Inferno

Year 9, Day 355 - 12/21/17 - Movie #2,800

BEFORE: I'm here, I made it to the last film of 2017 - another day late, since our office Christmas party was on Wednesday night, and after a few beers I was in no shape to watch a film when I got home.  But I'm still finishing a full 10 days before the end of the year, normally I'd be finished in mid-November, but I did go on vacation, and then "Star Wars" happened, so in the end everything worked out as it should.

Tom Hanks carries over again from "Sully", and my apologies if you were expecting "The Circle" or "The Post", but I don't have access to those films yet.  There's a precedence here, since my final film in the year 2010 was "Angels & Demons".

And my linking ends here, I'll start a new chain fresh on January 1, though I have no idea where to start just yet.  I've reviewed all of my February romance-related films, and assembled them in the best order I could do - there will have to be one full break in that chain, and I think two indirect linkings, which means after 10 years of linking movies, finally my opportunities are dwindling - still, I'm going to do the best that I can.  Then I've linked backwards from February 1 to about mid-January, so there's still some work to do to find the starting point for Year 10.  I'll explain this all further in next week's wrap-up post.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Angels & Demons" (Movie #730)

THE PLOT: When Dr. Robert Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Dr. Sienna Brooks, and together they must race across Europe to foil a deadly global plot.

AFTER: This film is the third film centered around Robert Langdon, but it's based on the fourth book.  That's all right, just like the James Bond series it doesn't matter what order they make the movies in, because each story is (more or less) self-contained.  Hey, the first book in the series was "Angels & Demons", but they made a movie out of the 2nd book, "The Da Vinci Code" first.  But it seems like the series follows some rule about diminishing returns, because the first film was a boffo smash success, the 2nd was somewhat less so, and this film, well, didn't really perform as it should have.

So perhaps there are no future plans to make a film out of "The Lost Symbol" - Wikipedia says they tried to make a screenplay for that, I wonder what went wrong.  It's a shame, because if ever there were a time to make a movie about the secret symbols in Washington, D.C. architecture and statues that suggest that there's a secret society running American politics, man, this would be it.  That would explain a lot, right?

Anyway, back to "Inferno" - this is yet another film where the story is not told completely linearly, we're thrown sort of into the middle of the story and have to piece together what took place before as it is slowly revealed, but here that design really works, because the main character is recovering from a head wound and has a form of selective amnesia - the far-fetched Hollywood kind that is only temporary, of course.  So we're just as confused as Langdon is about what's going on, and we have to figure it all out as he does.  So that's a case like "Memento", where starting at the middle of the story really is justified.  When this is used in a biopic or for forced dramatic effect, or to cover up a story's shortcomings ("cough - Sully - cough") or make a story conform to six-act structure, that remains unacceptable in my book.

As a result of this amnesia, Langdon does not know whom to trust - which would only be a problem if several parties like the World Health Organization and the Italian police weren't out to apprehend him.  He also vaguely remembers getting an injection, but since he doesn't remember the circumstances, it's possible that he himself is a carrier of the virus that he's trying to stop.  Again, we'll all find out when he does.

The referenced art here includes a lot of Botticelli, with literary references to Dante's "Inferno", which happens to share its name with the virus.  But unlike the secrets hidden in the art portrayed in "The Da Vinci Code", which were allegedly hidden by the Renaissance artists themselves, these seem to have been hidden by the modern-day criminal mastermind, which basically makes him about as believable as a Batman villain, since he can't seem to commit a crime without leaving behind a puzzle to solve, which opens up the possibility of someone really smart foiling his plot.  So "shenanigans" has to be called on this, because the really evil people in the world just DO THEIR BAD THING without tipping their hand in any way.

I'm glad that I didn't read this in book form first, therefore I was able to still be surprised by the twists and turns of the plot, I think that was important.  I did read the first two books in the series, though.  I've had "Ready Player One" in my "must-read" pile for a while now, but since that film is coming out next year, I've got much less motivation now to read it before the film's release.

I did fall asleep about 10 minutes in on this film, I admit it.  And I kept having to force myself awake, returning to that point and trying again, but finally I fell asleep at about 1 am and slept for a few hours.  So I woke up again at about 4 am Friday and stayed awake until the end, then went back to sleep around 6 am.  As you might imagine, this sort of behavior radically affects my ability to get to work later that morning at a decent hour.  I think once the craziness of the Christmas holiday is over, I need to start getting some more solid sleep at a more regular, non-vampire-like schedule.  I've got about four days after Christmas to rest up before starting again.

Also starring Felicity Jones (last seen in "True Story"), Omar Sy (last seen in "Burnt"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Irrfan Khan (last seen in "Jurassic World"), Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish, Paul Ritter, Gabor Urmai, Philip Arditti.

RATING: 6 out of 10 violinists (performing in a flooded room, for some reason...)

Sully

Year 9, Day 353 - 12/19/17 - Movie #2,799

BEFORE: Tom Hanks carries over again from "Bridge of Spies".  Just one more film and the Movie Year 9 will be over.  I'm gonna bring this year in for a landing, just like...oh, if only there were some kind of metaphor for how I'm gonna stick the landing on this one.  Maybe something will come to me.

THE PLOT: The story of Chesley Sullenberger, an American pilot who became a hero after landing his damaged plane on the Hudson River to save the flight's passengers and crew.

AFTER: They just couldn't resist doing one of those "Fractured Timeline" things with Sully's story - it makes me wonder why they couldn't just have started with the plane taking off on that January day, and letting the audience experience the event in (somewhat) real time, or at least in the proper sequence.  Instead they felt they had to start with the follow-up investigation of the incident, and then at some point they flashback to show the events of the day in question.

I guess the reasoning is as follows: if they wanted to cover both the incident and the aftermath, then the climax of the story, which is the landing and the ensuing rescue effort, and then the TSA investigation and the ways in which Sully was regarded as a hero, then the most exciting part of the story would come way too early in the movie.  One might imagine that even with some padding, then the crash (sorry, "water landing") would happen at the midpoint of the film at the latest, then it would be a long, hard slog through the boring third act.  So instead they moved the best, most accurate account of the incident, aka "the reveal" to happen shortly near the end, while the investigators and an audience are all listening to the flight recordings together.  It's a very sneaky way to move the most climactic moment of the story to where one might expect to find it in a narrative film, which is shortly before the ending.

But as a result, that means that excessive flashbackery ends up fracturing the narrative here, it's not a straight shot from start to finish, and as a whole, the use of this as a storytelling device has been much too prevalent in recent years.  I bet that in next week's wrap-up, if I count up how many films saw fit to jump back and forth through a famous person's life, I'd come up with at least a dozen examples from films I watched this year.  Enough of this crap already, just start at the beginning and end at the end, and if that doesn't make your story interesting, then PICK ANOTHER STORY TO TELL.

There are also visions of what COULD have happened, mostly from Sully's point of view, and mostly concerning Sully's plane crashing into one of NYC's many occupied buildings.  But we all know this DIDN'T HAPPEN, so this kind of comes off like a desperate attempt to spice up the story with what, a peek into some alternate realities?  Can we say for sure that Sully had these visions, that he was tormented with nightmares of the crashes that didn't happen?  I'm not sold on this point - I'd bet my money that the filmmakers didn't think that the landing that did happen wasn't nearly as visually arresting as the crashes that didn't, so they used CGI to give us a peak at those - but I'm calling shenanigans on this.

And I've said this before, whenever there's a film about an airplane crashing - I don't care if it's "Airport" or "Alive" or "Flight" or "Cast Away" - they all reinforce the fact that air travel is still dangerous to some degree.  I wish designers could guarantee every plane's safety, but they can't - so I don't recommend frequent air travel until such time as it becomes safe in a foolproof way.  If a flock of birds can bring down an airplane, maybe that should be telling us something.  Or maybe movies should focus more on air travel as the miracle that it is (like, how DOES the plane stay up in the air?  I took physics class in high-school and I still have no clue.  I think the plane just goes fast enough that it keeps going straight, and the earth curves out from under it, right?) and maybe a little less on the planes that crash.

Also, can we get a movie to explain to me how time zones work?  This always makes my head hurt - like, if you could travel across a time zone, west to east, in a fast plane and do it in under an hour, aren't you going back in time?  Like if I had a plane that left New York at 5 pm and could get to L.A. in an hour, I'd arrive at 6 pm NYC time, but that would be only 3 pm L.A. time, so I'd somehow arrive before I left.  Wait, that can't be right...

Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Laura Linney (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Mike O'Malley (last seen in "28 Days"), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Spotlight"), Anna Gunn, Holt McCallany (last seen in "Justice League"), Valeria Mahaffey (last seen in "Seabiscuit"), Delphi Harrington, Ann Cusack (last seen in "Nightcrawler"), Molly Hagan (last seen in "Red State"), Jane Gabbert, Jerry Ferrara (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Autumn Reeser, Max Adler (last seen in "Café Society"), Sam Huntington, Christopher Curry (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Wayne Bastrup, Jeff Kober, Molly Bernard, Chris Bauer, Blake Jones, with cameos from Katie Couric (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), David Letterman, Michael Rapaport (last seen in "The Heat")

RATING: 5 out of 10 flight simulators

Bridge of Spies

Year 9, Day 352 - 12/18/17 - Movie #2,798

BEFORE: I took a little break on Sunday night, just to get the 2nd half of my Christmas cards signed and packaged with a little mix CD of holiday music.  Then tonight (Monday) was my annual Festivus ritual, which is not anything like the one depicted on "Seinfeld", with the Festivus pole, the Airing of the Grievances and then the Feats of Strength.  No, my Festivus is much more free-form, it's just designed to get me into the holiday spirit about a week or so before Christmas.

I usually hit one of the NYC holiday markets, either at Union Square or Grand Central, or go on a walk between the two, and try to finish my holiday shopping, if need be.  This could involve buying books at the Barnes & Noble, or not, and it may involve a friend and some food and drink, or not.  This time I met my friend Victoria at the Union Square market, I had a Polish sausage and a Belgian waffle, then we shopped for books.

Tom Hanks carries over from "The 'Burbs", and it doesn't really matter what order I watch these last three films of the year in, but there's sort of a tenuous story connection with the last film, where those suburbanites thought their neighbors MIGHT be Russian spies, and this film is about a genuine Russian spy.  Russia's been weaving through the narratives of my films this year, I'll break down the extent of my blog's collusion with the Russians next week in the annual wrap-up post.

THE PLOT: During the Cold War, an American lawyer is recruited to defend an arrested Soviet spy in court, and then help the CIA facilitate an exchange of the spy for the Soviet captured American U2 spy plane pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

AFTER: Thanks to Hollywood movies, most of us think we know what being a spy is all about - cool gadgets, fast cars, even faster women, and so on.  But in the real world, espionage is probably a lot more boring, as evidenced in this film based on real events.  The KGB spy captured here by U.S. agents is an older, rather unassuming man, who paints in the park every day while he makes his "drops".  James Donovan is an insurance claims lawyer chosen to represent him in court, so that the public perceives that the spy has a "fair" trial, which makes Donovan hated in the news media at the time (1960).

The surprising plot twists here take the form of legal arguments, like "How can a man be accused of treason, if he never swore allegiance to the U.S. in the first place?"  In one sense, this spy, Rudolf Abel, was just doing his job, and if you follow the logic, then U.S. spies could be held for treason against the countries that they're spying on, and would we really want that?  Another legal question arises when Donovan tries to get the protections of the Constitution to cover Abel (you know, like a fair and speedy trial, no unjust punishments...) but the judge believes that since he's been in the country illegal, and, you know, SPYING on us, he's not necessarily entitled to those protections.  Which kind of sounds like he was assumed to be guilty, and not innocent until proven guilty.

But hey, congratulations on finding a way to make spy movies boring - just quote a bunch of legal arguments and watch the eyes of the audience glaze over as they lose their attention.  I'm fairly sure I fell asleep about halfway through this one, I had to force myself awake at about 4 am to watch the last hour of the film, just so I could go back to bed at 5 am and get a few hours of solid shut-eye.  That's just not going to help me perform at work the next day, guys.

Donovan convinces the judge to not sentence Abel to death, because as a foreign agent he might have some trade value with the Soviets.  And then, as if on cue, Francis Gary Powers gets shot down over Russian airspace while flying a U-2 spy plane taking photos, and suddenly trading one of ours for one of theirs seems like a fine idea.  So Donovan is sent off to recently-separated Germany to negotiate the deal, only there's a hitch: another U.S. citizen, a young economics student, has gotten into trouble with the East Germans, so Donovan has to try to arrange a two-for-one deal, getting one prisoner back from the Russians and another back from the East Germans.

The exchange plays out on the Glienicke Bridge, hence the title, and I wish I could say that this climax of the film is more exciting than what has led up to it, but really, it's just a prisoner exchange, and it's hard to imbue that with a lot of dramatic tension.  They try their best with the last-minute phone call thing, but it's a vain effort.   They also left themselves open for a sequel, because Donovan went on to play a role in releasing prisoners after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

NITPICK POINT: I recognized the subway cars in the opening scene as being just a bit too recent for a film set in 1957 - they look just like some of the older cars that are still in service.  Sure, some NYC subway cars haven't changed since the 1970's or so, but these looked all shiny with the ribbed siding, and those cars didn't come into service until 1964 (as mentioned on the IMDB "goofs" page).  They should have used the cars from the 6 Line with the flat sides, I don't think that design has been updated since the 1940's.

Also starring Mark Rylance (last heard in "The BFG") Amy Ryan (last seen in "Escape Plan"), Sebastian Koch (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Alan Alda (last seen in "Sweet Liberty"), Austin Stowell (last seen in "Whiplash"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Jason Bourne"), Billy Magnussen (last seen in "The Big Short"), Eve Hewson (last seen in "Enough Said"), Jillian Lebling, Noah Schnapps (last heard in "The Peanuts Movie"), Jesse Plemons (last seen in "Black Mass"), Michael Gaston (last seen in "Body of Lies"), Peter McRobbie (last seen in "The Hoax"), Domenick Lombardozzio, Will Rogers, Dakin Matthews (last seen in "Sunset"), Stephen Kunken (also last seen in "Jason Bourne"), Joshua Harto, Mark Zak, Edward James Hyland (last seen in "Café Society"), Mikhail Gorevoy (last seen in "Die Another Day"), Burghart Klaußner.

RATING: 5 out of 10 checkpoint guards

The 'Burbs

Year 9, Day 350 - 12/16/17 - Movie #2,797

BEFORE: This may seem like a big leap, from a sci-fi franchise film to a strange little comedy from 1989 - but Carrie Fisher's in this one, too, and this is certainly the last movie she'll be in this year, and since I've worked my way through her filmography, perhaps this is the last film I'll see her in.  What a damn shame.  I thought I taped this film around the same time as I got "Bright Lights", but it must have been after I watched "The Bonfire of the Vanities", or I would have linked here from Tom Hanks, right?  Anyway, it's my link to Tom Hanks, whose films are going to help me finish out Year 9.  I should be writing more Christmas cards tonight, but I'm anxious to get to the end of the year.  I could save the last three films to watch between Christmas and New Year's, but I think I'm going to need that time to write my year-end review and also figure out my starting point for Movie Year 10.  (That usually means figuring out the February schedule of romance films, and then counting backwards 30 or 31 linked films from there.)

THE PLOT: An overstressed suburbanite and his fellow neighbors are convinced that the new family on the block is part of a murderous Satanic cult.

AFTER: This is a strange little film, because for the longest time it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be - is it a horror film where the weird neighbors really are up to something evil or creepy, or is it a slapstick comedy where the right-thinking neighbors keep having accidents while they try to get close enough to find out?  Bad news, it's both of those things, and you really can't mix genres like that, it's like putting chocolate sauce on an onion.   And after Tom Hanks and his cohorts keep screwing up worse and worse, it's painful by the end to see them go for broke, when it's still possible that their imaginations have been getting the best of them, and the family in question is not evil, just very weird.

What's worse is that under the guise of pulling back the curtain to show how weird and twisted life can be in the American suburbs, it sort of justifies anti-immigrant sentiment at the same time.  What are those people, Slavic?  Their name sounds German or Polish or something, and you know what THAT means... And if that makes it OK to break into their house, or spy on them and violate their privacy, that's not a good thing.  Jeez, why didn't they just look for some information about the weird neighbors on the internet.  Oh, right, it was 1989 and they couldn't do that.

We really are spoiled these days, because if I had a strange neighbor, Googling them would be the first thing I would do, or I'd look for their Facebook pages and play amateur detective with their family photos.  I used to do some freelance genealogy work for a family friend of my first wife, basically if someone in the Cleveland area had a relative who died in New York City, I'd go to the surrogate court in the appropriate NYC borough and Xerox their will that was on file, which would reveal a lot of information about their relatives.  That's how I earned pocket money for a few years in the early 1990's, but I'm betting all that stuff's on the internet by now, if you know how to look for it.

An odd thing about this film is that, according to the IMDB, it was filmed during a writers' strike in 1988, so that does explain a lot about why many of the dialogue scenes feel improvised, because they were.  There are a few times where two actors are going back-and-forth on an issue, but the arguments don't always appear coherent, they drift off into random directions at times.

The whole thing's set on a cul-de-sac, in a town that's supposedly somewhere in Iowa, or perhaps Illinois.  But of course it was really shot on the Universal Studios back-lot, a set called Colonial Street, that's been used in many different movies and TV shows, at least as far back as "The Munsters", and then later it became Wisteria Lane on "Desperate Housewives".   You can also see this collection of fake houses in the exterior shots on the TV shows "Leave It to Beaver", "Marcus Welby, M.D.", "Providence" and the movies "Harvey", "Gremlins" and "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas".  Hollywood's been recycling since way before it was cool.

Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Bruce Dern (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), Rick Ducommun (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Wendy Schaal, Corey Feldman (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Henry Gibson (last seen in "Nashville"), Brother Theodore, Courtney Gains, Gale Gordon, Robert Picardo (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Dick Miller (also last seen in "Gremlins 2"), Cory Danziger, Franklyn Ajaye, Rance Howard (last seen in "Nebraska"), Nicky Katt (last seen in "Boiler Room").

RATING: 4 out of 10 delivered pizzas