Caught Fuzz

So, the Oscars have come and gone.  Congratulations to the winners, condolences to their fellow nominees, and it’s time to put the disappointment of awards season behind me and get on with bringing you analysis of all sorts of media.  We’ve been going heavy for a while, so let’s lighten things up a bit.  There were two movies concerned with dismantling white supremacy at the Oscars this year.  One should have won Best Picture and didn’t, the other lost to KPop Demon Hunters, but was still very good.  Let’s get into Zootopia 2.

If you haven’t seen Zootopia, pause the post here, watch it, and then come back.  The movie does start with a very high level recap, but it’s better to just watch the thing.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.  Now that you’ve done that, I can tell you that as much as Zootopia has changed, so much still feels the same.  Just like the march of progress is painfully slow in the real world (and subject to cyclical regressive pendulum swings), Judy and Nick may have shaken up how things are done in the city, but that doesn’t meant that they’ve dismantled every oppressive systemic issue just by arresting one sheep that sounds like Mona Lisa Saperstein.

Now partners, bunny Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin (Once Upon a Time) and fox Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Game Night) go on an unauthorized undercover mission that results in a catastrophic citywide chase that ends in the statue of beloved inventor of the weather walls that make Zootopia possible being summarily destroyed.  I didn’t need to mention that Zootopia is a city made up of anthropomorphized animals, did I? Anyway, these walls create biomes suited for each kind of animal, so they all have a place to live.  It’s like the Weather Dominator, but for good stuff.  The weather walls allow animals of all kinds to live in Zootopian harmony.

Well, all animals except reptiles, who are pretty much segregated into a small area called Marsh Market and especially snakes, the likes of whom have not been seen within Zootopia since the weather walls went up a hundred years ago.  You see, when that happened, a snake attacked Ebenezer Lynxley, a lynx and the creator of the weather walls, and killed his tortoise assistant in the process.  After this, the city turned on all reptiles generally and snakes specifically.  Their biome was deserted and eventually taken over by Tundratown, blanketing it in the fluffy white stuff that cold-blooded animals don’t very much care for.  Because when you’re a minority, the majority loves to blame the entire group for the actions of one individual rather than blaming the individual, as they do the majority (or whatever the in-group is at the time).  But in the process of this chaotic chase and landmark destruction, Judy comes across a piece of shed skin that she believes might belong to a snake.  She wants to investigate further, but Chief Bogo, voiced by Idris Elba (Heads of State, Knuckles) sends them to a group counseling course for mismatched partners.

You see, in Zootopia, yes a pig is a cop, but so are many other animals.  But most notably, partnered animals tend to be the same kind.  So a warthog is paired with a warthog, a zebra with a zebra, and so on.  Put a rabbit with a fox (and not even a bag of corn) and it’s seen as some sort of dysfunctional pairing.  Seems as much as Zootopia is billed as a place for everyone, there is a full on current of racism that runs through the city’s operations that people are just cool with.  This shouldn’t come as a surprise as I felt Zootopia was one of the smartest movies about systemic racism I’ve ever seen, it only makes sense that its sequel would continue to carry the torch.  If Zootopia were in fact a furry utopia, there’d hardly be a conflict to build a movie around.

Through the course of, again, unauthorized investigation, Judy comes to believe that Zootopia’s centennial gala, in which the Lynxley Journal is being unveiled for the first time since that fatal snake attack, will be targeted and the journal stolen.  So Nick and Judy, at the insistence of Judy and unwillingness of Nick, go undercover at the gala.  When checking out the journal, Judy runs into Pawbert, voiced by Andy Samberg (Brooklyn 99, Palm Springs), the black sheep of the Lynxley family, so to speak.  The nice guy who lacks the killer instinct of the rest of his relations.  And when the snake assailant reveals himself, through a series of misfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings, Nick and Judy end up on the run after refusing to kill the the snake and cover up his murder at the behest of the Lynxley patriarch, Milton.  The snake, named Gary, is after the journal, but doesn’t seem to want to hurt anyone.  Gary is played by the endlessly charming Ke Huy Quan (Loki, Everything Everywhere) and he’s on a righteous mission the details of which I will not divulge so you can experience it on your own.  What follows is an action-heavy, chase-heavy movie with loads of visual gags and large dash of social commentary.  It’s funny, it’s endearing, and it’s going to be a great time for kids and adults alike.  There were genuine twists and turns and while the the point it’s trying to make is unsubtle, it’s media made for kids.  I’ve said before that art reflects society, but children’s media, when it’s good, does more than just reflect.  Children, being the future and all that and little sponges that absorb every message, have the burden of carrying forward with the world we create for them.  Media helps shape what they will think is right when they get older.  Now, if you tend to believe that diversity, equal rights, and empathy aren’t good messages and that certain types of people are genetically inferior to others, (1) you’re probably not reading this, (2) evaluate your life decisions, and (3) you’re not going to like what Zootopia 2 has to say about those things.  But if you’ve read this far…

Zootopia and its predecessor are the key kinds of children’s movies I love to see being made.  In the midst of all these animal puns, sight gags, and social commentary is the central conflict of the movie.  Judy and Nick are having an argument and Judy says: “The world will never be a better place if no one is brave enough to do the right thing”.  It’s a lovely sentiment, something I probably believed at one point.  These days, I’m finding myself stopping before the “if”, with a world view more similar to Nick’s.  “The world is what it is and sometimes being a hero, it just doesn’t make a difference” is how he responds to Judy.  He’s got real millennial energy; it’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he’s cared in the past and was burned so many times that it’s just easier to pretend that he doesn’t.  He’s been broken by everything constantly going to pot and no one doing anything about it.  So he’s given up.  Judy hasn’t.  Judy probably won’t.  This movie addresses so many different issues; corpo-fascism, for example, the oligarchical overclass, the corruption built into systems and institutions, equality, gentrification, ethnic cleansing, and a lot of other really big topics that they handle with the proverbial kid gloves on.  But this conflict is at the center of everything the movie hits on.  What does it take to make a difference and what are you willing to put on the line to secure a better future.  It’s a hard question; planting seeds for a tree under which you will never sit and all that.  What’s it worth to you to make the lives of people you will never know better in a time that you will never see?  Zootopia 2 takes the stance that justice and equality are worth fighting for, even when your life is on the line.

Judy and Nick are going up against the Lynxleys here; one of the most prominent, well-known, and respected families in Zootopia.  At least by the regular folks on the street.  The kind of animals who see what they see in the news (that they control) or hear from politicians (whom they control), they think the Lynxleys are great.  But the underworld?  The animals that see and hear everything?  They know.  They’re more afraid of the Lynxley family than anything else.  To cross them is to be marked for death.  And they have the mayor and the police force in their pocket.  This is an uphill battle in a figurative and sometimes surprisingly literal sense of the word.  The Lynxleys get what they want.  And what they want is the eviction and extermination of reptiles from their small neighborhood because they feel that reptiles are inferior.  So of course they don’t deserve the same level of dignity or autonomy as lynxes or other mammals do.   Best to get rid of them altogether if you can.  And the Lynxleys are definitely capable of it.  And capable of getting away with it too.

But all this great messaging doesn’t really count for much if it’s not packaged well and boy is it packaged well.  The comedy is every frame here, to the point where I want to watch it again and just freeze the frame during several scenes so I can soak in all the small visual gags going on in the background.  There are references abound, which are fun if you recognize them, but if you don’t because, say, you’re a child and you’ve never seen The Shining, you’ll just enjoy that there’s a hedge maze your favorite characters have to contend with.  The story is genuinely engaging as well, I was quite happy not just with how it ended, but how it played out.  It was a good journey with a good ending.  The animation looks fantastic as well; it’s not as eye-popping and style-changing as movies like KPDH, Spider-Verse, or The Last Wish, but the animation is beautiful.  The characters are so expressive and look so detailed; it may feel old school compared to some animated films, but Zootopia 2 is really lovely to watch.  It’s vibrant without burning the retinas, it’s fluid, it’s colorful, it’s really high fidelity animation.  It’s also very funny, I had many laugh out loud moments and kids’ll certainly enjoy the gags even more.  Personally, I found it a little heavy on the chase scenes, but considering the plot centers around Judy and Nick being on the run, I can’t really knock it as not being thematic.  It is a narrative that grows in complexity and becomes more engaging as it progresses, which is really well paced.  You discover things mostly as Judy and Nick do, and it’s actually fairly decent mystery at the core of it.  While I don’t think Zootopia 2 is quite as good as the first one, it’s a more than worthy sequel to one of the most exciting Disney properties to come out in recent years. It’s streaming on Disney+, has a runtime of 1 hour, 43 minutes, and is rated PG.

The Fast and the Spurious

Oscar season is fully upon us with the awards ceremony being held this coming weekend.  And every year, I try to do the possible and watch all Best Picture nominees before the show and every year I come up short.  It has led to me watching movies I never thought I would, with mixed results.  I probably wouldn’t have sat down and watched Phantom Thread were it not for its nomination (now if that title sounds heckin’ cool to you too, it’s not about a haunted spool of thread methodically taking textile-based revenge against sweatshop owners and operators as I hoped it was) which was quite the uphill climb for me, but I also would never have would have watched The King’s Speech either and that movie was a masterclass in acting that, despite period pieces not really being my thing, has stuck with me for over 15 years.  We talked about Sinners already, I’ve seen One Battle After Another, but I’ve yet to be able to share my thoughts on that with you.  But this week, I have another Best Picture nomination and I will keep going through as many of these as I can for you even after the Oscars are long in the books.

People love an inspiring sports story.  Even people who don’t love sports can be buoyed by a tale of human accomplishment in the face of adversity, even somewhat frivolous adversity in a game that is ultimately meaningless (and I say this as a man with a deep, mood-altering love for the other football).  And there is little more inspiring than seeing a veteran take a rookie under their wing and teaching them the ropes.  An upstart rookie, brash and reckless, with almost no relevant experience walks on to the biggest stage of his life.  A hard-working, diligent, more established player who needs the rookie to succeed for the team to succeed.  That’s the setup of F1: The Movie.  Except the brash, reckless rookie is known sexagenarian Sonny Hayes, played by Brad Pitt (Chanel No.5: Wherever I Go) and the hard-working, diligent, but still pretty new guy is Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris (Snowfall, Megan Leavey).  The rookie is a veteran and the veteran is a rookie.  And it’s time for the veteran rookie to come into the APX GP team and Yellowstone all over the rookie veteran.

Retired driver, owner of APX GP, and Sonny’s old buddy Ruben Cervantes, played by Javier Bardem (Collateral, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile), is $350 million in the hole and if he doesn’t deliver a win for his team, which hasn’t won in its nearly 3 year existence and is suddenly without a driver, the board will force a sale and he’ll lose the team.  So he turns to similarly aged former rival Sonny Hayes, who hasn’t been behind the wheel of an F1 car in thirty years after he was left in a lifeless heap following a horrific crash as he was chasing down Ayrton Senna.  He’s spent those three decades getting divorced, failing as a professional gambler, and racing in one-off contracts for any team that’s willing to pay and doesn’t mind him riding off into the sunset in the camper van in which he lives when the job is done.  To put that into perspective, of the 20 current F1 drivers, only six are older than 30 and just two of them are over 40.  None are over 50.  So if a driver were born on the day Sonny Hayes retired, he’d be on the tail end of his career already by the time Sonny walked into the APX GP paddock and asked for a cup of Sanka.  So we’re straining credulity at the very premise of this film, despite the fact that Ruben recites a laundry list of F1 Grand Prix winners over 50 (read: it’s less than a handful of names) trying to justify choosing Sonny.  But that line in the film comes off as the writers trying to justify choosing Brad Pitt instead.  With the team needing a win in its final nine races or he’s out, Ruben throws his final Hail Mary right at Sonny and the film makes us watch as he hems and haws and decides to join finally after receiving advice from the waitress at the diner where they meet.  Of course it’s a foregone conclusion, but the film makes us sit there and wait for something we already know is going to happen.  After all, the movie is called F1: The Movie and not Brad Pitt: Van Man Goes to the Diner.

Sonny Hayes is man of walking contradictions.  Ruben describes him as the best driver in the world, despite never having won an F1 GP and spending the last 30 years in relative obscurity.  He’s similarly described as a has-been and a never-was.  He’s reckless, but preaches patience.  He refuses to touch a trophy he won in an endurance race, wanting only his bonus check.  The race he just won, by the way, is the Daytona 24, one of the biggest 24 hour races in the world, so it’s no small feat.  He doesn’t even take Rolex Daytona that winners get, he just wants his money and to be on his way (although that Daytona is worth a minimum five times his bonus).  But when Ruben tries to throw money at him to convince him to drive, he says it’s not about the money.  Is Sonny enigmatic or just wishy-washy?  And this is just a sampling of the wildly inconsistent characterization of Sonny Hayes, who gets to be whatever the writers want him to be from scene to scene so he can be positioned as the hero of story.

And now it’s time to meet the villain.  Rookie driver Joshua Pearce, a hard-working young Black man whose father died when he was 13 and who loves his mom.  And that’s kind of all we get for Joshua.  Sounds like a total heel, this guy.  Loves his mom.  What an a-hole, right?  When Sonny saunters in to test drive the car, Ruben says to Joshua that they’re not auditioning Sonny for the open seat, but that Sonny is auditioning them for his talents.  The level of entitlement is off the charts with Sonny, never more on display than when, during a heated argument between Sonny and Joshua, Joshua says that he worked extremely hard to get where he is and he won’t just step aside for Sonny to stand in the spotlight and Sonny literally calls that a “participation trophy”, a very non-charged line choice, definitely not the kind of boomer-esque complaint that has been levied at younger generations and is rooted in toxic masculinity.  That’s right.  The washed up has-been (and that is being generous) who got a personal invite to the team by the owner because they were friends a lifetime ago told the guy who earned his seat through hard work and dedication that his seat on the team is a participation trophy because he hasn’t won anything yet.  This is after he bins the car on his test drive trying to get within one second of Joshua’s time.  This is unironic.  This is the hero of the film, not the antagonist.  An old white man coming into a role handed to him on a silver platter because of unjustified qualifications is telling a young Black man that his accomplishments don’t mean anything.  He immediately infantilizes Joshua (who goes by and is called Joshua by everyone on the team) by calling him JP and saying that you don’t get to choose your nickname.  Initials are hardly a nickname; it’s really not that hard to call people what they want to be called.  In fact it’s quite easy.  I’d go as far as to say that I’ve called literally every single person that I’ve ever met by the name they wanted to be called, ever since I was a little kid.  If a 4 year old kid can figure that out, why can’t a 200 year old adult?

And this is the man I’m being asked to root for.  Not Joshua, the kid trying to establish himself on a failing team, struggling to secure the future he and his family sacrificed everything for him to have.  No.  The entitled white guy with the boomer platitudes of the Little League coach whose funeral you go to because you want to make sure he’s dead.  Being an F1 driver is one of the most exclusive jobs in the world.  Twenty people get to do this.  Twenty.  I can’t think of any other professional sport that fewer people get to do.  20 of 8 billion get to be Formula 1 drivers at any given time.  A matchday squad for a soccer team is 23 people.  So all the F1 drivers in the world wouldn’t even have a full bench in the most popular sport.  Pearce worked very hard to be there.  F1 teams don’t carry drivers.  There’s a whole show on Netflix that says over and over again that you perform or you’re out.  But Sonny gets to be there because he knew a guy once.  That’s the hero this movie gives you.

The story offers up some extremely ridiculous moments for a movie that is pretending to be serious.  For example, Sonny pits and refuses to leave pit lane until they put on the tires that he wants instead of the tires that were part of the race plan.  In F1, a fast pit stop is about 2 seconds.  A slow one is about 4 seconds.  A very slow one is about 6 seconds.  How long do you think an argument takes?  This scene was more reminiscent of Ricky Bobby’s first shot at driving in Talladega Nights rather than belonging in a film that is up for an Academy Award for Best Picture.  He also crashes his car several times in one race to exploit loopholes in the rules.  Each one of those crashes costs the team upwards of $300,000 for the smallest of them to writing off full cars that cost around $15 million each.  He also intentionally creates dangerous track conditions for the other drivers to force more safety cars.  Normally, this would be unacceptable reckless behavior that would result in official sanctions, team sanctions, penalties, and realistically, even firing.  But here, it’s a fun look at Sonny’s maverick ways.

And I do mean maverick, because writer-director Joseph Kosinski and writer Ehren Kruger also wrote and directed Top Gun: Maverick, another film that lacked any substance whatsoever.  And just like Maverick, F1 looks fantastic.  The direction and the cinematography are incredible.  The action is up close and pulse-pounding in the way that Formula 1 racing can be at its very best.  It’s a wonderful simulacrum of actual F1 racing which can only be matched by actually watching F1 racing.  Kosinski also wrote Twisters, which I dinged a lot for not trusting its audience (among other things) and here I found a similar situation.  With all this action, there’s commentary explaining what’s going in the race, like a play-by-play.  But the commentators have an effect on their VO that makes it sound like stadium announcers, which they don’t do in F1 races.  It was like the whole stadium was getting commentary tailored to one team out of ten and it really pulled me out of the moment.  If you felt the need to explain the racing more, I don’t understand why it couldn’t have been done with team chatter over their radios or in the pit amongst the crew.  It didn’t need to be VO and it definitely didn’t need that stadium loudspeaker effect; even that would have made more sense if it were done from the perspective of TV commentators.  Kosinski and I don’t seem to mesh and I’m not sure I’m the problem (although maybe I am, because like Twisters, F1 has a shockingly high RT score of 82% and even higher 97% audience score).  Although, credit where due, he did direct Tron: Legacy, which I thoroughly enjoyed and think is underrated.  The best things about this movie are certainly how it looks.  It’s so intense and shot so well that even though I couldn’t stand Sonny, I was invested in his performance as a driver.  That’s how well the visual storytelling works, there are moments where you can’t help but feel excited about what’s going on in front of you.  Until Sonny starts to talk again and he sounds like a gym teacher from the 90s, cracking a can of beer and smoking a cigarette while telling everyone else what they’re doing wrong.

Throughout the film, Sonny gets more and more reckless, to the point that his insane race strategies nearly get someone killed.  F1 cars are the safest cars in the world.  This isn’t an exaggeration, I’m not being hyperbolic.  But when it comes to explosions, no amount of safety tech can save you from burning alive when that Nomex suit finally gives up the ghost.  And yet, a minor scuffle that causes Sonny to lose track position elicits a much larger, physical, and violent response than his decisions putting people in life and death situations.  There are moments in this film that made me hate Sonny and yet the perspective of the film is that he’s the good guy.  He’s the one people need to be more like.  Including Joshua Pearce.

This is the part of the movie that infuriated me.  Like I said, I used to love racing.  I still care about it, but my feelings are more complicated (it’s hard to have a hobby that contributes to killing the planet).  Racing is very dangerous.  It’s not nebulous, it’s not ambiguous, it’s plain.  People die doing this job.  People take it very seriously and they do everything they can to race and engineer safely and they still die.  I have heroes I grew up worshipping who died or came close to death while behind the wheel.  Ayrton Senna, the man whose name this movie holds up like shibboleth to the racing fans, using his credibility to bolster their own, is dead because of a wild lack of safety considerations.  Jim Clark, another legend, died racing.  NASCAR was never my thing, but Dale Earnhardt died in what looked like a low speed collision on track.  Just recently, current F1 drivers Pierre Gasly and Charles Leclerc lost their close friend Anthoine Hubert to a fatal Formula 2 crash.  This is a dangerous job.  This movie was meant feel real.  To be in this world, our world; that’s why other than APX GP, the rest of the teams are real.  The real F1 drivers and team principals are in this movie.  They’re at real F1 circuits.  And the movie spends over two and a half hours acting like the biggest problem in Formula 1 today is that drivers aren’t willing to get each other killed for glory.  Frankly, as a fan of racing specifically and of people not dying for no good reason generally, I think F1: The Movie is a disgrace.  A glitzy, glossy fantasy film written for Yellowstone dads who think the point of manhood is getting others to perceive you as tough, no matter what the cost is to solidify and maintain that perception.  And the worst part of all this is that it’s told through the eyes of a man who knows very pointedly how dangerous racing is because he nearly got himself killed before he gave up Formula 1.  It cost him his promising career.  Living in a van and traveling the country with a sign that says “Have right foot, will travel” may be working fine for him, hell, it might even be the purest form of racing.  But it’s not what he dreamed of doing.  He pushed it too far and made a mistake.  That happens.  But he didn’t learn from it.  He’s haunted every night by dreams of that near-fatal crash.  And his response, 30 years later, is to be that reckless again and again and encourage others to do it too.

I desperately wanted to like this movie, but, like I said, from the very premise it had issues and then the execution was beyond maddening.  I wanted to talk about how excited I was to see Kerry Condon (Better Call Saul, Banshees of Inisherin), an unbelievably talented actress, on the big screen again after undeservedly losing Best Supporting Actress in 2023.  But I couldn’t even enjoy that, as she was reduced to a token woman on the team (they do have two in this movie, but for the life of me, I can’t remember if the sole woman on the pit crew was ever given a name) and love interest for Sonny Hayes despite them having no chemistry together.  None of that matters because they’re the two prettiest white people in the movie, so they have to get together.  Doesn’t need to make sense.  It was just as wooden and forced in Jurassic World and they made a billion dollars with that.  So I don’t get to talk about Kerry Condon because her role could have been played by a cardboard standee and Kevin McCallister’s Talkboy.  Doesn’t matter that she has the ability to steal any scene from actors of the highest quality as demonstrated in Banshees, no.  Her character, Kate, could just have easily been Love Interest No.1 on the call sheet.  I didn’t count, but I’m almost certain the announcers have more lines than she does.

F1: The Movie is not devoid of moments; it’s capable of engaging you emotionally from time to time but in a way that feels cheap by the next scene.  And the action really is exciting to watch, although not necessarily better than an actual F1 race, but for the density of action.  But the rest of this movie just isn’t worth it.  It’s flashy, hollow, and meaningless.  There is so much more wrong with this film that I didn’t even get a chance to talk about it all because this is already the longest post I’ve ever made.  I rarely outright recommend against watching a movie and I think this is the closest I’ve come.  If you can enjoy the action, go for it.  It’s streaming on Apple TV.  But if you want to watch something that properly celebrates racing, you can do far better than this Yellowstone ass movie.  Rush isn’t my favorite, but it tells a real story and is done well.  Ford v Ferrari is a beautiful, beautiful film with more heart and soul to it than this piece of very corporate feeling media (I read that for the teams to agree, Red Bull especially, they had to agree not to make any look bad or like a villain; that doesn’t feel like art to me).  It’s such a good movie that I need to watch it again and write about it for you because I don’t think enough people have seen it.  And if you want even more Formula 1, Netflix has eight seasons of Drive to Survive available.  And while Senna (the 2010 documentary, not the horrible Netflix series from 2024) isn’t streaming anywhere currently, that is a movie that is worth a watch for anyone with even a passing interest in anything vaguely wheel shaped.  It’s an amazing look at Senna’s life and the first film to get the approval of Senna’s family.  And if you want something as silly as this movie can be, but on purpose, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is still good fun, even if it is NASCAR.  F1: The Movie is a 2 hour, 35 minute film that does not respect your time, your intellect, or the sport of racing.  I cannot believe F1 got a Best Picture nomination.  Did movies suck this year?  Because this one did.

She's Doll That

It’s Women’s History Month and I had a little bit of a hard time coming up with something to bring you.  It’s hard to encapsulate the cornucopia of the massive contributions of women to history in one month, let alone one post about one movie.  I personally love women-led projects and never shy away from watching or covering them.  Just recently, I covered Birds of Prey, which is written by, directed by, and starring women.  Michelle Terry wrote and starred in The Cafe, which centers on three generations of women living in a small coastal English town and their Gilmore Girls-style struggles.  And I’m still singing the praises of KPop Demon Hunters to anyone who will listen.  So trying to think about one piece of media that can address womanhood, I struggled because of how big and complicated a topic that is and how unqualified I am to talk about it.  Just like when I discussed Sinners, I do need to note that I’m not a woman, so I’m coming at this topic from the outside and while I always seek to understand, nothing I could say on this topic could ever be complete.  So again, I want to urge you to listen to others as well, those who do have authority on this topic (you know, women).  But I’m going to do the best I can.  I’ve put on my favorite pink shirt, so let’s get into Barbie.

Barbie dolls are a part girls’ childhoods the way they were never a part of mine.  I remember in every trip to a toy store, whenever I got to the aisle (sometimes two aisles) that was bathed in pink everything, I would just walk past.  That was the girl aisle, there were no GI Joes or Hot Wheels cars in those aisles, not even any Legos, so they had nothing to do with me.  But for many young girls, Barbie is formative.  Just like for me, I always thought I had to be a tough guy held together with a decaying unseen rubber band (oh the pain of a GI Joe going from a heroic action figure one second to a pile of parts the next; actually kind of also like me sometimes), Barbie dolls help shape the way young girls see themselves.  That’s just how people work, kids are sponges that absorb everything, every little message, whether intended or not, whether conscious or not, whether twisted or not, children pick up on everything and they internalize it and not always necessarily when they have the tools to process it healthily.  That’s why children’s media is so important and so are their toys; the world you present to them is the one they’re going to look to see when they’re older.  Is that world diverse, respectful, tolerant, empathetic, and kind?  Or is that world something else?  And what’s their place in it?  Barbie aims to tackle a lot of that in this ambitious film and for most part, was very successful at it.

The vitals, if you weren’t caught in the Barbenheimer craze in 2023: written and directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women), starring Margot Robbie (Birds of Prey, Asteroid City) as Stereotypical Barbie, Ryan Gosling as Beach Ken (Drive, The Nice Guys), Kate McKinnon (Ghostbusters, Bombshell) as Weird Barbie, America Ferrera (Superstore, How to Train Your Dragon) as Gloria, Ariana Greenblatt (Love and Monsters, In the Heights) as Gloria’s daughter Sasha, Will Ferrell (A Very Jonas Christmas Movie) as the Mattel CEO, Michael Cera (Arrested Development, The Phoenician Scheme) as Allan, and a host of very famous and talented actors and actresses starring as various Kens and Barbies in Barbieland.  It’s even narrated by Helen Mirren (Fast X, Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw).  It’s rated PG-13 and has a runtime of 1 hour, 54 minutes.  And when we open up on Barbieland, it’s a picture of a pink utopia, where the Barbies are in charge and have their every desire fulfilled without a second thought.  The sight gags are on point here; the drinks have nothing in the cup, the shower cleans without water, and staircases are just ornamental; when going up or down things, the Barbies just float, as if being guided by an invisible hand because that how kids play with them.  I remember making my GI Joes walk up stairs a few times, but mostly stairs were an impediment at going up a level or something for them to tumble down during a fist fight.  It completely tracks.  It’s all very reminiscent of The Lego Movie, where you have this secret world which follows the rules of toys, which means there aren’t that many when it comes to physics or water (there are a lot of plastic water sight gags, which I do appreciate).

All goes well for the Barbies, including Stereotypical Barbie (SB).  They’re in charge.  Barbie president, an all-Barbie Supreme Court, every position of power or significance is filled by a Barbie.  They want for nothing and everything is taken care of.  It’s even a fairly diverse setup they have going; when I was a kid, Barbie was a tall blonde white girl and a tall blonde white girl only.  Or at least that was my perception of it.  But in Barbieland, there are Barbies of all different races, national origins, body types, and there’s even, very quietly, a trans Barbie.  And this is so great, I hope it’s reflective of the Barbie toys that are out there now, because kids, sponges, etc.; I said this part already.  You get a little establishing montage full of small feminist mantras that are on-the-nose.  But I’ve spoken before about subtlety in films and when you don’t want it due to the current state of media literacy and while it’s often the weakest part of the writing, it feels necessary otherwise too many people will miss the point.  The Kens are there, but they’re on the periphery.  They exist basically only in the eyes of a Barbie and when Barbie isn’t there, they all but go limp waiting to spring back into existence like an opposite Toy Story. Nobody cares about Ken, Kens are barely an extant species without Barbie; they fight amongst each other vying for Barbies’ attention.  But for the Barbies, every night is a nonstop party; a meaningless, wholesomely hedonistic existence that is nonetheless soundtracked by some fantastically catchy Dua Lipa music (she also plays a Barbie).  It’s all going swimmingly, until mid-dance, SB introduces a fly in the ointment, a monkey in the wrench: she asks if anyone else ever thinks about dying (you’re not alone, SB; I also contemplate death every time I’m forced to dance).  After a brief stumbling recovery, Barbie finds this level of self-inception unshakable and ends up speaking with Weird Barbie who tosses the mumbo-jumbo at SB that sets her on her journey to the real world to fix the issue that’s causing her existential crisis.  As long as you don’t try to make sense of the magical science behind it, it’s a good, fun setup and I really enjoy McKinnon’s performance as Weird Barbie, a Barbie who has gone strange from being played with too hard in the real world and has since been ostracized by the other Barbies.  Normally I’m not a big fan of her shtick, but she’s perfectly metered in this film and a real delight.  SB has to go into the world that Barbie “fixed for feminism” and find her little girl, so she can solve the problem that’s causing hers.  Beach Ken, whom I’ll refer to as Ken from now on, tags along.

It doesn’t take long for SB to have her rude awakening in our world, but Ken, well, he’s having a great time.  I’ll tell you, I have known Ryan Gosling was a good actor ever since I saw him in Drive, but I didn’t know he was so funny.  But this and his later role in The Fall Guy have really shown how good his comedic timing is.  I guess he was the more comedic character in The Nice Guys, but I didn’t think he’d be this good (especially after seeing Only God Forgives, yikes).  Presented with a patriarchal society for the first time, the two of them have very different reactions and this leads to Ken ducking out and learning how to become a manosphere influencer to take the patriarchy back to Barbieland, while SB goes to do her hero’s journey.  From there, the movie happens.  It’s a PG-13 movie about a child’s toy, so while it’s not always going to be as kid-oriented as The Lego Movie, for example, you pretty much know how it’s going to go, right?  This isn’t going to be some wild, expectation subverting narrative that gets really dark in the third act.  And that’s fine, it doesn’t need to be; the narrative arc isn’t as important to how it’s accomplished in a comedy and it’s accomplished very well here.  Margot Robbie, readers, she is fantastic.  Her performance as Stereotypical Barbie is so skillful, both in the drama of the character and in her comedic timing that you’d think that Robbie has been doing comedy for years.  Not only that, she’s an incredible scene partner, reading perfectly off the other actors and giving them their space to perform as well.  The movie is constantly shifting who’s being funny, who’s being emotional, who’s running into an awkward situation, and so on, that being able to step back and let the other actors stand in the spotlight for a moment is so important to the movie working. Gosling got an Oscar nomination and in a year of great actress performances, Margot Robbie wasn’t.  I haven’t seen all those movies, so maybe she just missed out because it was that strong of a year (and Greta Lee was snubbed for Past Lives as well, shame on the Academy), but in general, I would call it an Oscar-worthy performance.  She’s so good and toes the line between playing naive and playing stupid.  When entering our world, SB is undoubtedly unaware of how it works, but she’s never portrayed as dumb, which is a hard tightrope act.  Being dumb is easy comedy, we’ve seen countless pieces of media that rely on idiocy to be funny.  This is not one of those movies.  Okay, if I’m being completely honest, some of the comedy is that Ken is dumb, but it’s smartly written, so I’m going to give it a pass.  It’s not even that he’s dumb, he’s so desperate that he falls for bad ideas.  But what’s even more important about this particular comedy isn’t how funny it is, which is very, it’s how intelligent and significant its messaging is.

It takes on so much, much like Sinners encapsulated so much of the Black experience, I think Barbie fits in a lot of the woman’s experience into this.  There’s a lot here that I’m not going to be able to do more than just touch on and certainly more than I can personally do justice to; being catcalled and objectified, even assaulted, the mother/daughter dynamic (which seems to be a through line in Gerwig’s work), the feeling of being marginalized and never good enough, being asked to be everything and punished either way, the impossibility of paradoxical ideals, where the right kind of woman is entirely externally defined by people who are not women and women have no chance to live up to what is expected of them.  The list goes on.  We all know the speech by now, I think they showed it at the Oscars in 2024.  Gloria tries to explain what it is to be a woman, what it means, what women have to deal with on a daily basis.  It is a monologue, it is a record scratch on the film where everything stops and America Ferrera delivers an incredible speech on womanhood.  If you haven’t seen it or even if you have and it’s been a while, I encourage you to go back and watch it.  If you’re a woman, you probably identify with it pretty solidly, because I know the women in my life that I’ve talked to about Barbie have told me that they have.  And if you’re a man, like I am, there’s so much information packed in this couple of minutes that if you open your ears and open your heart and really listen and take it in, this speech has the power to change things.  We live in a world now where women are under fire from so many angles that it feels like all the progress they’ve made, that we’ve made as a society is being torn down and regressing to a much worse time.  And it will be a worse time for all of us, men included, which Barbie makes very clear.

Mattel is a bit brave for this.  Their executives look clueless, their headquarters looks one step removed from an evil lair (and not that far removed from the corporate offices I’ve worked in previously, so take from that what you will about corporate culture), and the movie doesn’t shy away from the doll’s role in contributing to body image issues for girls and women.  Gerwig pulls no punches.  Sasha, Gloria’s daughter, tears down the Barbie doll and its unintended side effects on girls and women in a laundry list of very real complaints.  I know Mattel made a boatload of money off of this, so it’s not like they were being completely altruistic in allowing this movie to be this honest, but if they hadn’t what would have followed is another piece of meaningless commercialism, which Barbie isn’t, even though it’s dressed up to look like it is.  So in the long, long list of things that are deserving of praise about this movie, far at the bottom, after Michael Cera’s fight choreography and Simu Liu’s incredible dancing, there should be a little honorable mention for Mattel.  Because as bad as audiences can be these days, they can instinctively feel inauthenticity and dishonesty (at least in a movie, if not a politician) and Gerwig and the cast come together to deliver an authentic and honest film.  The movie confidently plays with stereotypes in a way that’s clever and accurate, but not vindictive or hurtful; I see myself in some of these moments.  I’ve definitely espoused the virtues and importance of the Porsche 356 and its influence on the automotive industry before, so when I saw that on screen, I laughed.  It was real.  It was funny.  It was expertly handled.  Even when Ken is running rampant in Barbieland, turning it into this patriarchal hellscape of tradwives in French maid outfits and the widespread wearing of puka shell necklaces, the movie goes out of its way to empathize with Ken.  In this world, he is living the fake fear that every far-right influencer stokes to garner support—he is a marginalized white man and he’s used his newfound power to lash out.  But the movie doesn’t villainize him, instead it takes time to understand where he’s coming from and appeal to him in a way that fixes the foundational issues that led to his problematic actions.  In a way, they put him in therapy without putting him in therapy.

Earlier, I called Barbieland a pink utopia.  But a utopia isn’t quite a utopia unless it’s one for everyone and that’s one of the things Barbie is quick to call out (and then there’s Dinotopia, but that’s an entirely different story altogether).  The film doesn’t actually present Barbieland as alternative ideal to the real world, rather it’s a mirror, just with the Barbies in charge and the Kens marginalized, much the way the patriarchy marginalizes women while putting men in charge.  One of the reasons I think this movie is such a piece of successful feminist filmmaking is that it doesn’t ever feel hollow or one-sided; for all the unsubtle bon mots and caricatures presented in the film, it avoids feeling like it’s pandering, unlike some movies that try a feminism-flavored cash grab.  The biggest takeaway from this film isn’t that women are great and men are bad (though men don’t make a great argument for ourselves in general, neither in the movie nor the real world), but rather that the patriarchy harms everyone, men included and that inclusive feminism is better for everyone: women, men, and all genders.  It’s not through restoring single-sided order of any kind that makes world better, it’s through cooperation, collaboration, and mutual respect.  That’s been the vision of feminism that I’ve always been presented, as much as fear-mongers want men to believe that equality for women means diminishing men in some way (it doesn’t, obviously it doesn’t), and that’s what I see in Barbie.  That’s why I think Barbie is a movie for everyone, not just those looking for a dose of girl power and female empowerment.  This movie is anything but hollow and cheap.  It’s smart, it’s thoughtful, and highly empathetic to a perhaps unprecedented level.  The thing that works so well for this movie is that it’s not some surface level message. It encourages self-discovery, self-acceptance, cooperation, and empathy.  It’s feminism that includes and lifts up everyone.  It’s a vision of what equality could look like when people work together to make a better world.  It’s amazing what they can accomplish just with a little openness and kindness.  It’s a beautiful film, really, on top of being really funny.  This is a movie that everyone should and can watch and I think that’s why it became the sensation that it is.  I want more movies like this and by like this, I don’t mean about toys.  I mean, I’m not necessarily against that, but what I mean is that I want more thoughtful, smart comedies that are done well, are authentic and honest, and are this funny.  If somehow you haven’t seen Barbie, watch it.  If you have seen it, watch it again.  It’s streaming on HBO Max, you can watch Birds of Prey after and do a Margot-Robbie-is-fantastic double feature.

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.