Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello once again and welcome back to another episode of movie deputy reviews, where we interrogate the old, the new, the latest, the greatest and the best in between. Kind of a little bit all over the place. But what I do is I interrogate the movies, looking for the story, the, the plot, the content, of course, who the target audience is, etc. Etc. Etcetera. And I'm not going to disappoint you by doing that today. Now, you may have noticed I didn't get anything up over the weekend.
[00:00:30] There was kind of a reason for that. It kind of has to do with the movies that came out this week. So I'm gonna kind of make up for that. So bear with me here. Today we are going to be talking about Ezra. And if you don't know anything about Ezra, Ezra is a.
[00:00:46] It's a movie about autism, but not necessarily in the way that you might think. This one's actually.
[00:00:53] This one's actually been a really hard one to try to calculate, try to figure out how I'm gonna bring this one to you. I actually got to watch this a week ago today, and I have been going back and forth in my brain and just kind of different ideas because I'm like, there is just something about this that got to me. And I've talked to random people post movie and then just kill some people since then that have seen this and some that haven't.
[00:01:18] And the overwhelming thing that people walk away from this movie with is just something that is just. It sits hard in my gut. It's like I swallowed a boulder. And so this one is a really hard one for me to bring to you. Now, I'm going to tell you the score, but I'm going to ask you to stick around and actually listen to the review. That's one of the reasons I don't give the scores always at the beginning.
[00:01:40] But I'm giving Ezra just a three out of ten on the deputy scale. Now, a three means, if you really must see it, wait for it to come out on dvd, Blu ray, instant video, etcetera. But like I said, don't just automatically assume that that's bad. There's a lot of different things that go into that.
[00:01:58] So I want to kind of have a chance to explain that at least a little bit. Now, some people see autism as a disability.
[00:02:07] Some see there's a different ability. But which of these apply to Ezra? That is not necessarily obvious. You kind of see a different side of autism through this movie. And the fact that I am somewhat on the spectrum and I have an autistic son.
[00:02:26] I think a lot more people are on the spectrum than what people want to realize. I think all the conditions like ADHD, ADD, all of that, I think those are all just different parts of being on the spectrum. Just extensive study on a lot of the stuff, just with where I am on the stuff. And I think if even coming down to things like anxiety and things like that are all kind of tied into this at some level, and there's. There's so much that we don't understand about the brain that it just really is challenging. It's challenging to handle. It's challenging to live with. It's.
[00:03:05] It changes you. It changes life. If you've never been around anybody who has dealt with any sort of mental health issues or has dealt dealing with direct, somebody with autism directly, and there's different levels of autism. I mean, there's the high functioning and there's all the way down to, like, the nonverbal and very limited communicatives. Ezra is not nonverbal. Ezra is able to communicate, but his level of communication is difficult because of how much he's just overwhelmed by everything.
[00:03:38] And it's not that autistic people can't. Can't handle things. It's that they can have. That's that they try to handle everything. Their brains can't help it. Their brain takes in everything, like the little things that you or the next person around you or me or anybody might be able to look past. It's like if you stopped and paid attention to every little sound, every little detail that's going on in your life when you're in your house or in your home or traveling down on the street, it's like, okay, you hear the other vehicles running, you hear other people's radios. You hear all this. Now, imagine trying to do focus on all of those different things and then still trying to focus on what you're trying to stay focused on, it's nearly impossible. And a lot of people don't get that. That's really what autism is. And it's an overwhelming of the senses on a lot of different levels. Now, mind you, that's not all that autism is. It is so much more than that. But trying to explain that during a movie review like this is difficult. But in this one, Ezra is, like I said, he has difficult communicate. Difficulty communicating. His parents are divorced and just some family dynamic things going on. You see the complicated relationship that he has between him and his dad and his grandfather, and then his mom is kind of moving on with life and is about to, or he's kind of in another relationship and about to move forward with that relationship.
[00:05:03] And what you see as this movie plays on is that Ezra is not the only autistic person in his family. And there's a lot more to that. I won't give the details of that away or how that presents itself because that'd be spoilers. And, you know, you never have to worry about that with me.
[00:05:19] What this movie does is Ezra finds himself in a dangerous situation.
[00:05:26] How he ends up there again, I can't really explain that or that would be a spoiler, but it just. It leaves them from having to have. From having to assist Ezra being in public school to where they want to institutionalize him.
[00:05:43] And it's not the parents that want to. It's the school that wants to. And so they're trying to say, oh, what's best for Ezra? And do this, what's best for this? But they're not really looking at Ezra. They're just looking at the easy answer. And mind you, that works for some people, but that's not an easy fix for everybody because of this. And his dad is a struggling comedian. He's kind of an entertainer type person. But his dad's like, you know what? I'm just going to take my son and I'm going to go somewhere else and take him where he's safe. And basically, it's a parental kidnapping, which, don't worry, that's not a spoiler there. It's not giving anything away on that.
[00:06:20] And kind of how this plays out of his time going across the country with Ezra and what he's going across the country for. And then, of course, it's the mom reacting to what's going on and how to handle things at home and involving the authorities and just. It gets very, very complicated as it tries to, but. Taro, come here. Patero.
[00:06:46] Sorry. Kitties are insistent on coming in here with me, so you may have a little bit of background noise here. My apologies.
[00:06:54] But as this plays out, you really get to see a different side of Ezra, but you also get to see different parts of autism, and you get to see how people react to those in different ways. Some people are more accepting of it, some people are not. And just really, the interactions that are taking place in this movie kind of are a little bit all over the place.
[00:07:19] Now, this, that probably sounds like it's a great thing, right?
[00:07:24] This one. This movie really kind of rides a very fine line, and there's gonna be people that are praising it and thinking that it is the best movie they've ever seen.
[00:07:37] But there's other people that are going to take something else away from this movie. And that's what's putting the rock in my stomach as I saw this in the theater. It's like on those mystery movie Mondays that some of the theaters are doing right now.
[00:07:51] And as the movie was getting out, I overheard people walking out of the theater, and I even heard people in the hallway discussing this.
[00:07:59] And their takeaway from this movie was that it justifies them using the r word, that they have never really associated autism with the r word.
[00:08:10] And if I'm not gonna say the word, I will spell it for you, but I'm not gonna say it out loud just because I do not like the word. But it's r e t a R.
[00:08:21] I think it's d e d. Sorry. Trying to think of the spelling in my head because I'm not even typing it out. But people's takeaway from this movie. And they're like, oh, yeah, I totally get that. And I'm like, no, no, that's not the takeaway from this. And I've asked other people that have seen this movie, and they're like, oh, yeah, I can see how you could justify that.
[00:08:44] And I'm like, ow.
[00:08:47] How does that work? That is not a justification for that word. I mean, here you're seeing a child that is struggling. It's like, how does that justify that word? And I've had this discussion with people even outside of the theater, and just randomly, other people that have seen this, and there is such a big part of the population that still associates autism with the r word.
[00:09:13] But there's people out there, and it seems like a good portion of the people out there that watch this movie that are justifying using the r word because of this movie. Now, I know that is not the message that they were trying to portray with this at all, but I could.
[00:09:32] I can't justify it. I can't see it. But the way other people tried to describe it to me, it's almost as, in their words, a justification for it. That is why I have given this movie just a three out of ten on the deputy scale.
[00:09:51] It's just something that is that over the top and its message that that is the takeaway for a large portion of the audience. Is that your takeaway from this if you've seen it already? I don't know.
[00:10:05] I would love to know your feedback on this, so feel free to message me or just put something out on social media and use the hashtag hash moviedepity.
[00:10:14] But I really try my best to look in depth into these movies and look at the content and how the story plays out and just all of this. And does this movie have a happy ending?
[00:10:28] I won't spoil that for you. The ending that it has is not typical. I'm not going to say if it's a happy ending or if it's an upsetting ending or maybe even somewhere in the middle. There's it's just the ending. It's an ending you would not expect, let's put it that way.
[00:10:44] So if you should choose to engage in this movie, at least I have tried to prepare you to the best of my abilities.
[00:10:53] As always, if you want the latest and greatest movie deputy content, you know which buttons to push. And I will be back with another movie for you soon. Bye.
