When Spike Jonze’ Where the Wild Things Are came out in 2009, I often heard, “it’s not at all what I expected”. When I asked these people what indeed they did expect, they shrugged. They didn’t know. Just not that. Which is an odd thing to apply to an adaptation of a book that’s so short, less than 350 words comprising 10 sentences over 37 illustrated pages. Perhaps it speaks to how deeply engrained it sits in many of our childhoods. Perhaps we just really didn’t know what we wanted. 

I’m a big fan of understanding what a film is really going for. It’s okay to dislike something. Sometimes we prefer more explosions or better dialogue or more passionate acting. But there’s a difference between disliking something and critiquing it. Disliking something is a matter of pure personal preference. Critiquing it, when done respectfully, is looking at the goal of the filmmaking and seeing just how closely they came to succeeding.

So I read a few interviews from Jonze beforehand. I started to slowly, without realizing exactly what his movie would be like, understand what he was going for. He wanted to get inside the head of Max. He wanted the Wild Things to have that child logic of emotions, when they are big and scary and we’re unsure what to do with them. Knowing all this, I went to see it in a theater. And by the end, I was an emotional, near-tears mess. It felt like the biggest, warmest hug a movie theater could make, an embracing of the inner kid inside me. It remains to this day one of the most insightful and beautifully-conceived dramatizations of child psychology. In other words: if you want to understand children and their gorgeously violent inner lives better, watch this movie. 

Mister Rogers is perhaps just as giant a cultural artifact in our lives as Where the Wild Things Are, if not more so. They’ve both been around so long. They’ve touched so many people. So when I asked people if they’d seen ‘that Mister Rogers’ movie, I always got one of two responses: “not yet, but I want to” and “it was not what I expected at all; but it was really good”. 

When we think ‘that Mister Rogers’ movie, we’re likely imagining a biopic. A pretty standard linear story of the life of Fred Rogers and his inseparable creation. But if there’s anything I love more than a good movie, it’s a movie that takes a wild, risky swing. Fortunately and delightfully, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is both. 

The first hint that it would be something different and unexpected came when the 2019 Oscar nominations came out and Tom Hanks’ Mister Rogers was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and not in the bigger Best Actor category. Many people, who clearly had not seen the movie, were shocked. How dare they! How dare they game the odds for even a saint like Tom! But those who had seen it assured the rest of us it was no mistake. This was not the movie they thought it was. It was something far richer. And indeed it is. 

The genius of A Beautiful Day’s framing device is the way it introduces our real main character, journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys). Mister Rogers begins his show by introducing him as one of his friends that we’ll learn about, and if it’s not clear to you why this happens, it will slowly hit you as the movie rolls on: adults are really just bodies controlled by the inner child. We may have thought all along that Mister Rogers was a kid’s television program. But it’s clear his lessons are just as applicable to adults. And it’s clear he has just as much an interest in any one person, regardless of their age. Without outright saying it, director Marielle Heller’s genius film (with a risk-taking script from Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster), gently acknowledges just how much we still need a Mister Rogers in our lives to remind us that we’re human, we’re doing our best, and we are still going to feel these gorgeously violent emotions and learn how to deal with them. 

The older I get, the more I realize the things that hit me the hardest are rarely about the actual circumstances at hand. It’s a raw nerve that’s been touched, a deep elemental nerve that can also be considered a strong feeling I had as a child. Maybe it’s anger that came from feeling left out or alone. Maybe it’s embarrassment at not knowing what’s going on and being put on the spot. Maybe it’s feeling heard, but not understood. It could be a lot of things. But by and large all these things that bring out the biggest emotions in us come from deeply-embedded experiences we had as a child. Sometimes we fool ourselves into progress.  We feel wiser. We read a lot of books, do a lot of journaling. We think, I am now an adult, dammit! And then something completely unexpected hits us in just the right, vulnerable raw-nerve part, and the facade shatters to the floor. We’re still just a kid in a grown body.

One of the best things A Beautiful Day does is the one I hoped it would do the most: demystify and humanize Mister Rogers. You would think people want him to be idolized, a living day saint. Because that’s what we need. Someone – like Jesus or Baby Yoda – far more perfect than we could ever hope to be. Something to inspire us. But when Vogel asks Rogers’ wife what it’s like to live with a modern-day saint, she’s quick to politely express how much her husband doesn’t like that framing. Being considered a saint, she says, is not only untrue but it makes someone feel unattainable. Being like Mister Rogers is perfectly attainable. He still has a temper. He just has developed, over a long lifetime, ways to deal with it. 

By the end, after we’ve seen a beautiful arc with Vogel’s character, a deeply hurt inner child finally getting what he needs so forgiveness can pave the way, we’re left back with Mister Rogers. He tapes his show, wraps up his final take, and checks it on the monitor. He likes what he sees. Everyone breaks for the day and goes home. But he, the imperfect inspiration, remains behind. He walks across a darkening set and sits at a piano. He begins playing melodically before pounding out all the low keys at the same time, an exercise he previously told Vogel he does as a way to deal with the bigger, more difficult emotions. It’s a beautiful reminder that even after everything we have seen, including great joy and gratitude from Mister Rogers himself at Vogel’s journey and the new friend he’s made in him, he still is human. He still is grappling with the waves of emotions we all have inside of us. And he still, once again, is going to do his best to deal with it in a way that doesn’t hurt himself or others. He’s attainable. He’s the inspiration we need the most. 

Racing is an unforgiving sport. When all the rules and regulations are in place to make it as competitive an endeavor as possible, every mistake is magnified. Overheated brakes? You’ll lose control. An underpowered engine? You’ll be gasping to keep up. Making this even more difficult is the limited amount of space in a vehicle meant to be as sleek and aerodynamic as possible without actually lifting off into the skies. 

It’s creating a space shuttle meant to remain on Earth. 

At the start of the Ford v Ferrari, a team of Ford marketers are baffled at how to lift their flagging sales. When Lee Ioacca (Jon Bernthal) suggests sexing up their dusty brand by throwing Ford into the Le Mans 24, the most punishing and unforgiving race on the planet, the goal is set: to compete with the otherworldly Italians at Ferrari. The man they task to lead the way, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), knows how impossible their mission is. Luckily, he knows just the driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale), to help him bridge the gap. 

That’s the historical layout of the story. But what makes Ford v Ferrari work so well is how hard the filmmakers work to make their own cinematic Ford GTO, swapping out and exchanging parts for the sleekest earthbound spaceship possible. Ford v Ferrari existed as a script for nearly 10 years, with director James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Walk the Line, Logan) checking in from time to time. It needed one last push, one last exchanging of and honing of pieces to get it ready for the green light. So Mangold ditched the ensemble feel of the film and focused on the relationship between Shelby and Miles. They sacrificed some historical accuracy for the betterment of the emotional truth of the story: that true friendship is the only race we can always win. It makes this vessel of filmmaking lighter, tighter, and powerfully grounded. 

Mangold completely understands that the laws of gravity work just as well in storytelling: that every force will be met by an equal, opposing force. So the friendship doesn’t start smoothly, something the film circles back to in increasingly thoughtful ways. Shelby and Miles are two very different people who really need each other. Miles is the only driver Shelby can win with; Shelby’s the only one who will fight for Miles when corporate Ford fights his lack of PR skills. Before they finally get on the same page, they have a pretty hilarious public fight, with groceries flying and awkward fists landing. It’s Batman fighting Jason Bourne, a necessary scuffle to make sure they both know they’re gonna stick with each other to the end. 

There are other exotic parts that make up this finely tuned vehicle including a wife (Caitriona Balfe) as demanding of partnership and honesty as she is a true companion, a magnificently villainous Tracey Letts as Henry Ford II (aka The Deuce), and enough throttling, ferocious car camerawork to make the Fast and Furious series a little jealous. In the end, it all comes back to Miles and Shelby, to Batman and Bourne. Their friendship is forged in the fires of passion, an earthbound rocket chasing the amber sunset long after the checkered flag. 

While watching Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire last week, I couldn’t help but think of another lady: 2017’s Lady Bird. There, writer/director Greta Gerwig painted an indelible portrait of a high-school senior often at odds with her hometown and what she perceived to be as a limited, boxed-in future. As part of a deep lunge of an attempt to get accepted to an East Coast school she definitely can’t afford, she shows the head nun at her private school her admissions essay. 

“It is clear that you love Sacramento,” the nun says. (She’s spent most of the movie complaining about it) 

“I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird says. 

And then the nun offers a line I still, three years later, think about at least once a week: “Don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love and attention?”

For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to get back into drawing and improving my skills as a writer who draws. I recognized everything Marianne was doing – the contouring, the mixture of colors, the way she held her instruments. But what stood out to me the most is the most simple and important of all: attention. The way she leans and sneaks in looks at her subject in Héloïse, running behind a rock to sketch out her hands or struggling to remember the shape of her ears. 

It is astonishing how much our brain can misremember. If I told you “draw a car” you’d likely draw something with two wheels, a door, some kind of window. It wouldn’t really look like a car, though. I’d look like what you think a car looks like. The lack of attention breaks the reality. Now say you were – and this is exactly something I did, to astonishing results – to look at a picture of a car, or even better, look at a car from side profile in a parking lot. Really look at it and notice where the curves go. Where the door creases begin and end. Just how much space is between the tire and the frame of the car. They seem like minor details, but each of these minor details you can notice and approximate will have a substantial impact on your next drawing. You’ll get ever closer to the real thing.

It’s no mistake that Marianne’s love for Héloïse increases the more she pays attention. She cannot separate her attention to her subject from her love for her subject. They become one and the same. And the most hurtful thing that could be said to her comes when Heloise tells her she doesn’t even see herself, or worse, Marianne in the portrait. It’s chasing reality, but not the truth. And really, how painful is it to her from someone you are crushing on that you think you know them, but you really don’t? 

At one point, as they talk about when they may or may not have fallen in love with each other, they each list off the different things they do when they’re feeling different ways. We expect this from Marianne, after all. She is the artist. It’s literally her job to pay attention, to make this secret portrait without Héloïse knowing. But what we don’t expect is Heloise to be as incisive and perceptive about Marianne. She’s been paying attention, even as she’s been an avoidant subject to paint. It’s an exhilarating turn. 

The last shot in the film is one for the ages. The camera does not move. We just see Héloïse’s face for what seems like an eternity. It’s our portrait, a gift from the filmmaker, to allow us to see just how much we’ve been paying attention to Heloise and the connection she’s found herself in. And if we continue to pay attention, we’ll see it’s not just sadness that comes over her; it’s everything. Every laugh, every tear, every dash towards the sea. All the highs and lows and waves in-between. All we want in life is to be painted a portrait by someone who truly understands us, even if they are gazing agonizingly, appreciatively, from afar. 

One middle school summer, I had to write a few book reports. After thoroughly enjoying My Name Is Asher Lev, my mother encouraged me to read Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. My Uncle Mike, a poet and English professor, pushed for it further. I expected to be shocked with some legendary writing. Something that would fertilize my brain in the long, spaced out days of summer. What I did not expect was to be bored. Completely, utterly bored. Every line felt simple to a fault. It seemed to plod along, like a small boat bobbing in the calmest of waters, no land or fish in sight.

It wasn’t until a couple years later in my 9th grade Honors English class that I’d have to face this tedium again. As my eyes scanned the syllabus, there it was. That dreadful Hemingway fish book! Oh, joy! But what I didn’t account for is how much a difference a different perspective can make. This time, we would be led by my delightfully wacky English teacher, an older, energetic man who would often tell us on Fridays that if he wasn’t back at work on Monday, he was probably in jail for nonviolent protesting (this did happen). Slowly and surely, he fed us the meta meat of the novel. At the time of writing it, Hemingway couldn’t drown out the critical voices. Many wondered if he was past his prime, if he’d never write a book as good as his previous classics. He spent many a day drunk and beside himself, struggling to wrestle a story into shape. When you know this, it all clicks in place. Hemingway is the old man. The book is the fish. The struggle is exhausting and depressing and uncertain. All the sudden, a book I felt devoid of life was rushing with all the colors of vitality. It became – and still is – one of my favorite books ever.

I thought about this a lot after watching Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film After Hours. I don’t remember what compelled me to seek it out beyond hearing Catherine O’Hara – who my wife and I had been so lovingly enjoying in Schitt’s Creek – had a part in it. I felt compelled and thus a library hold was made.

But by the end of the 97 minute run time, we sat aback on the couch, completely baffled. What the hell had we just seen? There was no doubt of the filmmaking skill involved – the combination of Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus’ swift-moving camera and Schoonmaker’s rhythmic editing. All the actor’s brought their best game, as they always do with Scorsese. But…it didn’t quite add up to more than one dude having a really bad, never-ending night. So before we could dismiss it as something terrible, I offered that maybe the problem wasn’t the film, but rather that we weren’t quite seeing what it was going for. That there had to be some kind of meta-textual component running through it if Scorsese, already a legend with Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Raging Bull (among many others), would indulge his time and efforts in this script written by a film student.

I didn’t have my fabulous 9th grade English professor to set the table. So I looked online. And of course I’d find what I needed in a 2009 essay review from Roger Ebert. There, he gave some valuable context (some of which I’ve just mentioned). But the most poignant is the one that feels the most like a parallel to Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea. A great way to look at – if not the way to look at it, according to Ebert – is as an allegory for Scorsese’s frustrations with making The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie that wouldn’t be released until three years later.

Executives kept reassuring him that all was going well with that film, backers said they had the money, Paramount green-lighted it, agents promised it was a “go,” everything was in place, and then time after time an unexpected development would threaten everything. In “After Hours,” each new person Paul meets promises that they will take care of him, make him happy, lend him money, give him a place to stay, let him use the phone, trust him with their keys, drive him home – and every offer of mercy turns into an unanticipated danger.

 By the time a demoralized Scorses took a look at Joseph Minion’s script, the man just wanted to play. He wanted to get back in the gym and show everyone he could stay make any shot. Lead actor Griffin Dunne – so excellent throughout – is our Scorsese doppelgänger, a man who means well but just cannot, cannot find his way home.

From there, it all snapped into place. After Hours, like The Old Man and the Sea before it, belongs on that shelf of Art Electrified by the Metastory. It’s as skillful as anything Scorsese’s done, and just goes to show you how much a man exorcising his demons can do when he’s just given a chance.

At a certain point around the summer of 2010, I had a lot of people tell me I had an uncanny resemblance to Ryan Reynolds. At the time, people couldn’t quite remember his name. He was “that guy from The Proposal” or “That guy from Just Friends”. “That guy from Van Wilder” and so on. It started to build to a point that I just bought into it, recognizing the slow pattern that would emerge with every mention: the slight confusion, the smile of recognition, the discerning how just to bring it up to me, either as a question or an assertive comment. Sometimes I had to be reminded it’s not a bad thing to be compared to an actor you and many others like. It could be worse! You could remind people of a serial killer!

When I moved to Austin, Ryan’s career was in a weird spot. He had just come off the cosmic misfire of Green Lantern, followed by The Change-Up, Safe House, R.I.P.D., and voice work in Turbo and The Croods (if these movies barely sound familiar to you, well, that’s my point). In fact, my favorite work of his was probably his least-seen, as a very loopy, troubled dude in The Voices. You could say he was repaying his dues. Finding his way back into a steady career, grinding away in Mississippi Grind and other smaller fare. Even with all that, the easy joke always came back to Green Lantern. It took me a while, but I later realized all those second glances I got in Austin weren’t just maybe because they thought I was Ryan Reynolds. They may have also been looks of pity, as if they saw me and said “Wow. Look how far the guy has fallen.”

These days, Ryan’s in a much better place. He’s got a legit franchise with Deadpool (even if Disney threatens to neuter it), as well as this year’s 6 Underground and Free Guy. He’s doing pretty well for himself. So as I chose to cut off my HBO Now subscription and looked for some movies to check out before it expired, I saw Green Lantern just sitting there, begging to finally be watched. It felt like destiny. Like a rite of passage. A necessary look in my personal and film-loving mirror.

The biggest surprise is that the film is not nearly as bad as its reputation. I’d certainly rewatch this over many other DCEU offerings such as Batman v Superman or Justice League or Suicide Squad. But while it’s clearly an origin story, it’s not the one you think. The one all of us fortunate viewers thought we saw is the origin of Hal Jordan. What we really should have seen is the origin story of Hollywood’s coolest couple and the Kiwi filmmaker that would rise above it all.

WE FOUND LOVE IN A HOPELESS PLACE

In the midst of all the exposition Green Lantern throws at you, there’s a pretty clear concept: green light is powered by will(power), and yellow light by fear. Warner Brothers, eager for a new franchise, clearly greenlit Hal Jordan’s solo movie as its own Iron Man, an origin story about a cocky-but-soon-to-be-humbled character that would lead us into the Justice League, DC’s version of the Avengers. But while it was a green light that got it all started, it’s an abundance of yellow light shining on every decision after. Every decision is made out of fear.

There’s hiring a director who runs an efficient, studio-friendly set, but has never dealt with CGI of this magnitude. There’s wearing a greenscreen suit throughout filming so you can make changes later if people don’t like the superhero suit you came up with. There’s hiring the guy who wrestled the longest Harry Potter installment into a film to rewrite the work of 3 highly-talented, comic-book-knowledgeable writers. And then there’s the really fun one: throwing in a muddy CGI villain that looks like a giant shart (with horrifying eyes and a mouth) because you’re worried the sensible villain you have isn’t enough. I could go on. Movies are exceptionally hard to make. And I have no doubt everyone gave it their best shot. But sometimes these things fail because fear is guiding everything and crowding out any kind of voice.

Sometimes people who survive near-death experiences together feel incredibly close to each other. Sometimes even close enough to start dating and, I don’t know, later get married and have three adorable girls.

You can see Reynolds and Lively doing their best to bring this film to life. But they’re burdened with too much. Bad wigs. A weird mask. Bizarrely muted colors. Studio interference. A director who hated the choice for his leading character. It’s a lot. And yet! You can see that spark between Reynolds and Lively. You can tell they probably ad-libbed a few lines, and they were honestly the best ones. You can tell they probably took solace in each other’s new friendship while they watched a giant big-budget movie implode by death of a thousand bad decisions.

Let’s do some gossip math! Filming started in July of 2010. At the time, Lively was dating a Gossip Girl co-star and Reynolds was married to Black Widow herself, Scarlett Johnannson. They wouldn’t officially connect until the following year. Shortly after they finished filming, Blake Lively and Penn Badgley split up that September. It seemed pretty amicable. Her and Badge stayed friends! A couple months later in December, Ryan and Scarlett announced their divorce. Six months later, in June 2011 – Blake was rumored to be dating Leo (not exactly an ego boost for Ryan). But by October 2011, Ryan and Blake had started dating. By September 2012, they got married! Perhaps they saw the disappointing box office returns for Green Lantern and felt drawn to each other. For consolation. For friendship. For reigniting that Green Lantern spark. Sometimes the best relationships are forged in the fires of greenscreen hell.

And sometimes in that greenscreen hell, the next studio voices are forged.

KIWI SURPRISEGreen Lantern is, as far as I can tell, writer/director/actor Taika Waititi’s first American film appearance. Hopefully it was enough to finance his next few projects. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the uncomfortable work situation was an inspiration for his 2014 breakout hit, What We Do in the Shadows. After all, Hollywood is known to gently suck the life out of you. Sometimes for money; sometimes just to let the old, white whales live a little longer. Beyond that, Taika admitted in recent years that his time on the Green Lantern gave him a lot of experience in seeing how a big-budget film can be run. He expressed admiration for director Campbell’s efficiency on set. He probably also saw the perils of relying so heavily on CGI and how running out of money on a $200 million film can lead to even more baffling decisions.

I’d like to think the seeds were planted here for Waititi to make a pretty smooth transition from his New Zealand indie roots (Boy, What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople) to big-budget studio filmmaking with Marvel’s Thor: Ragnorak. It was so successful a marriage with Marvel that he’ll be returning for 2021’s Thor: Love and Thunder. He’s also been able to get to work with Reynold’s ex-wife in her Oscar-nominated turn in Jojo Rabbit, and Elisabeth Moss, Armie Hammer, and Michael Fassbender in his next film, 2020’s Next Goal Wins.

FROM YELLOW TO GREEN

The good news is that people can change. And sometimes studios do start to get the message. After a series of underwhelming DCEU movies, Warner Brothers seemed to finally be okay with letting their movies do their own non-serial work and let their freak flag fly a bit. Aquaman was its own bit of brainless, joyful fun. Wonder Woman 1984 looks to be letting Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot embrace what people loved about the first Wonder Woman movie and injecting it with even more flair and personality. Birds of Prey did right by its star and producer Margot Robbie, hiring a female writer and director, allowing for a movie with so much energy and spunk without ever being demeaning to its characters. Further, Warner is letting a new Batman fly again under the direction of Matt Reeves, hot off the last couple of highly underrated Planet of the Apes movies.

So really, everyone is doing great. Lively and Reynolds are having a blast with each other on social media while their family continues to grow and blossom. Taika’s career is hitting new heights after the success of Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnorak, opening up opportunities clearly deserving of his skill and talent. And Warner Brothers, nearly ten years after the film that nearly destroyed its hoped-for franchise, seems to finally be coming around to making movies audiences actually want to see. It took a while, but sometimes you just need a Green Lantern to light the way.