Yellowjackets Season 1

 2021 - Showtime - 10 episodes
Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson

The trailer, I have to admit, was enticing. A high-school girl's soccer team's plane crashes in remote wilderness, location unknown, and they're forced to survive. But also, that was in 1996.  In the modern day, a few of the remaining survivors, including Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis are having their past probed by a reporter, and nobody's talking...yet.

Great casting, an intriguing spin on Lord of the Flies, and the images from the trailer looked impressive (with director like Karyn Kusama, Deepa Mehta and Billie Woodruff on board, it's bound to be shot well), but I didn't sign on right away.  I hesitated.  Why? Because I thought I had it all figured out.  I thought for sure it was just going to be updated Lord of the Flies (as that what we expect when kids are left to survive on their own) but with cannibalism (as that's what we expect when sports teams crash in remote locations).  I didn't expect the modern day with its bigger name stars to be much more than a framing sequence.

Yellowjackets debuted to a little acclaim in its initial release in November, but as the series went on, it picked up more and more viewers and critical attention.  The buzz (pun intended) was good, real good.  I didn't pick up on anything specific from the buzz, except to say that people were surprised, and enthralled.  It became a week-to-week show that generated much noise on the internet.  Somewhere in the early days of January, just as the penultimate episode aired, we started watching (after a recommendation from friend and regular reader Shaun), and binged the first season over a few days.  It's good, real good.

It opens strong, with a young woman (her face never clearly seen, I tried real hard to look) running through wintery woods, completely inappropriately dressed.  Too much exposed flesh, no shoes.  Clearly panicked, she runs, only to fall into a disguised spike pit.  A fur-wearing masked individual looks down upon them.  That's the first 2 minutes.

We're introduced to the soccer team in 1996, regional champions going to the National Finals in DC.  We get a rapid sense of their dynamics, though there are a lot of girls, so it's hard to know which ones exactly will be come important.  We meet the 2021 (non-pandemic reality) version of Shauna (Lynskey) who is a housewife, completely dissatisfied with life.  Her husband appears to be having an affair, her daughter is an entitled asshole, and that rabbit keeps eating her plants in the garden (she later kills, cooks and makes stew of the rabbit). Tawny Cypress plays the adult Taissa, who is running for state senate with the support of her wife, but is distracted by her troubled son, and her opponent keeps insinuating things about her survivalist times.  Adult Natalie (Lewis) is just getting out of rehab, again, and instantly jumps off the wagon.  She's getting harder and harder the older she gets, but also more self destructive. And then there's Misty (Ricci) who was an outcast in high school and is still an outcast in adult life.  She's perpetually perky to an unappealing degree, which hides her psychopathic tendencies. 

As reported in the commercial, a reporter starts digging around, looking for the story that 25 years later still remains untold.  But there's more to the reporter than she seems.  And a mysterious invitation sent to some of the survivors leads to a possible murder of yet another survivor.  And then there's the charming and mysterious artist/mechanic who "accidentally" rear ends Shauna and pulls her out of her suburban funk.  Taissa's revelations start to strain both her campaign and her marriage. Natalie and Misty become a reluctant duo (mostly due to Misty's intervention) and things get warped.

But back in 1996, the first episode ends with the plane crashing.  Before that we learn that Shauna was sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend, and this relationship between Shauna and Jackie is one of the key focal points of the season.  In the woods over the next four or five months of survival (of an 18 month stint) thing fracture and fray between them until it reaches a breaking point.

Taissa in the past also has a best friend/girlfriend, Van, but Taissa's proactive nature winds up putting them, and a few of the other girls in danger.  And then there's the problem of her sleepwalking...

Misty in the past is the only one with any sort of first aid training, and reveals her competence quickly.  As appreciated as her skills are (and as necessary as they are) she just makes everything weird and awkward at every turn... especially with Coach Ben, the only adult survivor whom she's infatuated with (and starts to Phantom Thread him).

Natalie's past was traumatic enough, and it seems like more trauma just piles on top of her.  But when she proves herself to be the best marksman of the group, she's paired with Travis and they form a thin, yet unbreakable bond.  Travis and his brother Javi both survived the crash, but their father was killed.  Their brotherly bond is a rough one, but it's clear Travis knows he needs to look out for his timid younger sibling.  

Other key players include Laura Lee, the deeply Christian one and Lottie whose medication runs out and starts having "visions" which just weird everyone out.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about Yellowjackets was not just it's two-tiered approach to storytelling (which, yeah, acts like Lost in reverse) but also how it didn't choose the expected path.  Though the young women may have individual bones to pick with each other, they never threaten to fracture into two warring tribes.  Tensions may rise within the group, but also many of them are dispelled through sympathy and conversation.  It really does take into account that these are women, and not boys, and that there's a much different tone to how they interact.  Women use words (and silence, and emotions) to hurt each other, rather than physical violence.  The injection as well of two boys and an adult also really change up the dynamic nature of the entire group.  Very, very little of this played out as I would expect.  And if you were thinking, like I was, that there would just be high-school girls getting picked off every episode or two, well, beyond the first episode there's only, I think, two deaths in the woods, and not how you would think.

The present day is absolutely sodden with the traumas of the past that each of the four women we follow are saddled with.  They each cope in their own way - Shauna avoids the world, Taissa just keeps moving forward like a freight train, Natalie is deep into self-medicating, and Misty kind of seems to be having a good time in spite of everyone being totally weirded out by her.

The show hints as a bit of paranormal or mystical, but almost every instance has a pretty grounded truth to it, save for Lottie's visions.  It could have easily went into very specific horror tropes of having found a malevolent, infectious force in the woods that they then brought home with them, but no, it's all really just about survival, the horrors experienced along the way (wolves and bears and oh my), and the trauma that follows.  Even the insinuated cannibalism...still isn't exactly confirmed.  It's all but confirmed.  But the modern day survivors were definitely responsible, even if indirectly, for some deaths.

Season one gives us a lot to chew on, and really just hits home the characters and their dynamics both in the past and present.  What it doesn't give us is any answers to what ultimately happened.  The two deaths this season were accidental, so we're left to ponder what happened to the rest of them?  I can't wait to find out.

I should also note it has the best opening credits of 2021 (2022's best opening credits award is already locked down by Peacemaker).  Even after the full first season, it's a dizzying display of warped and haunting imagery, accompanied by the Hole-esque growl.  The song "No Return" is by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker,  from the rock bands Shudder to Think and That Dog, respectively. They also composed the score for the season.

We Agree: Shadow In The Cloud

 2021, d. Roseanne Liang - netflix

The film opens with a retro-styled WWII-era animated film meant to remind soldiers that there's no such thing as "gremlins" that will destroy their aircraft, that it's only human negligence that causes such errors.  It's a pretty great start, and seems to take more than a bit of inspiration from Roald Dahl's The Gremlins which was intended to be a Disney animated feature.  

Following the animated intro, the first note of score features Carpenter-style 80's synth cue, a cue which  pops up later in the film,  but only stands out in its sporadic use. This very well could be an homage to Carpenter-style action-horror(-camp) storytelling, but it's apparent they only wanted to hint at it, not commit to it.  It's a very Cameron-esque movie, complete with a modest budget, contained setting, the genre bits and pieces, and some semblance of a message underpinning it.

It's a tight 88 minutes full of creatures, aerial action, and so. much. peril. An ensemble piece where 90% of the ensemble is off screen and only heard over the radio 90% of the time. It asks a lot of Chloe Grace Moretz who has to carry all the weight of the film's ridiculous twists, as well as add some (no pun intended) grace to a character facing an agressively flagrant (and, unfortunately, not unrealistic) amount of mysogeny as she interlopes on the military boy's club aboard a war plane, seemingly with a clandestine mission which turns out to be something very personal.  Meanwhile, there's a gremlin tearing the plane apart, and Japanese fighters on attack.

In a film that posits plane-destroying gremlins are real, Moretz (no pun intended) grounds this to such a degree that it's only when she she has to extremely crawl out on the underside of the plane's wing like a seasoned freeclimber, using the bulletholes as finger and toe holds, (a simultaneously ridiculous and awesome sequence, especially given her character is operating with a broken pointer finger) that the film seems to be stretching its limits of credibility (relatively speaking).

Taking a script from (guh) Max Landis, director Roseanne Liang rewrote it into something that speaks truth to sexism women have constantly faced as they enter male dominated fields, and how they have to navigate insult and patronization with gritted teeth, courtesy and inner strength. Moretz's officer and pilot is confident, competent and more than capable, and certainly knows how to (no pun intended) navigate the patriarchy, but is still laid subject to it. Her character has to got to a lot of unusual places emotionally but she does so in a way that feel like a consistent character, that is until the finale. There she decides to go toe-to-toe against a wounded gremlin in what seems like it's revenge motivated, but it's such a typical movie machismo thing where the hero beats the villain creature with their own bare hands...something that a male writer would write to make a female character seem like a badass. It doesn't really feel like an in-character moment. But I liked Moretz ripping off her sleeve to reveal the muscles that just confirmed she was capable of hanging upside down from the underside of a plane wing while in flight.

It is a brisk romp that has no shame about the wild twists and turns it goes through. It doesn't try to explain gremlins, they just are. The parable here is that a woman faces many enemies, the monster that makes itself known, the shadows that lurk with potential to strike at any time, and the enemies she must walk amongst, the ones that say they're friendly but are perhaps the most dangerous of them all.  This, I believe, Liang shaped into a film about the lengths women have to go to to escape these threats, and the strength they possess is kind of beyond belief. 

It's not perfect.  There are definite questions left unanswered, and certainly inquiries about how certain things truly operate, but like Carpenter in the 80's, Liang doesn't slow down long enough for these questions to matter. Not perfect, but also not boring and quite a bit of fun.

[Toasty's take]

Triple Scoop of Pixar and Disney

Luca (2021, d. Enrico Casarosa) - Disney+
Onward (2020, d. Dan Scanlon) - Disney+
Encanto (2022, d. Jared Bush, Byron Howard, Charise Castro Smith) - Disney+

For about a decade and a half Pixar was the name to beat in family entertainment.  Every release seemed to have have a kiss of magic to it, a nugget (or nuggets) of something that made it more than just a kid's movie.  It wasn't long before parents began looking forward to a Pixar movie more than their kids did, and it wasn't uncommon to see childless singles or couples in the theatre alongside them.  It wasn't the revolutionary CGI animation, at least not alone, but the maturity in which Pixar films dealt with their supposed children's stories.  They became appointment cinema-going, at a time when parent company/distributor Disney was struggling to find yet another fable or fairy tale to adapt into an expected musical.  Disney was stale, Pixar was inspired.

But Pixar also opened the flood doors and found themselves faced with a sea of competition and imitators, but for every good one like Kung Fu Panda or How To Train Your Dragon there were dozens of others that were just the same old fart joke kid's pap.  CGI animation wasn't an instant sign of quality, but Pixar was.  But something happened around 2010.  Pixar started to lose the handle on their reputation, going back to the well for another Cars movie proved they were just as capitalistic as any other filmmaking company, and the muddled messes of Brave and The Good Dinosaur showed that even the seemingly infallable studio could make a dud.  Disney meanwhile decided to drop traditional animation altogether, having made a few middling-at-best efforts in the first decade of the 2000s, but hitting fairly huge putting their old model of traditional fairy tale into new CGI form with 2010's Tangled.

It would be another few years of muddled output before Disney started to get the formula right, Frozen, obvioulsy, the behemoth that pushed them forward, but Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero Six, Zootopia and Moana each could very well have been a Pixar film a decade earlier.  Only 4 of Pixar's ten films released in the 2010s would be originals, all the rest would be sequels to earlier hits.  Of this entire run, only Inside Out feels significant.  Beyond 2015 I lose track of which films are Pixar, and which are Disney (sequels excepted).  Such that I could have sworn that Encanto was Pixar and that Onward was Disney, and not vice versa.

Luca, honestly, feels like neither studio.  While it has some familiarity with traditional animated storytelling, it's not transporting you into a completely other world like Pixar films are so good at doing, but it's also not playing off of familiarity like Disney films do.  Luca is a big, expensive CGI movie that wants to be an Italian art film, focused on the melodrama of emotional friendships and family connections.  I mean, it does involve strange underwater creatures that appear human when they dry out, and we see a bit of that underwarter society, but it's not our focus.  

Our focus is on the mainland where Luca befriends a human boy, Alberto, and they fast become best friends. Luca has basically run away from his family who have threatened to send their disobedient son away, and he feels embraced by Alberto and Alberto's father in a way he never was at home (and also in a way Alberto himself can't be embraced because he hasn't forgiven his father for having abandoning him years ago, much like Alberto's father hasn't forgiven himself).

There's a lot to be said about the friendship between these two boys, and Luca's exploration of himself is a coded puberty metaphor, but in typical Italian fashion, there has to be a female interloper in Giulia who start to cause friction between the boys.  There is definitely a way to read Luca and Alberto's relationship as a gay love story, but I worry about viewing children in this manner.  It's not that I worry about it being a "queer kids in love" story, so much as "kids in love" story. I don't think the kids are quite thinking in these terms, even if deeper down those are the unknown and unfamiliar emotions they're responding to.  I mean, a story of gay and/or bisexual pubescence is far more appropriate a description than "love story".

The animation style is much different than most anything we've seen from a Pixar or Disney feature, a much more rounded, cartoony design to the characters that rings somewhat of Aardman-style clay animation mixed with Studio Ghibli converted to CGI, plus the much simpler environments of post-war Italy.  There's a looseness and bounciness to this picture that makes it's such a light and gentle watch, but allowing for emotionality and drama and a few exciting Vespa and bicycle rides.

In comparison, Pixar's offering from a year earlier, Onward, tried for too much detail, too much world building, that it got lost underneath it all, to the extent that it felt more like a Pixar knock-off effort. 

Where Luca succeeds at building dynamic relationships with dramatic complications, Onward really struggles with its central relationship, that between two brothers, the anxious Ian, and the enthusiastic, outgoing Barley.  They are both magical creatures, living in a world of magical creatures that, well, has become a lot less magical as they seemingly embraced a capitalistic reality similar to our own world.  It's the film's most fatal mistake, making a magical real too similar to our own.  Zootopia, or Monstropolous in Monster's Inc could have had a similar problem, but Zootopia is so uniquely its own place while Monstropolous isn't so much the backdrop as the Monster Factory is (and you get sort of comparisons with the human world and the monster world to highlight the differences).  The world of Onward is the worst possible result, boring.

Ian and Barley happen upon a spell that would allow them time with their long-deceased father (a father Ian doesn't even remember) for one more day only the wand facilitating the spell breaks leading to only the lower torso of their father appearing, and they must embark upon a quest to find some of the land's last remaining magic in order to complete the spell.

Where Luca is a joy throughout, Onward merely has moments that stand out, either visual gags (the half-a-dad pays dividends) or a solid set piece, but overall the world it establishes doesn't really connect.  It's trying to hard to be that kind of reality Cars had, but it winds up feeling like a weird Flintstones knock-off, only less clever.  The weight of the relationship between Ian and Barley isn't appropriately felt until the film's climax.  Ian keeps Barley at arms' length for too long and the film suffers for it.  There's a whole sub-plot about their mother and her cop boyfriend chasing after the boys, which again, has its moments, but altogether feels contrived.

We don't talk about Bruno

Encanto makes its own magical reality that exists both within and without our reality, or at least our reality at some point in time.  It also all about family dynamics and the impact of generational trauma.  It's also a lively musical, like Moana and Frozen before it, that should signify that it's definitely a Disney movie, but its fantastical reality feels so much more Pixar.

Escaping with her village from the violence of a civil war in Columbia, Alma witnesses the murder of her husbands by soldiers.  In a fit of grief she screams, triggering something magical.  The land raises up around her secluding the survivors from the violent reality outside.  Decades later, the land is a prosperous, safe, and happily isolated village.  Alma and the two generations of her family that follow live as the head household of the village, in a magical home that seems alive.  Each descendant of Alma is granted a special gift, a superpower basically, which they are to use to help the village grow and prosper.  Each descendant, that is, except Mirabel, who wasn't granted any gift, and as such is treated differently by the family (the townspeople still revere her because she is a part of the family).  But only Mirabel sees that the need for her grandmother to maintain the image of perfection, her need to keep the town safe, the need for everything to just be perfect, is actually causing fractures in the family, and their beloved home.

I'm into superheroes, so this sucked me in easy, being about a family who each get a special gift, all except one. How that person is treated because of it, and how they react to the way they are treated is just one of the film's many, many pleasures. 

The specficity of the location, the history the family (and town) matriarch brings, the ever-present Columbian cultural inspiration (food, music, dance, fashion and decor, flora and fauna)...I may not have picked up on everything, but you feel it. You definitely feel it.

The family members are each so distinct and wonderful, visually and personality. I adored each one of them, even Alma who is so hard on Mirabel. I understood from the tale that opens the film just what Alma had lost, and then had to build and protect. Very, very different story, but my grandmother had to do the same. We come to understand her better late in the film, as we should all come to understand our grandparents when we get older, to see them as human, not just a figurehead or relic of the past or silly old person. They lived a life. But it also doesn't excuse them: to understand them is to find perspective. In Mirabel's case, it's enough to help heal the wounds in her family.

While I didn't pick up on it until the second song, I started hearing Lin Manuel Miranada's voice so clearly in all the songs. I'm not sure what it is within me that wants to knock the tunes for that, but truly they are great. Having to restart a half hour in (because my daughter finally decided to want to watch something with me) and I realized how finely tuned these songs are. He is an exceptionally talented craftsman and, even though he has a few signature tells to his songs, those are kind of what defines an artist. 

I didn't really talk about the actors in either Luca or Onward (young talent in the former not really Italian, big name talent in the latter not really elfs) but Encanto's largely Colombian-American cast really grounds the film with actors with roots to their characters.  I know Stephanie Beatriz from Brooklyn 99 (and a few other things), and Diane Guerrero from Doom Patrol, and I think they're both amazing, verstile performers...I just had no idea they were such wonderful singers. I want them in a live action musical asap. Maybe in that Almodovar musical Penelope Cruz is trying to will into existence.

Encanto resonates magic in a way Onwards lacks.  It builds its fantastical reality based around emotion that make it more like Inside Out than Frozen. 

Of the recent Disney/Pixar releases, I still need to see Raya and the Last Dragon and if you were to ask me what studio it's from I wouldn't be able to tell you.  The upcoming Lightyear seems like such a Disney cash-cow move, not a Pixar-quality production, yet, that just goes to show how resonant that early Pixar reputation is, that we still hold it to a higher standard that it clearly won't always achieve, or even strive for.

[We agree-ish: Toasty on Luca]
[We agree: Toasty on Onward]

Last Looks

2021, Tim Kirkby (Brockmire) -- download

This post continues the tradition wherein I have another post sitting in drafts that requires more thought and likely a rewatch because I loved its subject matter, and because I likely have a lot to say about it, but will most likely end up saying, "uhh... movie good." In the meantime, I can distract you the reader, and my brain, with a quick post about a movie that I enjoyed, but didn't leave much of an impression one way or another.

Last Looks, originally called Waldo, after the main character Charlie Waldo, a disgraced LAPD detective who leads a couple of crime books by Howard Michael Gould, is a classic post-noir detective story set in and around Los Angeles, completely dependent on the city & environs as one of its characters. Waldo is hiding out, off the grid, in a trailer in Idyllwild possessing only 100 things, including a chicken named Chicken when his ex Lorena (Morena Baccarin, Deadpool; yes, a movie starring Charlie Hunnam playing a character named Charlie, and Morena Baccarin playing a character named Lorena) shows up to convince him to come back to the city to help her on a case, seeking to keep perpetually drunken Shakespearian actor Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson, Fatman) out of jail for murdering his wife. Waldo says no, but circumstances, and the violent interventions by two different criminal parties who already think he is working with her, drag him into it, because of course they do.

Long sentences entirely intentional, as the standard convoluted plots and sub-plots of the pseudo gritty detective stories always seem to lend themselves to trains of thought running on and on and on.

I suspect the writer & director don't like LA people much, but love the city. Every character is quirky but most often unlikeable, but even the likeable characters possess traits that would sour most people on them. Pinch is a pompous ass, always drinking, dismissive of his wife's death (not even sure he didn't actually kill her, as he was blackout drunk at the time), constantly looking to get into fisticuffs, but utterly (and charmingly) devoted to his utterly cute daughter. Waldo doesn't really seem all that capable and spends most of the movie getting punched and/or kicked, but he does have a knack for putting all the details together. But the movie is not a whodunnit, as it doesn't dole out the details our way except in the most peripheral manner, so the end reveal is a leap of faith. But the weird, almost mythical nature of Los Angeles and the people within it is always fascinating.

I think about whether I would recommend this movie, and I am not entirely sure. For those who like the paperback style private dicks in LA, it is passable entertainment. For fun, quirky performances, it fills a back tooth. But as a movie, it struck me more as something to be consumed, rather than entertainment. This is one of those movies that people who watch a lot of movies will reference at some point in the future, more as a footnote in comment on some other movie with Charlie Hunnam or Mel Gibson in it. Or in a conversation about the city of Los Angeles and the entertainment business that makes it.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation (parts 1&2)

 2021, d. Adam Conarroe & Patrick Stannard - netflix
developed by Kevin Smith

There are three things I absolutely loved as a kid: Star Wars, DC Comics, and Masters of the Universe.  In my teenage years, Star Wars made a big comeback first with novels, then comics, and a new line of toys.  DC Comics were kind of "maturing" with me, with more complex storytelling and universe-building and grittier/sexier characters.  But He-Man and his compatriots remained kids stuff from may past: beloved but left behind.

Over 20 years later, my daughter, at a very early age, started watching the classic '80's He-Man and She-Ra cartoons and got very enthusiastic, in the same way I was at her age.  We started collecting classic second-hand Masters of the Universe figures, vehicles and playsets, which ignited my nostalgia, if not altogether my enthusiasm.  I couldn't really stand to sit and watch more than an episode of the '80's cartoons, which were vibrant, colourful, and attractively designed, but samey and juvenile. A rewatch of the early 2000s cartoon revealed them to be action-heavy but quite dull and lacking the same alluring vivacity, and the designs were overdone (my daughter wanted no part of it... the original cartoon series was certainly something uniquely appealing to a child).  

Throughout the 2010s there were constant rumours of a MOTU feature film, but they would never come to pass.  I didn't closely track these rumours but I was excited by the prospect of a whole new MOTU that would maybe appeal to the Gen-Xers who grew up on it but also inspire a whole new generation of fandom. Somewhere in 2019 word came of a whole new wave of nostalgia based MOTU, in the form of a retro-styled toy line and two new animated series on Netflix, one that was said to pick up from where the '80's cartoon left off spearheaded by king of nerds Kevin Smith, the other a revamping of the property for kids of today.

Smith went to conventions, on podcasts and conducted fan-channel interviews stoking the flames of nostalgia, repeatedly talking up how his series would pick up immediately after the '80's cartoon and how it was made by fans for the fans. Excitement in the MOTU fan community was quite high, but, well, I followed Smith for quite a prolonged period of his career, only to eventually see through his geek-done-good exterior and find his skills as a writer and director somewhat limited, and his sense of humour stunted, experiencing no growth since his Clerks debut.  I was dubious how a Smith-run superhero cartoon, particularly one based off a beloved childhood property (meant for children), would fare in his hands.

When part 1 of Revelation debuted (the first 5 of 10 overall episodes) the proverbial shit hit the fan.  The series, for starters, looked nothing like the classic Filmation series (turns out the producers have the rights to the property Masters of the Universe, but not the style or music or original characters from Filmation).  Smith's story, as well, put Teela, not Adam or He-Man as the front-and-center character, and then took some very dramatic swings with the storytelling which set the worst of the fanbase (in the same vein that railed against the 2016 Ghostbusters remake or Star Wars:The Last Jedi).  Bad faith arguments were made, complaints about SJWs and wokeness ruining the property, but there was truth to the fact that Smith sold a bill of goods that he couldn't (and didn't) deliver upon.

Putting aside all the lead in hype, the backlash, and any expectations you might have about the cartoon transporting you to a place that you literally can never go back to, Revelations is, actually, pretty fun interpretation of the property, hung upon a damn good story with some exceptional twists, surprises and subversions.

Where Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an episodic series with no real continuity, no ongoing story threads, and a reset-to-zero conceit each episode. The series played on the ongoing battle between good and evil as He-Man and friends fought the evil forces of Skeletor over and over and over again, with nothing ever resolved, nothing ever advancing, only stopping Skeletor from succeeding. In Revelation each episode moves things quite dramatically forward, starting with a ceremony promoting Teela to man-at-arms, taking over from her father.  The celebrations are interrupted, however, by an all-out assault on Castle Grayskull by Skeletor and his forces.  The kingdom's forces, He-Man, Teela, and others, coming to rescue, and in the battle the power-sword is destroyed and both Skeletor and He-Man are killed, revealing Adam's true identity, and the players in his deceit in the process.

The series then follows Teela, having quit her new post and effectively becoming a mercenary, as she tries to regain some semblance of trust in her world and embarks on a variety of quests with her old allies (and in some cases, old enemies) to try and restore the broken magic of the land.

With He-Man out of the picture, a real spotlight is shone on his typical supporting cast.  Obviously Teela is the lead, but Orko, Cringer, Evil-Lyn, Beast Man and others get pulled into focus, having real character development and depth that was only ever hinted at in prior animated or comic book interpretations.   

Breaking the series up into two parts with a 5 month break in between did a real disservice to the flow of storytelling as well as the perception of the series.  Even fans that were willing to give the series the benefit of the doubt saw the twists of the end of part 1 as, well, fucking with them just too much.

The second half, however, stepped away from being overly dependent on surprises and really dug deep into the character study aspect, particularly of Lyn, which Lena Hedy absolutely demolishes the role.  The ending, after so many turbulent trials and tribulations is suitably triumphant, heroic and epic, but also full of emotional rewards. 

Smith and others have referred to Revelation as an anime, and in how the action is executed it certainly borrows the visual language, but in a design sense it's like a modern extension of the 2002 series, with more shading and depth but similar long angular figures, overly ornate costumes, excessively detailed environments.  It's a very dynamic series, but the action seems almost perfunctory with the drama and world building much more the draw.

My wife has no historical love or really any connection to the property or characters, and yet she was thoroughly engaged by the entire series.  If the series can actually grow the fandom for the property by delivering something that appeals to more than just the existing fanbase, then that's a win.  The existing fanbase of nerdy properties will be harder on any new interpretation of that property than anyone else, but they will still always support it.  In order for these classic franchises to succeed, to continue being viable, there needs to be growth.

If the emotionally stunted, middle-aged, male fanbase want to complain loudly about how it's not what they wanted, that should be taken with a grain of salt.  With every new iteration of some childhood property they are out in force bemoaning how this new take has destroyed their childhood.  Well, you can't actually ruin someone's childhood retroactively, that's not how time works.  What they're basically saying, without having the intelligence or self-reflective insight to adequately do so, is that the new thing doesn't capture the same feelings in them as the old thing.  Well, that's because they are no longer viewing things with a child's eyes.  It's an impossibility for anyone can draft a story, direct a movie, draw a picture, or make a toy that will adequately replicate what every single person loved about something as a child.  The best they can do is take the property and try to make something intriguing and enticing that captures some of what worked about the property in the past, but feels like it also belongs today.  Masters of the Universe: Revelation actually succeeds at that.  

Ted Lasso Seasons 1&2

2020-2021 - AppleTV+
Developed by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly

Season 1 of Ted Lasso was an absolute phenomenon.  I know this, because it's a situation comedy about a sports coach and Toasty loved it(!).   Oh, and it won a whole shit-ton of awards and stuff and everyone was talking about it.  But for Toasty to love something that was so steeped in sports, to me, resonated far more than anything anyone else could say about it, or any award that could be given to it.

The only problem with Ted Lasso, as far as I saw it, was that it was on AppleTV+.  Sigh, not another streaming service...

The common description of Ted Lasso season 1 was, affectionately, "kindness porn".  Just people being their best self, or working hard at making other people their best self, with Jason Sudekis' Coach Ted Lasso the chief instigator. 

Ted is an American college football coach brought on by AFC Richmond's new owner Rebecca Welton (who won the team in her divorce settlement.  Rebecca's ex, loving the club far more than he ever loved her, wants revenge, plain and simple, and thinks that the best way to get at her ex is by tanking his beloved team, and she does this by hiring Ted and his right-hand assistant, Coach Beard (yes, he has a beard, but that's just his name).  They made a splash by coaching a little known college to an NCAA championship in one year.  Ted knows nothing about Footie or its rules...but he coaches the people as much, if not more so, than the game.

Ted slowly wins over Rebecca, gets the team to unify under its captain - the hard-as-nails but past-his-peak team captain Roy Kent (hey!) - and even gets through to the selfish, egocentric young phenom Jamie Tartt (I like that people in the crowd sing his name to "Baby Shark").  Ted even lifts locker room manager/doormat Nate up under his wing to becoming an assistant coach.  All Ted's positivism masks the pain he has underneath, putting an ocean's distance between himself and his wife and son, as she has asked for space, so he's giving her as much as he can stomach.  But the pain he's experiencing trying to ignore that his marriage is over and missing his son is applied somehow into a lemons-out-of-lemonade positive manner.  Every major, and most of the minor characters experience some growth, either directly or indirectly from Ted's influence.  It's so damn heartwarming and enjoyable. 

 And, well, it's pretty damn funny on top of it all.

 It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, with Scrubs and Cougartown creator Bill Lawrence on the team with Sudekis, Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt (who plays Beard).  There's definitely a comedy pedigree on the creative team and in the writer's room.  There's a lot of great world building in and around the Richmond area, including a pile of fans Ted sees on the street or at the pub, and all the many players on the pitch.

Season 2 picks up following the big loss in season 1 looking sunnier than ever.  It's just bright and the optimism is almost unbearable, but an errant penalty kick is a tiding of bad omens and Season 2, while attempting to retain its positivity, gets both heavy and dark, frequently.  The team hires a sports psychologist to help the teammates where Ted can't, but Ted's history with therapy leads to a bit of a tet-a-tet with the new Doctor.  Ted himself starts experiencing panic attacks in the wake of his divorce.  Meanwhile Jamie Tartt's dad rears his ugly head, and Rebecca's dad dies.  But it's Coach Nate, as he starts to come out of his awkward shell, over-compensates, and winds up, very unexpectedly, turning the villain of the piece in a way, and it's quite unsettling.  I literally lost sleep over it after finishing the season.

It's not just the turn into darker thoughts (which mostly provide Ted and crew to find support and solace in each other and find the brightness amidst it all), it's rather the uneven and overly dramatic storytelling the season starts leaning towards.  Two episodes (a fun-if-schmaltzy Christmas episode and a very strange detour featuring Beard) were requested by Apple and added late in the season's production, but inserted into the season at midway points, kind of cutting the storytelling off knees with each episode for over 40-minute detours.  Past the halfway point, all of the episodes run at network TV drama length or longer which puts a fine point on the fact that the show started leaning far more into its dramatic elements than comedic ones.  And some of the drama just didn't play.

Season 2 effectively sidelines Ted with his own issues, which divides his attention and takes his influence out of a lot of the other players' lives.  With the title character busy with his own shit, seems like there's just less of a focused story than in season 1.

Rebecca, powerful, confident, determined in the first season, proving herself every bit the "boss bitch" Keeley dubs her, is relegated almost exclusively to looking for a relationship in the second season.  The match that the show makes for her never fits right, and the show never adequately justifies why either player is so invested in the relationship. Keeley, having moved on from Jamie to Roy in the first season, finds seemingly a perfect match in her new footie beau, but the show mismanages their relationship very late in the game, betraying the honesty they share for the sake of end-of-season drama.  Even the episode about Rebecca's dad's funeral misses a beat for certain characters like Nate and Jamie to reflect on their paternal issues.

There is still a lot of good in season 2, but when season one is pretty much a perfect season, there really was nowhere for them to go but down.  It's not like they could have quit while they were ahead, Ted Lasso was just too much of a freight train...but just like a freight train, it seems it was too hard for them to stop, or even slow down on certain story lines, with no possibility of them turning them around.

Season 3 has its work cut out for it.

n Short Paragraphs: No Time to Die

2021, Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation) -- download

After plowing through all those frickin' Xmas movies during December 2021's Advent Calendar, I just didn't have the heart to write one more post, let alone the energy to watch anymore Xmas flicks. It's weird, because we often watch them to add Moar Xmas Cheer to the season that I find so utterly fucking exhausting. Moar is needed. 

Between the pre-season buying and prepping, to the Week Of and all the errands and cooking and baking and prepping, and the Week After of errands, and eating and eating and drinking and eating and New Year's Eve buying and prepping and cooking and eating and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking, I just find this whole season to be draining. And even more so when I took the entire three weeks off. So yeah, THIS week, which is post-everything, finally gives me some proper drain-the-brain time (off), and yeah, I feel like I am back (best Keanu Reeves voice). Maybe.

Sometimes, when I blog-write like this, I wonder if readers view this like they view those annoyingly long bits at the tops of recipes posts, where the writer goes on and on about how their grandmother used to make this recipe that they copied line for line from the Joy of Cooking.

No matter, it is what it is.

When we last left Mr Bond, he was quitting the spy biz to run away with Madeleine, daughter of one of his greatest enemies, the Mr. White from all the previous flicks. We've seen this before, in previous incarnations, and even with Vesper. It never ends well. So that they tie that bad ending to this new thing is slightly overt, and ... it doesn't end well. Bond (Daniel Craig, Cowboys & Aliens) is almost blown up, ends up in a brilliant chase scene in a beautiful set-piece city, and ends up with him putting Madeleine (Léa Seydoux, Blue is the Warmest Colour) on a train, assuming she betrayed him.

She didn't. Time passes. Opening credits and song.

Bond ends up in a house in the tropics, the kind of house we have seen Will Smith and Jason Statham find refuge in, in other retired-killer movies. Of course, no one will let him be, and Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright, Westworld) the pesky CIA operative comes seeking his assistance in the rescue of a scientist from familiar bad guys Spectre (not dead just because their boss is in British jail) at a party in Cuba. His sidekick (and shoot) for the op is 2-weeks-out-of-training Paloma (Ana de Armas, Knives Out), who proves her self less Bond Girl and more Bond Foil. As Kent suspected, I found her just enthralling, and not just because she won't be having any of his undress-me shit (Bond is old? I feel seen...) but also because she is just so effortlessly capable. Alas, the successful op has the tables turned and Leiter is betrayed & fridged. Bond has his motive to return to the fold.

To me, this struck as a return to Bond of old cliches. The BBEG is a proper world-killing villain with a proper world killing weapon. He even has a name meant to be written more than said -- Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek, Mr. Robot) -- murky motivations, scars, and a Island Base. Safin also has a connection to Swan which forces Bond to reconnect with her and her... daughter? 

Like Kent said, they never really get into Safin's motivations. Sure, he wants to kill a large portion of the world with his DNA directed nanobot virus, but why? That it all is wrapped up in his obsession with Swan, the daughter of the man who killed Safin's own family, is rather distracting from his goal, and yet it is the crux of his plan. I found the mewling scientist who developed the virus to be the better Big Bad, as he is motivated purely by greed, and has nothing against playing both sides against each other. 

Bond's motivation is to rescue Swan and his daughter, but also stop the evil plan of Safin, and with it he gets one last go at being 007. I found the whole "give him back the number" idea condescending. The fact that Nomi (Lashanna Lynch, Captain Marvel) bears the moniker says she is more than capable, so why not just send her along with Bond with her '00' intact -- it's not like the British govt is doing this to keep their own reputation, given they funded the evil virus initially. But for the sake of the franchise, Bond has to once again don the title and perform the duties.

The ride is thrilling, and I found the plot a bit better executed than Spectre, but given this is Craig's last go at being Bond, they do a decent job of bringing the series to an end. Bond dies. Sure, they can easily undo that, as nothing stays dead in franchises, but like the Craig era started, the next one can be more of a reboot than a playful continuation. For one, I hope they ignore the Frothing Internet and go with someone divisive.

The Matrix: Resurrections

 2021, d. Lana Wachowski - digital purchase

I liked, but didn't love, the Matrix, but I did watch it quite a few times prior to the release of the sequels. Once the trilogy was complete, it would be over 15 years between viewing Revolutions in the theater and the trilogy as a whole. Until that rewatch last year, I didn't want more Matrix, I didn't think it had any relevant place in our culture, at least not one that wasn't a raw, toxic nerve. But the rewatch showed me there was definite depth, codified messages, and critiques (both overt and subversive) of our culture that continue to resonate, if you just look past the tedious exchange of gunfire and distracting display of special effects.

After the rewatch, I understood Revolutions as a double entendre, both in the dramatic change of a system of order, and of something moving in cycles. While the trilogy was one cycle, in the end it was quite clear the cycles weren't necessarily over, just changing. In that conceit, I was intrigued by what the next cycle could be, and how it could be different.

Resurrection shows us that, yes, the past cycle did break, but there is a contingent that can't forget how the cycles were, as well as another contingent that has exploited it for even more control, and still another faction that found liberty for themselves but in their comfort gave up on the idea of liberty for all. And then there are the believers, the ones who choose to see, and confront the new cycle they're in, to try and break it, so that things stop revolving and move forward once again.

There's a lot of subtext to this film. There's a meta narrative (working both at the surface and far deeper) of Warner Brothers forcing the Wachowski's hands into returning to something they had left behind, lest it be rebooted completely out of their influence. There's the subject of identity that seems like Lana Wachowski's raw, exposed nerve until she flexes it, showing it instead a muscle. There's a love story that seems as much about loving one's self and accepting one's past as it is about loving someone else. At some point I stopped seeing Neo and Trinity as two separate people but two parts of one whole.

The film defiantly wrestles control away from those that only responded to the trilogy's aesthetic of guns and trenchcoats and bullet- time. It doesn't really care about "cool", and it literally rebuffs bullet-time. Do Neo and Trinity ever even handle guns? It's not as interested in its action sequences (I wonder if that was more Lilly's speciality) as it is it's various story, themes and subtexts, but it's a better film for pouring its energies there than trying to find the next bullet-time effect that only distracts from the story's true core.

I have to wonder, should another Matrix come from Lana (or Lilly or both) whether it will be a meta narrative about accepting that they wont always be able to control the Matrix narrative. This film ends with Neo and Trinity (together as Lana's avatar) setting about rewriting the Matrix's reality, but at some point The Matrix will be out of their hands and the reality as written in the future (with recasted Neos and Trinitys, as there were recasted Morpheus' and Smiths here)?

I think this one's my favourite of the series.

I still think Keanu is a little wooden boy actor, I was confused by Smith's role in the story, I thought some of the special effects looked dodgy, but I didn't care.  In some situations, a film is either going to be about getting the story across or just being a visual spectacle.  Lana foregoes dressing up her empty calories and really leans into the heart.  All the familiar faces from Sense8 reminded me that the Wachowskis now seem to think it much more important to feeding the mind and heart than the eyeballs, and I don't think they're wrong.

New Year's Countdown...of Excellence: 1 - The French Dispatch (mulligan selection)

 1
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun
2021, d. Wes Anderson - rental

(Note:I had intended to watch Moonlight as my 2010's selection but not only did I run out of time but I didn't have immediate access to it on a streaming service.  I was willing to pay for it, but The French Distpatch was our New Year's Eve viewing selection and yeah, it was Excellence.  We had intended to see this in theatres, but the theatre experience was relatively short lived before COVID started making it a challenge again).

The Story (in two paragraphs or less)
In the wake of the death of the magazine's editor, The French Dispatch is the final issue of the magazine in cinematic form.  Consisting of six segments, the first being the introduction.  The second is a roving report on the home of the magazine's offices in Ennui, France.  The third is the arts and culture report on the artistic accomplishment of convicted murderer Moses Rosenthaler.  It follows both the artist and his tumultuous relationship with a female prison guard, as well as the art dealer who invested heavily on his success.  

The fourth is about a generational war in Ennui between the youth, protesting over restrictions in a girls dormitory, which flares after one of their ranks is conscripted into military service.  Reporter Lucinda Krementz gets involved with the leader of the youth protesters, both gaining an inside perspective as well as losing her journalistic neutrality.  The fifth story follows Roebuck Wright as his dinner with Ennui's police Commissaire (to report on the police cuisine of police chef Nescaffier), when the Commissaire's son is kidnapped.  The finale is the obituary for the magazine's editor.

What did I think I was in for?
A lot of artistically composed, highly intricate and ornate shots, as well as much whimsy, wit and the odd turn of melancholy.  It's Wes Anderson.  He has his things.  I love those things, and love how he applies them.

What did I get out of it?

Anderson's film is a love letter to The New Yorker, it's erudite, fastidious, pretentious but he's also bemused by it all, so there's a sense of both honouring that type of outdated, worldly journalism and poking fun at it for its staunchness.  

As intricate as Anderson's compositions have been in the past, he's at another level here, staging basically living photographs frequently throughout, just the most elaborate static shots, that aren't exactly static.  His set designs as well start at the top of what he's accomplished in prior movies (I think about the cross-cut of Steve Zissou's freighter, and how he does that with a building for what's only a momentary scene).  The initial five minutes of the film are just a wonder about his particular sense of detail.  His scenes are not so much choreographed but more of a fascinating Rube Goldberg machine which has to go off just right in order for it to work, cobbled together out of so many disparate pieces making such a fascinating whole.

His preferred cast of performers has ballooned in size over the years, and The French Dispatch accommodates many of them in peripheral roles (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe) while bringing new faces - Benicio Del Toro, Lea Seydoux, Timothee Chalamet, Francis McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright - as the key players in the three main stories.  The cast is stacked, and over 300 names are credited in the cast at the end of the film.

The stories themselves are each a unique piece.  The bicycle tour of Ennui is just a showcase for Anderson's niche of curious visual marvels, the second is an intriguingly bizarre tale that embraces the power of art and pokes fun at the pretentiousness of the arts establishment.  The student protest tale is perhaps the lowest of the three - yes, as it gets the heaviest -- but it is also challenged by it's ultra-quick patter, which makes it hard to glom onto the particular story at hand.  At the same time, catching just a smattering of the wit in the dialogue make it easy enough to push through the confusion.  The tale of the kidnapping is bracingly whimsical, filled with classic Anderson quirkiness that makes it just sail until it's big Tin Tin-style animated action sequence.  But there's an undercurrent of pathos and sincerity that make it a satiating dessert, rather than too sweet.

Much of the film is in black and white.  The three main stories have colour elements, which are the "modern' telling of the story as it was published in the Dispatch.  For "The Concrete Masterpiece", reporter J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) presents the story on stage to an audience at an arts gala.  In "Revisions to a Masterpiece", McDormand's reporter Krementz has adapted and expanded part of her story into a stage play.  For "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner", Jeffrey Wright as reporter Wright, retells his story word-for-word (thanks to his typographic memory) to a studio audience on a talk show.  There are layers of storytelling happening here, almost Inception-style, overlapping in unanticipated ways, and hard to fully decipher on first viewing, but they stylistically make themselves aware.

Do I think it's a classic?

The AV Club named The French Dispatch as it's top movie of the year, which is probably a result of the weighting of the individual ballots their reviewers post, rather than it being any singular choice, and I don't necessarily agree that it's the year's best since it's still so fresh to me and there's so many films I haven't seen, but it's definitely a wonderfully entertaining and visually outstanding picture. It's not Anderson's best-ever (still arguably The Grand Budapest Hotel) but it's still him operating at the height of his decadence powers. 

People complain about Anderson doing his "Wes Anderson" thing, and I don't understand why.  At this stage he's developed his voice into exactly what he wants it to be.  If you don't like it, then you don't need to watch it, but he delivers every time on who he is and the stories he likes to tell.  His films always of consistent quality, but the stories vary in their interest or appeal.  Here the stories are a range, from middling (for him) to approaching his best work.

If it's not a classic, it feels classic.  Anderson's penchant for 50's, 60s and 70s aesthetics give the film a very aged feel.  Watching this feels almost like picking up something unexpectedly aged and wonderful, like  M or The Third Man, just something I should have seen long ago, but missed.

Did I like watching this?
Every minute of it.

Would I watch it again?
I can't believe I'm not watching it again right now.  Of all the films I watched for this year's Countdown, this I can tell you will be the one I watch most often.

New Year's Countdown...of Excellence: 2 - Persepolis (2000's selection)

2
Persepolis
2007, d. Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paonnaud - Tubi

The Story (in two paragraphs or less)

Based off her graphic novel memoir, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's animated autobiographical perspective of growing up in Iran from the late 70's through the early 90's as the revolution overthrows the shah, but the democratically elected government institutes a corrosive, violent fundamentalist rule and in the mid-80s a western-fueled, meaningless war with Iraq doubles the danger.  Fearing for her safety, Marjane's parents send her off to Austria, but being alone and foreign in Austria proves to have its own harrowing challenges which Marjane barely survives.

Returning home to post-war Iran, Marjane, faces a great depression following her time in Europe but also learns the new normal, a brutal patriarchy where women are subjugated and arts and culture are repressed, is made only marginally tolerable by the support of her family.  Raised by revolutionary parents and a delightfully liberal grandmother who taught Marjane about ethics, integrity, and her family history in fighting for freedom of the people, Marjane cannot shake her political ideals and must permanently leave Iran.

 
What did I think I was in for?
I had a hard time figuring out what to watch for the 2000s.  The best of lists I was coming across featured a lot of films I had either already seen or films that were not easily accessible.  I was going to try Volver, which would be my first exposure to Pedro Almodovar's works but couldn't find it.  Dogville was my main back-up choice but it's not currently streaming.  One of my film podcasters is obsessed with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, so I was hoping to check out Syndromes and a Century which made many lists for the best of the decade, which, again, was unavailable.    I finally decided go with Yi Yi (A one and a two) a much celebrated Taiwanese film from Edward Yang which is on the Criterion Channel, but it's 3 hours long and time was running short.  I came across Persepolis on a list and found it readily available to view, and it was time....

Back when Persepolis came out it was quite resoundingly heralded and garnered an Academy Award nomination (among its many other awards and nominations).  But I already heard of Persepolis as a graphic novel, which had been widely heralded years before the film.  I was early into my comic book reviewing/ amateur journalism at the time and I generally was reading and seeing almost anything noteworthy as related to comics in mass media.  For some reason, I didn't manage to catch either the film or the graphic novel at the time, likely because I was somewhat hesitant about how challenging it would be to me. My misunderstanding was that it was solely about Iran in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, which seemed daunting/   I had always intended to catch up on both.

What did I get out of it?
First, the animation is gorgeous.  It uses stark black and white for it's figures but shades of grey for settings and backgrounds.  It's very stiking, and visually the figures pop.  There are moments of colour (as it's told as a retrospective, the modern day is in colour) that are pretty, but you really want to get back to the pop of black and white.  The figures are simplistic, but very distinctive in their caricature.

I don't have much knowledge of Iran beyond brief conversations with ex-pats who I have met or what little has seeped into pop culture (much of which is American propeganda).  This film gives a very basic, like talking-to-a-child level of simplistic understanding of the tumultuous history of the country in the 1900s.   It very much is appreciated, the bluntness to which it's detailed.  There's no doubt intricacies that are lost in such a simplistic addressing but it's the right way to convey it to a world not otherwise versed in it. 

Through Satrapi's first-hand and related familial experiences one gets a keen sense of what Iranian culture could have been, what the promise was following the overthrow of the shah, versus what it became.  The film, I should note, never mentions "Islam" or "muslim" once.  It really does want to be a more universal parable.  It presents a very "if it can happen here" story, which made me think what if the Christian fundamentalist rose in power in the US and started baring down on what women could or couldn't do, what music, media and culture could be created and consumed, what the youth could or couldn't do, and one realizes that there are movements (and machinations) that seek to do just that.

In the nightmare of having one's liberties restricted, the alternatives are abandoning one's home, one's status to go elsewhere as an outsider, to be viewed differently, treated differently, to feel differently.  With Marjane living alone as a teen in Vienna, she felt guilty for the liberties and frivolities she had, knowing only some of what families and friends were facing back in Iran.  But the realities of Vienna, and the people who live there, were very different from her own, and it created a barrier that drove her away from people or found her pushing people away.  

Do I think it's a classic?
I do, actually.  Animation was, I think, the perfect way to present this story, to find the humour, the emotion, and to make it all relatable in a way that live action would have instead put up barriers to investing.  The animation also allows for more dramatic and artistic interpretations to the horrors experienced, using abstraction to make things more potent.   

Did I like watching this?
I did.  It was captivating.  I wasn't expecting it to be so deeply personal a journey, and following Marjane from her childhood to her early 20's with the backdrop of Iranian history, it's hard not to care about her, to the point that I wanted it to keep going, to keep knowing Satrapi's story.

Would I watch it again?
Certainly. It's a beautiful movie.  As difficult as it is, there's still sweetness, love and humour amidst all the pain and upset.