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.

If you watch enough movies, you’ll find the rhymes.

Music is often talked about as being cinematic. The images the lyrics conjure. The feeling a swell of harmony gives you. The way you can, even as the song is playing, play out an entire 4-minute short film in your head, either wholly original, a mixture of old memories, or a little bit of both.

But what about movies as being musical? Good film, like good music, will match its choices to the message. Awful bickering might have sharp, harsh cuts between two whisper-to-full-yell characters, or it might have long, lonely takes in autumn light, each character looking for truth yet to spill out. There’s a reason why some film critics will, when a film is absolutely humming, say it simply sings. It’s harmony. It’s beautiful music to the mind’s ears.

We can see the music within a film, but what about from film to film? These rhymes come in their similarities, but most especially in their thematic overlap. Their characters – though movie-worlds apart – are struggling with the same questions and seeking the same answers.

In December of 2017, an aging, exhausted franchise was greatly revitalized by abandoning the myths of old. It took everything that had become stale – most especially the monomyth and themes of destiny – and chucked it like bad fashion even nostalgia couldn’t save.

This past December, an aging, exhausted franchise was greatly revitalized by abandoning the myths of old. It took everything that had become stale – most especially the themes of destiny and responsibility – and chucked it like bad fashion even a comics artist wouldn’t want to ink.

In 2017, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi took some bold steps, hacking with a lightmachete through the cobwebs of a claustrophobic Star Wars galaxy. Suddenly, what once felt distant felt instantly relatable. I could empathize with the characters again. I could see myself in them. They had earned my investment. Even more: they asked difficult questions of the audience and left them to ponder the answers.

In 2018, Rodney Rothman, Bob Persichetti, and Peter Ramsey’s Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse threw out the old Sony playbook and graffitied all over what had come before. It shot its shot and took some bold swings with Miles Morales at the front, and a parallel universe that multiplied the different Spidermans in one fell swoop. No longer did I feel a distance from Peter Parker. I actually kinda empathized with the dude. And I had five other Spiderman – each with their own distinct look and personality – to become invested in.

Both films masterfully operate as installments in an ongoing story and stories that stand alone. The Last Jedi wrestles with over 40 years of Star Wars history (the Expanded Universe, the games, the books, the comics) just as Into the Spiderverse tangles itself with over 50 years of Spiderman history (the comics, movies, video games, and graphic novels). Both are able to recontextualize what came before so that the future finally feels alive and fresh and inviting.

LOST IN THE WOODS

For the entirety of The Force Awakens and a good chunk of The Last Jedi, Rey is unsure of what exactly she’s supposed to be. She’s clearly good at some things, otherworldly at others. But she’s not sure if she’s ready. She’s not sure if she’s a part of a line of destiny. And she is certainly not sure just how to find out any of this. It doesn’t help that Old Man Luke is resistant to train her, or even that Kylo Ren revealed her parents were nobodies.

We find out early on in Spiderverse just how resistant Miles is to the idea of his new school. He waits until the last possible minute to pack, and he reminds his own father he’s only at this special boarding school because he won a lottery. He finds more comfort in his conversations with his Uncle Aaron, deep inside the darkness of the subway tunnels, making art that few people will stumble upon. He’s in that awkward middle school stage where puberty and the sudden ability to wonder about your place in things collide in confusing ways.

SHOW ME THE WAY

 “I need someone to show me my place in all of this.”

Both Rey and Miles have perfect opposing forces in their older mentors. Rey and Miles have all the energy and drive (even if it’s fueled by uncertainty and curiosity) but undeveloped skill. Old Man Luke and Peter B. Parker have zero energy and drive – so eager they are to return to their status quo and be left alone – but all the skill and wisdom. Both mentors do everything they can to avoid helping. They try to walk away, to slam another door in their face. But they can’t escape the persistence. They eventually must come into the fold and pass on the baton to the next generation, not only for their own (and a world’s) survival, but to continue the legacy they had begun.

A LEAP OF FAITH

Johnson often writes his movies like novels, dense and full of setups, payoffs, and themes. And the process of animation, with its fits and starts and thousands of storyboards, allows for the writers to embed as many layers as possible. Both films have lines that are planted early on and come back in deep, cathartic moments later in the film. They are not only thematic rhymes between films. They are thematic rhymes within their own story.

If you’ve seen any of the movie’s marketing, you’ve probably seen the shot of a hooded Spiderman in his Air Jordans, pushing off the glass of a skyscraper. His push, the glass behind his touch shattering, appears as violent as his fall feels quiet, even still. He’s falling in a vacuum, between the roof and the streets below, where his moment of truth is about to be revealed. Either he makes it, swinging his way out. Or he becomes Spidersplat.

It’s a beautiful image on its own, but even more so knowing it’s the one moment where Miles finally gives himself a chance. We even get to see how he chose one of the tallest buildings he could find. His web threads are shooting upwards as he’s dropping out of the sky. It’s a beautiful image of someone reaching at the same time they’re falling. It’s what taking a chance on yourself looks and feels like all at once.

This is when Miles unshackles himself of all expectations and trusts his own ability to at least try. It’s not exactly confidence. It’s bravery.  It’s doing something because doing nothing is only going to make you crazy.

After Kylo tells Rey her parents are nobodies, simultaneously deflating an online theory and the audiences’ expectations, she has to grapple with her place. She still doesn’t feel ready. But she’s forced into action. She has to do something to save her own life and the life of others.

 “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” – Kylo Ren

Miles, Rey, Peter B. Parker and Old Man Luke are all struggling with the past. Old Man Luke is stuck on his failure to teach Kylo Ren the ways of the Jedi, which led to Kylo joining the Dark Side and Luke going into hiding. Peter B. Parker laments the way he treated Mary Jane and their marriage, resulting in a divorce he’s not quite recovered from. Kylo’s line is meant for Rey, but it could be said to any each of the aforementioned characters. In fact, it needs to be said. It’s recognizing the freedom that comes from letting go of what came before and pursuing the opportunity of the future.

Miles – and his Spiderpals – struggle with the weight of expectations and with failure. Miles doesn’t truly grapple with how limited his skillset is until there’s a fatal, painful consequence he can’t quite move past. It’s paralyzing. When Peter B. Parker demands him to show his powers on command, he can’t do it. It’s that embarrassing, demoralizing moment of trying to prove to people you’re really okay when you know you’re not.

“When will I know I’m ready?” Miles asks.

“You won’t,” Parker says. “It’s a leap of faith. That’s all it is, Miles. A leap of faith.”

THE WAY FORWARD

There’s no way to know what JJ Abrams has in store for Rey and Kylo Ren in December’s The Rise of the Skywalker. I don’t have high hopes it will continue the thematic tissue laid down by Rian Johnson. Just like I don’t have high hopes that Sony will stick with Rotham and Ramsey to tell further stories for Miles. But, in a big way, that’s appropriate to what’s been stated before. The leap of faith involves jumping into the unknown. And we’ll always have – and remember – the platforms that were built for them to jump off of. The Last Jedi and Into the Spiderverse are classics for this generation and the next. They’ll show us how we can move forward in the face of uncertainty. How we can reclaim our story. How we can be like the heroes we’ve always admired.

The Last Jedi and Into the Spiderverse are both currently streaming on Netflix. 

The last three movies I’ve seen are quite different from each other. One is an epic 3-hour capper to an even more epic 22-film saga with a near $400-million budget. One is a Netflix joint put together by some of our finest comedic actresses. The third is a $40 million mid-major romantic comedy Hollywood rarely makes anymore.

And I deeply enjoyed them all.

But a funny thing happened in talking about all three of these movies with my friends: I immediately felt like I needed to express my awareness of their possible shortcomings. I robbed myself of some of the joy in the event my recommendation would boomerang back to me in the appearance of a giant, blaring “How did you not see this?” question.

It took me a while to realize just how much I was doing this until I ran into this Twitter thread from Kate Leth this morning: 

With Avengers: Endgame, I greatly enjoyed it. Did some of the jokes fall flat for me? Sure. Did I find the time-traveling confusing, even as they were trying to preemptively convince the audience every other time-traveling movie was full of shit? Absolutely. Did I find myself exhausted at the idea of a massive 40-minute CGI-filled battle with big bad? You bet I did. And did I feel like they may have tripped at the finish line a bit with Captain America’s final moment by making the audience burn too many time travel logic brain calories when they should have been letting their own heart do all the work? Most definitely.

But I also loved so much about this movie. The ballsiness in chopping of Thanos’ head so soon in the movie (don’t worry; he still is in the rest of the flick). The glimpse into an MCU/Leftovers crossover. Smart Hulk with his hipster glasses and sweater. The truly clever, truly inspired time travel mission that allowed the characters to peek into their old movies and fight their older selves. The admirable way the screenwriters were able to structure this gargantuan movie and still find the time and intention to let Tony Stark have a conversation with his father that beautifully laid out the one true and necessary choice Stark would have to make himself.

So yes, I very much enjoyed Endgame.

I wondered before seeing Wine Country if it would be Amy Poehler’s response to Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups movies. Where they gather a group of comedian friends together at a nice location and make a barely-there movie fully of silly humor, quality be damned. Sure enough, Maya Rudolph at one point called Amy from the set of Grown Ups and basically said, “Girl, why can’t we make one of these hangout movies ourselves?”.

Did I find Poehler partaking in some of those typical first-time director moments of crazy shots that don’t flow with the rest of the cinematic language? Sure. Did some of the jokes fall flat for me? Totally. Did I squint for a good chunk of the last third of the movie at the screen, wondering if they were actually acting against greenscreen while my brain kept telling me they were shooting on location? Definitely.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.

There is so much to celebrate. Everything about the Brene Brown cameo: the way they equated her as a Big Deal comparable to any other major film star; the specific questions they all asked related to her work; the way they all took the hint and quickly backed off when Brown mentioned ‘boundaries’. The way the few male characters are barely peripheral characters with no real impact on the plot (which we’ve seen done with women in so many male-driven comedies). The emotional punches the characters land throughout, and how they legit are grappling with real questions and struggles anyone can relate to. Paula Pell, who needs to be in a lot more stuff. And even if some jokes don’t quite hit, there’s an awful lot that do; it’s a very smart, hilarious group of women that make up the center of this film.

The first ten minutes of Long Shot play out aggressively, with a reality-breaking pratfall that just did NOT work for me. Beyond that, some jokes fell flat. Some story decisions felt kinda weird. I wasn’t sure I really needed to see molly used in ANOTHER movie (although the way it ends with Theron’s phone call is fantastic comedic acting on her part).

But guess what? I really, really liked this movie. It felt like a slightly-less elegant but nearly as charming American President for 2019. So much of it just totally worked for me: the chemistry between Theron and Seth Rogen. The soundtrack. Some truly inspired lines that I will remember for quite some time. A rather astonishing and hilarious turn by a barely-recognizable Andy Serkis. Bob Odenkirk giving us an American President torn straight from a Mr. Show sketch. O’Shea Jackson Jr’s revealing monologue reprimanding Rogen for being so damn assuming and judgmental.

Some of the knee-jerk defensiveness feels like having opening too many windows. Like our thoughts and feelings about things are an office high above the noise of the city, papers stacked upon an ever-expanding table. Each window that opens comes with the possibility of refreshing air – that feeling we get when we’re high on view-shifting conversation – but also with the possibility of a strong gust of wind that’s gonna blow all those papers into a confetti party. Sometimes we want the confetti, sometimes we want to keep things a little more under control. Sometimes we just wanna keep the windows closed and admire the view.

I suspect, once I log off of Twitter a little bit more and the dust dies down, these three movies are going to be talked about for a while. Not because of Endgame’s crazy box office haul. Not because Netflix won’t release viewing numbers on Wine Country. And not because Long Shot predicts anything of our 2020 election.

It will be because all three movies recognize the relationships at the heart of them and give them a great deal of attention.

Recently, through an episode of the (excellent) Scriptnotes podcast with screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin, I stumbled into an article about script doctor/producer Lindsay Dorin. To make a long story short, Dorin wondered for years why formula storytelling was formula storytelling, why certain movies connected with and satisfied audiences and others didn’t. After reading a book, Flourish, she stumbled into some clear-headed understandings about just how important relationships are in movies.

For example, Doran found that men and women processed the end goal differently. That the male view focused more on the specific goal/accomplishment (Endgame) whereas female relationship movies end with the characters realizing the relationships are more important than any accomplishment (Wine Country). Long Shot represents something that goes straight down the middle: the characters accomplish something together after recognizing the importance of and making sacrifices for their relationship.

What Doran also found is:

“…the accomplishment the audience values most is not when the heroine saves the day or the hero defeats his opponent.” Instead, she said, “the accomplishment the audience values most is resilience.”

Endgame is all about our heroes dealing with failure that left half the world missing and finding a way to get back up to bat. Wine Country doesn’t even pretend these women have it all figured out; just that they’re gonna try with a new focus. And Long Shot nearly wrecks the story (and movie) with quite a long shot of a story beat towards the end, which leads to our main, broken relationship bouncing back to life.

I can forgive a lot of time-travel bullshittery with Endgame because it truly understands how much it needs to land those emotional beats. And even if the dismount is not entirely a Perfect 10, it’s just close enough that we won’t even really see the feet moving or the slight buckle of the knees.

I can forgive nearly all of what doesn’t work with Wine Country because I so love all of these women and their relationships with each other. It’s pretty obvious the pizza place they all used to work at in the movie is a stand-in for the comedy world the actresses and writers all came up in. It’s clear these women have been close friends for a long time, and it’s beautiful how they recognize just how much they are hurting each other and themselves with what they’re not willing to confront. When they’re all in the hospital, making sure Maya Rudolph’s character makes a really important phone call she’s been avoiding the whole movie? That made the movie for me. I wanted to see them resolve – or at least confront – their personal and group issues. I wanted them to use their Brene Brown research and be vulnerable – to go together into the darker corners of life where the outcome isn’t known. And they did. And it was awesome.

Your mileage may vary with the relationship Theron and Rogen strike up in Long Shot, but I was in it all the way. I loved the way they challenged each other. The way they genuinely wanted to push each other to a better self they truly believed existed. I loved the way they honored the insecurities that such a situation would create and the messy way they navigate it. And by the end, when Theron is in Rogen’s apartment, tear-stricken and wanting them to repair what had been broken, I BELIEVED IT. I rooted for them. And the movie followed that up with the really smart thing of allowing us to see them share a very cool accomplishment together.

It’s more than okay to say you thoroughly enjoy a movie and not feel like defending it or pulling it apart. Just like it’s more than okay to say you love your family or your friends even if they drive you crazy in a bunch of different ways that you’d rather not get into. Living in an outrage culture of “I enjoy this, BUT” statements is exhausting and diminishes the joy and satisfaction we could feel. We can enjoy things despite their shortcomings. We can even enjoy these things because of their shortcomings. The love is still there, whether we feel like talking about it or not.

My freshman year of college brought me a lot of discoveries: how much weight I could gain from eating cafeteria food, how to nearly fail an English class, the wonder of Jim James’ voice. I went back and forth on how much I loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ excessive Stadium Arcadium double-album, and which of the two sides I loved more (this is still a debate I have not settled). I cackled every time I played ‘Knocked Up’, the opening song off Kings of Leon’s Because of the Times album in the family van, waiting for my very Catholic mother to flinch at the ‘I don’t know care what no one says, but she’s gonna have my baby…” (spoiler alert: she never noticed).

But one of my favorite and most lasting discoveries that freshmen year is stumbling into Before Sunset, the second film in Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. This was a solid six or seven years before I moved to Austin, unknowingly the hometown of Linklater himself. I had heard, based on a few reviews I had glossed over, that such a film was supposed to be short, compact, and absolutely worth a look. The premise – two friends/lovers who meet again after ten years – didn’t completely grab me. It didn’t need to. The plot, however thin, just creates the space for the story to fill up and nearly flood the emotional chambers. There was so, so much going on – each longing look, each pained joke – that I immediately seemed out the original Before Sunrise that started it all.

And like I went back and forth between the Mars and Jupiter sides on Stadium Arcadium, I went back and forth on whether I loved Before Sunrise or Before Sunset more. They both had their own way of holding me. Before Sunrise reminded me of the wide-eyed crushes I had in high school and college, when a short encounter – a dinner date, a Sadie Hawkins dance – would send my mind reeling at all the possibilities. And there was no way to know it, but Before Sunset would forecast the feelings I would grapple with in my early 30s, when the longer you live means the more you emotionally accumulate.

Jesse and Celine talked the way I imagined my conversations with my soul mate would go. Growing up the sole deaf person in a family, I frequently wished I could fully understand the conversations around me. I remember one particular night when my brother and sister and I were sent upstairs in the playroom so my parents could have an argument in relative private. I could hear their yelling and the cadence of their cases. But I could not make out enough of the actual words. I asked my sister, nearly four years younger, just what they were saying. They were not very nice things, she would tell me. But I didn’t care about the plus-minus value. I wanted to know the precise words. I wanted to know how the hearing world really talked to each other when they were very upset.

Movies (and the subtitles with them) gave me access to that conversation. Finally, I could understand what people were saying! Finally, I could see the actual words used in a real ugly, drawn-out argument. Or the awkward pauses when there’s nothing good to say. Or the cutting, sarcastic line that releases the tension and sends everyone into fits of laughter. I could finally be a part of this carefully-edited world these hearing people lived in, even if they were characters in filming locations, moving to director commands and separated by a big glass screen.

When I found out Before Midnight would be coming out in the summer of 2013, the first of the trilogy that I could actually see in theaters, I was hoping and praying it wouldn’t gloss over anything. I wanted to see all the warts, as sun-dappled by the Grecian sun as they may be. I wanted to be shown, “This is what your life could look like in another ten years,” and find a place of acceptance, if not hope. I wanted to know that two people I greatly loved and admired – however fictional – could get into an absolutely brutal fight and still find the reasons to remain together.

And boy, did I get it.

That final hotel fight in Before Midnight is still one of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen onscreen. You can see them digging in, alternating between saying the most hurtful thing they can think of, before backing off and realizing, “Oh shit, are we really going this far?”. It’s a delicate, masterfully written and acted moment. And I still doubted what would happen. I, for far more moments than I was comfortable with, wondered if they wouldn’t make it. The dream would be over. Reality would finally hit me upside the chin.

But Jesse finds Celine. And he makes a joke that brings them back to the beginning when they first met. And Celine holds out as long as possible, unconvinced that they can pull this off AGAIN.

As a time-traveler, he takes her back to that summer of ’94, the man who fell in love with her for the first time. And that’s what we all are in our stories: time travelers who live in the present moment while pulling out each memory we’ve built together, sometimes to lovingly pull us tighter together and sometimes to drive us a little further apart.

 

I thought about Jesse and Celine a lot as I watched Rob and Sharon move their way through Catastrophe’s fourth and final season. There’s a lot of similarities between the two sets of writer/actors, in that both would meet up and hash out ideas and write together before production (Linklater’s more direct writing/directing invovlement with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy the main difference). Both sets of actors drew from their own lives. Both seemed to be figuring out their own lives offscreen just as their characters were their lives onscreen. You can see what drew them together, in Before Sunrise and in the first season of Catastrophe. You can see where the cracks formed that would have to be sealed up between the two. And you can see just how they found their home stretch narratively, where they had to compromise, make some concessions, and be a little bit more forgetful about the past and a little more optimistic about the future.

Similar to Before Midnight, Rob and Sharon, in the last episode of the fourth season, have an absolutely brutal fight. Rob, most likely indirectly struck by the grieving of his mother’s death and a job offer to stay in America, absolutely tears into Sharon, saying the meanest things possible. Sharon is completely flabbergasted. She knows they’ve had a rough go of things, but damn. Even my fiancé said, “What the hell, Rob?”. Catastrophe has always done a great job of allowing their characters to have their human, unlikable moments. And they sure let Rob do so, with Sharon barely fighting back.

It’s so vicious and the situation so delicate, that we don’t know how they’re going to be okay again, even as the episodes – and series – ticks down to its final minutes. Except we remember all the other vicious fights we’ve seen (and this is where I realized just HOW MUCH they packed into four short seasons) from these two and how they’ve found a way to come back to each other.

I absolutely love the way this series ends, because it works on both a figurative and literal level. They pull over to a beach, finally beginning a vacation they’re almost not sure they can enjoy. Rob apologizes as Sharon assures him he really does make her happy. They both recognize a third child that’s on the way. And then Sharon takes off, discarding clothes with every few steps, beginning a swim she’s not sure Rob will share with her. Rob just watches all this until he spots a sign warning of strong currents and the generally very unsafe swimming conditions. Instead of screaming at her to come back, he discards his clothes and runs right in himself.

As he catches up to her she says, “Thought you didn’t want to swim.” And then Rob gives the real kicker of a response that wraps up the series so beautifully:

“I just didn’t like seeing you there drifting on your own.” 

They kiss. They enjoy each other’s presence as they barely keep their heads above water. The camera pans back to their clothes upon the rock. They’re physically and emotionally naked with each other. They’re all in. The camera pulls back wider and wider and we just see them for what they are, just like I saw with Jesse and Celine before: two people committed to swimming in this giant ocean of craziness because they enjoy each other and don’t want to watch each other drifting on their own.