Meanwhile With Trevor
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Four Missed Opportunities
September 17, 2024

This last weekend my mom was quite sick. As her only caregiver, there wasn’t much else I could do but sit nearby and watch movies while she slept. Maybe I could’ve read a book or written one, I admit. But frankly, I just wasn’t in the mood. As with anything that I really enjoy, if I’m away from it for too long I get hungry in my spirit for that thing.

And I was hungry for movies.

So it seemed like as good a time as any to catch up on a few of this year’s releases that interested me, and it’s a pretty short list. I still didn’t get to all of them. However, given how lackluster what I did watch was, I don’t have much hope for the others. Everything I saw had potential, and with a few, obvious, adjustments could have been far better. If there’s any value in watching weak movies, it’s the opportunity to learn from their mistakes so that I don’t miss any opportunities in my work.

Again, the movies coming out right now have some good ideas and are lacking because of missed opportunities.

There will be spoilers.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

As soon as I started Frozen Empire I realized that all I remembered about Ghostbusters: Afterlife was that I kinda liked it. As it went on, I remembered that one reason came from the fact that there’s a character named Trevor who has a know-it-all little sister. Finally, some representation! But since poor Trevor is hardly in this movie, and I felt no connection to anyone, really, the story just fell flat. The longer the movie went along, the more I wished I was just watching the original 1984 movie.

The missed opportunities

One of the biggest criticisms against Frozen Empire is that flirts with a lesbian romance and never commits. Now, I don’t need or want that in my family film anyway. But if they’d kept things traditional and had poor Trevor fall for the ghost who needs a human to provide the big twist, they could have had a real romantic subplot without worrying about offending half the country and much of the world. Another problem is that the OG Ghostbusters don’t get to do much. Actually, the people who save the day are new characters we barely get to know. A moment of self-sacrifice for our original trio was even foreshadowed! 

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

As with Frozen Empire, my recollection of the previous installment in this franchise was foggy. Apparently we aren’t doing memorable characters anymore. The only actor who seems to know what kind of movie he’s in and having any fun is Dan Stevens as a vet to the monsters. I’d watch a whole TV series if it starred his character and was designed in a Crocodile Hunter style. I will say, I laughed more at this movie than I did Frozen Empire, just because Kong uses Baby Kong as a club in a fight.

The missed opportunities

None of the characters have arcs. They go from Point A, to B, to C, without ever growing or changing. What if Stevens’ and Hall’s characters had hated each other and gradually fallen in love? Everyone in the movie (except Godzilla) emotes, but none of them actually seems to feel. Consequently, I felt nothing. The monster fights are pretty cool, though. No missed opportunities there. 

The Beekeeper

No surprise, this was the best movie I watched all weekend. Jason Statham’s quasi-political thriller with a John Wick plot is a blast. Plus, it’s not bogged down by being a sequel. Sure it’s about as thought-provoking as an 80’s action movie, even with a Hunter Biden analog accidentally taking down the military industrial complex. But that’s a feature, not a bug. We’re here for the violence, and The Beekeeper delivers in spades.

The missed opportunities

These aren’t so much complaints as observations. If this movie had been made in the 80’s there would’ve been a sex scene. If were from the 90’s there’d be a trip to a strip club. And at least in the 00’s the female FBI agent chasing our hero would’ve been a hot latina and not a thicc black woman. But apparently we’ve moved beyond such tawdry things.

The Heiress and the Handyman

Yes, I did follow up my brutal action movie with a Hallmark romance. Variety is the apple-spice of life, as it were. Can’t lie, I had hopes for this one. Like every guy my age, I’ve always had a little crush on Jodie Sweetin, and Hallmark movies tend to hit more than they miss. This one? This one’s a miss. Our heiress is nice, if comically incompetent. Actually, she’s too incompetent and, though Sweetin gives it her all, I don’t buy that she’s that dumb any more than I buy her hair isn’t a wig. She and the “handyman” get along from the get-go, which means the movie doesn’t even deliver on its premise of mistaken identities. But we do get this gem of a line, “I run the organic farm next door with my sister.”

The missed opportunities

Where to begin? First, they should have played the mistaken identity thing out longer. If the dude had let her think he really was her new estate’s handyman for more than two seconds we would’ve gotten some awkward hijinks and humor. Then they could’ve had fallen in love, fallen out of love, and gotten back together. There’s also no stakes. If the organic farm was struggling and our heiress was frustrated because she’d just lost her fortune, something more than winning a pie baking contest would’ve mattered.

Final thought

I still like movies, even when they disappoint.

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F1 is Modern Western

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

Boy, was I surprised.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

Naturally, his tactics put him at odds with his teammate, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), and his cocky attitude is a big red flag to the team’s engineer, Kate McKenna (Kerry Conden). So the movie all the tropes of a sports film, and I don’t think I need to summarize further. But it’s not a sports film. Or rather, it’s not just a sports a film. Surprise, surprise, it’s the western myth transposed into a racing a story.

It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

But he doesn’t.


Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that. 

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Girl-Power Isn't the Problem: Stop Treating Movies Like TV Pilots

Last weekend I was able to sneak off the theater for a screening of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Did I feel silly, telling the high school girl at the ticket counter, “One for Ballerina, and a small drink”? Well, not in the moment. 

I probably drank a liter of cherry vanilla Coke Zero, and that didn’t feel so great.

Plenty of box office analysts and Hollywood types are wracking their brains, trying to figure out why movies like Furiosa and Ballerina aren’t drawing huge crowds. Mad Max and John Wick are popular franchises, but apparently telling the stories of the women in those worlds isn’t working. Even if the movies are pretty good.

I’ve seen both, and they’re pretty good.

Some are arguing that no one will go near a movie that looks like it’s feminist girl-bossing. Others counter that movies like Alien and Kill Bill are female-led action films that were successful. Now, I’m not going to say that Ballerina is on par with those modern day classics. But I will say that, as a man watching the movie, it didn’t offend me. The movie never challenged me to confront any internalized misogyny. The small girl doesn’t take down John Wick in hand-to-hand combat.

Honestly, if you like franchise, whether you’re male or female, you should watch Ballerina.

In short, from a purely cinematic experience perspective, neither Furiosa nor Ballerina would be any better or worse with a male lead. Maybe that’s a hot take. But that’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. Well, okay, I wouldn’t watch a movie called Ballerina if it stared a dude. Nevertheless, I think you get my point. Petite women warriors aside, the plots and action are exactly as expected.

So what’s the deal?

Well, what no one seems to have noticed is that Ripley and The Bride weren’t replacing anyone. As we were watching their movies for the first time, we weren’t thinking about other characters for whom we already had a preference. Movies are more like TV than TV right now, and replacement characters have always been a hard sell, regardless of gender. We all remember Sam and Diane. Who still talks about Sam and Rebecca (even though Kirstie Alley won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the part)? I had to look up her name. 

No, they aren’t technically replacing them. It’s a spin-off, set in the same world.

Spin-offs tend to succeed when the characters are already well established (eg: Frasier). Furiosa and Ballerina are more like backdoor pilots, where new characters are dropped in for a single episode to sell us on the idea of a new show. This technique is very hit and miss on TV, and I can’t think of a single example of this working in a movie franchise. Film and television are very different mediums, and should be treated as such.

Still, if it doesn’t work on TV, it’s probably not gonna work at the movies. Not where new characters and spin-offs are concerned. 

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It’s making me nostalgic. 

Consequently, for the rest of the year, I’m prioritizing movies from 1995, the year I was twelve. At that time, my family didn’t really go to the theater, and when we did rent VHS tapes, more often than it is was older Disney movies or entirely forgettable Christian titles. Now that I’ve grown tired of trying to keep up with new releases, not there’s much worth watching anyway, it feels like a good time to catch up on those 30 year old movies that have become ingrained in what’s left of our pop culture.

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Some of these are movies I’ve seen before, but not in a long time. Others will be first time watches for me. There’s really no rhyme or reason to what I put on my list. It’s just movies that either interest me, or are currently in my collection, sadly unwatched. As things become available on streaming, I may add to the list. And if I don’t get to everything before the end of the year, no big deal.

Hopefully, they aren’t going anywhere. 

I’ll be posting some reviews and analysis as I go, so be sure to follow me here. 

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