Category Archives: Reviews

Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” (2014) (presented by 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective)

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This review originally appeared as a guest post on 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective, a film site in which editor Marcus Gorman and various contributors revisit a movie on the week of its tenth anniversary. This retro review will be a bit more free-form, recappy, and profanity-laden than usual.

“But they ate from the forbidden fruit. Their innocence was extinguished. And so for the ten generations since Adam, sin has walked within us. Brother against brother, nation against nation, Man against Creation. We murdered each other. We broke the world, we did this. Man did this. Everything that was beautiful, everything that was good, we shattered. Now, it begins again. Air, water, earth, plant, fish, bird and beast. Paradise returns. But this time there will be no men. If we were to enter the garden, we would only ruin it again. No, the Creator has judged us. Mankind must end.”

–Noah (Russell Crowe) tells his family a nice little bedtime story.

I’m going to toss out a hot take this Easter week and say that Noah’s Ark has a better claim to being the greatest story ever told than the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was the first thing I wrote in my notes for my re-review of Darren Aronofsky‘s 2014 film Noah, right before an all-caps reminder to myself: “DON’T BE AN INSUFFERABLE ATHEISTIC EDGELORD PRICK”. I sincerely wish to comply with that, but I’m certain some readers will see this comparison and think that I’m belittling the sweetness and mercy of my man J.C. in favor of his crotchety Old Testament Forebear, less likely to bequeath the Earth to the meek than obliterate them with fire and brimstone. I’m not praising or condemning that version of God (as if He’d care about my opinion anyway), but I sure do applaud that notion – as well as its encapsulation within the apocalyptic tale of Noah (Russell Crowe) and the Ark – for its sheer popularity among humans. The Genesis flood, which parallels other deluge narratives that exist around the world, all basically fit the mold of a rebirth of humanity, following punishment by one or more deities for their sins and excess. It has been used to justify some genuinely silly beliefs, such as George McCready Price‘s 1923 book, The New Geology, a 20th century repackaging of a fringe idea from a century earlier, which states that every piece of evidence that exists of an Earth that is older than 6,000 years can be attributed to the Great Flood of Genesis, which in addition to wiping out all of humanity, carved out every geological feature that we might erroneously conclude takes millions or even billions of years to form, and spread out a nice, orderly, stratified fossil record filled with naught but the Devil’s lies (which coincidentally possess the expected ratios of uranium, thorium, and lead). I’m trying to front-load all of my scoffery for the Young Earth Creationists, who deserve quite as little intellectual consideration as they give their own ideas, because I’m well aware that most religious people don’t really think that they live on a tapestry of pointless, Luciferian deceptions, but rather think that the universe can be whatever way we observe it to be, but that does not preclude the existence of a loving deity who set the whole thing in motion, because they find this idea appealing, as well as a theoretical source of virtue and moral truth. And this is fine by me, really, as a baseline idea. I had my first child shortly after this version of the Noah tale came out, and while I haven’t yet sent him to Sunday School to peer at the cartoon Ark with its cartoon elephants and giraffes sticking out with giant smiles beneath sun and rainbow, I have had to explain life and death to him, and in so doing, I’ve had to grapple with my own conviction that religious faith and tales about mortality are fundamental components of the human condition, and one way or another, my children will be exposed to both and have to decide for themselves which stories they find the most comforting. And, depending on where they land, they’ll have to try not to be insufferable, atheistic, edgelord pricks about everyone else’s comforting beliefs.

Still from "Noah" (2014 film)


The life and times of Jesus Christ are certainly popular, but they cannot be the greatest story ever told, if only because its adherents spend so much time ignoring or preposterously reframing them. Noah’s Ark, conversely, is a tale that humans have stood by through thick and thin because of its versatility as a tool of oppression and judgment. Humans, unique among apes for our perceptions of mortality and space-time, craft a uniquely human narrative: Do what I say or be judged wicked and face the wrath and apocalyptic vengeance of my god. The Curse of Ham (which does get a token nod near the end of the film) doesn’t even require any actual sins – it’s been used for the last thousand years to justify everything from medieval serfdom to the African slave trade, all on the grounds that some people are just born inferior because Ham (Logan Lerman) glimpsed his father’s drunken junk that one time.

The only specific sins called out in the Genesis narrative are violence and angel-fucking, and Aronofsky cleverly turns this in an environmentalist direction, crafting a version of barren Biblical landscape steeped in metaphor that hits hard in the modern age – a fallen wasteland dotted with distant, dying industrial cities, ancient technology, magical energy-carrying minerals, and a race of fallen angels called Watchers, rendered as beings of light trapped in the muck as huge, formless rock monsters, serving alternately as helpers and slaves of humanity, doing violence and hard labor alike in service to their will. This is Lord of the Rings meets Mad Max, with everyone in this land acknowledging the existence of the Creator like a fact they all accept in living memory, but with each interpreting it differently depending on their own inclinations and desires – just like most of the modern humans watching this version of this tale today. The descendants of Cain – the cursed, wandering son of Adam and Eve and the first murderer – have mined the Tzohar, built the cities, scorched the landscape, killed each other over resources, and hunted and eaten the animals. Aronofsky takes a few other creative liberties with Noah and his family, taking the biblical narrative that they are the descendants of Seth, but adding in that they are vegetarians in tune with the land who won’t even pick an errant flower if they don’t have some use for it. As one might expect, there were a few Christian biblical scholars and barbecue enthusiasts who felt the need to scoff at this notion when the film came out – and in all fairness, I did re-read the Genesis account for the first time since I was a child before rewatching this film, and it’s pretty clear that Aronofsky tossed out the parts of the story that didn’t fit his environmentally friendly message, including Genesis 9:3-5, which explicitly states that humans have a green light to kill and eat any animal that walks the Earth, provided they drain its blood first. Granted, the very next verse also contains an admonition not to kill other humans, and we all know how studiously humans have obeyed that one over the millennia.

Still from "Noah" (2014 film)

This version of Noah (Russell Crowe) is as much of a patriarchal cipher as the one in the holy books, being virtuous because he is deemed so by the Creator, and knowing best because he is the man in charge of family and boat-making operation alike. And it’s hard to argue with that designation when reality itself seems to bend to his hallucinatory visions, making a forest spring forth spontaneously from nothing but a seed from Eden, a clever hand-me-down from Puckish man-of-the-mountain Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), who is old enough (to his grandson Noah’s mere 600 years) to know that men of the Pentateuch can make miracles happen with nothing but their trusty thumbs and the confidence of a dude who speaks supernatural subtext aloud. It is with this miracle-thumb that Methuselah sets the third act in motion, curing the infertility of Ila (Emma Watson), an orphaned girl whom Noah finds as a child and raises as his own daughter. As she becomes a love interest for Noah’s eldest son Shem (Douglas Booth), the tension between her doomed desire to bear children for the boy she loves and Noah’s conviction that humanity has been judged guilty and must all die after saving the animals, becomes tension over whether Noah will slay whatever newborn child that his daughter should produce aboard the Ark. When I saw the film in theaters a decade ago, I daresay this act is when I checked out the most – acts 1 and 2, which consist of antediluvian Ark-building and angelic warfare with the wicked hoards of Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), were absolute bangers. And then, following the Doom of Man, comes a schism within this family, as Noah’s wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) – a woman-shaped instrument like so many in the ancient and modern writings of men – acts as conscience and voice of mercy to Noah’s commitment to baby-murder, and his son Ham bitterly bonds with a stowaway Tubal-cain, who acts as the devil on his shoulder, trying to manipulate and corrupt whatever remains of humanity, because…why not? Nothing else to do in Waterworld. This isn’t the first or the last time that Aronofsky’s strained, secondary Garden of Eden metaphor would fail to fully land with me (hi mother!), but to my great surprise, I found myself sympathizing more with Noah this time around, if only because his dilemma actually seems to make some rational sense in this world. His God is definitely real, and has definitely just obliterated nearly all of humanity, and Noah has definitely been put in charge of deciding whether any humans get to live after that’s over with. Let’s set aside the question of whether any God-handwavey solution to this genetic bottleneck amounts to an admission that the entire Ark project was unnecessary anyway (I said don’t be an insufferable atheistic edgelord prick, Glenn!), and let’s embrace the Chosen One narrative that sees its prototypical form here. Here is Noah, Champion of God, placed in the position of having to decide whether his family, whom he loves and knows to be virtuous and good as he has taught them to be, should live or die.

If nothing else, this sequence was a stark reminder of the tantalizing nature of fanaticism, main character syndrome, whatever you want to call it. Noah is the main character, he was right about everything, and he holds the power of life and death over all of humanity because that’s what the story says: the great, megalomaniacal tale of the human race. The greatest story ever told. And the question of what to do with that power – whether to believe in a future in which humanity can be at peace with one another and in balance with their environment – is the fundamental question of the human condition. Do we sapient apes choose life, and hope, and a future for ourselves? Or do we let it all get swept away, taking meager solace in the notion that something will live on, and perhaps even become smart enough to ask these questions again, as we, God’s greatest mistake, return to the dust whence we came?

I don’t have an answer. But in the fullness of time, I’m sure we’ll come up with one together.

FilmWonk rating: 7.5 out of 10

FilmWonk Podcast – Episode #209 – “Road House” (dir. Doug Liman), “The Book of Clarence” (dir. Jeymes Samuel)

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Poster for "Road House" (2024)

This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check out Doug Liman‘s faithful and surprisingly enjoyable Road House remake, a film which somehow finds its feet with a western premise that was dated in the 80s, transplanted here into the Florida Keys, where that decade never ended. And then we reach back into 2023 for an epic of Biblical apocrypha by The Harder They Fall director Jeymes Samuel, The Book of Clarence, a mixed bag of religious satire which somehow manages to give The Life of Brian a run for its money. Exvangelicals should not miss this one (1:05:48).

May contain NSFW language.

FilmWonk rating (Road House): 7/10 (Glenn), 7.5/10 (Daniel)
FilmWonk rating (The Book of Clarence): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 6.5/10 (Daniel)

Still from "The Book of Clarence" featuring LaKeith Stanfield and RJ Cyler

Show notes:

  • [02:17] Review: Road House
  • [27:17] Review: The Book of Clarence
  • [53:13] Spoilers: The Book of Clarence

Listen above, or download: Road House, The Book of Clarence (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)

FilmWonk Podcast – Episode #208 – “The Beekeeper” (dir. David Ayer), “The Kitchen” (dir. Daniel Kaluuya, Kibwe Tavares)

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This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check out The Beekeeper, an enjoyably uncomplicated John Wick retread which is heavy on bee metaphor and light on everything else. And then they check out The Kitchen, the near-future dystopian sci-fi film on Netflix, set in London’s last remaining social housing unit, and featuring the feature debut of actor Daniel Kaluuya as co-writer/co-director (53:59).

May contain NSFW language.

FilmWonk rating (The Beekeeper): 6/10 (Glenn), 5/10 (Daniel)
FilmWonk rating (The Kitchen): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 6.5/10 (Daniel)

Poster for "The Kitchen" (2024 Netflix film)

Show notes:

  • [02:26] Review: The Beekeeper
  • [21:04] Review: The Kitchen
  • [45:11] Spoilers: The Kitchen
  • The audiobook production of Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita that Daniel referred to was indeed narrated by actor Jeremy Irons, and is available on all audiobook platforms.

Listen above, or download: The Beekeeper, The Kitchen (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)

“American Fiction” (dir. Cord Jefferson) – A skewering of authenticity

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One of the earliest and most trite observations of my 20s was that authenticity is an overrated virtue. As I’ve gotten older, my opinion has softened a bit – authenticity is indeed a virtue; it’s simply impossible to assess either internally or externally, which renders it meaningless as an article of praise. At worst, authentic is used to describe an unfamiliar cuisine by people who have never eaten it before, often in the same breath in which they describe it as bold, experimental fusion. It gets worse when describing stories – at best, a story might be deemed “authentic” by a non-critic who shares some verifiable life detail with a work’s subject, e.g. a soldier rating another soldier’s memoir as such, often before asserting that no one can truly understand war unless they’ve lived it. Even the people who lived a particular life or in a particular neighborhood or with a particular worldview will be the first to tell you – their people contain multitudes, and nobody’s the same as anyone else. So what is authenticity, really? A stamp of approval of the truthiness of a thing? Confirmation bias as analysis?

I began this review with a discussion of authenticity because it is skewered so thoroughly in first-time film director Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction (Master of None, Succession, Watchmen), an adaptation of Percival Everett‘s 2001 novel Erasure. If you really want to damage your critical psyche a bit, spend about 15 years reviewing films and then go back and re-read every time you’ve used the word “authentic” in a review. Cringe appropriately. As a current practice, I prefer to judge a work by its perceived sincerity, and American Fiction is sincere, hilarious, and a great deal more than the sum of its elevator pitch: that frustrated fiction writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) would adopt an authorial minstrel persona in the form of fictitious fugitive “Stagg R. Leigh” in order to write a pandering pastiche of Black trauma porn, only to see it embraced by the literary establishment and the white world writ large. And the film’s greatest trick is to treat this pitch – almost certainly the reason why it has attracted such buzz in the wake of its audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival – as an afterthought to the establishment of Ellison himself – and his family, history, and relationships – as the furiously beating heart of this film.

When Monk ends up on a forced hiatus from his academic position after excoriating a white student for complaining a bit too much about the presence of the N-word in a class on literature of the American South, he returns home to his ailing mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), and is joined in turns by his adult siblings, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) – both doctors, and both recently divorced. This family is solidly middle-class bordering on upper, and – like many American families, just one medical crisis away from financial ruin. And so the family comes together, their history spelled out so plainly from the first interaction that I wanted to stew in it, because these people are as wryly hilarious as they are deeply damaged. Ross is a particular delight, having to establish a sibling dynamic with Wright in just a few utterly charming scenes in which these two make it clear that despite being out of touch and having serious shit to deal with in their lives, they still love and like each other, and are genuinely thrilled to be back in each other’s orbits. Brown, meanwhile, plays Cliff as the black sheep of the family, off his head on cocaine in half his scenes, and exploring his newfound identity as a divorced, gay, Black man, having only lived a third of that out loud so far, and experiencing pain and pleasure in equal parts at the freedom and pathos of finally letting his family know the entirety of himself. Cliff is very much not the focus of this story, and yet it is a testament to Brown’s performance that this character feels so fully realized. His life is a mess, but it goes on when the camera stops rolling. So it is as well with Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), the family’s longtime housekeeper and caregiver, who is rightly and mutually seen as part of the family, even as she finds herself the only maternal figure remaining as Agnes’ health begins to fade. And again with Coraline (Erika Alexander), an attorney and public defender who lives across the street from the family’s beach house, mid-divorce herself, and as eager to strike up a hasty, casual fling with Monk as he is to find a distraction from his deep well of career disappointment and self-loathing. These people exist outside of Monk and he outside of them, and yet they sketch out a life that is fully realized both onscreen and implicitly before the film began. I can’t speak to their authenticity, but they sure felt real as I watched them. And I spent so much time laughing aloud at their biting humor – as well as uncomfortable moments where the laughter was just a discomfited placeholder for incoming pathos – that I hardly had time to ponder what purpose they served as archetypes. I just wanted to live with these people for a bit, and hear what they had to say.

Still from "American Fiction"

Where Wright really shines is in his character’s capacity for both self-awareness and self-deception. From his first scene, he is utterly in command of both screen and classroom, and yet, he has so much anger stewing beneath the surface that he feels fit to burst (and ultimately does burst, kicking off the film’s plot). And yet, Monk has had a fortunate career and he knows it. He writes books that are sold in chain bookstores – albeit not with the kind of regard he wants. “The only thing black about this book is the typeface,” he says to a store clerk as he moves his book out of the “African-American fiction” section, even as the clerk assures him that he has no choice about the placement and that he’s just gonna move em back as soon as Monk leaves. Monk has written works that he is personally proud of, but he can’t continue to sell them to an increasingly monolithic and tunnel-visioned publishing world that only wants one specific narrative from Black writers: the Real Black Experience. By which they mean…a ghetto. Poverty. Drug abuse. Crime. Murder by the police. And slavery, if it’s a period piece. This version of Black fiction is represented in the film by a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who also fits the bill of characters who appear in Monk’s orbit fully-realized and yet feel as if they have a life outside of it. Sintara went to Oberlin and grew up well off, and touts the authenticity of the AAVE and patter in her book by saying she based her book on “real interviews”. This is the Michael Lewis of poverty tourism fiction authors – she hasn’t lived it and doesn’t really understand it, but…she sure can sell it. And she’ll defend herself persuasively to your face if you dare to try and make her feel bad about giving the market what it wants.

It is to the film’s credit that it really doesn’t take a position on whether Sintara’s mercenary attitude is any less dysfunctional and twisted than Monk’s self-important sense of discontent. Monk doesn’t hide his contempt for the publishing world nearly as well as Sintara does – at one point demanding on a conference call to the marketing department that Stagg R. Leigh’s new book should be retitled from My Pafology to simply…Fuck. Which, of course, they agree to do, and it only makes the book more buzzworthy. It hardly matters whether an artless exercise in self-parody actually gets read by anyone, as long as it makes for an interesting cover and conversation piece. Monk’s literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) concludes a reading of a racist review of his last book, in which the critic essentially tells Monk to stay in his lane (wondering what the book’s subject matter “has to do with his experience as a Black man”) by commenting that white people think they want the truth, but what they really want is absolution. This sort of cynicism is well-earned by the film’s plot, even if it taps out a bit at the end into a Kaufmanesque discussion of how the story should end for the audience they’re trying to sell it to. Monk playing ball with this discussion almost feels like he’s come around a bit to Sintara’s way of thinking, but it’s hard to forget how much he talked down to her about it without even deigning to read her book for himself. They’re both pretty awful in this moment, and yet, not nearly as awful as the white people praising Fuck for its authenticity. As a critic, American Fiction was a reminder to stay humble. And as a reader of fiction, American Fiction was a reminder that nobody knows anyone else’s life. And sometimes, the richness and texture of that life can be pleasant to immerse yourself in whether or not you can turn it into a grand observation about your own.

FilmWonk rating: 9 out of 10
 

FilmWonk Podcast – Episode #207 – “Killers of the Flower Moon” (dir. Martin Scorsese)

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CW: Discussion of abuse

This week, Glenn and Daniel follow the western genre into the oil-rich 20th century and the terror of white supremacy in the Osage Nation with Killers of the Flower Moon (55:22).

May contain NSFW language.

FilmWonk rating: 10 out of 10

Show notes:

Listen above, or download: Killers of the Flower Moon (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon” (2013) (presented by 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective)

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This review originally appeared as a guest post on 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective, a film site in which editor Marcus Gorman and various contributors revisit a movie on the week of its tenth anniversary. This retro review will be a bit more free-form, recappy, and profanity-laden than usual.

“What the fuck is this?”
-“It’s actually pretty good. It was made by this Danish woman in the ’70s. It’s probably not what you’re used to looking at, but it’s pretty hot.”
“OK, look, I have a girlfriend, all right? So…”
-“I’m sorry, did you think I was hitting on you? Because I’m not… I thought you could use something better than that shit you’re watching on your phone. …am I right? If you have a girlfriend, why are you watching dirty movies?”
“You’re fuckin’ weird, you know that?”
-“I don’t entirely disagree, but you’re the one who’s gonna pretend you’re texting while you watch people pretend they’re fucking on your phone.”
“The shit I watch on here? They’re not pretending.”
-“Of course they are!”

Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Esther (Julianne Moore), having a little chat in public about porn, as I’m about to do with you.

All of the actual porn clips that appear in Don Jon are cropped narrowly enough to get the film an R rating, but its dialogue is unrestrained in both obscenity and depth when it comes to discussing all things pornographic and masturbatory. The 1994 Kevin Smith film Clerks settled the question of whether theatrical movies can discuss sexuality in such candid terms without getting an NC-17 rating, via an argument made by legendary creep and fascist-coddler Alan Dershowitz, spawning an all-timer for that “worst person you know made a great point” meme. But even as no-account New Jersey fuckboy Jon Martello, Jr. (Gordon-Levitt) explains in exquisite detail each step in his several-times-daily ritual of porn and self-pleasure (noting that the sound of his MacBook booting up gets him hard as a fucking rock), it still feels transgressive, because most candid discussion about sexuality is either preposterous (like the Fifty Shades trilogy) or in pursuit of a quick joke, never offering any real insight into sex where a brief, discomfited chuckle will do. And don’t get me wrong; Jon’s monologue is as hilarious as it is off-putting, but it never feels shallow. Jon describes masturbation like he’s ascending to Nirvana: “All the bullshit fades away…I don’t gotta say anything, I gotta do anything. I just fucking lose myself.” And that honest feeling of disconnection from his sexual partners seems worth exploring, whether or not his attitude about porn is cause or mere symptom.

This film was originally titled Don Jon’s Addiction and even premiered at Sundance under that title, and its creator’s acquiescence to the distributor’s title change makes me wonder just how confident he was about that “addiction” framing. JGL took to Facebook on that occasion and opined that he didn’t want people thinking the movie was about porn addiction and sex addiction, which is fair enough, and was probably about the limit of my understanding at the time. While Jon does try and fail to stop watching porn at his girlfriend’s behest, and another character questions whether he ever tries masturbating without it, nobody ever actually refers to this common behavior as an addiction, but rather treats it like what it is: A thing lots of people do, which can be done in excess. If you ask the professionals, the answer is pretty definitive – sex addiction does not appear as a distinct disorder in the DSM or its international equivalents. My own state’s coalition of sexual assault prevention programs (WSCAP) published a discussion guide to accompany Don Jon, and the word “addiction” does not appear in it even once. The consensus of scholarly and professional opinion is that sexuality is an ordinary human behavior expressed in a variety of ways, and attempting to isolate “sex addiction” as a distinct disorder serves to pathologize ordinary human behavior in a way that is both counterproductive to treatment for better-defined mental health conditions which might encourage illegal, disruptive, or upsetting sexual behavior, and also used as an excuse by policymakers and religious conservatives to isolate and pathologize ordinary expressions of sexual behavior that they deem undesirable and seek to repress as a means of cementing their political power. The entire LGBTQ community can tell you about that one.

Still from "Don Jon"

So in the same way that Jon is forthcoming with the audience about what he gets out of his quotidian jerk sesh, so too is Don Jon honest about the limitations of its scope: Jon has very little at stake except his own maturity when it comes to sex and relationships, and consequently, the film plays less like a social document and more like a coming-of-age flick for horny twenty-something dudes who kinda need to get their shit together. And that is a fine and uncommon thing. It’s the rare indie gem, like Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions or Bill Condon‘s Kinsey, which discusses sexuality with any honesty, and even then, it’s usually in pursuit of some greater storytelling or biographical objective which justifies this odd moment in which we normie, God-fearing, uptight Americans find ourselves discussing sex when we’re all clearly too uncomfortable with the topic to do so. So I have to give some credit to JGL for crafting and portraying a character who is…essentially no one in particular except…a young American bro who likes watching porn between going to church to confess about it, and having sex with a parade of women he meets at The Club with The Boys, occasionally punctuated by a shouting dinner with his parents (Tony Danza and the late and excellent Glenne Headly) and his almost entirely taciturn sister (Brie Larson) about how his life is off-track and he’s a terrible football fan. That’s to say, JGL is putting himself forth through a fictional lens as a basic douchebag, and then putting that good-lookin fella on camera to confess to us, his friends beyond the fourth wall, that he doesn’t even really enjoy sex that much, and prefers the noble path of Onan and Pornhub. And lest we run the risk of liking him too much, he even troubles a one-two punch of suggesting that women can become hot enough to avoid having to give blowjobs and referring to men who enjoy performing the act of cunnilingus as “fucking crazy”.

Now, I’ll leave to the reader’s imagination whether and how often my tongue does a glissando – and it’s fair to say that men’s performative outrage at anyone questioning their watercress-grazing skills usually exceeds their true aptitude down south. But it’s also fair to say that Jon’s early and repeatedly-expressed desire to get head (as well as a variety of coital positions) without providing any reason why a partner would want to do so is presented to the audience as both an unlikable characteristic and a symptom of Jon’s dysfunctional attitude toward his own sexuality. Jon’s problem isn’t that he likes porn – and it isn’t that he’s dating a woman, Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who doesn’t trust or even particularly like him (feelings which seem to be mutual anyway). It’s that he doesn’t really understand how to connect with other humans on a deep emotional and physical level, and sees porn as an outlet that doesn’t even make him try. And all it asks in return is for us to occasionally, shamefully acknowledge that it has a better claim to invention of the internet than Al Gore.

Still from "Don Jon"

Back to Jon’s opening monologue for a moment. He describes the feeling of ejaculating to the perfect porn clip as “losing himself”. And why not? If you’re all alone, and you lose yourself, who’s left? The contrary view is embodied by Esther (Julianne Moore), a woman of the world who lost her husband, child, and any remaining verbal filter over a year before she meets Jon at night school and casually fucks him in her Jeep Wrangler. And it is in naked conversation with Esther that we finally see another human giving and receiving the kind of honesty that Jon had never thought about pursuing before. Relationships, she explains, are reciprocal. And all of Jon’s myriad dysfunctions – which Esther freely admits she wouldn’t tolerate if a meaningless hookup with a beefy bro weren’t something she sorely needed right now – are simple enough to explain: Jon has only ever pursued one-sided relationships, in which he gets whatever he wants – his pad, his ride, his girls (always rated on the 10-scale) – and he thinks little for anything he ought to give in return. This is why he was willing to accept a different sort of one-sided relationship with Barbara, who has very particular ideas about who he should be and how he should act – many of which are presented as facially reasonable, if Jon really is ready to settle down, and really wants to settle down with her specifically. I really have to hand it to ScarJo for a brilliant performance as a character who has to act in a deeply unlikable way while also being treated unfairly and misogynistically by the film’s protagonist. Barbara fits the mold I often call “more concept than character”, representing a version of henpecked, marital femininity as rendered by men who are terrified of finding a woman they deem hot enough to make them suppress their baser nature for a while. It’s a very particular and stereotypical view of how (immature, cishet, monogamous, marriage-inclined) men and women think and act towards each other, but even for its limited intended scope, this examination feels self-aware. The heteros are upsettero*, and in the course of explaining their gross feelings, we not only get to bask in Johansson’s wicked charm, but also get a breathtaking quasi-sex scene in a hallway which is perhaps one of the best pieces of physical comedy either actor has ever performed. We also get Brie Larson in the film almost exclusively to confirm, through female lips, that “that girl has her own agenda” and “she doesn’t care about Jonny” – fine and true bits of subtext which perhaps betrayed a lack of confidence that the audience would clock that both of these people are behaving with immature emotional intelligence and communication skills which they will both, hopefully, eventually, grow out of. Apart from losing a bit of my own verbal filter when it comes to discussing sexuality (adding a bit more candor, vulnerability, and empathy to my existing repertoire of the grotesque and the profane), those are precisely the skills I’ve put the most personal effort into improving over the last decade, because they seem essential to becoming a well-functioning human.

And like Tyler Durden said, self-improvement is masturbation.
Meaning it’s fine and everyone should get on it. Pretty sure that’s what he meant.

FilmWonk rating: 7.5 out of 10

* With all credit due to Tara Mooknee on YouTube

FilmWonk Podcast – Episode #206 – “Barbie” (dir. Greta Gerwig), “Oppenheimer” (dir. Christopher Nolan), “Asteroid City” (dir. Wes Anderson)

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This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, we do a #Barbenheimer (Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie and Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer), then split the difference of pastel colors, artifice, and nuclear testing with one we missed from June, Wes Anderson‘s Asteroid City. (1:05:52).

May contain NSFW language.

FilmWonk rating (Barbie): 8 out of 10 (Glenn)
FilmWonk rating (Oppenheimer): 8/10 (Daniel), 7.5/10 (Glenn)
FilmWonk rating (Asteroid City): 8 out of 10

Still from "Oppenheimer"

Show notes:

Still from "Asteroid City"

Listen above, or download: Barbie, Oppenheimer, Asteroid City (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)

“Barbie” (dir. Greta Gerwig) – Life in plastic

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What ultimately disappointed me about The Super Mario Bros Movie was that it contained nothing new or unexpected, give or take a Jack Black song that – despite being a pernicious little earworm – is barely a song at all. Mattel, a toy company, isn’t going to shock me with its desire to sell more toys, any more than Nintendo trying to sell more games, or Hasbro smashing toy robots together. But movies are still a medium of stories and characters who will, at some point, have to explain to me why I should bother watching what amounts to a two-hour toy commercial, and the Barbie doll’s position as an iconic but dated piece of Americana doesn’t obviate that requirement. So you can imagine my delight when director Greta Gerwig (with a script co-written with frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach) decided to play with a broad and inclusive set of dolls, all singing and dancing a medley of existential dread on the border between Barbieland – a plastic, pastel fever dream (beautifully realized by veteran production designer Sarah Greenwood) where Barbie’s in charge and Ken is surplus to requirements – and the real world, where the Patriarchy is alive and well; we just hide it a bit better than we used to. It’s not much of a boast to say I’m less of a fragile little bran muffin than Ben Shapiro, whose vague fleshy blob turned instantly to windblown ash the moment the P-word was uttered in dialogue not once, but a baker’s dozen times. But if you’ll indulge me a problematic compliment, I was genuinely delighted to see that this toy commercial had some fucking balls. Because while my cynical side will assume that Mattel approved every image and sound that appears on this screen, and corporate feminism always exists with a degree of self-aware marketability, it’s hard for me to imagine that having a modern child (Ariana Greenblatt) tell Barbie to her crying face that she’s the dumb, fascist scion of a vapid and environmentally destructive consumer culture was their first advertising choice. In truth, it was their 43rd choice. But it’s one I found myself happy that they troubled to make at all.

Following an amusing satirical nod to the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we start in the Dream House with Barbie (Margot Robbie), a narrative device reminiscent of The Lego Movie and Monsters, Inc., as we learn that Barbieland exists in a loose, metaphorical parallel with the Real World, with each Barbie corresponding to a real human child’s toy. Robbie, the tall, blond original model, is referred to in dialogue (by herself and others) as Stereotypical Barbie, with every other woman in this world also claiming the Barbie name, from President Barbie (Issa Rae) to Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef) to various Mermaid Barbies (Dua Lipa). There is also Ken – whose original (generic white beefcake) model is played by Ryan Gosling, with the narrator (Helen Mirren) informing us that the only thing that determines whether he has a good or a bad day is whether Barbie smiles at him – a bleak existence that is presented as such. This motivation unites all of the Kens, played by other beefcakes like Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and – briefly, in Merman form – John Cena. Between their cloying pursuit of the female gaze and various machismo contests on the Beach (in which they offer to “beach [each other] off” repeatedly), the Kens live a vapid and ill-defined existence, with no real place to go when the nightly dance party concludes at the Dream House, and the nightly Girls’ Night slumber party begins anew. Barbie and Ken play at romance as devised by a toddler, kissing with free-floating faces near each other, and “being boyfriend-girlfriend” with only the vaguest notion of what that actually means. Although they’re both quite clear on their physical limitations, with Robbie’s Barbie dutifully informing a few catcalling real-world construction workers that she has no vagina.

Still from "Barbie" (2023 film)

The key detail about Barbieworld is that it is a perfect, happy, feminist utopia where…literally nothing is at stake. Barbie’s food and drink are all automated play-objects that she doesn’t really need to consume. Dr. Barbie displays a heart-shaped x-ray of a minor Ken injury, but heals it with the ease of a child’s narrative handwave. President Barbie is the president of dancing and wearing sashes. But make no mistake – women and girls are in charge of Barbieworld, and men are their dutiful, superfluous sidekicks. And it is that unstable malaise that kicks off Barbie‘s plot: Stereotypical Barbie ends her nightly dance party by asking some of the other Barbies in the room whether they ever think about dying. And then her permanently high-heeled feet collapse into flats, she notices cellulite on one of her thighs, and she’s immediately sent to go see Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), her oddball fairy godmother with a messy, multicolored hairdo, doing permanent splits – perhaps a metaphor for adulthood, feminist awakening, queerness, or all of the above – to explain what she must do: Journey to the Real World and connect with whichever human child is playing with her wrong, a girl named Sasha (Greenblatt), who greets her with the devastating takedown I mentioned above.

Barbie’s Real World mission gradually expands to include Sasha’s world-weary, millennial mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), who deals with her existential ennui about the dolls she used to play with (and a tween daughter who wants nothing to do with them) – by working at Mattel and sketching dark and fucked-up little doodles of the Barbies she dreams about now. Cellulite Barbie. Fear of Death Barbie. Barbies who are allowed to pause for a moment and consider what the world is like if everything’s not perfect all the time. When Barbie finally meets Gloria, it’s in the course of discovering that Mattel, and the world it exists in, is run by men and the patriarchy, who hold all meaningful positions of power and advance their own ambitions at the expense of anyone who challenges their vision of how they should continue to hold that power. With Donald Trump and the entire Republican coterie of lifetime-appointed priest-kings a full year into their experiment with taking women’s reproductive rights backward half a century, this should not be a controversial position for anyone other than the right-wing cohort whose paychecks derive from performative outrage at people describing the world as it is. At the same time, even for a sympathetic audience, merely mentioning the patriarchy or Barbie’s desire to smash it wouldn’t have been enough by itself. An insubstantial and inconclusive riot grrrl vibe tanked my enjoyment of Amy Poehler‘s Moxie, which ultimately felt more like the ghost of 90s feminism’s past, rather than a story with anything useful or interesting to say about the modern world.

Still from "Barbie" (2023 film)

Instead, Barbie posits and persuasively argues for a common fourth-wave feminist talking point: That the patriarchy is harmful to men and boys as well as women and girls and everyone in-between. Given the film’s dutiful fourth-wall breaking, I’ll go ahead and lay my Low-T, Beta Cuck cards on the table here: I simultaneously believe this talking point is a piece of realpolitik coalition-building on the part of feminists hoping to make disinterested men give a shit about their cause – and that it’s objectively true, so I don’t really begrudge its functional purpose. The patriarchy is real, describing a system of historical, social control that empowers and benefits men in a huge and tangible way, but ultimately harms those same men by slotting their range of possible outcomes and identities into a handful of stifling archetypes, limiting their ability to ever truly know themselves and explore the full range of who and what they could be within a mutually supportive community of other men, women, and enbies who are free to do the same. The film begins by displaying a topsy-turvy fantasy world in which women are in charge, but there’s precious little to be in charge of, and even in that place, we still get a sense of how harmful the situation is to the Kens who don’t know their place, nor particularly have the mental wherewithal to consider it at all. To wit, Barbie begins with a cartoon matriarchy and says that’s Bad Too, Actually, before it even considers what the real world is like. When Gosling’s Ken finally sees the Real World, he is instantly taken in by it – men are men (and occasionally men on horseback), constantly supporting and high-fiving each other as they prop up a world they unapologetically rule over. As Barbie is learning about catcalling and sexual harassment, the script is positing, through the eyes of its most naïve and corruptible character, Ken, that the patriarchy is seductive. And as the patriarchy roils forth to corrupt Barbieland, it somehow doesn’t feel like it’s calling out anything that wasn’t always there in both worlds. Even as Barbie’s real-life creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) appears as a wandering spirit to confess the unachievable dream she was always selling with her creation (even calling out her eventual SEC charges and removal from the company), the film digs deep into Mattel’s archives to show us some of the gross shit Mattel was engaged in as recently as 2009, when it introduced…Sugar Daddy Ken (Rob Brydon), or 40 years earlier, when it released a Skipper (Hannah Khalique-Brown) whose boobs inflated with the crank of an arm as she grew up into a “tall, slender teenage doll“. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell as a business guy in both films, Barbie goes a step beyond The Lego Movie in arguing that despite multiple chipper song and dance numbers tooting a similar horn, everything was not awesome in Barbie World or ours to begin with, and a return to the status quo in either one will not be nearly as useful as characters who can speak honestly about the sinking feeling and cognitive dissonance they experience just trying to exist.

Gloria is ultimately handed the megaphone to make this point, and Ferrera delivers this monologue beautifully, laying out a litany of dysfunctions and contradictory expectations that come with being a modern woman. And as the badass boss bitch who sits directly outside the all-male board room at Mattel, Gloria is precisely the flawed avatar that this point deserves, because she’s a character that props up a system that she knows was harmful to her own childhood, but is ultimately just an ordinary woman trying to get through the day, take care of her kid, and participate in a system that she had little say in setting up, without ever feeling like a monster or a failure or a hypocrite. It’s an impossible standard. And for Ferrera to express it in a way that simultaneously feels relatable and sympathetic for a modern, multi-gender audience is a real achievement. Because a girly movie with something to say…which is only seen and heard by girls…isn’t accomplishing nearly enough (even if it manages to bring in a few terminally online film nerds who crafted an unlikely juxtaposition with a dour historical drama). And while Robbie’s Barbie does close the show (with a line I still can’t believe the movie had the audacity to end with), she spends a fair few lines acknowledging that this wasn’t entirely or even mostly a story driven by her version of Barbie. Barbie the film knows what these dolls are and what they’ve represented in American society, and it acknowledges that history in more than a tokenistic way, speaking less about the dolls themselves and more about the oppressive system for which they always functioned as brand ambassadors. Don’t just be a girl. Be this girl, with her waist-length blond hair and giraffe neck. Gloria gets it. And she tells the audience what’s what so smoothly that it stops just shy of being didactic or punitive to any dudes who showed up, voluntarily or with some encouragement, because ultimately all I felt from Gloria was a desire to cut herself and myself some slack about what society expects us to be. Because life in plastic…ain’t fantastic.

FilmWonk rating: 8 out of 10

FilmWonk Podcast – Episode #205 – “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (dir. James Mangold), “Joy Ride” (dir. Adele Lim)

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This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel face the destiny of Harrison Ford, who returns for his third and presumably final legacy sequel to a blockbuster franchise (barring any eventual return to Jack Ryan), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But first, we check out the upcoming raunchy road trip comedy from Crazy Rich Asians screenwriter Adele Lim, Joy Ride, in theaters this Friday (1:10:24).

May contain NSFW language.

FilmWonk rating (Joy Ride): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 7/10 (Daniel)
FilmWonk rating (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny): 4/10 (Glenn), 5/10 (Daniel)

Still from "Joy Ride"

Show notes:

  • [01:53] Review: Joy Ride
  • [22:42] Spoilers: Joy Ride
  • [34:53] Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
  • [54:35] Spoilers: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
  • I did indeed misremember – Daniel did not like Crazy Rich Asians as much as I did.
  • Thank you for listening.

Listen above, or download: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Joy Ride (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (dir. Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic) – It’s-A-He! Mario!

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“Everyone knows Mario is cool as fuck.”

–Phil Jamesson (Philosophy 101 paper)

How does a world-weary millennial approaching middle age with two kids even begin to discuss The Super Mario Bros Movie? By establishing his Nintendo bonafides of course. I won’t bore you with a list, but my first of 11 Mario games (plus another half-dozen Warios and Donkeys Kong) was Super Mario Land for Gameboy – the first portable Mario game ever released, and the one that became my sole obsession from that Christmas to the following June. I spent hundreds of hours playing Super Smash Bros on the Nintendo 64. And I spent a significant portion of AP Calculus in the back of the classroom tapping away on an unauthorized ZShell port of Dr. Mario on the TI-85 graphing calculator. The video game series has sold nearly 400 million copies, and I am so sure that anyone reading this also grew up with these characters that I’m cutting off the nerd solipsism right there. Truthfully, I adore Mario Mario (Chris Pratt), his brother Luigi Mario (Charlie Day), his pals Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), his pet Yoshi – whose brief, shelled appearance after the end credits is the closest thing this movie has to a spoiler but I don’t care and neither do you – and of course I love Bowser (Jack Black), as well as the waves of expendable weirdos he sends after me to be smashed and roasted and frozen and knocked aside as Koji Kondo‘s classic themes proclaim in a cheery symphony what an awesome job I’ve done – Brian Tyler allegedly composed an original score for this movie, but he was more of a DJ this time.

The reason why I love these characters is because they’re nothing more or less than they ever needed to be – bog-standard adventuring archetypes to support the world of a then-groundbreaking and still entertaining 2D side-scrolling platformer. And eventual 3D platformer. And eventual open-world game. And eventually other game mechanics. Mario the avatar, Mario the instrument – that Mario has always made sense to me. He was there to be a bright and colorful escape whose appeal was always ultimately in the sense of triumph he handed to whatever child overcame the mechanical difficulty of gameplay, whether it was you, the neighbor kid, an online strategy guide, or a call to a Clippy-like Luigi who ultimately led you to victory. And Shigeru Miyamoto is owed a debt of admiration by children of all ages for his iconic creation that can only be repaid in $60 installments to see what wondrous new game mechanics Nintendo’s skilled developers and hardware engineers have come up with this time.

Still from "The Super Mario Bros Movie"



But Mario the movie? It’s bright and colorful and well-made. Up to the standards of big-budget 2023 animation. Its characters and enemies and vehicles are studiously faithful to their most recent 3D game renditions. And The Super Mario Bros Movie succeeded in its supremely limited ambitions. I mentioned the voice actors above, but with the exceptions of Day and Black, they all essentially disappeared into bland characterizations with motivations and backstories whose simplicity was calibrated precisely for the 4-year-olds who will be seeing it next weekend. Including my own! And I am genuinely looking forward to seeing the delight on the faces of both my kids as they watch their favorite characters come to life on a gargantuan screen. But as an adult, I hoped that the appearance of Pratt heralded the arrival of something more like The Lego Movie, whose shallow, corporate, brand-promotional premise was handed to a pair of bonafide storytelling filmmakers who turned it into something that stands beautifully on its own, rather than a 92-minute unskippable cutscene that you’d watch once, admire for what it is, and then button-mash your way past to get back to the gameplay, the promotion of which is ultimately and transparently the only reason why this movie exists.

The plot: The Mario Bros are plumbers in Brooklyn whose mostly-mustachioed family (including a father voiced by original Mario voice actor Charles Martinet) doesn’t believe in their lofty, unrealistic dream of quitting a plumbing business to open a plumbing business. Then they’re sucked into a portal to the Mushroom Kingdom, and everything I just mentioned ceases to matter at all. Bowser, the Incel King of all Koopas, is invading every level of Super Mario World (including, eventually, the Mushroom one) with a Star power-up, which he will use to impress Princess Peach enough that she’ll overlook his status as a conquering warlord and agree to marry him. Princess Peach, a human from worlds unknown who was raised by Toads in the Mushroom Kingdom, strikes out to get the assistance of the Kong army, and allows the newcomer Mario to join her on this critical mission for the same reason she was elevated to rule the Mushroom Kingdom in the first place: Humans rule in this place, because they’re the ones who can learn the gameplay mechanics and interact with the powerups – rendered here as Mario reluctantly eating fist-sized mushrooms even though – like the four-year-olds he’s speaking to – he thinks he doesn’t like them despite how powerful they make him.

Still from "The Super Mario Bros Movie"


While a few brief action sequences in our world attempt to demonstrate that Mario has some natural aptitude for platform mechanics (by way of construction scaffolds, cars, and other real-world things), these mechanics become literal and unexplained once the Marios enter the Nintendo gameworld. Mario undergoes a sports training montage with Peach, as she teaches him about the powerups, and he leaps and slides his way through a 3D platform environment that just kinda floats over the Mushroom Kingdom. I managed to spend a few seconds pondering how the Mushroom Kingdom’s grasp of biohacking and gravity-defying metamaterials might, in time, make them formidable adversaries for Bowser’s warmongering, but the movie helpfully handwaves all of that away in the same manner as the games: Look, the platforms are only there so Mario has some way of hopping around up there to jump on Bowser. The Toads are just there to look helplessly adorable (one of them even explains this in dialogue), and Bowser is an unstoppable nemesis until you manage to jump on him three times and then he collapses like a neutron star. And in this movie, all of those same things will occur, but a camera will swoop around Mario impressively as he looks a bit frightened that he won’t make it, before he ultimately makes it. Peach kindly explains that not everyone gets it the first time, before strongly implying that she did. And even as we get a glimpse of the subtle evolution that Peach has made over the decades from being the object of gameplay to a sorta-protagonist, this movie contains no shortage of reminders that it has literally nothing to show you that you haven’t already seen in a video game.

There’ll be some driving, of course. The Kongs toodle around on Mario Karts, and the Rainbow Road highway chase was everything that a colorful pursuit through a formless void with shells and banana peels being thrown around can be. And Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) was certainly a character who appeared in this movie. I’m so tired. I don’t want to dunk on The Super Mario Bros Movie anymore, I really don’t. And it’s not necessary. It’s headed for a $225 million opening weekend. Everyone already knows the emperor has no clothes (preferring to stomp around in a spiky shell), and they’re going to come see the parade anyway. Let it never be said that I can’t appreciate shallow spectacle – I did, after all, put Avatar: The Way of Water into my Top 10 for last year. I appreciate its entertainment value for a demographic I used to be in, and its mere existence won’t stop me from shelling out for the next Mario launch title whenever Nintendo gets around to releasing a new system. Which means that if nothing else, the movie was effective. I just wasn’t one of its desired effects.

FilmWonk rating: 5 out of 10