I will die on this hill: that’s Battle Cat. I was not aware that I had strong, nay, immutable opinions about something as ridiculous as He-Man until the other day, when I said something about Battle Cat being in the trailer and my wife, who, for the record, was not a boy in the 1980s, tried to tell me that was Cringer.
Her argument? Battle Cat wears armor. Cringer does not. That cat is not wearing armor, therefore it is not Battle Cat. Quod erat motherfuckin’ demonstrandum.
The intellectual in me wants to make this post about ontology and how we construct identity and how we construct our categories and definitions. The ‘80s kid in me started screaming bullshit right away, and now that I’ve seen other people spreading this nonsense it’s time to fight about it.
It is true that that cat is not wearing armor. It is also true that that cat is holding his head high and his tail straight, and while he is standing behind the people in the image, I’d argue that that’s an issue of shot composition and not hiding. His bearing and stature conveys nobility. That is not Cringer.
A similar shot, from just a couple of moments later. Again, look at his eyes. This cat isn’t afraid of Goddamned anything. Also worth pointing out— he’s huge. Cringer grows during his transformation. That cat is absolutely big enough to ride, saddle or not.
And the coup de grâce:
Cringer ain’t never had that look on his face not once in his whole life. I don’t care about a helmet. That is Battle Cat, and if you think otherwise you are wrong and he’s going to bite your face off if you try and tell him otherwise.
I have never seen “The Wolf of Wall Street”. And yet, somehow, this is one of my favorite scenes in all of film, and I have most of it memorized. And it is damn near entirely due to Rob Reiner’s performance. My understanding is that most of the sequence was improvised, and Reiner is utterly breaking everyone in the room. The only one who can keep up with him is Jonah Hill, who is obviously cracking– you will never convince me that the laughing is acting– and the needling he’s directing towards Reiner just keeps winding him up more and more. DiCaprio is trying his damnedest to play the straight man in the scene, and he can’t hold it together either. I love every second of this scene, and I love it in a way that made me love Rob Reiner as an actor.
I don’t talk about it much, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time, but Stand by Me was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I was 10 when it came out, just a bit younger than the characters and a touch younger still than the actors playing them, but I’m willing to believe if I put it on right now I could still do a significant amount of the dialogue along with the movie.
The line “Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood” (and River’s underrated “Whoever toldja you had a fat one, Lachance?” a few moments later) is going to be stuck in my head until I die. I’ve probably seen the film a couple dozen times.
And then there’s The Princess Bride, a movie that I have seen even more times than I’ve seen Stand by Me, an absolutely fucking immortal movie.(*)
I wish it was more common to realize the effect that a stranger has had on your life before they pass away, particularly when someone passes away in as tragic and hideous a way as Rob and Michele Reiner did. I’m generally not especially pressed by the idea of meeting celebrities (although I did meet Mandy Patinkin once, speaking of Princess Bride, and yes, I made him say The Line) but damn, the chance to tell Rob Reiner thank you is an opportunity I’m deeply saddened to have missed.
May his memory be a blessing.
(*) There is talk about doing a remake of this movie, which I thought was a horrendous idea until today, when I suddenly realized how to do it right: you must cast Fred Savage in the role of the parent reading the book, and he’s reading it to his own son or daughter(**) as they’re home sick, and you make it very clear that Savage is playing the same character as an adult. This neatly provides for new casting as well as any updates or changes the new director might decide to make to the story– it’s someone new hearing it, and we’re seeing their imagination and their interpretation, not Savage’s.
(**) Not to be too gender essentialist about it, but I kind of love the idea of a girl rolling her eyes at the fight scenes the same way The Grandson does at the kissing.
You may recall that last year I read a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. I called it the scariest book I had ever read, and while I absolutely cannot say that I enjoyed it, it ended up at a pretty high position on my Best Books of the Year list at the end of the year.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is, technically, not a film adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, or at least, if it is, it never claims it. That said, it may as well be: a single nuclear missile is launched from an unknown source (in NWAS, it’s immediately attributed to North Korea) toward what is eventually determined to be Chicago. The movie tells the story of the seventeen minutes between the detection of the launch and the impact of the missile three times from the perspective of three different groups of characters in the American government, all ending as the president makes his decision about what the US’s plan of retaliation will be. That decision is described by one character as “surrender or suicide,” and it’s not clear that there is really a whole lot of daylight between those two scenarios.
You might think that watching the same twenty minutes three times (the film’s runtime is just under two hours, so there’s not exactly a clock ticking in the corner for the entire movie) might be repetitive enough to drain some of the tension out of the film. For me, at least, it absolutely wasn’t, and the fact that you hear some of the same conversations three times over the course of the movie didn’t cut the drama at all. This might be partially attributable to my age– I think us ’80s kids are going to get hit harder by this movie than the generations before or after us, as the threat of dying by nuclear annihilation was something that was hanging over our heads for our entire childhood and we’ve internalized that very differently than people who didn’t go through that. But I had to go outside and mow the lawn after watching this movie just to burn off excess nervous energy, and I think it’s gonna have me fucked up for the rest of the day if not for longer than that.
I don’t have a ton to say about the technical aspects of the movie. The music is very effective, quietly echoing Jaws in the worst imaginable way and again plucking at the strings of the ’80s kids. The acting is as good as it needs to be with no really standout performances; the only actor in the film I was previously familiar with was Idris Elba, who plays the President as someone who never really thought he’d have to make the decisions he is faced with and allows just a trace of “Why me?” to come through his performance. Angel Reese has a cameo; I guess I’ve heard of her, but the movie’s not going to live or die on her playing herself for a couple of minutes.
Much like Nuclear War: A Scenario, I can’t really recommend this movie so much as say it’s very effective at what it wants to do and it’s up to you whether you want that in your brain or not. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time reading reviews; they’re very mixed, and I’m guessing that the film’s ending is primarily responsible for that. I’m not spoiling anything; for me, it ended in the best way it could, but clearly a whole lot of other people disagreed.
In case it hasn’t been clear, or, like a normal person, you aren’t obsessed with my media consumption, I decided recently that I was tired of complaining about how I don’t watch movies any more, and instead I was going to watch more movies. And because nothing in my life can’t be mined for blog content, I might as well review them too. I missed last week, but this weekend’s movie (or today’s, at least; maybe I’ll make up for last week tomorrow) was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, written and directed by the Coens.
I only know this movie exists because of TikTok, which has served up numerous snippets of Tim Blake Nelson’s titular Buster Scruggs, a white-garbed, polysyllabic desperado with a penchant for murderous improvisation and bursting into song at the slightest provocation. What I didn’t realize was that this movie is actually six unrelated vignettes, all set in the Old West, with the framing device of a book of short stories called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Sadly, the book itself is fictional; each vignette begins and ends with a slow pan into the first or last page of the story, and what text that’s there aroused my attention and would surely have acquired my money had the book actually existed to be bought.
The stories themselves range from the comic and musical (Scruggs) to what really feels like supernatural horror (The Mortal Remains) to a couple that are more firmly reality-based and tend toward the dark and depressing. The second, Near Algodones, is the only near-miss of the bunch; James Franco’s bank robber character is not terribly interesting, and while the visual of a deranged bank teller protecting himself from gunshots with armor made from cast-iron pans is hilarious, the story is slight enough that I couldn’t remember it just now and had to look for a list of the vignettes to get myself to six.
As it turned out, I had already unknowingly seen Scruggs nearly in its entirety on TikTok, and I was a little worried after Algodones, but the last four vignettes are uniformly fascinating and well worth the cost of a subscription to Netflix and two hours out of my Saturday. If you like Westerns or the Coens’ previous output, it’s well worth your time.
Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.
It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.
Today? Dead quiet.
We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.
I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.
This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.
After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.
You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?
And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.
There’s a clip from this movie that I used to see on TikTok all the time, where Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Reggie Kray, talks shit to a bunch of rival gangsters who plan on “knocking the granny out of him” while Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Ronnie Kray, throws a fit that he’s not about to be involved in a gunfight, storms out, then sneaks back into the room behind everyone with a hammer in each hand. That’s where the clip ends. It’s a good clip.
I have planned to spend two hours of my weekend watching this movie for approximately nineteen straight weekends. I finally watched it this morning.
Let’s get this out of the way real quick:
Legend is the story of the Kray twins, notorious and apparently real Cockney gangsters from 1960’s London who worked out of the East End. Reggie is the levelheaded one; Ronnie is literally a dangerous psychopath who spends most of the movie off of his meds. Reggie falls in love with Emily Browning’s Frances early in the movie; Frances provides narration throughout the film, and their love story, such as it is, is the driving force behind the actual plot. She knows who she’s dating (and, eventually, marrying) and wants Reggie to go straight; Ronnie very much does not want that.
This is one of those movies that’s more about the actors than it is the plot, and … God damn, I had never really gotten Tom Hardy before, but he’s absolutely amazing in this. Ten years of development in movie effects means that Michael B. Jordan’s Smokestack twins look a little more seamless when they’re both facing the camera and talking to each other– you can tell some compositing is happening when both of their faces are in the same shot– but the distinction between the two characters is tremendous. Hardy’s wearing some prosthetics as Ronnie; his nose is broken, he’s a little heavier, and there’s something going on with his lips that I was never able to quite nail down, but what really distinguishes the two is the aura of utter malice that Ronnie radiates every single second he’s on screen. Neither of these men are nice guys, mind you, which the movie goes to great pains to remind you a few times– you are pushed away from identifying with either of them– but Reg is a scorpion and Ronnie is a pissed-off pit bull with a frayed piece of twine holding him back. Their voices are also slightly different– I have no idea what Hardy’s natural accent actually sounds like, but there’s a point in the movie where Reg does an imitation of his brother for a sentence or two and it feels like an impersonation rather than Hardy just briefly switching accents. It’s a tremendous, understated bit of acting and it was one of my favorite moments in the film.
But let’s talk about Emily Browning for a moment. I think this is the only thing I’ve ever seen her in, and she’s meant to be the stand-in for the audience– and, again, is also the narrator throughout the movie. You know from the jump that things aren’t going to end well, but unless you’re already familiar with the Krays you won’t know exactly how. Browning’s chemistry with Hardy as Reg is absolutely off the charts; their first scene together, where Reg asks Frankie out for the first time, is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen on-screen, and the two of them barely touch each other. The tension is crackling between the two of them; I was surprised there weren’t literal sparks. Similarly, she and Ronnie never trust each other at all; during their first encounter, he explains that he’s a homosexual but that he doesn’t “receive,” and that’s about as comfortable conversation as they’re going to have at any point in the movie.
I mean, stuff happens in the movie, but it’s ultimately about the relationships between these three characters, and how Reggie is torn between loyalty to his brother and loyalty to his wife. That’s what drives all of the conflicts in the movie; there’s a subplot about a cop chasing the two of them that doesn’t amount to much and a couple of court scenes, but everything revolves around them. Frankie’s brother works for Reggie. Frankie’s mom loathes Reggie, showing up in black to their wedding and prompting one of Ronnie’s most terrifying moments, and Reggie’s mom, who dotes on Ronnie throughout the film, doesn’t like Frankie much either. There’s a scene between the two of them where Frankie makes her a cup of tea and Violet rejects it, which is apparently the British equivalent of killing someone’s dog.
I know it came out ten years ago, but if you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out.
What I really ought to do for this review is just copy and paste my Superman review from a couple of weeks ago and then change all the names. Because it’s really kind of ridiculous how similar my feelings on both of the movies are. Which is, if you missed my Superman review, very much a good thing.
My son is sitting behind me, working on something for his summer science class, and he just read that over my shoulder and went “Heh. A good Thing.”
Ben Grimm is magnificent in this film, by the way. There has never been a good Fantastic Four movie, and there’s never been a good Ben Grimm in the bad Fantastic Four movies. This movie somehow manages to be one of the best superhero films I’ve ever seen despite picking up a franchise with an incredibly bad track record on film. I loved it for a lot of the same reasons I loved Superman— namely, that this is a story about heroes, who want to be heroes, and who are expected to be heroes. The whole intro to the film is all about them saving lives. There’s no squirrel rescue scene, or anything like that, but there’s lots and lots of saving people, which is the whole point of this entire genre.
Another thing this movie does right that it has in common with Superman is it knows good and Goddamn well that you’ve been watching superhero movies for twenty years now, and there have been four movies about these guys before this one, and so it dispenses with the origin story in about five minutes. This means that the film doesn’t need to start with Reed and Sue not being married and they don’t need to show them being in love; nay, it can literally start with, in a first for a superhero movie, Sue sitting on the toilet, having just peed on a pregnancy test, which is coming up positive.
Marvel tried to hide the pregnancy angle at first and then stopped, but this movie has no time to waste, so Sue’s pregnant right away, and is actually massively pregnant during the first encounter with Galactus– who, in another first, is also done right. Sue actually gives birth to Franklin Richards on the ship on the way back to Earth, and watching the team deal with her going into labor while trying to not get killed by the Silver Surfer is a hell of a thing.
I’m kind of rambling, so let me cut to the quick, here: this is a great superhero movie, for very much the same reasons that Superman is a great superhero movie: it understands its characters, and it understands why they’ve been in (damn near, in this case) continuous publication since the 1960s, and it doesn’t bother screwing around with them or changing them for the tastes of Modern Audiences, which always, always involves making them more evil and stupid. This Fantastic Four is optimistic and cheery and unapologetically brilliant, and there’s no dark secrets, and no hidden betrayals, and they fucking love each other, and that is so Goddamned refreshing in a 2025 superhero movie that it was really all they needed to get right for me to love the movie.
The boy wants me to mention that Mole Man was cool. He is correct. Mole Man, for the first time in his history as a character, was cool.
The casting was superb across the board, really. I had my doubts about Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards; they were incorrect, and now I can’t really picture anyone else in the role. Sue and Ben are fantastic great. And Johnny …
…
Let’s talk about the Human Torch for a minute here.
Johnny Storm is very frequently, and for good reason, used as the comic relief in Fantastic Four stories, regardless of the medium. He currently literally has a handlebar mustache in the comics for no reason other than that he knows everyone else hates it:
He has an interesting role in this film– and, hell, it’s just now hitting me that this is sort of another parallel to what Superman did with Jimmy Olsen– in that he usually sort of gets the Xander role, as the useless funny guy, and neither movie was interested in that character. This movie remembered that he was on that first flight for a reason, and handles it in a way that I’m still not convinced about.
(Minor spoilers to follow. Not a big deal. I’ll use separators.)
So this universe’s Johnny Storm is apparently a master of linguistics, somehow? Like, on Reed’s level, practically? There have been repeated alien signals coming for months prior to Galactus’s arrival, and Reed is preoccupied with running countless tests on his genetically-altered pregnant wife to make sure that the child is going to be okay, so Johnny takes over looking at the signals. And he figures out that the signals are in the same language that Shalla Bal (Silver Surfer) says to him during a very brief conversation, and he decodes the entire alien language in a couple of months. And then he manages to figure out some other things that I won’t spoil, and it ends up being way more important to the climax of the film than one might expect.
This Johnny Storm also has a streak of nobility to him that isn’t exactly new, but is definitely more pronounced in this film than I’ve ever seen in the past. There are at least two different points where he is more than ready to die so that everyone else can live. He’s completely fearless to the point where it feels unhealthy, to be honest. I like it. He may be the most carefully developed character in the movie, and that’s usually not how these things work.
Minor spoilers end.
Let’s see, what else? I loved H.E.R.B.I.E., and I loved that the movie didn’t bother explaining him and that he was just there. I love the retro-future 1960s look of the movie. Love it. I love that, and this is going to be dodging a spoiler again, the movie managed to surprise me with the way it ended, which has never happened in anything featuring Galactus before. I had some ideas about how this movie was going to connect with the wider Marvel universe(*), and let’s just say I was completely wrong. I don’t think I’ve speculated about that here, so we’re probably good. I liked that they remembered that Ben was Jewish. I liked that they kept him dressed for most of the movie. The Ben Grimm in the comics wears clothes! All the time! And so does this one.
There are some great insights into Reed Richards’ character, too, and some conflicts he gets into with Sue, that really felt true to the characters. Again, the main thing this movie did right was understand the people it was about.
The standard caveats! I am super enthusiastic about stuff I like, and I really liked this movie. To be honest, were I not substantially more invested in Superman as a character than I am the Fantastic Four, I might be willing to call this a better movie, and I think I have fewer complaints about it than I do the Superman movie. It’s crazy that two superhero movies this good in such similar ways came out in the same month. It’s even crazier that we’re basically done with superhero movies and TV shows until next summer, too. I don’t know right now if I’m back on board for Avengers: Doomsday or not. We’ll see. But between now and then, you should definitely make time to see this one.
(*) The movie starts off with a title card stating it’s on Earth-828, a number I thought about for a minute and couldn’t come up with any particular significance for. It ends with a quote from Jack Kirby, who was born on August 28th, 1917. Nice touch. Also, apparently there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Jack and Stan Lee together in a montage at the beginning of the film. I missed it.
I somehow wrote over 2,000 words about Superman yesterday and never mentioned the dog.
And I can’t decide which picture I want to use, so have another:
I gotta say, including the dog in this movie was a stroke of genius in a film that is not wanting for genius moments. And making Krypto an asshole was another great decision. I’m choosing that word deliberately, mind you; Krypto’s not mean, he’s not a bad dog, no, he is in fact the goodest of good boys, but he is absolutely a furry little asshole and he could use quite a bit more training. And having a pet, much less a pet he can’t really control, humanizes Superman in a way I really like. Superman’s powers don’t help him with Krypto at all, and his anger when he can’t find his dog after Lex and his crew invade the Fortress of Solitude leads to one of the movie’s best scenes– and, not for nothing, one of its most relatable as well. It’s a two-minute masterclass of acting from both Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult. One of them has to play the part of a man who could absolutely wipe the problem in front of him off of the face of the earth with no consequences, but who knows he can’t do that, and has to contain his perfectly understandable rage. The other guy has to stare his death in the face and smirk. It’s a stellar scene, and for my money better than this scene from Superman ’78 that it’s a callback to:
I had forgotten what a champion shit-talker Reeve’s Superman is. “Diseased maniac” indeed. Corenswet could never. He’s too nice.
… suddenly it hits me that none of the three men in this scene are with us any longer. Damn.
But back to the dog: Krypto is 100% CGI, a decision that I didn’t like until I saw the film and realized that there is about a minute out of the entire movie where they could have used a real dog, and most of that minute is in the two pictures at the top of the post. And the CGI is seamless anyway; the FX in the movie are generally solid, but none of the occasional less-than-perfect shots involve Krypto. (For some reason, shots where Superman is flying directly toward the camera tend to look weird, and I’m not sure why.)
So yeah. Absolutely ready for Krypto to have his own movie, where he goes and does dog stuff and accidentally saves the world while the Justice League is busy with something else. The Zeppo, but with a lead I actually like.
Tomorrow: maybe not a Superman post! But we’ll see.
