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Honey Boy is a semi-autobiographical movie written by actor Shia LaBeouf. The story about a child actor and his father was written while LaBeouf was in court-ordered rehab after a public intoxication arrest in 2017.

This is a very personal and intimate recreation of a defining time in Shia’s life. It’s an examination of a broken relationship that Shia didn’t realize had so deeply affected him until his past came up in therapy.

Honey Boy moves between two specific times in Otis’ life-1995 and 2005–ages twelve and twenty-two. When adult Otis gets in trouble (the same way LaBeouf did in real life) the flashbacks start as Otis explores why he feels the way he does now.

Otis’ father acted as his guardian while he worked on set. An angry and alcoholic man, being around James was often like walking through a minefield. At any time things could pop off. With Otis constantly around a toxic and dark person, he yearns for a calm and nurturing relationship with his father. He’s searching for solace.

This movie is smart in how it navigates trauma. With such a heavy topic it’d be easy to wallow in misery (Joker) and make this entirely brutal to watch. The movie keeps a steady pace, never beating to death on how awful James is without saying something important about it. Breaks are given to you with Otis finding joy when he can. With each scene together, their relationship is first established, examined, and then exposed. James thankfully isn’t portrayed simply as a monster for the sake of being a monster. Time is given to his history, the trail of why he is who he is.

Another important layer is that the misery leads to something–a reckoning between father and son that is messy and frankly very real. Let me put this to you as well: there’s no happy ending and clean conclusion. After all, Otis grows up and the trauma and things he picked up from his father are coming out in ways that are ruining his life.

The Talk Otis has with his dad is riveting and revelatory. Otis puts it all out there. It’s incredibly sad but necessary. Otis is forced to grow up far faster than he should, creating a confrontation that you and Otis aren’t sure how is going to go.

LeBeouf plays James and he’s doing some exceptional work. Noah Jupe plays young Otis and this kid is nothing but remarkable. I don’t know what’s going on right now, but there are some amazing kid actors working today. More than how he delivers his lines, it’s in his body language too. When James gets into a fight on the phone with Otis’ mother, Otis hangs in as long as he can before walking out of the motel room he and his dad live in. With a background of venomous screaming, Otis’ face contorts as he tries to fight back his misery. There are a few powerful moments like this.

Brilliant movie.

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That brings me to Uncut Gems. A movie I’m not sure how a feel about. At the end I didn’t regret watching it but the time getting to that point was rough.

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a high end jeweler in the Diamond District of NYC. It’s made clear early on that Howard is a gambler with a problem. After a few run ins with the people he owes money to–and seeing how he reacts to them–it becomes clear that Howard is a degenerate gambler. The high he gets from gambling is seemingly the only driving force in his life.

So Howard, like James in Honey Boy, is awful. But unlike James, Howard has no depth to him. It’s just a trail of stupid and misery from start to finish. A large portion of the runtime of Uncut Gems is a group of people screaming at each other. Just insipid insults, cursing, and nonsense yelling for what feels like minutes at a time. Put end to end, these scenes add up and it’s not good. It frequently gets exhausting and boring. I think making this a short film could have been the better way to go. The entire movie is him juggling one debt in the air to pay for the other.

That said, Adam Sandler is really good. He can bring a douche to life so I’ll give him that much.

Putting these two movies that travel on the dark side of life side by side (which I did not do on purpose) Honey Boy is the better investment of your time. It’s way richer in content and character development. The avenues to dissect and discuss aren’t even close.

I liked It (2017) a lot. It was a ton of fun and super creepy in all the right ways. The adaptation did the book justice while making the necessary tweaks to make it a bit more modern and ditch the ultra awkward bits.

So coming into Chapter Two, I was looking forward to it. The movie focuses almost entirely on the Losers Club as adults, 27 years after their encounter with Pennywise. Mike is the only one of the seven kids to stay in their hometown of Derry and he keeps the Club’s pact when he discovers that Pennywise is killing again. Mike calls his olds friends to come back to stop the slaughter.

It, the novel, is massive. It’s a good 1,000 pages so splitting it up for a movie is the right thing to do. Breaking it apart as the kid timeline and the adult timeline is the easiest way of taming this twisted story. But watching this second half felt way too familiar, like it didn’t quite justify it’s existence. It’s just more of the same, just with an older and taller cast. It’s a really weird thought because hey, isn’t that what sequels are? You keep going with what was done before. Keep what was good, move away from what didn’t and add to the world.

I never got the sense that Chapter Two found its purpose. For a movie that exceeds two and a half hours, it’s way too simple. Not much happens. The first chunk is getting everyone back together, Mike telling the gang he knows how to kill Pennywise. That leads into the second act where each person gets their “totem” to break Pennywise’s power (I guess) so the monster can be killed. The third act is obviously going after Pennywise. And that’s it. You find out what each kid did with their lives, but you don’t get to know anyone any better. The dynamic was much more interesting in the first because it’s a group of kids, all in different family circumstances, coming together to first figure out what’s going on and sticking together to do something about it. There’s way more comradery in the first and each beat with Pennywise feels new and fresh.

Plus, everything with Henry Bowers feels like an afterthought, tacked on simply because he lived through the first movie (if I remember right, Pennywise gets him as a kid in the book). He’s added as another threat which the story doesn’t need and he’s in maybe all of five minutes, so why bother? If those scenes were cut out, no one would notice or miss him. If the goal was to give Eddie more motivation for the end, there are better ways of doing it.

The big problem is that Pennywise is too familiar here. As monsters go, he’s super goofy (which I do like but it needs to be carefully managed–let’s be real, you can only prance so much), he lives to scare and then eat someone. There’s a lot of jubilation in how he hunts, stirring up fear to make him more powerful. So while he looks menacing as ever in Chapter Two, the actions are all rather predictable. It feels like too much of the same. Much like prancing, there’s a limit to how many times you can run at someone before it turns into a bit. Maybe not enough people get munched? It is rather dull to hang this on a low body count, but it would give a better perspective on how truly dangerous this entity is. Despite grandiose special effects, the scale comes off as small. Through the whole movie, only the Losers Club knows Pennywise is doing anything. The undercurrent of a threat isn’t realized well enough.

And what is with the weird reactions from the few bystanders that are in the movie? When the Losers Club first meets at the restaurant, Pennywise lets them know he knows they’re back with some hallucinations. It turns into a full scale freak out with six adults screaming in terror and Mike smashing the table with his chair. The hostess comes over and nonchalantly asks them if everything is okay. It’s like she noticed one of them looking around for a waiter instead of the entire corner of the resturaunt rioting.

On the production side, this movie is a knock out. The cast is terrific and the visuals are nuts. The special effects are fantastic with some really creative and well realized nightmare-ish scenarios. The one thing I did come away from Chapter Two is please give director Andy Muschietti a Nightmare on Elm Street movie! That’s all I could think about from the moment Pennywise came back on screen. The powers they show Pennywise doing fit Freddy perfectly and show how badly handled he’s been in his last three movies*. Muschietti knows how set up scenes and shoot for heavy special effects work. With the right script, he could bring the Nightmare franchise back.

*Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is really good, I was just disappointed with the very few death nightmares. Freddy vs Jason, Freddy was robbed in the body count. Jason kills everyone, I think they only did two nightmare sequences. The NOES remake (2010) wasted almost every opportunity to be creative. You can do anything in a nightmare which separates the Nightmare franchise from the rest and it’s been ages since someone ran with it. Tina’s death scene has been done three times. /rant