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I realize that’s a presumptuous question. It presumes that the studio that made “Supergirl”, despite spending billyuns on market research or whatever, had no idea what they were doing and, if they had a target audience, they had no clue how to connect with it. It also presumes that I am a cinematic genius, and know EXACTLY the target audience and how it *should* have gone, but didn’t. Well... It would seem that, like Washington DC, Hollywood is composed of idiots that are more eager to bootlick their way to climbing the industry ladder more than actually providing a decent product that people want to support. Not always true (well, it *is* always true of Washington DC), but frequently the case. It’s also true that I’m a cinematic genius, despite never having been involved in a movie production. You know what they say, those who can’t do, geniusify.

Based on the title alone, I am going to go ahead and propose that the target audience for “Supergirl” is girls. Based on the box office results, where it is possibly the biggest bomb of the year, I am going to propose that it didn’t land with its target audience, or any audience. I’m not shocked it didn’t land with men, because the film treats all men as obstacles for women to overcome in order to manifest their innate awesomeness. I mean, I get it. Men are dicks. Spoiler alert: Women are *also* dicks, proving that you don’t need one to be one.

But to examine why “Supergirl” is such a miss for girls, I will examine three franchises that were big hits with them. “Twilight”, “Harry Potter”, and “Frozen”. What do those three franchises have in common? Well, they all feature young women that have an attitude or trait that society views as a flaw, so they’re kind of social pariahs that are off doing their own thing. Bella is mopey and introverted, Hermione is more interested in math (”Maths” in Britain) and science than dolls and tea parties, and Elsa is a divine being with godlike power in a world that apparently doesn’t have any of those other than her.

As it happens, all three of those women would end up finding a community that not only accepts their idiosyncrasies, but values them. Vampires are notoriously mopey, so they welcome Bella with open arms. Wizards need maths to figure out spells and stuff, and Elsa literally just uses her power to create her own community from scratch, because she is capable of manifesting sentient life with a thought. Plus, she chills out with her sister. The point is, these communities don’t just accept differences, they nurture them. That’s a pretty powerful positive, not just for girls but for anybody. But especially girls. Especially considering that the idea that *everybody is fucked up* in some way is a Movieshyte thesis.

So this brings me to Kara. Supergirl. Like those other heroines, Kara is also “different”. She’s living on a red sun planet that strips her of her powers so that she can get drunk every night. She’s angry, short with people, and generally unpleasant. She’s not just depressed... She seems actually broken. She’s incredibly unlikeable, but all you have to do is read anything by Joe Abercrombie to realize that you don’t have to actually like characters in order to be intensely interested in what they do.

We learn over the course of the movie *why* Kara is like this. It’s survivor’s guilt. Unlike her cousin Kal, aka Superman, she wasn’t a baby when her father shot her from a dying world to earth. She was a teenager. To give a quick plot summary, Kara’s home planet Krypton blew up, but her dad, Zor-El, knew it was going to happen and built this energy field that took her home city and detached it from the planet and sent it into space. Krypton is gone, and these Kryptonians are now floating aimlessly in a city they call Argo because they’re big Ben Affleck fans. Well, history does nothing if not repeat itself, and Argo *also* starts to die as the people get sick from kryptonite exposure. Zor-El finds his brother Jor-El’s plans for the earthbound spaceship, and builds a ship for his teenage daughter Kara to escape the dying Argo and flee to Earth. Now, you might ask, why doesn’t Zor-El build spaceships for *everybody* on Argo? When asked, Zor-El responds “It’s not our place to become gods”.

Say what!?! Did you put that up to a vote, my man? Did everybody on Argo vote to stay and die of poisoning rather than go to Earth and acquire superpowers from the yellow sun? I’m going to go ahead and say no. This is what you get with autocracy. When a society is governed by a small number of “great leaders” and the common people just have to abide by their decisions... Your great leaders decide that it’s unethical for everybody *except their own fucking daughter* to become superpowered and doom your entire civilization. Again. Merry christmas, Kryptonians. Enjoy your philosopher king. Except you can’t, because your civilization was wiped out twice.

Kara is a TEENAGER when all this goes down. She understands that her crazy cult leader asshole dad is dooming her friends and neighbors while saving *her*. You think that might fuck somebody up? You think that might lead to somebody REJECTING the godlike power her friends were never allowed in the first place? We are watching a broken young woman, we are given her story, and I can completely empathize with Kara’s plight and be invested in her grappling with it, even if I’m not a huge fan of how she acts.

Here’s where the movie completely fails where those earlier franchises succeed. We’re given the backstory of Kara’s trauma... But it’s completely ignored. Does Kara find a community that understands this terrible ordeal she’s gone through and embraces her for it? Nope. Does she... Come to terms with it? Nope. Does she... Continue to act like a jerk while following a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” story progression that only cares about taking her from location A to location B to location C for the next special effects setpiece? Yup.

Me and my cinematic genius don’t get it. You have a character I can empathize with right there. But instead of rooting for her or being uplifted as she learns to process her trauma, I get to watch her punch people and do random stuff and encounter horrible man after horrible man. Even Lobo, the intergalactic bounty hunter, who is presumably a hero, is an asshat. Kara never comes to terms with the fact that the *MOST* horrible man is her father, who saved her while killing her friends because of ethical dogma.

On top of all that... Kara changes at the end. She stops drinking and decides to embrace her powers, put on the mini skirt and hooker boots and kick ass for the lord. Tangent: When I say “hooker boots”, I say it with affection. Those boots are awesome. I remember seeing the “Pretty Woman” poster for the first time, where Julia Roberts is wearing classic hooker boots, and it was probably the most erotic experience I’d had up to that point. I want to say I was 28 at the time.

Despite the fact that Kara’s shiny red boots are tight... It’s a shame that she puts them on. Why? Unlike Bella, Hermione, and Elsa, who are accepted for being different, Kara does THE EXACT OPPOSITE. She conforms to EXACTLY what society wants her to be: A sex symbol and a super hero. For no reason other than the script decided it for her. She works through nothing. The big climax of the movie is when she tells the girl she’s been escorting NOT to take revenge, because revenge will “rot your soul”. How does she know? She’s 23! What on earth does she know about revenge? What does revenge have to do with *her* story? Her dad already got revenge on himself by dying with everybody else on Argo. It makes no sense. Then, when Kara’s speech works and the girl walks away... Kara goes up to the bad guy, says “This is for my dog”, and kills him, even though HER DOG IS STILL ALIVE. Is this the action of somebody that has dealt with trauma? Or is it the action of either a complete psychopath or someone that has spiraled into such despair that morality now means nothing to her?

Yet this person returns to Earth, quits drinking or being mopey, dons the costume and becomes the hero everybody wants. Well, everybody except her. It’s grotesque.

There’s a ton of other minor flaws. I’ll talk about a couple that stood out to me. The group of evil men go by the name “The Brigands”. Really? “The Brigands”? Was “The Bad Folks” taken? Come on, people. What happened to real gang names? Like... For instance... Murder Incorporated. In the first scene, the leader of the brigands goes into a couple’s house. He’s looking for something, and he’s going to find out where it is from this poor couple using Hans Landa intensity. Except, his first words after he sits down are “Is that PIE??”. Well done, writers. Best introductory villain lines ever. “What’s the most you’ve ever lost on a coin toss?”, “You are part of the rebel alliance, and a traitor”, “Is that PIE??”. The movie is so earth coded it makes me angry. We’re supposed to be in space, yet aliens are singing songs. In a prison cell, we see a two headed mouse. Really? That’s your alien creature? A mouse with another head? It probably wasn’t even a special effect, it was probably imported from Wuhan.

What upsets me isn’t that “Supergirl” was a bad movie. It’s that the interesting movie was right there. They gave you the setup, they gave you the backstory, they gave you the reason to genuinely empathize with a traumatized young woman... Then they ignored it. I’m not saying that finding a community like those other heroines I mentioned earlier would have saved “Supergirl” at the box office. Maybe girls just don’t like comic book movies and it was doomed from the start. But it *could* have saved it from being blasted to ribbons by Movieshyte.

Wait... Is that pie?!?!?!?!?!?

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10/10

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Actually, that’s the wrong question. The right question is, do you think you’re normal?

I’m going to go ahead and say no.

This isn’t because I can read the minds of everybody on earth, or even the Movieshyte transitive property where my lived experience applies to everybody else as well. Actually, it kind of is that last thing. If somebody asks you if you’re normal, I would imagine a lot of folks would say yes. Because the alternative is being “abnormal” and, while some of us might embrace that moniker, plenty of people wouldn’t. But... It’s hard to picture anybody thinking “You know what? I’m a normal person. Right exactly in that sweet spot where I exactly meet society’s mundane expectations of me.” It’s not a pleasant thought. So even though folks might go to great lengths on social media (and in person, but especially on social media these days) to present themselves as normal, they don’t actually think they are.

While there might be a few Raskolnikovs out there who think they aren’t normal because they’re better than everybody else, for the vast majority of people I’m guessing y’all think that you’re fucked up. That you aren’t normal because you have desires, or an appearance, or just... Stuff that you think ‘normal people’ would frown on. And you do! That’s what’s insane about ‘normalcy’. If everybody is fucked up, then what exactly is normal, anyway? Yet, we still have an image of it. I think everybody’s image is different, but “Stable source of income with a monogamous romantic partner” trope sure comes to mind as something that culture presents as a goal to be achieved. Normalcy. But, if nobody is normal, then, if you are trying to achieve normalcy, aren’t you trying to do the impossible? You are! But there’s a ton of cultural pressure to do it anyway. Because, even if we’re all weirdos, we don’t want to appear that way.

Thus, nobody thinks of themselves as normal.

Except Charlie Thompson. He’s our main character in “The Drama”, played by ‘How is it these foos from “Twilight” are actually good actors?!’ poster boy Robert Pattinson. Seriously, I would not have guessed, based on “Twilight”, that Pattinson or K-Stew could actually act. Jury’s kind of still out on K-Stew, but I’ve become a pretty big Pattinson fan.

Back to Charlie Thompson. This is the guy that wakes up, thinks “I’m just a humdrum guy. Monogamous romantic relationship, steady source of income, et al.” Of course, I just postulated that this person isn’t possible, but that’s the beauty of art: We can explore impossible characters. In this case, we get to explore what exactly a “normal dude” actually wants. It comes as a surprise to nobody that he wants... The abnormal. Well, somebody is surprised: Charlie.

Charlie and his fiancee Emma (played by Zendaya... Who, coming off “Challengers” is in another movie about incredibly messed up relationships, so I have to give her props) are out looking at venues with their married best friends Rachel and Mike. They decide to play a pretty nutso game, which is the “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” game. I’ll give you this advice up front: Don’t play this game. Especially if you’re drunk. Well, it turns out that the two men are basically pussies, while the women have flirted with actual evil. Charlie, as a “completely normal” person, has actually NEVER DONE anything wrong, so he had to make up some lame story. Emma, however, reveals that back in high school, she stole a rifle from her dad and was about to commit a school shooting. She held the gun too close to her ear or it misfired, but she basically blew her ear out, and didn’t go through with it.

What would be your reaction to hearing this story? Shock? Horror? Rachel is so disgusted that she essentially ends their friendship (even though Rachel *also* did something pretty evil). I mean... Emma didn’t actually shoot anybody, so it’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, but you would imagine that Charlie, her fiance, would kind of look at her with that suspicious side-eye. That he would be trepidatious, if not outright disgusted.

But what he is, is jealous. Charlie gets angrier and angrier over the course of the movie because he is just so fucking normal, and his fiancee is so fucking... Not. It makes her *interesting* in a way that he isn’t. While I wouldn’t exactly want to put forward “mass shooter” as an example of ‘American Exceptionalism’, to Charlie, it is. It’s an unattainable persona: A person that exists outside the rules of society. Even if she doesn’t. Emma never shoots anybody or does anything I would even construe as ‘weird’, outside of telling her story, and yet that makes her this paragon of rebellion to Charlie, and he’s both fascinated by her and pissed off at himself for not being her.

He has a couple ways of trying to deal with this. First, he tries to “normalize” her. We get a series of flashbacks of Emma’s high school days. She was bullied. She was peer pressured. She was black. Yup, this is the giveaway that these flashbacks aren’t actually Emma’s, they are Charlie constructing his version of her history. Zendaya is... Ethnic (”from the islands”?), but the Emma in the flashbacks is black. This isn’t a continuity error, it is Charlie making her blacker because he’s aware of racism in America and wants to put her in the role of victim, because if she’s a *victim*, then acquiring the rifle and planning the shooting wasn’t her fault, and then she’s not exceptional, and he doesn’t have to loathe himself for being mundane compared to her. It ain’t the first time a dude has co-opted a woman’s history and made it his own, and it won’t be the last. But, unfortunately, even as he invents her past, he can’t fully buy in, so his anger remains.

So, after that, Charlie decides that, rather than ‘normalize’ her, he can radicalize himself! He plants a smooch right on his co-worker out of nowhere, and she is INTO it (even though she also has a boyfriend), and invites him straight to pound town. He’s about to go to town... When he steps back, zips his pants up, apologizes like 5 times and moonwalks out of the room, leaving her (and us) flummoxed. Thus, we are shown the truth of Charlie’s predicament: Normal isn’t a state that somebody should aspire to achieve, it’s a prison he can’t escape. He *has* to be normal. Charlie is British, so partially it’s a British thing, those blokes love the veneer of propriety and manners. So it’s partially that. But it’s mostly how he is. For whatever reason, at some point Charlie became normal, he can’t undo it, and now he is just stuck being furious with no outlet for his fury because he knows that NORMAL IS LAME.

So we get, essentially, an entire movie of Charlie being an ineffectual wuss because of his normality. I ain’t gonna lie, it’s not always an easy watch. Since our only perspective is *his* (even though the movie is, on the surface, about two people, it’s actually just about him, and our impressions of others in the movie are through his lens), we’re pretty much in the world of a normal guy. It’s not a fun world.

And after traversing the landscape of lame for an hour and forty five minutes, Emma forgives Charlie for being a complete douche. To be honest, I still don’t know why. That may well be the point. Even after watching her for a whole movie, we don’t really know anything about her. All we know is what Charlie thinks of her, and he’s making most of that up. She could have lots of reasons for wanting to be with him despite how he acts, and it makes his entire bout with anger and insecurity seem really petty. And annoying. But possibly enlightening?

It might be worth being exposed to a drab world, so that you might want to avoid it. When we have “society” telling us that it’s in everybody’s best interest if we should strive for a specific set of values or goals, it’s nice to have somebody tell you what can happen when you achieve them.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you should try to be weird. I’m also not going to tell you to avoid being typical, either. I’ll just let Charlie Thompson do it.

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5/10

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Never let it be said that I bury the lede! Before I continue, I realize that I have a blanket spoiler warning for all my reviews, but this review in particular is a murder mystery and I’ll be spoiling a lot of it. This is because you can’t have a real conversation about a film without talking about what actually happens in it. Random, non-spoiler comments like “The camera movement is artistically done” are junk and don’t really give you any insight into anything.

Back to dick being the worst. I am referring not to “Tricky Dick” Nixon, or men in general, but specifically sex with men. Now, this doesn’t come from Movieshyte, this comes from the most unassailable source there is: The internet. Yes, the internet has informed me that women are pretty much over sex with men. I’m not sure when women reached this conclusion, it’s very possible they knew it from the jump, but it’s taken roughly 300,000 years for them to say it openly. Well, say it to men. It’s possible they’ve been telling it to each other over the secret “women’s information pipeline” for thousands of years.

You don’t just have to take the internet’s word for it. We have data! Women are falling off Tinder like timber, and migrating en masse to same-sex hook up apps. If sex with men were so great, would this be the case? The data speaks for itself. Dick is the worst.

Which brings me to Bodil, the heroine of “Faithfully Yours”, the delightful Dutch mystery that I am, in theory, supposed to be talking about. Bodil loves having sex with men. *Gasp!*. I can hear the reactions of all the women reading this on Movieshyte: “TRAITOR!!” Sex? With men?? In 2026 (or 2022, when the film was made, but whatever)?? GROSS. She obviously must be punished for being a traitor to her gender.

The filmmakers agree! Because the entire purpose of “Faithfully Yours” is to punish Bodil for having the audacity to like dick. Every single man Bodil encounters, at some point during the film, she will be fleeing for her life away from them. That’s what you get, Bodil! You like sex with men? Then you have to live with the consequences: They will all try to kill you at some point.

Or... Bodil *thinks* they’re trying to kill her. Before the opening credits, the movie opens with a pretentious quote, which is something along the lines of the problem with liars isn’t that nobody believes them, it’s that they are incapable of believing anybody else. On the one hand, starting your film with a pretentious quote does give an audience a clue as to what your movie is going to be about, and possibly provide them with a solid lens to view it through. On the other hand, pretentious quotes are pretentious. If you’re going to make a movie about lying, then try just making a movie about lying and don’t be a douche about it.

The lying starts right away. Bodil and her best friend Isabel, who has 80s hair, are on an ‘academic retreat’ or whatever where they are supposed to go to this lecture and then hang out and have a fun girls night. What the trip *actually* is, is a fuck retreat where both Bodil and Isabel (who are both married, but monogamy is overrated so that’s not exactly an ethical sticking point for me) find strangers to hook up with while their clueless husbands are at home watching sports or being gross or whatever men do.

You might notice right away that I actually buried the lede. Because the biggest takeaway from this movie is that ISABEL HAS 80s HAIR. It’s fantastic! What happened to 80s hair, anyway? I get that it’s, like, a ton of effort... But it’s worth it! Isabel is insane. I wanted the movie to be about her. She goes to this Belgian sex club, and not only has 80s hair, but is wearing that 80s oversized jacket with the huge shoulders. It’s not just because I came up in the 80s that I appreciate these stylistic choices, 80s hair and jackets are OBJECTIVELY the best. I know this because I asked an AI chatbot and it confirmed that huge, blowout hair that requires an entire can of hairspray to maintain is the best. Then, as a control, I asked it if 90s hair was the best, and it agreed... So I immediately shut it off because it was right the first time.

Not only does Isabel have 80s hair... She’s into women. Which makes sense, because her husband is a controlling asshole who put a tracker in her phone without telling her. I don’t condone assholery... But I kind of get it. You want to control the 80s hair. But you can’t. It’s too wild. Too free. The 80s hair will not succumb to the will of any man.

While Bodil is busy hooking up with some dopey professor (who, admittedly, works out and does not have what I would consider a “professor’s body”), Isabel is sleeping with a hot woman. Who happens to be Bodil’s sister. The point is, Isabel *will not be punished*, because she has chosen the correct lover, whereas Bodil will eventually think her professor hook-up wants to kill her and have to run away from him. Isabel, in fact, eventually fakes her own death, which puts Bodil in mortal danger in addition to freaking her out, and Isabel’s *punishment* for all of this is that she and Bodil’s sister get on a plane and fly off to live happily ever after at the end of the movie. Presumably to paradise island or somewhere that doesn’t have any men.

Therefore, the idea that *liars* are being punished in this movie is ridiculous. Isabel is the queen of liars and she gets off scot-free, zero repercussions for anything she’s done. It turns out that the pretentious quote *was lying to the audience* by telling them they’re about to watch a movie about lies, when, in actuality, they’re about to watch a movie about how having sex with men is lame.

But that’s not the only deception propagated on us. I’ve already discussed how Bodil constantly runs from men... Except, the times when she is forced to actually confront them... She pwns them! She tases the shit out of her husband, and when Isabel’s asshole husband actually *does* try and kill Bodil... She leads him into the ocean, comes up behind him with a rear naked choke and drowns him. Huh?!? Bodil has a navy seal skillset? Why was she running away when she was capable of this?? Deception. Lies. If Bodil keeps running away, those men will *think* she’s helpless, until she reveals her actual skills and takes them out. Again... It’s not the liar being punished... It’s the gross men. Especially Isabel’s husband. He gets what he deserves for trying to control Isabel and her 80s hair.

The detectives trying to solve Isabel’s fake murder are both women, and I have to assume that they are May-December lesbians, because one of them is in her fifties and the other is like in her twenties, and I also have to assume that they’re the only police in Belgium because the police station is cavernous and empty of any other cops. You wouldn’t normally think a 55-year-old elderly stateswoman and a petite girl in her early 20s would represent the tyrannical enforcement arm of the state, BUT THEY DO. Fucking cops!! Bodil tells the cops she’s in danger, and asks them to protect her... And they tell her they don’t believe her and they won’t help her. What? Aren’t cops supposed to protect and serve? They can just refuse to help somebody? Of course they can, because they serve and protect THE STATE, not the people! Not Bodil! If I didn’t already know Bodil was a penis-liking traitor, I would have been upset that the cops just straight up refused to help her.

There you have it. A movie about lying turns out to be lying about being about lying. I do want to add that the direction is solid and the camera movement is quite artistic.

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9/10

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I’m a pacifist. Since hundreds of years before the dawn of history, “the pacifist” and “the realist” have engaged in a debate, which I have had myself on occasion. It goes like this:

Pacifist: If everybody was a pacifist, the world would be peaceful.

Realist: You’re an idiot.

You tell me who won that debate. Spoiler alert: It ain’t the pacifist.

I’ve never been in a physical fight or thrown a punch at another human being. Trust me, I am aware that this probably has more to do with luck and privilege than the flawless execution of any moral code, but it’s still true. That being said... Even my pacifist self had *that moment*.

The moment I am referring to will happen to everybody at least once. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or woman, a cop or a Shaolin monk, a botanist or a barber on Fleet Street. It is the moment where your response to the thing that just happened is pure, unadulterated RAGE and your only instinct is to respond with VIOLENCE.

For me, it was... Two decades ago? I’m old enough that time is meaningless and the difference between a decade or three is minimal. Let’s just say it was a while ago. I was running down on the boardwalk. A car was coming towards me, and I noticed there were two teenage kids leaning out the front and back windows. Just as I was thinking “why on earth would they be doing that?” THWACK THWACK I felt a stinging pain in my chest. I looked down, and I was covered with egg. Both kids had thrown an egg at me, as the car was driving towards me, and both had hit my chest.

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt pure rage the way I did in that moment. I might have literally seen red. The car drives past me, the kids are laughing, and I swear if I had a rocket launcher in my hands at that moment I might well have smoked those foos. Like... I WANTED it. I wanted the rocket launcher.

Then the car disappeared down the road, and I calmed down. The fact is... It wasn’t that bad. Yeah, it stung like a bitch and I was going to have a couple bruises, but other than that I could run home, wash my clothes, take a shower, and be more or less completely fine.

Despite that, for those precious few seconds after the eggs hit my chest... I wanted to blow up a car full of teenage idiots. This is me. The pacifist. I was a pacifist back then, as well. I always want to avoid conflict and never getting into a physical confrontation is very important to me. Yet... I uncovered the rocket launcher exception?

That’s the effect of *the moment*. You don’t know when it’s going to come, and it will come at different times and intervals for different people... But it will come. The good news for me is, I *didn’t* have a rocket launcher. Or a gun.

Which brings me to the movie I’m supposed to be reviewing, but haven’t mentioned even though I’m already almost halfway through the review. “5 Lbs of Pressure”. A character in the film explains the title in the very first scene (other movies can take lessons from this! I watched all of “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” and still don’t know what that title means, although it’s a lie, there is more than one take in the film). 5lbs of pressure is all it takes to squeeze the trigger on a gun. As a reference, I just asked Google what else you can do with 5 lbs of pressure, and it helpfully told me you can “push air through a shallow water diffuser line”. Thanks, Google! The point is, 5 lbs isn’t a lot. Pulling the trigger on a gun is incredibly easy, from a pure mechanical standpoint.

So the film is about what happens when you combine *that moment* with a gun. As you would imagine... The consequences can be devastatingly final. So it was with Adam (played by Luke Evans, who usually plays “British Guy” but here plays... ?? We’ll get to that later). When he was young, Adam was hit by *that moment*, and he happened to have a gun with him, so he shot and killed another person. Ended up spending 16 years in the clink. Adam might have been a young punk at the time, but he wasn’t a psychopath, or a violent killer. He was a kid who happened to have a gun in his hand when that moment of absolute rage hit him.

Because, normally, you can recover. Sometimes in a second or two. Take a deep breath. Punch the steering wheel. The problem is... It takes a lot less time than a second or two to pull the trigger.

So... Yeah. “5 Lbs of Pressure” is an anti-gun movie. But it’s not like proposing legislation to TAKE AWAY YOUR GUNS or framing gun users as maniacs or anything like that. It’s simply demonstrating... That gun violence is exceptionally easy, and you don’t have to be a psycho to pull the trigger, you just have to be in the wrong place or the wrong frame of mind in the split second it takes to pull that trigger and change everything. The film isn’t preachy. It doesn’t really stand on a soapbox and pelt you with ethics. It just... Shows you the consequences of an action that’s all too easy.

“5 Lbs of Pressure” is also... Not necessarily a great movie from a technical standpoint. In fact, I would go so far as to say the acting here is actually bad. The actors really lean on performative tools, such as bonkers accents. Luke Evans, who I like, is no exception. He has discarded his british accent for an I don’t know what on earth he’s going for, and he kind of uses it as a crutch to anchor his performance. In addition to outlandish accents, we have the cigarettes. I get it. Actors love cigarettes. You can fiddle with them, you can try to say lines with the cigarette still in your mouth, you can take beats between puffs. Yeah, you can do *stuff* with a cigarette, and whoa nelly do the folks in “5 Lbs of Pressure” love to go nuts with their smokes. It’s... Acting. They look and sound like they’re acting.

The script is... Fine. “Hollywood thrives on coincidence” is a saying that I might or might not have just made up, but coincidence plays a pretty big role here. Like the accents and the acting... It’s a little much.

But I don’t care. Because... It’s worth it. Because the story is worth telling. It’s not even really prescribing a solution, it just wants to make you aware of the problem. Maybe it will cause you to reflect on *that moment* in your own life. Maybe considering that moment will help you prepare to deal with it in the future.

Because knowing is half the battle? Or keeping the safety on can be the whole battle. Well, depending on the battlefield. I do like concluding my reviews with an elite metaphor.

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4/10

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While marriage has evolved since the Elamites’ time, it’s still a mechanism. In this case, it dictates how two people should behave towards each other. Now... We have structures that mandate how folks are supposed to behave towards society writ large, those being “laws”. Those are... Necessary for “civilization”? We’ll leave that debate for a different movie. Marriage is essentially laws for a couple to follow. The problem is... When you’re just talking about two people interacting with each other... Shouldn’t they figure out that stuff for themselves? Every relationship is different. How can a set of preprogrammed rules for a relationship be a good idea? It seems like, if those rules actually *did* strengthen the relationship, it would be random.

So a marriage rule would be monogamy, which I have talked about before. But, in the context of UnMarry what I want to discuss isn’t monogamy per se, it’s a larger mandate marriage put on your “hierarchy of empathy”.

Your hierarchy of empathy, if you follow ‘the rules’, goes something like this: Spouse > Romantic Interest > Friend. Your spouse gets the most empathy/concern, a romantic interest isn’t as important as a spouse, and a friend isn’t as important as either. You can throw other stuff into the mix, like your relatives, god, your country, etc, etc... However, for the purposes of UnMarry I want to focus on personal relationships.

I get why this hierarchy exists. If the amount of empathy you had for your romantic partner also applied to, say, Abele in Ethiopia who was killed by a pirate, the world would crumble you into a fine paste in a picosecond. If the empathy that you have for Abele applied to your romantic partner, you would appear to be a sociopath. So, even though you could, for example, group the entire working class of the entire earth into a unit, call them ‘the proletariat’, and have a tremendous amount of empathy for them as a group... I’ll put that to the side and say your empathy hierarchy is useful tool to keep your sanity.

The problem is... Marriage puts itself at the top. It’s a law. You should figure out the scope AND the order of your empathy for yourself, and marriage doesn’t let you do that.

Case in point, I finally will talk about UnMarry! Our two unmarried heroes are Ivan and Celine, both going through an annulment of their marriage. Celine is trying to end her marriage to her jerk husband, and Ivan’s wife Maya is trying to end the marriage with Ivan because he’s an alcoholic and it’s interfering too much with his ability to be a husband or father. Ivan and Celine have the same attorney, they meet, and they hit it off.

By ‘hit it off’ I actually mean they fall for each other *big time*. Celine is a genuine altruistic person who cares more about others than herself (the kind of person Richard Dawkins says doesn’t exist, but they can in movies [#academicnamedrop!]) and Ivan is a really sweet guy when he’s not drunk. We’re talking close to a love at first sight scenario. Except... It can’t be. Because Ivan and Celine are still married.

Spouse > Romantic Partner > Friend.

Since they are married to other people, they are *not allowed* to feel as much empathy for each other as they do for their spouses. Ivan flirts with breaking the rules when he leans in for a smooch, and Celine shuts it down. Not until her annulment is official. Ivan stays in the friend zone. He immediately agrees and doesn’t press the issue, because *his* annulment isn’t official either.

THIS is why you need to discover your relationship rules for YOURSELF. Celine’s husband is a complete jerk. Celine’s dream was to open a bakery, so her husband fronted her the money, and when the business took off and was successful, he used the fact that he provided the startup capital AND WAS THE HUSBAND (giving legal rights by default to people based on marriage status is another problem) to oust Celine from her own business, so he could take over full ownership and keep the profits for himself. Yeah, her empathy for this asshole should be ZERO. I would say negative, but Celine is too nice and would never intentionally fuck somebody up, even her husband. So... Even though she loves Ivan and has no feelings for her husband at all, the rules of marriage tell her those feelings are *wrong*. As long as she’s married, her husband takes priority!

Of course, it doesn’t end well. Ivan’s wife Maya happens to look like a model (Ivan’s wife’s lawyer ALSO happens to look like a model... Meaning Maya and her lawyer should have used the ‘attractive people in movies should be together’ rule to end up together, and find some way to have kids who would probably grow up to rule the Philippines if you believe the studies that say more doors open for you the more attractive you are [have I mentioned this is a Filipino movie? It is.]), so by the time Celine’s annulment becomes official, Ivan and Maya are back together. Now Ivan has to obey the marriage empathy rules, and keep Celine in the friend zone even though he still loves her.

Am I suggesting that Ivan, Maya, and Celine cast off the laws of marriage and become a Brady Bunch thrupple? I am! In fact, they should DEFINITELY add Maya’s lawyer to the group, and they could roam the Philippines in search of a few more men to balance out the genders.

But, assuming THAT isn’t going to happen (society won’t allow it, because society is short sighted and lame), how about this. How about Ivan or Celine say “I love you” to the other. Because they aren’t allowed to do it the entire movie. It’s... Awful. Following outside rules instead of their own hearts made sure they could never even express their love. Maybe it was inevitable that Ivan and Maya ended up back together. Maybe that even meant that he couldn’t love Celine in a romantic way. However... Not even saying “I love you” at any point? It makes Celine’s sacrifice absolute, because she doesn’t even have that expression of love to remember. It’s the definition of a tragedy that could have been avoided if folks didn’t view the rules of marriage, or marriage itself, as sacrosanct. Celine and Ivan needed the freedom to figure out their relationship for themselves, and they were never given the chance.

They didn’t get a copper smelting empire out of the deal either. Fucking marriage!

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3/10

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Apparently, she had just run over her boyfriend, Mebyark DeQuag. She was calling me because... ? I’m not sure, because I didn’t have time for her hijinks, because I needed to watch this movie for *you*, my loyal Movieshyte audience!

Also... I don’t particularly like Mebyark. It’s not just that nobody is good enough for my Cap’n (although nobody is!), it’s that he’s kind of dingbat. Plus, he’s a dude. Yuck. I guess nobody gave Cap’n Karen the memo that liking men in 2026 is really gauche. Maybe I’ll write it up for her after I’m finished with this review. Point is, Mebyark sucks, and running to his rescue is certainly lower on my priority list than watching a movie on behalf of y’all. In addition, I would *NEVER* abuse my power as Movieshyte and suggest to my audience that they slide into Mebyark’s DMs and comment that the Boston DeQuags lick the nards (and oves) of the Connecticut DeQuags..... *wink*

I lovingly told Cap’n Karen to deal with her own mess, and spun up “Hallow Road”. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the movie was ALSO about parents with a daughter that ran somebody over and called them up asking for help. What are the odds?!!?!

So, the parents in “Hallow Road”, Maddie and Frank, are played by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys. Doing Irish accents. For me, Rosamund Pike is a “telephone book” actor, which is to say that she could just spend 90 minutes reading the telephone book, and I’m in. If she’s using an Irish accent, I’m well able for it! If you don’t know what a telephone book is, look it up! In a telephone book. Matthew Rhys is a damn fine actor in his own right, and so I was certainly pleased at the prospect of spending some time with them.

Spend time with them we do. 90% of the film takes place in their car. And it’s a horror movie. Being in a car for the duration is... Disconcerting. If we are watching *it* come after our heroes, and we’re stuck in a car, it’s a lot more claustrophobic and unsettling than, say, if *it* is chasing them through the panoramic vista of the swiss alps.

Of course... They always have the option of just stopping the car and leaving. Except... They don’t have that option. Because the film isn’t really about their manslaughtering daughter, it’s about them. It’s about how they feel responsible for their daughter’s actions, and how that in turn leads them to revisit all the perceived mistakes of their past. You can’t just pull over to the side of the road and walk away from your guilt, regret, or sorrow. Thus, they’re stuck in the car, and we’re stuck with them.

For the duration of the drive, they are on the phone with their daughter. Early on, Maddie, who is a paramedic, is giving her instructions on how to perform CPR on her victim. The instructions... Are relentless. Time passes and Maddie is commanding her daughter to keep up the chest compressions, and then we hear a loud ‘crunch’, and Maddie says “You’ve just broken the ribs or the sternum, but it doesn’t matter. Keep going.” At this point, Maddie isn’t trying to save a random person her daughter ran over, she’s trying to save every single patient that she lost. The scene lasts uncomfortably long, and it’s relentlessly brutal.

Which is, of course, what guilt and regret are. Earlier I said “perceived” mistakes because, in an ‘objective’ sense, there is no way Maddie can hold herself responsible for patients she lost. They were in dire straits, and she was trying to help them. But objectivity and guilt aren’t on the same planet.

The same applies to parents. At some point, your children grow up. You might feel responsible for what they’ve done... But there comes a point where their actions are out of your hands. Feeling guilt over *that*... Over something that you ultimately had no control over... That’s the car. That’s driving inexorably toward self-destruction, and pulling over to the side and leaving the car doesn’t even seem like an option. That’s the horror of “Hallow Road”. It’s not the monster under the bed trying to eat your face, it’s the relentlessness of guilt.

We *also* get a version of the monster when a creepy old couple show up at the accident scene, snatch the daughter’s phone, and start talking to Maddie and Frank, who have been on the line with their daughter the entire drive. I was both surprised and not surprised (#wordsmith) when I watched the closing credits and discovered the creepy old couple were voiced by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys. I didn’t recognize their voices, but OF COURSE they were! They were *punishing themselves*... A response to regret that’s all too easy.

Watching Frank and Maddie at the end of the film just act like “You know what? Fuck it.” seems like a natural conclusion. They’ve just spent 80 minutes putting themselves through the wringer, and maybe sometimes that’s what it takes to deal with these emotions.

So... Was I supposed to feel responsible for the fate of Mebyark DeQuag? Was Cap’n’s terrible driving a reflection on either my parenting or my dislike of her boyfriend? Once “Hallow Road” finished, I called Cap’n Karen back to get the deets. Turns out, Mebyark is fine. They were just playing a “Crash” sex game that apparently got a little out hand, but nothing too outlandish. I told Cap’n “Really? Matt Dillon? REALLY?!?!”. She responded “Wrong ‘Crash’ dumbass” and hung up on me. Huh. Who knew that there were a bunch of movies named “Crash” that you could model a sex game on? Maybe she was trying to emulate MacKenzie Shirilla, who also killed her boyfriend in an automobile accident?

I’ll be proud of Cap’n Karen no matter what she does (and her choices are hers, not mine, so I don’t need to feel guilty about them), but if she does run over Mebyark DeQuag and ends up in the same prison as MacKenzie, where she then joins the new Murder Inc... It seems kind of dope.

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3/10

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Without answering that question myself (or I will answer it - “possibly”. Abstract noncommittalism for the win!), I will point out that, if the answer is ‘yes’, that is looking at movies through a somewhat specific lens: “Identity Politics”. Identity politics focuses on gender, race, and sexuality, and how those groups have been oppressed (by white men in particular), and the dynamics of that oppression.

I’m certainly not saying that’s a wrong way to look at movies, and it certainly isn’t wrong to apply it to “Obsession”. In “Obsession”, Bear (Michael Johnstone) finds novelty wish giver in an occult store, and makes a wish that his crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) would love only him forever. The result is, her personality is wiped out completely, and replaced with a new model that only wants to be with him and love him. He essentially takes her voice and her agency completely away from her. She is the co-star of the movie, but she is simply there as a way to look at his choices and define his character, while having absolutely no character of her own. This is what we call a “Classic patriarchy move”. It happens all the time, not just in entertainment but in society as well. Do you know Christine Blasey Ford or Renee Good? What do you know about them other than how they frame the actions of men? That’s right. Patriarchy has a way of front-and-centering women while not actually allowing them to have a history or independent voice. To say that lens *doesn’t* apply to “Obsession” just seems... Willfully short sighted.

But, the reason I’m not a huge fan of identity politics, is that it provides the endpoint as well as the starting point. So... Bear subjects Nikki. Bear is an allegory for all men and Nikki is an allegory for all women, and the moral of the story is that men oppress women. Done! That’s your movie! That’s... Not a very satisfying endpoint for analysis, because it doesn’t ask the most important question: Why? *Why* does Bear oppress Nikki? If identity politics is your start and your endpoint, then it tells you the answer: “Because he’s a man”. Heck, if you want to bring ALL of the stuff in, it’s “Because he’s a privileged straight white man who believes he’s better than, and should be able to oppress, everybody else”.

Really? If you believe that it’s just genetically baked into all men that they’re sexist, I’m not going to say you’re wrong... But how do you even start to solve the problem of *the sexist gene* when it doesn’t really exist? If you’re putting forth sexism as a film analysis, is it supported by scenes in the film? Prior to his wish, does Bear read forums or talk on discord channels about the inferiority of women? Does he treat women like shit? He doesn’t. Where was the “man” part of him then? It’s only after he makes his wish that he is actively oppressing Nikki. Is the wish patriarchy? Was patriarchy just waiting in the weeds for Bear to make a wish, then pounce on him and remind him he’s a man?

The wish answers the question “why” a bit better than identity politics, because the wish represents something more subversive and dangerous than sexism or racism: Power. Absolute power. Bear doesn’t even ask for it, really. It’s a classic “Monkey’s Paw” scenario, where the wish is interpreting the desires of the wisher in order to create maximum havoc and carnage. Granted, wanting Nikki to love only him is a dick move, but he doesn’t think the wish is real at that point. He certainly doesn’t ask that her entire personality be demolished and replaced with a Bear-loving psycho-sycophant. But that’s what the wish gives him. It gives him absolute power over another human being.

If there is one thing that living on this fucking planet will demonstrate over and over again, it’s this: You want power. It’s the goal. Competition. Capital. Money. Equity. POWER. That’s it. THAT’S the endpoint.

Over the last couple centuries, we, as a civilization, have decided that owning another human being is bad. That’s slavery. Except... We haven’t. Your boss can fuck your world because they have power over you (they also exploit you, but we won’t talk about that here, except I just did #Marx). Billionaires can prevent you speaking out by booting you off social media platforms, buy tons of houses to prevent you from being able to afford just one, and can fuck you in so many ways without ever knowing who you are (or, conversely, by knowing who you are). And. You. Can’t. Do. SHIT. To. Them. Not just that, you shouldn’t want to! Our society is built on the premise that accumulating as much wealth and power as possible is WHAT YOU SHOULD WANT. We venerate people with money, and don’t give a passing thought to people that don’t.

So, Bear is given power over Nikki by a novelty wish, an entity that doesn’t give a shit what race or gender he is, and we expect him to... What? Not abuse that power? Because he abuses it. Every time he has sex with Nikki, she has no choice in the matter. It’s rape. HOWEVER, she is telling him she wants to have sex with him, so he doesn’t have to have any moral quibbles about being a rapist. That is what POWER gets you.

So what do we want Bear to do with that power? Well... It’s pretty easy to say, reject it. If you’re given the keys to the powermobile, throw them in the drink! If this were a Japanese horror movie, Bear would spend the entire movie going to the old steel mill to find the dusty tome about the dude who made the wish in 1953 and how to reverse it (probably only to be fucked by it anyway). But... Bear doesn’t do anything to try and reverse the wish until the end of the third act, and only then when it becomes obvious to him that Nikki’s undying love for him presents a physical danger. Which is to say, he spends a lot of the movie holding on to his power even when he learns that the “real” nikki is in agony while the demolished form is proclaiming her love for him. So yes, it’s easy for us to look at him as a villain, because he is, and say that he should have tried to free Nikki from the wish a lot earlier than he did.

Except... Asking somebody to give up power when we live in a world that presents it as the ultimate goal... It’s a big ask. Of course we want Bear to give up his power... But we shouldn’t be surprised when he doesn’t. He doesn’t give up his power because society demonstrates to him that he shouldn’t, even as his moral compass is telling him he should. Abusing that power isn’t really a function of being a man.

If you reversed the gender of the two main characters, is it a completely different movie? If you think women don’t want power and won’t step on anybody (including, possibly especially, other women) to get it, I invite you watch an episode of “Real Housewives” or read any book ever. Women can be power hungry too, but they frequently have to be a lot more subtle about it, because they’re operating under patriarchy. Except... If an alien entity just GAVE Nikki that power, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be just as villainous as Bear. So... Does that remove identity politics? Are we now watching a banger of a horror movie and not a gender commentary because a woman is the villain? No. We’re watching a movie about the corrupting nature of power, and how society *tells* you to reject it while *demonstrating* that you should hoard it.

Whatever happened to world peace? If you’re making a novelty wish you don’t think will come true anyway, why not wish for an end to all war? Every single wish made in “Obsession” is for selfish, personal gain. The problem isn’t that “Greed is good”, as Gordon Gekko would say, it’s that greed is omnipresent. Asking somebody to “throw away” their wish on world peace in that kind of environment is borderline herculean. Plus, doesn’t making a truly altruistic wish kind of checkmate the wish inverter? Maybe if your wish is selfish, you get pwned, but if your wish is truly for the good of mankind or whatever, it goes through? Although, I would imagine that folks would bet on world peace on kalshi right after they wished for it. So maybe the altruistic wish is truly impossible. Let’s hope not.

I will say this: “Obsession” *is* a banger of a horror movie. The explosions of violence are genuinely gory and fun in an 80s way... And the way we get these shots of Nikki’s shadowy silhouette watching Bear from the shadows... It’s creepy AF. The “phone call” to the wish customer service is downright disturbing. To go from chilling to campy violent fun is a pretty rad ride. Yup, I just used “rad”.

Before I get too full of myself (too late!), let me say this: If identity politics makes for a bad endpoint of analysis, I’m not saying power dynamics is the right endpoint either. The fun of being a cinephile (#moviesnoot) is that you can discover new lenses through which to view the movie. Heck, when I was taking film studies courses in the early 90s, the whole thing was trying to figure out which character was an allegory for jesus. Do we still do that? The danger of identity politics is that it gives you your start AND your end before the movie even begins, and that eliminates the fun of discovery altogether. It’s not *wrong*, per se, but it’s also not *the whole thing*.

Andy Richter was definitely jesus. I guess we still do it!

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2/10

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Monogamy is: Taking the human capacity for love, which is infinite, and filling it with a single integer, and then pretending that integer is infinity. In actuality, the integer is, like, 3. It also happens to be a control mechanism for folks who want to tell you what to do. Whether that’s your priest, your boss, or your king (or queen), if somebody can control THAT, if they can control when and with whom you can boink... That’s the whole deal right there. They have you.

You don’t have to take my word for it (well, you’re reading my article, so you kind of do), but you can read Chris Ryan’s “Sex At Dawn”, you can ask a chatbot (just don’t ask the chatbot why monogamy is great, because it’ll tell you that too), or you can pull from your own personal experience. Have you been in a monogamous relationship? Have you seen another person, thought they were attractive or exciting or whatever, wanted to have sex with them (or even fantasized about it), and then realized you couldn’t because you were in a monogamous relationship? Yeah. Monogamy sucks.

So, when “Desire” opens on the 20th anniversary party of Lucero and Fernando... And, after the party, when they should be having anniversary sex (involving going downtown and rimming and all the stuff you should be doing all the time but vanilla prudes reserve for ‘special occasions’ like anniversaries) they instead have no interest in making love, and go to bed. Woohoo!! Take that, monogamy! Movieshyte wins, one to nothing! Because, going back to my amazing earlier metaphor, the integer might *start* at 3, but over time it degrades, and clearly for Lucero and Fernando, we’re well into the double-digit negatives. In their case, it has nothing to do with physical attractiveness, because Lucero looks downright INSANE for a married woman of 20 years who has two kids, and Fernando, while he’s missing the hollywood 6-pack and is a bit nerdy, looks pretty good too. But the attractiveness doesn’t matter, because monogamous relationships grow stale. The proof is right there on the screen.

At this point, I could just declare victory and walk away. But, out of loyalty to you, Movieshyte audience, I stuck around and watched like 70% of the movie (and slept through the other 30%, which was all act 2 junk anyway, so I’m kind of glad I missed it).

The movie is essentially this: Lucero’s daughter, Viviana, is a high school or collegiate swimmer. Lucero falls for Viviana’s swim coach Matias (I’m not entirely sure why, because Matias doesn’t have the body of Michael Phelps... He has the body of... Like... Roddy McDowall? It’s not great), and Lucero and Matias start having hot sex. Actually, the sex isn’t that hot, because there is no full frontal nudity, the camera is interested in watching the sex from the most un-erotic angles possible, and there are too many quick cuts and edits. Filming sex is like filming martial arts, you know how much the stunt team put in the work based on how many cuts are in the scene. But... To the *characters*, the sex is really hot (and, despite the filming, it’s pretty hot for the audience as well, I’ll get back to that a little later).

What makes the sex so hot? Well, there are a couple things. The first is ye olde partner of sex: Violence. Not that ‘pick you up and slam you into the table and hammer you until you’re not walking right for days’ violent sex like we get in, say, Wuthering Heights, but emotionally violent. Weaponized. In fact, it’s a fairly reasonable statement that every single major character in “Desire” uses sex as an instrument to emotionally batter another character. So... That makes it hot.

But even more than the violence, the sex is hot because it’s *forbidden*, and that makes it dangerous, and danger is hot. Lucero wants to have sex with Matias. Forbidden. Viviana ALSO wants to have sex with Matias. Forbidden. Matias wants a threesome with Lucero and Viviana. Well, he doesn’t explicitly say that, but I know it’s true. It’s also forbidden (although, society might want to reconsider on that)! Fernando wants to watch Lucero and Matias fuck. Forbidden. Viviana’s brother, Julian, wants to have sex with Viviana. Forbidden (unless you’re a Lannister or Targaryen... And Julian is definitely nerdy enough that he’s aware of the Lannisters and Targaryens). It’s all forbidden! There’s even a scene where, Matias and Viviana formally ask her parents if they can start having sex... These are the parents where Fernando (the dad) has been watching Matias fuck his wife Lucero (the mom), and now he’s asking *formal permission* to have sex with their possibly high school, possibly college-aged daughter? I mean, that’s not just *forbidden*, that’s straight up crazy town.

But... Man, having the sex be against the rules makes it all the sweeter. This isn’t just true for the characters... It’s true for the viewer as well. This isn’t pornhub we’re watching... It’s Netflix. Netflix is supposed to be the home of annyoingly precocious teenagers with psychic powers and secret agents who answer phones in the white house basement. It’s NOT for sex. So when we get it... Yeah, it’s exciting! I mean, you’re either watching with your partner, and using the forbidden/violent spark to make some awesome love of your own, which is fantastic, or you’re by yourself, kind of looking around, wondering if it’s okay that you’re feeling hot and bothered by a netflix movie, which is also pretty dope. How does that old saying go? Forbidden fruit tastes all the sweeter (unless it’s raspberry, then it sucks whether you’re allowed to eat it or not)?

This brings me around to my earlier victory over monogamy, and whether it might not be as absolute as I originally posed. Because, here’s the thing... You can’t have amazing forbidden sex unless something forbids it! I mean... If we didn’t have monogamy, then an ‘affair’ would just be another booty call. Mundane. You need the rules that say you CAN’T do it, in order to have the adrenaline and extra juice when you DO.

No more is this in evidence than the final scene of the movie. Lucero and Fernando are having the best sex of their lives. Over the course of the film, they’ve committed emotional violence against each other, and physical violence (in the form of cold-blooded murder) on other characters as well. Not to mention, they’re kind of screwed financially because of their actions. But the net result is the hottest sex they’ve ever had. So maybe we need those idiotic rules if we want the thrill of breaking them.

By the way, make no mistake, Lucero, Fernando, Viviana, and Julian all have an insatiable taste for it now. They are going to fuck and kill their way across Mexico in order to chase that high they can’t live without. And what made this all possible? Rules. Kind of terrible rules, but rules nonetheless.

So... Monogamy... Let’s call it a tie.

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3/10

Soldier: That’s a right lovely bird, mate. Is she your girl?

Keith: ....Yuuuuuup!

Staff Sgt: You! Colonel wants you in the command tent.

Keith: And where might that be?

Staff Sgt: Up two rows, hang a right, and bob’s your uncle.

Keith: What?! My only uncle is SAM, you pinko limey puke!

Staff Sgt: Um, YOU’RE British!

Keith: I am??? Well, tolly yop... zeeg?

Staff Sgt: ...Jaysus. You know what, the lingo, the accent, forget it. It’s called suspension of disbelief, and the british audiences have been forced to utilize it through decades of terrible yank actors.

Keith: I’ll have you know, I have three “shyteys” for supporting male performance in a diverse off-off broadway show. I can act. Accents too. Nigerian. “Dis is OFFRICA.” Boom.

Staff Sgt: Whatever. Just get to the command tent.

Keith enters the command tent, the colonel is waiting for him. Keith salutes

Keith: So... ‘Sup?

Colonel: Tomorrow at noon, the gleeb glorb division is going to mount an offensive. It’s a trap. They’ll be eliminated to a man.

Keith: And this interests me why?

Colonel: Don’t you have a brother in the gleeb glorbs?

Keith: ...Yes? I have no idea.

Colonel: You need to get this message, notarized by myself, to the commander of the gleeb glorbs so that the attack is called off.

Keith: How did you come by this intel?

Colonel: Via spy plane.

Keith: So can you fly the plane over and give them the message that way?

Colonel: We don’t have time for that, we’re keeping it real. Choose a man, take the message, get this done.

Keith: Fine. Pikachu, I choose you!!

Pikachu: Pika pee? [Funny, that’s what your mom said last night. I redefined the ‘shocker’, and she won’t walk right for weeks. Pikachu out!]

Colonel: Pikachu’s off limits. Choose somebody else.

Keith: Who is that guy?

Colonel: That’s Puupas Puupadoukus. He’s greek.

Keith: I’m not hanging out with somebody named that. How about that asian guy? He know karate?

Colonel: That’s Ching Chong. He also has a brother in the gleeb glorbs.

Keith: Let me guess... Chang?

Colonel: No, Douki Puupadouddi. Half asian, half greek.

Keith: …Douki Puupadouddi? Hard pass. I guess I’ll take that guy over there.

Colonel: That’s Rando.

Keith: Rando... Carrisian?

Colonel: You know, in 2026, I don’t think this dialogue would be acceptable. Fortunately, it’s 1917, so we’re fine.

Keith: Rando it is. Let’s go!

Scene: Keith and Rando are walking in the field

Keith: Listen. This movie isn’t big enough for two leads, so one of us has to die in the first act. Spoiler alert: It’s you. You’re going to get stabbed when the german pilot crashes. Just to give you a heads up.

Rando: ...What alert now?

Keith and Rando come up to a farm. A german plane crashes, Rando runs over and pulls the german pilot out of the plane. Keith moseys on over to them.

Keith: This german guy is evil, right?

Rando: He’s actually not! This is Dieter! He’s been in love with planes ever since he was a little boy, and he couldn’t wait to...

Keith: Cool story, bro. Keith pulls out a knife and stabs Rando and Dieter.

Scene: Keith happens upon a convoy stuck in the mud

Keith: Who are you guys?

Soldier2: Oim from the 31st, mick over there is from the 87th, and chet is from the 56th. We were supposed to rendevous with the 93rd when we came across the 25th.

Keith: Eight zero zero eight five. Boobs.

Chet: And who moight you be then?

Keith: I’m trying to get the gleeb glorbs. Can I hitch a ride with y’all? I mean, can meself, er, bloody bastards?

Mick: We’re stuck in the mud.

Keith: How long you been in the mud?

Chet: About a week.

Keith: A WEEK?

Chet: It’s like this, see. Maybe we’s had it with the killin’ and the dyin’, so maybe we’s stuck in the mud, and as long as we’s in the mud, we ain’t in the shit.

Keith: Listen, if I don’t get this message to the gleeb glorbs, they’re all going to die.

Mick: For reals yo?

Keith: I have no idea.

Chet: FINE we’ll push this blimey bastard out o’ the mud fer ye. But ye best deliver that message!

Keith: ...Yuuuuup.

Scene: Keith is in a bombed out French city, and he stumbles upon a french woman and her baby in one of the buildings.

Anais: Bonjour, american icehole! [Hello, american asshole!]

Keith: Hey girl. I don’t speak french, but I know you just said you want some of this. I’m more than happy to oblige.

Anais: Je n'ai aucun intérêt pour les dongs américains sauf s'ils sont noirs [I need milk for my baby!]

Keith: I got you, girl. What’s up with the baby? He like to watch? Cool.

Anais: Si tu entrais en moi, tu ne reviendrais pas vivant. [Please help us!]

Keith: You know it girl. Let’s get it on. Whup, look at the time. I gotta save the gleeb glorbs. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.

Anais: Tu ferais mieux de ne pas dire qu'il y aura une suite à ce morceau de merde. [Yay!!]

Scene: Keith has finally made it to the gleeb glorbs. They charge, Keith runs through the bombardment, and finds the sergeant major

Keith: I have a message for you from the colonel!

Sgt. Mjr: Who are you?

Keith: I’m Keith, duh. Listen, you can’t charge the german position. It’s a trap, they’ll wipe you out.

Sgt. Mjr: Tolly yop zeeg! Well, as you can see, we already charged. Everybody is dead except me.

Keith: Well then, no witnesses

Keith pulls out a knife and stabs the sgt. mjr

Keith: I’m the king of england!!!!!!!!

Anais: You’re in france, idiot.

Keith: So that’s why it smells like underarm and bung. This is maga country.

Anais: We better not roll the credits here.

ROLL CREDITS

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This particular keith happened to be named Keith. He was short, hirsute, and like most of his fellows in keithington, he enjoyed lazy sunday afternoons, pissing, and the sausage.

On a particular fine day, a random dude in a floppy hat walked up to Keith.

“Yo. I’m gandalf.”

“Is that name supposed to mean anything to me? Get the fuck out of here.”

“Listen, yaicehole. Right behind me are 13 dwarves. They’re going back to Mt. whatever to take back their shyte. 13 is an unlucky number, and they needed a 14th, and I suggested you, because you’re short and nimble.”

“You’re not allowed to say ‘dwarves’. Call them by their proper name. Midgets.”

——

That night, there was a big party, and Gandalf introduced the 13 dwarves.

“This is Sprinkles son of Hammerforge, Rosdower, PP Cummings, MC McMc, Peubicon Kim, DJ Tasty Taste, DJ Pasty Paste, Tweedledork, John ‘Cotton’ Candy, Fred Smrz, Mailbox Iris Mang, Teddy Blue Balls, and Isaac ‘Patricide’ Oscar. Our 14th memeber used to be Isaac’s dad. You can figure out what happened to him.”

“Other than Rosdower, those names are dope.” Keith wistfully remarked.

——

After the party, the merry band set off on an adventure. Their first encounter was with three random trolls.

“Hey, you know that 3 in every 1 girl says she’s trans now?! What is middle earth coming to?”

“What’s worse, these girls are MUTILATING themselves. If anybody is going to be mutilating girls, it’s going to be MEN. Certainly not themselves, and not their doctors, unless those doctors are men.”

“Not to mention these stupid girls are ruining sports by competing with boys and getting pwned. Girls are the worst! The good news is, the mutilation option is always on the table if they go out of control.”

“Here here!”

Then gandalf summoned the forum moderator, and the trolls were all turned to stone. They happened to have a bag of random weapons.

“Hey, this sword is called Skullripper, the final judgement.” said gandalf.

“Hmm, I got this sword called Yrinal, the open sluice.”

“You can keep that one.”

——

They ran into a bunch of goblins, and it was touch and go for a while there, but then gandalf remembered he was a wizard and exploded the goblins like Zoe Kazan.

The party went into the mountains, where Keith chatted with Gandalf.

“So, what makes you a wizard anyways?”

“Lots of stuff. Like, I can see the future.”

“Really?! What happens in the future?”

“I fight a balrog and we kill each other. It’s cool, though, because I get resurrected.”

“Ressurected?! Who are you, jesus?”

“Basically. I get resurrected as ‘gandalf the white’, so I am like my boy jesus, because he’s white as well.”

“Actually, jesus was middle eastern. Swarthy. We know this because he was born in the middle east. The white folks were further north, where there was a lot less sunlight. Skin color is a function of geography.”

...

“HOW. DAREST. THOU!!! You know what? I don’t have to put up with this noise. Screw all y’all, I’m outta here!”

Gandalf left the party.

——

They went into the mountains, where a blizzard hit and they were separated. Keith ended up by himself in a system of caves. He found a ring, which had the engraving, To Galadriel, remember when I put it in you consensually, literally and figuratively? Xoxoxo Sauron.

Then Keith ran into a weird frog creature.

“Hey, mr. weird frog guy, I’m lost. Can you help a brother out?”

“Lookee here. I challenge you to a game of riddles. If you win, I show you the way out. If I win, I get to eat your lame ass.”

“Challenge accepted. First riddle. How long is my dong?”

“That’s not a riddle!”

“Ya lose. Show me the way out.”

“FINE. Ummm, 5cm?”

“Urrrrrrrrrrrrrong. We don’t even use the metric system, because we’re way to cool. The answer is 1.9685 inches.”

“That’s the @#$!ing same!”

“No it’s not! If you don’t know your units, you suck. Now show me the way out, loser.”

“I’m eating you.”

Keith put on the ring, which made him invisible, and escaped.

——

They ended up in the woods with giant spiders, who, for some reason, could talk.

“Hey, how is it we can talk?! We don’t got no vocal cords.”

“What am I, an entymologist over here? Fuggetaboutit! I’m a spider.”

“No need to get snippy.”

“Snippy?! You want to know what I’m doing tomorrow night? I’m having sex! That means I splooge and my wife eats me!”

“Ouch. Any way to get out of date night? Maybe say you’re working late?”

“So what, I bang my secretary and then SHE eats me? I mean, she’s way hotter, so I guess it’s better... But it still sucks!”

“I feel ya, man.”

Then Keith killed all the spiders, because he was invisible and they couldn’t do anything about it.

——

He rejoined the dwarves and they ended up in the kingdom of the wood elves. The dwarves were captured, because they had axes and the elves had bows and if you bring an axe to a bowfight you’re not making Darwin proud. Errr... D’Ar’Wynn.

The elf king addressed the dwarves. “What are you dirty, dirty dwarves doing in the land of the pure, fair skinned elves?”

A female sodomite elf said “Yes! They’re so, so dirty.”

Sprinkles said “Er, we’re applying for asylum?”

“Ugh!! We have a new law. You can’t apply for asylum at the border. Go back to where you came from and apply through the proper channels. You know what? It’s going to cost too much to send you back. Put these losers on a caravan to rivendell and let THEM deal with this. You know what? Fuck it. It’ll be easier to kill your asses. I sentence you to death.”

It was looking grim, but fortunately the female sodomite elf let the dwarves out of prison and they escaped.

——

They ended up at Mt. whatever and sent Keith in to talk to the dragon. The dragon woke up.

“I know you’re here thief, I can smell you. You smell great. What is that?”

“Old spice body wash.”

“Can I borrow some?”

“No you can’t borrow my old spice body wash. It’s for me!”

“I’ll trade you a payday bar for it.”

“Are you kidding me?! Actually, that sounds pretty yummy. Deal. Wait! @#$! you! I’m here to steal your shyte. Wait up, is this a first edition of ‘mein kampf’, by gandalf?! This is harder to get than that zoe kazan cut from earlier.”

“Yup, I’m super proud of it.”

“I’m stealing it.”

“RAR!!”

——

The dragon flew out to destroy the human village. Fortunately, there was an archer named bard, which is stupid, because he wasn’t actually a bard, he was an archer. The archer gave a rousing speech to his arrow.

“Black arrow, you’ve never failed me. I’ve always retrieved you, because I am literally insane. Go ye and splice the chronozone so that mixeljub can rise and transmogrify the troposplat.”

“Why are you talking to an arrow?!” the arrow demanded to know, then it was fired, and it flew true and the dragon was slayed.

THE END.

Except it’s actually not. Five armies decided to fight for the shyte. If you were an asshole, you would make an entire movie out of that last sentence. Anyway, the eagles ended up winning, because ‘Merica.

THE ACTUAL END

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----

However, here at Movieshyte, we know that, even though a movie is *bad*, it can still be *interesting*. Does “The Paradise Murders” qualify? Let’s take a look!

So, we’ll use the obvious starting line: Our heroine, Emma. Every introduction to creative writing class will tell you that the engine that drives your story is the change in your main character. How do they start the story, and how do they end it? Getting from that point A to point B is the whole shebang, the reason you’re spinning your yarn. This even applies to horror movies. Why is the final girl being hunted? I’m not talking the physical, plot reason (which frequently boils down to “she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time”), but what is the *spiritual* reason the killer is after her? What problem did she need to solve before the shit went down? What void did she need to fill? Those are the questions that need answering, as much as “how will she get away?” or “why the @#$! did she leave the gun there? It was RIGHT there, why didn’t she pick it up?!?!?”.

We learn Emma’s problem in the first scene. Her husband, Jake. suggests that they go to this resort for their anniversary, and Emma says “I can’t... I have work.”

She has work. THAT’S her problem. She’s a *modern woman*. It makes sense. “The Paradise Murders” is a production of the Lifetime network. While I don’t watch it much (or ever), I know that Lifetime has two major components: Empowered women and true crime. So... I guess it’s women being empowered until they are brutally murdered. So Emma is an empowered woman, and she would rather honor her job than honor her husband’s wishes. These modern women in the workforce... Don’t they know that women were much, MUCH happier when they were staying at home, cleaning the house and looking after the kids?

By the way, that argument has as much merit as any argument about happiness: None. Because WE CAN’T MEASURE HAPPINESS. Any study about “happiness” is based either on bullshit made metrics that are attributed a “happiness score”, like wealth, for example (although it’s ALSO a myth that wealthy people are happier), OR they are based on self-reported happiness. Scrolling though a bunch of vacay pics from dipshits on insta tells me people are GREAT at self-reporting happiness. Because the overwhelming need to convince everybody on the internet that your vacation is amazing obviously means that IT IS. So, if you read a study that says Norway is the happiest country on earth, just throw it away. Norway can fuck off. Give me Djibouti. It’s got “booty” right there in name. What is happier than that?!?!!?

But, we have our character arc to track! Emma values work more than marriage. Presumably, she will be punished for this hedonistic choice.

The punishment starts immediately, as Jake convinces Emma to go to the resort despite whatever pressing work matters she has (we don’t actually know what she does, and, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter, because whatever it is, it is preventing her from staying at home and fulfilling her husband’s every need). The gaslighting is already starting. Jake has a Rizz score of approximately -7378397484379. When he talks, he has no emotion, and stares off into the distance like he’s reading dialogue off of cuecards. How on earth is Emma with him? Well... It’s because she has to be. She can be modern enough to have independent means of support, but NOT modern enough to actually be independent. She needs a man. Jake is a man. He’s there. Ergo... The fact that he convinces her to do anything, let alone ignore her precious job to go on an anniversary trip with him, means he’s already controlling her mind and/or driving her insane.

So we get to the resort, and we get to gaslighting moment #2: Jake declares it’s the most awesome bed he’s ever seen, and jumps into it. At this point, his feet are dangling off the edge of the bed, because it’s about a foot and half too short for him. Does this mean that the prop person couldn’t be bothered to find a bed that isn’t sized for the lollipop guild? NO!!! It means Jake is playing 5D chess. By telling Emma that a bed that is clearly terrible and too short for him is the greatest bed ever, he is already making her question reality itself.

Then some people get murdered. Strangely, this doesn’t seem to affect the booking of the resort AT ALL. You would think that, if multiple guests at the resort had been KILLED over the span of a few days... Maybe people would check out? Not want to stay there? There are people around, so it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

Plot stuff happens. A detective constantly threatens to take Emma “down to the station”, but it’s the emptiest threat of all time, because if they can’t even afford a normal sized bed, there’s no @#$!ing way they’re affording a POLICE STATION shoot for a couple of scenes. Emma suspects Jake, but it turns out the killer is this dude who knew her as kid, even though he has an Irish accent. Was he topping off a bit o’ the blarney stone between taking creepy photos of Emma when they were kids? Probably.

The point is, Jake is innocent (which makes sense, because conforming to “traditional values” doesn’t seem so valuable when it means you have to boink a serial killer) and Emma lives. The hero’s journey is complete when, in the final scene, Emma gets a phone call, and she looks at her phone and says, “It’s just work. It’s not important” and she puts the phone away.

Has Emma fully shed the shackles of modernity? Not entirely. She still has a job, which is all too modern, but she realizes that her negative rizz terrible husband is more important. She is one step closer to becoming the homemaker he dreams of, and that’s all we can ask in the span of a 83 minute feature film.

Now, as I said earlier... I don’t watch much Lifetime. But... If their empowered women are constantly being killed... And here, they are showing you Emma, who decides to reject the modern trappings of her job and embrace her obligation to her shitty husband... It seems a little subversive to me. Like maybe the “empowering” message they are pushing is actually a WARNING that being empowered leads to being murdered, and maybe being more ‘traditional’ means you get to stay alive. Hmmm... I see you, Lifetime! I see what you’re doing!

As Movieshyte, I must remain 100% neutral ad objective, and therefore I will not comment on the ethics or morality of the Lifetime model of empowered women.

It seems a little sketch.

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7/10

----

The three films are pretty similar. That might be your first reason right there. The same schtick done three times will eventually wear thin, even if it’s a good schtick. There’s a mystery, Enola (played by the no longer precocious because she’s too old Millie Bobby Brown) gets involved, she uses her martial and parkour skills to navigate some action scenes, has some witty quips that frequently belittle the dimwitted men around her, and randomly breaks the fourth wall, both by talking to the audience, and by doing this move where she will come to some startling realization and turn to the camera and stare straight down the pipe (by the third film, it’s actually pretty annoying). It asks the question, if she’s aware that there’s an audience, and she’s therefore the heroine of her own story, why is she dicking around England solving mysteries when she should be trying to manifest her godlike powers? Because she talks to us directly, she should be asking us questions like “Is this communication only one way? Why? Are you god? Am I god? Are we both god? Why does my brother look hotter than anybody in this time period should ever look?”, instead of giving us exposition dumps about what happened earlier in the movie.

By the way, movies, y’all need to chill with this ‘second screen’ nonsense. Scenes that force a damn recap of the movie-to-this-point in order to catch up viewers who weren’t paying attention because they were busy messing with their phones... Those scenes need to GO, and they’re only becoming more common. Hear this now and believe it later (or now): People who miss vital information because they were looking at their phones DON’T DESERVE THE INFORMATION. Let them figure it out! Don’t waste 3-5 minutes for the people who actually WERE paying attention. Not to mention, this is “Enola Holmes 3”, not “Stalker”. There IS no vital information!!! There’s Enola. She’s doing stuff. That’s what you need to know!

So yeah, all that stuff on repeat gets a little stale by the third film by default. But... That stuff is basically still watchable. I think my dislike of “Enola Holmes 3” ultimately boils down to what it’s trying to sell me.

“Enola Holmes 1” basically was trying to sell us on the idea that a girl could be a hero detective in victorian england. You know... Girl power. It’s not a hard sell, I basically bought that stock way back when I was watching “Yes Madam” or “In the Line of Duty 1” and “In the Line of Duty 4” in the early nineties, long before hollywood would catch up and figure out girls could be action stars or detectives or basically bust out of the “mirror through which we can examine the plight of our male characters” role that they were all too relegated to, during hollywood’s first 100 years. As a result, movies trying to sell me on a girlboss archetype don’t need a convincing pitch. I’m not saying they’re all good movies, but “Enola Holmes 1” sold it well enough. She was pretty funny, a decent fighter, and an overall fun watch.

“Enola Holmes 2” was selling the idea that workers are exploited, and that they suffer terrible working conditions, even to the point of death, so that a very few greedy/evil financial entrepreneurs can make a huge profit, and this is a fundamentally unjust state of affairs. Ummm... Okay, Enola Holmes... You’re selling me a Marxist historical lens? I’ll take two, please! By the way... Can we PLEASE give it up for a dude that both performed the incredible “Right Here Waiting” AND came up with a class-based lens through which to view history? The man had many talents! The point is... You don’t have to sell me on exploitation as a crime, I’m already there. What’s a little surprising... is that a lot of people aren’t? I would think that, of all the self-evident truths that are out there (well... As much as anything is true. You can check out my review of “Orwell 2 + 2 = 5” for more on this topic), “Rich people are assholes who take advantage of poor people” would be pretty high on the list. But it isn’t. Our culture still, for the most part, venerates rich people and tells us they’re great. Therefore, I’ll always welcome a movie like “Enola Holmes 2” that shines a light on this very problem.

So... What is “Enola Holmes 3” selling us? Well, on the surface, it’s selling the idea that “Colonialism is bad”. Great. I’m not going to disagree. But... Neither is anybody else. These aren’t the days of Harry Truman, where taking over other countries made you a man or whatever. Wars of conquest are pretty much frowned upon by most everybody. Sure, every now and then some dimbulb will suggest conquering Greenland or some such nonsense, but for the most part, we as the blob of humanity bought anti-colonialism wholesale soon after the second world war ended. So... Like... It’s a waste of a sales pitch. Not everybody has bought into the girlboss idea, and certainly only a few people have bought into capital as exploitation or “Hazard” as an underrated song, so I’m kind of down with what the first two movies were selling. But anti-colonialism... No thanks. However... It turns out anti-colonialism isn’t really what “Enola Holmes 3” is trying to sell.

It’s trying to sell marriage.

Now... I will be the first to admit... While it’s still going strong, marriage is starting to slip a bit. It should be slipping A LOT, considering that it was invented right around the same time as agriculture, where a bunch of dudes were like “Hey... We can grow these crops and store them... And turn them into equity! We can do the same with our women!” and marriage was born, and has remained omnipresent for the last 12000 years. However, around the globe, we’re starting to see marriage rates decline (along with childbirth rates). There are a bunch of reasons for this, and I won’t get into all of them, but the absurd expense of raising children and the fact that we now have an internet that gives you *other stuff to do* other than get married and have kids are certainly factors.

So marriage very much wants a saleswoman, and they got it in the form of Enola Holmes. You see, she’s engaged to this dude, and at the beginning of the movie she skips out on her wedding, because she’s like “Why would I want to leave my awesome job as a detective in order to be a wife?” Plus, her brother gets kidnapped and gives her a less philosophical reason... But she was having doubts even before she gets the news about Sherlock (the aforementioned “hottest man in England”, played by Henry Cavil, who is regrettably absent for much of the movie because he’s been kidnapped). By the end of the film, she’s realized that she can do BOTH. She can be an awesome detective and run around solving mysteries AND be a wife, because, you know, love! Win-win-win!

It’s a load of trash. It reminds me of a television commercial in rotation a few years back. I don’t even remember what they were advertising, but the hero of the commercial is this woman, and she’s at her job at the hospital, then she’s in spin class, then she’s picking up dinner for her family, and she walks in the door and her dumbass husband and daughters are dancing around the house. This is presented as a triumph of the modern age: The woman who can have and do it all! Are you kidding me? You want to present THIS reality as positive? I’m sorry, but if I’m working, then working out, then getting dinner AS WELL, and I come up to my husband dancing around while I was busting my ass all day? At the minimum, I am fucking my way through a bunch of my co-workers. There’s no way I’m spinning for hours and keeping it tight for a dancing blowhard who couldn’t even bother to get dinner. The illusion of the “have it all!” woman is ludicrous. Like... If you want it all... The marriage, the job, the having to do all the stuff for your family... I’m not here to tell you’re wrong, but... It seems unreasonably hard. Don’t let movies like “Enola Holmes 3”, that try to sell you on the idea that the “modern woman” has to be 10000 things successfully... Don’t let those movies taint your idea of what “success” even looks like, and certainly don’t ever buy the nonsense that, if you DON’T get married, run a successful business, AND be an awesome mom that you’re somehow a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just being sold a vision of success that isn’t real.

That’s what ultimately makes me upset about “Enola Holmes 3”. Not the action scenes, which are similar to the action scenes from the first two films, but edited much more poorly. Not the tired fourth wall breaking. Not the second screen recap nonsense. It’s trying to sell you a product that, often, will just make you feel bad about yourself, wrapped in a movie that is pretending to do the exact opposite. I’m not buying it.

I’m also not buying the villain. If there’s something I dislike about “Enola Holmes 3” almost as much as the terrible sales pitch, it’s Moriarty. As I frequently do, I’m going to spoil the end of the movie, but I have to bring up the speech. I thought the 5 minute word salad delivered by the bad guy at the end of “The Wrecking Crew” earlier this year was one of the worst “Before I kill you, Mr. Bond” I’d ever heard, but it was topped by Moriarty.

Moriarty has a gun pointed at Enola Holmes’s head, and instead of just pulling the trigger and offing her arch-rival, she delivers this speech (I am paraphrasing, but this is basically what she says):

“I can outsmart your dumbass brother every day of the week and twice on sunday. But you... Enola Holmes. You are the most incredible person on earth. Your intellect dwarfs even my own. The fact is, I CANNOT reconcile the fact that I have defeated you with the fact that you are this awesome. Therefore, rather than be wrong about your awesomeness, I’ll just lay down and lose.” And then she lets herself be sucker punched in the face and goes down. Like... What? You’ve just completely neutered your villain! If Moriarty believes Enola Holmes is the undefeatable pinnacle of earthlings, how can Moriarty be a threat anymore? She can’t! She’s utterly pointless!

Well, unless you were on the phone and missed her speech. Then, the only pointless thing, is basically the entire movie.

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9/10

----

Normally, when you have a well-intentioned director with a low budget, self-funded movie, the best case scenario is something like “The Room”, where the pure intentions lead to unintentional hilarity. Although, frequently, you end up with a mildly watchable pile of meh. The “Mythica” series really bucks that trend. The adventures of Marek the mage, Dagen the rogue, Teela the cleric (played by movieshyte favorite Nicola Posener from The Royal We! Since she’s a movieshyte favorite, Nicola actually gets a shout out, unlike the other actors who I won’t bother to look up even though they’re actually pretty decent actors) and Thane the warrior (yes, we have a full-blown classic dungeons and dragons party) (don’t have more than a single parenthetical in the same sentence, it’s confusing) are actually charming and fun to watch. Despite the lack of a budget, the enthusiasm that all involved have, from the actors, to the costume designers (big shout out, a lot of the “Mythica” costumes are really cool), to the location scouts, to the scriptwriter, to the director... Well, you get my point. Their enthusiasm just jumps off the screen. It’s infectious, and I can’t help but feel that exuberant energy as a low budget but heartfelt project plays out.

By the third movie, however, you run the risk of some of that initial enthusiasm wearing a bit thin. I have to say, for the first half or so of “Mythica the Necromancer”, it kind of does. The plot is stale enough I won’t repeat it, although it involves Thane the warrior getting taken by a bunch of yahoo dorks who he *should* be able to gank in his sleep, but doesn’t because plot. Turns out, Thane’s kidnapper is Marek’s owner back from when she was a slave, and he essentially sends the other three party members on a pointless quest so they can level up and return and kick his ass. I guess I *did* end up repeating the plot.

For the first half of the movie, they wander a bit aimlessly. For those of you familiar with tabletop roleplaying games, it’s kind of like when the gamemaster hasn’t prepared for the game that week, and they’re kind of winging it, and it isn’t going so great. Like...

Gamemaster: As you walk down the street, you happen across a warehouse!

Party: We keep going.

GM: WHAT? There’s a warehouse there.

Party: That doesn’t have anything to do with our current quest.

GM: The warehouse is RIGHT there. There’s probably treasure inside.

Party: We don’t care.

GM: Yes you do. You feel drawn to the warehouse!

Party: There isn’t any reason to break into a random warehouse.

GM: But it’s RIGHT THERE.

And so on. I might or might not have pulled this dialogue from my personal tabletop RPG experience. Point is, the first half of “Mythica the Necromancer” feels a bit like this. Kind of... Unrelated to the rest of the films and aimless. I did appreciate them stopping by a whorehouse and paying a sex worker for information (for my rant on the criminal mistreatment of sex workers both by law and art, check out my review of “The Wiz”). The whore says, since they paid her for information, she’ll go ahead and throw in other services for the fee. Both Dagen and Teela seem DTF, but Marek is having no shenanigans so they just leave. Marek’s attitude here actually makes more sense when we get to the critical scene of the film:

Marek and Dagen are chatting it up by the romantic campfire. Teela is off praying or whatever, so they’re by themselves. Dagen leans in for the smooch he’s been wanting to plant on Marek since way back in the first “Mythica”. Marek starts to lean in, and it looks like go time... Then she pulls away, pulls out a map, and starts reading it. My bro Dagen got cock blocked by A MAP. I assume that THE MAP is a treasure map that leads to a Hitachi Magic Wand +3 (you go, Marek!), otherwise, what are we doing here people??

But it might be karma! You see, back in “Mythica 2 The Darkspore” during an overnight rest in the wilderness, Thane the warrior was chatting it up with Teela the cleric. All of a sudden, while they’re talking, Teela turns to Thane and drops her robe. Thane is like “?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!”, and so is the audience, because Teela is a Lan’a’thael 10 and Thane is a Minneapolis 5. However, before Thane can recover from his shock, Dagen literally steps out of the shadows and says something like “Chilly night, isn’t it?” (a fact that Thane is witnessing first hand). Teela yelps in surprise and runs willy nilly into the night. Now, I’m not an expert in the bro code, but I think it dictates that, at this point, Thane brutally murder Dagen, and possibly wear his face. I don’t know, I would have to look up the code. Point is, Thane lets it slide (?!). As it turns out, Thane’s good buddy THE MAP would exact revenge on his behalf a film later!

Of course, while THE MAP might play a role, the real reason Marek doesn’t want to get with a sex worker or smoochy smooch with Dagen is that she’s a Necromancer, and she doesn’t have control of her powers. If she gets too excited, she might literally melt Dagen’s face off, because in “Mythica” necromancers take energy from people by melting their faces off. The thing is, Marek should just TELL this to Dagen, because Dagen would happily tell her that he doesn’t even want a face if it’s not going down on her. Communication, people. It’s important.

But, thanks to the intervention of THE MAP, the film really picks up in the third act. There’s a journey where Marek comes to terms with her powers, and an emotional climax that was so well done I was actually in tears. Despite some hiccups along the way, I was still invested enough in those characters for the scene (which, for once, I won’t actually spoil) to hit me the way it did.

That’s the thing. Even with budgetary concerns and some plodding plotting, a genuine desire to make a cool fantasy movie comes through. With a ton of big budget soulless corporate slop out there, we NEED the passion of these indie filmmakers. So, I am looking forward to watching the rest of the “Mythica” movies.

I need THE MAP to complete its hero’s journey.

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7/10

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These are words uttered by a member of Mike (Hugh Jackman)’s AA group early in the film. They’re right, right? The young foos are just ignorant of the random aches and pains and world weary experience that comes with age. Jerks!

Of course, being, errrrr... 15 years old myself (in spirit), like, that stuff I just said certainly doesn’t apply to me.

Wait, let’s rewind. “Song Sung Blue” is a movie about a Neil Diamond tribute band. Mike and Claire (Kate Hudson) are the band. They get success, drug and/or alcohol addiction derails them, they recover, and have big a comeback. See: Just about every biopic about every singer or band ever made. The stuff that happens is pretty typical...

Except for that line. “Young people just don’t know how good they have it.” There’s a flipside line, not said by anybody in the movie but that you might have heard: “It gets better.” This is what you tell young people who are having a rough go of it. Young people don’t know how good they have it. It gets better.

They’re both kind of lies.

In a sense they aren’t. It is pretty cool to wake up without back pain and be able to @#$! like a rabbit. Also... From a macro, sociological standpoint, it kind of does get better. I mean, it depends on your definition of ‘better’, of course. If you think the goal of humanity is to form the pan universal empire ruled by you, I don’t know if that’s in the cards. But, if you are a fan of just empathy and understanding other people, we’re better. Doesn’t always seems like it, because of course prejudice, sexism, reverse sexism, all that stuff is still out there, and it can seem pretty bleak. But, get in that time machine and go back 100 years, and then tell me we’re not more open to different cultures and sexualities and all of it (if you do find a time machine, remember the first rule: Regardless of what time period you go to in the past or future, DO NOT go to Russia. It’s horrible there and you will be mushed into a fine paste). So, yes, it kind of does get better.

But that’s an big, cultural scale. On a personal scale, it gets the same. That is to say, as a “young person”, you’re going to go through some hard times where you’re feeling down. You’re also going to experience profound joy and have triumphs as well. Guess what, that is ALSO the case when you’re an adult. The thing is, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and let the hard times and negative emotions completely shroud the positive ones. When that happens, it’s very easy to construct a past or future where things were better. If shit is bad, yeah, it’s all too easy to look at the past and say “it was better then” or to look at the future and say “it’ll be better”, but the fact is, shit got pretty bad back then, too, and will do so in the future as well. You can’t let the sadness take over, because the triumphs are there too, you just need to remember and embrace them.

So, what is my evidence for this amazing insight into human emotion? The answer is “Song Sung Blue.”

There is a third protagonist in the film, Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson), who becomes Mike’s daughter as well when Mike and Claire get married. Things aren’t always great for Rachel. She gets pregnant at a young age, her mom becomes addicted to drugs, and money is tight and things in general aren’t easy. Things aren’t always great for Mike either. His daughter gets pregnant at a young age, his wife becomes addicted to drugs, and money is tight and things in general aren’t easy. “Young people just don’t know how good they have it.” Looking at Mike and Rachel side by side, it sure seems like the old people and young people have it the same.

But... There are moments of joy as well for Rachel and Mike, and the two of them shape a lot of those memories together. Mike teaching Rachel how to fix cars, Rachel hanging out with her parents after a great show... That joy I talked about earlier, the stuff you need to prevent the shroud of sadness from taking over, Mike and Rachel find that joy in each other.

Now, don’t get it twisted. Romantic writers and pinko communist punks will tell you that’s where the secret sauce is: Face to face connection with other people. That’s a load of bung sauce. The secret sauce is WHEREVER YOU CAN FIND IT. Your cat. Your tree. Your AI chatbot. Your monogamous relationship. Your earth. Maybe not that second to last thing. Wherever your triumph comes from, you just have to REMEMBER it.

That’s actually pretty hard to do if your joy comes from, say, opioids. “Song Sung Blue” takes place in the 90s, and Claire was prescribed opioids after an accident. Of course, back then, opioids were advertised as “non-addictive” (even though, in the future, we would learn that the pharmaceutical companies knew damn well they were addictive and never shared the evidence). If people like Claire got addicted to opioids, that wasn’t an opioid problem, that was a Claire problem. It’s HER body, it’s HER responsibility. The thing is... That’s true. But it is ALSO true that opioids were overprescribed and alternatives to them weren’t even explored.

Individual responsibility versus systemic pressure. Both are responsible for addiction... But you can’t fix individuals. I mean, you can say “just say no to drugs!” or whatever, but other people’s decisions are ultimately out of your hands. You *can* fix systems. We did! We fixed the whole opioid thing with a class action lawsuit! Make those evil bastards PAY. It’s like “The Exorcist” model of problem solving. The catholic church created the problem of demonic possession (because if you’re a non-catholic possessed by a demon, you’re actually just a crazy person), and ONLY the catholic church can solve it. Same goes with money. If money, in the form of financial incentives to prescribe opioids, kickbacks, and other financial shenanigans built the opioid crisis, then money can SOLVE the problem by making the pharmaceutical companies pay billions. Do you even understand how many billions are in billions?!? PROBLEM SOLVED. That fact that for profit healthcare, and all those incentives ARE STILL IN PLACE doesn’t mean anything, because they PAID THAT MONEY.

Watching Claire gets addicted to drugs that were sold as “non addictive” pissed me off. Even today, pharmaceutical companies and conservative dipshits will blame addiction on individual responsibility (which is partially true), and place NONE of the blame on institutional pressure that you can actually try to fix (which is also true, but is ignored).

But ultimately (I have a blanket spoiler warning, but here I will issue a specific spoiler warning that I am about to talk about the end of movie) “Song Sung Blue” comes down to that “blue” feeling, and whether it’s more powerful than the joy of Neil Diamond. Turns out, it’s not. It’s not a coincidence that, after his greatest show, Mike passes away. What is more impactful: The joy created by his incredible performance, or the tragedy of his death? Those two things are simply... Potent examples of the cycle that everybody goes through. For his family, our last images are them remembering Mike with love. Remembered and holding on to the happiness he brought, even in the face of tragedy. Of course, having the music of the jewish elvis, Neil Diamond, front and center will help a lot with that whole “take your joy where you can get it” idea. Even if the song is sung blue, it’s coming up (cracklin) rosie.

By the way, since I randomly waited until the end of the review to talk about the music of Neil Diamond when discussing a movie that’s about a Neil Diamond tribute band, I do have to mention “the scene”. Just about every movie about musicians has that scene where the band or singer performs, and everything clicks into place, and the die is cast, we see and hear the magic bloom right in front of us. In “Song Sung Blue”, that scene is when Mike and Claire first get together to rehearse their new act, and they perform “Cherry Cherry” together. I ain’t gonna lie, I got chills. Turns out Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson sound absolutely phenomenal together. I don’t buy soundtracks anymore, and I already have an extensive Neil Diamond collection #humblebrag, but if I were to purchase a soundtrack I might actually get “Song Sung Blue” just to get the Jackman/Hudson versions of these Neil Diamond hits. They’re that good.

By the way, I’m sure I don’t need to insult my audience by explicitly saying that, if you’re not a fan of Neil Diamond, you might not enjoy a movie about a tribute band to him that’s full of his music. So consider that unsaid.

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7/10

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I guess it would be “Casanoira”. Point is, I could rattle off every classic movie, and we don’t have a remake of it with an all-black cast. Except one. “The Wizard of Oz”. I’m not saying it *shouldn’t* happen. If you wanted to pitch an all-black “Star Wars” I’d be down. It’d certainly be better than the sequel trilogy. But, the black remake that we *did* get was “The Wiz”, a “Wizard of Oz” remake from 1978, written and directed by a couple of white guys. Granted, one of those white guys is Sidney Lumet, who is actually pretty awesome #dogdayafternoon. The other is Joel Schumacher, who is... Aight? I guess?

So, I’m going through “The Wiz” chronologically, because really, the nutso starts from the beginning. We have 24 year old Dorothy, played by 83092182009 year old Diana Ross, who lives with her Auntie Em, singing about how everybody at this party is in a stable monogamous relationship except for her. I didn’t see an altar to the nuclear family in the background, but it must be around somewhere based on how much Dorothy apparently wants to be “normal”. Why isn’t she normal? You’re telling me Diana Ross wants a piece and can’t get none? I mean, she’s 24 and lives with her aunt, is she a millennial femcel? The fact is WE HAVE NO IDEA, because we don’t know a damn thing about Dorothy other than her circumstances. It’s hard to empathize with her desire for normalcy when I have no clue what’s preventing her from attaining it, other than “that’s just how it is”. Plus, I tend not to empathize with desires for normalcy anyway. Normal is way, way overrated.

After the party wraps up, Dorothy is talking with Em, and her aunt is encouraging her to take that new high school teaching job she’s been offered, and Dorothy says she’s fine teaching kindergarten. WHAT?!? I know some teachers, and it is a rare breed of completely insane person that would rather teach kindergarten than high school (bless those people, we need them, but they’re crazy). High schoolers might not have read “The Great Gatsby” the night before, but at least they’re sitting down. Kindergarteners are screaming, falling on their face, and peeing their pants. Even if Billy Madison is correct, and peeing your pants is the coolest, it’s still messy. We’re to believe Dorothy isn’t fleeing kindergarten at 100mph because... She’s stuck? Stuck being not normal? Again, WHY??

So, obviously, it’s time to go to Oz. Dorothy crushes the wicked witch of the east and takes her shoes (which are silver, instead of the iconic ruby slippers of the original 1939 “Wizard of Oz”. They kept the bricks on the road yellow, so why change the slippers from ruby to silver? *shrug*). The good witch tells her that, to go home, she needs to find the wizard of oz, and Dorothy is off to meet the scarecrow, who is none other than the king of pop himself, Michael Jackson.

I am assuming the resurgence of interest in MJ is why this movie was floating around my ‘recommended’ queue. Make no mistake, Michael Jackson was an icon while I was growing up, and I still think he’s one of the best on stage performers ever. Killer voice, insane dance moves, and wrote a bunch of his own songs. MJ is to pop music what Jackie Chan is to martial arts movies: He changed the game, and has arguably never been surpassed at his craft. I have to say, his performance as the scarecrow is terrific fun. He has this bowlegged gait that seems really goofy yet still has this great rhythm to it, and his singing voice... Well, I mean, we’re talking about MJ and Diana Ross, probably the two most iconic motown singers. Obviously the voice is there (and frequently, so are the songs). There is a big problem with the scarecrow, however.

He looks like trash.

Literally. The scarecrow in “The Wiz” was designed to look like a trash pile. The makeup, especially that weird, droopy face makeup, is just off-putting and, to be honest, kind of disgusting. I almost couldn’t look at him. Then, during the closing credits, I found out the makeup was done by legendary makeup and effects man Stan Winston? Are you kidding me? Why would you hide Michael Jackson behind retch-inducing garbage makeup? As far as I can tell, Stan Winston must have come from the future, and he was warning children: “This man is gross. Stay away from him”. I get it, but for those of us currently IN the future who are aware of MJ’s proclivities and just want to watch him perform, it’s a complete disaster.

Next we go pick up the tin man, Nipsey Russell. In the 80s, I only knew Nipsey Russell as the game show poetry guy. I watched a LOT of game shows in the 80s. Too many. I can’t tell you how much of my current worldview was shaped by “Card Sharks”, but it’s probably a lot. “We surveyed 100 housewives and asked, is your husband fucking his secretary? How many housewives answered yes, my husband is fucking his secretary?” It was always fascinating to watch the divide between the answer if the housewives told the truth, which would be 100, or if they are lying to either themselves or the survey team, in which case the answer will be 0. It’s an anthropological goldmine! But, Nipsey would appear on game shows, say a funny little 3-5 line poem, and then proceed to get his ass handed to him by Betty White, Richard Kline, or any of the celebrities who were *really good* at game shows (not handing Nipsey a burn notice, those people would school you and me as well at $25000 Pyramid). Well, of course Nipsey Russell isn’t just a ‘poetry guy’, he’s a song and dance man in the classic vaudeville tradition, and here he gets to show off those chops. He’s my favorite thing in the movie. Slick dancing, and unlike the scarecrow, the tin man looks dope. He just... Has it, you know? Charisma. Nipsey’s got The Riz while doin’ “The Wiz”. Although, his song about how he needs oil made me wonder if Exxon was funding the movie.

So, they “Ease on Down the Road”, pick up the cowardly lion, fight off some living garbage can that make 1970s daleks look state of the art, and end up in the red light district with the hos.

Of course, the hos are evil and work for the wicked witch of the west. They’re also scantily clad (as you might imagine hos would be). This movie is rated G, and while I don’t have a problem exposing my fake daughter, Cap’n Karen, to hos, I might think twice about letting her watch these evil hos. Hollywood, can we please portray sex workers as normal folks who have normal problems? Do they always have to be underhanded hustlers, hookers with hearts of gold, or wretched drug addicts? Oh, I guess they do, because sex work is illegal. That needs to end. These women (and a few men, but mostly women) provide a non violent service that is in demand, and they deserve dignity, civil rights, and recourse when violence is committed against them, and they have NONE of those because we still have puritan laws put down thousands of years ago. It’s a fucking travesty.

Time to fast forward to the final two scenes of the movie, starting with the “sweat shop scene”. Here, Evillene, the wicked witch of the west (played by legendary actress Mabel King, oversees a bunch of factory workers manufacturing sweat (as far as I can tell, they do this just to validate the pun, because we have no other exposure to the sweat market in Oz). These workers are also in some pretty... Problematic makeup. They kind of look of terrible racial caricatures straight out of minstrel shows you might find at the turn of the 20th century. However, after Evillene is vanquished (by pulling the lever to the sprinkler system... Which was sitting there. Out in the open. And could have presumably been pulled by anybody in the last number of decades), the workers pull off these costumes, and reveal the true black people underneath. It is a stunningly beautiful moment. Both in terms of the spiritual beauty of shedding the grotesque mantle of caricature and stereotype, but also beautiful in the Donald Sterling sense of these are a bunch of professional dancers, who are keeping it tight, and dancing in their underwear (again, this film is rated G, why are they in they underwear? *shrug*).

I loved the moment, but for it to make any sense, Evillene had to be white.

Now, I get it. You want an all-black cast. But... Those costumes the sweat shop workers were forced to wear that represented the distorted view of black people? Those stereotypes were created by “the man”. The white man. Whitey. If evil is manifested in Oz as witches, then that sweat shop should have been run by the Wicked Witch of the White. If you’re going to have your characters literally shed a racist view of them, then they should also be able to defeat the source of that racism. 70s blaxspoitation films had a long history of “the man” being the ultimate villain, and just ignoring it here seems... More cowardly than the lion.

After the factory workers start dancing, the crows, the hos, and the flying monkeys that formerly worked for the wicked witch join in and start dancing. Wait, what? These weren’t sweat shop workers that were forced into labor, these were folks that went out into Oz and did the wicked witch’s bidding, and seemed to enjoy it. We’re supposed to forgive them? Why? Because they were just following orders? You know who else was following orders? Adolf Eichmann. We didn’t let eichmann off the hook, so I’m not sure we should let the flying monkeys off either.

So, the witch is dead, the wizard of oz (Richard Pryor, in an oddly non comedic role) is revealed as fake, the good witch of the south shows up, tells Dorothy she’s had the power to go home the whole time, and Dorothy can’t wait to go back to harlem.

My question is: WHY? Why does she want to go back? In that opening scene she was singing about how she how she isn’t in a stable monogamous relationship, she teaches kindergarten, she lives with her aunt. Why exactly is she so eager to return? In Oz, she has adventure, she has friends, and if she wants that relationship, there are candidates. The idea that she wants to go back “because it’s the real world” is short sighted, lazy writing. She should at least be THINKING about it, but nope, she needs to return to “normal” earth and resume her quest for a normal nuclear family without a second thought. It makes ZERO sense.

Until... The final song of the film, where Dorothy reveals that she made everything, and instead of black “Wizard of Oz”, we’ve been watching black “The Usual Suspects”. She doesn’t go into her bedroom, where we see a Michael Jackson album and have $25000 Pyramid with Nipsey Russell playing in the background, but we might as well have. What, exactly, is supposed to be the takeaway here? She made up the movie, to what end? To make friends and then leave? I guess we’re to believe that her journey to a made up universe, which she engineered in a microsecond, gave her the ability to “get out of her rut” and be normal? I’m not sure what skills she acquired in Oz that would help her with that. Revealing that Dorothy just made up the movie didn’t really add anything other than dissatisfaction.

I guess Dorothy’s reluctance to examine whether or not ‘normalcy’ is worth pursuing mirrors the movie’s reluctance to be truly “dark and edgy”. Even if the cast is all black, the actual story is a whiter shade of puce.

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9/10

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There’s a technical term for a movie that starts with this kind of existential question, and it’s a long term: Arthoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooouse.

While I’m not usually here to issue warnings (I’m here to pump you up), I’ll warn that the movie doesn’t let up after that first scene, as far as not being fully comprehensible goes. The dialogue is full of allusions and metaphor, and *not* strictly what I would call “conversational”, and things aren’t helped by the ‘schizo’ bride who frequently has tourette’s-like tics where she yells out a bunch of gibberish. We get references to “The Thin Man”, “Bartleby”, “Bonnie and Clyde”, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers... Heck, even Harley Quinn. I’m sure there are tons of allusions that went over *my* big head, which means I would classify “The Bride!” as not especially accessible (especially to younger viewers). However, sometimes being movieshyte is less easy than pimpin’, because the more inaccessible the film, the more I want to access it! So, dear reader, we go into the breach of “The Bride!”

The first order of business would be to find a lens to start viewing the movie through. Hopefully, even arthouse movies will provide at least a clue, and we get an obvious clue here. We started the movie with Mary Shelley; this is clearly related to her masterpiece “Frankenstein”, so we’ll start there.

“Frankenstein” is the ultimate poster child for the “nurture” side of the “nature versus nurture” argument of how people develop their perspectives. This is accomplished by eliminating the “nature” out of the equation entirely. Frankenstein’s monster (who characters in “The Bride!” refer to as ‘Frank’, even though he’s NOT doctor Frankenstein, he’s the monster. I feel like he should be ‘Mons’, or ‘Big Ugly’, but since everybody else calls him ‘Frank’ I will as well) is completely unnatural, he’s a bunch of corpses stitched together and reanimated via nature’s antithesis: Technology. Having no ‘nature’ means that Frank is a completely blank slate. All his behaviors are learned. Sure enough, in the original “Frankenstein”, the hubris and obsessive nature of Dr. Frankenstein rub off on Frank, and he starts killing chumps. Nurture triumphs over nature. So, we’ll take this “nature vs. nurture” dichotomy, and apply it to “The Bride!”

After our opening scene frame up with Mary Shelley, we are introduced to the monster, Frank himself (played by academy award winner Christian Bale). It’s been over 100 years since his creation, and we’re in the roaring twenties in the united states. Frank is no longer a ‘blank slate’, as he’s had over a century to figure out what he wants, and he’s decided that he wants to be the star of a Judd Apatow movie (I talk about this in my Veronica Mars review, check it out!). He wants a monogamous romantic relationship and a steady source of income. Which is to say... He wants to be ‘normal’. Blech. I shouldn’t judge, being a monster is probably more easy than pimpin’, but still not easy. Frank finds a new mad scientist (the funnest character in the film, played by Annette Bening). They dig up a dead woman (the possessed woman from the first scene), use SCIENCE! to reanimate her, and we’re off.

Since Frank isn’t our ‘blank slate’, his new Bride! must be, right? She is indeed. She doesn’t remember her mortal self. She knows nothing. What will our ‘nuture triumphs over nature’ test subject tell us about the culture she is absorbing? How will this cultural indoctrination reflect back on us? This is it! This is the lens we’ll use to decode our dense arthouse movie.

Turns out, she absorbs... Nothing? Turns out... The Bride! is incapable of creating long term memories. Basically every day, she wakes up and whatever she’s learned is gone. Her status as a blank slate remains perpetual. She doesn’t absorb any culture, and so she’s not reflecting the darkest impulses of humanity back at us. What the heck? What’s going on? Does this mean that we should be paying attention to Frank? It doesn’t seem like it. Frank seems narrowly focused on his Apatow goal, and is more interested in getting The Bride! to like him by telling her what he thinks she wants to hear rather than telling her the truth. In that sense, Frank is like an AI chatbot for The Bride!

As it turns out... “The Bride!” does something pretty cool. It shifts the focus from “how is The Bride! absorbing society?” to “how is society absorbing The Bride!?” It’s not about what parts of the culture will be etched onto the blank slate, it’s about what happens when your society already has a rigid set of rules in place, and now you introduce a character that ignores the rules entirely because they have no idea what the rules even are. The Bride! doesn’t care about the rules (because she doesn’t know them and is incapable of learning them). She plays by her own rules! Does that make The Bride! a sigma grinder? Can women be sigma grinders? I am going to say the answer to both those questions is YES, because I completely understand the youth of today and their lingo. I ain’t no square, daddy-o, and you’d best get hip to the fact that the kiddos think I’m totes fab. Back to our main thesis: How will people react to our non-conformist Bride!?

Turns out... By treating her like a monster. Because, according to their rules, she IS a monster. We’ll start with her appearance. Her clothes are ragged, her hair is a mess, and worse, the gunk used to reanimate stains permanently, so she’s got permanent stains on her face, hair, and clothes. Women were expected to maintain a standard of appearance in the twenties (and now). The difference is, *now* we have perspective. Women might be expected to keep it tight, but we are aware that is a rule, a pressure that they can push back against or ignore. In the twenties, people weren’t using terms like “patriarchy” or “objectification”. Eating salad and spending hours on your hair and makeup wasn’t ‘a rule’, it was just how things were. If you wanted to pound a box of cookies and not bother with your makeup at all, you would keep it to yourself. Women didn’t do those things. It’s pretty hard to fight against systemic oppression when nobody is even acknowledging that it’s oppressive.

But... That *changes* when you actually see somebody who completely ignores the system. The Bride! isn’t actively fighting the system, even if she had an inkling to do that she would forget about it the next day... But it turns out that *passively* fighting the system by opting out is a pretty damn powerful idea. The men and women around The Bride! start to take notice. Women smudge their faces to mirror The Bride!’s blemishes. Men start to believe that women can be more than secretaries, they can be, say, police detectives. Exposure to the blank slate starts to change the culture it’s failing to absorb, while the slate remains gleefully blank. Opt out. The catchphrase of the aforementioned Bartleby, “I would prefer not to”, is spoken many times during the film. Don’t fight the system, ignore it. Trust me, world systems don’t want to be ignored, so the fight WILL be coming, but opting out at least gives you a way to deal with a crushing status quo that you might not even realize is crushing.

That’s pretty damn cool. While I think it’s great that we have the option of, say, going on substack and calling out the patriarchy (this never happens. I’m just kidding, it’s every other post, including this one?!?), I think there is something... Elegant about sigma grinding it (I am DEFINITELY using that term correctly) and just... Preferring not to.

Turns out, the destination at the end of an arthouse road might be worth finding after all.

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2/10

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Why? Why do women love true crime? Morbid insight into their own vulnerability? Fascination with the cruel fates of others? Or maybe women like to be reminded that they aren’t delicate flowers and can be just as ruthless and backstabby (or frontstabby!) as men, because the true criminal from “Maternal Instinct”, like “The Crash”, is a murderess.

Here’s my advice to the ladies: Stop freaking out. Allow me to redirect your interest to the holy trinity of stuff you should actually care about: Chicks, cars, and sports. Y’all need to step up to the plate and start listening to the “Cars!, chicks!!, and sports!!!” podcast, hosted by Bro McGLP2, with special guest every straight man on earth. By the way, “step up to the plate” was a sports reference, which you would get if you started listening to the podcast!

But, instead of taking my own advice, I watched “Maternal Instinct”, and in the opening scene was greeted by our villain, Taylor Parker, who has been pulled over to the side of the road by a police officer in New Boston, Texas. I am curious if New Boston runs a New Marathon, or if they still do it like in Old Boston.

The police take Taylor, who has a baby with her she claims she’s given birth to, to the hospital, where we promptly are treated to doctors, nurses, and police officers debating the veracity of her story.

Here’s the thing... This is a documentary, right? How are we getting this footage of Taylor on the roadside and in the hospital? Then it hit: We’re looking at footage from police body cams.

WHAT?!?

Isn’t the point of body cams to prevent abuse of police power (@#$! the police!)? To hold cops accountable for questionable actions? If so... Why has body cam footage become a clown, for our amusement? And how on earth did a netflix documentary crew get ahold of it? During the closing credits, they thank the New Boston PD for “providing” the footage. Providing? I might not know much, but I know this: Ain’t nothing free. I am guessing that the documentarians “provided” some of that sweet, sweet Netflix cash to the correct department, and then in return were “provided” with the body cam footage in the Taylor Parker case.

So now body cams, tools that are supposed to help underprivileged people not get railroaded by the state, are just providing entertainment. It’s like that old TV show “Cops”, except we don’t need a full fledged camera crew following the cops around anymore, we’ll just furnish the cops with THEIR OWN cameras, paid for by the government. This is exactly what economists are talking about when they mention “Socialist input, capitalist output”. The body cams are being paid for by US, the taxpayers (you’d best believe movieshyte pays their taxes... *wink*) and yet the profits reaped from the footage are being collected by Netflix, a private entity worth billions. Instead of the masses getting justice, they’re getting placated with spectacle. Why hold a cop responsible for beating somebody down when we can be entertained by WATCHING them beat somebody down? Goodbye humanity, hello epicaricacy. By the way, you might notice my insane vocabularly flex this review. You’re welcome.

Then we have the actual crime itself. Taylor is a con woman, but she is apparently the worst con woman in New Boston because none of her schemes actually work. She tries for a real estate thing that fails... And the central incident of the film, is she tries to convince people that she’s pregnant. Because... ??? I guess it doesn’t matter why, what matters is that the only person in the entire town that fell for the ruse was her boyfriend Wade.

We get interviews from Wade’s family, Wade’s friends, Taylor’s friends, lawyers, and even doctors (no engineers, so we don’t complete the trifecta of careers acceptable to asian parents), and ALL of these people say essentially the same thing: “It was obvious she was lying. I never believed she was pregnant. I tried to tell Wade, but he didn’t believe me”. Followed up by: “I was really curious what she was going to do when her ‘due date’ came up”.

There are two options here. First, these people are lying, and they actually were fooled by Taylor and don’t want to look stupid in hindsight. The second option, is that they are telling the truth, and kind of seem complicit in a murder.

Now, let me be clear. I don’t think Wade’s friends or the people of New Boston are vindictive or evil in any way. They seem like good people. If they had any inkling that Taylor would eventually murder a pregnant woman and steal her baby, they would have stopped her. BUT... They did have an inkling that *something* was about to happen. We know this, because they tell us in their interviews! What was going to happen when Taylor was ‘due’? A doctor in the town PUT THE HOSPITAL ON ALERT FOR A POTENTIAL BABY KIDNAPPING when Taylor’s due date arrived, because he was concerned she might take action that drastic. Umm... Doc? If you thought Taylor represented a threat large enough to put your hospital on alert... Why didn’t you just call the one person Taylor was fooling, her boyfriend Wade, and say “I’m a doctor. Your girlfriend is NOT pregnant.” He could have shut the ruse down right there. Wade’s friends, that tried to tell Wade he was being fooled, just kind of shrugged and walked away when Wade wasn’t buying their story. Why didn’t they pull up Taylor’s shirt, rip off her false belly, and throw it in Wade’s face?

I don’t want to speak for these people out of turn or claim to know exactly why they didn’t stage a full on intervention to uncover Taylor’s ruse. But I’ll tell you at least PART of it: Spectacle. They knew the Taylor car was going to crash (much like MacKenzie’s car in The Crash), and they wanted to know what the result looked like. I’ll repeat myself, I don’t think for a second that any of these people thought *murder* was going to be the outcome... But by being so fascinated by the spectacle of Taylor and Wade saga, they unintentionally left that murder door open, when they could have provided irrefutable evidence to Wade that his girlfriend was lying to him, and ended the whole ruse right then.

I feel bad for Wade. Apparently, after Taylor’s arrest and conviction, he was kind of treated like a pariah by the town. That seems unfair, being as Wade was only person actually fooled by Taylor’s fake pregnancy. That makes Wade guilty of what... Being a dumbass? Hardly. Relationships are hard, and it’s just unreasonable to expect people in relationships (romantic or otherwise) to be objective about them. That’s why the whole “throw the false belly in his face” thing was necessary to get him to see the truth. I think Wade is more innocent than all the townspeople that DID see through Taylor’s ruse, and just watched, waiting to see how the story would end. Then it ended in murder.

Can I sit here on my soapbox and say I would have done any differently? Of course I can’t. I wasn’t there. Maybe I would have seen through Taylor’s ruse and looked on with everybody else. Or maybe I would have been fooled by Taylor but lied about it to a documentary crew to save face. I don’t know. Hopefully, I would have learned from the experience. Maybe it’s better to stop cops from beating people down rather than enjoy watching them do it. Maybe it’s better to step in and try to help your friend by revealing his girlfriend’s duplicity before it can spiral into a tragedy that you never imagined was possible.

Or maybe you can just grab the @#$!ing popcorn and watch.

6/10

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This would be in the same vein that Russia loves its dirty ruminations on the depravity of existence, or Bollywood loves its romantic comedies, or England loves its kind of middling blarf (sorry England, in music you are unsurpassed. In movies... Not so much). Netflix picks up a lot of these Spanish cop thrillers, so I watch many of them. I find that they are the Chinese food of cinema... They’re pretty enjoyable, but then a week later I’ve forgotten about them.

“The Marked Woman” is slightly more memorable, because it’s not only about the mundane, averagely interesting cops (@#$! the police!), it’s about “The marked woman” herself, Alicia. At the start of the movie, she’s a woman found in a shipping container who has been brutally tortured and has no memory of who she is or why she’s there. At the end of the movie, she’s a full-on superhero. It turns out... “The Marked Woman” is a superhero origin story. That’s pretty cool.

Or, at least, it *should* have been pretty cool. Instead, it was just kind of ‘aight. For one thing... In the first act, Alicia is attacked by an assassin in her hospital room. It turns out, she has some pretty wicked parkour and combat skills, and the result is an actual thrilling chase and fight scene. As it turns out... It would be the only action scene in the entire film. If you’re making a movie about a superhero, and she has elite combat skills, I would think you might want to show them off more. I’m not asking for “The Raid”, but another action sequence or two with Alicia kickin’ some pendejo ass would have been welcome.

But the far more egregious problem with Alicia is that I don’t know anything about her. I know she was tortured, and over the course of the movie she slowly learns more about her past. She was a cybersecurity expert. Her sister is missing, and Alicia is looking for her. These are all external circumstances. We never learn a thing about *why*, emotionally, Alicia needed to become a superhero. What void within her is filled by the journey? The answer to THAT question is the difference between a tortured woman in dire circumstances I can empathize with, and a fully-fledged character that can carry a movie. Why did she work in cybersecurity? Was she, or her sister, scammed? Did she just want lots of money working in the tech sector? Does she love numbers and puzzles and that was the best outlet for her to flex those skills? We don’t know!!

For a movie with a runtime of almost two hours and a half, you would think we could invest *some* of that time learning about our hero and what motivates her. Instead, all that time is filled with... Stuff. Plot. Finding evidence that takes you to location A where you find additional evidence that leads you to location B where you find a bad guy who eventually reveals that you need to go to location C. Just going from setpiece to setpiece like a police procedural Indiana Jones, except without the action or humor. A film like “The Usual Suspects” might be driven by pure plot and dialogue while knowing little to nothing about the characters... But the plot of “The Usual Suspects” is an ensnaring web of deceit and fun, and dialogue is crisp and @#$!ing hilarious. It’s a really, really high bar. Usually pure plot-driven movies end up like “The Marked Woman”... Somewhat engaging but ultimately pretty soulless.

Of course, we have the standard tropes of the genre here. Corruption and payoffs abound in the police department. It’s almost like the movie is blurring the line between cop and criminal (See: Every cop movie ever made #Adaptation). Our forensic psychologist, Ripoll, has some nonsense from her past that she needs to deal with, but again, we don’t really delve into it or learn much about *her* either. She was on leave for psych evaluation, now she’s back. Like Alicia and the cargo container... Those are just circumstances. It doesn’t tell us much about what drives Ripoll. I also hope you like that name, because I feel like people yelled “Ripoll!” about 7894728798 times. It’s a decent name. Maybe not as good as Rip Van Winkle. Or Rip Torn. Ripoll doesn’t have a penis, so unlike Rip Torn, she can’t be in a scene where a woman is randomly batting his penis around for no apparent reason #Themanwhofelltoearth, which I guess is our loss.

What movie was I talking about again?

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10/10

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“Fast Charlie” provides exactly this kind of stimulus. This puts it in the same area code as “porn for girls” (”Twilight”), “porn for women” (”Fifty Shades of Grey”), and “porn for men aged 13-60” (actual porn). As your trusted advisor, I do have a piece of advice.

All y’all need to get better porn.

Now, before you think I’m handing out random burn notices to my loyal readership, I will say this: I get it. I get the thrill of smoking punks that don’t have respect or understand “the code”. I get wanting every hot guy in your school to fall in love with you. I get wanting to surrender control to a dark, tall, handsome stranger (although, arguably, Jamie Dornan is none of those things, but I still get it). I get the appeal of a pearl necklace. I’m down for all of it. However... Doesn’t it all strike you as... A little mundane? It’s time to level up to some real porn.

I am talking about *intellectual* porn.

For the intellectual porn pinnacle, one need look no further than the films of Shane Carruth. I am talking about the realization in “Upstream Color” that the worms are god (Ooooooooooooooooooooo!!!) and that reality itself has no meaning, to the erasure of your own past in “Primer”, thus proving that time itself is a construct of consciousness (Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggg!!!) and that reality itself has no meaning, to the FURTHER realization that god is actually the worms (Don’t stop! Don’t stoppppppppppp!!!) and that reality actually has a meaning, which is that it has no meaning.

That’s right. Instead of blowing your wad, Shane Carruth blows your mind. Then your wad.

Unlike “Veronica Mars”, I don’t advocate addiction, but by all means you don’t need to stop there. You can gyrate on over to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Kenji Mizoguchi, or any movie starring the god of intellect himself, Kelsey Grammer. I need Darius Emmanuel Grouch III, aka “the rumple” on my jock right now.

The point is dopamine release. Excitement. Curiosity. When your mind can get you there as well as your junk, and you realize that the intellectual and sexual are as interwoven as, say, Hans and Franz, then your porn possibilities become endless. It’s not about replacing vampires or stepsisters with something completely different, it’s about expanding your mental and physical ecosphere. Where the vampires and the god worms can live together in a disjointed mansion built for spooge fracking.

Take this advice, and hear me now and believe me later: You’ll thank me now. Or later.

Which segues not at all back to “Fast Charlie”, where our hero is played by Pierce Brosnan (which means you know Liam Neeson passed on the role, and Aaron Eckhart probably did as well). He does indeed smoke punks 1/3 his age, and despite the fact that he’s approximately 893108209380 years old, he ends up in Italy with Morena Baccarin as his lover (although, in hollywood years, Morena is about 78, which still makes her way younger than him). Even Liam had to say “Fook mate. That’s impressive”.

But you know something? The journey wasn’t bad. Yes... We’ve seen the old guy action hero before, but the film has a solid foundation. The dialogue is pretty funny, the action scenes are somewhat adrenaline pumping (as much as you can get from an 893108209380 year old pump), and Charlie’s plight is sympathetic enough that his nonsensical revenge by murdering a bunch of people actually carries some emotional weight. The best thing in the movie is probably the Fil Eisler score. It’s full of grindy, twangy cajun pieces that really set the mood and exemplify the southern setting. We even get some banjo. What happened to the banjo anyways?! There isn’t nearly enough of it, dueling or otherwise. Props to my man Fil for bringing it back!

The problem is... The filmmakers assume their audience is idiots. A thug has a shirt with the logo “Crispy Cream”, and he proudly proclaims, “I had it custom made!” Charlie rolls his eyes, and at this point, you have two options: Charlie says nothing, and the people who know about “Krispy Kreme” get the joke, and the people who don’t know about it don’t get it. OR, Charlie explains the joke, and the people who already got it now get double joke dipped, which is a fail, and the people who didn’t get it the first time are exposed as being as ignorant as our thug. OF COURSE Charlie says, “You spelled it wrong”. NO!!! Don’t explain the joke! How much of my nonsense do I take the time to explain?!? Not a lot! Because exposition and comedy work at cross purposes. Kind of like Hans and Gloria Steinem.

So, if you’re an old guy and want your porn fix, you can do worse than “Fast Charlie”, and if you’re not quite that old and want to spend 90 minutes with some zippy lines, decent action, and Morena Baccarin, you also could do worse. But you can also do better.

Or, better yet, you can do both.

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2/10

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I’m not an industry insider (although I play one on TV), but my best educated guess is “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and “Sing 2”. “K-Pop Demon Hunters” was in the netflix top ten for almost a year, and “Sing 2” was consistently in the top ten for OVER TWO YEARS. What do these movies have in common? Hypnotic power. Parents can plop their kids in front of these movies, leave, and get a sorely needed 2 hours of peace while their kids are enraptured by the bright colors, songs, and constant motion on the screen. Then... They can repeat the action. These movies emanate this field of child attention magnetism that makes them invaluable as parental tools. A successful film on netflix will get 10s of millions of views, possibly 100+ million if it’s a huge hit. “Sing 2” and “K-Pop Demon Hunters” measure their views in the BILLIONS because kids will watch them over and over again.

So, the big question is: Does “Goat” qualify? Will it entrance your kids and give you those two peaceful hours?

As much as I am childlike in my curiosity, imagination, and heedless optimism, I am an old man in body and wisdom. Therefore, I’m not really qualified to answer that question based on my own experience with the movie. I also don’t have any kids, so I can’t plonk them down in front of the TV to get their reactions.

Never let it be said that I will not go to great lengths for my loyal Movieshyte audience. Since I don’t have any kids, I invented one: My daughter, Cap’n Karen.

I asked Cap’n Karen to watch “Goat” top to bottom (t2b), in order to find out if it enchanted her into two hours of blissful silence. Cap’n Karen is 19 years old, and she said “No thanks, boomer. Fuck off.” Boomer?!? I’m not *that* old. I’m... let’s put it at “Old X”.

Again, loyalty to YOU forced my hand, and I promised Cap’n Karen a new phone if she would just sit down and watch the damn movie. She reluctantly agreed.

Did I get those two joyful hours? Well, it wasn’t entirely silent. Cap’n Karen ended up live-streaming herself watching “Goat”, as a “reaction video”. By doing this, she performed a kind of cinematic molecular gastronomy, turning a form of mindless content into a different form of mindless content that tastes the same. I suppose, if I wanted her genuine reaction, I should have watched her live-stream. The thing is, I don’t know how, and even if I did the last thing I would get from watching my daughter pimp herself out to her 53 followers is “peace”. So, I had to get her reaction the old fashioned way, by asking her.

Movieshyte: “Hey honey, how was the movie? Did it keep your attention?”

Cap’n Karen: “Where’s my phone?”

Movieshyte: “Surely you can’t be serious. Obviously I was lying. Who am I, daddy warbucks? If anything, I’m Papi Movieshyte. Yeah, you’re not getting a new phone.”

Cap’n Karen: “I HATE YOU!!!” (runs upstairs and slams the door to her room shut).

Movieshyte: “What, no ‘and don’t call me shirley?!?’ How the heck do you even set up these zoomers? Friggin’ kids. Whaddayagonnado?”

I feel like, if I had limited Cap’n Karen’s phone time when she was younger, maybe she wouldn’t be addicted to social media, and if she wasn’t completely oblivious to social cues and the people around her, maybe she would be nicer. But what could I do? I was busy getting the low down on movies, I didn’t have the time to police my daughter’s phone use 24/7. Even if I tried to take her phone away, she would just accuse me of ruining her stuff and then she would run up to her room and slam the door. Maybe her mother could have gotten through to her, if her mother hadn’t pulled off that impossible heist and relocated to a beach, where she’s now earning 20%. I’m still waiting for that child support check! I still wouldn’t buy Cap’n Karen a new phone.

So, where does that leave us, in terms of *Goat*’s utility as a digital babysitter? I honestly don’t know. The colors are bright, there is nonstop dialogue and action, and while it isn’t a musical per se, they manage to sneak a few tracks in there. I apologize, loyal audience, but you’re probably going to have to run the experiment with your own kids in order to find out whether or not “Goat” can be a substitute parent.

There is some stuff in the movie. I thought it was cool that the “roarball” teams featured men and women (Friggin’ liberal hollywood! Trying to shove female basketball players in our face! How. DARE. They?!?!?!?! Mennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!) There’s a message in there about teamwork being more important than winning, but then the team goes ahead and wins anyway, thus making the message pointless (See: Every movie about team sports ever made).

But, at the end of the day, the movie was mundane enough that it would actually cause me to use a garbage expression like “at the end of the day”. It was actually in the morning. That expression is trash.

Hopefully “Goat” can entrance your kids for two hours, and heck, you could even run the experiment on yourself, and possibly get two hours of peace from your own fucked up self. Good luck, and godspeed. Unlike the road runner in the movie, who never actually runs. Why is she there?!?

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9/10