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.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a pleasant fantasy action-comedy movie that skims the surface of the genre for cool aesthetics and a satisfying but rote story. Hasbro has a specific vision for the Forgotten Realms that is consistently applied across Dungeons & Dragons-related properties. This is a very successful filmic take on the same material as the game Baldur’s Gate 3, except way less horny. You’re supposed to enjoy watching this one with the kids. BG3 is for playing alone after the kids go to bed, if you know what I mean.

I promise I’m not talking D&D:HAT down for being a checklist of fantasy adventure tropes. The thing about movies that check boxes is that you’ll love it if those are your boxes, you know? There is nothing I love more than seeing funny little dudes chased around by a big kitty with psychic venus fly traps on its back. I have spent my entire life wishing that I was a scary bald witch who can use a disembodied meat fist to arm-wrestle with cute twinks. Holga could crush my head in the crook of her elbow by flexing her bicep. They could have done it with way less wit and warmth and I’d have probably still been seated for it.

Luckily, this is a Good Movie.

A shallow story means that they can access a greater depth of SFF lore than the layman might be familiar with. For instance, tracer beasts–the venus fly trap kitty. Have you ever seen a tracer beast in a blockbuster intended for general audiences? If you have, please let me know; I need to educate myself on that part of film history.

We have plenty of anthros walking around the world, like our long-suffering friend Jarnathan. Talking to the dead is strictly limited to five questions for reasons nobody in the movie knows but you can run around resurrecting the dead to your heart’s content. Justice Smith learns to think with portals. A gelatinous cube is a plot point.

You must accept that the movie is written with the structure of a tabletop campaign of Dungeons & Dragons. This has many perceptible effects on the writing: characters behave along the limited D&D axis of morality, the heroes move through environments that feel a lot like (very nice-looking) maps that are peppered with traps which only make sense as puzzles for players; you can tell when the writing intends for characters to have a good roll or a bad roll. All of this occurs without any meta framing story. This is simply how the universe works, to such a degree that Regé-Jean Page’s flawlessly lawful good behavior reminds me why I never, ever play lawful good.

It’s an extremely structured way to worldbuild. It makes sense in games. Actually, it’s kind of a clever and interesting approach to allowing a tabletop game to model a complex world using simple dice rolls. But it means the movie is less committed to traditional screenwriting than it is to game campaign writing. Lulls are scheduled between quests to a degree that feels unnaturally episodic within the movie.

None of that is really a problem. It’s executed very well. I think it would bother me if I was only a movie fan, and not a fan of the source material; mostly I’m just remarking on how it’s interesting to see the deviation from the traditional screenwriting structure like this, adapted from another format.

D&D:HAT wants you to have fun. Hence it’s not very interested in thinking very hard about what’s going on. This is a really straightforward story with extremely limited room for textual interpretation of themes or whatnot. It does, however, offer ample room for getting creative about Chris Pine and Regé-Jean Page’s characters bumping pretties, if you like writing fanfic.

The dead wife is the only thing that gets a wee bit sad, but she’s such an artificial representation of a fridged wife for a character’s backstory that it’s hard to feel attached. I wasn’t surprised to see a bunch of dude names in the credits for writing and directing, though.

This is one of those movies that I really, really enjoy whenever I watch it, but I kind of forget it exists once I’ve turned away to something else. It’s so well made. I genuinely like it. But it’s not very interesting to me on a narrative level, so it just doesn’t stick to my ribs the way more metaphor- and myth-oriented Tolkienesque fantasy does.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

This is the second time I watched Barbie and I’m still trying to unpack why I feel such antipathy when it’s generally charming.

I hadn’t really wanted to watch it again, but my mommy hadn’t seen it yet, I had her captive at my house, and I wanted to be able to Discuss. This woman gave me most of my taste in media. I like watching things with her.

Since it’s been a minute since I wrote the first review (all of a month ago), I thought I might like Barbie better. Sometimes I have to get over the shock/disappointment/dismay/whatever-the-fuck-is-happening-inside-my-chaos-brain of seeing a movie for the first time, and realizing the values are so distant from mine. And then after that, it’s fine. I just anticipate the good parts and ignore the bad parts.

Although I found myself more capable of enjoying Ken now that I’m resigned to the movie being so Ken-focused, I found the last act to be as much a needle in the balloon of my enthusiasm as the first time. It’s just so bleak.

My original review doesn’t really change.

I wonder if I would like Barbie out of the context of its time, when I didn’t spend a year suffering under the oppressive Barbeinheimer marketing (I’m Very Online so I just saw tons of it), but I am inclined to think I would not. As I said before, there is a deep cynicism to Barbie that always makes me imagine Greta Gerwig frowning while she sips champagne in a fancy California rich-people winery or something, telling herself, “Ugh being a woman is so hard.”

Since I have fewer big-picture thoughts analyzing Barbie on second watch, I roll my eyes more at the amount of Manliness in this movie advertised to be about Womanity. Ken’s arc is more dynamic than Barbie’s, he has a better musical number, everyone praises Ryan Gosling while mentioning Margot Robbie mostly in passing. Sometimes it feels more like a Noah Baumbach movie that let Greta Gerwig vent her womanly feelings.

The generalizations about still gender don’t speak to me, beyond the fact I recognize some people recognize some qualities as belonging to some genders. Thinking about the whole guy playing guitar being sad when a girl deprives him of attention thing — it’s like the movie is complaining about a stereotype I’ve only ever seen as a stereotype? It feels like we’re meant to be like “lol yeah THAT GUY, guys do that ALL THE TIME lollll” and I’m just like, “…do they?”

Feminist struggles in this movie are mostly men not taking women seriously, which is toothless.

The executive dick-sucking on screen is exhausting. The obvious insecurity of IRL Mattel executives needing to be soothed is exhausting. Even a few jabs have to be softened and ultimately allowed to fizzle out.

It’s that latter point that makes me feel the real problem with Barbie is actually its budget, like most contemporary blockbusters. These movies are simply too expensive. That means they *must* be *so* many things to *so* many people, mostly executives, who get elbow-deep in something that is actually just an unreasonably huge investment into a project that would have been a satisfying mid-budget kids’ movie, smearing corporate neediness all over some imperfect artists who are telling an incredibly personal message that is not as generalized as the movie constantly states. By centering Barbie as some icon of gender, and putting so much money into it, vastly overstating the importance and universality of the messages therein was inevitable; execution is incapable of matching expectations.

Barbie shouts, “Feminism!” and the marketing is forced to say that’s revolutionary because it’s revolutionary to the c-suite dudes who allowed it. But outside that tiny slice of world, feminism is not nearly so narrow, and “acknowledging the cognitive dissonance” doesn’t *actually* take away the patriarchy’s power on the people it marginalizes, unless you have the privileges of Gerwig and Baumbach and Robbie and Gosling and–

So that’s where my glass onion feeling comes from: there are a lot of things to consider about Barbie, which has more elements and bigger statements than it really has the capacity for carrying. When you pick them all apart you find it’s really just a toy movie with a story only as universal as being wealthy white Americans who suffer catering to the c-suite to afford caviar.

As always: Massive kudos to the art team. This thing is visual candy. I wish I didn’t think so much, honestly, because I love the fashion, I love the colors, I love the idea of commuting between universes via a cute catalog of Barbie scenes. I want to walk around my neighborhood saying, “Hi Barbie!” There is a lot to like, but I would like it SO much more if Barbie had acknowledged the fact it mostly serves to empower the already rich and powerful Barbies and Kens of the real world. Or like. Not done that.

Also my kids found it wildly boring. So whatever it is, it’s not necessarily a kids’ movie. We remain a Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse family. (And my mother did not like Ken.)

(image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)