Nick Offerman is damn near inseparable from Ron Swanson.

Like Nick, Ron does not benefit from a lack of facial hair. In fact, an increase in facial hair is directly proportional to an increase in overall badassness.

The unfortunate thing about being the actor behind such unmistakable characters is that you’ll never be mistaken for anything else. Including yourself. Including the new character you’re trying to play in a completely different movie set in a completely different world. What gave you a career can just as soon drain it away.

It takes a couple minutes and a glorious salt-and-pepper beard, but there’s enough in Frank Fisher (Offerman) to differentiate him from Ron Swanson. He’s softer. He’s at ease. He’s not so anti-government. Whereas Swanson had a love affair with breakfast foods, wood, and the great outdoors, Fisher finds refuge in the intersection of music and sweet, sweet vinyl. His record shop has the appearance of someone who only cares about the music. Not the colors. Not the graphic design in labels. Not the need for profit to keep the place afloat.

In fact, director Brett Haley and his co-writer Marc Basch do an excellent job of setting up Nick in his first scene, when he argues with a young millennial about records and whether or not he’s allowed to smoke in his own store.

But something connects Frank Fisher and Ron Swanson beyond the their homes on streaming platforms: they’re loathe to change.

For 6 glorious, pun-soaked, big-hearted seasons, Swanson’s antagonists ranged from his own office-mate, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), who represented everything he hated (namely government and publicly celebrating birthdays), to Ron Dunn (Sam Elliot), who TRULY represented everything he hated (hippies, veganism, etc).

But from the very beginning, Swanson’s biggest antagonist was change. He did not want to bend to anything. He wanted everything to bend to him. Or better yet, simply pass him by. After 2 failed marriages to two different Tammy’s, it took a woman like Diane and her two darling daughters to break him out of his ways. It was a long journey, but eventually Ron got to a point where he realized he could still uphold his values and make a few tweaks to make room for others.

Heart Beats Loud lays it’s premise out quickly: that Frank, recognizing he can no longer afford his precious record store, will not renew the lease with his landlord. Additionally, he’s only got a summer left with his daughter, Sam (Kiersey Clemons), before she heads off to UCLA.

A fortuitous jam session with Sam leads to a song that catches fire on Spotify, and you can slowly see Frank start to recognize that maybe he CAN have it all: maybe he can date his landlord, who will help him keep his shop open, and maybe even the song will convince his daughter to stay in Jersey so they can develop their band and do the music thing. He can have all the things he wants and is danger of losing: a successful store, a viable partner, a band, and a creatively and emotionally fruitful relationship with his talented daughter.

But to have all those things would require others to give up what they want. To make sacrifices that may benefit Frank in the short-term. But that in the long term? Everyone loses. And Frank knows this.

Offerman’s always had an incredible expressive face – 6 seasons of Ron Swanson taught me just how many emotions he can elicit with only his eyes and eyebrows, the rest of his face dominated by a glorious mustache – but his eyes become even redder and wearier and sadder as he realizes everything is shrinking away from him.

Everyone is moving on and changing but him. His daughter has the future ahead of her across the country in Los Angeles. His landlord is dating someone else. His best friend, Dave (Ted Danson), is enjoying his foray into the world of marijuana. Everyone’s chasing their happiness. And yet his seems more unattainable than ever.

Part of the beauty of well-told stories is how they guide their story into a corner seemingly impossible to get out from, and they somehow pull the damn escape off. Haley and Basch find a way to deftly wrap up their story with the bright shine of future potential and yet remain emotionally true to their characters. It is satisfying and rich, like the kind of record Frank would appreciate: a rare and unexpected find in a low-key, but lovingly-owned store.

It’s hard to believe now, but there did exist a time on this planet when Deadpool – as a movie character – felt like a gigantic risk. No one knew if it would work. No one knew if a story could be hammered out and an adequate budget paired along with it. The public’s first filmic taste of the character, which came in X:Men Origins: Wolverine, was so poorly received that it probably set back any development for, well, 13 years. It took some persistence from Ryan Reynolds and writers Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick to get this baby into shape. And then it took a mistakenly-or-perhaps-totally-intentionally leaked proof-of-concept short film to finally kick down the doors.

The point is: this is a movie that had a lot going for it, and yet: no one knew if it would be successful.

$781 million dollars at the worldwide box office will certainly help with that question.

The best thing Deadpool did, beyond make a lot of people a ton of money (and show that superheroes could be exceedingly silly and violent and still be an awful lot of fun), is show the character had been accepted. Now, the creative team didn’t have to worry so much about financing or funding or pushing a rock up a treadmill of a craggy hill. It could focus on telling a good story, coming up with some crackling humor, and having some goddamn fun.

This enabled them to take their time. To let the original director go over creative differences. To get a great actor like Josh Brolin aboard. To add a little more cheddar to the budget and raise that freak flag even higher than before. There’s beauty in confidence that comes from acceptance. And the Deadpool 2 team took it and ran with it as far as they could, before the public ever noticed they were about to run out of breath.

When Marvel got a taste of success with their first Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America movies, they started lining up the next installations in their ongoing story. But it didn’t matter how much money these movies made or how well they seemed to be accepted; I simply could not understand the appeal of a movie or character called Ant-Man. It seemed so desperately uncool. So uncinematic. What could possibly be the fun in this endeavor?

Edgar Wright’s involvement with Ant-Man gave me some indication the character had more potential that I realized. But his departure in 2012, a particularly sad piece of business, only increased my doubts. Surely, Marvel would realize they had something so uncool on their hands they couldn’t possibly heat it back up. But they moved on, hiring Adam McKay and eventual star Paul Rudd to finish up the script. They hired director Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Down with Love, The Break-Up) to take over. And they sped ahead, making this seemingly uncool thing into something worthy.

The original Ant-Man, like the original Deadpool, is a great example of what happens when fresh air is pumped into popcorn-stained theaters. I’ll never forget being positively delighted by the final showdown with the villain, an epic train fight that took place on a child’s Thomas the Train set and eventually the inside of a suitcase. After the excess of Avengers: Age of Ultron, it cleansed the palate so well my sense of taste and appetite for movies returned. Instead of feeling numbed by status quo, I felt enlivened by all the possibilities.

But the biggest thing the success of Ant-Man (and his appearance in Captain America: Civil War) taught its filmmakers is that the audience can definitely accept Paul Rudd – a delightful actor far more known for comedies such as Anchorman – as an action star. Just because Brian Fontana had a panther cologne didn’t mean he needed it to be credible; he could believably exist alongside the Black Panther himself, T’Challa, as well as Peter Parker, Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers, and no one would wonder if he had stumbled onto the wrong film set.

Deadpool 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp came out only a month apart, but they taught us the same thing: confidence through acceptance leads to an emboldened, risk-taking attitude. Deadpool 2 amps up the humor and brutal action, but it also takes some chances with more dramatic storytelling and spends a good chunk of its runtime building up a team for Deadpool that gets entirely killed off minutes into its first mission. Ant Man and the Wasp sees Reed and his collaborators having even more fun with all the shrinking and expanding, as well as deepening relationships, characters, and the presence of the Quantum Realm. Both films have an undeniable glee to their energy. They want to entertain you. They want you to get your money’s worth. But they also are clearly having so much goddamn fun. It’s a form of contagious that can’t help but make you giggle along.

The next steps for Deadpool and Ant-Man are less sure. Deadpool might be joining an X-Force movie before any further adventures. Worst case scenario: Disney’s purchase of Fox means we may have seen our last R-rated Deadpool flick. Deadpool can do without a swear word or two, but theres a level of chaos and inappropriateness inherent in the character that cannot be and should not be washed out. Ant-Man more than likely has to help bail out some of the Avengers in next year’s Infinity War: End Game before any further solo adventures with the Wasp.  I don’t know what will happen with these two emboldened, far-less-risky characters, but they can take satisfaction in knowing when the time came, they shot their shot.

 

Some movies are so heavily reported on they feel devoid of any surprise. By the time Warner Brothers released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and it’s unwieldy title into the wild, they had loaded a pre-emptive strike bullet into their PR gun: already, across the pond, film was rolling on its follow-up, Justice League. No one knew details on the story. No one knew if it was going to be any good. In many ways, it didn’t matter: they just needed the public to believe they had something already cooking.

Here’s a core relationship that you need to understand as a moviegoer: Marvel and DC are the two biggest comic book companies, and have been rivals since the 1960’s. DC has historically always been associated with Warner Brothers. You’ve seen their work in both animated and live-action form. Until 2006, Marvel was rather polygamous, selling its properties out to Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four, Deadpool), Sony (Spider-Man), and Universal (The Incredible Hulk) because it desperately needed the cash to stay afloat. But from the time Iron Man hit in 2008 and Marvel’s 20-movie plan culminated in last May’s Infinity War, Warner Brothers-DC has been looking through the window, drooling at their rival’s unprecedented success.

It knew it wanted some of that Marvel movie money. It just didn’t know how to get there.

So after Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy ended, DC did a little bit of everything. It made itself darker. That didn’t really work. It decided to do a soft opening of a team-up in Batman v. Superman before going hard with Justice League. But they barely crawled through to that, a leaden zeppelin scraping the tops of buildings in its reach for flight. Then they ultimately decided to disband the whole shared universe concept to focus on different stories while pulling their Justice League around to surround the one undeniable success so far: 2016’s Wonder Woman.

It looks like Warner Brothers is still guessing. You can’t look like you know what you’re doing if you’re trying to make 3 different Joker movies at the same time.

So here’s the very specific criteria it took for me to finally watch a $300 million dollar movie that came out 8 months ago: I had a 3.5 hour flight, limited movie options on-board, and needed it to be something that had closed captions and probably did not rely on a totally bitchin’ soundtrack.

Warner Brothers: there’s your audience.

So I decided to do a little bit for a running diary. Here’s the thing: it’s easy to make fun of a $300 million dollar movie like this, but it’s important to remember that a lot of very talented people worked on this with the best of intentions. Some movie births are relatively painless. Others are like 36 hours in labor without an epidural in sight. You never know.

Immediately after the credits: Much has been made about the space above Henry Cavill’s lip. It’s responsible for my favorite movie business story, maybe ever. And yes, it looks just as bad as expected. Who knew that Hollywood could be so adept at removing limbs, deaging famous stars by 30 years, and creating new worlds, but a single goddamn mustache would completely trip it up? I love it. The point is clear: facial hair is something that will continue to equally vex and fascinate humankind for the rest of time.

 

14 min – I don’t have any problem believing that Jason Mamoa talks to fishes. I mean, have you seen the guy? If you told me he could do Monty Python coconut-claps to draw an entire herd of horses to his feet, I would believe you 100%. It doesn’t even bother me that his hair is very NOT aerodynamic, or that he’s choosing to live in very cold waters when he could be easily lounging about closer to the equator – dude clearly likes to be shirtless, ya know?

 

But here’s what does bother me: any good swimmer enters the water with a dive. Doesn’t matter if it’s face down or face up – it’s common knowledge that lining your hands together above your head as  you dive is the slickest, most efficient way to enter the water. So of course, because this is a backasswards movie, Arthur Curry aka Aquaman aka King of the Seas enters the water in what can only be described as a trust fall with the beginnings of a backflip that somehow miraculously becomes a streamlined fish form. When you control the seas, you can apparently get away with some pretty uncool shit.

22 min – For 3 summers in college, I worked as an extra help grunt for the local school district’s maintenance department. I learned a lot that had nothing to do with maintenance (like how to legally play a forbidden game of volleyball by calling it ‘hand soccer’), but one thing I definitely learned is that the custodians hold the keys to the kingdom. They don’t just have a massive ring full of keys that threaten to pull their paints down. They have access to every room in the building AND your ability to get in these rooms is entirely contingent upon their presence and if they like you or not. It’s a display of power that’s weirdly disproportionate to how the general public tends to value a custodian. This just made me love custodians even more. But for all the access that these many keys may provide, I have never known a custodian to have such free after-hours access to an alien ship. A little bit of an oversight there.

27 min – I don’t know if this was something added late in the game (again, these are very talented people at work), but the entire attack on Themiscyra may as well have happened in a video game. Tons of weightless CGI with a weightless CGI villain and weightless CGI fights. What was once an enchanting, empowering place in 2016’s Wonder Woman has been rendered an afterthought by 2017. Here’s hoping Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 restores a little bit of that Themiscyra shine to the island.

40 min – Seeing this crazy Frankenstein of a movie so late meant that I saw Justice League and Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp within a week of each other. An interesting bit of product placement tidbit that I can’t get over: all of Justice League’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Mercedes-Benz, and all of Ant Man and the Wasp’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Hyundai. There’s a lot of ways to look at this, but this is my favorite: many people who drive Mercedes-Benz take themselves a little too seriously and think the name alone will draw people to it, whereas Hyundai knows it has to be a little more fun to stand out above the crowd and is a hard-working, reliable brand that gets the job done. Now, was I talking about the car brands or the movies? You can’t separate the two, right?

71 min – In case you were wondering, Clark Kent/Superman does not get buried with a Superman tie. This is highly disappointing and a clear missed opportunity in branding.

75 min – After Superman wakes up and is clearly not himself, the Justice League needs to band together to stop him. Barry Allen aka The Flash tries to run around him, and the look of recognition on both The Flash and Superman’s faces (they have time to recognize each other because being super fast means the movie slows way down for them) that they’re both looking at someone with hyperspeed abilities is pretty hilarious. In The Flash, we see fear. In Superman, we see pure annoyance. This is the moment where the movie seems to realize Superman CAN be a little funny!

ALSO: If you ever wondered how Wonder Woman and Superman would fight each other, this movie answers in a way I never expected: head-butts. Lots of head-butts. And supercharged ones at that.

77 min – Superman lifts Batman up by the chin, because he knows that’s how they’ll be measured: not by the content of their character, but by the strength of their chins.

*There is a 35 min gap between observations. This is no accident. Nothing particularly notable.*

101 min – Superman and the Flash, in the middle of a massive CGI battle against CGI monsters, participate in a dick-measuring contest. Barry saves a family in a truck from certain death. Superman, however, carries a whole apartment complex over his head. No team is above pettiness!

There’s not much that’s memorable in this movie (at least for the right reasons). Everything you heard seems to ring true: Ben Affleck looks bored and a little sad in his role; Wonder Woman is clearly the best character, even if she’s underwritten here; The Flash has some serious potential if they can finally get a movie made; Aquaman could be fun if it’s not drowned by CGI water.

The next year and a half is going to be a very interesting one for Warner Brothers, with Aquaman (Dec 2018), Shazam (April 2019), Joker (Oct 2019), and Wonder Woman 1984 (Nov 2019). Those four films offer quite the potentialmix of adventure, color, humor, camp, and darkness. Warner Brothers should know much better but the end of this cycle what works for them and what doesn’t.

Let’s just hope another mustache doesn’t trip them up.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a 148 minute mission to stop a plutonium nuclear bomb from detonating. The bomb’s attached to a countdown, of which must be stopped first before the wires can be cut to avoid a disaster killing over a billion people worldwide. I guess it isn’t a spoiler to say (this is a franchise, after all) the countdown is stopped. As this happens, the weapon of mass destruction disengages, pulls itself apart, and two plutonium balls drop out into the hands of nearby characters.

I describe this whole situation because by the end of this movie, it became clear to me those plutonium balls are something else: us, the audience. The tension, of which is miraculously sustained the entire film, is finally released, and into the palm of the hands of the movie itself. We can finally breathe, knowing Tom Cruise did not die a death faked by the studio. We know they’ll make enough money from this installment to send Cruise to space and/or pay for a team of researchers to figure out just what he could possibly do to top himself.

For the previous sequel, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise trained to hold his breath for nearly 6 minutes underwater. The problem with this feat is that the necessity of how they filmed and edited the scene made it difficult to tell if it was for real or not. Some digital trickery had to be employed to ensure safety, which only dampened the illusion. Contrast this with the high-speed motorcycle chase around the winding roads of Morocco – which clearly had Cruise doing it for real – and you can see where writer/director Christopher McQuarrie’s own mission became clear: make an entertaining movie that makes it clear Tom is doing this batshit crazy stuff for real, creating high stakes for both the actor and the character alike.

As a result of all this, everything that Tom does in this film looks legimitately dangerous. A soon-to-be legendary bathroom fight – which has supplanted Eastern Promises’ bathhouse fight as cinema’s greatest fight amongst the toilets and sinks – looks beyond brutal and destructive. You might as well wrap the scene up in an office, give it a name, and consider it a new demolition business.  A motorcycle chase through Paris has Tom doing his usual dangerous thing right up until he’s hit by a car and a slightly CGI Tom has to take his place to ensure he lives beyond the movie. And finally, the helicopter chase through the mountains of Kashmir: we will be talking about this one – what’s on the screen and what it took to accomplish it – for a long, long time.

Even more impressive to me is how McQuarrie and Co. managed to include its franchise star’s greatest collection of stunts in the same movie as his character’s most personal story yet. McQuarrie made it clear in interviews that Ethan Hunt had often functioned as a cipher in the Mission: Impossible movies, doing whatever the plot calls for but with no clear motivation of his own beyond the mission at hand. He’s been held at a distance while his team stands in awe of their greatest living weapon. A dream sequence that starts Fallout lets us know this is a new game: it’s going to be Hunt’s most personal yet and suggest costs he’s never had to reckon with.

McQuarrie challenged Cruise as an actor, Cruise challenged the crew as the wealthiest, most-famous stuntmen around, and absolutely everyone rose to the occasion. Special things happen with this kind of harmony. It’s enough synergy to disarm a nuclear weapon.

In May of 2017, I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 twice in theaters – once with my movie-going friends, and then again only days later with my coworkers as part of a Teacher Appreciation Day surprise. I enjoyed it even more the second time. A movie this stocked with the goodies is always going to be worth a revisit.

I would discuss this movie with friends for weeks after. We would laugh about the same jokes and express amazement at how understandable yet awful Ego’s plan was. We expressed our love of the new characters and the new relationships that formed with them.

We had a lot of movie to work with. A lot to appreciate.

But I left, both times, with the same astonishment at one fact: “I never thought I’d hear ‘The Chain’ played in the action climax of a superhero movie.”

Yes, the song is pounding, with that unmissable bass line and drum kick. But it’s still a song about discord, about pain and commitment and the way the two intertwine. It’s about a bond that’s tested to the point of being broken. The chain will at some point snap. It’s a matter of when, not if. It’s a matter of deciding what will be done with the loose ends.

In the context of the film – and for the characters involved – the song completely clicks. The Guardians of the Galaxy, especially as writer/director James Gunn has configured them, have always been a group of cast-offs who found family in each other. Peter Quill is a thief raised by the Ravagers. Gamora and Nebula are the extremely deadly adopted daughters of Thanos. Rocket Raccoon is a military experiment gone awry. Drax is a warrior bent on revenge. Groot is Groot, the one they don’t really deserve. They have all been, at some point, rejected, pushed away, or told they were not good enough. They hated each other before they found family in each other.

Everyone grows up with two families: the one they’re born with, and the one they find.

The Guardians of the Galaxy were given shitty cards. They couldn’t do anything about that. So they found, when not bickering with each other, some solace in their bond. They fought and sacrificed for each other. They became a family.

I, Tonya reminds us, from the very beginning, that this is a story told by a collection of unreliable narrators. Everyone is telling the story they want us to believe. And we often have no way of knowing who’s right or wrong. Even better, the characters – and the film’s writers – know this. They know the best card an emotionally burnt person can play is the one where the truth can be bent.

The movie doesn’t hide some key facts, though, particularly the reality of Tonya Harding’s upbringing. We see the familial discord she grew up in. The hardscrabble economic life. The mother who truly believed she skated better when she was made to feel like shit. The husband who continued a cycle of abuse that neither could pull themselves up from out of.

Each individual character closely echoes the emotional lives of each member of the Guardians of the Galaxy, at least until they found each other: a place that’s never quite emotionally secure or supportive. A place where promises mean little and boundaries are temporary lines meant to be pissed upon.

When “The Chain” comes on late in I, Tonya, a violent splinter has formed. Tonya Harding – as presented in the film – has finally pushed away every awful influence in her life. She has been failed and wronged too many times. She’s had it. It is time for everyone to go. There is no going back. Every relationship we have seen up to that point – with her mother, her husband, even her coach – is severed. She is officially, for better or worse, on her own.

The chain has been broken.

They don’t love her now, and they’ll never love her again. At least never the same way.

GOTG Vol. 2, on the other hand, employs “The Chain” twice. First, when they go to see Ego, Peter Quill’s long-lost father. It’s a moment of discovery meant to suggest a bond about to be made. Quill’s always wondered where and who his father is. A truth is about to be laid over a crack in his heart.

Except his father doesn’t turn out to be quite the father Quill expects him to be. The bond he hoped to form is violently broken in a most heartbreaking way. And yet, just as the chain breaks between him and Ego, it grows stronger around him as the rest of the gang – his true, new family – comes back to help him fight the good fight in the film’s major action climax.

The way these two movies use Fleetwood Mac’s classic tune – with wildly different intentions and outcomes – shows just how malleable the song is. It also shows just how easy it is to walk upon that fine edge, of commitment and rejection, and how badly we need someone in our lives who truly believe in us and stand by us on our best, worst, and in-between moments.