“Hey, everyone — Sandy Frink just landed in a helicopter!”

Is that an earthquake? In honor of the 20th anniversary of their 10 year reunion, we join the Madonna twins and a big giant girl who smokes and says “shit” a lot to revisit 1987 and 1997 in Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion. Watch out, Tucson!

Chris and Seth have a special place in their hearts for this teen comedy made specifically for the C-Group (and anyone else who ever had their hamburger stolen by a deludanoid), and mutually agree that this is the cutest the When We Were Young podcast has ever looked. Meanwhile, Becky (the obvious Rhoda of this episode) comes to the scarf-folding fun with a fresher perspective to examine how this cherished cult hit holds up against today’s comedic standards. The WWWY gang is also joined by special guest Chelsea, inventor of Post-Its, to discuss her fancy-schmancy formula for glue.

So grab your flip phone and your huge notebook, because When We Were Young is doing Tucson (for a business thing), and we’re not stopping until our shoes are overflowing with blood. If you hate throwing up in public, you’ve come to the right podcast!

Listen here and subscribe here.

I like a lot of movies, but it’s hard to think of one that makes me quite as happy as Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion. As much as I enjoy The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel (recently covered by this very same podcast), those films are ever-so-slightly marred by some goofier slapstick bits aimed at a younger audience. Romy And Michele, however, is Rated R and therefore lobs all of its jokes at an adult audience. (Granted, an adult audience that’s prone to laughing at Lisa Kudrow thrusting her tongue at the window to scare a little boy.)

I also find Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion the most insanely quotable movie of all time. I honestly don’t think there’s a single line you could say to me that I would not recognize, particularly when delivered in these characters’ distinct voices. (“I thought so!” isn’t a terribly memorable line… except the way Mira Sorvino delivers it.)

The first iteration of Romy and Michele was a 1988 play entitled Ladies Room, starring Lisa Kudrow and a bunch of other Groundlings, based on two women writer Robin Schiff really did encounter in a Los Angeles restroom. Sciff was also a Groundling, and that attention to character-based comedy is definitely what makes this film stand out. Ladies Room takes place at the Green Enchilada, a Mexican restaurant in LA, featuring a cast of 9 characters, and according to the original LA Times review, characters “range from the middle-brow women from the ad agency a few suicidal floors up to a pair of totally awesome Valley girls (Christie Mellor and Lisa Kudrow), vapidly looking for guys with good jobs (it makes them sexier).” Romy and Michele also appeared on a TV pilot written by Schiff called Just Temporary, where they were named Nicole and Torie.

Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion

Release Date: April 25, 1997
Domestic/Worldwide Total Gross: $29.2 million
Opening Weekend: $7.4 million
Metacritic: 59

In 1997, Friends was in Season 3 at the height of the Ross and Rachel romantic drama, so Kudrow was already a household name, though she had yet to carry a feature film. Mira Sorvino was an Academy Award winner, thanks to her role as a goofy prostitute in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite, beating formidable talent like Joan Allen and Kate Winslet. She was a mid-90s “It Girl,” known for dating Quentin Tarantino, but was by no means a bankable box office draw, either. Janeane Garofalo was the biggest movie star in the cast, having already proven herself in The Truth About Cats And Dogs and The Cable Guy. (At the time, it felt a little strange that she was playing second-fiddle to Kudrow and Sorvino in a studio comedy.)

The film co-starred Alan Cumming, Julia Campbell, Elaine Hendrix, Camryn Manheim (of The Practice), Jacob Vargas, and a then-unknown Justin Theroux — a stellar cast all around. The film was directed by Simpsons writer/producer David Mirkin, who later directed Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt in another female buddy comedy, 2001’s Heartbreakers. (It’s no Romy And Michele, but I have a soft spot for it anyway.)

Here’s what the critics had to say in 1997:

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone:

“The affably airheaded Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion won’t silence her detractors, though Kudrow’s Michele is a deadpan delight as she joins fellow misfit Romy (a deliciously funny Mira Sorvino) at their 10-year high school reunion. The trailer alone is wittier than the entirety of McHale’s Navy and Jungle 2 Jungle, two ’97 comedies driven by TV stars. Kudrow and Sorvino have a ball in this babe version of Dumb and Dumber.”

Todd McCarthy, Variety:

“Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion looks like a peroxided Clueless wannabe straggling along to the party two years after it’s over. Desperately uncertain in tone and able to generate only sporadic laughs, pic decks out its meager story of revenge and comeuppance with a vulgar, flashy shimmer that will no doubt attract teenage girls, or the core Clueless audience. Some good early returns are therefore likely, but the film’s own legs don’t reckon to be nearly as long as those of its statuesque heroines.”

There was no way Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion wasn’t going to hold up for me — I’ve watched it several times since my early fandom, though it had been a couple of years, at least, since I revisited it. This may have been the first viewing where I was looking for more than just a good time, though, and on that level, Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion is surprisingly potent.

Schiff’s script is truly smart in the way it addresses high school anxieties. It presents a tiered system of outcasts, which is definitely accurate — even most kids who consider themselves rejects are still cooler than someone — and it rightly separates the smart nerds (like Sandy and Tobey) from the dumb nerds (Romy and Michele) from the might-be-smart-if-she-gave-a-fuck nerd (Heather Mooney). It also grounds its characters in vulnerability — not just Romy and Michele, who make up a ridiculous lie about Post-Its to impress their former classmates, but Tobey, Sandy, and Heather, too. Tobey Walters could easily be a joke character the movie laughs off as easily as Heather does, but instead she gets a moment to explain how Heather’s harsh words hurt her, and we feel for her. Even Heather, as blunt and mean as she can be, is clearly acting this way defensively. Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion goes above and beyond most high school comedies in portraying the nuances of high school drama. Its much more complicated than the typical “jocks and homecoming queens versus the math club” that we usually see. Even the popular crowd is thought-through — yes, Christy Masters is pretty much the stereotypical bitch villain of every high school comedy ever made, but we definitely sense that her quest for external perfection has left her hollow inside. And there’s obviously something going on in the A-group between Christy and Lisa, which we get only a taste of in this movie. This is relatively rare in a studio comedy — the sense that every single one of these characters truly has a life outside the walls of this movie.On the podcast, we mention that Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion feels ahead of its time — perhaps not as a mainstream movie, but certainly in terms of its nuanced character work. This movie seems unlikely as a major release in 2017 — at least, not without some Bridesmaids-style raunch thrown in — but it’s easy to imagine these characters existing in a sophisticated cable or streaming comedy, the likes of which didn’t exist in 1997.

As much as I’ve always loved this film, it wasn’t until doing this podcast that I realized why I love it so much — not just because it’s hilarious (which it is), but because it has memorable, original characters and a smart, thoughtful message about several rites of passage in our lives. Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion understands that some, but not all, of who we are is evident in high school, and spreads that all-important message to the outcasts out there: “It gets better!” At the same time, it is realistic about the ways our high school insecurities linger far longer than it makes any sense for them to, evidenced most cleverly in Michele’s dream, in which just about every aspect of high school is still haunted by the domineering Christy Masters.

If we’ve left town and moved on from out high school lives, it certainly shouldn’t matter what a few people we happened to go to high school with think. But it does. In ways that are generally far less dramatic (or hilarious) as depicted here, high school reunions do give us a chance to get that closure — to face our old demons as the people we are now, and finally put them out of our minds. The lesson learned in Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion is one I learned at my own high school reunion, too — that everyone was and always will be dealing with their own shit, and most likely, no one ever was actively trying to make your life a living hell.

I’m not entirely sure I would have ever learned that lesson if Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion hadn’t primed me for it, almost 15 years ahead of time. So, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of this film, I have to say a truly heartfelt “thank you” to Robin Schiff, Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino, David Mirkin, and the rest of the cast and crew of this movie. I probably wouldn’t have said this before sitting down and truly contemplating what this film means to me, but Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion is really, truly a great movie.

Okay?

*

“He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don’t know what it means…”

I’m not sure any episode of the podcast will ever be as difficult as this one.

As you can tell when you listen to the episode, talking about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana results in an endless stream of contradictions and conundrums. We talked about him for well over two hours (mercifully edited down for you people) and easily could have gone on for a few hours more. We barely scratched the surface.

Many efforts have been made over the years to get to know Kurt Cobain, the man, like the documentary Montage Of Heck and countless other films, books, articles, and so on. It is impossible to determine where, exactly, the human being ends and the legend begins. So much about his life seems so predestined, so written, that it is easy to get carried away in grandeur and mythology and forget that, for Cobain, the experience of his life was present tense, as it was unfolding. He couldn’t have known what Nirvana’s music would become, even it feels like, at some level, he always had some idea. He especially couldn’t have known how the world would respond to his untimely (but, strangely, also seemingly inevitable) death. And yet it all feels like it only could have gone this way if it were all planned.

As far as I can tell, my own history with Kurt Cobain begins on April 8, 1994. The first time I was aware of him by name, he was already a tragic figure, a legend whose pain and suffering seemed outside the scope of what most can imagine. (Whether or not they really were is another story.)

There is something unreachable about the music of Nevermind. No matter what meaning you apply to the lyrics, there is always something intangible you can’t quite grasp, like you’re only getting half the story. They mean so many things to so many people that it feels entirely wrong to apply a singular definition to any single word of this music. Many other artists are esoteric, with enigmatic lyrics that are open to interpretation, but that feels intentional on the part of the artist. With Cobain, it is as if he intended to deliver his message with concrete clarity, and yet we fall short of truly grasping what he meant.It’s here that I run up against my problem in cogently speaking about Kurt Cobain as a human being. I know he was one. Yet for me (and many in my generation) he is an icon of near-biblical status. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a living, breathing Jesus Christ. Had I been born a few years earlier, I might have experienced him as many did in the moment — as a musician. A great artist, sure, but one who still had to live and breathe in this world. Had I been born a few years later, I would’ve been too young to pay any attention to the news of April 8, 1994, I wouldn’t have wondered who this man was, why everyone mourned him so, or what caused him to do such a thing. I would have come to his story too late to be a part of it, the way I experienced Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. As it is, my personal history with Kurt Cobain began at the exact moment his personal history had ended, the day he died.

In the coming years, I would hear a lot of Nirvana growing up. My chosen radio station (you could really only have one back then) was 107.7 The End, which played rock, grunge, and alternative from the 90s. Nirvana songs were about as popular as anything else ever was throughout this period, and still. “Come As You Are,” “Heart-Shaped Box,” “Dumb,” “Lithium,” “Polly,” “On A Plain,” “In Bloom,” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were always in that rotation, even though I wouldn’t have been able to identify them by name. Most, I probably couldn’t have said with any certainty were Nirvana. Moreso, there were many other songs by bands I hadn’t familiarized myself with, like Metallica and Pearl Jam, that all went into the same box. I kept up with the who’s who of new singles, but any music released before I started listening to the radio didn’t generally get called out by name. I suppose pretty much everyone else would have thought, “Well, of course that’s Nirvana.” I imagine the DJs at The End didn’t think there could possibly be some 15-year-old boy from Seattle out there who liked all of Nirvana’s music but needed someone to tell him what it was. (This is where Shazam could have saved me years of uncertainty.) In late 2002, the Nirvana compilation album was released. At this point, I was living in Los Angeles and listening to my own CDs and MP3s more than any radio station — I was also having a rather poppy moment in my history of musical appreciation. (Hey, this is when Britney and Christina were both really good! Don’t judge me.) I knew I liked Nirvana enough to enjoy a compilation album, so I purchased the CD and was able to parse out which songs from my youth actually were and were not Nirvana. Cutting out songs like “Alive” and “Black Hole Sun,” which are fine in their own right but don’t hold a candle to Cobain’s (in my humble opinion), allowed me to hone in on Cobain’s singular talent. It is perhaps because Cobain was such a chameleon in his subject matter that I hadn’t been able to pin down which tracks were his earlier. Listening to his music all together for the first time, I finally got a sense of his artistry and what people found so special about him.

At this point, I still didn’t care to dive into Cobain’s personal story. I knew the basics from my childhood — heroin and a shotgun. I enjoyed Nirvana’s music more or less apart from any appreciation of Cobain himself, much as I might listen to The Doors and enjoy the music without getting too caught up in the story behind any of it. I don’t generally like exploring music as an extension of an artist’s personal life, with few exceptions. I like to find my own meaning, and experience it as it relates to me.

But that doesn’t make for a very solid podcast episode. So for the first time, leading up to Episode 16, I had to do my Nirvana homework. I listened to Nevermind and In Utero, watched Montage Of Heck, and read up a bit on Cobain. The more I learned, the more I wondered: how does this inspired but deeply flawed drug addict reconcile with the esteemed artist who loomed over so much of my childhood?The answers never exactly arrive, but discussing these questions with Becky and Seth made for a fascinating conversation, and one of my personal favorites in When We Were Young’s run. Cobain and his music are conundrums we’ll never get concrete answers to. As much as any one man can be, he was the voice of a generation. He probably changed the shape of music in the 90s, maybe even still. The fact that guns are mentioned in the first three tracks of his massive hit, Nevermind — all major singles — feels almost too convenient, given how he died. Somehow, the idea that he died “for our sins” has seeped into his legacy, even though he committed suicide. On some level, perhaps, he thought that’s why he was dying — he was rightfully fed up with a lot of this world. He suffered greatly, but he also seemed to prefer suffering to making an effort to get better. He wanted his music to be adored while he himself was ignored — or something like that. Cobain needed and craved admiration, but was too insecure to deal with the level of scrutiny it takes to be so recognized. A part of him is very vulnerable, relatable, and child-like, while another aspect feels ethereal and wise beyond words.

I don’t know what to make of Kurt Cobain, who in some ways is very much like me — sensitive, moody, an artist who grew up in the Seattle area — and in some ways is very much not. The fact that he became a heroin addict after an unstable, difficult childhood is not a surprise, but how did he come to be so ahead of his time on issues like gay equality or sexual assault? His lyrics are obscure enough that it’s difficult to paint him as an “LGBT ally” or an “advocate for women’s rights,” especially given that he died before either issue would be identified that way. Something about what he stood for feels less than innate — handed down to him, or predestined. Even though we’ve pored over his lyrics, drawings, and journals, we still don’t really have a solid grasp of what he was thinking. For some reason, he’s harder to pin down than just about anyone else.

Perhaps that’s all greatness is — being unclassifiable. Not fitting into any box, and instead forcing one to be built around you.Nirvana is, of course, the sound of the 90s, feeling like an underline to all the angsty, Gen X art that appeared before and since. Previous podcast topics Seinfeld, Jagged Little Pill, and Trainspotting all captured this in some way — a reaction to the masculine, greed-is-good, middle class materialism of the 1980s. Seinfeld examined the petty problems of well-enough-off white people absent of any meaningful self-reflection; Jagged Little Pill was a woman speaking up against the “good girl” expectations placed upon her; Trainspotting, like Cobain, wondered if the antidote to capitalist mundanity was heroin and explored the price paid for such an escape.

But none of these works was quite as seismic at summing up the better half of the decade than Nirvana’s Nevermind, in part because its lyrics are obscure enough that they seem to be about everything all at once. I’ve previously struggled to understand exactly where Generation X’s rejection of mainstream Reagan-era values came from — it’s much easier to grasp the youthful unrest of the late 1960s in my mind, perhaps because I wasn’t alive yet. Yes, the 1980s wrought very bad things like the mismanagement of the AIDS epidemic and a crackdown on “crime” (AKA, minorities who committed even the most minor of crimes). But is this really what the largely white youth of the grunge movement was pushing back against? It’s hard to find much evidence to support this.

Cobain was born in 1967 and thus grew up in the 1970s, as part of the “latchkey generation” whose parents were supposedly too busy giving in to the temptations of the era to parent attentively. Certainly, an absence of familial love seems to be at least one driving factor of Cobain’s angst.If I had to truly pick out just one overarching theme from Nevermind, though, it would be the selfishness of survival — and how much that disappointed Cobain, in others and then, ultimately, himself. That the act of living itself is destructive to the world around us, and at least some of the people around us. Getting ahead ourselves means others must be left behind. Cobain was, I think, disappointed in the selfishness he saw in the people around him, and unable to live with it in himself. Using heroin is self-destructive, but generally pretty harmless to everyone else, and it allowed him an escape.

In “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the titular teens (presumably) demand to be entertained. In “In Bloom,” the song’s subject likes Nirvana’s music without ever considering its intent (and also sells his kids for food?). In “Come As You Are,” the speaker urges you to be yourself… but only if it’s “as I want you to be.” “Lithium” is all about a character’s mutable moods and contradictory internal workings. “Polly” takes on the persona of a rapist and kidnapper who dispassionately uses a young girl for his own gratification. “Drain You” is all about the yucky, leech-like aspects of romantic relationships. “On A Plain” chorus contains the lyrics, “Love myself better than you.” In “Something in the Way,” the song that first clued me in to these theme, Cobain says, “It’s okay to eat fish ’cause they don’t have any feelings.”

These may be slightly reductive looks at the meaning behind these songs — there are many more layers of depth in each — but it’s the one truly unifying theme I was able to draw between songs that otherwise take on some many subjects, moods, and styles. Cobain seems to be more often criticizing his peers than the older generation his parents belonged to. In a way, we look at Nirvana as having kicked off the grunge movement with Nevermind — and yet, in Nevermind, Cobain is already seemingly criticizing the grunge movement. Again, Cobain seems to be writing lyrics based on a future he couldn’t possibly have known about yet.As the story goes, Jesus Christ died for our sins — to make us all feel better about ourselves, I guess. He took on that burden rather graciously. Kurt Cobain also died as a result of the selfishness of man — the selfishness in others he couldn’t accept, and the selfishness in himself he couldn’t accept while judging everyone else. I think most of us feel some of what Cobain felt — guilt at merely being alive. If you’re reading my blog, you probably live in a first world country and have it pretty good. We know that there are thousands or millions across the globe suffering in various ways, without even some of the basic comforts we take for granted… and yet we live on without thinking too much about that, mostly. We can’t solve this problem ourselves, so maybe we do what little we can and move on, or maybe we don’t do anything and still move on. Either way, we don’t exhaust our mental and physical resources worrying about the pain everyone else is feeling.

This is all conjecture, of course; I can’t say with any certainty that this is what haunted Kurt Cobain, but it is the message I personally take away from his music. Nevermind is outwardly focused, giving it that anthemic, “voice of a generation” feel; many songs are about people who have little in common with Cobain. Often, he’s critiquing them by becoming them, imagining what they’re thinking and exposing how selfish or careless or petty they are, allowing us to be the judges. In In Utero, he was already focusing more on his own suffering, the way most artists do. In Utero is a terrific album with some great songs, including some of the most provocative and haunting singles of the 1990s. But for me, it falls short of the reach of Nevermind, which manages to be about everybody all at once. It seemed like Cobain was going out of his way to step into our shoes, see through our eyes, and understand us — and then, to his dismay, didn’t much like what he found.

The title of the album itself clues us in to what Cobain was getting at — the human instinct to shrug off the more hypocritical, destructive aspects of our quest for survival. When an unpleasant thought about our own inherent selfishness strikes up, most people immediately push it out of their heads, with an: “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” This, itself, is a survival technique — we couldn’t move forward otherwise.

Kurt Cobain didn’t. He made art of out it.

We reap the benefits.

Make of that what you will.

*

“We’d better get back, ’cause it’ll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night… mostly.”

Encounter the xenomorph in our ickiest episode yet! First, the gang discusses their own personal experiences with body horror, including bruised ears and slivers in places there should definitely not be wood. Then, it’s time to get all face-huggy and chest-bursty with Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise, beginning with Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror classic and moving on to James Cameron’s rock-’em sock-’em sequel. Have countless rip-offs dulled these classics, or are they still capable of making your jaws-within-jaws drop? Then, we quickly touch on David Fincher’s regrettable Alien3 and the campy Joss Whedon-penned Alien: Resurrection.

This is a mostly comprehensive look at one of the most influential horror franchises ever made… mostly. So strip down to your most retro panties, climb into the nearest available power-loader, and GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH! Because in space, no one can hear you make fun of the way Becky describes her history with the Alien franchise.

Listen here and subscribe here.

This episode goes back further than we’ve ever gone before on the podcast, way back to the summer of 1979, which saw the release of the first of many Alien films. (The franchise loomed large throughout the 80s and 90s, so it definitely warrants an episode of this podcast.) The film had a seismic impact on the cinematic landscape, with many imitators over the years. The first three films are directed by three of the most notable mainstream filmmakers of the past 40 years, Ridley Scott (Alien), James Cameron (Aliens), and David Fincher (Alien3). (Alien: Resurrection‘s Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known for Amelie, is no slouch, but he’s not quite at their level of influence.)

In 2012, Scott returned the franchise with the semi-prequel, Prometheus, and this month returns again with Alien: Covenant, the eighth alien film overall (not that those Alien Vs. Predator movies really count). As so many James Cameron joints do, the first Alien sequel also features a memorably hammy turn from the late Bill Paxton, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in February, which also made this a timely episode.

My first encounter with Alien occurred as a teenager. I don’t recall exactly what led me to the franchise, though I strongly suspect it was my interest in James Cameron following the colossal success of Titanic. I read a biography of Cameron and went back to catch many of his films I’d missed, given that they were generally too mature for me at the time of their release. I became a big fan of all of them — except Piranha 2, which I still haven’t seen, as Cameron would probably prefer. Eventually, Aliens became a prized piece of my beloved Fox Widescreen collection, along with two other Cameron films, The Abyss and True Lies. I used to play the opening vignette, explaining the crimes of “panning and scanning,” for friends to try to convince them that letterboxing was the way to go. It never worked.

(With the rise of DVDs and widescreen TVs, I am finally vindicated.)

ALIEN
“In space, no one can hear you scream.”

Release Date: May 25, 1979
Metacritic: 83
Budget: $11 million
Opening Weekend: $3.5 million
Domestic Gross: $80.9 million
Worldwide Gross: $104.9 million

Alien has one of the all-time great horror movie taglines, which is appropriate for one of the all-time great horror movies. I’d seen Alien many times over the years, including the 2003 Director’s Cut in theaters and more recently on the Blu-Ray I bought. There was never any danger that the film wouldn’t stand the test of time for me.

However, reviewing for the podcast does give me an opportunity to think about such a classic in a new context. One thing that struck me were the negative reviews calling out the film’s violence, as well as James Cameron’s sequel. The special effects in Alien are still pretty disgusting, and are rarely topped by modern horror movies for squirm-inducing effect. This has little to do with the effects themselves, and more to do with the story — when the tiny xenomorph bursts from John Hurt’s chest, it’s a genuinely shocking moment. It is as unexpected from these characters as it is from the audience. Whether on purpose or accidentally, most horror movies today often telegraph what’s coming, but nothing we’ve seen so far in Alien tells us, “Oh, hey, I’ll bet a little alien baby’s about to burst out of his chest.” But because we already built up plenty of suspense with the face-hugger, it also makes perfect sense.

It’s no revelation to state that Alien is not just a landmark in science fiction and horror, but also for female action heroes. Ripley is still probably the all-time greatest action heroine ever to grace any screen (and I say this as a die-hard Buffy The Vampire Slayer devotee). No one quite has her mix of smarts, cool, confidence, courage, brawn, and vulnerability. Perhaps this is only because the character was originally written genderless, and easily could have been played by a man instead. I don’t think the series would have had nearly the same impact, though. Maternity is so thoroughly baked in to the Alien series that it has infinitely more resonance when our protagonist is a woman, even if, as in this first film, we know almost nothing about her. The potential trauma of giving birth is nicely flipped by the creature that bursts from a man’s chest this time. It is often joked about that men would freak out at going into labor; this joke is nicely given a horrific twist in Alien. But if that were all this movie was, it wouldn’t be the classic it is.

The Alien films were never planned as a series, of course, but moreso than almost any other film franchise, each entry feels entirely unique, with themes and mood all its own. Appropriately, Alien is the film most concerned with the human body itself, as it introduces the odd (but eerily plausible) mechanism through which the xenomorphs are “born.” Writer Dan Bannon created the creature wanting to make audience — primarily men — uncomfortable. The alien can be interpreted as a stand-in for many things throughout the series — cancer, AIDS, rape, the “miracle” of birth — but one thing that tends to be consistent is our biology betraying us.

To me, Alien is most universal as a metaphor for puberty — our body doing strange, new things we can’t understand, as we are forced to “become” something else (whether we like it or not). This is brought out by the callous computer program named Mother, which Ripley must break away from in order to survive. There is a moment for many of us in our teenage years where some aspect of our body feels alien to us — we discover something new and unexpected, often even frightening. We may try to ignore it and proceed as if everything is normal, but it will not be ignored. “Life finds a way,” as it is put in another very good sci-fi/horror thriller.

The potency of this first Alien film is how broadly it can be interpreted. The alien is frightening in its own right, but what’s truly terrifying is the way it uses our own bodies against us, and how little power we have over our own physicality once the process has begun. As humans, we are all susceptible to the whims of biology. We consider our bodies to be “us,” but ultimately, have no say in what they’ll do to us. More than a monster movie, Alien is a film reaffirming that our greatest enemy is the skin we live in. We can’t predict its moves or fight against its will, any more than the crew of the Nostromo can outwit or outmatch the xenomorph.

ALIENS
“This time, it’s war.”

Release Date: July 18, 1986
Metacritic: 87
Budget: $17-18 million
Opening Weekend: $10.1 million
Domestic Gross: $85.2 million
Worldwide Gross: $131.1 million

The tagline called out the fact this sequel to the relatively small-scale Alien was going to be bigger and more action-focused than its predecessor. If Alien was a haunted house movie in space, Aliens is more like a war movie, with the sides slightly more evenly matched. That doesn’t stop most of them from being dispatched rapidly, but you can’t say they weren’t warned.

I have virtually nothing negative to say about either of the first two Alien films, and could gush about each for hours. Alien is the true original, a sci-fi/horror classic that left its mark on cinema in a major way. It’s still the most spectacular and original creature design I can think of, especially for extra-terrestrials. Aliens, on the other hand, is a perfect morsel of popcorn entertainment — not just because it gets the action and special effects right, but because it has an honest emotional core and treats its audience like adults. (Even though the movie spawned action figures aimed at kids — oddly enough, for an R-rated gore-fest.)

After The Terminator, which created Sarah Connor (but didn’t yet make her a true badass), James Cameron took the reigns of the inevitable Alien sequel, re-purposing a script he’d already written entitled Mother. In his Director’s Cut (the superior version of the film), Ripely learns that the daughter she left behind before her 11th birthday has died of old age in the 57 years she’s been in hyper-sleep. How strange it must be, to see your own daughter grow older than you are now.

James Cameron doesn’t get quite enough credit for how femme-forward his action-packed oeuvre is. Every one of his films has a female character who is as interesting and complex as the male “hero,” if not moreso. She’s never a mere damsel, either. The Terminator’s Sarah Connor may spend most of the movie needing rescue, but by the sequel she’s learned a thing or two and then some. True Lies’ Helen Tasker is played as a bumbling housewife, but she gets to (comedically) kick ass a couple of times, too (and Jamie Lee Curtis makes the most of the role). Even Titanic’s dainty Rose proves herself pretty capable once the ship is going down.

Aliens remains Cameron’s most female-centric film, however, finishing what Ridley Scott started in making Ripley the greatest action heroine to ever grace the screen. Ripley remains professional and cool under pressure, but Aliens adds depth to a character left purposefully vague in the first film. Ripley finds a surrogate daughter in Newt, the sole survivor of the alien attacks on the recently colonized LV-426. Weaver earned the first ever Best Actress Oscar nomination for a sci-fi, horror, or action film, and remained the only nominee in these genres until Sandra Bullock’s Gravity nod. Given how iconic Ripley has become, in large part thanks to where Aliens took the character, it is well-deserved.

The first Alien can be interpreted in many ways. For me, it’s best looked at as a tale of adolescence — breaking away from “Mother,” facing strange new biological happenings, and proving oneself capable of surviving on one’s own. There’s less gray area in interpreting Aliens, which is clearly focused on maternity. Not only do Newt and Ripley become each other’s surrogate daughter/mother, but the showdown at the end is against the Alien Queen who is similarly aiming to protect her young. The movie certainly passes the Bechdel test — even the classic line, “Get away from her, you bitch!”

If James Cameron got Ripley so right in 1986, it’s a wonder that we haven’t seen a true rival to this character since. (Sarah Connor might be next in line on that list.) Even a woman being known by her last name, rather than her first, is a rarity. (Hillary Clinton, who came close to becoming the most powerful woman in the world, is generally called “Hillary” rather than “Clinton.”)

Aliens is as entertaining as it is because, like Alien, it is intelligent and has real depth beneath its more superficial pleasures. In it, a lot of typically “male” elements — military machismo, corporate greed, technology — brush up against biology, maternity, and reproduction. The masculine side of the equation gets its ass thoroughly handed to it. No amount of artillery or money is a match for Mother Nature. The men all fail against the aliens, leaving it up to Ripley to save the day.

The Vasquez character manages to be even more butch than Ripley, and still avoids being a stereotype. (Her retort to being asked if she’s ever mistaken for a man is priceless.) Bill Paxton’s performance is pretty hammy — he’s the tough guy who ends up being not-so-tough when faced with killer space monsters — but the character manages to be endearing, anyhow. (Cameron has a way of making the slightly goofy work.) Despite a bigger budget, cast, and scale, Aliens remains true to its roots by keeping the action pretty contained and retaining the focus on the survival of a few core cast members. It’s easily one of the best action films — let alone sequels — ever made.

ALIEN 3
“The bitch is back.”

Release Date: May 22, 1992
Metacritic: 59
Budget: $50 million
Opening Weekend: $19.5 million
Domestic Gross: $55.5 million
Worldwide Gross: $159.8 million

 That tagline is perfectly suited for the dreary, pitch-black third installment in the Alien franchise.

Otherwise, Alien 3 is the biggest misstep in the franchise, by far, and I see no cogent argument for any of the other installment being worse. (Still not counting anything that also has Predator in the title.) The film is joyless, fumbling badly where the first two films soared — in getting us to root for the characters’ survival. We don’t care about anyone in Alien 3 — not even Ripley, because she isn’t very keen on surviving herself. Alien 3 also kills Hicks and Newt off-screen, which renders Ripley’s triumph in Aliens completely moot. (I have a beef with franchises that kill off main characters from previous films carelessly.) By the time another alien wreaks havoc in Alien 3, Ripley has outlived everyone she’s ever known, including her own daughter, then failed to save her surrogate daughter and a potential love interest (or at least, a friend). What’s left for Ripley to want now? Well, she wants to eradicate the aliens. That’s about all we can hope for here.

Alien and Aliens were certainly dark films overall, but the interactions between characters had a certain light-heartedness. Alien 3 is portentous, elaborating on a bizarre story by Vincent Ward that saw a planet of monks battling the xenomorph, believing it is the second coming of the Black Death. Using a prison as the setting doesn’t endear us to these characters, and the all-male supporting cast just feels wrong for the franchise that previously had two or three great female characters in each film. Even David Fincher has virtually disowned this movie. (It is his first and easily his worst, the only true misfire of his career… though the direction is the least of its problems.)

Alien 3 does have a few interesting ideas, like Ripley’s near-rape (a chilling echo of the xenomorph’s rapey reproductive process). With Alien telling a story about adolescence (says me) and Aliens about motherhood, Alien 3 is very much about death and accepting one’s mortality. Ripley’s climactic sacrifice might have been moving in a film that set it up better. Alien 3 reminds me of the ways this franchise follows the Scream series — with the first film being a bold and truly frightening original, the second upping the ante but remaining emotionally truthful, the third striking the wrong tone completely, and the fourth moving back in the right direction while falling far short of the original two installments. Like Scream, the Alien movies can easily be seen as a metaphor for trauma — Ripley survives once, and in the second film, survives again — mostly for Newt’s sake. By Alien 3, she’s too traumatized to have any hope for survival this time around (and who could blame her?).

Admittedly, Ripley’s shaved head is the perfect look for Weaver in this gritty third film. (She gets a little more butch in each installment.) But ultimately, there’s very little pleasure to derive from an Alien 3 viewing. It might have sounded good on paper, but in execution, it’s a drag.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION
“Witness the resurrection.”

Release Date: November 26, 1997
Metacritic: 63
Budget: $75 million
Opening Weekend: $16.5 million
Domestic Gross: $47.8 million
Worldwide Gross: $161.4 million

“Witness the resurrection”? That’s a marketing department that’s seriously bankrupt on ideas.

Alien: Resurrection may over-correct for Alien 3’s dourness — it is silly in moments, bordering on campy, which is not terribly surprising given that it was penned by Joss Whedon. This is the only Alien film I actually remember being released, though I didn’t know the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer had written it then, or I would have seen it sooner. (I don’t know exactly when I caught this one, but I have owned it on DVD for quite a long time.)

Alien: Resurrection has far more interesting ideas on its mind than Alien 3 did — mainly, that Ripley is a clone of her former self, and xenomorph DNA has mixed with her own to make her not quite human. She has some memories from Ripley’s past, but poignantly can’t remember Newt’s name. (Leave it to this film to mourn Newt when Alien 3 killed her but couldn’t be bothered to do anything more than give us an icky autopsy of the poor girl.) The scene in which Ripley discovers many failed attempts at cloning her in a lab — one who asks for a mercy killing — is appropriately disturbing.

The “Newborn” (the white, somewhat humanoid alien we meet at the end) is a bit ridiculous — the original xenomorph and Alien Queen are much more frightening villains. The series wisely never asked us to feel any sympathy for these killing machines… until this moment. (The Newborn is kind of… cute?) But the action works well, and Whedon’s script has a similar wit to Alien and Aliens. (“It was in my way” as Ripley’s justification for killing her “kind” rivals her Aliens retort: “They can bill me.”) It also positions Winona Ryder as a heroine similar to Ripley in the first film, which is particularly interesting given that she ends up being an android. (Alien 3 ignored the “man versus tech” angle that’s so crucial to the other films.) Neither Ripley nor Call is fully human… and once again, it’s the women who are left to survive.

I wouldn’t say Alien: Resurrection speaks to any stage of human life the way the first three films do, though the Ripley clone nicely embraces the “not giving a fuck” mentality many of us hit at some point in our old age. It’s nice to see Ripley have a little fun for a change.

The Alien films not only hold up as well as they did upon their release — they’ve actually gotten better with age, especially in comparison to all the lesser creature features we’ve seen since. (Not you, Alien 3. Your CGI is atrocious.) Even the special effects are still great, far more convincing than the computer generated monsters we see these day. Many critics were put off by the gore in the first two films, though they’re both rather restrained by today’s standards. Now, it’d be difficult to find a critic who would argue that the first two films are classics.

Even with one truly bad entry and one that’s merely competent, this series’ batting average is still pretty stellar. There’s still enough juice left in the series to get me interested in Alien: Covenant — not bad, for a series that’s going on 40 years old.

*

This just in: WOMEN can direct MOVIES.

Despite their menstruation and inability to lift heavy things, females are either as capable or even more capable than men at making films that involve punching and kicking!

Still with me? Okay! As it turns out, women, who are not historically known for either punching or kicking, can make action blockbusters just like men, who are statistically more likely to punch and kick.

At this rate, who knows? We may even get a female president someday!! I’ll pause to let you wrap your head around that impossible concept for a second.

After unloading Man Of Steel, Batman V Superman, and Suicide Squad into theaters recent years, Warner Bros. apparently decided to switch things up this summer by offering filmgoers an actual movie rather than a flaming pile of nonsense garbage.

Here’s another newsflash: it turns out that audiences prefer a well-written story and heroes we actually like to an incomprehensible, emotionally numb dumpster fire.

Even when it is directed by a woman, and not a man. Hollywood, take note!

(Forgive my sarcasm, but the biggest wonder surrounding Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman is that we still need to be astonished that women can, like, accomplish things.)

Okay, now for the real review. At long last, a Wonder Woman feature film has lassoed its way into theaters. The fact that it centers on a woman is only a small miracle — we’ve seen “superhero”(-ish) films like Elektra and Catwoman… that just so happened to suck (independently of the fact that they were about women, of course — lots of male superhero movies at that time sucked, too!). More recently, hit blockbusters like The Hunger Games and recent Star Wars offerings have also made a killing off of worthy heroines. It’s not news.

But I guess it is news that Patty Jenkins is the first female to direct one of these movies, and that Wonder Woman is the first Marvel or DC offering in the current canon to center on an action heroine. The Marvel movies have been relatively female-friendly — Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is arguably the emotional centerpiece of the Avengers films — but did we get a Black Widow movie? No. Instead, Black Widow was second banana in movies named after men, as in the sequels to Iron Man and Captain America, even while being one of the most dynamic and relatable characters in the entire franchise.

The case has already been made for female action heroes. Go back to Ellen Ripley in 1986’s Aliens, or Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for a couple prime examples. It should not surprise anyone that Wonder Woman performed comparably to other recent superhero titles. Nor, after Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar win for The Hurt Locker, should it be news that a woman can direct an aces entry in a traditionally male-dominated genre. Are we meant to be shocked that Wonder Woman marks the biggest opening weekend for a female director, ever? Well, that’s dumb, because Wonder Woman is a superhero movie, and superhero movies make lots of money. A woman could have directed a successful superhero movie at any time, and it didn’t need to have “woman” in the title for it to work.But it did. Wonder Woman‘s success seems especially obvious given how dismal the DC “universe” has been in its latest incarnation, (no) thanks to Zack Snyder, whose bone-headed take on these beloved characters defies logic. Last year’s one-two whiff of Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad gave us the two worst movies I saw in 2016. The movies have all been box office hits, but that’s inevitable. Audiences were lukewarm, and critics seriously hated them. Short of setting fire to the entire Warner Bros. lot, Jenkins could have done anything with Wonder Woman and it’d still look good in comparison.

Wonder Woman really only had to be halfway watchable to be declared a success, and to be the biggest femme-helmed film of all time. It’s a little better than that, though.

Early on, Wonder Woman feels like a Disney princess tale on steroids — what would happen if Moana decided to fight in World War I? The all-female Amazons in Wonder Woman evoke a fun, Xena: Warrior Princess-esque vibe, with Robin Wright providing the gravitas as the badass general Antiope, Diana’s aunt. This world is rich enough that it could sustain an entire film on its own — it’s almost a shame when Steve Trevor, the spy played by Chris Pine, drops in and beckons Diana to the outside world.For a spell, Wonder Woman becomes an Amazon-out-of-water comedy as Diana adjusts to polite society in the “modern” world, and interacts with Etta, Steve’s wryly amusing secretary (Lucy Davis). Then the film introduces us to a ragtag team of sidekicks and gets back into superhero mode, with some James Bond-esque spy hijinks along the way. (The climax takes a page from the Season 5 finale of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, by the way.) It all moves along nimbly, and hangs together merely because we like Diana and Steve and their friends, and believe in what they’re hoping to accomplish. This would seem obvious, except that it’s been entirely missing from Wonder Woman‘s three DC predecessors. Did anyone truly like Henry Cavill’s Superman, or Ben Affleck’s Batman, or anyone in Suicide Squad besides Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn?

Gal Gadot was the only watchable presence in Batman V Superman, and Margot Robbie was Suicide Squad‘s saving grace. So, again, let’s not register too much surprise that women are the sole saviors of DC’s lineup. I’m not ready to declare that Wonder Woman bests any Marvel movie thus far, but it’s up there. Jenkins gifts the film with both heartfelt resonance and a nimble comedic touch, which only the top tier of Marvel’s offerings manage to balance. The emotional beats in Wonder Woman land in a way that is rare in blockbusters these days. (For all the heavy-handed sobriety of, say, Batman V Superman, we don’t actually feel a thing as that dreadful, dumbfounding story unfolds.)My preferred brand of superhero movie will probably always be Tim Burton’s Batman, but comparing the delightful gothic camp of Batman Returns to what DC is serving up these days is pointless. As far as today’s comic book superhero adaptations go, Wonder Woman is as good as it gets — it’s hard to imagine a major studio letting Jenkins (or anyone) take greater narrative risks. (As much as I’d love to see a superhero drama with the complexity of Monster.) In Wonder Woman, Jenkins knows exactly what kind of movie she’s making, and she does it better than just about anyone in the past decade. It’s all the more impressive that a credible Wonder Woman film is not an easy thing to make — skimpy costume, golden lasso, invisible jet? This character has major cheese potential. The fact that this Diana is a certified badass is all the more commendable.

Wonder Woman has a slew of compelling female characters, from the Amazons to Etta to the creepy Dr. Poison, played by Elena Anaya. The male villains are boring, but the good guys are a pretty solid bunch, too. Though he’s not a superhero, Steve Trevor is as developed as Marvel’s Steve Rogers is. Wonder Woman is not a great film in its own right — it is still too beholden to the tropes and ticks that have plagued every single Marvel and DC movie after 2008’s Iron Man and The Dark Knight. The script by Allan Heinberg is more serviceable than transcendant — the fish-out-of-water scenes are amusing, if a bit obvious (and reminiscent of gags in Thor and Captain America), and the more earnest stuff is par for the course. Wonder Woman has its over-the-top touches, particularly in the flashy, effects-heavy third act. It falls victim to the same climactic pomposity all superhero movies these days succumb to, though Wonder Woman sticks the landing better than most.

Remember six months ago, when Deadpool had Best Picture buzz? That was ridiculous, but Wonder Woman has a shot at getting there. (I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s better equipped than any other DC or Marvel release in recent memory.) Wouldn’t it be kind of great to see Jenkins do what Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder could not? If any superhero film since The Dark Knight deserves Oscar lovin’, it’s Wonder Woman. Compared to others of its kind, it may as well be a masterpiece.

While Wonder Woman centers on an Amazon exploring the world of man during World War I, another recent film takes the reverse approach — centering on a man exploring the world of the Amazon during the same period. (It is also released by Amazon Studios, for some added Amazon oomph.)

Based on the bestseller by David Gann, The Lost City Of Z is the true story of explorer Percy Fawcett and his belief in a lost civilization in the Amazon rain forest. At the time of Fawcett’s first foray into the woods, Machu Picchu had not yet been discovered and there was severe doubt from Britain’s “Royal Geographic Society” that anything greater than savages could exist in the region. Fawcett, in turn, believes these people were more capable and advanced than turn-of-the-century Brits are giving them credit for.

I entered The Lost City Of Z knowing only that it was based on a nonfiction bestseller and took place in the Amazon. I knew nothing about Fawcett himself, nor how his quest concluded. This turned out to be a very good thing for my enjoyment of the film — it contained more suspense for me than it might to someone who read even a brief description of the film or book its based on. I was surprised, for example, that The Lost City Of Z depicts not one, but several journeys into the jungle, returning with Fawcett back to England between quests and exploring how his lengthy intercontinental jaunts are affecting his wife and children.The Lost City Of Z is reminiscent of Heart Of Darkness, of course, particularly in its theme of obsession with an unknown, untamed jungle. Gray doesn’t get too caught up in the ensuing madness like Francis Ford Coppola did in Apocalypse Now, however. Fawcett is preoccupied with his pursuit, but the movie isn’t so tunnel-visioned, remaining at a distance that is more reminiscent of classical Hollywood stories than most contemporary ones. The film uses visual symbolism and fantasy sparingly, presented with a stiff-upper-lip reserve that feels appropriate for the setting and period (early 20th century and beyond World War I). The Lost City Of Z has learned many things from great man-versus-nature adventure stories that preceded it, without being too beholden to any one of them.

There’s a hint of Jaws in the relationship between Fawcett (played with maximum Brad Pittness by Charlie Hunnam) and Henry Costin (a very bearded and distinctly un-heartthrobby Robert Pattinson). Brody’s belief in the killer Great White that is initially ridiculed and ignored by the higher-ups certainly feels like the cinematic model for Fawcett’s quest, and though Hunnam sells it, the reason why this particular fixation hits this particular character is vague. We know Fawcett seeks the glory that a major discovery like this could bestow upon his name, but Fawcett’s fascination grows more urgent and we never quite learn why. It feels like the answer should have come up in the bond between Fawcett and Corbin, which is more suggested by the screenplay than felt. Costin’s character is underdeveloped — the dynamic between these two men is never as compelling as Brody and Hooper’s partnership in Jaws. The story might have been even more poignant if we believed more that this fixation on the City of Z was a shared madness of both men, and then one of them gradually woke up from the spell while the other succumbed further to fantasy, eventually substituting his son as a replacement for Corbin. (That is the story we get, more or less — but we have to dig a little to get to it.)

This isn’t so much a flaw of Gray’s film as it is an afterthought about how it might have been even more gripping than it already is. Gray doesn’t seem to want us to feel or identify with Fawcett’s Amazon obsession. At many points, it asks us to pause and reflect whether Fawcett’s quest is worth the sacrifices he’s making at home. As Fawcett’s wife Nina, Sienna Miller gets a meatier role than we expect from the wife of an adventurer. Fawcett’s lengthy trips into the wild frustrate Nina and their children, but rather than make Nina the naggy spouse begging her hero to “come home,” both she and Fawcett’s son Jack long to become a part of Percy’s adventures — a far more compelling choice. (Jack is played by Marvel’s once and future Spider-Man, Tom Holland.) This focus on Fawcett’s family is another Spielbergian nod to Jaws, and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind even moreso. The story is at least as much about what Fawcett is giving up back home than it is his adventuring.

The Lost City Of Z might have been a pointed “be careful what you wish for” tale, but neither the film nor its characters condemn Fawcett for his quest. We are left to conclude for ourselves whether or not these pursuits are worth the perils they put us in. Like David Fincher’s Zodiac, another masterful tale of men’s shared obsession with an enigma, The Lost City Of Z both does and does not solve its central mystery, presenting us with a likely answer while raising enough doubt in our minds that we question such easy answers. Gray’s film is deceptively simple and straight-forward in its storytelling, but thematically gnarled and complex. The final shot alone demands that we pause and reconsider what this story is really about.

The film sheds little light on what actually does await these explorers in the Amazon, and doesn’t instruct us how to feel about that. The jungle and its inhabitants remain as ethereal and unknowable at the end of the film as they are in the beginning. That’s the right choice, even if it’s a rather unsettling one in terms of Hollywood epics. Gray’s daring in concluding this film in such an abstract way — more Malick than Spielberg, more Lynch than Lean in the end — elevates the film above what could have otherwise been just another sturdy historical drama. The Lost City Of Z is both episodic and epic, with a reach that exceeds its grasp in the best way possible, suggesting themes that linger in the mind, even though they’re barely nodded to in the film’s text. Though it came and went from theaters with little fanfare, I hope Amazon Studios finds a way to get the film the attention it deserves.

*

“It was a mistake. I didn’t hate her. I wasn’t disgusted with her. I was afraid. At that moment, I felt small, like… like I’d lacked experience, like I’d never be on her level, like I’d never be enough for her or something like that, you know what I’m saying? But, what I did not get, she didn’t care. She wasn’t looking for that guy anymore. She was… she was looking for me, for the Bob. Butby the time I figure this all out, it was too late, man. She moved on, and all I had to show for it was some foolish pride, which then gave way to regret. She was the girl, I know that now. But I pushed her away. So, I’ve spent every day since then chasing Amy… so to speak.”

After a careful examination of the evidence, I’ve come to a conclusion:

Kevin Smith is not even supposed to be here today.

Back in 1990s, the New Jersey-born amateur auteur made Clerks, which — along with a handful of other titles — was a game-changer for independent cinema, and perhaps for comedy itself. Clerks was not the first film to put a couple of not-so-bright slacker dudes front and center. By this point, we’d already had two servings each of Bill And Ted and Wayne’s World, and other nerd-glorifying titles.

But Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth were the butt of the joke in their comedies, whereas Kevin Smith positioned his protagonists as laid-back heroes, of a sort. Smith isn’t afraid to call his characters out on their shit — in fact, that’s what the majority of the running time in his films consists of. And since most of Smith’s central characters are proxies for himself, he’s really just doing a lot of self-therapy and bringing us along for the ride.

This was fine — novel, even — in the 1990s, but pop culture grew up in the interim. Kevin Smith mostly didn’t. More than 20 years after the release of his auspicious debut, and exactly 20 years after the release of his most widely-praised movie, Smith is still more or less doing what he always did, with diminishing returns.

To be fair, Smith has stepped off his beaten path a time or two — witness Red State and Tusk (the latter of which I haven’t seen… but I think I get the gist). But to the degree that these represent a maturing of Smith’s stylings, they also still feel mired in juvenile obsessions and “see what I did there?” fan service, at least in concept.

In a perfect world, Kevin Smith’s early efforts might be quaint, charming signs of a greater talent to come. They seemed that way at the time. Instead, the “View Askewniverse” films like Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma are still pretty much the sum total of what Smith has had to offer over a nearly 25-year career. More often than not, his subsequent films have been riffs on the same ideas, often featuring some of the same characters, if not direct sequels.

I know Smith himself is involved in plenty non-cinematic efforts — podcasts, comic books — and I imagine they please a number of his fans. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Kevin Smith the person, nor condemn his overall value to pop culture. Here, I am looking only at his films — the three overwhelmingly considered to be his best films, at least historically — and making a personal judgment about how they hold up for me:

They don’t.

(Mostly.)

CLERKS

• Release Date: October 19, 1994
• Budget: $27,575 + $230,000 (post-production)
• Domestic Total Gross: $3.2 million
• Metacritic: 70

I’ll admit, this is a bad moment in history for me to be looking at a body of films that rather unimaginatively examine the psyche of the straight white male. A straight white male viewpoint is as valid and worthwhile as any other, of course. I know many straight white males. (Don’t we all?)

But the straight white male majority has asserted a rather cartoonish stronghold over our nation in 2017, somehow, and if there’s one thing we don’t need more of in our culture right now, it’s the “heterosexual Caucasian with a penis” perspective.

That isn’t Kevin Smith’s fault, of course. He made Clerks and Chasing Amy as a reaction to the cinematic heroes that dominated the big screen in the 80s and early 90s — Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to name a few. There was still a lot of celebration of machismo in mainstream culture at the time, to the extent that these bromances sometimes bordered on homoerotic (something Smith really likes pointing out in his films). But in the years since, we’ve seen the rise of Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow, amongst so many others. The lazy, not-so-bright, unremarkable white dude who somehow lands a supermodel by the end of the movie… through no action of his own, usually, but because an unremarkable white dude also wrote the screenplay.

In Clerks, we’re meant to sympathize with Dante and Randal, even if we aren’t supposed to condone everything that comes out of their mouths. Smith considers other points of view, sort of, but ultimately he’s siding with the titular clerks, because they’re him. Dante’s ex is so traumatized by an appalling sexual experience she goes catatonic, but she’s just the butt of a joke here. He wants to get back with her until that experience, at which point he decides to go back to the other woman who is too good for him in this story. Dante (and Smith’s) incredulity  that his ex might be better off with a smart, sensitive, successful Asian guy is problematic, too. In Smith’s View Askewniverse, average-looking guys with no money and dim prospects for the future deserve hot women because… umm… why?

Yes, Smith points this out in hid humor. He knows these guys aren’t worthy of these woman, but in the end he shrugs and gives them what they want anyway. It’s not that plenty of other filmmakers haven’t done this (and worse, like the date rape endorsement in Sixteen Candles). It’s just that Smith’s entire oeuvre rests upon this kind of entitlement. There was probably plenty of room to have fun with the “geek gets the girl” archetype back in the 90s, but in 2017, it’s grown tiresome to see a beautiful woman’s affection used as a reward… especially when the protagonist has done nothing to earn it.

As a debut feature and a time capsule, Clerks is absolutely fine. It’s still pretty amusing, for all its shagginess. Too many Kevin Smith wannabes have made films that look and sound like this in the interim, and technology has advanced enough that most amateur efforts these days are a lot more polished than Clerks ever was. Today, Clerks feels like a B+ effort from a sophomore in film school, and it’s difficult to think back to 1994, when so few were doing this sort of thing, and Smith would get an automatic “A” for being the only guy who showed up.

That’s a pretty good way to start a career, as long as the next effort has a little more polish…

CHASING AMY

• Release Date: April 4, 1997
• Budget: $250,000
• Domestic Total Gross: $12 million
• Metacritic: 71

“A little movie with big truths, a work of such fierce intelligence and emotional honesty that it blows away the competition when it comes to contemporary romantic comedy.” 

— Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas (perfect score)

“Whatever Miramax was hoping for when it decided to bankroll films by Kevin Smith, it surely wasn’t Chasing Amy, the awful third installment of his ‘two guys hanging out’ trilogy, begun with the over-praised Clerks, and followed by the ludicrously bad Mallrats. The words ‘written and directed by Kevin Smith’ are now an instruction to run very fast out of the theater. Do not pay money to see this movie. Do not rent it when it comes out on video.”

—Washington Post, Eric Brace  (worst possible score)

I tried to watch Mallrats. It didn’t work out. That might be for the better, since I’d already watched four Kevin Smith films (and two episode of the Clerks animated series) in preparation for the podcast, and a little View Askewniverse goes a long way.

Clerks still has its charms, in large part because Smith’s stories align better with shoddy camerawork and low production value than they do with a more ambitious budget. When the scope of Smith’s stories gets bigger, his writing typically stays at the same small-scale level, and it just feels… off. And that’s apparent in Chasing Amy, which keeps the low-key vibe of Clerks but attempts a more emotionally ambitious storyline.

The 90s were an unfortunate moment when it felt like gay characters needed to be acknowledged in cinema, but every straight character had to steadfastly assert that he was not gay whenever the topic arose. Smith was far from the only straight white guy to use this to comedic effect, but I’m not sure anyone else dipped into to that well more often over the years. It’s forgivable in Clerks, but grows more problematic through Chasing Amy and Clerks II, the climactic set piece of which involves a leather-clad gay man having sex with his donkey.

In isolation, Smith’s gay jokes are harmless enough. In aggregate, it starts to feel like the guy has some issues he needs to work through privately before he unleashes them on us. This brand of comedy stopped being funny before Smith stopped abusing it, and what’s left is pretty aggressively obtuse by today’s standards.

Alyssa, played by Joey Lauren Adams, is an intriguing character. Smith obviously spent some time considering her point of view, and the way he renders her emotional dilemma is interesting. I’m on board for stories about fluid sexuality, whether those characters identify as gay or straight (or don’t identify either way). The problem with Chasing Amy is not that Alyssa, who identifies as lesbian, falls in love with a man — it’s that she falls in love with Kevin Smith.

Ben Affleck plays Holden, the Kevin Smith proxy we get in almost every one of his films. (In addition to the actual Kevin Smith, who plays Silent Bob in so many of them.) Like Dante from Clerks, Holden is a pretty simple dude with a love of comic books who’s most significant relationship in life is with his also-simple, also-white, also-comic-book-loving best friend, who is exactly like the protagonist except less sensitive and more of an outspoken jerk. But in Clerks, Randal was funny and good-natured underneath it all. Jason Lee’s Banky is an atrocious monster.

Part of this is 1997. Part of this is Jason Lee’s performance. Part of this is Kevin Smith. Banky was meant to be homophobic and misogynistic in 1997, but ultimately likable. The empathy hasn’t aged well, however. Using words like “bitch,” “dyke,” and “faggot” frequently and derisively, Banky’s behavior is pretty inexcusable, even if we’re meant to believe that this is due to his repressed homosexuality. The film itself does very little to convince us that this is the source of Banky’s anger — Smith had no problem imagining a rich sexual history for Alyssa, but stops short of considering what Banky’s sexuality really feels like. It’s not that we come away from Chasing Amy thinking Kevin Smith hates gay people — far from it. It’s nice that he tried, but his reach exceeded his grasp in Chasing Amy. He explores the straight male fantasy of girl-on-girl action, with a fleeting nod to male homosexuality.

Once again, the Kevin Smith proxy lands the woman who is hotter, smarter, and more appealing in just about every way. But this time, she sacrifices her entire sexual orientation to be with him! Why? What is it about Holden that drags a gay woman back into the closet? I can imagine a decent version of Chasing Amy about the Alyssa character falling in love with an entirely different man — one who doesn’t remind us of Kevin Smith. But the way it plays out here is so obviously a wish fulfillment fantasy on Smith’s part that it defies plausibility.

I admire Smith’s aim to include gays and lesbians in his Askewniverse. Hooper is a refreshing, worthy addition to this otherwise familiar cast of characters. In 1997, it was hard to find stories that represented these people well. But now that we see lesbians and gay men telling their own stories more often, Smith’s attempt to squeeze them into his rather limited worldview feels clumsy. Ultimately, both Alyssa and Banky’s sexualities are primarily used as obstacles for the Smith-like protagonist to reckon with, and he ends up alone because… that’s too much work for him? Smith’s discomfort with female sexuality is raised again, more seriously and less comedically than in Clerks. He gives Alyssa a fair shake, but did we need another story about a guy who can’t deal with the fact that the girl he likes wasn’t a pure and innocent virgin before they met.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the one scene I truly liked is the one that Holden doesn’t figure in — Alyssa, having to tell her (gay) friends that the new love of her life is a man. Smith works best when he gets out of his own way — imagine if the whole film had been proxy-free?

DOGMA

• Release Date: November 12, 1999
• Budget: $10 million
• Domestic Total Gross: $30.7 million
• Metacritic: 62

Dogma stands apart from a lot of Smith’s movies for having a real plot, even though the juvenile sense of humor remains intact. It also features a more talented and diverse set of actors than any View Askewniverse movie before (or since?). Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek, Chris Rock, and Linda Fiorentino bring a little something different to the sameness of Smith’s previous movies. (It’s amazing what you can do when you cast real actors, isn’t it?)

The execution is still pretty shaggy — the film makes a $10 million budget look pretty cheap, and the dialogue is rambling and exposition-heavy. In Dogma, Smith wrestles with his Catholic upbringing the same way he wrestles with sexual insecurity in Clerks and Chasing Amy, but the former lends a little more mileage to a feature screenplay.

In my eyes, Dogma is still Smith’s best effort at doing something “different.” He assembled the best cast he’s ever worked with, wrote a story with actual stakes, and managed to represent a spectrum of competent, empowered women who weren’t first and foremost romantic/sex objects pretty well in the process (for what I’d venture to say was the first and only time). It’s telling that Jason Lee’s apocalypse-craving demon Azrael seems somehow less evil than his Banky character in Chasing Amy, and Matt Damon easily bests Ben Affleck in the Matt-and-Ben scenes, as you might expect by pitting Talented Mr. Ripley-era Matt against Forces Of Nature-era Ben. Overall, the film is a funny, entertaining ride with just enough gravitas to sustain Smith’s cruder comedic beats. (I could do without the shit monster, though.)

Following Dogma, Smith fell down the Jay-and-Silent-Bob rabbit hole again by giving them their own movie, in addition to a Clerks sequel and a Clerks animated series. He also made hit-or-miss titles like Jersey Girl, Cop Out, and Zack And Miri Make A Porno. (Cop Out, the first movie he didn’t write, sadly remains his biggest box office hit.) It was around this time that Smith probably became more notable for his podcasts, comic books, books, and other endeavors than his filmmaking output. Films like Red State and Tusk have been interesting departures from the View Askewniverse, but box office success has eluded him, even when filmmakers who capitalized on his brand of slacker comedy went on to make blockbuster hits. He was also long-rumored to be involved in a Superman movie, long before the current wave of superheroes continually smashed box office records.

Smith’s films are reminiscent of a halcyon time before comic books dominated the pop culture landscape. It’s hard to remember an era when being a “nerd” was actually nerdy. Keeping this in mind, it’s a little easier why Dante, Holden, Jay, Silent Bob, and the rest of these guys are so glorified in Smith’s films. At the time, they weren’t the dominant force in pop culture.

But now they are. Reality TV became popular in the years after Smith’s debut, and now we’re inundated with stories about unambitious, unremarkable people doing poorly in their humdrum jobs. Many of the biggest comedians of the 2000s are also dead ringers for Clerks‘ Dante — like Seth Rogen, and just about every character he’s played. Of course, we now also have web series, many with the rambling dialogue, low production value, and juvenile humor Sundance deemed cinema-worthy in the 90s. Smith was bold in 1994, showing that just about anyone can make a movie about anything. (His movies are, in a way, a less skillful version of Seinfeld, the “show about nothing.”) Now, we live in a world where everyone is filming and showing off their very average lives via social media.

In the 90s, Smith was a chill white dude making movies for other chill white dudes, and it worked — he grew a devoted fan base, and for a brief moment, seemed poised to take Hollywood by storm. He was the It Slacker. But then he kind of slacked on that. The various sins of Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma would be easy to shrug off if Smith had gone on to bigger and better things afterward. Unfortunately, so many of his movies seem tethered to Smith’s own limited world view — which, contrary to his branded “View Askewniverse,” is basically the very opposite of askew at this point. The titles of his books, like My Boring Ass Life, could easily be reality TV series. Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good could be the autobiography of our current president. It’s not Smith’s fault that what once was niche is now so mainstream… or is it?

Smith makes movies about guys like him, hanging out with the same handful of characters, many of whom are his real-life friends. That’s fun for him, and occasionally the audience. But I, for one, have lost interest in Smith’s shtick, at least until pony learns a new trick. I don’t know if any filmmaker’s entire body of work has ever aged so poorly in such a short time.

I still like Dogma, though!

Catch the latest When We Were Young episode on Kevin Smith here and subscribe here!

“Maybe Michael couldn’t commit to this marriage, so he created a delusion… produced an unconscious, psychosomatic manifestation of… I’m better with food. Okay? You’re Michael. You’re in a fancy French restaurant. You order crème brûlée for dessert. It’s beautiful, it’s sweet, it’s irritatingly perfect. Suddenly, Michael realizes he doesn’t want crème brûlée. He wants something else…”

“What does he want?”

“Jell-O.”

“Jell-O? Why does he want Jell-O?”

“Because he’s comfortable with Jell-O!”

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the union of a pretty woman and a talented filmmaker. If anyone can show just cause why they should not be joined — well, that’s too bad! It happened in 1997.

In honor of wedding season, our hosts share their childhood visions of holy matrimony before revisiting two nuptial-themed films by Aussie auteur P.J. Hogan. First, we say “I do” to 1994’s Muriel’s Wedding, a quirky drama that’s not nearly as terrible as Muriel herself, starring Toni Collette. Then,  we attend My Best Friend’s Wedding, a unconventional rom-com that has our hosts thoroughly divided.

Is Rupert Everett’s scene-stealing George a dated stereotype, or a monumental achievement in queer representation in summer blockbusters? Is Julia Roberts playing a heinous sociopath, or… a lovably heinous sociopath? Most importantly: will Jell-O always be bested by crème brûlée?

Say a little prayer for us, because contrary to rom-com tradition, happy endings are not guaranteed on this podcast. Listen here and subscribe here.

MURIEL’S WEDDING

Release Date: March 10, 1995
Budget: $9 million
Opening Weekend: $244,969
Domestic Total Gross: $15.1 million
Worldwide: $15.5 million
Metacritic: 63

I missed Muriel’s Wedding when it came out, though I remember seeing trailers at the beginning of other VHS tapes and posters in my local video store. It always looked quirky and fun, though it was probably a tad too adult for me upon its initial release. Mostly, I remember Abba’s “Waterloo,” a song I was unfamiliar with but found insanely catchy. (I did not yet know about Abba’s dangerous earworms.)

Muriel’s Wedding feels absolutely Australian. It is a dramedy with a tone all its own, and only loosely follows a coherent narrative arc. Few romantic comedy heroines steal from family members as a major plot point. Few comic relief sidekicks get a tumor and lose the ability to walk over the course of the story. One can imagine a much broader version of this story, focusing more on Muriel’s engagement to a hunky South African swimmer. Muriel’s Wedding isn’t any of the movies a Hollywood screenwriter would have turned it into, and on some levels that’s frustrating, because there’s definitely more comedic potential to be mined from these situations. As great as Toni Collette’s performance is, I never truly got the sense that I really knew Muriel.

What I do appreciate about Muriel’s Wedding is the way it makes a young(ish) woman’s fetishization of weddings tragic, and then lets her overcome this tragedy. Like many single women her age, Muriel dreams of a perfect wedding to a perfect groom as the tonic that will cure her imperfect, aimless life. It’s her friendship with Rhonda (a delightful Rachel Griffiths) that most promisingly elevates her self-esteem and status in the world, but insecurity with being an independent woman threatens this friendship as Muriel pursues a sham marriage instead. What seems like a one-note joke at first, however, blossoms into a truly interesting romance (sort of), as David the hunky swimmer (Daniel Lapane) finds some genuine affection for Muriel, and she realizes this isn’t the kind of love she needs in her life after all.

Do I wish Muriel’s Wedding had taken more time to explore some of its deeper, darker themes? I do. For me, Muriel’s Wedding is really about three movies in one, and I only get a little bit of each of them. I want more about Muriel and Rhonda taking on the “mean girls” (a la Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion, I guess), and more between Muriel and David. (And maybe one more scene where Muriel’s sister tells she’s “terrible.”) That doesn’t really diminish my enjoyment of the film as it is, though on the whole, I find it somewhat less than satisfying.

MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING

Release Date: June 20, 1997
Budget: $38 million
Opening Weekend: $7.4 million
Domestic Total Gross: $127.1 million
Worldwide: $299.3 million
Metacritic: 50

My Best Friend’s Wedding is probably my personal favorite romantic comedy of all time, and undoubtedly my favorite rom-com of the 90s. The 70s have Annie Hall, the 80s have When Harry Met Sally, and… okay, I know a lot of people would not rank My Best Friend’s Wedding up there with those titles. It’s definitely aiming for a different vibe. In one sense, it harkens back to the great screwball rom-coms of the 1930s and 40s, with a broad plot that works best when held at some distance from reality. In another, it maintains a fraction of the stubborn Australian shagginess P.J. Hogan delivered in full force in Muriel’s Wedding. Both films are about not-so-admirable women who invent fake weddings to further their own agendas, engaging in rather questionable behavior along the way.

What I love about My Best Friend’s Wedding is that it doesn’t do this as a quirky Aussie import, but in the guise of a big, splashy Hollywood rom-com starring Julia Roberts. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I love the way it snuck into movie theaters in 1997 and took moviegoers who’d gone to see Julia get the guy (again) by surprise. My Best Friend’s Wedding satisfies all the requirements of a romantic comedy while defying everything we’ve come to expect from one. The heroine does not get her man, nor does she find a suitable replacement. There’s no real silver lining for Jules in this film — a nice dance with George, sure, but we also believe it’s possible that she really did let the love of her life get away, and will perhaps never find anyone she loves more deeply. What other romantic comedy better informs the women (and men) in the audience that it’s okay to be alone? That “winning” the love of the girl or guy you want isn’t the most important thing? That, in the end, it’s better to do the right thing and be able to live with yourself than lie, cheat, and trick your way into romance?

I don’t want to rail against the entire genre, but there are plenty of fucked up messages validated by Hollywood romances. In my eyes, My Best Friend’s Wedding is the lone corrective to them all. In the 20 years since its release, I don’t think any other rom-com has been quite as daring, particularly not a big studio movie with a major leading lady. Ronald Bass’ script allows Jules to be near-sociopathic in her cruelty to Michael and Kimmy, but Roberts’ starry performance keeps us along for the ride. There’s a deep moral quandary that emerges about halfway through this movie, as it begins to dawn on the audience — we don’t actually want Jules to break Michael and Kimmy up, or to see her end up with this guy. We’re conditioned to think that it’s definitely going to happen, because what Julia Roberts rom-com would end with Julia Roberts alone? We root against the tropes of the entire romantic comedy genre, and it creates genuine suspense. Not only is “Will she get the guy?” a real question in this movie, which it isn’t in virtually every other romantic comedy ever made, but so is: “Do I even want her to?”

I don’t remember many other studio movies that have made me feel so torn between my loyalties to a protagonist and my own moral fiber, let alone romantic comedies. My Best Friend’s Wedding actively participates in the romantic comedy genre while stealthily deconstructing it from within, and you don’t know what it’s really up to until the end. This is my preferred mode of entertainment — which should surprise no one who knows my appreciation of Scream and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. My Best Friend’s Wedding is, in ways, the Scream of the romantic comedy genre, and ultimately takes a very favorable attitude toward women. So many screenwriters would position rich, blonde, beautiful Kimmy as a vapid bitch — but as played by Cameron Diaz, she’s neither. She’s depicted as naive and privileged, but we also see that there’s a real person underneath, and by the end of the film we wish her well. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, it’s okay to be either the traditional blushing bride or the spinster cynic. In most rom-coms, the endings are already prescribed. My Best Friend’s Wedding forces its characters to actually work for their respective endings, be they happy or bittersweet.

Of course, there’s one other factor that makes My Best Friend’s Wedding a landmark of 90s cinema, and that’s Rupert Everett as George. He wasn’t the first gay best friend to appear in a romantic comedy, and was far from the last — after My Best Friend’s Wedding, sassy gay sidekicks became the cliche, to the extent that gay people had to fight against being seen as mere window dressing in lesser films.

But George is the highlight of the movie, in addition to being the voice of reason. Instead of feeling like he exists merely to help Jules through her romantic foibles, George constantly seems like he’s putting his more refined, sophisticated life on pause, deigning to help his hapless girlfriend. Yes, George is the “magical gay” in the tradition of the problematic “magical Negro.” As far as we can tell, he’s flawless, and we get the sense that he’d fix everyone’s problems in five minutes if they all just listened to him. Everett’s performance is so lively, though, that I can’t help but see George as a fully developed, fully realized person whose backstory is perhaps as colorful as Everett’s own personal history. He’s definitely gay — he leads a Dionne Warwick sing-along! — but it’s still rare to see a gay male treated with this much respect in a studio endeavor. None of the comedy surrounding George comes at his expense or panders to cheap stereotypes. Nor does the character overcorrect for his sexuality by being overly hetero-acting. He has more charm and charisma than almost any other supporting character I can think of — it’s a shame he didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it.

As I describe in the podcast, George is also perhaps the first gay character I saw growing up who wasn’t somehow tragic. In the 80s and 90s, most depictions of gay characters I’d seen dealt with bullying, drugs, AIDS — or all of the above. My Best Friend’s Wedding doesn’t have time to deal with George’s actual sexuality, perhaps in part because it might have been polarizing to do so in this movie at that moment. But you know what? I actually greatly prefer that George seem asexual than to have some tossed-off crack about his promiscuity, which is what we usually get with George-like gay sidekicks.

Back in 1997, for me, George was merely a really fun character in a movie I liked quite a lot, but looking back I think it was probably helpful to see a confident, handsome, hilarious gay man (who did not have AIDS) on the big screen in a major studio’s summer blockbuster comedy. Rupert Everett became a legitimate sex symbol after playing George, the guy women knew was gay but still found sexy. That’s an important milestone on the way to Will & Grace, which is basically just a sitcom version of the Jules-and-George relationship, and where we are now, when a mostly hopeful, only-sort-of-tragic gay drama just won Best Picture. To the extent that gay characters appear in studio movies these days, it’s almost always as sidekicks, and none feel as fresh or vital as George in My Best Friend’s Wedding did in 1997.

I find My Best Friend’s Wedding so bold, original, and admirable in so many ways. It’s definitely a broad comedy that stretches plausibility in its plotting, but what rom-com isn’t? I think it’s wonderful that TriStar let Bass and Hogan let Jules be “pond scum” and conclude the movie dancing with a dashing gay dude, which on its own terms serves as a truly happy ending. I can’t think of any other major romantic comedy that took this kind of risk, before or since. Twenty years later, I find My Best Friend’s Wedding just as revolutionary as it was in 1997, which says a lot for P.J. and Ronald and Rupert and Julia and not a lot for the studio comedies made since.

Forever and ever it’ll stay in my heart.

*

“You remind me of the babe.”

“What babe?”

“Babe with the power.”

“What power?

“Power of voodoo.”

“Who do?”

“You do.”

“Do what?

“Remind me of the babe.”

I don’t have all that much to say about The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth that I didn’t say on the podcast. I have fond memories of Jim Henson’s work from my youth, but never saw The Dark Crystal (until just before the podcast) and I’ve always seen Labyrinth as more of a quirky curiosity than a cherished childhood classic. In the case of the latter, it turns out that digging into the fairly complex themes and nuances of the story is, for me, more pleasurable than watching the film itself.

THE DARK CRYSTAL

Release Date: December 17, 1982
Opening Weekend: $4.7 million
Budget: $15 million
Worldwide Box Office: $40.6 million

“Most surprising is the lack of either humor or wit, especially in the designs for the mythical creatures. More than anything else, they seem inefficient, as if no order of evolution could ever have thrown them up, even in an off millennium. Miss Piggy would not be kind to The Dark Crystal.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Both films are a wonderful display of Henson’s singular talents — and, like many visually sumptuous stories, I wish as much craft had been put into the storytelling as the puppetry. Both movies are a little too straightforward and on the nose, though they’re stuffed to the gills with charming characters and brilliant ideas. The Dark Crystal is fascinating to behold with nary a human on screen, but it’s also very remote. It all feels like it’s happening in a faraway land, long ago, without real emotional resonance. I was happy to see the characters move as they did, but the story could have been about anything.

Labyrinth is a much more accessible film, one that deals with universal subject matter like the awkward teenage years between childhood and adulthood. (This, more than anything else, probably, is what we tend to cover on the podcast.) The ways Labyrinth expresses those universal themes is totally bonkers, however, involving a gender-bending David Bowie and an omnipresent, eye-catching mound in his “perve pants.”

Even moreso than The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth is bursting with imagination and a lovable puppet supporting cast, giving us more to hang onto than we got in The Dark Crystal. (It also helps that this one has a sense of humor.) I personally loved Sarah’s distraction as she struggles to put away her literal childhood things, with the Junk Lady trying to remind her of each item’s sentimental value in order to stop her from reaching her goal.

The limbo between youth and adulthood can stretch out infinitely (like a labyrinth!), and when growing up gets particularly tough it is tempting to stop moving forward and act like a kid again. Sarah accomplishes a grown-up goal — saving her baby brother — while managing not to succumb to the Goblin King’s bulging charms. In the end, she gets to keep her fairyland friends a while, holding onto some innocence even while learning a lesson about being selfless.  Alas, getting to this point across requires making Jennifer Connolly act as petulant as possible — it feels like her character should perhaps be a year or two younger than she is, with her love of make-believe. Connolly is also saddled with a lot of tricky dialogue, a good deal of which is spoken to herself or no one in particular.

And then there’s David Bowie — who is magnificent, of course, in the campiest, cheesiest way an actor can be. I can’t remember how old I was when I first viewed Labyrinth, but I know the hair, makeup, and costuming definitely set off the alarms of abnormality even then. This was probably before I’d ever seen a man taking on feminine characteristics as something that was supposed to be — well, I still don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Sexy? Scary? Cool? A little of all of these?

I’m not sure anything about the Goblin King makes a lick of sense. Does he want the baby, or does he want Sarah? What would he even do with that baby, when he got tired of singing to it? If he wants the baby, why give Sarah a chance to rescue him? If he wants Sarah… well, ew. Sarah must learn that the glam rock star monarch has no power over her, and refuse his offer to be her master/slave. It’s sort of unclear whether staying in this kingdom represents childhood or adulthood — she’d live in a world of fantasy and make-believe forever, but she’d also be responsible for keeping that codpiece satisfied. When she returns home, she’s become less the bratty sister and more of a nurturing mother figure to Toby, and of course she’s going to grow up. But she also made David Bowie keep his anaconda out of her labyrinth, so innocence is not lost.

It’s rare to be so mystified by the lesson a children’s film is trying to impart, but at least it’s an intriguing enigma. There never was and never will be another movie quite like Labyrinth, that’s for sure.

LABYRINTH

Release Date: June 27, 1986
Opening Weekend: $3.5 million
Budget: $25 million (approximate)
Worldwide Box Office: $12.7 million
Metacritic: 60

“With their technical astonishments, Director Henson and Executive Producer Lucas have been faithful to the pioneering Disney spirit. In suggesting the thrilling dilemmas that await a wise child, they have flown worlds beyond Walt.” – Richard Corliss, Time

“Jim Henson knows what he`s doing with his Muppet characters on TV and in the movies. But he’s completely at sea when he tries to create more mature entertainment in the form of such adventure films as The Dark Crystal and now Labyrinth. Both films are really quite awful, sharing a much too complicated plot and visually ugly style. What an enormous waste of talent and money is Labyrinth.” — Gene Siskel

“Your gun is digging into my hip.”

Somebody stop us! In Episode 21, When We Were Young says “alrighty, then!” to a trip back to 1994, when Jim Carrey soared to superstar status in three back-to-back blockbusters — Dumb & Dumber, The Mask, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

We’re not just talking out of our asses here. Clearly, Carrey was one of the most bankable stars of our youth… but how do his rubber-faced hijinks hold up when viewed for the first time as adults? Are these comedies still sssmokin’, or do misogyny and homophobia end up making everyone involved look like a LOOOO-HOOOOO-SER?

It’s the most eye-popping, jaw-dropping, fourth-wall-breaking, 90s-catchphrase-spewing, Cameron Diaz-introducing episode of the podcast yet! So fire up your ’84 sheep dog, kill a couple pretty birds, and prepare to hear the most annoying sound on Earth, because we’re about to spend an entire year with Jim Carrey!

(Seriously… won’t somebody stop us??)

Listen here.

Subscribe here.

This was a particularly fun episode of the podcast for me, because I got to rediscover three significant films from 1994 that I hadn’t seen since at least 1995. Classmates spewing catchphrases from these films stuck out to me more than anything about these films themselves. None of these movies were particular favorites of mine as a child (hence, I never watched them again), so I had very little idea what to expect in taking another look.

ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE
February 4, 1994

Budget: $15 million
Opening Weekend: $12.1 million
Domestic Total Gross: $72.7 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $107.2 million
Metacritic Score: 37

“Jim Carrey stoops to new highs in low comedy: Actually he bends over, flaps his cheeks and introduces the world to butt ventriloquism in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. A riot from start to finish, Carrey’s first feature comedy is as cheerfully bawdy as it is idiotically inventive.” – Rita Kempley, Washington Post

“The movie basically has one joke, which is Ace Ventura’s weird nerdy strangeness. If you laugh at this joke, chances are you laugh at Jerry Lewis, too, and I can sympathize with you even if I can’t understand you. I found the movie a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. Kids might like it. Real little kids.” – Roger Ebert

Having not seen this film since its initial home video release, I remembered next to nothing about it, except that the storyline somehow involved the Miami Dolphins and spawned oh-so-many ubiquitous mid-90s catchphrases. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is a film everyone remembers but is rarely referenced or discussed, at least in my presence. I expected to have very little to say about it.

And boy, oh boy is there a lot to say about Ace Ventura.I wasn’t expecting to like the movie now, given that I didn’t even particularly like it when I was ten years old. At this point in my life, most of Ace Ventura‘s comedy was already too juvenile for me. But I had completely forgotten the movie’s central twist: that Sean Young’s Lieutenant Einhorn turns out to be the male villain in disguise, resulting in Ace Ventura violently stripping her in front of the police before he beats her. This is some Boys Don’t Cry level transphobia, and the fact that it’s played for laughs makes it all the more disturbing. It’s amazing that this movie got away with that in 1994, and that most people didn’t even think about how wrong it was. Hooray for progress?

A cleverer script might have found a way to mock the ways Silence Of The Lambs and The Crying Game portrayed its gender-bending characters. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is not at all clever. Aside from its jokey, backward attitude toward non-gender conformity, which might be forgiven in context of the times, the movie seems completely oblivious about its central promise, never establishing what a “pet detective” does, or why Ace Ventura is one. A broad studio comedy like this doesn’t necessarily need much in the way of establishing a character, but Ace Ventura doesn’t know what it’s parodying, or why its central premise is supposed to be funny. Football, pets, police work, a surprise gender-flip — none of this fits together in a single story without some guiding comedic force behind it. The film’s only “joke” seems to be that Ace Ventura is super obnoxious. That’s it. I can’t think of another movie that so fully squanders such a no-brainer premise.

(For the record, in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the character actually makes sense in comparison, even if it’s not exactly a masterpiece.)

THE MASK
July 29, 1994

Budget: $23 million
Opening Weekend: $23.1 million
Domestic Total Gross: $119.9 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $351.6 million
Metacritic Score: 56

“The Mask underscores the shrinking importance of conventional storytelling in special effects-minded movies… Far more energy has gone into stretching Mr. Carrey’s face, twirling his legs and conceiving animation-style gags for him to exploit than into creating a single interesting character or memorable line. Even more egregiously than most of this summer’s blockbusters, The Mask tells a story that wouldn’t be worth telling without tricks.” – Janet Maslin, New York Times

“It is said that one of the indispensable qualities of an actor is an ability to communicate the joy he takes in his performance. You could say The Mask was founded on that.” – Roger Ebert

The Mask is the film that provided the biggest question mark for me, going into the podcast. I knew enough about Ace Ventura and Dumb And Dumberer to know that they weren’t stealth sophisticated comedies that had been unfairly dismissed over the years. I knew what audiences these films were aiming for, and that that audience wasn’t me.

The Mask had a bit more of an X-factor in my mind, given that it was based on a comic book character and had a bit more style to it. It was also the biggest hit of these three films and introduced the world to a very ravishing Cameron Diaz. Our podcast on Roger Rabbit informed that I’m not always up for zany, cartoon-like characters interacting with a hyper-stylized “real world.”But you know what? Sometimes I am, and The Mask gets it right in that respect. Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, a mild-mannered banker who wishes he had the confidence to “get the girl.” (Any girl will do, really.) Then he finds the titular mask, and becomes the titular Mask, unleashing his bonkers id, which owes a lot of its best ideas to Tex Avery.

In its funniest moments, The Mask is basically a live-action cartoon with the perfect star, Jim Carrey. His inner horndog reminds us of Pepe Le Pew, inner rage reminds us of Elmer Fudd, his unstoppable energy reminds us of the Tasmanian Devil. Carrey and the screenplay rely on some rather overdone impressions and film references, but a lot of it is truly entertaining, such as Carrey’s sassy salsa to “Cuban Pete,” which has the police dancing and singing along. (A much better use of the police than Ace Ventura’s groaning and vomiting transphobic cops.)

The crime plot wears out its welcome in the end, with a villain far too tepid to carry the third act of this film. (Luckily, we get Stanley’s dog wearing the mask for a while to liven things up.) The Mask is a film that knows what it’s trying to do and does it pretty well, containing at least a few moments to make you smile, if not laugh aloud. It’s also still one of the best showcases for Carrey as a performer, since he truly brings the character to life underneath all the prosthetics and makeup. (Easier said than done, if you ask the villains from Marvel movies.) I appreciated the film’s knowingly lame Gotham City proxy, Edge City, with Landfill Park being the most romantic spot in town. I also enjoyed the dash of darkness retained from the comic books that let Carrey play the role as a truly dangerous maniac, something he’s turned out to be pretty good at. The Mask isn’t a forgotten gem, but I was glad to revisit it.

DUMB AND DUMBER
December 16, 1994

Budget: $17 million
Opening Weekend: $16.4 million
Domestic Total Gross: $247.3 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $247.3 million
Metacritic Score: 41

Dumb And Dumber isn’t my thing. It just isn’t. I knew that when it was released, and I knew it before watching it for the podcast.

I can laugh at stupidity, but it usually needs to be couched in some cleverness. Ace Ventura is an idiot in a world full of idiots (who are either slightly smarter, or slightly dumber, than he is, with no rhyme or reason). The Mask is ridiculous and silly, but pretty crafty. Pure idiocy doesn’t amuse me much — I gravitate toward characters who are more clueless than incompetent. See: Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion, The Brady Bunch Movies, and (duh) Clueless. This highlights a crucial difference in comedies: when women are stupid in movies, they’re often stupid in a driven way. Romy and Michele decide to claim they invented Post-Its at their high school reunion, but we know what they want to accomplish with this, and they at least think through some of the details before the big lie. Regina George in Mean Girls is dumb enough to eat a bunch of high-calorie protein bars to “lose weight,” but she’s an evil genius about the best ways to undermine and sabotage her frenemies. Dumb And Dumber’s Harry and Lloyd, on the other hand, are wholly incompetent human beings. How did they even get jobs? Should they really be driving? Cher Horowitz and Marcia Brady never make us wonder if they need to be institutionalized, but I questioned this constantly during Dumb And Dumber.

Dumb And Dumber lives up to its title with amiably stupid humor, though the Farrelly brothers aren’t witless. The way Harry and Lloyd’s dumb comments are set up is often pretty clever. A few gags are legitimately funny, even if the script overall is pretty inconsistent about exactly how dumb these guys can be. I appreciated Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ performances, which play off each other well. Jeff Daniels plays Harry as different enough from Lloyd that the manic energy doesn’t get too tiresome. Dumb And Dumber is a passable comedy, though I wish it committed more to the subversive dark comedy that peers in around the edges (particularly in the Unrated edition).

*

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is not really a movie.

Technically, yes, it is a movie, but the experience I have watching it is something different. Upon viewing Lars Von Trier’s Dogville in theaters, I felt like I’d just seen a very intimate and powerful stage production, not a film. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was a little like that, too — the fact that time really is unfolding over the years for these actors, along with their characters, wipes the usual artifice of cinema away.

A Ghost Story is the latest such film. I liken seeing it to going to an artist’s exhibition — the scenes are like individual pieces. You stop there for a minute or two, think about what you’re seeing, what it makes you feel… and then move on.

Despite the word appearing in its title, A Ghost Story isn’t a “story,” exactly. The characters are broadly sketched, stand-ins for humanity at large. Casey Affleck stars as “C,” the titular ghost, performing under a white sheet with eye holes — the kind that might be a cheap, last-minute Halloween costume (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone dressed up like that). Rooney Mara plays “M,” his left-behind girlfriend (maybe wife?). Following his death, C’s ghost stalks out of the morgue and heads back home to his girlfriend, observing as she mourns. As in most ghost stories, he can’t communicate with her or touch her, and she has no idea he’s there. Occasionally, he is capable of some poltergeist-style mischief, but only when he’s very upset, it seems.

You might find the fact that Casey Affleck is delivering most of his performance under a bedsheet ridiculous. It is ridiculous, in the abstract, though it’s surprising how rarely A Ghost Story finds humor in this. (Only two brief scenes featuring subtitles really highlight the absurdity of the situation.) Somehow, this blank white nothing manages to make us feel for him all the more.

On paper, A Ghost Story sounds like the setup for a Ghost-like tale of a man trying to reach out to his beloved from the beyond. You could see it that way. The way I experienced the film, though, it’s not so much about death, but about time… and grief, but not the kind of grief you’d expect.(I suggest experiencing the film for yourself, if you’re interested in doing so, before reading on.)

A Ghost Story is primarily concerned with memory — specifically, the sentimentality we attach to where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and who we’ve been with. Losing a lover in an unexpected accident is, perhaps, the most extreme kind of breakup,but the grief C and M feel in this film could easily be about a much simpler parting of ways, or any form of painful moving on in life. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara’s characters haunt each other after they’re separated. The ghost literally haunts M’s house, while C declines to “go to the light” because he prefers to dwell in the comfort of the past. A flashback tells us more about his reluctance to accept change — M wants to leave their house, and C doesn’t. (He gets his wish… and so does she.)

The argument highlights two different approaches to holding onto the past. M chooses to let go and move on, but that doesn’t mean the ghosts of her past don’t linger. C chooses to stay with what’s familiar. There doesn’t seem to be anything physically binding him to the house, but he doesn’t follow her when she goes out. When she leaves, he waits for her to come back. When she moves, he stays.

It’s not really M herself that C wants or needs. M’s life goes on, and C has no interest in learning where she’ll go from here. All he wants is his experience of her, the memory of what they shared together. For C, clinging to the nostalgia of the past is preferable to looking into the future, and risking it not being as good. (That’s true before he’s dead, too, which is why a more literal version of this story is imaginable — in which C is still alive and makes the same choice… to stay in the house when she leaves him.)A Ghost Story intentionally lacks specificity, because it doesn’t ultimately matter why C feels a connection to this house, and whatever good times they had there. The house stands in for anything we feel nostalgia for, an object or a person or an era. Our pasts are haunted by things no one else can see, no one knows are there.

That’s what memories are. Objects, places, moments and people are important to us, and the “ghosts” of what they mean imbue them with a sense of meaning. Tenants attach deeply personal feeling to a house, but then they leave, and the next tenant sees none of what was there before. They make their own memories, which have nothing to do with what happened there before. C’s ghost represents that sentiment, something intangible no one else could ever observe. Ghosts like C are littered throughout our pasts. No one else will ever see them, or know what they mean to us. That experience is ours alone.

In another flashback, C shares a piece of music he’s produced. M listens patiently, but doesn’t seem moved. She doesn’t feel what he feels. Later, after his death, she listens to the song again, and she does feel something… but what she feels is different than what he felt, or maybe the same thing but too late. The emotions that feel so real are not real to anyone but us. Sometimes, two people seem to share the same thing — love — but do they? Is it really the same thing? Is this a shared experience, or are both parties experiencing it in entirely different ways? There’s no way to ever know.

Time passes very differently in A Ghost Story than any other movie I can think of — sometimes excruciatingly slowly, and sometimes in a blur. The more time that passes after C’s death, the less power he has to “haunt” anyone, or anything. Eventually, the ghost — representing C’s impression upon the world around him while he was alive — becomes obsolete. (Another character briefly enters the story to deliver a monologue about this, which might sum the film’s themes up a bit too neatly.)A Ghost Story takes a radical, jarring turn in its third act, becoming weightier and more portentous than before (somehow). C’s ghost witnesses an event from the distant past. More than anything else in this unusual film, this threw me for a loop… if the ghost is meant to be C’s memories, or the memories other have of him, or his impression on the mortal coil… well, how could that exist before he was even here? Perhaps the point is that as much weight as we give our own grief, there is a history that came before us that is equally raw and wrenching; eventually, we all get swept up into the past, the forgotten sadness of what came before.

There’s nothing special or unique about this particular ghost.

The above is personal interpretation of the film. David Lowery’s offbeat film is open to plenty of other discourse, although it does occasionally narrow its focus (like in that monologue). I don’t know if we’re supposed to believe in A Ghost Story as a literal ghost story, or if it’s looking to cohesively “make sense” from start to finish. For me, the various scenes are ruminations on connected themes.

A Ghost Story isn’t what I’d call an entertaining film. As I mentioned, it’s barely a film at all. Rather, it’s an experience that will reward viewers who sit and have a dialogue with it, who don’t feel the need to grasp every beat of the “story.” It is also best for those willing to be bummed out for 90 minutes, losing themselves in deep thoughts about mortality, memory, and the cosmic pointlessness of human lives.

Before the credits rolled, I had the thought that this could be the most interesting movie I’ve ever seen. Almost two days later, I still can’t think of anything that offers an equivalent experience.

Did I like it? I don’t know.

Fifty years is a long time. Unfortunately, it has not been long enough to distance America from the depicted in Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit. There’s Motown music in the background and the cars look old, but otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single moment of the movie that doesn’t crackle with contemporary relevance. Bigelow’s direction is as frenetic as it has ever been, one-upping the verisimilitude she showed in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. This has become a popular stylistic choice for hard-hitting stories that straddle the line between drama and thriller, from United 93 to Children Of Men.

Bigelow’s latest film falls into this sub-genre, technically, though I’m not sure either “drama” or “thriller” is the best descriptor. Detroit is a horror movie, tense and relentless and deeply upsetting.

Detroit has been released almost exactly 50 years to the day after the events it depicts, a case of police brutality amidst the Detroit riots of 1967. The riots killed 43 people and resulted in over 7,000 arrests. Detroit hones in on a few of those deaths in particular, as several black men and two white teenagers are hold hostage by the police and the National Guard in a motel frequented mainly by African-Americans. It’s a particularly egregious example of Civil Rights-era racial injustice; the events depicted are unique and extreme. If they weren’t, we probably wouldn’t even know about them. Many horrors along these lines have gone unpunished and unrecorded throughout American history.

We hear more about them lately, not because it happens more often, but because now people have the tools to share their stories with a wider audience. You probably know at least a half-dozen victims of police violence by name. If you weren’t already familiar with what went down in the Algiers Motel on July 25, 1967, here are a few more names to add to that list.Detroit focuses primarily on two characters — Larry (Algee Smith), a rising star in the Motown group The Dramatics, and Dismukes (John Boyega), a security officer who attempts to deescalate conflicts between black citizens and white law enforcement. Both are real people. The film’s third lead character is Krauss (Will Poulter), a Detroit PD officer, fictionalized for legal reasons. (Even fifty years after the fact, it’s dicey to pin a white cop with any wrongdoing against black men.)

The centerpiece of the film is an extended sequence set inside the Algiers Motel, where the police are hunting a sniper. A small amount of detective work suggests that there is no sniper — there’s no gun, and none of the suspects are violent — but there’s already one black body on the scene. The police figure they can scare some kind of confession of wrongdoing out of these suspects. After all, it’s a group of young black men in Detroit… how could they not be criminals? The police know it won’t take much wrongdoing on the suspects’ parts to justify the killing they’ve done.

Amongst the group held hostage by the police is Larry, who seems destined for a major singing career, and Greene, an honorably discharged Vietnam veteran. As far as we know, they couldn’t be more innocent, but they’re black and they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and the riots have spun Detroit into a near-apocalyptic frenzy. To their credit, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal don’t make these nice, upstanding guys the sole tragic figures of the movie. What happens to these people is deeply wrong, whether they’re criminals or not. They pose no threat to the police officer. They don’t deserve to be executed based on a bad cop’s judgment call. Two white teenagers are also amongst those brutalized — Julie (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever). They’re also real people. The cops decide that if these girls are “shameless” enough to hang out in a black motel, they must be shameless enough to be prostitutes. These girls suffer their own indignities at the hands of the police — they’re women, and cops can get away with it. What happens to Julie and Karen isn’t more or less horrifying than what happens to the black men in this story — Bigelow’s film is even-handed in saying that this abuse of power is sickening, no matter who the victims are or what they’ve done.

Bigelow is no stranger to controversy, thanks to Zero Dark Thirty, for which she was criticized for not coming down harder on torture tactics. Detroit is the antidote to that particular gripe — the movie is entirely about an inhumane abuse of power. Detroit is still susceptible to criticism as a primarily black story told by primarily white filmmakers. But being white also gives Bigelow and Boal free reign to depict the white cops as heinous racist cowards. In the hands of a black filmmaker, this very same film might be criticized for not being fair to the white characters. For dehumanizing them. For not bothering to show their point of view. In the hands of a black male filmmaker, some audiences might get queasy about the way white women are abused with same unflinching gaze as the black men.

Ultimately, there’s no filmmaker on Earth who can authentically tell every side of a story, but it’s hard to imagine a film with more raw empathy for its black and female characters than Detroit. To work as well as it does, Detroit‘s cops need to be as slimy as they are. I’m glad Boal and Bigelow had the guts to go as far as they do, with so little mercy for the men who were clearly in the wrong that night. The cops aren’t mustache-twirling villains, but they are despicable people committing unspeakable acts for no good reason. Detroit is crystal clear on a few facts: these cops are wrong, the justice system is flawed, and people who didn’t need to die have been murdered in cold blood. It’s a statement that needs to be made, and not just by black filmmakers. Crucially, the white girls aren’t the audience’s “way in” to the story, as white people are in a lot of stories about black people. (See The Help or The Blind Side as recent examples.) Bigelow’s camera captures the humanity of each victim, depicting the pain and horror of what they experience in a way that transcends race and gender identities. She comes as close as a filmmaker can to putting us in these people’s skin.

That’s an effective tool in a horror movie, but in this particular context, it’s a bombshell. Detroit makes us feel the hopelessness and anxiety of being caught in this dehumanizing predicament — not just vulnerable at the hands of a few wicked cops, but vulnerable to an entire system of oppression. In horror movies, the “final girl” often gets away in the end, and in many of them, there’s a sense that her troubles aren’t over. (Occasionally, the killer even pops up for one final scare before a smash cut to black.) In Detroit, it’s painfully obvious that our “final men” are never truly safe from this movie’s villain — never have been, never will be. As long as the system continues to work the way it does, with so little consequence for wrongdoing, the horrors of Detroit could happen again at any moment. Intellectually, this is an idea we’re used to — from Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, from the awareness raised by Black Lives Matter, from the news — but in Detroit, we truly feel it in our bones.

Earlier this year, Jordan Peele’s horror-comedy Get Out made a killing, both figuratively and literally, and managed to be adored by critics and audiences alike. Get Out is savvy entertainment, allowing us to laugh (and scream) at difficult, divisive topics we usually just get angry about. Like Get Out, Detroit equates being black in America with the dread and anxiety experienced by protagonists in a horror movie… to much different effect, of course. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at the very real racial issues Get Out depicts, but the film’s inconclusive, upbeat ending also lets us off the hook. Detroit leaves us hanging on it.

Not every moment of Detroit is handled with as much finesse as its nerve-wracking centerpiece. The third act is shaggy and a bit too traditional in dealing with the aftermath. A handful of powerful moments are dragged down as Bigelow and Boal try to barrel through too much plot too fast. (The third act deserves to be its own movie, but here, should have been condensed to match the tone of earlier sections.)

Detroit has also been called out as exploitative… and is it? Sure. It uses exploitation to its best possible effect. Bigelow doesn’t shy away from violence. Punches sound like they’re hitting our own skulls. There’s a lot of blood, though unlike your typical torture porn gore fest, it’s never “cool” or “fun.” In ways, this is a deeply unpleasant filmgoing experience. Not everybody wants to know what it’s like to be a victim of the majority — particularly those in the majority. But it’s important to know. Bigelow’s film gets about as close as a piece of entertainment can get to experiencing this injustice firsthand — knowing you’ve done nothing to deserve this, there’s nothing you can do to escape, there’s a very real possibility that you could be killed and that it probably won’t even be tried as murder if it happens.

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street was misunderstood by some as an endorsement of the greedy excess it depicted. Zero Dark Thirty got flack for allegedly implying that torture was an effective tactic in finding Osama bin Laden. Anyone who thinks Detroit is an endorsement of excessive force is a nutcase, but some may think the film goes too easy on its villains. That’s the point.

How can we expect Bigelow’s film to punish these men, if we won’t even punish them ourselves? As long as real police officers get away with murder, these stories should not be cathartic. They should barely be palatable, and that’s what this is. If you leave Detroit feeling angry, exploited, punished, or abused… well, good. You should. It’s about time that everyone felt that way, if only for a couple hours in the comfort and safety of a movie theater.Many harrowing historical dramas depict unimaginable atrocities happening to decent people. In contrast to Amistad or 12 Years A Slave, Detroit can’t be considered through the luxury of hindsight. A decade or two ago, white filmgoers might have emerged from the theaters with a sigh of relief, exclaiming, “Thank God that’s over with!” Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many headlines and videos that say otherwise. The fact that this film resonates with so much power is a testament to the activists who have made “Black Lives Matter” a part of our modern lexicon, who made sure that deaths of black men and women at the hands of the police do not go unnoticed… even if they do often go unpunished.

At a time when Christopher Nolan’s solid Dunkirk is getting rave reviews as a tense, experiential masterpiece, Detroit does the same thing, but with more urgency. For all its masterful filmmaking, Dunkirk feels like a very old story. Detroit takes place less than 30 years later, in 1967, but it feels like it’s happening now. Because it is happening now. It’s like watching Schindler’s List while the Holocaust is still happening. This is the war we’re still fighting.

Boal and Bigelow do end the film on a grace note, allowing one character a small beacon of hope. It’s not a happy ending, but it shows that life goes on, even for victims of brutal crimes — or those lucky enough to walk away from them, anyway. Several men in Detroit are robbed of their lives — not just those who died, but also those who survived. Larry ends the film damaged, but not broken. He carves out a niche where he can feel safe in this world, doing all he feels like he can do — hoping and praying that he doesn’t again find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, opposite the wrong cop.

And in a way, that says everything about what’s been going on for the past 50 years.

*

“Are you crying?”

Did a baseball diamond used to be your playground? If so, you’re probably one of the fans who made the Rockford Peaches stars of the most successful baseball movie of all time. Penny Marshall’s World War II-era dramedy is a who’s who of major league 90s names, from Geena Davis to Rosie O’Donnell to Tom Hanks to Madonna. (And Marla Hooch!)

There’s no denying that the film is a feminist feat: a rare sports drama directed by and starring women. A League of Their Own paved the way for so many stories about female athletes to follow, like… uhh… has anyone seen my new red hat?

In honor of the film’s 25th anniversary, the When We Were Young hosts drug their chaperones and trade oven mitts for baseball mitts, debating whether Betty Spaghetti & co. knock it out of the park or drop the ball. And all without letting our noses get shiny!

Listen here.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
July 1, 1992

Budget: $40 million
Opening Weekend: $13.7 million
Domestic Total Gross: $107.5 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $132.4 million
Metacritic Score: 67

I don’t have a particularly storied history with A League Of Their Own, nor a particularly “hot take” on it now. The movie has aged very well. The bookends feel pretty cheesy, but the period stuff is fresh and nuanced, and its female characters are terrific across the board. I’m not sure Dottie’s story is as punchy as I’d like it to be, which I talk about plenty on the podcast. I suspect there’s a more resonant drama hiding somewhere in there, but the one we get works well enough. It’s entertaining from start to finish, with wonderful comedic performances from Madonna, Tom Hanks, Megan Cavanaugh, and Rosie O’Donnell. It’s also the highest-grossing baseball movie ever made! (Yes, that includes the ones about men.)

The terrible sitcom highlights how broad and stereotypical the film could have been, and it’s a tribute to the writers and Penny Marshall that the film never makes any concessions because it’s about women. Obviously, the sexism of the league’s owners and managers and the media play a large part in the story, like that hilarious newsreel. But the story itself is as sports-focused and serious as you’d expect a comparable film about men to be. Dottie and Kit’s sibling rivalry is the same kind we’ve seen in stories about male athletes. If anything, the movie takes winning and losing less seriously, because for these women, it’s a boon just to play the game.

“I thought I knew you
I thought I knew you
I thought I knew you…
Oh well.”

Check out the No Doubt episode here!

No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom has been mentioned on the podcast several times. Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion first introduced me to the band, inspiring me to buy those soundtracks (a nice intro to some 80s music, but No Doubt-less) and, eventually, the Tragic Kingdom.

Revisiting the album was fun. I’d heard the singles many times in the years since, but hadn’t listened through to Tragic Kingdom as an album in a long time. “Just A Girl” and “Sunday Morning” are still by far my standout faves, but it was fun to rediscover songs I’d forgotten about, like “Happy Now” and “Sixteen,” though I instantly remembered almost everything about them.

Tragic Kingdom takes me back to the days when I first discovered actual music. It was the first CD I ever bought (because the Hercules soundtrack doesn’t really count) and it made me feel pretty damn cool for a moment there. Of course, then No Doubt became a bit overexposed, particularly with the success of “Don’t Speak,” and they didn’t quite have the edge most of my friends were looking for anymore. (I was looking for that, too, by proxy.)

I’ve appreciated many of No Doubt’s later efforts, from “New” to Rock Steady and some of Gwen Stefani’s solo stuff, too. It’s enjoyable to hear an album from a female perspective that isn’t known for that. You can hardly find any commentary on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill that doesn’t reference her gender, but No Doubt managed to slip under that radar, for the most part, even thought “Just A Girl” is about as blatantly feminist as you can get.

I’m not sure I’d call Tragic Kingdom a truly great album on the whole. Its tracks range from great to fine, though a spirit of light fun carries over its entirety. It’s also distinct from other 90s music. Yes, the mainstream success of No Doubt helped to usher in an almost-mainstreaming of ska, and may also have been partially to blame for that bizarre swing revival. But when I listen to Tragic Kingdom, I don’t really hear hallmarks of the 90s. I hear a band carving out its own unique sound — a sound that unfortunately got watered down in the band’s post-2000 years. No Doubt has always been pretty good, but they didn’t remain that distinct. Thankfully, at their peak in 1995, they were, and that album still manages to sound fresh in 2017. Not bad.

How to review a movie like Mother?

Honestly, it’s probably best not to try… but here goes.

Darren Aronofsky’s films usually inspire debate. From the manic dread of Requiem For A Dream to the time-tripping earnestness of The Fountain to the gonzo horror-art of Black Swan, Aronofsky goes for broke in his filmography, taking huge artistic risks. A lot of cinephiles adore him for it — myself included. Some find his films too heavy-handed… a little much.

By most metrics, Black Swan is his biggest success thus far — raking in overs $300 million worldwide, admired by critics and audiences, a Best Picture nomination and an Oscar for Natalie Portman. There are plenty of people who didn’t care for Black Swan, my favorite film of 2010, and I get that. Because it’s art. Not many films are made these days, truly, as art — those that are are made on such a small scale, the general public never hears about them.

But the general public has heard about Mother, hasn’t it? And like the best art, it is provoking some very strong opinions.

If you don’t like any other Darren Aronofsky movies, there’s almost no hope you’ll love Mother. It doubles, then triples, then quadruples down on all the things his harshest critics lambast him for. It’s somewhat obscure, but not subtle. (The official title is mother!, after all.) And even if you adored Requiem For A Dream or Black Swan, that’s no guarantee you’ll have the same goodwill toward Mother. For some Aronofsky fans, this is a bridge too far into this auteur’s brand of grandiose intensity, a film that marries his two most love-it-or-hate titles, The Fountain and Black Swan. Like The Fountain, Mother explores a relationship between a man and a woman in a very unconventional fashion. Like Black Swan, it strands us in a tormented young woman’s point of view. However much you liked or did not like The Fountain and Black Swan, multiply it by ten, and there’s my prediction of how you’ll feel about Mother. Mother is probably best categorized as a horror film, though it’s a far cry from Annabelle or It. Like recent indie horror hits like It Follows, The Babadook, and Get Out, there’s more on Mother‘s mind than thrills and chills. Much more. A lot of horror films are allegories; very few are only allegories. But that’s what Mother is. There’s no way to take the story at face value — to believe its characters are real, relatable people, or that the situation they find themselves in is literally happening. In its simple set-up, Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem play a couple living in an idyllic, isolated house, with no hints of any neighbors nearby. They soon find their domestic paradise intruded upon, first by a man claiming to be a doctor (Ed Harris), and next by his mischievous wife (Michelle Pfeiffer). None of these characters have names, which is a good tip-off that there’s more to what’s happening than meets the eye.

It’s understandable why filmgoers expecting a studio horror-thriller would be put off by Mother. First of all, making sense of it requires work. Very little of what happens in the film is logical, and the characters don’t behave quite like real people would in such circumstances. (Because they’re not.) Aronofsky has been pretty straightforward regarding what Mother is “about,” while leaving room for alternate interpretations. Mother is art. The artist has his intent. And, as in all works of art, other elements from the author’s psyche find their way in, too — maybe consciously, maybe not. Mother is all allegory, but thinking it’s all one allegory is a boring interpretations. The film works on many levels at once, commenting upon the past, present, and future of human existence, both real and imagined. You might leave the theater asking, “Was it about the Bible? Or climate change? Or fame? Or the subjugation of women?” The answer is yes.I doubt that any one single interpretation of Mother justifies all its disparate parts. Rather, it’s a film of ideas, and these ideas may differ from scene to scene. I already likened one other 2017 movie to an “art project” — David Lowry’s A Ghost Story, which in many ways is a very similar film. (It is also equally likely to alienate filmgoers who prefer not to have to think about what they’re seeing.) Both Mother and A Ghost Story take place almost entirely within one house. Both have a jarring approach to the passage of time. Both focus in on an unnamed male and an unnamed female, though there are occasional intruders into each story. Both movies are made to provoke thought in willing viewers — complex and esoteric thoughts about life, love, mortality, and plenty more. Neither film is specific to its protagonists — because neither film has real characters, per se. These films work less as stories about individuals, and more as ruminations on mankind itself. Is that ambitious, or pretentious? Yes.

Mother is a film I’ll need to watch it again, multiple times, to sort through all the many thoughts I had while watching it. I’ll have to grapple with it a while before I know how I truly feel about it. That makes it a success. The rapid-fire pace of the internet has taken a lot of the art out of moviegoing; everything is love it or hate it, the best or the worst, rotten or fresh, “liked” or unliked… and word travels fast. Mother has a fascinating “F” Cinemascore and has stirred up so much ire amongst its potential fan base. I think that’s great. I see plenty of films meant to provoke such reactions, but most people don’t. They see The Fate Of The Furious and It and Beauty And The Beast. (I see some of those, too.) Most people don’t have a chance to get riled up about a m0vie that was made to infuriate them anymore. You have to seek that experience out, and most don’t. But this weekend, I’m seeing so many real reactions to this film. I find that encouraging.Yes, plenty are attempting to dismiss the movie as “awful.” But what was awful, Mother-haters? The performances? The visual effects? The cinematography? It’s fair to challenge these elements of the filmmaking, but they’re too purposeful to write-off as merely “bad.” Most Mother-haters would probably agree that on a technical level, it’s largely a well-made film. What a lot of people mean by “it sucks,” in Mother‘s case, is that the experience of watching it challenged them, and they did not enjoy being challenged. You can walk into a museum and look at a painting and call it terrible, if you wish, but what you really mean is that you didn’t like it, and the reason you didn’t like it is because of an emotional response. Some movies are terrible, abjectly failing at what they set out to do. But Mother knows exactly what it’s doing — the CinemaScore “F” proves it. Even for those who hated every minute of it, Mother will linger in the mind. It won’t be forgotten. Its themes may come back to those who saw it in unexpected moments. Fans of the film will continue challenging critics, and hopefully draw out debate. I love that people found Mother to be really, truly excruciating — because it’s a response. Mother won’t be seen far and wide by mainstream moviegoers, despite its sizeable release, but even the viewership it’s achieved thus far is impressive, for any work of art. It’s an antidote to the big screen binkys that dominate the box office — another Star Wars, another Spider-Man, another live-action Disney cartoon. Mother doesn’t play by the rules today’s moviegoers have been trained to abide. It isn’t neat, or safe, and it won’t remind you of anything from your childhood. Your Netflix queue won’t be able to predict whether or not it’s “for you.” (Well, maybe if you’ve given low scores to every other Darren Aronofsky movie.) It doesn’t care for tomatoes — fresh, rotten, or otherwise.

That isn’t to say it’s not valid to absolutely, positively fucking loathe this movie with every fiber of your being. But to do so honestly, you’ll have to grapple with Mother, and at least some of what it’s trying to say. It is a film meant to remind the frog that he’s sitting in a pot of boiling water, though most frogs prefer not to be reminded. Let’s discuss.

Aronofsky’s Mother is a cinematic expression of “giving zero fucks,” an exceptionally weird film by any standard. It may be an intentional joke, on his part, that so many who deride Mother for “bad storytelling” literally worship this exact same story. (Does that one make sense?) The ire audiences have for Mother comes as no surprise in a year like 2017 — it is a film made outside of the bubble, no matter which bubble you’re in. Most movies this strange and surreal are elusive, as in the works of David Lynch. By contrast, Mother is in your face — willfully, defiantly challenging, but not the kind of movie you need to “figure out.” There’s no puzzle to be solved, no key to understanding it better. The more you know about Mother, the more questions it will raise. The more I review it, the more I need to keep on reviewing it. So I might as well stop now.

Mother is a work of art, meant to provoke strong reactions and incite debate. So far, it’s working.

*

A handful of episodes standout in a “very special episode” kind of way, but they’re done with finesse and avoid the cheese factor that usually accompanies sitcoms when they broach a serious subject. When Saved By The Bell tackled caffeine pill addiction, it became the show’s mocking calling card. The equivalent Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air episode, “Just Say Yo,” isn’t perfect, but it isn’t pat, either. I remember the “shocking” moment when Full House tackled the taboo topic of teen smoking through the Gina character. The episode made it feel as if Gina had pulled a gun on Stephanie. Ultimately, sitcoms rarely let their protagonists do anything truly “naughty;” at best, it’s the mischievous new friend who misbehaves in order to teach us a moral lesson. The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air is unique among sitcoms for not always sweeping controversy under the rug by episode’s end. There are hugs and lessons, but there are also lingering questions that go unresolved.A few exemplary episodes of the show deal explicitly with hot button issues like racial profiling, while others that speak to less touted aspects of black American life. “Mistaken Identity” is a brilliant episode of television, hilarious and heartbreaking. It concludes with a gut-punch moment, as Carlton tries to make sense of his arrest in a way that doesn’t have to do with his race. Ultimately, Will and Uncle Phil know better, and the episode ends with the ominous sense that Carlton is going to have to learn this lesson again and again before it truly sinks in.

Another standout is Season Four’s “Papa’s Got A Brand New Excuse,” in which Will’s father returns to the picture just long enough to get his hopes up, then promptly bails on the plans they’ve made. This is a plot we’ve seen on TV and in movies often — the deadbeat biological parent stepping in to shake things up, only to leave their offspring crushed by disappointment. This episode culminates in a raw, explosive monologue from Will that showcases some of the star’s best acting (ever). The episode both follows sitcom formula and, ultimately, defies it. The same story could be — and has been — told about a white father and a white child, but The Fresh Prince knows which nuances make it specific to Will’s experience, and that specificity pays off.

Looking back, it’s surprising that The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air tackles race head-on so often. (I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s how the show is remembered by most.) Will Smith is about a raceless as a major movie star can be — he has generally avoided roles that explicitly call for African-American actors, except when he’s playing a real-life person (as in Ali, The Pursuit Of Happyness, and Concussion). Even in these films, race is more of a background issue than it is in The Fresh Prince.

In most ways, The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air adheres to sitcom formulas (including a lot of pretty terrible clips episodes). Few, if any, of its storylines couldn’t be done on a sitcom with a primarily Caucasian cast (though I shudder to think of a white sitcom attempting a story like Carlton’s visit to Compton in “72 Hours”). But so many episodes resonate more because of the insight the writers and actors bring to how these comedic setups reflect racial issues across the spectrum. Will and Carlton going to jail for a false-alarm car theft could happen on any show, but the concluding moments, as Carlton grapples with new realizations about racial injustice, have the power they do because they reveal such a dark truth about racism in America. Most sitcoms would laugh it off anyway. The Fresh Prince doesn’t.

There are also episodes like “Mud Is Thicker Than Blood” which deal with racial issues between African-American characters. The basic setup — Will and Carlton rush a fraternity, and Carlton is too nerdy to get a bid — is, again, something you’d find on any sitcom. But the way it plays out is singular to these characters and this experience. At its best, The Fresh Prince manages to satisfy the punchline quotient required of a sitcom and shed a surprising light on underdiscussed social issues. The show’s class contrast is fairly jokey — the Banks family is absurdly wealthy, and Will’s “rough” upbringing tends to gloss over some harsher points — but it is satisfying to see so many different black characters dealing with black issues in different ways. As was the creators’ mantra, The Fresh Prince says there’s no right or wrong way to be black. It backs that up constantly, showing how each character responds to challenges in their own specific way.

Though only a handful of episodes take deep dives into racial issues, this is the feature that sets The Fresh Prince apart from other cheesy 90s sitcoms. It’s amazing — and a little disheartening — that every issue the show tackles feels just as fresh today (if not moreso). Though there are plenty of mediocre moments, overall The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air boasts hilarious and heartfelt performances, strong writing, and clever fourth-wall-breaking gags, plus a few episodes per season that go above and beyond what a 90s sitcom is expected to.

 

 *

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do replicants dream of unicorns? Does Sean Young dream of being in a movie where she isn’t inappropriately manhandled by a major movie star?

In Episode 25 of When We Were Young, the lines between man and machine are blurred as we discuss Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Daryl Hannah, in advance of the Ryan Gosling-starring sequel Blade Runner 2049.

First, the gang shares childhood visions of Things To Come, and wonders why there are so many dystopias in the fictional future (and so few utopias). Then, we dive into the year 2019 (by way of 1982, in 2017) to revisit the darkest, wettest, most neon-geisha-filled depiction of Los Angeles ever. We all agree that Blade Runner has amazing parking meters and fierce eye makeup, but is the story itself worth the film’s cult classic status? Opinions may differ!

In a special bonus segment for superfans at episode’s end, the gang celebrates a full year of podcasting. We share the pop culture revisit that surprised us most, our favorite funny moments (that are all about Becky), and the resurrection of Playtime, in which a Death Match determines once and for all what movie, album, or TV show held up the best over the years. (Hint: it’s not Roger Rabbit, Kevin Smith, or Buffy.)

Listen here and subscribe here for our episode on Blade Runner.

BLADE RUNNER
June 25, 1982

Budget: $28 million
Opening Weekend: $6.2 million
Domestic Total Gross: $27.6 million
Lifetime Gross: $32.9 million
Metacritic Score: 72

At first glance, it may strike you as odd that Blade Runner has the reputation it does. It is one of the landmark sci-fi films, with a die-hard fan base that will passionately debate the film’s central mysteries and pore over various cuts of the movie. It’s hard for any film to live up to that kind of legend, and Blade Runner in a particular is a strange case. Certain themes and narratives feel disjointed to anyone who isn’t familiar with the source material or the storied history of the film’s creation. Most audiences in 1982 didn’t “get” Blade Runner upon first viewing, and even now, that initial visit to Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles of 2019 is rife with frustration and confusion. Very little about this futuristic world is explained explicitly, and a lot of what is explained is fairly obscure. A more straightforward film would have shown us a lot of what we’re told. (Blade Runner might look more like that movie, if not for its budget troubles.) Most questions go unanswered — and not just the ones about Deckard being a replicant. I have a hard time imagining anyone sitting through Blade Runner just once and feeling they fully understood everything. As we’re seeing now with Aronofsky’s mother!, audiences tend to resent films that challenge them. Blade Runner was initially seen as a disappointment.

I never saw Blade Runner when I was young. I first viewed it a few years ago. Like audiences in 1982, I was impressed by the production design and murky about some plot points. I remembered the film’s aesthetics better than I remembered its story. I could tell you that Daryl Hannah’s character had some killer makeup, but couldn’t remember the actual function of her character, or whether she was a hero or a villain.Ultimately, the whole point of Blade Runner is that Pris is neither a hero nor a villain — nobody is. We’re not used to that kind of ambiguity in big budget sci-fi films, which might be why the film has been hard to connect to for audiences just looking for a good time. We don’t typically watch something with the budget and star power of Blade Runner expecting complex moral questions and ambiguous themes. A normal studio movie might make us question whether blade runners killing replicants was necessary or a gross injustice, but then they would answer that question. In Blade Runner, Deckard is neither heroic nor corrupt, as far as we can tell. Ford’s performance doesn’t indicate one way or another whether we’re supposed to like this guy. We think we’re supposed to be on his side because he’s the protagonist of the story… but honestly, aside from that, what stake do we have in this guy?

Similarly, the replicants are more dynamic characters — child-like Pris, the “pleasure model”; the tragically intelligent Roy Batty; sassy snake-dancing stripper Zhora; and innocent young Rachael, as she undergoes the existential crisis of realizing she’s synthetic. Supposedly, replicants are dangerous because they lack empathy. But we don’t get a lot of empathy from humans, either. Rachael cries when she realizes she’s an android. Pris seems to get some genuine joy out of her friendship with J.F. Sebastian, however self-serving it is in the end. Batty spares Deckard’s life for unknown reasons. Maybe the replicants are manufacturing their empathy — but then again, maybe we all are, on some level. Deckard gives a complicated test meant to detect empathy in humans and differentiate them from androids, but can empathy be legitimately measured? Who’s to say whether replicants do or don’t have it? There’s no proof in Blade Runner to draw a solid conclusion.This is a powerful allegory for our times (or any times, really). Through various twists of fate, some classes of human beings have decided they’re more valid than others. They’ve taken it upon themselves to decide how the “lesser” race or class should live, and often, when they should live. American slavery and Nazism are two towering examples, but there’s still plenty of arbitrary judgment about who should live, and how they should live, going around. Blade Runner barely even broaches the subject in its text — rather, the film’s moral murkiness requires viewers to grapple with it on their own (or not). That’s a key reason why the film has been reexamined so many times, has never exactly felt “finished” — because it necessitates thinking, research, and discussion outside the text to even make sense of it. That’s not everybody’s cinematic bag. (Again, see Mother.)

Of course, I’m not sure all this ambiguity was intentional. From draft to draft, and from script to screen, Blade Runner lost key visuals, dialogue, and plot points that would almost certainly have made it stronger from a narrative perspective. Add to this the disparate thematic and character ideas of the director, writers, actors, and crew — it seems this group was rarely on the exact same page with who was doing what, why, and what it meant to the story overall. The result is more like a dazzling art project than a coherent motion picture — which is interesting, now that we’re about to get the sequel Blade Runner 2049 from Denis Villeneuve. It’s hard to imagine that this sequel won’t be at least a little more straightforward than its 1982 predecessor.

Blade Runner is endlessly open to interpretation, because there’s no one answer to any challenge it poses. It was perfectly timed to be owned and dissected by cinephiles with the rise of home video in the 1980s, and lives on now because it’s also a great movie to pore over on the internet. I come away from it fascinated as much by what isn’t in the movie as what is. It’s a very unique film.

*

I hate to react too quickly to any movie, because opinions settle over time. I often see a movie and have a negative reaction, only to find that it sits better over time. Sometimes, I leave a film satisfied, but gradually find reasons to like it less.

But it’s been less than an hour since I walked out of Blade Runner 2049 and I’m already comfortable calling it one of the best science fiction films of all time, and quite possibly the greatest sequel ever made.

I dove deep into Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner for the When We Were Young podcast, reading both Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and Future Noir, a comprehensive recounting of the making of the film. Both texts gave me a greater appreciation for the film itself, which contains many obscure references to themes from Dick’s story that easily go over most audiences’ heads during their initial viewing. It is difficult to fully piece Blade Runner‘s plot together as a casual viewer. Crucial details are mentioned but not shown. This exposition often feels off-the-cuff and half-told — there’s no indication that these are important facts the audience should hold onto, yet the movie makes little sense without them.

Blade Runner is a fascinating and unique piece of cinema, but it doesn’t always come together as a fully realized story. Learning more about scenes that were never shot or didn’t make the final cut (in any of the many versions), one discovers plenty of intentions that might have made for a more coherent and more powerful story. (Screenwriter Hampton Fancher’s original ending was beautiful.) I don’t begrudge anyone who thinks the original Blade Runner is a bona fide masterpiece, but I also have no beef with anyone saying it isn’t. I appreciate the film’s look and sound and the individual creative contributions of many players, while also wishing certain elements of the story had been developed better.

Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, is more or less a perfect film, both entertaining and soulful. The story makes sense from beginning to end, yet its beats are frequently surprising. It is not in any sense a “reboot” of the original, but rather a very direct sequel, in that it couldn’t possibly exist without the first film. (In fact, I wonder if anyone who hasn’t seen the original could fully appreciate it.) And it might be the best sequel ever made.

A handful of films are probably popping into your head as possible counterpoints. The Empire Strikes Back? The Godfather Part II? Aliens? The Dark Knight? Batman Returns? Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Those are all great sequels, on par with the first film — and in some cases, better — but none of them really make the original better. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, feels made in part to fix the shortcomings of the original. It has subtle and not-so-subtle homages to Dick’s novel and Scott’s film (including my favorite nod, an origami sheep). It’s not a retread, nor does it abandon the elements that made its 35-year-old predecessor so distinct. Set 30 years after the original’s 2019 placement, director Denis Villeneuve’s vision of 2049 feels like a natural progression from the future we glimpsed in Blade Runner. It doesn’t just revisit the themes and story elements from the first film — it pushes them in intriguing, unexpected, but completely consistent directions. Has any sequel made such a strong argument for the original film’s mere existence?

Like Blade Runner, 2049 shows us a vision of the future that’s not quite like any other film we’ve seen before. (Not even Blade Runner.) The original film shaped the collective cinematic vision of dystopias over the past three decades — it’s a marvel Blade Runner 2049 found any new ideas to play with, given how popular the subgenre has been. No film I can think of so honors its predecessor while feeling so fresh simultaneously. Blade Runner 2049 not only expands on certain murky story beats from the original — what we learn in Blade Runner 2049 makes the original film stronger and more satisfying. It’s hard to fathom how a sequel to Blade Runner could be any better.(I’ll keep my synopsis vague and spoiler free, as it works best to know as little as possible going in.) In the film, Ryan Gosling plays K, a blade runner who is both similar to and very different from Harrison Ford’s Deckard. Like Deckard, he’s an isolated bachelor who puts his work first. In the opening scene, a routine assignment goes in an unexpected direction, sending K on a crucial mission that, as his boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) puts it, “breaks the world” if it fails.

The marketing has made no secret of the fact that this quest eventually leads K to meet Deckard. Other key players include replicant manufacturer Liandel Wallace (Jared Leto), his dutiful employee Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), and Joi (Ana De Armas), an A.I. who is best described as the 2049 version of Amazon’s Alexa. Three other women, played by Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, and Hiam Abbass, also have important roles, not to mention the thematic importance of a female character from the original Blade Runner. Refreshingly, Blade Runner 2049 is bursting at the seams with compelling female characters. In fact, with the exception of K and Deckard, almost every pivotal character in the film is a woman. (Leto’s Wallace is a compelling figure, but he’s more the puppet master than a direct player.) I can’t remember the last time a big budget studio film was so peppered with great roles for women… quite possibly because the answer is “never.”

Blade Runner set the scene for some interesting debates. Blade Runner 2049 is a loving correction of the original’s sins. The story makes perfect sense, and also makes more sense out of the original. Both are hauntingly beautiful aesthetically, but Blade Runner never drums up much sympathy for Deckard, which may or may not be intentional. (A little of both, I think.) The most emotional readings of the original film take place outside the text of the movie. If Deckard is a replicant, his dirty work takes on an added layer of ironic sadness… but the film only hints at this, giving viewers little reason to even consider the possibility (unless they do some additional reading and view alternate cuts of the film). Either way, Deckard is a miserable son of a bitch. He shoots a fleeing (replicant) female in the back, kills Daryl Hannah’s Pris in equally brutal fashion, and forces himself upon Rachael in ways that call her consent into question. (Maybe they didn’t so much in 1982, but it wouldn’t fly in 2017.) The female characters in Scott’s original are, in many ways, the highlight of the film. Dangerous but child-like Pris is somehow the most relatable character, while Sean Young’s Rachael also earns our sympathy. But these women are also violently abused by our supposed “hero.”

Blade Runner seems rather indifferent about how we should feel about Deckard’s actions. We aren’t given much evidence that replicants really deserve to be so violently offed — yes, they’ve been known to kill humans, but did that start before or after humans started exterminating them? History has taught us that human beings aren’t always right when they declare themselves superior to a different kind of person. American slavery was justified with the notion that black people were savages, intellectually and morally inferior to white men. Some slaves did, then, behave rather savagely — but that’s just a consequence of treating people like savages.

Scott’s Blade Runner half-poses many fascinating questions, then never answers them. Ambiguity can be a powerful tool in storytelling, but only when we it’s intended. Some of the ambiguity in Scott’s film comes instead from budgetary restrictions, too many cooks, and lots of rewriting. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, never loses its way for a second. Every scene and shot are painstakingly thought through. We can tell. It doesn’t just revisit the troubling moral questions the original asks. It asks them again, with new story beats that make them even more impossible to answer.One love story in Blade Runner 2049 adds layers of complexity onto the original model — the Deckard-Rachael romance. At first, this is pretty par for the course in a sci-fi dystopia, but it ends up adding real heartbreak to the film. How capable are replicants of empathy? Of love? Blade Runner 2049 keeps this open ended. Many characters are on screen for just a few minutes, but each is fascinating and full of life (whether or not they are “alive”). You could make a fascinating film about any character in this movie. Clocking in at nearly 3 hours, Blade Runner 2049 is long enough, yet plenty that goes unresolved, and several characters we could stand to learn more about. The conclusion of this film makes it difficult to imagine a direct sequel — and also difficult to imagine that there won’t be one.

Science fiction films in which androids or artificial intelligence take on human characteristics certainly aren’t rare these days — take, for example, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Her, and Ex Machina, to name a few very good ones. Both Blade Runner films are less explicit than most, implying moral dilemmas but rarely voicing them. Where Blade Runner 2049 triumphs over its predecessor is in empathy, of all things. Gosling’s K is a more defined character than Ford’s Deckard ever was. He undergoes an enthralling emotional journey over the course of the film, and it’s clear what kind of journey it is. Blade Runner‘s vision of the future was so dreary, it was hard to care if any humans or replicants survived to return to their dark, damp, joyless existence. Blade Runner 2049‘s vision of the further future is about as bleak as Blade Runner‘s 2019, but there’s enough soul and verve in these characters to make it worth the investment. This is not an entirely hopeless world, as frightening as so much of it is. The sequel also adds biblical undertones that make it easier to grasp the stakes in this narrative. Blade Runner 2049 touched me in ways the original never did… in ways studio films rarely attempt.

I’m not exactly surprised at how great Blade Runner 2049, both as a sequel and a standalone cinematic experience. It is directed by Denis Villeneuve, after all, who made my Top Ten thrice in the past three years with Enemy, Sicario, and Arrival. (In case you can’t tell from this effusive review, he’s on deck for a fourth.) The film was shot by the legendary Roger Deakins, who’s been nominated thirteen times for an Academy Award, and curiously never won. (I expect this to change in the very near future.) On an artistic level, Blade Runner 2049 is anything but a failure.

The film’s box office take thus far has fallen short of expectations. Fittingly, so did the original Blade Runner. But so what? There’s a good chance Blade Runner 2049 will have staying power in one way or another, just as the original did. It has Oscar potential in numerous categories, provided the Academy is willing to consider a genre sequel through an artistic lens. Costume design, visual effects, and cinematography are all superb. It just might be a Best Picture nominee as well, unless Star Wars: The Last Jedi is several cuts above The Force Awakens and steals Blade Runner‘s thunder. (That’s plausible enough, considering it was directed by Rian Johnson, who made a near-masterpiece original sci-fi film of his own with Looper.) Blade Runner 2049 could be too adult and ponderous to cross the $100 million mark in the United States, which will unfairly categorize it as a flop; then again, I’m already frothing to see it again in theaters, and I’ll bet you I’m not the only one.

Blade Runner 2049 is already one of my favorite science fiction films of all time. It deserves to be held up as a classic of the genre, right alongside the first Blade Runner. In spirit, both Blade Runners share so much — they’re morally complex, visually dazzling, and somewhat disturbing. With a few excisions, Blade Runner 2049 could have been an original sci-fi story, but both films are made better with the existence of the other.

You might even call Blade Runner 2049 a replicant of Blade Runner. Common sense tells us that the original is inherently superior, because Blade Runner 2049 wouldn’t even exist without Blade Runner. Sequels are meant to be vapid, functional carbon copies of something better — but in the Blade Runner films, the replicants end up having more life to them, more personality. Such is the case with Blade Runner 2049.

This film is a masterpiece.*

“Now, repeat after me: ‘Yo!'”

“Yo!”

“Hot damn!”

“Hot damn!”

“What a fabulous window treatment!”

“What a fabulou—”

“That was a trick!”

Come one, come all, and come out already for When We Were Young’s most same-sex-loving episode yet! In honor of Coming Out Day on October 11, Episode 26 takes a furtive glance back at the gay 90s, which marked a sea change in pop culture’s depictions of people who are — yep! — gay.

First, our hosts coop up in The Birdcage, Mike Nichols’ 1996 comedy that pushes Robin Williams and Nathan Lane back in the closet to appease Ally McBeal’s right-wing parents. Next, we touch on Ellen DeGeneres’ game-changing “Puppy Episode,” the coming out party heard ’round the world. And finally, we celebrate the 20th out-iversary of In & Out, starring Kevin Kline as a small-town teacher outed at the Oscars, and Joan Cusack as his increasingly desperate bride-to-be.

Plenty of social progress has been made in the days since Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and DOMA, so how do these mid-90s gay characters hold up in 2017? Practice your John Wayne walk, book some therapy with Oprah, and stop dancing to “I Will Survive,” because our hosts’ opinions of these films are definitely not homogeneous.

THE BIRDCAGE
March 8, 1996

Budget: $31 million
Opening Weekend: $18.3 million
Domestic Total Gross: $124.1 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $185.3 million
Metacritic Score: 72

Prior to The Birdcage, the biggest gay-centric films of the 90s included 1993’s Philadelphia, 1994’s The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, and 1995’s Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. Angels In America debuted in the early 90s, too.

That was essentially what gay life was to most moviegoers — either a fabulous, feminine party, filled with bright colors and outrageous costumes and plenty of cross-dressing, or bleak and tragic, haunted by the spectre of certain death.

Obviously, AIDS was on a lot of people’s minds at this time, a fresh wound and a looming threat. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense Of Marriage Act were the government’s response to gay efforts for equal rights. Gay people were to be pitied or ridiculed — maybe not cruelly, but the joke always seemed to be at how silly it was to see men dressed as women. This was just about the only way audiences could see gay people in mainstream entertainment — dressed as women, or dying. There wasn’t much nuance.

The Birdcage was a massive hit and signaled that there was an appetite for stories that fell somewhere in between — even if it still has one foot in the drag queen’s closet. Director Mike Nichols does make room for tender scenes between Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, as well as plenty of lively banter. The dialogue is sharp and the performances are incredibly fun, and it all works pretty well if you don’t think too hard about it.This time around, though, The Birdcage rubbed me the wrong way in a few critical areas. My main concern is that the plot doesn’t make a bit of sense. Gene Hackman’s conservative senator gets caught up in a scandal involving an underage black prostitute, but it’s not his scandal. It’s his newly deceased colleague’s. It’s easy enough to imagine how that might put Senator Keeley in some hot water; it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine that the media would be sated by Keeley’s 19-year-old daughter getting married, no matter who it’s with. It’s just plain ridiculous that the media follows Keeley to Miami… for what reason, exactly? As far as they know, there isn’t even a story. (They also zoom in on a videotape to hear it better. Um, that’s not how anything works.)

The media subplot is dumb. Fine. Whatever. That would be fine as long as the principle characters’ actions made some sense… but do they? Val and Barbara lie to the Keeleys, both about Val’s Jewishness and his parents’ queerness. They even lie about his last name. Is Barbara keeping her maiden name? Are we supposed to believe that the Keeleys will never stumble upon this information? None of these questions are even asked.

Val wants Armand to pretend to be straight, and Albert to disappear while they meet the parents. That’s great… but there is going to be a wedding, right? Armand and Albert are entrenched in Miami’s decadent gay drag scene, so none of their friends will be at the wedding. Armand might pull off his straight man act, and fool the Keeleys into thinking he’s still with Katherine. And then what? They’re just never going to get together again, for the rest of their lives? What if they have kids?

Val and Barbara’s foresight is lacking, and their plan is stupid. They’re not the main characters, though. It would be nice if Armand was smart enough to bring up some of these points, and maybe find clever solutions to them. Instead, the screenplay just sweeps them under the rug. Even that might be forgivable if what actually happened followed any sense of logic. But what the hell is Albert doing in this movie? He’s hurt that Armand and Val are ashamed of him… so he dresses as a woman and poses as Val’s biological mother. What is he trying to accomplish? It’s unclear how Albert thinks this will solve any of these problems. Clearly, it’s just adding to the mess.

If you can buy that Albert would be so selfish and reckless to potentially ruin Val’s engagement with his theatrics, then the point where Armand calls the ruse off comes out of nowhere, and we see very little of the Keeleys’ reaction. Instead, the bad media plot resurfaces, forcing the Keeleys to dress in drag and sneak their way out of the club. Why? Because if the media sees them associating with gay people, it will make them look bad. Next scene? A huge wedding, with lots of flamboyant gay attendees. The secret’s out. Yes, the secret that the entire plot of the movie bent over backward to contain is apparently just… not important anymore? What the fuck, Mike Nichols?

The Birdcage lacks a resolution of any of the conflicts it has addressed. We have no reason to believe that Keeley would suddenly accept Armand and Albert’s “lifestyle,” let alone embrace it. We’ve been told that Keeley being seen with Albert and Armand will ruin his political career… so, uhh, does it? The Birdcage has asked me to follow a handful of characters who do everything in their power not to let Keeley be associated with the outrageous gays from Miami, and then in its final scene, asks me to just… not care anymore, I guess? From a story perspective, that’s pretty wretched screenwriting.

I don’t begrudge anyone who enjoys The Birdcage. I enjoy it too, to an extent. The actors have incredible comic timing, and they’re given fun, snappy dialogue. But the only characters who make any sense are the Keeleys, and even that’s a stretch. Armand should think ahead about his son’s lame plan and come up with something better. Albert should have a reason why he thinks dressing in drag for the Keeleys is the best solution to Val’s problem. Val and Barbara should probably just not get married. No one here is acting with any remotely plausible intentions.

Comedy has to be grounded in some reality to be really funny. Nonsense wackiness doesn’t cut it. To an extent, this is a matter of taste — but The Birdcage wouldn’t have had to do that much work to come up with a coherent twist on this story. It’s just too lazy.

The Birdcage is practically a shot-for-shot remake of La Cage Aux Folles, a French farce from 1979, complete with the same plot beats and punchlines and everything. The Birdcage made zero attempt to update its views of gay life for 1996, and I find that sad. Albert behaves like a child throughout the entire film, throwing tantrums and overreacting. This might be interesting, if the film had something to say about why some gay men infantilize themselves this way, why they disappear into a diva persona as an escape from reality. (To be clear, I’m not suggesting that cross-dressing or doing drag is inherently infantilizing. But that seems to be the case with Albert.) And it all ends with the concerns of these gay characters unresolved, but all’s well that ends with a heterosexual union.

I can’t connect to The Birdcage, as no one in it acts like a sensible human being whose actions are actually going to take them where they want to go. (That’s probably its French roots, in large part.) It feels a bit too much like a minstrel show — straight (or, in 1996, presumably straight) men dressed up in “silly” costumes, acting ridiculous for a mostly straight audience. The Birdcage could be a lot worse, in this way — its depiction of gay men doesn’t bother me, I just wish there were a little more to it. I knew I was in trouble when the film began on the most obvious choice for an opening musical number — “We Are Family.”

The Birdcage is the reason a movie like My Best Friend’s Wedding was retroactively important to me. Rupert Everett’s George was a joyful scene-stealer, like Nathan Lane’s Albert — but no one needed to teach him how to walk, or dress, or put butter on toast. He’s a grownup.

There’s nothing wrong with gay men (or straight men, for that matter) dressing as women, but by 1996, I was pretty sick of that… without even knowing it. Get AIDS or dress as a woman… these were essentially the two options mainstream pop culture was offering gay people. George in My Best Friend’s Wedding was a supporting character, but he was something different, someone who said that gay men can be suave, confident, hilarious, the life of the party… even when dressed as men! The movie was a hit, and George was what everyone was talking about, even though he’s not one of the three primary characters.

A few months earlier, Ellen DeGeneres did this in an event more visible way — her “Yep, I’m Gay!” Time magazine cover wasn’t exactly subtle. But most gay people don’t actually want their coming out to be headline-worthy. It was everybody else who thought it was their business… and in 2017, still does, too often.

Of being gay, Ellen said in her infamous interview: “I ignored it because I didn’t really know what it was until I was 18 years old. I dated guys. I liked guys. But I knew that I liked girls too. I just didn’t know what to do with that. I thought, “If I were a guy I’d go out with her.” And then I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to be a guy, really.’ So I went, ‘Oh, well,’ and just went on with my life.”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t read that at the time, but if I had, it might have sounded familiar. I didn’t want to dress like a woman, and I didn’t want AIDS, and I liked girls well enough, and that was enough evidence for me to believe that I was straight. Pop culture didn’t give me anything to aspire to — at least, not anywhere I looked. That started to shift in 1997, first with Ellen’s “The Puppy Episode,” which aired on April 30. I was still several years away from realizing it had anything to do with me, but I appreciated it as a momentous media event, and it’s a great episode. The public and the media was clamoring for that “one moment” when Ellen finally tells us she’s gay, as if we have a right to that information. There is such a moment — accidentally blurted into an intercom at the airport. (That’s exactly how coming out feels, by the way. Like you have literally announced something private and uncomfortable to the whole world… which DeGeneres really did.)

But “The Puppy Episode” is also peppered with slow and steady revelations. Ellen first realizes she’s gay when she most staunchly denies it, upon her attraction to Laura Dern’s wonderful Susan. Here, she won’t even come out to herself. Then she allows herself that realization, and tells one trusted confidante — who just happens to be Oprah. (Life would be a lot easier if every gay man and woman could test it out with Oprah first.) Then Ellen tells Susan, and her friends, and her parents, and her boss… it’s a long process that takes us to the end of the season.

IN & OUT
September 19, 1997

Budget: $35 million
Opening Weekend: $15 million
Domestic Total Gross: $63.9 million
Worldwide Total Gross: $63.9. million
Metacritic Score: 70

Like both The Birdcage and Ellen‘s “Puppy Episode,” I saw Frank Oz’s In & Out just once, in the comfort of my own home, and I don’t remember finding it applicable to my own life in any way. (If anything, the scenes about the Academy Awards resonated most.) What I appreciate about the film now is that it also deals with coming out in steps, a series of revelations. It should go without saying, not all gay people have the same coming out experience. Some know that they’re gay early on, almost before they know everything else. For them, coming out is more about “when” and “how,” and less about “if.” (Albert was almost certainly one such case.) Then, there are characters like Ellen Morgan and Howard Brackett, involved in heterosexual romances that are adequate enough. It hasn’t really hit them yet. And then… bam. Everything changes.

That’s a lot more similar to my personal experience, and maybe why I find “The Puppy Episode” and In & Out so satisfying now. The very notion of “coming out” was new to most audiences in 1997, and it was new to these characters. We got to go on that journey with them. Now, these long, deliberate coming out stories are mostly besides the point — we’ve seen so many, let’s see something else. Still, it was refreshing to rewatch two stories that dwelled on a difficult, confusing, and often very painful process, without skipping through it. Coming out in 2017 is easier than it was in 1997, for some, but not for everyone. It still takes the kind of courage Ellen DeGeneres displayed in 1997, to risk flipping your whole world upside down. It’s a bigger shakeup for some than others.

Aside from its witty dialogue and great comedic performances, I was happy to leave characters like Nathan Lane’s Albert in the dust for a while, and examine characters who didn’t have to become brassy women just to be palatable to the mainstream. But my cohosts found plenty to love in Albert, and that’s the point. We now have enough gay characters that most people can find the one that speaks to them. It might be a drag queen, but it might not be. We have that choice.

Oh, and another thing about In & Out — it’s fucking funny. Paul Rudnick’s script is full of great gay one-liners, but the story examines the perspectives of many characters. Howard’s parents are thrown for a loop, but soon his mother (the divine Debbie Reynolds) uses his big revelation as a springboard for her own confessions, and her old lady gal pals follow suit. Howard’s students have to take a decisive stand on how they feel about an issue most of them had never confronted before. Howard’s straight buddies at his bachelor party show that they accept him by breaking out some Barba Streisand movies — womp womp! That’s an easy joke, except In & Out twists it by having these dudes legitimately argue about which films holds up best. (Sound familiar?) Turns out, they love Babs as much as the gay guy. And of course, there’s Joan Cusack’s Oscar-nominated turn as his would-be wife, who also has to confront some sad truths about herself. She “comes out” as desperate, forced to admit that she’s settling for Howard because she never believed anyone could really love her. What’s nifty about In & Out is that Howard’s coming out is just the catalyst for everyone in this town to come out of their shell, one way or another.

In & Out has more going for it than its satiric look at coming out in a small town. It also lampoons Hollywood, and it’s dead on in that respect. (I will happily watch the entire four hour fictional telecast, if it it’s available.) As with The Birdcage, In & Out plays it pretty safe in terms of what is shown, and how much gay sexuality is expressed (almost zero). But we’ve had two decades to make for that. Almost exactly twenty years after Ellen came out, an intimate and briefly erotic film about a closeted gay man won Best Picture. (And thank God it was better than the fake gay movie that wins an Oscar in In & Out.)

It’s hard to know what kind of influence these coming out stories (or, in The Birdcage’s case, “going back in” story) had on what came after. It’s hard to deny that Ellen’s outing was probably the most significant pop culture event in terms of making gays mainstream. In 1998, Will & Grace premiered and dealt much more explicitly (though still quite cartoonishly) with gay life. And then we were just kind of on a roll.

That isn’t to say we don’t have a ways to go. We’re just now getting around to female and black superheroes, after all — it’ll be a spell before Disney grows enough balls for, say, The Beast And The Other Beast. If ever. But change has come pretty quickly, overall, and it’s been fascinating to witness it. We have it pretty good these days, even if we still have to promise that “it gets better.” Thank you to all those who fought to get their stories told when it wasn’t so easy.

*

“Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood.”

Stranger things have happened than what happened on Stranger Things — thanks in large part to one of horror’s most prolific names. In honor of the Netflix nostalgia-fest’s second season, When We Were Young takes a look at the 1980s oeuvre of the show’s biggest influence, Stephen King.

Following two true blue horror masterpieces, Carrie and The Shining, King unleashed a wave of spine-tingling adaptations with varying degrees of schlock, from pyro pixie Drew Barrymore in Firestarter to the killer car in Christine. We discuss these titles and their influence on Stranger Things, then dwell on the 1986 coming-of-age classic Stand By Me, which blends some macabre moments with a more melancholy tale of boyhood, mortality, and purple vomit. Finally, we all float over to 1990, where Tim Curry’s fearsome fanged clown Pennywise awaits us in the sewer-dwelling TV movie It, recently remade as the most successful horror film of all time.

How does Stranger Things — which tries so very hard to emulate the 1980s — stack up against the stuff that actually scared us back then? Can looking and feeling like when we were young really capture the essence of when the When We Were Young hosts were young? If your brain is exploding from all the nostalgia-within-nostalgia nesting doll action happening here, great. Happy Halloween!

Subscribe here.

STAND BY ME
August 8, 1986

Budget: $8 million
Opening Weekend: $3.8 million
Domestic Total Gross: $52.3 million
Metacritic Score: 75

Despite being a modest fan of Stephen King, I escaped my childhood without ever seeing two of his best-known works, 1986’s Stand By Me and the 1990 TV movie adaptation of It. King’s prolific body of work spans many subjects and explores many themes, though it’s hard to imagine any double-feature that digs into King’s core quite like this one. Stand By Me is best classified as a coming of age drama, while It is a schlocky supernatural horror movie. Yet in many ways, they tell the same story.

Both feature adults protagonists flashing back to their childhood in the 1950s. Both of these men are now horror writers whose work has been shaped, in large part, by dark childhood experiences. Both of their brothers were tragically killed when they were young. Both are bullied. Both find solace in banding together with a rag-tag group of friends. All of these children have abusive or negligent parents. Both stories take place in fictional towns in Maine.

Directed by Rob Reiner, Stand By Me is one of King’s more straightforward adaptations, dealing with the real-life horror King witnessed as a child when a friend was struck by a train. It’s alternately funny and touching, with memorable dialogue and imagery, anchored by fantastic performances from River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Jerry O’Connell, and Corey Feldman. It all holds up pretty perfectly.

IT
November 18 & 20, 1990

Network: ABC
Ratings: Aprox. 30 million households
Domestic Total Gross: $52.3 million
Metacritic Score: 72

It doesn’t emerge from its era quite so unscathed, though I had a good time with it. Its strengths lie in the bones of Stephen King’s sprawling novel, one that takes the novella The Body (which Stand By Me is based on) and heaps on a bunch of twisted supernatural horror, most of it involving the evil clown Pennywise. Tim Curry’s performance is a thing to behold — campy, of course, but still unsettling. The young cast includes Jonathan Brandis and Seth Green, while John Ritter and Annette O’Toole stand out amongst the actors playing the “Losers’ Club” kids as adults.

It‘s effectiveness as a horror movie will vary from viewer to viewer, based on their tolerance for melodrama and TV movie production value circa 1990. The film’s best special effect is Tim Curry — non-Pennywise visuals haven’t aged so well.

It is over three hours long, and in a way, still left me wanting more — the story is such a rich tapestry of characters, themes, and ideas, I wanted it all to be explored further. I wanted to see more of the Derry adults’ complicity in what befalls these children — their extreme denial, the ease with which they turn a blind eye on some truly gruesome happenings. I also would have liked to see each child character’s horror be more specifically tailored to the real-world problems they’re burdened with, as the movie takes ample time to develop at least some of these stories. It’d work a lot better if one or two of the characters were excised, leaving that time to focus on the rest. (I haven’t read King’s book, but I imagine that, too, might have benefited from a leaner cast.)

Still, I found the story compelling enough to carry me through the movie. Despite its flaws, it may be the best cinematic distillation of Stephen King, warts and all. In It and Stand By Me, this prepubescent moment is looked back upon with reverence. Teens and adults are pretty horrible all around — these would be formidable antagonists even without It‘s  murderous clown on the loose. In King’s stories, life is filled with horror, and only some of that horror is of the shape-shifting clown demon variety. Children can be senselessly killed, with or without supernatural intervention. (If the clown doesn’t get you, the bullies might!)

It‘s Losers’ Club grows up to be overachievers. Significantly, none of them are parents. The story suggests that people must wrestle with their childhood demons — literal or figurative — before they have children of their own, or else be doomed to pass the horror down a generation. Adults are, at best, ambivalent toward the youth they’re supposed to care for; many of them are actively hostile. A young boy wanders off and is struck by a train, but we don’t hear much about it from the adults. It’s the four boys at the heart of the story who turn this boy’s wasted life into their own epic quest, one that will haunt them throughout the rest of their lives. Everybody’s got issues — Pennywise is just one more problem to add to the list.

In Stand By Me, Gordie mourns the friendships he had when he was twelve, acknowledging that these bonds can’t be carried forth into adulthood. As much as they try to hold onto each other, Gordie and Chris drift apart, and Chris is eventually killed in yet another meaningless accident. The more fantastic It indulges in the fantasy of childhood friends being reunited as adults, reforming the bonds they need to survive, both then and now. Even its B-movie scares can’t completely drown out the heart of King’s very personal story.

Stand By Me features River Phoenix, while It stars Jonathan Brandis. Tragically but fittingly, both also died far too young — at least in some part because they were still wrestling with the demons of their formative years. Like so many of his characters, King survived to tell his tale (and many, many others). For him, it seems to be a bittersweet triumph.

*