Author: S. Brady Calhoun

This is a movie that declines anything resembling a Hollywood hook. 

Audiences will find neither a broad comedy, a horror or a a special effects spectacle. Instead, it’s about a woman navigating her life, rationalizing her decisions and dealing with the emotional fallout of her choices. 

It’s romantic, a little, and deals honestly with the immigrant experience of a Korean woman who immigrated to Canada as a child and is trying to make it in America. 

I figured I would be the only one in my theater to show up. But a young couple (possibly teenagers) sat a few rows behind me. So, it was just the three of us grappling with writer/director Celine Song’s film.

In the first section of the movie shows us Nora and Hae Sung who have a puppy-like hand-holding romance at 12. 

12 years later they find each other over the newly formed Facebook. They are worlds apart but still connected. And they begin to speak every day and share their lives with each other. 

And then, spoilers, they essentially break up. Neither will leave their career behind to move across the country for the other. Each of them say it will be a year before they could even get their heads above water enough to get on the same continent. 
Nora (Greta Lee) tells Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) she needs some space. Then, she meets Arthur, marries him and moves to New York City.

The movie shifts again to 12 years later. Hae Sung comes to New York City to visit. Nora agrees to spend a few days with him. They have deep and meaningful connection, still. But Nora is married. Hae Sung allegedly has a girlfriend (although the movie never shows her and I think she does not exist). Arthur is a good guy and a good husband. Although, I’m docking points because he apparently wrote a book called Boner. 

Arthur and Nora have a conversation in bed that many couples will recognize. It’s the, “Why are you with me conversation.”

Why me, why is, why now, why here? 

If this were a story, Arthur explains, Hae and Nora would run off together. Nora makes a joke, explaining how this couldn’t be possible. She would never leave her work. 

Instead of anything resembling emotional pyrotechnics everyone involved has a series of conversations. Each of them deep, meaningful and carefully considered. 

No one wants to hurt anyone, no one wants to be hurt. 

The ending is inevitable but the movie suggests something, in an alley, in its final scene. Nora never says a word, it’s all done in looks. It’s the best bit of acting I’ve seen this year. 

And then it’s over. 

From behind me I heard one of the kids say, “Is that it?” 

But to me it was more than enough. I was locked into every moment and couldn’t look away. 

And here’s what I want to say to you. If you are young watch this movie. Give it a chance. I know it’s not the usual fare. Then I want you to watch it again in 12 years. 

I’m in my 40s and I felt every emotional choice, every conversation and every tear. But what will it feel like when I watch it again in my 60s? 

You can’t enter the same river twice. And people change so much, so quickly in some ways. 

And sometimes we remain completely the same. The people we were when we were 12 or 24 or 36 are still there. Our past lives moving with us through the years. 

What if Charlie Kaufman wrote a Wes Anderson movie?

This is it, more or less, a movie that’s thrilling and confounding and moving in equal measure. 

As I was going in the teenager at the concession stand asked me what movie I was watching. After hearing it he furrowed his brow and said, “a bunch of us watched it, none of us know what happened.” 

That is a hell of an endorsement. 

But it isn’t correct or it’s not correct for me. I know exactly what happened but I can’t tell you why any of it happened, what it means or what Anderson was referencing for this one. 

This movie gives us the usual Anderson visuals and story and then does a black and white documentary (I think?) that purports to show us scenes of the playwright, the director and the actors who first brought the original play of the movie we are watching to life. 

In the movie there is definetly a story unfolding that follows from A to B to Z. But the documentary sections aren’t telling a story, instead they are commenting on it or maybe riffing on the themes of it. 

At one point the actor playing the alien says, “I’m going to play him as a metaphor.”

Someone then asks, “A metaphor for what?”

He responds, “I don’t know.”

And if that bit if business didn’t just give you an immediate need to go see this movie then you should probably stop reading this review and move on with your life. 

Wes Anderson makes movies for like 10 people and weirdly given my background and education I happen to be one of them. 

Anderson’s main influence on his last movie was The New Yorker and I spent the whole movie like the Captain America gif: “I know that reference!”

Here, fraid not. I wanted to write this before I looked up the trivia and find out exactly what Anderson is up to. I would not want you, dear reader, to think I am smart enough to get it when I clearly didn’t. 

And while I don’t know the references it didn’t dampen any bit of my love for the film. 

Like, I’m sure if I took creative writing at Brown at any time in the last 50 years I would have studied the 1950s era playwright who is likely satirized in this movie. 

Certainly, given how the movie begins and the subject matter you might think of the Twilight Zone but Anderson rejects any lessons and the comparisons don’t hold for long. 

Anderson and Tim Burton remain the only directors of the last 50 years where production design is ever present in every film. You can take any frame of any of their movies and recognize the director like they handed you a business card. 

And there is definetly several elements that felt like this was Wes Anderson does Mars Attacks. Those are the setting, the music and the alien itself. Oh, and someone has a disintegration ray. 

Someday Anderson will do a movie based on comic books from the 1960s and I will be able to tell you all about it. 

I’ll tell you something else I find interesting about Wes Anderson films. He gets the greatest collection of actors in the world and then prevents them from doing anything close to emoting or capital A acting. 

It works so well because anytime something close to an emotion shows up on screen is moves the audience. But it remains funny that nearly every actor, many of whom make their living playing characters that are permanently at a 10, are only allowed to play their characters at a 2 and then if they get an emotional denouement at all it will be a 3. 

There is a moment here where Tom Hanks grandfather character has a discussion with his son-in-law (Jason Schwartzman) about the death of his daughter and Schwartzman’s wife.

And in the scene Hanks gets frustrated with Schwartzman and pantomimes grabbing him and shaking him.

But he pantomimes it, he doesn’t actually touch him. And here’s the perfect encapsulation of every Wes Anderson character ever. They are constantly frustrated with each other and they are forever unwilling to fully show their emotions or reach out and take hold of each other. 

Two other things that struck me. Schwartzman has three small daughters who learn of their mother’s death and then grieve in their own weird and amusing way. Every scene with them is heartbreaking and hilarious.

If the whole movie had been more of this? Perfect. If the whole movie had jettisoned the Charlie Kaufmanesque meta story? Sure I would have loved it.

Second thing I keep thinking about. 

There is a scene in the documentary section where Schwartzman’s actor character is discussing a speech he is going to give in the play. And now I wonder if I remembering this right. Maybe it was Scarlett Johanson’s character or both of them together. Regardless, the discussion is about a speech which is given in the documentary that clearly sums up the themes and emotions of everyone in the main plot.

And when it happened I thought, “oh, they are gonna do this again, in the main story, with everyone finally playing some emotion and it is going to be amazing.” 

And then, something else happens. And that scene doesn’t get a repeat. 

It’s so audacious that they don’t go back to it and it felt so brilliant and (please forgive me) it’s CINEMA! 

And as I write this it’s entirely possible that I just missed it. Maybe it happened and I missed it in the maze that is this movie. 

But I don’t think so. 

Instead, near the end Schwartzman leaves the movie, has a discussion in the documentary section of the movie with the actress who was supposed to play his dead wife in the play (but her scene got cut for timing) and misses his cue.

I think that scene was supposed to happen there and instead we got a different (equally brilliant) scene. 

Here’s a fun aside.

I just called my friend who sees every movie and asked him if I was remembered all this correctly and he said, “Man I’m still trying to piece it together.”

When I pushed him he said, “I took an edible remember?” 

“Ohhh shit. Yeah.” 

“Yeah, when it opened with a black and white documentary the whole crowd heard me go, ‘Fuck me.’ 

Bwah ha ha. 

He wanted one of Anderson’s candy colored delights. Instead, we all got a movie that doubles as a maze mixed with a crossword puzzle. 

The lack of that scene reminds me of The Big Lebowski where several of the characters discuss a big bowling tournament. And given how movies work the audience thinks, ‘man, that bowling tournament is gonna come back and be important later.’

And then that just never happens. Nor does it need to happen. In that era The Coen Brothers were working on a different level making movies that never needed anything close to convential closure. 

One other connection I made was to Goodfellas. That film cruises along with normal movie logic and then in the final five minutes the main character turns to the audience, breaks the fourth wall and explains the brutal truth of his world, our world and how the rest of his life is going to go.

It’s the move of a filmmaker who knows he has you in the palm of his hand. 

We’re long past the point where I could tell you which of Anderson’s movies is his best movie. I’ll let someone else tell you which one is the best one. 

What I can say, safely, is that this one may be his most unique movie in a career full of singular creations.

The way I do this, or did this when I was a young cinephile, is by picking someone and working through all of their films.

Well, not all of them, usually if the reviews all stink I’ll avoid the thing. But this method is how I ended up seeing almost all the Clint Eastwood flicks, and Scorsese’s cannon and most of the Spielberg entertainments. I’ve grown up with Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino so I’ve watched all of those (well I skipping some the Kevin Smith stuff.)

It’s, theoretically, a director’s medium, but in several cases there are writers I try not to miss, David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin especially.

Along the way I tracked down most the highpoints of director Sidney Lumet’s career. So Serpico, of course, and 12 Angry Men and his last great work (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) I think I caught in a theater in 2007. Lumet is one of the great directors of his generation but his style is grounded in documentary and realism.

He doesn’t draw attention to himself.

Dog Day Afternoon certainly has its directorial flourishes but Lumet is usually content to let the story work on its own terms.

There are directors I mostly dislike precisely because they won’t ever let me forget I’m watching a movie and that they directed it.

Anyway, The Verdict is one of those all-timer Lumet movies that should be up there with the best of his work. Paul Newman, playing an old, drunken, failure of a lawyer is given a case by his former law partner.

The movie will eventually explain why Newman (Frank Galvin) is so down and out and then Galvin will, of course, break all the rules in order to win this thing as he finally shakes back to a sober and productive life.

It’s a movie where a lawyer goes to the hospital, sees his pitiful client, and essentially vows to himself that he will cross heaven and hell to see righteousness prevail.

Material like that shouldn’t work. But Newman and Lumet make it work. Apparently, there were several versions of this script but Lumet went back to an older version written by a playwright who had only one other movie credit to his name.

That playwright was David Mamet and the other credit was the Jack Nicholson version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

I didn’t realize it was Mamet until I got to a scene where Newman meets with the opposition. They want to buy him and his clients off. Which is exactly what a good lawyer should do. The whole point of the thing is to take a settlement.

But, as I said earlier, he met the client and made a vow and now, even to his own shock, he can’t take the blood money.

The opposition then points out that Newman doesn’t have a lot of options.

“How’s your law practice?” one of them asks.

“Not too good. I only got the one client,” Newman responds.

And, that’s when I knew this was a Mamet script. Witty but with dialogue that can cut straight to the heart. There’s a betrayal in here too about midway through the movie. And the way it is presented, and the dialogue around it, is unique.

Mamet and Lumet come from the same school of movie making. Show it and don’t tell it and whatever you do don’t overwrite it. The beauty of poetry, haiku, street magic and filmmaking is in doing as little as possible to get a powerful response out of the audience.

Anyway, if you are in the mood for a lawyer picture then this is a top notch lawyer picture. If you want to make a night of it I suggest A Civil Action, which has John Travolta and Robert Duval, and teaches the opposite lesson about lawyers and empathy.

And The Rainmaker which is the best of the John Grisham adaptations and has Matt Damon being earnest, Danny DeVito being sleazy and John Voight being haughty. It might be the best lawyer movie ever made.

The Verdict stands with them. It’s a great one.

Once upon a time oh God he’s doing that thing where he talks about how old he is again we had three channels and no remote control.

You knew what was on television because you flipped between the channels to see what was happening. As the only child I was the resident channel flipper. Only fancy households had TV Guide. Also, what do I need a TV Guide for? There are only three channels.

Yes, they were in color. Shut up.

Anyway, with the advent of cable but before the internet there were about a hundred channels and we had a remote control. My ability to control the VCR became as important as my previous duties to get up and change the channel.

But even with all this new technology we still missed things. And if you missed an episode of Magnum P.I. then you were just out of luck. Hope you catch the rerun in the summer Jack.

Of course, back then, television shows were not serialized all that much and if you missed one it was not all that big a deal. This did not become a problem for me until Babylon 5, which was one of the first great shows of my generation to be heavily serialized. It was syndicated which meant that it often appeared at weird hours and was a struggle to track down.

And then, glory of glories, we got the DVR. First it was known as a TIVO and like the TV Guide it was only for rich people. But it eventually became part of every cable set up. Now, you could tell the tv computer what shows you liked and it recorded all of them, the good ones even recorded syndicated episodes on other channels. You could, over the course of a few months, get every episode of The Simpsons or Buffy The Vampire Slayer or some other classic show.

What I didn’t know then that I know with certainty now, is that a lot of technology can actually make life worse. Much worse.

For instance, the TIVO and the DVRs let us skip ads. What has the streaming era brought to many of us? Unskippable ads.

Ugh.

The other thing that has happened is that the television and movies you might want to watch are buried in a hive of different services that don’t talk to each other or talk to whatever computer box you use to watch shows.

It’s so bad (both how the stuff is presented and my television addiction) that I have to use several apps to keep it all straight. Here are some of the ones I like:

Letterboxd:

For good or bad this blog exists because of Letterboxd and Twitter. Letterboxd is a place to catalogue movies you have watched and the review them. You can follow other people and read their reviews. It’s fun and I was having a fun time with it and then one day I said to myself, “Hey, what happens if an absolute schmuck buys Letterboxd and all these things you wrote on there just disappear.”

Or say, the cheapo new owner wants to start charging for the previously free services? After watching Stop! Or My Mom will Shoot do you have the perfect essay on how it fits into Stallone’s mid-career choices? That will be $8 please.

Letterboxd is wisely (I think) dedicated to film. But as a serious TV watcher it leaves a lot of room for me to use other services.

Sequel:

A tracker for nearly everything. It lists movies, series, games, books, and audiobooks. I don’t much care for the layout or the (I’m struggling for the right word) the way it feels, I guess. The way it works? Intuitive. That’s the word. This is not intuitive to me. I would be nice to have everything in one place. It also gets bonus points because it has home screen widgets. If you don’t know what those are then don’t worry about it. If you do then know what they are then know that Sequel is the only one, I think, that has them and they are cool.

I haven’t tried the book or audiobook sections of Sequel. Also, for me, if I was going to have one app to rule them all, then it would need comic books as well.

Speaking of Comic Books.

I use CovrPrice and CLZ Comics. I think CovrPrice is the best of the various comic book tracker things I’ve tried. No one has gotten this right yet though. And it’s a hard one to crack. If CovrPrice had an interface as easy to use as TV Time (coming up in a minute) it would be a real winner.

Reelgood:

Reelgood is the first one of these tracker things that I used with any regularity. It’s solid and it did what I wanted it to do in terms of keeping me up to date on where I was in various television shows. The movie section was underwhelming though.

TV Time:

This is the one I’m using the most now, has the best interface and does everything I want. I really enjoy the upcoming section to help me keep track of which new episode will show up when and where. This one for me is the winner so far.

Callsheet:

I ended up in a beta test for Callsheet, a new app that was released today. Think of it as IMDB but optimized for your iPhone. Callsheet actually helped me find the Sarah Silverman comedy special I was looking for yesterday. It wasn’t Netflix it was HBO.

I like Callsheet, I’ll probably pay the $9 a year the developer is asking for it. It’s a good little resource to help you keep actors and movies and shows straight. It isn’t really competing with TV Time or any of the rest of these other apps. It’s not for keeping track of things (at least not so far). But it does what it does well, and you can stay away from the gunked up internet to get a movie or TV answer.

Apple TV:

The app is actually one of the first places I go to figure out where I can watch a movie or a tv show. It does a great job of pointing you to the right streamer. And I skipped Blu Rays and bought a ton of movies and some TV directly from Apple over the years.

I’m mostly happy with my life choices.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was always going to be my kind of show. A chatty, well-written dramedy about a woman trying to make it as a comedian in 1960s New York?

Sure thing.

I’m a dialogue guy and the dialogue on this show was otherworldy in a good way. It wasn’t realistic, it takes place in a fantasy world where most of the people involved have modern sensibilities. It took the origin of (I suspect) Joan Rivers and mixed it with a few real-world celebrities (most notably Lenny Bruce) and built a story about a young divorced woman who was trying to break into the big time.

It had a spectacular first season but delivered diminishing returns through its five-year run.

Before we get into how great the first season was let me tell you where I almost tapped out.

One of the things that kept continually happening on this show was that Midge would be presented with an opportunity that would make her famous and successful and she would almost immediately blow it up.

Usually by mentioning the one thing she should not mention, whatever it was, in her stand-up routine. The first go-around of this was with a character named Sophie Lennon, (the amazing Jane Lynch) who presented herself to her audience as a big, dumb, and poor New Yorker. A kind of mash-up of Henny Youngman and Minnie Pearl.

Lennon in real life is rich, poised, and cruel. And this dichotomy cannot stand. So Maisel slices and dices her in her stand-up and dooms her first real shot at a good career.

And that is not the point where I emotionally checked out of the series.

It was when Midge did it a second time. That happened in the third season with a character named Shy Baldwin, a black singer who is gay. This time, Midge is about to go on a world tour as his opening act and she, (either because she was incredibly stupid or because the writers needed it) makes a few minor jokes that hint at his sexuality.

At the end of season 3 Midge is quite literally left at the airport.

It was a moment where you could feel the heavy hand of the writer going, “Nah, we can’t actually do a world tour yet, we got too many other plans. There are characters back in New York who must be serviced, there isn’t enough budget for it, yadda yadda yadda.”

I feel this way anytime John Goodman gets killed on a television show I like.

Ahh, they wanted to lure me in with John Goodman but they didn’t want to keep paying that John Goodman money.

Ok, that may have only happened two times but you get my point.

Even if these decisions drove me batty, I kept up with the series. Stephanie Hsu was in this thing and she was fantastic. I got to see her light up a scene long before Everything Everywhere All At Once.

And then, because television can sometimes^* turn the battleship around, season five was as good as, or better than the first season.

It had a couple of things working in its favor. First, everyone knew this was the final season so there was no reason to hold back. Second, the creators dispensed with the idea that Midge might not make it. The show now included flash-forwards and allowed us to see that Midge is, in the future, both rich and successful and had the kind of career she dreamed of.

At first, I thought this was the wrong call. As if I knew better than the brilliant Amy Sherman-Palladino. I do not. The flash-forwards, or future timeline, or whatever you want to call it made the show work in a whole new dimension giving it both the ability to tell more story and to make the moments in the present more dramatic (instead of the less drama I feared.)

The flash-forwards give us the arc of Midge’s career and the impact it had on her friends, family, and children. But we also get glimpses of her ex-husband’s future, her kids, and in one of the best episodes of the show, a roast (set in the future timeline) of Midge’s manager Susie Myerson.

The season also gave us several moments of real heartbreak. Midge’s daughter, grown up, brilliant and tortured, says that the only one who ever understood her was her grandfather but he’s gone now.

That grandfather, played by Tony Shalhoub, coming to the realization that his daughter, whom he mostly ignored because she wasn’t his son, was a brilliant person who had overcome an amount of adversity that would have crushed him. I can’t do it justice because I can’t remember exactly how it was phrased but it was a gut punch with Shaloub wringing every bit of emotion out of it.

There’s a bit with Susie where she has to confront the first great love of her life in order to get Midge a shot on a television show. Susie had fallen in love with a woman in college who went on to dump her and eventually marry Gordon Ford. Ford just happens to now have his own television show and Midge is working as the only woman in the writer’s room.

Sure, it’s convenient but it’s also good television.

Anyway, eventually, Susie does what she has to and then pours her heart out about her lost love to Midge.

And Midge, still oblivious to a lot of the world, asks Susie if she ever fell in love again.

Susie answers the question with a devastating look. This pair of fictional characters went through the best and worst years of their lives together. If you ever wonder why that is, you could see it right then, in Susie’s face.

The finale gives us one more stunning turn of Midge doing stand-up in a high pressure situation and killing it and then an epilogue that suggests the final years were both happy and sad, just as life is and will be for all of us.

* Two other last season turnarounds I can think of. The final season of The West Wing, which still suffered from serious problems but gave us two new politicians who reinvigorated the storylines and punctuated the show’s themes. And Angel Season 5. Angel was good to great for the first four seasons. Season 5 flips the premise of the show entirely and was the best season of any of the Whedonverse shows ever.

For good or bad this is a Marvel movie.

It stars Chris Pine as a rogueish balladeer with a heart of gold and a tragic backstory. He gathers a team of quirky heroes: a chaotic good wizard, a neutral good warrior, a lawful good paladin, and a neutral good druid.

Together they must save his daughter from Hugh Grant’s Lawful Evil con man (and Pine’s former partner) and then an entire town from a Chaotic Evil wizard.

There is a decent amount of true emotion in it and plenty of action and quips. Fun, fast, get in and get out with a little fighting, almost no romance, a dungeon, a fat dragon and a (spoiler) mostly happy ending.

There were, I’m sure, plenty of in-jokes to make the D&D faithful happy but there was also enough here for an outsider, like myself, to have a good time with it.

Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez play versions of the same character we have seen them play in a half-dozen action comedy movies over the last decade or so. This is not a bad thing. It’s … comfortable.

Also, I’m looking forward to this phase of Hugh Grant’s career where he just plays weasels. He’s a natural.

I think this was an above-average take on material that can be impossible to fit into the frame. Not only does it remind me of a Marvel movie but I suddenly recall Pirates of the Caribbean. We all walked in asking ourselves, “A Theme Park Ride? How are they going to make that work?”

And then most everyone left happy and satisfied.

I know, I know, I’m an easy mark for this stuff.

But I want you to know that this one is better than the others. You probably had to be a really serious superhero comic fan to watch all (or even most) of the CW Greg Berlanti superhero shows.

All of those shows followed a basic formula that mostly worked. TV Budget level superhero hijinks in the opening, some light comedy followed by 35 minutes of crying in hallways, 5 minutes of TV Budget level superhero hijinks and then a group hug or a cliffhanger and finis.

I’m not, necessarily insulting the formula here, despite a lot of what happened over the last 20 years most great TV usually needs a formula. Law and Order, Columbo, House, The Office and dozens of others understood the mission and nailed it down and were rewarded by audiences that loved them for it.

Anyway, Superman and Lois follow the CW formula but it is usually miles better than its contemporaries. It’s one of those things that sticks out to me because every time I watch the thing I am happy surprised. And it’s nice to be happy surprised because usually surprises from the CW go the other way.

Here’s what I decided.

First, the premise of this particular flavor of Superman is the right thing at the right time. It presents Lois and Clark as the parents of teenagers trying to raise their boys while also fighting supervillains and uncovering evil plots.

That’s a new wrinkle. We’ve had decades of Superboy in Smallville, Superman starting out in Metropolis, and established and married Superman and Lois. But the super-couple with teenagers? I like it.

One of the boys should have been named Bruce though.

Also, I think the acting is a cut above.

Bitsie Tulloch manages to make world famous multi-time Pulitizer prize winning reporter Lois Lane larger than life without stretching it too far. The best bit from a recent episode is that Lois did a Masterclass on reporting. Of course she did!

This season features Chad Coleman (he’s been in everything but was a big presence in early years of The Walking Dead and The Expanse) as Metropolis gangster Bruno Mannheim. Coleman is one of those actors who always brings something interesting and, again the writers have given him a range of reasonable emotions to play.

Tyler Hoechlin can really do the Superman and Clark Kent thing quite well. I think his Clark isn’t quite as nerdy as you might want but since the series is set in Smallville and he’s a dad of teenagers what he does with Clark works within the show’s parameters.

There’s a moment I loved recently when, coming home to find his family had been accosted by a local neer-do-well Hoechlin, with fire in his eyes, announces that he’s going to confront the jerk at the Smallville diner.

Lois: Superman can’t get involved.

Clark: Oh he’s not going!

And then an angry Clark Kent makes that dude pay.

Incredibly good bit.

It’s a show full of good bits. A show that makes a meal out of the soap opera elements but also understands the comic book lore and is able to twist that to its own ends.

The first season featured a unique take on John Henry Irons that had a decent twist along the way. The second season started with the familiar origin of Doomsday and twisted it to present a unique twist on Bizarro Superman. And season three used the soap opera elements to emotionally connect Lois Lane and John Henry Irons’ daughter to the bad guys.

It’s moments like that when the show plays a card you didn’t quite expect, that it really soars.

Also, this show is either written by people who love the comics or at least by people who did their research before launching into the superverse.

Just one example: Lois Lane’s newspaper partner and clumsy sidekick character is named Chrissy Beppo. Beppo is the name of one Superman’s pets. In case you were wondering its Krypto the superdog, Streaky the supercat, Comet the superdog and Beppo, the supermonkey.

That knowledge is something I’ve carried around forever and is just a freeby for y’all.

Finally, and to be fair to the other CW shows, Superman and Lois has the advantage of coming along in the era of 12-episode seasons. If this thing had to grind through 22 episodes, I doubt it could work as well as it does. The other CW super shows also started strong and tended to end somewhere between decent and “oh God I gave up.”

The long middle full of crying hallway scenes were often too much to manage.

Nor has every moment or storyline in Superman and Lois been a winner. I tend to tune out on subplots involving the teenagers. But what I do find compelling is that the cast has enough people, that you usually understand and care about, that when one of them is in trouble you can get concerned.

Comic Book Scribe Gail Simone recently noted on Twitter that heroes need those supporting characters to add drama to the super battles.

A show named Superman and Lois is probably not going to kill off either Superman or Lois. But Lana Lang’s ex-husband? Lois Lane’s military dad (played perfectly by Dylan Walsh of Nip/Tuck) or John Henry Irons’ daughter (Taylor Buck)? All these people could bite the bullet at any moment.

Season 3 is wrapping up as both the CW and DC Entertainment get new management. All the other CW related shows are done and CW won’t get any new ones. Meanwhile, James Gunn is gearing up for a new future that features a keystone movie that he is writing and directing about a (much younger) Superman.

I’m not sure there is space in this brave new world for this show. I’m hopeful though, that they get at least one more season to write themselves and their characters a happy ending.

Writer/Director James Gunn takes the characters he made famous through one final, musical and emotional adventure that delivers everything a fan could want.

Gunn once again proves that he can make esoteric superhero and science fiction material and turn in a story with heart and a few laughs. This is a movie that confidently rests its emotional core on a CGI trash panda and Bradley Cooper’s vocal skills.

Just the intestinal fortitude of that decision alone is enough for me. To center your movie on Rocket’s tragic origins without fear of flopping? Wow.

Guardian’s aesthetic has, perhaps, been ugly cute all along, but this one really puts the weirdness on display by giving plenty of screen time to the horrific creations of the High Evolutionary.

The “your CGI looks bad” crowd won’t be complaining this go around. This movie looks great and Gunn takes every opportunity to show you something new and different. An organic space station (or spaceship) is certainly not new but I don’t think I have ever seen one on a mainstream movie and certainly nothing to this degree. Depending on your point of view Nope and Babylon 5 may be the exceptions to this pronouncement.

Gunn also flies high at two things, top notch fight scenes and giving every, single character a storyline. That’s nearly impossible with a cast that’s gotten this shaggy, but Gunn even finds a setup and a payoff for Cosmo the dog.

Gunn is also a master of a cliche so old that Sam Peckinpah originated in the Wild Bunch in 1969. But it’s a cliche because when done right it always works. So yes, there is a walk (set to the perfect song) where the main characters all stand together and head off to face unbeatable odds.

“I’m done running,” one of the Guardians says as the final charge begins.

Friends, it just works.

Chukwudi Iwuji, as the bad guy, takes another cosmic Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creation and makes you believe in his unique motivations and emotional flaws. Iwuji deserves so much credit for carrying his part of the story.

Finally, Gunn finds a way to pay off every storyline that he began in the first movie. Even things that began in an emotional opening sequence. It’s a true final bow to a trilogy that in MCU fashion also includes Guardian storylines from Avengers movies and a small thing in the Disney+ Holiday Special.

There are a few small flaws. Gunn emptied his playlist and I think included some pop hits that were probably unnecessary. The High Evolutionary is not that far removed from Vol. 2’s Ego in terms of his story beats.

And? Well, not much else.

I absolutely would stack it up with any other trilogy you might want to name. These things tend to run out of steam by the time we get to the third one. Guardians of the Galaxy still had plenty of gas in the tank.

It flies and dances joyously into the forever.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 is not the greatest superhero movie ever made but it is my favorite superhero movie.

Briefly: The best superhero movie ever made is Spider-man 2 (the Sam Raimi one with Doc Ock). The most important superhero movie ever made is Joss Whedon’s Avengers.

Vol. 1 goes from a stunning opening where a boy loses his mom and gets kidnapped by aliens immediately into an amusing heist with a dancing hero (Star-lord mannn) and then breezes through a fun plot about buncha losers who find they have to work together to be their best selves and save millions of lives from a racist villain.

Rhomann Dey: They call themselves the Guardians of the Galaxy.

Denarian Saal: What a bunch of a-holes.

Guardians of the Galaxy

It toes the line between comedy and action and drama so effortlessly and with so much joy that you never come down from that initial high.

In comics, a team of castoffs and losers was old hat, but at the movies, the A-list still ruled the box office. Despite a wealth of interesting characters DC can never manage to do much more than endless reboots of just Superman and Batman. Meanwhile, which their biggest hit characters licensed out Marvel turned to its other heavy hitters — a super-soldier, a Norse God, and a billionaire scientist with a super-suit.

The Guardians are most definitely none of those things. Instead, they are space criminals and losers and idiots.

It is obvious that Director James Gunn had a lot of affection for Star Wars but to comic fans it’s also clear that Gunn had probably read plenty of comics and specifically the classic J.M. Dematteis, Keith Giffen and Kevin Maguire run of the Justice League. Affectionately known (by me at least) as the Bwah ha ha era.

In that run most of the heavy hitters couldn’t join the Justice League and so the premier super team in DC comics was made up of second-string characters (I like Booster Gold but he ain’t Superman) and although there was plenty of super action there was also a ton of comedy.

Gunn, who took over the project that was begun by screenwriter and director Nicole Perlman, pulls this off and manages to hit the notes needed for the overarching 10-year-long Infinity Saga plot.

Both movies also find their groove through the use of pop music. And, no offense to anyone, but most of it is second-tier pop music. Gunn’s ability to find just the right song for just the right moment is up there with two other great directors, Quentin Tarantino, and Martin Scorsese.

It’s still a movie that ends with a dance-off. It’s still a movie that doesn’t quite make sense of Starlord’s relationship with his kidnapper. Gunn hints at it and then makes it the central theme of Vol. 2.

Yondu: He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn’t your daddy.

Guardians of the Galxy Vol. 2

It is not perfect. But it is as close to perfect as most any movie ever gets.

Vol. 2 is the rare sequel that is on par with the original. It doesn’t surpass the original. The second bite at the apple is rarely as good as the first. But it is nearly equal to Vol. 1.

If Baby Groot dancing between the life and death battle his adoptive family faces doesn’t fill your heart then I wish you joy in your future endeavors and regret to inform you that we cannot be friends.

The sequel expands a stacked cast with bright spots by adding another ally in Mantis and turning Nebula into a reluctant part of the family.

The movie drags a bit (though not much) and I giggle every time I watch the scene where Ego takes the song Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) and uses it to hammer home the plot of the movie he’s starring in. It is not subtle.

However, a movie with a talking trash panda, two alien assassins, an empath who looks like a bug, a sentient tree, and a muscle-bound warrior who can only understand literal phrases probably left subtle a long time ago.

As I write this I am a couple hours away from seeing Vol. 3.

We’ve been on a 10-year journey with this crew with these two movies, last year’s Holiday Special, and their appearances in Infinity War and Endgame.

And with Gunn taking over the film and television division of DC this is most likely the closing chapter for both the Guardians and Gunn’s involvement with the MCU.

Every great story needs a final chapter and in the movies when you hit the third one it’s usually a fine time to turn out the stage lights.

We don’t know what tomorrow holds but we can be certain that this was a great ride. All the way from the opening notes to (hopefully) the final stanza.

Charlie Wilson’s War is not quite a bullseye but second tier Aaron Sorkin is still full of crackle and wit. 

Sorkin is a screenwriter, like David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino, Jane Espensen and Kevin Smith who’s style is so distinct that I can pick it out with my eyes closed. 

Most of us who write are interchangeable but a few have a style so distinct that it is unmissable. 

And this is right in what would seem to be Sorkin’s wheelhouse. A somewhat true history about a shady US Congressman who recognized that the country should fund Afghanistan fighters in their war for freedom against Russia. 

Sorkin, who wrote both the American President and the untouchable first four years of The West Wing is the perfect guy for a tale about the inner workings of the US Government. 

The movie joins Wilson at a party with naked playboy models and cocaine in Las Vegas. Wilson clearly revels in a liberated life and is enjoying the perks all his status has to offer. 

Here’s his statement to the press when a scandal about that lifestyle breaks, “The congressman has never been to rehab. They don’t serve whiskey in rehab.” 

Whether or not Charlie Wilson needs to go to rehab (yes he does) is not the point. Wilson (Tom Hanks) is functioning just fine and he seems to be able to do a decent job of being a congressman. 

He offers an obvious solution to a political problem early in the flick and surrounds himself with a whipsmart staff. They also happen to all be beautiful women. 

He has a reason for that … which I’m not going to repeat here. 

Wilson gets dragged into the Afghanistan conflict and then he goes to the country and finds himself in a unique place where he has the power to do, what he believes is an important thing. 

He will use the levers of the US government to fund the Mujahideen and fight off the Russians. Afghanistan will become their Vietnam — a quagmire that drags the whole empire down. 

Wilson is joined by Julia Roberts who is having a ball playing the 8th richest woman in Texas and who sees Afghanistan as a holy war for her particular flavor of conservative Christianity. 

And the late Philip Seymore Hoffman plays CIA Agent Gust Avrakotos who is perhaps the only spy in the history of the movies who constantly tells the truth to everyone he meets. 

I particularly enjoy the way Hoffman hits this line, “For twenty-four years people have been trying to kill me. People who know how.”

The movie has a solid flow and it rushes  through its historical set up and then to what Wilson and his compradres did to fund this phase of the cold war with the Russians without starting a hot war. 

I think the rush to the finish line sacrificed a lot of nuance and I get the feeling that some scenes were left on the cutting room floor. There are times when Wilson seems to have serious alcohol related medical issues but that’s never dealt with or explained. 

And this ever rises to top-tier Sorkin for me. It’s not in the same league as Moneyball or The Social Network. I’m not sure I can articulate exactly why. I wonder if it’s just hard to buy Tom Hanks as a congressman who says with a straight face: 

Charlie Wilson: Well, Jesus, Donnelly. Everyone in town knows I’m on the other side of that issue.

Donnelly: Ethics?

Charlie Wilson: Yeah!

Hanks’ persona is built on earnest affability. But Charlie Wilson needed something different, I think. Hanks doesn’t, for instance, snort cocaine at a cocaine party in Vegas. Later, Hanks would say that he didn’t refuse to do it but that no one ever asked him to pretend to do a line. 

That’s kind of the definition of the problem. Would casting someone else have made a difference? 

Maybe. We’ll never really know. To quote a former U.S. Secretary of Defense it’s an unknown unknown. 

In the end Charlie Wilson is around to catch both his flowers and a warning from Gust about how this glorious victory might backfire. 

The audience and the filmmakers have the benefit of hindsight and so we know that eventually, the Mujahideen come to believe that Russia is only one of their enemies and that they attack us several times over the next few decades until they kill 3,000 Americans on 9/11. 

The movie suggests that if America had done more to rebuild Afghanistan after Russia fled this might not have happened. 

Perhaps. 

Or perhaps the people who attacked America were simply mad men who would attack us no matter what we did or didn’t do. 

I’m reminded of a quote from another great war movie. 

“Doesn’t matter what it was. When one man says to another, “I know what let’s do today, let’s play the war game.”… everybody dies.” 

A Bridge Too Far