Apocalypse Now

Here's the second-to-last movie in my backlog, a DVD I must have bought all the way back in college, Francis Ford Coppola's famous Vietnam War masterpiece and Heart of Darkness adaptation, Apocalypse Now. Specifically, here's the "Redux" version, which clocks in at nearly three and a half hours.

I respect the absolute hell out of this movie, but I'm afraid it's not a perfect ten for me. How much of that comes from the run time of this alternate, extended cut? Probably plenty! I can easily picture a shorter and simpler version of this movie, a less meandering one, hitting home harder and more succinctly. But that is not the version I watched, and alas, not the version I am here to blog about today.

One more DVD, guys. One more and then finally I can shut the book on this ten-year project of watchign every DVD I own.

American Gangster

Shit, remember when I would post about movies on this blog? Yeah, this is the first Blu-ray I've watched in well over a year. It's just not a thing I do anymore. I'm sorry! (I'm not sorry.)

Two DVDs remain, and then I've officially completely and entirely eliminated my movie backlog.

This movie was really not so good. That's the only take I've got.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Plenty to say here, but it's all been said elsewhere. I'll be brief!

I really enjoyed this. I know taking the anti-nerdfan stance isn't exactly a difficult thing to do, and I acknowledge that this movie had all kinds of imperfections and flaws and issues, but I mean, who gives a shit, it's Star Wars. This is the ninth movie in the dang franchise, and literally most of them have been deeply imperfect and flawed. There's an argument to be made - and I'm not saying I'm making it, just acknowledging that it can be made - that The Last Jedi is the most emotionally gratifying movie in the whole silly series. It's almost certainly, at least, the most competently made and best-written movie in the series - but that's not saying much when almost all of the others were written and directed by George Lucas, is it?

Anyway, after The Force Awakens, I can't say I was really excited to see what happened in Episode VIII. But after The Last Jedi, I'm very, very curious to see where J.J. Abrams goes with Episode IX. Probably nowhere good, given that it's J.J. Abrams, but still - I'm excited! Thanks for that, Rian Johnson.

Prevenge

Snooze. Pregnant woman goes nuts and murders the seven members of a climbing expedition who left her husband for dead. Is the baby possessing her, telling her to kill, kill, kill? Of course her unborn baby is possessing her. British, which adds no charm, but means it's necessarily of shittier quality. Nothing about this did anything for me. So it goes!

Kuso

One of the weirdest and grossest and dumbest movies I've ever seen - and intentionally so, like an Adult Swim project that tries to ape David Lynch and only ends up as this interminable hour-and-a-half of messy, shitty, anxiety-inducing garbage. Which begs the question - is this art? There's no real plot or story to follow, aside from a few recurring characters existing. I think it's anti-art. I think this entire movie is a giant middle finger to highbrow art cinema - I just don't think that makes it better than absolutely terrible in its own right.

I feel pretty confident in saying that this is far and away the worst 2017 movie I've seen. But I plan on squeezing in a Pottersville viewing before the year wraps, so, who knows? Wide open race, folks!

Always Shine

This wasn't even on my radar until David Ehrlich's "Top 25 Movies of 2016" countdown, and I haven't heard anyone say anything about it since then, either. But sometimes an Ehrlich nod is good enough for me; it took me a year, but I finally gave this a whirl. It was decent! Quick and easy, which I love, a simple little thriller about female friendship gone wrong (and ultimately violent). Not for everyone, barely even for me, but whatever, glad to have crossed it off my list at least.

The Red Shoes

Korean cinema's got a higher batting average than most in my book, but that makes it all the more disappointing and deflating when I catch something I just don't enjoy. This one goes off the rails quickly, starting out as at least something resembling an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale by the same name, but devolving quickly along messy J-horror lines. Uninteresting in every regard, cheaply made, batshit plot - there's just not a lot going for this one.

And yes, the shoes are pink. Go figure.

Don't Think Twice

Here's a smaller movie from 2016 I've been meaning to get around to. It's about an improv group and the way their close-knit family starts to fall apart as different members start to see different levels of success in their careers, which makes it a drama about comedy, really.

It was cute enough but inconsequential and forgettable - the type of movie I waffle between giving 2.5 or 3 stars on Letterboxd. (Settled for the three, but like with so many other movies, I could see myself readjusting it downward in hindsight.) But one thing did jump out at me, and in a very bad way.

Holy shit. Improv sucks.

I've been to an improv show or two, and I've seen plenty of it on TV, and I've run into "improv people" at parties. I don't hate it! I enjoy it, I understand it, I even think I'd be pretty good at it if I wanted to do it. (I can do impressions, I have a quick enough wit, and I know when to pull out a callback - what else is needed? Okay fine, maybe I'm not high energy enough. Fine! Crush my dreams, already.)

But holy shit, watching scripted improv was painful and cringey in a way I never knew watching improv could be. And I'm not sure that this movie intended for that to be the case. In fact I think this move has an affinity for improv, a love for the artform. I think maybe that was part of the problem - this movie wanted to show how much fun these guys are having doing improv, and it set out to make imrpov look like this wistful, enjoyable way to bond with friends. But again, it's a drama about comedy, I guess, and not really a comedy at all. So maybe I shouldn't hate it for not being very funny. But still. It's about improv comedians. It should have been funnier than this.

Thirteen

This was completely fucked up in a way-too on-the-nose way, but I couldn't bring myself to hate it. Young Nikki Reed, young Evan Rachel Wood, young Vanessa Hudgens, all of them more or less my age, all of them in this movie about being a teenager in shitty, shitty 2003 Los Angeles. Holy shit, what a culture, what a cesspool. Holly Hunter was also here, and also great.

One of the craziest parts about being thirteen - and being a teenager in general, but really, thirteen - is how horribly underdeveloped your brain is. And don't get me wrong, you're physically undeveloped too, or like, partially developed at most. But even though you're awkwardly caught between having a child's body and an adult's body, holy shit, the real scary part of it all is just how fucking dumb you are. It's fucked up, is all I'm saying. And this movie gets that! (And, ironically, it was cowritten by a fourteen-year-old. Okay maybe just most teenagers are dumb as hell.)

Sully

Went into this with a slightly different approach over on Letterboxd, but to me this is a quintessential movie that didn't need to exist for any other reason than that some sort of movie about the miracle on the Hudson needed to exist. Think about it.

There was a big and memorable event in real life, and we live in an age where we need to make all of the big and memorable events into movies, even though real life is as documented and widely seen as it ever has been.

But the problem with the miracle on the Hudson - from a cinematic standpoint - is that the whole thing happened in less than five minutes. So how do you stretch that out into a ninety-minute movie? Furthermore, what was notable and wonderful about this particular event was that it was a fucking plane crash in the middle of New York City (or rather, between New York City and the New Jersey portions of the New York metropolitan area) with about as little actual drama as you could imagine and hope for. "A very competent pilot successfully did his job, and the flight crew and passengers all cooperated, and an enormous rescue effort was launched and completed in, like, half an hour or so, and everyone lived and no one was even seriously hurt." That's great! That's, frankly, amazing! But that is not a movie.

So in order to make it a movie, Clint Eastwood and his crew need to really hammer home that, you know, maybe Sully wasn't actually a hero, but a reckless son of a bitch who made a very bad decision and then lucked into a flawless water landing. There were airports nearby, after all! And so Mike O'Malley is cast as this computer-humping dude who trusts simulations over experienced pilots, and boy does he want Sully's ass for this! And so thus the real drama in the film doesn't concern the actual event itself - again, five minutes long and thankfully tragedy-free, albeit very suspenseful - but instead, a courtroom hearing (or rough equivalent) in which Sully maintains he had no time to make it over to one of those other airports, now get your dang computers and engineers and fancy math out of my face already. (Clint Eastwood, ladies and gentlemen!)

But what are we left with? We're left with a movie where the suspense isn't about whether or not Tom Hanks can land that plane safely on the water, but instead about whether or not Tom Hanks can convince his bosses and himself that he had to land the plane on the water. So the most climactic scenes aren't, you know, the fucking water landings, but instead simulated airport landings that end up failing, vindicating our man Sully.

Isn't this all kind of self-defeating? Big event, okay, now let's make a movie about that big event, only it turns out the big event in no way supports an entire movie, entirely because everyone at every level was competent and in control the whole time, but it's hard to make a movie about competence and success, because there's really no drama there, so now instead our movie focuses on the question, "but wait, was Sully really a hero?" which is an interesting enough route to take if this is, in any way, a movie about how Sully was maybe not a flawless pilot, but it is emphatically not that movie, it is a movie meant to celebrate his heroics, but in order to do so we have to go through the charade of questioning his heroics in the first place. What? I don't doubt that Sully had to face an assload of scrutiny after the landing, but were the investigators actually out to nail him, or were they just taking their jobs - to find out anything and everything that leads to airline crashes so we can attempt to learn from our mistakes - very seriously? Did we have to make them bad guys? Did we have to make the essential conflict in this movie "Sully vs. everyone who questioned what he did?"

But here's the thing - of course we did, because in order to have a movie, or at least a movie with a big budget and Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood, we need to have a conflict, because without a conflict there is no plot. So rather than just saying, "hey, you know what, maybe this isn't actually something we can make a movie out of," we collectively willed this thing into existence, and it needed "bad guys" beyond the birds the plane hit, and so why not make the investigators fill that role?

In short, then, they had to manufacture all of the conflict in a movie based on a real life event. Artistic license is one thing, but honestly - why make this movie? Why make this movie? If we're going to make shit up anyway, why base this movie on a real event with a real hero? What's wrong with a movie where it's Sully himself having doubts about whether or not he did the right thing, and then the investigation board confirms to him that he did, rather than putting him on trial for it?

Whatever. This just didn't need to be a movie! Except for the fact that - I know, I get it - someone had to make it a movie. At least it was decent! At least it wasn't bad!

Nurse

As far as sexploitation goes, this was pretty dumb but also a little fun, and self-aware enough to be campy and over-the-top instead of taking itself seriously at all. Coming in briskly at under ninety minutes, it's the tale of a femme fatale who works as a nurse by day and then murders cheating husbands and rapists by night. It all comes off the rails very quickly - like, twenty minutes in it's teasing a lesbian roommate angle - and I think at the midway point the movie completely shifts perspectives and narrators without marking any sort of clear delineation, but there are worse things a movie like this can do.

The Mountain of the Cannibal God

More total bullshit to throw on in the background while I grind around the World of Ruin in Final Fantasy VI. Alright, so the name of this one is "Mountain of the Cannibal God" in Italy, "Slave of the Cannibal God" in America, and "Prisoner of the Cannibal God" in the UK. The latter two are almost synonymous, but the English title makes perfect sense whereas the American one absolutely doesn't; there are cannibals in this movie, sure, and they live in a mountain, yes, and they take plenty of prisoners, who they later eat, but slaves? No, no slaves. Part of me thinks the "slave" portion of the name was added in order to sexify and kink up the title for American audiences in 1978. There's nudity here, and sex, and even sex with an animal! Yeah, this one cannibal just starts, no shit, fucking a giant pig toward the end. Why?

Speaking of animals, that's really the only part of this that merits any discussion. There's a lot of animal-on-animal violence in this movie, between a snake eating a monkey and a hawk fighting another snake and a lizard at one point getting his belly slit open. (Okay fine, that last one was human on animal violence.) And given that this was the 1970s, not to mention an Italian production, there's absolutely no reason to believe these weren't the kind of animal fights that handlers behind the scenes would be setting up. Unless this is like Terrence Malick or Planet Earth, where the animal violence is just found footage. (But then, no, a dude slitting a lizard's belly open is in no way "found footage.")

Escape From Tomorrow

Here's a movie I've long been interested in. It's a very amateur effort, but it's famous for the way it was made: in Disney World, in secret. The film follows a family of four, mainly the father, as he endures a psychological breakdown in the middle of Disney World. The way it was filmed is that film crews consisted of regular-looking dudes with handheld video cameras, not unlike what you'd expect to see, in general, if you went to Disney World. Disney has chosen to ignore the film's existence rather than pursue legal action, which is a big win for fair use law.

Anyway, the shame of it all is that the movie really isn't very good. It starts out as this deeply disturbing piece of psychological horror, one I had to look away from constantly. But it ends up being this ridiculous and absurd and silly pile of campy bullshit. Is Disney World hell on earth? Yeah, probably - but this film would have been better and stronger if it had anything bigger or more controversial than that to say! Oh well. Glad I finally caught this one, even if it wasn't very good.

Amateur Night

I had Hulu open on my laptop while I was playing some SNES last night, and this very bad and very bland movie just started playing. The poster kind of says it all, believe it or not. Jason Biggs, a dweeb and a schlub, the "amateur" the title refers to, needs to make some real quick cash because his wife's thirty-six weeks pregnant and they have no health insurance. So he gets hired by a pimp (a "distributor") to drive a prostitute around for the night from job to job. Before very long there are two other hookers joining in and Jason Biggs is hand-washing a bag full of dildos and then Ashley Tisdale squirts lady cum all over him.

Okay, yeah, maybe the poster doesn't say it all. At all. But Jason Biggs' face on the poster certainly does.

I mean this is just a total piece of shit movie. It was apparently released last year. I had literally never heard of it - have any of you? And maybe the saddest thing about this movie is Jason Biggs. Do you remember like almost twenty years ago how he played awkward teen goober very well, the kind of guy who'd fuck a pie or superglue his hands to his dick? And here he is, in 2016, still playing the kind of guy who has to bumble around hand-washing a bag full of dildos and getting hooker cum all over himself.

I mean, just take a glance at the Jason Biggs filmography: (https://letterboxd.com/actor/jason-biggs/by/release-earliest/) Look at the posters. In Saving Silverman and Anything Else, he's being crushed or otherwise held down by a beautiful woman - just like in the poster above. In the Wedding Daze poster, hey, look, handcuffs - just like in the poster above! (Side note - I love how the Wedding Daze poster just straight up apes the typeface of the American Pie series. They're like, "fuck it, it's a Jason Biggs movie, you know what to do.")

So as I said - the poster says it all. Ugh, what a total piece of shit this was.

The Florida Project

Guys, this one was just excellent. Can't quite call it "dark," since it takes place in the vibrant and beautiful and hella tacky world of Orlando, Florida, but it's beyond dark. It's outright tragic! And yet also weirdly wonderful and happy and innocent, as it's largely seen from the point of view of a fun-loving six-year-old girl. Does she know, can she even comprehend or fathom, that her horrible mother can barely afford to keep them off the streets, living week-to-week in a rundown motel outside of Disney World? Of course not - she's just a kid who wants to run around and go swimming and take selfies and eat ice cream with reckless summertime abandon. This is a movie about a community of marginalized people - the type of people who turn to petty crime and small scale hustling and prostitution in order to scrounge up enough cash to keep going for another week. It's downright depressing. It's also downright life-affirming.

Lady Bird

Sacramento, 2002, some shitty and nondescript Catholic school. Meet Lady Bird, a high school senior whose family is poor as hell and who really just wants to get the hell away from her hometown already. Played by the always-charming Saoirse Ronan, she does all the same shit you remember doing in high school, like fighting with your parents, falling out and making up with your friends, being embarrassed about your home life, trying to befriend the cool crowd, worrying about your sex life before it even gets started. You know, classic coming of age type stuff.

What sets this one apart is how real and genuine it feels. It's not so much a slice of life as it is a large collection of very quick slices of life, but then, isn't that what life really is, in the end? The Boyhood influence feels unmistakable here, the way we cut from a shocking discovery to a bad break up, the way a whole year passes in what feels like the blink of an eye, but this is a breezy and pretty funny hour-thirty that takes place across a single year, not three hours long and drawn out. (Come to think of it, the depressing mom who just wishes her kid would be more grateful feels curbed from Boyhood as well. Look, it's not an issue - I absolutely loved Boyhood, even after all the understandable and predictable "pretentious" backlash.

I really liked Lady Bird. It was charming, quick, and felt very genuine. And it does feel like the kind of movie that'll get better in my memory with time rather than sizzling fast and then burning away. But for now, I can only call it "very good," and say that I "really liked it." Words like "great" and "love" - I'm just not there yet! Maybe one day.

Murder on the Orient Express

Loaded cast, but this is exactly what you think it is: a perfectly enjoyable but ultimately forgettable movie. Picture, in your head, a 2017 adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. It looks pretty, you know the writing holds up already, the actors give it a certain weight, but this isn't going to be anything new or special whatsoever, you know?

It was fine. And fine is much better than bad! But at least bad tries, you know? Sometimes.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Yeah, it's just a Saturday of mediocre background comedies for us, I guess. This one - I'd heard it was really, really not good. And, good news! It was only not good! It wasn't even bad, I'd say. Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher play two bored-ass suburban spouses, and then Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot move next door, and they're just these super-human people who are gorgeous and talented and, uh, international special agents! And then Zach and Isla get pulled into their latest caper, and they all win, and then the movie ends. But don't worry - at one point Isla Fisher gives Gal Gadot a big old smooch!  Like right on the mouth! Ay caramba!

Okay, yeah, maybe this was pretty bad.

But forgivably bad! Jon Hamm is, I continue to insist, obscenely underrated as a comic actor. Am I being blinded by how handsome he is? Yes, probably, sure. But still! He's funny! And so is Isla Fisher, even if she really isn't very funny here. But then, the movie only asks her to be funny for like, two scenes.

You know what this feels like? This feels like a perfect plane movie. Just something you can throw on and not really care strongly about, a pleasant but formulaic romp through some explosions and some laughs. There's a place for movies like this, really, which is why I hesitate to call it "bad" outright. But that's the best I can do, really. "Not bad, but, okay, maybe pretty bad." There are worse things in life!

Horrible Bosses 2

Not really sure what I was hoping for. This wasn't bad, really, by any stretch - but like the first one, it was just sort of a mildly and intermittently funny comedy. Sudeikis, Bateman, and Day have an admirable chemistry for three guys who, presumably, had never really interacted before the first movie, but the plot's still razor thin here and the whole movie sort of feels like an excuse for a payday for everyone involved. Chris Pine makes for a fun little addition; Christoph Waltz is completely wasted, on the other hand. And Aniston's sex-crazed hijinks have very diminishing returns. I mean, let's put it this way - every single person on that poster has been in much, much better things. (Even Sudeikis has Sleeping with Other People!)

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun

Got the day off (thanks, troops!) and it's way too cold to do any yardwork, so here I am, inside, catching up on my TV backlog. The second season of Lady Dynamite came out last night, and I forgot how much I loved that show until I dove back in today - just brilliant shit, folks - but more on that in a few days or a week or so.

After two episodes of the show, I backed out to the search results for "lady" on Netflix, and this obscenely long title caught my eye. It's been ages since I last watched a movie I knew absolutely nothing about, and this looked simple and harmless enough, so I threw it on in the background while I went off to do some dishes and fold some laundry and write up my thoughts about Nathan for You. With a title this long and specific, I thought it might be a low-budget horror movie, or perhaps a single-location thriller like Phonebooth or Open Water or something. Or, perhaps, a straight-to-Netflix parody of a movie like that.

Nope! Couldn't have been more wrong.

This is a French psychological drama of sorts from 2015, set in the 1960s, itself a remake of a movie from the '70s by the same name I've never heard of. Okay, fine - I'm on board. The subtitles are a bitch, because now I have to watch the screen instead of just listening, but, fine - I'm barely invested in this, it means nothing to me, so even if I only come away understanding ten percent of the plot, I can always Wikipedia in the blanks if I even care.

Turns out, the movie was nothing special - not bad, well-shot and well-paced, and with a solid performance at the center from Freya Mavor and her legs (more on this to come) but with an absolutely ridiculous plot twist involving a - hey, speak of the devil - Nathan for You-level harebrained scheme. It was a fine movie, nothing special, competently made, but not at all memorable. Very stylish, very pretty in a period-appropriate way, but there was really nothing notable about it whatsoever.

Except!

Except for one thing. One huge thing.

You hear a lot about the "male gaze" in movies, in television, in games, in any visual medium created by mean, for men, the idea that when the camera lingers on a woman for a split second too long, or catches her in a certain light, or when the costume she's wearing accentuates certain, uh, assets, that it's small-scale sexual fantasy fulfillment on behalf of the director or meant for the audience. Hell, it's even there in Renaissance artwork - it's always been here and it probably always will be. There's a spectrum of male gaze-iness for sure, and it's usually subtle and non-distracting, and even when it's at its worst and most overt (hi there, enslaved princess Leia on a leash in a metal bikini) it's often easy to dismiss or ignore, especially as a man, especially in a world where we're all so used to it and accustomed to it. But it's a very real thing, and when you know where and how and why to look for it, you see it everywhere. And you see when it isn't there, like in the new Wonder Woman movie, where a female director manages to put Gal Gadot in essentially a corset and bikini briefs and

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this. Think about just how bad and blatant and shameless a movie would have to be with the male gaze for you to notice, like ten minutes into a psychological crime thriller you know nothing about, that the director is absolutely, ravenously horny for his star actress - and more specifically, for her legs. I present to you now several frames from the movie. Please keep in mind that these are not cropped images, but entire frames.

Alright, nothing egregious so far. Just a beautiful young woman in her underwear. Racy, maybe, sexy - but nothing out of the ordinary. This is standard male gaze, nothing more, you might tell yourself. Okay, but circle back to these when we're done and see if you can't tell that something else is up here.

And, sure, okay, on its own this is nothing out of the ordinary. Women striding around in a tall pair of heels is a common trope, and it's eye-catching, and it's head-turning, and these are some great legs to boot. It's not weird that "the camera" loves them, tracks them, follows them, has no interest in what's going on above her waist in two separate shots as she enters a gas station.

This one might even be a stretch on its own, but maybe you have to understand the context of the scene to understand how weird this shot is. This woman is starting to think she's going crazy, as this little boy tells her there's a body in her trunk. So she exits the car and walks to the back to investigate. This is a moment where, perhaps more than any other in the movie, it'd be nice to see her face, her reaction, her apprehension. But, no - we get that same lithe, confident stride. Am I overthinking it to point out that the boy's head is level with her waist, as if to suggest that the two characters in this scene are the boy and the woman's legs? Probably! But, come on.

She's dancing on the beach here - pardon the blur! And pardon the upskirt-esque camera work. Just had to have this shot of her twirling around in her very '60s miniskirt to expose her extraordinarily long and thin thighs, I guess.

Here we have not one but two separate shots, interrupted by a male character's stare, of the main character putting on a pair of six-inch wedges. Note that we get two completely different angles of foot coverage - arches and toes as she puts on the left shoe, then underneath and behind the right. Note that the director included both of these shots and ask yourself - why? (Come on. Why else?)

Okay, so it's as clear as day by now that "the camera" has a thing for legs and feet. That's fine! I'm not here to kink shame, and I think all of these shots are sexy too! But, Jesus. There's nothing symbolic here. The shoes, the miniskirt - none of them hold any symbolic value to the characters or to the plot.  It;s not like she's barefoot when she's scared or shaken, and then strutting confidently when she's not. It's a very abstract movie, sure, more style than substance as I mentioned - but if you think all of these leg shots have any value beyond fetish fuel, I can assure you - they do not!

Last one, a little icing on the cake - if you were in denial before, get a load of this one. No, this is not from the "point of view" of any character hiding or spying or creeping. This is simply the camera, set up all voyeuristically behind a corner, just gobbling this up.

And here's where I think it's important to make two more points. The first is that, while I've shown you all kinds of leg action, I gathered the above dozen frames from trailers and one-minute scenes on YouTube; the rest of the movie is just as loaded with them. The second is that, come to think of it, at no point in the movie is the main character wearing anything that covers anything between her upper thighs and the tops of her feet. Like, she may have been in close-toed heels at one point, I can't remember, but definitely never in pants or even a knee-length skirt or dress. (Return, now, to the second picture, where she's sort of wrapped in the blanket. See what I mean?)

The reason I bring all this leg attention up is, again, to point out just how obvious and unshakable the male gaze was here, even for me, a male with a "gaze" of my own! And with all the terrible reports coming out of Hollywood about directors and sexual proclivities and power imbalances, I have to wonder - this actress, this woman, Freya Mavor - 22 when this came out, probably a year or so younger when it was shot - when she got the script for a remake of a 1970 crime thriller, did she expect that she was signing up for... this? Just fueling her director's masturbation sessions? 

I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if the movie kept focusing on, say, her ass. Or her chest. (I mean, this overtly, this often, yeah, sure, I might have.) And I shouldn't assume that Freya Mavor  wasn't totally comfortable with this, or maybe even in on it. And I shouldn't even assume that the director - Joann Sfar, a comic book creator - is dirty or skeevy or nefarious whatsoever. Because that is kink-shaming, and that's not me, I swear! Maybe the first day the pair met for shooting, he was just like, "listen, you have gorgeous legs, and I want to get my camera on them as often as possible," and she was okay with it, and all for it, and totally flattered. But I guess my bigger point is, holy smokes, this guy just couldn't help himself. "I was only gonna remake a noir crime thriller thing but hubba hubba, check out the gams on that tomato!" It's distracting as hell, it takes away from the rest of the movie (which, granted, wasn't worth a lot to begin with), and frankly it's just sort of tonally jarring. "This woman is starting to doubt her own mind, and oh by the way, don't you love the shape of her knees?"

I suppose the learning experience I can take form this is that the absurd leg focus here is really no different from, like, making Natalie Portman's space shirt all torn and wet in the second Star Wars movie, or putting Margot Robbie in panties for the entirety of Suicide Squad. Oof. "Red-blooded males" really are disgusting creatures, aren't we?