Life was a bitter cup for the saddest of all men (bomp-bada-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-ba-bomp dang-da-dang-dang-ding-a-dong-ding)

BLUE MOON

2025

Directed by Richard Linklater

Written by Robert Kaplow

Spoilers: for what, Oklahoma!? I mean, high, I guess

Reviews from gulag: Police abuses

Well, it's probably not the most inappropriate connection I've drawn between two films, but we are trying to do an end-of-year wrap-up here with barely 48 more hours to go before it's moot, so that's what we're going with.  Today's subjects: I'm Still Here and Hit Man.

I'M STILL HERE

Ainda Estou Aqui

I'm Still Here, concerning the extrajudicial murder undertaken by the Medici-led military government in Brazil that triggered the mid-life ascendance of famed human rights lawyer Eunice Paiza to prominence, is exactly the kind of movie you'd guess it was from the "I'd never heard of it till it was nominated for Best Picture" thing it's got going on, and even then you'd probably ask "of the movies broadly like it, why this one?", though a more charitable response would be "why not?"  Maybe it's because it looks alright, albeit mostly by virtue of being shot on film (a 35mm so grainy I thought it was 16, and now I'm a little unsettled about it); maybe it's because it couldn't possibly offend anyone, though it does come off categorically anti-military coup, and I think that's just awfully closed-minded of it.

Still, I can't help but think it's sort of wrongheaded, as a matter of its overall narrative strategy.  Which isn't to let the tactics off the hook: take, for instance, the extended pre-inciting incident first act that's just this naturalistic slice-of-life for a Brazilian family, one that I assume was this large and of this composition in real life, because there are, like, at least three more children than the actual film can handle in its extant configuration (something the film even sub rosa acknowledges in numerous ways throughout, for instance being noticeably relieved to have gotten rid of the eldest daughter by way of a long trip abroad once her function of "being a politically-conscious teen" and "providing some almost nauseatingly-shaky Super 8 home movies" has been accomplished), but this is a slice-of-life that has no goal whatsoever besides impressing on you that bad things can still happen to nice people.  And they are, for sure, nice: with the obvious exceptions, it seems like it'd be cool to be in this family, and live in their cool beach neighborhood, and enjoy the 70s Brazilian lifestyle of wearing underwear or overclothes but not both simultaneously, but this does not, by itself, make them all that interesting to watch.  (And as long as we're talking small stuff, then the constant reference to period pop cultural signifiers is a routine example of the movie's naturalistic tolerance of dead air—I assure you, I do get that it's right at the transition to the 1970s.)

Reviews from gulag: 2022's junk drawer, part 1

There is unfortunately no theme I can think of to bind the following reviews together besides "they're all animated," and, hell, none are even animated in the same medium.  I don't know, maybe the theme is "they are actually good in inverse proportion to how much they're appreciated," but that's just the theme of, like, all fucking existence.  Nevertheless, here's reviews of Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, and DC League of Super-Pets.

GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO

The fact that it's named Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio is a tiny bit aggravating, not least because it's reminiscent of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, another stop-motion animated film attributed to a celebrated Gothic dark fantasy filmmaker who has no business claiming sole authorship of it—Mark Gustafson co-directed, and given the technology, I strongly expect he did more than "co-direct"—but you know, it gets a pass.  2022 was lousy with Pinocchios, and there was obviously a need for Del Toro and Netflix to differentiate it from the other ones.   These include a cheapo Russian cash-in with Pauly Shore, and, even more depressingly, Robert Zemeckis's quintuple-down on poorly-received disaster-projects, coming in the form of Disney's remake of their own 1940 Pinocchio that's so plainly bad that you don't need to see it, you can smell it from afar.  It is entirely probable that GDelT's P (hereafter just Pinocchio, thanks) is indeed the best of these.  It has been anointed such, and, because Del Toro fanboys are everywhere—even people who historically have not been fanboys for the extremely-uneven, I'm-gonna-just-put-it-out-there-not-that-good filmmaker have turned out to have nursed a secret desire to join the club—it has been anointed one of the year's great animated films.  I can sort of see the impulse—it's been a very bad year for animation (though I'm not sure "more than half of 2022's major animated features are mediocre or worse" is the consensus).  But, you know, I'm particularly enervated by the applause Del Toro has managed to gather upon himself on social media by taking the brave, heretical stand that "animation is a medium, not a genre!", which in A.D. 2022 is such a lamely self-impressed "cow says moo!" thing to say that I doubt it would ever occur to, for instance, Phil Tippet to actually voice it; I'm also not sure why Del Toro, adapting children's literature, thinks he has somehow not made a children's movie.  Is it just because his titular character and his titular character's sidekick are uglier than typical?