Chris Fritz's Blog - Posts Tagged "review"

Recently Netflix released an independent film from France on their platform called Cuties. It’s been very controversial on the internet and that’s what we’ll be discussing. Let’s start with an overview of the film. It’s about an eleven year old Muslim girl named Amy living in France with her strict religious family. Feeling quite repressed by her conservative mother eventually she meets a group of girls her own age who are part of a twerking dance team. Amy befriends them and they enter a twerking dance contest.

The film has been heavily criticized for it’s sexualization of children. Now when I read all the internet backlash against this movie I couldn’t help but think back to 2019 when everybody talked about the controversy surrounding Joker. While they thought Joker would normalize radical violence this movie would normalize the sexualization of children and pedophilia. There are several schools of thought about how society should relate to movies like these. One is that art is a reflection of society and can be used to reflect the values of the society. That it can teach us things and can have direct impacts on society. In this framework a movie like this would be condemned for its sexualization and it’s through this framework that most of the critics make their criticism. Another school of thought is that art exists outside of society and doesn’t have any impact on it what so ever. We do not get our values and our societal norms from art and instead we get them from the people around us. In this framework cuties is not controversial it’s just a movie that exists. There’s probably a synthesis between these two ideas that can work in real harmony. On a personal level I’m close to that second philosophy where not all art has to instill values or reflect societal norms. I believe art can be offensive and be filled with things that society would hate. I also hold a belief that if there is something that offends you you should look directly at it and understand it more that’s why I watched this movie. Yes I did I watched the whole thing so now I’m probably on an FBI watch list but I have to tell you I hate this movie. Earlier this year I saw the controversy just surrounding the movies poster and I admit that did paint this movie in a bad light for me. The worst part is that in the movie they make that poster move. Even if I hadn’t read all that backlash early on I still think I would have heated this thing. The sexualization is way too explicit and any theme it tries to convey gets drowned in this sexualization. While I think this movie is bad I don’t think it’s dumb. I actually like the end of it where Amy rejects both her twerking dance crew and her religion is probably the best possible ending for this film.

I also watched some interviews with the director and she says that this film is semi autobiographical. It’s definitely drawn from growing up as a Muslim woman in France and that’s a big part of the film. The other part comes from real life instances when she watched young girls doing twerking dance routines and I guess this is supposed to comment on how girls have to grow up in a hyper sexualized society. In the interview she talks about different roles of femininity in society and how they clash with each other. She does create a strict divide between her conservative religious role of femininity and a western sexual ideas of femininity. In the end both ideas are really systems of oppression and control so this movie does have something deep to say unfortunately. To criticize her there were ways to get this point across with a movie where every one of the main characters is over the age of eighteen. I would probably want to watch a movie about a repressed religious eighteen year old Muslim girl grappling with her own sexuality by dancing. That leads me to believe that the director made these characters eleven years old so the movie could be more offensive and that she could create internet backlash getting herself free advertising. So we all fell for it. We’ve been tricked and bamboozled. The only thing we can do now is donate money to organizations that combat human trafficking. That’ll show em all.

Now I don’t want to be all pessimistic here. As far as I can tell this film has two main messages. Society has a corrupting obsession with sex and women’s sexuality and the innocence of children is eroded as the adult world encroaches in on it. Now two good films that tackle these subjects individually they are Showgirls and the Florida Project.

In Showgirls a Las Vegas stripper named Naomi Malone gains fame and fortune but along the way she turns to violence and sleeping with her boss to get to the top. In the film there is gratuitous amounts of full frontal female nudity and all the actors are over the age of eighteen. The film rubs our faces in over the top sex. This satirizes America’s obsession with sex and pornography. It’s completely over the top and campy at times but everyone in the movie is an adult and not a child. In the Florida project a six year old girl named Moonee who lives in Orlando and is extremely poor. She gets into juvenile mischief with her friends culminating in her friends accidentally burning down an abandoned house. In the film Moonee is exposed to several adult activities. At one point she and her friends are solicited by an elderly pedophile. The creepy old man is stopped by Willem Dafoe’s character before anything bad happens. She’s also exposed to adult themes by her mother who takes her with her as she scams random people on the street. They constantly move from motel to motel and at one point her mother brings a random man to their home to prostitute herself while Moonee hides in the bathroom. The child’s innocence is fully destroyed when child protective services shows up and takes her away from her mother. As she’s exposed to more and more adult themes her childhood innocence is eroded and eroded away into nothing. I’d also like to point out that in this movie there are no little girl’s twerking anywhere. So these subjects can be addressed in more subtle and artistic ways. Stuff like this just makes me hate cuties even more.

Also when I think about it more I get kind of pissed that the director would exploit the young girls staring in this movie by sexualizing them. How hypocritical can you be when you try to say that society sexualizes young girls while you are the one really sexualizing young girls? In the end this whole thing is a fucking mess that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If Cuties is remembered for anything it will probably be all the times it made us cringe whether we saw the movie or not. Netflix might take a big hit for this one but I don’t think it’s the end for them. Goodbye everybody and remember, pedophilia is wrong.

Last week HBO Max released the re-edited version of the movie Justice League that some people have just named the Snyder Cut. It's supposed to represent Zack Snyder's original vision of what the film was supposed to be. I talked about it on my blog earlier so I thought that I would do a follow up now that I've actually seen the movie. I didn't think it would happen but it actually came out. This movie definitely made me feel a lot of emotions. It made me think back to 2017 when I saw the theatrical cut of this movie and was ultimately disappointed. It made me think of all the things that have changed since then. It made me spend a lot of time thinking about the two previous films that lead up to this one. Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of justice. How a lot of people thought they were bad movies. How they thought the theatrical release of justice league wasn't that good. So I was very curious to see if the Snyder cut would turn all of that around. I'm not really sure if I went into seeing this with high expectations, low expectations, or no expectations at all. I just new something had to happen and that this movie is important. The Snyder Cut has the same basic plot as the theatrical cut almost everything happens the same there's just some notable additions and subtractions.

When I first heard it was four hours long I almost didn't believe it. But it is four hours long and it's divided into multiple chapters. Very reminiscent of Tarantino's longer films. The blanket differences are the whole movie is visually darker, it's paced really slow, and for some reason there's a lot of opera being sung in the background. On the whole this new cut does fix some problems that the original version had. It adds a lot of scenes that improve the story without changing the story. It makes me empathize with the characters more. I feel like I have a better understanding of almost every character in the movie. Almost all of the plot points are more flushed out and make more sense creating a stronger narrative as a whole. The villains are better. In the original Steppenwolf was just generic and bland. In the new one he's a disgraced warrior who has to regain his honor by conquering the planet. That's just a surface level and easy change that made him a whole lot better. It was nice to see Darkseid in this movie. He was truly a shadow that cast itself over the entire film. That really took the story to a new level.

For this last part I would like to talk about a video game called Injustice: Gods Among Us. The story of the video game is related to the Justice League. It takes place on an alternate earth where Superman has morphed into a despotic Tyrannical dictator who rules over the entire planet with an iron fist. The heroes of earth that are left standing have to stop him. Somehow this game has become a small source of inspiration for Zack Snyder and his overall vision for the three movies he made in the DCEU. The standard criticism I'm going to level at this man is this. He is the man who hates superman and then made three movies about superman. Now one of his previous films was the movie adaption of Watchmen. Now ever since he made that movie he internalized the themes of Watchmen that basically try to corrupt the golden age super hero and deconstruct the mythos of the super hero. It shows us a truly dark side of a superhero mythology. So with all that in his heart Zack Snyder made three movies that simultaneously build up super heroes and deconstruct super heroes all at once. I think in the future that will be the main highlights of the criticism against his three DC movies. I'm not going to lie to you there are parts of me that think Zack Snyder is the worst filmmaker of all time. Not for any of these movies I just really hate Sucker Punch.

My last thing I'm going to say is the Snyder cut does a lot of foreshadowing for a potential sequel. Now based on the foreshadowing it would seem this hypothetical sequel would be very much like the injustice game I talked about. Thus completing the ultimate cycle for his deconstruction of the DC super heroes. I don't know if we will ever see a sequel to this Snyder cut. I highly doubt that Henry Cavil wants to be Superman again and DC is going forward with a new Batman with Robert Pattinson. I could predict that a Synder cut sequel won't happen but then again I was thoroughly convinced that the Snyder cut didn't exist so who am I to say. So maybe that foreshadowing was just planting seeds in the ground and we don't get to see the garden. It's like a child that you wont get to see grow up. That reminds me I nearly had tears in my eyes when I saw the final slate of the film say "for Autumn." So overall this movie has a lot of heart, that heart was missing in 2017. It's been a long road but I think we finally have some closure. This movie is really good. It's way better than Wonder Woman 1984 that movie is weird.

I guess the lesson we should take away from this is if you make a piece of art and you don't think it was very good don't be afraid to try again.

Looking back at all the movies I saw in 2021 I made an extraordinary discovery that my notion of storytelling to its very core. To demonstrate this notion I’m going to have to write about my favorite movie that came out in 2021 and my least favorite movie that came out in 2021. So let’s follow along and see if we can learn something.

The worst movie I saw in 2021 was Marvel’s the Eternals. Going into the movie I knew it had a bad rotten tomatoes score but I still wanted to see it. Right now I’m going to have to agree with the critics and say this movie was a swing and a miss. It feels strange because I am deep into the marvel cult and I know very little about the Eternals. I hoped for the best but I was disappointed. Maybe studying this movie for a little bit can teach us an important lesson. Here’s what I really believe. The Eternals is the complete antithesis of everything that makes marvel movies good. It takes everything that gives marvel success and runs in the complete opposite direction. Let’s start at the beginning with the characters. One staple of the MCU is making movies with big casts of unique characters. Some of the best examples would be the first Avengers movie and Infinity War. One of the reasons those movies are so good is that they don’t introduce us to new characters. They take almost all the characters from previously established movies and focus on the characters just interacting with each other. In Eternals they introduce us to ten new main characters, and this is the first time the audience is seeing any of them. So, this movie has to spend a good chunk of its run time introducing all these characters. It just fails to keep all these characters unique and interesting. Now right now you might be saying to yourself that there’s an exception to this rule. Guardians of the galaxy introduces us to an ensemble of new characters and it’s one of marvels greatest movies. That’s because that movie has a very strong plot which is the next thing I want to talk about, the plot. Now the plot of guardians of the galaxy is pretty straight forward. Here’s a powerful McGuffin all these characters have to play keep away with it for two hours. The plot of Eternals has so much deep lore, mysteries, magic, and plot twists that it’s enough to make anybodies head spin. There’s so many layers to this plot that it all just gets lost in the sauce. My final point is the probably the most important criticism I can levy against the movie and that is this movie doesn’t have good themes. To understand the themes of this movie you just need to understand the bad guys plan. A celestial god wants to destroy the earth and give birth to a new celestial who will in tern create new worlds across the galaxy giving life to trillions of sentient beings. (Spoiler alert) They want to trade the lives of everyone on earth for the lives of all these potential beings. If that sounds familiar to you it’s because that’s the theme of Avengers infinity war. Thanos wanted to trade the lives of half the universe so the other half could flourish. The Eternals just recycled that theme and the characters spend a good chunk of the film debating weather or not they should even save humanity. I moral dilemma that has already been solved by the previous avengers movies. So Eternals is really a bitter tasting mess that does not belong in the MCU and would probably feel more at home in the DCEU.

Now to review a film that I thought was one of the best from 2021 and that is a movie called Don’t Look Up. For those of you who haven’t seen it it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of scientists who discover a meteor that will collide with earth and destroy all life on the planet and they have to convince people to do something about it. Now for several years I’ve debated with myself about whether or not satire is a dead art form. Is it possible to satirize society and make jokes about our culture? Ever since the election of Donald Trump I think it’s become harder to do that. Mostly because with him we’ve ushered in the post truth era I think a side effect of this is a fracturing of culture into several different sub cultures that hold different beliefs and recognize different truths. So with all these fractured sub cultures how can someone truly satirize culture? The answer is Don’t Look Up. Let me explain. In the film the giant meteor that is headed to earth is an obvious comparison to climate change. So the audience can spend the entire movie comparing the disaster in the real world to the disaster of the fake world. The only thing that is consistent between the two is how humanity responds to the disaster. One major lynch pin of this movie is the fact that it does criticize the responses towards the meteor. But it doesn’t criticize the actions of everyday individuals. Instead it criticizes systems of production and consumption that envelop those individuals. Systems that envelop entire cultures and sometimes entire communities. So how does all of this relate to satire? Earlier this year Dave Chappelle released a stand up special called the closer and was immediately criticized for transphobic jokes. Now some people might argue that the jokes he told weren’t transphobic but here’s why I think a lot of people thought they were. In Dave’s jokes about the LGBTQ community he probably thought he was commenting on society in some way. And in a way he was but in a much bigger way he’s criticizing one subculture from the perspective of a different subculture. Subconsciously putting the African American culture up against the LGBTQ subculture. He also acts like these are two completely different factions that don’t have any way to cross over to each other. So I guess that’s why I think Dave Chappelle was thrown into the grinder this year. The guy is the greatest comic but maybe that means we should hold him to high standards. So my question still stands. Is it possible to satirize society? After all of this time I have to say the answer is yes but satire is going to look a lot different from now on. Now I guess the biggest thesis of Don’t Look Up is stated in the beginning minutes of the movie. When it just displays the text of a joke that reads like this. When I die I want to die like my grandpa peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like his passengers. This movie criticizes a lot of real world events and people. From politicians like Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton to billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. So I guess in this framing this satire is trying to tell us that these billionaires are the grandpa that died in his sleep and the entire earth are the passengers. In the end I think this movie is a good example of a great story. It’s a fantasy that can tell us more about ourselves than real stories ever could. Now my one criticism of the movie is that comparing climate change to a giant earth shattering comet doesn’t line up completely. Climate change is of course slow and manmade while a comet is a sudden cosmic anomaly. But it’s still a decent movie if you want to watch excellent acting get a few chuckles and also have a slow anxiety attack.

Now there’s something very amazing that happens when you compare Eternals and Don’t Look Up and that is this. They are the exact same movie but they go in completely opposite directions. Both movies are about a small group of people trying to save the world from total destruction. They both contemplate humanity, society, and nature and they both encounter god like beings that want to wipe out humanity. Both of these narratives question if humanity is worth saving and they come up with different answers. In Eternals they save the world in Don’t Look Up they don’t save the world. So let’s go over the process by which each movie comes to their own conclusion. In Eternals it runs the gamut of all human history and focuses on all the deadly weapons mankind has created. All the death and destruction of entire cultures and civilizations. But it does ground itself in a romantic humanism that always wins out in superhero movies. While Don’t Look Up does a deep dive into contemporary culture and forces us to look at our everyday contradictions. Just little things that we think or believe that are ultimately harmful to us. Things we’ve normalized that might harm us down the road. It could be the way we communicate, the way we produce, the way we consume, or even the way we reproduce. We can find harmful contradictions in all of them. Just maybe all of those contradictions add up to a point where we can’t help ourselves anymore. That leads me to something that I have believed for most of my life and that is this. Inside of every bad movie there is a good movie just trying to get out. So think of this when you’re reading, writing or creating. Sometime the difference between something good and something bad is just a few decisions.

I did find it interesting that two movies can be released in the same year and be about the same thing even though they’re different genres and styles. I’m very interested about stories that are apocalyptic or even post-apocalyptic so I might write more about those in the future. But what do you guys think? Am I on to something here or am I completely out in left field. Let me know in the comments.

I hate Batman's eyes. Over the years Batman has been adapted for the big screen several times and one thing that has remained consistent with every iteration is the eyes of the bat suit. What do I mean by this? Whenever we see Batman he has a suit that makes the majority of his body look like a bat but when we look at the eyes of the bat suit they are the eyes of a human. You're probably thinking to yourself as opposed to what eyes exactly? Here's the alternative. In Batman the animated series whenever he puts on his suit his eyes turn into white slits. that's how batman's eyes look in the majority of his comic book appearances and all of his animated incarnations. The movies however still have a caped crusader that looks nothing like this. What do we lose with this. Well if we look at human eyes that tells us that Batman is really just a man underneath that costume. If we look at two white sectioned off slits in the mask that gives him more of an inhuman look. he could strike more fear into the hearts of his enemies. So much of the batman mythology centers around him becoming more than a man. Surrendering his humanity and ascending to the status of symbol, of myth. With human eyes he still retains his humanity but with inhuman eyes he becomes so much more. That's a small visual representation that the movies have missed. To more solidify my point in the Spiderman movies from the early 2000's the eyes on the Spiderman suit look true to the comic books and nothing like human eyeballs. So it was done in a film that was better able to encapsulate the superhero trope of becoming superhuman and accomplish everything I'm talking about. So why do I care about this? I believe that it was Edgar Allen Poe that said eyes are the windows to the soul. That is extremely true for our favorite movies. If we see a characters eyes we can see there humanity and their soul. Conversely if we don't see a persons eyes then this character becomes so much more than a character. Certain characters like Robocop and judge dread wear dressings that cover their eyes. This is a step that removes them from humanity and makes them incarnations of cold, hard justice. In Star Wars when we look at Darth Vader and the storm troopers they wear masks that cover their entire face removing their humanity almost entirely becoming representatives of evil and death. I'll just touch on Boba Fett briefly saying that he is one of those characters that is removed from humanity because we do not see his face. I think back in the day what made fans love him was how little we interact with him. His limited screen time gives him an air of mystery around him. And in that mystery fans were able to imprint whatever they felt on to that character. Some fans could think of him as a cowboy others a knight others a bounty hunter. The possibilities were endless. So this is a cry to have Batman fall in line with other interesting characters in the cinematic tradition. It's a concept that I've yet to see live action batman embrace and it especially was absent in the most recent film with Robert Pattenson. There is some hope on the horizon though. There was a live action film that portrayed this eyeless Batman for me. In Batman V Superman dawn of justice Batman wears a mech suit for his fight with the son of krypton and this mech suit sports pale blue glowing eyes. They are a perfect representation of what I'm talking about and I hope they pick up on it in future films.

I might as well give you a personal update while I'm here. I do have to admit that my writing process has hit a snag. I've gone through a very big change in my life. I've gotten a new day job that's really started to take a good chunk out of my day. I know it's for the better but it's made me rearrange and reevaluate things in my life. So don't feel sorry for me feel glad for me. I definitely have been keeping myself busy right now I'm working on a project that could change everything in my life. So stay tuned for some amazing news.