It's become a cliche to call Die Hard a Christmas movie you didn't realize was a Christmas movie. But another '80s classic got there first. Though it doesn't take place during the holidays, The Terminator is a Christmas movie — and one of the purest of them all.

While many Christmas stories are about vague notions of kindness, or family, or faith, the 1983 Arnold Schwarzenegger classic is the rare Christmas story that pulls closely from the New Testament, to retell the story of the birth of Jesus Christ.

No, it isn't obvious on on the surface.

Like all great sci-fi movies, the film uses allegory to make you think about familiar ideas in a new way. It is the story of a teenage waitress, Sarah Connor, who is hunted by a merciless, unstoppable killer from the future — Schwarzenegger's T-800 iteration of a Terminator. It wants to kill her before the birth of her son, John, who in the future will be the savior of humankind.

Sound familiar? A teenager hunted by a powerful force afraid of the savior? It's the Biblical story of King Herod of Judea, who ordered the "massacre of the innocents" — the murder of Bethlehem's newborns – because he feared that a savior would rise from among them, and would one day seize his kingdom. Like John Connor, this savior would have the initials JC.

And like Sarah Connor, Jesus Christ's mother, Mary, would be visited by an angel. In the Gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel tells Mary to be not afraid, and that she will soon give birth to the Son of God, though she has never been with a man.

In the film, Gabriel and the immaculate conception are replaced by guardian angel Kyle Reece (Michael Biehn) — a man sent from the future by John Connor himself to protect his mother from the Terminator. Sarah and Kyle fall for each other, and he becomes John's father.

Sarah and Mary have almost the same questions. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary asks Gabriel, "How will this happen? I have never had a man?" In The Terminator, Sarah Connor asks, "Why me?"

An Interesting Aside

Interestingly, James Cameron came up with the idea of The Terminator in Rome, not so far from the Vatican. He has said the film originated with a dream of the metallic, fiery iteration of Terminator we see at the end of the film. But it's hard not to see how his proximity to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church could influence his plotting of The Terminator. (We cannot find any reference to Cameron commenting on the theory that The Terminator is a Christmas movie.)

Different though their settings may be, it's notable how similar the plots are between the 1984 sci-fi classic The Terminator and Netflix's new Mary, which tells the story of Jesus' birth from his mother's perspective. Consider the very cool. Terminator-esque logline when Mary was announced in April:

"Propelled into circumstances far beyond her control, Mary is shunned following the otherworldly conception of her child and forced into hiding. King Herod’s relentless drive to maintain power at any cost ignites the murderous pursuit of the newborn child that he believes is a threat to his reign on the throne. In a breathless ticking-clock pursuit, the film takes us on a journey as young Mary and Joseph are on the run, smuggling their baby, Jesus."

Of course, in The Terminator, the murderous pursuit comes at bidding of an A.I., Skynet, and not a king.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Christmas Movies

Schwarzenegger has made other, more overt Christmas movies — including 1996's Jingle All the Way and a little-known Christmas in Connecticut remake that he directed for basic cable after completing Terminator 2.

The story of that remake is the subject of an episode of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. When we saw the title — "A Very Terminator Christmas" — we assumed it would be about the fact that The Terminator is a Christmas movie. But it is not. So we wrote this.

Finally, we just have to point out, even though Jesus Christ stops short of saying it at the time of his crucifixion: He and The Terminator have the exact same catch phrase.

Main image: Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator. Orion.

In the early years of comic book adaptations, Hollywood seemed hellbent on distancing comic book-based movies from their source material. The original Superman, good as it was, enlisted the writer and star of The Godfather — Mario Puzo and Marlon Brando — to add gravitas to the Superman story. With 1989's Batman, Tim Burton admirably found a balance between the camp of the 1960s Batman and the seriousness of Frank Miller's Dark Knight. And Warren Beatty's 1990 Dick Tracy dared to get very comics accurate, even using a limited color palette reminiscent of an old comics strip.

But in the early 2000s, as comic book movies began to take over the box office and become essential to studios' bottom lines, some trends emerged. Movies generally tried to follow comic-book lore without getting so nerdy that general audiences — people who may not have ever read the source material — would be turned off.

While they had many good qualities, the X-Men provide a good example of this have-it-both-ways approach. They put almost everyone in black leather, distancing the films from the outlandish costumes of the comic book X-Men, especially in their freak-flag-flying Chris Claremont era. Christopher Nolan's excellent Dark Knight films eschewed super powers, giving us a scrupulously logical Batman whose every costume detail served a purpose grounded in reality.

You can listen to our deep dive on Superman on the Low Key Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or here:

Iron Man was so well-grounded that I remember a friend telling me he took his wife to see the 2008 film without telling her what it was about. She thought they were watching a war movie until — 35 minutes in — Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark donned an early prototype of the Iron Man armor. It was only then that she realized she'd been lured into a comic book movie.

Zack Snyder's superhero films, more than any other comic book movies, drove home the message that they were not for kids: Superman snapped a bad guy's neck in 2013's Man of Steel, and grittiness abounded at every turn. The low point was 2016's gloomy, clunky Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

As the Marvel Universe became more successful, the MCU films occasionally had the confidence to get goofy — and were better for it. 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy, led by proud comic book nerd James Gunn, went deep on some of the MCU's least-memorable characters, including a talking raccoon (who insists he isn't a raccoon) named Rocket. The next year, Paul Rudd led one of the silliest and best Marvel movies, Ant-Man, about a thief-turned-hero who can shrink to ant-size, and enlist ants in his fight for justice.

But films still sought, for the most part, a middle ground. Some of the biggest Marvel movies were genre movies that happened to feature people with super powers. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a '70s-style paranoia thriller. Thor: Ragnarok was a trippy sci-fi farce. Black Panther was an Afrofuturist twist on a Bond movie.

When comics-accurate costumes occasionally popped up in comic-book movies, it was cause for celebration among diehard fans — even though they were often played for laughs. Hugh Jackman's comics-inspired blue and yellow costume for last summer's Deadpool and Wolverine was a joke on many levels: It was absurd to see such a comics-correct outfit onscreen in any context, but especially on Wolverine, given his grim past screen portrayals, which included, at one point, surviving the bombing of Hiroshima.

The Deadpool films aren't so much comic book movies as parodies of comic-book movies.

Sony's 2018 Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse did the best job of embracing comic-book lore and history, brilliantly and beautifully. I love it. But because it was animated, it may never have the sense of can't-believe-my-eyes veracity of this summer's live-action superhero success stories.

Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps feel entirely new in their live-action embrace of comics. They are unabashedly comic book movies, in love with and totally reverent to their source material. Both have gotten strong reviews, and Superman is already a hit. Fantastic Four, which arrives in theaters this week, is tracking well, thanks in part to strong word of mouth from those who have seen and loved it so far.

Superman and Punk

What's special aboutSuperman and Fantastic Four: First Steps is that the nerdiest parts are also the best parts.

When we say "nerdy," of course, we don't mean it pejoratively — we're taking the Oxford definition, "characterized by great enthusiasm for and knowledge about a particular subject, especially one of specialist or niche interest."

Superman writer-director James Gunn came to lead DC Films via a series of complicated events that started with his temporary dismissal from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise over jokey, deliberately offensive tweets. (Right-wing sleuths, upset by his left-wing politics, unearthed them to make him look bad.) Saner heads soon prevailed and he ended up directing DC's 2021 The Suicide Squad, impressing Warner Bros. execs so much that they put him in charge of the whole DC universe.

It was a dream come true for a kid from outside St. Louis who had coped with a tough childhood by "sort of escap[ing] into my own little world with comic books and books," as he told MovieMaker in 2021. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of comics, while also embracing punk. He detailed in our 2021 interview how a brief encounter with The Clash's Joe Strummer, at a record store, changed his entire life.

"Whenever I met anybody who I looked up to, just the act of their being present, just looking at somebody and taking in who they are, it makes a huge difference. Because most people don’t. If you see most people signing autographs or doing whatever, they’re just kind of off in space. But there are people that just take a moment to be with that person—just give them that one moment," Gunn recalled.

Also Read: The 12 Best Superhero Movies Ever Made

All movies are team efforts – just read the long credits at the end — but Gunn's new Superman may be as close as a big-budget superhero film will ever get to being a personal film, almost in the auteur tradition, as romanticized and exaggerated as the notion of an auteur may be.

The Superman character seemed impossibly outdated just a few years ago, as superhero movies tried to humanize the comic-book characters by giving them profound vulnerabilities and making them look more like the general populace. An all-powerful white male didn't feel in keeping with the times.

But Gunn went back to the character's roots as a creation of two Jewish-American children of immigrants, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who introduced him as a beacon of hope, even as Nazism spread with alarming speed across Europe.

Gunn's Superman reminds us — elegantly — that Superman is an immigrant and a striver, trying to assimilate and gain acceptance by being good. He rejects the idea of utilitarianism or collateral damage, stopping in the middle of huge battles to save children and even, at one point, a squirrel.

He's not the kind of guy who would ever brush off a kid in a record store. In fact, he comes very close to dying fairly early in the film — because he sacrifices himself to save his dog, Krypto. ( Who isn't even really his dog.)

Lois Lane, the human be most wants to impress, is a self-identifying punk rocker. Clark Kent listened to the coolest music available to a Kansas farm kid — a light pop-punk band called The Mighty Crabjoys — and Gunn is confident enough to start the Superman end credits with a song by the Teddy Bears and punk icon Iggy Pop, "Punkrocker," the kind of cool anthem Lois would love — and then continue with "The Mighty Crabjoys Theme," a song Gunn helped write.

It's hard to imagine another comic-book movie going so deep into nerdery. It's notable that none of the seven other Superman movies came close to mentioning Krypto, one of the silliest Superman characters — much less making him crucial to the movie. And Superman doesn't stop with Krypto.

There's a giant kaiju, who is treated sympathetically. Metamorpho, a character who dates back to the '60s and has especially cartoonish powers, gets a moving and important arc. And Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), a tragic, often-overlooked character in the comics, gets an essential and scene-stealing part in Superman.

The Teamwork of Fantastic Four: First Steps

Superman feels in many ways like a moviemaking miracle — Gunn has balanced heart, real emotion and comic-book deep cuts like no one else. It may feel like Gunn is able to get away with this kind of deep dive because he's not only the creative pitching the studio executive, but — as the co-head of DC Films — he is the studio executive.

But thrillingly, Fantastic Four: First Steps, released in the same month, achieves similar success, with a very different approach.

First things first: It's every bit as gloriously nerdy as Superman. Within the opening minutes, we meet a household helper, comics-accurate robot named H.E.R.B.I.E., the Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser) and a super-ape who works for a character called The Red Ghost. And it all works.

What's more striking, though, is that the character Galactus — who eats planets and wears a purple suit and helmet with weird triangles sticking out of it — is presented almost exactly as he appeared in the early 1960s Fantastic Four comics. And he's genuinely scary.

A Deadpool-style movie could have scored cynical laughs with a character like Galactus — "haha, weren't the old comics silly?" But no: First Steps goes all in, making one of the most outlandish looking Marvel villains to date also one of the most compelling. The film raises the stakes in a host of ways I won't spoil, expect to say that it all works.

The Batman show of the 1960s went for camp both because of 1960s network TV budgets and because the producers wisely calculated that the show should laugh at itself to win over skeptical viewers.

Fantastic Four draws from a similar space-age, Mad Men, '60s aesthetic — but everything looks luxuriant, elegant. Anything but campy.

It's notable that First Steps feels as much like a team effort as Superman feels like a James Gunn film. Four people are credited with the screeplay — Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer — and Pearson, Kaplan, Springer and Kat Wood are credited for the story. They're all under the assured guidance of director Matt Shakman, and everything Marvel is led by producer Kevin Feige.

Many Marvel films in recent years — and especially many Disney+ Marvel shows — have felt like the products of too many cooks. And to be honest, I expected that First Steps would be kind of a mess.

But no: Along with Superman, it's one of the best comic-book movies I've ever seen. And the reason it succeeds is that the film seems so indebted to, and enamored with, the original comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the artist most responsible for the cool visual flair of the comics and now the film.

Fantastic Four is so geeked out over Kirby, in fact, that it sets its story in Earth 828 — a world named in tribute to Kirby's birthday, August 28, 1917.

That's nerdy. And that's heart.

To kids reading comics, comics aren't kitsch, they're canonical — a source of hope and inspiration. Superman and Fantastic Four treat them with the respect they deserve.

Main image: Superman/Fantastic Four: First Steps. Warner Bros./Marvel

Johnson, a bluesman, is sometimes considered the first rock star. He lived from 1911 to 1938, when he died of poisoning at the very rock star age of 27. He is best known for his song "Crossroad," aka "Cross Word Blues," and for the myth that it spawned: One night he went to a crossroad, got down on his knees, and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical fame.

It's a myth attributed to many rock stars since, through the era of playing records backwards in search of Satanic messages — and it's a compelling part of Sinners.

The film follows Sammie Moore (Miles Canton), a son of a preacher man who can't resist the lure of his blues guitar. His father pleads with him not to take it out to play at juke joints like the ones the twins are opening, warning his son that they're sinful places where people waste their lives. But Sammie takes the twins' money — and the possibility of fame — and goes out into the world.

Sinners leaves wide open the possibility that Sammie's decision is what invites in the hell that follows. Without giving too much away, one could come away from the film concluding that Sammie has made his own deal at the crossroad.

Much has been made of Ryan Coogler's deal with Warner Bros. to make Sinners, in which he will retain the rights to the film in 25 years. One anonymous executive told Vulture that Coogler's deal could be "the end of the studio system" since studios build so much wealth around exploiting old IP.

How did Coogler get his Sinners deal? It doesn't hurt that the Creed and Black Panther franchises, both of which he launched with Jordan, are huge hits. Black Panther was the No. 2 movie of 2018, and helped make it the biggest year ever for domestic box office.

Though Quentin Tarantino made a similar deal for the eventual rights to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's rare for any creative to retain control of their creation. And it's especially rare for a Black artist like Coogler.

Anyone who lives in America knows a story as old as the blues: White people making money on the work of Black artists, just as white Americans built centuries of wealth on the labor of enslaved African-Americans. Legions of producers and executives, most of whose names we will never know, have quietly screwed countless Black artists out of fees and royalties.

Also Read: 'He Is In the Red Sand With the Ancestors': A Thank You to Chadwick Boseman

More complicatedly, many perhaps well-meaning white artists have built up careers by riding the legacies of Black artists.

Take Johnson's "Crossroad," aka "Cross Road Blues." Eric Clapton's Cream recorded its louder, faster, electrified version, called "Crossroads," in 1966, helping lead a wave of British and American artists, from Led Zeppelin to Aerosmith, who have covered songs created decades earlier by Black blues musicians.

In some cases, no doubt, the white rock stars' versions of these songs refract some of their popularity to their blues predecessors, giving them long-overdue shine from the public — and perhaps even money for surviving Black artists, or at least their estates.

But in the worst-case scenario — the all-too common scenario — the original Black blues artists or their beneficiaries get nothing. The white artists, meanwhile, get to associate themselves with the art of the blues, but not the suffering that created it.

The latter phenomenon is smartly exemplified in a scene from 2001's Ghost World, in which Steve Buscemi's blues-lover character goes to a bar to see a bluesman he loves, and is mortified by the opening band — a bunch of white pretty boys called Blues Hammer who sing about "pickin' cotton all day long":

Down to the Crossroad

The story of Robert Johnson and "Crossroad" was so popular in the hair-metal '80s that it helped spawn a little-remembered 1986 Walter Hill film called Crossroads, in which Ralph Macchio plays a young guitarist who seeks out an authentic bluesman, Willie Brown, to teach him the ways of the blues. (The film is almost invisible to Google, unless you seek it out, because of a 2002 Britney Spears movie of the same name.)

Crossroads was Macchio's second time playing a young white Italian-American who embraces another culture and thrives in it — it came out just two years after he mastered martial arts in The Karate Kid.

In a curious, very '80s conclusion, Crossroads ends with Macchio and another guitarist, played by Italian-American Steve Vai, battling it out for blues guitar supremacy before a mostly Black audience in a juke joint like the one the twins open in Sinners. It's like 8 Mile, 20 years before 8 Mile, and with blues.

You can make the case that The Karate Kid and Crossroad exploited Asian and Black cultures, respectively, by centering a white protagonist. Or you can make the case that neither movie would have been made in the 1980s without a young white star. Or both.

There's a similar question with The Blues Brothers: Is it a story of white comedians milking Black culture? Or of white people helping Black music cross over further to white audiences? Or both? How often did any of us hear of the blues, prior to Sinners, aside from the House of Blues chain co-founded by white Canadian Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd?

Also, have you noticed that all the examples of blues-related films and businesses referenced so far have involved white creators?

Why do you think that is?

The Rights to 'Crossroad'

Questions of cultural and financial appropriation can get very messy, as they do with the story of Robert Johnson's "Crossroad."

In the early 1970s, after British and American rock stars embraced Robert Johnson as a spiritual father, blues fan and researcher Stephen C. LaVere sought out Johnson's survivors and made a deal for his unreleased music.

Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, a boxed set released in August 1990, earned Johnson a posthumous Grammy for Best Historical Album Grammy and sold more than a million copies. Author Robert Gordon wrote a detailed piece, first published in LA Weekly in 1991, questioning how well the deal worked out for Johnson's heirs.

The article reported that LaVere struck his deal with Johnson's half-sister, Carrie Thompson, and that the copyright on Johnson's works went to him after Johnson's death.

"Now that she is gone I have an obligation to pay her heirs, and when I’m gone, my heirs have to pay her heirs. And it goes on, as long as money is collected, money will be paid,” Gordon quoted LaVere as saying.

LaVere died a decade ago, but not before giving an interview in which he said he thought his legacy would be bringing Robert Johnson's work to the wider world: "I think that the good will overshadow the bad," he said.

Ryan Coogler Offers Questions and Answers in Sinners

Sinners takes a provocative approach to questions of cultural appropriation: One standout, magnificent scene connects ancient African drumming to funk, modern hip-hop and even Chinese opera, showing how music can seamlessly connect generations and even continents. The main white characters in the film keep saying they just wanted to enjoy the juke joint's music — though they're withholding some key information. The film's composer is the Swedish Ludwig Göransson, who also composed the music for Coogler's Creed and Black Panther, among many other projects. (He won an Oscar for both Black Panther and Oppenheimer.)

The film suggests that cultures, continents and centuries can come together — beautifully, uncomplicatedly — on a dance floor.

Behind the till is another story. Smoke and Stack spend a good section of Sinners worrying over real money, wooden nickels, and gold. The movie starts with a business deal with a white man with the worst of intentions.

But Coogler's deal with Warner Bros. seems like a good deal for everyone: The film had made more than $71 million as of Tuesday, blowing past industry expectations.

The film ends with a scene that hints at how the story could go on. Perhaps Sinners will become more valuable in the decades to come, just like "Crossroads."

Tarantino, after all, is a famously exacting and unique director who rightly insists on close creative control over his projects. Why would he hand off a character he clearly loves, having featured him in 2019's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and a more detailed 2021 novelization?

The realness of the project became more apparent as more details emerged: Days after the Playlist report, The Ringer's Sean Fennessey reported on the Big Picture podcast that he had checked with his Tarantino contacts and learned that the film should "probably should not be thought of as a sequel. It should be thought of as a follow-up that is connected to, but not the same as" the original film.

Fennessey compared it to the relationship between two Raymond Chandler adaptations: 1946's The Big Sleep and 1975's Farewell, My Lovely, both of which feature Phillip Marlowe — though he is played by Humphrey Bogart in the first and Robert Mitchum in the second. Fennessey also said the new film will take place in 1977, eight years after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Also Read: Quentin Tarantino Movies Ranked

It seems that a film set eight years after its predecessor, featuring the same actor in the same Oscar-winning role, with the same screenwriter, is more like a sequel than a 1975 film featuring a different creative team and released a generation after the previous Phillip Marlowe movie. But we can debate that when the movie comes out. The more pressing question is why Tarantino would hand off his character to anyone else.

The answer may be legacy.

How The Movie Critic Connects With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Tarantino has famously stated, many times, that his next film, his tenth, will also be his last. He abandoned plans to direct what had been expected to be his last film, a project called The Movie Critic, in April 2024. The Hollywood Reporter said at the time that Pitt had been in talks to star in The Movie Critic, reprising the role of Cliff Booth.

The Playlist reports that the Movie Critic script seems to have turned into the project that Fincher will now direct.

Handing the script off to Fincher gives Tarantino newfound creative freedom, and a chance to have it both ways: He gets to leave his character in the hands of a very trusted director and contemporary he has long admired, while going off to do something else for his tenth and final movie.

And if the Fincher movie is a failure — which seems very unlikely, given the pedigree of everyone involved — Tarantino can sit back and enjoy years of fans and critics lamenting the Tarantino version that might have been.

The Playlist also says that Netflix, which purchased the project, "may have paid over $20 million for Tarantino’s screenplay."

That's a win-win-win.

Quentin Tarantino on David Fincher

Tarantino admires Fincher — whose films include the Pitt-led Fight Club and the masterful Zodiac, among others — but does not exactly see him as competition, as he told Charlie Rose in 2009 interview to promote his then-brand-new Inglorious Basterds.

A telling, oft-cited quote lays out both his high esteem for Fincher and the pressure Tarantino feels as a writer-director.

"One of the most talented filmmakers of my generation is David Fincher, but he's not in the same category as me because I'm a writer-director, and that makes it different," Tarantino told Rose.

"That makes it a different thing. It's hard work to go that blank piece of paper and start from square one, start from scratch every single solitary time. You are at the bottom of Mount Everest, every single solitary time, and everything you've done before not only does not help you, it can even like hang over your head. ... You make less movies that way, and it is a lot easier to go look at the scripts that are out there and available and maybe work with the writer or do a little rewrite or that kind of thing and you get more movies made."

Every Tarantino film — except for 1997's Jackie Brown, based on Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch — came from an original story. And he wrote them all alone, with the exception of 1994's Pulp Fiction, which he co-wrote with Roger Avary, his former video store co-worker. (Today Tarantino and Avary co-host the Video Archives Podcast, recounting their days as South Bay video clerks, and recommending films.)

Though famously opinionated and committed to his own vision, Tarantino seems to seek out collaborations with artists he trusts and respects, including Avary and Robert Rodriguez, with whom he made 1996's From Dusk till Dawn (Rodriguez directed while Tarantino starred and wrote the script based on a concept by Robert Kurtzman) and 2007's Grindhouse (featuring two films, Planet Terror and Death Proof, the first written and directed by Rodriguez and the second written and directed by Tarantino.)

Tarantino has long floated the idea of making an R-rated Star Trek film — which would have put him at the helm of someone else's IP for the first time — though that idea seems to be in the past.

Tarantino also wrote the screenplays for 1993's True Romance, directed by Tony Scott, and 1994's Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone, though he sold both early in his career before he had the clout to insist on directing them himself. He has frequently praised the late Tony Scott, though he famously dislikes Stone's Natural Born Killers.

No matter: Instead of directing either of those films, he made Pulp Fiction, widely considered far superior to either True Romance or Natural Born Killers.

Fincher's version of Cliff Booth could be a True Romance, which generates awe for Tarantino's writing and the aforementioned speculation about whether the film would have been even better in his hands. Or, worse-case scenario, it could be a Natural Born Killers, in which fans credit Tarantino for the good elements and blame someone else for the flaws.

Either way, Tarantino is now free to end his film career with a fresh project, potentially superior to the one that might have been, while secure in the knowledge that one of the best filmmakers of his generation is looking out for Cliff Booth.

Main image: Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt behind the scenes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Courtesy of Sony.

I will never watch it. The title reminds me of an extremely upsetting PSA that ran throughout my childhood.

In the film, Lohan is playing a young woman named Avery (great name) who discovers that her new boyfriend's sister is dating a man named Logan (Ian Harding) whose marriage proposal Avery turned down a decade ago.

The PSA ran during cartoons as I grew up in the Los Angeles area, during the 1980s, and features an adult voice saying "Now don't tell anyone where I touched you. It will just be our little secret."

In the movie, Avery and Logan decide, for the sake of keeping the peace, not to tell their respective partners about their shared history. But of course this leads to romantic tension in a house full of relatives trying to enjoy the holidays.

Also Read: 12 '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember

I've been trying to find the creepy PSA, via YouTube and Google, since being surprised by the title of the movie. Surely someone in the Netflix chain of command remembered this ad? Surely lots of Netflix employees grew up, like me, in Los Angeles in the 1980s?

The Our Little Secret Movie vs the Our Little Secret PSA

I'm a solid Lindsay Lohan fan and would ordinarily be happy to watch a movie with this cute hook — kind of reminiscent of the terrific Glen Powell-Sydney Sweeney rom-com Anyone But You, one of the big theatrical success stories of 2023 and subsequently a cute movie to watch with your special somebody on Netflix.

Also: I know I didn't imagine this very scary PSA, but only because of a Reddit post where someone wrote: "I remember this creepy PSA that would air growing up in the 80s, very similar to the 'stranger danger' commercial, but this one had a creepy guy talking to a little girl, and touching her dress, and he specifically said, 'Don't tell anyone where I touched you. It'll be our little secret.' My coworkers looked at me like I was crazy! I know I've seen this before! Help!!" That's more detail than I remembered.

Christmas movies, like rom-coms, are all about comforting people with familiar setups — meeting the family, etc — with just enough problems for the audience to feel like the main characters have overcome something. But wouldn't you want the title to not creep anyone out?

One more thing about the Reddit post: In the three years since that person posted it, somehow no one has posted the original video, which somehow makes the whole thing even creepier to me. This is perhaps the only video I've tried to find online that I can't find.

Do you think major studios and streamers have a department that vets titles to make sure they don't have any weird associations? It's totally possible that I've just aged out of the demo — I mean, I grew up in the '80s, making me a full-fledged Gen Xer. Is everyone at Netflix younger than me, maybe? And am I what Gen Xers often accuse younger generations of being — too sensitive?

Also, is it possible that the reason I can't find the PSA is that it was pulled for being too creepy? But that it was upsetting enough to have remained in my head all these decades?

I'd watch the movie if it had almost any other title, I really would. How has no one else noticed this? I'm not saying to ban this movie or boycott it or something, not at all. I'm basically a free-speech absolutist. But this just seems like a marketing misfire. Or maybe not, since no one else seems to be aware of it or care.

Also, I can't tell you how common these kinds of PSAs were in the '80s — there's even one with He-Man and She-Ra. And I don't think the effort was misplaced, either. I grew up very aware of the McMartin pre-school case, which, though it was later linked to the Satanic Panic and led to zero convictions, definitely established for me and my childhood friends that we had to be careful. I had several friends who I later found out were abused in the less-regulated '80s. That's part of the creepiness and sadness I feel from the phrase "our little secret." When I hear people complain about how kids today are too supervised, I always think, OK, but what do you think that is?

It doesn't tarnish the real Carlin's legacy. The jokes, such as they are, are decently constructed. The voice sounds enough like Carlin's, which I guess would be impressive and relatively cool if I were playing a George Carlin videogame. I don't find it funny, but these things are subjective.

Where the A.I. special fails is where A.I. content will always fail: It cannot capture or share a legitimate human experience. Which is the point of comedy.

George Carlin was a person. He fell in love, he got frustrated by things, he decided what to have or not have for breakfast. He tripped sometimes, got weird shooting pains sometimes, smelled things he didn't like, had heart failure that ultimately killed him, wondered what it would be like to die, worried, appreciated, made peace with his mortality or didn't, cared.

An A.I. can't do any of those things, so I can't bring myself to care what it has to say. No one can.

The purpose of standup comedy isn't just delivering jokes. If it were, an A.I. might someday be great at it. A very good comedian — he used to be on Saturday Night Live – explained to me once that jokes are kind of like math, in that they follow certain formulas. Of course someday artificial intelligence will be able to come up with jokes as effectively as a computer can do math.

But no one will ever care.

Because what you're getting with standup comedy isn't just a bunch of well-constructed jokes. You're getting someone else's perspective and experience. I don't know anyone who lost their dad on 9/11, but I listened to such a person for an hour last night when I watched the new Pete Davidson special. (It's funny — to me.) I don't know anyone who has met Lil Nas X at a party but I listened to someone who has for an hour last week when I watched the new Dave Chappelle special. (Also funny — to me.)

George Carlin and Atmeal

Once I heard Dana Carvey, a great comedian, tell a story about the time he worked in a hotel, and served George Carlin a bowl of oatmeal.

"And I put it in front of him, and he goes, 'Oatmeal. Drop the O, and you have atmeal.'”

It's an innocuous little story that makes both comedians feel a little more real. Dana Carvey has worked a regular job. He served oatmeal to someone who had his dream job, and wondered if he would ever reach Carlin's level. Carlin had a moment with a waiter, could maybe sense the waiter wanting something, gave him a little ad lib. It was weird and maybe awkward. A very human exchange.

The kind of weird little moment a computer will never have.

I watch standup to hear about moments like this.

When you watch standup, you're learning what it's like to be someone you're not: A man, woman, Black, white, from a mixed-race household, very tall, very fat, gay, a survivor of child abuse, extremely rich — and maybe all of those things. You're getting a hopefully funny window into someone else's life.

The best part is that, because this exchange is fairly one-sided, you're under no obligation to agree with everything this person says. You can just hear their story, and laugh, if they do a good job. But you can also hear, for a little while, what it might be like to be someone else.

Maybe it will make you more forgiving of other people's flaws. Maybe not, it's fine. I know that every time I wash the dishes I think about Bill Burr's routine about how one person in every relationship does the dishes, and one always lets them soak. Do these routines make me better about doing the dishes? Sometimes.

The real beauty of standup is totally unavailable to an A.I. — you're watching someone make comedy out of their life, in front of a crowd that wants to laugh and will resent the comedian who doesn't make that happen. It's high human drama. When the comedian embraces the bargain — by trying hard things, instead of reciting safe jokes — it's maybe the purest art form of them all.

Even comedians who invent personas – Anthony Jeselnik is one of my favorites — are still taking risks. They're creating a drama between their actual selves and the person they're pretending to be. To tell jokes that are evil and wrong, which Jeselnik does better than anyone, you have to understand exactly why they're evil and wrong. What line is being crossed.

The comedian is always taking a reputational risk — going too hard, going too soft. Saying something interesting about a subject that's hard to talk about versus feebly attempting the topic for cheap laughs or shock value.

Plus the countless other calculations, worked out over months of honing a routine, or in seconds, in the moment. The comedian is always looking for a balance between being so real that the routine isn't funny and being so outrageous that there aren't any stakes.

For an A.I., there simply aren't any stakes. There's no career to be canceled, no feelings to be hurt, no experience to share. Nothing it says matters. Nobody cares.

Main image: George Carlin at a signing of his book Brain Droppings in New York City. Photo by Alex Lozuprone under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Both Barbie and Oppenheimer are those wonderful kinds of movies that you pay to see once, but get to relive over and over as you ponder their messages and meanings. I expected that of Oppenheimer, but not really of Barbie, and I was wrong.

If you haven't seen Barbie or Oppenheimer, maybe you share some of the preconceptions I had going in to each film: that Barbie will be frothy, silly and fun; and that Oppenheimer will be a grimly serious spectacle. Both of these Barbenheimer expectations are pretty reasonable: Oppenheimer is about the father of the atomic bomb famous for quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds." And Barbie is about a pretty doll coming to life.

But Barbie has a tremendous amount to ponder, as we probably could have guessed from the fact that it's directed by Greta Gerwig and written by her and Noah Baumbach, whose last two films have been about divorce (Marriage Story) and death (White Noise). The film announces it has more on its mind than cool costumes when Barbie needle scratches a Dream House dance party by asking, "You guys ever think about dying?" It isn't a trite "girl boss" message movie, either: There are no easy answers.

Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is as funny as it could possibly be, albeit in a very wry way. One scene with Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman gets a decently big laugh for Truman's bluntness, and another line about a honeymoon in Kyoto gets a laugh for how audaciously it explains why people can't be trusted with atomic bombs.

Barbenheimer Thoughts

I saw Oppenheimer on Tuesday, and have spent days puzzling over the universal questions it raises, including: Are scientists responsible for their creations? Is violence the only answer to violence? What is the morality of using death to potentially prevent more death?

These questions are actually in some ways easier for me to answer than the ones in Barbie, because I have some distance from them: I will never be an atomic scientist. But I am a man, in a world full of men, women, and people who decline a binary commitment to either gender, and gender expectations come up in my life, and I suspect yours, all the time.

I saw Barbie a couple of hours ago, and was impressed by how it offers a smart, messy, and yet always funny critique of gender roles that directly affects everyone in their daily interactions. It poses fundamental questions about fairness, expectations, and sharing responsibility, even if its questions are dressed up in metaphor and jokes. It challenges us to come up with better ways for men and women to coexist, fairly and equitably.

It also questions whether the Barbie model is inherently harmful to young girls, or if some Barbieland may exist where Barbie can be a force of only positivity. The latter questions aren't really about Barbie the doll, but about the unrealistic ideals she embodies.

Together, the films subtly and smartly ask us to look at our own sense of destructiveness, particularly if we're male.

If those last words freaked you out, please don't be that guy who flies off the handle and gets overly emotional like some soft baby doll. Both movies are thoughtful and entertaining non-lectures, and both deserve to be seen, and for viewers to enjoy thinking about them afterwards. Just maybe not at the same time.

Barbenheimer, in Summary

Barbenheimer is a wonderful thing, but each half of it deserves time to process.

Barbie and Oppenheimer are now in theaters.

Main image: Barbenheimer.

Through a flashback in Dead Reckoning, we see Hunt express grief and responsibility over the death of a woman in his past who was killed by the newest antagonist, Gabriel (Esai Morales). Though Dead Reckoning only offers us a few minutes of this fairly generic backstory, the storyline is symbolic of a shift in the series away from the light-hearted tone of its predecessors, and towards a grittier and grayer morality.

Up until Dead Reckoning, the clearest Ethan Hunt origin story did not appear on screen, but rather in a DVD bonus feature. In a character profile on the Mission Impossible (1996) DVD, Hunt is identified as an only child from Wisconsin whose boyhood knack for impressions led him to a dual degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in linguistics and theater.

Also Read: Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible Director Christopher McQuarrie Argue a Lot — About You

Later, while enrolled in the CIA training academy, Hunt pulled off a large-scale prank that drew the attention of the IMF, the super secret organization that still assigns him impossible missions to this day.

How the Changing Ethan Hunt Origin Reflects Changes in Mission Impossible

A class clown-turned-spy Ethan Hunt origin story is fitting for the protagonist and playful spectacle of the first Mission Impossible film: Hunt is young, charming, and showy, and the action scenes mimic his personality — exploding chewing gum is used more than once. Burying a throwaway joke about Hunt’s theater kid background in a DVD menu only heightens the film’s frothy sensibilities.

Fallout (2018) updated the dossier in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene to show that Hunt was a recruit of Colonel Briggs, a reference to the original Mission Impossible series of the 1960s. It’s an insider joke for the eagle-eyed, and a sign of reverence for the series that started the entire franchise. But it's mostly been ignored by modern fans.

How the New Ethan Hunt Origin Story Fits Dead Reckoning

In comparison to both Mission Impossible and Fallout, Dead Reckoning is downright nihilistic. The IMF team is more under-resourced than ever and the primary trio of Hunt, Luther, and Benji are weary. None of the tech they’ve relied upon for the last six movies can be trusted anymore thanks to the evil AI antagonist, and they instead switch to clunky analog tools. The message is clear: the old world is gone and they’ve helped to kill it in the rampant proliferation of surveillance and military tech.

Significantly in Dead Reckoning, we learn that the IMF does not exclusively recruit from intelligence agencies, as has been hinted at throughout the series. As Hunt explains to series newcomer Grace (Hayley Atwell) — the master thief who unwittingly gets tied up in Gabriel’s plans for world domination — he, Luther, and Benji have all been in the exact desperate spot she is.

They were all given the choice she’ll have to make: to either die on the run, spend life in prison, or join the IMF.

This new turn in Dead Reckoning indicates that Hunt is no longer the beacon of all-American morality we’ve come to know over the last twenty-five years. Hunt’s previously been portrayed as certainly imperfect and undoubtedly a risktaker, but not rash or selfish. He’s never shared James Bond’s taste for liquor, luxury goods, or sexual impropriety.

Hunt has always seemed motivated by, yes, adrenaline chasing, but most profoundly by a deep sense of global humanism. He wants to save the world, and he does, over and over again, without complaint. 

Also Read: The Motorcycle Parachute Jump Wasn't the Hardest Scene to Shoot in Dead Reckoning

Mission Impossible’s fast and loose attitude towards continuity has always been one of its strengths. Its anti-nostalgic ethic stands in fierce contrast to the backstory-heavy trauma plots that have dominated the major franchises.

In a landscape where the Star Wars universe dedicates hours of screen time to minor plot points from decades-old movies and entire Reddit forums are dissecting individual frames of Taylor Swift videos, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a movie that prioritizes large-scale storytelling over minutiae and requires no prior knowledge to enjoy.

Like Cruise himself, Ethan Hunt has mostly avoided looking in the rearview mirror. Perhaps this is why Cruise has deliberately merged his public persona with Ethan’s, hoping that their shared penchant for hard work and gravity-defying stunts will convince audiences to ignore the actor’s once very public and hotly debated private life.

Dead Reckoning reminds us what Ethan Hunt has always been: a folk hero. And we adapt folk heroes to fit the times. In 1996, we saw a cheeky upstart explicitly reject the past and recognize that no authority figure, no matter how trusted, was immune to corruption.

In 2023, we’re asking what the ramifications are of the technology that we’ve welcomed into our lives, and whether a man who has done wrong can redeem himself. We’ll have to wait until Dead Reckoning Part Two to find out the answers.

Main image: Tom Cruise and Vanessa Kirby in Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.

Wait, What Is Barbenheimer?

The internet has been wild for months with the concept of Barbenheimer, aka a Barbie and Oppenheimer double feature on the day they both open. (Both are officially in theaters Friday, but will screen early Thursday night.) Even Tom Cruise embraces Barbenheimer.

A few days ago, Rotten Tomatoes asked people if they’re seeing Barbie or Oppenheimer, and a few brave souls (like yourself) said they’re seeing both — going full Barbenheimer.

Most said they’re seeing Barbie first, and dear reader, they’re making a big mistake. 

Let’s assume they’re seeing Barbie first because they expect it’s going to be more exciting, less dense, and of course, shorter than Oppenheimer. They’re not wrong! Barbie is a silly ride through Barbieland with a cast stacked with every Barbie and Ken variant. It’s the cavity-inducing summer snack we all deserve. Barbie’s the key lime pie to Oppenheimer’s (burnt) broccoli. 

Also Read: Barbie Evades Ban

That’s not to say Oppenheimer isn’t good! It’s everything you come to expect from a Christopher Nolan film: dark, brooding, a bit talky, adult, and serious, with next-level visuals that leave you reeling. Especially this time around. We’re talking about the a movie about the guy who created the atom bomb, for crying out loud. 

But, but, but, now you’re thinking: “Why does it matter if I see Barbie before Oppenheimer? Both are Hollywood blockbusters with A-list actors.” Both even have everyone’s favorite childhood actors all grown up. Barbie has Superbad’s Michael Cera and Oppenheimer has Drake and Josh’s Josh Peck. In a different timeline, you might even see Peck co-star in the goofier of the two movies, but in this multi-verse, it’s Michael Cera who plays Allan, the Drake to Ken’s Josh in Barbie. Times have a-changed, indeed.

Why You Must See Oppenheimer, Then Barbie, to Do Barbenheimer Right

The order you see the movies matters because Oppenheimer is medicine and Barbie is sugar. Think about it: Do you take the chaser before the shot? No! Have we already forgotten Mary Poppin’s most important lesson? “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

And Oppenheimer is definitely medicine. Audiences have been taught for the last 365 days that Nolan’s explosive epic is coming to wipe the smile off your face and make you sit up straight in your chair. Even cinema’s resident prickly Facebook prognosticator Paul Schrader, who admittedly isn’t a Nolan groupie, calls Oppenheimer “the best and most important film of this century.”

Also Read: Why Oppenheimer Was the 'American Prometheus'

Maybe it is. History is an explanation of the present, but what’s most important is really a subjective point of view in movies. At the end of the day, everyone with a camera is doing the same thing — from filming your dad’s last birthday on your iPhone, to Christopher Nolan simulating an atom bomb explosion, to Greta Gerwig using every last drop of pink paint to create Barbieland — using light, shadow, and sound to capture or create something meaningful. 

What you see on screen might be more important to you than someone else, but it’s no less important because of it. Even if one person with a camera is more skilled than the another. 

Plus, Oppenheimer might’ve dropped his first bomb 15 years before Barbie debuted on shelves, but Barbie is the only one who’s getting a sequel. So see Oppenheimer first and chase it with Barbie, if you ever want to feel joy again. 

Barbie and Oppeheimer, aka Barbenheimer, are in theaters Thursday night, together and separately.

Main image: Margot Robbie as Barbie and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Barbenheimer.

Who are these people, and why would they ever be divided?

Yes, I know lots of critics are dutifully acting like there was anything remotely unconventional about Sunday's shoot-'em-up. The Hollywood Reporter had two critics talk out what it described as a "devastating finale." The Today Show enlisted a philosophy professor to sort out our feelings.

But folks, I took a freshman ethics course, and feel well-equipped to handle the question of whether Joel (Pedro Pascal) did the right thing.

Of course he did. And every single person watching the show – who isn't lying to themselves and others on Twitter — wanted him to do what he did. He did the only thing that made sense, not just emotionally, but within the logic of the show.

The Last of Us and The Trolley Problem

I'm assuming you know what Joel did or have no intention of watching the show, which lays out what I'm about to say much better, with its bazillion-dollar budget, than I can with this rattly keyboard, but here we go. SPOILERS.

In the season finale, Joel finally delivered Ellie to the rebellious Fireflys who claimed they could use Ellie to cure humanity of the fungal virus turning people into zombies, thanks to her immunity to zombie bites.

(We also learned in the episode that she probably gained immunity during childbirth, when her mother was bit just before delivering her. It was extremely sad.)

But: When she arrived at the Firefly facility and was put to sleep for surgery, Joel learned that the Fireflies' method of extracting the cure required their doctors to remove cordyceps from her brain, which would kill her.

So Joel, and the audience, were presented with a seemingly simple version of The Trolley Problem, first discussed by Philippa Foot in 1967. It asks you to make the most ethical decision in various scenarios in which a trolley is about to go off a track, presumably killing many people, unless you sacrifice one person. (Who is described here as a "fat man," which seems needlessly cruel, considering the hypothetical sacrifice he may be asked to make. But OK.)

Also Read: Dallas Harvey Film 'Metamorphose' Is Not for Trypophobes

The trolley problem has come up kind of a lot lately, including in Knock at the Cabin, perhaps because our recent pandemic has made us think more and more about our moral and ethical obligations. It comes up in debates about vaccines and masks, for example.

What makes the Last of Us trolley problem seemingly simple is that it posits that Joel needs to decide between Ellie and all of humanity. Ellie has been sedated for this weird brain surgery, so she can't decide what to do. Joel has to agree to be led out of the facility by Firefly thugs, so the Firefly surgeons can do their grim business on his daughter surrogate.

But the show isn't really presenting a simple trolley problem. It's a mess.

Why the Last of Us Trolley Problem Isn't That Much of a Problem

First, there's no guarantee that this medical procedure will work. This is the first time they're trying it. And given that the procedure will kill Ellie, and may not even work, the Firefly doctors really seem to be rushing things.

Second, the procedure isn't the only way to save humanity. As we've seen throughout The Last of Us, whole societies and cities have managed to survive — and in the case of Jackson, Wyoming, even thrive. There are ways to manage the zombie problem that don't require killing unconscious teenage girls.

Third: Read that last part again. The Fireflies could have asked Ellie for her consent — to be killed — before putting her under. But they didn't. Some people have made the claim that Joel did an unethical thing by lying to Ellie about what happened, after making Ellie's decision for her.

But even assuming that Ellie might have consented to die, the safest decision in the event of an ethical tie is generally to not kill the innocent person. (And what about all the Fireflies Joel did kill? They weren't innocent. They were either directly involved in the procedure, or trying to guard it.)

Finally, this is the finale of the first season of a show that will likely go on for a long time. This isn't the final say on the matter of whether Ellie should be sacrificed to save humanity. This is just the introduction of that question. To present Joel's decision as the final say in the matter is absurd.

Don't Do Us Like The Walking Dead

The only ominous thing here is the possibility that The Last of Us, like The Walking Dead before it, will play the TV game of streeeeetching out storylines long past the point where they would naturally resolve, for the sake of keeping the franchise undead.

Early episodes of the show suggested that it had an admirably ruthless approach to storytelling in which anyone could die at any time. (In the first five episodes, we lost at least five very endearing characters who audiences might have liked to get to know over several seasons.) But their loss was good for the show, because it gave us the sense that we'd better stay on our toes.

In the latter part of the season, we learned the limits of the show's ruthlessness. It did a frankly lame fake-out at the end of Episode 6, hinting that Joel might be killed off early — shades of Game of Thrones Season 1. It even ended with this Joel-free trailer of Episode 7:

But then he recovered, quite well, with help from a rampage by Ellie and some penicillin.

Nobody cried for the people Ellie killed to get Joel the medicine, because of course we didn't: Ellie and Joel are the lead characters, and the people Ellie killed were either the architects or enforcers of murder. Just like the Fireflies.

That philosophy professor enlisted by Today – Steven Gimbel of Gettysburg Colleges — said something as true as it is obvious: “We are wired to respond more strongly to people we care about and to people we think are like us.”

There's the rule of first-person: We become invested in characters from Humbert Humbert to Patrick Bateman, no matter how terrible they are, simply by our proximity to them. As viewers, we're rooting for Ellie and Joel over the unseen masses, just because we've traveled with them for so long.

Main Image: Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in The Last of Us.