Like Minds (aka Murderous Intent)

Year 10, Day 20 - 1/20/18 - Movie #2,820

BEFORE: Eddie Redmayne carries over from "Fantastic Beasts", and I've had this film down near the bottom of my list for a long while.  It wasn't really part of the "unlinkables" section because it does link through Toni Collette to two other films, however I can't really go to either of those from here, because they're not on theme for January (one is "Krampus") or present me with a dead end ("In Her Shoes").  So I'll have to separate this one from those two, follow a different link out of this one, and hope that this doesn't create a linking problem later on.

I could have followed another very obvious link out of "Fantastic Beasts" to "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales", but then I'd have no way to get back on track to the rest of January's list, and no definite path to February 1.  (Actually, this is not true, I could link via Keira Knightley to "Atonement", so I really just don't want to re-organize the rest of January's films.) This is the second time I'm avoiding connecting to "Pirates", but I think I can get to it somehow later this year.  If no other way presents itself, there's always "Fantastic Beasts 2", which is due in November.  "Dead Men Tell No Tales" has a huge cast list, so there's bound to be another way to get there.

Either way, I'd rather clear something off the list that's been on it for a while, I should have plenty of time to get to a big 2017 film that's just debuting on streaming platforms now.  And taking something off the list makes room for a new film, but watching a film that hasn't been added to the watchlist does not.

THE PLOT: A forensic psychologist is tasked with determining whether or not a minor should face murder charges for killing his schoolmate.

AFTER: First off, this is a film with two titles.  It ran on HBO as "Murderous Intent", but the IMDB lists it as "Like Minds" - I remember that I couldn't find it at first in the IMDB when I was adding it to  my watchlist.  It seems like "Like Minds" was the original title, but I guess that didn't sound "dangerous" enough when it was released on DVD in 2007.  But there are at least two other films with the title "Murderous Intent" listed in the IMDB, so to avoid confusion there, I guess it goes by the original Australian name?  Anyway, it's really best to pick one name and stick with it, if you want your film to stand out.  It's one thing to have a bad title, but it's a real recognition killer to be all indecisive about it.

This is the first film of 2018 to be accused of excessive flashbackery - because when the film starts, the main character, Alex Forbes, is already in police custody, accused of murder, and we have to wait for the lead detective and police psychologist to question him so that we can see the entire story unfold via flashback.  Thank God at least their questions start at the beginning and move in only one direction forward until the story catches up with the present.  So we soon find out that Alex couldn't stand his prep-school roommate, and even though Alex's father was his headmaster, the fact that his roommate was dissecting small animals at odd hours didn't change his father's advice to buck up and learn to get along with this possible sociopath.  But eventually the roommate, Nigel, is no longer among the living, so it seems pretty straightforward that Alex must have killed him.  But is it?

If Alex's account is to be believed, then of course there's more to the story.  But how reliable is the account if the narrator himself is the suspect?  (He's a ginger, after all, and they have no souls...)  If Alex is telling the truth, then Nigel was the villain here, committing all sorts of illicit acts, and finding ways to make Alex appear complicit.  But again, this is coming from Alex himself, so how can they ever know for sure?

There's a lot of stuff about the Cathars and the Knights Templar that seems quite out of place, and you have to wonder if all that is here just to muddy the waters even more.  And the audience is already being asked to do a number of mental gymnastics to understand the plot if Alex is telling the truth, and an even larger set of said gymnastics if he's not.  Then to not even acknowledge the possibility that there might be something romantic going on between the two boys, like a love/hate relationship, that feels a bit like a misstep.

Also starring Toni Collette (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Tom Sturridge (last seen in "Vanity Fair"), Richard Roxburgh (last seen in "Moulin Rouge!"), Kate Maberly (last seen in "Finding Neverland"), Jon Overton, Amit Shah, Patrick Malahide, David Threlfall, Cathryn Bradshaw, Henry Hereford.

RATING: 6 out of 10 fingerprints

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Year 10, Day 19 - 1/19/18 - Movie #2,819

BEFORE: Colin Farrell carries over from "The Way Back" and gets me to this film, which I really should have watched in some form last year, if I'm being honest.  But, everything in its proper place, and I've had this on my list next to tomorrow's film, which was relegated to the "unlinkables" file for a long while, so I'll be rescuing that one soon.  My December re-organization of the list to program January (by counting back from the Feb. 1 film) was a great opportunity to shuffle this one up closer to the top of the list.

I spent the first 2 weeks of January finally getting copies of all 8 "Harry Potter" films - I'd seen them all before, but I didn't bother buying or saving copies on DVD - but then HBO decided to run them all in a row on New Year's Day AND make them all available On Demand at the same time.  Of course I then suddenly had all kinds of dubbing problems, like a VCR that was making a noise that suggested it wanted to be put out of its misery.  Then I had to figure out which of my back-up VCRs had the least amount of problems and could be called into service as my new main dubbing deck.  Plus most of those films are over 2 1/2 hours long, so I really had only one tape that would hold each film.

I would like to re-watch all of the "Harry Potter" films in order, all at once, which I've never done - but I just don't have that kind of time.  Maybe later this year, since I'm not planning on working at Comic-Con any more, I can take a week off from the chain and just knock those out.

THE PLOT: The adventures of magic zoologist Newt Scamander in New York's secret community of witches and wizards, 70 years before Harry Potter reads his book in school.

AFTER: My first thought regarding this film is, "Jesus, doesn't J.K Rowling have ENOUGH money by now?"  But this is the world we live in, where three or four movies in a series is just not sufficient, not when you can drag the last book out into two movies (see also: Hunger Games) and then come up with a few tangential spin-off movies (see also: Rogue One).  And it's really clever, the way they got out of the world of Hogwarts and Hagrid and Quidditch and Dumbledore and moved the action to 70 years earlier and all the way to NYC.

Plus, all those girls who fantasized about young Harry Potter during their teen years (the damaged boy with secret powers, no doubt a teen turn-on) are now older, some of them are in college and finally realizing that their jock boyfriends who mistreated them during senior year were, in fact, assholes, and they're looking for their first adult relationships (I'm guessing here, but work with me for a sec.)  Along comes Newt Scamander, and he's charming, a bit odd but very polite, he's kind to animals and probably likes long walks on the beach, plus he's well beyond his teen years, so there's not that awkward training phase, he already knows how to use that wand, if you get my drift.  So this is a very shrewd move, to appeal to that same demographic that may have aged out of the Potterverse.  I get that.

Combine that with a group of beasts and monsters roughly equivalent in number to that seen in the Pokemon franchise, and that's a license to go crazy with the merchandising of toys, stuffed animals and Happy Meal collectibles after the film takes off, right? 

This is another case of "hero finds himself in a strange land, and has to learn the new rules of that place to fix the situation at hand" - that's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" again, heck, that describes just about every film this week, once you take that step back from it.  Only this one has cuter creatures than "Alice", like the platypus-thing and the thing that looks a bit like Baby Groot.

What's interesting to me is the American spin that's placed here on the wizard types that were once seen only at Hogwarts.  In the U.S. "Muggles" are called "No-Maj" people - it makes sense that Americans would divide themselves according to a class structure that emphasizes their differences, and that the terminology would be there to make one group feel like "less than" - it would be like calling people of color "non-whites", which probably was a thing at some point.  Then instead of a Ministry of Magic, there's a Magical Congress (MACUSA) which much like the real Congress, is full of rules and regulations and seemingly incapable of making decisions and presumably, passing new legislation.  And come on, making foreign wizards apply for "wand permits" is a riff on ineffectual gun control in the U.S., right?  But hey, at least our house elves aren't treated like slaves.

Also starring Eddie Redmayne (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Katharine Waterston (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller (last seen in "Justice League"), Samantha Morton, Jon Voight (last seen in "The Champ"), Carmen Ejogo (last seen in "Alex Cross"), Ronan Raftery, Josh Cowdery, Faith Wood-Blagrove, Jenn Murray, Kevin Guthrie, the voices of Ron Perlman (last seen in "Drive"), Dan Hedaya (last seen in "The Crew"), and cameos from Johnny Depp (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Zoe Kravitz (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie").

RATING: 7 out of 10 occamies

The Way Back

Year 10, Day 18 - 1/18/18 - Movie #2,818

BEFORE: We're already more than halfway through January, and I've resisted all urges to tear apart my chain for February and March to try to rebuild them better - I think I'll stay the course as long as I can.  I've worked out a way to get from the end of the Sherlock Holmes movies to my two Easter movies, which involves buying only 1 film from iTunes to bridge the gap.  All things considered, that's not bad.  I'll have to double-up on some of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films to do it, but I can work with that, I think most of them are not very long.

Looking ahead, 2018 is going to be a bit of an odd year because Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day are going to coincide, and I can't remember that ever happening before.  This also means that Easter and April Fool's Day are going to be the same day, which I can't recall ever happening either.  That's got to be a sign of the apocalypse or something.  (Part of me thinks that Easter should always coincide with April Fool's, if not on the calendar then at least in spirit, but that's a personal opinion.)  Good luck to you if you have to program a movie, however, that manages to fulfill two holidays at once - it can't be done.

I've also got an eye looking ahead to TCM's annual "30 Days of Oscar" programming, which kicks off on February 1.  What's going to be the theme this year, the method in which they'll be organizing their films?  I don't think there's been a formal announcement yet, but after peeking at their schedule for Feb. 1, I saw a wide variety of films that didn't seem to have anything in common - "Robin and the 7 Hoods", "Swing Time", "Days of Wine and Roses" and "Born Free"?  Ah, but that last one gives it away, "Born Free" won an Oscar for Best Original Song, and "Swing Time" won in the same category for "The Way You Look Tonight", so it looks like they'll be organizing by award category this year, while it may not be as fun for me as linking by shared actor, I can work with that.  Once they print the full month schedule I'll go through it and see if there's anything I haven't seen that I'll want to pick up - a bit unlikely at this point.

Ed Harris carries over from "Appaloosa", and I'm back on Netflix tonight, and then I don't think I need to watch anything on Netflix until February 9, so I can start making some progress on my watchlist again, that is to say the physical, non-streaming DVDs already in my collection.  But films are still coming in via cable and being added to my list almost as quickly as I'm removing films from the other end, so progress is still going to be very slow for a while.

THE PLOT: Siberian gulag escapees travel 4,000 miles by foot to freedom in India.

AFTER: This is an amazing story about a group of (mostly Polish) escapees from a Russian prison - there's one American in the group, plus one Russian criminal, a Latvian priest and a Yugoslavian accountant, but the details hardly matter.  The film here is a bit like what you'd get if you mixed together "The Shawshank Redemption", "The Great Escape" and "Into the Wild".  (I thought that one of the escapees looked a bit like Emile Hirsch, but it wasn't him.)

What makes this story possible, however unlikely, is the fact that the Russians supposedly didn't spend much time tracking down gulag escapees, figuring that the harsh environment would take care of them - this group happened to possess enough survival skills to get away from the gulag, then they only had to endure a harsh Siberian winter as they trekked to Lake Baikal, a natural source of fresh water and food.

Once on the run, they learned ways to survive, by avoiding towns where they could be recognized and captured, and walking instead of running, which looked less suspicious.  Still they had the worst luck, after surviving the Siberian winter they crossed the border into Mongolia, just in time to spend summer crossing the Gobi desert. And upon their arrival, they learned that Mongolia was now a Communist country, so they'd have to continue on to China to find a country that wasn't in league with the Axis powers.  It seems the whole global political scene changed while they were in prison.

And then, once they reached China, guess what?  Their best bet seemed to be to strike out for Tibet and then India, never mind this little thing in their way, known as the Himalayas - they didn't let that stop them, either.  So, 4,000 miles from the Gulag to India, with no money, no resources, just the clothes on their back and the will to keep on walking.  It would be nicer if the story was true, but Wikipedia seems to have cast some doubts on the veracity of this story.  It's loosely based on the memoir "The Long Walk" from Slawomir Rawicz, but the BBC started poking holes in his claims sometime around 2006.  Then another man came forward and said that this story happened to him, but that claim is also questionable.

Even if it never happened, it's still one hell of a story.  After watching this, I've vowed to never ever complain again about how cold it gets during a New York City winter, or how hot it can get here in the summer, because it could always be worse, right?  At least I'm not walking across Siberia after escaping from a Russian prison, or dying of thirst while walking across the Mongolian desert!  I've also realized that I'm not very in touch with my Polish heritage, just one of my grandparents was born in Poland, but that's still 1/4 of my genetic background.  My parents both identify as mostly German, but my mother's really German/Polish and my father's German/Irish.  I've been to Bavaria and I think I understand what it means to be Irish, but I'd love to connect some time in the future with the rest of my heritage by visiting Poland and/or Alsace-Lorraine.  (It's possible that my other grandfather came from Alsace while it was part of France, not Germany, but my father's family refuses to acknowledge any possibility of being French, it's German all the way...)

Now, this film really continues the theme that I accidentally hit on this week, which is that of people out of place in strange lands, forced to follow a different set of rules to fix their situation - it sounds weird, I know, but when you take a step back from these films, and think along these lines, you might come to realize that "The Way Back" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass" are, essentially, very similar films.

That being said, I've got to call NITPICK POINT, or at least "shenanigans" on this portrayal of people walking 4,000 miles from country to country - not because of whether the story is true or not, but because you've got to figure at some point in that journey, these escapees would find some place to stay for a while, to say, "Hey, you know what, this country's not so bad.  Let's stay here for a month or two, maybe get a part-time job and earn some money, maybe relax, heal up and have some nice meals for a while." Unless they're really masochists at heart and enjoy suffering.  You know, Lake Baikal looked pretty nice, with fresh water and a nice supply of fish - why didn't they stay there for a few months so they wouldn't have to cross the Gobi desert during SUMMER?  But hey, I'm a planner, that's what I do, which comes in handy whether you're about to go on vacation, or trying to get away from Russian cossacks.

Also, the ending is really contrived, and I wish the film had told us the fates of all of the travelers who made it to India, instead of focusing on just one.  I don't want to give anything away, but are we meant to believe that this guy kept walking and walking around the planet for the next 45 years, until Communism finally loosed its grip on Poland in what, 1989?  In all that time he never stopped to rest, never held a part-time job, never found a place to hang his hat for a year or two?  Come ON, I can't believe that.  And in all that time, he couldn't call or write his wife, who was behind the Iron Curtain?  They had phones, you know, or he could have mailed her a letter at some point in the 1970's or 1980's, to suggest otherwise presents me with a tale that's very hard to swallow.  To have this ending follow such an amazing story is like fumbling the ball on the 1-yard line.

Also starring Jim Sturgess (last seen in "Cloud Atlas"), Colin Farrell (last seen in "Winter's Tale"), Mark Strong (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Brooklyn"), Dragos Bucur, Alexandru Potocean, Gustaf Skarsgard, Sebastian Urzendowsky.

RATING: 6 out of 10 worn-out boots

Appaloosa

Year 10, Day 17 - 1/17/18 - Movie #2,817

BEFORE: Jeremy Irons carries over again from "Assassin's Creed", and after that complicated junk-science plot about genetic memories and VR simulators, maybe this is just what I need - a nice, simple Western where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black ones and such. 

Oddly, I've got 5 films with Renée Zellweger on my schedule for the first three months of 2018, but it just doesn't make sense for them to go together.  Three of them are romances, sure, that would be easy - but when putting together February's schedule it was really constricting to put the Zellweger films in a row.  Splitting them up made more connections possible and allowed me to include more films in the chain, so that's what I'm gonna do. 

THE PLOT: Two friends hired to police a small town that is suffering under the rule of a rancher find their job complicated by the arrival of a young widow. 

AFTER: Ed Harris not only starred in this film, he directed it AND sang a song that played during the closing credits, "You'll Never Leave My Heart".  (The other song that played there is "Scare Easy", a fantastic song performed by Tom Petty's and his alt-band Mudcrutch - see, I told you I'd get a shout-out to Tom Petty before we got too far into the year dedicated to him...)  For good measure, Ed Harris also cast his own father in the role of a town judge. 

As Virgil Cole, Harris wears black throughout the film, though, not the traditional movie "white hat" - this also brought to mind his recent appearance on "Westworld" as another cowboy dressed in black.  I don't think we need to read too much into the symbolism of color theory, because here he's as straight an arrow as they come, if anything he's a little TOO moral, verging on uptight and naive.  He and his partner go from one Western town to another, earning their money by enforcing a set of by-laws, aka a moral code, provided that the town elders give him free rein to do whatever has to be done, kill whoever he's got to kill to keep the peace.

At first glance that seems pretty straight-forward, but there's the same conundrum that was in "Assassin's Creed", oddly enough.  Can the common good be preserved for all by taking away the free will of a few trouble-makers, and more importantly, should it?  Do we want peace if that means that a few civil liberties will be curtailed? 

Things get more complicated when Allison French, a young widow, arrives in town, with no experience living out West or ideas on how to work or where she'll fit in - she arrives with just some luggage and her piano-playing skills.  Virgil falls for her and soon has plans to build her a house they can live in, but the main question is whether she'll be a distraction to him when he should be focused on Randall Bragg, who lets his boys run wild, killing and raping, and then shoots any marshal that comes to arrest them. 

What happens next is what elevates this film above most simple Westerns - when Bragg is finally tried and arrested, a couple of Cole's old associates come to town during the trial, and their presence changes the outcome, and Cole's relationship with the young widow is leveraged against him.  This is probably the greatest fear of any law officer, that their family or partners will be in danger because of their work.  Bragg is saved from execution once a telegram arrives from President Chester Arthur (come on, isn't that the oldest trick in the book?) and becomes a "changed man", running the new gambling parlor and saloon in town. 

Another character undergoes a moral change, too, and I don't want to say much about it, except that it might seem out of character at first.  But apparently the ability to adapt and change IS part of that person's character, so the audience has no choice but to roll with it.  Perhaps the Old West was really kind of like this, the definition of morals changed depending on which side you were on, or who was paying your bills.  And women had to think about this as well - which man was most likely to survive the upcoming shootout, and therefore be alive to take care of her? 

A more cynical person might question the timing of Miss French's arrival in town, and wonder if she was sent there just to serve as a distraction - but I don't think that's necessarily the case, even if it would help explain a lot.

Also starring Ed Harris (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "28 Days"), Renée Zellweger (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Timothy Spall (last heard in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), James Gammon (last seen in "Vision Quest"), Tom Bower (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Ariadna Gil (last seen in "Pan's Labyrinth"), Lance Henriksen (last seen in "The Quick and the Dead"), Rex Linn (last seen in "A Million Ways to Die in the West"), Adam Nelson, Corby Griesenbeck, Timothy V. Murphy, Luce Rains, Bob L. Harris.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Apache warriors

Assassin's Creed

Year 10, Day 16 - 1/16/18 - Movie #2,816

BEFORE: Well, now I'm feeling like I screwed up.  Not only did I get a new Ben Foster film on my list, "Alpha Dog", which maybe could have been included between "The Finest Hours" and "Warcraft" (or maybe not, I'm not sure if it came into my possession a bit too late...) but I also see how I could have worked in the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, which recently surfaced on Netflix.  I could have followed the Johnny Depp link out of "Alice Through the Looking Glass", and then linked back to the next film, "The Man Who Knew Infinity", via Kevin McNally.  I could have squeezed in another film, crossed it off the list and still be right where I am.

Or, more correctly, I'd be one day behind then - because right now, after a couple other recent additions, I'm scheduled to start the annual romance chain on February 1.  Dropping in another film on the January schedule at this point would mess with that - so maybe it's a good thing that I didn't notice that connection.  The new "Pirates" film will probably be on Netflix for a good long while, so maybe this is the universe's way of telling me that I should prioritize by putting other films first, especially ones that have been streaming for a while and are likely to disappear.  It's tough to say.

Either way, I don't go back and mess with my previous posts, I'd have to slot a film in and re-number everything, and that's counter-productive.  So I'll have to circle back later and pick up "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" some other way.  That's all part of the challenge I've assigned myself.

Today, Jeremy Irons carries over from "The Man Who Knew Infinity", and he'll be here tomorrow as well.

THE PLOT: Callum Lynch explores the memories of his ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha, and gains the skills of a Master Assassin before taking on the secret Templar society.

AFTER: I know this film, like "Warcraft", is based on a video-game, but it's not one that I've played. (I'm old-school, really, my best games are still "Q-Bert" and "Mr. Do!")  Perhaps playing the associated video-game would have helped me to understand this story, but maybe not - I found it to be a complete mess.  I can't really find anything here that makes any sense - and I know it's possible to write a fantasy or futuristic story with weird teach that still makes sense, but this is beyond the pale, it's gone away from science to form complete non-science - or "nonsense" for short.

Let's start with the main character, Cal Lynch, who at a young age witnesses his father killing his mother.  That's a fine jumping-off point, but then most kids' fathers aren't part of a league of assassins.  But while you might think that would just screw a kid up, in this alternate movie universe that just makes him a great candidate to join the league.  Because he's got some kind of connection to an ancestor from 500 years ago, who might have known the location of a particular mystical object.  (I'll get to that object in a minute...)   So this shadow corporation fakes Cal's execution, which is NITPICK POINT #1.  They either did this by putting him in a state that mimics death, which is not possible, or by letting him die and then bringing him back, which is also impossible.  Hey, at least the writer didn't let reality hamper his creative process.

The Abstergo Foundation needs Cal because he's some kind of "genetic match" with his ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha (this conveniently allows the same actor to play both characters, in the past and the present, I get that.)  But here comes NITPICK POINT #2, what do they mean by "genetic match"?  Because none of us are genetic matches for our ancestors, the only person you could have a DNA match with would be your clone or your twin.  An ancestor from 500 years ago would be separated from Cal by about 15 generations (give or take) and that's a lot of genetic mixing.  Did all of his ancestors mate with their twin sisters or something?  Because that's disgusting.  Imagine finding out that your father and his father and his father all had sex with their sisters to keep a bloodline pure, and you were expected to do the same.  Otherwise, I think you'd only expect someone 15 generations down the line to share a small portion of the same DNA, or am I mistaken here?

The Foundation wants to hook Cal up to the Animus, this weird machine that will allow him to access Aguilar's memories, and then the machine will allow him to move around in a VR simulation of sorts, so he can move like Aguilar did and keep the memories flowing, to eventually discover the location of the missing object.  Basically, it's a holodeck situation, and that's more tech that doesn't even exist yet.  Plus, NITPICK POINT #3, where did the foundation get Aguilar's memories, if he died 500 years ago, before there was any way to record his memories, and all the sights and sounds around him.  What the hell were they using to program the machine, and if they somehow, impossibly had all this data about what was said and done back then, then why do they need Cal to act it all out?  Don't they already have the information they need, if they're using it to program the machine?

Ah, but maybe the information is inside Cal's head, like in some kind of genetic memory, but if so, then that's NITPICK POINT #4, because that's not how memory works.  Memories don't get "stored" in our DNA to be passed on to the next generation, and the one after that, etc. so you can't crack open Cal's brain in order to access Aguilar's memories.  And even if it DID work that way, which it doesn't, there's a chance that Aguilar would have had a child and passed on these "stored memories" BEFORE the time of these critical events that the Foundation needs to see.  And even if this VR machine could somehow read Cal's thoughts and his ancestor's memories, which it just can't, is the machine moving Cal through the simulation according to Aguilar's memories, or is Cal moving the machine, which is moving him?  There's just no good way to approach this that seems to work.

Now, the object itself is NITPICK POINT #5, because it's supposedly the famous apple, the "forbidden fruit" from the Garden of Eden.  Jeez, last night people at Cambridge believed that the same tree that dropped an apple on Isaac Newton's head could last over 200 years, and this is even worse.  How did this apple survive since the beginning of time, unless it's not really an apple at all, it's some kind of magic object and the whole apple thing is just a metaphor.  Either way, these Templars believe that if they can find the apple, they can use it to undo humanity's free will (since it's supposedly the thing that gave humans free will in the first place) and create a new, harmonious world where there is no violence of any kind.  That seems like a big leap in logic - and even if that's the way it works (which they couldn't possibly know, because they DON'T HAVE THE APPLE YET), the humans won't be killing each other all the time, but we'll all be mindless followers?  Thanks, but I think I'd rather have the free will, violence and all.

I guess this is some kind of commentary on how people are willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in order to be guarantee their safety, but that still seems like a nonsensical contradiction to me.  What good is being safe if your freedoms are eroding?

I'm going to add one more, NITPICK POINT #6, because the lead female in the foundation is portrayed as a brilliant scientist, someone who wants to control humanity's more violent impulses, and on some level that seems like a noble goal.  But it makes no sense for a scientist to say, "I'm going to do this with the help of a mystical object and a shadow group of assassins."  Searching for the lost forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden is in no way "science", and in fact represents the opposite.  I just can't resolve all the contradictions here, which compound on each other to make a vast, unintelligible pile of junk.

Also starring Michael Fassbender (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Marion Cotillard (last heard in "The Little Prince"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Albert Nobbs'), Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "Stardust Memories"), Michael Kenneth Williams (last seen in "Triple 9"), Denis Menochet, Ariane Labed, Khalid Abdalla, Essie Davis (last seen in "Australia"), Matias Varela, Callum Turner (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Carlos Bardem, Javier Gutierrez, Brian Gleeson (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Hovik Keuchkerian, Crystal Clarke, Michelle H. Lin, Gabriel Andreu.

RATING: 3 out of 10 eagles overhead

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Year 10, Day 15 - 1/15/18 - Movie #2,815

BEFORE: Sometimes, once I get on a U.K. theme, it makes sense to stay there for a while, that's just how the linking tends to work.  So "Albert Nobbs" was set in Dublin, Ireland, and "Alice Through the Looking Glass" is based (very loosely) on a British novel.  Tonight's film is set at Trinity College at Cambridge University, in the mathematics department.  Lewis Carroll was also a mathematics professor, but he was an Oxford man.

Stephen Fry carries over from "Alice Through the Looking Glass", where he provided the voice of the Cheshire Cat.

THE PLOT: The story of the life and academic career of the pioneer Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his friendship with his mentor, Professor G.H. Hardy.

AFTER: It's not easy for the average person to understand complex mathematics - in high-school I sort of got as far as Algebra II before I started to lose track of what I was doing, or perhaps why I was doing it.  I stuck it out for two more years - trigonometry and calculus, but by then the thrill was gone.  What the hell is calculus, anyway, does anybody know?  Something about calculating the area under a curve - who cares?  I still did the work and worked out the derivatives, but that didn't mean I understood it.  I was on my high school's math team, but when it came to trig, I learned how to be a good guesser, after finding out that the more complicated the problem, the more likely the answer was to be "zero".

So I kind of feel for the man portrayed here, Srinivasa Ramanujan, for whom math is more intuitive, he can see the theories in his head, but is unwilling at first to do the work necessary to prove his theories.  (The difference between us, of course, is that I was often guessing at the answers in 12th grade math, and this guy had the right answers, he KNEW he was right, he just couldn't prove it.).

But in a FILM about such a man, I would hope that the filmmakers would be able to properly express to the members of the audience who aren't math experts what it is this man was capable of, and why it was important.  I was left unsure about why his theories were a big deal - I sort of understood what "partitions" were (the partition of the number four is five, because that number can be expressed five ways - 1+1+1+1, 1+1+2, 1+3, 2+2, and 4+0)but had to scratch my head when presented with his formula that, what, estimated the partitions for larger numbers?  Again, who cares, if someone else can get there using simple addition, even if that takes longer?

But this does help give me a rough theme for the week so far, which is something about people who are different and unique, but have to stand out and succeed in a world that doesn't support them - Albert Nobbs had to dress like a man to work and save money for his dreams, Alice was the only human in Wonderland and had to find the Mad Hatter's lost family, and tonight this Indian math expert has to excel at a university of British people who don't want him to succeed.  All of them learned they had to follow the rules - the rules of courtship, the rules of time travel, the rules of submitting math proofs.

Sometimes three films in a row that seem very different turn out to not be so different after all...

NITPICK POINT: How come these brilliant mathematicians, who are supposed to be so smart, all seem to believe that the apple tree in their college square is the same one from which an apple fell and hit Isaac Newton on the head?  There's no way that same tree would be there after 250 years, or if it were the same tree, it would be enormous.  But most likely a tree would not live that long?  For that matter, why do they all regard an apple hitting Newton on the head as being some kind of big deal?  Gravity was a B.S. discovery, because before Newton formulated his theory, everybody already knew that things fall down.  So let's face it, Newton was a hack and a poser.

Also starring Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Justice League"), Dev Patel (last seen in "Chappie"), Toby Jones (last seen in 'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Jeremy Northam (last seen in "The Invasion"), Devika Bhise, Kevin McNally (last seen in "Legend"), Malcolm Sinclair (last seen in "Casino Royale"), Enzo Cilenti, San Shella, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Arundhati Nag.

RATING: 5 out of 10 positive integers

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Year 10, Day 14 - 1/14/18 - Movie #2,814

BEFORE: I forgot to mention last night that I watched "Albert Nobbs" on an Academy screener left over from 2011's campaigns.  As far as I can tell, the film has not aired on premium cable yet - what's the hold-up?  I mean, it's available on Amazon Video for $3.99 and on iTunes for $5.99 so I saved a couple bucks.  It must still be doing well there, if it hasn't made it to cable yet - but I pay so much for cable each month that I don't think I'm doing anything wrong by watching a screener for free.  That is to say, I will record the film when it inevitably appears on a premium channel, but sometimes that takes too long and my chain needs to be as unbroken as possible.  Like I watched "Into the Wild" last year on iTunes and paid $3.99 or whatever, because it fit perfectly into my chain.  It just aired on TCM yesterday, I've been scanning the listings for it for years - so of course it airs for free a year after I needed to watch it.  OK, whatever.

Today I'm back on Netflix for another film that hasn't made it to cable yet, but I'm just as curious about this one, and it fits into my chain, plus I don't want to wait any longer to watch it, since it could disappear from Netflix at any moment.  Disney's working on their own streaming service, so that clock is ticking.  Mia Wasikowska carries over from "Albert Nobbs".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Alice in Wonderland" (Movie #1,082)

THE PLOT: Alice returns to the whimsical world of Wonderland and travels back in time to help the Mad Hatter.

AFTER: As prep work for this 2016 sequel, I went back and read both the plot summary and my review of the 2010 film "Alice in Wonderland" - my main complaint seemed to be that the film bore no resemblance to the famous Lewis Carroll work, except that it used the same characters.  Why bother adapting a novel if you're not going to stay true to the story one bit?  Well, the same complaint stands tonight.  While Carroll did write a novel called "Through the Looking Glass", about the only similar story element between that book and this film is the fact that Alice does reach Wonderland by walking through a mirror.


(Carroll stupidly left out the name "Alice" from the title of the second book, because it turns out he knew nothing about "branding".  Possibly because that wasn't a thing back then.  Never fear, Disney Corp is here to put the word "Alice" in the title, right after their own corporate logo.  Thankfully, as much as they wanted this film to be titled "Disney's Alice Through the Looking Glass", cooler heads over at IMDB prevailed.  That way it could be alphabetized "properly", next to "Disney's Tarzan" and "Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame", so that nobody will confuse them with Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan or Victor Hugo's novel of the same name.)

The original novel by Lewis Carroll is a complicated journey, based on a chess game that one could re-enact in real life on a chessboard.  It also features the famous poems "Jabberwocky", and "The Walrus and the Carpenter", the latter of which is recited by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the White Queen and the Red Queen (who is NOT the same character as the Queen of Hearts from the first story).  But since Disney's 2010 movie mixed most of these characters into that film's story, there's really nowhere for them to go here except to make up a completely new story using the same characters.  And since today's kids apparently can't handle something like a chess-based story, there are no puzzles, riddles, chess games, or poems here - just someone going on a random quest through time to try to "fix" things in a nonsense realm.

The story opens in the real world, where Alice is the captain of a sailing vessel - this is more or less where the first film left her, only this is really revisionist history, since I'm fairly sure that there were no women even allowed on British sailing vessels in the 1800's.  We see Alice commanding her father's ship, the Wonder, and escaping from Chinese pirates in a manner that seems even too unbelievable to appear in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.  When she returns to port, she learns that her ex-fiancé has conned her mother out of the family's house (so far this year, the villains seem to be bankers, more often than not) and is leveraging the house against her ship, while offering her a demotion from ship's captain to clerk, but it's the chance to be the first female clerk.  (Hey, it's a job, with a pension, though probably not equal pay to a male clerk.).

As in the first film, Alice's journey to Wonderland (sorry, Underland?) coincides with personal problems in her life - so, is the journey to the fantasy realm real, or just her working out solutions to problems, or trying to avoid those problems?  This is unclear.  But when she reaches Wonderland she learns that the Mad Hatter is even more mad than usual, so she agrees to drop everything to work on his problem.  He somehow believes that his family, believed to be dead, is still alive, so Alice steals a chronosphere from Time himself, to travel back and figure out what happened to them.

Through a few jumps to key moments in Wonderland history, she learns that nearly everything's connected to something that happened between the White Queen and the Red Queen when they were children.  And there's almost a message here for the kids, about how important it is to tell the truth, and forgiving people when they are truly sorry, but unfortunately this gets spoiled when we see that there really is no punishment for lying, and there are also no repercussions for people who do bad things like go on tantrums and imprison people they don't like.

I also don't understand why someone felt the need to give all of the characters proper names. The White Rabbit is now named Nivens McTwisp - who the hell cares?  We all know him as the White Rabbit, why can't that be his name?  Similarly, who cares if the Red Queen is named Iracebeth, the Dormouse is named Mallymkun and the March Hare is Thackery Earwicket?  Why this obsessive need to re-name all of Lewis Carroll's classic characters, these more complicated names just don't add anything to the story.  They all sound like names rejected from the "Harry Potter" series this way.

I do want to get to some more time-travel films this year, that's been on my agenda for a while.  But "Project: Almanac" is a very difficult film to link to, and so is "The Butterfly Effect 2".  There are three more time-travel films on Netflix, maybe I need to just bite the bullet, suspend my linking for a few days and knock them all out.  Perhaps in March, but I need to consider this a bit more.

Also starring Johnny Depp (last seen in "Black Mass"), Helena Bonham Carter (last seen in "Cinderella"), Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Don Jon"), Sacha Baron Cohen (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Rhys Ifans (last seen in "Snowden"), Matt Lucas (last seen in "Paddington"), Lindsay Duncan (last seen in "About Time"), Leo Bill (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Geraldine James (last seen in "Rogue One"), Richard Armitage (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Hattie Morahan, Ed Speleers (last seen in "Eragon"), Andrew Scott (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Joanna Bobin (also last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Simone Kirby, Joe Hurst, Siobhan Redmond, Frederick Warder, Tom Godwin, Eve Hedderwick Turner, Amelia Crouch, Leilah de Meza, with the voices of Alan Rickman (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Stephen Fry (last heard in "A Liar's Autobiography"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "Passengers"), Timothy Spall (also last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Paul Whitehouse, Barbara Windsor, Matt Vogel, Wally Wingert (last seen in "Starring Adam West"), Meera Syal.

RATING: 5 out of 10 pocket watches