Rocky IV (Director’s Cut) (dir. Sylvester Stallone)

-Jere Pilapil- 5.5/10 (Director’s Cut) Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago - Ultimate Director’s Cut sure is an odd relic of… something. I’m not sure what, because there’s been little about why Sylvester Stallone decided to recut Rocky IV 35 years after its release. (Caveat: there is a “making of” documentary about the work of restoring/re-editing this movie, but it’s literally as long as the movie. I’ll be watching it soon.) I have to imagine, whether Stallone admits it or not, it’s because the aftermath of Creed II tells us that the aftermath of Rocky IV was so ruinous for Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago that he did the ninja revenge thing and trained his son to be a single-minded vengeance machine in order to reclaim his former glory. That’s a relatively serious sports drama, but Rocky IV is prime 1985 kitsch, a movie so thin it’s about 90 minutes and more montage than story. It lives on as classic of “so bad it’s good” variety and as a particularly hilarious of example of Cold War melodrama.

The director’s cut tries, then, to focus a little more thematically. It’s still the story of Rocky vs. Ivan Drago and the road leading there, but Stallone has replaces or altered many scenes to tighten up the pivotal relationship between Rocky Balboa (Stallone) and Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). In the original cut, the then-retired Apollo goes on to fight Russian super fighter Ivan Drago as, effectively, a lark. Here, we get more scenes of Rocky pushing back against Apollo‘s choice, and much more of Adrian disagreeing with it and Rocky’s later choice to do the same for revenge.

If the intended effect is to make this a “better” movie, then mission accomplished. But it’s a conventionally “better” movie, and Rocky IV does not live in the annals of pop culture because it’s “good” in a conventional stretch. It’s a superhero movie or a mythic story, stripped down to the bare essentials. It’s an American cultural moment and an American cultural instinct boiled into a barely 90-minute movie. Intrinsically, it’s a movie about America not only winning geopolitically through sheer strength and might, but also being beloved for it. A movie like that deserves to be fucking random, with Paulie getting a robot (excised here). Thankfully, Stallone leaves some of that core intact, but this version loses some of its charm by becoming a somber reflection of pride and duty while also being about that other shit.

Glass Onion (dir. Rian Johnson)

-Jere Pilapil- 8/10 Folks, it’s good. I’m happy to see and happy to say that Rian Johnson seems to have found a repeatable formula where he can indulge a bit in his interest in meta commentary and rule breaking without enraging nerds who’ve formed a parasocial relationship with the Skywalker family. The Knives Out franchise, in so far as its two entries show, as ensemble mysteries anchored by Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. Each movie is a murder mystery where a gaggle of famous actors are the suspects, and each blows up the formula for a murder mystery story a little bit. Each one also revels in the dysfunction of the upper class. This time around, Edward Norton is, in a sense, the patriarch of a group of friends who call themselves The Disruptors (the movie rolls its eyes at this as much as you do). Norton’s Miles Bron is a tech billionaire who invites the rest of the cast to a remote Greek Island for a murder mystery party. Every guest is a success story - in politics, fashion, science, uh, men’s rights - but Bron is the biggest success of all, as shown by the excesses in architecture and décor throughout his island. As one might expect, a real murder happens. Sometimes it’s just good to see a cast having fun, and in this case that’s enough for me. Midway through the movie, we gain some new information in a somewhat cumbersome and tiring way, but the performances carry the audience through this. Daniel Craig spent my entire adult life as James Bond, excellently, but it’s still a joy to see him playing silly as Blanc in both of these movies (and shout out to the underrated Logan Lucky). Ditto Kate Hudson, whose turn in Music was as agonizing as that movie itself. Norton has fun as the smarmy Bron, and Janelle Monaé runs away with much of the movie via a fantastic performance as the Disruptor on the outs with the rest. There is a lot of poking fun at Miles the billionaire here, to say nothing of how vapid or fake these other prominent figure stand-ins are. That shouldn’t be surprising considering the class consciousness (or attempt at it) of Johnson’s The Last Jedi and Knives Out. It’s strangely gotten more attention this time, but I think this movie was conceived with a general “fuck billionaire worship” perspective and lucked into some of our most famous billionaires exposing their own idiocy for the last quarter of 2022. There was no way to know that people would have incidents like Ye’s antisemitism and financial and cultural implosion or Elon Musk’s [gestures vaguely at Twitter and Tesla stock] fresh in their minds when this movie dropped in time for Christmas. That’s just some good timing that not even Miles Bron can buy.

Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton)

-Jere Pilapil- 8.5/10 Folks, it’s good. I’m happy to see and happy to say that Rian Johnson seems to have found a repeatable formula where he can indulge a bit in his interest in meta commentary and rule breaking without enraging nerds who’ve formed a parasocial relationship with the Skywalker family. The Knives Out franchise, in so far as its two entries show, as ensemble mysteries anchored by Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. Each movie is a murder mystery where a gaggle of famous actors are the suspects, and each blows up the formula for a murder mystery story a little bit. Each one also revels in the dysfunction of the upper class. This time around, Edward Norton is, in a sense, the patriarch of a group of friends who call themselves The Disruptors (the movie rolls its eyes at this as much as you do). Norton’s Miles Bron is a tech billionaire who invites the rest of the cast to a remote Greek Island for a murder mystery party. Every guest is a success story - in politics, fashion, science, uh, men’s rights - but Bron is the biggest success of all, as shown by the excesses in architecture and décor throughout his island. As one might expect, a real murder happens. Sometimes it’s just good to see a cast having fun, and in this case that’s enough for me. Midway through the movie, we gain some new information in a somewhat cumbersome and tiring way, but the performances carry the audience through this. Daniel Craig spent my entire adult life as James Bond, excellently, but it’s still a joy to see him playing silly as Blanc in both of these movies (and shout out to the underrated Logan Lucky). Ditto Kate Hudson, whose turn in Music was as agonizing as that movie itself. Norton has fun as the smarmy Bron, and Janelle Monaé runs away with much of the movie via a fantastic performance as the Disruptor on the outs with the rest. There is a lot of poking fun at Miles the billionaire here, to say nothing of how vapid or fake these other prominent figure stand-ins are. That shouldn’t be surprising considering the class consciousness (or attempt at it) of Johnson’s The Last Jedi and Knives Out. It’s strangely gotten more attention this time, but I think this movie was conceived with a general “fuck billionaire worship” perspective and lucked into some of our most famous billionaires exposing their own idiocy for the last quarter of 2022. There was no way to know that people would have incidents like Ye’s antisemitism and financial and cultural implosion or Elon Musk’s [gestures vaguely at Twitter and Tesla stock] fresh in their minds when this movie dropped in time for Christmas. That’s just some good timing that not even Miles Bron can buy.

Avatar: Way of the Water (dir. James Cameron)

-Jere Pilapil- 9/10 I can very much believe that James Cameron did it again. After working for 13 years on this sequel to Avatar, you would hope that at least the visuals and effects would be on point. Thankfully, that’s the case here - I went in expecting my mind to be blown after seeing a brief scene at the end of the Avatar re-release a couple months ago, and was only a smidge disappointed. The story, though, is an improvement on the original movie, but it almost had to be. Avatar arrived into the world as the kind of spectacle that movies used to deliver regularly. Its use of 3D was revolutionary, or would have been, if anyone else had been able to replicate its success (for my money, Scorsese’s Hugo was the one other instance where I was kind of into the effect). But the story it told was as bare bones and generic as could be: Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a human sent to the alien world Pandora to infiltrate the cat-like Na’vi people, where he eventually switches sides to fight off the invaders. He learns their ways and actually becomes better at some of their rites of passage than the Na’vi themselves. There are dozens of ways to critique this story, but for the most part, it worked as a simple way of delivering the wonders of James Cameron’s world to the audience. The follow-up couldn’t do the same trick twice, but Cameron might be the best modern director of sequels. This time around, we join the Sully family - Jake, wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), sons Neteyam (James Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), adopted daughter Kiri (born of Sigourney Weaver’s character in the first movie and voiced by Weaver in this one), and human buddy Spider (Jack Champion). Worthington is the right guy for the role of Jake, but at times that character can flat. The focus this time, though, is on the kids. It’s one of the smarter moves in a movie that isn’t, let’s say, uhhh sophisticated. This time around the burden is split amongst them, as they all try to find belonging, especially after they relocate to a water tribe. Their links to their parents (adopted and otherwise) create much more emotionally complicated ground than Jake’s previous struggle. About that relocation: that’s really where the magic is. Cameron made a big deal of how he had to develop new technologies to capture his vision, and I’m glad he did. I’m iffy on whether filming at 48FPS (double the standard) is particularly helpful, but it’s an interesting effect when used on this entirely CGI created characters and settings. Some of the aquatic scenes here are truly breathtaking and felt like peering one’s head into an aquarium. Unfortunately, 3D technology still only goes so far, and the scenes taking place in our old jungle haunts aren’t quite as effective. You can tell where Cameron’s heart is, and it’s with the sea. There’s an entire chunk of the prologue that probably would have been another film maker’s second film, but Cameron says “fuck that, we’ll do it in voiceover and go to the beach faster.”

From Russia with Love (dir. Terence Young)

-Jere Pilapil- 10/10 Double 0 Status: 10. This was and is one of my favorites Theme: Matt Monro’s “From Russia with Love” is a nice theme that hints at what later Bond themes would be aiming for, but many would surpass it. Still, it’s a good and memorable theme, a very of its time 1960s pop ballad. 7/10 They couldn’t make a James Bond movie like this today, in the sense that people expect a certain scale and scope from the Bond movies that this doesn’t even attempt. The premise here is convoluted, but it doesn’t bend and break as it goes along in service of flimsily connected action scenes (even the relatively grounded Casino Royale had a hellacious, massive opening foot chase). This time around, the terrorist organization SPECTRE concocts a plan to pit the Russian and British spy organizations against each other. They have a Russian cipher clerk fake a defection to the British in exchange for a decoder machine, with the hopes of killing both agents and retrieving the decoder for themselves. There’s a little bit of contrivance here, with SPECTRE guessing - correctly, it turns out - that the British would smell the trap and send their best man, James Bond (Sean Connery), into the fray, all the better for revenge for killing Dr. No in the previous film. But once that’s out of the way, we get a relaxed first half of the movie, with Bond gallivanting around Turkey waiting contact from the clerk, Tatiana Romanoa (Daniela Bianchi). All the while, he is dodging Soviet attempts on his life, until he and Tatiana can flee on their way to London. The movie very neatly divides in halves this way, where in the second half Bond (now with Tatiana) going from dodging Soviet assassination attempts to dodging SPECTRE agents, mostly notably the brawny Grant Red (Robert Shaw) and a particularly determined Rosa Klebb (Lottie Lenya). The movie keeps a brisk pace throughout as a result, with each action scene being a unique entity on its own. Our heroes are on the run, and they never seem able to quite get out of danger for long. As a result, it’s also a much smaller-scale movie than the Bond franchise would be known for. Usually, the MacGuffin would lead to a revelation of some larger conspiracy, like a satellite that blows up a region’s dams and imperils the world’s wheat supply or some shit. No, this time SPECTRE just plans to sell the device back to the Russians, the silly geese. But it makes for a much better balanced movie than most of the rest. There isn’t a particularly grandiose plan to reveal or a larger-than-life personality behind it all. It’s just a spy doing spy shit, and Sean Connery having some charged chemistry with everyone around him. From Russia with Love captures the Bond series at a point where the blueprint is still in progress, but a sound foundation has been laid all the same.

The Fabelmans (dir. Steven Spielberg)

-Jere Pilapil- 7.5/10 The combination of the World Cup and my nascent addiction to the game Deathloop have really forced me to stray from watching movies, let alone trying to express my thoughts on movies I’ve seen. So I wound up seeing The Fabelmans twice, once because a friend invited me and again because my in-laws wanted to go (and my wife didn’t tell them I’d already seen it, to their surprise). Judging from the commercials, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is a semi-autobiographical movie about a young boy growing up loving film and navigating prickly parental relationships. The advertising makes it look like trite Oscar bait: a movie about how life-changing and romantic movies are; a personal coming of age story; a performance-focused work where the actors can be real quiet AND THEN SHOUT A MONOLOGUE for the nominations reel. But, if any director has earned the right to do such a movie, it’s Spielberg. And if any director could probably do that kind of movie in his sleep, it’s also probably him. For better and worse, The Fabelmans is a more complicated and interesting movie than all that, though. Gabriel Labelle plays Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord plays him as a child), a teen aspiring filmmaker. The movie’s centered on him, but it’s always emotionally centered on him. The movie has an interesting tendency to let Sammy fall into the background a little bit as the film searches for empathy in the people around him such as his father (Paul Dano), mother (Michelle Williams), family friend Benny (Seth Rogen) or even a high school bully (Sam Rechner). It’s both an odd decison, but an effective one: Sammy’s not quite a cipher, but you can feel him soaking in these moments in ways that would, in real life, echo later on. Unfortunately, things are a little uneven all over. I’m not necessarily sure that all these good parts fit together well, which might be the most awards bait-y thing about it. There is a through line about Sammy’s love for his family competing with his love of film, as explicated as clear as day in a centerpiece monologue by Judd Hisrch, but I don’t see it as following through on that conflict too strongly. It’s easier to say that this movie’s central thesis is that an artistic temperament and interpersonal relationships affect each other in varied, unpredictable ways. Sometimes Sammy sees things in his films he doesn’t like, and sometimes others see things of themselves they don’t like. On a subplot-by-sublot basis, this is all interesting but doesn’t quite hang together.

Much of the heart of the film is taken up by Sammy’s relationships with his parents, which feels like an uneasy mix of ideas: the script lets the parents down a bit, their dichotomy established in the first scene and set in stone. Michelle Williams plays Sammy’s mother as a warm but unpredictable, occasionally manic presence. Paul Dano plays the father as a brilliant but emotionally distant engineer. Both of them, in a way, lack dimension in the way a child might view their parents, but this instinct clashes with the film’s attempts to center their emotional experiences over Sammy’s.

Seeing it twice, I was hoping to be able to make some of the movie feel a bit more cohesive to me, but couldn't quite do it. The benefit of seeing it twice, though, is seeing where Spielberg-as-craftsman shines. Scenes and settings parallel each other in ways that create interesting juxtapositions. As though wearing his upbringing on his sleeve, Spielberg quietly creates a precise film that could make an engineer proud, but one that’s stilly messy and hard to pin down, especially emotionally, as it unfolds. There is something very respectable about that, but it isn’t an easy one to love. I can list all the little things I noticed about this (and this here is a lot of them), but this one didn’t make me love movies as much as its protagonist does.

Chinatown (dir. Roman Polanski)

-Jere Pilapil- 10/10 One of the famous quotes from this movie is “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”, and, almost like a magic spell, I am able to watch and rewatch Roman Polanski’s Chinatown over and over again, having forgotten so much of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love this movie, but it’s one of those noirs where the plot is so knotty with twists and turns that I can’t tell you how the first scene leads to the last scene without a Wikipedia assist. Plus it’s about water irrigation and land rights, two subjects that don’t spice up the room no matter how much corruption or evil is involved.

Coolidge Corner theater showed this one on the big screen, though, and I had to go. And seeing it in this context felt like a whole new experience, even more than my other times watching it. I don’t think I ever realized just how funny Jack Nicholson is as Jake Gittes, just as one of those differences between seeing a movie in a full theater versus seeing it alone at home. He’s great, though, with plenty of charisma to spare and every one-liner getting a laugh. It’s perfect casting: you truly get the sense that having Jack Nicholson’s charisma and delivery got Jake Gittes 90% of his way through life, and being a very resourceful and smart investigator got him the rest of the way.

I also realized that part of the reason why I can never fully remember this movie with time is because everyone is lying for the first, like 2/3 of this thing. Jake’s got at least a couple “gotcha!” moments with big speeches and facts he’s tallied up to charge characters in his orbit with conspiracy. Unfortunately, he’s in a 1970s neo noir, and that kind of speechifying in the name of justice doesn’t get him far. This is a bummer of a movie about evil being too powerful and corrupt to overcome. It’s a thrilling, tight movie about how that evil is essentially in the soil of Los Angeles.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (dir. Ryan Coogler)

-Jere Pilapil- 8/10 “It’s about grief!” was such a pervasive summary of Wandavision. And in hindsight, that seems like it devalues the idea of a superhero movie grappling with the reality of losing a loved one. The premise of Wandavision was an apt metaphor for how one might process a personal tragedy, but it was, ultimately, a hypothetical. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a movie steeped in grief, an attempt to put on a brave face and move forward (as all Marvel franchises must) while still paying tribute to the star of the previous Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman. Black Panther remains my favorite Marvel movie, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever at times feels like a perfectly fitting sequel. Much like how loss will interrupt life in its most unexpected moments, though, it also feels like a movie that was blindsided by Boseman’s untimely death from cancer. Here, the Black Panther T’Challa dies off-camera due to an unspecified disease (a glaring and jarring vagueness, considering how Marvel/Disney are so insistent of showing us every single detail they can). His mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett, tremendous) takes over ruling Wakanda, which finds itself imperiled by international interference on all sides. This movie is defined by the absence of Boseman, but it’s also one of the best Marvel movies to be centered on the experience of women (and I liked Captain Marvel!). It’s mostly the story of Letitia Wright��s Shuri, T’Challa’s sister, as she navigates the death of her brother and comes into her own. But it makes space for the women who populated the previous movie: Ramonda, of course, but also Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia and Danai Gurira’s Okoye. It introduces Riri Williams, a teen genius inspired by Tony Stark’s Ironman. They all have their own arcs that do justice to the talents of the actresses behind them, a balancing act that Coogler achieves pretty well. Meanwhile, the main opposition to Wakanda is introduced via Tenoch Huerta Mejia’s Namor, leader of undersea nation Talokan. Wakanda revealing itself and its resources to the world at the end of the previous movie inadvertently risks the secrecy of Talokan, and Namor’s solution is first to retried and kill a MacGuffin (Williams, the young scientist), or, failing that, war. Even after the original Black Panther, it’s refreshing to see a massive blockbuster like this centered on nonwhite characters. The people of Talokan are descended from the Mayans, and the movie takes care to make them sympathetic, even if Namor’s solutions are potentially catastrophic (pausing a second to roll my eyes at how much Marvel does that, but it’s the right choice this time). It’s an incredibly busy movie, to its detriment. It’s one of the moments where the gap between source material and adaptation shows: a comic book could grapple with the death of a character (or pay tribute to a behind-the-scenes loss) with an issue or two, segmenting it off from the rest of a story arc. Comic book movies, though, are more inclined to jumble everything together, jamming so much into 161 minutes that at points that you just want to breathe and take a break, but no, this is a movie theater. And even at home you could pause, but you’d pick right back up with 3 plotlines to follow at all times.

I get the sense that a good chunk of this movie would have happened had Boseman not passed, and that his loss added some extra plot points and shifted some character arcs a bit. It’s a weirdly sobering thing to dwell on, the way these movies are such a capitalist factory product that even the unexpected death of the face of the franchise cannot stop the production. And that sometimes-uneasy grafting isn’t the only flaw for this movie, which, like so much of Marvel’s “Phase 4”, succumbs to needless spinoff setups for the sake of feeding the Disney machines. And, arguably least importantly of all, the action feels a bit more generic and less considered than in the original. Still, despite all that, the emotional core of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is satisying, the worlds explored and characters populating them still worth the time.

Suspiria (dir. Dario Argento)

-Jere Pilapil- 10/10 I can’t believe I forgot to log this one, but I was a bit distracted by my Neon Genesis Evangelion revisit, I guess. Dario Argento’s Suspiria is a quintessential horror movie, a beautiful, bold story of witches and mystery. I was lucky enough to attend a showing at the Somerville Theater, where they screened the movie and had Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin play the score live, a rare and exciting treat that I had to attend. And I’m glad I did. Suspiria has always been one of my favorite movies: it’s got mix of style, absolute batshit wildness and an almost surreal strangeness that is entirely unique. It’s the story of American ballerina Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper, wide-eyed and sympathetic), who goes to a German dance school. On her way in for her first night, there’s a torrential downpour and she watches a young woman flee the school fearfully (not the best omen). We follow the woman to a friend’s, where she is murdered, brutally and theatrically. When we get back to Suzy and the school, everything is off-kilter due to the murder but also general strange happenings . Suzy investigates, eventually uncovering some hidden secrets in the school’s history. Every death scene in this movie is an incredible exercise in tension. Argento masterfully ramps up the suspense of these scenes, which almost could be movies on their own. And then, finally, they explode in spectacular bursts of violence and gore. But the look of the movie is all vivid colors at night (deep reds and blues especially) and ornate sets in the daytime scenes. Its aesthetic sense is peerless. Seeing this movie with the score performed live was incredible. It gave the music that extra volume and power, a massive asset for a movie that so often paired its violence with intense music. It was also kind of funny: turning my eyes down like 3 degrees and seeing Simonetti and his band waiting patiently for the next scene that has music in it was always a bit weird. I wonder how many times he’s seen this movie and performed it. Suspiria, even 45 years after its initial release, is still a jolting, powerful watch. I hope it is for Simonetti, too, but there are far worse movies to sit through for work.

Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (dir. Hideaki Anno)

-Jere Pilapil- 10/10 The second of Hideaki Anno’s Rebuild of Evangelion movie, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance is where this project spins off in wildly new directions. On this watch, though, I was struck by how subtle it is in doing that, though. The first rebuild movie was a beautiful remake of an arc or two of the anime. It is, to date, still a bit redundant. In this movie, we get a little but more of an exploration of the world, some new subplots and, finally, an ending that recaptures the wild harrowing grandeur of the original series at its best. We first get a cold open introducing Mari, a new pilot who didn’t exist in the anime. It’s a thrilling action scene, resembling something out of Aliens. It introduces us to Ryoji Kaji, who steals an artifact (a different one from the series!) to hand over to our familiar ominous psuedo-miltary-slash-research body, NERV. It’s the first sign that this movie won’t simply redo the next set of episodes from the show. From then on, Mari’s involvement is kind of minimal until late in the movie. The core of the movie is the relationship between the existing characters: perennial sad boy Shinji Ikari, quiet and distant Rei Ayanami, abrasive, proud and protective Asuka Langley Shikinami, Shinji’s distant father Gendo, and Misato Katsuragi, guardian to Asuka and Shinji and head of NERV’s defense operations. The story is wildly different from the show: both Rei’s emotional distance and Asuka’s abrasiveness are toned down here. Rei, inspired by Shinji’s apparent culinary skills, plots to cook a meal for everyone to mend the relationship between Shinji and Gendo. Asuka, in parallel, attempts something similar out of jealousy. But things, of course, don’t turn out as planned because this is essentially a mech show (and my skin crawls at how awkward the resulting dinner scene would be). The end of the movie is beautiful, yet another example of Anno finding the most horrific imagery to pair with the sweetest pop music. That’s all juxtaposed with what is, actually, an incredible and well-earned emotional breakthrough for both Rei and Shinji, dating back to their incarnations on the show, followed by some catastrophic shit and an ominous final line (before a post-credit scene and a “preview” of the next movie). It feels like Anno found a shortcut to some destinations, here, but the route is no less scenic or enthralling. It’s just different, and quite a bit shorter than the show. In the end, this is the first of the Rebuilds that made the approach feel worthwhile.

Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone (dir. Hideaki Anno)

-Jere Pilapil- 7/10 A week of fuckin’ reruns here as I rewatch a bunch of stuff. The clock is ticking down on my timer before I see Evangelion 3.0 1.0 in glorious IMAX, and now I’m finally rewatching the proper “Rebuild” movies. The Evangelion story is retold, in part, here: Shinji Ikari, a mal-socialized boy living through an end of the world is recruited by his negligent-at-best father Gendo to pilot a giant sorta-robot called an Evangelion to fight alien-ish monsters called Angels. Son is reluctant to take up this responsibility, father seems nonplussed by the (workplace) proximity of his son. Tale as old as 1997. The big notable things here are that the animation is gorgeous. Having just recently seen the original show, I kind of prefer the lovingly hand-drawn style there, where you kind of have to sit in awe that a human eye and a human hand had to determine certain details. Still, the animation is extremely snazzy here, and the upgrade in technology gives us some sweet 3D angels and some new cinematic angles. Other parts are shot for shot remakes, but smoother and glossier. The action is familiar, but the presentation is given a great upgrade. Unfortunately, this movie truncates the first 6 episodes of the series into a single movie. It’s pretty close to what I imagine Evangelion: Death(True) to look like (until I sit down and watch it and have my head unscrewed and my perception blown away). Surprisingly, not a ton is lost in translation, except for the quiet moments highlighted by the series’ ever-present cicadas. So the end result is a summary that rushes through the emotions that are so much more potent in their original form. I noticed some differences between the movies and the show this time, and now, having the full series of rebuilds at hand, I think it’s significant that the series starts this way. The post-credit teaser for the next movie says Shinji’s story falls apart. You could argue that’s an accurate description of his story in the original show (it gets sad, traumatic, abrasive and weird). But it also describes how these rebuilds deviate wildly from the “establishes” Neon Genesis Evangelion canon. I think it’s significant that this first movie contains a full emotional arc for Shinji, one where he finds, if not a purpose, then a sense of community, sort of, in this insane situation. Already, it’s an ever-so-slightly more optimistic story.

The Spy Who Loved Me (dir. Lewis Gilbert)

-Jere Pilapil- 8/10 Double-O Status: Kind of cheating here, as I already wrote about this one before deciding to watch all of these Bond movies in a random order. I had it at a 4/5 on Letterboxd and that seems kind of fair Theme: Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better”. Another odd choice for a Bond theme, but it fits. It’s a lush, romantic song that’s a good fit for a spy movie centered around the interplay between two spies attracted to each other. It’s a bit trite and sappy, though. 7/10 Last time I watched Lewis Gilbert’s The Spy Who Loved Me, it was in the context of trying to rehabilitate my opinion of Roger Moore’s run as the iconic spy. This time, I’m coming at this having spent the year rewatching every James Bond movie, and this one still comes out pretty frickin’ good. This is the story of Bond (Moore) and rival Russian spy, their Agent Triple X (lol), Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), investigating some sensitive submarine tracking technology and winding up stumbling across a plot to sink the world and reestablish mankind under water (gonna bookmark this in my brain before I see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever this weekend). One thing I respect about these old Bond movies (especially the Moore and Connery years) compared to newer action movies is that they’re so chill. Sure, Bond and Amasova stare down death multiple times throughout the movie (I still dig the opening ski jump off a mountain and the helicopter chase scene), but Moore’s Bond treats this all as perturbing as if the line for a Disneyland ride was longer than expected. Bach’s performance is as stiff as a board, but ultimately it just makes Moore work harder to be charming. His charisma and ease rubs off on her, and they somehow wind up with good chemistry. That keeps the movie afloat, basically, in between the expected action beats. This time, the villain is Carl Jürgens as Karl Stromberg, a rich scientist who, again, wants to force civilization under water. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, which is kind of refreshing after 20-ish Marvel movies where the bad guy is “good intentions and bad methods”. The guy just has an aqua fetish or something, and the resources to force everyone to experience it themselves or whatever. Still, the center piece is, in fact, the Spy Who Love Each Other. I wish more of the later Bond movies worked a bit more with this blueprint (some of Quantum of Solace, including the poster, is an homage to a scene here): there’s a doomsday threat here, but the movie never dips into being gloomy or particularly emotionally involving. It’s a movie where the two spies are mostly equals in skill, where Amasova might occasionally outsmart Bond. That’s a fun take that breaks up the formula ever so slightly enough to make The Spy Who Loved Me a solid highlight.

Dark Passage (dir. Delmer Daves)

-Jere Pilapil- 6.5/10 I’ve seen this movie before, in my college days, going through a noir phase or a Bogart phase. Either way, I’d forgotten this one and probably conflated it with Key Largo in my head as “one of the ones with Bogart and Bacall in it, but not The Big Sleep and not the one with the ‘you know how to whistle, don’t you?’ scene”. And in the end, that’s kind of what it deserves: Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage is a perfectly passable noir with a couple wrinkles that elevate it ever-so-slightly. The first of those wrinkles is that the first third or so is filmed from a perspective. Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, a prison escapee convicted of murdering his wife. Except he doesn’t look like Bogart, as we see in a photograph printed in newspapers all over (an uncredited Frank Wilcox in the photo). It’s from this perspective that we meet Lauren Bacall as Irene Jansen, a woman whose father suffered a similar fate as Parry: innocent but convicted of murder. She shelters and clothes him long enough for him to (oh my fucking god) get plastic surgery that makes him look like Bogart. This is probably the most interesting stretch of the movie, though not entirely successfully. Filming like this is limited and goofy: early, when Vincent throws a punch, it looks an awful lot like melee combat in a video game. But we do get to enjoy Irene bossing Vincent around a bit, and some fun character work by Tom D’Andrea as a cab driver. Throughout, I had an uneasy feeling that the whole movie might be like this, that Bogart - then the highest paid actor in Hollywood - somehow agreed to essentially a voice actor roll. But once the movie reveals Bogart and gets down to business, things get a bit generic. See, Vincent, of course, wants to escape the law and wants to investigate the murder of a friend. The set up for this is a bit too neat: Madge, a former fling and a witness who testified against him (Agnes Moorehead) and her current beau Bob (Bruce Bennett) happen to be close friends with Irene. It creates the feeling of too tight a circle, a snow globe world that is distractingly convenient to the plot. The performances, specifically Bacall but Moorehead and Clifton Young as a smalltime crook, elevate this thing, but the third act falls apart as Vincent corners the perpetrator with essentially no leverage, and the final scene of the film feels extremely tacked on. Bogart is basically on autopilot here, navigating a bumpy script. Still, there are a lot of fun corners explored here. It may just be a silly curio, but it’s an enjoyable enough one.

The End of Evanglion (dir. Hideaki Anno)

-Jere Pilapil- 9/10 I wrote about this one already, here, but I’m revisiting the whole Neon Genesis Evangelion shebang with the final “rebuild” movie playing in IMAX at the end of the month. Usually I don’t write quite so much the second time though, except to update my thoughts. This is a bit different, though: when I originally logged this movie, I was remembering the series via memory from the last time I watched it, maybe mixed in with the manga, which I read in the interim. This time, I went straight in after finishing the series (with a brief detour through the Evangelion: Death recap/montage movie). I had remembered the broad strokes of the series, but not the specifics, And that matters, contextually, for this specific movie. Hideaki Anno’s The End of Evangelion is, famously, a bit of a re-do: the original finale of the “boy pilots a robot to fight monsters” series, episodes 25 and 26, specifically, delved into the mind of main character Shinji Ikari (Megumi Ogata in the Japanese language version). And that would be fine, as the whole series is a portrait of broken psyches, with Shinji’s in the center, but the previous episode left things off in a quizzical way, and wrapping up the emotional threads of Shinji’s story left the physical threads of Shinji’s story and everyone else’s fates, um, strongly implied to put it politely. And so this movie can’t help but be a bit of fan service: much of the extra runtime is spent making explicit what was implied in the series. Our heroes, basically, confront the end of the world (and I can’t get more specific than that both because of spoilers and because it is, truly, complicated as fuck). This stretch gives us final, loving, closing arcs for the secondary and tertiary characters. Justice is served and ass is kicked throughout. The first half of End of Evangelion is an expertly crafted sci-fi war movie, filled with intrigue and spying and double turns. But we still wind up in Shinji’s head, essentially, for the second half, as he sorts through every bit of a psychological crisis one may have. I love and respect that Anno, after all the criticism and confusion. Essentially, the fate of humanity is in Shinji’s hands, in a way. Here, Anno contemplates the impossibility of people knowing or understanding people and the equal pull of needing to be with people. Through it all, the animation is rich and evocative, full of grotesque and unsettling imagery, abrasive avant-garde techniques, and impenetrable walls of dialogue interspersed with live action footage of movie theaters, empty and full. Going through the whole thing, yet again, is a rich and rewarding experience. At this point, I just feel Shinji’s emotions along with him on a visceral level. It’s interesting, though, that given the redo, a chance to expound upon or clarify his work, Anno chooses not to. He instead murks it up with one of the most enigmatic endings I’ve ever seen in a movie. The final scene of The End of Evangelion feels like it could be interpreted in infinite ways. The more I watch the movie in different contexts, the more I”m drawn into its mysteries. It’s a befuddling, yet, depending on how you look at it, resonant and fitting end. Until the next one.

Evangelion: Death(True) (dir. Masayuki, Hideaki Anno)

-Jere Pilapil- 5.5/10 With Evangelion: 3.0 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time getting an IMAX screening at the end of the month (ticket aquired), I decided to rewatch all of the related Neon Genesis Evangelion media that leads up to it, including the TV show, and the two movie that are related to that. The first, Evangelion: Death(True)². True to the nature of everything involving this fucking series, it's confusing as all hell. Evangelion: Death is a clip show, a sort of summary (I'll get to that later), editing the first 24 episodes of the series into a roughly 70 minute movie. The initial release had some newly animated/inserted scenes that have since been relegated to the "director's cuts" of episodes 21-24. Evangelion: Death been re-edited and re-released in various ways, often combined with the film End of Evangelion, an alternate and/or complimentary ending to the series. I tried to explain all this to my wife the other night. It was impossible. I don't know if I'd ever watched any iteration of Evangelion: Death until now, since it is, by reputation, basically a summary of a show that borders on impenetrable no matter how much Hideaki Anno explains or revisits the material. Thankfully, even if the exact details of what the fuck is going on, what does X want, what does MacGuffin Y do, etc. all remain obscured, it's a deeply felt and emotionally evocative show, even in this abridged form. What Evangelion: Death (True)² reminds me of is 1990's Led Zeppelin Boxed Set. Led Zeppelin's discography had been long available at that point, a long and winding road of artistic evolution and innovation. For their part in the CD boxed set craze of the era, part of the selling point was that guitarist Jimmy Page himself went through the albums and mixed 'em all up, spreading most of the music over the course of 4 CDs instead of the original running order. This created new contexts and new juxtapositions of old hits, new links between old and new songs, giving fresh insight to old material. Evangelion: Death (True)² similarly rearranges the familiar Neon Genesis Evangelion beats: we open with events that were flashbacks in the show, the Second Impact that decimated the world. From there, we get a framing device: a performance of Pachelbel's Canon by the pilots of the mech-like Evangelion units. We start, of course, with Shinji Ikari, the horrifically traumatized and mal-socialized protagonist, alone. His story is told in a scattered, hyper-edited, messy way. As the other Evangelion pilots join one by one, we get their stories told similarly. The context here is not chronological, but emotional: it highlights the journey each character takes, individually. The way the show repeats dialogue and animation cels is no doubt a cost-saving measure, but it gets highlighted as an effective artistic one as well. That kinetic montage-style editing, though, makes this movie almost completely inaccessible and useless as a clip show. You can't show this to someone who hasn't seen the show and expect them to get what's happening. There's simply no room to breathe or consider the endless reams of concepts and keywords thrown through the screen at you. If you're familiar with the show, it's an interesting way to review the information, but the show is still the best way to experience the story (much like Led Zeppelin's boxed set vs. their proper albums). It makes sense that this movie was made in 1997-98 (depending on re-release/re-edit) because the TV series may not have been readily available at the time, but now it seems only to be included in DVD/blu-ray/streaming releases for the sake of completion.

Don’t Worry Darling (dir. Olivia Wilde)

-Jere Pilapil- 3/10 I swear to God, I tried with Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling. I will start with the positives: Olivia Wilde is a talented director. This movie’s second greatest strength is it’s visuals: it made for an interesting trailer because it looks gorgeous. This iteration of 1950s-ish suburban bliss is all classic cars and popping bright colors, flattering fashion and endless sunshine. It’s greatest asset? Florence Pugh, who is always an excellent actress, found here chewing the scenery because there are no nutrients to be found anywhere else. The premise: Alice (Pugh) is married to Jack (Harry Styles, who I am starting to believe is an AI experiment asking “can a human be made of pure agreeability?”). They live in the company town of Victory. It’s very “our imaginations of the 1950s”: the men go to work, the women keep the house clean and raise the kids, dinner is ready when the men get home, etc. But something is wrong! Alice is seeing things, in her dreams and maybe hallucinations. One of her friends, Margaret (Kiki Layne), is asking the wrong questions and is ostracized. Alice sees a plane crash, and, following it into the Very Dangerous and Off Limits Desert where only the men are allowed, starts to share Margaret’s paranoia about their situation. “This perfect place is hiding something nefarious” is a well-worn premise with good reason. The problem with Don’t Worry Darling is that there’s no tension. There’s never any doubt that Victory is hiding something. There’s never a moment where the audience might be redirected to think that maybe something is wrong with Alice, or any other possible outcome. So the movie is a loop of diminishing returns: things are idyllic, the music does that Hans Zimmer-esque “BWAAAAMMMM” thing, something sinister happens, and then the idealism is restored, Alice left to ask “What was that?” In between Alice and Jack fuck some, Pugh with the ravenous energy of a One Direction fan with a Harry Styles body pillow, Styles with the screen presence and energy of said body pillow. This stretch for the first two or so acts are a bore, but they could be redeemed by the ending. When writing about Tár, I mentioned that I wasn’t on board the whole time, but that its ending offered such fantastic clarity surrounding its themes and ideas that it honestly may go down as my favorite movie of 2022. Granted, even in its worst moments, Tár is masterfully and patiently paced, acted and written in a way that most of Don’t Worry Darling isn’t, but a good ending could redeem things to “satisfactory” levels. Not so - the inevitable “twist” is, first off, dumb and obvious, but worse, it’s couched in some modern trappings that instantly date it without saying anything about our cultural moment, about the movie’s ostensible themes of gender roles and feminism. It’s empty calories disguised as a meal, a hollow kind of feminine empowerment that’s about as empowering as escaping the maze on the back of a cereal box.

Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me (dir. Alek Keshishian)

-Jere Pilapil- 7.5/10 I am always a little (or a lot) suspicious of music documentaries, including the latest trend such as Alek Keshishian’s Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, which belongs to the same family as Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry, Charli XCX: Alone Together and Taylor Swift: Miss Americana. They all, by all means, are an extension of these pop singers’ brands, doing the heavy work of humanizing singers who otherwise would be fixtures in social media posts (by or about them). That said, for the most part these are really well-made and more illuminating than the legacy artist equivalent of a biopic. Those tend to flatten a lifetime into a set narrative; these documentaries capture a specific, messy moment. It helps - and I am loathe to say this, but follow me here, I beg you - that some of Selena Gomez’ struggles are medical. I mean “helps” in the sense that this style of documentary very much runs the risk of being a vanity project about a pop star and how hard being wealthy and famous is, boo hoo. But Gomez is a particularly sympathetic person here. The movie starts as an attempt to chronicle her 2016 tour, which gets canned as she struggles with lupus and gets diagnosed with bipolar disorder (we see her happily greeting fans and taking pictures with them during meet and greet sessions during the tour. It must be so weird for these fans to see themselves in this old footage, knowing now that she was going through a private crisis). The movie picks back up in 2019 and follows her attempt to find a kind of stability while reentering the sphere of public performance. And that means many things: she visits her hometown a few times, thrilling the children at the school she attended as a child, before being swept into the Disney machine as an actress and singer. She visits Kenya to witness firsthand the effects of her philanthropic work working with a nonprofit to build schools, featuring a very moving conversation between Gomez and a student who’d nearly ended her own life before finding a new path via the the charity. It’s all very nice but very PR-friendly. It helps to present Gomez as a well rounded and relatable figure, but I’ll admit some restlessness. I actually found Gomez at her most likable and relatable at her most prickly. Immediately after the Kenya trip, she embarks on a press tour through Europe. Gomez wants to be treated humanely but our celebrity coverage infrastructure does not allow that, almost justifying the existence of this documentary on its own. One interview is simply a word association game. At another, she gets asked a thoughtful question, finally, but after giving her own thoughtful, honest answer (that when the pop machine winds down for her, she’d like to focus on philanthropy), the interview abruptly cuts off. As if to say, “this is just another word association segment”. No one is more a slave to the content machine than our celebrities. Elsewhere, her partner nonprofit gets embroiled in scandal, and who hasn’t hitched their wagon to the wrong horse? For a 95 minute movie, there is a lot here and a lot to chew on. And while its technique as a documentary might be uncritical of its subject, it does make clear that Gomez might be her harshest critic. It’s an illuminating look at a person learning to live with mental illness and at the machinations of fame, and its largest and most important subtext may be that the two are not compatible, that the latter is actively harmful to the former. I don’t know what, exactly, to do with that information. Except I will note: days after I watched this, Aaron Carter, former child star and brother to Backstreet Boy Nick, died. By all accounts he struggled with mental illness and seemed to lack the resources and support system that surrounds Gomez throughout this documentary. Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me is an affecting watch, and that says something, that it’s arguably about one of the lucky ones.