#pulp diction

It's the summer before starting college. A summer full of secret languages, pregnant raccoons, escaped murderers, and some pretty big emotions coming to the surface for Louise and her oldest friends.

Rated T

My original character kirin, Pulp Diction. (cisgender he/him)(gay) He is Garrett the griffon's boyfriend.

The thing about immortals is that their central conflict has a relatability problem. For everything from Tuck Everlasting to Interview with a Vampire to The Good Place season 4, their driving ennui—that immortality has a downside of severe emotional lethargy—is one that while we can never understand has to somehow be addressed in the narrative. 

This is the discussion that The Old Guard circles back around to over and over, with somewhat mixed results: Here is a crew of “immortals,” led by Andy (Charlize Theron), whom we’re led to believe is very, very old. She commands Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), and new-arrival Nile (Kiki Layne), as they work to secretly right the wrongs and avoid mysterious powers who target them for their power. 

Old Guard is based on a comic book of the same name, but—unlike the studio tentpoles these days—they are not weighed down by the baggage of the property. That leaves director Gina Prince-Bythwood a whole lot of leeway to create something softer, more introspective. The fight is never that far for Andy’s crew, but the movie lets the stunt work be informed by the patient character work happening in between, allowing action to feel more like it punctuates these people’s lives than the other way around. As they sit and contemplate what they’ve done and who they’ve lost, the camera sits close, lingering on the loss that spills over their face. In the end, we are just as delighted to see Andy source a baklava by taste as we are to see her wipe out nameless SWAT members sent to abduct her. 

Theron’s ability to kick ass is, by now, well-known. Old Guard has her much more in 1,000-yard-stare, Furiosa mode than zany, Longshot “having it all” frustration. It could be tedious, but she is always balanced in the story—whether by Nile’s outsider perspective, or Nicky and Joe’s florid confession of love for one another. 

The crew, like the film, functions like clockwork, always aware of where they have to be even if they can’t quite get there. Their stunt choreography is graphic and well-done (if that’s not too gauche to say in conjunction with each other): we never lose track of who is where, meaning a single falter can speak volumes about a character’s ability. There’s sharp cuts from editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, which alternates the scope between wider action and the intimate drama undergirding the whole thing. With such artful construction, there’s no bloated feeling after so many showdowns; each fight brings new stakes, and never loses steam for the story. 

What’s so valuable about the film is how it does all this with a some-what doddering emotional core of immortality. Again, it’s just a hard drum to keep beating in a meaningful way, and the audience is likely to tire of it much faster than they would of actual immortality. But Prince-Bythwood’s direction, married to Greg Rucka’s script allows for a natural rhythm to form, an inhale-exhale of mundanity of their plight mixed with a resolve to do something about it. 

There is an indelible kindness to Miss Juneteenth. This is not to say it is a film about the ease of life: as we follow Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) trying to prep her daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) for the titular pageant, we see things constantly piled in her way. She has to raise the funds for all the pageant costs and the special dress she wants Kai to wear, her estranged husband’s bond, the power bill. Any step that Turquoise takes is laden with burden, threatening to throw the balance of her world out of whack. So Turquoise does what she always does: she makes it work. 

A film with a namesake like that could crumble under the pressure of representing all Black life. But Miss Juneteenth delightfully curtsies at it, choosing instead to narrow its focus on the life of a woman and her daughter struggling to get by. It keeps its story gentle, and its stakes relatively small, but no less important. 

While the world of Miss Juneteenth is delicate, it belies a fighter’s edge. Turquoise, we’re lead to believe, has not had the life expected of a pageant winner, working a collection of odd jobs to make ends meet. Beharie is the crux of the film, folding in a world-weariness that is still hopeful for her daughter into every interaction, every moment of solitude. It’s through her that the resilience is gently laced into the fabric of the film, radiating out to the rest of her community: All around her people are finding ways to scrape money together to get a bit of the world that’s theirs. It’s a community that runs on mutual aid, celebrating it even when it can breed individual struggle. 

“I just want something that’s mine,” Turquoise says when she turns down a suitor. It’s a galvanizing statement, but Nicole Behrarie speaks it with all the world weariness of knowing that nothing in life comes easy—not pageants, not work, and certainly not ownership of anything. It’s absolutely lovely that the biggest stake of the film comes from the relationship between mother and daughter, struggling to figure out how to connect to each other when they both just want the best. It’s a deeply kind and human perspective that benefits because it refuses any grandstanding and instead just lets the people in the film be. 

It’s a confident first showing from writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples, who gives the whole affair a sincerity that makes it more than a slight slice of life. She allows for moments of quiet in Turquoise’s life, leaving room in the specificity for identification but not judgment. There’s a naturalism to her shots—not only in the way they softly gaze in on the world, focusing on the mother/daughter pair, but in the natural colors, the subdued tone that so much of Miss Juneteenth takes. This is not the vivid desert, nor the Texas of a major city. This is small-town, hard-won Texas, for better or worse. Though Kai and Turquoise’s relationship wrinkles and rankles each other at times, they are a pair, a duo, a team against the world, in sickness and in health. 

God may be all around us, but his head of state, the pope, is typically seen from afar. The “supreme pontiff” is tucked away in the Vatican, perched up on a balcony, or else riding around in his popemobile. He is not untouchable, but he is close to it. 

“The Two Popes” allows its pontiff no such distance. Director Fernando Meirelles holds the camera in tight on Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins), as much a critical eye towards him as it can feel sympathetic towards Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), his debate partner (and future pope himself). The former represents a doubling down by the church leadership in the conservative direction. He believes there are to be no married priests, no homosexuals, and preferably every one of his cardinals would speak Latin; tradition uber alles. 

The latter is the new guard, beloved and forward-thinking. Benedict isn’t pleased about Bergoglio having either of those qualities, especially not when he was the runner up in the papal election, and now hopes to quietly resign as Archbishop. It’s a move that Benedict worries would undermine his authority, and make his papacy seem even more rocky. By 2012 (when this movie is set) his church has been rocked by the public revelation they covered up rampant sexual abuse, he struggles to connect with those around him and isolates himself for meals. His breathing is labored, next to fit and friendly Bergolio. He feels attacked from all sides.

Even the camera closes in around him. As Bergolio and Benedict banter, it hovers in close up, sometimes erratically zooming in tighter, as if to really back them up against a wall. The only time it gives ground is to place them at even greater odds with their environment—tiny, amongst the natural splendor of Italy; dwarfed by the Vatican’s artwork. 

“Two Popes” at its heart is about the way these two men shoulder the burden of those legacies. To Benedict, the church’s role is to be “infallible” in all ways. Bergolio knows that while piety may ennoble suffering, the love of the church is too great a thing to risk with punitive measurements. The fact that both men see themselves holding the line on this makes it that much harder to relinquish any movement. To those who are non-Catholics, it does not often feel like the most fruitful or even necessary discussion; what do we gain by watching church leaders debate stances within Catholicism? Why not interrogate how odd it is to live in a time with two popes? 

Sometimes it feels like there is another version of this movie that could’ve been more fun: By the end we have two men, who have both borne the brunt of the papal life, connecting over something as common as a World Cup match. It is a relationship born of mutual respect and understanding, if not agreement. Gone are their long soliloquies that sometimes strain under the weight of the conceit. And after their struggle to connect on anything before (finally landing on “inability to drink coffee late at night”) it is simple. 

In fraught times such as these it seems that our divisions matter a lot more than our similarities. Not just across party lines, but within our enclaves as well, a notion “Two Popes” intuitively understands; it is sometimes remarkable how easy it is to find no easy common ground with someone who agrees with you in almost every respect. When we finally get down to the nitty gritty of enacting policy, it becomes more important why we do what we do. Even a slightly different angle can ultimately bring a wildly different trajectory. 

In this way, the politicking of the church feels more organic and relatable: Even 2,000-year old institutions struggle with how to hold themselves accountable to those they serve. The differences of the men who would be pope can be found in the small things (their backgrounds, their musical interests), but those ultimately bubble up to inform their whole worldview. Their focus is tight because these are the inches with which a behemoth is turned. 

What do you do when your city outgrows you?

That's the question that seems to echo around at the heart of "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," the new film co-written and directed by Joe Talbot.

Talbot takes an odd eye to the site of some of Silicon Valley's biggest disruption; the camera is at times visceral -- like when it gets thrown like a rock on the beach with children -- and at other times leisurely, creating shots that feel more like slow-moving baroque paintings. It is often unhurried and unobtrusive, as if to say that it doesn't matter where the camera is positioned, it would capture the warm, soft light landing exactly right no matter where in SF it was.

Indeed, sometimes that idea seems to be the engine powering the story, following Jimmie Falls (played by Jimmie Falls, who grew up with Talbot in San Francisco, and reportedly discussed this film with him as young as being a teenager) who lusts after the Victorian house that -- as he proudly tells anyone who will listen -- his grandfather built in the 1900s.

The problem is the family doesn't own it anymore. Despite name-checking a few redlining efforts that shaped San Francisco's makeup, like internment camps, "The Last Black Man in San Francisco" isn't concerned with the exact specifics of what drove Jimmie and his family out of the historic Fillmore District; once his family could lay claim to property there, now worth millions, now they can't.

And while that may not be a universally welcomed creative decision, it's a strength of "The Last Black Man" and its storytelling: it softly draws its audience in to a story about gentrification, redlining, changing city streets with heart instead of statistics.

Perhaps no one has made a more lilting love story about what it feels like to feel not at home in your hometown; while numbers are helpful for illustrating a larger story, "The Last Black Man" brings things much closer to home with just emotional punches.

Again, Talbot's camera is key here, catching facial asides after grand statements, or inspecting the house that Jimmie and his best friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) eventually repossess, in their own way. In between shooting San Francisco's architecture with almost religious reverence, Talbot and Falls delicately draw connections between how Jimmie at once sticks out and is at home with the city equally angry and fanciful.

As he skates through the city, sweaty and wind-blown, the house itself drips, while the curtains billow out the window. He winds the board down a classically steep hill, comfortably zig-zagging while the cars and trolley around him move perfectly straight. And when he stands on the deck, proudly proclaiming his legacy to a passing segway tour, his clothes match the distinctive color palette of the house. It seems, finally, that he is home at last.

There are a lot of children's films that speak directly to common kid anxieties: emotions that feel beyond your control, what to do if you don't feel at home in your family, your misfit identity as its own superpower.

But there aren't many that speak to the uneasiness that children might pick up on from the world around them. Enter "The Kid Who Would Be King."

What is on its face another repackaging of Arthurian legend — Alex, the titular kid, finds Excalibur in a stone, and is suddenly tasked with defending and saving the world from Morgana — is actually a delightfully poignant approach to tackling the apathy and polarization that runs rampant in our cultural discourse of the moment. It not only meets kids where they are, but looks today's events right in the face and tells them to do the same.

At first it seems like mere background noise; as Alex rushes to school to rescue his best friend Bedders from a bully, he rushes past headlines that at least allude to the political mood that adults face in their Twitter feeds every day.

But Alex's own valiant quest is built on the very notion that the world has lost control — Morgana herself says she'll rise again when "hearts are hollow, and the world is leaderless." The movie works hard (but makes it look easy) to show how the greater societal mood can affect kids even when they don't necessarily know what it means.

And so "The Kid Who Would Be King" gives them something to grab onto: standing strong in the face of evil. It's more than just a new package, it's a repurposing of the mythos to speak directly to what the younger set might be picking up on from the news. And without getting too political about it (well, anymore political than calling our modern state "leaderless," I suppose) "The Kid Who Would Be King" merely asks the children to be their best.

Of course if it were that simple we wouldn't have a movie, and luckily writer/director Joe Cornish (whose past works include "Attack the Block" and "Ant-Man") knows how to ratchet up the stakes slowly and methodically.

While superhero movies are often criticized for generating fatigue around action scenes, Cornish slowly builds and adapts the mythology he's created here: Alex and his posse have four nights before Morgana will lead her attack, and so every sundown they must wage war against more and more of her wraith-like minions. It's almost video game-esque, the way it so eloquently modulates itself to "level up;" every night brings not just a new wave of forces to fight, but new techniques, lessons, and tools for the kids.

Cornish shows the same sort of easy pivot ability he does with "Ant-Man," jumping between comedy, action, and back again, creatively staging battles in a way that's both smart and comically effective.