The Book of Lieh Tzŭ has a parable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved The Mountains”. A nonagenarian begins hauling away the mighty T’ai-hsing and Wang-wu mountains, one bucket of rocks at a time. A bystander laughs at this futile task, but the Foolish Old Man Chides him. It’s not futile. His children will continue digging when he’s gone, and so will their children. God hears the Foolish Man’s words, and is moved by his faith. He sends two angels to carry the mountains away on their backs.

It’s symbolic and isn’t meant as a psychological portrait, but I wonder what the Foolish Old Man’s children thought of the idea. Shackled to the dream of an old man; knowing that even after their father has died, they’ll still be be there, slaving at the mountainface, watching it subside with torturous slowness, before they die in turn and their children continued their fate.

And what would they do when they finished? Hundreds of years from now, will their descendents lift the last flake of rhyolite, granite, or chert from a flat plain…and go utterly mad with realization? Understand at once, with the force of a crashing wave, that this was for nothing? “The man we did this for is dead. He died long ago. He knew he’d never live to see his task fulfilled. It was never about the mountains. It was about making us suffer.”

Whiplash is an intense and terrifying film a young jazz drummer and his abusive bandleader. The kid tries to rationalize their relationship as something more than it is. A stepping stone on the road to greatness. A struggle to overcome. In the end, though, there’s no point except pain.

Technically, Whiplash is phenomenal, with fantastic filming, acting, and editing. Shots are almost blood-freezing in their brilliance—JK Simmons raises a hand to deliver a count-in, and the camera orbits it in a slow arc, allowing that raised hand to become the center of the universe. The presence of “Caravan” on the score inspired me to dig out my old Duke Ellington charts and re-learn part of it on bass.

But in the end, Whiplash’s technical merits recede from memory, leaving a raw, stark, and sad story about a kid trapped by the prison bars of a drumset, unable to leave.

Andrew Neiman is a young drummer at the fictional Schaffer Academy. He’s hand-picked to join the band of Terence Fletcher: a band leader who has the rep of demanding perfection from his students. Neiman sees this as a way to fast-track his career, and earn the respect of his parents. But Fletcher turns out to be a cruel, sadistic monster. He intersperses tirades and bullying with insincere little pep talks (“Listen, the key is to just relax. You’re here for a reason!”). He pushes kids to the breaking point, and then doles out just enough fatherly kindness to stop them from quitting.

Neiman is a naive, tragic figure. He’s wandered into the jaws of a monstrous, oblique game, against a man who is very good at playing it. Throughout the film, he resists the realization that Fletcher’s an enemy, not a mentor. Even at the end (when he’s won a victory of sorts), we sense he might get sucked back in by Fletcher’s glib charm. I found this believable. Only sinners and fools go to hell, so Neiman has to believe he’s secretly in heaven.

I’ve heard Whiplash described as a study of futility, like Werner Herzog’s “Conquest of the Useless“. But in this case, it’s worse than there simply being no point. Fletcher has a clear goal: to make Neiman and others cry and feel helpless and maybe commit suicide. Some people enjoy taking all the pains of the world, and other people enjoy giving them.

Fletcher’s excuses for his behavior—he’s pushing kids to achieve greatness, like how Jo Jones made Charlie Parker great!—is so thin you could use it to paper the head of Neiman’s snare drum. He has no actual interest in music or art. On at least one (and maybe two?) occasions, we see him knowingly sabotage a performance in front of a live audience to embarrass a musician. He likes hurting kids. That seems to be his thing.

Oddly, that’s how the movie works, too. Writer-director Damien Chazelle wrote the film based on a negative experience he had in a high school jazz band. But Whiplash isn’t really about collegiate jazz, or even music. Adam Neely, in a review of the film, observes that it’s actually a sports movie. Every plot point and character arc (Fletcher as the gruff coach, Neiman as the talented rookie, the competition at Lincoln Center as “the big game”) would make more sense for, say, NCAA Football. It features stylistic tropes that don’t really make sense. Like having extra musicians sitting around, turning the pages, hoping they’ll get a turn to play. This is because the movie needs an analog for “being on the bench”.

But there’s also a weird king of logic to it. Once Neiman is in Fletcher’s kingdom, the world starts to change. The rules become blurry. Is he playing too fast or too slow? Is he counting 215 beats per minute? He doesn’t know. Too late, he realizes it doesn’t matter at all what he’s doing wrong: Fletcher is hazing him. The rules are weird, arbitrary, and completely divorced from any sort of ground truth.

But reality has a way of coming back to you. We see Fletcher near the end of the film, and he’s reduced to a diminished, pathetic shadow of himself. We see him tinkling some lame cod-jazz on a piano at a shitty West End bar, and he finally stands revealed as what he is: a talentless hack, pushing students to achieve something he could never do himself.

He talks to Neiman (this time, as equals, not as master and student), and defends his teaching methods as a necessary evil. Students need tough love, because otherwise we get more “Starbucks jazz” albums. Which is bitterly ironic: the music we just heard him play was the epitome of “Starbucks jazz”. Fletcher, in a way, is running from his own shadow. Neiman is haunted by the idea that he might be a failure waiting to happen. For Fletcher, it’s worse. There’s no “waiting to happen” for him, he knows he’s a failure. This isn’t to say we ever feel sympathy for Fletcher. But his character does gain a certain depth.

JK Simmons plays Fletcher really hard. Too hard? It’s hard to believe that a teacher at a prestigious college would fling metal chairs at students’ faces, call them faggots, call a Jewish student a “hymie”, etc, etc.

Is the Schaffer Academy is publically funded? Asking a female student if she got her chair because she’s cute sounds like a great way to get the school buttfucked by a hundred-thousand-dollar Title XI decision. Nobody could afford to hire Terence Fletcher in real life, no matter how talented he is. He would bankrupt any school he worked for.

(My own band leader teaches high school. I asked him what the current climate is, regarding teachers touching students. His response was “Are you kidding me? We’re not even allowed to pat our students’ bodies on the back to say ‘well done'”.)

But the story is tightly constructed, and has a tendency to coil back on itself in interesting ways. The legendary “rushing or dragging” scene, where Neiman has to decide whether he was too slow or too fast (with Fletcher slapping him in the face), and finally admits he was rushing. This lines up with metronomic precision with a later scene, where Neiman rushes, and pays dearly for it.

Yet the world of the film has a slight gauzy unreality to it, as if it’s stuck halfway in the birth canal of Chazelle’s imagination. Characters don’t always behave how real people would behave. But it points to something true. Of the many lies told to children, one of the worst is “It’s for your own good”. No, often it’s for their own good. Many parents pressure their children to become a lawyer—a miserable career path, with some of the lowest rates of reported happiness of any profession. Why? Well, having a child as a lawyer makes them look like successes as parents. It has nothing to do with the child’s happiness at all, only their own. Neiman is caught in this parental trap. He grasps a dream, finds it has sharp edges, and keeps gripping until his hands come to pieces.

“So good I’m surprised it’s not better” sums up how I feel about most Pixar films. They’re so polished that they seem kind of dead: expensive show dogs that have been so primped and groomed that nobody noticed the poor animal expired during its last blow-dry.

Soul is an exercise in box-ticking. It’s hip, diverse, and relevant: featuring an African American protag near the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and showcasing jazz music when that was having a mainstream moment, too (Whiplash, La-La Land, Adam Neely…). It has an “high concept” tilt, addressing themes of life, death, and fate. It has cute characters that can be turned into toys. It has leavens serious moments with jokes at the correct places. It reaches for the stars, but also has characters that are just like you. It does everything right.

But jazz has something called “blue notes”, where a note is bent a little out of correct pitch. Magic happens on the edges, on the fault lines, on the places where Discordia fights Aneris. Soul really needed blue notes.

I thought the beginning was wonderful. A part-time music teacher is offered a) a permanent position at a job he hates, and b) a seat with a famous jazz quartet. His mom wants him to take the steady paycheck, while he wants to follow his dream (although we wonder whether his dream working for the tyrannic band leader will be as fun as he imagines.) Joe Gardner feels real in a way that most Pixar heroes don’t.

On his way to purchase a suit for the big gig, he falls down a manhole, and enters a permenant vegetative state. His spirit emerges in a kind of celestial mail-sorting room, full of souls. Some are departing for the hereafter, others are going to inhabit newly-born infants. He hatches a plan to sneak back to his body on Earth, using a rebellious soul called 22.

The movie becomes a bit too talky for its own good. A lot of time is spent explaining the mechanics by which souls operate (literalizing things that should be left unsaid), and this is when Soul stopped possessing one. As soon as characters started infodumping about the rules of their fictional universe I became very bored. This should be the part of the movie where it detonates. Joe has essentially died. He’s at the point where the chains of words and language break, the ceiling of the universe is flung open, and he’s staring up infinity’s tunnel. The possibilities should be endless.

Instead, the story gets jammed up in its own turning gears (souls must visit special “Personality Pavilions” to infuse them with personality traits, but there’s also a critical “Spark” that can only be found in the Hall of Everything, and once they have both the Spark and the Personality they can receive an Earth Pass, which allows them to…). I felt like I’d arriving late for a D&D session and the Dungeon Master insisted on explaining the minutia of the past three hours before I was allowed to play.

The best Pixar movie may have been the first. Toy Story had nearly no exposition. Toys are alive. What more do you need? Later Pixar movies held your hand a little, but there was often a reason for it. In Monsters Inc, the joke was that these freaky monsters are living in a rules-heavy bureaucracy, so it sort of made sense. But here? I think Pixar has forgotten how to make movies any other way.

Pete Docter’s 2015 monster Inside-Out seems to have set the tone for latter-day Pixar. A minimalist abstraction, with five tons of exposition clinging to its bones. It might have seemed wonderfully simple to have “anger” and “sadness” as characters. But they couldn’t figure out a way to tell a story visually, so they had to add so much in-universe lore that the movie suffered greatly for it. Docter wanted his film to fly so badly that he crushed it under the weight of huge steel wings, and something similar happens here.

This aside, the movie’s stylistic choices are almost uniformly great. The New York setting is colorful, and the jazz scenes are good. In my opinion, jazz is far more fun to play than to listen to, but it’s also enjoyable watching people play it, even when they’re animated characters.

The jokes are well-judged, with only an extended body-swap gag getting aborted before it grew too irritating. The angels look fantastic. Weird glowing coathangers, or yin-and-yang collisions of positive and negative space. Very creative stuff.

The souls themselves are sickeningly cute moppets with huge eyes, so clearly designed to be plushy dolls that you can almost see a Made in China tag hanging off them. Like much of the movie’s choices, it’s correct, but maybe not exactly good. Part of why I’m cold on Pixar films is that they all seem like a marketing team was set loose on them before a writer ever was. Antz was better than A Bug’s Life, despite its flaws. I don’t want to watch 90-minute toy commercials.

I admire Soul more than I like it. Once, as a child, I tried to make a bowl out of modeling clay. I didn’t know that potters use a wheel, so I tried to painstakingly create the same kind of smoothness with my fingers. I spent hours patting and prodding and shaping clay, until it was covered in my fingerprints. The result was a correct but loveless pot that I couldn’t stand to look at. It hurt me, because I remembered the tediousness of the process.

Soul has a similar affect. When I look at it, I don’t see a movie so much as compacted effort. Dozens of creative people sweating over every decision, trying to create something universally marketable and appealing, afraid to take any risks at all. Afraid that someone, somewhere, won’t like what they’ve made. Consumed by neurosis that they’ll have done the slightest thing wrong. The jazz theme is surface-deep: Pixar in 2020 is as far from Miles Davis as you can get.

The heart-wrenching story of Jack, a simple farmhand who can talk to animals, Forrest Gump gets worse every year. I am not the first to notice its entropic quality: the way it lies rotting in cinematic history like a corpse reeking inside a bog. The movie fluxes and changes as time squeezes its hand, but never in a good way. Its skin grows putrid, its features grows sunken, its bones shine through gaps in its deliquescent flesh. Long, slow death is pulling it down and then tearing it apart. Six Academy Awards, seven hundred million dollars at the box office, and now this. The movie’s hollow, rictus-grinning skull is an urgent warning: you can take none of this with you.

I thought it was a great movie once, when I was eight or nine (I watched it with Mom and Dad, they they fast-forwarded through the part in the burlesque club).

Another thing I did when I was eight or nine was create a superhero called Yarn Dog. He was a dachshund who could rapidly knit complex objects. In one of Yarn Dog’s adventures, the villain hurls him off a cliff, so he whips out a trusty ball of yarn, gets clackin’ with his needles, and knits a fully-functioning helicopter around his falling body. Moments before he hits the ground, he grabs the throttle and flies his yarn helicopter away into the sunset which is actually a profound metaphor for

I hate Forrest Gump. It’s so bad. Its main storytelling choice—to tell the history of late 20th century America from the perspective of a mentally-handicapped man—is tactical: Forrest is too slow to form opinions on anything happening around him, which means the writers don’t have to form one, either.

Forrest Gump takes no stances, advances no arguments, makes no interpretations. It is a movie about nothing. It’s a rapid-fire montage of historic moments (Vietnam, Watergate), with Forrest Gump standing around looking oblivous. I wonder what are you supposed to “get” out of Forrest Gump? That the sixties happened? I already knew that.

This movie thinks you’re abysmally stupid. Every plot point is explained to death, reanimated using a Necronomicon, then explained some more. The first (but by no means last or worst) example comes when Forrest’s mother tries to enroll him in school. The principal says it’s impossible, because his IQ is 75.

This doesn’t need further exposition. Even if you don’t know how IQ scores work, you can infer from context that Forrest is unintelligent. We get it. It’s not necessary for the principle to pull out a chart, and indicate for the audience where Forrest is on the distribution.

While that might seem like a small complaint, it exhibits one of the film’s main problems: it never knows when to stop. Whether it’s explaining the plot, telling a joke, or making a cultural reference, Forrest Gump always goes too far, spoiling its desired affect with crassness.

It’s not enough that Forrest met Elvis as a kid. He inspires Elvis’s stage moves, too! It’s not enough that he stays at the Watergate hotel. He also exposes the plot! It’s not enough that he meets John Lennon. He basically writes the lyrics to “Imagine”, live on TV!

(The film makes Lennon look like an imbecile, with the questions he asks Forrest. “No possessions? No religion?” Lennon had been involved in revolutionary politics for years by that point. Surely he’d heard of China.)

By the end of the film, it’s absurd that Forrest isn’t the most famous person in America, recognized wherever he goes. Literally two dozen things have happened to him that would be the coolest-ever event in the life of the average man. He’s received the Medal of Honor, competed at a historic international sporting event event, foiled a conspiracy, met multiple US Presidents, and that’s just for openers. In real life, a guy from Milwaukee became a national craze just by looking a little like Hugh Jackman.

The movie has no weight or believability behind it. The image of a drifting feather kind of sums up the film.

But it’s a comedy film. So I shouldn’t analyze it seriously or literally at all.

This is the “clown nose on, clown nose off” defense, described by Kevin D Williamson here—when a comedian starts doing serious political commentary, they invariably cover up their mistakes by putting a clown nose on and reminding you that they’re just a comedian.

The fact is, Forrest Gump is only barely a comedy film. It’s sanctimonious Oscar bait, lightened only by Forrest’s oblivious commentary, and huge sections of it are played completely straight.

Sometimes the movie’s just laughable. At the start, Forrest is wearing leg braces, but when he gets chased by some comical “gimme your lunch money” movie bullies, he starts running, and the braces dramatically explode from his legs in a thousand pieces. It has the air of a superhero transformation, like the Incredible Hulk tearing apart a shirt. Those braces couln’t have been cheap. My only thought was “now his mom will have to fuck the orthopedic doctor as well as the school principal.”

A big part of the film’s credit was the special effects—with Robert Zemeckis directing, how could they not be excellent?

But looking back, the effects are quite hit or miss. The effect where they remove Lt Dan’s legs looks great. The entire Vietnam sequence looks fake to me. Rain is generated by a hose held above the actors (you can clearly see no rain is falling in the background). The monsoon season ends, and moments later, the leaves and grass look bone-dry. Forrest narrowly escapes multiple thermobaric bomb explosions…and immediately has a conversation with a wounded soldier? His eardrums haven’t ruptured from the overpressure blasts?

Other shots composite Forrest into archival footage. But it looks “wrong” in a way your brain subconsciously (if not consciously) picks up on. As I’ve said before, people automatically position their bodies to accomodate the presence of others, and it’s obvious when this isn’t happening. You can’t just digitally insert a new human being who wasn’t there in real life. He will conspicuously not belong in the scene.

There were some parts I liked. Lt Dan has a character and a personality. The joke about Forrest making millions investing in “some kind of fruit company” was funny.

But these gains are erased by the soap opera plotline involving Jenny. She’s just a poor moppet, a collection of shameless cliches. An abused child, a drug addict, and on and on.

Here is where it comes closest to actually saying something about the values of the 60s counterculture, and the way—according to some—they were either hollow, or swiftly sold out by the hippies themselves. (I saw a funny joke on Twitter: a picture of Woodstock, captioned with “somewhere in that crowd is the man who invented ATM fees”). But Jenny is such a manipulative cliche of a character that this falls flat.

Forrest Gump does provide an interesting illustration of something.

The “Waluigi Effect” in generative AI describes the tendency for a language model to give the opposite output than expected. Read it for technical details, but basically, if you specifically ask an AI to be smart, you’ve accidentally made it more likely to say something stupid. This is because [positive trait] and [opposite of positive trait] exist close in probability space, and when you push the model toward one, you inevitably push it toward the other.

But this happens to humans, too. What is “Imagine” by John Lennon except the Waluigi Effect? It is clearly trying to be profound and deep and meaningful, but it just sounds really trite. It wants to unite humanity, but it’s surprisingly mean and catty (John’s smug “I wonder if you can…”) It rejects religion, but strives for the stateliness of a secular hymn.

Forrest Gump is an even better case. It wants picturesque authenticity but feels tinny and fake from end to end. I have never seen a movie so utterly the opposite of what it thinks it is than Forrest Gump.