In the mid 1990s, Hollywood was inundated with an exciting new class of independent filmmakers who would change the movie business as we knew it. People were really paying attention to films with low budgets and unique visions — but only one of those films featured a dead baby crawling on a ceiling.

Trainspotting (1996) is one of the most provocative, intoxicating films to come out of the 90s indie scene. But 20 years after its release, has the high worn off? Take a jump into the Worst Toilet in Scotland (it’ll be worth the trip) and join us as we discuss whether Danny Boyle’s surrealist joyride into the world of heroin addiction still holds up.

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“The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

We’re getting further and further into the 21st century, but a number of the year’s best dramas have been rooted firmly in the century before. One of them is even named after last century.

20th Century Women isn’t particularly mired in a historical moment — the same story could take place now, more or less — though the airing of Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech takes a prominent role, resonating with eerie accuracy for these modern times more than 37 years later. 20th Century Women is writer/director Mike Mills long-awaited follow-up to 2011’s Beginners, which was was semi-autobiographically based on Mills’ father, who came out as gay late in life. The portrayal won Christopher Plummer a much-deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Dorothea, the driving force in 20th Century Women, is loosely modeled on Mills’ mother and fabulously portrayed by Annette Bening, who is also likely to get an Oscar nod for her troubles. (It’s a crowded race this year, however.)

Like Beginners, 20th Century Women bucks genre conventions to tell a humane story about realistic people. There’s less quirk here than in Beginners (which had a subtitled dog performance) and a little less plot, too — Dorothea is a single mother raising her teen son Jamie (played by Lucas Jade Zumann) in a house she also rents to two subletters, William (Billy Crudup) and Abbie (Greta Gerwig). Meanwhile, Jamie is engaged in a will-they-or-won’t-they teen friendship with Julie (Elle Fanning), who is already quite sexually experienced for her age but doesn’t want to complicate her relationship with Jamie by giving in to his carnal desires. Early in the film, Jamie engages in some stupid teenage behavior that nearly gets him killed, awakening Dorothea to the fact that Jamie may need more guidance in life than he can provide. She enlists Abbie and Julie to help her keep an eye on her son.

That could be fuel for a lot of nutty plot contrivances in a broader film, but in 20th Century Women that setup hardly matters. Abbie takes it upon herself to educate Jamie using feminist literature and teaches him all about the clitoris, resulting in some very funny conversations (and an equally amusing brawl with a peer). Julie doesn’t do much in the way of watching out for him, as she has her own turmoil to deal with. Mostly, the film is a series of vignettes about these characters interacting with one another. Abbie is dealing with the fallout of a battle with cervical cancer, and tries out a friendship-with-benefits on the free-spirited William. Julie has unprotected sex and worries about the consequences. Jamie goes on a spontaneous road trip or two, causing Dorothea to fret further about his safety. None of these plot elements are terribly novel in their own right, but the way they’re spun together, they’re utterly compelling.

20th Century Women uses several characters’ voice over and period photographs to set us in a time and a place — Southern California, 1979, to be exact. Using dialogue, it flashes forward to tell us what will become of certain characters, including when and how they will die in some cases. This expands the scope beyond the rather intimate dramedy we see, encapsulating the past and future as well as the present, so that the movie becomes about these people’s rich, full lives. The title is something of a misnomer, since Jamie is the central character, and William is given roughly equal consideration as Abbie and Julie are. Two-fifths of the cast is male, including the protagonist — yet it is the trio of females who become the most striking figures in the movie.

Bening is sublime as Dorothea, a woman not easily defined, who is written simultaneously as overprotective and underreacting. (The fact that she’s based on Mills’ mother feels right, since it’d be difficult to create a character this complex and contradictory out of thin air.) Gerwig shines (as she always does) as Abbie, the scarlet-haired punk and the woman in this film who feels the most prepared to break out of the 20th century and enter the 21st. But I was also surprised at Lucas Jade Zumann’s portrayal of Jamie, who on paper sounds like the sort of precocious teenage boy we’ve seen in countless coming-of-age dramas, and yet feels fresh as written by Mills. Though he causes some minor havoc and has certain self-serving proclivities, he’s an inherently good soul underneath, providing a compelling anchor for the movie. What emerges is a unique film that feels both personal and universal, containing very few big moments but a collection of perfectly captured small ones that linger in the mind the way little memories of our own lives do.

By contrast, Hidden Figures is about as down-the-middle as they come as far as historical dramas go — for once, that isn’t such a bad thing. The film stars Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae, and Octavia Spencer as a trio of NASA employees who helped get Americans into space for the first time. Katherine (Henson) is a math whiz, the first African-American called up to the Big Boys’ office; Mary (Monae) dreams of becoming an engineer, but finds segregated schools getting in her way; Dorothy (Spencer) can’t get the promotion she deserves and takes it upon herself to learn how the program’s first computer operates.

Hidden Figures co-stars Kevin Costner, Jim Parsons, and Kirsten Dunst as white folk who have varying degrees of blinders on about what things are actually like for black women in a place like this at that time, and how capable these women can be at their jobs. (Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali and Everybody Wants Some‘s Glen Powell round out the cast as Katherine’s studly love interest and the hunky, charming astronaut John Glenn. It’s a stellar cast all around.) The script and direction are both slightly hammy in moments, and the whole film is very broad, allowing us to bear witness to injustice without ever really feeling the true shame and horror of race relations in Virginia at this time the way a film like Loving does. But you know what? That’s perfectly fine. Hidden Figures is more entertaining than it probably ought to be, given how pat and predictable it can be, preferring an empowering, 21st century portrayal of three women who are well-deserving of having their story told. As an audience member, it’s easy enough to go along on this ride, even if it all feels a bit too neatly packaged to do the real drama of this moment justice. Sometimes, a feel-good drama is enough.Christine is Hidden Figures‘ direct opposite — you could easily dub it the “feel-bad movie of the year.” It, too, tells the story of a real life woman who made a notable impact in the second half of the 20th century. Christine Chubbuck was a news reporter in Sarasota, Florida who suffered from severe depression. It’s the second of two 2016 releases centered on this tragic figure, and though most reviews give away “the ending” of the movie (certainly, the only reason we’re watching a movie about this woman in the first place), I won’t. Suffice to say, it isn’t pretty.

Christine follows Nightcrawler‘s lead in examining the exploitative “if it bleeds, it leads” bloodlust of the nightly news, with a protagonist who is equally as off-putting as that film’s sociopathic protagonist, portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal. And like Nightcrawler, Christine contains a fantastic lead performance that really ought to be garnering more attention for Rebecca Hall. Christine isn’t an easy film to watch, especially as its subject spirals more and more out of the bounds of socially acceptable behavior, at one point predicting the advent of reality TV decades before it actually happened. (And look how that turned out.) Christine co-stars Tracey Letts as Christine’s gruff boss (in a similarly sympathetic antagonist role to the one he played in Indignation), Michael C. Hall as the news anchor Christine unrequitedly crushes on, J. Smith-Cameron as Christine’s concerned mother, and Maria Dizzia as a friend who attempts to help Christine out of her doldrums. It also contains a downbeat and wonderfully ironic utilization of The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song.

All three films are impressive in their own way, though they range from broad studio dramedy to quiet, pleasant indie to deeply disturbing drama. And all are anchored by compelling performances from the actresses who bring these characters to life, giving some 20th century women new life in the 21st.

*

Another year, another awards season.

But this was no ordinary year.

Where to begin, when we speak of 2016? Most years, I just pick my favorite films, and that’s it. But this year, it felt important to really think about these choices, and what they expressed about my feelings this year. That’s not to say I picked a bunch of films I didn’t like as much just because they were “important.” Not at all. But I also know that when I look back at what cinema offered in 2016 many years from now — provided we’re still all in one piece by then — I do want it to reflect the turmoil, the despair, and the utter, unspeakable horrors inflicted upon so many of us over the course of the last year.

So, uhh, no. La La Land will not be my pick for Movie of the Year.

Naturally, every movie released in 2016 was completed before the results of the election were clear. Not a single film was actually made in response to the events of 2016, because it hadn’t happened yet. Yet if we look at the movies, we can see so much of what we grappled with over the course of the past year:

A witch hunt (the literal kind) carried out against a woman who deserved far better in The Witch; the aimless, restless, reckless youths that the white collar world forgot in American Honey; the desperation of two lower-class outlaws who’ve been screwed by The Man in Hell Or High Water; the inconsolable working class grief of Manchester By The Sea; the angry young white men of the fiction-within-the-fiction of Nocturnal Animals; not-too-terribly distant battles over marriage equality in Loving; true tales of notable, questionably heoric Americans like Snowden and Sully; the gunman with a grudge taking it out on Wall Street in Money Monster; the fearless liberal lobbyist taking down corrupt, gun-loving right-wingers in Miss Sloane; the murderous white supremacists of Green Room; the insatiable bloodlust of the media in Christine; the racially charged bloody vengeance of The Birth Of A Nation; and two biopics centering on a certain young black would-be president, Netflix’s meditative drama Barry and the charming Barack-meets-Michelle romance Southside With You.

Looking over such themes, it’s hard not to see that 2016’s sinister soul was bubbling in that stew all along, even if we didn’t quite know it until late last year. Granted, we were distracted — by superheroes of all kinds, the good (Captain America: Civil War), the bad (Batman v Superman), and the sassy (Deadpool); by lackluster summer sequels; by escapism. And, then, right before our eyes, as we watched helplessly, our own world became stranger than any movie.

In a way, it is pointless to try and assign any meaning to a group of movies from any given year. Some scripts may have been written a decade ago, or be based on material that was written even further back. Filmmakers come from all over the world; they’re of different ages, and have vastly different viewpoints. I don’t consciously select my favorite films of the year because they fit in any one category, yet I can’t help but notice certain themes emerge — like how my favorite films of 2013 spoke about largely the American economy, or the streak of violence and menace running through most of my 2014 list, or how last year’s picks all explored complicated, unconventional women.

What emerged amidst my 2016 picks was a sense of the passage of time — its ability to heal wounds, or its failure to. Moreso than most years, my favorite films of 2016 spoke to me on a deeply personal level, some reminding me of various moments in my past, others raising anxiety about the present. Like many, I’m more concerned than I’ve ever been about the future. That’s in this list, too, somewhere… but we’ll have to go back to the past to get there.

Let’s go back.

10. EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!

“Well, boys, we came for a good time, not for a long time.”

Four of my Top 10 films of 2016 fall under the broad umbrella of a “coming of age” film, though they’re very different in other ways. This is the first, made by a filmmaker who wrote and directed two of the greatest films ever made about adolescence, 1993’s Dazed And Confused and 2014’s Boyhood.

Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some (I will hereafter leave off the two titular exclamation points for simplicity’s sake) was pitched as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed And Confused, which makes sense, since both films draw on Linklater’s own past and are set in eras he “came of age” himself. But Everybody Wants Some also picks up about exactly where Boyhood left off, with a young male getting his first taste of college life — and in its own subtle way, its storyline plays more like an extension of Boyhood‘s boy-to-man arc than a follow-up to his 1993 teen comedy.

Like Dazed And Confused, Everybody Wants Some kicks off with a hit period tune playing out of a cool period car’s stereo. Both films are essentially plotless, taking place in a fixed amount of time (Dazed And Confused on the last day of school in 1976, Everybody Wants Some counting down to the beginning of college classes in 1980). Both mire us in party culture that feels very authentic to its characters, its scenes very much about “just hanging out.” But like Dazed And Confused, Everybody Wants Some has a little more on its mind than meets the eye. Whereas Linklater’s earlier hit captured teens’ various levels of boredom or satisfaction about the present along with some stray anxiety about the future, Everybody Wants Some is about finding and shaping one’s identity once that future has begun.

This movie’s protagonist is Jake (Blake Jenner), who moves into an off-campus house for baseball players at a Texas university, which is for all intents and purposes a fraternity house. With his baseball buddies, Jake attends a disco, a country western bar, a punk club, and a performing arts party, finding that all have something to offer him (often, a comely young lady), but none manage to define him completely. Like all its central characters, Jake is a jock, but Jake is still searching for an alternate place in the world, aware that professional baseball is an unlikely future for all except the very best. Jake fits in easily with the other ball players; he makes friends easily and charms women, but he also seems to want a little more than what’s being offered by the macho posturing and bro camaraderie of his teammates.

Critics of the film largely complained that the jokey jocks didn’t offer a “way in” to this film — some couldn’t identify with these guys, whose primary preoccupations are sports, getting drunk, and getting laid. (That’s no different than Dazed And Confused, except that it focuses exclusively on the athletes.) I can understand why that might be the case, but as a former fraternity boy myself, I’ve never seen another film that so perfectly captures the carefree early days of college life, days that are all about exploration and finding an identity for oneself. Relationships made in this time are tenuous — how many of us are exactly the same person coming out of college as we were going in? Yet the people we meet at this time become an important part of our personal history, sharing the bond of a very special moment. That is, I believe, why Linklater chose to make a film that’s a tribute to them. The memories of these days are about as golden as they come, which is what makes Everybody Wants Some so fun and buoyant.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the film ends on Jake taking a snooze in class, emitting a small smile. Everybody Wants Some is a rare movie about contentment, about a brief window of time in which life is worry-free and full of possibility. We know the future holds plenty of conflict for these immature jocks, but this movie doesn’t take us to that point. I can identify with those detractors who find Everybody Wants Some too slight, finding fault with this easy, breezy narrative. Me? I was perfectly content to “Let the Good Times Roll,” as the Cars song playing over the credits urges.

In 2016, a difficult year for so many of us, many filmgoers sought refuge in the nostalgic escapism of La La Land. And that’s fine. Consider Everybody Wants Some my equivalent — the most optimistic and light-hearted film amongst my favorites of the year by far. It’s a film that takes me back to better times and lets me live there for an hour or two; to what seemed like the dawning of the brightest possible future.

9. COMPLETE UNKNOWN

“You don’t understand the feeling. I went to Portland, and in Portland I was a whole other person, and I felt reborn. But then after a while, it started to feel too familiar, and I realized I could just step out of it. I could just start again.”

Have you ever wanted to know what it’s like to be somebody else?

Almost certainly, you have. But not many have ever done it. Complete Unknown is a tribute to those who have, exploring the consequences of seizing complete control over one’s identity.

Every film in my Top Ten list deals with a search for identity in some sense, but the one that grapples with it most directly is Joshua Marston’s Complete Unknown, the story of a woman named Alice who shows up as a plus one to a dinner party and proceeds to fascinate the guests with her tales of adventure in Madagascar and a recording of a newly discovered species of frog. The problem is that the host of the party, Tom, believes that he knows this woman from the past, going by a different name.

The nifty thing about Complete Unknown is that it captures a science fiction premise and unleashes it in the mundane world. Tom is more or less happily married to Ramina, though their union is headed toward a rocky patch because she wants to move to California and he’s hesitant to leave his work behind. But in Tom’s past, there’s a woman named Jenny he broke up with long ago, and there’s a part of him that’s always wondered what happened to that girl, and if maybe he would’ve been happier with her. We all wonder what might have happened if our lives had gone in different directions. In Complete Unknown, Alice and Tom explore such possibilities over the course of one evening.

See, most people accept who they are early on. Their names, their history, where they live, what they do. Their identity — there’s continuity. To do anything else? Well, that would be crazy!

That’s why Complete Unknown shows us a number of characters reacting to what unfolds in exactly that way — as if they’re dealing with someone dangerous, someone insane, someone who deserves to be demonized simply for shaping her narrative in defiance of the one that has already been shaped for her. You can certainly see this side of things — a person’s sudden absence causes confusion, sadness, fear. Is it still wrong to deceive people if the fib feels like the truth?

Complete Unknown deals with morally complex situations, such as a sequence in which Tom tries another life on for size, helping an injured woman by pretending he’s a doctor (at Alice’s urging). We see the temptation in adopting a new life. But such a gambit is hardly for everyone, and comes at a high cost of loneliness. Alice isn’t immune to ordinary feelings — which is what brings her to see Tom in the first place. She has begun to wonder if she might not have been happier in her original life.

Complete Unknown is a small-scale drama featuring evocative performances by Michael Shannon as Tom and Rachel Weisz as the fascinating Alice. Its setup suggests a bigger mystery than the one that is ultimately explored, which is more about one person’s unique response to an identity crisis, and how another person comes to understand that that’s okay. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, nor does distance — sometimes, we need to seek out and confront our pasts in order to gain closure.8. CLOSET MONSTER

“It’s going to be super dangerous, and super scary.”

The second “coming of age” film in my Top 10 is also a “coming out” film, a genre I’m rarely very fond of. These tend to be predictable, artless affairs, but in the hands of 27-year-old Canadian Stephen Dunn, this overly familiar old material is given fresh style and a welcome touch of the macabre.

Closet Monster isn’t an overly dark story. It has some welcome comic relief in a hamster named Buffy, voiced by Isabella Rosselini, because why the hell wouldn’t she be? It is the story of Oscar (Connor Jessup), who crushes on Wilder (Aliocha Schneider), a French boy of ambiguous sexual orientation, while pretending that he’s dating his best friend Gemma (Sofia Banzhaf) to keep up appearances for his homophobic father. None of this breaks new ground for a coming out film on paper, except that Oscar is haunted by a violent incident he witnessed in his youth, carried out against a young gay boy.

Most gay films depict the emotional turmoil that accompanies an acceptance of one’s non-hetero sexuality. Few go much darker, but Closet Monster is peppered with nightmarish visions of what Oscar is grappling with in his mind, heart, and soul — because, for many, the coming out process involves more than just “he loves me, he loves me not” anxiety. It can be a violent, even deadly reckoning.

Closet Monster is about a young man struggling to find his identity, just as Everybody Wants Some is. The difference, of course, is that Everybody Wants Some‘s jock Jake is someone “everyone wants”, while Oscar stands to lose the affection of everyone he holds dear. (Except Buffy the Hamster… she’s open-minded, naturally.) There’s a looming threat of bloody rage simmering throughout Closet Monster, threatening to come to a boil and destroy Oscar himself, or perhaps someone close to him. Most coming out stories end with acceptance — time does tend to heal the gnawing agonies of our youth — but not all of them do. Throughout, Closet Monster threatens not to. There’s no guarantee of survival.

For all the strides LGBTQ people have made this century, 2016 made clear that the battles are far from over. From the unfathomable Pulse massacre to the election of Republican leadership that seeks to snatch back everything we’ve achieved in the past eight years, being gay is still dangerous. Our first, most vicious attacker is often oneself, and if we survive that, there’s still a whole other world to reckon with.

I appreciate Closet Monster for splattering some bright red blood across a tired genre — it’s the coming out film that most resembles my own personal experience. But it also has arresting visuals, appealing teen characters, one of the best soundtracks of the year, and — never forget this — Isabella Rossellini playing a hamster named Buffy.

7. ARRIVAL

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”

Of all the films I saw in 2016, no film will be branded into me quite the way Arrival was, by pure happenstance. Arrival is the first film I saw in theaters following the devastating election results of November 8, a point in time that felt very much like the end of the world. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s eerie, otherworldly score is the perfect accompaniment to that mind-blowing moment, which felt very much like everything we knew about our future and our place in the world had just imploded.

Arrival is surprisingly optimistic and life-affirming for an alien invasion story, one in which the government at least attempts some friendly contact before opening fire on our extraterrestrial visitors. (Aliens, if you’re out there, please wait at least four years before touching down on Earth, okay? Trust me, it’s for your own good.) You can tell the film was written during the Obama administration, a time when science was valued and communication between nations was deemed essential in a crisis. The somewhat level-headed response of government officials in Arrival now just feels… quaint.

Arrival is the story of a linguist named Louise who finds herself the most sought-after scientist when mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe. We get only a minimal glimpse at the world’s reaction to this phenomenal event, but we’ve seen plenty of that in other films. Arrival is primarily concerned with Louise and fellow scientist Ian’s process in interpreting the aliens’ strange graphic language in order to ascertain why they’ve showed up on Earth. Time plays an important role in the film, less as a healer of wounds than as a necessary component of them.

As usual, Denis Villeneuve’s arresting filmmaking style transcends what we’d normally get from a genre piece — he depicts sci-fi events we’re familiar with as we’ve never quite seen them before. The film is bookended with Louise’s emotionally fraught personal story involving a daughter she lost to cancer, which turns out to be both emotionally powerful and intellectually ingenious in how it dovetails with the extraterrestrial elements. Arrival goes for both the heart and the head at the same moment, and nails both.

The film’s message about transcending the superficial barriers that isolate us from one another is more crucial now than ever, though I’m afraid it’s one that’s already been lost on this country. In Arrival, humans and aliens bridge the wide divide between species using patience, trust, and communication; in 2016, Americans had no such patience, acting in opposition to their best interests, spitting in the faces of those who want to help them, preferring to just blow the whole thing up.

I don’t know what it means when an alien invasion story contains more measured reason than the real life headlines. But here’s to science. Here’s to communication. Here’s to a woman who tried her best to build bridges across a great divide and save a planet in peril. Too bad it’s just science fiction.

6. ELLE

“There’s a nut job out there. Nut jobs are my specialty.”

If you’d told me a year ago that Donald Trump would be president and a Paul Verhoeven movie would be one of my Top Ten films of 2016, I don’t know which I would have found more ridiculous. But that’s 2016 for you.

Complete Unknown, Closet Monster, and several other films on this list feature protagonists who struggle with self-destructive tendencies that threaten to alienate them from loved ones. Chop them up and toss them in a blender, and you’d still need to add an extra scoop of emotional damage to get you to Michèle, the heroine of Elle — and that’s before she is violently raped by a masked assailant.

In 2017, there’s still a national debate about what claim men can make over women’s bodies. A presidential candidate was caught on tape bragging about his ability to get away with sexual assault, and it didn’t make him any less popular with his constituent. He was elected anyway. Elle isn’t exactly the “fuck you” to men you might expect from a film with its premise, but it does challenge our preconceptions about what should and should not happen following a sexual assault. Do you dare cast judgment on Michèle? You’d better take a long, hard look at the world around you first.

Elle begins with that shocking rape, which is calmly observed by Michèle’s cat. When he’s finished, her attacker leaves and Michèle carries on with her life. Over the course of the next few weeks, she does a few things you might expect her to do — buy a gun, investigate potential suspects — and quite a few things you wouldn’t. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t call the police. She doesn’t shave her head. She doesn’t become a hardened badass.

In my original review, I dubbed Huppert’s Michèle the “Trauma Queen,” and the more I think about it, the more I consider this character the epitome of traumatized females of the screen. (Second only to Sidney Prescott, perhaps.) We’re used to seeing one of two narratives play out when a woman is raped in a film: either she helplessly allows the male hero to avenge her, or she does it herself (usually through a less-than-convincing transformation process). There’s nothing inherently wrong with the female fantasy of a rape-revenge thriller, except that it bears little resemblance to the aftermath of such trauma in real life. These films inherently suggest that a woman is “ruined” by rape. Elle cannily bucks all audience expectations with its unpredictable heroine, who alternates between being sympathetic and off-putting throughout the movie. There’s a mystery in Elle, beyond the identity of the rapist — it’s the horrors of her past, a level on unimaginable anguish that, in some ways, prepared her for this attack. One traumatic blow is more than enough for one person, but life doesn’t dole out suffering so equally. Michèle deals with more than her share of shit coming at her from all angles. She’s not invincible, the way the heroine of your typical wronged-chick-makes-things-right thriller can be — but she is strong, in the most believable way.

Elle deals with some heavy subject matter, to be sure, but the film is also a stylish, twisty thriller with unexpected bursts of comedy from a vibrant supporting cast. Elle is the kind of film you could watch a dozen times, and come away with a different interpretation in each. Huppert’s brilliant performance never gives away exactly what this woman is thinking, and doesn’t exert any extra effort in making her endearing. Time cannot heal wounds that run so deep and so nasty as Michèle’s, but it can build them into a sort of armor. In Elle, its fascinating to watch her fend off the next wave of terrors, in part by using her own past as a weapon. You’ll never meet another woman quite like Elle.

5. KRISHA

“Well, hello, Richard. Yes, I’d like to leave a message. I want to say I hope you’re very happy. I hope that you really like the way this all turned out. When you didn’t return my phone calls, when you told me to need you. ‘Call me if you need me, baby. Be vulnerable. I’m your big man, right? I got your back.’ Well, it’s too late now, okay? All my hard work. It’s too late. Because not one fucking person on the planet would answer the phone when I called them for help. So you know what? Fuck you. You are dead to me.”

And now we’ve arrived in the Top Five.

Homecoming is a common theme in films set around Thanksgiving. But not many have the concept so thoroughly baked in as Krisha. Filmmaker Trey Edward Shultz, who, like Closet Monster writer/director Stephen Dunn, is in his 20s (damn you!), filmed Krisha in nine days at his family’s home in Texas, using mostly his real family as actors, including his leading lady. That sure sounds like a recipe for unwatchable disaster, but you know what? Krisha turns out to be one of the most compelling films of the year, the rare family drama that plunges us so deep into conflict, it threatens to become a horror film in certain moments.

Krisha (played by Krisha Fairchild) is somewhat new to being sober, and though we don’t learn many concrete details about her past, we can sense just by the way everyone walks on eggshells around her that this family has been through it. She shows up on Thanksgiving day with her dog, missing a finger, and insists that she be the one to prepare the turkey. This gesture is important to her: a reparation. Gradually, we learn that Krisha’s “nephew,” Trey (played by the writer/director himself), is actually Krisha’s abandoned son, and more than anything she wishes to reconnect with him.

This setup might suggest a heartwarming family dramedy, but — well, Krisha is not that film. As with the protagonists of Everybody Wants Some, Complete Unknown, and Closet Monster, Krisha is still searching for an identity. Unfortunately, in her case, she’s already got one — she’s the drug-addicted, alcoholic mess who turns everything she touches into chaos. As determined as she is to escape this role, it won’t be easy. It may not even be possible.

In my estimation, Krisha is not a story about substance abuse — it doesn’t seem that Krisha has chosen any one drug as her poison. Rather, she’s addicted to being a mess. To fucking up, over and over. Her better self rails against it, but there is something dark deep within her that always drags her away from those who are poised to love and forgive her. Krisha is the villain of the horror movie that is her mind. No matter how languid and idyll the family around her is, there’s always something sinister looming in Krisha’s mind, threatening to take control and alienate her from the family.

Krisha is painful to watch, because we know how much is at stake and sense that this is Krisha’s last chance to make amends with her family. The turkey’s not the only thing that’s slowly roasting through the second act; over the course of the film, Krisha reaches a point of no return. Shults’ camerawork, alternately frenetic and observant, depicts a family gathering for a holiday in a wholly believable way rarely captured on film. The non-professional performances work perfectly alongside those from more experienced actors, including Billie Fairchild as Krisha’s mother — both the character and the real woman playing her have Alzheimer’s, lending the scene a remarkable poignancy. At times, Krisha is reminiscent of Boyhood in its homemade verisimilitude, though it clocks in at half the length and contains some showier cinematography, particularly in its doom-tinged final act.

Ultimately, Krisha does become a sort of horror film — one in which Krisha is both the victim and the perpetrator of her resurgent evils. The holiday plays out to its inevitable conclusion — one all of these characters, including Krisha, sensed was coming all along.

They hoped for better. What they got was history repeating itself. More often than not, that’s how things go for women like Krisha.

4. INDIGNATION

“There are reasons you die. There are causes. A chain of events linked by causality. And those events include decisions that you have personally made. How did you end up here, on this exact day, at this exact time, with this specific event happening to you?”

The third coming of age film on my list is by far the bleakest. A far cry from the easily assimilating jocks of Everybody Wants Some, Indignation is all about what happens when you’re not a part of the alphas.

Indignation begins with two scenes, seemingly disconnected from our main narrative — the first, set in a nursing home in present day; the second depicting a Korean soldier who meets a tragic end in the 1950s. This is the first half of 2016’s best cinematic bookend.

We meet our protagonist, Marcus Messner, at the funeral of a friend, a Jewish boy sent off to die in the Korean War, as so many young men were. Marcus is bound for a different fate — he’s a straight-A student who dreams of a career as a prominent lawyer, standing in front of the Supreme Court. He’s destined for great things, everyone knows, because he’s a smart boy who works hard and avoids trouble. How could a good kid like Marcus not have a bright future ahead of him?

Well. Marcus is a part of the Jewish minority at the Ohio college he attends, far from his comfort zone in Newark, New Jersey. He falls for Olivia Hutton, a comely blonde from a good family, but soon learns that she, too, is an outsider at this school. An act of oral sex, in part, sets in motion a chain of events that will seal the fates of both characters.

Thematically speaking, there’s a lot to unpack in Indignation that feels freshly relevant in 2016, from the way America has periodically been reckless with young men’s lives to the double standard slut shaming young women faced at this time. Primarily, the film deals with perils of non-conformity — Marcus leaves his safe Jewish neighborhood for a community in which he’s a minority; he declines an invite to join the Jewish fraternity, preferring the company of his two Jewish roommates. Soon, Marcus finds himself ostracized even by these two. Marcus has the pride and arrogance of an intelligent youth — he’s perfectly willing to go it alone, if he has to, not realizing how vulnerable this makes him should things take a turn for the worse.

The 1950s are often remembered as an idyllic era. It is often forgotten that, at this time, being an outsider could be very dangerous for anyone who didn’t subscribe to cultural norms. Now, in 2017, we are once again dealing with a movement to whitewash diversity, a threat to those who dare to think and live differently than the majority of Americans do. We still haven’t escaped the potential for oppression from a white Christian majority.

That makes Indignation sadly more relevant than it was ever intended to be, more relevant than it was during its theatrical release last summer. The film’s villain is the college’s Dean Caudwell, a white Christian whose mouth says everyone is free to practice a religion of their choosing while his policies fail to back that up. Sound familiar? The Republicans who have risen to power in 2017 will still say America is a safe haven for all comers, but their actions won’t back that up — not by a long shot. Marcus is an independent thinker — an atheist who challenges his professors in the classroom and rails against Dean Caudwell’s policy of forcing students to attend mass. It’s easy to imagine American conservatives in 2017 condemning Marcus the way he’s condemned in Indignation, railing against the smugness of intelligentsia. Indignation is a caustic reminder of what, historically, has often happened to those who dared to be different.

At once theatrical and cinematic, Indignation is anchored by riveting performances across the board, including one 12-minute powerhouse scene between Marcus and the dean. Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon perfectly play the young lovers caught up in forces greater than their unlikely romance. Though based on a Philip Roth novel, James Schamus’ film makes Olivia Hutton far more than just a tragic sex kitten — she’s mature and vibrant, and if any girl is worth what Marcus ends up paying for her, she’s it.

Indignation makes effective use of floral wallpaper to stir nostalgia in an old woman who, otherwise, appears to be emotionally vacant. So much time has passed that only a faint whisper of the past still echoes. But it does linger — even when it is unkind, time does not completely erase the memories of our better days.

3. OJ: MADE IN AMERICA

“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Here’s a question I don’t have to ask of my Top Ten very often: is OJ: Made In America even a movie?

Critics are divided. OJ: Made In America was produced by ESPN for their 30 For 30 series. It can currently be streamed in five pieces on the ESPN website, and each segment has opening and closing titles. Sounds like TV, right? OJ: Made In America also played in some theaters, despite its colossal running time (467 minutes — nearly 8 hours). Most of this would lead me to the conclusion that it is a documentary miniseries, not a movie, and therefore should illegible for my Top Ten, which is why I originally discounted it for consideration. Add to that the fact that I’ve stopped including documentaries in my year-end lists at all, since, as a rule, I find them rather incomparable to narrative films. Making a documentary is about working with existing pieces — interviews, archival footage, available information. That’s not to say documentary filmmakers can’t be incredibly creative in how they present this material, or that their point of view isn’t heavily influential in what they make. But as someone who approaches filmmaking first and foremost through the lens of storytelling, I find this to be an entirely different set of skills than sitting down with a blank page and creating action and dialogue. (Though many of the more original documentaries out there blur this line by hiring actors to portray their subjects.)

But then I actually watched OJ: Made In America, and even though I watched it in the comfort of my own bedroom on a very small screen, afterward I could not escape the feeling that I had just had a cinematic experience. Like the greatest movies, its scope reaches far beyond its subject matter. Every minute of OJ: Made In America is necessary to tell the story of football legend turned pariah OJ Simpson, yet the film is also one of the best ever made about race relations, the city of Los Angeles, and American culture in general. While it deals explicitly with these themes in pieces, it reaches far beyond anything that is actually said or depicted in the film cumulatively. OJ: Made In America doesn’t moralize or even sum up what it’s trying to say, yet its many messages are crystal clear. To sum up what it’s “about” would be reductive and, ultimately, impossible. OJ: Made In America is essentially a movie about America itself, a thousand subcategories contained within it. Race, justice, fame, ego, identity, corruption, legacy… any one of these would have been enough, but somehow, OJ: Made In America contains them all. And then some.

OJ Simpson was never much of an actor, but somehow he ended up being the second biggest star of 2016 (following a certain other vain, rich prick who seems primed to get away with murder). It is very strange that the OJ Simpson trial had such a moment in 2016, with the success of the equally lauded The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. But 2016 was no ordinary year. I watched OJ: Made In America recently, post-election, which made its depiction of systemic injustice and deadly narcissism particularly impacting. We are living in a moment when the bad guys win in the biggest of ways, when our values have been shaken to the core, when everything we thought we knew about our fellow Americans has been decimated. America has proven itself to be a dumber and uglier place than we would have believed. The reasons OJ Simpson got away with murder are direct precedents to the election of our new president, and both are shockingly unfair — and yet, OJ: Made In America traces the path of the former so precisely that we can see how it was inevitable. Maybe in 20 years, a filmmaker as brilliant as Ezra Edelman can help us make sense of what the hell happened to us in 2016. For now, I look at OJ: Made In America as a prequel, of sorts, to that movie. OJ: Made In America contains such multitudes that, for me, at least, it is essential to call it cinema, and laud it as a necessary component of 2016’s legacy in film.

I said before that my Top Ten of 2016 struck a deep personal chord, and while it may seem strange to see much of myself in a documentary about an African-American athlete who was tried for murder, I did go to USC, like OJ did, and have lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles, which is such an integral part of this story. The OJ Simpson trial is one of the first news stories I can remember — Marcia Clark, Johnny Cochran, and Robert Shapiro were celebrities of my childhood, indistinguishable from more legitimately famous figures. A lot of Simpson’s experience is nothing like mine, but I know what it’s like to want to break free from one’s roots. Even tangentially, I’ve lived in OJ’s world enough to know that this documentary captures it with eerie, skin-crawly accuracy.

If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that the bad guys win big sometimes. Despite the infamous 1995 verdict that was almost certainly a miscarriage of justice, OJ: Made In America does end with OJ where he probably belongs — behind bars. It’s a somewhat comforting ending that may restore our faith in the American process. Perhaps justice does arrive in this world, even if it often shows up late. Can we expect the same now, in 2017? Time will tell.

2. JACKIE

“A First Lady must always be prepared to pack her bags. It’s inevitable.”

I debated over this year’s #1 film more than any other year I can think of. My gut tends to tell me what my favorite movie of the year is, and it’s rare for more than one movie per year to punch me in that very same place.

But, like I said before… 2016 was no ordinary year.

If I had to pick one film that screamed “2016!” at the top of its lungs, it would be Jackie. That might seem unusual for a film set in 1963, which shows us both how far we’ve come since then, and how far we haven’t. The JFK assassination was a deep American wound that never healed completely, and now it’s been ripped back open.

Jackie takes place in the week following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, a man who is generally respected and admired as one of the great politicians of the 20th century. His death is one of the most famous murders in history, and one of the most iconic — the motorcade, the president and his wife waving and smiling in the backseat, and of course, Jackie’s iconic pink Chanel dress, which would be stained with blood before the day was over.

The president’s widow spends most of Jackie grieving what she’s lost — not just a husband, but a whole way of life. She believes that Kennedy’s legacy is important, much more important than the man he really was, an infamous philanderer. She wants him remembered like a knight of Camelot, fighting the good fight. It may not be entirely true; nor is it entirely fiction.

But Jackie is more than just a funeral dirge for a fallen figurehead. It depicts the first television broadcast from the White House, nearly 55 years before a man known primarily for his reality TV show would be sworn in as president — having defeated a former First Lady in the election. When Kennedy is killed, Soviet interference is suspected. Jackie shows us a nation in crisis. People are wondering what the hell is going on, when will this madness end?

Though it was never intended to be, Jackie is a requiem for the American dream, which has rarely been in as much jeopardy as it is now, in 2017. The Kennedys would be horrified to learn what has become of this country, and Jackie is a fascinating time capsule that helps us observe the ways in which American politics have always been a frightening and blood-soaked affair, and the ways it used to be more dignified and directed toward a common good. It took over 50 years for the melancholy madness of JFK’s execution to reach its logical conclusion, with a public that has lost faith in its leaders, that is both terrified and desensitized to acts of mayhem, that expects a presidential election to play out like a reality TV show, with a leader who cares only for his own fragile ego. John F. Kennedy fought for Civil Rights. Our current president would prefer to strip them away, after more than half a century of progress (in fits and starts, of course). Russia is again one of our most feared enemies. Jackie Kennedy turned to the press in order to carry on her slain husband’s important legacy; now, it’d be dismissed as “fake news.” Do you think Jackie obsessively counted how many people attended her husband’s funeral procession, and exaggerated the figures by two or three times?

As Natalie Portman’s Jackie mourns a dead husband and the shattering end of the glory of Camelot on what might be the darkest day of the 20th century, I grieved along with her for what we have lost more recently. And I also envied her, for not knowing what was coming… how things would get even darker, still, in the 21st. Jackie’s shell-shocked walk through the White House in a blood-stained pink Chanel suit is, without a doubt, the defining cinematic image of 2016 for me. It exquisitely captures exactly how I’ve felt since November 2016. And I have taken solace in the comfort the priest played by John Hurt offers to the widow, who no longer has much will to live: God ensures that every day contains just enough hope, just enough reason for us to keep on keeping on.

It took Chilean director Pablo Larrain to cut through the artifice that coats most biopics and just show us a widow on a mission, a First Lady who has one final job to do before she’s irrelevant. Larrain’s camera practically stalks Jackie through the White House, in good times and very bad; Jackie is artful to the point of being alienating to impatient modern audiences, weaving back and forth through time and memory. Portman is astounding as Jackie, embodying the woman absolutely, and Mica Levi’s unusual score is hauntingly sublime. Jackie may have narrowly missed being my #1 film of 2016, but it is certainly the film that best depicts how it felt to live through it.

Ever since November, I keep thinking about an “alternate fact”: Hillary Clinton just became President of the United States of America, a former First Lady risen to the leader of the free world, and we all feel really good about it — safe, and secure, and equal. That’s the way it was meant to be. I’m so sure. I still can’t really believe that the world won’t right this terrible wrong and restore order. And that’s only the first stage of grief: denial.

For one brief shining moment, there was Camelot.

And now there’s not.

1. MOONLIGHT

“At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you’re going to be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.”

Films don’t exist in a vacuum. Movies are created based on the history that has come before; alternate histories would create different movies, and a different response to them. I believe that Moonlight was the best movie released in 2016, qualitatively, while Jackie was the best movie of 2016.

What the fuck does that mean?

It means that I really, really wanted to kiss-off 2016 with a film about a First Lady who literally shaped history. With the trauma of an assassination. With a blood-soaked widow stalking through the White House. A big part of me wanted that to be 2016’s cinematic legacy; the legacy it deserved. Fuck you, 2016… here’s Jackie!

But in the end, I just couldn’t. The reason why is Moonlight.

Moonlight is the fourth and final “coming of age” story in my list, though only the middle chapter really qualifies. It is at once specific and universal, telling the story of a boy named Chiron, played alternately by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes. Chiron lives in Miami, raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood. The world doesn’t expect much of him. To most, he’s a nuisance, a target, or a problem waiting to happen. He might end up being another statistic; another drug addict, or another drug dealer. But there are two key figures who see a little deeper into Chiron throughout the course of the film — two men, who see him for who he is. The first is Juan, played all-too-briefly to perfection by Mahershala Ali. Juan merely offers the boy what little help he can — which both isn’t much, and means everything. This is the kind of cliche that has been explored in countless films, but in Moonlight, feels freshly illuminated. A simple act of kindness, of compassion, of love, can alter the course of a man’s entire life.

The film’s three chapters are each titled after the name Chiron goes by at that moment in his life, showing that he assumes at least three different identities along the course of his life. But Moonlight isn’t about a search for identity, so much as it is about a young man who knows his identity, but is unsure how that can reconcile with the circumstances he’s been born into. No one and nothing in Chiron’s world is telling him that it’s okay to be attracted to other boys, until he meets Juan. As a straight black man whose occupation is dealing drugs, Juan is an unlikely candidate to preach self-acceptance to a young gay boy, but that’s just the first way writer/director Barry Jenkins manages to buck our initial judgments and show that every one of us is unique and unpredictable. We look at Chiron’s childhood, at his mother, at his neighborhood, at the color of his skin, and think we know what will become of him. But we don’t. It’s not that he avoids every trap that’s been set for him — it’s that, even when he falls in, there’s a lot more to this young man than meets the eye. To prejudge him would be doing a disservice to ourselves, moreso even than to him, to rob us of the experience of getting to know him.

The film I most regret having to leave off my Top Ten is Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, which is also a coming-of-age story, and one that is also about the impact people we just happen to meet through our lives have on who we become as a person. In a way, it makes a nice companion piece to Moonlight, and several other films on this list. (Consider that an honorable mention.) Moreso than in other years, I am moved by the fates of these characters, at the points at which each of their respective films leave them. Jake the jock, newly infatuated with a pretty girl, in the very early dawn of “finding himself” in college in Everybody Wants Some; Alice in Complete Unknown, walking away from her past once again down a busy sidewalk, on the hunt for a new name and occupation; Closet Monster‘s Oscar, having wrestled the demons within, ready to take on life as a gay adult; Louise, deciding that life is worth living to the fullest despite the emotional agony that requires, in Arrival; Elle‘s Michèle finding solidarity in female friendship, a safe haven in a man’s world; Krisha in Krisha, helplessly succumbing to darkness, unable to quell her destructive impulses and appetite for chaos; Marcus, learning the hard way that going against the grain can come at a high cost, in Indignation; the unlikely superstar who rose from a humble upbringing to transcend low expectations and stark racial boundaries in OJ: Made In America, only to become the ironic embodiment of everything that was fucked up about race relations in the 20th century, and ultimately incarcerated after all; Jackie in Jackie, shaping the narrative of her husband’s legacy for a greater good, wishing she didn’t have to carry on without him, but putting on a brave face for her fatherless children because it’s the proper thing to do. And Chiron. Chiron’s fate at the end of Moonlight is more ambiguous than many of these — like Everybody Wants Some‘s Jake, his polar opposite in my #10 slot, we get the sense that whatever’s coming is just beginning, and we’ve barely seen any of it.

Some of these people suffer much more than others. Some are privileged, some are not. Some have everything, and yet some self-destructive impulse within them destroys it. Some are born with everything against them. Some face unspeakable evils, and yet manage to find a way to carry on. Some make grand gestures that alter the course of history; others just live their lives as humbly as they’re able. Some dream of greatness, but a crueler fate cuts them down to size before they’ve ever had a chance to get there. Some flee their own identities, refusing to accept the rulebook the world has written for them. Some have their whole lives ahead of them. Others don’t.

That’s the most sense I can make out of 2016 at this point. Random chaos and cruel fate, avoided by a lucky few. It is tempting to despair. 2016 was the gloomiest year to come in a long time, and by most standards of measurement, the immediate future looks pretty bleak. It is very difficult to choose a film that doesn’t reflect that as the best movie of 2016 — and perhaps that is why it is all the more important to do so.

Moonlight is a story of hope. It is a story about a young man who grows up with everything against him — no father, a drug addicted mother, poverty, bullying, homophobia. One man reaches out to him as a child and offers what little assistance he can provide — temporary shelter, a hot meal prepared with care, and most importantly, a sympathetic ear. Juan listens to Little and, in his own way, tells the boy it’s okay to be who he is.

That alone isn’t enough to set Chiron’s life on the path of the straight and narrow. He’s still got to get through high school, where he faces the torment of bullies who seize upon the fact that he’s different. Before Chiron has fully accepted and embraced his own identity, the bullies recognize who Chiron is and punish him for it, the same way his mother does, in lesser ways. Juan is gone now, though his kindness resonates through Teresa (Janelle Monae), the girlfriend he left behind who still provides Chiron a home away from home. And that’s enough.

Chiron doesn’t initially choose a path we want to see for him. He follows Juan’s footsteps, earning a living in a way that is dangerous and destructive — at least, for now. But in the film’s final act, as he is invited into another man’s home, offered another hot meal prepared with care, it again offers hope that Chiron can and will make better choices. That, against all odds, he’ll get through this.

Jackie mourns for the past — a perfectly acceptable response, given what’s happened in the present. Moonlight is about moving on. Carrying forward. Moonlight gives us reason to hope for the future.

In the end, I had to choose that — hope and change, and all that. Because what else is there? We live in a nation led by men who want to hold Chiron back — for being black, for being gay, for being poor. They want us all to sit back, while they move forward. If Chiron can avoid all the boody traps that have been set for him and find love in a hopeless place, maybe we can all get through whatever we face… but I don’t know for sure, because Moonlight is just a movie. Still, it won’t hurt to take Moonlight’s lesson to heart. Let’s help who we can, however we can, when they need it. Let’s make things better for each other instead of worse.

Let’s hope.

(Original reviews can be found by clicking film titles.)

The Top 10 Films Of 2015

The Top 10 Films Of 2014

The Top 10 Films Of 2013

The Top 10 Films Of 2012

The Top 10 Films Of 2011

The Top 10 Films Of 2010

The Top 10 Films Of 2009

The Top 10 Films Of 2008

The Top 10 Films Of 2007

The Top 10 Films Of 2006

The Top 10 Films Of 2005

The Top 10 Films Of 2004

The Top 10 Films Of 2003

The Top 10 Films Of 2002

The Top 10 Films Of 2001

“An older version of me
Is she perverted like me?
Would she go down on you in a theater?”

And now for something I don’t care about at all!

Why are you so petrified of silence? In our tenth episode, the When We Were Young podcast revisits Alanis Morissette’s monolithic 1995 album Jagged Little Pill. As one of the best-selling albums of all time with half its songs released as singles, you oughta know the one — but is it truly an angst masterpiece worth falling “Head Over Feet” for? Or is it time to “Wake Up” and take one hand out of your pocket so that both hands can cover your ears?

From her Paula Abdul-esque early 90s pop stylings to the album’s (possibly unfair) reputation as “angry chick rock,” Alanis Morissette gets put under the When We Were Young microscope, as some of our hosts worship the ground she walks on (appropriately — she did play God in Dogma), while other hosts experience a deep-seeded rage whenever hearing Alanis’ trifling despair over rain on her wedding day. And yes, we will discuss Dave Coulier and whether or not the answer to “Isn’t it ironic?” regarding the song “Ironic” is… no.

Listen to the latest episode here and subscribe here!

This episode of the podcast marks, to date, the topic I have had the least experience with or interest in, though it was fun to approach something that many consider a landmark with fresh ears, more or less. I was surprised to learn that Jagged Little Pill is far from a “breakup album,” with digs not just at exes but also sleazy former managers, stage parents, and the Catholic patriarchy. Who knew? (Yes, I know — everyone who was alive in the mid-90s, except for me.)

When We Were Young is a podcast devoted to the most beloved pop culture of our formative years (roughly 1980-2000). Join us for a look back to the past with a critical eye on how these movies, songs, shows, and more hold up now.

You can help us defray the costs of creating this show, which include purchasing movies/shows/etc to review, imbibing enough sedatives to take down an elephant, and producing & editing in-house at the MFP Studio Studio in Los Angeles CA, by donating to our Patreon account, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes!

“Think I’ll go for a walk outside now,
The summer sun’s calling my name…”

In the latest episode of When We Were Young, Seth, Becky, and Chris discuss what made us laugh the most growing up. If you thought The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and A Very Brady Sequel (1996) were the funniest (and most quotable) movies ever made, you’re in good company (with two of our hosts, at least)!Twenty years later, do either of these satirical sitcom adaptations stand the test of time and still make us laugh? Or are they as stale and unfunny as the TV show they’re based on?

Throw on your Sunday best, kids, we’re talking the Brady Brunch movies!

(Listen here or subscribe on iTunes.)

“Search for the Stars is looking for fresh young musical acts. First prize is exactly twenty thousand dollars. Hmm… too bad I’m not a musical act.”

The Brady Bunch Movie
Released: February 17, 1995
Budget: $14 million
Box Office: $54.1 million
Tagline: “They’re back to save America from the 90s.”

So, yes. In junior high I did have a shameless obsession with The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel, the fish-out-of-water sitcom adaptations from the mid 90s. It would not surprise me if I’ve seen these movies more than any single other film ever made. Seriously.

Fortunately, I am not alone in my Brady nerdiness, for my co-host Becky shared my nostalgia for all things Brady. (Okay, not all things. It’s not like we got that into the original TV show — except to go back and laugh at all the scenes they mocked in the movies.)

I remember seeing The Brady Bunch Movie in theaters with my mom and sister. (At least, I think I remember this — my caveat for this and every episode of the podcast is that I might be recalling some of the those hazy 80s and 90s memories slightly wrong.) I believe the time-warp of the very 70s Bradys popping up in the 90s particularly appealed to me. I still love a good fish-out-of-water comedy, particularly when there’s a time travel-ish element involved. (I can’t remember the last time I saw a decent movie that actually had such a premise. They’re mostly a relic from the 90s.)

Of course, at the time I wasn’t even quite a teenager yet, which meant that a lot of the movie’s more mature gags went over my head. Still, this was one of the first more “sophisticated” comedies I latched onto — “sophisticated” may seem like a strange word to apply to the spoofy Brady Bunch Movie, but I do think this brand of comedy operates at a fairly high level. (Aside from the Home Alone style physical violence gags I reference in the podcast.)

It would take a while to go over everything I adored about this film — we didn’t even get to everything in the podcast — but in particular, I’ve always enjoyed the hilarious relationship between Marcia and Jan. Their sibling rivalry is relatable, even if exaggerated, and one of the easiest targets to lampoon from the original sitcom. As much as I had a thing for Christine Taylor at this time, Jennifer Elise Cox is the standout comedienne in the cast — her Jan is one of the best comic characters of the 90s, holding her own against any character Chris Farley or Adam Sandler played. She’s both the goofiest Brady character and the soul of the story. Jan is the protagonist of the movie, made clear when the climax hinges on her brief stint as an Afroed teen runaway. (“The new Jan Brady” is, apparently, black.)

But back to Marcia. (Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!) I love that Marcia is both the butt of so many jokes — “she’s harder to get into than a Pearl Jam concert” — and genuinely popular, in her own way. It’s totally believable that she would have a shot with the “big man on campus,” and yet still be as wholesome and naive as the rest of the Brady clan. That brings me to what I truly love about these films, and other favorite mid-90s comedies of mine, including Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion and Clueless. The characters are ridiculous — we’re laughing at them, and the world at large is making fun of them in the film — and yet they exist in a happy bubble, blissfully unaware of how absurd they are. The Brady Bunch may not fit in very well with grungy, mean-spirited 90s Los Angeles, but it’s actually the world around them that needs an attitude adjustment. They’re doing just fine on their own.

A lesser comedy wouldn’t have been able to pull that off. It would have made it seem like there’s something wrong with the Bradys, not something wrong with us. As warped as they seem, the Brady’s loyalty and family values are sort of nice. Maybe we don’t aspire to be exactly like them, but wouldn’t it be nice to have five brothers and sisters, two devoted parents, and even a kindly maid who all have your back?

“Oh my God… I’m tripping with the Bradys.”

A Very Brady Sequel
Released: August 23, 1996
Budget: $12 million
Box Office: $21.4 million
Tagline: “The more everything changes, the more they stay the same.”

I went into the first Brady Bunch Movie merely hoping to enjoy it, and came out a Brady maniac. After the film was released on VHS, I’m pretty sure my sister and I watched it nearly every day one summer. (That was probably the summer of 1996, leading up the release of A Very Brady Sequel.) We also rewound the tape constantly to catch little gags we missed. In retrospect, it’s kind of a marvel no one smothered us in our sleep.

A number of my friends at the time also got into the Brady Bunch movies. Eventually, we’d move on to (slightly) more mature offerings, but this was a nice gateway drug into “adult” humor. A Very Brady Sequel pushes this even further than the original, particularly with the Greg-and-Marcia pseudo-incest plotline. (“Yes, Greg?”) Some small part of me wanted to lip sync one of the Brady songs with 5 friends at a school talent show, even though the rest of me definitely knew I’d be beaten up for it.

“Sunshine Day” and “Keep On” are two delightful numbers from the first movie, but I have to say, A Very Brady Sequel‘s musical moments just barely top them. “Time to Change” is an absurd romp through Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, which is even better than the whole gaggle of Bradys bopping down the escalator at Sears. The real highlight is “Good Time Music,” though, with the Bradys amusing themselves by performing a full on song and dance on an airplane bound for Hawaii. This is the best fish-out-of-water moment in the sequel, which (as pointed out by co-hosts in the podcast) is not as much a feature of the sequel as it was in the original.

Yes, The Brady Bunch Movie is a stronger film overall, while A Very Brady Sequel often feels like a very long episode of an actual sitcom. But it also gives us more of everything that was right in the first film, with less of the physical violence gags that take its predecessor down a notch. That includes Marcia’s ever-more-inflated ego (“I’ll go first ’cause I’m the prettiest”) and Jan’s fake boyfriend, George Glass. (Marcia thinking to herself, “This is all Jan’s fault” is also the perfect summation of their relationship, as is her plea to their faux father: “Take Jan!”)

Everything I loved in The Brady Bunch Movie is repeated and/or turned up a notch, from the music to the RuPaul cameo to the spoofing of ridiculous storylines from the sitcom. Also, it’s notable that both of these films were directed by women (Betty Thomas and Arlene Sanford, respectively), which is pretty rare in 90s comedy.

These remain some of my favorite and most quoted comedies, even though loving them now is slightly embarrassing. The less said about The Brady Bunch In The White House and Growing Up Brady, the better (except in the podcast that I mistakenly said Adrien Brody played Barry Williams/Greg Brady in the latter, when I meant Adam Brody. I would definitely have kept watching if it was Adrien.) Finally, I will direct you to “A House To Die For”, the only episode of Wings I bothered to watch (thanks to some very Brady cameos), and this truly baffling piece of pop culture, which I don’t trust myself to even describe.

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It’s just about Oscar time again — though for once, the Best Picture race isn’t exactly the most disappointing contest I’ll witness over the past year.

At times like these, the Academy Awards feel somewhat frivolous. It’s possible that some likely winners — The Salesman, Mahershala Ali, The White Helmets, OJ: Made In America, and even Zootopia — will have a political charge. We can certainly expect at least a few winners at the podium to speak out against the GOP’s onslaught of intolerance. Still, the main narrative of this Sunday’s Oscars telecast is shaping up to be about escaping these horrors rather than confronting them. I’m finding it difficult to celebrate that.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with escapism — the whole point of going to the movies is to have a good time, whatever that may mean to you — but, for all Tinseltown’s flaws, the powers and persuasions of Hollywood are one of few tools capable of getting messages of diversity and inclusion to the masses (who, we’ve learned increasingly in recent months, so obviously need them). Wouldn’t it be nice if, this year of all years, Hollywood did something besides masturbate to itself in the mirror?

I’m not picking on La La Land, a well-intentioned and intermittently charming film that would be a lot less egregious a Best Picture winner if it didn’t follow a whole slew of other Best Picture winners that might as well have also been titled La La Land. The sum total of recent self-congratulatory Best Picture winners — Argo, The Artist, Birdman — are not a good look when compared to the Best Picture winners that are about something besides the noble sacrifices of filmmakers. Spotlight, 12 Years A Slave, The Hurt Locker.

Most years, this is merely irritating. This year, it’s a true shame.

It doesn’t feel like a great time to stick our heads in the La La sand.

That said, the crop of nominees from 2016 is, overall, a respectable bunch. An encouraging number of people of color were nominated, compared to the “so whiteness” of the past couple years. Three films in the Best Picture race are solely centered on African-Americans, while another is about an Indian-Australian. Women play prominent roles in many of these movies. One of the most nominated films of the year is a stirring homosexual romance. That’s progress, when compared to the overwhelming straight white maleness of the past couple of years.

As usual, my personal picks have a fair amount of overlap with the Academy’s in certain places, and almost none elsewhere. Certain 2016 nominees feel fresh and exciting and progressive — Moonlight, Hell Or High Water, Arrival, and in some ways (and certainly not in others), Hidden Figures — while others feel like throwbacks to another era, a world we may have left behind. Some are clinging to the Hacksaw Ridges and La La Lands and Lions, films that remind us of movies we’ve seen before, movies have already won Oscars. A movie like Moonlight has never won a Best Picture Oscar, and it doesn’t look like it will this year, either. But the fact that it got close — while no real consolation — means we can hope to still get there next time, or the time after that.

While Hollywood tends to be a pretty progressive industry, at least in comparison to the country as a whole, the split we see between traditional picks and those that push boundaries is reminiscent of the national mood. I don’t want to hang too many politics on a bunch of filmmakers voting for their favorite movie of the year, but like the United States as a whole, the Academy doesn’t seem quite ready to move on from what used to be “great.” A lot of people want to proudly embrace the diversity represented in Moonlight, but not quite enough.

It reminds me of a certain other disappointing vote this year.

And on that cheerful note, I give to you my Not-Oscars for the film year 2016! (You can check out my Top Ten here.)

BEST ACTRESS

Natalie Portman, Jackie
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Tilda Swinton, A Bigger Splash
Krisha Fairchild, Krisha
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women

Honorable Mention: Ruth Negga, Loving; Rebecca Hall, Christine

I have bestowed kudos upon seven actresses in total above, and still it was painful to not include three others amongst them. (Here’s lookin’ at you, Amy Adams and Jessica Chastain and Sally Field!) I was also a fan of Emma Stone’s likely-to-win work in La La Land, moreso than I was a fan of that film as a whole.

The year’s most dismaying snub was Annette Bening in 20th Century Women, who does some of the best work of her career as a mother struggling with her son’s fitful transition into a man. Mike Mills’ previous film won Christopher Plummer an Oscar for playing a prototype of his father; Bening should have at least scored a nomination for playing a version of his mom. (Did Meryl really need that nod for Florence Foster Jenkins?) Krisha introduced me to Krisha Fairchild, a dynamo who goes on quite the emotional journey one Thanksgiving; the part was written for her by her nephew, the film’s director, who surrounded her with fellow family members to act opposite of (and it worked!). Less of a revelation was Tilda Swinton, of course, because she’s always excellent, but A Bigger Splash brought out a new side, as Swinton’s rock star encounters laryngitis and therefore mimes or croaks most of her performances. It’s good stuff. Huppert scored a nomination for a role that easily could have proved too much of a turn-off for the Academy — a “victim” of rape in name only, who

Truly, each and every one of these is an award-worthy performance. But the one that looms over them all is Natalie Portman’s haunting transformation into Jackie Kennedy. There are those out there who find the performance overcooked; this may be because Jackie’s own role as First Lady — perhaps her whole identity — was a performance, and was also overcooked. Portman has her work cut out for her just nailing that strange, strange accent, but she doesn’t stop at mere imitation. There’s a well of anger and sadness under this grieving widow, as well there should be — not just because she lost her husband. The pain of her marriage is in there, too. Portman’s Jackie is both elusive and emotionally raw. It is easily the best of the year.

If Portman didn’t have an Oscar already, she’s probably win it this year. Having won recently, it will almost certainly go to Emma Stone.

BEST ACTOR

Andrew Garfield, Silence
Denzel Washington, Fences
Jesse Plemons, Other People
Logan Lerman, Indignation
Connor Jessup, Closet Monster

Honorable Mention: Ethan Hawke, Born To Be Blue; Joel Edgerton, Loving

To be honest, I could have filled the Best Actress category twice before I got to any lead male performers I felt as passionately about this year. Some years, you get Bruce Dern in Nebraska and Chiwetel Ejiofer in 12 Years A Slave and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf Of Wall Street all at once (all deservedly nominated — and none of them even won). Other years, great lead performances slip past the Academy’s radar altogether, like last year’s Michael B. Jordan in Creed or the previous year’s Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler.

Any of those performances would have easily topped my list had they come in 2016, but instead this year easily belongs to the ladies — which isn’t to say the men didn’t do solid work. Joel Edgerton said little but held the screen a lot in Jeff Nichols’ understated Loving, infusing a simple man with quiet dignity. Ethan Hawke embodied the tortured jazz musician Chet Baker (blowing Ryan Gosling’s hipster wannabe in La La Land out of the water); in Born To Be Blue, his Baker struggles to stay clean and re-learn the craft that made him a sensation after a devastating injury makes it unlikely he’ll ever play the same way again. For a while, I figured I should put these acclaimed performers in the main list above younger newcomers, but then I remembered that this is my list and I can do what I want.

Connor Jessup plays a conflicted gay teen who may or may not be driven to commit an act of violence in Closet Monster, as well as in Season Two of ABC’s American Crime, which also aired in 2016. The characters are similar enough that it almost feels like one performance, though the stories go in starkly different directions. Is this my way of sneaking a TV endorsement into a post about the Oscars? Maybe kind of! Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what Jessup does next.

Logan Lerman impressed playing the headstrong Jewish college student in Indignation, a difficult role to make endearing (to the audience) but off-putting enough to the film’s antagonist, a Christian dean who unfortunately bears a lot of resemblance to politicians we’ve seen take the national stage recently. It took two viewing of Other People to fully appreciate the stellar work Jesse Plemons does there — Molly Shannon, as his dying mother, has the showier role, but Plemons injects the gay comedy writer who sits by her side with humor and pathos that feel utterly true-to-life. His freak-out over where to find the laxatives in a drug store is awards-worthy all on its own. And Denzel Washington, a likely winner for the actual Best Actor statue, can’t be written off for his towering portrayal of a flawed father in Fences. Washington won a Tony for the same role, and you can tell — it would be impossible to deliver a performance this lived-in without months of practice.

Ultimately, though, my favorite lead male performance of the year is Andrew Garfield’s — but not in Hacksaw Ridge, the one he’s actually Oscar-nominated for. (He’s good there, but it’s a very simple character.) Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a long meditation on complex issues of faith, one I found only intermittently engaging. But to the extent that it worked, it did so because of Garfield. Garfield commits utterly to his characters’ unwavering faith, bringing across the necessary depths of passion his missionary must feel about his religion — then, the agony and torture of watching innocent people die for those same beliefs. Garfield’s luxurious, Jesus-like locks cast him as a perfect protagonist for a spiritual drama. I even believed he could be Portuguese.

The actual Best Actor race comes down to Washington versus Casey Affleck. I liked Affleck well enough, but Washington’s command of the screen in his most intense scenes was more impressive.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Ashton Sanders, Moonlight
Trevante Rhodes, Moonlight
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash
Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals

Honorable Mention: Lucas Jade Zumann, 20^th Century Women; André Holland, Moonlight

I was impressed by Lucas Jade Zumann’s anchoring performance as an angsty teen in 20^th Century Women, holding his own opposite such formidable talents as Greta Gerwig and Annette Bening. I also delighted in Michael Shannon’s slightly scenery-chewing work in Nocturnal Animals, playing a gritty Texas detective. It’s very similar to the role Jeff Bridges was nominated for in Hell Or High Water, which I also enjoyed — but I gave the edge to Shannon because he also starred in one of my favorite films of the year, Complete Unknown, and went unfortunately unrecognized last year for 99 Homes also. I was certainly tempted to pick Ralph Fiennes’ truly magnificent work in A Bigger Splash, if only for all the kooky dancing. As we learned well in Schindler’s List, Fiennes’ plays a slimeball to perfection, and though his music producer character in A Bigger Splash is several shades less monstrous than a trigger-happy Nazi, we can tell he delights in driving a wedge between his ex-girlfriend and her sober beau, who seem otherwise quite happy. (That, and he seems to be perving on his own teen daughter, which again has an unfortunate echo in today’s White House.)

Yet despite plenty of solid performances elsewhere, I honestly could have filled this entire category with the male cast of Moonlight. Even with three Moonlight actors in my Top 5 supporting performances and one more in my honorable mentions, I still had to leave out solid work from such performers as Alex Hibbert (who plays Little in the film’s first section) and Jharrel Jerome (the second Kevin).

I’m incredibly hopeful that Mahershala Ali manages to win in this category at the Oscars — the Moonlight cast deserves at least one Academy Award amongst them. (Sorry, Hidden Figures, you were delightful — but that SAG Award really belongs to this ensemble.) Ali sets a wonderful tone for the story that follows in his brief but gripping turn in Moonlight. If this character didn’t work, for some reason, the whole movie wouldn’t. However, I was ever-so-slightly more impressed by the actors who played the protagonist in the film’s last two segments. Trevante Rhodes is a very good-looking man, and when we first glimpse him in the Moonlight‘s third chapter, I was like, “Wait — what?” It’s a jarring transition from the awkward, scrawny boy we’ve been following. I was devastated that Moonlight had taken such a sharp wrong turn.

But within moments, Rhodes had me back on board. Despite his good looks and charisma, he’s believably vulnerable as a gay man who is concealing his full identity for reasons we don’t entirely know. Is it because of his work? His mother? Or is he just waiting for “the one” to come back into his life? The answer is suggested by Rhodes’ performance in the final act, which feels very much like an extension of Sanders’ and Hibbert’s performances despite the physical differences between them.

For money, I found Sanders in the film’s second chapter to be the most compelling Chiron of all. He carries the film’s most outwardly emotional scenes — quietly mourning his departed father figure, figuring out how to manage his crack-addled mother, experiencing his first love and first betrayal in heartbreaking succession, and allowing his anger to make a decision with massive consequences for him. Sanders does all this with so little dialogue, carrying it all on his face, behind his eyes, in his body language. I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted to reach through a movie screen and give a character a hug more than I did with Ashton Sanders’ Chiron.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Molly Shannon, Other People
Greta Gerwig, 20th Century Women
Riley Keough, American Honey
Viola Davis, Fences
Sarah Gadon, Indignation

Honorable Mention: Janelle Monáe, Hidden Figures; Rachel Weisz, The Lobster

The clearest frontrunner in the entire Oscar race is Viola Davis for Best Supporting Actress. Anyone betting against her is, quite simply, nuts. (This is largely due to the fact that she has approximately 400 times as much screen time as Michelle Williams in Manchester By The Sea, and legitimate doubt about whether she should have been run as a Best Actress.) I can imagine plenty of actresses making that role in Fences feel like a supporting part — but not Viola. She acts the shit out of every moment, because that’s what she does. When thinking about Fences, we sometimes have to remind ourselves that the movie isn’t all about her. Maybe it is a supporting part; maybe it’s just that they got a lead actress to play it.

No matter — credit where credit is due. Viola Davis is a phenomenal actress, and it’ll be nice to see her get the Oscar she should’ve nabbed from Meryl for The Help. (Not because The Help was such a great movie, but because The Iron Lady was such a bad one.) My other favorite supporting actresses went unrecognized by the Academy. That includes Sarah Gadon as Olivia in Indignation, who at first seems like the kind of banal love interest we expect in a period romance, but gradually reveals deeply layered complexities and an admirable level of pride. (She has an anachronistic but appropriate response to being slut shamed.) It’s hard to ignore a woman in a Confederate flag bikini, and that’s exactly the kind of performance Riley Keogh gives in American Honey — she’s a scene stealer, a total delight in every moment, a businesswoman we both respect and mistrust. Greta Gerwig makes my Not-Oscars list for the third year running, following Frances Ha and Mistress America with a multifacted role as a 1979 feminist punk-loving cancer survivor and photographer. She plays the character so well, you sometimes wish the whole movie were about her. (But that’s true of everyone in that film.)

Only one of these performance felt like a true revelation, however. Last year, an actress known primarily for comedic TV roles was overlooked for a bravura performance as a mother fighting a losing battle with cancer, a performance that showed a level of range from her we’d never seen. That was James White‘s Cynthia Nixon, and this year it’s Other People‘s Molly Shannon. (Both women were honored with an Independent Spirit Award nomination, at least.) It’s not a shock that Shannon can be very sad, in addition to being very funny — I’ve seen her do that in Year Of The Dog and HBO’s Enlightened. But, like Swinton in A Bigger Splash, Shannon does a lot of her acting here without much of a voice. Between these women and Moonlight, it was clearly a very good year for the soft-spoken.
BEST DIRECTOR

Pablo Larrain, Jackie
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Denis Villenueve, Arrival
Trey Edward Shults, Krisha
Mike Mills, 20^th Century Women

Honorable Mention: Luca Guadagnino, A Bigger Splash; Andrea Arnold, American Honey

Again, it was a tough call between Moonlight and Jackie for me. And since I crowned Moonlight my #1 of the year, I decided that Pablo Larrain gets the edge as Best Director. This is partially because he delivered three films that opened in the United States last year — one of which, Neruda, was quite beautiful and stirring in its own right, even if it doesn’t come together as masterfully as Jackie. (I haven’t seen The Club.) His Darren Aronofsky-like stalking of a bloodstained Natalie Portman through the White House is chilling, portraying this American tragedy in fragmented snatches of memory that come across almost like a horror movie. He’s the filmmaker I discovered in 2016 for whom I most looking forward to seeing what comes next.

That shouldn’t discount the marvelous Barry Jenkins and his achievement in Moonlight. Something about Moonlight is so intimate that it almost feels more like live theater than a movie, even though Jenkins’ cinematography is strikingly beautiful and cinematic. There’s no question that a masterful storyteller had to be behind Moonlight in order to get everything so right. I have been a major fan of Denis Villeneuve for the past several years — his films have made my Top 10 list three years in a row — and, in contrast to 2014’s unsettling Enemy and 2015’s sinister Sicario, Arrival is a beautiful and hopeful story that I saw in a moment I needed it most. It shows that Villeneuve can do optimism as well as despair and moral murkiness, which means he’s the closest thing we’ve got to the Next David Fincher.

Big ups to Trey Edward Shults, who I’ve praised a lot for his curiously good achievement in Krisha, directing a cast of his family members in their own house for a mere 9 days and coming out with something as original and compelling as Krisha. I loved the quiet yet epic balance of tone Mike Mills managed to convey in 20th Century Women, which gave us both the little details of some ordinary lives as well as a big picture macro view of where these characters might end up. Luca Guadagnino’s style was on full display in the splashy A Bigger Splash, which veers between genres haphazardly but remains utterly watchable throughout. Andrea Arnold’s American Honey is long and messy and somewhat rambling, and yet I haven’t been able to shake the film’s characters and spirit from my mind. It all feels so true and lived-in, it might as well be a documentary.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Moonlight, Barry Jenkins and Tarrell McCraney
Arrival, Eric Heisserer
Indignation, James Schamus
Elle, David Birke
Hello, My Name is Doris, Laura Terruso and Michael Showalter

Honorable Mention: Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford; The Handmaiden, Park Chan-Wook

Nocturnal Animals is a curious story-within-a-story that doesn’t totally pay off, but I loved the daring ending and Tom Ford’s overall writing. Park Chan-Wook’s tricky The Handmaiden certainly took some careful crafting. The Academy’s rules once again get in my way, because Hello, My Name Is Doris is considered an adapted screenplay even though it is based on a short film by Laura Terruso, which is an original story. Oh well. This light comedy is a pure delight from start to finish, one of my favorite escapist entertainments of the year. Elle grapples with some dreary, dark subject matter and keeps us constantly guessing, managing a nimble, almost comedic tone in spite of the material. Adapting Philip Roth novels hasn’t been easy for Hollywood, which is why James Schamus’ fascinating take on Indignation is all the more impressive. It’s both perfectly cinematic and novelistic, with one 12-minute scene between hero and antagonist that is largely lifted directly from the book. I nearly chose Eric Heisserer’s Arrival as my favorite because of the degree of difficulty of writing it — it hinges on a mystery and plays with time in interesting ways, and the fact that it packs such an emotional whallop despite that is a sign of a great storyteller.

But no surprise here: Moonlight pops up again, despite some confusion about how “adapted” it really is (based on McCraney’s unproduced play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue). In many scenes, the script’s dialogue is spare — which is what makes the gems, like Mahershala Ali’s monologuet that invokes the film’s title, all the more shimmering. Every word counts — the lead character through all three segments is not what you’d call a chatty Kathy, but when he does speak, it’s so heartfelt and honest and meticulously crafted. Arrival is a more ambitious story and a showier achievement in screenwriting, but the biggest challenge for a screenwriter is to allow your characters to say everything while actually saying very little. Jenkins and McCraney chose their words carefully, and they chose all the rights ones. I can’t think of a single moment in Moonlight‘s screenplay I’d want to polish. (And that’s saying a lot, coming from me.)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Other People, Chris Kelly
20th Century Women, Mike Mills
Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade
Everybody Wants Some, Richard Linklater
Hell Or High Water, Taylor Sheridan

Honorable Mention: Jackie, Noah Oppenheim; Born To Be Blue, Robert Burdreau

I always have a bit of a bias when it comes to Original Screenplays. Well-known stories, even if not specifically adapted from a book or another work, have a certain amount of their characters and story structure in place before the writer even begins, which has more in common with an adaptation than a truly original screenplay. That’s largely why Noah Oppenheim’s Jackie, one of my favorite films of the year, doesn’t rank a bit higher. (Ditto Born To Be Blue, though that took a few more liberties with its fiction.)

That’s why, for my own awards, I decided to celebrate full-on originality. Hell Or High Water was a perfectly calibrated Western thriller with compelling characters on both sides of the law. As a big Linklater fan, I appreciated the easy camaraderie he managed to build into all the bro bonding of Everybody Wants Some. Toni Erdmann is one of the most original films of the year. Its script is shaggy and overlong, but comes up with such wonderfully hilarious ideas that it can’t be discounted. 20th Century Women is at once a deeply personal story and a universal one, with subtle moments beautifully crafted by Mills.

My favorite this year, however, has a bit of a bias — I read the script long before seeing the film and connected to it immediately. As directed by the writer, Kelly’s Other People easily lives up to that strong screenplay, with a perfect blend of light-hearted comedy and crushing sadness. Other People is currently streaming on Netflix, awaiting your discovery. Get to it.

BEST ENSEMBLE

Moonlight
Everybody Wants Some!!
Krisha
A Bigger Splash
20^th Century Women

The comedic ensemble of Everybody Wants Some is pitch perfect (save one overcooked character who comes across as a tad too broad to be believable). Krisha uses a cast comprised largely of non-actors to surprisingly great effect — including one with Alzheimer’s who may not have even known she was giving a performance. The central quartet of A Bigger Splash is a delight — Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenarts, Tilda Swinton, and Ralph Fiennes imbue the project with steamy, sexy intrigue. And the 20th Century Women are joined by a couple very capable men for a quintet that is just sublime.

But there was no contest about which cast rises far above the rest. Moonlight isn’t just the best acting ensemble of 2016 — it is, quite frankly, one of the best acting ensembles I’ve ever seen in a movie, which is all the more impressive given that I was familiar with almost none of these actors before seeing the film. I’d seen Mahershala Ali and André Holland before, but I wouldn’t have been able to name them. I knew Janelle Monae as a musician, but had never seen her act. The only cast member I was really familiar with was Naomie Harris. Yet in all three sections of the film, I was constantly blown away by how much I connected to the characters on screen.

BEST SCORE

Money Monster, Dominic Lewis
Arrival, Johann Johannsson
Jackie, Mica Levi
Moonlight, Nicholas Brittel
Knight Of Cups, Hanan Townshend

The score and cinematography of Knight Of Cups are so incredibly beautiful that I have an urge to strip out the dialogue and leave it playing in my home 24/7 as a piece of video art, just forgetting entirely that it’s supposed to be a movie. Moonlight‘s distinct and haunting score sets a gorgeous tone for that gorgeous story — it’s almost impossible to imagine the movie without it. I love Mica Levi’s offbeat compositions for Jackie, which immediately clue us in that this is no biopic even before we’ve seen the first image of the film. For a split second, the strings are upbeat and optimistic — and then it all goes horribly downhill. Arrival was unfortunately shut out of the Academy’s nominations due to the fact that some of its “score” was an existing piece of music (also used in Shutter Island, incidentally); that’s too bad, because the part of the score that actually is original is as original as a film score can be. As mentioned before, it’s the perfect “WTF is happening?” soundtrack for 2016.

But if we’re being honest, the film score I’ve listened to the most, over and over, is Dominic Lewis’ score to Jodie Foster’s hostage thriller Money Monster. A great movie? Money Monster is not. (A guilty pleasure, at best.) But its energetic score is riveting — it’s become one of my go-to “get it done” soundtracks.

BEST POLITICAL FANTASY

Miss Sloane
Arrival
The Witch
Neruda
Zootopia

BEST POLITICAL REALITY

Jackie
Weiner
13th
Southside With You
Barry

WORST POLITICAL REALITY

All of 2016

BEST DOUBLE FEATURE

Barry & Southside With You

BEST MOTHER

Amy Adams, Arrival
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women
Molly Shannon, Other People
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Rachel Weisz, The Light Between Oceans

WORST MOTHER

Kate Dickie, The Witch
Krisha Fairchild, Krisha
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Linda Emond, Indignation
Laura Linney, Nocturnal Animals

BEST FATHER (OR FATHER FIGURE)

Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Peter Simonischek, Toni Erdmann
Ron Suskind, Life, Animated
Michael Shannon, Midnight Special
Gabriel Byrne, Louder Than Bombs

WORST FATHER (OR FATHER FIGURE)

OJ Simpson, OJ: Made In America
Ralph Ineson, The Witch
Aaron Abrams, Closet Monster
Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash
Casey Affleck, Manchester By The Sea

BEST PET

Buffy the hamster, Closet Monster

WORST PET

Black Phillip the goat, The Witch

BEST KISS

Moonlight
Hello, My Name Is Doris
Closet Monster
La La Land
Southside With You

BEST FUCK

American Honey
A Bigger Splash
Julieta
The Handmaiden
Hell Or High Water

WORST FUCK

King Cobra
The Neon Demon
Elle
Sunset Song
Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

MOST AWKWARD OR UNFORTUNATE HOOKUP (OR ATTEMPTED HOOKUP)

Weiner
Indignation
Maggie’s Plan
The Edge Of Seventeen
Manchester By The Sea

BEST MUSICAL MOMENT

“The Greatest Love Of All,” Toni Erdmann
“City Of Stars,” La La Land
“Equal Rights,” Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
“Drive It Like You Stole It,” Sing Street
“Rapper’s Delight,” Everybody Wants Some

BEST FAKE POP/ROCK STAR(S)

The Style Boyz, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Baby Goya & the Nuclear Winters, Hello My Name Is Doris
Sing Street, Sing Street
Marianne Lane, A Bigger Splash
Chet Baker, Born To Be Blue

WORST FAKE POP/ROCK STAR(S)

The Messengers, La La Land
Florence Foster Jenkins, Florence Foster Jenkins
Destiny’s Child, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
The Ain’t Rights, Green Room
The Joker (?), Suicide Squad

*

THE 2016 ROSTER

Here’s every movie I saw from 2016, ranked by how much I liked them.

1. Moonlight
2. Jackie
3. OJ: Made In America
4. Krisha
5. Arrival
6. Indignation
7. Elle
8. Closet Monster
9. Complete Unknown
10. Everybody Wants Some!!
11. 20th Century Women
12. A Bigger Splash
13. Other People
14. Born To Be Blue
15. American Honey
16. Toni Erdmann
17. Christine
18. Miss Sloane
19. 13th
20. Manchester By The Sea
21. Hell Or High Water
22. Hello, My Name Is Doris
23. Silence
24. Loving
25. Nocturnal Animals
26. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
27. The Witch
28. The Handmaiden
29. The Lobster
30. Weiner
31. Southside With You
32. Maggie’s Plan
33. Louder Than Bombs
34. The Neon Demon
35. Lion
36. Hidden Figures
37. Sing Street
38. La La Land
39. Fences
40. A Man Called Ove
41. Sully
42. The Edge Of Seventeen
43. Captain America: Civil War
44. Sunset Song
45. Neruda
46. The Light Between Oceans
47. Love & Friendship
48. Zootopia
49. Barry
50. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
51. Julieta
52. Things To Come
53. 10 Cloverfield Lane
54. The Meddler
55. Life, Animated
56. The Nice Guys
57. Deadpool
58. The Birth Of A Nation
59. Hacksaw Ridge
60. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
61. Eye In The Sky
62. The Hunt For The Wilderpeople
63. Snowden
64. Aquarius
65. The Fits
66. Midnight Special
67. Captain Fantastic
68. Green Room
69. Money Monster
70. Florence Foster Jenkins
71. Knight Of Cups
72. Demolition
73. High-Rise
74. Triple 9
75. Hail, Caesar!
76. Bad Moms
77. Equity
78. King Cobra
79. Swiss Army Man
80. Suicide Squad
81. Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice
*

The Not-Oscars 2015

The Not-Oscars 2014

The Not-Oscars 2013

What a night!

Leave it to a telecast celebrating the films of 2016 to have a shocking surprise in store at the end. Last year, the modest Spotlight bested the bombastic The Revenant in the Best Picture race, even after Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won Best Director. This wasn’t a total shocker, because The Revenant was a more divisive film than Spotlight, which everyone pretty much agreed was at least good. But I predicted The Revenant in my Oscar pool because I was being a realist — and also because I convinced myself that predicting the movie I wanted to win would mean it wasn’t going to.

This year, like most prognosticators, I predicted La La Land, taking the same strategy. Again, the film I actually wanted and hoped would win did.

Apparently, there is something to my theory after all.

You’re welcome, Moonlight.

All kidding aside, tonight feels historic — and not only because of the unprecedented blunder of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway receiving the wrong envelope. Much is being dissected about that snafu, which was possibly one of the most thrilling televised moments I’ve personally ever seen. (I don’t watch sports. The Oscars are my sports. Just imagine a game-changing 9th inning touchdown, or whatever.)

I don’t need to get into that envelope mix-up here, since everyone is already buzzing about it. What I want to talk about is what will matter when this story dies down — Moonlight, winning Best Picture.“There’s a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture. This is not a joke.”

Since this past November, many of us have felt unsettled. Our understanding of what is even possible in this country has been challenged and defied. We can expect plenty more of the same coming down the pipeline for the next few years.

So this year, in particular, it was difficult to hope another high-profile vote would turn out the way I’d like to. Of course, I know the election of the leader of our country has a hell of a lot more consequence than which movie wins Best Picture at the Oscars. Would I rather live in a world where Hillary Clinton is president and La La Land wins Best Picture? You bet.

But still. Now, of all times, it’s very important that it’s Moonlight.

Had Moonlight been called as Best Picture straightaway, without the erroneous La La Land win first stealing its thunder, it would have been a wonderful, jubilant moment. A welcome surprise to many, including me. But the way it happened was shocking, surreal, another thing entirely — and ultimately, it highlights (rather than diminishes) how significant the moment is.

Here’s how it played out: La La Land was announced as Best Picture, as expected. We were midway through the acceptance speeches when there was a flurry of strangeness on stage and La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz had to make it clear that no, actually, Moonlight was winner — well, it felt like fate intervening, saying, “Hey, wait a second… that isn’t right. Let’s correct this.”It’s particularly ironic, coming during the coronation of La La Land, a film that ends with a flash to an “alternate universe” where Seb and Mia end up happily in love, then rips that illusion away to present us with bittersweet reality. That’s exactly what we saw play out on stage — history going the way we expect it to go, according to precedent — and then it just stopped, and something better happened.

I wish fate showed up a few months earlier and chose its contest more selectively. A “Gotcha! It’s Hillary!” would have been so right, so satisfying. For weeks after, many of us were in denial that the election went the way it did. Surely something would come along and save us before inauguration… right? Revelations about Russian interference? Jill Stein’s recount? The electoral college deciding not to vote for that creep after all? It’s still hard to swallow that things turned out the way they did… and then just kept getting more and more dismaying.

Our national nightmare is far from over, and of course, Moonlight being Best Picture doesn’t change that. But after Adele besting Beyonce’s more ambitious and socially relevant Lemonade at the Grammys, it seemed all but inevitable that the whiter, more populist choice would take home the Oscar, too.

Instead, something finally went right.

Moonlight is the first Best Picture winner centered on gay characters, and the first about black people that isn’t explicitly about slavery or race. It isn’t based on the true story of an abolitionist or Civil Rights leader. Moonlight is based on an unproduced play that is semi-autobiographical, directed by a filmmaker very few of us had heard of a year ago. Hardly anyone in its cast was a recognizable name to most moviegoers last year. It cost less than $2 million to make, and was clearly assembled with genuine passion and heart. It’s one of the most critically acclaimed films released in ages. Not everyone loves Moonlight, but few have anything truly disparaging to say about it. So you can’t attribute Moonlight‘s win to any of the usual scapegoats — Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood being out of touch, huge awards campaign budgets, Academy voters loving to see themselves reflected on screen, a former nominee being awarded for a lesser work. This one is based purely on the quality of the movie.

Moonlight had to be a fucking incredible film to get as far as it did, and it is. You don’t make a movie about gay black men thinking you’ll be a big hit at the box office. You don’t make a film like Moonlight thinking you’ll win an Oscar for it, let alone that the public at large will even hear about it. That’s why Moonlight‘s victory is so victorious — it is really, truly earned. It’s a fantastic Best Picture winner that will stand the test of time, that the Academy can still be proud in five, ten, and one hundred years. I’ve seen a few films I love and admire take this award before, but it’s been a long time since any of the meant as much as Moonlight.

Some may consider Moonlight‘s win a political statement against the current White House, or an over-correction for the last couple years’ #OscarsSoWhite controversy. But if that’s all it is, why Moonlight? Why not Fences or Hidden Figures, which had bigger budgets and bigger stars and a hell of a lot more marketing? I’m sure many voters considered the fact that this film honors both African-Americans and LGBTQ people before filling out their ballots, but I don’t buy that as the primary reason the Academy went for it. Voters should take a pause and think about what kind of statement they’re making when they select the winners — but that alone shouldn’t declare the winner. Moonlight won Best Picture because it’s a beautiful movie that moved so many people, because it is well-crafted at every level, because it is unique and authentic and special. It had no advantages; in fact, it had everything going against it as a Best Picture contender. By contrast, La La Land plays into some of the worst stereotypes about Oscar voters — the voting body that chose The Artist, Argo, and Birdman, none of which are, on their own merits, true classics. Hollywood is one of few voices with the power and reach to stand strongly against the actions of the current president and his administration, and it would have been a bit of a shame to see Tinseltown award such a nostalgic throwback (“Make musicals great again!”) at this moment. Those of us on the right side of history need to celebrate all the diversity we can, as loudly as possible. For all its charms and merits, La La Land doesn’t do that.

So when fate intervened and literally ripped those golden statuettes out of those poor La La Land producers’ hands, it felt like a belated righting of all the wrongs we’ve witnessed over the last few months. My jaw dropped. I was confused, but ecstatic. It was like a genie had appeared to grant my wish right before my eyes. Like magic.

I felt like I’d won Best Picture.

No, Moonlight winning Best Picture doesn’t actually do anything for us in the here and now. But as long as there are movies, people will see its name amidst some of the most popular and beloved titles of all time — All About Eve, Gone With The Wind, Titanic, Lawrence Of Arabia. (And, okay, A Beautiful Mind and The King’s Speech.) This win will get people who would never watch Moonlight to watch Moonlight. I don’t know that one film alone can change anyone’s mind about major political issues, but if one can, Moonlight isn’t a bad bet. It’s a film about empathy, about understanding the life of a man who, on the surface, is very different from most of us, yet totally relatable to all in the way his story is presented. Intolerance, in large part, is born from ignorance and misunderstanding. Moonlight could help people understand and empathize with someone that is far outside their usual social circle.

No, I don’t expect the Rust Belt to rush out and buy up all available copies of Moonlight on DVD. I don’t expect hearts and minds across the nation to suddenly shift, all thanks to Barry Jenkins. But more people will see Moonlight now, plain and simple, and that’s a good thing. Producers and studios will look at its win, and decide that it is worth taking a chance on more films about black or gay people — or black and gay people. Through no fault of its own, necessarily, La La Land didn’t have the message Hollywood and America needed to send out to the world in 2017. Moonlight did.

Let me be clear: La La Land is not the Donald Trump of movies. This year, that would have been something with far fewer redeeming qualities, something brash and obnoxious and stupidly popular like Batman V Superman or Suicide Squad (which, unfortunately, really did win an Oscar). La La Land earns at least some of the harsh backlash it received — Damien Chazelle’s depiction of Seb as the self-proclaimed white savior of jazz isn’t great, and the problems of the film’s central dreamers pale in comparison to — well, every other Best Picture nominee, frankly. Its story doesn’t totally hang together with close scrutiny. But it wouldn’t be a historically bad choice for Best Picture — just an obvious and uninspired one. That wouldn’t have done anyone any favors.

As a Best Picture winner, La La Land would have been in trouble, subject to a legacy of vitriol that currently gets spent on Crash, mostly. (For the record, I remain a fan of Crash, and still like it better than Brokeback Mountain — though that would have been a perfectly worthy Best Picture winner, too.)

As a Best Picture loser, La La Land is free to go back to being a pretty okay original musical with a lot to like about it.In fact, after the Oscars telecast and Moonlight‘s stunning victory, I was struck by an inexplicable urge to watch… no, not Moonlight. Yes, La La Land. Maybe because Jordan Horowitz and his team handled that defeat with such grace, I found myself feeling unexpected sympathy and respect for them and their little musical. You had to feel bad for those guys, experiencing the greatest triumph of their careers, then learning that they actually hadn’t — live on television in front of millions of people. Suddenly, La La Land was an underdog — and La La Land is a much better underdog than it is an overachiever. It’s a movie about the setbacks and disappointments that accompany a life of reaching for the stars. Having rewatched La La Land just now, I can tell you that those setbacks and disappointments play a lot better when the film itself a loser.

(A loser that killed at the box office, is admired by many critics and audiences, and won six other Oscars, that is.)

Moonlight‘s Best Picture win allowed me to forgive La La Land its shortcomings and just enjoy it in a way I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. I imagine the same will be true for many others who were underwhelmed by the film and cursed its likely win. I honestly believe that losing Best Picture is the best thing that could possibly have happened to Damien Chazelle and La La Land in the long run.

Despite the fuck ups, the net effect of the night’s Oscars telecast was simply beautiful. Viola Davis is an incredible actress who deserves at least one Academy Award. Casey Affleck was quite good in Manchester By The Sea (if not so great in real life). Emma Stone did so much to enhance La La Land’s strengths — she made us feel for her in a way that her male counterpart did not. (Perhaps because of the writing, perhaps because of the acting — most likely, because of both.) And Mahershala Ali is a revelation to many of this year — can you imagine how his career path will change now? I hope there are many more great roles in store for this charismatic actor.

OJ: Made In America may or may not be a movie, but obviously the Academy and I agree that it can be. I didn’t see The Salesman or The White Helmets yet, but I was happy that the important messages from their filmmakers reached a mass audience. Arrival got a well-deserved technical award. I didn’t love the way every category panned out, but I can honestly say that looking down the list of the night’s winners makes me really content. It’s the most satisfying the Oscars have been in quite some time.These are hard times for anyone who isn’t a heterosexual white Christian, and for those who care about the people who don’t fit in this narrow box. We needed a victory right now. I needed a victory. This is a significant moment, not just because my favorite film of the year won Best Picture, and not just because Moonlight, in some ways, represents me in a way no other Best Picture winner ever has.

It’s because, on paper, Moonlight is the least likely Best Picture winner to ever win Best Picture, and also one of the most deserving. It’s a sign that things might be slowly but surely getting better for the people this film is about.  People out there need to know that, for all the recent setbacks and problems we have yet to solve, diverse voices can still rise up out of nowhere, from nothing, and end up broadcasting their stories to the entire world. I’m so happy that message got out there, even if it had to happen the way it did, under the weirdest and most dramatic of circumstances. Moonlight is the kind of movie I want to see more of and the kind of movie I want to make. It gives me great hope that it has been so celebrated by the industry’s foremost artists and professionals.

I don’t equate my own struggles with any other group. We’ve all got our own problems in the current moment, some more severe than others, but all worthy of being heard. Yet in the past few months, I’ve felt a swell of solidarity with everyone else out there who is vulnerable under this administration, and everyone who has stood up to support us. It’s not because I feel I’m at the same level of risk as many others — I’m not — I’ve just gotten a little taste of it, and that changes the way I see the world around me now. I don’t pretend to understand what I haven’t experienced, but I try harder now to empathize with it.

Last year, Moonlight was the film that best spoke to that, in the most simple and understated way. I’m always glad when diversity is deservedly rewarded, but I don’t know that I’ve ever felt I truly shared one of those awards, until now. Not to undermine the achievements of the incredible talents who actually did the work of making this incredible movie, but a Best Picture Oscar for Moonlight feels like a Best Picture for all of us.

Here’s to the fools — the straight white male ones, and all the rest, who have to dream even harder to make it.

The Not-Oscars 2016

Moonlight

La La Land

The Tens: Best Of Film 2016

*

“No weapons… no friends… no hope. Take all that away, and what’s left?”

“Me.”

In every generation, there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the podcasts. She is the slayer.

In When We Were Young’s 12th episode, Chris shares his teenage infatuation with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. (The TV show, not the movie. Obviously.) He also brings in the podcast’s very first guest host, Kevin Murray, Buffy fan extraordinaire, to help him slay the apocalyptic criticisms rising from Seth and Becky’s Hellmouths.

We know Joss Whedon fans still love Buffy, but how does it hold up for newbies to the Scooby gang? In honor of the show’s 20th anniversary, we look at episodes from each of the show’s first five seasons, including standout classics like “Hush” and “The Body” and the phenomenal musical “Once More, With Feeling,” to see what made the series such a groundbreaking cult hit. Grab your crossbow, get your vamp face on, and be prepared to die a couple of times (at least), because we’re off to Sunnydale!

Listen here and subscribe here.

My affinity for Buffy The Vampire Slayer has hardly been a secret, least of all on this blog, where I ranked my Top 25 episodes.

So I needn’t go too far into the weeds to sing my praises of Joss Whedon and Sarah Michelle Gellar and all the rest. Doing a podcast on this series was daunting, because I knew I’d never be able to cover everything that made this show so meaningful for so many, and I knew I’d never be able to catch my co-hosts completely up to speed in only a handful of episodes.

In the end, I decided to give them a sampling of Buffy‘s first five seasons on the WB, which nicely coincided with my high school years. There’s so much about Buffy that matters, I distilled it down to one quality per season that particularly stood out (and the podcast still came in at over two hours).

Extra thanks to my friend Kevin Murray, the Faith to Buffy for this episode, for helping me fight back as a knowledgeable Whedon fan.

“Welcome To The Hellmouth” & “Prophecy Girl”
Aired: March 10 & June 2, 1997
Focusing On: The Talent (The Writing & The Cast)
My Ranking: #12 (Prophecy Girl)

The show’s first season is considered by few, if any, to rank as Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s best. It’s always a conundrum, trying to hook new fans into the show with the proper background and context, without allowing the campy tone, so-so special effects, and uneven writing of Season One to turn them off completely.

Despite these factors, Buffy made its mark when it debuted as a mid-season replacement on Mondays at 9 PM on The WB, following (yes) the squeaky-clean 7th Heaven. Two things stood out above all else: the performances of the cast, and Joss Whedon’s writing.

The acting in Season One is the show at its most iffy, I’ll admit. Anthony Stewart Head was solid from moment one, and Alyson Hannigan rarely takes a misstep as the smart but shy Willow. The rest of the supporting cast can be hit or miss, and the guest stars are more often than not unremarkable. The show rests on Sarah Michelle Gellar’s shoulders, of course, and it’s not an easy job. She has to convincingly sell snarky quips, fight scenes, heavy drama, horror sequences, and plenty more. She has to believably embody a capable superhero and a vulnerable teen girl. Few actresses are ever called upon to show such range in a single role. Many don’t display this much range across their entire careers.

As a longtime fan, it’s difficult or impossible to step aside and look at Gellar with fresh eyes. As our guest Kevin said in the podcast, she is Buffy, plain and simple, and having watched her entire performance as the character (many times), she is absolutely the most powerful and meaningful character in all of pop culture for me.

As for the writing, Whedon’s style is distinct and polarizing. Along with Kevin Williamson, he ushered in the self-conscious teenspeak of the late 90s, a reaction against less self-aware teen characters we saw in horror and elsewhere. Obviously, I love this, and I love it the most in Buffy and Scream, when it was fresh and new. (I’m the first to admit that it got stale when too many pale imitators jumped on the bandwagon.) I’m not one to blindly worship at the altar of Whedon, though I greatly admire the originality of what he brought to television. I still believe Buffy The Vampire Slayer is far and away his best work. Feminism is far from a solved problem two decades later, and you can nit-pick Whedon’s portrayal of women as filtered through a straight white male perspective, but Buffy broke new ground in portraying a female hero who was layered, vulnerable, and truly admirable, who was neither stripped of sexuality nor oozing with it, who did not exist primarily to be ogled, who did not need to be raped or brutalized by men in order to be a strong woman. Plus, with Willow and Tara, he’s still responsible for one of the best gay relationships on television to date. Even considering Season One’s many shortcomings, these talents are evident and, I believe, what kept fans like me on board for greater things on the horizon.

“Passion”
Aired: February 24, 1998
Focusing on: The Romance / Soapiness
My Ranking: #8

Despite Season One’s bumpy beginnings, Buffy The Vampire Slayer took a fairly big bite out of the pop culture landscape during 1997, if not exactly the ratings. Not every critic was a fan from moment one, but a lot of them were (including my Bible at the time, Entertainment Weekly).

Here’s what the critics had to say during the show’s first season:

Todd Everett at Variety: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer plays like an uneasy cross between The X-Files and Clueless.”

John Levesque at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Buffy to perfection in this witty, intelligent and thoroughly entertaining series based loosely on the 1992 film, and if she isn’t the next closet-door poster queen — or the Internet-shrine equivalent — I’ll be stunned.”

By Season 2, Buffy was a veritable phenom. Gellar was one of the hottest teen stars around, appearing on the cover of every teen rag and in hit horror films like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2. It was a heavenly time to be alive for a Buffy fan.

Many episodes in Season Two have the same flaws as the worst hours in Season One — “Inca Mummy Girl,” “Some Assembly Required,” and the dismaying “Go Fish” adding insult to injury by popping up right before the season finale. Depending on which episodes you tuned in to, you could be forgiven for dismissing Season Two as more of the same.

But Season Two also kicked off Buffy as a truly serialized show, and its best episodes capitalize on that rather than the monster-of-the-week-ness of Season One. There’s lots of various pairing off, in true teen soap fashion, with Xander and Cordelia beginning an unlikely love affair and new character Oz’s courtship of Willow. Of course, this is also when the romance between Buffy and Angel hits a peak, resulting in maybe the series’ most potent storyline ever: sex with Buffy releases Angel’s soul, causing him to revert back to the evil Angelus.

This is what cemented Buffy as a landmark in teen culture of the 90s. Even if the show had been canceled after Season Two (God forbid!), it would have gone down as a classic. Many of us can relate to opening ourselves up to someone we have feelings for, only to see that person “change” the moment we do so. It all boils down to a spectacular showdown in the season finale, “Becoming,” which I still vividly remember being floored by when it first aired.

“Earshot”
Set To Air: April 26, 1999 / Actually Aired: September 21, 1999
Focusing On: “High School As Hell”
My Ranking: #14

Season Three is Buffy at its most classic. The most egregious flaws found in the series’ first two seasons were (mostly) gone. Most Season Three episodes hold up pretty well, and some are flat-out stellar. The cast had also found its rhythm at this point. There isn’t really a weak link here.

It also introduces Eliza Dushku as Faith, the “bad” slayer, and one of the most compelling season-long arcs — the Mayor’s Ascension. As storytelling goes, it’s pretty punchy stuff.

One of my favorite “introductory” Buffy episodes has always been “Earshot,” because you don’t need much context to connect to it. It is also perhaps the very best example of the show’s central metaphor, “High School As Hell,” which worked quite well at times and also led to a few of the show’s most legendarily clunky moments.

I articulated my thoughts on this well enough in the podcast, but “Earshot” is a wildly entertaining hour of television that also has a powerful message, one that more people could stand to learn — especially those who feel so marginalized and ignored they turn to violence to get a point across. It’s shocking that this episode was set to air less than a week after the Columbine shootings, before it was delayed several months as the media grappled with its depictions of gun violence (a rather short-lived moral examination, if you ask me). At its best, Buffy tackled teen issues that really mattered and found a way to make the emotions of young people understandable through supernatural metaphor. Nearly anyone can find an episode of Buffy that speaks to their high school experience. With humor and pathos, this one explores what happens in American high schools when that “Hell” is actually unleashed.
“Hush”
Aired: December 14, 1999
Focusing On: The Cinematic Quality / Inventiveness / Genre
My Ranking: #10

Buffy is now known as one of the most inventive television series of the 90s, and of all time. It had a silent episode, a musical episode, a dream episode, and plenty more. Some also credit it as an important milestone in ushering in the second “Golden Age of Television” that The Sopranos is largely affiliated with.

TV is still flush with creativity, thanks to streaming. We tend to see more inventiveness on the small screen than on the big screen these days. Buffy was one of the first shows to make TV feel truly cinematic, and this is the first episode that did so in a major way. “Hush” is essentially a mini-movie — it helps that we know these characters already, but it would work just as well if we didn’t. It’s one of few episodes of Buffy that is truly scary, though it also contains some of the series’ comedic high points. This was also the series’ only nomination for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing. (It deserved a few more.)

At this point, Whedon established himself as more than a mere showrunner, but a real auteur.

“The Best Of Buffy” — Episodes #1-5

“The Best Of Buffy” — Episodes #6-10

“The Best Of Buffy” — Episodes #11-15

“The Best Of Buffy” — Episodes #16-20

“The Best Of Buffy” — Episodes #25-21

“Life in plastic, it’s fantastic…”

Heya, Barbie! Wanna go for a ride? How about all the way back to 1998, when boy bands were just starting to be a “thing” (again), we listened to music on compact discs, and the blonde brothers Hanson seemed like they might have long-lasting relevance in the pop music sphere? (Okay, that last part was never true.)

In our latest episode, When We Were Young revisits Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 1, along with other compilation CDs you could order over the phone (what?!), like the ready-to-rumble Jock Jams and the whale-saving, orca-flowing Pure Moods. We listen to acts ranging from the poppiest of pop (Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys) to moody alternative acts (Everclear and Fastball), seeing how they’ve held up over the past couple decades. (‘Cause that’s what you get when you mess with us.) Yes, we even pause to throw back a bottle of beer and debate what the hell was up with the 90s revitalization of swing spearheaded by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ “Zoot Suit Riot.”

So don’t “Fly Away” — please “Say You’ll be There” as we get “Together Again” with the musical masterpieces and misfires of the late 1990s — and some surprisingly dark origin stories. Let’s go party!

Listen here and subscribe here.

I’ll keep this pretty brief, since this episode of When We Were Young is especially not, and I got a chance to say just about everything I could ever say about the songs on these compilations.

I never owned a Now That’s What I Call Music CD, because by the time they were released I was either over all the songs I liked or had purchases the albums they were found on. (I almost never bought CD singles. Maybe most songs I wanted weren’t released that way, or maybe I just didn’t know about them.) Liking songs I heard in passing somewhere led me to discover full albums I loved, like Filter’s Title Of Record and Everclear’s So Much For The Afterglow. (I’m pretty sure that neither of Everclear’s big singles from this album, “I Will Buy You A New Life” or “Father Of Mine” was the one I bought the album for, though.)

I’ve always had a rather contradictory relationship with mainstream pop music. I was around in the late 90s, of course, when some of the most enduring pop artists of the past few decades emerged. I watched TRL and got my dose of Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, Christina Aguilera, and so on. I tended to like the female pop artists, and didn’t have much affinity for the boy bands.

(I certainly didn’t have much affinity for Jock Jams or Pure Moods, either.)

Later in life, I came to feel even more this way — I was a bigger fan of “Slave 4 U” Britney and “Dirrty” Xtina than I was of their bubblegummier days — and I usually preferred electronic artists remixing pop tunes than I actually liked the Top 40 versions.

This is still mainly true. I may like about 25% of Top 40 songs marginally, and am indifferent to 50% while hating 20%. I maybe actually really like 5% of this. The Now That’s What I Call Music albums have endured (pretty unnecessarily), and I peruse their track lists and have affinity for almost none. Partially, this is being more familiar with the artists than the songs by name, and also, not being a teenager. But I think the digital age has definitely segmented music much more, and we’re less likely to be inundated with big singles that absolutely everyone is hearing. There are maybe a couple of these per year — from Adele and Taylor Swift and Justin Timberlake and Beyonce, often — and the rare breakout by a new artist, like “Call Me Maybe.” I’d say I was pretty familiar with 14 or 15 of Now Vol. 1‘s 17 tracks, by comparison, and I don’t think it’s only because I’m “out of touch” with “what the kids are listening to” these days. It’s a factor, sure. But the digital age has also allowed people to segment their music consumption on playlists that will only play songs with a certain flavor, and Top 40 radio is not a staple in most people’s lives anymore. (I still listen to the actual radio in the car sometimes, because I have an older car.)

I am interested in what doing this episode made me consider, how the consolidation of music, film, and TV has been a long-gestating, ongoing process. A little over 100 years ago, there was no such thing as consumption of music unless it was live. The early films had no synced sound, and instead relied on pianists to score the film live in the movie theater. The phonograph and radio changed this, and no one would ever have tried to play a reel of Citizen Kane on their phonograph, or flip on the radio expecting to find the latest I Love Lucy. (Though Lucy did begin as a radio program, My Favorite Husband.) “I Love Lucy” notably has long Ricky Ricardo performances in almost every episode, which was a way of mixing a sitcom and musical entertainment; perhaps it was the Beatles who first introduced the idea of getting music via TV as a mainstream commercial idea. Not long after, there were plenty of TV programs geared around music that mainly targeted teenagers, which predicted the rise of MTV.

Movie screens got wider in the 60s and 70s as a way to differentiate cinema from television. Record players, TVs, and film reels were still distinctly different. Music beat film as a consumer product, but in the 1980s, VHS tapes caught on around the same time that most music was consumed on cassette tapes, too. Gradually, these mediums got even more similar. MTV debuted mainly as a “visual radio,” playing music videos, which were like short films set to music. Soon, music made the leap to compact discs, which films did soon after as DVDs. Computer games moved from disk to CD, too. TV was sold on VHS and then, more popularly, on DVD. At this point, all of these mediums could essentially be found on very similar-looking discs. Now That’s What I Call Music was basically a CD version of listening to the radio.

It was also an early adopter of “getting music via your phone,” which of course happens much more quickly now. Our TVs have widened and grown to look more like movie screens. Music, TV, and movies are consumed by many digitally, and physical media in these forms may eventually be phased out altogether. We can listen to radio and albums, watch TV, or see a movie all on the same devices. Most of us still have TVs, in addition to smart phones and tablets, but the same media can be played across all of these. Soon, we may not have more than one device at all, or at least, it will become much simpler to consolidate the content that plays on these devices.

These compilation CDs are a hilariously dated but fascinating look at a specific moment in this evolution. This was a fun episode to record, and hopefully is a fun episode to listen to, too!

“Is there nothing that can permeate that impervious puss?”

Just in time for Easter, we’re taking a trip back to visit every kid’s second (or third, or fourth…) favorite bunny!

Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) effortlessly blended live action and animation in a cinematic experience never seen before (and rarely since). It was also a colossal hit for Touchstone Pictures (AKA Disney) and managed to delight children, adults, classic cartoon fans and noir thriller aficionados — no small feat!

The When We Were Young hosts originally saw this comedy-mystery hybrid blockbuster as little kids; now that we’re old enough to have a complicated appreciation of Jessica Rabbit’s heaving bosom, we decided to head back into Toontown to see if the groundbreaking flick still holds up today.

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My memories of Who Framed Roger Rabbit are rather vague. Unlike other major family-friendly blockbusters, in many ways it feels like this film has been erased from pop culture, at least to me. It’s rarely discussed. It’s barely quoted. I never saw it again. When compared to other blockbusters released around this time — Home Alone, Indiana Jones, E.T., and Zemeckis’ own Back To The Future franchise — it doesn’t feel like Roger Rabbit exists quite in the same space. Even Toon Town at Disneyland seems more preoccupied with Mickey and friends than the movie that provided its namesake.

That could be my own bias, though. I remember very little about the film from my early childhood viewing, which was probably  in 1989 or 1990, except that I was mildly disturbed by the insertion of real actors into cartoon violence. (That steamroller scene tripped me out.) My overall memory of  Who Framed Roger Rabbit was one of mild displeasure, but then I mostly forgot about the film until it came time to do the podcast.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit was well-reviewed by critics, beloved by audiences, and earned a killing at the box office, in addition to six Oscar nominations and three wins. I turned it on expecting to find a lot to like, figuring the humor had gone over my head during my original viewing.

As it turns out, even at age 6, my sense of humor was too sophisticated for Roger Rabbit.

Beyond some impressive special effects (for that era), I have a hard time grasping the appeal of this film. Roger Rabbit is an obnoxious character who is neither endearing nor particularly funny. He lacks the dry wit of Bugs Bunny or the likability of Mickey Mouse. Sometimes, rude and crude  cartoon characters can be funny — The Simpsons, to provide the most obvious example. But The Simpsons is a clever, often biting take on current pop culture and societal norms. Even its most outrageous characters have moments of relatable humanity. I never once connected to Roger Rabbit, or any other character in this movie.The animation-laden spin on old film noir feels super stale, even in 1988, given that Looney Tunes had done this endlessly for decade up until this point. Who Framed Roger Rabbit doesn’t put a new spin on that oft-parodied genre. I enjoy the idea of Jessica Rabbit as the cartoon twist on a typical femme fatale, but I wish the film had been more subversive in how it utilized her. She ends up being a pretty typical damsel in distress. Both the major female characters exist solely to moon over the men in their life. Maybe that’s inevitable from a family film from 1988, but it definitely puts the special effects far ahead of the screenwriting in terms of being ahead of their time.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Probably the ominous-looking guy dressed all in black we meet a few minutes into the movie.

When I have a particular grudge against a movie, it’s usually because I can imagine a version that is much better (for me, at least). I love the idea of cartoon characters interacting with a gritty film noir world, but it doesn’t work for me when the world the humans inhabit is as flat and cartoonish as the animation. I find the cartoon cameos totally pointless, on the whole, as they are in many bad comedies that try and substitute recognizable faces for actual jokes. Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse cameo together in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is wonderful in theory, except that they serve literally no function. They could be replaced with any other cartoon characters and the scene would play out exactly the same way. So what’s the point?

Wouldn’t it be funny if Bugs Bunny was a rival of Roger Rabbit’s? Maybe Roger is always aspiring to be like Bugs, but he can’t because he’s so doofy and off-putting? Is there any hierarchy in Toon Town? It’d be amusing if the Disney characters were all treated like royalty, and the other toons all envied them. As it is, there’s no differentiation between the Looney Tunes and the Mouse House and all the rest. These are properties that have decades of familiarity, and they bring none of that baggage. The personalities we’ve grown to know and love over the years are barely present. And in my estimation, Roger Rabbit is no substitute.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is clearly not my cup of carrot juice. I don’t particularly judge anyone who finds the movie whimsical or delightful — I just experience none of that while watching it. To me, the film’s major flaw is in its uninspired screenplay (written by the duo that brought us such other gems as the misbegotten and forgotten Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West and How The Grinch Stole Christmas with Jim Carrey. I find the writing in Who Framed Roger Rabbit exactly on par with those titles. I also don’t see much to set it apart from other live-action meets animation titles like Cool World and Space Jam, although the special effects are probably better. (I haven’t revisited those, either.)

So far on the podcast, I’ve found value in everything we’ve revisited. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill isn’t really my jam, but I appreciated its originality and the craft that went into it. In a way, it was refreshing to find something that I just didn’t like at all. But since picking on a beloved family film from the 80s just makes one sound like a grump, I suppose I’ll leave it at that.

“Hey, everyone — Sandy Frink just landed in a helicopter!”

Is that an earthquake? In honor of the 20th anniversary of their 10 year reunion, we join the Madonna twins and a big giant girl who smokes and says “shit” a lot to revisit 1987 and 1997 in Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion. Watch out, Tucson!

Chris and Seth have a special place in their hearts for this teen comedy made specifically for the C-Group (and anyone else who ever had their hamburger stolen by a deludanoid), and mutually agree that this is the cutest the When We Were Young podcast has ever looked. Meanwhile, Becky (the obvious Rhoda of this episode) comes to the scarf-folding fun with a fresher perspective to examine how this cherished cult hit holds up against today’s comedic standards. The WWWY gang is also joined by special guest Chelsea, inventor of Post-Its, to discuss her fancy-schmancy formula for glue.

So grab your flip phone and your huge notebook, because When We Were Young is doing Tucson (for a business thing), and we’re not stopping until our shoes are overflowing with blood. If you hate throwing up in public, you’ve come to the right podcast!

Listen here and subscribe here.

I like a lot of movies, but it’s hard to think of one that makes me quite as happy as Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion. As much as I enjoy The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel (recently covered by this very same podcast), those films are ever-so-slightly marred by some goofier slapstick bits aimed at a younger audience. Romy And Michele, however, is Rated R and therefore lobs all of its jokes at an adult audience. (Granted, an adult audience that’s prone to laughing at Lisa Kudrow thrusting her tongue at the window to scare a little boy.)

I also find Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion the most insanely quotable movie of all time. I honestly don’t think there’s a single line you could say to me that I would not recognize, particularly when delivered in these characters’ distinct voices. (“I thought so!” isn’t a terribly memorable line… except the way Mira Sorvino delivers it.)

The first iteration of Romy and Michele was a 1988 play entitled Ladies Room, starring Lisa Kudrow and a bunch of other Groundlings, based on two women writer Robin Schiff really did encounter in a Los Angeles restroom. Sciff was also a Groundling, and that attention to character-based comedy is definitely what makes this film stand out. Ladies Room takes place at the Green Enchilada, a Mexican restaurant in LA, featuring a cast of 9 characters, and according to the original LA Times review, characters “range from the middle-brow women from the ad agency a few suicidal floors up to a pair of totally awesome Valley girls (Christie Mellor and Lisa Kudrow), vapidly looking for guys with good jobs (it makes them sexier).” Romy and Michele also appeared on a TV pilot written by Schiff called Just Temporary, where they were named Nicole and Torie.

Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion

Release Date: April 25, 1997
Domestic/Worldwide Total Gross: $29.2 million
Opening Weekend: $7.4 million
Metacritic: 59

In 1997, Friends was in Season 3 at the height of the Ross and Rachel romantic drama, so Kudrow was already a household name, though she had yet to carry a feature film. Mira Sorvino was an Academy Award winner, thanks to her role as a goofy prostitute in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite, beating formidable talent like Joan Allen and Kate Winslet. She was a mid-90s “It Girl,” known for dating Quentin Tarantino, but was by no means a bankable box office draw, either. Janeane Garofalo was the biggest movie star in the cast, having already proven herself in The Truth About Cats And Dogs and The Cable Guy. (At the time, it felt a little strange that she was playing second-fiddle to Kudrow and Sorvino in a studio comedy.)

The film co-starred Alan Cumming, Julia Campbell, Elaine Hendrix, Camryn Manheim (of The Practice), Jacob Vargas, and a then-unknown Justin Theroux — a stellar cast all around. The film was directed by Simpsons writer/producer David Mirkin, who later directed Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt in another female buddy comedy, 2001’s Heartbreakers. (It’s no Romy And Michele, but I have a soft spot for it anyway.)

Here’s what the critics had to say in 1997:

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone:

“The affably airheaded Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion won’t silence her detractors, though Kudrow’s Michele is a deadpan delight as she joins fellow misfit Romy (a deliciously funny Mira Sorvino) at their 10-year high school reunion. The trailer alone is wittier than the entirety of McHale’s Navy and Jungle 2 Jungle, two ’97 comedies driven by TV stars. Kudrow and Sorvino have a ball in this babe version of Dumb and Dumber.”

Todd McCarthy, Variety:

“Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion looks like a peroxided Clueless wannabe straggling along to the party two years after it’s over. Desperately uncertain in tone and able to generate only sporadic laughs, pic decks out its meager story of revenge and comeuppance with a vulgar, flashy shimmer that will no doubt attract teenage girls, or the core Clueless audience. Some good early returns are therefore likely, but the film’s own legs don’t reckon to be nearly as long as those of its statuesque heroines.”

There was no way Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion wasn’t going to hold up for me — I’ve watched it several times since my early fandom, though it had been a couple of years, at least, since I revisited it. This may have been the first viewing where I was looking for more than just a good time, though, and on that level, Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion is surprisingly potent.

Schiff’s script is truly smart in the way it addresses high school anxieties. It presents a tiered system of outcasts, which is definitely accurate — even most kids who consider themselves rejects are still cooler than someone — and it rightly separates the smart nerds (like Sandy and Tobey) from the dumb nerds (Romy and Michele) from the might-be-smart-if-she-gave-a-fuck nerd (Heather Mooney). It also grounds its characters in vulnerability — not just Romy and Michele, who make up a ridiculous lie about Post-Its to impress their former classmates, but Tobey, Sandy, and Heather, too. Tobey Walters could easily be a joke character the movie laughs off as easily as Heather does, but instead she gets a moment to explain how Heather’s harsh words hurt her, and we feel for her. Even Heather, as blunt and mean as she can be, is clearly acting this way defensively. Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion goes above and beyond most high school comedies in portraying the nuances of high school drama. Its much more complicated than the typical “jocks and homecoming queens versus the math club” that we usually see. Even the popular crowd is thought-through — yes, Christy Masters is pretty much the stereotypical bitch villain of every high school comedy ever made, but we definitely sense that her quest for external perfection has left her hollow inside. And there’s obviously something going on in the A-group between Christy and Lisa, which we get only a taste of in this movie. This is relatively rare in a studio comedy — the sense that every single one of these characters truly has a life outside the walls of this movie.On the podcast, we mention that Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion feels ahead of its time — perhaps not as a mainstream movie, but certainly in terms of its nuanced character work. This movie seems unlikely as a major release in 2017 — at least, not without some Bridesmaids-style raunch thrown in — but it’s easy to imagine these characters existing in a sophisticated cable or streaming comedy, the likes of which didn’t exist in 1997.

As much as I’ve always loved this film, it wasn’t until doing this podcast that I realized why I love it so much — not just because it’s hilarious (which it is), but because it has memorable, original characters and a smart, thoughtful message about several rites of passage in our lives. Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion understands that some, but not all, of who we are is evident in high school, and spreads that all-important message to the outcasts out there: “It gets better!” At the same time, it is realistic about the ways our high school insecurities linger far longer than it makes any sense for them to, evidenced most cleverly in Michele’s dream, in which just about every aspect of high school is still haunted by the domineering Christy Masters.

If we’ve left town and moved on from out high school lives, it certainly shouldn’t matter what a few people we happened to go to high school with think. But it does. In ways that are generally far less dramatic (or hilarious) as depicted here, high school reunions do give us a chance to get that closure — to face our old demons as the people we are now, and finally put them out of our minds. The lesson learned in Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion is one I learned at my own high school reunion, too — that everyone was and always will be dealing with their own shit, and most likely, no one ever was actively trying to make your life a living hell.

I’m not entirely sure I would have ever learned that lesson if Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion hadn’t primed me for it, almost 15 years ahead of time. So, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of this film, I have to say a truly heartfelt “thank you” to Robin Schiff, Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino, David Mirkin, and the rest of the cast and crew of this movie. I probably wouldn’t have said this before sitting down and truly contemplating what this film means to me, but Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion is really, truly a great movie.

Okay?

*

“He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don’t know what it means…”

I’m not sure any episode of the podcast will ever be as difficult as this one.

As you can tell when you listen to the episode, talking about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana results in an endless stream of contradictions and conundrums. We talked about him for well over two hours (mercifully edited down for you people) and easily could have gone on for a few hours more. We barely scratched the surface.

Many efforts have been made over the years to get to know Kurt Cobain, the man, like the documentary Montage Of Heck and countless other films, books, articles, and so on. It is impossible to determine where, exactly, the human being ends and the legend begins. So much about his life seems so predestined, so written, that it is easy to get carried away in grandeur and mythology and forget that, for Cobain, the experience of his life was present tense, as it was unfolding. He couldn’t have known what Nirvana’s music would become, even it feels like, at some level, he always had some idea. He especially couldn’t have known how the world would respond to his untimely (but, strangely, also seemingly inevitable) death. And yet it all feels like it only could have gone this way if it were all planned.

As far as I can tell, my own history with Kurt Cobain begins on April 8, 1994. The first time I was aware of him by name, he was already a tragic figure, a legend whose pain and suffering seemed outside the scope of what most can imagine. (Whether or not they really were is another story.)

There is something unreachable about the music of Nevermind. No matter what meaning you apply to the lyrics, there is always something intangible you can’t quite grasp, like you’re only getting half the story. They mean so many things to so many people that it feels entirely wrong to apply a singular definition to any single word of this music. Many other artists are esoteric, with enigmatic lyrics that are open to interpretation, but that feels intentional on the part of the artist. With Cobain, it is as if he intended to deliver his message with concrete clarity, and yet we fall short of truly grasping what he meant.It’s here that I run up against my problem in cogently speaking about Kurt Cobain as a human being. I know he was one. Yet for me (and many in my generation) he is an icon of near-biblical status. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a living, breathing Jesus Christ. Had I been born a few years earlier, I might have experienced him as many did in the moment — as a musician. A great artist, sure, but one who still had to live and breathe in this world. Had I been born a few years later, I would’ve been too young to pay any attention to the news of April 8, 1994, I wouldn’t have wondered who this man was, why everyone mourned him so, or what caused him to do such a thing. I would have come to his story too late to be a part of it, the way I experienced Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. As it is, my personal history with Kurt Cobain began at the exact moment his personal history had ended, the day he died.

In the coming years, I would hear a lot of Nirvana growing up. My chosen radio station (you could really only have one back then) was 107.7 The End, which played rock, grunge, and alternative from the 90s. Nirvana songs were about as popular as anything else ever was throughout this period, and still. “Come As You Are,” “Heart-Shaped Box,” “Dumb,” “Lithium,” “Polly,” “On A Plain,” “In Bloom,” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were always in that rotation, even though I wouldn’t have been able to identify them by name. Most, I probably couldn’t have said with any certainty were Nirvana. Moreso, there were many other songs by bands I hadn’t familiarized myself with, like Metallica and Pearl Jam, that all went into the same box. I kept up with the who’s who of new singles, but any music released before I started listening to the radio didn’t generally get called out by name. I suppose pretty much everyone else would have thought, “Well, of course that’s Nirvana.” I imagine the DJs at The End didn’t think there could possibly be some 15-year-old boy from Seattle out there who liked all of Nirvana’s music but needed someone to tell him what it was. (This is where Shazam could have saved me years of uncertainty.) In late 2002, the Nirvana compilation album was released. At this point, I was living in Los Angeles and listening to my own CDs and MP3s more than any radio station — I was also having a rather poppy moment in my history of musical appreciation. (Hey, this is when Britney and Christina were both really good! Don’t judge me.) I knew I liked Nirvana enough to enjoy a compilation album, so I purchased the CD and was able to parse out which songs from my youth actually were and were not Nirvana. Cutting out songs like “Alive” and “Black Hole Sun,” which are fine in their own right but don’t hold a candle to Cobain’s (in my humble opinion), allowed me to hone in on Cobain’s singular talent. It is perhaps because Cobain was such a chameleon in his subject matter that I hadn’t been able to pin down which tracks were his earlier. Listening to his music all together for the first time, I finally got a sense of his artistry and what people found so special about him.

At this point, I still didn’t care to dive into Cobain’s personal story. I knew the basics from my childhood — heroin and a shotgun. I enjoyed Nirvana’s music more or less apart from any appreciation of Cobain himself, much as I might listen to The Doors and enjoy the music without getting too caught up in the story behind any of it. I don’t generally like exploring music as an extension of an artist’s personal life, with few exceptions. I like to find my own meaning, and experience it as it relates to me.

But that doesn’t make for a very solid podcast episode. So for the first time, leading up to Episode 16, I had to do my Nirvana homework. I listened to Nevermind and In Utero, watched Montage Of Heck, and read up a bit on Cobain. The more I learned, the more I wondered: how does this inspired but deeply flawed drug addict reconcile with the esteemed artist who loomed over so much of my childhood?The answers never exactly arrive, but discussing these questions with Becky and Seth made for a fascinating conversation, and one of my personal favorites in When We Were Young’s run. Cobain and his music are conundrums we’ll never get concrete answers to. As much as any one man can be, he was the voice of a generation. He probably changed the shape of music in the 90s, maybe even still. The fact that guns are mentioned in the first three tracks of his massive hit, Nevermind — all major singles — feels almost too convenient, given how he died. Somehow, the idea that he died “for our sins” has seeped into his legacy, even though he committed suicide. On some level, perhaps, he thought that’s why he was dying — he was rightfully fed up with a lot of this world. He suffered greatly, but he also seemed to prefer suffering to making an effort to get better. He wanted his music to be adored while he himself was ignored — or something like that. Cobain needed and craved admiration, but was too insecure to deal with the level of scrutiny it takes to be so recognized. A part of him is very vulnerable, relatable, and child-like, while another aspect feels ethereal and wise beyond words.

I don’t know what to make of Kurt Cobain, who in some ways is very much like me — sensitive, moody, an artist who grew up in the Seattle area — and in some ways is very much not. The fact that he became a heroin addict after an unstable, difficult childhood is not a surprise, but how did he come to be so ahead of his time on issues like gay equality or sexual assault? His lyrics are obscure enough that it’s difficult to paint him as an “LGBT ally” or an “advocate for women’s rights,” especially given that he died before either issue would be identified that way. Something about what he stood for feels less than innate — handed down to him, or predestined. Even though we’ve pored over his lyrics, drawings, and journals, we still don’t really have a solid grasp of what he was thinking. For some reason, he’s harder to pin down than just about anyone else.

Perhaps that’s all greatness is — being unclassifiable. Not fitting into any box, and instead forcing one to be built around you.Nirvana is, of course, the sound of the 90s, feeling like an underline to all the angsty, Gen X art that appeared before and since. Previous podcast topics Seinfeld, Jagged Little Pill, and Trainspotting all captured this in some way — a reaction to the masculine, greed-is-good, middle class materialism of the 1980s. Seinfeld examined the petty problems of well-enough-off white people absent of any meaningful self-reflection; Jagged Little Pill was a woman speaking up against the “good girl” expectations placed upon her; Trainspotting, like Cobain, wondered if the antidote to capitalist mundanity was heroin and explored the price paid for such an escape.

But none of these works was quite as seismic at summing up the better half of the decade than Nirvana’s Nevermind, in part because its lyrics are obscure enough that they seem to be about everything all at once. I’ve previously struggled to understand exactly where Generation X’s rejection of mainstream Reagan-era values came from — it’s much easier to grasp the youthful unrest of the late 1960s in my mind, perhaps because I wasn’t alive yet. Yes, the 1980s wrought very bad things like the mismanagement of the AIDS epidemic and a crackdown on “crime” (AKA, minorities who committed even the most minor of crimes). But is this really what the largely white youth of the grunge movement was pushing back against? It’s hard to find much evidence to support this.

Cobain was born in 1967 and thus grew up in the 1970s, as part of the “latchkey generation” whose parents were supposedly too busy giving in to the temptations of the era to parent attentively. Certainly, an absence of familial love seems to be at least one driving factor of Cobain’s angst.If I had to truly pick out just one overarching theme from Nevermind, though, it would be the selfishness of survival — and how much that disappointed Cobain, in others and then, ultimately, himself. That the act of living itself is destructive to the world around us, and at least some of the people around us. Getting ahead ourselves means others must be left behind. Cobain was, I think, disappointed in the selfishness he saw in the people around him, and unable to live with it in himself. Using heroin is self-destructive, but generally pretty harmless to everyone else, and it allowed him an escape.

In “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the titular teens (presumably) demand to be entertained. In “In Bloom,” the song’s subject likes Nirvana’s music without ever considering its intent (and also sells his kids for food?). In “Come As You Are,” the speaker urges you to be yourself… but only if it’s “as I want you to be.” “Lithium” is all about a character’s mutable moods and contradictory internal workings. “Polly” takes on the persona of a rapist and kidnapper who dispassionately uses a young girl for his own gratification. “Drain You” is all about the yucky, leech-like aspects of romantic relationships. “On A Plain” chorus contains the lyrics, “Love myself better than you.” In “Something in the Way,” the song that first clued me in to these theme, Cobain says, “It’s okay to eat fish ’cause they don’t have any feelings.”

These may be slightly reductive looks at the meaning behind these songs — there are many more layers of depth in each — but it’s the one truly unifying theme I was able to draw between songs that otherwise take on some many subjects, moods, and styles. Cobain seems to be more often criticizing his peers than the older generation his parents belonged to. In a way, we look at Nirvana as having kicked off the grunge movement with Nevermind — and yet, in Nevermind, Cobain is already seemingly criticizing the grunge movement. Again, Cobain seems to be writing lyrics based on a future he couldn’t possibly have known about yet.As the story goes, Jesus Christ died for our sins — to make us all feel better about ourselves, I guess. He took on that burden rather graciously. Kurt Cobain also died as a result of the selfishness of man — the selfishness in others he couldn’t accept, and the selfishness in himself he couldn’t accept while judging everyone else. I think most of us feel some of what Cobain felt — guilt at merely being alive. If you’re reading my blog, you probably live in a first world country and have it pretty good. We know that there are thousands or millions across the globe suffering in various ways, without even some of the basic comforts we take for granted… and yet we live on without thinking too much about that, mostly. We can’t solve this problem ourselves, so maybe we do what little we can and move on, or maybe we don’t do anything and still move on. Either way, we don’t exhaust our mental and physical resources worrying about the pain everyone else is feeling.

This is all conjecture, of course; I can’t say with any certainty that this is what haunted Kurt Cobain, but it is the message I personally take away from his music. Nevermind is outwardly focused, giving it that anthemic, “voice of a generation” feel; many songs are about people who have little in common with Cobain. Often, he’s critiquing them by becoming them, imagining what they’re thinking and exposing how selfish or careless or petty they are, allowing us to be the judges. In In Utero, he was already focusing more on his own suffering, the way most artists do. In Utero is a terrific album with some great songs, including some of the most provocative and haunting singles of the 1990s. But for me, it falls short of the reach of Nevermind, which manages to be about everybody all at once. It seemed like Cobain was going out of his way to step into our shoes, see through our eyes, and understand us — and then, to his dismay, didn’t much like what he found.

The title of the album itself clues us in to what Cobain was getting at — the human instinct to shrug off the more hypocritical, destructive aspects of our quest for survival. When an unpleasant thought about our own inherent selfishness strikes up, most people immediately push it out of their heads, with an: “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” This, itself, is a survival technique — we couldn’t move forward otherwise.

Kurt Cobain didn’t. He made art of out it.

We reap the benefits.

Make of that what you will.

*

“We’d better get back, ’cause it’ll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night… mostly.”

Encounter the xenomorph in our ickiest episode yet! First, the gang discusses their own personal experiences with body horror, including bruised ears and slivers in places there should definitely not be wood. Then, it’s time to get all face-huggy and chest-bursty with Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise, beginning with Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror classic and moving on to James Cameron’s rock-’em sock-’em sequel. Have countless rip-offs dulled these classics, or are they still capable of making your jaws-within-jaws drop? Then, we quickly touch on David Fincher’s regrettable Alien3 and the campy Joss Whedon-penned Alien: Resurrection.

This is a mostly comprehensive look at one of the most influential horror franchises ever made… mostly. So strip down to your most retro panties, climb into the nearest available power-loader, and GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH! Because in space, no one can hear you make fun of the way Becky describes her history with the Alien franchise.

Listen here and subscribe here.

This episode goes back further than we’ve ever gone before on the podcast, way back to the summer of 1979, which saw the release of the first of many Alien films. (The franchise loomed large throughout the 80s and 90s, so it definitely warrants an episode of this podcast.) The film had a seismic impact on the cinematic landscape, with many imitators over the years. The first three films are directed by three of the most notable mainstream filmmakers of the past 40 years, Ridley Scott (Alien), James Cameron (Aliens), and David Fincher (Alien3). (Alien: Resurrection‘s Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known for Amelie, is no slouch, but he’s not quite at their level of influence.)

In 2012, Scott returned the franchise with the semi-prequel, Prometheus, and this month returns again with Alien: Covenant, the eighth alien film overall (not that those Alien Vs. Predator movies really count). As so many James Cameron joints do, the first Alien sequel also features a memorably hammy turn from the late Bill Paxton, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in February, which also made this a timely episode.

My first encounter with Alien occurred as a teenager. I don’t recall exactly what led me to the franchise, though I strongly suspect it was my interest in James Cameron following the colossal success of Titanic. I read a biography of Cameron and went back to catch many of his films I’d missed, given that they were generally too mature for me at the time of their release. I became a big fan of all of them — except Piranha 2, which I still haven’t seen, as Cameron would probably prefer. Eventually, Aliens became a prized piece of my beloved Fox Widescreen collection, along with two other Cameron films, The Abyss and True Lies. I used to play the opening vignette, explaining the crimes of “panning and scanning,” for friends to try to convince them that letterboxing was the way to go. It never worked.

(With the rise of DVDs and widescreen TVs, I am finally vindicated.)

ALIEN
“In space, no one can hear you scream.”

Release Date: May 25, 1979
Metacritic: 83
Budget: $11 million
Opening Weekend: $3.5 million
Domestic Gross: $80.9 million
Worldwide Gross: $104.9 million

Alien has one of the all-time great horror movie taglines, which is appropriate for one of the all-time great horror movies. I’d seen Alien many times over the years, including the 2003 Director’s Cut in theaters and more recently on the Blu-Ray I bought. There was never any danger that the film wouldn’t stand the test of time for me.

However, reviewing for the podcast does give me an opportunity to think about such a classic in a new context. One thing that struck me were the negative reviews calling out the film’s violence, as well as James Cameron’s sequel. The special effects in Alien are still pretty disgusting, and are rarely topped by modern horror movies for squirm-inducing effect. This has little to do with the effects themselves, and more to do with the story — when the tiny xenomorph bursts from John Hurt’s chest, it’s a genuinely shocking moment. It is as unexpected from these characters as it is from the audience. Whether on purpose or accidentally, most horror movies today often telegraph what’s coming, but nothing we’ve seen so far in Alien tells us, “Oh, hey, I’ll bet a little alien baby’s about to burst out of his chest.” But because we already built up plenty of suspense with the face-hugger, it also makes perfect sense.

It’s no revelation to state that Alien is not just a landmark in science fiction and horror, but also for female action heroes. Ripley is still probably the all-time greatest action heroine ever to grace any screen (and I say this as a die-hard Buffy The Vampire Slayer devotee). No one quite has her mix of smarts, cool, confidence, courage, brawn, and vulnerability. Perhaps this is only because the character was originally written genderless, and easily could have been played by a man instead. I don’t think the series would have had nearly the same impact, though. Maternity is so thoroughly baked in to the Alien series that it has infinitely more resonance when our protagonist is a woman, even if, as in this first film, we know almost nothing about her. The potential trauma of giving birth is nicely flipped by the creature that bursts from a man’s chest this time. It is often joked about that men would freak out at going into labor; this joke is nicely given a horrific twist in Alien. But if that were all this movie was, it wouldn’t be the classic it is.

The Alien films were never planned as a series, of course, but moreso than almost any other film franchise, each entry feels entirely unique, with themes and mood all its own. Appropriately, Alien is the film most concerned with the human body itself, as it introduces the odd (but eerily plausible) mechanism through which the xenomorphs are “born.” Writer Dan Bannon created the creature wanting to make audience — primarily men — uncomfortable. The alien can be interpreted as a stand-in for many things throughout the series — cancer, AIDS, rape, the “miracle” of birth — but one thing that tends to be consistent is our biology betraying us.

To me, Alien is most universal as a metaphor for puberty — our body doing strange, new things we can’t understand, as we are forced to “become” something else (whether we like it or not). This is brought out by the callous computer program named Mother, which Ripley must break away from in order to survive. There is a moment for many of us in our teenage years where some aspect of our body feels alien to us — we discover something new and unexpected, often even frightening. We may try to ignore it and proceed as if everything is normal, but it will not be ignored. “Life finds a way,” as it is put in another very good sci-fi/horror thriller.

The potency of this first Alien film is how broadly it can be interpreted. The alien is frightening in its own right, but what’s truly terrifying is the way it uses our own bodies against us, and how little power we have over our own physicality once the process has begun. As humans, we are all susceptible to the whims of biology. We consider our bodies to be “us,” but ultimately, have no say in what they’ll do to us. More than a monster movie, Alien is a film reaffirming that our greatest enemy is the skin we live in. We can’t predict its moves or fight against its will, any more than the crew of the Nostromo can outwit or outmatch the xenomorph.

ALIENS
“This time, it’s war.”

Release Date: July 18, 1986
Metacritic: 87
Budget: $17-18 million
Opening Weekend: $10.1 million
Domestic Gross: $85.2 million
Worldwide Gross: $131.1 million

The tagline called out the fact this sequel to the relatively small-scale Alien was going to be bigger and more action-focused than its predecessor. If Alien was a haunted house movie in space, Aliens is more like a war movie, with the sides slightly more evenly matched. That doesn’t stop most of them from being dispatched rapidly, but you can’t say they weren’t warned.

I have virtually nothing negative to say about either of the first two Alien films, and could gush about each for hours. Alien is the true original, a sci-fi/horror classic that left its mark on cinema in a major way. It’s still the most spectacular and original creature design I can think of, especially for extra-terrestrials. Aliens, on the other hand, is a perfect morsel of popcorn entertainment — not just because it gets the action and special effects right, but because it has an honest emotional core and treats its audience like adults. (Even though the movie spawned action figures aimed at kids — oddly enough, for an R-rated gore-fest.)

After The Terminator, which created Sarah Connor (but didn’t yet make her a true badass), James Cameron took the reigns of the inevitable Alien sequel, re-purposing a script he’d already written entitled Mother. In his Director’s Cut (the superior version of the film), Ripely learns that the daughter she left behind before her 11th birthday has died of old age in the 57 years she’s been in hyper-sleep. How strange it must be, to see your own daughter grow older than you are now.

James Cameron doesn’t get quite enough credit for how femme-forward his action-packed oeuvre is. Every one of his films has a female character who is as interesting and complex as the male “hero,” if not moreso. She’s never a mere damsel, either. The Terminator’s Sarah Connor may spend most of the movie needing rescue, but by the sequel she’s learned a thing or two and then some. True Lies’ Helen Tasker is played as a bumbling housewife, but she gets to (comedically) kick ass a couple of times, too (and Jamie Lee Curtis makes the most of the role). Even Titanic’s dainty Rose proves herself pretty capable once the ship is going down.

Aliens remains Cameron’s most female-centric film, however, finishing what Ridley Scott started in making Ripley the greatest action heroine to ever grace the screen. Ripley remains professional and cool under pressure, but Aliens adds depth to a character left purposefully vague in the first film. Ripley finds a surrogate daughter in Newt, the sole survivor of the alien attacks on the recently colonized LV-426. Weaver earned the first ever Best Actress Oscar nomination for a sci-fi, horror, or action film, and remained the only nominee in these genres until Sandra Bullock’s Gravity nod. Given how iconic Ripley has become, in large part thanks to where Aliens took the character, it is well-deserved.

The first Alien can be interpreted in many ways. For me, it’s best looked at as a tale of adolescence — breaking away from “Mother,” facing strange new biological happenings, and proving oneself capable of surviving on one’s own. There’s less gray area in interpreting Aliens, which is clearly focused on maternity. Not only do Newt and Ripley become each other’s surrogate daughter/mother, but the showdown at the end is against the Alien Queen who is similarly aiming to protect her young. The movie certainly passes the Bechdel test — even the classic line, “Get away from her, you bitch!”

If James Cameron got Ripley so right in 1986, it’s a wonder that we haven’t seen a true rival to this character since. (Sarah Connor might be next in line on that list.) Even a woman being known by her last name, rather than her first, is a rarity. (Hillary Clinton, who came close to becoming the most powerful woman in the world, is generally called “Hillary” rather than “Clinton.”)

Aliens is as entertaining as it is because, like Alien, it is intelligent and has real depth beneath its more superficial pleasures. In it, a lot of typically “male” elements — military machismo, corporate greed, technology — brush up against biology, maternity, and reproduction. The masculine side of the equation gets its ass thoroughly handed to it. No amount of artillery or money is a match for Mother Nature. The men all fail against the aliens, leaving it up to Ripley to save the day.

The Vasquez character manages to be even more butch than Ripley, and still avoids being a stereotype. (Her retort to being asked if she’s ever mistaken for a man is priceless.) Bill Paxton’s performance is pretty hammy — he’s the tough guy who ends up being not-so-tough when faced with killer space monsters — but the character manages to be endearing, anyhow. (Cameron has a way of making the slightly goofy work.) Despite a bigger budget, cast, and scale, Aliens remains true to its roots by keeping the action pretty contained and retaining the focus on the survival of a few core cast members. It’s easily one of the best action films — let alone sequels — ever made.

ALIEN 3
“The bitch is back.”

Release Date: May 22, 1992
Metacritic: 59
Budget: $50 million
Opening Weekend: $19.5 million
Domestic Gross: $55.5 million
Worldwide Gross: $159.8 million

 That tagline is perfectly suited for the dreary, pitch-black third installment in the Alien franchise.

Otherwise, Alien 3 is the biggest misstep in the franchise, by far, and I see no cogent argument for any of the other installment being worse. (Still not counting anything that also has Predator in the title.) The film is joyless, fumbling badly where the first two films soared — in getting us to root for the characters’ survival. We don’t care about anyone in Alien 3 — not even Ripley, because she isn’t very keen on surviving herself. Alien 3 also kills Hicks and Newt off-screen, which renders Ripley’s triumph in Aliens completely moot. (I have a beef with franchises that kill off main characters from previous films carelessly.) By the time another alien wreaks havoc in Alien 3, Ripley has outlived everyone she’s ever known, including her own daughter, then failed to save her surrogate daughter and a potential love interest (or at least, a friend). What’s left for Ripley to want now? Well, she wants to eradicate the aliens. That’s about all we can hope for here.

Alien and Aliens were certainly dark films overall, but the interactions between characters had a certain light-heartedness. Alien 3 is portentous, elaborating on a bizarre story by Vincent Ward that saw a planet of monks battling the xenomorph, believing it is the second coming of the Black Death. Using a prison as the setting doesn’t endear us to these characters, and the all-male supporting cast just feels wrong for the franchise that previously had two or three great female characters in each film. Even David Fincher has virtually disowned this movie. (It is his first and easily his worst, the only true misfire of his career… though the direction is the least of its problems.)

Alien 3 does have a few interesting ideas, like Ripley’s near-rape (a chilling echo of the xenomorph’s rapey reproductive process). With Alien telling a story about adolescence (says me) and Aliens about motherhood, Alien 3 is very much about death and accepting one’s mortality. Ripley’s climactic sacrifice might have been moving in a film that set it up better. Alien 3 reminds me of the ways this franchise follows the Scream series — with the first film being a bold and truly frightening original, the second upping the ante but remaining emotionally truthful, the third striking the wrong tone completely, and the fourth moving back in the right direction while falling far short of the original two installments. Like Scream, the Alien movies can easily be seen as a metaphor for trauma — Ripley survives once, and in the second film, survives again — mostly for Newt’s sake. By Alien 3, she’s too traumatized to have any hope for survival this time around (and who could blame her?).

Admittedly, Ripley’s shaved head is the perfect look for Weaver in this gritty third film. (She gets a little more butch in each installment.) But ultimately, there’s very little pleasure to derive from an Alien 3 viewing. It might have sounded good on paper, but in execution, it’s a drag.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION
“Witness the resurrection.”

Release Date: November 26, 1997
Metacritic: 63
Budget: $75 million
Opening Weekend: $16.5 million
Domestic Gross: $47.8 million
Worldwide Gross: $161.4 million

“Witness the resurrection”? That’s a marketing department that’s seriously bankrupt on ideas.

Alien: Resurrection may over-correct for Alien 3’s dourness — it is silly in moments, bordering on campy, which is not terribly surprising given that it was penned by Joss Whedon. This is the only Alien film I actually remember being released, though I didn’t know the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer had written it then, or I would have seen it sooner. (I don’t know exactly when I caught this one, but I have owned it on DVD for quite a long time.)

Alien: Resurrection has far more interesting ideas on its mind than Alien 3 did — mainly, that Ripley is a clone of her former self, and xenomorph DNA has mixed with her own to make her not quite human. She has some memories from Ripley’s past, but poignantly can’t remember Newt’s name. (Leave it to this film to mourn Newt when Alien 3 killed her but couldn’t be bothered to do anything more than give us an icky autopsy of the poor girl.) The scene in which Ripley discovers many failed attempts at cloning her in a lab — one who asks for a mercy killing — is appropriately disturbing.

The “Newborn” (the white, somewhat humanoid alien we meet at the end) is a bit ridiculous — the original xenomorph and Alien Queen are much more frightening villains. The series wisely never asked us to feel any sympathy for these killing machines… until this moment. (The Newborn is kind of… cute?) But the action works well, and Whedon’s script has a similar wit to Alien and Aliens. (“It was in my way” as Ripley’s justification for killing her “kind” rivals her Aliens retort: “They can bill me.”) It also positions Winona Ryder as a heroine similar to Ripley in the first film, which is particularly interesting given that she ends up being an android. (Alien 3 ignored the “man versus tech” angle that’s so crucial to the other films.) Neither Ripley nor Call is fully human… and once again, it’s the women who are left to survive.

I wouldn’t say Alien: Resurrection speaks to any stage of human life the way the first three films do, though the Ripley clone nicely embraces the “not giving a fuck” mentality many of us hit at some point in our old age. It’s nice to see Ripley have a little fun for a change.

The Alien films not only hold up as well as they did upon their release — they’ve actually gotten better with age, especially in comparison to all the lesser creature features we’ve seen since. (Not you, Alien 3. Your CGI is atrocious.) Even the special effects are still great, far more convincing than the computer generated monsters we see these day. Many critics were put off by the gore in the first two films, though they’re both rather restrained by today’s standards. Now, it’d be difficult to find a critic who would argue that the first two films are classics.

Even with one truly bad entry and one that’s merely competent, this series’ batting average is still pretty stellar. There’s still enough juice left in the series to get me interested in Alien: Covenant — not bad, for a series that’s going on 40 years old.

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This just in: WOMEN can direct MOVIES.

Despite their menstruation and inability to lift heavy things, females are either as capable or even more capable than men at making films that involve punching and kicking!

Still with me? Okay! As it turns out, women, who are not historically known for either punching or kicking, can make action blockbusters just like men, who are statistically more likely to punch and kick.

At this rate, who knows? We may even get a female president someday!! I’ll pause to let you wrap your head around that impossible concept for a second.

After unloading Man Of Steel, Batman V Superman, and Suicide Squad into theaters recent years, Warner Bros. apparently decided to switch things up this summer by offering filmgoers an actual movie rather than a flaming pile of nonsense garbage.

Here’s another newsflash: it turns out that audiences prefer a well-written story and heroes we actually like to an incomprehensible, emotionally numb dumpster fire.

Even when it is directed by a woman, and not a man. Hollywood, take note!

(Forgive my sarcasm, but the biggest wonder surrounding Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman is that we still need to be astonished that women can, like, accomplish things.)

Okay, now for the real review. At long last, a Wonder Woman feature film has lassoed its way into theaters. The fact that it centers on a woman is only a small miracle — we’ve seen “superhero”(-ish) films like Elektra and Catwoman… that just so happened to suck (independently of the fact that they were about women, of course — lots of male superhero movies at that time sucked, too!). More recently, hit blockbusters like The Hunger Games and recent Star Wars offerings have also made a killing off of worthy heroines. It’s not news.

But I guess it is news that Patty Jenkins is the first female to direct one of these movies, and that Wonder Woman is the first Marvel or DC offering in the current canon to center on an action heroine. The Marvel movies have been relatively female-friendly — Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is arguably the emotional centerpiece of the Avengers films — but did we get a Black Widow movie? No. Instead, Black Widow was second banana in movies named after men, as in the sequels to Iron Man and Captain America, even while being one of the most dynamic and relatable characters in the entire franchise.

The case has already been made for female action heroes. Go back to Ellen Ripley in 1986’s Aliens, or Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for a couple prime examples. It should not surprise anyone that Wonder Woman performed comparably to other recent superhero titles. Nor, after Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar win for The Hurt Locker, should it be news that a woman can direct an aces entry in a traditionally male-dominated genre. Are we meant to be shocked that Wonder Woman marks the biggest opening weekend for a female director, ever? Well, that’s dumb, because Wonder Woman is a superhero movie, and superhero movies make lots of money. A woman could have directed a successful superhero movie at any time, and it didn’t need to have “woman” in the title for it to work.But it did. Wonder Woman‘s success seems especially obvious given how dismal the DC “universe” has been in its latest incarnation, (no) thanks to Zack Snyder, whose bone-headed take on these beloved characters defies logic. Last year’s one-two whiff of Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad gave us the two worst movies I saw in 2016. The movies have all been box office hits, but that’s inevitable. Audiences were lukewarm, and critics seriously hated them. Short of setting fire to the entire Warner Bros. lot, Jenkins could have done anything with Wonder Woman and it’d still look good in comparison.

Wonder Woman really only had to be halfway watchable to be declared a success, and to be the biggest femme-helmed film of all time. It’s a little better than that, though.

Early on, Wonder Woman feels like a Disney princess tale on steroids — what would happen if Moana decided to fight in World War I? The all-female Amazons in Wonder Woman evoke a fun, Xena: Warrior Princess-esque vibe, with Robin Wright providing the gravitas as the badass general Antiope, Diana’s aunt. This world is rich enough that it could sustain an entire film on its own — it’s almost a shame when Steve Trevor, the spy played by Chris Pine, drops in and beckons Diana to the outside world.For a spell, Wonder Woman becomes an Amazon-out-of-water comedy as Diana adjusts to polite society in the “modern” world, and interacts with Etta, Steve’s wryly amusing secretary (Lucy Davis). Then the film introduces us to a ragtag team of sidekicks and gets back into superhero mode, with some James Bond-esque spy hijinks along the way. (The climax takes a page from the Season 5 finale of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, by the way.) It all moves along nimbly, and hangs together merely because we like Diana and Steve and their friends, and believe in what they’re hoping to accomplish. This would seem obvious, except that it’s been entirely missing from Wonder Woman‘s three DC predecessors. Did anyone truly like Henry Cavill’s Superman, or Ben Affleck’s Batman, or anyone in Suicide Squad besides Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn?

Gal Gadot was the only watchable presence in Batman V Superman, and Margot Robbie was Suicide Squad‘s saving grace. So, again, let’s not register too much surprise that women are the sole saviors of DC’s lineup. I’m not ready to declare that Wonder Woman bests any Marvel movie thus far, but it’s up there. Jenkins gifts the film with both heartfelt resonance and a nimble comedic touch, which only the top tier of Marvel’s offerings manage to balance. The emotional beats in Wonder Woman land in a way that is rare in blockbusters these days. (For all the heavy-handed sobriety of, say, Batman V Superman, we don’t actually feel a thing as that dreadful, dumbfounding story unfolds.)My preferred brand of superhero movie will probably always be Tim Burton’s Batman, but comparing the delightful gothic camp of Batman Returns to what DC is serving up these days is pointless. As far as today’s comic book superhero adaptations go, Wonder Woman is as good as it gets — it’s hard to imagine a major studio letting Jenkins (or anyone) take greater narrative risks. (As much as I’d love to see a superhero drama with the complexity of Monster.) In Wonder Woman, Jenkins knows exactly what kind of movie she’s making, and she does it better than just about anyone in the past decade. It’s all the more impressive that a credible Wonder Woman film is not an easy thing to make — skimpy costume, golden lasso, invisible jet? This character has major cheese potential. The fact that this Diana is a certified badass is all the more commendable.

Wonder Woman has a slew of compelling female characters, from the Amazons to Etta to the creepy Dr. Poison, played by Elena Anaya. The male villains are boring, but the good guys are a pretty solid bunch, too. Though he’s not a superhero, Steve Trevor is as developed as Marvel’s Steve Rogers is. Wonder Woman is not a great film in its own right — it is still too beholden to the tropes and ticks that have plagued every single Marvel and DC movie after 2008’s Iron Man and The Dark Knight. The script by Allan Heinberg is more serviceable than transcendant — the fish-out-of-water scenes are amusing, if a bit obvious (and reminiscent of gags in Thor and Captain America), and the more earnest stuff is par for the course. Wonder Woman has its over-the-top touches, particularly in the flashy, effects-heavy third act. It falls victim to the same climactic pomposity all superhero movies these days succumb to, though Wonder Woman sticks the landing better than most.

Remember six months ago, when Deadpool had Best Picture buzz? That was ridiculous, but Wonder Woman has a shot at getting there. (I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s better equipped than any other DC or Marvel release in recent memory.) Wouldn’t it be kind of great to see Jenkins do what Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder could not? If any superhero film since The Dark Knight deserves Oscar lovin’, it’s Wonder Woman. Compared to others of its kind, it may as well be a masterpiece.

While Wonder Woman centers on an Amazon exploring the world of man during World War I, another recent film takes the reverse approach — centering on a man exploring the world of the Amazon during the same period. (It is also released by Amazon Studios, for some added Amazon oomph.)

Based on the bestseller by David Gann, The Lost City Of Z is the true story of explorer Percy Fawcett and his belief in a lost civilization in the Amazon rain forest. At the time of Fawcett’s first foray into the woods, Machu Picchu had not yet been discovered and there was severe doubt from Britain’s “Royal Geographic Society” that anything greater than savages could exist in the region. Fawcett, in turn, believes these people were more capable and advanced than turn-of-the-century Brits are giving them credit for.

I entered The Lost City Of Z knowing only that it was based on a nonfiction bestseller and took place in the Amazon. I knew nothing about Fawcett himself, nor how his quest concluded. This turned out to be a very good thing for my enjoyment of the film — it contained more suspense for me than it might to someone who read even a brief description of the film or book its based on. I was surprised, for example, that The Lost City Of Z depicts not one, but several journeys into the jungle, returning with Fawcett back to England between quests and exploring how his lengthy intercontinental jaunts are affecting his wife and children.The Lost City Of Z is reminiscent of Heart Of Darkness, of course, particularly in its theme of obsession with an unknown, untamed jungle. Gray doesn’t get too caught up in the ensuing madness like Francis Ford Coppola did in Apocalypse Now, however. Fawcett is preoccupied with his pursuit, but the movie isn’t so tunnel-visioned, remaining at a distance that is more reminiscent of classical Hollywood stories than most contemporary ones. The film uses visual symbolism and fantasy sparingly, presented with a stiff-upper-lip reserve that feels appropriate for the setting and period (early 20th century and beyond World War I). The Lost City Of Z has learned many things from great man-versus-nature adventure stories that preceded it, without being too beholden to any one of them.

There’s a hint of Jaws in the relationship between Fawcett (played with maximum Brad Pittness by Charlie Hunnam) and Henry Costin (a very bearded and distinctly un-heartthrobby Robert Pattinson). Brody’s belief in the killer Great White that is initially ridiculed and ignored by the higher-ups certainly feels like the cinematic model for Fawcett’s quest, and though Hunnam sells it, the reason why this particular fixation hits this particular character is vague. We know Fawcett seeks the glory that a major discovery like this could bestow upon his name, but Fawcett’s fascination grows more urgent and we never quite learn why. It feels like the answer should have come up in the bond between Fawcett and Corbin, which is more suggested by the screenplay than felt. Costin’s character is underdeveloped — the dynamic between these two men is never as compelling as Brody and Hooper’s partnership in Jaws. The story might have been even more poignant if we believed more that this fixation on the City of Z was a shared madness of both men, and then one of them gradually woke up from the spell while the other succumbed further to fantasy, eventually substituting his son as a replacement for Corbin. (That is the story we get, more or less — but we have to dig a little to get to it.)

This isn’t so much a flaw of Gray’s film as it is an afterthought about how it might have been even more gripping than it already is. Gray doesn’t seem to want us to feel or identify with Fawcett’s Amazon obsession. At many points, it asks us to pause and reflect whether Fawcett’s quest is worth the sacrifices he’s making at home. As Fawcett’s wife Nina, Sienna Miller gets a meatier role than we expect from the wife of an adventurer. Fawcett’s lengthy trips into the wild frustrate Nina and their children, but rather than make Nina the naggy spouse begging her hero to “come home,” both she and Fawcett’s son Jack long to become a part of Percy’s adventures — a far more compelling choice. (Jack is played by Marvel’s once and future Spider-Man, Tom Holland.) This focus on Fawcett’s family is another Spielbergian nod to Jaws, and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind even moreso. The story is at least as much about what Fawcett is giving up back home than it is his adventuring.

The Lost City Of Z might have been a pointed “be careful what you wish for” tale, but neither the film nor its characters condemn Fawcett for his quest. We are left to conclude for ourselves whether or not these pursuits are worth the perils they put us in. Like David Fincher’s Zodiac, another masterful tale of men’s shared obsession with an enigma, The Lost City Of Z both does and does not solve its central mystery, presenting us with a likely answer while raising enough doubt in our minds that we question such easy answers. Gray’s film is deceptively simple and straight-forward in its storytelling, but thematically gnarled and complex. The final shot alone demands that we pause and reconsider what this story is really about.

The film sheds little light on what actually does await these explorers in the Amazon, and doesn’t instruct us how to feel about that. The jungle and its inhabitants remain as ethereal and unknowable at the end of the film as they are in the beginning. That’s the right choice, even if it’s a rather unsettling one in terms of Hollywood epics. Gray’s daring in concluding this film in such an abstract way — more Malick than Spielberg, more Lynch than Lean in the end — elevates the film above what could have otherwise been just another sturdy historical drama. The Lost City Of Z is both episodic and epic, with a reach that exceeds its grasp in the best way possible, suggesting themes that linger in the mind, even though they’re barely nodded to in the film’s text. Though it came and went from theaters with little fanfare, I hope Amazon Studios finds a way to get the film the attention it deserves.

*

“It was a mistake. I didn’t hate her. I wasn’t disgusted with her. I was afraid. At that moment, I felt small, like… like I’d lacked experience, like I’d never be on her level, like I’d never be enough for her or something like that, you know what I’m saying? But, what I did not get, she didn’t care. She wasn’t looking for that guy anymore. She was… she was looking for me, for the Bob. Butby the time I figure this all out, it was too late, man. She moved on, and all I had to show for it was some foolish pride, which then gave way to regret. She was the girl, I know that now. But I pushed her away. So, I’ve spent every day since then chasing Amy… so to speak.”

After a careful examination of the evidence, I’ve come to a conclusion:

Kevin Smith is not even supposed to be here today.

Back in 1990s, the New Jersey-born amateur auteur made Clerks, which — along with a handful of other titles — was a game-changer for independent cinema, and perhaps for comedy itself. Clerks was not the first film to put a couple of not-so-bright slacker dudes front and center. By this point, we’d already had two servings each of Bill And Ted and Wayne’s World, and other nerd-glorifying titles.

But Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth were the butt of the joke in their comedies, whereas Kevin Smith positioned his protagonists as laid-back heroes, of a sort. Smith isn’t afraid to call his characters out on their shit — in fact, that’s what the majority of the running time in his films consists of. And since most of Smith’s central characters are proxies for himself, he’s really just doing a lot of self-therapy and bringing us along for the ride.

This was fine — novel, even — in the 1990s, but pop culture grew up in the interim. Kevin Smith mostly didn’t. More than 20 years after the release of his auspicious debut, and exactly 20 years after the release of his most widely-praised movie, Smith is still more or less doing what he always did, with diminishing returns.

To be fair, Smith has stepped off his beaten path a time or two — witness Red State and Tusk (the latter of which I haven’t seen… but I think I get the gist). But to the degree that these represent a maturing of Smith’s stylings, they also still feel mired in juvenile obsessions and “see what I did there?” fan service, at least in concept.

In a perfect world, Kevin Smith’s early efforts might be quaint, charming signs of a greater talent to come. They seemed that way at the time. Instead, the “View Askewniverse” films like Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma are still pretty much the sum total of what Smith has had to offer over a nearly 25-year career. More often than not, his subsequent films have been riffs on the same ideas, often featuring some of the same characters, if not direct sequels.

I know Smith himself is involved in plenty non-cinematic efforts — podcasts, comic books — and I imagine they please a number of his fans. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Kevin Smith the person, nor condemn his overall value to pop culture. Here, I am looking only at his films — the three overwhelmingly considered to be his best films, at least historically — and making a personal judgment about how they hold up for me:

They don’t.

(Mostly.)

CLERKS

• Release Date: October 19, 1994
• Budget: $27,575 + $230,000 (post-production)
• Domestic Total Gross: $3.2 million
• Metacritic: 70

I’ll admit, this is a bad moment in history for me to be looking at a body of films that rather unimaginatively examine the psyche of the straight white male. A straight white male viewpoint is as valid and worthwhile as any other, of course. I know many straight white males. (Don’t we all?)

But the straight white male majority has asserted a rather cartoonish stronghold over our nation in 2017, somehow, and if there’s one thing we don’t need more of in our culture right now, it’s the “heterosexual Caucasian with a penis” perspective.

That isn’t Kevin Smith’s fault, of course. He made Clerks and Chasing Amy as a reaction to the cinematic heroes that dominated the big screen in the 80s and early 90s — Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to name a few. There was still a lot of celebration of machismo in mainstream culture at the time, to the extent that these bromances sometimes bordered on homoerotic (something Smith really likes pointing out in his films). But in the years since, we’ve seen the rise of Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow, amongst so many others. The lazy, not-so-bright, unremarkable white dude who somehow lands a supermodel by the end of the movie… through no action of his own, usually, but because an unremarkable white dude also wrote the screenplay.

In Clerks, we’re meant to sympathize with Dante and Randal, even if we aren’t supposed to condone everything that comes out of their mouths. Smith considers other points of view, sort of, but ultimately he’s siding with the titular clerks, because they’re him. Dante’s ex is so traumatized by an appalling sexual experience she goes catatonic, but she’s just the butt of a joke here. He wants to get back with her until that experience, at which point he decides to go back to the other woman who is too good for him in this story. Dante (and Smith’s) incredulity  that his ex might be better off with a smart, sensitive, successful Asian guy is problematic, too. In Smith’s View Askewniverse, average-looking guys with no money and dim prospects for the future deserve hot women because… umm… why?

Yes, Smith points this out in hid humor. He knows these guys aren’t worthy of these woman, but in the end he shrugs and gives them what they want anyway. It’s not that plenty of other filmmakers haven’t done this (and worse, like the date rape endorsement in Sixteen Candles). It’s just that Smith’s entire oeuvre rests upon this kind of entitlement. There was probably plenty of room to have fun with the “geek gets the girl” archetype back in the 90s, but in 2017, it’s grown tiresome to see a beautiful woman’s affection used as a reward… especially when the protagonist has done nothing to earn it.

As a debut feature and a time capsule, Clerks is absolutely fine. It’s still pretty amusing, for all its shagginess. Too many Kevin Smith wannabes have made films that look and sound like this in the interim, and technology has advanced enough that most amateur efforts these days are a lot more polished than Clerks ever was. Today, Clerks feels like a B+ effort from a sophomore in film school, and it’s difficult to think back to 1994, when so few were doing this sort of thing, and Smith would get an automatic “A” for being the only guy who showed up.

That’s a pretty good way to start a career, as long as the next effort has a little more polish…

CHASING AMY

• Release Date: April 4, 1997
• Budget: $250,000
• Domestic Total Gross: $12 million
• Metacritic: 71

“A little movie with big truths, a work of such fierce intelligence and emotional honesty that it blows away the competition when it comes to contemporary romantic comedy.” 

— Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas (perfect score)

“Whatever Miramax was hoping for when it decided to bankroll films by Kevin Smith, it surely wasn’t Chasing Amy, the awful third installment of his ‘two guys hanging out’ trilogy, begun with the over-praised Clerks, and followed by the ludicrously bad Mallrats. The words ‘written and directed by Kevin Smith’ are now an instruction to run very fast out of the theater. Do not pay money to see this movie. Do not rent it when it comes out on video.”

—Washington Post, Eric Brace  (worst possible score)

I tried to watch Mallrats. It didn’t work out. That might be for the better, since I’d already watched four Kevin Smith films (and two episode of the Clerks animated series) in preparation for the podcast, and a little View Askewniverse goes a long way.

Clerks still has its charms, in large part because Smith’s stories align better with shoddy camerawork and low production value than they do with a more ambitious budget. When the scope of Smith’s stories gets bigger, his writing typically stays at the same small-scale level, and it just feels… off. And that’s apparent in Chasing Amy, which keeps the low-key vibe of Clerks but attempts a more emotionally ambitious storyline.

The 90s were an unfortunate moment when it felt like gay characters needed to be acknowledged in cinema, but every straight character had to steadfastly assert that he was not gay whenever the topic arose. Smith was far from the only straight white guy to use this to comedic effect, but I’m not sure anyone else dipped into to that well more often over the years. It’s forgivable in Clerks, but grows more problematic through Chasing Amy and Clerks II, the climactic set piece of which involves a leather-clad gay man having sex with his donkey.

In isolation, Smith’s gay jokes are harmless enough. In aggregate, it starts to feel like the guy has some issues he needs to work through privately before he unleashes them on us. This brand of comedy stopped being funny before Smith stopped abusing it, and what’s left is pretty aggressively obtuse by today’s standards.

Alyssa, played by Joey Lauren Adams, is an intriguing character. Smith obviously spent some time considering her point of view, and the way he renders her emotional dilemma is interesting. I’m on board for stories about fluid sexuality, whether those characters identify as gay or straight (or don’t identify either way). The problem with Chasing Amy is not that Alyssa, who identifies as lesbian, falls in love with a man — it’s that she falls in love with Kevin Smith.

Ben Affleck plays Holden, the Kevin Smith proxy we get in almost every one of his films. (In addition to the actual Kevin Smith, who plays Silent Bob in so many of them.) Like Dante from Clerks, Holden is a pretty simple dude with a love of comic books who’s most significant relationship in life is with his also-simple, also-white, also-comic-book-loving best friend, who is exactly like the protagonist except less sensitive and more of an outspoken jerk. But in Clerks, Randal was funny and good-natured underneath it all. Jason Lee’s Banky is an atrocious monster.

Part of this is 1997. Part of this is Jason Lee’s performance. Part of this is Kevin Smith. Banky was meant to be homophobic and misogynistic in 1997, but ultimately likable. The empathy hasn’t aged well, however. Using words like “bitch,” “dyke,” and “faggot” frequently and derisively, Banky’s behavior is pretty inexcusable, even if we’re meant to believe that this is due to his repressed homosexuality. The film itself does very little to convince us that this is the source of Banky’s anger — Smith had no problem imagining a rich sexual history for Alyssa, but stops short of considering what Banky’s sexuality really feels like. It’s not that we come away from Chasing Amy thinking Kevin Smith hates gay people — far from it. It’s nice that he tried, but his reach exceeded his grasp in Chasing Amy. He explores the straight male fantasy of girl-on-girl action, with a fleeting nod to male homosexuality.

Once again, the Kevin Smith proxy lands the woman who is hotter, smarter, and more appealing in just about every way. But this time, she sacrifices her entire sexual orientation to be with him! Why? What is it about Holden that drags a gay woman back into the closet? I can imagine a decent version of Chasing Amy about the Alyssa character falling in love with an entirely different man — one who doesn’t remind us of Kevin Smith. But the way it plays out here is so obviously a wish fulfillment fantasy on Smith’s part that it defies plausibility.

I admire Smith’s aim to include gays and lesbians in his Askewniverse. Hooper is a refreshing, worthy addition to this otherwise familiar cast of characters. In 1997, it was hard to find stories that represented these people well. But now that we see lesbians and gay men telling their own stories more often, Smith’s attempt to squeeze them into his rather limited worldview feels clumsy. Ultimately, both Alyssa and Banky’s sexualities are primarily used as obstacles for the Smith-like protagonist to reckon with, and he ends up alone because… that’s too much work for him? Smith’s discomfort with female sexuality is raised again, more seriously and less comedically than in Clerks. He gives Alyssa a fair shake, but did we need another story about a guy who can’t deal with the fact that the girl he likes wasn’t a pure and innocent virgin before they met.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the one scene I truly liked is the one that Holden doesn’t figure in — Alyssa, having to tell her (gay) friends that the new love of her life is a man. Smith works best when he gets out of his own way — imagine if the whole film had been proxy-free?

DOGMA

• Release Date: November 12, 1999
• Budget: $10 million
• Domestic Total Gross: $30.7 million
• Metacritic: 62

Dogma stands apart from a lot of Smith’s movies for having a real plot, even though the juvenile sense of humor remains intact. It also features a more talented and diverse set of actors than any View Askewniverse movie before (or since?). Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek, Chris Rock, and Linda Fiorentino bring a little something different to the sameness of Smith’s previous movies. (It’s amazing what you can do when you cast real actors, isn’t it?)

The execution is still pretty shaggy — the film makes a $10 million budget look pretty cheap, and the dialogue is rambling and exposition-heavy. In Dogma, Smith wrestles with his Catholic upbringing the same way he wrestles with sexual insecurity in Clerks and Chasing Amy, but the former lends a little more mileage to a feature screenplay.

In my eyes, Dogma is still Smith’s best effort at doing something “different.” He assembled the best cast he’s ever worked with, wrote a story with actual stakes, and managed to represent a spectrum of competent, empowered women who weren’t first and foremost romantic/sex objects pretty well in the process (for what I’d venture to say was the first and only time). It’s telling that Jason Lee’s apocalypse-craving demon Azrael seems somehow less evil than his Banky character in Chasing Amy, and Matt Damon easily bests Ben Affleck in the Matt-and-Ben scenes, as you might expect by pitting Talented Mr. Ripley-era Matt against Forces Of Nature-era Ben. Overall, the film is a funny, entertaining ride with just enough gravitas to sustain Smith’s cruder comedic beats. (I could do without the shit monster, though.)

Following Dogma, Smith fell down the Jay-and-Silent-Bob rabbit hole again by giving them their own movie, in addition to a Clerks sequel and a Clerks animated series. He also made hit-or-miss titles like Jersey Girl, Cop Out, and Zack And Miri Make A Porno. (Cop Out, the first movie he didn’t write, sadly remains his biggest box office hit.) It was around this time that Smith probably became more notable for his podcasts, comic books, books, and other endeavors than his filmmaking output. Films like Red State and Tusk have been interesting departures from the View Askewniverse, but box office success has eluded him, even when filmmakers who capitalized on his brand of slacker comedy went on to make blockbuster hits. He was also long-rumored to be involved in a Superman movie, long before the current wave of superheroes continually smashed box office records.

Smith’s films are reminiscent of a halcyon time before comic books dominated the pop culture landscape. It’s hard to remember an era when being a “nerd” was actually nerdy. Keeping this in mind, it’s a little easier why Dante, Holden, Jay, Silent Bob, and the rest of these guys are so glorified in Smith’s films. At the time, they weren’t the dominant force in pop culture.

But now they are. Reality TV became popular in the years after Smith’s debut, and now we’re inundated with stories about unambitious, unremarkable people doing poorly in their humdrum jobs. Many of the biggest comedians of the 2000s are also dead ringers for Clerks‘ Dante — like Seth Rogen, and just about every character he’s played. Of course, we now also have web series, many with the rambling dialogue, low production value, and juvenile humor Sundance deemed cinema-worthy in the 90s. Smith was bold in 1994, showing that just about anyone can make a movie about anything. (His movies are, in a way, a less skillful version of Seinfeld, the “show about nothing.”) Now, we live in a world where everyone is filming and showing off their very average lives via social media.

In the 90s, Smith was a chill white dude making movies for other chill white dudes, and it worked — he grew a devoted fan base, and for a brief moment, seemed poised to take Hollywood by storm. He was the It Slacker. But then he kind of slacked on that. The various sins of Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma would be easy to shrug off if Smith had gone on to bigger and better things afterward. Unfortunately, so many of his movies seem tethered to Smith’s own limited world view — which, contrary to his branded “View Askewniverse,” is basically the very opposite of askew at this point. The titles of his books, like My Boring Ass Life, could easily be reality TV series. Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good could be the autobiography of our current president. It’s not Smith’s fault that what once was niche is now so mainstream… or is it?

Smith makes movies about guys like him, hanging out with the same handful of characters, many of whom are his real-life friends. That’s fun for him, and occasionally the audience. But I, for one, have lost interest in Smith’s shtick, at least until pony learns a new trick. I don’t know if any filmmaker’s entire body of work has ever aged so poorly in such a short time.

I still like Dogma, though!

Catch the latest When We Were Young episode on Kevin Smith here and subscribe here!

“Maybe Michael couldn’t commit to this marriage, so he created a delusion… produced an unconscious, psychosomatic manifestation of… I’m better with food. Okay? You’re Michael. You’re in a fancy French restaurant. You order crème brûlée for dessert. It’s beautiful, it’s sweet, it’s irritatingly perfect. Suddenly, Michael realizes he doesn’t want crème brûlée. He wants something else…”

“What does he want?”

“Jell-O.”

“Jell-O? Why does he want Jell-O?”

“Because he’s comfortable with Jell-O!”

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the union of a pretty woman and a talented filmmaker. If anyone can show just cause why they should not be joined — well, that’s too bad! It happened in 1997.

In honor of wedding season, our hosts share their childhood visions of holy matrimony before revisiting two nuptial-themed films by Aussie auteur P.J. Hogan. First, we say “I do” to 1994’s Muriel’s Wedding, a quirky drama that’s not nearly as terrible as Muriel herself, starring Toni Collette. Then,  we attend My Best Friend’s Wedding, a unconventional rom-com that has our hosts thoroughly divided.

Is Rupert Everett’s scene-stealing George a dated stereotype, or a monumental achievement in queer representation in summer blockbusters? Is Julia Roberts playing a heinous sociopath, or… a lovably heinous sociopath? Most importantly: will Jell-O always be bested by crème brûlée?

Say a little prayer for us, because contrary to rom-com tradition, happy endings are not guaranteed on this podcast. Listen here and subscribe here.

MURIEL’S WEDDING

Release Date: March 10, 1995
Budget: $9 million
Opening Weekend: $244,969
Domestic Total Gross: $15.1 million
Worldwide: $15.5 million
Metacritic: 63

I missed Muriel’s Wedding when it came out, though I remember seeing trailers at the beginning of other VHS tapes and posters in my local video store. It always looked quirky and fun, though it was probably a tad too adult for me upon its initial release. Mostly, I remember Abba’s “Waterloo,” a song I was unfamiliar with but found insanely catchy. (I did not yet know about Abba’s dangerous earworms.)

Muriel’s Wedding feels absolutely Australian. It is a dramedy with a tone all its own, and only loosely follows a coherent narrative arc. Few romantic comedy heroines steal from family members as a major plot point. Few comic relief sidekicks get a tumor and lose the ability to walk over the course of the story. One can imagine a much broader version of this story, focusing more on Muriel’s engagement to a hunky South African swimmer. Muriel’s Wedding isn’t any of the movies a Hollywood screenwriter would have turned it into, and on some levels that’s frustrating, because there’s definitely more comedic potential to be mined from these situations. As great as Toni Collette’s performance is, I never truly got the sense that I really knew Muriel.

What I do appreciate about Muriel’s Wedding is the way it makes a young(ish) woman’s fetishization of weddings tragic, and then lets her overcome this tragedy. Like many single women her age, Muriel dreams of a perfect wedding to a perfect groom as the tonic that will cure her imperfect, aimless life. It’s her friendship with Rhonda (a delightful Rachel Griffiths) that most promisingly elevates her self-esteem and status in the world, but insecurity with being an independent woman threatens this friendship as Muriel pursues a sham marriage instead. What seems like a one-note joke at first, however, blossoms into a truly interesting romance (sort of), as David the hunky swimmer (Daniel Lapane) finds some genuine affection for Muriel, and she realizes this isn’t the kind of love she needs in her life after all.

Do I wish Muriel’s Wedding had taken more time to explore some of its deeper, darker themes? I do. For me, Muriel’s Wedding is really about three movies in one, and I only get a little bit of each of them. I want more about Muriel and Rhonda taking on the “mean girls” (a la Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion, I guess), and more between Muriel and David. (And maybe one more scene where Muriel’s sister tells she’s “terrible.”) That doesn’t really diminish my enjoyment of the film as it is, though on the whole, I find it somewhat less than satisfying.

MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING

Release Date: June 20, 1997
Budget: $38 million
Opening Weekend: $7.4 million
Domestic Total Gross: $127.1 million
Worldwide: $299.3 million
Metacritic: 50

My Best Friend’s Wedding is probably my personal favorite romantic comedy of all time, and undoubtedly my favorite rom-com of the 90s. The 70s have Annie Hall, the 80s have When Harry Met Sally, and… okay, I know a lot of people would not rank My Best Friend’s Wedding up there with those titles. It’s definitely aiming for a different vibe. In one sense, it harkens back to the great screwball rom-coms of the 1930s and 40s, with a broad plot that works best when held at some distance from reality. In another, it maintains a fraction of the stubborn Australian shagginess P.J. Hogan delivered in full force in Muriel’s Wedding. Both films are about not-so-admirable women who invent fake weddings to further their own agendas, engaging in rather questionable behavior along the way.

What I love about My Best Friend’s Wedding is that it doesn’t do this as a quirky Aussie import, but in the guise of a big, splashy Hollywood rom-com starring Julia Roberts. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I love the way it snuck into movie theaters in 1997 and took moviegoers who’d gone to see Julia get the guy (again) by surprise. My Best Friend’s Wedding satisfies all the requirements of a romantic comedy while defying everything we’ve come to expect from one. The heroine does not get her man, nor does she find a suitable replacement. There’s no real silver lining for Jules in this film — a nice dance with George, sure, but we also believe it’s possible that she really did let the love of her life get away, and will perhaps never find anyone she loves more deeply. What other romantic comedy better informs the women (and men) in the audience that it’s okay to be alone? That “winning” the love of the girl or guy you want isn’t the most important thing? That, in the end, it’s better to do the right thing and be able to live with yourself than lie, cheat, and trick your way into romance?

I don’t want to rail against the entire genre, but there are plenty of fucked up messages validated by Hollywood romances. In my eyes, My Best Friend’s Wedding is the lone corrective to them all. In the 20 years since its release, I don’t think any other rom-com has been quite as daring, particularly not a big studio movie with a major leading lady. Ronald Bass’ script allows Jules to be near-sociopathic in her cruelty to Michael and Kimmy, but Roberts’ starry performance keeps us along for the ride. There’s a deep moral quandary that emerges about halfway through this movie, as it begins to dawn on the audience — we don’t actually want Jules to break Michael and Kimmy up, or to see her end up with this guy. We’re conditioned to think that it’s definitely going to happen, because what Julia Roberts rom-com would end with Julia Roberts alone? We root against the tropes of the entire romantic comedy genre, and it creates genuine suspense. Not only is “Will she get the guy?” a real question in this movie, which it isn’t in virtually every other romantic comedy ever made, but so is: “Do I even want her to?”

I don’t remember many other studio movies that have made me feel so torn between my loyalties to a protagonist and my own moral fiber, let alone romantic comedies. My Best Friend’s Wedding actively participates in the romantic comedy genre while stealthily deconstructing it from within, and you don’t know what it’s really up to until the end. This is my preferred mode of entertainment — which should surprise no one who knows my appreciation of Scream and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. My Best Friend’s Wedding is, in ways, the Scream of the romantic comedy genre, and ultimately takes a very favorable attitude toward women. So many screenwriters would position rich, blonde, beautiful Kimmy as a vapid bitch — but as played by Cameron Diaz, she’s neither. She’s depicted as naive and privileged, but we also see that there’s a real person underneath, and by the end of the film we wish her well. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, it’s okay to be either the traditional blushing bride or the spinster cynic. In most rom-coms, the endings are already prescribed. My Best Friend’s Wedding forces its characters to actually work for their respective endings, be they happy or bittersweet.

Of course, there’s one other factor that makes My Best Friend’s Wedding a landmark of 90s cinema, and that’s Rupert Everett as George. He wasn’t the first gay best friend to appear in a romantic comedy, and was far from the last — after My Best Friend’s Wedding, sassy gay sidekicks became the cliche, to the extent that gay people had to fight against being seen as mere window dressing in lesser films.

But George is the highlight of the movie, in addition to being the voice of reason. Instead of feeling like he exists merely to help Jules through her romantic foibles, George constantly seems like he’s putting his more refined, sophisticated life on pause, deigning to help his hapless girlfriend. Yes, George is the “magical gay” in the tradition of the problematic “magical Negro.” As far as we can tell, he’s flawless, and we get the sense that he’d fix everyone’s problems in five minutes if they all just listened to him. Everett’s performance is so lively, though, that I can’t help but see George as a fully developed, fully realized person whose backstory is perhaps as colorful as Everett’s own personal history. He’s definitely gay — he leads a Dionne Warwick sing-along! — but it’s still rare to see a gay male treated with this much respect in a studio endeavor. None of the comedy surrounding George comes at his expense or panders to cheap stereotypes. Nor does the character overcorrect for his sexuality by being overly hetero-acting. He has more charm and charisma than almost any other supporting character I can think of — it’s a shame he didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it.

As I describe in the podcast, George is also perhaps the first gay character I saw growing up who wasn’t somehow tragic. In the 80s and 90s, most depictions of gay characters I’d seen dealt with bullying, drugs, AIDS — or all of the above. My Best Friend’s Wedding doesn’t have time to deal with George’s actual sexuality, perhaps in part because it might have been polarizing to do so in this movie at that moment. But you know what? I actually greatly prefer that George seem asexual than to have some tossed-off crack about his promiscuity, which is what we usually get with George-like gay sidekicks.

Back in 1997, for me, George was merely a really fun character in a movie I liked quite a lot, but looking back I think it was probably helpful to see a confident, handsome, hilarious gay man (who did not have AIDS) on the big screen in a major studio’s summer blockbuster comedy. Rupert Everett became a legitimate sex symbol after playing George, the guy women knew was gay but still found sexy. That’s an important milestone on the way to Will & Grace, which is basically just a sitcom version of the Jules-and-George relationship, and where we are now, when a mostly hopeful, only-sort-of-tragic gay drama just won Best Picture. To the extent that gay characters appear in studio movies these days, it’s almost always as sidekicks, and none feel as fresh or vital as George in My Best Friend’s Wedding did in 1997.

I find My Best Friend’s Wedding so bold, original, and admirable in so many ways. It’s definitely a broad comedy that stretches plausibility in its plotting, but what rom-com isn’t? I think it’s wonderful that TriStar let Bass and Hogan let Jules be “pond scum” and conclude the movie dancing with a dashing gay dude, which on its own terms serves as a truly happy ending. I can’t think of any other major romantic comedy that took this kind of risk, before or since. Twenty years later, I find My Best Friend’s Wedding just as revolutionary as it was in 1997, which says a lot for P.J. and Ronald and Rupert and Julia and not a lot for the studio comedies made since.

Forever and ever it’ll stay in my heart.

*

“You remind me of the babe.”

“What babe?”

“Babe with the power.”

“What power?

“Power of voodoo.”

“Who do?”

“You do.”

“Do what?

“Remind me of the babe.”

I don’t have all that much to say about The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth that I didn’t say on the podcast. I have fond memories of Jim Henson’s work from my youth, but never saw The Dark Crystal (until just before the podcast) and I’ve always seen Labyrinth as more of a quirky curiosity than a cherished childhood classic. In the case of the latter, it turns out that digging into the fairly complex themes and nuances of the story is, for me, more pleasurable than watching the film itself.

THE DARK CRYSTAL

Release Date: December 17, 1982
Opening Weekend: $4.7 million
Budget: $15 million
Worldwide Box Office: $40.6 million

“Most surprising is the lack of either humor or wit, especially in the designs for the mythical creatures. More than anything else, they seem inefficient, as if no order of evolution could ever have thrown them up, even in an off millennium. Miss Piggy would not be kind to The Dark Crystal.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Both films are a wonderful display of Henson’s singular talents — and, like many visually sumptuous stories, I wish as much craft had been put into the storytelling as the puppetry. Both movies are a little too straightforward and on the nose, though they’re stuffed to the gills with charming characters and brilliant ideas. The Dark Crystal is fascinating to behold with nary a human on screen, but it’s also very remote. It all feels like it’s happening in a faraway land, long ago, without real emotional resonance. I was happy to see the characters move as they did, but the story could have been about anything.

Labyrinth is a much more accessible film, one that deals with universal subject matter like the awkward teenage years between childhood and adulthood. (This, more than anything else, probably, is what we tend to cover on the podcast.) The ways Labyrinth expresses those universal themes is totally bonkers, however, involving a gender-bending David Bowie and an omnipresent, eye-catching mound in his “perve pants.”

Even moreso than The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth is bursting with imagination and a lovable puppet supporting cast, giving us more to hang onto than we got in The Dark Crystal. (It also helps that this one has a sense of humor.) I personally loved Sarah’s distraction as she struggles to put away her literal childhood things, with the Junk Lady trying to remind her of each item’s sentimental value in order to stop her from reaching her goal.

The limbo between youth and adulthood can stretch out infinitely (like a labyrinth!), and when growing up gets particularly tough it is tempting to stop moving forward and act like a kid again. Sarah accomplishes a grown-up goal — saving her baby brother — while managing not to succumb to the Goblin King’s bulging charms. In the end, she gets to keep her fairyland friends a while, holding onto some innocence even while learning a lesson about being selfless.  Alas, getting to this point across requires making Jennifer Connolly act as petulant as possible — it feels like her character should perhaps be a year or two younger than she is, with her love of make-believe. Connolly is also saddled with a lot of tricky dialogue, a good deal of which is spoken to herself or no one in particular.

And then there’s David Bowie — who is magnificent, of course, in the campiest, cheesiest way an actor can be. I can’t remember how old I was when I first viewed Labyrinth, but I know the hair, makeup, and costuming definitely set off the alarms of abnormality even then. This was probably before I’d ever seen a man taking on feminine characteristics as something that was supposed to be — well, I still don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Sexy? Scary? Cool? A little of all of these?

I’m not sure anything about the Goblin King makes a lick of sense. Does he want the baby, or does he want Sarah? What would he even do with that baby, when he got tired of singing to it? If he wants the baby, why give Sarah a chance to rescue him? If he wants Sarah… well, ew. Sarah must learn that the glam rock star monarch has no power over her, and refuse his offer to be her master/slave. It’s sort of unclear whether staying in this kingdom represents childhood or adulthood — she’d live in a world of fantasy and make-believe forever, but she’d also be responsible for keeping that codpiece satisfied. When she returns home, she’s become less the bratty sister and more of a nurturing mother figure to Toby, and of course she’s going to grow up. But she also made David Bowie keep his anaconda out of her labyrinth, so innocence is not lost.

It’s rare to be so mystified by the lesson a children’s film is trying to impart, but at least it’s an intriguing enigma. There never was and never will be another movie quite like Labyrinth, that’s for sure.

LABYRINTH

Release Date: June 27, 1986
Opening Weekend: $3.5 million
Budget: $25 million (approximate)
Worldwide Box Office: $12.7 million
Metacritic: 60

“With their technical astonishments, Director Henson and Executive Producer Lucas have been faithful to the pioneering Disney spirit. In suggesting the thrilling dilemmas that await a wise child, they have flown worlds beyond Walt.” – Richard Corliss, Time

“Jim Henson knows what he`s doing with his Muppet characters on TV and in the movies. But he’s completely at sea when he tries to create more mature entertainment in the form of such adventure films as The Dark Crystal and now Labyrinth. Both films are really quite awful, sharing a much too complicated plot and visually ugly style. What an enormous waste of talent and money is Labyrinth.” — Gene Siskel

“Your gun is digging into my hip.”

Somebody stop us! In Episode 21, When We Were Young says “alrighty, then!” to a trip back to 1994, when Jim Carrey soared to superstar status in three back-to-back blockbusters — Dumb & Dumber, The Mask, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

We’re not just talking out of our asses here. Clearly, Carrey was one of the most bankable stars of our youth… but how do his rubber-faced hijinks hold up when viewed for the first time as adults? Are these comedies still sssmokin’, or do misogyny and homophobia end up making everyone involved look like a LOOOO-HOOOOO-SER?

It’s the most eye-popping, jaw-dropping, fourth-wall-breaking, 90s-catchphrase-spewing, Cameron Diaz-introducing episode of the podcast yet! So fire up your ’84 sheep dog, kill a couple pretty birds, and prepare to hear the most annoying sound on Earth, because we’re about to spend an entire year with Jim Carrey!

(Seriously… won’t somebody stop us??)

Listen here.

Subscribe here.

This was a particularly fun episode of the podcast for me, because I got to rediscover three significant films from 1994 that I hadn’t seen since at least 1995. Classmates spewing catchphrases from these films stuck out to me more than anything about these films themselves. None of these movies were particular favorites of mine as a child (hence, I never watched them again), so I had very little idea what to expect in taking another look.

ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE
February 4, 1994

Budget: $15 million
Opening Weekend: $12.1 million
Domestic Total Gross: $72.7 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $107.2 million
Metacritic Score: 37

“Jim Carrey stoops to new highs in low comedy: Actually he bends over, flaps his cheeks and introduces the world to butt ventriloquism in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. A riot from start to finish, Carrey’s first feature comedy is as cheerfully bawdy as it is idiotically inventive.” – Rita Kempley, Washington Post

“The movie basically has one joke, which is Ace Ventura’s weird nerdy strangeness. If you laugh at this joke, chances are you laugh at Jerry Lewis, too, and I can sympathize with you even if I can’t understand you. I found the movie a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. Kids might like it. Real little kids.” – Roger Ebert

Having not seen this film since its initial home video release, I remembered next to nothing about it, except that the storyline somehow involved the Miami Dolphins and spawned oh-so-many ubiquitous mid-90s catchphrases. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is a film everyone remembers but is rarely referenced or discussed, at least in my presence. I expected to have very little to say about it.

And boy, oh boy is there a lot to say about Ace Ventura.I wasn’t expecting to like the movie now, given that I didn’t even particularly like it when I was ten years old. At this point in my life, most of Ace Ventura‘s comedy was already too juvenile for me. But I had completely forgotten the movie’s central twist: that Sean Young’s Lieutenant Einhorn turns out to be the male villain in disguise, resulting in Ace Ventura violently stripping her in front of the police before he beats her. This is some Boys Don’t Cry level transphobia, and the fact that it’s played for laughs makes it all the more disturbing. It’s amazing that this movie got away with that in 1994, and that most people didn’t even think about how wrong it was. Hooray for progress?

A cleverer script might have found a way to mock the ways Silence Of The Lambs and The Crying Game portrayed its gender-bending characters. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is not at all clever. Aside from its jokey, backward attitude toward non-gender conformity, which might be forgiven in context of the times, the movie seems completely oblivious about its central promise, never establishing what a “pet detective” does, or why Ace Ventura is one. A broad studio comedy like this doesn’t necessarily need much in the way of establishing a character, but Ace Ventura doesn’t know what it’s parodying, or why its central premise is supposed to be funny. Football, pets, police work, a surprise gender-flip — none of this fits together in a single story without some guiding comedic force behind it. The film’s only “joke” seems to be that Ace Ventura is super obnoxious. That’s it. I can’t think of another movie that so fully squanders such a no-brainer premise.

(For the record, in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the character actually makes sense in comparison, even if it’s not exactly a masterpiece.)

THE MASK
July 29, 1994

Budget: $23 million
Opening Weekend: $23.1 million
Domestic Total Gross: $119.9 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $351.6 million
Metacritic Score: 56

“The Mask underscores the shrinking importance of conventional storytelling in special effects-minded movies… Far more energy has gone into stretching Mr. Carrey’s face, twirling his legs and conceiving animation-style gags for him to exploit than into creating a single interesting character or memorable line. Even more egregiously than most of this summer’s blockbusters, The Mask tells a story that wouldn’t be worth telling without tricks.” – Janet Maslin, New York Times

“It is said that one of the indispensable qualities of an actor is an ability to communicate the joy he takes in his performance. You could say The Mask was founded on that.” – Roger Ebert

The Mask is the film that provided the biggest question mark for me, going into the podcast. I knew enough about Ace Ventura and Dumb And Dumberer to know that they weren’t stealth sophisticated comedies that had been unfairly dismissed over the years. I knew what audiences these films were aiming for, and that that audience wasn’t me.

The Mask had a bit more of an X-factor in my mind, given that it was based on a comic book character and had a bit more style to it. It was also the biggest hit of these three films and introduced the world to a very ravishing Cameron Diaz. Our podcast on Roger Rabbit informed that I’m not always up for zany, cartoon-like characters interacting with a hyper-stylized “real world.”But you know what? Sometimes I am, and The Mask gets it right in that respect. Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, a mild-mannered banker who wishes he had the confidence to “get the girl.” (Any girl will do, really.) Then he finds the titular mask, and becomes the titular Mask, unleashing his bonkers id, which owes a lot of its best ideas to Tex Avery.

In its funniest moments, The Mask is basically a live-action cartoon with the perfect star, Jim Carrey. His inner horndog reminds us of Pepe Le Pew, inner rage reminds us of Elmer Fudd, his unstoppable energy reminds us of the Tasmanian Devil. Carrey and the screenplay rely on some rather overdone impressions and film references, but a lot of it is truly entertaining, such as Carrey’s sassy salsa to “Cuban Pete,” which has the police dancing and singing along. (A much better use of the police than Ace Ventura’s groaning and vomiting transphobic cops.)

The crime plot wears out its welcome in the end, with a villain far too tepid to carry the third act of this film. (Luckily, we get Stanley’s dog wearing the mask for a while to liven things up.) The Mask is a film that knows what it’s trying to do and does it pretty well, containing at least a few moments to make you smile, if not laugh aloud. It’s also still one of the best showcases for Carrey as a performer, since he truly brings the character to life underneath all the prosthetics and makeup. (Easier said than done, if you ask the villains from Marvel movies.) I appreciated the film’s knowingly lame Gotham City proxy, Edge City, with Landfill Park being the most romantic spot in town. I also enjoyed the dash of darkness retained from the comic books that let Carrey play the role as a truly dangerous maniac, something he’s turned out to be pretty good at. The Mask isn’t a forgotten gem, but I was glad to revisit it.

DUMB AND DUMBER
December 16, 1994

Budget: $17 million
Opening Weekend: $16.4 million
Domestic Total Gross: $247.3 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $247.3 million
Metacritic Score: 41

Dumb And Dumber isn’t my thing. It just isn’t. I knew that when it was released, and I knew it before watching it for the podcast.

I can laugh at stupidity, but it usually needs to be couched in some cleverness. Ace Ventura is an idiot in a world full of idiots (who are either slightly smarter, or slightly dumber, than he is, with no rhyme or reason). The Mask is ridiculous and silly, but pretty crafty. Pure idiocy doesn’t amuse me much — I gravitate toward characters who are more clueless than incompetent. See: Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion, The Brady Bunch Movies, and (duh) Clueless. This highlights a crucial difference in comedies: when women are stupid in movies, they’re often stupid in a driven way. Romy and Michele decide to claim they invented Post-Its at their high school reunion, but we know what they want to accomplish with this, and they at least think through some of the details before the big lie. Regina George in Mean Girls is dumb enough to eat a bunch of high-calorie protein bars to “lose weight,” but she’s an evil genius about the best ways to undermine and sabotage her frenemies. Dumb And Dumber’s Harry and Lloyd, on the other hand, are wholly incompetent human beings. How did they even get jobs? Should they really be driving? Cher Horowitz and Marcia Brady never make us wonder if they need to be institutionalized, but I questioned this constantly during Dumb And Dumber.

Dumb And Dumber lives up to its title with amiably stupid humor, though the Farrelly brothers aren’t witless. The way Harry and Lloyd’s dumb comments are set up is often pretty clever. A few gags are legitimately funny, even if the script overall is pretty inconsistent about exactly how dumb these guys can be. I appreciated Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ performances, which play off each other well. Jeff Daniels plays Harry as different enough from Lloyd that the manic energy doesn’t get too tiresome. Dumb And Dumber is a passable comedy, though I wish it committed more to the subversive dark comedy that peers in around the edges (particularly in the Unrated edition).

*

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is not really a movie.

Technically, yes, it is a movie, but the experience I have watching it is something different. Upon viewing Lars Von Trier’s Dogville in theaters, I felt like I’d just seen a very intimate and powerful stage production, not a film. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was a little like that, too — the fact that time really is unfolding over the years for these actors, along with their characters, wipes the usual artifice of cinema away.

A Ghost Story is the latest such film. I liken seeing it to going to an artist’s exhibition — the scenes are like individual pieces. You stop there for a minute or two, think about what you’re seeing, what it makes you feel… and then move on.

Despite the word appearing in its title, A Ghost Story isn’t a “story,” exactly. The characters are broadly sketched, stand-ins for humanity at large. Casey Affleck stars as “C,” the titular ghost, performing under a white sheet with eye holes — the kind that might be a cheap, last-minute Halloween costume (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone dressed up like that). Rooney Mara plays “M,” his left-behind girlfriend (maybe wife?). Following his death, C’s ghost stalks out of the morgue and heads back home to his girlfriend, observing as she mourns. As in most ghost stories, he can’t communicate with her or touch her, and she has no idea he’s there. Occasionally, he is capable of some poltergeist-style mischief, but only when he’s very upset, it seems.

You might find the fact that Casey Affleck is delivering most of his performance under a bedsheet ridiculous. It is ridiculous, in the abstract, though it’s surprising how rarely A Ghost Story finds humor in this. (Only two brief scenes featuring subtitles really highlight the absurdity of the situation.) Somehow, this blank white nothing manages to make us feel for him all the more.

On paper, A Ghost Story sounds like the setup for a Ghost-like tale of a man trying to reach out to his beloved from the beyond. You could see it that way. The way I experienced the film, though, it’s not so much about death, but about time… and grief, but not the kind of grief you’d expect.(I suggest experiencing the film for yourself, if you’re interested in doing so, before reading on.)

A Ghost Story is primarily concerned with memory — specifically, the sentimentality we attach to where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and who we’ve been with. Losing a lover in an unexpected accident is, perhaps, the most extreme kind of breakup,but the grief C and M feel in this film could easily be about a much simpler parting of ways, or any form of painful moving on in life. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara’s characters haunt each other after they’re separated. The ghost literally haunts M’s house, while C declines to “go to the light” because he prefers to dwell in the comfort of the past. A flashback tells us more about his reluctance to accept change — M wants to leave their house, and C doesn’t. (He gets his wish… and so does she.)

The argument highlights two different approaches to holding onto the past. M chooses to let go and move on, but that doesn’t mean the ghosts of her past don’t linger. C chooses to stay with what’s familiar. There doesn’t seem to be anything physically binding him to the house, but he doesn’t follow her when she goes out. When she leaves, he waits for her to come back. When she moves, he stays.

It’s not really M herself that C wants or needs. M’s life goes on, and C has no interest in learning where she’ll go from here. All he wants is his experience of her, the memory of what they shared together. For C, clinging to the nostalgia of the past is preferable to looking into the future, and risking it not being as good. (That’s true before he’s dead, too, which is why a more literal version of this story is imaginable — in which C is still alive and makes the same choice… to stay in the house when she leaves him.)A Ghost Story intentionally lacks specificity, because it doesn’t ultimately matter why C feels a connection to this house, and whatever good times they had there. The house stands in for anything we feel nostalgia for, an object or a person or an era. Our pasts are haunted by things no one else can see, no one knows are there.

That’s what memories are. Objects, places, moments and people are important to us, and the “ghosts” of what they mean imbue them with a sense of meaning. Tenants attach deeply personal feeling to a house, but then they leave, and the next tenant sees none of what was there before. They make their own memories, which have nothing to do with what happened there before. C’s ghost represents that sentiment, something intangible no one else could ever observe. Ghosts like C are littered throughout our pasts. No one else will ever see them, or know what they mean to us. That experience is ours alone.

In another flashback, C shares a piece of music he’s produced. M listens patiently, but doesn’t seem moved. She doesn’t feel what he feels. Later, after his death, she listens to the song again, and she does feel something… but what she feels is different than what he felt, or maybe the same thing but too late. The emotions that feel so real are not real to anyone but us. Sometimes, two people seem to share the same thing — love — but do they? Is it really the same thing? Is this a shared experience, or are both parties experiencing it in entirely different ways? There’s no way to ever know.

Time passes very differently in A Ghost Story than any other movie I can think of — sometimes excruciatingly slowly, and sometimes in a blur. The more time that passes after C’s death, the less power he has to “haunt” anyone, or anything. Eventually, the ghost — representing C’s impression upon the world around him while he was alive — becomes obsolete. (Another character briefly enters the story to deliver a monologue about this, which might sum the film’s themes up a bit too neatly.)A Ghost Story takes a radical, jarring turn in its third act, becoming weightier and more portentous than before (somehow). C’s ghost witnesses an event from the distant past. More than anything else in this unusual film, this threw me for a loop… if the ghost is meant to be C’s memories, or the memories other have of him, or his impression on the mortal coil… well, how could that exist before he was even here? Perhaps the point is that as much weight as we give our own grief, there is a history that came before us that is equally raw and wrenching; eventually, we all get swept up into the past, the forgotten sadness of what came before.

There’s nothing special or unique about this particular ghost.

The above is personal interpretation of the film. David Lowery’s offbeat film is open to plenty of other discourse, although it does occasionally narrow its focus (like in that monologue). I don’t know if we’re supposed to believe in A Ghost Story as a literal ghost story, or if it’s looking to cohesively “make sense” from start to finish. For me, the various scenes are ruminations on connected themes.

A Ghost Story isn’t what I’d call an entertaining film. As I mentioned, it’s barely a film at all. Rather, it’s an experience that will reward viewers who sit and have a dialogue with it, who don’t feel the need to grasp every beat of the “story.” It is also best for those willing to be bummed out for 90 minutes, losing themselves in deep thoughts about mortality, memory, and the cosmic pointlessness of human lives.

Before the credits rolled, I had the thought that this could be the most interesting movie I’ve ever seen. Almost two days later, I still can’t think of anything that offers an equivalent experience.

Did I like it? I don’t know.

Fifty years is a long time. Unfortunately, it has not been long enough to distance America from the depicted in Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit. There’s Motown music in the background and the cars look old, but otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single moment of the movie that doesn’t crackle with contemporary relevance. Bigelow’s direction is as frenetic as it has ever been, one-upping the verisimilitude she showed in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. This has become a popular stylistic choice for hard-hitting stories that straddle the line between drama and thriller, from United 93 to Children Of Men.

Bigelow’s latest film falls into this sub-genre, technically, though I’m not sure either “drama” or “thriller” is the best descriptor. Detroit is a horror movie, tense and relentless and deeply upsetting.

Detroit has been released almost exactly 50 years to the day after the events it depicts, a case of police brutality amidst the Detroit riots of 1967. The riots killed 43 people and resulted in over 7,000 arrests. Detroit hones in on a few of those deaths in particular, as several black men and two white teenagers are hold hostage by the police and the National Guard in a motel frequented mainly by African-Americans. It’s a particularly egregious example of Civil Rights-era racial injustice; the events depicted are unique and extreme. If they weren’t, we probably wouldn’t even know about them. Many horrors along these lines have gone unpunished and unrecorded throughout American history.

We hear more about them lately, not because it happens more often, but because now people have the tools to share their stories with a wider audience. You probably know at least a half-dozen victims of police violence by name. If you weren’t already familiar with what went down in the Algiers Motel on July 25, 1967, here are a few more names to add to that list.Detroit focuses primarily on two characters — Larry (Algee Smith), a rising star in the Motown group The Dramatics, and Dismukes (John Boyega), a security officer who attempts to deescalate conflicts between black citizens and white law enforcement. Both are real people. The film’s third lead character is Krauss (Will Poulter), a Detroit PD officer, fictionalized for legal reasons. (Even fifty years after the fact, it’s dicey to pin a white cop with any wrongdoing against black men.)

The centerpiece of the film is an extended sequence set inside the Algiers Motel, where the police are hunting a sniper. A small amount of detective work suggests that there is no sniper — there’s no gun, and none of the suspects are violent — but there’s already one black body on the scene. The police figure they can scare some kind of confession of wrongdoing out of these suspects. After all, it’s a group of young black men in Detroit… how could they not be criminals? The police know it won’t take much wrongdoing on the suspects’ parts to justify the killing they’ve done.

Amongst the group held hostage by the police is Larry, who seems destined for a major singing career, and Greene, an honorably discharged Vietnam veteran. As far as we know, they couldn’t be more innocent, but they’re black and they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and the riots have spun Detroit into a near-apocalyptic frenzy. To their credit, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal don’t make these nice, upstanding guys the sole tragic figures of the movie. What happens to these people is deeply wrong, whether they’re criminals or not. They pose no threat to the police officer. They don’t deserve to be executed based on a bad cop’s judgment call. Two white teenagers are also amongst those brutalized — Julie (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever). They’re also real people. The cops decide that if these girls are “shameless” enough to hang out in a black motel, they must be shameless enough to be prostitutes. These girls suffer their own indignities at the hands of the police — they’re women, and cops can get away with it. What happens to Julie and Karen isn’t more or less horrifying than what happens to the black men in this story — Bigelow’s film is even-handed in saying that this abuse of power is sickening, no matter who the victims are or what they’ve done.

Bigelow is no stranger to controversy, thanks to Zero Dark Thirty, for which she was criticized for not coming down harder on torture tactics. Detroit is the antidote to that particular gripe — the movie is entirely about an inhumane abuse of power. Detroit is still susceptible to criticism as a primarily black story told by primarily white filmmakers. But being white also gives Bigelow and Boal free reign to depict the white cops as heinous racist cowards. In the hands of a black filmmaker, this very same film might be criticized for not being fair to the white characters. For dehumanizing them. For not bothering to show their point of view. In the hands of a black male filmmaker, some audiences might get queasy about the way white women are abused with same unflinching gaze as the black men.

Ultimately, there’s no filmmaker on Earth who can authentically tell every side of a story, but it’s hard to imagine a film with more raw empathy for its black and female characters than Detroit. To work as well as it does, Detroit‘s cops need to be as slimy as they are. I’m glad Boal and Bigelow had the guts to go as far as they do, with so little mercy for the men who were clearly in the wrong that night. The cops aren’t mustache-twirling villains, but they are despicable people committing unspeakable acts for no good reason. Detroit is crystal clear on a few facts: these cops are wrong, the justice system is flawed, and people who didn’t need to die have been murdered in cold blood. It’s a statement that needs to be made, and not just by black filmmakers. Crucially, the white girls aren’t the audience’s “way in” to the story, as white people are in a lot of stories about black people. (See The Help or The Blind Side as recent examples.) Bigelow’s camera captures the humanity of each victim, depicting the pain and horror of what they experience in a way that transcends race and gender identities. She comes as close as a filmmaker can to putting us in these people’s skin.

That’s an effective tool in a horror movie, but in this particular context, it’s a bombshell. Detroit makes us feel the hopelessness and anxiety of being caught in this dehumanizing predicament — not just vulnerable at the hands of a few wicked cops, but vulnerable to an entire system of oppression. In horror movies, the “final girl” often gets away in the end, and in many of them, there’s a sense that her troubles aren’t over. (Occasionally, the killer even pops up for one final scare before a smash cut to black.) In Detroit, it’s painfully obvious that our “final men” are never truly safe from this movie’s villain — never have been, never will be. As long as the system continues to work the way it does, with so little consequence for wrongdoing, the horrors of Detroit could happen again at any moment. Intellectually, this is an idea we’re used to — from Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, from the awareness raised by Black Lives Matter, from the news — but in Detroit, we truly feel it in our bones.

Earlier this year, Jordan Peele’s horror-comedy Get Out made a killing, both figuratively and literally, and managed to be adored by critics and audiences alike. Get Out is savvy entertainment, allowing us to laugh (and scream) at difficult, divisive topics we usually just get angry about. Like Get Out, Detroit equates being black in America with the dread and anxiety experienced by protagonists in a horror movie… to much different effect, of course. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at the very real racial issues Get Out depicts, but the film’s inconclusive, upbeat ending also lets us off the hook. Detroit leaves us hanging on it.

Not every moment of Detroit is handled with as much finesse as its nerve-wracking centerpiece. The third act is shaggy and a bit too traditional in dealing with the aftermath. A handful of powerful moments are dragged down as Bigelow and Boal try to barrel through too much plot too fast. (The third act deserves to be its own movie, but here, should have been condensed to match the tone of earlier sections.)

Detroit has also been called out as exploitative… and is it? Sure. It uses exploitation to its best possible effect. Bigelow doesn’t shy away from violence. Punches sound like they’re hitting our own skulls. There’s a lot of blood, though unlike your typical torture porn gore fest, it’s never “cool” or “fun.” In ways, this is a deeply unpleasant filmgoing experience. Not everybody wants to know what it’s like to be a victim of the majority — particularly those in the majority. But it’s important to know. Bigelow’s film gets about as close as a piece of entertainment can get to experiencing this injustice firsthand — knowing you’ve done nothing to deserve this, there’s nothing you can do to escape, there’s a very real possibility that you could be killed and that it probably won’t even be tried as murder if it happens.

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street was misunderstood by some as an endorsement of the greedy excess it depicted. Zero Dark Thirty got flack for allegedly implying that torture was an effective tactic in finding Osama bin Laden. Anyone who thinks Detroit is an endorsement of excessive force is a nutcase, but some may think the film goes too easy on its villains. That’s the point.

How can we expect Bigelow’s film to punish these men, if we won’t even punish them ourselves? As long as real police officers get away with murder, these stories should not be cathartic. They should barely be palatable, and that’s what this is. If you leave Detroit feeling angry, exploited, punished, or abused… well, good. You should. It’s about time that everyone felt that way, if only for a couple hours in the comfort and safety of a movie theater.Many harrowing historical dramas depict unimaginable atrocities happening to decent people. In contrast to Amistad or 12 Years A Slave, Detroit can’t be considered through the luxury of hindsight. A decade or two ago, white filmgoers might have emerged from the theaters with a sigh of relief, exclaiming, “Thank God that’s over with!” Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many headlines and videos that say otherwise. The fact that this film resonates with so much power is a testament to the activists who have made “Black Lives Matter” a part of our modern lexicon, who made sure that deaths of black men and women at the hands of the police do not go unnoticed… even if they do often go unpunished.

At a time when Christopher Nolan’s solid Dunkirk is getting rave reviews as a tense, experiential masterpiece, Detroit does the same thing, but with more urgency. For all its masterful filmmaking, Dunkirk feels like a very old story. Detroit takes place less than 30 years later, in 1967, but it feels like it’s happening now. Because it is happening now. It’s like watching Schindler’s List while the Holocaust is still happening. This is the war we’re still fighting.

Boal and Bigelow do end the film on a grace note, allowing one character a small beacon of hope. It’s not a happy ending, but it shows that life goes on, even for victims of brutal crimes — or those lucky enough to walk away from them, anyway. Several men in Detroit are robbed of their lives — not just those who died, but also those who survived. Larry ends the film damaged, but not broken. He carves out a niche where he can feel safe in this world, doing all he feels like he can do — hoping and praying that he doesn’t again find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, opposite the wrong cop.

And in a way, that says everything about what’s been going on for the past 50 years.

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