I Guess I'll Write About Movies Now

In 1816, 18 year-old Marry Shelley tapped into her culture's inchoate fears of the burgeoning advancements in science and the threat they posed to humanity, and created one of the all-time great works of literature, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus . Her work has terrorized us for two centuries with dire warnings about what happens when our scientific reach exceeds our grasp. I wonder what she would think about artificial intelligence. Would she have written The Terminator , or Blade Runner ? Perhaps she would've written a better version of Wish . (Google "Disney Wish AI" for more on that) I doubt that she would look at artificial intelligence and come up with something as heartwarming, tender, and uplifting as The Wild Robot , but I'm so glad that someone did. Let's get some things out of the way: The Wild Robot is a near-perfect film. And I only call it "near" perfect because I haven't gone back to rewatch it yet. In terms of recent anim...

Ilse Aichinger's famous 1957 short story, "Der gefesselte Mann" ("The Bound Man") tells of a man who learns how to move with almost supernatural grace and strength while living within the limitations of his bindings. Once his bonds are removed, he doesn't know how to recreate his glorious acrobatic feats, and so he has to shoot a wolf and run away before he is killed by angry villagers and circus performers. I should've mentioned that it's a German story. Anyway, I've always found it interesting to think about how our limits can inspire us to find ways to exceed our expectations. And I sometimes think about how, once those limitations are taken away, we might find ourselves getting high on our supply and creating horrible, self-indulgent shit and confusing it for a magnum opus. That's all just a longwinded way of saying that Megalopolis is a masturbatory piece of garbage, and Francis Ford Coppola either needs to stick to making wines or surro...

This is an "m-e-double-s" mess of a movie. Here's the elevator pitch: Brandy and some dude are expecting a baby, and they have financial troubles that threaten to sink them until the dude's evil, elderly, racist stepmother moves into their Front Room  and proceeds to shit her pants so much that Brandy eventually kills her. Nothing about that pitch is false, but it does leave out some things. Maybe the old woman has supernatural powers, maybe she's possessed, maybe she can can communicate with dead babies, maybe Brandy has been driven insane by the loss of a previous child. I left those things out of the pitch because, while the film raises all these questions, it never fucking addresses them. And not in a "ooh, it's open to interpretation, you have to figure it out for yourself" kind of way, but more like a "meh, we ran out of time and film stock so we just didn't shoot the rest of the movie but you get the gist, right?" I cannot stress...

Have you ever lived in a home that has had coat after coat after coat of new paint slapped on to try and convince the inhabitants that what they're seeing every day is new and fresh and wonderful? Well, if you're not careful, then over the years the paint builds up and builds up builds up to the point where even the slightest bit of humidity means the doors swell up and lodge themselves shut, as all the normal breathing room has been taken over by layers of forgotten paint jobs. That's kind of what feels like happened in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , except the doors were all forced open, and it seems like every plot idea and character was invited in and absolutely no one was left out. The result is that a lot of great stuff made it in, as did some stuff that should've been put to use elsewhere. All told, I enjoyed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice  for what it delivered, including the warning to filmmakers attached to legacy projects that sometimes less is more, and when you bring a...