I Want a Famous Luthor and an Unknown Batman in Batman Vs. Superman

It won't happen, but if it does, allow me to make this pledge right now:

If Ryan Gosling is the new Batman, as the unlikely rumor has it, I will not go see him in 2015.

Wait, no. That's a bold-faced lie. I will go see the new Batman movie even if Betty White plays Bruce Wayne. Especially if Betty White plays Bruce Wayne.

Now picture her doing the Batvoice.

But if Ryan Gosling is the new Batman, I will be significantly less excited to see him in 2015.

The same goes for Josh Brolin, possibly for Matthew Goode, and definitely Orlando Bloom -- three other actors rumored to be in the early running to take on Batman's cowl. I don't dislike Brolin or Goode (can't say the same about Bloom, sadly). I've never seen a performance from Brolin I didn't like and Goode seems more than capable as a rising star who's already taken on one superhero role. But I don't want either of them to play Batman in 2015 because I think Batman should play Batman.

The role of Batman ought to be a star maker, not a star magnet -- like it was for relative unknown Christian Bale in 2005 and certainly for Henry Cavill in 2013. An unfamiliar actor is ideal for such a part because the role the actor will be playing is already familiar on its own. I don't want someone I recognize to take the role of Batman in 2015 - I want to really believe he is Batman. I got this in 2005 with Batman Begins (I was born in 1988... a little young for American Psycho) so the effect of watching this unfamiliar actor inhabit the story I already knew was enthralling. I can't watch an actor as familiar as Ryan Gosling put on a cape and truly believe that he is Batman. But I can believe that Ryan Armitage is the Caped Crusader.

Honestly, I'd only recognize him if he were four feet tall with a beard.

None of the above, however, applies for the role of Lex Luthor.

Most of the best villains I've ever seen on screen were performed by actors who were either a) stretching themselves, b) clearly having the time of their lives, or c) both. There's something undeniably gleeful about watching an established, dignified, award-winning actor put on his best mustache-twirling face and set the audience either screaming or nervously giggling for two hours. I could provide examples for hours here. Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman. Robert DeNiro as Max Cady in Cape Fear. Kevin Spacey as John Doe in Se7en.* And so forth. Half the pleasure of watching these performances comes from the fact that we recognize the actors immediately, but they aren't acting anything like their "normal selves," so to speak. It's like seeing a good friend in an incredible costume on Halloween. They're recognizable, but their appearance in this new and frightening role is even scarier because of their familiarity.

For this reason, I'm gunning for Bryan Cranston in the role of Lex Luthor. It's total speculation at this point Breaking Bad fans have long been familiar with Cranston's dark side, but the role of Luthor is completely different from the everyman-gone-wrong character of Walter White. This is beyond looking for a good actor who happens to look bald. Bryan Cranston (like Michael Shannon) can be equal parts scary and hammy, the essential ingredients of a good supervillain actor.

Separated at birth?????

So let's get Cranston on board as a super villain. Don't put that bald head to waste.

*As much as I love Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, I feel uncomfortable providing it as an example because 1) in my opinion, Ledger is unrecognizable in the part, and therefore largely unfamiliar to the audience and 2) the aftermath of the movie showed that we could hardly say that Ledger enjoyed the experience.

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Bitches Be Hoverin'

At least that's what American Horror Story: Coven is promising some more of in its latest trailer. The first line of their House of the Rising Sun cover, and lots of ladies in midair.

If you just can't get enough of ghostly women about three feet off the ground between now and October, here's the first promo with Legos. 

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What do Ben Hur and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter have in common?

A director, apparently.

This is a film we will happily boycott.

Or maybe Messala was a vampire hunter the whole time?!?!?!

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Weird new teaser for a JJ Abrams Project

Not that all mysterious JJ Abrams projects are worth watching (see evidence here), but this one creeped us out.

Check it out here and let us know what you think.

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Skyler's No Hero: Dissing the Women of Breaking Bad

There's been a lot of buzz in the Breaking Bad world today about Skyler as a strong female character and her refusal to get pushed around in last night's episode. She held her own against Hank, who came riding up on his white horse in the diner, talking about how he was going to protect the long-victimized Skyler from her husband's machinations. Color Skyler unimpressed; she hustled out of that diner and called a lawyer straightaway to avoid testifying against Walt's (and her own) operation. Next it was toe-to-toe with Marie, who tried to spirit Holly away from her crazy parents only to have Mama Bear Skyler standing and screaming in her way. If the Schraeders thought they were going to find an ally in Skyler for taking down Walt, Skyler's made it pretty clear that she's not interested in being the D.E.A.'s mole. She's in it for herself, and she's going to protect herself and her family just as she's always done.

Is Skyler the strong woman heroine that TV drama's been looking for? Sorry. I'm not buying it.

The fact that Skyler is strong does not make Skyler good. Skyler has held her own against the other players in the complicated world of Breaking Bad, but only to keep her life together while Walt works chaos around them. She's has kept her head down while her husband has wantonly slaughtered anyone who gets in the way of Blue Sky's production. She's kept Walt's secrets, and Walt's money, while the White family's dabbling in the meth business endangered the lives of their own family members -- Schraeders and Whites alike. Sure, she didn't let Hank talk her into testifying against Walt in the diner. But now Hank is on the hunt for definitive proof of Walt's guilt, and who knows how many people will be, um, "sent to Belize" while he tries?

I'm as unimpressed by Skyler's supposed strength as I am by Lydia's. The two seem to be uncomfortable doubles, really. Lydia, like Skyler, is exacting, driven, self-preserving, and goal-oriented. While Skyler squared off against the Schraeders to keep her family intact, Lydia sent her team of sociopathic skinheads to wipe out the subpar meth-producers and set up their own shop. But like Skyler, Lydia is only as tough as her own ignorance allows her to be. Skyler doesn't know the half of what Walt's done, and she took off from the diner before Hank had a chance to tell her. Lydia, likewise, cowered in a bunker with her hands over her ears during last night's gunfight, and closed her eyes while walking past the hits she personally ordered.

There's a difference between being strong and being a hero, and Skyler is certainly not the latter. I don't know what honorable choices Skyler still can make at this point (anything that might not ruin the lives of her children, maybe, but it's probably too late for that) but I know she hasn't made them yet. Anna Gunn nailed her performance last night, and I hope she gets nominated for an Emmy this season, but I'm not ready to praise Skyler as a character or person yet. If Skyler's going to redeem herself this season, she's going to have to make some tough choices. And she'll probably have to choose against Walt, who doesn't seem interested in redemption anymore.

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Whites vs Schraeders: Breaking Bad Shows No Signs of Letting Up in "Buried"

It's refreshing to watch a show as relentlessly paced as these final eight episodes of Breaking Bad. While last night's episode was not the shocking, teeth-clenching panic attack that last week's premier was (and they can't all be -- there's eight episodes in all, for heaven's sake), once again Gilligan and company has shown that the good people who keep us glued to our seats every Sunday know exactly what they're doing. Walt and his cohorts are headed for justice, or at the very least for catastrophe, and the results should be satisfying.

The noose keeps tightening for Walt as his secrets leak out. Suffice to say the battle lines between the Whites and the Schraeders have been definitively drawn, and no one is getting away easily now. Marie first learns the truth about Walt's from Hank, which pits her against her brother-in-law. But even more alarmingly, Marie begins to uncover Skyler's secrets from Skyler herself. This is bad news for Hank, who in the diner sequence seemed to think that Skyler was only a victim of Walt's criminal behavior and not something of a victimizer herself. At any rate, when Skyler takes Holly back from Marie it's clear that the gulf between the two families is officially unbridgeable. From the beginning of this episode, it became clear that the writers are setting us up for a seven-episode showdown between Walt and Hank (check out that shot-reverse shot of them on both sides of the garage door... chills). And as Skyler and Marie made clear in their scene together, both wives are squarely on the sides of their husbands, sisterhood be damned.

And speaking of those sisters, Anna Gunn was the champion of this episode. That long, slightly-out-of-focus shot of Skyler's face as Marie figures out the depth of Skyler's deception was remarkable. Equal parts coldly composed while emotionally broken, Gunn knocked that scene out of the park. Here's to more moments like that this season.

My only problem with this episode, really, was Skyler's assertion that Walt could not give himself up without giving up the money. Why on earth not? It's pretty well hidden, considering that Walt's got it buried at a secret location in the desert that only he knows. Why couldn't Walt confess, run out the cancer clock and, since the police have very little to threaten him with at this point, die with the secret of where the money was hidden? Or is Skyler concerned that Hank and Marie know too much about the meth to let Skyler get away with that when Walt is gone?

Who says crime doesn't pay?

Perhaps all will become clear later. But for now, I'm happy to say that we are two episodes deep in teh final stretch of Breaking Bad  and I'm still impressed. I'm really enjoying this pattern of putting almost no gap time between one episode and the next. Last week we saw Hank right straight out of that bathroom after learning the truth about Heisenberg, and now we got to watch Hank put that garage door right back up and Walt walk away from the confrontation. If the pattern continues, we'll get to start next week in the interrogation room with Hank and Jesse -- a scene I think we've all been looking forward to for awhile, and if the teasers for next week are any indication, should be a high point of the season.

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Our theory for box office success

Don't name your film a one word abstract noun.

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#4: Space Jesus

In a desperate attempt to appease their only fan, Beth and Louise bite the (faster than a speeding) bullet, (man of) steel themselves, and watch 2013's most underwhelming orgy of destruction, Man of Steel.

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Casting Ashton Kutcher in a bioepic about Steve Jobs didn't work?

Color us shocked.

What could go wrong?

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We Really Don't Do Anything but Talk About "Breaking Bad" Anymore

And we've got more evidence that Louise is right. Jesse is doomed, and Walter will kill him.

You heard it here first. Jesse's a dead man.

Wearing your dead partner's jacket... that's cold, Heisenberg. 

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Fix Your Screenplay with Brain Worms: The Tree of Life and Upstream Color

I really, really hate to criticize The Tree of Life. I really do.

As an evangelical Christian as well as a rabid fan of cinema, it's pretty rare that I get to see a movie that both 1) authentically communicates the Christian story and worldview and 2) doesn't suck. The Tree of Life (2011, directed by Terrence Malick) one such movie. The Exorcist is a second, and I can't think of a third. For that reason, I want to say that The Tree of Life is a peerless cinematic triumph, it should have gotten every Oscar, and everyone ought to own a copy and watch it twice a year.

But it's not perfect, and I can't pretend that it is. I love this movie but I know it's flawed. Primarily, this movie suffers from the fact that, between moments of poignant character interactions and wide, sweeping pan shots of staggering beauty, there are also extended sequences of gratuitous voiceovers coupled with the characters behaving in ways that I have never seen a human being act. People tell their children to love every leaf, flower, and ray of sunshine. They stare contemplatively at votive candles. They show astounding awareness of their own emotional motivations, and explain them spontaneously with the clarity of an essayist.

They are, if I may coin a phrase, suffering from acute Terrence Malick syndrome.

The Tree of Life is a highly allegorical movie and its aims are nothing short of cosmic. It meditates on the tragedies of one family and sets those tragedies in the context of the Christian story of the universe -- the beauty and brokenness that exist side-by-side in creation, which culminate in the redemption of the whole world and the end of pain and suffering. It's telling an archetypical, ancient story that literally spans from the beginning of the universe to the end of it, and the fact that Malick takes missteps in the execution is probably inevitable. The problem is that, in using grand, abstract words and images to tell the grand, abstract story of the universe, the individual characters (whom the story is ostensibly supposed to be about) become grand and abstract themselves. They lose their relatability as they increasingly become the voices and tools of the director. As the camera swoons and sweeps around them in the beatifically-shot Southern home, their dialogue resembles not the conversations between real people but the sound effects of Terrence Malick's worldview, underpinning the imagery. They aren't real, and they couldn't exist in the real world. If people -- especially women, like Jessica Chastain's character -- acted like they do in The Tree of Life (commune with nature, look beatific, teach life lessons, etc.), no one would be able to hold a job, raise children, or manage responsibilities.

She's sitting in the yard because her house was repossessed. 

A movie without real characters, I would argue, is a movie divorced from reality and is truly incomplete. What The Tree of Life needs are more scenes with brain parasites.

Now, before you all start lining up outside my door so I can fix your screenplays (really, Mr. Sorkin, this is getting embarrassing), allow me to back myself up with a movie that is ultimately better, and no less ambitious, than The Tree of Life: Upstream Color (2013, written and directed by Shane Carruth). The phenomenon that Upstream Color explores is no less grand and mysterious than the coexistence of beauty and evil that consumes The Tree of Life: how do we explain the process by which two people meet, connect, and love each other? Where does chemistry come from?

The answer, according to Upstream Color, is a strange parasitic organism that lives in orchid roots,

then worms, then people, then pigs, then back to orchid roots, and connects every being through which it creeps. When Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth, doing triple duty with writing and directing credits) are both infected, the worm that has burrowed deep into both of their bodies links them inseparably.

As a narrative conceit, the parasitic worm of Upstream Color is genius. For one thing, it literalizes something that everyone who has ever fallen in love (and by "love" I'm including its romantic, friendly, and familial incarnations) can confirm. The worm links the psyches of those it infects so thoroughly that they trust each other before they have a reason to, love each other before it's rational, and feel each other's pain so deeply that suffering for one is equal suffering for the other. The idea of the parasite provides a way to explore aspects human relationships that everyone knows experientially to be true. On the other hand, the worm gives Carruth permission to use a style similar to Terrence Malick's, but with better reason. The characters act like no one you've ever met because they have a brain parasite that makes them act like lunatics. The voiceovers in Upstream Color are more appropriate because Kris and Jeff are so inextricably linked that they think each other's thoughts instead of talking. They take long, contemplative looks at beautiful scenery not because the director likes it, but because their consciousness has been so radically reconstructed that they can barely do anything else. And the swooning, hypnotic look of the cinematography isn't just pretty; it communicates the disconcerting fact that something powerful and foreign has taken hold of Jeff and Kris' senses.

A lot of people saw and liked The Tree of Life, and I don't think they're wrong. But Upstream Color takes the look and style of a Terrence Malick movie and puts it to work. A light dose of genre conventions (especially body horror -- there are some gnarly worm-under-skin moments) adds energy and dynamism to Upstream Color that Malick just can't pull off. It's as lovely, mysterious, and contemplative as The Tree of Life, but while The Tree of Life stumbles in and out of pretense, Upstream Color's cruises to soaring altitude and stays there. It pulls from many genres and breaks the boundaries of all of them. If you ever wondered what the love child of a David Cronenberg and Terrence Malick movie would look like, wonder no more, because it's astounding. And if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go watch Primer, because I want to know what else Carruth's been cooking.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Bryan Cranston as a Bald Evil Corporate Executive*, Cont'd

Well, this is a surefire way to send us racing of to the theaters to see Superman vs. Batman.

We're begging you, Mr. Snyder, Mr. Cranston, Warner Brothers, and whoever else out there we have to plead with to make this happen. Please. Please please please. Can we pay you? We'll pay you.

How can you say "no" to this face?

*For the purposes of this comparison, we're referring to "undisputed meth champions of the American Southwest" and "successful car wash owners" as "corporate executives."

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The Cronenberg Crawl: It's Not Easy Being Racist Edition

I first encountered the movie M. Butterfly (1993) in a Zizek essay on courtly love that I read for a medieval lit class in undergrad. The article was about the bizarre impersonality of many of the longed-after heroines in medieval poetry. They seem to often be just beatific names and faces (automatons, Zizek called them) onto which the more three-dimensional heroes can project their own whims and assumptions on. They are the Bella Swans of epic poetry, the blank spaces into which the hero can insert his own perfect woman under the template of the lady.

M. Butterfly is about a European imperialist who projects his fantasies onto a woman of the empire. At the end of M. Butterfly, the empire strikes back.

Rene Gallimard (Jeremy Irons, who’s so damn sexy and tormented in this role that I ate up his ham-fisted performance like popcorn) is a French diplomat in 1960s Beijing who’s had it up to here with European women and their headstrong, modern, feminist ways. He wants himself an Oriental (sic) woman, a Madame Butterfly, a submissive, sweet-tempered virgin who will worship him unquestioningly and bow to his every whim. He has absolutely no suspicion that he will fail to find such a woman in China and never doubts that he even has such a right to expect this of someone. The fact that he’s never met a woman like his “Oriental” ideal does not challenge his fantasy. As one character pointedly notes, “Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.”

If that’s so, Rene’s yellow fever gets him more of a woman than he bargained for when he meets “Butterfly,” a singer of classical Chinese music who plays the female roles in the Beijing Opera’s performances. If you think it’s redundant that I specified that Rene’s lover plays the female roles, it’s not. Butterfly is Song Lilling (John Lone), and the female roles in traditional Chinese theatre are played by men with high voices, trim figures, and good wigs. It’s clear that Rene doesn’t know all this the first time he hears Butterfly sing. Whether he catches on  at all during their twenty year affair (this is based on a true story) is left to the viewer. We don’t see Rene discover that Madame Butterfly is Monsieur during one of their clothed, discretely-backdoor lovemaking sessions (Butterfly cites the importance of modesty in Chinese culture and even fakes a pregnancy), but Cronenberg doesn’t exactly go out of his way to hide Butterfly’s identity. With a clearer screen than the laptop on which I watched this movie, you can apparently see John Lone’s mustache beneath his makeup, and his gravelly, androgynous voice leaves plenty of room for speculation before we see him naked in the final scenes. As previously stated, throughout their affair Butterfly will not let Rene strip him, fondle him, or see him naked. After twenty years of cohabitation and the birth of a child, with no relaxing of Butterfly’s strict code of modesty, surely Rene had more than enough evidence to suspect that something was amiss.

For the record, Butterfly is not presented as gay or transgender. You’ll notice I’ve called him “he” throughout this review -- on purpose. Butterfly is a Communist informant, taking advantage of Rene’s standing with Western governments to gather information on American troop movements in Vietnam. While he begins by reporting only the information that Rene throws around casually in conversation, eventually Rene becomes party to Butterfly’s espionage and finds work as a government courier to steal classified documents. By the time their affair reaches its disastrous conclusion, Rene is hopelessly devoted to a fantasy female, utterly exploited by a man who knows how to use Rene’s own stereotypes and desires against him, and a traitor to his own nation and homeland. He is, as Cronenberg delights in spelling out for us, Madame Butterfly himself.

And because the scenes between them are so tender, so tormented, so scene-munchingly excessive and wonderfully hammy, you often forget that you’re watching John Lone go down on Jeremy Irons. Irons’ fantasy actually begins to draw you in. There’s no getting around the fact that the script and performances are ludicrously melodramatic, but I’m willing to let that slide. Anyone who’s ever had it really bad for someone knows that, given enough time, you start acting like Jeremy Irons too, so when Rene falls on his knees before Butterfly and begs her for her love  you’re kinda rooting for him. Grand gestures, big speeches, and sappy declarations are hilarious to everyone but the person giving them. But I believed that Irons was feeling every emotion he was so wildly telegraphing to us, the audience, so I gave him a pretty wide berth. And Lone’s character is, of course, egging him on, so I gave Lone a wide berth too.

"This is awkward."

All this to say: Roger Ebert doubts that Rene could have really not known that Butterfly is a man. Having watched this movie, I think the strong evidence against Butterfly’s femininity is irrelevant to this movie’s character motivations and story arc. Rene didn’t know Butterfly was a man because he didn’t feel like knowing. All of Rene’s dialogue and actions indicate that Rene is solidly insulated in his own world of loving a doting, submissive fantasy woman from the East, and if this fantasy requires this skinny Chinese opera singer to be a woman, then dammit, he’s a woman. Any evidence that does not fit with who Rene has imagined Butterfly to be does not even register. Even at the end when Rene has seen Butterfly au naturale with his own eyes, he still opines that he has been “loved by the perfect woman.” And in Rene’s world, he absolutely has. The fact that this perfect woman is not a real woman is utterly beside the point.

All in all, I love M. Butterfly, warts and all. It’s a fascinating study in self-deception and the blind spots that come with one’s own assumptions about culture, race, and gender. It’s also a satisfying portrayal of a racist sexist jerk getting what’s coming to him, but I digress. If you follow Ebert’s incredulity (“Did Rene’s hand never once wander?”) about this film, I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think you’re off-topic. Irons does a solid job portraying a man who is so deluded, and so comfortably deluded, with the woman that he has invented for himself, that there is nothing he could possibly find under Song Lilling’s clothes that could penetrate this character’s defenses. And as we watch him tormented, suffering, and still in love with Butterfly from a Parisian jail, we’re almost tempted to say he deserved it.

He still has his dignity, though.

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My Mom Herzog, Part 2

In a gated community in Texas in October 2001, a fifty-year-old nurse named Sandra Stotler was found floating in a retention pond wrapped in the duvet from her own bedroom. The bodies of her son, Adam, and his best friend were found in the woods nearby. The convicted killer, Michael Perry, was sentenced to death for the three murders, while his accomplice Jason Burkett was sentenced to life in prison. The motive was theft. The boys had wanted to steal the Stotlers' red Camaro. Werner Herzog's documentary Into The Abyss documents the last eight days of Michael Perry's life.

As Herzog interviews the shellshocked survivors of the ordeal -- Stotler's daughter, full of grief and anger, Burkett's father, serving a prison sentence himself and wracked with guilt, and Burkett's wife, who married him while he was in prison and remains convinced of his innocence -- it becomes quickly apparent that we, the arthouse audience, are seeing a part of America that we normally get to look past. It is astounding how many people touched by the murder have been in prison, suffered violence, or faced homelessness. Burkett's sobbing father informs Herzog that he is currently facing his fifth prison sentence, and believes that his addictions to drugs and alcohol are primarily to blame for Burkett's crimes. The brother of one victim broke parole to attend his brother's funeral (he was arrested at the service) and lost his other sister in an accident when she was walking on the freeway. Burkett's brother is serving a prison sentence as well, and a bar full of witnesses heard Perry bragging on the night of the murder about shooting someone to steal a car are barely ruffled. Violence, loss, waste, and harm seem to be part of the daily rhythm of life for these people. They are up to their eyes in it.

Which is why it is all the more jarring when we hear Herzog's genteel German accent from behind the camera, asking a grieving man about his tattoo. "What does that tattoo on your arm say?" he asks, politely.

"Brandy," says the man. "My girlfriend."

And just like that, Herzog channels the spirit of my midwestern suburban mother, and says, "You got your girlfriend's name tattooed on your arm? What if the relationship dissolves?"

Herzog wants you to think about the consequences of your actions. He feels strongly about your bad habit of texting and driving, and now he wants you to think about your tattoo choices. A tattoo is forever, right?

Which begs the question: can you make a documentary that treats its audience, and its subjects, like peers?

Herzog is a master-class documentarian and overwhelmingly, Into the Abyss is spectacular. It suspends judgement about the guilt of Michael Perry (Perry himself maintains his innocence) and avoids political conversation about the death penalty in favor of storytelling. It's a long, meditative look at the victims and perpetrators of violence themselves -- whether the perpetrators be homeless car thieves or employees of the state. It allows the subjects to tell, in their own words, what the homicide and its aftermath has meant for them. A prison guard who executes two prisoners a week for a year finally breaks down and quits his job when he realizes he can't do such work any longer. The daughter of Statler, whose life story is one long chronicle of disaster, shares her anger at Perry and the closure she got from his death. A chaplain opines that he can swerve his golf cart to save the lives of squirrels, but can do nothing to save the inmates he ministers to every day.

But you can never shake the feeling, when you hear Herzog's voice, that Herzog, and by implication us, are horribly out of place. Herzog asks questions that have apparently never occurred to these people. He tries to draw out the metaphysical side of a prison guard ("Do you think that there was a part of you, a part of your personality deep down, that believed this was wrong?") only to be looked at with confusion and stammering. The guard is practical, and concerned with consequences. Herzog is an abstract artist. The two are talking past each other. Herzog also has a hard time hiding his outsider's fascination with Burkett's wife, and her choice to marry a convicted felon. While his interest is understandable on several levels (the couple has never been permitted a conjugal visit, but Mrs. Burkett is pregnant with her husband's child), the questions he asks about their relationship seem a bit wide-eyed, and forward to the point of being rude. Mrs. Burkett is a kind of zoo animal to him, whose actions and desires are completely foreign to the filmmakers and audience.

For all its strong moments, those weird tonal moments of Into the Abyss, when Herzog shows off just how out-of-place an old liberal white man is in this world, make the experience of watching this documentary feel occasionally like cultural tourism. We interact with the people on and around Death Row, who are profoundly unlike us, and then we watch another Sundance movie while we drink a dry Cabernet and have quinoa salad for dinner. The people in this documentary become the objects of our study, and interest, and pity. They do not become our peers.

Herzog served as the quintessential suburban mom when he warned young motorists not to text and drive, and I stood by him in that film. I'm a cyclist and I like my brain where it is. But the tone that Herzog kept slipping into in this film reminded me of another kind of suburban mother: the kind who goes out of her comfort zone to volunteer at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and, no matter how well-meaning she tries to be, just can't help but alienate the people around her. She's not like the people around her, and she knows it. The result is, despite the best intentions, a deepening of the gulf between two groups of people that ultimately does more harm than good.

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My Mom Herzog, Part 1

Werner Herzog made a PSA about texting and driving.

It is thirty-five minutes long.

It seems sort of silly to evaluate From One Moment to the Next as a documentary project, even though it's filmed like one. After all, it was commissioned by AT&T to be shown in high schools and government agencies, and features several shots of people reading the message of the short film at the camera lens, after-school-special style: "Don't text and drive. Seriously, don't do it."

If this were a normal documentary, I would find this pedantic, but because Herzog is basically making a PSA he is unapologetically taking the role of your mother telling you to put down your damn phone and watch the road. We do not hear Herzog at all in this documentary, asking questions or providing voiceovers, unlike his feature documentary Into the Abyss. The result is thirty-five uninterrupted minutes of car crash victims giving frank, wrenching accounts of the damage of the accidents they caused, the accidents that the car next to them caused, and the way these accidents upended their lives. It's a glorified version of the anti-drug PSAs we used to watch as kids, and if that sounds like an insult, it's not. It's relevant, refreshingly straightforward, and honest. And like the best warnings, it lets the people who have made mistakes speak for themselves.

I'm linking this because I'm a cyclist and I see dozens of you nutjobs doing this every day. I like my skull the way it is. Don't text and drive.

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Beth and Louise love falling montages

Or at least ones set to "In the House, In a Heartbeat" from 28 Days Later.

Check this out.

Can Dory Carry a Movie By Herself?

She's going to try, but I'm skeptical. Pixar's announced their three major releases that will take us through 2016. Two of the coming attractions (The Good Dinosaur and Inside Out, the latter of which has a premise I'm not entirely enchanted by) are, thankfully, original features. But because the world just can't have enough sequels, we're also getting a Finding Nemo sequel, Finding Dory, in 2016.

With the exception of the sterling Toy Story sequels, Pixar's first forays into franchises (Cars 2 and Monsters University) definitely haven't earned the same accolades that Pixar's other classic pictures have. And when you're hanging your entire movie on a character who thrived in a supporting role, I'm pretty skeptical about Finding Dory. What made Dory so delightful in Finding Nemo was the fact that she always had the anxious Marlin beside her to play straight man, and the chemistry and dialogue was fantastic. But if Dory's the star of the show, and showing off her giggle-inducing-short-term-memory-loss without a sharper-minded character to ground her, I worry that Finding Dory will quickly lose its way.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

A Reply to Matthew Yglesias's Review of Breaking Bad: Why I Love Hank Even More after "Breaking Bad: Blood Money"

"Why on earth did Hank confront Walt?" -- Matthew Yglesias on Slate 

"Because Hank is a better man than Walt." -- Us

Full disclosure: I love Hank. He has no serious rivals as my favorite character on Breaking Bad (except maybe Jesse). Throughout five seasons of Breaking Bad, in a world full of twisted, immoral, dissembling, and dishonest characters, Hank has been the moral bedrock in a way that no one else has been. While Walt can lie to himself and others, and spin his increasingly monstrous actions in a way that makes them seem more palatable to himself and others, Hank is honest in a way that no one else on the show can be. When he sees the signature in Walt's poetry book, he doesn't try to talk himself out of believing its obvious implications. When Walt tries to gaslight Hank and convince him he's crazy, Hank doesn't back down. And when Walt shows Hank the tracker and asks, with frighteningly good manners, where it came from, Hank doesn't try to buy himself time and avoid a confrontation. He closes that garage door and gets down to brass tacks, his own safety and secrecy be damned.

He does, in other words, what Walt can never bring himself to do. He puts the truth first.

And that's why Hank is the best character on the show.

In Yglesias' review of 5.2's season premier, "Blood Money," Yglesias quite accurately points out that Hank's choice to confront Walt is strategic suicide. Hank knows Walt is a killer. He knows he's alone in a garage full of sharp pointy tools (I was wondering if a screwdriver was going to end up in someone's chest, personally) with a man who is physically stronger than him while he, Hank, is still suffering from  the aftermath of a panic attack and car crash. Was Hank's choice foolish, as far as potential consequences are concerned? Sure. But it was also the only honest choice Hank had when Walt pulled out that tracker.

Hank could have made up some story to forestall a confrontation with Walt, but it wouldn't have been true to Hank's character. Walt is the show's strategist, not Hank. While Walt keeps on lying even when it's obvious Hank is on to him, Hank doesn't back down. He won't listen to Walt's insistence that he's "a dying man who owns a car wash" and tells Walt to his face exactly what he's done. It's not the safe thing to do, but Hank's not a safe guy. Walt uses lies and tricks to protect himself and get out of trouble, but Hank never does. He is honest and straightforward to a fault, even when it means he runs afoul of Heisenberg himself.

What was Hank thinking when he confronted Walt? He was thinking how to confront evil like a honest man, no matter what harm he brought on himself. And that's what separates him from Walt.

In comments, let us know: should Hank have confronted Walt in last night's premier?  And if you like what you've read, follow us on twitter and tweet at us.  We promise to tweet back.

Louise Hates Aaron Sorkin

But she does love irony.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Louise Can't Hate Breaking Bad, Not Even a Little Bit, Not Even At All

Each season of Breaking Bad has ended with a showdown between Walt and one of his various male rivals, all promising the most inevitable and gut-wrenching showdown of them all: Walt versus Hank, his D.E.A. agent brother-in-law.  Tonight, Breaking Bad made good on that promise.

A buyout from the meth business has not made Walt a more honest man.  He’s up to his old tricks, lying about his cancer and about Mike’s murder at the conclusion of season five.  But while Walt has descended further into a life corrupted by his own hubris and endless capacity for dissembling, Hank has remained the moral center of their story. For all his dishonesty, Walt cannot lie to Hank, and Hank cannot stop himself from throwing the truth back into Walt’s face.  In the conclusion of Blood Money, Hank lays bare the full list of Walt’s crimes, none of which Walt is able to dispute. Stripped bare of the lies, Walt pivots between his two remaining defenses: portraying himself as a doomed, helpless cancer patient, or as the powerful and unpredictable criminal we know him to be.  To no one’s surprise, he settles on the latter, setting into motion the showdown we’ve been waiting for five seasons.

Breaking Bad, for all its badassery, is not an action-packed thriller, at least not most of the time.  Usually, its installments are character-driven slow-burns, where, between sequences of action, we sit with the characters and ruminate on the moral depravity of their universe along with them.  Blood Money didn’t stray far from this pattern.  This was the Breaking Bad we’ve been waiting for, as moody, dark, and well-paced as any episode before it, and I’m absolutely up for seven more episodes just like it.

Oh, and as a postscript, Walt’s going to use the ricin to poison Jesse in an act of revenge.  You heard it here first, folks.

In the comments below, tell us what you thought of tonight’s episode, who you think is going to get ricin-ed (we swear that’s a word) and be sure to follow us on twitter at @bandlhatemovies.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Podcast #3: Good Sex, Bad Sex Edition

What do the 2009 Greek satire Dogtooth and the 2012 stripper drama Magic Mike have in common? If you said, "nothing," "I wouldn't watch either with my parents," or "Sorry, I've never heard of Dogtooth," you're right, normal, and probably have friends. Unfortunately for Beth and Louise, they watched both movies this week and wanted to talk about both, so here are discussions of Dogtooth and Magic Mike crammed together in one big, sexy, hour-long episode. Also featuring a guest appearance from Louise's cat, Flannery O'Connor. 

To subscribe or download the podcast, go the link https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/beth-and-louise-hate-movies/id685027084 and click "view in iTunes" to see our list of previous podcasts.  Or just go to iTunes, search "Beth and Louise Hate Movies" and hit "subscribe" to download this week's podcast and subscribe to future ones.

In the comments below, let us know if if you're going to go out and rent Dogtooth (we know you are).  Also, please leave us a review on iTunes!  We'll read the reviews we get on the next edition of the podcast.

#3: Good Sex, Bad Sex

What do the 2009 Greek satire Dogtooth and the 2012 stripper drama Magic Mike have in common? If you said, "nothing," "I wouldn't watch either with my parents," or "Sorry, I've never heard of Dogtooth," you're right, normal, and probably have friends. Unfortunately for Beth and Louise, they watched both movies this week and wanted to talk about both, so here are discussions of Dogtooth and Magic Mike crammed together in one big, sexy, hour-long episode. Also featuring a guest appearance from Louise's cat, Flannery O'Connor.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Bryan Cranston is a Better Alien than Henry Cavill

In honor of the glorious return of Breaking Bad,  here's Bryan Cranston as a bad guy on Power Rangers.

I'm hoping that this is actually a leaked scene from the finale in which Walter White finally tries his own product.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The First Teasers for American Horror Story: Coven are Live

The first and second teasers for American Horror Story: Coven are live, confirming AHS is once again playing to its primary (only?) strength: an amazing repertoire of very creepy imagery.  Unfortunately, the great, spooky moments at the beginning of season 1 gave way to a pretty disappointing conclusion in the finale and that disappointment turned to total disenchantment once I’d staggered through season 2, American Horror Story: Asylum.  

Because the Asylum casting director thought this man would make a great zombie-making leg-amputing Nazi scientist.

I’m cautiously optimistic about AHS:C.  Both the previous seasons started strong but had a difficult time sustaining an intriguing, coherent narrative over an entire series.  Aslylum, in particular, was  so laughably overcrowded with horror tropes (aliens! Mental hospitals! Demons! Zombies! Nazis!) that all these disparate plotlines had to be hastily solved in its disastrous penultimate episode.  If you haven’t seen it, and don’t mind it spoiled, AHS:A ends something like this: in an unintentionally hilarious sequence, James Cromwell’s character, a secret former Nazi scientist, shoots all the loose-end characters and creatures in the head and then burns himself alive in a crematorium.  In other words, in an unprompted series of murders and suicides, he mercy-kills the storyline, and then himself.  Hopefully the writers of AHS have learned from their mistakes, especially the mistake of overcrowding the plot. But since the Emmys went on to nominate all of the show’s worst performances and thus reinforce this bad behavior, I’m nervous. 

AHS has never been either of the two things I want for it to be: a madcap, balls-to-the-wall, bloody campfest, or a genuinely frightening prestige television drama.  Both the previous seasons have navigated an unsuccessful, uncomfortable middle ground between these two genres.  The casting of Patti LuPone and Cathy Bates seems to suggest they’ve fortified their holdings in both genres, which could be interesting.  On the other hand, AHS is also bringing back some of its perennially weakest performers, including the incredibly un-scary Zachary Quinto and Lily Rabe, who will probably continue to ruin any of the series’ attempts at real horror.  


I’m excited by the premise of AHS:C and its New Orleans setting.  Other than Quinto, Rabe, and Paulson, who I find to be disappointing, the rest of the cast is great, in particular the addition of newcomers Gibourney Sidibe and Angela Bassett.  Finally casting two African American actresses in this show was a necessary move, especially if AHS:C intends to recreate the American South authentically.  So with that, despite my reservations, I’ll certainly be tuning in to this season premier.  Whether I tune in past that is— like the ladies starring in this creepy new trailer— entirely up in the air.  

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!