Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a movie where future-America, seven hundred years from now, is a utopia thanks to the transcendent rock music of a band called Wyld Stallyns. Unfortunately, the members of the band were extremely stupid teenagers, and they will not get to form Wyld Stallyns if they don’t pass high school. George Carlin is sent back in time to give them a time-traveling phone booth so they can give a report that will please their teachers.

I rewatched this with my 13yo Eldest, whose favorite movie is Back to the Future. Their review was, “I knew it was going to be one of the movies of all time (sic) when Napoleon went down a waterslide.” Too true, offspring. Too true.

It’s probably good I watched this with my kiddo because I had to play it cool. Otherwise I would have spent the entire time *screaming* over how cute Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters were. It truly feels like these two young lads were just kind of tossed around a movie set so they could react to things with wide-eyed earnestness, dropping many a “whoaaa” and “far out!” The pairing of their clueless-stoner voices with their sometimes loquacious vocabulary is probably (sincerely) the basis for how I talk: extremely casually, like a total idiot, with multisyllabic words thrown in simply because I know them. It’s extremely adorable coming out of these babyfaces. (The jury is out on having it come from a middle aged mother.)

The titular characters speak half their lines simultaneously. It’s just so cute – these boys clearly only share a single brain cell between them, and that lonely braincell is overclocked. Charmingly, I’m not sure any of the historical figures they grabbed have extra brain cells to share. They are deeply underwritten in a way that feels totally unimportant. It’s just a total frivolous delight.

I actually didn’t realize this feels like a pretty straightforward kids’ movie until this watch. The realization came around the time we time travel to the Wild West and are treated to fart sounds in an outhouse. In order to keep the plot moving, everyone in all time periods are casual about the weird events unfolding, so characterization always plays second fiddle to concept, and the shallowness feels like part of its appeal.

The extremely “history lite” version of the world is wholly appropriate as a platform for merely introducing various historical figures. I didn’t realize, for instance, that my child (who is well-versed in Napoleonic history) had yet to hear of Joan of Arc, so having to look up an article to explain exactly what she did counts as homeschooling. But if you already have the 101 on historical figures, you can just enjoy the way the script puns about what each of them might do when unleashed in a 1988 California shopping mall.

Of course this movie still has to be weird and gross about someone’s mom. It’s not as incesty as BTTF, but Bill’s dad married a woman who’s only three years older than his own son, and her hotness/Bill’s attraction comes up repeatedly. This is also why I had to explain what an Oedipal complex is to my 13yo, and I’m not grateful to the 80s for that one. Homeschooling doesn’t need to cover all subject matter.

The time travel is given exactly the rigor it needs, which is to say, none at all. Where Back to the Future delights in the science fiction questions raised by time travel, Bill & Ted is just here to have simple fun. I’m not even offended when these two dumdums call each other fags for hugging. They call each other fags at the exact same time, doing the thing where they speak their lines together, and it’s the faggotiest thing I’ve ever seen. Of course these sweet babies are in denial. How could I even be offended. I wanna pinch em.

~

It was really interesting coming back to Bill & Ted on the same day that I watched The Breakfast Club. Both movies feel like they came out of the drug cultures of the 80s, but The Breakfast Club feels like the bitter memories of someone crashing off a coke high, whereas Bill & Ted feels like a grownup stoner imagining how much easier high school would have been if Sigmund Frood Dood could have given him therapy for his final grade. Yet it also touches on that authoritarian rift between parents and kids that we also saw in TBC.

Worth noting that Ted “Theodore” Logan’s rift with his father is central to his character, yet he remains a joyful weirdo who wants to play lightsabers with medieval swords while time traveling, a rescuer of princesses, and a supportive friend. If we want to read the creators’ narrative/tonal choices as a reflection of their values, then I might observe not everyone reacted to the ultra-authoritarianism with anger and violence: some embraced cheery absurdity instead.

It’s kinda thinking too much to even broach this subject with Bill & Ted. I mean, this is truly the movie of all time. Napoleon really does go down a waterslide (at a park called Waterloo, no less). They’re not aspiring for anywhere near the same level of humanity as John Hughes’s work. Tonally and stylistically, they’re completely different. But I think you can kinda get a sense of life of teens in the 80s in the places that the venn diagram of these movies overlap, which makes them a fascinating double feature.

(Image source: Orion Pictures Corporation)

The Breakfast Club is a legendary culture moment for Gen X about growing up. Five teenagers have detention at school on a Saturday, and the long, boring time in the library helps kids across cliques and caste realize they’re all fundamentally human.

I was born ‘88; this takes place in ‘84; this was not part of my personal canon growing up. I’ve seen it before though, just not in a while. These days I usually watch older movies and think, “Wow, everyone looks so young.” Everyone in The Breakfast Club somehow still looks exactly my mom’s age. I think it’s because this is such an anachronistic movie: beyond the music and fashion, the exact dynamic expressed between generations is distinct to Gen X.

I expected the story to be more timeless. If you boil it down to the core message — one where People Are People, and Growing Up Is Hard — that feels extremely timeless. Yet the way that the people interact feels distinct to its time.

We’ve spent decades growing away from the sort of social attitudes that made open mockery of weird, naive, earnest, or *anyone* culturally acceptable. Relentless bullying from Bender against his fellow students gets groans and eye-rolls, even when he pulls a switch blade–that’s how commonplace it seems. One kid is found with a gun in his locker and sent to detention instead of help. Violence is both explicit and verbal. Also, there is no communication between these children that is not hyper-aware of their position in society and prioritizes that before anything else, so accepting other people as human must be their primary development. They are still far away from a point where they might actually be able to build healthy relationships, and that’s so depressing.

Further, the dynamic between Gen X and their parents is distinct. Older gens were extremely traumatized by the depression and great wars; they passed a lot of authoritarian junk onto their children out of fear. There was such a rift in trust between many parents/kids, and this haunts our protagonists. Remember how we judged Helicopter Parents? That was a lot of Gen X trying to figure out how to *actually* bond with their kids, because their parents expected them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Millennials, meanwhile, have coined “gentle parenting” and get judged for being too nice. I suspect we’re going to see a swing back into more trauma-influenced parenting trends through the 21st century, but I’m not sure the teen/parent dynamic will ever quite look the way it did in 1980s.

Every character in The Breakfast Club feels vividly real–probably because they *are* so screwed up in such authentic ways. The personal-feeling nature of it — the fact I can only associate these characters/situations with people I actually know, who were not adults for me when I needed them — means I just feel uniformly bad encountering it. But that same very evocative personal nature is its charm for many fans.

I can’t add anything about the Claire/Bender dynamic that wasn’t better described by Molly Ringwald in a thoughtful article reflecting on her time working with John Hughes. I feel pragmatic about the toxic masculinity of this era of cinema. Even before seeing Ringwald remark that Hughes took rejection like Bender did, I sensed the story is obviously a very personal one to Hughes, and the fact he can harass the girl thusly and get at her by the end is obviously fantasy fulfillment for the creator. This is true of quite a few movies. If someone is narratively rewarded for bad behavior, it’s usually fantasy fulfillment for the creator.

Of course, one wants to sympathize with Bender/Hughes, especially if Bender’s story of abuse has any reflection from Hughes’s life. Men have learned throughout the generations that they can get sympathy despite bad behavior if they claim an abuse history. It’s human instinct to protect our fellow person. But loads of people are abused without turning into abusers, sexually assaulting girls, and pulling knives on classmates; likewise Hughes was more than grown enough to handle rejection without violent explosions.

I don’t think anyone likes seeing Allison’s transformation at the end of the movie, nor do I find her HFN with Andy satisfying or compelling. We’ve seen too many transformation from “ugly” girls to “actually pretty” (whether or not the movie meant to say that) to take it as anything but policing aesthetics of femininity. I mean, the two of them are still better than Claire and Bender. I am willing to accept these things as an expression of the theme, though: In order to accept that people are just people, these kids had to realize that they can do and be all the same things as their peers. They can date anyone, dress any way they like, and be who they want. That’s a good message, even if it gets bogged down by grossness.

After all, this movie is predominantly a fantasy for a successful white dude who wrote extremely offensive coked-out comedy (citation: Molly Ringwald’s article), and I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it to be anything else. It is what it is. It’s a microcosm of a generation that feels toxic as hell, but it was trying to heal. And when I take it from that direction, I can appreciate it, even if my urge to rewatch is going to be pretty low. All I can think is that the people who relate to this movie must have *really* needed it, and I’m comfortable setting it down as “not for me, not my time, but clearly a noteworthy part of cinema.”

We are all screwed up in our ways, and Hughes allowed those people to be visible, to be heroic, to be *cool*. His work is fascinating, problematic, and nuanced, and The Breakfast Club is one of the problematic but also more iconic examples.

(movie credit: Universal Pictures)

Joker was too political in its moment to be evaluated on its own merits. The PR around Joker’s release turned into an arm of Trump-era pre-pandemic culture war. Joker, both the movie and central figure, were claimed as icons of right-wing reactionaries. Being part of the left-leaning internet, I mostly saw analyses talking about how much incels loved it. It didn’t feel at the time like anyone was actually watching the movie.

But basically, if you wanted to be a libertarian neckbeard pissing off SJWs for the lols, you associated with Joker (often seen alongside memes like Pepe); if you were mostly trying to survive these guys, then you were following Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn redemption journey instead.

Now that we’re five years out from the mess of its Discourse, it’s easier to see that Joker is just a character piece akin to Taxi Driver wearing Batman clothes. Fleck’s journey is one of a man let down by society and his mother, the only two possible support systems he has, and gets real revengey about it. The revenge element, and knowing what power the Joker gains as a crime boss after the end of the movie, certainly makes this an appealing fantasy for a certain kind of person.

Does Joker intend to appeal to right-wing reactionaries? I don’t think so. Does Joker do anything to dissuade bad behavior from such reactionaries? Also no, but Joker’s bad behaviors and public shootings are not narratively approved. They are only *Joker* approved, and the movie can’t say anything Joker doesn’t think by virtue of its close POV.

This falls into the trap of any character piece about a villain: when you take a sympathetic and aesthetic look at bad guys, you give irl bad guys someone to misinterpret.

My biggest issue with the movie is that I personally don’t like incarnations of Batman’s Joker which give him a back story. I have never liked Red Hood. I wouldn’t even acknowledge The Killing Joke if Babs hadn’t spent so much time as Oracle thereafter. My preferred Jokers play into his role more like a chaos-entity, like the mischievous Coyote of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, emblematic of themes and serving as a mirror to Batman/Bruce Wayne’s character issues. Turning Joker into an actual person takes away the arcane magic of the Batman mythos.

I don’t mind this Joker backstory too much. It doesn’t feel like a real Batman-universe movie, really. It’s an adoring homage to cinema that appealed to a trend of comic book movie dominance in order to get funded.

Enormous narrative tension surrounds both literal and metaphoric loaded guns, which you know must fire, but not when or how or who will catch the bullet. The close POV with an unreliable narrator means having no clue which parts of the movie are real until you get the perspective of a conclusion. You can sense that Arthur’s making things up, but the seamless slip through his version of reality and actual reality makes it difficult to grasp the difference. Truth doesn’t seem all that important after a while.

The editing and score have a gorgeous confluence, evoking some of Nolan Batman’s rhythms and grit but without any of the action. The style is beautiful to look at, in a horror movie way; Gotham’s 80s NYC wear-and-tear has been rendered in stark shadows and shocks of virulent neon.

The performances are outstanding. If you’ve never understood when someone says “the actor disappears into this role,” Joaquin Phoenix manages to do it with Arthur Fleck here. His development of Arthur Fleck is really such great work, hand-in-hand with director and writers who take great care to show us that Joker is actually a really bad guy and his barely sufficient healthcare really was keeping him from turning into a monster. It’s a fun approach to the king of the Batman Rogue’s Gallery. Batman’s rogues are so traditionally representations of mental illness and trauma that they literally go to an asylum instead of jail when caught. But Joker’s really, really just a Very Bad Man.

I agree it’s easily read with bad motives, too. It felt more irresponsible to release a movie so easily appropriated by right-wing reactionaries in 2019 when Americans were suffering under a chaotic orange clown in the White House. But within itself, on its own rules, Joker doesn’t have to say anything about that — it just has a terrible sense of humor and legendarily bad timing for its political moment. Arthur Fleck couldn’t have done it worse himself.

~

What I personally find irresistible about Joker is how I relate to Arthur Fleck’s early movie struggle with his “mental illness.” I saw the movie not too long after my stay in a mental hospital. The healthcare system in my state was like participating in my own degradation for the betterment of my health. It meant spending a lot of time in very old buildings with peeling walls. It meant fighting side effects for medication that were sometimes worse than the illness itself.

My outcome was ultimately positive, but it felt bleak to trudge through. Fantasies constructed for self-preservation in such an environment can easily skew toward seeking a horrible catharsis. I don’t have the angry character of someone like Fleck, but I can *feel* it sometimes. The dangerous allure of leaning into the worst fantasies. This is a lot of the reason I also can’t resist Donnie Darko.

If the arc where Joker goes from being an infantilized fool into a serial killing kingpin mostly by stopping his medication doesn’t convince you to keep taking those meds, then maybe nothing will. (I’m kidding.) (Is it a joke? Would Arthur Fleck laugh?)

(image credit: Warner Bros)

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” -Lizzy from Pride & Prejudice

“Somehow, I’m mad and horny.” -Noah from Fire Island

~

If I’m in a TV mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I watch the BBC version starring Jennifer Ehle.

If I’m in a movie mood and need to itch my P&P urges, I grab the 2005 one with Kiera Knightley–then fling the DVD straight out the window! Sorry, Tom from Succession, you’re a great Mr. Darcy but I just don’t dig the adaptation.

I’m watching Fire Island, baby!

What I love about Jane Austen books – surely what everyone through the ages has loved about Jane Austen books – is the timelessness of gossip, relationship fuss, class arrogance, and how amazing femmes are. It’s only right to transpose the courtship drama of Pride & Prejudice on a bunch of modern queens as they spend their summer vacation on Fire Island.

Rather than sisters, we have a bunch of bff gay guys who spend every year visiting their fag hag, who is like Mrs. Bennet with all the good parts and none of the bad parts. The sisters’ personalities are flawlessly transposed on each of the friends: a lovely sensitive older sister (Bowen Yang!!!!), the two completely inappropriate little sisters, and the brainy one who thinks you’re all fools for subjecting yourself to toxic beauty standards.

Everything works perfectly compressed into a week. The nation’s gays have converged on Fire Island, a real vacation destination favored by mostly East Coast homos, and everyone’s around for a good dance and snort and suck. By everyone, we mean anyone who can afford it. Fire Island is real fancy and our girls are…not as much. Lesbian Mrs. Bennet is about to lose her house on the island. This is their last summer together. It’s easy to project the precarity of the Bennet economic situation upon our gays teetering on the brink of rich enough for the ultimate gay vacay.

This is their last chance for a big blowout. So Noah and Howie (Lizzy and Jane) seek to get laid, of course. Noah has sworn he shall not hook up until they find someone for Howie. They trip into the companionship of an especially wealthy group of friends. That’s where we meet Jane’s Mr. Bingley (really adorable and clueless in this adaptation) and Lizzy’s Mr. Darcy (the hunkiest robot-man-lawyer who makes dorkiness look cool). Everything you think will happen, happens – this is a great adaptation. It’s just that this version is if Jane Austen took poppers and wrote her book at a sauna.

Look, I don’t know how to tell you that our culture *needed* Queer as Folk mashed up with Pride & Prejudice. But it did. It really did. This is a celebration of femme gays with the textured writing of Joel Kim Booster, who plays Noah, and obviously knows exactly what he’s talking about. The Mr. Wickham scandal is handled with an especially deft modern hand.

There’s a season for all movies. In much the way there are different horror movies for Halloween season versus Valentine’s Day, there are also different romcoms for Valentine’s Day versus summertime. Fire Island belongs on a list of summer rewatches. You can put it on any time you want to recall the smell of sunblock, lube, and salt water, or when you want to feel like you’re watching your gorgeous best friends get up to bitchy nonsense wearing virtually nothing, the way God intended it.

In How Do You Know, Reese Witherspoon ages out of a softball career at the wizened age of 31 and finds herself reeling. A practical, determined person with affirmations taped all over her mirrors, she approaches her post-sports period with a conscious kind of soul-searching. Her compassion and vigor catches the eye of Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, two extremely different suitors, and then a lot of adorable introspective stuff happens and I loved it.

With a star average of 3.2, Letterboxd does not agree, to say the least. At this point, I’ve decided Letterboxd just doesn’t like earnest romance the way I do. How Do You Know is about a character on a sincere journey, and God forbid she does it by having heartfelt conversations with a couple of guys in good lighting.

Reese Witherspoon’s performance as a well-written heroine was just a delight. It’s easy to see why she attracts both of the guys–although Paul Rudd’s uniquely smitten performance does a lot of heavy lifting. I like to talk about actors who have good Pining Face (they’re usually in the regency movies/shows), but Paul Rudd’s Adoration Face is something else entirely. No matter how much terrible life stuff he’s dealing with (his dad is business shark Jack Nicholson, so it’s a lot), it seems like gravity completely vanishes whenever Rudd is in the same space as Witherspoon. He grows *devoted*.

Paul Rudd’s character is generally delightful to watch. He never reacts quite the way I’d expect. He’s much too nice, extremely neurotic, and up to his neck in a federal indictment for businessy-bribing-idk-stuff that he did not personally do. He effervesces pathetically through the situation. More than anything, this guy just wants to help out, even if that means taking the fall for Dad Jack Nicholson’s crimes (maybe??) (he’s thinking about it). He would fully be a sad sack in another actor’s hands. Rudd somehow makes it fun to watch. And Jack Nicholson somehow softens himself into the role, matching Rudd’s energy, turning the grimmest dad moments into something…heartfelt? How did they do that?

Choosing Owen Wilson to play the heel was casting brilliance, mostly because I find it hard to decide if I should even describe him that way. This is another one where casting changed the character’s writing entirely! Jealous and sometimes obsessive behavior would look like an entire stadium of red flags played by most actors. Wilson makes smashing a lamp seem like a golden retriever just got the zoomies rather than a jilted boyfriend angry his girlfriend left. It takes a deft hand to play someone so persistently clueless without the faintest sense of malice. Instead, you walk away feeling like they’re the wrong fit: so many women would be happy with Wilson, and Witherspoon just needs something else.

This unexpectedly charming romcom reminded me of Four Christmases, another Reese Witherspoon romcom that won me over last year. It’s funny how all the romcoms I’ve been watching have made me totally reevaluate my mental rankings of actresses who tend to appear in this genre. Meg Ryan remains my absolute favorite, but Reese Witherspoon has bumped Julia Roberts out of the rankings for me. I still love Roberts! But where Roberts seems drawn to cynical darker-edged stories, Witherspoon seems drawn to warmly textured character pieces, and I prefer the latter when I’m watching romcoms.

Speaking of actresses who tend to appear in this genre, Katherine Hahn really made a living off of best friend roles in romcoms for a while. Here, she’s not bff to Goldie Hawn’s daughter, but to Paul Rudd. Not only do we get a very lovely close friendship between the two, but Hahn’s character is also the platform for one of the sweetest scenes in the movie. It also just occurred to me that the extremely close platonic relationship between Hahn and Rudd is a great contrast with Wilson’s immediate suspicion at finding Witherspoon with a male friend. (In defense of the toxic golden retriever, though, was he wrong? Maybe his “I’m the third wheel in a romcom” sense was tingling.)

In general this is a very well-constructed movie. Creative spotlighting create a dreamy atmosphere vignetting our lovers at the important moments. Much of the story is actually about the characters’ respective journeys, and meeting up to parse everything that’s happening is where love forms. The ultimate expressions of love are so sincere that it’s hard not to imagine the screenwriter thinking about their spouse as they write it out. It’s that sweet!

Rare is the movie that gets me happy-teary, but this is the second Reese Witherspoon movie to do it now. I really loved this one and it’s fine that Letterboxd doesn’t like it because, idk, more for me. That’s definitely how movies work.

(source: Sony Pictures)

Willy’s Wonderland is the best Five Night’s at Freddy’s movie the way that Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie.

Watching Willy’s Wonderland, there’s no period where you will think “this is a good movie,” but you will think “this movie is gloriously stupid” at least twenty times, and Willy’s Wonderland is very satisfied to be stupid.

Surely Nicolas Cage was onboarded with the pitch, “You don’t have to learn a single line and we’ll just tell you what to punch and the shoot will be over in a week.” This was a great idea because the dialogue for other characters is overlong and poorly written. Staring is the best screenwriting we get.

Early in the movie, Nicolas Cage slams his first energy drink and then stands in place beside his car, staring at nothing for eight hours as the sun moves his shadow from the left side of his body to the right side of his body.

In fact, Nicolas Cage does two things in Willy’s Wonderland: absolutely destroy animatronics (and a pinball game), and stare.

You can tell when you meet the young lady who will be his best friend when they have a stare-off. He likes the way she stares so much, he adopts her so that they can stare together.

I have never felt so deeply satisfied by a movie so eagerly diving feet-first into its gonzo concept of “Nicolas Cage is the night guard in FNAF and he’s ready for it,” or perhaps, “Liam Neeson from Taken gets hired as the FNAF night guard, played by Nicolas Cage.”

Actually, the Wikipedia article informed me that Willy’s Wonderland was inspired by one of my recent super-favorites, Mandy (2018). Which means the actual best way to describe it is, “The part of Mandy where Nicolas Cage kills his way through a murder cult, except the murder cult is also FNAF animatronics, and there’s no Andrea Riseborough.”

The amount that I enjoyed this makes me wonder if comedy-horror is actually my favorite genre, maybe?

~

Amusingly, I can actually come at Willy’s Wonderland with one of my anti-capitalist labor-focused reviews, too.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has plenty to say about capitalism, intentionally or otherwise. I am not actually sure how cognizant of any labor messaging the game may be when it’s creator is an American conservative, who are typically opposed to labor rights; maybe the IP is actually fine with sacrificing employees on the altar of capital.

In the first game, you’re playing a night guard (actually it might be a name–The Night Guard?) who has to watch over a pizzeria like Chuck E. Cheese. The animatronics come to life and try to kill you. I am a mother of kids who like FNAF, particularly the older of the two, so my exposure to it has been quite persistent over the years but I very seldom play. It’s a puzzle-reaction game with jump scares if you fail to respond to the sensory input with the correct action, basically. No thanks, not for me.

But I think you can infer a lot about America’s work environment that a realistic story is “guy gets night job with zero training and everyone knows the job will kill him, then it does.”

What makes Willy’s Wonderland especially charming for me is that Nicolas Cage’s character (here, called The Janitor) is an extremely cognizant worker bee with a very healthy work/life balance.

It could be said that any job you get is going to demand something horrible of you. Many service industry jobs will happily destroy you, though often more slowly, by grinding down your back, your knees, your shoulders, using repetitive labor and heavy lifting. You may be denied timely bathroom breaks. Factory workers may find themselves blown to pieces or crushed when safety standards are not met. Retail workers will get underpaid jobs in dangerous parts of town where they are expected to work minutes after a robbery, assuming they survive–their lives on the line for capital.

So what’s the big difference between that and a building full of animatronics actively trying to kill you? Well, at least the animatronics are faster, and they have some fun music.

Nicolas Cage gives the impression of a man who has done a *lot* of crappy jobs in his life, and this is just one more. He literally could not care less about anything outside of what he agreed to do. (His boss in this is Tex Macadoo. I have to say that because it’s my new favorite name.)

When the timer goes off indicating he needs a break, he takes a break, even if it means leaving animatronics to murder teenagers. But also he doesn’t try to escape the pizzeria before his work is done. The doors were chained shut, but that’s not what’s keeping him inside. The Janitor agreed to clean and he’s going to do his job, darnit.

Truly, an icon of labor meeting quota.

~

If I wanted to think too much about it, I think there is an argument to be made that The Janitor is not simply a man willing to do whatever dirty job is placed on his shoulders: there is implicit characterization at multiple points. The way he regards the Willy’s pinball machine seems reverent. Either he’s got a previous relationship with this specific machine, or he really likes arcade games. Definitely there’s something nostalgic going on inside his head.

The way that The Janitor stares at icons of Willy specifically suggests either 1) foreshadowing the ultimate conflict with Willy, or 2) he was, perhaps, one of the child fans hurt by Willy’s, now grown up and looking for revenge.

I don’t think it’s the first one because The Janitor and Willy don’t actually have an especially remarkable showdown. It’s still possible simply because The Janitor stares at *everything.*

But the second theory makes more sense. It could explains why he isn’t surprised by any of this, and why he goes from zero to sixty on the intensity of his violence as soon as an animatronic activates. There is a History. Perhaps then, too, we can expect he acquired the Young Staring Heroine as part of his crew (?) family (?) copilot (?) out of a sense of shared trauma and responsibility.

If The Janitor does have a history, then he was fully expecting his car to get stopped in that town. He was expecting to get looped into the trap and fight these bad boys. He’s already headed out with the full intention of getting this dirty job done, which is a fun thought.

I feel no real attachment to this theory, but I put it forward because I think it’s *fun* how a movie without any dialogue for its main character (and bad dialogue for the other characters) can manage to create fertile ground for reading backstory and deeper lore behind what it presents. Acting, directing, and editing did a lot of narrative work here.

Nicolas Cage is actually a really committed actor wherever he shows up, for better or worse, and I’m gonna tell you this is one of the better ones.

I’m so delighted that there’s a version of Mandy I can share with my young teenager.