam Scott) as Cassie’s EMT partner. He’s practically the third-leading character. The movie makes several ham-handed meta references about his eventual role in crafting Spider-Man’s development (I also guess he gets to marry Marissa Tomei, so good for you). “Ben can’t wait to be an uncle,” one person says, with, “All of the fun and none of the responsibility.” They might as well just turn to the camera and point-blankly state, “This man will eventually die and inspire Peter Parker to be a hero.” The worst moment of all this forced connectivity is when Mary demurs on picking a name and says she’ll determine when he’s born, even though the film has a “guess the name” baby shower game. Does this mean she saw her newborn babe and the first thing she thought was… Peter? The entire Spider-Man lineage feels so tacked-on and superfluous as glorified Easter eggs.
I’m generally agnostic when it comes to product placement in movies. People got to eat and drink and drive cars, and as long as it’s not obnoxious, then so be it. However, the product placement needs to be mentioned in Madame Web for its narrative prominence, and this leads to some spoiler discussion but I’d advise you read anyway, dear reader, because this movie is practically spoiler-proof by its very conception. Ezekiel Sims is battling Cass and the Spider girls atop a large warehouse with a giant Pepsi sign built onto scaffolding. Then the engineer of Ezekiel’s doom is none other than the falling “S” from Pepsi. That’s right, the villain is dispatched through the help of Pepsi, as well as a literal sign falling from above (cue: eye-roll). Without the assistance from Pepsi (or “Pep_I”), these women might not have lived. You can’t expect that kind of divine intervention from any other cola company. Coke was probably secretly working with the villain, giving him aid and comfort from being parched (begun these Cola Wars have). Deus ex Pepsi. It’s just so egregious and in-your-face that I laughed out loud. Is it also a reference to the original Final Destination ending or am I myself reading the signs too closely?
For those hoping for a so-bad-it’s-good entertainment factor, I found Madame Web to be more dreary, bland, and confusing than unintentionally hilarious. Johnson is an actress I’ve grown to enjoy in efforts like Cha Cha Real Smooth and The Peanut Butter Falcon, also the much-derided but still enjoyable Netflix Persuasion, but she sleepwalks through this movie. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame any of the actors (poor Rahim’s performance seems entirely replaced by bad ADR lines). The character’s nonchalance already zaps the low stakes of a movie where a psychic character we don’t really have fond feelings over is trying to save a trio of annoying teenagers before a vague hodgepodge of a villain succeeds in killing them before they can kill him, which means they all need to kill him before he can kill them before they are destined to kill him. No wonder the executives decided to crassly cram in some Spider-Man relatives to make people care. Madame Web is less a bad movie and more a poorly executed and confused movie, one that doesn’t understand the desires of its intended audience. It’s barely even a superhero action movie, with few scenes of elevated action, though the director enjoys her ceiling perspective flips. There’s a moment where our villain flat-out says, “You can’t do [a thing],” and literally seconds later, through no setup or explanation, suddenly Cassie can do [that thing]. The whole movie feels like this moment, arbitrary and contrived and desperately reaching for an identity of its own. It should have stayed in the Amazon researching spiders before it was destined to die.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Butterfly Effect (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released January 23, 2004:
Notice: I found Ashton Kutcher, star of The Butterfly Effect, on a trip to buy dog food, and cordially asked him to write a review. This is what he sent me. It’’s totally him. I wouldn’’t make this stuff up. That would be dumb.
“So, like, this Nate guy asked me to do a review of my new awesomest movie, The Butterfly Effect. Dude, like anyone needs a review for the most awesomest movie ever. I mean, like, the term ‘awesomest movie ever’ should say, like, everything. The only thing possibly more awesome than The Butterfly Effect would be trucker hats …… or two chicks totally making out. And I only said ‘possibly more awesome,’ which doesn’’t mean it is more awesome, because, dude, like I said before, The Butterfly Effect is the most awesomest thing ever. You can’t dispute that. Don’t even try. I’m awesome!
Like, the story goes like this, man. I play this guy, like I know big stretch there, but he’s not the most awesome guy ever, which is what you’d be thinking since it’s the most awesomest movie ever. But no, he’s like this kid who blacks out and has this wickedly twisted childhood where he stars in his neighbor’s kiddie porn, has his dog set on fire, and, like, his dad is all crazy, or, like I like to say, insane in the ole’ membrane. Ha, I totally made that up right now. I’m awesome!
So, you’re like saying, ‘Dude, that movie sounds less than awesome. Yes, sir, I am having definite doubts about the awesomeness of this movie. Like, do I need to go to the movies to, like, feel bad? I got my parents to do that for me. That and school.’ Hey man, I’m there, I know what you feel. ‘Cause right when you are like, ‘Dude, when is Demi gonna’ show up playing his mom?’ I find these old journals of mine and, dude, use them to travel back in time. I know, the awesomeness has returned. And I use the journals to go back and try and punk time, man. I try and make things better and change the future but I like totally just make it worse. I know, double punk’d, man! I try and fix the life of this hot girl in the movie (she showed her boobs in that Road Trip movie, did you see that? That part where she shows her boobs, oh man … It is awesome) but things don’’t work out. Like she becomes a crack ho at one point. Dude, total punk’d. I’m awesome!
I should be taken as a serious actor. I didn’t hit my head on something and I grew a beard, what more do people need to know I got the goods? I mean, I don’t want to keep saying it but …… beard. C’mon! When actors want to be taken seriously they, like, grow beards. That’s why all those people in movies before 1970 (I know, it surprised me too that there were older movies) got awards and stuff. Beards, dude. Beards. When Billy Dee Shakespeare, like, invented acting, he totally imagined dudes, and chicks too, with beards. That’s why girls can’t be taken as serious actors, ‘cause they can’t grow beards. Ha. I’m awesome!
So, like, if you ever wondered what it would be like to see me, Ashton Kutcher, the most awesome man alive …who ever lived, no… the most awesome human being …-the most awesome thing …- ever, as a frat boy, or like, some poor dude with no arms, then you should see my new movie, The Butterfly Effect. After all, it is the most awesomest thing ever. That’s awesome. So, like, you people reading (is that what school is for?) should go see my movie. I’ll tell you why in two words: beard.”
Nate’s Grade: C+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
It’s hard to remember but there was a time where Ashton Kutcher was the king of the early 2000s universe. He had parlayed his excitable supporting character on a late 90s network sitcom into a successful movie career top-lining wild comedies, and he had also found success as a producer, bringing new life to the hidden camera prank TV show with his eponymous Punk’d where many of his celebrity friends would be victimized for the lols. The man even single handedly made goofy trucker hats a fashion mainstay. I know we haven’t seen much of the Kutch in a while, as he’s settled into his non-profit charities and being a family man, ceding the spotlight to his wife and former sitcom girlfriend, Mila Kunis. The Kutcher brand was stronger than ever at the time of The Butterfly Effect, enough so that Kutcher signing on as an executive producer was what finally got this widely read industry script to finally get made. You must view The Butterfly Effect as a point not just in Kutcher’s career but also in millennial edge-lord culture, the concept that anything dark is therefore compelling, and the more twisted the better. Re-watching the movie twenty years later, I wanted to laugh out loud at so many points because The Butterfly Effect is so serious while being so silly as it plumbs every depth of misery, both for its characters as well as any potential audience members still keeping track of the messy metaphysics.
Kutcher plays the adult version of Evan, a kid who has had quite a challenging upbringing to put it mildly. Mom (Melora Walters) is doing her best while Evan’s father is locked away in a mental asylum, and she’s worried her child might have inherited dad’s instability. He blacks out for extended periods and is found holding a knife or having drawn a horrible massacre at school, and even worse neighborhood tragedies (oh, I’ll get to all of them). A psychiatrist advises him to start journaling as a therapeutic means, and so he does, and when adult Evan reads his childhood journals, the words become blurry and he’s able to travel back in time to those exact moments. With this great power, adult Evan tries to right the wrongs of his life and those around him, but as all time travel stories are destined to discover, there are cruel unintended consequences to endure.
Watching this movie is like watching a checklist of events that producers thought would be dark and grisly and So Messed Up, but this movie is so self-serious that it could be a parody of what a moody teenager would think of as a “mature movie.” Let me just list some of the content the movie covers: the drunken dad next door (Eric Stoltz) is a pedophile who records his daughter and son and Evan in child porn, the kids put a firecracker in a mailbox that blows up killing a mother and her baby, an angry kid kidnaps Evan’s dog and ties him in a bag and literally sets the bag on fire killing the animal, lots of violence against young children including murder, attempted suicide, disturbing behavior in children including traumatic self-harm at school, prison rape, multiple mental asylums, disfigurement and disability, prostitution and addiction, and in the original ending, the one I re-watched, a fetus literally strangling itself with its own umbilical cord rather than being born. Wow. Just… wow. This movie is only two hours and it crams enough sundry melodrama and grimdark grist to fill out a month of the grimiest soap opera ever. Because of the sheer amount of disturbing content, every new provocative addition makes the movie’s tone teeter further and further into unintended self-parody. Once you’re starting to process the homegrown child pornographer, the movie throws animal cruelty at you, and so on. It’s not enough that Evan had a bad childhood of trauma, but does he have to experience all the traumas?
Much of the movie follows Evan’s morose quest to improve the life of his unrequited love, Kayleigh (Amy Smart as the adult version). He runs into her after several years apart and merely bringing up the past with her pedophile father filming the two of them propels her to kill herself off-screen. She’s literally introduced in one scene and then in the next she’s dead, and it’s all Evan’s fault, so says her angry brother via the answering machine clunkily informing us. Evan goes back and stops her dad from molesting her, so now dad only molests her brother Tommy instead, who Evan kills as an adult defending himself. He travels back in time and now her brother is dead and she’s become a heroin-addicted hooker and that won’t do. He travels back again and manages to improve the lives of Kayleigh, Tommy, and their friend Lenny, except in this timeline Lenny and Kayeligh are the romantic couple and Evan has no arms, having lost them in the childhood mailbox explosion. He travels back again and this time Kayleigh gets blown up as a child. Ultimately Evan concludes he cannot save her and have everything he wants, so he makes some form of sacrifice by the end; in the theatrical cut, young Evan upsets her so she chooses to live with her mother rather than her pedophile father, and in the director’s cut, he ensures Kayleigh will never meet him by killing himself in the womb (his mother reveals she’s had multiple miscarriages, leaving the impression other future siblings have done the same). I appreciate how the filmmakers have streamlined their convoluted time travel tale into a simple task of trying to get the girl, but it also becomes so overwrought that I wanted to shake my head and sigh.
These characters are put through an emotional and often physical grinder, so it’s hard not to feel sorry for them. I long felt the film’s contempt for Kayleigh ever since young Evan (a young Logan Lerman) tells her, “You don’t even know how beautiful you are,” like she’s so stupid to see the obviousness of his compliment. I think dark comedy is the best way to read the movie, laughing along the way as Evan fails time and again to improve the lives of everyone through his space-time interventions. He can save this kid but doom his mother to lung cancer. He can save this person but is locked away in prison. It’s a no-win scenario for Evan, so he decides it’s better if he was never born, negating all the possible good he’s done in his life, including maybe being a force that could keep Kayleight from living with her dad. Maybe not having that friend and an advocate push her into that decision doomed her to a life of molestation, so way to go Evan.
I kind of loathe the time travel method in this movie but at least it provides a limitation that works within the universe of The Butterfly Effect. He can only travel reading his journals, which means he’s stuck in whatever nightmare timeline he’s responsible for unless he can recapture some part of his childhood scribblings. Reading them aloud is also an unexpected source of dark comedy because it makes me question how forthcoming a child of trauma would be about writing down his experiences in simplistic shorthand (“So today Kaleigh wasn’t feeling so good. Her face blew up. I was sad”). I did like that this inherited disorder provides more mystery to his family line, a source of material not covered in either of the Butterfly Effect direct-to-DVD sequels unrelated to Evan’s troubled story. This is perhaps the second worst method of time travel I’ve found in the movies after 1980’s Somewhere in Time where Christopher Reeve uses the power of positive thinking to convince himself he’s in 1912, and lo and behold he shall be.
Watching this movie is like revisiting a Goth phase you had as a brooding teenager but have since considered a point of embarrassment (not that being Gothic is something to be ashamed of, simply that it was an overzealous step in asserting a misguided sense of what being a mature adult meant, generally disaffected and cynical and edgy for its own attention). The Butterfly Effect is an endless improv game of “yes and” where the proceedings only get worse. My original review in 2004 was one of my more unconventional reviews, and I just wanted to adopt my perception of the “Kutcher brand” persona of the era and make a bunch of dumb jokes, several of which I’m not too ashamed to admit still made me chuckle (“two words: beard.”). I’d lower my grade a tad but there is still a car-crash fascination of watching a movie try so transparently hard to be so twisted.
Re-View Grade: C
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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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Poor Things (2023)
Poor Things is going to be a lot to many people. It is a lot, and that’s kind of the larger message because ultimately, for all its peculiarities and perversions, the movie is also an inspiring fable about living one’s life to the fullest and embracing the choices that make us happy and content. It’s a feminist Frankenstein allegory as well as an invitation to see the world with new eyes and a fresh perspective, to embrace the same hunger for a life that defines the journey of Bella Baxter from woman to child to woman again. Under the unique care of director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Terry McNamara (reuniting after 2018’s triumphant and irreverent The Favourite), Poor Things proves to be an invigorating drama, a hilarious comedy, a stunning visual experience, and one of the year’s finest films.
Bella (Emma Stone) lives a life of solitude with her caregiver, a brilliant but disfigured surgeon named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe), who Bella refers to as “God,” and for good reason. Bella is herself one of the doctor’s experiments. Her body belongs to an adult woman of a different name who killed herself. Her mind belongs to the baby that had lived through its mother’s suicide. “God” resuscitated the body of the mother by giving her the brain of her child. She’s curious and defiant and soon yearns for independence and discovering the outside world. A caddish lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), is drawn to Bella and offers to take her on a grand adventure to parts of the world. She agrees, and from there Bella gets an education on the plentiful pleasures and pains and puzzles of being a human being.
In many ways, Poor Things serves as a fish-out-of-water fairy tale that invites the audience to question and analyze the Way Things Are. Bella’s childlike perspective allows her to strip away the assumptions of adulthood and the cynicism of disappointment. Everything is new and potentially exciting, but she can also cut through the cultural hang-ups and repressive rules of polite Victorian society. This is expressed perhaps most memorably in her embrace of sexuality and the pursuit of physical pleasure. She’s told not to seek out this pleasure except for very specific settings and situations, and this confounds her. Why aren’t people doing this all the time, she asks after an extensive session of vigorous sexual activity. She is a person incapable of shame during a modest time of conditioned shame. This brashly hedonistic reality might prove too morally demented for many viewers uncomfortable with the premise. In context, it is a grown woman’s body being operated by the mind of a child. We are told that she grows and matures as she accumulates her worldly experiences, but the movie keeps it purposely vague how analogous her brain-age might be and whether that maturation is of a pace with traditional aging. It’s a reverse of 1979’s The Tin Drum, a German movie where a child refuses to grow up once he hears the drudgery of the adult world, and so he remains three years old in appearance but continues maturing intellectually and emotionally. There’s a cliche about looking at the world with a child’s unassuming eyes, and that doesn’t necessarily mean only looking at the things that are safe and appropriate for children.
Bella responds with wonder to the many pleasures of being human, but, sadly, it’s not all puff pastries and orgasms. The world is also filled with horrors and injustices, and Bella’s personal journey of discovery is also one discovering the human capacity for cruelty and selfishness. Some of this is a response to Bella wanting to assert herself and independence, as she very reasonably doesn’t understand why all these men get to tell her what to do or expect that they should. At one point, Duncan literally hurls her books into the sea so that she will not continue educating herself. This extends to later in the movie when Bella looks at prostitution in a Parisian brothel as a means of earning a living. Her same sexual appetites, that were enthusiastically encouraged by Duncan, are now paradoxically looked at by the same man as wicked. Absent riches, Bella is treated as a disposable commodity and she’s trying to make sense of why one version of her receives respect and adoration and another version is looked with disgust. It seems that an essential part of maturation is acknowledging the faults of this world and its entrenched systems of thought, but does giving in to these systems make one more human or merely more cynical? Is it a matter of learning or is it a matter of giving up on changing the status quo? These are many of the questions that the movie inspires as we join Bella on her fantastic journey of self-discovery.
This movie would not work nearly as well without the fearless performance from Stone (Cruella). She gives everything of herself for this role and rewires the very movements of her body to better portray such a unique elding of a character at so many crossroads. Her early physicality is gangly like she’s learning how to operate this adult body of hers that appears too ungainly, and her expressions are without restraint, as if she’s peeled back every acting impulse to instead find a purity of perception. There is a transparent and transcendent joy in her performance as well as an ache when Bella discovers the awful shortcomings of this world. Lanthimos movies exist in a different world than ours, a cracked mirror universe of deadpan detachment and casual cruelty, so it requires a commitment to a very specific tone of performance. And yet, the requirements of this role work against that Lanthimos model of acting because Bella cannot be detached from this world. As a result, there is the same matter-of-fact reaction to the world but channeled through an idealistic innocence rather than the sarcastic skepticism that can dominate the director’s oeuvre.
The supporting cast contributes wonderfully. Dafoe (The Lighthouse) is a natural at being a weirdo, but he exhibits a paternal love for his creation that is surprisingly earnest. I laughed every time he went into one of his extended wails when he was disconnecting himself from a machine to handle his bodily gasses. Ruffalo (The Adam Project) is devilishly amusing as he abandons all pretense of likeability to play a deeply manipulative but fascinating louse, a character that is almost as transparent about his desires as Bella. His faux elitism is a constant source of comedy. Kathryn Hunter (The Tragedy of Macbeth) has a memorable and sinister turn as the brothel madame who teaches Bella about the nature of capitalism and socialism. Christopher Abbott (Black Bear) appears late as a privileged man from Bella’s past reappearing with his own demands, and his is the most terrifying portrait in the entire wacky movie, an antagonist that’s all too real and scary in a movie given to such brilliantly quixotic flights of fancy. 
Under Lanthimos’ direction, the movie presents the world as an awesome discovery and the lurches into the surreal allow the viewers to see the marvels of existence with the same awe as Bella. The movie feels like it takes place in a science fiction universe of crazy visuals and the avant garde incorporation of past, present, and future. It makes every scene something to behold. This is his most visually decadent film of his career. The musical score by Jerskin Fendrix, a first-time film composer, and it works on a thematic level as trying to discover new kinds of sounds along with the journey of its heroine. However, there are sequences where the music feels like an assault on your ears. While intentional, the detours into abrasive dissonance can make one long for something less experimental and more traditional at least for the sake of your own sensitive eardrums.
Life can be decadent, it can be confusing, it can be ridiculous, it can be heartbreaking, it can be terrifying, but it’s an experience worth savoring and embracing, and this ultimately is the message of Poor Things. Stone is brilliant as she confidently carries us along for every moment of an exploration of what it means to be human, and with an ending that is so fitting and satisfying that I wanted to stand and applaud. For those squeamish from the heavy amounts of sexuality, Poor Things is at its core a very pro-life movie. It’s an inspiration to make you think one minute while making you snort laughing the next. May we all see the world with the voracious hunger and curiosity and boldness of Bella Baxter with her second chance at this one life.
Nate’s Grade: A
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