Tag Archives: Review

Run for Cover (1955)

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Run for Cover is rarely talked about in conversations of westerns, but there’s something fascinating about getting a James Cagney-led sagebrusher.  Like seeing Edward G. Robinson in The Violent Men, it’s hard not to read his entire history of gangster pictures into his backstory because although it’s a different decade, genre pictures still hold a place in the viewing public’s hearts.

Before they broke out with the likes of Hud, Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch penned the story this movie was based on. Although it hardly has the pedigree of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, the images of the picture are still stunning in their own right shot on location in Aztec, New Mexico.

The opening premise is frankly pretty corny. Cagney meets John Derek at a watering hole very conveniently. They ride on together with no apparent purpose except to get to the nearby town. Then, in a freak misunderstanding, while they’re shooting some scavengers out of the sky, the two men are mistaken for train robbers, and they have a bag full of cash literally dropped in their laps.

The locomotive heaps on the coal to race back to town to sound the alarm after their close scrape with the “outlaws.” Realizing what has happened, Cagney, always the level-headed one, looks to follow behind and return the money. They have nothing to hide. Still, there’s only one way this might end.

The mountains in the background are towering — truly awesome to look at — but there are more pressing matters at hand. It’s rather foreboding. It’s been some time between viewings, but there definitely are elements of The Ox-Bow Incident and Johnny Guitar here where the lynch-mob mentality takes over the local populations driven mostly by fear and traumatic experience.

However, this is all a false start, a way of developing the scenario ahead of us. It’s about that same man played by Cagney — now the town marshal — and his young companion who’s stricken with a life-altering injury. They must figure out what it means to live their lives.

Cagney rarely got a lot of late-period credit. There’s White Heat and then One, Two, Three comes to mind — these are marvelous showcases for his tenacious talents. Run for Cover is rarely talked about, whether it’s in the context of ’50s westerns, the career of Nicholas Ray, or that of Cagney himself.

But it does feel like another picture to buttress his legacy with. Not because it’s some grand masterpiece; he proves that he can make a slighter, quieter picture like this sing. Because his talents were not always purely bellicose or irascible. He has a more general charisma even later in his career.

He’s summed up so beautifully in a crucial scene. The doctor says Derek will never walk again. Cagney won’t hear of it, and he walks into the adjoining room as the boy lies on the floor crying out that he can’t get up. As their kindly Swedish benefactor (Viveca Lindfors) attends to him, Cagney simply beseeches him to “get up.”

There’s an authority in his words that feels almost Christ-like. It might seem like it comes out of a place of callousness, but really there is so much concern there. He doesn’t want the boy to give in and waste his life. In some manner, he is a miracle maker, a man of faith looking to bring the best out of this boy.

it’s a fairly slow-paced, straightforward western and this means much of the brunt of the movie must be carried by the merit of the performances — the relationships cultivated between them.

John Derek feels like little more than a pretty face, and the young actor might have said as much, but Cagney seems generous to him just as his character is generous to his young companion enlisting him as his deputy. He gives him credence and importance in this movie that he wouldn’t get otherwise without such a consummate professional to partner with.

There is some menace in the picture. Ernest Borgnine represents one — a shifty outlaw — and later some godless out-of-towners come tumbling into church mid “Christ The Lord is Risen Today” prepared to raid the bank.

What Run for Cover has to its advantage is how it turns all manner of dynamics on its head. The sheriff lambasts the townsfolk who are so righteous, so willing to condemn others, even as they are supposed to represent civilized society.

Then his one protégé becomes the film’s final and most crucial point of conflict, and this is not just like the Searchers, the ornery old man budding heads with the impetuous youth.

It’s a different kind of complication as they must face off against one another and come to terms with who they are down to their very core.  There’s a clear-cut emotional intensity that can only be resolved in one telling act. It’s tragedy and redemption all rolled up into one, and here we have something that feels distinctly of Nicholas Ray.

3.5/5 Stars

Born to Be Bad (1950)

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“When you came here that first day, I fell flat on my face over your suitcase. I never really got up.” – Joan Leslie as Donna

Born to Be Bad is not high-grade stuff. Its trashy exploitive title says as much, but it’s also worthwhile for exactly these reasons. Nicholas Ray would make a name for himself in Technicolor — not black and white — capturing a bevy of emotive performances from the likes of James Mason and James Dean. But it’s easy to forget some of his earlier films are equally stirring. Bogart in In a Lonely Place or Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground.

There’s something lighter, more convivial about the performances in Born to Be Bad, but straight down the line, it offers up a thoroughly intriguing cast. It has to do with how they can play off one another and couple up with various character dynamics forming between them.

We have a disorientating beginning because we don’t see Joan Fontaine, but someone who turns out to be Joan Leslie. She’s older now, mature, assured, and still more ebullient than I ever remembered her before in the early Warner Bros. days.

Within the context of the picture, she has reason to be. She’s deliriously happy, about to marry the love of her life, a rich moneybags (Zachary Scott), and yet she still finds time for a job and other wisecracking male companions. One’s a painter (Mel Ferrer), the other a purported novelist (Robert Ryan). There’s a happy-go-lucky familiarity to it all. We almost forget what the movie is meant to be about.

Then, Joan Leslie trips over a suitcase, her hair tossed violently askew, and she looks up to see the soft features of none other than Joan Fontaine perched on a couch. The unassuming beauty is her usual diffident self. However, this iteration of her screen image holds a manipulative underbelly.

As Cristabel ingratiates herself into Donna’s good graces and initiates designs on her man, it’s almost easy enough to dismiss her actions as first. She wheedles her way bit by bit until it’s more and more evident her ingenue from Rebecca or Suspicion has gone sour and self-serving.

Even when he’s partially a victim, Zachary Scott manages to give off a smarmy veneer. Robert Ryan has his own curious introduction, berating Cristabel when she’s on the phone, but it’s not a party line. He’s in the house and she wanders into the kitchen to see the stranger raiding the icebox. At first, she’s indignant. Then she starts to fall for his blunt charms.

Ryan would join forces again with Ray in On Dangerous Ground, and he seems like the kind of actor the director can use well. There’s a raw incisiveness to him that can function durably without sacrificing certain levels of emotional honesty. Because he has an unsparing frankness about him that one can either appreciate or become royally turned off by. Very rarely does Ryan elicit an apathetic response.

Fontaine does her part beautifully — her eyes constantly flittering around. In one particular conversation between Scott and Ferrer, she casually listens as she takes in the scene around her, just happy to be in such a place. She manages to be so helpful and so helpless getting everything she wants as a result.

Donna’s preparing to storm off to London, her relationship with Curtis torn asunder. Her pointed remarks to her rival have a delightful sting: “Somebody should have told the birds and the bees about you.” I don’t know what to make of it, but there’s something in Joan Leslie’s eyes when she’s been slighted that’s reminiscent of Marsha Hunt — a glint that Fontaine never owned. Leslie provides her a fine foil as we continue to explore a variation on the All About Eve dynamic.

Two exemplary shots of juxtaposition happen in adjacent scenes with Fontaine’s sparkling features framed on the chest of her man as she reposes there and, of course, there are two of them. She’s so good at flitting back and forth between two men. They both speak to her in different ways or rather, they both offer something unique that she can benefit from.

The jilted lovers, Leslie and Ryan, fall in together as friends and business associates if not romantic partners because there is something more in the works. Cristabel finally gets caught in her lies, though Born To Be Bad has a fairly lightweight ending. No one gets tragically wounded and everyone seems to laugh it off or get their wrist slapped. It’s not noir, nor is it effectively weighty, but it’s an intermittent pleasure to watch if you’re fond of the players. It more than lives up to its title.

3.5/5 Stars

Berlin Express (1948)

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Added to the landscape of The Third Man, Germany Year Zero, and A Foreign Affair, Berlin Express is a fascinating portrait in the rubble-film genre. These are the pictures on the cutting edge of filmic history, shooting on-location in the post-war world that was still licking its wounds and putting the pieces back together across France, Germany, and really any other place that was directly affected.

Although we see the IG Farben Building — famously Eisenhower’s command post after the end of the war — it’s the bombed-out world surrounding it that proves the most telling. Even as the newsreel narration feels overbearing after a certain point (it doesn’t have the wry verve of Carol Reed), we’re getting to see elements of the world as it was at that precise moment. Jacques Tourneur is at his best with evocative canvasses to work against, and the post-war landscape certainly fits the bill.

It is a different take on The Third Man milieu. You get the seedy, grungy impoverished nature of the world, tramping around the train station where men fall to the ground for a dropped cigarette while peddling any miserable trinket they possibly can.

But the drama also considers the zones of the newly divided Germany by calling up characters of each rank and nationality. They are all very overtly represented and implicated in this story.

It commences with a train loaded with passengers of all different nationalities who make for a convenient focal point for our story because they come to represent the Allies looking to consolidate power and pave the way for the Cold War in a decaying imperialistic society.

One can’t help but think of archetypal train tales like Christie’s Murder on The Orient Express or Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. However, the movie shares more in common with The Narrow Margin than some may realize. Even Charles McGraw, who would play the protagonist in the later Richard Fleischer B picture fills a part in this one.

Here he’s helping to smuggle a very crucial German leader (Paul Lukas) across the country to help the reunification efforts. The remnants of the Nazis would love to get their hands on him or do away with him for good. They are the film’s primary evil — lurking in the negative space — until they are finally forced to show their hand.

Merle Oberon calls on the sense of camaraderie from each Allied faction to help her find the missing doctor because it’s true that despite the best-laid plans, betrayal is imminent. He is far from safe. They group off to search in all the local back alleys and hellholes.

At this point, Robert Ryan seizes his chance because he’s taken an immediate shining to the French girl Lucienne (not to be confused with the film’s cinematographer Lucien Ballard). It’s amazing to acknowledge approximately 49 minutes into the picture Oberon and Ryan finally get together in what feels like a more traditional Hollywood dynamic with the headliner stars linked romantically. Until this point, however, it’s very much (and very purposefully) a picture by committee.

Ryan for his part is fairly straight-laced and likable, Oberon is principled, and the other blokes add their own touches of good humor or contrarian perspectives. It never feels like a consistent drama and there are whole patches of dialogue broadcasting its intentions too readily. Of course, this has been the cardinal sin of screenwriting since the dawn of time. Closely connected to the storytelling commandment passed down from Billy Wilder: Thou shalt not bore.

But when Tourneur is able to take moments and work them out through dynamic visual means, we get something wholly worthwhile. Even as it’s not always superb storytelling, watching Robert Ryan punch it out in a vat of beer in an abandoned brewery, cloaked in the shadows of noir, is the movie at its very best.

Close behind is when a wounded clown incognito totters onto the stage to uproarious laughter only to topple right on top of the camera as the investigating military police are left to pick up the pieces.

In such moments, it doesn’t matter where it happens or what it means so much as how it is executed for our benefit. We feel the impact. Or later on the train, with a traitor in their ranks, a violent act is perpetrated and implausibly reflected out a train window. Whether it makes total sense, the core of the action is relayed to the audience in such an ingenious fashion.

Then, the movie wraps up with more wry, slightly disdainful commentary about the bombed-out ruins of Berlin as if it’s a sightseeing tour. It runs in tandem with many of the more staged moments promoting a lasting message of goodwill. Alas, it was not to be.

So while the film can never get out of the shadow of propaganda or cast off its noble intentions, for viewers interested in something more timeless, Berlin Express has a handful of genuinely gripping moments belying any bouts of heavy-handedness. It’s relatively easy to latch onto the good and tolerate the rest.

3.5/5 Stars

Linda, Linda, Linda (2005)

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“Like a rat, I want to be beautiful. Because you have a beauty that can’t be reflected in pictures” -sung by Linda, Linda, Linda

During the grainy opening scene of Linda, Linda, Linda there’s some time spent figuring out how these characters relate to our story as two AV nerds look to video a high school girl who is introducing a school’s forthcoming cultural festival.

It’s not so important to get to know who they are as to realize they will become the bookend for the movie and the parameters of its world. Because when you are a Japanese student, “Bunkasai” really is your chance to shine in front of your peers.

Linda, Linda, Linda captures this environment better than any other film I’ve seen thus far, and it’s because there’s really an ecosystem built out. Each class has their own task, game, or food vendor that they’re preparing for. Sports teams will have exhibitions. Clubs will have booths. Bands put on performances on the big stage for everyone.

However, this canvas wouldn’t work without the human drama we come to expect with high school. One girl hurts her hand and petty disagreements lead to the dissolution of an all-girl rock band. Three of its members, Kei, Kyoko, and Nozomi, decide to form a new quartet without their lead singer. Son (Bae Doona), the unblinking Korean exchange student is quickly found as her replacement.

Some western audiences might not recognize what an odd choice Son is to be their lead singer. Japanese is not her first language. They often have trouble communicating with her (A stunted bus stop interaction brought back all sorts of personal memories from my time overseas). She has to learn all the lyrics to their setlist and she’s a bit kooky. Still, it fosters a beautiful kind of relationship.

There’s something leisurely and unhurried about the pacing of the movie. Characters are put in front of us, and yet we don’t feel like there’s some objective to be obtained. It’s about getting to know them and observing their situations.

My primary avenue to consider this film is through the filter of my own experience. I went to a cultural festival like this. There was giant Jenga and classrooms turned into rollercoasters and carnival games. We had boba, sweet potatoes, and frankfurters (while supplies last). But the best part was the music. I saw many of my students come into their own, witnessing sides of them you never see in the classroom. Raging fuzz-filled guitar solos, singers coming out of their shells, and girl guitar gods rocking out.

In fact, I was up on that stage too. Rather like Son I was an outsider. I got asked to sing a song in English and so without any musical training or a voice to speak of I agreed spending several weeks learning a One Direction tune. It’s not quite The Blue Hearts, but I’m not much of a singer. Son spends her time training at a karaoke drink bar.

If that experience was hardly a highlight of my life, I fall back on the experiences I got to witness. Linda Linda Linda has that same raucous joie de vivre we rarely attribute to Japanese culture. That’s what made it so joyous watching my students rock out to One OK Rock and Green Day.

It’s the same energy making Linda, Linda, Linda buzz with a pervasive joy. The audience imbibes the energy, cheers it on, and the musicians feed off of it. Nerves die away. They give themselves over to the music and enjoy themselves. If it’s like my school, these kids will probably never be professional musicians, but that’s hardly the point. Music has joys going beyond fame and monetary gain.

I was once taken by the idea of James Carse with his infinite games. Finite games have winners and losers. In infinite games, the players seem to be cooperative feeding into something bigger than themselves and utilizing a different, intrinsic rubric for success.

Although Linda…deviates mostly from the similar-sounding Swing Girls, what they share beyond a frantic slap-dash finale, is this performative exhilaration found most often in music. Soon enough, the festival is over and that’s the end of it.

But for a couple shining moments in the middle of the setlist, they were at the center of something spectacular. It’s easy to be a sucker for these kinds of stories when they feel so closely tied to my own fond memories. Long live Linda, Linda, Linda.

4/5 Stars

His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) and The Rocking Horsemen (1992)

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His Motorbike, Her Island (1986)

There’s an immediate aesthetic artifice to His Motorbike, Her Island. Our hero is cool and simultaneously cruel representing a husky-voiced, brusque masculinity that feels no doubt appealing and equally toxic. He recounts his life’s observations through voiceover — the monochrome dreams making up his memories — and as such the movie slaloms easily between black & white and color.

It feels perfectly at home in its moment as part ’80s biker movie full of style. Some of this no doubt comes from director Nobuhiko Obayashi who always seems to have a propensity for commercial pop culture imagery. I would hesitate to call him a technician, and yet since he both edited and directed many of his films, maybe I don’t want to use the label because it sounds too austere.

His films are suffused with a vibrant energy and although the comparison misses the mark, the only reference I could think of was Richard Lester. I’d be interested in hearing who others bring up.

The movie’s premise is quite simple. Koh Hashimoto (Riki Takeuchi) runs errands on his motorcycle part time. His idle hours are taken up with a docile beauty name Fuyumi. He even gets in a duel with the girl’s older brother, who’s worried for her honor. Whether the outcome impacts his view of her or not, Koh, breaks it off. By his estimation, she’s boring (all she knows is crying and cooking).

Koh is looking for the Japanese version of the aloof dream girl, and he finds it in Miiyo. She captivates him with her confident vivacity, taking pictures of him, chatting in the onsen, and ultimately taking up his first love of motorcycles.

Their relationship blossoms when he visits her hometown out in the country during Obon, and we witness how the summer holiday is rooted in both a veneration and a celebration of dead loved ones. Koh’s captivated watching Miiyo dance during the festival proceedings. It’s something about her spirit he finds so attractive.

It also signals the film’s dangerous edges. Because if I wanted to distill His Motorbike, Her Island, down to its essence, we would need to talk about the intoxicating and reckless abandon of youth. It’s mesmerizing when it’s projected up on the screen in all its glory existing without worldly consequence of any kind.

Miiyo follows Koh and becomes infatuated by his singular passion: a 750cc Kawasaki. But it’s not just a supercharged motorcycle, and it’s not so much about an object made of chrome and an engine. It’s the adrenaline hit and emotional high of riding a motorcycle and riding it fast. It’s almost a dare for life to come at you head-on. For them, living life on on the edge like this is an obvious antidote to the malaise.

It’s both what attracts them to one another and threatens their ultimate undoing. Live fast, die young, has a poetic inevitably to it. I feel like I will need to watch the movie again down the road sometime, but there’s a pervasive sense that this motorbike, this island, this young man and this young woman take on a kind of mythic proportion.

Just like I never caught onto a perceptible rhythm of the monochrome and color, what we witness is not always an objective, tangible world. It exists in the hinterlands of memory, love, passion, and emotions just out of reach. The irony is obvious.

Sometimes, to feel alive, people need to get as close to death as possible. I’m not sure if this star-crossed, high-octane hedonism is still en vogue, but it’s easy to understand how it could seem attractive albeit misguided. There’s a hubris to it.

3.5/5 Stars

The Rocking Horseman (1992)

When I lived in Japan, I was flabbergasted to learn that there was a group that was bigger in Japan during the ’60s than the Beatles. It was The Ventures! This instrumental act kicked off the “Eleki Boom” as their iconic onomatopoeic glissandos (deke-deke-deke) captivated a generation of youth. These teenagers subsequently rushed out to buy their electric guitars and start their own bands during the “Group Sounds” explosion.

Although I didn’t think about it at the time, I’m a sucker for a good musical coming-of-age movie, and this landscape was ripe for such a story. Recently, when I came upon The Rocking Horsemen, I realized a void in the cinematic landscape had been filled thanks to Nobuhiko Obayashi

Fujiwara (Yasufumi Hayashi) feels like the most innocent and congenial of Obayashi’s boy heroes, a Ferris Bueller-type who instantly takes us into his confidence by not only providing voiceover but speaking directly to us.

OB’s films are easily placed in this provincial milieu outside the hustle and bustle of the big city. This gives them a kind of comfortable intimacy, and it’s only a small jump to place them in the past. In this case, Japan during the 1960s. I already mentioned that the movie covers a subgenre I have a private preoccupation with: form-a-band origin stories. That includes That Thing You Do! and Sing Street to The Commitments, Nowhere Boy, and School of Rock. What sets this one apart is the unique context and cultural moment.

Now I’ve been inculcated from an early age that the Beatles had the greatest music, but Fujiwara is coming of age with an ear raised to the admonitions of his elders. Pop music is puerile entertainment, cultural dregs compared to the sophistication of classical music. The Beatles included.

Then, his radio played “Pipeline” and he is changed forever. Any kind of snobbery quickly dissipates. The new sound assaults him as he reclines in his bedroom. There’s no escaping its force, and he converted for good, caught up in the same boom I read about. It was electric liberation.

Since a rock musician can’t look like a Buddhist acolyte, the first course of action was to grow out his hair. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I find these movies compelling is it involves some kind of youthful industry. When you’re young you don’t need to be told the odds. If you want to start a band, and that’s you’re impetus, you can go ahead and do it. No permission is necessary (parents notwithstanding).

In this way, Fujiwara meets his future bandmates. The first shares his interest in rock and turns his back on the more traditional setlist the school club follows. The rest of the members include a priest’s son, who’s the band’s source of worldly wisdom, and then a gawky dork who gets coerced into playing the drums for them.

If initially they fall together organically enough, they also premeditate how to best go about their business. In the end, they resolve to get summer jobs at a local manufacturing plant to save up to buy their instruments. These scenes are mostly transitory — only an end to the means — but as “Woolly Bully” plays over their assembly line, there’s a sense of optimism. They’re getting closer to their goal.

Ittoku Kishibe shows up again after Lonely Heart as a good-natured teacher who supplies American lyrics and ultimately offers to become their club advisor. It’s a small addition, but his tacit affirmation of their endeavors speaks volumes.

I’m fascinated by how pop culture can infiltrate and suffuse through the cracks of a society, especially in an international context. I met Japanese folks with very specified knowledge about Korn or Olivia Newton-John, Sam Cooke, Jazz or Punk music. Or think of the two teens in Mystery Train who go on a pilgrimage to Memphis in search of The King. Where does this come from?

While I wouldn’t call the general Japanese populous particularly aware of world culture, you do find these hyperspecialized niches of expertise. These boys glean their inspirations thanks to radio and import records, even older siblings who pass down a love of Nat King Cole.

A perfect example is Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” played as our hero rides his bike through his neighborhood. It’s a totally different context from the California surf culture I was born and bred in. But it still reaches them on the other side of the world. The same might be said of The Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

It doesn’t feel like a mistake that the first time the new band convenes and brandishes their new name — The Rocking Horsemen — they start playing, and it’s a flawless rendition of “Pipeline” (exactly like the Ventures recording). They make their debut at a show during Christmas with mixed results, but they disregard the critics and play their hearts out. What’s more, they gel and become galvanized as a group. How can you not under the circumstances?

But as school comes to a close, their journey together winds down too. Their first and last big show comes at the annual school cultural festival and with a set list including “I Feel Fine” and “Johnny B. Goode,” they can’t miss. We’ve seen this moment before in many a movie so it’s a kind of expected wish-fulfillment watching them go out.

When you’re an adolescent these are the kind of memories that stay with you. And in a final act of solidarity, Fujiwara now listless and despondent over the future, has his newfound brotherhood to come around him. They christen him their “Bandleader for Life.” So even as their journey as a band might have met its logical conclusion more than an impasse (not many make it like The Beatles), The Rocking Horsemen do have some amount of closure. The music and those relationships will never leave them.

4/5 Stars

Lonely Heart (1985)

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Lonely Heart is a film bathed in the golden hues of nostalgia (“natsukashii” in Japanese). It also boasts a rural landscape with a topography that’s the utter antithesis of Tokyo’s urban skyline. This in itself already evokes a certain quaintness, regardless of the story being told almost 40 years ago.

Hiroki (Toshinori Omi) envisions his world through the shutter of his camera — though he rarely has actual film to use — and so he imagines what he might capture. After school, he can be found scampering through the village streets in his school uniform with his two best friends doing backflips and cracking all manner of jokes. They have a youthful ingenuity that’s clever when it’s not getting them in trouble.

For instance, their use of Bunsen burners, forceps, and various pieces of lab equipment to cook up a delectable meal is inspired. Then, Hiroki’s friends razz him about following his father’s footsteps to be a Buddhist monk — he must give up meat lest he goes to hell for cutting corners on the road to enlightenment — and they’ll gladly eat his portion.

The next moment, they’re ushered off to the principal’s office to clean as a minor punishment. Instead, they teach vulgarities to the principal’s prized parrot and their mothers have the ignominy of coming into school to atone for their indiscretions. Hiroki’s mother is your typical portrait of a Japanese parent, at the very least because she’s always on her son to study more and pick up his grades. Their underlining failure to communicate is a universal adolescent struggle.

But his life stage is also about love, something that still feels naïve and untarnished by regrets and ample experience. He often looks through his camera viewfinder at the mystery girl, “Lonely Heart,” as she plays the piano, rides her bike, and takes the ferry home. If this was all it was, Lonely Heart might be a fairly rudimentary exploration of youth — another boyish awakening where the girl is cast as an object rather than a human being with a unique inner life.

Some of this happens in the movie with the ethereal Yasuko Tomita, but there’s also a parallel tale leaning into these themes in a more profound way. In fact, it takes them a step further. Hiroki receives a visitation from an impish ghost of a girl who materializes on numerous occasions even going so far as berating his mother and toying with her.

This seems like a curious development, but then Japanese culture has a greater tolerance for ghosts. If you’ve seen some of Miyazaki’s movies (arguably Japan’s most beloved cinematic export), you already know there’s a kind of acceptance of these things. They aren’t so much supernatural and if she’s labeled as “weird,” she’s also more or less accepted as fact.  Just as magical realism and surrealism can often permeate Japanese cinema.

This is easier to accept as I often have trouble with Japanese humor because it feels broad (whatever that means). The film is full of juvenile shenanigans and adult caricatures who overwhelm the screen from time to time blindsiding us with absurdity.

However, in juxtaposition, there are these instances of sensitivity playing out in Lonely Heart’s more pensive parts, personifying what Hiroki grapples with all throughout the film. It’s this long-lost love — the deep longing within all of us — resigning us to be these lonely creatures.

In Japanese culture, there’s also something innately beautiful about this sacrificial melancholy for the sake of some greater good or greater call. If I didn’t get my cultural signals crossed, it ties into the essence of “mono no aware” — an impermanence or transience of things. I’m not sure if Japanese culture would speak about love with these same terms, but please allow me to, even if only momentarily.

I’ve gotten to a juncture in my film-viewing life where, if I haven’t quite matured, I’m willing to take things on their own terms. Lonely Heart does not function within our western logic. If you asked me to explain everything away I’d be hard-pressed to say all the whys and wherefores. And yet something about this movie, mixed in with all its various forms and flights of fancies, left me with an indelible sense or feeling that will remain with me.

Somehow it reminded me of the more recent gem Petite Mamman. It has to do with honing in on a magical and poignant connection between parents and children. It developed differently than what I was expecting — the fantasy has a unique kind of functionality — and so by the time the movie’s over it has done work on us.

It’s offered up a quiet epiphany that we might tuck away for later enjoyment. Hopefully, if you get the chance to watch the film you’ll understand exactly what I mean. However, I wouldn’t dream of divulging that here.

3.5/5 Stars

Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)

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Sometimes you start a film and there’s such a specific sense of place, rhythm, and tone you perk up in anticipation. I felt that sensation from the opening credits of this new film starring Daisy Ridley.

The score is replete with a few murmuring voices and a harp, and there’s the muted color palette of a certain sleepy town in the Pacific Northwest. There’s an instant sense of where we are and what end we might be converging on. That is, besides death.

Sometimes I Think About Dying is directed by Rachel Lambert from a screenplay co-written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, and Katy Wright-Mead. It’s easy to pigeon-hole it as a project filling the quirky indie fix and the proof of concept seems littered with a minefield of tropes.

Fran (Ridley) works in an office — the dreaded 9 to 5 desk job — and between emails and spreadsheets her mind will drift away to far off places in her subconscious. It’s also a movie with plenty of inserts of contorted posture. At times it’s uncomfortable watching her exist.

Robert (Dave Merheje) is the new guy. He’s personable and a little dorky in a charming sort of way. Make him a cinephile and you have a perfect movie character. He feels like the Yin to Fran’s Yang and somehow that bodes well.

They don’t so much have chemistry as stunted, awkward interactions. They go see a movie at the local art house theater. They have pie afterward as one does. One wouldn’t label them a couple so much as they’re two people looking for a connection; he’s just moved to town and well, she’s not the most sociable human being.

In this depicted life of dreary and at times surreal isolation, human connection is such a moving balm. They meet up again and she sees his new home, gets the tour, and learns he has his own past; he’s been divorced, not once but twice.

Ridley’s performance does feel like a performance, but the act of playing something so stunted and repressed and yet giving the sense of a charming person just trying to get out is such a meaningful focal point. Because in another movie it would vie to get bigger, but she never allows it to get into a cartoonish heightened reality of indie purgatory.

A distinction must be made. Fran doesn’t hate her life. She’s good at her job and in her own way is a part of the ecosystem in the office. Whereas Excel sheets and requisition forms are soul-crushing for someone like me, Fran seems to thrive in such a regulated environment. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t also feel the pangs of loneliness. It’s not like they are mutually exclusive; people are nuanced.

Within the context of the film, budding feelings are meager but precious. Her personal hurt and even her greatest transgression are never extended blow outs but these contained moments thoughtfully developed within time and space by the filmmakers.

Fran and Robert get invited to a get together and they both oblige. The subsequent gathering of murder in the dark is a nice evocation on the movie’s primary theme. It’s a visualization of death for a character who does consider its headiness from time to time. The best parts of these scenes is that they feel like a rambunctious good time. That is one of the movie’s strengths: balancing these emotions of warmth and affability with real melancholy.

Robert tells her later in the car, “You’re secretly good at a lot of things. You just don’t let anyone know.” It’s true. Introverted people like this do exist in the world. I feel like I know at least a few of them. On the surface, they seem so taciturn and unassuming but there interior lives or even what they do in their off hours are so vibrant. They offer so much, but they don’t need to tell everyone about it. Selfishly I wish we knew about more of them because we would do well to learn from their example.

My primary critique of the movie initially might have been its opening runway. It felt like for a fairly truncated film, it took a lot of time to get to Robert’s introduction; we even watch as they give a going away party to his predecessor who is set to retire and go on a cruise with her husband.

But even this is paid off when Fran stops by a local coffee shop to get donuts for the office. She’s going through a different kind of pain and regret because she said something regrettable that she cannot take back; she wants to acknowledge her remorse; tell Robert how she feels. But how can she do that if she can barely string two sentences together?

There Fran bumps into her retired co-worker surprised. She was supposed to be on a cruise. Except her husband had a stroke; she couldn’t bear to tell anyone and so now she drinks her coffee alone and looks out the window at the harbor wistfully. Fran could have traded pleasantries and left it at that. There is no personal utility to stick around, and yet she stops and sits down. She makes the decision to listen and her reactions feel real.

Somehow these feelings make her empathy and concern genuine. The action of getting something for her coworkers — a learned altruistic behavior is one thing — but there is also another turn. For one of the first times, we see her sympathy on display for another human being. She connects even if it’s just a little thing.

Later, she asks Robert genuinely, “Do you wish you could unknow me?” What a question, but it comes from such a place of honesty and fear. It fits hand in hand with the hypothetical question, “If you died tomorrow, would anyone care?” Could the lie be true? The voices in our own heads can be vicious.

There’s probably an HR caveat in here somewhere, but a movie is a movie. What lingers is this reverberating optimism. Human connections are worth the risk and effort. I left the film thinking, “Me too, Fran. Me too.” I resonate with this title though not because of some kind of ideation. From dust we come and from dust we will return. 

In the final embrace of the movie, it’s in a copy room. But within seconds it’s transformed into a garden-like greenhouse — a little slice of paradise. The imagery seems only fitting. We were not made to be alone.

3.5/5 Stars

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

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From watching one of director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s interviews, it’s made clear he started Evil Does Not Exist by using the music of Eiko Ishibashi as inspiration. There’s a swelling breadth to it augmenting everything it touches. At times doleful and then evolving into a plinking intensity looking for release.

It plays against a backdrop of austere forests, trickling streams, and fresh dustings of snow outside the prying eyes of the Tokyo metropolis. The score becomes a viable metaphor for the movie itself.

The film’s relationship with its characters is also distinct. There’s something Bressonian about it. Because the famed French director famously envisioned his actors as models and often cast non-professionals. He wasn’t looking for performances in the conventional sense.

I don’t know Hamaguchi’s filmography all that well, but it doesn’t feel like he has a stock company. Rather he likes to use different actors for what they offer in each distinct context. We spend the opening minutes watching this man named Takumi (crew member Hitoshi Omika) exist and act, though not in the way we normally think of it in film.

It is slow cinema in the sense that we watch him in the paces of his life from collecting stream water to chopping wood. This tells us more about him than any amount of dialogue might, but it also signals to us what kind of movie we’re in for.

Hamaguchi is prepared to steady your heart rate, and I could use much more of this amid the daily grind. However, it is a tightrope because it’s so easy to lose your audience as they grow potentially disillusioned by the pacing and elongated editing schemes. Seeing as Drive My Car was over 3 hours and Happy Hour over 5 hours, there’s something about Evil Does Not Exist that feels, if not economical, at least more contained.

Takumi’s relationship with his quizzical daughter is rather reminiscent of Leave No Trace (2018). So much of their affection and relationship is facilitated through their shared love of nature with the father passing down his knowledge to his girl.

The movie’s dramatic conflict comes with an impending land development. A Tokyo-based talent agency has plans to install a Glamping site, which ostensibly is little more than a ploy to get a coveted tax subsidy.

Like any conscientious Japanese company, they do their due diligence by holding an open forum for the locals to voice their concerns. The subsequent extended community scene is trademark Hamaguchi with a sprawling dialogue exchange. While it’s not a Park and Rec episode, maybe it’s the Japanese alternative.

There’s something tight-knit about this small community rubbing up against the wary encroachment of the Tokyo firm. Their concerns are well-founded and measured. They see through everything with a clarity that no formal Japanese double-speak can totally obfuscate.

Their opposition, if you will, are the archetypes of a veteran salaryman and his deferential associate who hasn’t quite detached from her empathy. The audience I sat with was mostly quiet if attentive, but there was more than one occasion I found myself chuckling to myself, either from a line of Japanese dialogue or an interaction.

I found this section of the movie especially rich with behavioral humor. There’s a youthful rebel in baggy pants who tramples over the typical decorum and has to be held back. The ritualistic bowing is met with contempt and even Takumi is brusque. They want to try to recruit him as an advisor for their glamping endeavor. He has no business card to give them as is customary, nor does he want their token gifts or pleasantries.

These might be subtle, but it’s a pleasure to watch how these locals eschew what feels like traditional norms. Because so much of Japanese life feels like a tug of war between exterior and interior identity. We say don’t judge a book by its cover and here it holds true on more than one occasion. Many of these characters seem perceptive and ultimately nuanced.

One of the other surprises is how Hamaguchi turns the “enemy” into real people over an extended car ride back to the countryside. They know they’re not dealing with idiots, but their superior encourages them to return and ensure they stay on schedule. It feels like an untenable mission. Having seen both sides, we feel for them. Their hearts aren’t in it.

They trade their hopes, aspirations, and dating prospects in a way that you rarely see in Japanese work culture without alcohol as a social lubricant. Despite the modest scope, I’m not sure if others are aware of how radical this feels.

Takumi takes his guests out into the natural world and allows them to walk alongside him in his daily tasks. Later that same evening his daughter disappears and darkness is closing in. There’s something dismal and inevitable about it as the entire population mobilizes to try and find her.

Without drawing it out too much, they do discover the girl as well as a fawn and doe who feel like semiotic creatures. It’s no coincidence there was a movie called The Deer Hunter. He lives on the fringes of the frame here with his bullets flying in a game of offscreen roulette.

The willfully oblique ending is inexplicable, but I could not look away. You can take it one of two ways: either with mystified displeasure or a contentment in not understanding everything. I fit in the latter category. It was like staring at a mesmerizing spell.

Somehow it feels like a pleasure and a privilege to get these moments in time slowed down for us — sequences that are purposefully meditative. I couldn’t help thinking how much of a backward society we live in that it takes a screen in the dark projecting images in front of us to draw a person out of the hubbub and back into nature. Are we so removed that moving pictures are one of the last vestiges of the natural world in the urban jungle? Because it’s not the real thing.

I would find it instructive for the director to expound on his themes at length — that’s what I want — and yet the movie leaves the results up to us. Still, if nothing else, Hamaguchi gives us a reminder of our imperative ties to the natural world lest we forget where we originate. As much as we try, life cannot always be domesticated comfort. There’s wild beauty out there we would do well to remember.

I think we share an appreciation of the natural world. Maybe it’s semantics or a mere positive affirmation, but if evil does not exist, we could also conjecture, like The Deer Hunter, that interpersonal discord, war, and death are natural in a chaotic world. 

However, I would not say that humans nor beasts are inherently good. For the time being, we live in a broken, fallen world and this is just a reality. Our world is full of entropy, but this is not meant to be our resting state.

It’s all the more reason to do our utmost to look after our environments, be kind to our neighbors, and work toward human flourishing. Of course, that’s easier said than done, but like Thomas Aquinas posited I would like to believe that good can exist even without evil. We’re not there yet, but I’m still hopeful.

3.5/5 Stars

Wildcat (2024)

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A version of this article was published in Film Inquiry.

“I am always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it is very shocking to the system.” – Flannery O’Connor

As someone fascinated by story structure the biopic form is often a tough nut to crack. Cradle-to-grave entries in covering the breadth of a life, can either feel like rushed simulacrums or stodgy overlong hagiographies nailed to the floor.

The very best movies of this ilk inevitably evoke the spirit of their protagonist with the very sinews and bones of their structure. Hence a movie on Mishima that’s wild with heavily striking mise en scene. A Brian Wilson story that is empathetic, hallucinatory, and musical to the nth degree.

Director Ethan Hawke and his co-writer Shelby Gaines have found their own way to do service to famed southern Catholic author Flannery O’Connor. Because her life was famously banal — she lived in her Georgia town with her mother writing before her death at 39 — they tackle her formative years through the vivid imagination of her own literary works.

It’s important to note while this movie is full of fanciful and often humorous and grotesque portraits of humanity, it never feels like the escapism the author abhorred (One can imagine she would have choice words for a hothouse melodrama abruptly featured at the outset). O’Connor always was concerned with depicting the life she knew by unorthodox and often startling means. There was nothing conventional about it.

A Good Man is Hard to Find is case and point, one of her startling works where a self-righteous old hag ends up being shot to death by a wanted fugitive and in this precise moment she becomes a gracious person for the first time in her life. In the film when the gun shot goes off, we watch a young O’Connor (played by the director’s daughter Maya Hawke) go flailing backward from behind her typewriter. She feels her stories so profusely.

We watch her life during her early years as a young woman. There are stints at the illustrious Iowa Writer’s Workshop under the tutelage of Cal Lowell (Philip Ettinger). She pays a visit to a publisher who tries to tactfully give her feedback on her first novel Wise Blood. She’s quick to retort that she’s “amenable” to criticism but only if it does not attempt to neutralize her artistic vision.

There are segments of her returning to live with her mother Regina (Laura Linney) in a society where people want her to be the next Margaret Mitchell, penning the next Southern nostalgia lost cause classic like Gone With The Wind. Meanwhile, Flannery seems antithetical to this entire idea.

It’s evident she is a singular mind who will not settle when it comes to her writing. She tells the truth as spiny and ugly as it might be. This is my own experience with her work. I rarely enjoy it. I feel scandalized and assailed by it at every turn.

It’s difficult going and then she turns a story around and uses her characters and the bizarre scenarios to ambush me. Ironically, the saving grace of her stories are how they all revolve around the scandal of grace — our need to recognize and accept it in our own lives.

The threads of the movie’s narrative are tied together with earnest excerpts from her prayer journal and many of her most notable short stories. One that was my introduction to Flannery was “Revelation” where a self-righteous southern woman gets tackled in a waiting room by an indignant girl named Mary Grace. This comes only after a dream where Jesus comes to her and says she can only enter heaven as a negro or white trash. Perish the thought…

The other is “Parker’s Back” where a profligate covered in tattoos marries a devout woman and gets the image of Christ tattooed on his back to please only for his wife to beat him. He’s tossed out of the house, bloody and bruised, brought to the lowest point imaginable. Is this idolatry or as we watch the picture of Christ being bloodied in front of us, what are we to do with it exactly? It feels uncanny and uncomfortable, a perfect evocation of O’Connor’s sensibilities.

Delving into their conversations, it’s apparent Maya and Ethan Hawke have an abiding appreciation for this woman and her writing. There would be no other reason to make a movie like this with so much tender loving care. And so any mild criticism feels like putting kindred spirits under the chopping block. It need not be so. They feel like dear friends.

John Huston’s adaptation of Wise Blood has an intuitive handle on the Southern milieu and the absurd humor found in O’Connor’s work. She’s darkly funny. It seems to thrive while still getting to the perplexing themes at the core of a story that feels scandalizing as she tears through the Southern mentality with her incisive quill.

What Wildcat has is something so often absent from both film and art these days. It’s not squeamish about the tough conversations nor does it skirt over the most prickly issues, not only of America’s legacy but the very essence of the human experience.

There’s a weight and a gravity to it that’s felt in almost every frame. The only reprieves come from O’Connor’s own wit. This is all in service to its subject because Flannery was a young woman sincerely struggling to balance her aspirations to be a great writer and a devout person of faith in communion with God.

So often we are told these creatives and religious life are mutually exclusive. Which of course feels preposterous to O’Connor in the face of her Creator-God. It’s easy to be moved when she sits among her cohort at the writer’s workshop in Iowa — a midwestern institution that nevertheless maintains a reputation for the literati — and she says religion is not an electric blanket; it’s the cross.

It’s so difficult to take stories that live in our mind’s eye and bring them to the screen because then they are tangible and concrete. Endless possibilities of imagination are distilled down to distinct creative choices. Hawke’s film tailors its palette to a tempest-like existence that roils O’Connor’s soul as she seems to battle for life and death with her typewriter as her only weapon.

Is this a bit much? Perhaps and yet anyone who does write and cares about art or has suffered and struggled, recognizes that it doesn’t feel like hyperbole. It feels real and affecting — like something we understand intimately. In O’Connor, we see reflections of our own struggles in our creative endeavors.

Because we believe our words mean something and that life matters and questions of death and religion are not ancillary topics for dinner parties. They are the crux of our entire existence.

Cal, Flannery’s pen pal and hinted love interest, gives her Thomas Merton, and in this reference and watching her tumultuous struggle depicted on film, it’s difficult not to draw lines between Hawke’s performance and her father’s protagonist in First Reformed (Ettinger who plays Cal also had a crucial role in that film).

For that matter, one of the other integral scenes involves a priest played by Liam Neeson. It feels almost like a reprieve after his apostasy in Silence. He pays Flannery a visit as she’s bedridden, stricken with the lupus that killed her father, and currently unable to write.

Here he enters in to provide Flannery comfort and in all her internal struggles remind her of grace and grace abundantly — something given to her through the death and resurrection of the Jesus they believe in. There is immense power in this scene, even in its simplicity.

Because the storm outside her bedroom widow or even the lupus that’s ravaging her body almost feel like outward manifestations of the real struggle going on. Why does hardship often make us more aware of grace and our need for it in our lives whether we want to accept it or not. Pain is not easy. Happy, warm, affable stories are a lot more palatable.

O’Connor would never dare to be so disingenuous about her faith or her storytelling. And judging from her life and premature death, she was more than acquainted with troubles. She had an intimate relationship with them. Certainly this was not the life she had envisioned for herself.

Still, she ran the race of life even if it was on crutches. Perhaps not dissimilar to that hapless chicken walking backward. What’s more, she blessed all of us with her stories — signposts to help us along our own paths — shocking us back to reality.

I couldn’t get the image out of my head — first as Flannery picks up her new peacock from the train station and then the remarkable moment where its tail feathers fan out behind her in a glorious display. If other people saw her as that measly chicken, in the eyes of her Creator she really was that glorious peacock. What a gift it is.

4/5 Stars

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

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A version of this article was published in Film Inquiry. 

If Spider-Man was the template for what the modern superhero movie would become, its sequel feels like the standard bearer all future successors were asked to eclipse. I had never seen the movie before as I was young during its initial run, but the aura of Spider-Man was always around.

Sitting in a packed theater there was a sense of buzzing anticipation when the opening credits rolled, backed by Danny Elfman’s almost otherworldly score that hints at more eccentric inclinations. The Marvel monolith had yet to be fully consolidated and turned into a factory. For the time being, it feels like director Sam Raimi had free reign for fun.

Because we already have some context for the character carrying over from the first movie, the film’s instincts are correct in reintroducing us to Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) with an opening gambit laced with levity.

We watch him racing to keep his job as a pizza delivery boy only to switch into the spider suit to beat mid-day traffic. There’s an extended bit with a closet full of mops that had the audience in stiches as he drops off the order sheepishly with the front desk.

I’m so oblivious but it does seem like Tobey Maguire has become a walking meme and a lasting internet celebrity based mostly on his Spider-Man persona. There’s something about his delivery that’s so awkward — maybe something about his quivering upper lip — or how he almost lisps out his lines of dialogue. But it’s also endearing.

And for every time the audience laughed, it was never out and out derision. They love this guy. He is their hero and they hold him aloft so when he goes slinging webs and rises again across the skyline, people ring out in audible cheers.

The same goes with the dialogue. Some of it might be inadvertently funny and yet so much of it is in on the joke. Raimi is wonderful in allowing for these incubated moments of a visual gag or an insert with a cameo part that has a reaction or a bit that’s good for a laugh. It can be about a stolen pizza in the opening minutes or even a terribly ordinary Peter stumbling away from a crash scene after he can’t catch his fall and proceeds to set off a car alarm.

This hints at part of the dramatic question at the center of this film. What makes Spider-Man mythology so popular is the nature of his superherodom as initially conceived by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

His story arc is grounded in relationships on all sides however rudimentary they might be. An aunt and uncle, his crush, and the alienation that forms between he and his best friend. What’s more, Peter is faced with the universal conundrum of what he wants versus what is sacrificial in the name of his city. With great power, comes great responsibility. But the words get muddier when it comes to specifics.

And the villainy is equally relatable. Albert Molina is sympathetic but also carries a gravitas with his physique and stage presence that wears the role of Dr. Octavius well. He becomes first a mentor and then an adversary for Peter — a perfect foil for what he represents.

His life’s work — creating a fusion power source for Oscorps — gets out of control during a public showcase.  In the aftermath, his mental faculties get overridden by his new mechanical arms driven by AI. He knows not what he does and becomes a public menace who wants to rebuild his reputation, and avenge the loss of his beloved wife.

Due to the strains of his Spider-Man mantle, Peter’s grades are suffering in college and he’s absent in the lives of the people he cares about most. Aunt May is about to go through an eviction and MJ’s been making a name for herself as a theater actress and model. She feels like Peter has rebuffed her and it hurts.

Peter decides to relinquish his Spider-Man suit because he doesn’t want to keep secrets from anyone; he doesn’t want to break his promises anymore. He steps back into he shadows and lives a normal life even as the crime rate begins to rise in the city

There is the real sense that there is no longer a protective hedge against crime and other antagonistic forces. He must make a decision, and at the same time his powers begin to atrophy for inexplicable reasons.

I never thought I’d get T.S. Eliot or Joel McHale in this movie, but sure enough both are featured. Peter pulls out Eliot in a NYC laundromat as he tries to wash his Spidey suit and find new ways to woo MJ. Girls supposedly dig poetry. It feels like a small Easter egg that one of my favorite high school bands had a song featured on the U.K. soundtrack inspired by Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.”

Meanwhile, McHale shows up as a teller in the bank who sheepishly tells Aunt May she’s not eligible for a loan. It’s one of any number of injustices that make Peter feel powerless to help the ones he loves.

From a dramatic standpoint, the gala where he’s called upon to take pictures feels like the nadir of his story so far. An inebriated (James Franco) smacks him around in a very public setting, and then Peter learns MJ is getting married to someone else; she’s not waiting on him any longer.

These are only the personal stakes, but so many subsequent superheroes have lost this reality and gotten muddled because they dealt in expositions and nebulous things that we have little to no concern for. Here it’s simple yet effective.

The action is wonderful and the visual representation of Doc Ock with his mechanical arms has a real menace that rarely takes a false step in disrupting our suspension of disbelief. In fact, the whole film holds ups though there are a few obligatory final shots that feel like gratuitous eye candy

Aside from this, each confrontation between Peter and Octavius plays like an extraordinary piece of narrative drama that goes beyond surface level pyrotechnics. It’s meant for Saturday matinees as they duel it out inside the bank, scaling sides of buildings with Aunt May in the balance, or even battling over a railcar in a chase that evokes The French Connection while still applying a Spidey twist.

What a wonderful and mysterious thing is it for Spider-Man to lose his mask, and far from castigating him or just wanting a piece of his celebrity, the people he has just saved acknowledge his youth, and vow to keep his secret. There is a neighborliness and a desire for the communal good that feels like wind under our sails.

Because while other installments about superheroes explore characters’ isolation, anonymity, and identity as vigilantes, there is a sense that this Peter Parker does not have to worry. These people are protective of him, grateful for what he has done, and he deserves their care. He deserves grace. After all, he’s only a teenager.

What’s more he has a girl who will stick by him as he looks after the city. There is a precise moment of truth where Peter is able to allow his girl know his true, full self. It’s a supreme gift for the character.

Looking back now 20 years on, Spider-Man 2 is an early 21st century depiction about the dangers of AI, but at its core it’s about the choice. Every great hero must decide what to do in the name of self-satisfaction or personal sacrifice.

The movie would also maintain the more dubious tradition of franchises outstaying their welcome. I’ve been told Spider-Man 3 jumped the shark, and yet I imagine even now there is a nostalgic patina hanging over this trilogy.

Spider Man 2 is a wonderful delight, and it’s a pleasure to see it with an audience who care about the movie so profoundly. It means something to them even after all these years. They may be older, but they come to this movie with the same reservoir’s of affection. It’s the effulgent joy of any little kid who’s ever had dreams of being a superhero.

I’ve never been into ardent superhero fandom, but now finally getting around to Spider-Man 2 after the fact gives me a newfound appreciation for my peers. I see the hype. I’m still hoping the Marvel fad has finally begun to abate for more eclectic forms of entertainment, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate where these films came from.

4/5 Stars