Dredd is an early-10s science fiction action movie where a post-nuclear war America has consolidated into a few metropolises, and most people live in giant towers, like whole cities in a skyscraper. Quality of life is real, real bad. A brutal policing force of Judges intervene with crime. They have the authority to judge and kill perpetrators on sight. Massive public car chases and shootouts are common. In this particular movie, Judge Dredd takes a trainee to answer a call, and things escalate.

This is based upon source material also adapted in an 80s movie with Sylvester Stallone, so if it sounds familiar, it should. 2000 AD is a comics classic.

Surely I could come up with involved, over-thinky commentary about how this satire of America’s punitive police-forward culture is just as much participating in the mythology of copaganda as it is criticizing it. Aside from the very fact they differentiate between good cops and bad cops, fundamentally misunderstanding ACAB, any movie that makes bad stuff look cool allows people to take the wrong message. See: terrible IRL cops idolizing The Punisher.

Dredd leaves much room for genuine idolization of this brutal police state. The creators’ intentions are coming from the right place; the observations are keenly made. It’s really more symptomatic of the policing culture’s greater issues that you can’t make a brutal, awful cop that cops won’t wanna mimic. I don’t want this kind of policing satire anymore, no matter how well it’s done. You know?

All that said, Dredd 3D is superlative on every other axis I care about. Imagine someone made a perfect adaptation of the *spirit* of 1990s Boomer Shooters (Doom, Hexen, Quake, et al) wearing the clothes of 2000 AD. That sort of dry action hero paired against absurd numbers of enemies, with a multi-functional gun that can shoot whatever you need (providing you conserved ammunition for the boss battle), and the floor-by-floor level design of Dredd feels like a much better adaptation of Duke Nukem 3D than we will ever see.

Alex Garland is behind the screenplay for Dredd 3D. Considering Garland’s fascinating relationship with feminine gender in Men and the highly metaphoric Annihilation, it makes sense to see him here: Ma-Ma and Anderson are two female characters written and played pitch-perfectly. Is it weird to say the movie Dredd simply doesn’t hate women? There is frank acknowledgment of female objectification in the story, but even visions of sexual violence against women are kept vague, and Ma-Ma declines to commit excessive violence against Anderson. It’s a show of ultimate respect that Ma-Ma simply wants Anderson dead. Not tortured, raped, or skinned–just a whole lotta bullets in the chest and the head. Now that’s feminism I can get behind.

Whenever I think of movies with fabulous editing, Dredd 3D is at the top. The score is kind of a minimal electronic drum-and-bass thing for the most part, but it’s unrelenting, and the dominance of the rhythm draws you from one cut to another with the breathless excitement of a music video. The pacing is outstanding.

Dredd’s also a shockingly beautiful movie, with shots that are like anti-aesthetic fine art. This is a movie celebrating the bright spatter of blood, the shock of angry scars on pallid flesh, and grunge dragged down stucco walls. SFX took great pride in showing every frame of bullets blasting through bodies. It will always hold the title of Best Movie Shown in 3D in Cinemas Ever, for me, because the sparkling slo-mo scenes are the single greatest usage of stereoscoping filming I’ve seen, and it’s almost as beautiful on my flat television.

None of it would be as sweet if Dredd didn’t have the most flawless action movie punchline known to mankind. With a crazy escalating level of violence endangering a city block’s worth of people (and then some), things feel huge. The stakes are big. Ma-Ma turns out to be a major source of criminality for all of Mega City One, and a lot of people die, and cops turn even more corrupt, and a drug lab gets destroyed. Yet the punchline is that this is just another day. Shrug. When he finally delivers “justice” upon the big bad, Dredd’s ready to go home to take a shower and sleep for the next one.

Fabulous.

(image credit: Lionsgate)

This is one of the very few movies that didn’t involve dragons, vampires, aliens, or alien vampires that I ever bothered watching as a kid.

Yet again I find myself in the surreal position of growing beyond the young heroines to which I once related. I used to see myself as Wednesday in The Addams Family; I became Morticia sometime in my twenties when my adorable children sprouted sarcasm. Now in my thirties, with an artistic principled teenager and a perspicacious blonde spitfire, I find myself relating to older moms yet, like Susan Sarandon as Mrs. March. You can tell she used to be like her daughters. She’s still got that youthful, hopeful edge that keeps her fighting for her daughters’ rights to be individuals, free of systemic abuse and expectations that don’t suit them, and the fact she can’t get through a conversation without bringing up feminism is way too relatable.

How beautiful to grow up with the families in my movies. How lovely it is to connect to womanity throughout the decades. This is a book from 1868 filtered through 1990 sensibilities, now viewed from the mid-2020s, and I find myself reflecting on the progress (or lack thereof) from thirty years ago as much as a hundred sixty years ago. Such a straight line can be drawn from, say, the March daughters’ coming of age to my mom’s coming of age, and my own, and those of my children.

A hundred sixty years doesn’t feel so long ago, and that’s comforting. A hundred sixty years from now maybe isn’t that far away either. I wonder if there will be women butting up against the expectations of the Heterosexual Treadmill like Jo March, who’d much rather write gothic stories than get married and have babies*. I can say with certainty that there will be girls developing friendships with boys they think *like* them, only to discover the boys actually *want* them, just like 1868, just like my own young life at the turn of the 21st century.

Marriage is a complicated prospect meaning a great many potentials that had higher stakes for women. They still do. The implicit burden of being the one with less economic power has changed somewhat, but perhaps the difficulty of men to genuinely recognize that burden hasn’t changed at all. While Jo in the story was storming around denying a need for marriage, Louisa May Alcott held similar sentiments. She didn’t initially choose to marry off the girls. The need was passed down from a publisher who wanted happily ever afters for a hungry audience.

Giving Jo an ending with Mr. Bear feels weird, just like the developments with Laurie don’t feel *good* exactly. I don’t think I’m projecting my unease on the story. It feels a lot like Alcott expected even the best man to struggle to respect her passions, like Mr. Bear. And Teddy’s attraction to the March family more than Amy has a whiff of the role women are expected to play for men as wife, mommy, therapist, and his entire social life.

But the bittersweet authenticity of these disappointments, compromises, and sacrifices is maybe what makes Little Women so good, too. If you told your childhood self how your adulthood turned out, don’t you think you’d feel a little bittersweet in the comparison? A lot of people don’t end up living out wild childhood dreams – perhaps most people don’t – but life may be beautiful if you hold love and family close anyway.

On a sentimental level, Christian Bale is such a charming Teddy because he’s also the voice for Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle. If you love Howl and Sophie in the American version, it’s kinda not hard to root for him a *little* bit? Even when he’s being a weird womanizing punk? I expected him to explode into miserable goo when he started tantruming over Jo.

The score for this particular version of Little Women is enough to absolutely break my heart even when I’m not facedown in bed over Beth for the thousandth time in my innocent life. Seeing the absolutely *amazing* cast so young, when we’ve now become accustomed to their grown faces, has a way of making a gal reflect on exactly how much her own face has grown. The years pass in the movie and the characters age but the actresses don’t (with the exception of a casting-swap for Amy mid-movie). This is the sentimental dream of childhood’s years coming to an end. It aches in such a lovely way.(image credit: Columbia Pictures)

Though Eternals is very much the same brand as Marvel’s other offerings, it feels quiet and intimate. The visual style is soft: with flattering, moody lighting, the surgically enhanced lead actors look truly like timeless aliens rather than video game characters (as Marvel’s creations sometimes do by the end of post-production). We linger in close conversations held between ancient beings. The narrative slips away from modernity to historical periods with a drifting camera. The Eternals themselves are comfortable in every time period, and so are we, lovingly experiencing humanity beside them.

Shakespeare loved to write about direct opposites, and Chloé Zhao has made full use of this technique to hammer home the humanity intrinsic to gods on Earth. A grand-scale comic book story about planet-sized aliens is made relatable by treating the Eternals as normal-ish people who want to help the world, who are then changed in dramatic ways when their mission is revealed to be less-than-helpful.

Unfortunately, the grand-scale story also comes with a grand-scale cast. Each character was designed with interesting power sets played marvelously by actors who brought interesting things to the role, and I would have liked to see more from all of them. But how much time can you spend with all your favorites when you have about a dozen favorites and 2.5 hours to visit with them?

I most often rankled against Eternals when it reminded me that it’s part of one of the biggest entertainment franchises, like ham-handed text on screen explaining lore that is then repeated by the characters. Laboring over explanations of why they didn’t intervene with other MCU events irritated me. This movie desperately wanted to be its own, but it is still part of the brand, packaged in plastic and dispensed with a Happy Meal. Zhao did a wonderful job making a wonderful movie within those constraints.

Whether Eternals works in the greater scope of the MCU ultimately depends on how future creators will handle them. The piecemeal storytelling means we may see these characters brought in elsewhere, with all but their simplest defining characteristics stripped so that they can be functional cogs in an oversize, spectacular machine (like, say, Peter Quill in Endgame). This is where I find my dissatisfaction in the MCU, and it will seem especially criminal to reappropriate the Eternals in such a fashion when the complexity and charm of the characters in Zhao’s vision are what make them worth watching.

(Image credit: Disney. This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on Jan 14 2022.)

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is so *interesting*. A really authentic portrayal of loneliness in the internet era. It also made me think about what horror can be. The movie was simple but, I think, pretty subtle too.

I read the movie as being about a Queer Elder trying to keep tabs on a very-depressed Queer Youth over the internet when the Youth is descending into a bad place. Trying to love and care for someone from afar. The fear when you can’t reach them.

The story ended up being actually really sweet, but terribly sad about the aching loneliness and isolation. The brief giddiness of meeting someone you know *so* well for the first time IRL, and then returning to your isolation. I feel like it was written by someone much like me.

I am not capable of (or interested in) writing anything as subtle as this movie. There are shots that are, say, 7 or 8 minutes long, and very little happens in them. I still thought it was interesting. That’s so much not my style. But the internet experience resonates.

This feels so personal, and also deeply of-the-moment. This captures so much of my internet life so well. I used to be the younger person. I became the older person. A horror movie indeed.

(Image credit: Utopia. This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on Dec 13 2022.)

You know the “how often do men think about the Roman Empire?” meme that used to go around? Well, for me, it might as well be The Princess Bride. I think about it constantly. A lot of the time I’m thinking about the book, actually, which is a wonderful ironic read that zoomed straight over my head as a kid, but has a lot of great imagery in it. Naturally the book characters look like the movie actors, who were, in my childhood esteem, probably the most famous actors in the entire world. To be clear, I was an age where 11-year-old Fred Savage looked grown up to me, maybe like a teenager, so I must have been very wee trying to navigate this meta masterpiece.

Humans aren’t even capable of abstract thought until adolescence, which means the exquisite sarcasm of The Princess Bride formed my base wiring by first confusing me and then leaving me smitten. No wonder I remain obsessed thirtywhatever years later. God, this movie is my entire gender identity, my sexual orientation, my mascot, my master, my mommy. It is everything.

I married a Westley type who would absolutely go transform into a pirate and adventure back to save me from an evil marriage. Early in our relationship he used hard labor to show how much he loved me, like carrying around giant bags of cat litter. And I was usually a big jerk about it. I didn’t shove him down any hills, but… Anyway.

The Princess Bride ran so that Shrek could sprint gamely after it. One after another, William Goldman presents us with pulp adventure stereotypes that are inverted: the commoner princess too spicy for the evil prince to handle, an extremely erudite and considerate swordsman on a bloody revenge scheme, a soft-hearted giant serving as the muscle for their unintimidating ringleader. Even our sincerely handsome, valorous hero is played to the goofy hilt by Known Silly Bitch Carey Elwes, who I have been in love with for my entire life.

But I’ve been EVEN MORE in love with Robin Wright as Princess Buttercup that whole time. I remember in the book, they talked about how she brushed her hair a hundred times a day. It made her more beautiful. There was something about bathing in milk, I think. And it was the beauty she gained from the sadness of losing Westley that drew the Prince’s hungry eye. Robin Wright is every inch the ethereal, unbelievable beauty described in the book, and it shouldn’t be possible. A human is actually that beautiful!

Everyone in this movie is what, like, twelve years old? I’m telling you, they were old-ass people when I was a kid, but now I’m middle aged and this movie is full of babies! What happened?

(I was *so* *young* when I loved this movie so passionately. I’m telling you, the name Buttercup made me laugh because I thought it meant like…butter…in a cup. So young!)

In fact, The Princess Bride is much funnier when you have adult cognition, and you’re not still eating glue like it’s a part-time job. The broad family appeal offers something for every age, really. Little kids enjoy the excitement, older kids enjoy relating to Tiny Fetus Fred Savage who is reluctant to listen to the story, teens can enjoy the hotness of the surprisingly young leads probably, and older adults can actually know what’s going on.

You can tell an absolute genius like Rob Reiner sits in the director’s chair for this one. The Princess Bride is basically the When Harry Met Sally of 80s fantasy. I love it forever.

(image credit: 20th Century Fox)

I’m simultaneously impressed by the sheer ambition of the project, and feeling wholly incapable of ever giving this a star rating. This is…unique.

The animation is incredible, when it’s animated, and when it’s interspersed with heavy rotoscoping or filtered footage, it’s very interesting.

The Halflings look like children, mostly, which is unsettling. In several places, it definitely looks like they rotoscoped children for Hobbits. I just don’t think of them as childlike, though Frodo is certainly young.

Twinkolas is drawn VERY pretty. Gimli is as tall as Twinkolas and Old Man Aragorn. Boromir wears a pseudo-viking horned helmet. The Men have miniskirts (TUNICS) and either naked legs or skin toned leggings.

A lot of this is just aesthetic sensibilities of the 70s, or Bakshi’s taste, and Bakshi was a hell of an artist. Sacrifices were made in design in an attempt to do more animation, and when he succeeds, it’s beautiful.

The microexpressions of his characters and their hand gestures are like…wow. The backgrounds are divine! I love the fully rendered environments but I love the more abstract ones more.

I scream-laugh at the Ringwraiths every time they show up.

Thing is, you can nitpick what feels weird about this until the end of time, BUT IT ALL WORKS! This is obviously an incredible labor of love, and even the compromises are made with dedication and genius imo.

I could see this being a great kids’ intro to LotR.

(This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on Jan 03 2023. Image credit Warner Bros.)

Baroque isn’t the first word most folks would associate with Fury Road, but I’d argue this movie exemplifies the concept. I recall Guillermo Del Toro describing certain projects as baroque when they are detailed down to the most minute elements; his art style can be rather baroque. Whether you look closely or step back for a wider look at his films, you will see absurd levels of detail. Everything is considered.

George Miller’s style of filmmaking for Fury Road is similar, even if the aesthetic is post-apocalyptic.

An enormous ensemble is filled with distinct characters who have obvious lore associations that is mostly explained via aesthetics. Actor performances are outsized. You can be confident these characters are filled with character even if you haven’t seen the other movies, read the comic books, or seen interviews with the cast and crew sharing details. Just doing a few searches for Fury Road information brought up so much Mad Max lore that my head’s still spinning.

The editing is also baroque, packing so many quick shots into sequences that it feels like you’re somehow watching action occur from inside and outside vehicles simultaneously. A conscious focus on clarity of framing (trivia says they chose to center characters in the frame to make it easier to track) means you can absorb a lot of the exhilarating details without losing everything to the blur of violence.

And oh boy, the violence. These creative characters smashing around the movie are doing so with gleeful, drug-hazed brutality. The energy is usually frenetic. There are so many explosions and car flips. I’ve never seen another movie with stunts that feel as visceral as these ones. Though the special effects aren’t exactly hidden — often, the visuals look like a really cool art wall at a tattoo parlor rather than shooting for realism — a shocking amount of the movie was produced with practical effects, and you can feel it. Fury Road is a movie made out of exclamation marks with hardly a comma to breathe.

With this level of detail everywhere you look, it’s fitting that the actual plot of the movie is simple. Our Heroes try to get from point A to point B with minimal deaths, then are forced to turn around and return to point A. There isn’t much to follow if you don’t care to do so. The main character doesn’t talk very much.

If you do pay attention, you’ll note character development all over the place. Max goes from a feral blood bag to someone who goes to any end to save Furiosa’s life, the brides each find different routes to becoming fighters in charge of their own destinies, Nux turns his zealotry away from Immortan Joe–but while the presence of these arcs serve as a rugged scaffold to connect action scenes, Fury Road is still mostly about action scenes.

It’s fun to have such beautiful models centered in a fashion that seems typical for genre movies — presumably, under-dressed for our titillation as much as Immortan Joe’s — who each let slip quite a bit of character in their depictions and coexist in the movie alongside elderly and disabled women. They’re a great example of how Fury Road subverts the very tropes it benefits from. Despite the whole movie ostensibly being framed as another episode in Max’s life, this is one of the more radically feminist movies in the genre.

Behind-the-scenes trivia is worth reading for this one. The shoot it took to produce a ballet of exploding Burning Man cars was as harrowing as you’d think, and I can’t begin recapping all the trivia here. It starts with “Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy hated each other” and carries through “the oldest actress was 78 and did her own stunts” into “the nearly-naked girls nearly froze to death because the desert is flipping cold” and beyond. Hopefully everyone got over the difficult shoot well enough to feel proud of their contributions to one of cinema’s modern classics in retrospect.

My love for Fury Road isn’t anything new; it was one of the most popular movies of 2015. We knew Fury Road was a classic when it came out. For my money, it’s as good as Dredd 3D, the under-performing 2012 release that also featured an oppositional male/female pairing getting closer through killing people. The front half of the decade was so good for SF action movies!

(image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)