Tag: movies

The Toxic Avenger, still the world’s most disgusting superhero

For a series that literally stinks of radioactive ooze, the Toxic Avenger sure has had a long half-life. 

The Toxic Avenger movies are often objectively terrible films, working hard to be as nasty and dumb as they can be, and yet the franchise has somehow lasted more than 40 years and now is reborn in a moderately big-budget Hollywood movie.

I first came across 1984’s The Toxic Avenger at a high-school late-night party devoted to cheesy movies like Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes and Night of the Lepus. It’s an airhorn blast of crude comedy and gore, the story of a screeching nerd who’s bullied relentlessly and falls into a vat of toxic waste, transforming him into the Toxic Avenger, “New Jersey’s first superhero.” Armed with a janitor’s mop, he dispatches crowds of bad guys in nastily inventive ways, with splattery violence and slapstick lowbrow humour all crashing together into a swampy mess. 

Within the first 10 minutes of The Toxic Avenger a bunch of thugs run down an innocent teenager on a bike in sick, lingering detail, played for comedy, and you know what kind of trash-flick you’re in for. It feels like the only proper way to watch these movies is on a battered VHS tape in your Mom’s basement, hopped up on Nerds candy and Jolt cola. 

Troma, the studio behind Toxie, made its calling card its splattery punk-rock ethos B-movie horror comedies, calculated to outrage and offend.

 And yet, there’s a bit of ugly charm to some of the Toxic Avenger series if you’re in the right twisted frame of mind. It’s got this “let’s put on a show” amateur enthusiasm that evokes the days I’d spend as a pre-teenager hacking together terrible comedy cassette tapes with pals, or scribbling my early comic books. It’s the appeal of doing something, anything, even if it isn’t very good.

The first movie is so in-your-face with its offensiveness and broad comedy that it’s curiously watchable, but the three sequels spewed out from 1989 to 2000 are generally a case of diminishing returns (and they’re also all way too long – 87 minutes is the scientifically correct length for this kind of movie, not nearly two hours).

Toxic Avenger Part II takes our hero to Japan for some amusingly silly equal opportunity offensiveness, while in the proudly inept Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, our hero battles Satan himself. Both of these movies – shot at the same time and even oddly duplicating a few scenes – are choppily directed, terribly acted and gleefully stupid, although the sleazy sheer malice of the first movie fades away for a bumbling sloppiness. I gather Troma was trying to “mainstream” Toxie a bit – heck, there was even a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon and a Marvel comic book of this most un-mainstream saga. 

Ultimately, the twistedness all comes roaring back with 2000’s Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV which is easily the grossest, most offensive movie of the franchise, ramping everything up to 11. A mad story that claims to be the only “real sequel,” it’s about Toxie and his evil alternate universe doppelgänger, and overflows with bodily fluids, gratuitous nudity, rape, rancid racial stereotypes and gore, to the point where the satire gets pretty lost in the sheer ugliness. Maybe I’m a snowflake, but lingeringly gross scenes showing a school shooting in a classroom of mentally disabled students or riffing on racist hate crimes just go too damned far. I get what they’re going for, but not sure I want to go there. Citizen Toxie is definitely an experience, but also an endurance test for most people. 

After the nihilistic stench of Citizen Toxie it’s strange indeed to see the character “redeemed” in a way with the new moderately gentler, family-focused reboot.

It’s strange to contrast director Mason Blair’s The Toxic Avenger 2025 with its predecessors. It’s far more of an actual movie, for one thing, with decent special effects and recognisable stars like Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood. It’s got gore and a few raunchy bits but held up against the sleazy originals, it feels positively tame. While it follows a similar arc – bullied Winston Gooze (Dinklage) is transformed into a working-class deformed hero taking on corrupt businessmen – it’s all slicker and less eccentric. 

There’s a core sense of sadism to much of the Troma Avenger years that simply doesn’t fly for many viewers in 2025. It’s funny to me that apparently the new Toxic Avenger, which was first released in 2023 but only now hitting cinemas, couldn’t find a distributor because it was “unreleasable” due to violence. Honestly, it’s about 1/10th as offensive and gross as Citizen Toxie. Times change. 

Toxic 2025 is still a pretty good time, although ultimately it’s far more conventional and lacks the outsider-art reek of the original movies. In the first four Toxic Avenger movies, everyone is pretty loathsome, even our hero (the incredibly unappealing performance by Mitch Cohen as the nerdy pre-Toxie in the first movie honestly makes you want to root for the bullies). It’s a world that feels tangibly rotten, with cackling moronic extras, gibbering villains and bumbling anti-heroes. 

Dinklage’s excellent performance here fills you with actual sympathy for his Toxie, and his relationship with his bullied son (a great Jacob Tremblay) gives the movie some serious heart, while Bacon and Wood have a lot of fun playing the sneering bad guys. There’s righteous vengeance and over-the-top villains (my favourite was the endlessly parkouring thug), but also a bit of a moral about acceptance. 

I can’t say I would ever feel the urge to rewatch anything but the first and most recent Toxic Avenger movies, to be honest, but I am oddly captivated by the strange longevity of Toxie’s warped world, where everything is shit, even the superheroes. The original Toxic Avenger series doesn’t have a serious bone in its body, mocking everything from the blind and disabled to the very concept of heroism. The new movie ends with a father bonding with his defiantly different son, on a kind of elegant note of optimism despite all the chaos that came before. 

As nice as all that feels – and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you want to wash your hands afterwards like the Troma movies do – it’s also not very Toxic, I guess. Then again, the world is a toxic enough place these days as it is, isn’t it? Perhaps a gentler Toxic Avenger is the hero we need. 

Universal Monster endings: The Creature Walks Among Us

I’ve written many a time before about my love of the classic 1930s-1950s Universal Horror monster movies, which almost a century on still cast a spooky spell. And my sentimental favourite has always been Creature From The Black Lagoon, whose 1954 debut came at the end of Universal’s classic run.

Creature is in my mind an almost perfect old-school horror movie – it’s got exploration of the unknown, man meddling where he shouldn’t, a sexy lady in a swimsuit and a monster who is ultimately a tragic figure. In a tidy 79 minutes it tells a classic beauty and the beast story with a kind of haunting elegance (especially those gorgeous underwater scenes) and gives us one of cinema’s most memorable monster designs. I’ve watched it countless times and get a kick out of it every time.

It’s a shame the two sequels never felt very essential, although in one choking last gasp, the franchise finale The Creature Walks Among Us is almost a good movie. 

Universal Horror movies were the best, but they weren’t usually very good at sequels. Other than the original Frankenstein, which boasted great follow-ups in Bride Of and Son Of Frankenstein, most of them fumbled at sequels. They foolishly didn’t bring back the iconic Bela Lugosi for a sequel to 1931’s Dracula until 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which while fun, isn’t exactly top-tier. Lon Chaney Jr’s melancholy Wolf Man ended up as a supporting player against other monsters after the first Wolf Man, Claude Rains’ Invisible Man died and sequels to that were bland bores, while Boris Karloff’s Mummy was reborn again and again without Karloff in a series of increasingly silly riffs. By monster mash House of Frankenstein – where the monster barely does a thing until the final 5 minutes – everything was increasingly played out.

A clutching claw at the heart of civilization! They don’t make tag lines like they used to.

The same problem befell the Creature of the Black Lagoon, who was enough of a hit to come back for two more sequels. The uninspired 1955 quickie Revenge Of The Creature is basically a remake with a Florida aquatic park setting and a brief cameo by Clint Eastwood in his movie debut. 

The last sequel – and the last of Universal’s classic monster era in general – was 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, which took an intriguing idea and dropped the ball, but left us just enough hints to imagine a much better movie. 

In this one, the Creature is once again captured by pesky humans – but this time by a fanatical scientist, Dr Barton (Jeff Morrow), who wants to experiment on him, turning him into from an aquatic creature into a more human organism. (The pseudo-science explanation given is this would somehow prepare humans for interstellar travel.) The Creature is captured but badly burned, which gives Barton the excuse to alter his genetics. Of course, being a monster movie, things go badly for everyone in the end.

It’s an interesting idea but the execution is limp – far too much time is spent on irritating scientist Barton’s marriage troubles, and the Creature feels like an afterthought in his own movie. Also, the end game appears to simply be to set the Creature up in a kind of petting zoo enclosure, so not sure what all that science was really for. 

In the encyclopaedic book The Creature Chronicles by Tom Weaver – an insanely comprehensive green-scaled bible that’s a must for any fan of the movies – it’s revealed that earlier drafts had a fair bit more Creature action and debate over what it means to play god with such a being. Little of that shows in the finished movie, which is workmanlike and slow and padded out with dull humans. Only the Creature himself – despite the alterations, still an unforgettable look – is worth paying attention to. The Creature’s sad journey – given short shrift in the film – is the movie that should’ve been made.

There is something haunting about the repeated images of the mutilated monster, who now has very human eyes, reduced from a sleek underwater god to a hulking, out of place figure in a world he doesn’t fit in. Creature Walks is a monster movie with very little monster action – the final minutes kick in with the Creature framed for a murder by nasty Dr Barton – who he then, of course, kills himself. The Creature evades punishment, unusually for a monster movie – he is last seen lonesomely on a beach, advancing towards the ocean, where in his altered form he will surely die. Is this the end of the Creature? It’s a pleasantly open-ended and evocative ending. 

And even though the movie is a pale imitation of the original Creature and much better Universal Monster movies, those final moments feel like they could sum up the appeal of classic monsters in general – a misunderstood creature alone, on a beach, staring at the sea, trying to find a place to belong. 

Why Eddington is the movie America deserves in 2025

Look, the world kind of lost its mind in 2020, didn’t it? And we’re all still dealing with that. 

We’re all very much living in the aftermath of the pandemic, which seemed to break apart the bonds we imagined held the world together. Everyone’s got a relative or friend whose opinions seemed to go down weird rabbit-holes, or topics you just don’t discuss anymore. Covid, culture wars, digital disinformation – a dozen tangled threads all seemed to bloom and spread beginning in 2020. 

But so far, there haven’t been a lot of major motion pictures looking at this age of weirdness. We need satire and storytelling to process the societal earthquakes that hit us. After Watergate in the 1970s we saw a surge in paranoid cinema, while it took America until the 1980s to really unpack its Vietnam traumas with films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born On The Fourth of July and the like.  There were even a slew of (mostly kind of dire) 9/11 reenactment movies after those 2001 attacks or smarter ones like The Hurt Locker processing how terrorism spreads.

But on Covid, lockdowns and the fractured, polarised world that’s come out of it all, Hollywood’s been pretty silent. Ari Aster’s new film Eddington – a black comedy Western pandemic dystopian frenzy of a film – boasts two Oscar winners and a hot director and seems to be the first major Hollywood take on the year everything went, for lack of a better word, batshit. 

Even now, I don’t like thinking back to the strangled tenseness of the pandemic years, to masks fogging up my glasses, to queues at the supermarket, social distancing and the lurking rise of protest movements galore and the latching on to conspiracies. No matter what your views are on how it’s all turned out, it ain’t a time anyone fondly remembers now. 

The pandemic still feels raw, the culture war battles are still raging strong under Trump 2.0, so is it really time for satire? Yet Eddington feels like the movie America deserves in 2025. It’s shocking and slapstick in equal measures. “More distance will make it easier to laugh,” the LA Times’ Amy Nicholson wrote in her positive review of Eddington, and I can’t disagree.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross, a tense conservative who doesn’t care for masks and social distancing and who despises the town’s charming mayor (Pedro Pascal) and decides to run against him. His wife (Emma Stone) is going down online rabbit holes and Joe feels like everything in his world is changing. Black Lives Matter protests come to town, Covid is here, and big tech is making a play for a giant start-up facility in town. Because this is an Ari Aster movie, and Aster is the patron saint of dread in film right now, everything escalates very quickly into a violent, unpredictable mess. 

Joe posts Facebook campaign videos saying “we need to free each others hearts” but soon starts ranting about sexual predators and driving around in a truck plastered with slogans like “Your (sic) being manipulated.” Pascal’s perky mayor slaps up pandering inclusive videos featuring smiling Black extras in a town with almost no Black population. A lovestruck white teenager who dives into BLM activism to win over a girl ends up bemoaning his white privilege to a crowd, yelling “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!” 

Eddington is an equal-opportunity satire that sees the absurd in all viewpoints. It hits all the bases – mask mandates, pedophiles, artificial intelligence, police racism, Bitcoin and Antifa – offending left and right with equal measures. 

But ultimately, Eddington is really about how social media has rotted our brains, turning us all into circus animals hooked on dopamine and conflict. It’s bad here in New Zealand but exponentially feels far worse in the far bigger America, where politicians and celebs now spew conspiracies and hate speech that felt unthinkable 10 years back. 

America doesn’t make much sense to me at the moment, and Eddington is an exhausted grim chuckle at how fractured it’s all gotten. 

“I am a much better human being than you,” Joe sneers at one point to his opponent, and that arrogant phrase seems to capture so much of the vibe of America 2020 and Social Media 2025. 

I wouldn’t argue that Eddington is a masterpiece – it’s too long, a bit scattered and overstuffed, the ending ramps up the violence to a kind of incoherent mess, and Aster’s “everyone’s an idiot” worldview will probably rub some the wrong way … but in its bleakly comic way, it captures the moment in a way that cinema kind of needs to help us process whatever the hell has happened to the world the last few years. And Phoenix, who never feels better on screen than when he’s falling apart, is terrific.

Eddington shows how community and dialogue vanishes as we all get sucked into our little tech bubble windows, how performative our lives have become and how lonely we’re all getting as a result. “All of these people are kind of living on the Internet and they are sort of all seeing the world through these strange, individualized windows,” Aster said in an interview.

Sometimes you just need to see it all splayed out before you under a hot desert sun, and marvel at the endless foibles of humans and how easy it is for the things that hold us together to prove as flimsy as a tumbleweed in the breeze. 

Eddington is not here to make conclusions, other than that perhaps we’re all kind of ridiculous creatures. At the moment, still trying to process the world we all live in now, laughing a little about that feels like enough for me. 

Movie review: Superman 2025 soars

There’s an impending natural disaster. There’s two countries going to war. There’s a rich, arrogant billionaire tech bro who wants to rule the world. This sounds like a job for Superman!

Director James Gunn’s new reboot of Superman brings some much-needed compassion and good humour back to the Kryptonian superhero after director Zach Snyder’s overly grim approach to the character in The Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman. 

Forget the same Super-origins we’ve all already seen before – baby rocketed away from dying planet, growing up on a farm in the Kansas wheat fields, yadda yadda – Gunn drops us immediately into the middle of the action with a story that starts at full tilt and rarely lets up for two hours. This colourful, pleasantly weird epic is just unpredictable and refreshing enough to stand out from the sea of superhero content. 

Oh, and there’s a dog – a very good boy by the name of Krypto who very nearly steals the movie right from under Superman’s cape. 

It’s a tangled plot that starts out with the aftermath of Superman (David Corenswet) attempting to stop a war and spins into a broader tale of whether this alien immigrant from another world can truly be trusted. On-and-off girlfriend Lois Lane (a fierce and funny Rachel Brosnahan) is trying to figure out their relationship, while scheming Lex Luthor (a terrific scowling Nicholas Hoult) has gathered some bad guys and sets in motion a plan that aims to defeat Superman once and for all. 

Gunn had already made a splash on the comics movie scene with his quirky Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy for Marvel and his giddily gory and over-the-top The Suicide Squad. He impressed DC Comics so much they hired him to shepherd their whole rebooted universe of screen projects, in a course correction after movies like Justice League and The Flash underperformed. 

The 2025 Superman is a comic book movie that embraces a fundamentally goodhearted view of the world, no matter how many terrible things happen, and understands what makes Superman work. Corenswet makes a sturdy, likeable Superman, whose fundamental guiding principle is helping others. He’s all about the art of being kind, while Luthor’s preening ego only cares about envy, power and control. 

Gunn channels some of the charming energy of Christopher Reeve’s seminal 1970s and ‘80s Superman films, especially with repeated riffs on that iconic John Williams theme music – still the best superhero movie score of all time. He’s not afraid to get goofy, and embrace the colourful eccentricity of the original comic books. 

Fans who think comic movies should always be super-serious and “realistic” may be turned off by Superman, but a plot that features robot sidekicks, shapeshifting element men and shimmering cosmic scenery feels truer to the wild world of the original Superman comics. A few years ago having that super-dog Krypto in a movie would’ve been seen as campy. These days, it feels like a welcome relief. Why can’t a dog be a superhero, anyway? 

Superman sets up yet another cinematic universe, but there’s a deft touch to the way Gunn introduces a pile of other characters from ratbag Green Lantern Guy Gardner (a hilarious Nathan Fillion) to steely Mr Terrific. By avoiding the well-worn origin stories here this universe feels a bit more lived in. Comics fanboys will be delighted to see even characters like reporter Jimmy Olsen (a fun Skyler Gisondo) get a moment to shine.  

Still, Superman is, intentionally, rather overstuffed. Sometimes Gunn threatens to lose control of the narrative, and a few characters get short shrift – I would’ve loved to see a little more depth to Corenswet’s Clark Kent or some of his Daily Planet co-workers. Yet most of the dangling pieces come together nicely in an action-packed conclusion that features plenty of city-smashing chaos without the nihilistic undertones to it all that 2013’s Man Of Steel had. 

Most importantly, the “man” in Superman is key here. Too many Superman movies starting with 2006’s misfire Superman Returns have focused on the melancholy godlike figure soaring above it all, forever apart from the rest of us. Corenswet’s relaxed, genial Superman bleeds a lot and makes mistakes, while never losing his cheery optimism for long. 

This is the first Superman movie since 1981’s Superman II I haven’t felt a vague sense of disappointment with over compromises or inept plot decisions.

Of course, the usual outrage merchants online are already banging on about how Superman has apparently gone “woke,” as if he hasn’t been fighting bullies and haters for the past 80-plus years. Sincerity is a much better superpower than cynicism, isn’t it? 

For a while, Superman’s reputation has suffered in comparison to edgy heroes like Wolverine, Deadpool or Batman. Is Superman still cool? Sure, he may be a little corny, a little idealistic, but he also refuses to back down and hangs out with an awesome dog. 

I know which hero I’d rather have in the real world any day of the week. 

*This review appears in a slightly different form over at my day job at Radio New Zealand!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

Golly, but I’ve been busy writing everywhere but this blog lately.

I’ve been doing a lot more assorted fact-checking and explaining work for cash money so it’s time for another roundup of stuff what I wrote:

Just in time for the hopefully good new movie opening this week, I did a recap for Radio New Zealand on Superman’s best (and not so best) moments on screen to date and some comics recommendations!

Everything you need to know about Superman before his latest movie

Over at AAP FactCheck, I did a deep dive into the disturbing and increasingly surreal world of bizarre AI slop infesting your social media feeds. The “conjoined twins celebrity scam” posts are the ones that finally broke my brain for good, I reckon:

Junk accounts serve up fantasy tennis tales

For RNZ, I’ve also done a few long explainer pieces lately:

Did you know US Customs can legally search your phone? Here’s what you need to know about it

And finally pivoting back again to the murky world of AI and how it’s slowly eroding all that is fair and decent on social media, here’s another explainer:

How to tell if an image or video has been created by AI – and if we still can

Featuring my very own test AI-generated slop image that I was particularly proud of:

Don’t always believe your eyes, is the moral of the story.

Unless it’s something on this website, which in that case is totally 100 percent legit and doesn’t need factchecking.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and assist in the emergency conjoined twin surgery for my good friend, celebrity Taylor Swift.

The 10 Best Movies of the 21st Century, according to me

What film geek can resist the nerdy pleasures of making a list? 

The New York Times has embarked on a fun project this week listing the best 100 movies of the last 25 years, which 500 Hollywood actors, directors and others voted on. 

All these lists are subjective and should never be taken utterly seriously, but at the same time, they can point you toward movies you’ve never heard of (Patton Oswalt is making me hunt down the obscure to me Coherence, for instance) or make you appreciate those you have seen with a new eye.

One of the cooler features of this project is the NYT allowing you to nominate your own list, which gosh, is almost like being in The New York Times yourself, isn’t it?

Everyone has their own list, and that’s a cool thing. I’m not here for the outrage or the ranty YouTube videos about why that choice or this choice sucks. Art is democratic, whether we like it or not. 

After an hour or so of scrambling, debating and pondering, here’s what I came up with for my favourite 10 movies from 2000-2025: 

Almost Famous (2000) – Whatever happened to this Cameron Crowe? A movie as sincere and comforting as a bowl of chicken soup that gives us a fan’s view of ‘70s rock stardom through teen journalist William Miller’s wide eyes. 

Boy (2012) – Taika Waititi broke through with this deadpan and witty story of a lonely Māori boy growing up on New Zealand’s remote East Cape, and while Taika’s career has gone up and down since, this is one bloody great Kiwi film, you eggs. 

The Florida Project (2017) – Sean Baker won all the Oscars for last year’s great Anora, but this utterly heartbreaking story of a young girl and her mother living on the edge of the American dream might just be his masterpiece – realistic and raw, somehow both despairing and impossibly optimistic at the same time. 

Godzilla: Minus One (2023) – A movie that finally met the full potential of all Godzilla’s world-breaking metaphors, and made it a deeply compelling human story about trauma too, without skimping on the carnage. A miracle of a movie, really, for us Godzilla nerds. 

Hedwig And The Angry Inch (2001) – I am a sucker for a good musical, and John Cameron Mitchell’s gender-twisting odyssey of sexual self-discovery and acceptance only seems to get more relevant with time, especially here from the timeline of the great culture wars. 

The Holdovers (2023) – Some movies you just fall in love with, and Alexander Payne’s cozy comedy-drama about a curmudgeon teacher and a misfit student forced to spend winter break together hits all the sweet spots for me. It’s about who you hope to be and who you end up being.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) – I sometimes think Quentin Tarantino’s movies won’t age well in the long haul. Yet this one, a fevered homage/rip-off to every sleazy kung fu romp and revenge thriller, really sums up his energy and magpie talent better than almost every other movie he’s made this century. 

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – Unexpectedly, George Miller returned to the wastelands without Mel Gibson to make what’s still the best action movie of this century so far – a triumph of sweaty, real life filmmaking before CGI and AI slop rolled over everything. 

Parasite (2019) – There’s a reason Bong Joon-Ho’s groundbreaking foreign-language Oscar winner is on so many other best of lists, and that’s because his tense narrative of class struggle and envy speaks to every person, no matter what language the movie is filmed in. 

The Royal Tenenbaums (2002) – Wes Anderson has only got more stylised with age, but with this, his third film, he hit an emotional peak that was still full of quirky originality – that, and the late, great Gene Hackman in one of his finest performances. 

That top 10 is hardly set firm in time and space, because what’s the fun of doing that?

Ten more that barely missed the top 10 for me and might all end up on it on a different day in a different mood: American Splendor, Anchorman, Captain America: Civil War, Grizzly Man, Mulholland Drive, Oppenheimer, Perfect Days, Spotlight, There Will Be Blood, The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Pee-Wee As Himself: I know you are, but what am I? 

Pee-wee Herman was so uncool that he became cool.

Watching Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, it felt like nothing I’d quite seen before – a colourful, free-spirited adventure of a peculiar man-boy who was searching for his lost bicycle. It kicked off Tim Burton’s career, and for a while, it and his popular children’s TV show made Pee-wee a superstar. Of course, it all fell apart a bit in the end. 

Up until his sudden death from cancer in 2023, Reubens wrestled with Pee-wee’s legacy – was the character eating him alive? It surely felt so at times. 

The fascinating new 3 1/2 hour documentary Pee-wee As Himself reveals Reubens as never before, in a posthumous tribute and confession from this remarkable, furiously independent man. 

I was one of the weirdos at age 13 when Pee-wee hit the big screen. Gawky, shrimpy and obsessed with comic books and action figures and all that jazz, I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. Was I the good church-going Presbyterian my folks raised me as, or was I an artsy innovator – or was I both? I got picked on and called “strange” a lot in adolescence and to me, Pee-wee Herman was a revelation. He showed you didn’t have to fit in some “cool” box. Some found him annoying. I found him liberating. 

Even in the ‘80s, a decade filled with eccentric superstars from Mr T to Boy George to Michael Jackson, Pee-wee stood out. Almost never breaking character, Reubens created a kind of Peter Pan for the MTV generation. Pee-wee would never grow up (in his final appearance in the genial 2016 film Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, Reubens was 64 years old, but you’d barely know it). 

Pee-wee, freaky as he was, was a signal for many of us misfits and those struggling with their identity that it was cool to be just who you are. Both in his movies and the kid-friendly Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the ultimate message was acceptance – a vibe which feels more precious and precarious than ever here in 2025. 

What elevates this lengthy documentary is Reubens’ very vocal, opinionated participation, in 40 hours of interviews done shortly before his death. He spars with the director several times over whether he should be taking part at all, whether the documentary would be better if he directed it, and over just how much he wants to reveal. Reubens’ endearingly cranky debating feels like a discussion on the merits and failings of celebrity documentary as a whole, and somehow his tense reluctance makes Pee-wee As Himself feel richer and more multi-dimensional. 

Reubens hid his homosexuality for much of his career and a particularly heartbreaking revelation in the documentary is what that cost him. He abandoned one long-term relationship as a young man for his career, he bluntly admits, and he knew that in 1980s America he could never come out of that closet.

Of course, Pee-wee As Himself hits on the scandals – his 1992 arrest at an adult cinema, the very dodgy attempt to drag him over his collection of erotica in the early 2000s. Seen today when corruption and malice are everywhere, those so-called “scandals” seem pettier than ever and carry a large whiff of homophobia. 

It’s hard to fathom now just how omnipresent Pee Wee was in US culture after Pee-wee’s Big Adventure came out. He’d appear in rock videos and magazine covers and had toy dolls made of him, but he was always slightly, cheekily subversive. (Rewatching Pee-wee’s Playhouse episodes today as a creaky adult, you realise how much he played with the very idea of a kids’ show, and never, ever gave up on pushing those envelopes.) 

Pee-wee As Himself spends a lot of time exploring how Reubens came to create the character, and how the freeform experimentation of art school, performance art and the Groundlings improv troupe formed him. Reubens wanted to become a superstar, and embraced Pee-wee, who subsumed all the other character creations Reubens had been playing with and took over. 

Pee-wee went mainstream for a while, but was firmly a creature of the alternative underground tweaked just enough to “pass”. In today’s culture wars-infested world I don’t think Pee-wee Herman would’ve made it past the workshopping stage, although you can see hints of his wonderful surreal imagination in things like Adventure Time. 

I admit to choking up a little hearing what Reubens recorded the day before he died – even the filmmakers didn’t know about his cancer battle – and his last message: “I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love.”

The art of Criterion: Judging a movie by its cover

Because a man has got to have hobbies, one of mine is collecting boutique blu-rays of movies you typically won’t find on the anemic streaming services down here in NZ. And the gold standard of fancy-schmancy blu-rays has always been the Criterion Collection, which has specialised in bringing both iconic classics and obscure discoveries to screens for years now. 

Criterions play to the obsessive fans out there – who doesn’t love a good Criterion Closet video? – and one of their calling cards is the often-dazzling artwork they put on their discs. In an age where physical media seems to be becoming an afterthought for so many people whose eyeballs are glued to their phones 24-7 , Criterions are still cool, darn it. Even Natasha Lyonne thinks so:

Sometimes their disc covers play with recognisable imagery, sometimes they go abstract and arty as heck. On a recent trip to San Francisco, I visited my beloved Amoeba Records, which boasts an entire heaving shelf of used Criterions in their movie room. I dove in to fill in my Criterion Charlie Chaplin collection, rare noirs and more, and a few times, I just picked up a movie because I liked the cover.

You probably shouldn’t judge a movie entirely by its cover – or its poster, for that matter – but sometimes, a single stark image can lure you into discovering something entirely new. Take the gritty delights of Burt Lancaster’s prison breakout movie Brute Force, which drew me in solely based on that amazing artwork. Or the incredibly insane gonzo Japanese horror-comedy, 1977’s House, which sucked me in just with that haunting dog/demon/ghost image on the cover. 

I love the Criterions which don’t just do a variation on the movie poster, but instead pick an image from the movie to capture the vibe wonderfully – Clark Gable’s It Happened One Night, or Billy Wilder’s icy cold noir Double Indemnity. Of course, not every Criterion cover is a winner, but when they hit, they hit. 

I know we’ve got an ocean of “content” to navigate these days, but for me, sometimes the best gamble to take is picking a random Criterion based solely on its art, perhaps a movie I’ve vaguely heard of, perhaps one I’ve never heard of. You never know, you might discover your next favourite thing.

You can’t judge a movie by its cover, but you sure can be seduced by it. 

All hail Tom Cruise, the impossible entertainer

Of course, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is ridiculous. It’s preposterous and excessive and just so very, very much – and that’s kind of why I love it and Tom Cruise’s dogged, determined drive to entertain the hell out of us all for nearly 30 years, whether we want it or not.

It’s insane that Cruise has been playing gritty intelligent agent Ethan Hunt for 29 years. As a point of comparison, if Sean Connery had played James Bond as long as Cruise had played Hunt, he would’ve been in Bond movies from 1962 to 1991, well into his bearded balding Hunt for Red October/Untouchables elder statesman era.

The MI movies kicked off with Brian DePalma’s twisty, relatively restrained 1996 original, and derailed a bit with John Woo’s lavishly dated 1999 style overdose in Mission: Impossible 2.

But for me, the series staged a remarkable comeback beginning with 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, with the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sneering villain and Cruise’s Hunt given just a little more of a personality. Simon Pegg’s twitchy Benji and Ving Rhames’ sturdy Luther coalesced into the heart of a solid little team for Ethan, who is, as more than one character has noted, always going rogue or about to go rogue from his vaguely omnipresent Impossible Mission Force.

Cruise and his creative partner for most of the last few movies, director Christopher McQuarrie, settled into a solid routine of dastardly global threats, sneering villains and incredible stunt scenes that the rest of the plot basically is there to support.

The sixth instalment, 2018’s Mission Impossible: Fallout, reached an improbable high point for the series. This, Cruise whispered in audience ears as he bounced off mountain ranges and airplanes and ran, always ran, to the next plot point – this, is an action movie. 

To bring James Bond back again, Cruise quietly surpassed that franchise for reliable action thrills some time ago. While Daniel Craig starred in some of the best Bonds, studio meddling and creative fumbling also stuck him in some of the worst. Cruise and McQuarrie had a clear vision for their series. Even at the series’ nadir – John Woo, hello – a Mission: Impossible movie has never been less than a good time, check your brain at the door.

I like to think of what I call “the piano move” from 2023’s Dead Reckoning as a symbol of the series as a whole and its amiable desire to please. After surviving a pitched knife battle on the roof of a moving train, after that train then crashes off a cliff, after Ethan Hunt and partner clamber dangerously through the train cars before they fall into a canyon, after all that, in the final car, we see a piano, hanging on by a single strap, about to hurtle down through a train car and into Hunt and partner. Will that piano fall? You bet it will. In Ethan Hunt’s world, there’s always another piano about to fall on you. 

The best moments of the MI movies are nothing but piano moves, where Cruise fascinates you with his ingenuity and escape skills. I’d be dead about 5 seconds into trying to have a knife fight with a madman on the top of a moving train, for instance. For Cruise, that’s just a Wednesday. 

Final Reckoning, at nearly three hours, does suffer a bit of end-times fatigue – the two-part story Dead Reckoning and this comprise, about a rogue artificial intelligence, is timely, but it’s all tarted up with an absurd amount of MacGuffins and missions that are, well, impossible. Watching parts 7 and 8 over two nights, as I did, exposes you to nearly six hours of Tom Cruise running like mad – it’s like mainlining energy drinks while eating popcorn. Gradually, Cruise has become a messiah figure in the movies, as the challenges get ever more impossible. 

You’d expect part 8 of a series to run low on steam, and the opening act of Final Reckoning is a little sluggish, but when it gets going – especially with two stunning set-pieces involving a submarine and a biplane – all your doubts fly away, and you find yourself asking, “how is he doing that?” I don’t care that in real life Tom Cruise would’ve died like 50 times over by now. I just go for the ride. 

Yeah, yeah I know, while Cruise does a lot of his own stunts there is a certain amount of movie magic and digitally erased safety gear behind it all, but that doesn’t distract from the tactile reality of seeing a man scale the Burj Khalifa towers as he did in 2011’s Ghost Protocol or clutching feverishly onto a spinning biplane in this romp. He was there and not just in some green screen studio laboratory. And the fact that the man is now 62 is astonishing. 

In his dogged quest to be the impossible entertainer and singlehandedly save us all as The Last Movie Star, Cruise has largely abandoned some of the more interesting acting choices he made before he went all-in on the impossible. His turns in movies like Magnolia, Edge of Tomorrow, Interview With A Vampire and Collateral showed a brooding range. I kind of hope he might take some more chances if this, as it probably should be, is the last impossible mission.

These movies aren’t deep, but they’re fine machines of movie magic – mostly devoid of the CGI-slathered blurs that are starting to make superhero and action movies all feel like the same unreal videogame slurry. Mission: Impossible movies are ridiculous, absurd, over the top. And I reckon that both me and Tom Cruise wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Watching Robocop with my Dad

The very first R-rated movie I ever saw in a theatre was Robocop, with my Dad and a buddy. 

It was a pretty full-on choice – Robocop goes hard and never stops, but it’s also one of the most brilliant and satirical action movies of the 1980s. Of course, I didn’t have much cinematic expertise then, at the age of 15 or so. We just saw the poster and TV commercials for this heavy-metal policeman and thought, that looks awesome!

Getting into your first R-rated movie as a teenager was a moment. My pal Nate and I tried, on our own, but were embarrassingly turned down by a snarky cashier only a few years older than us when we tried to see Eddie Murphy’s Coming To America. 

So when it came to Robocop, we somehow talked my Dad into taking us.

Well over 35 years ago now, I can remember cringing a little over the explosion of profanity and violence that pepper Robocop with my Dad sitting next to me. The opening half hour or so, as eager cop Murphy is brutally mown down in torturous detail by cackling psychopaths, is hardcore to watch even today. 

My dad was a good-hearted, church-going and genial guy whose tastes I think ran a little more to Roger Moore James Bond and Tom Clancy books, not splattery sci-fi like Robocop, but he took me anyway. I don’t know quite what he thought as Clarence Boddicker spat invective and people died in inventively bloody ways, but I don’t think he hated it. 

Dad’s been gone nearly a year now, and of course I think about him all the time. 

I re-watched all three Robocop movies recently in a bit of a binge (The very goofy and violent Robocop 2 and the kid-friendly Robocop 3, which I’d actually never even seen, are serious steps down from the flawless polished gleam of the original, of course, but they do have their moments). 

And as memory does, it floats around in your head unasked, and I kept straining to recall that long, long ago afternoon in a movie theatre in ’80s small-town California, watching Robocop with my Dad. It was a very small moment of my time with him over more than 50 years, I know. 

I honestly can’t remember much at all other than how cool Robocop was, but I guess that’s not important. I remember my Dad was there for me, and even if he perhaps quietly thought Robocop was a bit much for his nerdy 15-year-old son, he was pretty cool, too.