BEFORE: Robert De Niro carries over from "Last Vegas", and I'm starting to think I've made a minor miscalculation - I'm on track to link to "Avengers: Age of Ultron" by this Sunday, but I may not be able to get to the movies until Tuesday. My local subway line is undergoing repairs over the next few weekends, so unless I can convince my wife to join me on Sunday, I've got no way to get to the theater. I've been seeking out another Robert De Niro film to add to the list, or something with Sean Penn or Ben Stiller or Kristen Wiig in it to delay the "Avengers" film a few days more, but nothing has surfaced. So I may have to take Sunday and Monday off, and just play catch-up on Tuesday. Hey, these things happen.
I was at my old job today, helping to clean out my old desk even further, getting rid of old paperwork and equipment dating back to pre-2000 levels of clutter, and I stumbled on a copy of my watchlist from July 2010. I must have made a photocopy at the office in case I ever lost my written list at home - this must have been before I maintained a copy of the list at imdb.com. There were 388 films on the watchlist at that point, more than double the current list of 165 films. And I still had the Hitchcock films on the list, plus ALL of the Woody Allens, even the ones I'd seen before. What's also notable is that almost every film on the 2010 list has now been watched, there's been a complete turnover of material in the last 5 years. Except for "Yentl", that's in the collection on a technicality in that there's a VHS copy owned by my wife, and I may never watch it. If I clear the list except for that film, I may consider my work done.
AFTER: One thing I'm going to have to get used to, as I get closer to the end of the project and my watchlist keeps getting smaller (OK, it's been stuck at 165 for the last week, but you get the idea) is the fact that the films left on the list have less and less in common with each other. If I maintain my actor linking then my subject matter is going to vary more and more, and I'll be less able to find common themes in adjacent films. I could watch a Western one day, follow that with a sci-fi film, maybe a light comedy - things may get weird around here (OK, weirder) if I don't program according to genre, and this could turn into a free-for-all.
But not yet. Is there really that much difference between "Goin' South", where Jack Nicholson is an 1860's horse-thief trying to get to freedom in Mexico, and this film, where two 1930's convicts are trying to get to freedom in Canada? So they have to pretend to be priests, so what? That's easier than mining gold and getting married, right? And just like that Western town in "Goin' South", the northern town here is the home of a convenient plot device, namely a group of priests/monks who make a pilgrimage each year into Canada with their weeping Madonna statue.
This film is not a direct remake of the 1955 film of the same name, which starred Humphrey Bogart - instead, it's based on a stage-play titled "My 3 Angels", adapted into a screenplay by David Mamet. (Ah, that explains all the cursing...). It was released in 1989, just a few months before "Nuns on the Run", with a slightly similar plotline.
If much of the humor in "Last Vegas" came from the lead characters being old, here it mostly comes from them being dumb - but not really dumb like "Dumb & Dumber" dumb - the characters are relatively street-smart, they're just clearly not as smart as the two priests they're impersonating, who are apparently theology experts who have written several books about the finer points of worship. The humor comes from them not knowing how to say grace, how to give a sermon, or how to sing along with the Latin Mass. I think if you're a hard-core Catholic, this becomes much funnier.
It got quite repetitive, though, each time the convicts got up enough nerve to try and cross the bridge - only to get nearly there, then realize some reason why they'd probably be turned away, so they'd give up once again. I started to feel as frustrated as they probably were, to be so close to moving the plot along, only to fail once again with each attempt.
I also wasn't sure if the "Weeping Madonna" was meant to be taken seriously, or was more of an indictment of religion in general, and those phony miracles and bogus relics specifically. I mean, it was pretty obvious where the statue's tears were coming from - were the priests so into the whole miracle thing that they didn't understand the physics of it? Or did they just have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of the miracle? I don't doubt that people see images of Jesus in grilled cheese sandwiches or the Virgin Mary on a foggy screen door, but I just question whether those things are there due to divine providence. I mean, think of how many grilled cheese sandwiches people eat in a day, chances are good that an image of Jesus would get burned into one eventually.
Also starring Sean Penn (last seen in "Gangster Squad"), Demi Moore (last seen in "Mortal Thoughts"), Hoyt Axton (last seen in "Disorganized Crime"), John C. Reilly (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Bruno Kirby, Wallace Shawn (last seen in the FedEx office on 6th Ave. three weeks ago, but last seen in film in "Admission"), James Russo (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Ray McAnally, Jay Brazeau, Ken Buhay.
RATING: 4 out of 10 5-dollar bills
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