The past few months have been a crazy mix of a little bit of everything. Thank you to streaming services and the local Alamo Drafthouse for appeasing my ADHD brain.

Barry

Barry is a premise that sounds built for comedy: a hit man’s job goes awry as he stumbles into an acting class and decides he wants to be an actor. What’s completely unexpected about this show is just how deep it’s willing to go. Bill Hader delivers as a very capable hitman desperate to get out of the game. For a distraction. For anything. But what starts as a fairly innocuous acting class taught by a note-perfect Henry Winkler slowly becomes something far more gripping. Barry’s got demons to deal with on top of the mounting pressure of a deadly side gig he can’t quite seem to sweep under the rug.

Season One was designed purely to lead up to it’s most jaw-dropping, cathartic moment, where Barry finally injects some emotion into his acting just as he’s wrestling with the unexpected, heavy guilt of killing people he knows. It’s incredible acting by Bill Hader – so completely transfixing and harrowing – just as it’s incredibly acting for Barry. It only got better from there as the season ended on a gripping cliffhanger.

But Season Two? Sweet Jesus. It’s always a beautiful thing when a new show figures itself out in its first season and then comes back for a second, fully aware of its identity and ready to rock. And even though Barry felt fully-formed from the first frame of it’s maiden season, Hader, Alec Berg, and company clearly had no intentions of coasting. They just dial it up a whole ‘other notch of awesome. I still think, on a weekly basis, about the fifth episode of the season – written and directed by Hader himself – a beautifully self-contained story that somehow never interrupts the momentum of what comes before or after.

These guys have something to call their own and I cannot wait to see what they come up with next year.

Fleabag

Like Barry, Phoebe Waller Bridges’ Fleabag arrived fully-formed in its first season with a completely distinct voice. And like Barry, it just loaded up and rocked to new, freakishly confident heights in its second season. I don’t know if I found a better outlet for praise for Bridges’ work than Twitter. Twitter can be a very icky, maddening place. But it’s also a place where you can easily see the thoughts and takes of a wide variety of very smart writers, artists, and filmmakers that you greatly admire. Guess what people I followed talked about for nearly 2 weeks straight? Fleabag. The only thing they talked about more than Fleabag itself is just how insanely talented Bridges’ is her herself.

She’s so talented she’s the first woman I know of to be hired to punch up a James Bond film script purely because she’s that fucking awesome. (A ridiculous glass ceiling she should have to punch, but nonetheless a mighty fist heading towards that breakage).

Sometimes it’s really hard for writers to communicate to non-writers just how good something is. Just like it’s hard it would be for someone to explain a brilliant economic policy or piece of coding to me. But I can assure you: this is writing of the highest degree. This is someone who can find the tiniest things that make people tick and turn a simple dinner into a massive, all-out slugfest (and that’s before any actual punches are even thrown). Who can make each character feel so unique and full of depth, through dialogue and action alike?

I’m in awe of what Waller-Bridges’ pulled off this season and the way she used the Hot Priest storyline to bring out so many amazing conversations and fits of understanding and confusion. The moment where the Hot Priest finally keys in on Fleabag’s main way of communicating with her audience? Divine.

Most of the time a brilliant season of television will leave you wanting more of the same. But Waller-Bridges ends her story so beautifully and with such delightful, yet careful abandon that I almost don’t want her to come back to the same well. I want her to punch up Bond movie scripts so she can buy herself the time and opportunities to writer and pursue whatever she wants to. She’s the goods and she’ll hopefully be around for a long, long time.

Schitt’s Creek

Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy are national treasures (even though they’re Canadian – I’ll call them National Treasures on Loan for now). I’ll watch anything with them. And this may be one of the few times I’ve seen them upstaged.

There’s so much to love about this show, from the fact it’s created by Levy and his own son Daniel Levy to the many colorful characters played by equally colorful characters. I can confidently say I’ve never seen nor enjoyed a character as much as I have with Daniel Levy’s DANIEL. He’s the perfect fix of well-written and expertly acted, which can be said by just about every other character in this delightful small town.

Top Secret!

I heard about this film for the first time thanks to some of my favorite screenwriters joking around on Twitter, sharing their favorite GIFs from this movie. My interest went way up when I realized it was Val Kilmer’s feature film AND singing debut.

A weird fact that I find absolutely delightful: this was Peter Cushing’s final American film appearance. For those who don’t know, he played Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars movie. When Rogue One wanted to use the character for a prequel to a movie that was filmed 30 years ago and didn’t have Cushing around, they found this solution:

“In order to ensure a proper make-up appliance, Peter Cushing had a life-mask taken of his face. This mask remained in deep storage for over 30 years until it was used by visual effects artists during the making of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) to assist them in generating a CGI motion capture duplication of Cushing’s facial features in the role of Governor Tarkin.”

I will die laughing if this is what the internet will remember about this movie in ten years. That’s quite the legacy. But I’m optimistic people will eventually come around to this deeply enjoyable batch of 80’s craziness. Much like Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers’ previous runaway hit Airplane!, Top Secret! is full of highly inappropriate, poorly-aged jokes. But it’s also full of delightful puns, a Beach Boys’-ish song about skeet surfing (you gotta see it for yourself), and the best underwater fight you’ve ever seen.

Top Secret! is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Chernobyl 

My favorite thing about Chernobyl (beyond just how deeply excellent it is) is how many times I’ve seen a variation of this same sentiment: how did the writer of The Hangover II and III, Scary Movie IV, and Identity Thief make THIS? HOW???

But I kind of saw this coming. You see, Craig Mazin and John August have been hosting a delightful screenwriting podcast, Scriptnotes, for well over 7 years now. I remember when they first started out and I would spend many, many summer afternoons sweating my balls off in the Austin heat and reading their podcast transcripts, absorbing their Hollywood wisdom and keen insights. Mazin and August are two of the more successful screenwriters in the business, but they’re also two of the kindest and most generous. Their podcast and everything they provide with it is free. It’s a service and a beautiful thing.

But if you’ve listened to any of Mazin on Scriptnotes, you’ll know two things: 1) he went to Princeton, and 2) he’s really, really wicked smart.

It was always a great bit of cognitive dissonance to me for a long time: how could someone this smart and well-spoken be the writer for what I (probably quite unfairly) felt to be low-hanging comedy fruit? There had to be more to this dude.

Turns out all it took was a matter of time and opportunity. Mazin found a passion project with Chernobyl and goddamn did he shoot his shot. All 5 episodes are so well-written and constructed that I never once let the show do anything other than wash over me. Every piece fits together so beautifully. Johan Renck’s direction only further augments and extends Mazin’s craft.

I’m so glad for the existence of such a well-told story about an event many of us knew very, very little about. And the way Mazin makes it relevant to our times today is a thing of stark, unavoidable beauty.

But what I may love more than all of this is that it’s allowed Mazin to finally get a well-deserved moment in the sun and a chance to begin a new chapter in his writing career.

Always Be My Maybe

It’s easy to forget how out-of-nowhere Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra standup special was when it arrived on Netflix three years ago. Initially, the attention came with the fact she did her entire set very, very pregnant. Shortly after, the attention became what a unique, hilarious comic voice she is. Her background as a comedy writer became clear just as she unleashed her growing star potential. Between two comedy specials and now Always Be My Maybe, she is, as much as anyone can claim to be, a star Netflix nearly grew on their own.

This is a movie literally born from a random pitch on Twitter. It speaks to Netflix’s willingness to front money in a hurry that they were able to get a project like this made so quickly. Just like the previous Netflix romantic comedy hit, Set It Up, this takes a rather simple rom-com setup and skates upon the powerhouse charm and Randall Park and Ali Wong. You believe their friendship, and I’m especially impressed with how much depth they gave Wong’s character, even as the romantic comedy structure tried its damnedest to swing her into wackier territory.

Even better is the specificity the movie clearly dedicates to its Oakland setting. A great number of writers I follow on Twitter found themselves completely floored with how much this movie nailed the specificity of the Oakland they knew and loved, especially with the music. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned with Netflix and its giant pool of money, it’s their willingness to spend a LOT of money on getting whatever song clearances the movie (or show) wants. Even if you don’t know Oakland that well, you can tell there’s an extra layer of care and dedication imbued in the story. It’s that extra kick of special sauce.

And speaking of special sauce, I haven’t even mentioned Keanu Reeves yet! There may be no movie trope I enjoy more than when big, famous actors willingly play with their image onscreen. We’ve all heard the many heartwarming stories about Keanu. He’s clearly a good, good dude. And yet, the dedication he puts into playing a version of himself that grows from godlike to more and more assholish is purely a character arc soaked with delight.

If you’re one of those people who swears the romantic comedy genre is dead, then do yourself a favor and watch a doubleheader of Netflix’s Set It Up and Always Be My Maybe.

Tag

When my fiance and I arrived for our first night in Melbourne, we decided to seek out a movie to complement our takeout fish and chips dinner. Problem was: the place we were staying only had a box of HD-DVD movies, which is not exactly a format we Americans really see much of anymore. Needless to say, our options were very limited. Tag looked like the best bet. A couple of hours later, we sat in our chairs, completely stunned. It wasn’t the food coma. It was the complete inability to find any words to describe what we watched. So I let it sit. A couple of hours later, I could only think of one thing and one thing only: thumb drives.

You remember when thumb drives were made and we were promised that we could not only hold a bunch of data on them but that we could easily slot them into any USB port and access this stuff anytime? And how it would be so convenient? And just plain awesome? But then a weird thing would happen: the files would get corrupted. If you managed to open them up, they’d come up all weird and nearly impenetrable.

This is how I felt about Tag. The premise – a based-on-true-story tale of grown-ass men who’ve kept their friendship alive through the world’s longest-running game of Tag – is the USB thumb drive. It’s all there. It should be light and easily accessible. It shouldn’t be expected to change the world, but it should at least create an entertaining couple of hours.

Well.

I don’t know what happened, but that USB drive got corrupted somehow. Everything feels a little bit off. The lines that should be funny are rushed through. The lines that aren’t funny are given a lot of focus. The camera might be moving more than the actors themselves and they’re basically playing ONE LONG GAME OF TAG.

I’m just baffled at how they could get so many brilliant, hilarious people in one movie and only yield a couple of good laughs. In fact, the funniest part of the movie comes during the credits, when they show footage of the actual Tag friends (from Spokane, WA – shoutout to the hometown they clearly did not film in!) performing some of their stunts and it is legitimately heartwarming and hilarious – two qualities I’m sure the movie was shooting for but ultimately failed to achieve.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

With so many sequels and reboots in theaters, it’s been a bit harder to get motivated to go to the movies. Especially with so many streaming options at our fingertips. So an unexpectedly fun way to approach all of this has been to ditch the 2019 movie rabbit race and check out films I’ve never seen before (true story: there’s a LOT of them).

How I’ve lived 32 years on this pale blue dot and never seen Bill & Ted is beyond me. But I am so, so glad I finally got around to it. What a delightful bunch of actors to spend time with. And you could do a lot worse than coming away from a movie with a catchphrase like “Be Excellent To Others”.

Even better, original writer Ed Solomon is making a third outing, Bill and Ted Face the Music, with the breakout actor from Barry, Anthony Carrigan. Another great group of people working together with a reportedly great script. Can’t wait!

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (rewatch)

Whenever I thought about this movie, which I had seen over 2 years ago, I imagined a key character’s death to come almost immediately in the movie. In fact, I remember remarking her death happened about Minute 20, which fell in line with so many formulaic screenwriting books I had read up to that point. What struck me this time out is how much time Taika gives to the relationship with the foster mother before her shocking death. He truly lets it marinate, giving Ricky time with her that’s a mix of meaningful and listless – just like real-life interactions tend to be. We see her struggle to get through to Ricky. We see her try a different tact in talking around Ricky and seeing if he’ll develop an interest. We see Ricky run away from home and fail miserably. Waititi quite economically packs a lot of story into those first 20 minutes so that we know 3 key things: 1) Ricky’s stakes (he’s going to juvie once the foster care people seize him again), 2) Hec (Sam Neill) can’t go back to jail with his criminal record, and 3) Hec and Ricky really, really do not like each other.

By the time Ricky visits his old pal at the end and Hec unspools his own, imperfectly perfect haiku, you’ll realize just how far these characters have come and just how much you’ve grown to love them.

Bad Times at the El Royale

Drew Goddard is such a brilliant, smart writer that sometimes he trips himself up. The premise of Bad Times is excellent. Strangers stumble into this retro, immaculately-designed motel that sits on the border of California and Nevada. Much like Cabin in the Woods, Goddard slowly peels back the layers until you’re left with a largely unpredictable story.

The elliptical way the story is told, cycling back through time before running again through the present, makes for a captivating watch. The pieces are slowly put into place before they’re laid out and blown to pieces in the final act. Every actor brings their A-game, tearing into the material.

But here, it feels like Goddard may have devised a story that’s a bit too clever for its own good. When you’re trying to create complex characters in the middle of a complicated plot, your brain can be burning so many calories taking it all in that there’s little energy left for feeling emotional heft. I was certainly entertained, but it didn’t quite stick.

The Dead Don’t Die 

You may have heard of such physical laws as E=MC2 and Newton’s Law of Gravity, but I’m pretty sure there is another one people tend to overlook:

Deadpan Bill Murray + Deadpan Adam Driver = Instant Comedy Gold

We all know Bill Murray. And whenever Driver hasn’t been sparking new fan theories with his Star Wars roles, he’s been doing great work in delightful indies such as Patterson and last year’s highly underrated Logan Lucky. The trailer for The Dead Don’t Die seemed to suggest quite the confirmation of this new physical law. These two would be delivering dry one-liner after one-liner, eliciting gut busters throughout the entire runtime.

But I also wondered why such a deeply soulful filmmaker like Jim Jarmusch would be making such a wacky comedy. All I can say is: when you see it, it will make total sense. The trailer definitely sets up a different kind of comedy than the one you get.

We’ve heard tragedy + time = comedy. Jarmusch seems to want to try a new law, one that says comedy + time = tragedy. Or rather, comedy + indifference = tragedy.

There’s a lot to laugh at in this movie. Random celebrities such as Iggy Pop in full zombie regalia. A racist, MAGA-infused Steve Buscemi. A whispery, delightfully nerdy Caleb Landry Drones. Tilda Swinton being revealed to actually be the alien we all assumed she is. Adam Driver rolling into the scene in a Smart Two car that barely fits his massive, gangly frame.

But there’s a slow sense of dread that creeps over you, both for the characters and as an audience member. For one, the movie has all the makings of a comedy, but the levity is blunted by something far less funny: indifference. You see, these zombies are lumbering around and biting into people in new and gruesome ways. The cops are always called, but they’re frequently at a loss of what to do. It’s a small town. The world’s going to hell. And no one seems to care.

You can read Jamursch’s intent as a lot of things. The frequent mention of polar fracking makes it easy to read it as our lack of response to climate change. But like Craig Mazin’s stellar HBO show Chernobyl, it brings up a theme that can be applied to so much. Chernobyl made us wonder what the cost of our lies are; who is really paying the price when people refuse to tell the truth? Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die holds up a mirror that asks us all just what the hell is up with this indifference? Why are we allowing our town to be attacked by zombies and carrying about like everything’s business as usual?

The answer comes in taking a look at the news. The day after I saw the movie, there was news of a horrifying shooting at a California music festival. Which followed a week in which our President unapologetically made a number of terribly racist comments. Which followed a Congressional hearing where it was confirmed another country totally meddled in our most recent presidential election, which was followed by a congressman blocking a bill that would have allowed for more voter security to help ensure meddling doesn’t happen again. None of this is normal. And yet. The lack of action from the powers above us has probably conditioned those below us to a level of inaction, or at the very least, a feeling of pointlessness. Many people love to point out that our focus on relatively trivial pop cultural moments, such as NBA free agency or Tarantino’s newest film, is the reason the world is not changing. But I would argue the other way around is just as responsible; that feeling like anything we do won’t make a difference has led us all to focus on the trivial. As escape. As a chance to get so passionately upset about something completely random so we just might remember what it feels like to feel a little in control.

The Dead Don’t Die gains its power long after you’ve seen it. I watched nearly the entirety of this movie waiting for something to kick in. Something to happen. The many weeks since has taught me that’s what Jamursch wanted us to wonder all along.

I remember the posters. The covers of the VHS tapes at Blockbusters. You know the iconic shot. The one dressed up as the cover of the pulp paperback novels the movie emulates. Uma Thurman lays on a bed, cigarette in one hand, a novel in the other. A gun lies right in front of her. I don’t know if there was anything that screamed, “Do not let your kid watch this!” to a Catholic parent any more than the advertising materials for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

It checked all the wrong boxes. It was not to be watched. And so I went most of my life hearing about this seminal, impactful film and never actually seeing it.

By the time I hit high school in the early 2000’s, my band and Honors English friends were obsessed, I mean OBSESSED with one movie. It wasn’t Pulp Fiction. It was one of its many imitators: The Boondock Saints. I was able to sneak a VHS copy home (we weren’t cool enough for DVD players yet) and watch it when the family was away.

The movie has 239 instances of the F-word. Pulp Fiction has 265 instances (slightly dwarfed by Tarantino’s previous, Reservoir Dogs’ 269 instances). Both films have partnered main characters, with Saints’ Catholic twin brothers, and Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I have a feeling my dumb teenage brain thought that ultraviolet Catholic criminals dedicated to taking out the scum of the earth would be slightly more permissible to watch than whatever this Tarantino guy had cooked up.

The first time I saw Boondock Saints – either on its own merits seen through my rapidly changing teenage brain, or through the heavy influence of wanting to be a part of the cool conversation with my friends – I absolutely loved it. I laughed all the way through. I found it supremely entertaining and couldn’t wait to rave about it with my buddies back at school.

But when I saw the movie again four years later, this time with a very Catholic friend, I had a completely different experience. While my friend loved it and found it hilarious, I found it to be a transgressive piece of trash. All the swearing and over-the-top violence grated on me. It felt designed to speak to my teenage brain, but had nothing to offer my slightly-more-mature college brain. Maybe it was all the foreign films I had seen. Maybe I had more sophisticated taste. Maybe, just maybe, the movie was always that awful and I needed time to see it. Who knows?

What I do know is that if there was ever a time to see and appreciate Pulp Fiction for what it is, the time was now. With Tarantino’s newest just arriving in theaters and Pulp Fiction an easy few buttons away on Netflix, I decided to hunker down and see what 25 years of fuss was all about.

From what I had seen with Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, I had grown to love just how much fun Tarantino has with his movies. You can disagree with his choices. You can call his dialogue too writerly. You can say he uses too many references and maybe a little too much violence. You can say all these things, but you cannot say the man does not absolutely entertain himself before anyone else. You can hear the giggling behind the screen in every frame. In every song choice, every carefully-worded monologue and shocking blast of violence.

From a screenwriting perspective, what stuns me the most about Tarantino and Roger Avary’s script is how it feels so structurally sound despite being told out of order. If you placed all the scenes in their chronological order, we’d see Jules have a conversation with Marcellus Wallace about quitting the game much sooner, and then he’d be off the chessboard. But we don’t see this anxiety about the future from Jules until the last 20-30 minutes of the movie, when Jules and Vincent’s storyline collides with the restaurant robbery that begins the movie. And after we’ve seen Butch blow off a promise to try and escape his own game, get nearly killed 3 different times and somehow escape with the same guy who broke his promise to, we’re left with one question that Jules answers in his own way: if you have a chance to get out of this awful, bloody game, why wouldn’t you take it?

We see how dangerous the game is in the opening acts of the film, see all the things that can go wrong when drugs and business get mixed up, and then we get many many instances of people being in the wrong place and wrong time and paying dearly for it. It’s an brutal, taxing game. For all it’s problematic elements, this is still a very entertaining movie that’s aged reasonably well, a worthy wine of a movie for those ridiculous Catholic brothers to get a taste of.

A couple of nights ago, I found myself swimming in the Gulf of Nostalgia. In the space of just a few hours, I was both the swimmer and the beachgoer watching those crazy kids nearly drown under the waves. The scene: Thundercloud Subs. The situation: simply ordering a sandwich to take to the summer production of Disney’s The Little Mermaid at the Zilker Park Hillside Theater.

In the midst of talking to the sandwich artist about our plans for the evening, Disney became a topic of conversation and she asked about the new Lion King 2019. Being the only one of the 3 in the conversation who had seen it, I suddenly felt an intense pressure to dance around my actual thoughts of it. The sandwich artist, who I had just met and would likely never see again, seemed to really want me to say great things about this movie. Maybe she even needed me to say great things about it. I gave her about as neutral a response as I could give: that it was nearly a shot-for-shot remake but was well-done. And then we left.

A couple of hours later, the play started. Even though it was really an adaptation of the Broadway play, itself an adaptation of the original Disney animated movie, it still had all the songs we had come to know and love. And in our group of 4, 3 of us had very strong memories tied to this movie. It wouldn’t take such a great leap of thought to say that when Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid hits theaters in a couple of years, we might be those sandwich artist people, asking someone who’s seen it just how it is, unknowingly forcing them to dance around the issue.

I know with these remakes just how dicey a proposition they are for audiences. But I’ve always come to remember one very important thing: we will always have the original. I don’t have a lot of faith in Rob Marshall to deliver. Or that Disney won’t find some way to make it all very, very weird. I mean, just HOW are they going to make it a movie entirely underwater and not look like a Disneyfied version of Aquaman? How are they going to make Javier Bardem into Triton underwater and not look like this guy:

Lion King 2019 has taught me, more than anything I’ve seen this year, the value of saying, “It’s not for me.” With every movie I see, I try to find something worthwhile out of it. The acting, the editing, the special effects. Maybe even the completely whacky go-for-broke choices. Because if every film requires an army of well-intentioned artists to wrestle into completion, shouldn’t I at least try and meet them halfway, somewhere, somehow?

From the minute it was clear to me Disney would be recycling (remaking feels a bit generous of a term) just about every one of their animated classics, I saw Lion King 2019 as the natural, pessimistic endpoint for just how far the exercise could go. It’s the only Disney animated classic (other than Bambi) which has no humans whatsoever. And I knew, before even seeing a frame of the film, that the natural slope from Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book – completely with near-photorealistic CGI animals and backgrounds – to Jon Favreau’s The Lion King would be a technical marvel, but artistically inert.

(Conspiracy Theory Time: from the time Disney bought Lucasfilm back in 2012, it’s been asked if and when a Star Wars TV show will ever come into existence. The party line has always been that such a show would be too expensive. In fact, in 2006, George Lucas himself had announced they had a Star Wars: Underworld series in the pipeline, but the obvious challenges remained: “It sits on the shelf. We have 50 hours (of scripts). We are trying to figure out a different way of making movies. We are looking for a different technology that we can use, that will make it economically feasible to shoot the show. Right now, it looks like the Star Wars features. But we have to figure out how to make it at about a tenth of the cost of the features, because its television. We are working toward that, and we continue to work towards that. We will get there at some point.” The technology that Jon Favreau and his team developed – which involves video game technology, VR sets, and a series of other inventions that could cut costs for big-budget films considerably – appears to be the same technology used for the new Disney+ Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, that Favreau is spearheading. It wouldn’t surprise me if a significant part of Lion King 2019’s budget is really R&D for The Mandalorian (and beyond). And the more cynical part of me just wonders if Lion King 2019 was the project that made the most sense to a) pay for new technology, b) test it out, and c) still make a ton of money in the process. Okay, back to our original programming!)

I had a lot of thoughts about Lion King 2019 (such as: why would a shaman-like monkey like Rafiki need scientific proof of Simba’s existence if he’s totally cool with summoning Mufasas’ spirit in the clouds? Did Favreau intentionally cut out Rafiki from the frame when Simba sees Mufasa in the clouds so that he can look at smartasses like me and say, ‘Ha! Maybe it was all in his furball head!“? If the movie’s willing to spend precious seconds and minutes of costly animated time on mouses moving around and a tuft of lion hair, couldn’t it have used some of that time and energy to transition Simba and Nala to nighttime so when they sing ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight?’ it’s actually taking place at night?), but two really stuck out to me:

The Incredibles and Super Mario. Allow me to elaborate.

For nearly a decade after The Incredibles (2004), writer/director Brad Bird was asked in every possible interview when a sequel to his Pixar classic would be coming. Every time, he had the same response: it won’t come until I have a story to tell. It took 14 years, but he finally landed on something worth telling. Even better is his insistence they maintain the same style of the original film, but slightly upgrade it. If you look at both movies side to side, the characters have the exact same caricatured look to them, only with cutting edge texture and vastly increased complexity. There are way more moving parts amongst the masterfully-directed action scenes. Their skin looks more realistic, but their faces remain as expressive as ever.

When you’re looking at a photorealistic lion, there’s not much room for emotion. And while the film does a better job towards the back end giving their animals slightly more telling facial expressions, it still feels like Planet Earth with an expensive, star-studded voice track. Now, I will be the first to admit that trying to make these 2019 lions as facially expressive as the 1994 original could be quite the source of nightmare fuel. It might look terrible. It might look fantastic. I have no idea! That’s why Disney doesn’t pay me the big bucks to shepherd these quarter-million-dollar movie theater rides.

I just wish, when this film was originally pitched as The Lion King done like The Jungle Book, someone had stopped to think about what that would do to the story. There’s only, to my recollection, a couple of scenes added (and a whole lotta sometimes delightful ad-lib from Timon and Pumbaa) and it would be overselling it to even call them scenes when they’re really just a series of shots illustrating the processing power of the new digital technology. So what you then have is a movie that is a near shot-for-shot remake of the original – meaning, that you know exactly what is going on and what’s coming ahead of you – and drained of a good 70-80% of all emotion because these animals have so little expression on their faces.

Here’s an example of how predictable this movie is: only a couple minutes into the film, my captioning device started malfunctioning. Letters disappeared and came out garbled. It was like water had been doused on it, each gasp of captioning worse than the one before it. So I took it back out of the theater, down the hall and to the lobby, switched it out, conferred with another manager, and we came back with a device that worked. And guess what? I did not miss an entire thing. Even while my device wasn’t working, I could hear and understand all the dialogue pretty clearly. Not because my hearing aid is so wonderful. But because the original, which I have not seen in years, is so seared into my brain as to be paying rent. And in the time I was gone, no new scenes or information appeared to have taken place. It’s was like watching a prohibitively expensive quote-a-long with a new coat of fancy CGI paint.

Mario and the Evolution of Complexity

Imagine The Lion King as the original Super Mario series (1, 2, 3, and Super Mario World). They were finely-tuned 2D sidescrolling classics that literally made Nintendo what it is today. In fact, people still play them all the time in a totally unironic way! They’ve held up over the years, not unlike The Lion King.

When Super Mario 64 came out in 1996, it was the first time I’d seen Mario in 3D form. Now he wasn’t limited to from going from left to right. Now he could go pretty much anywhere. He still went to all the places you were used to – the castles, underwater, way up in the sky – but he did it all with a newfound sense of freedom. The technology felt like a serious upgrade, yet remained true to the spirit of the predecessors.

From there, Nintendo adopted their Mario franchise for every iteration after (Gameboy, GameCube, Wii, WiiU, etc) and each time it upped the ante of what was possible while still remaining true to their jumping, pipe-sliding, problem-solving franchise hero. Does Lion King 2019 move the technology forward while retaining the spirit of the original? For some, the answer will be an unqualified yes. For others, like me, it’s going to be a conflicted no. It’s the same story, same shots, same songs – but I never once felt anything the entire time (other than a couple laughs at Timon and Pumbaa) – and I tear up at animated movies all the time!

But I recognize that I may be in the minority. And that Film Twitter, which had quite the time pulling apart the cultural meaning of this film at this junction in history, is still a relatively small part of the filmgoing population. Many, many people will go for nostalgia alone. Many will go because the technology looks totally bitchin’. And a great many will go simply because it’s a safe, oddly bloodless, entertaining movie for 2 hours in an air-conditioned theater in the dead middle of a hot summer. And that is all totally okay!

I just hope they can remember what they did with The Incredibles – or even look to something like Sony’s daring Into the Spiderverse – and realize they can take some risks with their storytelling. Disney is currently in the enviable position of accounting for nearly 60% of all movie ticket sales. They’re not just the king. They’re the king, queen, and chessboard. Calling them a monopoly sounds underwhelming. They’ve nearly canvassed every good weekend in the release calendar. And they’ve primed their audience for the next and the next and the next.

My only hope is that between the gross amount of success they’re accumulating and the introduction of their Disney+ streaming service, Disney will finally take the foot off the gas a little and add a few slices of invention to their safe-bet sandwich. No studio in the country is better suited to absorb the failure of a big risk, just the same as no studio in the country is better suited to offering the opportunity for a big risk.

In fact, Disney already has several very successful risks in its portfolio. It’s easy to forget, but before Marvel became the MCU, it didn’t have the rights to X-Men, Fantastic Four, or Spiderman until just recently. They were so broke they had to sell the film rights to several studios – Fox, Universal, and Sony – to stay afloat. And even then, the first Iron Man was a pretty big risk. Robert Downey, Jr. was just making a comeback. It wasn’t clear who knew Iron Man beyond comic book fans. When Iron Man made a ton of money at the box office, it still wasn’t a given that Captain America would be embraced by the public. And even when THAT movie did well, Thor was still seen as a massive risk – and, I mean, when you see what they did with Chris Hemsworth’s eyebrows in that first movie, can you blame them?

Guardians of the Galaxy? No one knew who these guys were until the first movie hit theaters with a fantastic cast and script from the brain of James Gunn and made $773 million worldwide. So what looks like unventured territory to Marvel is really pretty familiar to them. The Eternals, Shang-Chi, and a female Thor may sound like big risks. But they all are until they’re not. Pixar made its name on a series of original films, each a risk in their own way, until their first sequel with Toy Story 2. After a glut of sequels, it looks like they’re finally going back to taking risks, with two original films coming out within a year of each other (2020’s Onward and Soul)

So to say that Disney does not take risks would be unfair. But here’s hoping they stand up, take a look around in their own house at Pixar and Marvel and Lucasfilm and realize they don’t have to remake their most popular movies down to the bone. Because what makes the movie linger for many years after is not the skeleton or the skin: it’s the heart.

The opening shots of Mike Mills’ (Beginners) 2016 film, 20th Century Women, show us the Californian ocean. The water is moving slowly, yet looks fierce and wild. It is worth admiring but highly unpredictable to be a part of. In essence, it is the inner visual of what every person growing up and finding their place in the world looks like. It is what raising a child on your own looks like. It’s what being told your life is never going to be the way you imagine it looks like.

It is as startling and perfect an image Mills could begin with. A few seconds of nature’s power reminding us how little control we all have.

The story, on the surface, sounds simple and perhaps inconsequential: a single mother raises her teenage son in a house of interesting characters in 1979 Santa Barbara. Afraid that she’s not giving her son the kind of upbringing he needs, she asks two women – one a twentysomething roommate, and the other her son’s high school best friend – to help her. Essentially, she wants them to fill the role of the father he doesn’t have around. When she first asks them, they’re absolutely befuddled. How could they do such a thing and what does that even look like? But the ways they navigate this proposition and how it impacts Dorothea’s (Annette Bening) son is a big part of its beauty.

As the movie went along, I found myself sucked into its laidback vibe, but also just randomly writing down dialogue that stuck out to me (fun fact: it was a lot). At least once a week, I think about when Abbie (Greta Gerwig) describes to Dorothea about all the shenanigans she got her son into at a party the night before. When Abbie expresses surprise that isn’t mad about all of it, Dorothea’s lays down a whopper of a line:

“You get to see him out in the world, as a person. I never will.”

I think about this all the time. How our parents are never not our parents. From the time we’re born, they feel a sense of responsibility and they’ll never be able to have that mental, emotional freedom of seeing us as regular people in the world. It’s a beautiful, somewhat heartbreaking thought that’s stuck in my ribs ever since.

And the great lines, they keep on coming. Like when Dorothea says, “Men always feel like they have to fix things for women or they’re not doing anything – but some things can’t be fixed. Just be there.” Or when Abbie says, “Whatever you think your life is going to be like…just know it’s not going to be anything like that.”

In the last shots of the film, Dorothea is on a plane, flying over the same ocean Mills introduces us to in the beginning. The sea is just as chaotic, just as much a force of nature to work with. But there’s a freedom she feels in, at least for now, being able to see it for what it is and admire the view.

20th Century Women is now on Netflix.