Tangled (2010)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 16, 2025

It’s for extra-textual reasons that the poster for Disney’s Tangled hangs in the back of HL-5. For follicle-challenged me, a movie about magical flowing locks should stoke envy, not warmth, but the story behind the rectangle I face while I teach overwhelms jealousy. I have the same poster hanging at home, too.

Because my affection is so divorced from the film, I’ve tended to overlook how excellent Tangled is. With catchy songs, a winning story, and two clever character arcs, Tangled showcases Disney at its fairytale repackaging best.

After being kidnapped as an infant, Princess Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) grows up unaware of her royal bloodlines but in possession of a rare gift: her hair has revitalizing powers. Her kidnapper, the vain Mother Gothel (Donna Summer), uses that hair to remain perpetually young while securing her access by gaslighting her “daughter” into believing she can never leave their tower home. When the strapping Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi) serendipitously ends up in her living room while evading police, the two set out to answer Rapunzel’s many questions about the dangerous world beyond her cramped home.

Disney released Tangled fifteen years ago, and that age shows. Everything looks fine from a distance, but the character models look rudimentary on a larger modern TV screen. That’s a minor issue in an otherwise gorgeous film that frames lively characters with painting-esque backdrops that evoke a fairytale world. Paired with expressive voice actors, the film overcomes its aged tech, filling the screen with vivid color and a dynamic story beat via a careening screenplay by Dan Fogelman of This Is Us fame.

Watching Tangled last week for the first time in a decade, I found myself newly enlivened by the experience. The songs really do rock, and I don’t just mean forever-favorite duet “I See the Light”; “When Will My Life Begin” and “Mother Knows Best” establish the story’s stars and stakes, while “I’ve Got a Dream” subverts stereotypes in a manner far more profound than I’d ever given it credit for.

Perhaps due to our proximity to year’s end, I realized this week that Tangled is an excellent film for graduates. Rapunzel begins her story trapped inside a small place, yearning to connect and bursting with curiosity about the larger world; by the end, she’s found a new home and family by overcoming her fear and trudging forward into the unknown. There’s a scene in the film where she struggles with her newfound freedom, oscillating between giddy glee and anxious apprehension, and I thought of my classes, many of whom bounce between blow-this-pop-stand dashing out the door and nervous gnawing over the friends and familiarity they’ll flee. Through that lens, I love Tangled for the Class of 2025: Rapunzel wants change yet also fears it. But when she takes the leap, she discovers her place in the wider world waiting beyond her walls.

It’s been a long time since I looked to the future and didn’t see a familiar loop, but I don’t envy Rapunzel any more than I do our soon-to-be graduates. I appreciate the stability that comes with staring at a poster for fourteen years and centering one’s work around the mindset it once inspired.

I hope each Wildcat walking at Golden One next week finds their place and people as Rapunzel does in Tangled, and as many of us have here at Franklin High School.

 

Your Name (2016)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 9, 2025

I first watched Your Name on a bootleg anime website. “Don’t click on any banners,” the recommender instructed me. “Play it safe.”

That first viewing felt surreal. Tipped off to the gorgeous music and production design, I was unprepared for the emotionality of a story, particularly one about star-crossed lovers that blends body-swap farce, disaster flick, and coming-of-age dramedy.

Teenagers Taki and Mitsuha each have bizarre dreams about living alternate lives. When they discover those alternate lives to be one another’s—and not random dreams—their lives entwine, but fate refuses to let them connect. When danger looms for one, each endeavors to prevent devastation and maintain the possibility of one day meeting the other.

Much like Haruki Murakami’s novels, Your Name leans into a magic realism that occasionally disorients me. Some scenes have cultural components outside my perspective, leaving me sure I’m missing something significant. But Your Name wields an urgent intensity that overwhelms my questions. When there’s no real threat, the film grips me, squeezing my heart in a vice as these teens learn about each other and themselves, but things ratchet up to eleven in the second act. There’s tense drama when two not-that-distant worlds collide and the clock ticks ever closer to tragedy.

Still, the defining feature of Your Name is its beauty and artistic craft. I’m no anime connoisseur, but I’ve watched enough to confidently declare that few look and sound like this. Night skies swell with mesmerizing color, while lake water beckons cool and nourishing; the lens flare here’s so vivid you’ll wonder whether it’s actually filmed. Every shot, whether pastoral or urban, is a masterpiece, the music keeps pace with the images, and the score by RADWIMPS incites emotion with every piano keystroke. I use several instrumental pieces from Your Name in my “If You Really Knew Me” playlist for Diamond Day—they’re that soothing, that powerful.

That all of this beautiful art would support a Quantum Leap romance between teenage protagonists would seem to be a misappropriation of resources. How many times have we watched young lovers pining? It’s a trope as old as time! But Your Name is greater than the sum of its parts because it treats the Taki-Mitsuha relationship with cosmic sincerity; yes, there’s a silly body-swap premise, but the filmmakers portray it as a grand, metaphysical tether across time and space, in a way that should be laughably ridiculous but instead pulls me onto its wavelength. Your Name presents its relationships as they feel to the young people within them: epic, all-encompassing, and life-affirming. It’s refreshing.

While you can surely find it online, the streaming service Crunchyroll has Your Name available right now. I technically own the Blu-ray, but considering I loaned it out in 2018 and haven’t seen it since, you’re on your own finding this one.

Rest assured, Your Name is worth some searching.

 

Almost Famous (2000)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 2, 2025

The girl I had a crush on for most of high school was into music.

Everything she said left me spellbound, but her affection for music awed me. The bands, songs, albums, and venues changed every day, but she spoke about it as an astrophysicist does the universe. Music was everywhere. Music was everything.

And I never understood it. We were staring at the same Red Delicious, but I saw an apple and she saw divinity. For that reason—as well as her more than passing resemblance to Kate Hudson—I’ve always watched Almost Famous with a detective’s eye. I watch it every year and remember both her and that chasm between our respective hearts while listening to music (music).

William (Patrick Fugit) is the brilliant but sheltered son of a college professor (Frances McDormand). His hobby of writing about music gets him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine: write 4000 words about Stillwater, an emerging rock band led by the golden Russell (Billy Crudup) and the jealous Jeff (Jason Lee). This task sends naive William on the road, where he documents the band while discovering himself and falling in love with Stillwater’s persistent fan Penny Lane (Kate Hudson).

All these years later, Almost Famous remains my Rosetta Stone for music. In the beginning, that perspective endeared Cameron Crowe’s film to me. The open road, the wild parties, the endless charisma of a young Crudup—these were my hints, my ciphers, my decoder rings to this other state of being. If you watch Almost Famous as a story about music, there’s reward; it makes me believe that art, emotion, and rhythm form the fabric of existence. Watching now in 2025, I’ve been to concerts big and small; I’ve felt favorite songs vibrating through my ribcage from the front row and joined 70,000+ in performing the chorus for my favorite singer. If ever I could extract some of what she felt in music, now would be the time.

But I’m also older now, and watching again, I marvel at how young Hudson, Fugit, and Crudup look. Instead of feeling this time-displaced wonder, I watch three characters grapple with growing up. I once watched Russell as the “golden god” he declares himself to be, but now I see a man at a crossroads with gray threatening his temples; he’s ready to rise, but also terrified. William and Penny also straddle a critical line: they are children in a mature world, play-acting as theoretical adults extrapolated from still-developing selves. There are no deities here, only flawed, flailing people hoping the wave of music carries them to shore. That sex-drug-rock n’ roll lifestyle they encounter doesn’t appeal to me now anymore than it did while I stared doe-eyed at my crush, but that moment when anything and everything seemed possible? That still does.

Almost Famous is a frolicking coming-of-age film about music. It follows an exciting journey, it features a fantastic cast, and it fictionalizes a world I’ll never know with such vivid realism that it feels almost like I do. It’s a blast. But it’s something greater, too: we all bring something to Almost Famous separate from the film itself, tapping into the last dwindling traces of our dust-coated almosts and long-retired dreams.

That’s almost certainly not what my high school crush meant when her eyes lit up talking about music like it was everything. Or maybe, in some way, it was? Perhaps she already understood that it’s a blessing to think a noun in italics like she did music.

Or to watch a film that convinces you that you do, too.

 

Sinners (2025)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 25, 2025

I can’t tell you what genre Sinners belongs to.

Often, that’s a problem for a movie; it’s a sign the film lacks cohesive vision, that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, do, or say. But Sinners, while ambitious and chock-full of ideas, has no such struggles. Ryan Coogler’s latest work is a supernatural musical historical horror-drama, which sounds like too much but is instead much too startling, moving, and entertaining to falter. There’s something in Sinners for everybody, but without ever feeling rounded off or broad. It’s tight, it’s intense, it’s an original sensory feast.

It’s the best movie so far in 2025. I’m not sure anything else is close.

After absconding from Mississippi to work for gangsters in Chicago, twins Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) return with money, liquor, and a vision: to open a juke club at the old saw mill. After purchasing the property, recruiting the transcendent musicians Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) and Slim (Delroy Lindo), and rallying support and interest around town, the community joins forces and has the place hopping on opening night. But when Preacher Boy’s performance draws in malevolent forces, a war breaks out between the townsfolk and folk-singing vampires hell-bent on destroying what Smoke and Stack aim to build.

I’m serious when I say there’s something in this for everybody. Sinners is a period piece, and the costumes and hairstyling both are marvels. The Ludwig Göransson score, like his from the Black Panther movies and Oppenheimer, evokes time and place despite modern sensibilities, and the musical performance by Caton really does play like it might disentangle the fabric of reality. Jordan’s performances are sharp and separate, while Coogler and his team vividly render the world of Clarksdale, presenting its thriving and collaborative community while always keeping the Jim Crow tension and bigotry visible in the frame.

With that incredible foundation established, Sinners is free to be so many seemingly disparate things. In one scene, Jordan somberly visits a grave and attempts a reconciliation; in the next, he drives burning stakes into a snarling vampire. Both work. Coogler engineers incredible horror sequences, timing cuts for maximal dread, but he renders loving glances and heart-wrenching anguish with the same precision. When Sinners momentarily melts into a time-bending music video, there’s spellbinding technical achievement afoot; when it becomes a shoot ‘em up war film, the combat is clear, the rage palpable, and the action gripping. I’ve mentioned the impressive cast already, but Sinners features superb performances up and down the card. Saul Williams, Wunmi Mosaku, Hailee Steinfeld, and Jayme Lawson all play secondary roles wonderfully and memorably, and I especially loved Jack O’Connell as Merrick, the folksy vampire who preys on the community with promises of a better “life” and a small guitar.

At just over two hours, Sinners does incredible things within its reasonable runtime. That Coogler’s film drew a diverse spectrum of emotion out of me, everything from over-the-shoulder fear and fist-pumping thrills to three occasions of earned tears, says it all. Whatever you could want from a film, Sinners has it—and probably has it in spades.

At the end of the day, what Sinners is might be elusive, but who cares? What matters is this: it’s awesome.

 

Mamma Mia Here We Go Again (2018)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 18, 2025

Mamma Mia Here We Go Again begins in bold fashion: by killing off its main character.

In the opening scene, we learn Donna (Meryl Streep) has died, leaving daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and her three fathers to grieve. Although the movie made nearly $400M at the box office, many audiences found this jarring. They expected a Meryl Streep movie. Some never forgave the film. 

Their loss: this frothy, ridiculous jukebox musical of ABBA songs is a glorious slice of cinema. Armed with hilariously on-the-nose pop songs sung and danced with earnest maximalism, Here We Go Again is sugary-sweet eye- and ear-candy padding two low-stakes stories…until it pops in a mouthguard, punches you in the heart, and slurps up your tears with a crazy straw. 

Daughter Sophie (Seyfried) wants to fulfill her mother’s dream by opening a cozy island hotel, but she and her partner Sky (Dominic Cooper) are struggling. While working to launch the resort, Sophie imagines her mother’s fateful summer when a trio of steamy flings led to her conception. 

This premise is…slight. The first Mamma Mia exists, so we know the trajectory of all those earlier romances, and a hotel opening in gorgeous Croatia-pretending-to-be-Greece offers sumptuous scenery but humble drama. There’s never a moment when you doubt all will work out for everyone involved; even when ABBA’s music dips into legato, it explodes into a peppy number four measures later. It’s a jukebox musical! There’s a ceiling on the intensity when stitched-together Swedish pop blankets the film.

But Here We Go Again has two aces hiding up its sleeve that make it magical. The first is Lily James, playing the young Donna while she canoodles through Europe. James glows in every scene, physically and musically; she’s doing an impression of Streep’s character (who wasn’t exactly deep herself), but she plays the role with radiant cheer and unblinking conviction. You end the movie in love with James and wholly convinced she’s destined for stardom. 

The second thing the movie has is intense, huge-hearted emotion. Underneath all the costumes and choreography, Mamma Mia 2 is about motherhood, and it lands its reverence for moms with devastating precision. In the second half, when Sophie’s life changes dramatically, her and her late mom’s stories pull up in parallel. It’s then that Streep appears, ushering in the waterworks. I saw this in theaters with my mom, and though each of us had seen it already, that viewing together meant so much more. This is a movie I think about on Mother’s Day. 

Even if the emotion doesn’t get you or you’re some mom-hating curmudgeon who finds Bambi hilarious, everyone’s having so much fun on screen I dare you not to tap your foot. I’m not a huge fan of ABBA’s music, but I know this soundtrack by heart and may have even dabbled in a dance number inspired by it. The movie offers less nuance than birthday cake, but I love birthday cake.

And I love this movie.

 

Longlegs (2024)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 11, 2025

When I watched Longlegs on opening night last summer, I sat in an invested audience. All of us were in sync: gasping in unison, lurching in our seats as though tandem marionettes. Psyched for the latest “scariest movie in years” contender, this crowd paid rapt, anxious attention from the oddly aspect-ratio’d opening until the bitter end.

Directed by Osgood Perkins, the son of the star of Psycho, Longlegs works because it builds on the serial killer story made famous by The Silence of the Lambs. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is our Clarice, an aloof FBI rookie with a knack for patterns, and she’s hunting a ritualistic killer (Nicolas Cage) who goes by Longlegs in coded missives left at the scene. The case is tricky—Longlegs seemingly induces gruesome murders—and it hits close to home for Harker, but the pursuit of the man responsible proceeds as you’d expect.

What elevates Longlegs is that it’s in conversation with Silence of the Lambs but never settles into tired homage. Perkins litters his film with unsettling elements, leaving audience members spinning a roulette wheel of fear. In one stretch near the midpoint, Harker and his boss (a stately Blair Underwood) explore an abandoned farmhouse, unearth an uncanny valley doll, and interview a child-like woman corrupted by shadowy forces. Across its runtime, you’ve got three or four incredible jump scares, gorgeous Dutch-angled cinematography, and a game-for-it Cage dialed up to eleven as Michael Jackson-meets-Freddy Kruger. The whole time, you feel this throbbing dread because you know Longlegs is going somewhere, and even though you have no idea where that is, you’re confident it’ll be bad.

Granted, this kitchen sink cookie approach to horror has its drawbacks. Longlegs is a busy movie; none of its threads disrupt the twisting tension, but not all perfectly line up on closer inspection. The artistry of the elevated horror breaks the immersion at times, scratching my cInEmA itch when it aims for my adrenal gland, and Cage at eleven is really more like seventeen, which some viewers reasonably find grating. I love the result—this made my top ten for 2024—but I know that it’s not a perfect movie, even setting aside that some simply can’t stomach horror’s nightmare fuel in the first place.

My best sales pitch for Longlegs might be this: I think the film plays like a great rollercoaster. When you watch it in a dark room, absorbing its every rise and fall, your breaths quicken. You leap when Harker leaps; you shield your eyes when the heavy axe swings. But when the whole thing’s over, you’re energized. You survived a tightly calibrated, harrowing thrill ride. That’s only possible with fantastic filmmaking.

I’d call Longlegs fantastic filmmaking.

Longlegs is available to stream on Hulu and rent on most platforms.

 

Draft Day (2014)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 4, 2025

 

Draft Day is among the worst movies that I love.

The script is clunky, cliche-ridden, and borderline nonsensical. Costner’s performance is among his least charismatic. The romance and workplace dynamics have aged poorly, football’s most moribund franchise centers the thing, and the entire plot collapses if you throw a minimally critical eye at it.

And yet, I love Draft Day. I adore the ridiculous fan-fiction lunacy of this glorified NFL marketing device.

Sonny Weaver Jr. (Costner) is GM of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, and he’s got personal and professional conflicts colliding on the biggest day of his year. One week after losing his father, Sonny receives an ultimatum from the Browns’ owner: “Make a splash” at the NFL Draft or find alternate employment. Pushed to the brink, Sonny starts wheeling and dealing, leading to chaos as the first pick he’s just acquired approaches.

While I stink at March Madness, I know the NFL Draft. I’ve been a late-April diehard since middle school, and I even won the NFL’s Predict the Pick contest in 2008, meaning the league flew me to NYC for the NFL Draft one year later. The film evokes my experience: I’ve sat in Radio City Music Hall, I’ve watched the colorful screens, and I’ve waved to Mel Kiper Jr. Draft Day is, for me, nostalgic—for the place, for the event, for the era when I knew so much about sports I could actually win a contest.

Alas, that special connection is a gift and curse for the movie: I love what it harkens to but also see through the artifice. Draft Day is a sincere movie portraying the event with epic import, but it’s silly, half-baked fan fiction. While diehards like me devour the drama of the Falcons picking Michael Penix after signing Kirk Cousins, Draft Day’s writers know they need human drama to reach everyone else, so they tell a thrilling story…that violates so much of how the event works that it offends me, the only person who would eagerly watch the thing.

Still, there’s something satisfying about Draft Day. It’s a comfort movie that sounds like an event I love, and it delivers a madcap final act of sheer lunacy that induces eye-rolling chills. I know I’m watching something with the intellectual richness of Cool Ranch Doritos, but I’m obsessed with an event where 22-year-olds get hats and sign contracts for more than I’ll make in my entire career. Perhaps the delirium of Draft Day is, secretly, just right for the occasion?

Draft Day is a ridiculous head-shaker, but it’s my ridiculous head-shaker. I love the thing, warts and all.