Let the Bite One In

As February comes to a close, we’ve already looked at one movie that centers both love and racial equality right after we talked about a classic that intertwines romance, loss, and antifascism.  Then we had a film that focused on being kind on the path to love and a break-up movie for the ages.  And now, at the end of Black History Month and on the precipice of the Oscars, it’s time we get into what I believe is the best movie 2025 and completely appropriate for the month of February, writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.  No burying the lede here, let’s get into it.

Sinners primarily follows the Smokestack Twins, Smoke and Stack (not their real names), played by Michael B. Jordan (Black Panther, Fruitvale Station) who come back to the Mississippi Delta after a stint in Chicago working for Al Capone.  We’re talking Jim Crow-era Mississippi here, so when asked about the freedom for a Black man in Chicago and they say the racism up there is the same, it just takes a different form, it hits like a punch in the gut.  Jim Crow or not, in Chicago they’re still Black and that dictates how they’re treated and what opportunities are available to them.  So they gather a considerable amount of money under circumstances best not asked about and come home to establish a Black-owned juke joint, a nightclub.  They buy an old saw mill to convert into their club and they have plans on putting it all together for that night.  A bold plan, no doubt.  I usually don’t even like making plans and going out on the same night, I need advanced warning.  The twins are clearly more bold than I am and more effective too.

The first thing they notice, though, about this saw mill is that the floors have been freshly cleaned while nothing else has.  It’s not nearly as subtle as some things are, but if you’re not paying attention it’s easy to miss.  The twins clock the seller as Klan right away and they know that if the floor was cleaned and nothing else was, that meant it was likely because of blood on the floor.  I don’t know much about saw mills, I’m no lumberologist or treeintist (and I’m far from a sawmillosopher), but I am fairly certain that trees don’t bleed.  But if the Klan wanted a quiet place go about their ethnic cleansing, an abandoned saw mill with nothing around for miles seems like a good place to do it.  This is such a small, interesting moment to me; it shows just how vigilant they have to be in order to survive, and every minority will recognize that scan you have to do when you walk into an unknown place to see if you’re going to be safe there or not.  Either way, at the end of the deal, Smoke and Stack warn the seller that if he or his Klan friends ever set foot on their property, they’ll be shot dead, with no hesitation.  The man replies that the Klan doesn’t exist anymore; just another example of how evil operates and it foreshadows the threat to come.  Evil always wants you to believe it’s not a threat.  It always wants to be invited in.

Helping them get ready for the grand opening is their cousin Samuel, the pastor’s son, who happens to be the best guitarist that they’ve ever known.  I’m talking cosmically good here; his music is so powerful that it transcends space and time and, as his father puts it, invites evil.  Sammie, played by musician and actor Miles Caton, is at odds with his father, who really feels that his gift should be used to praise god—that is, the Christian god and the Christian god only, not any religion that’s a part of their ancestry—rather than be played for people drinking, carousing, dancing, and fornicating at night clubs and juke joints.  You know, those sinners.

I’m done now with the synopsis; you don’t need me to tell you that things don’t go that well on opening night and something pure and beautiful was interrupted by something corrupt and evil.  Every single detail, every single moment of this film defies mere words.  I spoke before of the difference between watching a movie at home and at the theaters, that sharp breath in instead of applause.  And that’s what this movie is, from start to finish: a sharp breath in.  There’s no moment that isn’t captivating and full of layered storytelling.  To put it in perspective, I took two thirds of a page of A4 in notes in just the first 8 minutes of this film.  I fear that my words won’t be enough to describe just how brilliant this movie is, but I’m willing to try.  Let’s start with the acting.

Michael B. Jordan is a tour de force here as Smoke and Stack.  This isn’t the case of one person playing two characters differentiated by a costume change and costume change only.  Yes, Smoke wears his cool colors and Stack his fiery reds, but it goes far, far beyond that.  They are easily distinguished from each other by their demeanor, the way they carry themselves, even the way they walk.  Michael B. Jordan wore shoes that were slightly too small for his feet when filming Stack so he’d be ever so subtly encouraged physically to keep on the move.  You know each of them when you see them; it’s an incredible performance.  One thing about them, though, is that beneath that hard exterior, they act like leaders in the community.  When paying a young girl to watch his truck, he teaches her to negotiate and not take his first offer.  He took a moment to teach a young Black girl to advocate her worth at his own expense.  In Jim Crow Mississippi.  The Delta.  Even the idea of the juke joint is about creating something Black-owned for the people in the community.  A safe place for Black people to relax, unwind, have fun, and spend some money.  Gangsters or not, you can’t help but like the Smokestack twins.

Miles Caton does a great job, he’s a young musician and actor who walked into one of the biggest films of all time to star alongside an actor putting in two all time performances and he did very well.  And if you’ve been watching prestige TV on HBO or Disney lately, you’ll already know how good Wunmi Mosaku is as Annie, because you’ve seen her tear up the screen in Lovecraft Country and Loki already and she is so good here.  I feel bad not taking the time to point out how good everyone is, because they all are; Hailee Steinfeld (Into the Spider-Verse, True Grit) continues being a talented actress, that’s no surprise, Delroy Lindo delivers some of the most powerful scenes in the film, especially as he recounts a story when they drive past a chain gang.  His performance will move you after a career of strong performances and perhaps not nearly enough recognition.  Jayme Lawson (The Running Man) has a small, but excellent role here and I can’t wait to see more of her in more films.  And, oh my, Li Jun Li (Evil, Spider-Noir) is showstopping.  Also, how did I not yet mention Jack O’Connell (‘71, 28 Years Later) as the Irish vampire Remmick?  So creepy and yet played with so much depth.

The movie also looks so good.  The way it plays with light and shadow is just so striking.  There are scenes where people’s faces are in plain view, but the vampires are enshrouded in darkness, as if magically cloaked; there was no light where there should have been light.  This is a movie that really benefits from 4K, not just visually, but also the music.  Because not only does Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, The Mandalorian) deliver an excellent score as he always does, the musical performances within the movie itself are top notch.  When Samuel plays, you feel how his music is magical.  You can feel it cut the barriers of space and time and and in one of the most inventive scenes I’ve seen on screen in a long time, you get to watch it.  The action is not made of big, grand set pieces.  No, it’s the exact opposite of that.  It’s chaotic, visceral, bloody, and makes you not want to blink.  It’s not polished fight choreography, it is not balletic.  It’s raw, it’s desperate.  It’s tragic and horrifying on a human level.  It hurts your soul to watch.  All this rage, all this hate, all this despair.  Nowhere for it to go.  The injustice of generations echoes through these characters, even the vampires themselves are victims of the monsters who stripped them of their humanity and forced them to become the monsters they are.

And that brings us to the crux of what I think this movie is really about.  It’s not quite just a monster movie about trapped clubgoers and a pack of hungry vampires prowling outside.  It’s a movie about colonialism and cultural identity.  I should preface this by saying that I am still not Black, so of course I’m not in the best position to speak about the Black experience in America, but I’m going to do my best.  At the heart of everything I do is learning, and the way I learn is by listening more than I talk.  And if you’re reading this, you can take a pretty educated guess at how much I like to talk; so you can also imagine how much I end up listening.  But what I see when I watch Sinners is the story of a people who were stripped of their identity, shipped to another continent, and had another culture imposed on them.  It’s dehumanizing, to have that ripped from you and replaced with someone else’s religion being forced on you.  Ultimately, I think this what drives Sammie to play his powerful music.  The gospel isn’t his, but the blues is.  “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion.  Nah son, we brought this with us from home.  It’s magic what we do.  It’s sacred and big,” Slim (Delroy Lindo) says.  And he’s right.  Annie practices hoodoo, a religion developed by slaves in the south that draws on African and other practices, not Christianity.  In fact, that crucifix may not be as helpful as you’d think when these particular bloodsuckers come knocking.  Coogler’s choice to make Remmick (Jack O’Connell) Irish was a stroke of genius.  Not only does he get to inject some incredible Irish folk music into the soundtrack (including stopping for a whole on Riverdance stage production that just works so well), he also reminds us that the Irish were colonized also.  There was an Ireland before Christianity, with its own mythology and folklore.  And that too was taken from them.  And now, in vampire form, they’ve come to do it to Smoke, Stack, and everyone they know and care about.  Remmick knows what it’s like not to be accepted in America and he’s more than happy to use that to get to the people in the juke joint.

He appeals to them by saying that the world has already left them behind.  And in a way, they know he’s right.  Smoke and Stack said it themselves; not even going to Chicago and working with Al Capone, who owed a large part of his success to his willingness to work with different cultures, was enough to escape racism.  In Remmick’s words are a message: You have not been accepted by America, you will not be accepted, but the acceptance you crave is available with me.  It’s a message that’s been parroted by those who wish to deceive for their own good; cults, gangs, abusers, politicians.  It’s about appealing to the worst fears and worries and offering yourself up as the solution to those fears.  They tell you that they’re the only ones on your side when all they really want is to use you for their own motives, their own goals, their own aggrandizement.  And it’s all a lie.  Of course it’s a lie.  But in your lowest moments, in times without hope, those appeals are very hard to resist.  But it’s their power he wants and that’s why he resorts to manipulation.  One thing that I find so interesting here is that Remmick wants Sammie for his power; so often the trope is that the musician sells his soul to a devil in exchange for their talent, but Sammie’s power is intrinsic.  It belongs to him and no one else, and it wasn’t given to, it wasn’t granted to him, it wasn’t bestowed upon him by anyone.  It’s his and it always was.  He was born with that magic inside him.  And there’s so much power in that; this is something that he has that the vampires want from him.  It’s what all colonizers seek to do—take your humanity and replace it with their commodity.

Sinners is an exceptional film.  Calling it any one genre is reductive.  It’s a film that uses fantastical horror to describe a real life one.  It’s as genre-bending and innovative as Get Out was.  And rarely is someone able to tell a story so grand, so effectively, and in such a reasonable amount of time.  It’s hard to explain, but it almost feels more like a three episode miniseries than a movie, such are the different vibes of each act of the film, and each act could feel complete on its own.  It could be a film about two twins coming back home to open a club and turn it into a bastion for their community.  It could be a movie about vampires looking to prey on what they thought would be easy targets.  It could be a film about the racial tensions that existed in America and still reverberate now.  And it is.  It’s all those things.  And more.  And it all works.  But it’s also a movie that celebrates Black culture and its music and the resilience of Black people in a way that you don’t usually get to see in movies.  So much pain, so much loss, so much they’ve had to endure.  All of it is shown on the screen in just over two hours.  This film is a masterpiece.  This isn’t just the best movie I’ve seen all year, I think this is one of the best movies of all time.  In the future, I think we’ll be talking about Sinners the way we talk about movies like Casablanca and Citizen Kane.  I do my best not to get caught up and I try not to oversell or overhype, but sometimes it’s just not possible to temper my enthusiasm.  I simply cannot get over how brilliant Sinners is.  It’s a movie that will get better every time I watch it and every time I notice new things because it has so many layers to peel back before I’m certain I’ve gotten to the artichoke heart of it all.  I hate to sound hyperbolic, but this feels like a generational film to me.  This is simply one of the most powerful pieces of art I have ever witnessed.  Sinners is, without a doubt, a perfected film.  And it’s not just perfect.  It’s magic.  It’s sacred and big.  And it is a must watch.  For Black history month, for the beauty of the romance of it, for everyone at any time, Sinners is an important film that I think we’ll be talking about for decades to come.  If somehow you’ve managed not to see the trailer for this, don’t watch it.  Jump right in and experience the movie that has earned a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, including best lead actor, best supporting actor, best supporting actress, achievement in directing, original score, and best picture.  Sinners is R-rated, 2 hours and 17 minutes, and streaming on HBO Max.

The Great Gotham Break-Up

So we’re halfway through the month of February now and we’ve already celebrated the power of love to change the world and how finding love in unexpected circumstances can be life-affirming and sweet.  But Valentine’s Day is over, the half priced candy is flying off the shelves, and all that heart shaped paraphernalia is sitting in the recycling bin.  And just like on December 27th, you want to gather all those dead living room trees and return them to the earth from whence they came in a cleansing bonfire (No? Just me?), it’s time to mark Cupid’s arrow return to sender and see how that cherubic little bastard likes it.

But what break-up movie feels right in this moment?  We can beat ourselves up musically and try to forget Sarah Marshall, but I never really knew her.  I don’t own any physical music anymore, so I won’t be rearranging my record collection.  And it’s the dead of winter, so even though I also love The Smiths, I’m really not feeling counting the days of Summer.  Because while ending a relationship can be sad, even when it needs to end, there’s something really beautiful and empowering about leaving behind something that didn’t work and freeing yourself up to find what does.  Break-ups always suck, even the ones that needed to happen; the resulting splitting of belongings, of friend groups, the inevitable King Solomon act with regards to your pets, and an entire city’s criminal underworld coming to kill you because your boyfriend’s no longer protecting you.  It’s all pretty bad.  Let’s get into Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.

The title’s a mouthful and has been the subject of much speculation over the years, but that doesn’t matter.  I’m just going to call it Birds of Prey.  Harley and the Joker are no more.  Seems like it was a messy break-up, but thankfully we’re not only spared what would be the undeniable and likely clinical insanity of an argument between Harley and Joker, we’re also spared any real glimpse of Jared Leto (that’s right, we’re back in the pre-Gunnmosphere dark ages of DC).  Now, Harley and Mr. J have a history of breaking up and getting back together, even in the cartoons this happened.  But this time, Harley is well and truly done.  And she’s ready to announce it to the world that Harley Quinn is going to stand on her own two feet.

Now, at this point, if you don’t know Harley’s whole story like I do, having literally watched her first appearance as a child on a Saturday morning, don’t worry.  The movie will nutshell it for you in a very quick and efficient way, which I appreciate.  So when Harley gets completely obliterated on a night out with so-called friends and decides that the best way to make it abundantly clear that the relationship is over is to drive a giant truck into Ace Chemicals and blow it up, you’ll know how big of a deal that is to their relationship.  Unfortunately, so does everyone else in Gotham, because the explosion of the chemical plant sends literal and figurative shockwaves through the city and its underworld.  Ace Chemicals is where the Joker became the Joker.  It’s also where, in the DCEU anyway, Joker drops Harley into the same kind of acid that turned him into a monster.  It’s their Eiffel Tower.  And by blowing it up, Harley declared herself independent.  The underworld, in turn, declared it open season on Harley Quinn.  Turns out when your boyfriend is a psychotic murderer, you rub a lot of people the wrong way.  And now shed of Joker’s protection, Harley is very quickly realizing the danger she’s just put herself in.  Still, that must have felt cathartic.  I remember doing something similarly bold and reckless after my last break-up; I sat quietly and thought about things (as a repressed millennial, that’s pretty big for me).  I want to pause for a moment here because I will get into it further as we go along, but the actual chemical plant explosion is absolutely magnificent on screen.  The direction here, the use of colors, everything is so appropriate and in line with the tone of the movie and the character of Harley; it’s all so good.  Makes me sitting on my sofa quietly look positively boring by comparison.

In the midst of all this chaos, a similarly sadistic and psychotic crime boss called Roman Sionis, also known as Black Mask, played by Ewan McGregor (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Big Fish) is making a play for even greater power than he has now, by going for the Bertinelli Diamond, a 30 carat diamond with the financial information of the famed and homicidally defunct Bertinelli crime family and that diamond ends up in the tummy of street urchin and pickpocket Cassandra Cain.  Through a convoluted series of events, Harley gets involved—and that’s when things start to go really sideways.  Also along for the ride are Detective Renee Montoya, played by Rosie Perez (Search Party, Do the Right Thing), who wants to bring Harley in, of course.  Cops are going to do cop stuff, but Montoya has the added problem of being an overlooked woman in the department, with her partner getting the promotion that she deserved.  Then there’s Dinah Lance, played by Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country, The Order), a singer at Sionis’s club just trying to survive.  It’s a dangerous life in a dangerous city, and when Roman takes a shine to her, it becomes much more perilous than she could have imagined.  Not only is Roman so unstable he makes a house of cards look like a block of brutalist flats, his righthand man Victor Zsasz makes Roman look like the Hoover Dam.  And Zsasz, played by Chris Messina (Sharp Objects, Argo), is the jealous type.  He’s also the “regularly cut people’s faces off and manipulate Roman into indulging his bloodlust” type, so if you’re Dinah, you’re in trouble because Roman is the special kind of mix of psychotic, privileged, and childish that could become president someday.  But for the moment, his energy is focused on her, as well as a few other things.  And rounding out our band of misfits here is the so-called Crossbow Killer, who has been killing mobsters across Gotham and elsewhere using, you guessed it, a crossbow.  I’m not going to tell you anything else about her, except that she’s played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 10 Cloverfield Lane) and that is a delight.

Now, the story is one of overlapping strands coming together and on top of all that, it’s told out of order.  This is the kind of thing that would have felt like a gimmick if we’d just seen Memento for the first time and it felt like every subsequent film was playing with chronology.  But now that we’re back to linear storytelling as the norm, this doesn’t feel like a gimmick.  It feels like a natural extension of Harley Quinn’s personality.  Harley narrates the film and it plays out like a story she’s telling the audience.  In this way, jumping around the narrative feels diegetic and intentionally cluttered, the way Harley thinks after her life with the Joker.  I actually love this decision; I don’t know who came up with it, but whoever it is, whether it’s director Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs, which I haven’t seen but has a 97% RT and is going on my list), writer Christina Hodson (Bumblebee), or someone else on the creative team, but that person deserves a pat on the back.  Because it really works brilliantly here and if not handled well, it could have been a jumbled mess.

Birds of Prey is also one of the most visually arresting action films I’ve ever seen.  There is such an amazing use of color and comic book mechanics that make the movie not only fun to watch, but exciting and thrilling.  The fight choreography is incredible; the improvisational nature of Harley’s fighting style makes total sense for a character whose formal training is in psychiatry and not, you know, capoeira or jujitsu.  And it also varies the fight styles and keeps you in the moment and focused on the action.  And some of the stuff Harley does is just silly and it all works somehow; we’re talking about a character who snorts airborne cocaine for a power-up like Mario eating a mushroom or Popeye downing a can of spinach and who fires glitter bombs out of a grenade launcher.  And the best part of this is that it all looks amazing; I am not an expert in special effects and I don’t honestly know how much of this was done with practical effects, but to my relatively untrained eyes, it all looked very convincing.  There were moments of CGI no doubt, but it seemed like there was a heavy focus on physical effects ands areas that looked real.  It injects so much immersion to the scenes that you just can’t get from a disposable CGI army or a sky beam.  This is such a grounded film for something about girl who breaks up with a killer clown.

And the fights are not just great action scenes, they play for comedy really well.  It seemed like after Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we were inundated with movies that put on tonally mismatched music over fight scenes to make them funny.  It was a trend that lasted way too long and lost its impact almost immediately, but the use of not just music, but also the actual fight choreography itself is funny.  The visual comedy here is so good, and Harley isn’t the only one who delivers it.  This is maybe the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen Birds of Prey and it never gets less impressive to look at.  We’re talking about a movie that has Margot Robbie fighting in a room where the sprinklers have gone off for some ancillary reason.  Normally, that’s the kind of scene that would seem needlessly lascivious and male-gaze-y, but we’re talking about a movie written, directed, and starring women.  The water isn’t there to scandalize, no, not at all.  It’s there to create one of my favorite fight scenes since the throne room in The Last Jedi.  What follows those sprinklers going off is a ballet of pain, a violence-capade that grabs your eyeballs by the lapels and instills a sense of wonder in action movies again.  We don’t need waves of indistinguishable CGI assets and mysterious sky beams; we need more movies that look like this.  It’s the Radio City Music Hall of Broken Bones and Harley Quinn is all the Rockettes at once.  And I cannot get enough of it.

Not only that, Birds of Prey is self aware in a way that Deadpool can only dream of; it’s not about quips and cameos and throwing jokes spaghetti style at the wall to see what sticks or just looking at the camera and pointing out how cliched you are and hoping that makes your cliches clever.  It understands the world in which it was made and the one in which we live and it draws such a line between them.  There is so much misogyny built into the antagonists here and it’s done in a way that’s in your face, but not pandering the way some movies can feel when they’re trying to go for a hollow appeal to “girl power”.  There is nothing hollow about how this film was crafted or how misogyny affects these women and how they overcome it.  I love this as an empowerment film.  It’s so satisfying to see these horrible, horrible men get what’s coming to them.  All due respect to Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, but this is a break-up movie; forget walking around your apartment naked, take on a criminal organization of misogynists, that’s how you get over someone (don’t take relationship advice from me).  I’m teetering on something here that I’m very much unqualified to talk about, but I feel like having women filmmakers creating a movie like Birds of Prey is what elevates it from something that easily could have been eye candy for teenagers into a great feminist action film and by far the best movie of the DCEU era.  The Snyder films can’t compare.  Don’t get me started on movies like The Flash and Black Adam.  Even the first Wonder Woman film, while heartfelt and really quite good, just isn’t on this level (and its follow-up wasn’t just bad, it was deeply problematic).  And it’s not just because because of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, it’s everything else as well, but it’s also because of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn.

Yes, I conspicuously didn’t get into Margot Robbie (Barbie, Asteroid City) earlier because she gets her own paragraph.  This isn’t taking anything away from the other talented actresses in this film, because they are all wonderful, with Jurnee Smollett especially putting another incredible performance (if you can put up with the Jonathan Majors of it all, I highly recommend HBO’s Lovecraft Country).  But Margot Robbie is something else.  Like I said, I was there in front of the TV the moment Harley Quinn was introduced to the world.  I have loved this character since I was six years old and she is very dear to me.  It would have been so disappointing to see a half-hearted translation to the big screen.  And I’ll say this; as much as Robbie deserved to be nominated for Best Actress for Barbie, she simply is Harley Quinn.  This is the role she was born to play; other than the late Arleen Sorkin, on whom the character was based, I can’t imagine a better performance.  It’s one of those things I’ve said before: when an actor, any actor, can disappear into a role and make it appear as if they’re not acting at all, it is a true feat of thespian prowess.  And it’s all the more impressive when the actor in question is one as well-known as Margot Robbie.  This isn’t the first time she’s played Quinn and it wasn’t the last, but it was the best; she was front and center in this film, not the sidekick, not one member of a team.  All respect to the rest of the cast, she’s the big show here and not once, not for a moment, did I ever feel like she was acting.  It’s odd to say that in a movie where she has pet hyena and duct tapes someone to a toilet, it’s her subtlety that I really admire.  She’s gets so lost in the character that even her minor, micro-expressions are fully in character.  There’s no moment where she’s not Harley.  I hope she plays this character for many years to come.

Birds of Prey deserved to be DC’s biggest hit.  There’s so much good about this movie that I’m only getting to the soundtrack now, which was perfectly curated for the film and has a lot fresh sounding covers and a version of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” that I’ve listened to at least a hundred times.  It should go down as one of the best movie soundtracks of all time and one of the most fitting since Yesterday had all Beatles songs (it was about the Beatles, it wouldn’t have made sense if it were, for example, filled to the brim with Pink Floyd).  But, much like Dungeons & Dragons, the 2020 release date didn’t do it any favors, in addition to its connection to the truly awful Suicide Squad (the pre-James Gunn one), a nonexistent marketing push, a title that people weren’t expecting to see on the marquee, an R-rating, and I would wager some of that built-in misogyny we talked about earlier in a fanbase that has a reputation for being embarrassingly unwelcome to women.  I want a million of these; at a reported budget of $84.5m, it was a bargain compared to Suicide Squad at well over twice the price.  Of course, that value is tempered by the fact it was a box office failure, but that’s environmental factors.  This movie deserves a spot in the upper pantheon of comic book films.  Streaming on HBO Max, Birds of Prey is 1 hour, 49 minutes of sheer enjoyment that’s great whether you just got out of a relationship or if you just want to watch a really fun, well done action movie that’s only sort of incidentally about superheroes.  I know I talk about movies in the 70s on Rotten Tomatoes, but this 79% isn’t a movie that thinks it’s better than it is, it’s a movie that’s far better than everyone thinks it is.  And if you haven’t seen it, now’s the time.

Can’t Hardly Date

Meet Bob Kenner.  Bob’s a normal guy.  He lives in a quiet neighborhood called Peckham in southeast London.  He goes for walks on the high street and his neighbors know him.  He sings (quite poorly) in a church choir.  He opens jars for people.  He’s a bit socially awkward and a bit lonely.  He’s kind and he makes mistakes, sometimes he says the wrong thing, but he always apologizes when he does.  He’s completely normal.  Just like you or I.  Well, for the good of the world, I don’t sing.  I prefer to spare people from that.  But in most other respects, Bob’s as regular as the next person.

Except, well, a meteor struck London and gave him superpowers and now he acts as the world’s only superhero, being deployed by the British government and Ministry of Defense to help aid the world with disasters and the like.  There are no supervillains, he doesn’t have a rogues gallery.  He has a small house in Peckham, a mother in a care home, and a housekeeper who’s his only friend.  And your basic suite of superpowers; super strength, invulnerability, and flight.  But most importantly, he’s got a date.  Let’s get into 2015’s British indie rom-com, SuperBob.

SuperBob has been having some PR issues lately, which I’m sure you’re bound to when you crash about and break stuff.  In this instance, the villain here is a US Senator who has developed a vendetta against Bob after he tried to poach him for the US government and Bob didn’t go along with it.  So Bob’s boss at the MOD, Theresa Ford, played by Catherine Tate (The Office, Going Dutch), hires a documentary crew to follow him on his day off.  The goal here is to humanize Bob, so people think of him as a person and not just a cape.  Bob, played by Brett Goldstein (Ted Lasso, Shrinking), forgot about this, so the first time we really get to see him on camera is when he opens up the front door and is immediately awkward in front of the doc crew.  How uncomfortable he gets is instantly endearing (and yes, it helps that the many hours I’ve watched Goldstein as Roy Kent makes me inclined to like him, but he’s a likable character even independent of that) and you can tell he just wasn’t really meant to be in the spotlight.  In superhero films, there’s often this idea of heroism being thrust upon people and them rising to the occasion.  Bruce Wayne didn’t ask to be traumatized by his parents’ murder.  Clark Kent didn’t ask to be sent to a planet where he’d be nigh invulnerable to escape his own local apocalypse.  Peter Parker didn’t…you get the idea.  But in the end, they all stepped up and found the hero inside them (in wildly different ways) and they embrace that role as a hero and role model.

Well, Bob didn’t ask for a meteor to fall on Peckham and give him superpowers.  And he seems to do the superheroing well, especially in a world where there are no other superheroes and he doesn’t really have free will in what he responds to because he works for the UK government.  I feel like if someone had shown SuperBob to Tony Stark, we could have avoided that whole Civil War he had with Captain America, because Bob’s ability to do good is severely hindered by having to go through a governmental buffer.  To Bob, being a superhero isn’t something he loves or wants to do to be an example or anything like that.  To Bob, being a superhero is just a job.  It’s another fact of life in a mundane existence that’s punctuated on occasion by moments of the fantastic.  He goes where he’s sent and he does what he’s ordered to do by the Theresa and the MOD.  But, as much as I could go on about the politics of superheroing, that’s not really what this movie is about.  It’s certainly not not about that, but since it is February, I want to focus on the other aspect of this film.  It’s somewhat sneakily a rom-com.

It doesn’t look like one on its face, but the movie takes place on Tuesday, Bob’s day off.  And after months of crushing on June, he tries to work up the courage to ask her out.  June, played by Laura Haddock (Guardians of the Galaxy), works at the local library in Peckham, is sweet and passionate about books.  Which is good, given her career, and through months of wayward wooing, Bob finally reads her favorite book, House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (who liked one of my tweets once) and details the unique reading experience of that novel.  I have a copy of it sitting on a corner of my desk, I am going to get to it (I’ve started it before, but it is freaky) and if you’re familiar with the book, his description of it is rather hilarious.  But for a guy who flies headfirst into danger on the reg, asking June on a date turns out to be a greater challenge than he’s previously faced and she asks him first.  Adorable.  He’s like a slightly less fuzzy Paddington sometimes, I love it.

Bob’s only friend is Dorris, played by Natalia Tena (Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian), who also happens to be his housekeeper who works at the retirement home where his mother lives.  The relationship between these two is unbelievably sweet—Dorris seems to be the only person in the world who treats Bob like a regular person.  She makes fun of him, she sees him for the hopelessly awkward guy that he his, and she genuinely cares about him and his mom, which is really nice.  Bob needs that kind of normalcy in his life and she’s always there to gently bring him back down to Earth.  And sometimes not so gently; but sometimes a friend has to be the one to say things that you might not necessarily want to hear and that’s exactly what Dorris does for Bob.  Their relationship is lovely and sweet and I couldn’t get enough of it.  Whenever they were on screen together, not only were their interactions always funny, they were also always sincere.  In an interview, writer and director Jon Dever said that through the many iterations of the story, they settled on wanting to make something that was nice.  He wanted to make a sweet, funny film that leaves you feeling good at the end.

And in that goal, SuperBob most definitely delivers.  Comedy is always hard to talk about because the best way to make a joke not be funny is to describe the joke and then explain why it was funny.  But there are so many subtly comedic moments in SuperBob that I found myself really, really laughing a lot despite sitting with a pen in hand, taking notes.  Brett Goldstein is so good here.  My introduction to him was Roy Kent, so I was used to him being very gruff, lovably caustic, and bitingly harsh, and this was a completely new look for me.  He brings this sweetness to the role that you wouldn’t expect from a superhero.  Or from Roy Kent.  It comes as no surprise that he’s funny, because he was the vehicle for so many of Ted Lasso’s funniest moments, but the manner in which he does it is so refreshing.  I watched the original short on which this movie is based and you can see where it all came from; this notion of someone who doesn’t have the personality type you typically associate with being a hero who nonetheless has these incredible powers and wants to good with them.  Although, funnily, in the original short, he name drops other heroes like Batman and Superman, which is a concept they smartly cut from the feature. 

Natalia Tena is also excellent here as Dorris, who came to England to save up money so she could go back to Colombia and open a nursery.  I ran into some terminology here; nursery can mean so many things and British terms don’t always line up with American English, but I gather that she means she wants to take care of children and not plants. Why that word means both a daycare and a place where you buy plants, I’ll never know, but I do remember a very confusing exchange with my mother as a small boy when she said we going to the nursery to pick something up and it was a houseplant and not a new little brother or sister (I was very young, we’re talking believing in stork delivery age).  Either way, Dorris is such a great character played with great care by Tena and she’s absolutely the heart and soul of the film.  Tate and Haddock do well with smaller, but still very important roles.  It’s a more reserved performance from Catherine Tate here, but it still needed that veteran comedic timing she has.

I wanted to look at rom-coms this February because a lot of times, they get discounted as highly gendered films that are often fluffy garbage.  That’s not what this is.  There’s definite emotional heft here, as SuperBob takes a look at different kinds of love and the things that get in the way and how much it’s worth going for when you have it.  In the end, Bob’s not a weapon and he’s not a superhero; he’s just a person.  When Theresa Ford hires a documentary crew to humanize him, well, it’s very effective.  You see Bob as a man first, not a superman.  He’s just a guy with wants, hopes, dreams, and a desire to love and be loved.  And that’s really something, as Dever would put it, quite nice.  It makes him incredibly relatable for a man who’s invulnerable and can fly.  There’s some subtle messaging here too, which you should be able to experience without me drawing it out into an additional essay about the importance of being able to love who you love, but those are the kinds of things that set it apart from other more paint-by-numbers rom-coms.  This is one you can watch with someone on Valentine’s Day or by yourself on a random Tuesday night and it will be just as enjoyable and just as life-affirming.  And it’ll still be just as funny, which is great, because it’s very funny.  And at just 1 hour, 22 minutes, it’s a comedy that knows how long to be in your life.  It’s a short, sweet movie that is delightful and rewatchable and a hidden gem that I highly recommend.   

Wed Reckoning

You may know this story already from your history textbook; probably not though, since history can get pretty selective depending on who’s writing the syllabus.  I didn’t learn about it until I was in law school, when I studied it in 1L Con Law (still better than having to learn about Tulsa from an HBO show).  In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional, settling the case Loving v. Virginia, which made interracial marriage bans illegal across the United States.  Talk about impact legislation—this didn’t just change Virginia or the lives of the Lovings, but changed everything about love in the country.  It opened the door for Obergefell, nearly five decades later, embarrassingly long, yes, and now in danger, certainly.  But Loving was the first blow struck for marriage equality in a long line of them and its legacy is still under fire now, a decade after Obergefell.

But behind those facts, behind that landmark case that took the United States closer to the continually unfulfilled promise of the nation, there were just two people in love that weren’t allowed to be.  We’re here at the start of February, a month known for two things.  A celebration of love and romance, albeit very Hallmark-y and manufactured in the form of holiday theming and special edition Reese’s hearts, and a celebration of Black history.  And I can’t think of a better way to start this month off than with a movie, based on a true story, that celebrates both those things.  Let’s get into Loving (2016).

We’re in Virginia in the late 1950s/early 1960s.  Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, tells her boyfriend Richard Loving, a white man, that she’s pregnant.  Richard is overjoyed—he loves kids and can’t wait to be a dad.  His mother is a midwife, so he was raised in a home where babies were being born on the reg.  He takes her out to a field, excited and babbling.  Then it clicks for Mildred.  Richard is talking about building a home for the two of them, just a short walk from where Mildred grew up and her family still lives. At this point in time, of course, interracial marriage was still illegal in Virginia, so Richard wanting to get married raised a big problem.  But he figures out a way around that.  They head to Washington, D.C. to get married and they do, married by a judge.  When they get home, Richard frames and hangs their marriage license in their bedroom. I thought this was a sentimental decision and maybe it was, like hanging a degree, but it turned out to be a more practical choice than I thought, whatever the sentiment may have been.

As it turns out, even though they were married in D.C., Virginia still doesn’t take too kindly to interracial marriage and one night they burst through the door to arrest them.  Richard quickly points to the marriage license on the wall, but the police tell him that the D.C. license isn’t valid in Virginia and throws them both in jail.  Mildred is heavily pregnant at this time.  But that doesn’t matter.  A cold jail cell with no chance at bail until after the weekend when Richard is able to be bailed out immediately, that’s where they put her.

On his way out, the Sheriff has a talk with Richard.  Sheriff Brooks is so gentle in the way he speaks to Richard that it almost takes a moment to realize exactly what he’s saying.  He’s so polite, even bordering on kind in the way he opens his conversation with Richard that it’s not until the second he tells him that it’s god’s law to maintain racial purity that you realize just what a horrible person he is.  This is the most insidious kind of in-plain-sight evil.  The righteous hate, espousing such horrific nonsense with the full and honest believe that they are in the right.  That their evil is holy.  When most people do wrong, they know it.  They know it and they do it anyway, for whatever reason it may be, justified or not.  But this kind of evil can throw a pregnant woman in a solitary cell and call it sanctified.  They think this hate, this inhuman darkness is what makes them good.  This is the kind of belief that is so hard to be reasoned with because it lives outside the confines of basic human decency and in the realm of a fantastical masquerade where hate is godly and any good message a religion has is perverted to serve their twisted stances.  It’s disgusting.

Ultimately, they plead guilty to such crimes as unlawful marrying and cohabitating as man and wife “against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth”.  Remember, this was the law at the time.  This was legal and the two of them being together was not.  Law is not morality, just look at 55mph speed limits.  One year, suspended sentence, predicated on the two of them leaving the state for 25 years.  If they set foot in Virginia, they most certainly can’t be together.  They have no other choice but to pack up and leave, moving to D.C. to live with relatives.

Mildred can’t find a moment’s peace.  Growing up in rural Virginia, this isn’t anything like the life she is used to or ever wanted to live.  The sounds of the cars driving by, the horns honking, the general din of the city; it’s all so much for her.  I love the sound of the city at night; I can barely sleep if I don’t hear the sound of sirens in the distance.  But for Mildred, the sounds are nigh unbearable; she lies awake at night thinking about the world she left behind, in which the sound of distant crickets were the only obstacle between you and a quiet night’s sleep.  D.C. may be where they live, but it’s not their home.  And when it comes time for their baby to be born, she desperately wants Richard’s midwife mother to deliver the baby because that’s how she always envisioned it.  On the surface, asking your husband to smuggle you into another state like moonshine in the 1920s so you can give birth in your mother-in-law’s living room seems like a wildly unnecessary risk, but when you think about it, is it anywhere near as unreasonable as the rule that would keep them from it?  So their child could be brought into the world among a loving family rather than a large, scary hospital?  Risking prison, risking losing the child to the system.  The risk is so incredibly high.  I’d never risk it.  But it should never have come to this in the first place; this never should have been a decision that had to be made.  The absurdity of racial purity being enforced by the state should be horribly revolting to any decent person, of any creed or religion, or absence thereof.  It’s plain.  It’s obvious.  To any decent person.

Of course that’s not how it goes in Virginia in the 1960s and the Lovings manage the luckiest of escapes.  Ever so cruelly, life goes on.  They keep trying to make a life in the city.  They have two more kids, jobs, friends.  But it’s never home.  In the meantime, someone you may have heard of marches from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery and the Civil Rights Movement is well underway.  The ACLU gets involved and the Lovings put their case right into the Virginia court system.  The rest of it, as they say, is well and truly history.

Not only is this an important story to be telling—as important in 2016 as it is now in 2026–it’s also a great movie.  Joel Edgerton (The Gift, Zero Dark Thirty) plays Richard Loving so well; Richard was a regular man who wanted regular things and Edgerton plays him with such an emotional honesty.  He just wants to build a life together with Mildred; a home for them and their family built with his own two hands, peacefulness, and happiness.  It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.  Sheriff Brooks is played by Marton Csokas (The Lord of the Rings) and so incredibly effectively.  It was like poison dripped from his fangs every time he opened his mouth, it was so satisfying to hate him with every fiber of my being.  Phenomenal acting job.  The ACLU attorneys who represent the Lovings are played shockingly well by comedian Nick Kroll (Big Mouth, my favorite episode of Brooklyn 99) as Bernie Cohen and Jon Bass (Baywatch the reboot) as Phil Hirschkop.  But they’re far from the stars of the show, they’re not even white knights here to deal with a poison pill.  Kroll is kind of an animal; he seems to really want to make a name for himself and is happy for Richard and Mildred to be his ticket to ride.  Bass is more measured, more savvy than Kroll, but his role is also smaller, so it makes less of an impact.  The lawyers aren’t the heroes here, this isn’t Bridge of Spies, but they are important.   

But the star of the show here is Ruth Negga as Mildred Loving.  You’ve seen her before in shows like Agents of SHIELD and Preacher, and despite the fact neither of those shows are very good, her performances in them were always among the best parts.  And that tradition continues because she is so incredibly powerful here.  Ruth Negga plays Mildred with such quiet strength and dignity, it’s a performance that is subtle and captivating.  She draws you in, pulls your attention to her, and keeps it there every time she’s on screen.  The sheer strength of her performance is nearly impossible to overstate.  Mildred’s bravery is on full display through her incredibly talented acting ability.  As good as Joel Edgerton is as Richard, Ruth Negga is flawless as Mildred in a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (losing out to Emma Stone in La La Land, which I couldn’t sit through).

There’s a lot in this movie.  And just like Casablanca and even The Running Man, it’s sadly still relevant now, ten years after the movie released and the better part of six decades after the landmark court decision.  But what this movie isn’t, and thank goodness for that, is a courtroom drama.  What makes it so effective as a narrative is the human aspect of the film.  A courtroom drama can be loads of fun to watch and properly nail-biting as well, but you can look that up.  You can read the court opinion, you can read the case brief, you can read the Wikipedia entry.  This movie isn’t about a landmark Supreme Court case.  It’s a movie about two people who fell in love with each other at a time in the United States when their love was illegal because of something so horrendously stupid as their races.  I don’t want to live in a nation where consenting, loving adults are banned from being with each other because of other people’s prejudices.  Can you imagine living in a country that calls itself free while its government tells you who you are allowed to love on the basis of race or sexual identity?  What kind of backwards nation would do something like that?  By focusing on the story of two people who are just trying to get through an already difficult life together, Loving humanizes their struggle rather than locking it behind dense legalese and civil procedure.  It takes it from a film about a fact and turns into a story about poeple.  You see their love for each other and their children, you see the fear they live in when a pair of headlights in the distance behind you grow larger and they worry that it’s at best the police coming to arrest and separate them or at worst a lynch mob coming to kill them.  To fear for your life because of who you love.  What a horrible world that would be.

The message of Loving is incredibly straightforward and it’s exemplified by one single moment.  When going to argue in front of the Supreme Court on their behalf, Bernie Cohen asks Richard if there’s any message he wants to pass along to the Justices.  He says simply to tell them that he loves his wife.  Because what other argument could there possibly be?  A man who loves his wife.  A woman who loves her husband.  Two people who love each other and their family.  What does it matter what color their skin is or anything else beyond the fact that they’re adults who care for each other?  Loving is 2 hours and 3 minutes long and currently available to stream on Prime Video.  And it’s an important two hours and three minutes to spend; a length of time that celebrates with its soft, but strongest voice the power of love and the power of equality.  And the sacrifices one couple made so the rest of us can live and love a little more freely.