A Film Nerd 2.0 birthday milestone leads to the wildest movie marathon so far

Plus we're rebranding around here and talking about the new podcast

It’s Tuesday, July 12, and here’s where we are…

I wasn’t ready.

I thought I was, but I really, really wasn’t. Toshi’s birth feels like it was a moment ago. I still feel like I am just getting started at this whole parenting thing, and yet, somehow, my oldest son is 17 now.

He spent his actual birthday on a series of airplanes returning from a two-week school trip to Europe. He’s spent a good chunk of July in London, Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, and it has apparently been life-changing. I am so happy for him and I know we’ve raised a good kid who made (largely) good choices while he was there. Even so, it was a terrifying feeling to have him on another continent. I don’t know how my ex-wife handled having him away from home. I thought I would be able to play it cool the entire time, but of course, by the time his plane touched down in London I was already acutely missing him, and I’m sure I messaged him way too many times while he was gone, just to check in and see that he was okay.

It’s fun to have just one of the boys here, though. I don’t get to spend enough time alone with either Allen or Toshi by themselves. They’re pretty much a package deal 24/7. While Toshi’s gone, I’ve had a whole bunch of hang time with his younger brother, and I had a pretty amazing experience with Allen and my girlfriend the other night. I decided to put something on with very little preamble and for the first fifteen minutes or so, he seemed highly skeptical. I asked him to give the film a chance until the actual title appeared onscreen, and he agreed. Sure enough, by the time the title appeared, he was completely on board, and I’d put the same challenge to any of you. If you turn on Netflix and put on the film RRR and watch it until you actually see that title (along with the subtitle Rise Roar Revolt) appear onscreen, I suspect you will happily devour the rest of the movie because it is one of the most exuberant spectacles of recent memory, a double-barreled blast of pure movie mania.

This was Allen’s first Indian film of any kind. While it was not my first, I do not profess any kind of expertise when it comes to Indian cinema. There are several different sub-industries that make up “Indian film,” and it is such a vast ocean of movies that I feel overwhelmed at the thought of trying to catch up. What I do know about Indian cinema is that there is such diversity of form and content and style within those industries that it’s almost unfair to lump it all under one umbrella. RRR is not representative of all Indian cinema, certainly, but I suspect that it could serve as a fun gateway drug for viewers who are largely unfamiliar with it. It certainly woke Allen up to the possibility, and part of what he loved about the experience was the anti-colonialism that is baked into the film’s premise. He loved seeing the English portrayed as the bad guys and was genuinely excited by the idea of a movie that centered the perspective this way.

Directed by S.S. Rajamouli, the movie is a sprawling historical fantasy, a story built around two real-life revolutionary figures who have been turned into superheroes here. The equivalent here would be a film in which a young Martin Luther King Jr. and a young Malcolm X have a rollicking giant-scale ass-kicking road-trip adventure that ends just before they both make their first appearance on the national stage. It’s a wild premise, and in the wrong hands, it could be wildly insensitive and even offensive. Not here, though, and they navigate some tricky ground with some of the characters. When a young Gond girl is “purchased” from her parents by some rich English assholes and abducted to Delhi, the village sends a “shepherd” to retrieve the lost member of their flock, and that shepherd, Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), has to go undercover while he tries to figure out where they are keeping the little girl, Malli. When the government finds out that there is someone looking for her, they assign Alluri Satarama Raju (Ram Charan) to uncover him and stop him, and they promise to make him a Special Officer, something he’s been actively chasing, if he brings Bheem in alive. They’re set on this collision course after both being established as unstoppable forces, and then 40 minutes into the film, they are brought together, completely unaware of the other’s identity, when they work together to save a child, instantly becoming best friends in the process.

image courtesy of Netflix

It is hard to fully express on the page what the film feels like, and part of me wishes I’d seen it in one of the packed theatrical screenings that have been happening around the country. This is a movie designed to be watched with other people, and as many of them as possible. Just watching it here in the house with the three of us, the excitement building every half-hour or so, it was one of the most joyous viewings of anything that we’ve had in a while. That initial skepticism on Allen’s part turned into full engagement, and then that turned into a sort of giddy exuberance as we entered the third hour of the film. It is ingeniously plotted and both the action scenes and the musical numbers (and yes, there are several) are staged with an emotional maximalism that could be exhausting if it wasn’t all so much fun. Ray Stevenson and Allison Doody represent all of English colonialism, and they are suitably loathsome. So much of the film’s success depends on the chemistry between Raju and Bheem, and I doubt I’ll see any film in any language this year that features movie star performances this big and this determined to entertain.

Netflix is currently the easiest way for most people in America to see this film, but if you’d like to read more about why there are different versions on different streaming services, the always-great Siddhant Adlakha breaks it down for you here.

I urge you to take a chance on this one and, if possible, to see it on a big screen. I’m thinking of taking the boys to see it theatrically since the Alamo has it in heavy rotation right now. It really is a singular experience, more movie than I was prepared for in one sitting, and I suspect it will reward repeat viewings enormously.

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NO ONE UNDER 17 ADMITTED

We had another priority first, though, because every year, we do a birthday movie marathon for Toshi, programmed to share things with him that his younger brother isn’t quite ready for. I consider these milestones, and this one is a very particular milestone thanks to the weird standards of the MPA and its film ratings. I decided to use this year to explore the boundaries of the R rating, and to walk Toshi through the door into this wider world. He has access to my film collection thanks to Plex and all of the physical media in the house, and there have always been very carefully drawn lines about what he was or was not allowed to watch. As he put it to me the other day, “I can watch anything I want now. It’s the law!” While that’s technically true, there’s still some sense of curation that I think will continue as I suggest things and encourage his interests.

He’s seen so many big films already, and part of the reason I feel comfortable showing him certain things is because we talk about the films after he sees them, and we talk about the intent behind them as well as what it is he takes away from them. There are plenty of his friends who have seen far more than he has, ratings-wise, but whenever I talk to him about how they see things, it’s clear that there’s no supervision or participation from their parents. So many young people just get abandoned to media by their parents, so it’s small wonder they have a hard time processing some of what they see. I’ve made a few mistakes along the way, but even in those cases, they’ve become opportunities to talk about why something was too much, why they had trouble with the images or the ideas.

There are some titles he’s been asking about and other titles I programmed because of the way they played off of each other. We started with one of the monoliths he’s been asking to see for a while now, Brian De Palma’s Scarface. The 4K blu-ray that Universal put out for the film is a spectacular visual and audio presentation, and Toshi was absolutely flattened by it. He’s seen a bit of De Palma before, including Carrie, The Untouchables, and Blow Out, but this is such a different thing that it’s hard to see it as “his,” so to speak. Before the screening, we talked a little bit about Oliver Stone since the boys are going to start digging into his filmography when Platoon is released on 4K later this year, and we talked about the original film and the context in which it was remade. We talked about the way the film has permeated pop culture and not always for the right reasons.

image courtesy of Universal

And then we watched it and had a goddamn blast with it. I always forget how funny Al Pacino is in the film, how De Palma leans into the not-remotely-subtle nature of the whole thing. It is over the top, a big fat rollercoaster of a movie, and part of the fun of it for Toshi was seeing just how not-Michael-Corleone Tony Montana really is. He’s a cartoon character, and anyone expecting otherwise would most likely be disappointed by the film. I love Steven Bauer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michelle Pfeiffer in the film, all of them doing terrific character work. The whole film is packed with great character actors like F. Murray Abraham and Robert Loggia, everyone absolutely chewing scenery. It is a record of the time when it was made because there’s no way you’d have this many white people playing a largely Cuban cast of characters, but it remains wildly entertaining, one of the biggest pure entertainments of De Palma’s entire career.