Reviews

If you do a title search on IMDB, apparently everyone who ever grew old in Hollywood is "The Last Mogul"! Jack Warner. Daryl Zanuck. Even Dino De Laurentiis or Golan and Globus!

Look, sure, these were all important enough figures in their way. But Wasserman was a guy who actually changed the underlying structures of Hollywood; who had the power, where the money flowed, what sort of compromises needed to be made. He was a guy who affected Hollywood (and, dare we say it, the US), not just one company.

This documentary does a great job of explaining just why he mattered and the ways in which he affected the industry. The talking heads documentary is difficult form to master - most are utter garbage, starting with the choice of subject matter. Thus it's fascinating to see one done right, from interviewing the correct people (and tossing out the interviews that add nothing) to the sequencing, to the correct balance of interviews versus data presented in other ways like voiceovers or old clips.

I mean I get it. Yes yes, it's a criticism of the Catholic Church. And yes, yes, maybe it (the movie) thinks it's a criticism of totalitarian regimes (the whole business of fear of laughter and all that).

What I don't get is why this movie gets such rapturous reviews. Everything it's saying is trite and obvious. You're against totalitarianism? Find me someone who isn't. You think the Church did some bad things during the Middle Ages? You and about 8 billion other people.

The points it makes are trivial and obvious. What's interesting is why people keep falling into these patterns over and over, but that's never even considered. A work like, say, Darkness at Noon, or hell, even Fantastic Beasts or Game of Thrones, tries to grapple with that question. Simply assuming that some people are bad is cartoon morality, not something deserving 10 stars!

Is the book itself much better? I have no idea. It does seem like the author cared rather more about self-referential literature (cf The Wasteland) than in answering this question, so I don't imagine I will be reading it any time soon.

All I can say is that if you hope to be watching a thought provoking movie that will change your understanding of the world, think again. It's a lowbrow imagining of what a highbrow movie is like.

Yes, it's visually beautiful. But the storytelling is irredeemably broken.

Look at how Marvel handles its best stories: the issues are admitted to be complex, and both sides are treated as having legitimate arguments. Heck, even X-men got this right. But this story feels like something from DC, with a simple-minded claim that one side is right (to hell with all evidence to the contrary) and everyone else is wrong - basically a triumph of teenage narcissism. I'm left with little interest in the third episode because it's obvious what will happen - our Mary Sue will be proven to have been correct, all the other spidies will help prevent disaster, and what we will have learned is that you should always listen to 13 yr olds, no matter how often they have been wrong in the past. Pathetic, just pathetic.

The way the story should have gone (and could still go, but we all know it won't...) is as a villain origin story - Miles Morales lost his community and his soul because his hubris led him to believe he knew more and could do things no other spidie could do, with tragic results (cf, eg Star Wars). But of course that would be against canon...

Halfway through this, I couldn't help thinking "This feels an awful lot like a Nick Hornby movie" (eg High Fidelity or Juliet Naked). And, lo and behold, what do I see in the credits...

So it's basically exactly what you would expect -- man-boy with a particular obsession who is forced to grow up by the love of a good woman. Fine if that's your thing, otherwise ignorable. This particular version of the story plays up the Rom-Com angle a lot more than High Fidelity or Juliet Naked, which I guess makes it a better date movie, but also a rather less interesting movie.

I think there's scope for many more movies in the "obsessive" genre, but the Nick Hornby template has probably been taken as far as it should go; time for something from a different direction (like Whiplash).

The first two or three episodes were very interesting; basically about the technology and art of film.

But once we reach the 50s, everything becomes about the political stance of film. And there's no nuance here - the narrator has exactly the political stance you would expect, and is only interested in movies that push his political agenda. At times the narration becomes almost comical! Shortly after seeing a Spanish movie that makes fun of the Catholic church (ha ha, those silly old Christians) we hit a movie that could possibly be interpreted as not being sufficiently deferential to Martin Luther King, as not treating him as a modern day saint, and this comes along with plenty of apologies from our narrator, that people back then at that time in the mid-sixties weren't yet sufficiently deferential to that name. And yet our narrator appears utterly oblivious to these two side-by-side behaviors.

So yeah, whether it's worth watching depends on what interests you. If you want to be reinforced in a bunch of ideas you already believe, go right ahead. But if you hope to learn anything non-ideological about film -- eg changes in technology, or the business model or, hell, even the end of the studio system, good luck. You might get a quick reference to something you should already know, but you won't get a deep analysis.

Exactly the sort of lightweight silliness you'd expect.

The primary interesting point is a comparison with say the equivalent 50s movie. In the 50s both the adults and the kids would be subject to the same moral code; in this movie we get the adults (who, let's not forget have both been married) kinda sorta going down a different path from what they insist for the kids, but feeling guilty about it.

Obviously in both cases this is all show, we know from plenty of war memoirs exactly what happened in WW2 (and who can blame them, both the guys expecting to die at any moment, and the girls fully aware of how serious the stakes were and doing whatever they could to help those guys out). But that's followed by the end of war and an awful lot of divorces or persisting, but unhappy, marriages.

So I guess we have the 50s as a desperate attempt to, not exactly impose normality, but more inform people "look we've lived through the extreme passions, we know how it goes, and the consequences are long even as the honeymoon is short". What happens in the 60s? Well Griswold is 1965. But that's only for married couples. Looks to me like we have a combination of

• the war (and all its consequences in terms of mad passion, unwed pregnancies, and early marriages) is 20 years ago and the memories less fresh
• contraception is clearly going to be commonplace even if it isn't so yet

So we have movies like this at the cusp, still insisting on the morality of pre-1965, but very clearly aware that the post-1965 world is coming.

And of course the adorable idea that "Swedish girls are easy" which is basically the perpetual dream of the teenage male that, certainly not where he lives, but perhaps somewhere, the girls are easy. If you live in New York, maybe this is the case in California (The Sure Thing). If you live in England maybe it's the case in Greece (The Inbetweeners Movie). And so it goes.

Ah, the speechifying movie, in which the playwright (come on, of course it's a playwright) tells us, in 90 minutes, how the world works and what's wrong with it. It's an extremely delicate flower -- no sane person has any interest in the playwrights life theories, so everything depends on whether the rest of the story is compelling enough to make us care. Almost every version fails because it's too heavy handed; predictable characters, doing predictable things for predictable reasons.

This one (barely) succeeds. The characters are each a mess, none of them likable, but they're not predictable and not boring, and that's enough to keep going.

I do have to say, in a world where every loser (including most of Hollywood) insists that nothing is their own fault, that their lives suck purely because of some vaguely defined 'ism, it's refreshing to re-encounter a movie that's willing to state categorically that the reason your life sucks is because of the bad, unforced, choices you made, again and again. I think it's features like this willingness to be honest with themselves and each other that, in the end, make the characters, not exactly appealing, but at least interesting enough to spend 90 minutes with.

I remember when this came out I was maybe 14 years old, and this movie had a legendary status among my crowd (none of whom ever got to see it). And why not, just looking at the poster promises everything to excite a young teenage male, basically a Rock album cover (or DnD book) come to life.

And it does not disappoint! I had no idea what to expect 40 years later, but I am more than happy with what was delivered - a sequence of loosely connected stories that, in some sense are obvious and unsophisticated, but are all strangely compelling.

And of course the girls, OMG, the girls. It's probably best I did not see this at 14 because my brain would surely have exploded.

Yes, sure, we live today in an age on infinite porn, so who cares about these girls? I think this is where some evolutionary psychology can help. Consider your male ancestor; sure there's one module in his brain for actually performing sex, doing the job; and that's the module that's tickled by porn. But there's a different module (I don't want to say more important, let's just say more subtle) that's about the search for a female mate, for the part before the porn kicks in. It is that *that* module that this movie kicks in overdrive and beyond, an on-going stream of "her, no her, no her, no HER HER HER".

And hell, it even teared me up towards the end. All in all far far better than I expected, and well worth a watch, even two or three.

Don't be fooled, this is not "a woman explains how to take a bath", it's rather more interesting than that. There's a story (slight, but present) but more interesting is the degree of background that's just assumed, but which is, 90 years or so on, of the most interest.

So yes, we get to see some minor amount of skin, but if that's what you're after, well, it's a big internet out there with a lot more skin. What I found interesting included

• the bath/shower ritual is just strange. We run the bath, sit in it for some period of time, then wrap a shower curtain around us and start the shower. What is going on here? Obviously by Janet Leigh Psycho time 25 years later people have figured out how to use showers properly, but apparently in the 1930s this was still not widespread knowledge.

• likewise it doesn't seem like they understood plumbing very well. Look at that wall of dials and controls to (somehow) set the temperature and pressure for the bath and shower! And I'll bet that, even with that many controls the temperature and pressure fluctuated wildly.

• likewise the twin beds. Yeah yeah, I know we're supposed to believe that this was just because of Code, but I don't buy it, not in this case. The movie is happy to show nekkid babes, but balks at showing a queen or king-sized bed?

I'm guessing that the beds were separate because that was the way most people slept, but why? A quick internet search tells us that between 1850 and 1950 separate beds were considered the superior option for various reasons. Theories are given as to why they became popular, but I find them unconvincing. So I'll chalk this up to an accurate depiction of social reality (likewise, for all those 50s TV shows, and then inertia, and the tiny size of the show set for TV shows, especially sitcoms, not prudery, keeps it as the TV standard for another thirty or forty years), but remain unsatisfied as to what drove this pendulum, first one way then the other.

• it's not especially surprising, this being the olden days and the Depression, but note the lack of product of any sort. I mean, I'm no prima donna in the bathroom, but I have at least a few bottles, cans, bars and suchlike spread around.

• So that's the bathing itself, but just as interesting is the story. Basically it's all about portraying one type of marriage versus another, a nice happy couple, kind friendly, helping each other versus an unhappy complaining couple. Of course this sort of thing has been done to death and any modern treatment would rapidly descend into various versions of

+ who started it? Why does she get all the blame?

+ why is it the blonde WASP couple that are happy and the ethno-jewish couple that are unhappy?

And so on.

But I'm more interested in the extent to which this was something portrayed and talked-about in 1937. What were the expectations and mores surrounding the creation of a happy marriage? How common were they vs angry fighting marriages? Was this a trivial conceit exploited by the screen-writer purely as a way to get two girls on screen; or was it in fact the primary interest of at least some of the people involved, with the skin as a way to sneak in the social point?

OK, so I've just finished all six seasons back to back. What's the lesson?

I suspect this will not be a popular opinion, but the lessons I take are that

• substances are vastly more destructive in America than guns
• and Hollywood is ground zero for normalizing every aspect of their destructiveness.

It think it tells you everything you need to know about Hollywood's America that a show that is so self-aware, and that makes a big deal of the issue of normalization, is so blind to the water in which it lives that the show could resolve the way it does, with the ultimate litany of issues condemned vs not condemned over the show.

So I don't know. At the end, I think I'm more pessimistic for America. Life is hard, yes, people are terrible to each other yes. But we solve that by facing honestly and head-on what the causes are. And what I see in popular American culture is a massive unwillingness to face one particular big cause. Oh sure, scream and rant about slavery as an issue from 150 years ago. Blame everything on (a particular theory of) what the US was like 50 years ago. Bring in your parents. But god forbid we ever say one bad word about the elephant in the room...

So will America end its days living on soma? Yeah, I think so, I really think so.

There are a few great movies about childhood, but they mostly tend to start at First Romance, so around 12 years old (eg My Girl, Flipped). I've never before encountered a movie like this which is basically just the feeling of life at 10 years old, pre-romance, pre anything really. Sure, there's the dreamlike B story to give the exercise some structure, but that's not the point!

I'm seven years older than the film's author, but I grew up in South Africa which lagged the US enough that it balances out. Perhaps you need to be at last forty to appreciate a film like this, not just the texture of the time, but the texture of childhood as so long ago. All I can say is that every minute was a flash of recognition! The alienness of the adult world and its irrelevance to our lives.(Our hero had in his background the sixties and Vietnam, but none of that affected childhood; likewise in South Africa we had war in Angola, and similar political struggles, but again irrelevant to a preteen.) Along with that, no idea what your parents did all day, and no interest.

Fighting with siblings over the record player. Groups of kids sitting in the back of a flatbed truck. The magic of going to the beach, or to an amusement park. Living in a newly built subdivision. Really the only one I think he missed was the excitement of going to a fast food restaurant, for us perhaps a treat of twice a year.

I especially loved the way Linklater singled out the experience of falling asleep in the backseat of a car, in the blackness, in a separate world from your parents, but feeling safe and warm; I still remember the emotions of that exact same feeling!

See it! Really, see it!

Look, I get it. The first episode in this trilogy was charming. It was so refreshing to see decent kids who were mostly decent human beings, not sociopathic monsters. With that expectation, this second episode can seem disappointing - both are heroine and (at least by some people's lights) our hero are revealed to have feet of clay.

BUT to be fair, what both of them are doing is stumbling around not quite sure how they are supposed to play these new roles. Look more closely at how they behave. They're not actually doing anything that's clearly stupid. They're not even doing anything that's cruel. They're simply two kids in a situation they've never been in before, and with no great role models. Everything they've seen on TV and movies is thoroughly destructive (stupid messages to the girl about how she needs to be crazy jealous of her boyfriend's past and his female friends, nothing helpful about listening to what the other person is saying and not immediately jumping to conclusions).

Viewed in this light, the movie becomes a lot more positive. Yes, they do dumb things, but they see how they are being stupid, and they learn!

So you get exactly what you expect from Aaron Sorkin. Great dialog, superbly organized. Clever arguments with the occasional unexpected development. Politics that's as honest as you can expect from someone with a definite political view.

Honestly I prefer non-political Sorkin (eg A Few Good Men, Sports Night, Studio 60) but even political (and thus too predictable) Sorkin is better than most dramatists. Can you imagine what he would have done with Nixon and Elvis instead of what we got?

On the plus side, at least political Sorkin is not woke Sorkin. This is squarely the politics of the 60s presented as the politics of the 60s, not the usual attempt to retrodict the concerns of today onto the entire past of human history. Be grateful for small mercies!

Honestly, a lot of Sandler's work irritates me. I'd say I've enjoyed about half the comedies (stopped watching the other half after just a few minutes) and never found one of the dramas appealing. And yet there's something about this special that made me keep going, I kept expecting I'd get bored or irritated and switch it off, but no, I made it all the way to the end.

As I say, I think it's that the guy has heart in a way that he's not faking (or faking very very well!) The way he talks about his kids, the way he talks about his wife, you feel the love without feeling the edge of resentment that some comedians bring to those subjects. Whether or not you like Chris Farley (personally I never got the appeal) the way Adam Sandler sings about him tears your heart out. You end up walking away feeling rather more emotion than you expected from a standup show.

Tom Sharpe has to be one of the funniest writers in human history, and in my younger days I remember my joy every time a new books came out.

But some works are so rooted in their medium that attempted transplants are essentially impossible, and so it is here.

The screenplay does what it can, and yes, we get the outlines of the story. There are even a few funny scenes. But there's none of the magic, and there's none of gut busting absurdity that hurts your lungs one page after the next, just a somewhat mediocre story. No-one to blame and, hell, valiant effort, but some things just aren't meant to be.

WTF did I just watch? Everything about this movie is just bizarre!

The entire story feels like it began life as a farce (burglars breaking in at exactly the right time, people dressing up as other people, that sort of thing) but somewhere along the way the director decided to play the script straight.

The visuals and acting feel like they belong to a movie called _Not Another 70's Movie_ they are such an over the top parody of early 70's movie appearance. Likewise the behavior of every character, and the script that imagines it's just so clever in its successive twists.

It's exactly the sort of movie that becomes a cult classic, because you just cannot believe your eyes that this was actually made and distributed.

Best watched in the dubbed version since the somewhat wooden dubbing and dialog definitely add to the surreal experience!

My one line summary says it all. You get essentially the action and the suspense of First Blood and The Fugitive in a hybrid of those two stories. Taken in those terms, it's done middling well; better than many "suspense/action" movies, not nearly as well as the best.

Where it falls down (and where I think most people are disappointed, even if they can't articulate it) is there's no clear morality going on! In First Blood, OK, the villains are the US Govt in either its military version (treats vets badly) or local police version (treats vets badly). In The Fugitive, well the end point business of who framed him gets a bit tangled up, but we understand that the fugitive is a good guy, while his pursuer, just doing his job and doing it well, is a different type of good guy.

But what's going on in this movie? OK, the hunter is the good guy, sure. But is the hunted guy good or bad? Is he justified in his crusade against "authority" or has gone off the rails? Is the business of animal rights what's motivating him or not? Everything to do with his motivations is a jumbled mess; everything to do with the motivations of the US military in hunting him down is just as much of a jumbled mess.

You can justify it, if you have to, by saying that it's movie of witness, not a movie of opinion; it tells you a set of things that happened but not why or what to think. (Some Tarantino is like this.) But come on! If you're going to pull that stunt, you need to work a hell of a lot harder to clarify the extent to which you are no longer an ordinary movie playing by ordinary narrative rules. This movie doesn't do that.

Many of the reviewers here seem to take this movie seriously, as though it matters whether it's history or propaganda. I think they are missing the point.

There are movies for which these sorts of questions matter, but this is not one of them! It exists in the same sort of space as a Tarantino movie, like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or Inglorious Basterds.

For these movies, history is not the point; homage to a certain type of earlier movie is the point. Your villains were bad? Well my villains are worse! Your action was extreme? Well my action is over the top! You used a trope without realizing it? Well I use 50 tropes and am aware of every single one of them!

There are even the usual Tarantino-esque scenes playing with language, in this case an otherwise bizarre scene where the different soldiers all ruminate on their different dialect words for potato.

Given this, does it work as a Tarantino'esque movie? Yes, but... It manages to hit most of the Tarantino notes but I found the wordplay to work less well than in a Tarantino movie, and the storyline+action to be a lot more confusing. Both of these may reflect the fact that I don't speak Korean (so I'm relying on the subtitles) and know pretty much nothing about the country except the basics, so the names and place names meant nothing to me; perhaps to a native Korean these elements fit together a lot better?

Overall I think it's an interesting watch in terms of seeing how other filmmakers are taking and adapting American techniques.

Technically this is not badly done; lighting, pacing, acting, effects are all good value for the budget.

BUT honestly it feels like a movie put together by an AI... Take the formula for this sort of movie since at least the 70s (various disparate individuals in trouble, some family conflict, some stupid behavior, some heroic behavior) and just transplant it to Norway.

It's raised ever so slightly above the average by the scenes of how traffic control works from the inside, but there are far too few of these. I kept thinking of how someone like Aaron Sorensen (for all his predictability) could have made it so much better, with constant small speeches and explanations between the various characters saying things like "we do it this because in the fire at xyx in 2006 such and such and happened." It's adding in this background texture, not just plot but a feeling that you understand some of why the system works as it does, that makes a movie like this better than a thousand similar movies...