BEFORE: We're coming up on Thanksgiving, but I already have to be thinking about totaling up the stats for 2018, and also figuring out what films to watch in January. The easiest way for me to do this is to create my February chain of romance films first - I've got more than enough, and last month I went through the films available on Netflix so that I'd have some connective material. Once I have the starting point for that chain, I designate that as the film for February 1 and then I try to work backwards.
I had some time over this past weekend, now that I'm not watching a film EVERY night but instead every other night, and I came up with a rough chain that's 30 films long, which is the right length - but I'm not married to this chain just yet. I'm not crazy about the starting point since it's not a "one-linkable" film as usual. Plus, even though it contains a bunch of films that I tried to get to in 2018 but just couldn't, it hinges on me being able to watch "Mission: Impossible Fallout" in January, and I'm not sure that I'll be able to do that. Sure, it may come to my boss on an Academy screener, especially if it wants to get nominated in the special effects category, but it might not. And if it's not available on premium cable in January, then I'll be screwed.
So, perhaps I should come up with an alternate January chain, just in case. If one chain is possible, there must be others that are possible, based on the films I have access to on DVD, cable and Netflix, right? The trick is then finding one that I like, that also gets me where I need to be on February 1. I still have plenty of time to work on this.
For now, Jack Black carries over again from "Goosebumps" - and with just five films left until the end of Movie Year 10, I'll have to deal with the rest later.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jumanji" (Movie #924)
THE PLOT: Four teenagers are sucked into a magical video game, and the only way they can escape is to work together to finish the game.
AFTER: I was pleasantly surprised by this one, but also slightly annoyed. Let me deal with the first part of that before mentioning the second. But this film was MUCH better than "Goosebumps", which played with some of the same elements - "Goosebumps" had monster characters jumping out of a book and becoming real, and this film had real people being drawn into a video-game, so I guess that's the opposite, real people being dragged into a fictional story, which for them plays out like a virtual reality. Damn, but it's a much more clever idea this way. (Side note: "Goosebumps" and this film also shot scenes at the same high-school, so that school also carries over...)
The original "Jumanji" was a story about a man (played by Robin Williams) who had been somehow brought into a magical board game, and as kids played the game, they somehow brought real wild animals into their house, so the elements of the game became real, then they helped rescue the man who'd been stuck in the game. This sequel puts a spin on THAT idea by morphing the board game into a video game (circa 1996) and bringing the players inside that, where they're represented by avatars that are much different than themselves. And instead of the jungle taking over a house, instead they've got a whole WORLD to explore in VR (which looks suspiciously like real reality, but OK, whatever). Oh, that blows the original story out of the freakin' water, there are NO LIMITS here, except for the rules of the video game.
If anything, the game looks TOO GOOD, because they obviously shot in a real jungle, so the "video-game" looks a bit too close to reality - because I remember the video games in 1996, and they mostly sucked, like the graphics sure weren't good enough to fool you into thinking they were real. I think MAYBE there was Sony Playstation 1 in 1996, and I'm sorry, but nobody's going to confuse "Crash Bandicoot" or "Donkey Kong Country 3" with virtual reality. But since this is a movie, and not meant to really reflect the actual state of video-games in the mid-1990's, let's move on. I could just say that these people who got sucked into the game are seeing the game with their avatar's eyes, so maybe to them, everything that should look like 64-bit graphics looks as good as real.
Anyway, you can't get sucked into a video-game, so the whole thing requires some suspension of disbelief. The opening act of this film plays out like a combination of "The Breakfast Club" and "Tron", like if the kids who were bonding together over having detention at the same time then got digitized and pulled into the game, where the rules of time and space are different. And I don't think I'm far off with the "Breakfast Club" comparison, because among these four kids there's the nerd, the jock, the spoiled bitch and the mousy shy girl. They're already walking stereotypes, but then the nervous nerd's consciousness gets put into the avatar that's the strong fearless hero, the jock gets put in the avatar of the weak but smart sidekick, the spoiled bitch gets put in the (male) body of the history and map expert, and the mousy shy girl gets put in the avatar of the fighting bombshell babe.
I love this idea - it would have been so lame if they played the same personalities in the game that they had IRL. Nearly all of the comedy comes from seeing the words of a gaming nerd coming from the mouth of super-hunk "The Rock", and then hearing tiny Kevin Hart complain about how he's not a big, strong athlete in the game, like he should be. And of course the shy girl has to learn to overcome her shyness in order to flirt and fight, while the spoiled girl, well, she has to learn to read a map and pee standing up. (To me, that's a glaring NITPICK POINT, there are no bodily waste functions in video games, except for maybe "The Sims". Certainly not in an adventure game. There was one "Grand Theft Auto" game where characters had to eat to gain energy, but that was very unpopular and they never did it again.).
They each have different skills, whether it's zoology or map-reading or dance-fighting, and when the situations demand it, they appear to be able to access these skills, to advance the game. But each character only has three lives, and they each manage to lose one pretty quickly, so there's urgency to work together and accomplish the game's task before they run out of lives, the fear being that they could die for real if they lose their third life. And the fact that the characters act differently when they're on their last life is also very smart. (Though it's also a bit hokey, once they make the comparison to the fact that's how all life works, we're all hanging by that thread...).
Now, the "magic" part of the story is completely unbelievable, like how did the board game turn ITSELF into a video game cartridge? And how does time pass differently within the game world - like if you're playing a video game for three days straight, shouldn't three days have passed in the real world, and wouldn't the parents of these kids be wondering why they didn't come home from school? But damn it, the story is so much fun that's it's as hard to criticize it as it is to take it seriously.
Now, as to why this story annoyed me - it's because I tried to write something along these lines, and I never was able to finish it. My best screenplay idea ever was based on my time playing Dungeons & Dragons, as part of a 6-person (occasionally 7) group that played together for years. During that time, people became friends, people hooked up, people broke up, a lot of stuff went down in the real world between the players that I believe was influenced by what happened in the game. Of course there were many other factors, but I believe the group interaction was partially responsible for the end of my first marriage - basically my wife was attracted to another female player in the group, and things devolved from there. We quit the group and tried to keep things together, but the damage was done - and the signs were all there in the gaming world, only I didn't want to deal with them, or I dealt with them poorly.
So, as a form of therapy, I tried to write a screenplay about a group of 6 friends in the early 1990's who met every other week for years, to play D&D - and friendships would form, people would hook up and break up, and then during the course of three gaming campaigns (perhaps depicted in animation), the audience would see how the events in the gaming world affected their real-world relationships, and vice versa. Essentially, in the animated gaming sequences, where the characters are exploring dungeons or fighting monsters, they'd have the same voices, but look like D&D characters. And in much the same way, their characters would be either a reflection of who the player is in real life, or more likely, the person they WISH they could be, or the person they NEED to become.
But, I could never get the screenplay past an outline stage - whenever it came time to flesh out a scene with dialogue, I'd draw a blank and eventually lose interest. And now it's too late, because if I ever went back and finished that now, everyone would say that's already been done, because of "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle". For every little difference between this film and my idea, it seems that this film's idea is better. My idea would be set post-college, but damn, putting the story in a high-school setting is so much better. And immersing people in a video-game is so much more visual than watching them roll dice and argue over hit points. So now I see my mistake, I was trying to make a story that was small and intimate like an indie film, when I should have been thinking of things that were bigger and more crazier. Anyway, we're too far from the "Lord of the Rings" films, I think interest in D&D is on the wane, so clearly I missed my shot at being a screenwriter. And that annoys me, though I suppose I should be more annoyed with myself than with this film.
By the way, kudos to Jack Black, who had a very difficult task, that of playing a self-obsessed entitled teen girl inhabiting his body. He totally nailed it, so even though he's usually thought of as not a great actor, or as someone who's too over-the-top, his style really worked here.
Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last heard in "Moana"), Kevin Hart (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Karen Gillan (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Nick Jonas (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian"), Colin Hanks (last seen in "Untraceable"), Rhys Darby (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Alex Wolff (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Madison Iseman, Ser'Darius Blain, Morgan Turner, Mason Guccione, Marc Evan Jackson (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Tim Matheson (last seen in "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon"), Sean Buxton (last seen in "42"), Carlease Burke, Maribeth Monroe (last seen in "Downsizing"), Missi Pyle (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Kat Altman, Marin Hinkle, Tracey Bonner, Natasha Charles Parker, Michael Shacket, William Tokarsky, Rohan Chand.
RATING: 7 out of 10 albino rhinos
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