Delayed Reaction: Jab We Met

The Pitch: Forces of Nature, but with dance numbers.

A depressed businessman crosses paths with an energetic Punjabi girl and their lives become linked.

I'm trying to improve my movie diet. Club 50 took care of modern domestic hit movies. My love of the Sundance selection is taking care of my indie movie appetite. My Netflix queue is giving me a healthy stream of older classics to finally catch up on. I've been recently obsessed with documentaries. The last major area I need to improve is foreign films. That's not going to happen though if all I'm catching are the critical darlings. A lot of those are too damn depressing. I need some feel good hits.

I like India. Every since I had a year long school project about it back in 8th grade, I've paid more attention to it than a lot of other countries. My IT job inevitably has me interacting with a lot of Indian people. Beyond all that though, Indian cinema intrigues me. First of all, it's huge. Bollywood is only one part of it. There's also Tollywood, Kollywood, and several other languages in India with their own films and film industry. However, I don't understand the economics of Indian film. Boxofficemojo is one of the sites I visit the most. I check box office numbers every weekend. I hear plenty of international box office numbers. I can tell you that Wolf Warrior 2 destroyed the Chinese box office and that any Fast and Furious movie is money there. I know that Spirited Away is still king in Japan, but half of their top movies all-time are from the US. Indian numbers are a little harder to nail down. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion is their biggest movie ever (I think). U.S. films do OK there, but apparently not great. They are much more interested in their of cinema, which is great. It seems like more of their films have been making their way to the US in recent year. Nothing has really broken out. I'm pretty sure Baahubali 2, which finished 3rd one weekend back in 2017 and finished 105th is the US box office that year is the biggest hit so far from India. Like with Chinese cinema, there are some distributors that appear to be determined to keep trying until something hits big. I see a lot of trailers for these movies. Many of them look very "Hollywood". Apparently, a lot of Indians mix Hindi and English freely, which is kind of cool. I don't run into that much elsewhere. Especially with languages that are so different.

All this ranting is to say that I decided to finally watch an Indian movie. I'm not sure why I chose Jab We Met. I didn't feel like watching one of the big action movies. I wanted a RomCom and this one came highly rated. Overall, I found the movie to be quite charming. Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor have nice chemistry. Kereena in particular was very good as a manic pixie dream girl variant. Like most RomComs, it's funny without ever making me laugh. I knew to expect random dance numbers, which were good anyway, so I didn't mind them. There are a few silly things that I assume are tied to standards and practices in Indian cinema. Like, that very sexually charged hug toward the end felt really over the top. My only major issue, from my understanding, is a common one with Indian movies: it's too damn long. I'm certainly conditioned by the length of American movies, but really, no RomCom need to be going past the 2hr mark, let alone approach 2.5hrs. There's a lot of filler and repetitive plotting, so this could've easily been edited down. Otherwise, I was pleased by the movie. I'm definitely curious to see more of what Indian cinema has to offer.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Aliens

The Pitch: We know Ridley can handle one alien. How about more than one?

After 57 years in stasis, Ridley returns to LV-426, which was turned into a colony and has been overrun by alien creatures.

Alien v. Aliens is up there with The Godfather v. The Godfather Part II and Star Wars v. The Empire Strikes back among the great sequel debates. Which one is better? I think your answer says more about you than it does about either film. Personally, I like Alien better. I prefer the slow build horror of it. I know a lot of people prefer Aliens though. It is a great SciFi action movie.

James Cameron probably doesn't get the respect he deserves. That's a strange thing to say when you consider that he's made the two highest grossing movies of all time, one of which tied for most Oscar wins ever. However, when you ask someone for a list of the greatest directors, he's never at the top, which is kind of  crazy. His career effectively started with The Terminator in 1984, which is technically the most successful indie movie ever made. That movie is a SciFi classic. Next, he took another director's idea, practically changed the genre of the movie, and arguably improved on it with Aliens. He followed that with the ambitious The Abyss. After that, Terminator 2 - about as perfect an action movie as you'll find. Personally, I love 1994's True Lies, which is Cameron seamlessly making an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (which is virtually a genre unto itself). After that, he makes Titanic. People tend to forget how risky that was at the time. It cost a ton of money. It wasn't like anything he'd made before. It was so damn long. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet weren't box office gold. They were only moderately known quantities. Romantic epics hadn't been big hits at the box office in decades at that point (not at the level that Titanic needed to be a success, at least). Not only did that movie succeed - by any measure, that movie became a phenomenon. He then took 12 years to make Avatar. I have a lot to say about Avatar, but I'll try to be brief. While it's stunning how quickly that movie has been forgotten as a pop culture touchstone (Is there a single universally recognizable line or shot in that movie?), you can't ignore how much of a success it was*. Perhaps the argument against Cameron is that he isn't making the kind of "high art" that a lot of the other auteurs make. But, his ability to know what people want before they know to ask for it is an unrivaled skill. It reminds me of Hitchcock in that his first aim is to entertain, and if he accomplishes anything else [artistic] along the way, that's nice too.

Sorry for the long James Cameron aside. I won't have another opportunity for that unless I decide to track down Piranha Part Two: The Spawning or the Avatar sequels (if they ever come out).

What I'm really trying to say is that Aliens is really good. James Cameron made some non-intuitive choices about the direction that really worked. This is the best version of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. Bill Paxton is a hoot. I find it funny that I like Paul Reiser so much in other shows/movies, that I spent too much of this movie not wanting to believe that he's as much of a scumbag as he really is in this.

This is one of those movies that I'm sure I've seen a long time ago or at some point when I wasn't fully paying attention to it. It's new enough to me to get a rewatch and a Reaction though.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend

*Since I'm never going to make an individual post about this, I'll go into a long diatribe here. As of when I'm writing this, 34 movies have made $1 billion in the global box office.

• 19 of those movies are directs sequels:

Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers: Infinity War, Furious 7, The Fate of the Furious, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Iron Man 3, Captain America: Civil War, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Skyfall, Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Toy Story 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Despicable Me 3, Finding Dory

• 5 are practically sequels or effectively reboots

Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Marvel's The Avengers

• 5 more are part of a franchise directly or indirectly.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Black Panther, Beauty and the Beast (2017), Minions, Alice in Wonderland (2010)

That leaves 5 movies that got to $1 billion on their own. Zootopia and Frozen have the benefit of the Disney Animation branding. Jurassic Park only made it to $1 billion because of a massively successful 3-D re-release. All three film are massive accomplishments still.

That just leaves Titanic and Avatar as the only truly stand-alone $1 billion successes...and they are the top two movies of all time, Avatar by a significant margin. James Cameron's success is an anomaly.

Delayed Reaction: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

The Pitch: How the did Polanski end up exiled from the U.S.?

The story of Roman Polanski, primarily focusing on his rape trial.

Before the Harvey Weinstein fallout, with the Rolodex of exposed Hollywood figures, the discussion of how to separate the artist from the film centered around two figures: Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. With Allen, it was about him and Soon-Yi*. The longer that he and Soon-Yi stay together, the less scandalous that situation looks. Besides, technically nothing about it was illegal, just icky. Roman Polanski's situation is far more cut and dry. He raped a 13 year old girl. That's illegal and doesn't leave much room for debate.

*The Dylan Allen accusations didn't take hold until recently.

I've always been a little uncertain about the specifics of Polanski's situation though. How did he get out of U.S. custody and where do things stand now? That's the focus of Wanted and Desired and it does a pretty great job covering that. This is a man who survived the the Jewish holocaust, then made a classic Horror movie. After that, his wife and unborn child were murdered is public and sensational fashion, then he made a classic crime movie. That's where he was at going into this destructive period that led to his sexual assault case. The man has had a hell of a roller coaster of a life. Wanted and Desired tries to stay impartial without letting Polanski off the hook. I appreciated that, because I wasn't in the mood to watch 90 minutes of defending Polanski's actions.

It's a strongly assembled documentary. They collect a lot of footage of both his real life and his films and mix them together well. Certainly anyone looking for a refresher on Polanski should track it down.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Godfather

The Pitch: An epic movie about the epic novel.

The son who once distanced himself from his family ends up taking over the family business when his father dies. Oh yeah, and Italian mafia stuff.

The 70s are when I stop really having a sense of the motion picture landscape. I get the 90s and the 00s because I've lived through them. I grew up with enough residual pop culture of the 80s to know what was going on then. I can look at a movie like Beverly Hills Cop and place it with other movies at the time and how it fit. I can understand how things came together to make that into the highest grossing movie of that year and I get what Eddie Murphy meant to pop culture at the time.

The 70s get murkier. I know about New Hollywood in the beginning of the decade. Spielberg created the modern blockbuster with Jaws which directly led to Star Wars and Superman. It's a decade with romances  the covered a spectrum from Love Story to Harold & Maude to Annie Hall. I can trace how the world digested the Vietnam War from M*A*S*H to Apocalypse Now. I still don't have a way to contextualize The Godfather though. It's a little too organized to fit in New Hollywood. It's an epic, but not like Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago from the decade before. All the mafia movies I can think of come from a post-Godfather understanding of the genre, or are something like The Public Enemy, which aren't remotely similar. The best comparison I can find is how Lord of the Rings changed everything about how people approached fantasy. Fantasy certainly existed before The Fellowship of the Ring, but it hasn't looked the same ever since that film. the Godfather changed things. I just don't have enough understanding of the times to really understand how significantly.

This is actually the second time I've watched The Godfather. I last saw it around 2010 it left only a slight impression on me. I watched it as a modern movie that happened to be 40 years old. In that light, it's only OK. It's not fair to do that though. Directors have been building off the template set by The Godfather and expanding on it for years. What was once revolutionary becomes commonplace. Rating The Godfather against modern movies on the same terms would be like comparing Jerry West to James Harden. It's not fair to either. Anyway, I've seen at least a thousand movies since the last time I watched The Godfather, from a larger assortment of eras and genres. So I figured I was ready to see how I liked The Godfather with a bit more context. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around it. I did like it a lot more though.

What's not hard to understand is how much on screen talent there is in this film. By my count, the cast in this movie has collected 32 Oscars nominations, including five wins, between eight actors. That doesn't even include John Cazale who, incredibly, only starred in five movies, all of which were nominated for Best Picture, and three of them won. I don't know if the movie makes the career for the actor or the actor makes the greatness of the movie. Either way, it's hard to compare with those numbers.

I know I haven't actually said much about the movie. That's because with movies as old and revered as this, there's nothing to say that hasn't been said before. Perhaps if I disagreed with it being a classic, I'd have more to say. I can't argue with the esteem The Godfather has earned.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend